Identity politics, elites and omnibalancing: reassessing Arab Gulf state interventions in the uprisings

This blog summarises some of the key ideas in a recently published article featured in the Conflict Research Programme’s Special Edition in the journal of Conflict, Security and Development: Identity Politics and Political Marketplaces. Focusing on the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar – in relation to the Arab Uprisings between 2011 and 2017 – the article points out their un-institutionalised nature and challenges the ‘geo-sectarian’ narrative often used to account for them. It argues that identity politics were indeed a central component of regime manoeuvring in this period, but that rulers were at least as concerned with suppressing or co-opting politically assertive forms of Sunni Islamism in the domestic sphere as they were with countering the supposedly geopolitical sectarian threat from Iran.