Adam Hanieh - Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East

The Global Middle East series seeks to broaden and deconstruct the geographical boundaries of the Middle East as a concept to include North Africa, Central and South Asia, and diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America. The series features fresh scholarship that employs theoretically rigorous and innovative methodological frameworks resonating across relevant disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. In particular, the general editors welcome approaches that focus on mobility, the erosion of nation-state structures, travelling ideas and theories, transcendental techno-politics, the decentralisation of grand narratives, and the dislocation of ideologies inspired by popular movements. The series will also consider translations of works by authors in these regions whose ideas are salient to global scholarly trends but have yet to be introduced to the Anglophone academy.

Money, Markets, and Monarchies

The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East

Adam Hanieh

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

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Adam Hanieh 2018

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The motivations for this book lie in my interest in processes of class and state formation across the six Gulf Arab monarchies: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. In some of my earlier work I had begun to tentatively explore the connection between these states and the political economy of the wider Middle East, but it was the massive wave of social protest that erupted in December 2010 that led me to attempt a more systematic conceptualisation of these intra-regional connections. Since that time, the Gulf states have emerged as chief protagonists in the political trajectories of the Middle East; at the same time, the spiralling conflicts across the entire area seem to mark a profound setback to the hopes, dreams, and aspirations that first brought millions onto the streets a few short years ago. All of this confirms the importance of seeing the past in the present. I have tried to keep a sense of these temporalities broadly in view with the hope that the book may say something useful about how a better future might be reached.

Writing a book can appear as an intensely solitary experience, but I firmly believe that any intellectual endeavour is always a collective project pushed forward in dialogue with a wide range of diverse interactions, conversations, and debates. I am extremely privileged to work in the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where colleagues and students continue to make teaching and research such a pleasure. Many wonderful friends have discussed and debated the ideas in this book, helping in innumerable ways during the writing process and my trips to the region: Ala Jaradat, Alberto Toscano, Alessandra Mezzadri, Ali Cantay, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Ayed Abueqtaish, Brenna Bhandar, Burcu Erciyes, Catherine Cook, Christian Henderson, Dae-oup Chang, Gilbert Achcar, Greg Albo, Hanan Elmasu, Hazem Jamjoum, Laleh Khalili Leandro Vergara-Camus, Lori Allen, Mandy Turner, Mayssun Sukharieh, Mazen Masri, Mostafa Henaway, Nimer Sultany, Omar Shehabi, Paolo Novak, Paula Hevia, Parvathi Raman, Rashmi Varma, Robert Knox, Ryvka Barnard, Sahar Francis, Subir Sinha, Tieneke Dykstra, Yang-Ji Lee. I am particularly indebted to Dale Tomich, Jeffrey Webber, Rafeef Ziadah, Thomas Marois, and Tony Norfield, all of whom generously gave their time to read and critique various parts of the manuscript. I have learnt a lot from all these exchanges and continued to be inspired by their individual work as scholars across numerous disciplines.