The Arab Gulf monarchies have experienced new opportunities and restrictions in domestic and foreign policy-making, marking ten years of the Arab uprisings. With use of post-structuralist interpretation of hegemony, this study defines the Arab uprisings as an organic crisis that has deeply affected the intra-GCC relations and the roles of small Arab monarchies in the region. The reforms in the GCC states' domestic politics were valid only immediately aftermath of the uprisings to maintain the hegemonic power supporting the status quo. However, alternative stances in the monarchies' foreign policymaking, particularly for the UAE and Qatar, triggered antagonisms in the discourses and led to a trench war. The Gulf crisis 2017 thus was a conjunctural crisis that institutionalized the diverse imaginaries in the GCC. The scope of the research is not solely on domestic politics. Instead, it aims to approach intra-GCC relations in the post- Arab Spring era with examining the transformation of the small states’ foreign policymaking. The maintenance of Saudi Arabia’s hegemony in the GCC does not provide spaces to the UAE’s and Qatar’s counter-hegemonic discourses in Yemen, Libya, Egypt and with their relations with Iran and Turkey. Although the Gulf Crisis was mainly for timing Qatar’s counter-hegemonic discourse, the UAE’s diverse stance in Yemen, Libya and the Horn of Africa is also an indication of new voices in the region-wide foreign policymaking. Thus, the clash of the status quo and change is a convenient tool to scrutinize challenges and opportunities for the pluralism in the region. The paper approaches the pursuit of hegemony regarding the antagonisms emerged in the GCC by the Arab spring to answer the main research question: how has the deconstructed hegemony in the Gulf political complex manifested itself? The primary argument is that the segmented hegemony in the GCC dominated by Saudi Arabia has been dislocated by the Arab uprisings and since then the four levels of hegemonic project (dislocation, competition, formation of historic bloc and institutionalism) have been passed by the Arab Gulf states. The paper thus will use the hegemonic project of the post-structuralist discourse theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and later revised by Anna Smith and Dirk Nabers, to combine discussion of hegemony in the tangled GCC. Thus, the paper will provide a theoretical discussion of alliances and conflicts among the oil monarchies, with elaborating GCC's fragile politics focusing of the deconstruction of hegemony in the post-Arab spring era.

In his text After the Sheikhs, Christopher Davidson makes a bold claim that by 2015, the Gulf monarchies would cease to exist as we know them (Davidson 2015). More than a decade earlier, Jill Crystal presciently observed that “despite the obituaries regularly written for these regimes, their rulers have survived the arrival and departure of Britain, the trials of independence, and now the new demands of oil wealth” (Crystal 1989). These two scholars frame an interesting puzzle: Why do Gulf monarchies survive? Why have scholars incorrectly predicted their demise? And why, if relatively small and weak do these states maintain independence in foreign policy decision making? This paper uses a comparative case study of Kuwaiti foreign policy, informed by two decades of comparative ethnographic research, to advance an understanding of small state behavior and survivability in the Arabian Gulf. The paper argues that states, whether small or large, act to preserve sovereignty and project power, using their limited capabilities and powerful friend networks to deflect threats. In other words, small states are like all other states; to predict their demise is to underestimate their capabilities; and expressions of independence in foreign policy decision making provide evidence to support the other two claims. Two recent Kuwaiti foreign policy decisions are used to test these claims. In 2017, Kuwait’s Emir decided not to join the 2017 blockade of Qatar. In fact, in addition to seeking an independent, mediating role in the conflict, Kuwait expanded relations with Qatar—including establishing new contracts for natural gas imports, expanding direct flights, enhancing bi-lateral trade and investment, and pursuing a foreign policy that provided Qatar a way to subvert the blockade. Similarly, but perhaps even more dramatically demonstrating the small state’s independence in foreign policy decision making, in spite of pressure from the administration of President Donald Trump, and regional neighbors including UAE and Bahrain, Kuwait contradicted the US President’s statement that “Kuwait would be next to make peace with Israel” by stating instead that Kuwait “would be the last to make peace with Israel.” This paper will explore the power and politics behind these two events to advance theories of small state behavior and the survival of a Gulf monarchy.