Small State Security Dilemma: Kuwaita After 1991.

• Author: Battaloglu, Nesibe Hicret

Small State Security Dilemma: Kuwaita After 1991

By Radhika Lakshminarayanan

Notion Press, 2019, 150 pages, ISBN: 9781647339609

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces entered Kuwait and invaded the small Gulf kingdom within two days. Lhe invasion of Kuwait was devastating for the entire region in the post-Cold War era, as for the first time an Arab state invaded another Arab country. Lhe international coalition forces led by the U.S. repulsed the Iraqi aggression and Kuwait was liberated in 1991. Lhe Kuwaiti invasion was transformative for intra-Arab relations, identities and alignments; regional security structures; relations with extra-regional powers and even the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While there is an exhausting literature on this particular period, Radhika Lakshminarayanan's recent book, Small Security Dilemma: Kuwait after 1991, focuses on Kuwait's strategies of survival as a small state in a turbulent regional environment since its liberation. Lakshminarayanan's academic interest in Kuwait traces back to 1993, when she visited Kuwait for the first time and the physical and psychological impacts of the invasion were still evident. Dr. Lakshminarayanan is an associate professor at the American University of the Middle East, Kuwait; her research focuses on small state studies, Middle East foreign policy and diaspora studies.

Lhe book consists of five thematically designed chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter, "Small States in a VUCA World," the author defines the concepts of small states, their unique security needs and the regional security complex. Further, she exclusively focuses on the evolution of the balance of power, small-state alliance strategies and small-state security dilemmas in the literature. She articulates the acronym VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) to define Kuwait's security environment in a multipolar world. The second chapter focuses on this particular environment in a more detailed fashion; Lakshminarayanan locates Kuwait geographically and presents the historical evolution of its security from pre-oil era dependencies toward self-reliance and multilateralism after 2003. Lakshminarayanan defines oil and location as geo-economic and geo-strategic challenges to Kuwait's security.

In the third chapter, "Kuwait's Regional Security Architecture," the author coins the term 'South West Asian Security system' in analyzing mechanisms and issues of regional dialogue and...