Roles,identity,and security: foreign policy contestation in monarchical Kuwait

The GCC and Security Pact

The Security Pact was the product of autocratic coordination through the GCC. As a security alliance, the GCC had oriented against external threats since its founding in 1981, when the Gulf kingdoms banded together to counter Iranian aggression (Gause, 2010: 46–49). Charged with boosting collective defense through economic and military integration, the GCC was a conventional response to the pervasive insecurity of the oil-rich Arabian Gulf. The GCC had only partial success in its integrative purpose due to territorial and political disagreements among members (Al-Yusuf, 2014: 401–424). However, the Arab Spring catalyzed dramatic changes. Complementing its external mission with an internal one, the GCC quickly became a regional organizational vehicle for “autocracy promotion” (Tansey, 2016). It enabled several new collaborative efforts between its monarchist members to contain the threat of domestic uprisings and build a geopolitical firewall against the Arab Spring’s regional wave.

The first was organizational retooling. By spring 2011, officials referred to the GCC less as an external security alliance, and more as a “club for monarchies” (naadin lil-malakiyyaat) that could stand as the Arab world’s last bastion of stability against the spreading chaos of revolution (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, 2011). During 2011–2012, the group hosted monthly meetings as officials monitored regional events, exchanged strategic knowledge, and floated new projects. The May 2011 summit, for instance, considered expanding the club to include the non-Gulf kingdoms of Morocco and Jordan. Second, the GCC facilitated mutual interventionism and belligerency. The March 2011 intervention in Bahrain, staffed by Saudi and Emirati troops under imprimatur of GCC peacekeeping, terminated its revolution. The GCC also accused Iran as masterminding internal unrest, inflaming Gulf tensions. It also announced a $20b aid program to prop up Bahrain and Oman, the least prosperous GCC states (Kamrava, 2012: 98).

Third, and most relevant here, the GCC began to transnationalize repression. Much like past examples of transnationalized repression, such as Operation Condor under Latin American military dictatorships in the late 1970s, this aimed to redistribute the costs of domestic coercion borne by individual regimes across regional space and enhance its effectiveness. After nearly a dozen sidebar meetings between Interior Ministers, these efforts bore fruit in the 2012 Internal Security Pact. The landmark treaty’s 20 articles called for unparalleled cross-border cooperation, such as sharing citizens’ biometric data; harmonization of anti-terror laws and security practices; joint policing and military operations; intelligence pooling; and rendition of wanted individuals.

Signed at the December 2012 GCC summit in Bahrain by all six rulers, the Pact was ratified over the next year by all states except Kuwait. It represented an upgraded model of transnational repression by rendering domestic opposition vulnerable to a regional dragnet of coercion. For instance, the treaty’s Article 16 triggers mandatory deportations calling for member states to transfer anyone wanted by fellow GCC kingdoms for suspected “crimes,” vaguely defined. The Pact also furthered the reach of despotic power through judicial convergence, as common standards of anti-opposition restriction emerged. During 2013–2014, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE all promulgated new anti-terrorism laws mirroring one another in language, and which criminalized such an impossibly large range of speech that it made legal dissent all but impossible (Lawson and Legrenzi, 2017). In turn, these coordinated statutes allowed new methods of punishment to diffuse among authorities, such as withdrawing citizenship against critics to render them stateless.

The Pact also gave rise to new techniques of violence. Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE responded to Article 16 by summarily deporting oppositionists wanted by other GCC states. Others began cross-policing—that is, arresting national citizens for criticizing fellow GCC regimes, even if they had said nothing about their own monarchy. Notably, even Qatar, whose rivalry with Saudi Arabia resulted in the 2017 embargo crisis that would split the GCC, participated in this repressive surge, having enthusiastically ratified the Pact. Finally, the treaty allowed governments to share vast securitized information. It proposed the comprehensive tracking of GCC residents through a regional database, which would give national intelligence agencies access to personal and biometric profiles for all individuals. A pilot program in the UAE was declared a success in 2015. In parallel, GCC Interior Ministers proposed to network their operations facilities to one another through fiber-optics, which would allow security forces to seamlessly coordinate crackdowns in multiple countries in real time (Al-Khaleej, 2014).

Explaining Kuwaiti failure: identity and other variables

The Kuwaiti Emir’s December 2012 assent to the Security Pact indicated a desire for closer integration within the GCC’s authoritarian regional order. However, ratification was not to be. The possibility of GCC-mandated transnationalized repression contravened what many Kuwaitis saw as the monarchy’s role as tolerant protector of domestic pluralism. The two identity components underlying this was the constitutive norm of toleration, which embodied the regime’s historical stance of allowing for opposition and pluralism,; and the relational understanding of exceptionalism, which conveyed the royal obligation to prevent foreign pressures from subverting this liberal tradition. These historical, habituated, and widespread beliefs had long served as reference points in Kuwaiti society and political discourse. The Pact appeared to violate these notions, and its potential ratification after 2012 hung over public discourse like a Damocles Sword. Impassioned opposition filled media spaces and civil society, leading parliament to reject the Pact in April 2014 to widespread applause. Popular criticism and contestation continued afterwards, such that by 2017, the Emir and his government had stopped not only advocating but even mentioning the Pact altogether, signaling acceptance of failure.

Mainstream theories struggle to account for why Kuwait defected from its initial foreign policy commitment to more transnationalized repression. First, neorealism suggests that given its structural constraints, the Kuwaiti leadership should have promulgated the Pact at all costs. Crippled with weak offensive capabilities and small populations, Lilliputian states like Kuwait are consumers rather than producers of material security (Cooper and Shaw, 2013; Hey, 2003). Balancing theories predict that they should align with larger allies through treaties and alliances (Walt, 1990). This explains why even Qatar—the state least likely to bandwagon, given its historical tensions with Saudi Arabia—still implemented the Pact. In the past, Kuwait’s need for protection against Iraqi irredentism and Iranian interference underlay its participation in the GCC, as well as its strongly pro-Western orientation. Yet despite these structural incentives, Kuwaitis rejected the Pact, and their monarchy refused to muscle it through.

The omni-balancing version of neorealism suffers a similar blind spot. Theorists of omni-balancing have shown how small state foreign policies reflect not just external constraints but also domestic factors. Such states often exploit outside alliances to contain domestic opposition, such as securing foreign aid to pacify a rebellious social group (David, 1991; Salloukh, 2004). Hence Bahrain, whose Sunni monarchy drew upon Saudi-led GCC support to suppress its restive Shi‘a majority, vocally backed the Pact. The Security Pact was textbook omni-balancing, as it allowed Kuwait’s regime to deploy its foreign policy to outmaneuver domestic opposition during a period of crisis. This makes the Pact’s ultimate failure all the more puzzling.

If IR theorizing does not offer answers, perhaps comparative politics can through theories of rentierism and authoritarianism. First, rentier state theory dominates security studies of the Gulf given the GCC states’ dependence upon hydrocarbon revenues. In basic form, rentier state theorists suggest that fiscal reliance upon oil and gas windfalls generates predictable policies, such as increased repression (Ross, 2013) and greater belligerency (Colgan, 2013). Rentier wealth also distorts economic and political institutions, as it obviates the need to tax citizens and underwrites generous welfarism that can reinforce authoritarianism. However, rentierism as a macro-level variable gives little guidance in explaining the Security Pact’s failure in Kuwait. Paradoxically, GCC kingdoms that were both less rent-dependent and poorer (Bahrain, Oman) and more rent-dependent and wealthier (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE) all ratified the treaty. ²

Theories of authoritarianism deliver another candidate, namely the rational calculus of repression. Given their will and capacity to coerce, dictatorships may impose unpopular policies only if they can do so at acceptable cost (Bellin, 2004; Escribà-Folch, 2013). Hence, perhaps the Sabah regime simply lacked the resources to impose the Pact over domestic opposition. However, this argument lacks validity. For one, ratifying unpopular measures is well within the Kuwaiti regime’s institutional repertoire. In the past, the monarchy has overcome parliamentary intransigence by bribing deputies or else dismissing the assembly altogether and ruling by decree—a move undertaken seven times in the past. Second, the regime could intimidate detractors when necessary. During the Arab Spring, security forces contained dozens of protests and arrested hundreds of activists. These were selective measures rather than sweeping crackdowns, and no protester died; but they showed that Kuwaiti authorities could easily intervene when the stakes were high (Tétreault, 2012). Finally, the regime did not press the Pact after the Arab Spring had ended, when “the fever of demonstrations declined” and opposition was more easily repressed (Alnajjar and Selvik, 2015: 108). That it did not push the treaty through at the precise moment when it was easiest to do so suggests that something other than the cost of domestic coercion motivated the Sabah regime’s foreign policy retraction.

The argument

The puzzle here requires a new explanation, one that accounts for both the strength of domestic opposition and the acquiescence of the ruling autocracy. Figure 1 reveals the argument in theoretical sequence, showing how conflicts over role-based identity can stymie foreign policy—from initial crisis and reactive policymaking to subsequent identity contestation and policy failure. The Arab Spring and the Internal Security Pact occupy the first two stages: in response to a major new security threat, the Sabah monarchy sought greater collaboration with the GCC. Herein lies the explanatory purchase of ideational logic. A proposed foreign policy can spark cognitive dissonance when citizens see this policy as irreducibly contradicting the regime’s traditional role—something so closely tied to its historical identity that the policy appears as a radical departure, even betrayal, of the national self-conception. The foreign policy becomes what Lisel Hintz terms a “point of intolerability,” something so incompatible with an existing worldview or cognitive foundation that reconciliation is impossible (Hintz, 2016: 348).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The argument: crisis, contestation, and policy defeat.

Public contestation then arises. While some advocates defend the foreign policy, citizens contend it diverges from their regime’s role-based identity by violating the constitutive norms and relational understandings that anchor its power to social foundations. What the foreign policy proposes would prevent the regime from what it is supposed to do as the embodiment of national society. Faced with this destabilizing ontological schism, the regime yields.

Role-based identity

Scholarly work on identity politics has moved away from defensive justifications of constructivism, and toward exciting applications of theory-building in International Relations and comparative politics (Abdelal et al., 2009; Zehfuss, 2002). As a variable, identity links cognition to action; how actors conceive themselves in terms of the “Self” influences how they behave regarding some “Other.” As Wendt’s classic definition noted, identity construes not only “role-specific understandings and expectations about self” but also “motivational and behavioral predispositions” of an actor (Wendt, 1999: 21, 224). Thus, a regime’s self-conception can prefigure foreign policy outcomes by making certain policy options appear more or less appropriate in ontological and emotional terms.

Upon this constructivist foundation, theorists have posited critical mechanisms that explain foreign policy behaviors, among them social norms (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998), discursive-cognitive structures (Hopf, 2002), and information-seeking (Glaser, 2010). Such works frame foreign policy as an outcome of identity politics: normative forces, not the objective structure of anarchy, explain why states choose certain foreign policies. Yet more recent work advances an analytical twist: foreign policies are not only the final expression of antecedent ideational struggles, but are themselves episodes of contestation in which debates over identity play out (Hintz, 2016; Lindemann, 2011). Indeed, as Antje Wiener has suggested, identities become more meaningful through contestation, defined as when actors object to a given claim by questioning authority, reconsidering practices, and discursively testing the boundaries of appropriateness (Wiener, 2014: 27–31).

What aspect of foreign policies can provoke such contestation, particularly in nondemocratic states? Here, role theory comes into play by highlighting disputations over roles as an effect of controversial foreign policies. Roles, understood as social positions that imbue a sense of purpose within the Self and expectations from Others, are mutually constitutive to identity because maintaining an actor’s self-conception often requires performing an implied role. If identity connotes the Self’s supposedly intrinsic qualities, then roles indicate what that Self must do in order to keep those qualities consistent and present. The term introduced here, “role-based identity,” captures this. Role theory’s classic expositions showed how national role conceptions allowed governmental elites to heuristically filter foreign policy options and highlight those that seemed to be most appropriate to their national identity (Holsti, 1970; Walker, 1987). For instance, that European officials frame the EU as a “normative” great power today suggests not only an institutional self-conception of an economic hegemon, but also outside expectations that such a hegemon prefers to project interests through soft power rather than military might (Bengtsson and Elgstrom, 2012). Roles, therefore, influence how states socialize into the international system and forge institutional arrangements (Harnisch et al., 2011; Thies, 2010).

However, a semantic shift is needed. Role theorists deal with states as the decision-making entity, while the key actor here is a regime. Regimes are subsets of states. Comparative politics views the former as the political and legal institutions that regulate access to power, while IR views the latter as the sovereign organizational containers encompassing both regime and society. When IR scholars define roles and identities at the systemic level, they assume such concepts have primarily foreign audiences; thus, they emphasize less the domestic interactions between regimes and societies, and more how these ideational properties change states’ external behavior. Middle East specialists, for instance, have shown how states like Egypt and Jordan in the Cold War tailored their foreign policies to symbolically co-opt Arab Nationalist ideology in hopes of securing popular pan-Arab legitimacy (Barnett, 1998; Lynch, 1999). More recently, case studies show how new national role conceptions, like Indonesia as an Asian democracy promoter (Karim, 2017) or Venezuela as a Latin American anti-imperialist patron (Thies, 2017), operate at the interstate level by intending to provoke reactions from allies and rivals.

Yet for comparativists, the term “regime” brings to mind not external audiences, but the domestic society over which a leadership governs. The innovation here is that roles and identities must be conceived as not just state-based, in which the primary audience are other states, but also regime-based, in which domestic audiences push back when a regime’s foreign policy clashes with, and thus destabilizes, what they perceive as its national role conception. Certainly, some theorists acknowledge that foreign policy roles can invite domestic backlash (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012; Simon, 2019). However, such studies focus upon democracies, in which contestation emerges from democratic actors such as meritocratic bureaucracies and multiparty coalitions. Missing is corollary awareness of autocracies, in which regimes are institutionally detached from society given the absence of competitive elections, and enjoy far less horizontal accountability.

In this conceptual milieu, Kuwait shows how, foreign policy roles can be (1) acquired by regimes through close interaction with domestic society, not just the international system; and (2) invoked and contested by society, even in nondemocratic contexts. In autocratic settings, the contestation envisaged by Wiener occurs not through quotidian institutions of elected government, in which citizens vote for new leaders, but rather through discursive battles in the public sphere. Through national debates, civic activism, and political statements—all empirical data that can be observed—social forces can argue that a new foreign policy so transgresses their understanding of a regime’s role-based identity that it is unacceptable. Such popular mobilization is what occurred in Kuwait after 2012.

Constitutive norms and relational understandings

A proposed foreign policy can trigger domestic contestation when it appears to contradict a regime’s role-based identity. Yet when does such opposition become solidary, intense, and sustained, and why would an autocracy be compelled to submit to such defiance? Here, constitutive norms and relational understandings come into focus as components of a regime’s role-based identity. ³ When these components are so closely associated with the collective history and self-conception of the entire polity, and citizens believe them to be violated by a new foreign policy, opposition is likely to erupt.

Constitutive norms encompass the implicit rules and values that delineate how a regime ought to govern and treat domestic society. They embody historical expectations by citizens regarding the legitimate scope of political rule. In Kuwait, the constitutive norm of toleration infuses the monarchy with the obligatory role of tolerating pluralism and diversity, including opposition forces that criticize it. Thus, a government that transgresses a constitutive norm would face interrogation from popular critics who see the new policy change as profoundly inappropriate. A constitutive norm of the French Republic, for instance, has long been the domestic enshrinement of the French language as a sentinel for national unity and identity. Suddenly lifting the Toubon Law, with its linguistic mandates woven into the fabric of French society and educational practices, might elicit public discomfit and questioning about the government’s perceived abandonment of a cultural pillar.

By contrast, relational understandings concern the external dimension. They refer to shared beliefs among citizens about how their regime ought to behave regarding the outside world. They include cognitive comparisons that draw similarities and contrasts with the country’s peers and neighbors. In Kuwait, the relational understanding of exceptionalism expresses recognition that Kuwait has something that its Gulf neighbors do not—liberal political practices; and as such, it must remain separate and protected from Gulf conformity. Relational understandings can instigate conflict if leaders and citizens disagree about how to treat those external forces. Turkey’s move away from EU membership since the early 2000s, for instance, stems from the governing AK Party’s neo-Ottoman Islamist identity clashing with, and eventually defeating, the republicanism expressed by secular elites (Hintz, 2016).

If constitutive norms concern a regime’s domestic orientation to society, then relational understandings dictate its appropriate stance with the outside world. When a proposed policy contradicts these components so sharply that citizens perceive the leadership to be acting inappropriately or even irrationally, situations approximating cognitive dissonance can result. Cognitive dissonance refers to the inconsistency between what is observed versus what is expected (Festinger, 1957). While cognitive dissonance commands its own social and behavioral scholarship, one portable finding when facing strong dissonance, actors often respond with positive actions to restore consistency to their world. For instance, voters in a democracy who witness their preferred party’s candidate espouse contradictory views to their own can exercise the option of either not voting (that is, exit) or else changing their vote (Acharya et al., 2018).

When a foreign policy symbolizes a regime relinquishing its longstanding role-based identity, though, most citizens cannot exit their polity. Instead, they can either convince themselves that the foreign policy and regime identity are actually compatible, or else demand the foreign policy be reversed. In Kuwait, the former was not an option; as the next section shows, the Sabah monarchy’s role as tolerant protector is synonymous with Kuwaiti identity, punctuating national history and embodied through modern practices and institutions. Unable to entertain reconciliation, hence, citizens mobilized for policy reversal.

Constitutive norm of toleration

Because the Sabah dynasty’s actions punctuated key points of Kuwaiti history, its normative orientation is connected to larger conceptions of national identity and pluralism. In Kuwait, the constitutive norm of toleration signifies that pluralism, such as free association and political dissent, is a central feature of public life. This does not make Kuwait an electoral democracy; in institutional terms, executive power has always laid with the Emir and his appointed governments, with hereditary succession determining the mode of leadership change (Herb, 1999: 75–87). However, the Sabah regime has long accepted at least some constitutional limits to absolutism. Such a norm stems from the implicit social contract between the Sabah dynasty and its constituents that crystallized long before 1961, when the principality attained independence from Britain. It embodies what the late Mary-Ann Tétreault identified as the enduring power of founding narratives in national history, whose “paradigmatic story” is one that citizens believe and reproduce as part of their everyday social routines (Tétreault, 2000: 11).

In the Kuwaiti story, historians trace toleration as stemming from the establishment of Kuwait itself in the 1750s, which came through consensus and consultation. Then, tribal settlers freely chose as leader of their fledgling community a modest family with renowned diplomatic skill, the Sabah clan (Al-‘Aydrus, 2002: 12–25). Its perceived legitimacy came not from coercive force, as the Sabah ruler had no permanent army, or from superior wealth, as most economic capital was held by an elite stratum of merchants. Rather, Sabah primacy came from participatory politics and political accessibility: they governed because they consulted with the governed themselves and were open to criticism and complaints (Al-Humeidi, 2005: 152–159).

This early idea that Sabah rulership flowed not from repressive violence but voluntary consent was further reinforced by the resolution of domestic conflicts in the early 20th century. Repeated taxation disputes between wealthy merchants and Sabah rulers climaxed in the 1938 legislative crisis, when merchant oppositionists self-elected a popular assembly to curtail royal power (Al-Jasim, 1997: 149–188). While the democratic movement did not last, it compelled the Sabah leadership into political compromises and dialogues that further limited its power. When oil wealth began enriching Kuwait in the 1950s, thus, the monarchy pursued not despotic exclusion but popular inclusion: it redistributed its hydrocarbon rent to not only benefit the old merchant elite, but also enrich and protect peripheral forces like the Shi‘a minority and Bedouin tribes (Crystal, 1990: 84–89). The result, upon the eve of independence in 1961, was agreement between monarchy and society for a liberal constitution that institutionalized political pluralism through an elected parliament and protections for basic freedoms. More than a façade, this constitutional framework institutionalized a “political culture that provided a stable social basis” for what might be called benevolent authoritarianism (Yanai, 2015: 236).

At an institutional level, hence, the post-independence decades featured a vibrant civil society, independent media, and participatory politics. Kuwaitis publicly debated many government policies in ways not possible in most other Gulf and Arab states. Different social currents, such as Arab Nationalists, Islamists, liberals, and the Shi‘a, competed in parliament, but shared the belief that the right to dissent was an inviolable aspect of the social contract between monarchy and society. Vitally, this understanding has been inscribed in not just political order but social spaces as well. Cultural productions such as educational textbooks and the National Museum all underscore the Sabah dynasty’s claimed synonymy with tolerance. For instance, the concept of mu‘aradha (opposition) in these official narratives is described not as threatening to stability, as might be expected under nondemocratic rule, but instead a productive virtue of Kuwaiti culture and Sabah benevolence (Jamal, 2004: 138–155). This notion is also embedded in social practices, such as the diwaniya—the weekly gathering of male kin from an extended family for purposes of critical discussion. The diwaniya is a centerpiece of informal politics; its “habitus” not only bolsters communal bonds but also furnishes an inviolable space against external, including governmental, intrusions into private political discourse (Chay, 2016: 15–19).

Relational understanding of exceptionalism

The constitutive norm of toleration embodies societal expectations about the monarchy’s lenient treatment of domestic society. The relational understanding of exceptionalism overlaps with this slightly, but adds an important external dimension: it holds that not only does this liberality make Kuwait unique in the Gulf region, but in turn the Sabah regime is obligated to maintain this distinctiveness by preventing the more despotic practices of its GCC neighbors from diffusing inwards. All the GCC states share in common rule by monarchism and rentier dependence. Yet in the post-colonial period, Kuwaiti historians exalt that only their monarchy chose to install a political system that institutionalized pluralism and opposition (Ghabash, 2010: 117–121). In discourse, this exceptionalism and the need to defend it became inseparable notions in the 1960s, when the Gulf’s other royal autocracies gained full sovereignty after the retreat of British imperialism. Then, many Kuwaitis feared that pressures from other Gulf kingdoms like Saudi Arabia would undermine their elected parliament and independent media. As one Kuwaiti official warned, the Sabah regime’s respect for “fundamental freedoms of speech” did not comport well with “the opinion of her neighbors,” which saw such liberal allowances as threatening to their absolutist rule and political stability (Shehab, 1964: 472–473).

Public understanding of Kuwaiti exceptionalism, expressed through constant relational comparisons of Kuwait’s liberalized politics with other Gulf kingdoms, became more evident after the GCC’s formation in 1981. As Michael Herb notes, when the Gulf kingdoms began proposing economic and military cooperation, Kuwaitis worried their “relative political freedom” would be sacrificed on the altar of Gulf integration (Herb, 2014: 104). This incongruency manifested in various ways. By the 1980s, for instance, Kuwaiti civil society incubated rich associational life typified by vocal activism by merchant conglomerates, student movements, professional syndicates, and other civic groups (Hicks and Al-Najjar, 1995). Kuwait’s press allowed daring debates about state corruption and governmental incompetence to play out in ways that could never happen in other GCC states. Likewise, the Sabah regime never created a large coercive apparatus devoted to extirpating domestic dissent. Whereas the other Gulf kingdoms were seen as places where censorship reigned, in Kuwait “peaceful methods of expression and resistance” were inculcated in educational, cultural, and social routines (Al-Ghabra, 1991: 213). Kuwaiti politics was thus defined by divergence from the Gulf.

Kuwait’s societal repertoire of vocality did not mean politics was bereft of conflict. However, it did mean that by frequently comparing Kuwait with her neighbors, citizens could successfully oppose regime dictates. For instance, the monarchy periodically sought to throttle opposition through civic restrictions and parliamentary manipulation during periods of uncertainty. Examples of heavy-handed policing include the late 1970s and late 1980s. However, citizens understood that such repression was mild, expressed in targeted measures such as newspaper closures rather than mass liquidations. Moreover, the burden of proof always fell upon the Emir to justify curtailments of rights. In a prominent example, after the Emir suspended parliament in the late 1980s, a national democracy movement coalesced (Tétreault, 2000: 67–75). When several gatherings, including diwaniya meetings, were violently shuttered by police in late 1989, shocked commentators lambasted such “Gulf-style” brutality, noting that the diwaniya space was as sacred and authentic as Sabah rulership itself (Al-Mudayris, 2002: 25–31). Royal sensitivities to such accusations of destroying Kuwaiti exceptionalism became quickly apparent: the regime halted all arrests, held conciliatory dialogues, and after the Gulf War restored the constitution.

Regional context and identity contestation

The constitutive norm of toleration and relational understanding of Kuwaiti exceptionalism define the Sabah monarchy’s role-based identity. It links regime to society through historical narratives and political institutions, and for many Kuwaitis are synonymous with conceptions of Kuwaiti-ness. Of course, Kuwait is not the only Gulf state where citizens have pleaded for toleration, or argued their polity was distinctive. Democratic activism exists in all the GCC kingdoms. Moreover, social movements advocating greater pluralism have also historically mobilized in UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar, basing their appeals to rulers on themes of monarchical benevolence or relational distinctiveness (Yanai, 2015: 198–215).

However, what makes these ideational components so powerful in Kuwait is their historical incorporation into royal practices. During Kuwaiti state formation, the Sabah dynasty was buffeted by exogenous shocks, such as fiscal scarcity in the 1930s and threats of Iraqi irredentism in the 1960s, which made it vulnerable to popular mobilization (Herb, 2014: 60–61). The Kuwaiti leadership was forced to recognize and integrate popular demands into its policymaking, whereas foreign patronage, external security, and other regime-boosting factors enabled the Saudi, Bahraini, and other Gulf monarchies to simply crush pluralism instead. As Kuwaiti commentators note, the liberal ideals tying the Sabah dynasty to the citizenry thus reflect not innate enlightenment, but rather the reality that formative crises in the past required regime and society to pragmatically work with one another (Al-Sa‘udi and Tahir, 2011: 9–36).

By the Arab Spring, thus, the Sabah monarchy’s role-based identity as tolerant protector was well established. The constitutive norm of toleration placed public expectations upon the regime to allow for dissent and opposition, while the relational understanding of exceptionalism imbued a complementary expectation that the Emir would preserve this Kuwaiti distinctiveness by not importing the practices of fellow Gulf kingdoms. These ideational components laid a cognitive roadmap for regime behavior: so long as the Sabah rulership met these expectations in its policymaking, it was acting in acceptable—that is, identifiably “Kuwaiti”—ways. In this context, the GCC Security Pact became a point of intolerability, because the treaty’s perceived violation of this image of the Sabah monarchy as tolerant protector also implicated deeper questions about Kuwaiti-ness. As the next section demonstrates, much as situations of cognitive dissonance often compel actors to restore consistency to their world, clashes within Kuwaiti identity politics created overwhelming mass resistance and ultimately successful demands for the monarchy to reverse this foreign policy.

Justifying the Pact

When the GCC Internal Security Pact was inked by all six monarchs in December 2012, few in the government believed it would instigate such controversy. According to one senior prince, the assumption was that since most Kuwaitis had long accepted the GCC’s conventional mission of improving external security through regional integration, introducing another mechanism ordained by the regional organization would not be controversial. ⁴

Still, the regime ensconced its justification for the Pact through two rhetorical tropes—regionalism and stability. First, it linked the Pact to regional unity. The treaty was framed as a way to achieve the collective good of Gulf security, thereby spatially reorienting Kuwait as part of a fortified, confederal Gulf front. ⁵ The strongest statement came from the Interior Minister and royal prince, Sheikh Ahmad al-Humud. The Pact’s primary purpose was consonant with the GCC’s mission of creating a “protective shield” over the Arabian kingdoms, because only with well-policed, stable members could the GCC resist external threats such as Iran (Kuwait Ministry of Interior, 2012). Another analyst compared the GCC to the European Union, noting that the EU’s economic and military power came only after states made small sacrifices of national sovereignty (Al-Rai, 2012). For such a greater regional goal, the Pact was a small price to pay.

The second tactic entailed justifying the Pact as necessary for stability. Foreign Minister and royal prince Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid, for instance, framed the agreement as the best way to empower the government to stop terrorism and criminality, framed as the “real” threats to Kuwaiti freedom (Al-Jarida, 2012a). By raising the specter of the Arab Spring, such statements unleashed a familiar authoritarian trope: unless citizens wanted chaos, the government needed better tools to ensure political order. Throughout early 2013, likewise, activists recounted a coordinated strategy in which royal surrogates, including ministers and princes, visited the diwaniya meetings of prominent tribes, as well as public conferences of major institutions, to assure that the Pact was purely about public safety, not criminalizing dissent. At a March 2013 meeting at the Diplomatic Institute, the finishing grounds for foreign affairs personnel, one delegation noted that while the Pact could indeed “network” Kuwaiti citizens into a GCC-wide database, the Emir personally assured this was to root out terrorists, not track individual movements or blacklist political dissent. ⁶

Resistance and Kuwaiti-ness

The Pact’s text was obscured until April 2013, when the government submitted the treaty to parliament for ratification. Controversy then exploded across the media and civil society. Kuwaiti interlocutors rejected connecting the Pact to regionalism and stability, and instead used the monarchy’s historical role as tolerant protector as the basis of principled opposition. They did not use the Pact to demand democratic reforms, or any other grassroots campaign; rather, the unifying thread was that the Sabah regime was turning its back upon its revered identity, one that implicated the very meaning of being Kuwaiti. In the public sphere, the constitutive norm of toleration and relational understanding of exceptionalism were not just cognitions abstracted from history, but discursive referents that justified and oriented these contentious engagements.

First, the constitutive norm of toleration helped frame the Pact as a point of intolerability. A majority of MPs affiliated with the liberal, populist, and Islamist blocs immediately aligned against the Pact. Spearheading this was the National Democratic Alliance, the liberal opposition bloc, which in May 2013 held a symposium on the treaty. ⁷ Nearly a dozen speakers declared the Pact would not only destroy Kuwait’s political norms, but also abrogate the Sabah monarchy’s duty by rendering the Emir more accountable to the GCC than Kuwaitis themselves. In articulating this, MPs picked apart individual clauses to show how the Pact transgressed the constitutional backbone of pluralism. For instance, Article 16 would mandate the regime could extradite any citizen wanted by other GCC kingdoms for “crimes” as simple as political joke—a ludicrous requirement, given that dark humor about corruption and politics pervaded many public discussions (Al-Rai, 2013). Article 10’s requirement for security cooperation implied that during future protests other Gulf militaries might send troops to suppress Kuwaitis on their own soil. As speakers dissected each article, they posed the rhetorical question: how could the Emir—the embodiment of Kuwaiti leadership and practices—reconcile centuries of his family embracing societal pluralism with the sudden imposition of radical restriction?

Such normative condemnation also saturated the mainstream media, which reveals another front of ideational resistance. The largest Arabic dailies Al-Rai, Al-Jarida, Al-Qabas, and Al-Watan—which spanned the ideological spectrum, and often supported sensible government policies—were saturated with commentaries disparaging the treaty. Indeed, the media sector overall evinced little pro-Pact sentiment, due to two factors. One was the absence of public figures, including intellectuals and writers, willing to back this foreign policy initiative. Another was consensual opposition by the journalistic community itself against the treaty. As one Kuwaiti writer claimed, even if there was the occasional pro-Pact viewpoint submitted by outside contributors, the editorial staffs of most newspapers would refuse to publish them, thereby helping to create this lopsided debate. ⁸

Elsewhere in civil society, critics emphasized incongruency between the Sabah monarchy’s historical toleration norm against the prospect of what one activist called “the anti-Kuwaiti, Kuwaiti police state.” ⁹ Several NGOs decried the move. The Kuwait Transparency Society, for instance, noted that the Pact’s implementation would nullify royal protections by making Kuwaitis vulnerable to the predations of other Gulf kingships (Kuwait Transparency Society, 2013: 232–234). Meanwhile, youth activists exploited social media to ridicule the treaty. One questioned whether the Emir had “lost his mind”—a phrase repeated several times during the interview as to emphasize the irrationality of the move. ¹⁰ Another blogger provocatively posted the scanned image of the treaty’s last page to expose the Emir Sabah’s signature (Al-Ziadi-Q8, 2013). This exposed the literal handiwork of the national figurehead in a picture retweeted many times, emphasizing the perceived mismatch of a royal tolerator endorsing official intolerance.

Second, many Kuwaitis also deployed their relational understanding of Kuwaiti exceptionalism to attack the monarchy’s seeming failure to uphold its role of tolerant protectorship. One tactic turned the argument for Gulf unity on its head. The Pact would indeed help achieve an integrated, even confederal, Gulf union; but this would drown Kuwait in a sea of regional despotism, thereby erasing its moral existence. Parliamentarians argued this point many times. For instance, Ahmed al-Saadun, a veteran MP associated with tribal-populist forces, reasoned on a popular TV show that in such a Gulf confederation, either Kuwaiti liberalism would diffuse outwards or else the other kingdoms’ repressive standards would infiltrate inwards—and the latter was far more likely given the numbers (Talk Show Al-Washihi, 2013). Other opposition elites concurred. Salafi-Islamist MP Osama al-Manawar, for example, explained on the same program that the quest for Kuwait’s Islamic order required Kuwait to retain its character under Sabah stewardship. One could not attain religious actualization if Kuwait was policed by Saudi troops, for the Islamization needed to arise indigenously rather than from the GCC (Talk Show Al-Washihi, 2014).

Civil society forces argued within the relational perspective as well. Early on, the media raised the fact that the GCC had floated past versions of the Internal Security Pact before, most recently in 1994. Yet the Sabah Emir had always rejected them because any Gulf-wide agreement to crack down on dissent could never “match” Kuwait’s cultural heritage (Al-Jarida, 2012b). As one critic averred, “being Kuwaiti was never the same as being khaliji (Gulf),” and it was “mysterious” that a dynastic leadership that long recognized this was now suggesting the two were coterminous. ¹¹ Likewise, among the arguments from the Kuwaiti Observatory for Human Rights was that important social practices, like the diwaniya, could not survive if Kuwait converged with its neighbors by emulating their legal and policing standards. ¹²

As one blogger wrote, ratifying the Pact meant the Emir was importing a Gulf “model of power” into a social landscape least prepared, and least willing, to accept it (WhatKuwait, 2013). This relational perspective was best embodied, as the aforementioned critic averred, in the following contrast: while activist voices in Gulf kingdoms like Saudi Arabia desired their monarchy to move beyond its normal behavior by tolerating more democracy, in Kuwait they merely wanted the monarchy to return to its normal behavior by rejecting the treaty. ¹³

Finally, the Shi‘a community rebuffed the Pact. Shi‘a commentators argued that it was the Sabah dynasty’s historical benevolence that allowed Kuwait, unlike other Gulf kingdoms, to socially and politically integrate the Shi‘a (Al-Ghabra, 2014: 6–7). However, by turning Kuwait into a sectarian simulacrum of the Gulf, the Pact meant the monarchy was sacrificing this commitment on the altar of geopolitics. Crucially, whereas sectarian controversies often pitted Shi‘a voices against Islamists and liberals in the past, here these groups were bound by consensus that the Security Pact threatened Kuwait’s exceptional nature.

Rejection and defeat

As the evidence suggests, opposition against the Internal Security Pact was not predicated upon technical issues or purely democratic demands. The image of the Emir and monarchy lay at the heart of contention, for the Pact represented a point of intolerability—a foreign policy project irreconcilable with the monarchy’s role-based identity as a tolerant protector, and with it the nature of Kuwaiti-ness. This section completes the argument by illustrating that such identity contestation convinced the Sabah monarchy of the Pact’s impossibility. Though causal tipping points can prove elusive in ideational research, two streams of evidence stand out here. The first concerns the decisiveness by which parliament rejected the treaty in spring 2014, and the second was the swiftness by which the regime dropped the Pact from its agenda afterwards.

First, the Kuwaiti parliament has long served as a barometer for public opinion. Though it does not form the government, being a limited organ under the ruling monarchy, its debates are surrogates for public preferences, because its elected deputies represent the ideological, tribal, and political spectrum of society (Salih, 2006). What made parliament’s consideration of the Pact so striking was its lack of debate on the issue. Before legislative proceedings even began in February 2014, the media noted that most deputies had taken a “national stand” against the Pact, as virtually none publicly supported the treaty (Al-Jarida, 2014).

In the ensuing parliamentary sessions, which royal observers closely followed, only a handful of pro-regime deputies spoke in favor of the bill. Among them was Speaker of Parliament, Marzouq al-Ghanim, who repeated early arguments about Gulf unity and public safety, as well as the Sabah princes leading the Interior, Foreign, Oil, and Justice Ministries, who spoke as ex-officio parliamentarians (Al-Sabah, 2014). However, deputies participating in these discussions attest that the vast majority of elected parliamentarians pledged to vote against the treaty on grounds that the Pact was “un-Kuwaiti.” ¹⁴ Among the public, such consensus was evident in the media: no less than seven deputies in February 2014 alone authored editorials in the two largest Arabic dailies, Al-Rai and Al-Jarida, against the treaty (Al-Rai, 2014a). Summing this mood, Shi‘a MP Abdulhameed Dashti declared that parliament was exercising its “historical responsibility” to reject the Pact, which “violated the wishes of Kuwait’s [Sabah] founding fathers” and would otherwise destroy Kuwait’s “beautiful civilization” (Al-Rai, 2014b). When parliament’s committee on foreign affairs rejected the treaty in April 2014, thus, few were surprised. Both the scope of such rare consensus and the fact that the Pact had not even reached parliament’s floor for a formal vote were interpreted as humiliating defeats for the Emir.

The second indicator that such solidary resistance convinced the regime to abandon the Pact came in the aftermath of the April 2014 parliamentary defeat, when officials did so little to counterattack. Throughout 2015, senior Sabah ministers pressed parliament to reconsider the treaty, urging the matter be “expedited” given the worsening climate of regional insecurity (Al-Watan, 2015). However, though a handful more votes were secured through clientelist pressuring, parliament refused to formally vote on the matter. Thereafter, state officials simply began to drop all references to the Pact. The last public statement from a senior Sabah prince mentioning the treaty came in October 2016, when deputy Foreign Minister Khalid al-Jarallah deplored that Kuwait was attracting “ridicule” for being the only GCC state to reject the Pact (Al-Qabas, 2016). That had little effect, as the item remained off parliament’s agenda. By 2017, the issue was essentially dead.

Extracting definitive evidence in authoritarian settings is difficult, but insights given from two sources close to decision-making circles suggest that for the Sabah leadership, an internal process of learning and adjustment had taken place. First, by 2016, foreign policy officials conceded that they were no longer keen on advancing the Pact, as many feared that perpetuating popular hostility to this regional initiative would “permanently dirty” the public image of the GCC. ¹⁵ This would endanger Kuwait’s other external commitments, as maintaining cordial GCC relations was still necessary to deal with other security threats, such as ISIS-inspired radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Second, royal commentators suggested that the sheer weight of Kuwaiti opinion had become apparent to palace leadership. One senior prince suggested that after the parliamentary rejection, decision-makers realized “compromise was impossible” because the Pact was a zero-sum matter, being ratified or not; and for an Emir recognizant of his historical responsibility to heed popular interests, “when an entire country is shouting, it is hard to pretend deafness.” ¹⁶

Final evidence regarding the effectiveness of identity contestation stems from what did not happen—a unilateral royal maneuver to push the Pact through. Hypothetically, the Emir could have suspended the parliament, a move repeatedly done before to circumvent obstructive assemblies (as happened seven times from 1976 to 2012). In fact, the monarchy dissolved the legislature twice during the Arab Spring alone; the next logical tactic would have been to decree the Pact through royal fiat or else call for new elections so that more conservative deputies could be seated. Likewise, the regime did not suppress the Pact’s foes through authoritarian means. Activists knew well that on vital issues the government was still capable of using “a little muscle” to intimidate its foes. ¹⁷ For instance, the most vocal Kuwaiti protesters during the Arab Spring protests battled public prosecution for years. Yet the regime was “not motivated to push it through. . . It could have technically and legally [done so], but there didn’t seem to be this urgency” (Al-Akhbar, 2015). In essence, the monarchy could not impose a repressive treaty seen as contradicting its status as tolerant protector through more repression, as this would further highlight its jarring dissonance with the normative and relational underpinnings of Kuwaiti-ness.

Plausibility and significance

The argument here does not overgeneralize by implying that every Kuwaiti opposed the Pact due to their monarchy’s role-based identity as tolerant protector. The Sabah regime has many identity components, and Kuwaiti society is diverse. Indeed, many political debates reflect regnant cleavages—Sunni versus Shi‘a, urban versus Bedouin, citizen against foreigner (Nakib, 2016). Kuwaiti politics is also highly patriarchal, reflecting gender gaps that only recently have begun to diminish. Yet the proposition here, as triangulated from media statements, personal interviews, and public discourse, is that despite these differences, a powerful and successful groundswell of public opposition to the GCC Security Pact mobilized. Citizens and parliament engaged in public, vocal, and concerted attacks on a new foreign policy seen as contradicting two core elements of the Sabah monarchy’s role-based identity, the constitutive norm of toleration and relational understanding of Kuwaiti exceptionalism. Many Kuwaitis, in their minds, were not simply debating a technical regional initiative, but rather symbolically addressing the monarchy through a relentless campaign of ideas and critique. This was expressed by the scope of public resistance, the swiftness of parliamentary rejection, testimonials into regime learning and recognition, and finally the absence of authoritarian tactics to ratify the Pact.

In comparative perspective, this is significant. While democratic opposition exists in all the GCC kingdoms, only in Kuwait could activists criticize the Pact with an argument that not only invoked their regime’s historic identity, but also tied that identity to the fabric of social life—national history, political practices, and institutional routines that defined their national self-conception. In theoretical context, that the Sabah monarchy failed to ratify the Pact is notable. This foreign policy project, just years earlier, was presented as the kingdom’s bulwark against chaos and instability. In conceding this issue, the regime turned away from an opportunity to more closely integrate within an autocratic regional order, whose purpose was to deliver what it had always craved the most—greater security.