After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies.

• Author: Aksu, Ibrahim Enes
• Position: Book review

After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies

By Christopher M. Davidson

London: Hurst & Company, 2012, 298 pages, $34.83, ISBN: 9781849041898

In the last ten years, the people of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have lived through transitions, civil turbulences and civil wars, which creates the necessity of dealing with questions such as: what is the future of the Arab uprisings of 2011, and how will they impact the situation of the monarchies in the region? Considering that these uprisings resulted in the overthrow of many longstanding one-man regimes (i.e. Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Gaddafi in Libya), one might argue that the Gulf monarchies would eventually succumb to the same fate. Following a similar line of argument, Christopher M. Davidson, in his book After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies, argues that "traditional monarchy as a legitimate regime type in the region is soon going to reach the end of its lifespan, especially as most of the Gulf states are now caught in a pincer movement of pressures between unsustainable wealth distribution mechanisms and increasingly powerful 'super modernizing forces' that can no longer be controlled or co-opted by political elites" (p. 240). However, considering that it has been more than seven years since the book was first published and the Gulf monarchies still stand, one can hardly find the book's main argument nor its scenario for the demise of the Sheikhs convincing.

In the first half of the book, Davidson provides the historical details of the development of the Gulf monarchies and the role that the British empire played in it. He later touches on the big names in modernization theory (i.e. Daniel Lerner, Seymour M. Lipset, and Samuel Huntington) to explain that these monarchies will eventually collapse due to the absence of historical legitimacy and the continuing transformation of their societies. Putting the challenges of having a rentier economy at the center of his argument, Davidson argues that the Gulf monarchies have relied on the huge wealth generated by hydrocarbon reserves and avoided collecting taxes from their citizens, which in turn enables them to maintain their rule of 'liberalized autocracy,' wherein the public has little or no chance of demanding representation and accountability. However, for Davidson, because subsidies drawn from the enormous oil and gas revenues will be impossible to sustain in the long...