Rocky royalty

An expert says that the Gulf monarchs have had it. A premature judgment?

The Economist - Nov 2nd 2013

After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies. By Christopher Davidson. Oxford University Press; 304 pages; $34.95. Hurst; £29.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IT IS bad luck that “After the Sheikhs”, which came out in Britain last year and is only now being published in America, went to press before the forces of revolution in the Arab world suffered their recent string of reverses. In 2012 the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, the most populous and pivotal of the countries in the region, were riding high. The Syrian opposition seemed to be winning. And the wind of change had begun to buffet the rulers of the Gulf, the butt of this book. Christopher Davidson’s message, implicit in the title, is that their number is up. It is just a matter of when rather than if they fall. “Most of these regimes—at least in their present form—will be gone within the next two to five years.” This is a bold proposition, to put it mildly. In the past few months the forces of reaction have been fighting back.

Mr Davidson, who has lived in Ras al-Khaimah, one of the poorest of the seven statelets that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is one of the most knowledgeable academics writing about the region. He sets out his scenario of monarchical doom with authoritative and often riveting detail. He shows how the rulers of the six countries under his gaze—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—have managed to keep their people under control.

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