Traditional and cultural spaces are important in the Gulf region due to their uniqueness and nostalgy that they bring to the collective memory. The importance of these spaces can be a good venue for networking between governments and ordinary people, which push for more cross-border cooperation and sometimes potential threats. This paper focuses on camel races, festivals, and markets in the Gulf, mainly Qatar and Saudi Arabia to understand how such tribal venues have become a source of discomfort, mobilisation, and political competition. The paper will focus on to what extent traditional spaces related to camels in the Gulf can be a source of mobilisation during the periods of political crisis and state-level competition. Process tracing and case study will be in place to refer the development of camel industry in the Gulf, which gives a chance to regional regimes to penetrate these venues for political gains. The plan is to understand how Saudi regime used cultural and traditional spaces (camels) to influence transnational tribes in Qatar to build leverage against their regime. Moreover, the paper will draw on information that the researcher already collected during fieldwork in Qatar between March and August 2021. The paper will be divided into three parts: placing the research within the ontological security literature, importance of camels for tribes and states, and the Gulf crisis and use of camel owners for mobilisation. Here, the goal of Saudi regime was not only about using its leverage over Qatari camel owners against their own government but extended to creating Saudi dominance in camel industry. The Saudi government has established the International Camel Organisation (ICO), which includes over 50 countries, and camel owners can get benefits for their membership. The ICO shows that the Saudi efforts to establish international and regional dominance over this cultural space. In contrast, Qatar has not yet become a member in the ICO and has also invested to have its own camel market and festival in addition to the races, which have started since 1970s. To understand these efforts to dominate the camel industry for political gains, the paper will combine the ontological security literature, which highlights the importance of understanding how and why regimes feel insecure about their self-identity, with the literature of transnational identity-building and cultural spaces. This paper’s main contribution is understanding the state-level competition over informal cultural spaces.