Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Blumi, Isa

Titel

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

Ist Teil von

• Government and Politics of the Contemporary Middle East, 2024, p.545-652

Auflage

3

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Ever since its creation in 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has been studied as a cohesive political, economic, and military unit whose member states operated in unison. As demonstrated in this chapter, such a narrative of cohesion and cooperation proves misleading. Despite considerable strategic importance given to the region's oil and gas wealth, the GCC's unstable political and economic conditions remain a paradox rarely registered in the scholarship. Indeed, this chapter argues that the origins of instability in the larger Middle East region directly informs the very precarious nature of the GCC, with domestic rivalries between key elements of each member states' political and merchant classes regularly upsetting relations between members. As such, this chapter explains how the contentious politics and struggle for economic advantages makes for the entirety of the Gulf a complex setting in which foreign influences, initially European and then the United States of America, significantly impact the evolution of each member state. As elsewhere, key local, regional, and global factors contribute to a necessarily modified, more realistic understanding of the Politics and Government among GCC countries.