Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Centers of Power in the Arab Gulf States (London, Hurst) 406 pp., $42.50.

In January 2015, the elderly king of Saudi Arabia appointed his twenty-nine-year-old son, Mohammed bin Salman, as defense minister. The international circuit of diplomats and foreign policy analysts knew several older siblings, but few had even heard of this young man.

Saudi royal successions can be as opaque as papal conclaves. But two years later, by the time the young man had sidelined all rivals and become crown prince and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, he was still largely unknown outside of the country. In 2019, one of America’s premier think tanks published a book about Saudi-American relations praising a rival who by then was living in permanent house arrest in Riyadh, a testament to perhaps not only the author’s loyalty to this fallen rival but also to the thinness of collective understanding of this important country.

Since the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia has been the world’s swing producer of oil; it is the only Arab member of the G-20. Understanding this country is not an esoteric quest to be left to desert explorers and impressionistic journalists for hire.

Unto the breach, dear friends, now comes Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a British-trained academic. After years of visiting the Gulf (I met him in Riyadh in early 2007), he has written a book that describes eight “centers of power” that characterize all six Arab countries on the eastern littoral of the Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman).

I confess to an initial skepticism of Ulrichsen’s book or any study that lumps together these six countries without first describing their differences. One is a giant (the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River) multi-ethnic kingdom, another is a confederation of city-states, and the other four are single city-states with varying degrees of hinterland and mostly quite small. Two of the states are not majority Sunni Muslim (Bahrain is majority Shia, and Oman is majority Ibadi).

There are nevertheless strong common traits binding all six countries, and Ulrichsen does a superb job of illuminating them. He starts with the most obvious one: dynastic rule by absolute, not constitutional, monarchs. He rightly complicates that reality with key nuances. The king, emir, or sultan rules within the consensus set by powerful family members and allied families There is always a shifting constellation of powers behind the throne. Dynastic succession in the Gulf usually goes to the most capable son, not necessarily the eldest, in accordance with local tradition and in contrast to the primogeniture tradition of Western monarchies. The author also describes how the centralizing power of oil revenue changed the traditional relationship between the ruler and the merchant families who used to control much of the countries’ economic power.

Ulrichsen identifies three common traits that, in effect, check the ruler’s power: consultation or shura, representation, and political opposition. He is particularly good at delineating the different shura traditions that are rooted in tribal custom and Islamic law. Especially in the smaller Gulf states where this kind of direct interaction between ruler and ruled is still feasible, shura has supported the somewhat tentative emergence of national representative bodies in the past half-century. He is likewise excellent in discussing opposition movements to the Gulf dynasties, from Arab nationalism to today’s Islamism. In a chapter on “Responses,” he shows a range of governmental reactions to these movements. Still, details are lacking, for instance, about critical responses like the Saudi victory against al-Qaeda or Qatar’s cooptation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Throughout, Ulrichsen relies on a thorough mastery of the academic literature on the Gulf. The thinness of that literature is particularly apparent in the treatment of economic power. These six states, while taking over national control of their oil and gas industries with the help of the oil majors, formed some of the most comprehensive welfare states in existence. Being a Gulf state citizen is like getting Willy Wonka’s golden ticket: free health care, free education through university, subsidized mortgages, subsidized fuel costs, and no income tax (though Oman may soon become the first to have an income tax).

The flip side of this golden ticket is that Gulf states tightly control migration and citizenship, and foreign migrant workers don’t qualify, even though they form a high percentage of the resident population (in Qatar, the migrant share of the population is around 88 percent). One challenge facing all six Gulf countries is how to integrate these millions of foreign residents. The United Arab Emirates has attempted to manage this situation through an official Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence with its multi-faith ideals symbolized through the Abrahamic Family House, which houses a mosque, church, and synagogue. These efforts go unmentioned in Ulrichsen’s book.

Another shared challenge is how to sustain these welfare states while transforming their economies for a future global energy market that will be less dependent on oil and gas. Ulrichsen’s book discusses the welfare states but is largely silent on these shared challenges.

Ulrichsen acknowledges in his introduction an influential and provocative book, Arabia Without Sultans, by the Anglo-Irish leftist academic Fred Halliday, who had supported the ultimately failed 1970s Dhofar rebellion in Oman and the cause of pan-Arab nationalism. Since Halliday, there has been a drought of interesting literature on the region. Ulrichsen’s book encapsulates the current state of that literature and thus highlights existing gaps. Accordingly, its chapters on Gulf domestic politics should open the way for more study and better understanding of this fascinating corner of the world.

Robert Silverman, former President of the American Foreign Service Association, is a lecturer at Shalem College and President of the Inter-Jewish Muslim Alliance (IJMA). Follow him on LinkedIn and X @silverrj99.

Image: Kashif Hameed / Shutterstock.com.