This paper tackles an important counterfactual question. Despite invasion, occupation, and frequent threats from multiple neighboring countries, why did Kuwait not develop a more capable national military? After all, the Kuwaiti military in 2020 is not significantly different from the military that the Iraqi Army attacked in August 1990. The conventional answer is that small states cannot defend themselves and therefore seek out external protection. But consider other small states like Eritrea, Rwanda, and Jordan--but particularly the United Arab Emirates--and this answer is incomplete. Kuwaiti society has been on the frontline of the region’s most wrenching wars, yet it has neither developed military capacities to deploy beyond its borders nor built any particular military capacity. Why? The staring assumption of this paper is that national militaries (preparation for war) are not just reactions to external conditions but are part of ongoing social and political dynamics. Moreover, building military capacity can come in multiple forms and may emerge from “wasteful spending” or be embedded in networks of rent seeking (i.e., the US military). First, this paper will present comparative evidence to establish the post-1990 history of Kuwait’s military. It will focus on changes since 1990, particularly Kuwait’s deepening relationship with the US military, as well as continuities since. An implicit comparison will be made with other Gulf Arab militaries over the same period. Second, the paper turns to explanation, weighing resident international relations theories against domestic and transnational political economy approaches. Given restrictions on research, the aim is to build a conceptual and methodological frame that will inform the field research in 2021-22. If field research in Kuwait is possible sooner, the paper can extend beyond the conceptual and begin to offer qualitative evidence to compliment the historical overview. The contributions of this paper fall in two broad areas. First, the field of critical security studies privileges analysis of transnational political economies and this paper enhances that work. Second in scholarship particular to Kuwaiti politics, there is a tendency to scope analysis into a seamless web linking parliamentary politics, rents, and corruption. Is it possible that these forms of resource distribution in Kuwait inhibit or supplant military “investment” or military rent-seeking? It may be the case that there are few incentives to build a more capable military in Kuwait but missing the constraints may make one blind to important politics at the core of what constitutes “security.”

For nearly 70 years, the US has fed Jordan a heavy diet of security assistance, defined as economic funding, military arms, training programs, intelligence transfers, and technical support. The purpose of such assistance has been to bolster Jordan’s coercive apparatus, comprising its military, civil police, and mukhabarat; and it has been enormous, measuring over $20 billion since 1957 – or several times more than all domestic taxes collected by the Jordanian state. Yet a paradox abounds. At the operational level, US security assistance achieves none of the goals espoused by its own strategists. US military officers and defense planners underscore the need to “professionalize” Jordan’s military and security institutions, “upgrade” their reservoir of techniques, and “build” their strategic capacity. In short, they aim to give the Jordanian state the independent ability to practice violence effectively. But US security assistance has failed. Jordan’s coercive apparatus remains a underwhelming garrison force, able to police dissent within civil society but not much else. It is permeated by corruption, and incapable of waging war or even squashing mass mobilization without emergency American help. The obvious explanation to why security assistance flourishes despite this deficiency speaks to hegemonic interests: clearly, the US cares more about propping up the Hashemite monarchy, a quintessential American client state, than anything else. But the way that failure has been normalized in official policy discourse linking Washington to Amman remains curious. The weakness and corruption of Jordan’s organs of violence are treated as symptoms rather than causes, and they are accepted as a matter-of-factly externality in dealing with an Arab state. Deconstructing this theater of absurdity requires two critical insights. First, security assistance thrives not despite, but because of, failure. In Jordan, violence and the crises that justify its deployment are mutually constituted: the threats that the state sees as imperiling its survival, such as Islamist radicalization and economic decay, are the result of maintaining a bloated coercive apparatus that consumes the lion’s share of national resources. Second, an ideational factor lurks, for elite politics transcend state boundaries and dictate the social construction of security interests. A transnational coalition oversees US security assistance to Jordan, namely American officers and strategists in Washington, and Jordanian generals and royals in Amman. The careers of both require fueling a military-industrial complex designed to amplify or invent threats to stability in order to justify the further profitable delivery of aid, arms, and knowledge.

In this article, we offer a cross-case examination of the politics of dignity and citizenship in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative analysis of two cases of youth living in mining communities possessing distinct characteristics, we detail how issues of dignity and citizenship constitute the basis of mobilization from the margins by mostly the poor. Despite the existence of progressive regimes of welfare and social assistance in both cases, we argue that dignity and citizenship concerns of the poor remain largely downplayed or negated by those in positions of authority, which creates a violent setting. As our analysis will show, this negation has often fostered new geographies of governmentality aimed largely at not addressing these citizenship (or dignity) concerns but to dramatize and perform such concerns. The public performance of such negated concerns is not in any way directed at eliciting public sympathy but merely an act of highlighting the limitations of modern forms of conventional politics especially in advanced economies of the South, such as Morocco and South Africa.

This paper sheds light on the Israeli military and security innovation in the framework of settler-colonialism and the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories. A key variable for understanding Israel's global rise in military and security innovation pertains to the decades-long colonial ventures and regional wars. Despite its extensive efforts and investments in security and military production, Israel continues to be structurally dependent on the U.S military system, financial aid, and private investments. Beside the high profitability of security and military innovation to Israel's war economy, it also serves as a key foreign policy instrument to achieve a variety of regional and international objectives (e.g., weapon diplomacy and regional normalization).

This paper brings together two cases from the Global South—the Libyan Arab al-Jamahiriyah and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela—to de-center notions of security, development, and war from Western paradigms. It examines how mainstream analyses in IR and IPE have relied on three main ‘theses’ (authoritarian, rentier, rogue) to frame the historical socio-political formations of these states, as well as the extent to which those terms continue to set the frame to comprehend the nature of their current socio-economic crises. The paper argues that the uncritical reliance on these concepts hardens into a one-size-fits-all vision of international (in)security. On the one hand, it internalizes the causes of war and conflict within these countries, de-linking from the political economy of confrontations vis-à-vis the US-led capitalist global order. On the other, it forecloses possibilities for alternative paths to development, as emerging from and grounded in a global South context.