Since the 1970s, the security landscape of the Gulf has been shaped by a series of transformative events, including the Iranian Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, the US invasion of Iraq and shifting global energy dynamics. More recently, factors such as the rise of non-state actors, geopolitical rivalries, economic volatility, and the COVID-19 pandemic have further complicated the regional security calculus. These developments have profoundly influenced the threat perceptions and strategic priorities of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, reinforcing the region’s centrality in broader Middle Eastern security debates.

This chapter examines the evolution of Gulf security by engaging with classical debates, updating key conceptual frameworks, and categorising threats into external, internal, and ‘intermestic’ dimensions. By applying these analytical lenses, the chapter explores the most pressing contemporary security challenges facing the GCC, offering a comprehensive assessment of the shifting regional order and its implications for both policy-makers and scholars of security and regional studies.

The governance of politics, the economy and security has evolved in the Gulf States since independence. State formation describes the process by which states have grown in capacity and resources for the governance of different public policy areas: security, economic welfare and political representation. Theoretical approaches to state formation propose to look at war-making and resource mobilisation as drivers of this. However, war-making has in the Middle East often destroyed states, rather than helped build them. Moreover, rulers of the Gulf States have benefited from abundant revenues from oil and gas that have allowed them to govern without the need to mobilise domestic revenues. The specific governance model that has emerged is described as a rentier state bargain. Rulers are expected to ensure security, provide welfare and allow for representation of their citizens. This chapter describes the evolution of these processes in the Gulf States, including how certain societal groups have been central in state formation. The chapter also discusses expectations for a social contract beyond the rentier bargain.

During 1917–1918, the trans-European crisis of the war and its ending brought variable patterns of regime instability, popular insurgency, and revolutionary collapse. Most dramatically affected were the defeated countries (Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary), along with Italy, who ended on the winning side disappointingly. After great confrontational divisiveness and civil violence, outcomes varied from successful revolutionary insurrection (Russia), through fraught stabilization within republican-democratic frameworks (Germany, Austria), to violently repressive counter-revolution (Hungary, Italy). In western and northern Europe, victor powers (France, Britain, Belgium) and neutrals (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) underwent versions of democratic strengthening and substantial reform. These outcomes produced new political fields of polarized enmities and mostly fragile consensus that vitally shaped the 1930s.

This chapter examines the foreign policies of the Gulf states, including members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Iraq and Iran. It systematically evaluates three primary contextual dimensions that exert influence on the formulation of foreign policy within the Gulf region, namely the domestic, regional and international arenas. Furthermore, this chapter delves into the application of key international relations theories, including realism, neorealism, liberalism and constructivism, as frameworks for explaining the external behaviour of Gulf states. While realist and neorealist perspectives offer valuable insights into the Gulf states’ behaviour, particularly regarding threat perceptions and power dynamics, alternative theoretical paradigms offer different analyses that contribute to our understanding of Gulf politics. Since their inception, the Gulf states adopted diverse strategies aimed at ensuring their survival, including strategic hedging, omni-balancing and bandwagoning. Therefore, this chapter explains the evolution of Gulf states’ foreign policies, tracing their progress from the reliance on external powers, mainly the US, to having greater autonomy and confidence in the pursuit of their own interests.

This chapter explores the evolution of European Union (EU)-Africa relations against the rise in interest of both China and the US in the African continent. It describes the role of the three different actors in Africa, concentrating on two important policy fields, namely security and development aid. The EU has been particularly active in promoting security in Africa, both through military and civilian missions, and by supporting the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). The chapter proposes a theoretical framework which is mainly inspired by neo-classical realism, complemented with some elements of small state theory. It also proposes to place the neo-classical realist approach within a broader theoretical framework, linking the concept of 'intentional ideas' and soft power to the significance of values and norms in international affairs.

This volume sets out to provide a concise and accessible overview of the history of today’s European Union. A brief account of such a sprawling topic obviously cannot be comprehensive. Instead, I hope to lay out the broad sweep of developments, without getting bogged down in the details. These days all the EU’s significant moves are documented online, including all its treaties, major decisions, national positions, specific policies, and other technicalities. The institutions themselves provide deep insights into their ongoing work, often also supplying snapshots of historical developments. Even more importantly, there are entire libraries of books on specific policies and the roles of institutional actors such as the European Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and the various member states. Amidst such a wealth of information, it is all too easy to get tangled up in the details. In response, this book seeks to provide a coherent survey of the EU’s history for the general reader.

This chapter explores how the European Union (EU's) strategic preferences, as evidenced by its behaviour in Africa, inform the notion of a strategic culture in the Union's external relations. It examines Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations. Sub-Saharan Africa is of considerable interest as a 'test-bed' of CSDP activity. The chapter introduces the notion of strategic behaviour and its relation to the concept of strategic culture as applied to the EU. It identifies three frames of EU external relations, derived from an analysis of strategic declarations: the security-development nexus, the human security imperative and preference for local enforcement. The chapter argues that these frames, which motivate the EU's CSDP activities, constitute a basis for understanding the EU's strategic culture. By assessing CSDP missions in Africa based on these types, the chapter gives context to the EU's foreign and security policy in the region.

Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

Prohibitions, Permits, Power

A mill owner in Salem conducted his own social experiment in sobriety in February 1939. He assembled his workers and instructed them to sit and stand several times in rapid succession, noting that they would ‘never have been so responsive to orders in the days when they drank’. Salem went dry on 1 October 1937. Chittoor and Cuddapah followed suit a year later, and North Arcot went dry in 1939. Prohibition's introduction occurred at the convergence of state-directed reform, political competition, entrenched social anxieties and waves of resistance to the policy. Official assessments painted a glowing picture of its successes, reflecting the ‘idiom of enthusiasm’ so characteristic of Congress mass mobilisation. English and vernacular newspapers joined studies commissioned by Rajaji's government in heaping praise on prohibition for apparently improving the lives of former addicts. Much of the extant literature has echoed this bias while dismissing non-elite resistance to prohibition as ‘local nuisances’ to a policy of great societal importance.

That there would be such a bias is not surprising. Prohibition had been won after a long, hard struggle. By the time the policy was introduced, the priority was proving that it would work. Policymakers found themselves having to justify the sacrifices that had already been made and that were yet to come. Publicly, they feted prohibition. Privately, however, the policy continued to function as prohibitioning between political elites, between the authorities and society, and between different social groups. Prohibition thus developed a double life until the colonial government suspended it in September 1943.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.