The Resilience of Kuwaiti Parliamentary Life
Plus, another week's MENA Academy roundup
Courtney Freer, The Resilience of Parliamentary Politics in Kuwait (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
Kuwait held yet another election last week, its fourth in four years and the first since Sheikh Meshal al-Ahmad al-Sabah took over as Emir. The vote was the latest in a seemingly interminable series of frustrating battles over the power and role of the legislature and the royal family. Not much changed, with the opposition continuing to hold the majority amidst high turnout of over 60%. It is not yet clear when the new Parliament will be seated.
The battles over Kuwait’s Parliament is the subject of a fascinating new book by Courtney Freer, one of the first comprehensive examinations of the institution in English in years. Freer argues that the persistence and the role of Kuwait’s Parliament should make us think more seriously about whether to simply classify the country as an autocracy or as identical with the other monarchical regimes of the GCC. In her view, the Parliament has sufficiently powerful roots within society and an effective role in legislation that Kuwait should be classified with other hybrid authoritarian regimes and evaluated differently from the other Gulf regimes which allow no comparable insitutional vehicles for popular participation in politics.
Kuwait’s Parliament really is exceptional within the Gulf context. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources in English and Arabic, Freer traces its history to the pre-independence days, showing how pan-Arab demands for independence from Britian in the 1950s intersected with the efforts of the al-Sabah family to establish its rule over independent Kuwait. The Parliament went through its ups and downs, with elections held under a wide variety of different electoral systems and frequently dissolved in the midsts of political controversies. Nonetheless, it persisted.
Freer traces the role of Parliament through Kuwait’s history. She shows how it battled over the allocation and use of the oil revenue windfalls of the 1970s and 1980s. When Saddam’s Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Parliament had been dissolved by the Emir, and its restoration was a key demand of the resistance forces which had battled Iraqi occupation while the royal family and many elites rode out the war in exile. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, she shows how emergent youth movements challenged the political system demanding reform through extra-Parliamentary means — placing Kuwait, in contrast to the rest of the Gulf, very much within the mainstream of the rising tide of Arab protest movements which would culminate in the 2011 Arab uprisings.
The ongoing battle over the power of the Parliament is one of the most fascinating things about Kuwaiti politics. While there’s a lot going on in terms of legislation, including Islamist pushes for socially conservative laws and repeated clashes over citizenship rights, the core of the struggle revolves around whether, how and when the al-Sabah family is accountable to the Kuwaiti people. Political crises are frequently sparked by demands to interpellate (interrogate) cabinet ministers who are royal family members or for the resignation of royal prime ministers. The Palace, in turn, frequently dissolves the Parliament and calls new elections under different electoral systems in hopes of engineering a more compliant institution (very Jordanian, to my eyes).
For years, those battles have contributed to political deadlock in the country, which has sparked ever greater frustration. Monarchical apologists across the Gulf delight in pointing to Kuwaiti dysfunction as evidence of the superiority of kings over democracies (an argument which rather overstates the performance of kings, in my opinion). But the Kuwaiti Parliamentary experience goes far beyond a few years of stalemate, and offers genuinely fascinating comparative lessons for students of authoritarian institutions. I spoke with Freer this week on the Middle East Political Science podcast. Listen here:
MENA Academy Weekly Roundup
Matthew Benson, “Of Rule not Revenue: South Sudan’s Revenue Complex from Colonial, Rebel, to Independent Rule, 1899 to 2023,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (April 2024). ABSTRACT: This article analyses taxation practices in colonial, post-colonial rebel-led, and independent South Sudan and argues that the ethos of taxation in the region has been and remains primarily oriented around predatory and coercive strategies of rule. This overarching pattern endures because the fundamental structure and rationale of revenue-raising practices, which collectively constitute South Sudan’s revenue complex, have not changed since at least Anglo-Egyptian occupation of the region in 1899. The paper explains how tax collecting as predation began when the first colonial administration deployed taxes to acquire loyalty from customary authorities such as chiefs and sheikhs, who personally benefitted from their taxation powers. From the early 1960s to 2005, armed groups in the region periodically fought against Khartoum-led rule, and rebels extorted taxes from the population to help fuel their war efforts. Taxes in today’s South Sudan, which acquired independence in 2011, are not collected to raise revenue except to pay off the individuals collecting them, and they continue to generate predation. The rise of international aid and windfalls from oil revenues have further diminished taxation’s financial significance for the national government and have altered local authorities’ coercive demands for payment. The portrait that emerges from the practices of South Sudan’s successive war-makers and state-makers is one of taxation wielded as a technology of rule, one of coercion and often extortion, to fulfil the self-interests of tax collectors. The article is based on archival research in Sudanese and South Sudanese national archives, British colonial archives, and 205 interviews conducted in South Sudan.
Mara Revkin, Ala Al-Rababah, and Rachel Myrick, “Evidence-Based Transitional Justice: Incorporating Public Opinion into the Field, with New Data from Iraq and Ukraine,” Yale Law Journal (April 2024). ABSTRACT: The field of “transitional justice” refers to a range of processes and mechanisms for accountability, truth-seeking, and reconciliation that governments and communities pursue in the aftermath of major societal traumas, including civil war, mass atrocities, and authoritarianism. This relatively new field emerged in the 1980s as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers looked for guidance to support post-authoritarian and post-communist transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Since then, the field has grown rapidly—so rapidly that it is outpacing its capacity to learn from past mistakes. Recent methodological advances in the study of public attitudes about transitional justice through quantitative surveys and qualitative interview methods provide unprecedented insights into how different mechanisms—including domestic and international prosecutions, truth commissions, amnesty laws, and compensation—are perceived by their intended beneficiaries. The results have been troubling. Numerous studies in diverse contexts found that some of the most well-known transitional justice mechanisms, including those employed in South Africa, Rwanda, and Cambodia, failed to achieve their objectives of peacebuilding and reconciliation. In some cases, these policies had harmful consequences for their intended beneficiaries, including retraumatization and perceived “justice gaps” between victims’ preferred remedies and their actual outcomes.
Ruth Hanau Santini and Paolo Wulzer, “The Evolution of the Gulf: History and Theories of a Complex Regional Subsystem,” Middle East Policy (April 2024). Part of a special issue on the Gulf and China. Wiley’s wacky website won’t give me access to copy the abstract, but it’s an interesting article and the title speaks for itself.