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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
169254
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article revisits prevailing ideas about the legitimation of monarchical rule through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) by emphasizing the neo-traditional rule of the GCC regimes. It assumes that legitimacy claims often cross the local, national and (sub-)regional levels and analyzes them from a critical historical perspective and against the background of a global capitalist order. I show that the history of the sub-regional organization is wedded to legitimacy claims, referring to a common Gulf identity and good economic performance for the benefit of the members’ citizens. However, I focus on what often is marginalized in scholarly analyses: The common normalization of highly segregated labor markets on which the neo-traditional regimes depend. In effect, I criticize not only the international failures to oppose the GCC’s common repression of democratic revolt (2011). I also depict a bias in many scholarly analyses of autocratic legitimacy, as they neglect citizen-foreigner gaps. Finally, I argue that geopolitical and elite competition, as evident in the tensions between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, does not prepare the end of the GCC as we know it. Only substantive democratization could do so.
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| 2 |
ID:
103753
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay draws attention to the importance of Montesquieu's earliest and unpublished writings on liberty for our understanding of the famous eleventh book of the Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu's investigation of the nature and preconditions of liberty, the author argues, was much more polemical than it is usually assumed. As an analysis of his notebooks shows, Montesquieu set out to wrest control over the concept of liberty from the republican admirers of classical antiquity, a faction that he believed to be dangerously populist and revolutionary. In order to do so, Montesquieu came up with a redefinition of the concept of liberty that allowed him to argue that monarchical subjects could be just as free as republican citizens. This conclusion has important implications not just for our understanding of Montesquieu's writings but also and more broadly for our understanding of the intellectual history of liberalism.
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| 3 |
ID:
156629
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article considers religious, social, political, and economic dimensions of the
Saudi-Wahhabi state imagination. Since the inception, the Saudi state has relied on two
main pillars: the monarchy and Wahhabism, which have been in a symbiotic relationship.
In time, the state imagination in Saudi Arabia has been determined and reconstructed
by factors like Wahhabism, monarchism, rentierism, internal and international political
and economic obligations, and modernization efforts imposed by being a “nation state.”
Those factors made Saudi Arabia a sui generis state. The legitimacy of the monarchy has
been ensured through tribalism and, on a larger scale, religion. Foreign aid, booties, oil
revenues, and, on a rather insignificant scale, tax revenues have created a material infrastructure
to build citizenship.
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