Middle eastern studies
- PDF / 554,843 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 25 Downloads / 234 Views
Middle eastern studies Chaoqun Lian1 Received: 27 May 2020 / Accepted: 20 June 2020 © The Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS), Peking University 2020
1 Qatar and the Gulf Crisis, by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Oxford University Press, 2020, 224 pages, $37.50 (Hardcover) On May 4, 2020, rumors spread on social media about a failed coup d’etat in Qatar, which was soon discredited as disinformation. This incident was reminiscent of the Gulf Crisis arising three years earlier, when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt severed diplomatic relations with Qatar and initiated an overall blockade/boycott by land, air and sea. Not coincidently, it was widely accepted that the crisis originated with a hack of the Qatar News Agency and a disinformation campaign aimed at delegitimating the Qatari ruling family. This, according to Ulrichsen, was the first “international crisis symptomatic of the ‘alternative facts’ era of the Donald Trump presidency” (2, 255), marked by “evident disregard for international norms and conventional diplomacy, and the blurring of fact and fiction” (6). The sudden announcement of the blockade/boycott took the world by surprise, but Qatar’s swift response and resilient survival have impressed the world even more. It is against this backdrop that Ulrichsen sets out to explain in this monograph “how and why [Qatar] was able to beat back a blockade that was supposed to isolate the country and force it into a position of submission to the would-be regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi (in the UAE), and how instead it emerged arguably stronger and more united as a result” (5). Ulrichsen succeeds in giving a comprehensive and convincing answer to the questions he raises. He contextualizes the Gulf Crisis by first situating it in the long back-story of power struggles and territorial disputes in the Arabian Peninsula from the mid-nineteenth century until the Arab Spring in 2011 (Chapter 1). He then links the Gulf Crisis to the concerted actions Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE took in 2013–14 to challenge Sheikh Tamim—then the new Emir of Qatar (Chapter 2). This contextualization, which encompasses both remote and recent memories, paves the way for a detailed account of the events leading up to the crisis in 2017 (Chapter 3) and a thorough review and analysis of “the range of political, economic, energy, * Chaoqun Lian [email protected] 1
Department of Arabic, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, No.5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
China International Strategy Review
defense, security, regional, and foreign-policy measures” (9) that the Qatari leadership and population took to tackle the crisis (Chapter 4–8). Ulrichsen ends the book with an interesting final chapter addressing the tug-of-war around International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup 2022, a global carnival of sports scheduled to be held in Qatar, within the intricacies of the Gulf Crisis. Ulrichsen gives w
Data Loading...
