In Stories of Democracy, Mary Ann Tétreault argues that “Kuwait’s ‘main event’ throughout the twentieth century has been the repeated clashes between would-be citizens demanding civil and political rights and … a deeply entrenched albeit variably autocratic ‘traditional’ regime.” The 1990-91 Iraqi invasion and occupation, she says, was a “sideshow” to this main event. It is certainly provocative to characterize the invasion as anything other than a “central defining moment” in Kuwait’s history (2). However, her treatment of the invasion as one incident in a century-long struggle towards democracy pushes us to think about the seven-month occupation in the context of what came before and after it, rather than simply as an isolated trauma as is most common in Kuwaiti historical memory. Tétreault’s work is also unique in its analysis of the occupation in relation to Kuwaiti society and domestic politics rather than its foreign relations or regional security. Tétreault’s work has significantly shaped how I think and write about the invasion as a Kuwaiti historian. Rather than simply a finite act of aggression by an external force, for me the occupation was also a domestic political episode significantly shaped by Kuwait’s own government’s ongoing struggle for political stability in the face of diverse homegrown challenges and forms of opposition. One of the most interesting issues Tétreault examines is the tension that arose between insiders (who stayed throughout the occupation) and exiles (who were either abroad or left after August 2). The latter included the ruling family, who faced immediate criticism among Kuwaitis abroad for losing the country’s sovereignty, fleeing, and appearing paralyzed in exile. Kuwaiti citizens, meanwhile, demonstrated a tremendous capacity for self-government both in exile and under occupation, and demanded a restoration of the parliamentary process (suspended in 1986) after liberation. My own research expands on Tétreault’s work to examine how these political dynamics shaped certain state policies immediately after liberation, through extensive oral history interviews with Kuwaiti and American government officials, Kuwaiti resistance members, and people who lived through the occupation both inside and outside the country. My paper argues that policies such as the dissolution of the Kuwaiti resistance, the scapegoating of Palestinians as a so-called “fifth column,” and the controversial 1991 martial law trials against perceived “collaborators” contributed to constructing a national narrative—or “myth” to borrow Tétreault’s term—of victimhood that deflected the rulers’ own culpability in the crisis and restored their political legitimacy.

Mary Ann Tétreault’s insights on feminism, specifically on how women begin to “participate as autonomous actors rather than as spectators whose public experience is controlled by or mediated through family members or religious leaders” (1993, 280), are formative foundational pieces for gender studies in the region. Her 1993 article on “protected spaces” in Kuwait made the important argument that diwaniyyas (gatherings within the home) are “a plausible substitute for civil society in the public space” (279) as they “institutionally, legally, and normatively are off-limits to state intervention” (277). As formal civil society organizations are often repressed in the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, her observation on the protected space of the in-home diwaniyya represents a crucial link in the larger study of civil society in the region. In many different pieces of her work, Tétreault was particularly interested in how women’s engagement and empowerment may be advanced through these and other types of organizations. In her most recent work, a draft shared with me in May 2015, she speculated that progress in women’s human rights depends on “opportunity structures”: “open spaces where activists confront disharmonies between ideas and practices, question the status quo, and reach out for new values and approaches to living well” (22). In-home gatherings represent an opportunity structure that is particularly well defended against government encroachment, and as such may be places where we can witness civil society activism at the grassroots level. My own work draws directly on Tétreault’s insights on feminism and civil society. Her observation on the semi-private, semi-public sphere of the diwaniyya was the foundation for my recent grant, in which a team of faculty and students focused on Qatari women’s engagement and empowerment through their participation in women’s majaalis. Our research speculated that these majaalis may provide important spaces where civil society can take root, and lead to increased citizen interaction with and influence over the public sphere. Our ethnographic and survey evidence demonstrated the nuances of this hypothesis by elaborating on the differences between various types of majaalis as well as other indicators of public sphere engagement. Throughout this research, Tétreault was an advisor and a support, and her insights and interest remain an inspiration as we continue to investigate the drivers and obstacles of women’s progress in the region. Tétreault, Mary Ann. 1993. “Civil Society in Kuwait: Protected Spaces and Women’s Rights.” Middle East Journal 47 (2): 275–91.

This paper both acknowledges the seminal contribution of Mary Ann Tétreault to the scholarship on Kuwait’s democratic dynamics and shows how my own work on the biduns (stateless people) in Kuwait pushes and explores the path she set fifteen years ago. In doing so, it mainly focuses on her book Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (2000), complemented by her work on the marginalization and enfranchisement of Kuwaiti women. Tétreault’s most robust argument in Stories of Democracy is on the inability of the Kuwaiti government, however autocratic its tendencies, to absolutely neutralize opposition to its authority, or the tenacity of “would-be citizens demanding civil and political rights” (2). Her work widened the research focus of Kuwaiti politics beyond the sole emphasis on the merchant elite and its constitutional bargain with the ruling family. She included other actors and their attempts at constituting themselves as fully-fledged “citizens” rather than mere “subjects”, noting the rise of government-supported tribes and devoting particular attention to Kuwaiti women. In the latter case, she showed how the issue of gender pitted different groups in Kuwait against each other (secularists vs. religious-minded, male vs. female), and how the power relations of domestic forces evolved over time until the granting of women’s political rights in 2005. She also took into account non-parliamentary means of political resistance, highlighting the role of “protected spaces” of home and mosque. My forthcoming book takes this enquiry a step further by examining another disenfranchised group excluded from the Kuwaiti polity. Through the use of in-depth qualitative interviews complemented with researches in press archives, I focus on the biduns’ stubborn, decade-long claims of belonging to the Kuwaiti nation. Like Stories of Democracy, the book examines practices of resistance to the state’s autocratic and often repressive measures. It concludes that the gradual engagement and political awakening of the biduns owed much to the resistance practices developed in the “protected spaces” identified by Tétreault: the private sphere of Kuwaiti homes, historic clubs, and lawyers practices. I also explore the gradual rise of the Bedouin periphery that Tétreault touched upon. However, my research expands Tétreault’s work by debunking the democratic myths that, built on the very exclusion of biduns, form the basis of Kuwaiti nationhood. I show how excluded voices have tried to timidly contest these national myths and to re-imagine an alternative Kuwaiti past in which they better fit.

Mary Ann Tétreault’s numerous publications on the political economy of oil, small states, and state-society relations have greatly influenced my understanding of how the policies, structures, and capacities of the international oil economy have conditioned economic development in the global south. In The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the New World Order Tétreault argues that economic power is not the exclusive right of the advanced industrial world as popular dependency theorists argued (Cardoso and Faletto 1979). In her case study of Kuwait, she argues that this small Gulf state acted autonomously in vertically integrating the oil sector under state ownership, allowing it significant autonomy from internal and external influences. However, Tétreault simultaneously challenges resource curse theorists (Gause and Yom 2012, Grey 2012, Waldner and Smith 2012, Herb 2014, Hertog 2010, Bellin 2012) who agree that oil rents foster socio-political stagnation by buying off citizens, making them dependent, and undergirding state autonomy from society. Her work on political opposition and civil society dynamics in Kuwait reveals that social life in oil monarchies is complex and not merely a network of patron-client relations conditioned by oil wealth. Building on Tétreault’s work on political economy and oppositional politics, this paper analyzes how certain socioeconomic institutions in Kuwait—particularly municipal cooperatives and other welfare institutions—impact the relationship between social forces and the state’s economic co-optive power, at the micro-level. Using in-depth interviews with a variety of Kuwaiti social groups coupled with archival research into the history of these institutions, I argue that although the state successfully developed methods of oil wealth distribution (e.g. the development of cooperative societies that distribute food subsidies), many organizations have roots in the pre-independence era, revealing the ongoing relevance of pre-oil structures on state-society relations. Families and groups that run the cooperatives often have important interests that are beyond government control, and the state has to negotiate how to distribute state subsidies (challenging the top-down distribution model of resource curse theory). As Tétreault consistently showed, such forms of negotiation and consensus have been the building blocks of Kuwaiti institutions. My research also considers how new political processes over the past fifteen years (universal suffrage, electoral district reform, and the rise of powerful youth movements) coupled with considerable changes in the distribution of oil wealth (increased budget spending on social programs and reforms to citizenship laws) have impacted these socioeconomic institutions and their relationship to the state.