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Arab Gulf rulers face incentives to develop non-economic sources of legitimacy to maintain popular support while maximizing scarce resource revenues. By sowing communal distrust, highlighting threats, and emphasizing their ability to guarantee security, regimes can reinforce domestic backing and dampen pressure for reform more cheaply than by distributing welfare benefits. Survey data from four Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar) demonstrate that governments can effectively cow populations into political inaction even as the economic benefits citizens receive are dwindling. 

Key Themes

• Gulf regimes establish electoral and legislative rules that institutionalize cleavages based on identity politics. 
• Official national narratives in the Gulf are frequently exclusive, highlighting differences among citizens and privileging certain population segments over others. 
• Gulf regimes increasingly treat even peaceful opposition and dissent as veritable threats to national security, rather than as ordinary political challenges. 
• Some Gulf Cooperation Council states have conducted an assertive, adventurist foreign policy that has contributed to regional instability and promoted a militaristic nationalism.
• Feelings of insecurity are heightened by government promises of radical economic reorganization in the face of dwindling oil and gas revenues. 

Findings 

• Analysis of survey data from the region reveals that more security-minded Gulf citizens are willing to accept lower levels of economic performance by a government in return for stability. For them, the state’s provision of security represents a substitute for the financial benefits expected by citizens in oil-rich states. 
• In this way, Gulf governments can capitalize on the security concerns of citizens to purchase popular political support more cheaply than through the standard distribution of material benefits.
• Gulf regimes thus have economic and political incentives to embellish or manufacture domestic and external threats, in order to heighten popular concerns over security and so lower the cost of accruing political support. 
• Gulf rulers are often unable to manage social tensions once unleashed, and some have ended up stoking the very dissent they wished to suppress. This is a precarious strategy that carries serious risks to citizen welfare and the long-term survival of regimes. 

Introduction

In January 2016, authorities in Saudi Arabia unexpectedly and unceremoniously put to death dissident Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a perennial antigovernment firebrand and leader of Arab Spring protests in the kingdom’s Shia-dominated Eastern Province. Executed alongside 46 other individuals convicted mainly of association with al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Nimr was portrayed as just another “terrorist” threatening the nation’s stability and security.¹

The public response was swift and predictable. While Western missions protested against the political nature of the charges against al-Nimr—which included “disobeying the ruler,” “inciting sectarian strife,” and “encouraging, leading and participating in demonstrations”²—the move was cheered by many ordinary Saudi Sunnis, for whom the cleric’s calls for greater recognition and empowerment of Shia represented at once religious and political heresy.

Further afield, the execution sparked popular protests in Bahrain, in Iraq, and in Iran, where demonstrators overran Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Mashhad and set fire to its embassy in Tehran. The attacks prompted a formal severing of diplomatic ties between the two regional rivals, with the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warning that Saudi Arabia would face “divine revenge” for its killing of the “oppressed scholar” and “martyr.”³

Strategic Sectarianism

Yet, behind this latest outward manifestation of sectarian-based conflict between citizens and governments in the Middle East, most Gulf observers were quick to identify a more mundane cause. A week before al-Nimr’s execution, Saudi Arabia announced a 40 percent increase in the price of fuel as well as sweeping cuts to subsidies for electricity, water, and other goods. This came on the back of an expected $98 billion budget shortfall for 2016—equal to 60 percent of projected state revenues.⁴ Amid depressed oil prices and expectations of a weak market for years to come, the Saudi state, like the other five members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC),⁵ can no longer afford to underwrite the onerous social and economic benefits provided for decades to citizens, and faces an uphill battle in selling unwelcome and painful economic reforms without offering corresponding concessions in the political realm.⁶ The execution of al-Nimr, then, with the resulting escalation in domestic and regional tension, was seen as a well-timed distraction from the kingdom’s new fiscal reality, and the dubious policies—including a costly, disastrous war in Yemen—that helped usher it in. It was, in the words of one Gulf scholar, “red meat to the sectarian radicals.”⁷

The Saudi state and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries can no longer afford to underwrite the onerous social and economic benefits provided for decades to citizens.

It was also one episode in a larger pattern of political instrumentalization of sectarian and other group divisions that has become a defining feature of the Middle East, and to a lesser extent North Africa, since the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011.⁸ As nondemocratic regimes have come under pressure to reform or relinquish power altogether, rulers have hit back most often by positioning themselves as the defenders of a core group of (often co-sectarian) constituents under purported threat from foreign actors or the illiberal demands of fellow citizens.

The force of these appeals has been bolstered by a heightened sense of insecurity among Middle Eastern publics in light of widespread civil war and disorder, the increased capabilities and reach of terrorist organizations, shifting geopolitical alliances, concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, and perceptions that the United States is withdrawing militarily and diplomatically from the region. The result is that a substantial proportion of citizens who might agree in principle with the need for change are expected to choose nonetheless to abstain from opposition, or even stand against those engaged in opposition politics, because of uncertainty over the eventual outcome of popular mobilization. In short, challenged rulers can capitalize on the fears of more risk-averse individuals and members of sectarian, ethnic, or other groups whose political or economic preferences would likely be overturned in the event of revolution or fundamental reform.

Challenged rulers can capitalize on the fears of more risk-averse individuals and members of sectarian, ethnic, or other groups whose political or economic preferences would likely be overturned in the event of revolution or fundamental reform.

This strategy of autocratic self-preservation, sometimes likened to “protection-racket politics,” is not limited to the post-2011 period, nor is it specific to the Arab world.⁹ But its seeming ubiquity and success in thwarting opposition movements in this context has begotten something of a conventional wisdom: that fear-mongering and timely activation of sectarian and other latent social divisions offer beleaguered Arab governments a critical pressure-relief valve helping to perpetuate their authoritarian rule.

As al-Nimr’s execution demonstrates, there appears to be strong anecdotal evidence to support such a conclusion. Yet, until now it has never been put to the test empirically by examining individual political behavior. In other words, is it really true that Arab citizens who prioritize stability over other aims tend to be more supportive of incumbent regimes as guarantors of the status quo? If so, does such a relationship hold universally or only for some categories of citizens or countries? Moreover, what impact does the prioritization of stability have on the normal link between the performance of, and popular support for, governments? Are status quo–oriented citizens more forgiving than others of poor economic and political performance, or are their expectations similar to those with different individual priorities?

This essay attempts to answer these questions by examining mostly original public opinion survey data collected in four Arab Gulf countries—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar—between 2013 and 2016. This diverse sample of cases includes societies that witnessed major political upheaval (Bahrain), limited protests (Kuwait and Oman), and virtually no popular reform demands (Qatar) during and after the Arab Spring.

In investigating the political attitudes of ordinary men and women in the region, the analysis shows that there is substance to the notion that Gulf governments can effectively scare their citizens into acceptance of the political status quo. It demonstrates that under conditions of insecurity, a majority of Gulf Arabs prefer a less than ideal situation with which they are familiar over a push for fundamental change that, while it may potentially bring improvement, also carries real risks of uncertainty and instability. This reality sheds light on the political economy of sectarianism in the Middle East, and especially the Arab Gulf region, revealing the strong incentives rulers have to cultivate non-economic sources of legitimacy in order to maintain the necessary preponderance of political support while maximizing scarce resource revenues. The exploitation of latent social tensions affords one such source.

The Logic and Drivers of Sectarianism

Writing in 1974, an economic adviser at Kuwait’s state-run development fund helped launch the rentier state paradigm when he observed that the capacity to meet citizens’ material needs without extracting taxes “helps to explain why the government of an oil-rich country . . . can enjoy a degree of stability which is not explicable in terms of its domestic economic or political performance.”¹⁰ That is to say, oil-rich Gulf governments can maintain the otherwise dubious political support of citizens through the generous distribution of resource revenues.

While the basic tenets of the theory remain valid today,¹¹ almost half a century later political scientists and other scholars have come to recognize the diverse nonmaterial bases of authority and stability in the Arab world generally and in the Arab Gulf region particularly. These include the very institutions of monarchism,¹² Islam,¹³ and the ruling family;¹⁴ traditional forms of political consultation rooted in tribal custom;¹⁵ stewardship of the arts, culture, and higher education¹⁶ international prestige;¹⁷ and, increasingly since 2011, the provision of security and order in the face of real and imagined adversaries.

Under conditions of insecurity, a majority of Gulf Arabs prefer a less than ideal situation with which they are familiar over a push for fundamental change that, while it may potentially bring improvement, also carries real risks of uncertainty and instability.

The provision of security, which is the focus here, comprises two distinct elements: the state’s ability to protect citizens at a time when the suffering of their Arab neighbors are on constant display, and the foreignness of the threat facing the nation, whether from a geographical or an ideological standpoint. The first exerts an attractive force, bolstering support for the status quo among more security-minded citizens. The latter acts as a reinforcing negative influence by encouraging rejection of what is branded as alien—alien countries (Iran, the West), alien political ideas (the Muslim Brotherhood, Western liberal democracy, the Islamic State), and alien religious interpretations (Shiism).

Beyond their main effect of dampening popular appetite for dissent, these threat perceptions have also helped feed the rise of a previously unknown nationalism in those places where they have been most actively cultivated, namely Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In all Arab Gulf countries, however, leaders have benefited from a visceral sense of insecurity, inexplicable forces spurring regional change, and a future replete with unknowns.

By feeding intercommunal distrust, sowing fear of external threats, and emphasizing their unique ability to guarantee security, ruling elites can reinforce backing among loyalists and dampen incentives for protest among reformists more cheaply than through the standard provision of material benefits.

This one might call the political economy of sectarianism, the latter understood broadly as the politicization of ascriptive group identities—that is, those established by birth. Public uncertainty surrounding the interests and intentions of different groups in society earns Gulf leaders a political subsidy by decoupling support among certain factions and individuals from actual political and economic performance. For these supporters, the state’s provision of stability—whether as a good as such or as protection of entrenched interests—serves as an effective substitute for the public and private benefits otherwise expected of governments and duly expected by other, less status quo–oriented, members of society.

Such dynamics are doubly enabling for regimes because, at the same time as they enhance legitimacy, they also free up resources that might otherwise have been spent buying support. By feeding intercommunal distrust, sowing fear of external threats, and emphasizing their unique ability to guarantee security, ruling elites can reinforce backing among loyalists and dampen incentives for protest among reformists more cheaply than through the standard provision of material benefits. A sectarian strategy thus carries the prospect of significant political as well as economic payoffs when compared to a traditional system of direct patronage. It is at once an allegiance-building and cost-saving measure.

Although the origin and extent of competition among sectarian and other social groups varies widely across the Arab Gulf countries, still one can identify a set of mechanisms that today contribute to polarization either directly or indirectly by heightening overall feelings of insecurity. Some purposeful and some less deliberate, these mechanisms include:

• electoral and legislative rules that institutionalize descent-based cleavages rather than crosscutting programmatic coalitions;
• exclusionary national narratives that highlight differences among citizens;
• the securitization of opposition, especially among Gulf Arab Shia populations seen as presumed sympathizers with Iran;
• an emboldened GCC foreign policy that has contributed directly to regional instability and promoted a militaristic nationalism in some Gulf states; and
• the specter of radical economic reorganization in the face of dwindling oil and gas revenues.

Institutionalizing Group Conflict

Arab Gulf societies feature a natural tendency toward political groupings based on ascriptive affiliation. This owes, first, to the region’s political environment, which is largely devoid of open media, political parties, or an independent civil society that might transmit information about the attitudes and preferences of fellow citizens. At the same time, the rentier system privileges individual rather than group competition over private economic benefits conferred by the state, which works against the formation of programmatic or class-based coalitions. The latter factor reduces incentives for joint political action among citizens who have shared economic or normative interests, while the low-information nature of the political environment limits the ability of like-minded citizens to identify each other and coordinate politically, even if they so desire.¹⁸

Rather than implement measures to counteract this predisposition for descent-based conflict, most Gulf states have actively sought to enhance sectarian, tribal, and other group cleavages in order to avoid the emergence of a more dangerous category of actor: socially crosscutting factions with broad bases of support capable of exerting effective political pressure.

A primary weapon in this battle is governments’ design of formal representative institutions. Although Gulf legislatures wield no effective power outside of Kuwait and to a lesser extent Bahrain, still the rules governing their election and functions offer insights into the way that states structure political competition in a manner conducive to preserving the status quo. And, universally, these institutions have had the intended consequence of deepening and indeed institutionalizing group competition behind a veneer of modern democratic politics.

In Bahrain, electoral districts gerrymandered along sectarian lines undermine the electoral prospects of populist and secular candidates. The result is a lower house of parliament permanently divided among Sunni Islamists, loyalist tribal “independents,” and—when it chooses to participate in elections—an opposition Shia bloc.

Most Gulf states have actively sought to enhance sectarian, tribal, and other group cleavages.

Elites in Kuwait use similar measures. The GCC’s oldest and most influential legislature, the Kuwait National Assembly, is subject to an ever-changing set of rules governing voter eligibility, the number and shape of electoral districts, and the voting system that are crafted to suit the political circumstances of the day. To counter the strong influence of Arab nationalism in the decades after independence in 1961, Kuwait naturalized more than 200,000 Bedouin to serve as a reliable pro-government bloc in parliament. When the Iranian Revolution later shifted concern to Kuwait’s large Shia minority, the state redrew and expanded the number of electoral districts, with tribal areas and urban merchant elites disproportionately represented. More recently, a shift toward opposition among tribal factions necessitated yet another change. Following four parliamentary dissolutions in four years, in 2012 Kuwait reverted to a five-district system while also doubling the number of candidates a voter could select. The hope was that larger districts and greater choice would hamper tribal coordination of voting via informal primary elections, in which tribal blocs unify behind a single candidate or list.¹⁹

Similar if less consequential manipulations can be observed even where elected deliberative bodies enjoy a purely advisory role. For its municipal council elections, Saudi Arabia employs an electoral system seen nowhere else in the world, in which voters are able to cast ballots in all districts of their municipality. This undercuts localized bases of support, ensuring, among other things, that minority Shia candidates are unlikely to succeed outside of the Shia-dominated Eastern Province.

In the United Arab Emirates, voter franchise is limited to a handpicked electoral college that included less than 1 percent of Emirati citizens in the first Federal National Council elections of 2006.

In the United Arab Emirates, voter franchise is limited to a handpicked electoral college that included less than 1 percent of Emirati citizens in the first Federal National Council elections of 2006.²⁰ The electorate was later expanded to allow the participation of around 12 percent of nationals in 2011, and expanded again to roughly 20 percent of citizens, or around 225,000 eligible voters, in 2015.²¹ There, as in Oman and Qatar, electoral results tend to follow patterns of family and tribal settlement owing to districting and voting rules. For instance, a study of Qatar’s 2015 municipal council elections found that the single greatest determinant of both voter registration and the act of voting itself was the number of candidates from the same family or tribe running in an individual’s district.²²

In sum, the experience of Gulf legislatures shows how regimes have generally succeeded in structuring acceptable avenues of political participation around existing social fault lines, rather than in a way that encourages citizens to overcome narrow group identities.

Selective National Narratives

A second direct contributor to the social fragmentation of Gulf citizenries is the explicit ascriptive-based distinctions between citizens that are ingrained in the very histories propagated and celebrated by Gulf countries. Crafted in the images of ruling families, official narratives reflect the ideal of the Sunni Arab tribesman and even of specific schools of Islamic jurisprudence—Hanbali in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Ibadi in Oman, Maliki in Bahrain and Kuwait, and a more Sufi orientation in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Necessarily excluded from these supposedly national portrayals are citizens of nontribal origin: non-Arabs, including notably those of Persian ancestry; citizens who ascribe to a different Sunni tradition; and of course Shia Muslims. Additional distinctions, especially prominent in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, separate native citizens from latecomers who gained citizenship after some legally defined cutoff date. Except in Bahrain, where new arrivals receive preferential treatment as an incentive to immigrate,²³ naturalized citizens are seen by more established families as dissipating state resources and thus the welfare benefits to which the latter are entitled by birth. Consequently, naturalized citizens are generally afforded fewer political and economic rights. There also remain substantial populations, in Qatar and especially in Kuwait, that have been denied citizenship altogether despite the long-term residence of their families and tribes, again so as not to dilute the state-provided benefits enjoyed by others.²⁴

This pyramid of citizenship and belonging in Gulf states—codified both in law and in the public imagination through media, school curricula, art and architecture, and everyday life—makes clear society’s descent-based dividing lines and also, critically, who stands to lose and gain from a fundamental change in political organization. The open differentiation of social groupings means not simply that some citizens have a greater personal interest in maintaining the prevailing system, but also that the relative incentives of all groups to support the state as ultimate benefactor are understood by all—it is, in the language of political science, “common knowledge.”²⁵

Gulf states feature in this way an inherent social tension whereby advantaged groups recognize the disproportionate propensity for opposition among disadvantaged groups, while second- and third-tier citizens understand, similarly, that members of advantaged groups are more likely to support the regime. And since the line between advantaged and disadvantaged is determined largely by ascriptive criteria—accent, dress, skin color, given or family name, and so on—outward markers of group affiliation communicate information not simply about social affiliation, but about presumed political allegiance. Daily social interaction among Gulf citizens thus entails a constant sizing up and interpretation of visible cues so as to allow the placement of others on a mental pyramid of citizenship, and their evaluation as likely allies or rivals.

Opposition as a Threat to National Security

The securitization of opposition is a third source of group fractionalization in the Arab Gulf states. This notion refers to the growing conception and treatment of dissent as a veritable national security threat, to be addressed within a law-enforcement framework, rather than as an ordinary political challenge.²⁶ It represents the delegitimization of political disagreement itself. Specific targets are dictated by domestic politics, but include Shia activists and organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist groups, and even individual online critics of Gulf regimes.

The post-2011 trend toward securitization has increased social polarization directly by promoting an us-versus-them dichotomy that paints fundamentally political actors, along with their real and imagined supporters, as threats to the general welfare. In publically demonizing their opponents, Gulf states such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have also linked domestic actors to transnational movements and rival governments, painting dissenters as foreign-inspired—even foreign-backed—traitors.

In addition to ostracizing major segments of Gulf populations, the redefinition of opposition as a state security problem also fosters group competition indirectly by raising society’s overall threat-perception level. Rather than view fellow citizens as competitors for resources within a normal political framework, individuals are encouraged instead to fear partisans of rival groups and ideologies as potential terrorists. The effect is to magnify existing apprehensions over widespread regional instability and civil strife and, moreover, to make external conflicts seem closer to home, by linking them to groups and individuals operating domestically. In this way, even citizens of apparently stable Gulf countries may come to see themselves as but a few steps removed from a fateful breakdown in law and order, and ruling families as alone equipped to protect against such a possibility.

GCC Activism and Nationalism

Another reason for heightened feelings of insecurity among Gulf publics is the newfound foreign policy activism of GCC governments themselves. Excepting Oman, which maintains a stubborn neutrality to the annoyance of other Gulf countries, and to a large extent Kuwait, which has offered mostly token participation in GCC initiatives, the Gulf states have shown an unprecedented willingness to act militarily to counter the perceived expansion of influence by challengers to their religious and political authority—whether Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Islamic State.

Beginning with the GCC’s Peninsula Shield force dispatched to quell mass demonstrations in Bahrain in March 2011, the alliance has undertaken a string of interventions spanning the breadth of the Arab world. Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, it has carried out air strikes and supplied weapons to combatants in Libya and Syria, financed an embattled regime in Egypt, and embarked on a full-scale invasion of Yemen. That Gulf citizens feel more vulnerable amid a neighborhood descended into chaos, then, owes in no small part to the deliberate foreign policy choices of their own leaders, whose involvement in what began as domestic political conflicts has likely increased the duration and, in the case of Yemen, the brutality of these Arab wars.

Five years of participation in armed conflict has also given rise to what Saudi scholar Madawi al-Rasheed has called a “militarized hypernationalism” in those countries most heavily involved, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.²⁷ There and elsewhere in the GCC, claims that countries must be protected in the face of aggressive Iranian and Shia expansionism have been transformed from the stuff of official news agencies into a general political mantra demanding action and sacrifice by ordinary citizens and rulers alike. Since 2014, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have all introduced compulsory military service for male citizens, and the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia has called for his country to adopt a similar policy to help in the fight “against the enemies of religion and the nation.”²⁸ At the same time, senior Gulf royals have also been active—and highly conspicuous—participants in the Yemen war. This includes numerous Saudi princes, the eldest son of Dubai’s ruler, the son of Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, two sons of the Bahraini king, and the son of the ruler of the emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, who was seriously injured in a missile strike.²⁹

More than simply to drum up popular support for a costly and largely unsuccessful military campaign in Yemen, the GCC’s engineered patriotism is intended, as al-Rasheed writes, to “perform the miracle of homogenizing . . . subjects and molding them into one entity.”³⁰ But this larger instrumental value also means that Gulf rulers face the perverse incentive to sustain rather than curb their engagement in external conflicts, as a temporary antidote to social fragmentation and a weak sense of national belonging. Leaders in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere thus emerge as both a primary source of, and self-styled solution to, the sectarian-based insecurity facing their nations. In that way, they draw closer to them those citizens who accept the premise of an existential threat posed by Iran and officially unsanctioned Islamic movements, while further alienating those domestic groups identified as potential sympathizers.

The Specter of Economic Upheaval

A final major source of uncertainty for Gulf publics is the process of fundamental economic transformation now being embarked upon to a greater or lesser extent by all GCC countries as a result of diminishing revenues from oil and gas. Except for Kuwait, all Gulf governments have moved to shore up enormous budget deficits by curtailing expensive subsidies on fuel, electricity, and other commodities, while at the same time investigating new sources of revenue through the once-unthinkable means of raising taxes and privatizing core state assets.³¹ At the regional level, all six GCC countries have agreed to implement a region-wide value-added tax of 5 percent by as early as 2018, and Saudi Arabia has publicly indicated a willingness to impose excise taxes as well.³² Rather than these being temporary measures to solve a short-term fiscal challenge, Gulf leaders have made it clear to their citizens that the changes being studied will herald a fundamental break with the traditional Gulf rentier model in place for generations. This message was aptly summarized in a November 2015 speech by the emir of Qatar, steward of the region’s most extensive welfare system, in which he warned Qataris in unusually blunt terms that the state could no longer afford “to provide fo