Troubled Waters: Insecurity in the Persian Gulf by Mehran Kamrava (review)

Mehran Kamrava does not offer a very optimistic picture of increased peace and cooperation among the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), nor between the Arab states in the Gulf and their neighbor Iran. In fact he argues that insecurity in the Persian Gulf is "perpetual" (p. 6). In this latest work Kamrava sets out to explain why this narrow stretch of water between some of the world's largest oil and gas producers continues to be a zone of insecurity and instability with global ramifications. He focuses less on the economic factors of influence and more on internal leadership and institutional deficiencies, calling regional actors "willful belligerents" in their own quest for security (p. 3).

The approach is very similar to the classic formulation by Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoush Ehteshami in their concept of "complex realism" to explain how structural powers, domestic politics, and regional ideational and identity issues influence foreign policy-making in the Middle East.¹ For the Gulf and for Kamrava, it is the peculiar insistence or even recalcitrance of political leaders and institutions that perpetuate a security dilemma. And for Kamrava that security dilemma is rooted in expansionist and adventurist foreign policies that leaders undertake without due regard for citizens. At the heart of Kamrava's critique is a dire assessment: lack of attention to the relationship between state and citizen, the basis of human security, creates a cycle of deteriorating state security and, ultimately, legitimacy.

The book contains five chapters, with some historical context. However, it is largely an analytical assessment based on some qualitative and interview-based research, rather than a theoretical proposal. It is thoughtful and written with some emotion and lament from a scholar deeply connected to the region. He writes with more trepidation than hope for its future. Other scholars, and even the World Bank, have centered their analysis on the chronic insecurity of the Gulf (and the wider Middle East) on a broken social contract.² On the structural level, Kamrava sees the evolution of security arrangements as driven by external actors, namely superpowers and their interests in the Persian Gulf, to the exacerbation of conflict. Kamrava's approach also zeroes in on the aspect of human security that is fragile in the Gulf. The relationship between ruler and ruled, state and society, is undercut by rising and tactical sectarianism. Kamrava engages critical security studies but does not see emancipation or the demand for social equality and democracy as a core driver of insecurity in the Persian Gulf (p. 23). Nor does he elevate the threat of environmental insecurity as others might. Instead, he focuses on four components of security: military matters, human security, migration, and state weakness.

One of the strengths of the book is its ability to synthesize theoretically from critical security studies to traditional understandings or realist conceptions of security threats. In this way, Kamrava includes nonconventional security threats of identity politics and sectarianism under the rubric of human security. As he explains:

the widespread growth of sectarian sensitivities across the Persian Gulf has given rise to previously nonexistent social anxieties, and specifically to feelings of "otherness" in the face of pervasive threats of having one's primordial religious identity overrun by hostile "others." This sectarianism is fanned and deepened by complementary political and military developments in and around the region

(p. 30).

What Kamrava describes is the symbiosis between conventional threats brought on by the 2011 Arab uprisings, to more identity-based threats from a rise in instrumentalized sectarianism. Both in cases of conventional and identity-based threats, the outcome is the same. The outcome is a more securitized environment, one that is institutionalized at all levels of state-society contact. Kamrava describes this as a state's "sense of besiegement" (p. 31).

External actors, specifically the United States, continue to disrupt any semblance of balance or regional security architecture stability, notably within the fragile GCC. Kamrava discusses the shifting American position toward Iran...