- 26 Feb 2024
[Book Talk] The Gulf Monarchies after the Arab Spring
(This event is organised by MEI Political Economy research cluster.)
The post-Arab Spring collapse of decades-old regimes inaugurated a decade of re-shaping for the geopolitical order in the Middle East and North Africa region. A multipolar disorder ensued, solidified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Amid general bewilderment, the small monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) spent the decade between 2011 and 2022 trying to re-shape regional equilibria as protagonists. Cinzia Bianco’s book applies an original theoretical framework to unpack the threat perceptions and strategic calculus driving the behaviour of these new impactful regional players. Six chapters look at the GCC monarchies individually. Bianco challenges commonly-held narratives, and goes beyond attention-grabbing headlines, thus provides reading keys to the past, present, and future of policy-making in the Gulf monarchies, which are middle powers destined to play an oversized role in the new multipolar world. Against that backdrop, the book talk will allow us to reflect on the major evolutions of Gulf states in the past decade, and venture on their future trajectories.
This public talk was conducted online via Zoom on Monday, 26 February 2024, from 4pm to 5pm (SGT).
Watch the full talk here:
Listen to the full event here:
Image caption: book cover of ‘The Gulf Monarchies after the Arab Spring’ by Cinzia Bianco
About the Speakers
Visiting Fellow
the European Council on Foreign Relations
[Moderator] Dr Jean-Loup Samaan
Senior Research Fellow
Middle East Institute, NUS
Dr Cinzia Bianco is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, where she is working on political, security and economic developments in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf region, and relations with Europe. Additionally, she is a senior analyst at Gulf State Analytics. She was previously a research fellow for the European Commission’s project on EU-GCC relations ‘Sharaka’ between 2013 and 2014.
She holds an MA n Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King’s College London, and a PhD in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, where she worked on threat perceptions in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) after the 2011 Arab uprisings. She is the author of “The Gulf monarchies after the Arab Spring: threats and security”. (Manchester University Press, 2024)
[Moderator] Dr Jean-Loup Samaan is a Senior Research Fellow specialising in Middle East strategic affairs, with a particular focus on the defence and security policies of Gulf states and Israel. Prior to that, Samaan was a policy analyst at the Directorate for Strategic Affairs of the French Ministry of Defence (2008-2011), research adviser at the NATO Defence College (2011-2016), and associate professor in strategic studies at the UAE National Defence College (2016-2021).
