Gulf States-Age of Conflict

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course examines the Gulf states as sovereign political actors navigating an era of accelerating great power competition, regional fragmentation, and active armed conflict. Beginning with the historical formation of Gulf polities and the colonial architectures that shaped their boundaries, institutions, and identities, the course moves through the political economy of small statehood, rentier theory, and the structural conditions that define Gulf foreign policy calculus. Students will analyse how Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman position themselves within, and actively shape, regional security orders, diplomatic frameworks, and international alignments. The course centres the ongoing US-Iran-Israel war as a live analytical laboratory, tracing how the conflict exposes fault lines in sovereignty, identity, and belonging across the Gulf. Special attention is given to the role of religion and political Islam in underwriting and destabilising political authority; to the media ecosystems and information warfare strategies that Gulf states deploy in wartime; and to the gendered dimensions of national identity construction and women's political agency. Demographic pressures, geographical vulnerabilities, and the internal contradictions of states that must simultaneously project stability outward and manage profound social transformation within are examined as structural, not peripheral, concerns. Drawing on postcolonial IR theory, small state scholarship, rentier state theory, and political sociology, this course treats Gulf states not as passive objects of great power competition but as consequential actors whose choices, constraints, and agency demand serious analytical attention. Students leave with the theoretical vocabulary and empirical grounding to interpret one of the most consequential regional orders in contemporary world politics.