This paper analyzes the subsequent fragmentation of the Shi'i political community after their return to Saudi Arabia and its turn towards local politics and away from the idea of a cosmopolitan Shi'i state. The 1993 Accord between King Fahd bin Abdulaziz and the leaders of the Shi'i opposition signaled the reentry of the Shi'i opposition into mainstream Saudi society. After spending the 1980s in exile, leaders of the Shi'i community in Saudi Arabia earned the chance to sit down with the Saudi government to discuss the state of the Saudi Shi'i community and the return of its leaders from abroad. The announcement of a secret agreement with the Saudi regime and the Shi'i leaders came as a surprise to the region, but perhaps as shocking because former Shi'i oppositional movements began taking steps in the late 1980s to reform their message into one of acceptance. This agreement stipulated that the Shi'is must cease their political operations before they arrive home, and in return the Saudi government would implement changes to the discriminatory policies against Shi'is in the kingdom. However, the introduction of the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue presented a decisive issue for the community and created irreconcilable arguments concerning the advancement of the Shi'i population in the kingdom. The discipline previously acknowledged the importance of these Shi'i political developments across the region, but this paper will stress the prominence of the evolution of the Shi'i political community. I argue that the balance between the expectations after 1993 and their predicted life in the following years caused the Shi'i opposition to begin to fracture according to how they viewed their changing world and country. After the establishment of the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue in 2003 and the subsequent lack of agreement within the community, the group fully fragmented from the once cohesive Shi'i opposition movement. By examining the writings and statements of Sheikh Hassan al-Saffar, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, Fouad Ibrahim and Hamza al-Hassan, this paper tracks how the community evolved in its attempt to acquire rights for Shi'is in Saudi Arabia. The 1993 Accord provided a formative agreement from which the leaders could cement their modern interactions with their community.

The 2011-2014 Bahrain protests pitted the mostly Shi‘i opposition against the Sunni Al Khalifa ruling family. These protests, initially aimed at achieving equality and greater political freedom for the majority Shi‘i population, turned into a call for revolution, and then an arena of regional rivalry, followed by external intervention. This series of events evoked “memories” of an earlier crisis—the crisis that began with an uprising in 1922, widened in 1923 to include Iranian nationals, gained the attention of the Pahlavi government in Tehran, and culminated in the dramatic British interventions that laid the foundations of the modern state administration in Bahrain. Various actors and eye-witnesses including British colonial officers, Iranian nationals residing in Bahrain, Shi‘i villagers and Sunni tribesmen, produced divergent narratives and interpretations of these events. During the 2011-2014 Bahrain protests and their aftermath, these historical narratives were revived, revised and deployed for political purposes. Oppositionists invoked the 1922 “Shi‘i uprising,” and disseminated British archival documents attesting to past traumas suffered by the Shi‘a at the hands of the Al Khalifa. In this context, history and memory were deployed as instruments of identity construction and group mobilization. Fresh state-sanctioned counter-narratives were also produced. They depicted the “civil strife" (fitna) of 1922-23 as the consequences of a British colonial policy which manipulated ethnic and religious differences in service to “divide and rule” tactics. Sectarianism in Bahrain is not an organic schism, they argue, but rather a colonial myth whose persistent shadow exposes Bahrain to internal fragmentation and external interference. Fresh analyses of the same historical events were also produced in Iran. These analyses revived the tale of the “people’s uprising” against the illegitimate colonial rule of the British on the “Iranian Island of Bahrain.” The 2011-2014 protests were thus cast as a continuation of the Bahraini people’s quest for “solidarity with their motherland.” This study employs narrative analysis to explore how and why the events of 1922-23 were remembered and communicated by states and social groups during the 2011-2014 Bahrain protests and their aftermath. The study examines fresh scholarly analyses of these historical events in Arabic, Persian and English, as well as the cultural production and dissemination of related historical narratives and collective memories by means of online media. These contested narratives of Bahrain’s past will be located within the politically charged context of the 2011-2014 protests to shed light on the relationship between memory and politics in Bahrain.

This paper leverages recent legislative changes in the Arab Gulf state of Qatar to examine in-group identity and naturalization preferences in the rentier state. In return for greater political autonomy, rentier state leaders distribute some portion of rents to citizens via generous salaries and welfare benefits. Rulers and citizens thus share a material interest in minimizing the pool of citizens-cum-welfare recipients, so as not to dissipate the wealth each enjoys. In the paradigmatically rentier Arab Gulf states, these incentives have given rise to unique systems of naturalization that limit citizenship to an in-group defined by strict ascriptive and temporal criteria. Such criteria provide no pathway to nationality for most rentier residents, including not only the millions of foreign laborers who build and sustain Gulf economies, but also many individuals whose linguistic, racial, and religious identities are indistinguishable from those of citizens. Previous work (e.g., Longva 2006) suggests that it is this drive for economic exclusion—rather than group preferences per se—that underlies identity politics in some Gulf societies. Yet little is known about the preferences of rentier citizens toward naturalization, and how these are shaped by identity factors. While rentier state citizens may tolerate the presence of foreign workers from a diverse set of countries and backgrounds, with which groups, if any, are they willing to share their citizenship privileges? This study uses a conjoint survey experiment to investigate attitudes toward naturalization among citizens of Qatar, a quintessential rentier state. The experimental design builds on the work of Hainmueller and colleagues, who use conjoint analysis to examine preferences toward immigrants in the U.S. (2014) and Europe (2016). In a departure from previous work, this paper examines acceptance of naturalization, or the extension of citizenship, rather than immigration. This choice entails more than the passive tolerance of migrant workers common in Gulf countries: rather, it implies acceptance into a narrowly defined in-group with clear economic and social privileges. The relevance and feasibility of the study are enabled by recent changes in Qatari law that offer the possibility of permanent residence and quasi-citizenship to non-Qataris. We examine the ascriptive and non-ascriptive factors that citizens weigh in judging possible candidates for citizenship, including length of residence, occupation, salary, language, religion, and ethnicity. Results of the experiment will allow us to assess the relative importance of these competing factors and to better understand the complex realities of naturalization in the rentier context.

For decades, much scholarship on state-society relationships in the Arab Gulf region has focused on how British imperial interests and oil wealth combined to created regimes buoyed by consolidated economic and military power. Unfettered by the need to impose taxes, these regimes have been described as autonomous from societal influence, buying acquiescence from their populations by distributing oil wealth (e.g. Rolf Schwarz “The political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East,” 2008). However, recent scholarship demonstrates that control over state coercive and economic institutions is but one arena of political struggle in Gulf states, with parallel struggles seeking to define the moral frameworks that regulate state-citizen relations (Mazhar al-Zoby and Birol Baskan, State-Society Relations in the Arab Gulf States, 2014). This paper contributes to this growing field by examining the political and ideological struggles neglected by the rentier model. Drawing from interviews, archival material and ethnographic research, it uses the aftermath of Cyclone Gonu (2007) in Oman as a case study of how various state and social actors compete to define public problems, their causes, effective solutions, and responsibility for addressing them. The response to Gonu shows that Omani citizens are hungry for ways to publicly display national honor, solidarity, and willingness to sacrifice for a larger good, and to do so in accordance with their religious beliefs. Thus, actors within the Omani state as well as citizens more broadly are deeply invested in shaping both understandings and public expressions of the “common good,” as well the extent to which ordinary Omanis look to the government and fellow citizens to achieve it. The paper concludes by arguing that this ideological conflict is not unique to the aftermath of Cyclone Gonu, but a more visible episode of a longer process in which various actors and institutions have forwarded competing values to rely on in evaluating social and political authorities. Thus, rather than reading the distribution of oil rent to society as a rational, quid pro quo exchange between citizens and an autonomous state, scholars of the Gulf should reevaluate how the use of oil rent operates in a larger field in which changing understandings of national prosperity, security, and citizenship give meaning to that exchange.