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The Consequences of Some Angry Re-Tweets: Another Medium is the Message

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2019

Geoffrey Martin
Geoffrey Martin*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

Most research on the Gulf states focuses on oil and its impact on state power. The literature on rentier theory almost unanimously agrees that oil rents buy off citizens and lead to socio-political stagnation. Massive protests and government attempts to address citizen demands in Kuwait between 2011 and 2013 call into question that narrative. Since those protests, the Kuwaiti government has taken steps to increase its representation of public officials and accessibility in the public sphere, including by expanding the government's presence on Instagram. How have Kuwaiti citizens voiced their opinions to government accounts? And how has the government responded to online criticism?

This essay looks at the pattern of interactions between the state and Kuwaiti citizens on Twitter and Instagram using a content analysis of government accounts. The findings raise questions about the validity of the payoff thesis and understandings of consent and acquiescence. My analysis illustrates that there is a public dialogue that moves beyond the rigid structure of state and society by which the literature has traditionally understood Gulf rentier societies.

Keywords

Rentier TheoryDigital PoliticsAuthoritarianismArab SpringKuwaitGulf States
Type
Special Focus: The Online Public Sphere in the Gulf
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , December 2019 , pp. 259 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2019

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Footnotes

1

Geoffrey Martin is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. I would like to thank both Bashar Marhoon and Jassim Al-Awadhi, who were crucial in making this project a reality.

References

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12 Coates Ulrichsen, “Politics,” 223–24.

13 Mona Kareem, “Kuwait Youth Movement Reignites Opposition,” Al Monitor, September 26, 2013, https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/09/kuwait-youth-opposition-cdm.html.

14 F. Gregory Gause, III., “The Year the Arab Spring Went Bad,” Foreign Policy, December 31 2012, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/31/the-year-the-arab-spring-went-bad/.

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19 “Kuwait poll: Opposition wins nearly half of parliament,” Al Jazeera, November 27, 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/kuwait-poll-opposition-wins-parliament-161127060822207.html

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25 James Calderwood, “Kuwaitis Happy with Emir's 1000-Dinar Gift but Still Waiting For a Plan,” The National, February 25, 2011, https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/kuwaitis-happy-with-emir-s-1-000-dinar-gift-but-still-waiting-for-a-plan-1.429839.

26 Laura El-Katiri, Bassam Fattouh, and Paul Segal, “Anatomy of an oil-based welfare state: Rent distribution in Kuwait,” London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE): Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States 13 (January 2011), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9427274.pdf.

27 Ibid.

28 Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, “Beyond allocation: The politics of legitimacy in Qatar,” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2013), 23.

29 Beetham, David, “Max Weber and the legitimacy of the modern state,” Analyse & Kritik 13.1 (1991): 34–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Linz, Juan José, Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), 70–71Google Scholar; Mitchell, “Beyond,” 28.

30 Abulof, , Uriel, . “‘Can't buy me legitimacy’: the elusive stability of Mideast rentier regimes,” Journal of International Relations and Development, 20.1 (2017): 55–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Mitchell, “Beyond,” 33.

32 There are several excellent examples of scholarly work that also revises assumptions of classical rentierism. Gray (2011), Gengler (2015), and Freer (2018) work on developing a revised rentierist model, which takes into account the different dimensions of rentier state policies. Matthew Gray, A Theory of “Late Rentierism” in the Arab States of the Gulf, (Occasional Paper 7, Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, 2011); Gengler, Justin, Group conflict and political mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf: Rethinking the Rentier state (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Freer, Courtney, Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

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36 In contrast, there are numerous examples of scholarly work on the macro-level implications of new media use as it relates to collective action and state repression. For example, see Wolfsfeld, Gadi, Segev, Elad, and Sheafer, Tamir, “Social media and the Arab Spring: Politics comes first,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 18.2 (January 2013): 115–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 All tweets and Instagram posts have had usernames and other details removed to respect the confidentiality of participants.

38 Source. Twitter

39 Source. Twitter

40 Source. Twitter

41 The sample of posts I analyze are drawn from the Instagram accounts of 34 MPs, 2 Cabinet Ministers and 19 Government ministries/organizations. In February 2017, Instagram had roughly 360,000 users in Kuwait. By May 2017 there were 1.5 million. Salem, “Social Media,” 60.

42 Michael Herb, Kuwait Politics Database, Georgia State University, http://www.kuwaitpolitics.org.

43 Figure 7 leaves out two MPs: Marzouq Al Ghanim and Safaa Al Hashem. Ghanim has 498,000 followers and Hashem 350,000. Both are celebrities in their own right and are not representative of the sample.

44 See: https://www.instagram.com/kuwmun/.

45 Anon, “Kuwait holds Municipal polls amid low turnout, September 28, 2013, http://news.kuwaittimes.net/kuwait-holds-municipal-polls-amid-low-turnout/.

46 Source. Instagram

47 Source. Instagram

48 Source. Instagram

49 Source. Instagram

50 Source. Instagram

51 Source. Instagram

52 Source. Instagram

53 Source. Instagram

54 Source. Instagram

55 Source. Instagram