MENA Scholar Spotlight: F. Gregory Gause III

What's up with one of the great Twitterless scholars of Gulf International Relations?

Welcome to the MENA Scholar Spotlight! Every Friday I ask a leading scholar of MENA politics a few questions about themselves and their interests - a fun way to learn more about your favorite academics!

Greg Gause is the dean of American Gulf scholars, especially on Saudi Arabia and regional international relations, despite (or perhaps because of) his complete lack of a Twitter or other online social media presence. His most influential book, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf, is the gold standard for the subfield of Middle East International Relations: clearly written, innovative, deeply informed empirically, and a compelling model of the sort of pragmatic combination of Realism, Constructivism and Regime Security Theory toward which many analysts now gravitate. Year in and year out, it’s a student favorite in my graduate courses for a good reason.

Gause has published widely in a range of academic journals, most recently, a fascinating recent Security Studies piece comparing British and American hegemony in the Middle East. He contributed this fantastic short piece to a symposium I edited (with Curtis Ryan) on the Arab Spring and IR Theory , and also co-authored the IR chapter in my recent edited volume The Political Science of the Middle East. He’s served as a mentor to several generations of the small world of Middle East International Relations scholars, while maintaining a regular presence in the policy world.

Where Gause shines, in my opinion, is in his regular contributions to Foreign Affairs. He’s a master of the form, especially because we so often disagree: for examples, see Gause, “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring” / Lynch, “No We Didn’t”, and Gause, “Resilient Royals” / Lynch, “The Arab Monarchy Debate”, and Gause, “The Price of Order” / Lynch, “The New Old Middle East Order”, and maybe this CFR webinar discussion. The core of our disagreement, I think, is over whether a region populated by autocracies ruling over ever more economically, politically and socially miserable populations can be stable — and over whether U.S. interests or the interests of the people of the MENA region are best served by American alliances with such autocratic regimes. The thing is, we disagree productively! It’s an increasingly lost art, one well worth preserving and modeling.

Without further ado, let’s welcome Greg Gause to the MENA Scholar Spotlight!

Abu Aardvark: What are you reading right now?

Greg Gause:   Earlier this fall I read the book of the year in Middle East politics circles, Jillian Schwedler’s Protesting Jordan (Stanford UP, 2022) .  It is great.  I do not study protests and I have not really kept up with Jordanian politics much in recent years, so I learned a lot about both from the book.  It is a model of tightly-reasoned, theoretically informed political ethnography and a fun read. 

Earlier this year I read a prepublication draft of Steven Simon’s forthcoming memoir/analysis of American foreign policy in the region, The Long Goodbye, which will be coming out from Penguin in the spring.  Steve served on the National Security Council in the Clinton and Obama Administrations and is a prolific author on the region and America’s role in it.  I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but it is a fascinating read.  He combines great analytical skills with the perspective of someone who was at the table for the debates in D.C. 

I also just finished a great historical novel that has nothing to do with the Middle East, Acts of Oblivion, which tells the story of the hunt in colonial New England for two of the judges who condemned Charles I to death in 17th century England by Restoration authorities.  Cracking good story.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever published?

I wrote three articles/think-tank pieces around the Arab Uprisings that, IMHO, have held up pretty well.  I think of them as a set:  1) “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90, No. 4 (July/August 2011); 2) “Kings for All Seasons:  How the Middle East’s Monarchies Survived the Arab Spring,” Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper No. 8, September 2013 [a shorter version, co-authored with Sean Yom, “Resilient Royals:  How Arab Monarchies Hold On,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 23, No. 4 (October 2012); and 3) “Beyond Sectarianism:  The New Middle East Cold War,” Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper No. 11, July 2014.

I really like that last one. I couldn’t even disagree with it! What are you currently working on?

I continue to write stuff for policy audiences, the most recent is a piece in the January/February 2023 Foreign Affairs on Saudi-American relations.  Briefly, I argue that the current tensions in US-Saudi relations are less the product of the clashing personalities of President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and more about the global structural change from American unipolarity to emerging multipolarity.  The long-term project is a book on Saudi Arabia.

What’s your dream project?

An homage to Malcolm Kerr and his The Arab Cold War based on regional international relations since the Arab Uprisings.  Why haven’t I done it?  Too lazy.  Curt Ryan, you need to get on this!

I would love to read that. Who, besides yourself, do you think is doing the most interesting work on the region these days?

There are so many people doing interesting work that it is hard to pick.  Not many people work on the IR of the region, so I am always interested in what the people who do come up with.  Two people whose work on Middle East IR that I find really interesting these days (besides your own bad self, Abu Aardvark, of course) are May Darwich (Threats and Alliances in the Middle East, Cambridge UP, 2019) and Ariel Ahram (Break All the Border:  Separatism and the Reshaping of the Middle East, Oxford UP, 2019 and War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa, Polity, 2020).  I am also anxiously awaiting the results of the project on state capacity that you and Steve Heydemann are working on.  Get that stuff out!

What’s your current favorite MENA food?

Bateel dates.  They come from the heart of Najd and are the best dates I have ever had.  Every time I go to to the Gulf, my wife says, “You had better come home with some of those dates.”

What worries you the most about the state of the field in Middle East political science? 

There are all sorts of things to worry about, like access to the field, fieldwork in increasingly authoritarian environments and continuing Covid issues.  However, the thing that worries me the most, as I approach retirement, is how the professional obligations of advancement in the discipline push scholars away from asking the big questions.  There are now a couple of generations of extremely well-trained political scientists who study the Middle East, who know their languages and do their field work and are also very conversant with the methods and approaches that dominate the discipline.  They do great work.  They are much better political scientists than I am.  But the pressures of publication in the disciplinary journals and the training they are receiving at the best graduate programs push them to narrow their questions in the interest of being able to make absolutely airtight causal inferences.  Hard to do that with the big questions.  I just worry that the price of disciplinary success is increasingly an inability to address the questions that got most of us into the field to begin with.