NPF Cycle One Fellows and Projects
Ala’a Shehabi: Rethinking Sovereignty in Revolutionary Times: The Case of Bahrain
Abstract: This paper will explore the “sovereignty crisis” in Bahrain that has been at the forefront of the political conflict since Bahrainis joined the Arab revolutions in 2011. In attempting to theorize the Bahrain uprisings, which culminated in a military intervention by a Saudi-led army, we can ask ourselves, are the so-called Arab spring uprisings a quest for full sovereignty? And what do various foreign interventions in Arab countries in response to uprisings say about sovereignty of states? I argue here that the paradigms of studying sovereignty need to be reformulated in light of the the contradictions and ambiguities of the current social discontent expressed in the Arab uprisings. Through this close-grained examination of the case of protest, repression, and reconfiguration of national, and regional authority in and around Bahrain, this article offers three new avenues for rethinking understandings of sovereignty: (1) I identify and explore forms of outside-propped “provisional sovereignty,” which in many ways resembling and reanimating the apparatuses of the former British Colonial regime but which function, today, to reflect pervasive substantive limitations on the capacity of weak states to shape domestic decision-making in the current global order; (2) I challenge and rework the sovereignty implications of the debates around “monarchical exceptionalism,” which insist that states like Bahrain operate via forms of legitimation typical to rentier states that operate through personalized, top-down forms of rule and not via popular mobilization and participation; I challenge the notion that these exceptionalist sovereignties are stable by rethinking how their allocative functions operate to renegotiate the distribution of “rent” and cooption of the opposition; and (3) I develop the notions how repressive forms of militarized and securitized rule are generated around processes of reinventing or fetishizing binary or essentialist notions of Shia/ Sunni identities, and thus building a dangerous form of “sectarianized sovereignty.” I argue that these politically generated sectarianized identifications produce kinds of phantom sovereignty that justify certain local, regional, and geopolitically embedded forms of repression and emergency rule that reframe and demonize logic of empowerment and popular sovereignty, and that paradoxically inflame challenges to monarchical exceptionalism and “provisional sovereignty” in this context.
Ala'a Shehabi has a PhD in Economics from Imperial College London, and an MSc in Economics and Finance from Warwick University. She worked for two years as a policy analyst at RAND Europe contributing economic analysis to real-world government policy issues in the UK and Europe. She taught economics courses on the undergraduate programs at the University of Wales programmes at the Bahrain Institute for Banking and Finance for two years. She is a founding member of Bahrain Watch and the Bahrain Rehabilitation & Anti-violence Organisation (BRAVO). Currently, she is a fellow on the ACSS’s New Paradigms Factory program where her research is on the sovereignty crisis in Bahrain that explores the historical political contestations that lead to the current political conflict. She writes for Jadaliyya, Guardian, OpenDemocracy, Al-Akhbar, and UnCut.
