Repression and Collaboration: The Arabian Gulf in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: Development and Conflict in the Era of American Withdrawal

Abstract

Can transnational repression end conflict among competing autocracies residing in the same regional order? This paper inductively assesses this question by juxtaposing the Arabian Gulf today with Cold War-era South America. The six Gulf kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Since the 2011-12 Arab Uprisings, these ruling monarchies have gradually overcome regnant rivalries to cooperatively squash popular mobilization through transnational repression—such as coordinating the systematic arrest, prosecution, and kidnapping of one another’s citizen-dissidents across the GCC neighborhood. Such cross-border coercion mirrors the historical case of Operation Condor, an autocratic alliance in the late 1970s between Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru, and Brazil. These right-wing dictatorships similarly sought to destroy democratic opposition across a shared South American space through intelligence, military, and diplomatic cooperation. In a supposedly post-American era in the Middle East, the GCC’s revitalized efforts to staunch democratic forces have seemingly overcome deep geopolitical disputes, such as Saudi-Qatari hostility, to generate the seductive lure of peace through authoritarianism.

Comparative perspective from Latin America, however, suggests that regional orders built upon such perverse bargains are ephemeral. Drawing on newer “revisionist” studies of Latin America’s Cold War years, I show that Operation Condor disintegrated in the early 1980s due to three overlapping factors that hold relevance for our broader understanding of conflict dynamics in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South. First, resurgent inter-state conflict between Chile and Argentina over bordering territory brought these “collaborative” regimes to the edge of war, radically separating their foreign policies and creating wider fissures. Second, US support for transnational repression wavered under the weight of accumulated human rights abuses, weakening the regional alliance given its dependency upon American sponsorship. Third, democratization eventually upended the perpetrating military dictatorships themselves. Nearly a decade of bloody cross-border operations, which killed a thousand leftists across the South American southern cone, failed to staunch liberal opposition forces.

This historical analysis sheds three cross-regional insights to help build a tentative theory about transnational repression and regional peace. First, autocratic collaboration is unlikely to eliminate conflict when the sources of inter-state friction predate the democratic threats that wrought that collaboration in the first place. The GCC matches this condition. Gulf kingdoms have long tangled in territorial disputes and dynastic rivalries that originate from their post-colonial institutions and distinctive political economies. Their underlying conceptions of regime security have not changed, even in the face of Arab Spring-style popular dissent. Second, the absence of great power patronage raises the transactional costs of cross-border repression, and makes it more difficult to sustain—a parameter that also accords with the GCC. The withdrawal of American hegemony in the Middle East makes transnational repression in the Gulf more difficult to sustain, unless another great power can substitute as a global sponsor.

Finally, authoritarian alliances are only as robust as their constituent dictatorships. Yet the GCC presents evidence that autocratic regime stability is far from assured. In Kuwait and Oman, royal successions and societal competition have created surprising momentum for democratic shifts. In Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, domestic opposition persists despite withering coercion. In totality, these arguments suggest that transnational repression in the Gulf is no guarantee for ending regional conflict: dictatorships may band together against democracy, but this does not mean they will partner for peace.

Author

• Sean Yom, Temple University