Gulfization of the Arab World ed. by Marc Owen Jones, Ross Porter, and Marc Valeri (review)

In the years since the 2011 Arab uprisings, the Arab states of the Gulf have moved to the center of regional politics. Working to shore up endangered regimes or hastening the demise of others, the Gulf arguably occupies an activist position unique in its history. The volume under review analyzes the diversity and history of these roles through the concept of "Gulfization." As the editors acknowledge, it is not an easy neologism, and it suffers from a degree of overstretch. Nevertheless, the contributors offer rewarding and fascinating analyses of social, political, and cultural aspects of "the Gulf moment." The effort is not exhaustive, but it is an excellent start and important for any student of the Gulf.

Beyond the standard portrayals of soft and hard power projecting from the Gulf, the editors are careful to frame Gulfization from a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, it has been tempting to explain the regional activism of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar by conceptualizing it in the language of international relations, balances, hegemonies, and alliances. Gulfization of the Arab World indeed deploys Gulfization as an expression of power, but it is also rendered as a "discursive process" in which struggles to define, exclude, and include Gulf societies play out on multiple levels. Put differently, Gulfization is transnational and transregional. The contributing chapters unpack dynamics over time, exchanges within and between Gulf states, and with the wider region. Four chapters are specifically rewarding in their historical perspectives.

Manal Shehabi contributes an overdue and well-evidenced analysis of Kuwait's efforts to move its citizens out of the public sector and into private employment. She shows that "Kuwaitisation" was more than just a labor policy and has been active since at least the early 1980s. But instead of the conventional explanations of failure, which emphasize incentives or the lack thereof, Shehabi makes a more credible interpretation that lack of implementation was "both deliberate and systematic."

Similarly, Marc Owen Jones demolishes the conventional view that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is the critical cause for Bahrain's history of contentious politics. Against this form of "transnational determinism," Jones persuasively demonstrates that pre-1979 patterns of political discrimination and despotism pursued by the ruling House of Khalifa primed the country's domestic struggles. Displacing exclusive emphasis on the revolution's effects allows for a comprehensive and nuanced accounting of the interplay between ostensibly domestic and foreign factors.

Joshua Rogers, utilizing newly available Egyptian archives, investigates a different direction of Gulfization during the Egyptian intervention in Yemen between 1962 and 1967. He assesses Egyptian efforts at military reform and state-building in Yemen as contradictory yet consequential in unforeseen ways. Rogers' analysis of this critical period in Yemeni politics complements other current work on Yemen, such as Isa Blumi's Destroying Yemen (University of California Press, 2018).

A chapter by Abdulrahman Alebrahim breaks new understandings of modern Kuwait's intellectual and cultural development. Departing from the typical frame of the discovery of oil as critical to all things Kuwaiti, Alebrahim investigates Kuwait's pre-independence links with Ottoman and Hashemite Iraq. Tracing the histories of intellectual exchange and knowledge production, he argues that subsequent Kuwaiti intellectual movements focused on social, religious, and identity issues that emerged from these transnational connections.

Two other contributions explore processes of national identity formation and expression. Victoria Hightower discusses the heritage and museum projects of the UAE and Qatar. These efforts are commonly interpreted as efforts at nationalization or increasing their international profile. Hightower contends that these projects also aim to legitimize Gulf histories as coherent intra-Arab narratives alongside the more established Levantine and North African frames. In this sense, "Gulfness" is at once a unique accounting as well as part of larger stories of historical belonging.

Focusing on historical processes of exclusive identity formation in Oman, Irtefa Binte-Farid examines how shifting marriage patterns figured in struggles over who...