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ID:
106712
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
THE SAUDI royal family is afraid. Very, very afraid. A crisis of leadership is brewing. The king is ailing and his successor, Crown Prince Sultan, is in even worse health. Their hard-line brother, Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, is set to take the throne. One of the last absolute monarchies, the Saudi family seems to represent all that the Arab Spring is fighting against: closed societies with unequal wealth distribution; repressed minorities living within manufactured boundaries; strong Islamist sympathies across its lands; a latent Sunni-Shia power struggle embedded in the country's fabric-not to mention a string of surrounding states struggling to stave off revolutions that could easily have a contagion effect.
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| 2 |
ID:
101740
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why have absolutist monarchies in the past three decades survived when so many succumbed to coups and revolution in the past? The rulers' use of divide-and-rule and balancing strategies as Lust-Okar and Jamal noted recently, served as a partial solution. Overlooked in the literature on the persistance of monarchies was how these mechanisms, which reduce the leader's domestic vulnerability, mar his offensive capabilities to cope with centralising, more effective and threatening neighbours. To cope with this trade-off between internal and external vulnerabilities, monarchs and leaders of other Third World states have been involved in a two-level game of 'omnibalancing' - allying with strong outside powers when possible while continuing to employ divide-and-rule and balancing techniques domestically. Only resource-rich or strategically located monarchies can enjoy such protection which is why most of monarchies that have persisted are located in the Middle East.
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