Marc Owen Jones

Foreword: On the Prelude to the 14 February Uprising - Abdulhadi Khalaf Introduction: Bahrain's Uprising, the Struggle for Democracy in the Gulf - Ala'a Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones Part I: Voices of the Condemned 1. A Trial of Thoughts and Ideas - Ibrahim Sharif 2. God After Ten O'Clock - 'Ali Al Jallawi 3. A Room with a Wiew: An Eyewitness to the Pearl Uprising - Tony Mitchell Part II: Configuring Dissent: Charting Movements, Space, and Self-Representation in Bahrain 4. Shifting Contours of Activism and Possibilities for Justice in Bahrain - Luke G.G. Bhatia and Ala'a Shehabi 5. The Many Afterlives of Lulu: The Story of Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout - Amal Khalaf 6. Tn Tn Ttn and Torture in Bahrain: Puncturing the Spectacle of the 'Arab Spring' - John Horne Part III: Suppressing Dissent in an Acceptable Manner: Modes of Repression, Foreign Involvement and Institutional Violence 7. On the Side of Decency and Democracy: The History of British-Bahraini Rel...

Revolutions seldom involve more than one percent of the population. However, in Bahrain, a small island nation with a population of around 570,000, twenty percent of the population took to the streets in February 2011 to demand greater democratic reform, making it “proportionally one of the greatest shows of ‘people power’ in modern history.” The regime's response was disproportionally brutal. Saudi-dominated troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force were “invited to” or “invaded” Bahrain, depending on who is telling the story. Under cover of the Saudi military, Bahrain's security forces killed dozens of civilians, torturing, maiming, and raping many others. The arsenal of repressive techniques was exhaustive. Belonging also was used as a tool of repression, with many being stripped of their Bahraini citizenship on spurious, terror-related charges.

Despite being afflicted by cyclical bouts of unrest over the past century, repression in Bahrain as a concept has not been the focus of considerable academic attention. This is the first interpretive historical and contemporary study of repression in Bahrain. It addresses the limitations of regime-type analysis and quantitative studies of repression, which tend to focus on the co-variation between repression and demobilization. Using a template analysis, a virtual ethnography and framing theory, this thesis offers a new conceptualisation of repression. Several episodes of contention in Bahrain are analysed, including; tribal resistance to the British reforms of the 1920s, the rise of the Higher Executive Committee in the 1950s, the leftist agitation of the 1970s, the 1990s Intifada, and the 2001 Uprising. Using evidence from multiple sources, including recently released Foreign and Commonwealth Office files, social media, and historical records, this thesis argues that Bahrain's...

A product of the global rise of right-wing populism has been a seeming normalisation of gendered public disinformation, which portrays female public figures as unintelligent, untrustworthy, irrational, and libidinous. Social media has also allowed gendered disinformation to be used in targeted harassment campaigns that seek to intimidate and shame women, reducing their public visibility through psychological violence. Despite this, very few studies on social media involving the Arabic language have explored in detail this phenomenon in the Persian Gulf, despite numerous examples of harassment against women public figures. Since 2017, women journalists critical of regional governments have been subjected to increased attacks online, but none as intense as the attack on Al Jazeera anchor Ghada Oueiss in June 2020. Through keyword analysis, network analysis, and open-source intelligence techniques (OSINT), this paper highlights the intensity and scale of one such attack, identifying th...

To address the dual need to examine the weaponization of social media and the nature of non-Western propaganda, this article explores the use of Twitter bots in the Gulf crisis that began in 2017. Twitter account-creation dates within hashtag samples are used as a primary indicator for detecting Twitter bots. Following identification, the various modalities of their deployment in the crisis are analyzed. It is argued that bots were used during the crisis primarily to increase negative information and propaganda from the blockading countries toward Qatar. In terms of modalities, this study reveals how bots were used to manipulate Twitter trends, promote fake news, increase the ranking of anti-Qatar tweets from specific political figures, present the illusion of grassroots Qatari opposition to the Tamim regime, and pollute the information sphere around Qatar, thus amplifying propaganda discourses beyond regional and national news channels.

believes this revolution to be “the most important event in the Persian Gulf region, perhaps in the entire Middle East, in the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 80). With it, he argues, the regional landscape changed in two major ways: first, it marked the end of calm as the USallied Iranian monarchy was replaced by a radical, revolutionary, anti-American Islamic republic; and second, it brought about direct US military involvement in the Gulf. Gause offers a refreshingly dispassionate perspective on American military involvement in the Persian Gulf, culminating in the two Gulf Wars of 1990 and 2003 (Chapters 4 and 5). While the US strategic objective of securing the status quo remained unchanged, the thinking behind it evolved in the period 1971–2008. During the Cold War, keeping the Soviet Union out of the Persian Gulf was the main incentive. But the end of the Cold War and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 changed this in favour of direct military intervention to reverse Saddam Hussein’s expansionism. This evolving thinking took a bigger turn, with President Bush’s “global war on terror” leading to the second Gulf war in 2003. Gause reminds us not to underestimate the shock of 9/ 11 to the US psyche. Before 2001, US policy in the Persian Gulf was limited to adjusting to local changes and relying on local allies short of military involvement. But the decision to go to war in 2003 was very different, as it intended to change Iraq’s political system: the previous time the USA had initiated a regime change was half-a-century before, in 1953 when the elected government of Iran was toppled. The 2003 war, he points out, was driven in large part by Washington’s belief that “the character of domestic political regimes in the region was the key to understanding their foreign policy” (p. 239). In his concluding section, Gause reiterates the importance of factors such as oil, ideology, and identity as power resources, stressing the point that recognising this does not negate “Realist insights about anarchy, power and conflict in the Persian Gulf”, but “contextualises those Realist insights by giving us a fuller understanding of how state leaders define their interests and understand the power resources at their disposal”. Transnational ideologies and identities are important in understanding security dynamics, but they are power resources “in the hands of state and non-state actors” (p. 243). Acknowledging this functionalist approach as the driving force behind state and regime choices clearly offers a more integrated explanation. It is indeed timely to see a volume on the Persian Gulf— or the Middle East for that matter— that goes beyond the fashionable discourse on ideology, religiosity or ethnicity and makes good use of tested theoretical insights from politics and international relations by taking into account concepts such as power, interests, resources, and decision-making processes. It is equally enticing to see much analytical clarity, thematic overview and narrative being packed in a volume that is concise and highly accessible, yet avoids deductive predictions about the Persian Gulf region.

This is the author accepted manuscript.Exeter Critical Gulf Series 1This chapter contends that there is an overemphasis in the academic literature on the effect the Iranian Revolution had on shifting the dynamics of contentious politics in Bahrain. This has created a discourse in which belligerents are framed according to the contemporary transatlantic antipathy towards Iran, reifying a narrative that can contribute to the perpetuation of anti-Shi‘a and anti-Baḥārna prejudice. Using a closer reading of historical and modern sources, this paper argues that it was not solely the Islamic Revolution, nor the discovery of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, that shifted government policy towards Bahrain’s Shi‘a. Instead, ethno-religious discrimination is rooted in the Al Khalifa legacy of conquest, which was ossified by colonial intervention, but reinvigorated by Bahrain’s Independence, growing Saudi influence, the Iran-Iraq war, and a historically-rooted Al Khalifa antipathy towards the indigenous population. Thus, changes in the modalities of repression are better explained by a multitude of interacting factors, rather than the totalising influence of Iran

Torture, tear gas, bird shot, electrocution, anal rape, and beatings are just some of the examples of state-sponsored violence undertaken by the Bahraini regime since 2011. This more commonplace 'state-sponsored' violence has monopolised the headlines due to its egregious nature and visceral unpleasantness. Yet the rise of social media, and the devolution of acts of surveillance and online vigilantism has confused this binary of state versus loyalist violence. Now, acts of social control undertaken by those representing the hegemonic order, such as balṭajiyya (thugs), but not necessarily agents of the state, are becoming increasingly important as a regime survival strategy in Bahrain. This paper acknowledges the importance of violent acts undertaken by those representing the hegemonic order, while also problematising the notion of violence itself. In Bahrain, where surveillance and social media are increasingly an important tool in the state's intimidation of activists and civilians, it is important to critically interrogate how the generation of fear through social media and surveillance constitutes violence itself. These strategies of control, which generate physiological responses such as fear anxiety, should no longer be distinguished entirely from acts of physical violence, and taken more seriously as a form of repression.

Last year the Bahrain government began an extensive process of police reform. These appointments came as the government sought to implement recommendations laid out in the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report, an investigation that was highly critical of how the country's security apparatus had operated following the widespread unrest that began last year. Despite these reforms, police deviance continues. By looking at the relationship between police deviance and politics, this paper rejects the idea that police deviance in Bahrain is the result of a few 'rotten apples', and instead argues that police deviance is a systemic necessity, imperative in preserving Sunni hegemony in Bahrain. It explores how police deviance is a form of political currency in Bahrain, vital in maintaining the loyalty of the ruling regime's support base, who believe that softer forms of policing will result in a 'Shia takeover'. In this respect, police deviance includes acts of excessive force, brutality and police misconduct. The paper also explores how deviance as political currency involves excessive leniency towards regime supporters who engage in criminality, as subjecting them to the full extent of the law might risk isolating the support of those on whom the regime's legitimacy based. In this case, deviance is defined as 'failure to perform law enforcement duties'. This paper concludes by arguing that police deviance is an inevitable outcome of maintaining the current hegemonic order, and that police reform is therefore impossible without political reform.