13.07.2017

Institutskolloquium: The Failure of the Monarchies Club

Sean Yom, Temple University at Wednesday, 19th July 2017, 16:00 c.t., Room 124, IfP

For nearly two decades, the Gulf Cooperation Council has witnessed repeated attempts to better integrate and unify its six constituent kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman. These institutional initiatives have taken many forms, such as military cooperation against Iran, a common economic market, and even expanding the GCC to include Morocco and Jordan. Kuwait and Qatar have long resisted integration because their political identities greatly clash with an envisioned GCC operating as a close-knit monarchical club. Yet regimes in Kuwait and Qatar – both oil-rich, rentier-oriented, and non-democratic – derive these identity and interests from divergent sources that reveal much about the problem of regional integration, nature of authoritarian regime security, and relevance of identity politics today.

Sean Yom is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research focuses upon, within the Middle East, post-colonial state formation, the dynamics of regime durability, and strategic implications for US foreign policy. His newest project analyzes the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf Cooperation Council. His past work has appeared in Journal of Democracy, Middle East Journal, Studies in Comparative International Development, CTC Sentinel, and other journals. He is also author of From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016).