Autocracies and the temptation of sentimentality: repertoires of the past and contemporary meaning-making in the Gulf monarchies

Abstract

The scholarly debate on the durability of autocracies is vivid. It has explored a broad spectrum of regime types and respective sources and mechanisms of regime survival. A bias towards the strong effect of material means of regime survival, for example repression, cooptation or output-legitimation, is striking. In resource-rich Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, this has been deeply rooted in the logic of rent economies. Only recently have nonmaterial factors of authoritarian power such as emotional engagement or affective behaviour of the populace gained more prominence in the literature, since autocrats are, for example, increasingly trying to strengthen societal bonds by referring to the past. In order to deconstruct this phenomenon in twenty-first-century autocracies, this article introduces sentimentality as a conceptual approach that allows a more fine-grained analysis of contemporary meaning-making attempts on a national level for the sake of regime survival. We assume three dimensions in which forms and functions of sentimentality can be seen – actors, spaces and media – and provide empirical evidence from the Gulf monarchies.

Keywords:

• Autocracies
• regime survival
• sentimentality
• Gulf monarchies
• national identity

Introduction

The scholarly debate on the durability of autocracies is vivid. It has explored a broad spectrum of regime types including their sources, mechanisms and factors of regime survival. Yet there remains an academic bias towards the strong effect of material means of regime survival, be it for example cooptation, repression, different modes of output-legitimation or international alliances. In resource-rich Middle East and North African (MENA) countries – in our case, the six Gulf monarchies on the Arab peninsula – this has been deeply rooted in the logic of rent economies and subsequent specifics in the setting up of state–society relations. Only recently have nonmaterial factors of authoritarian power gained more prominence in the literature. Greene and Robertson (2022, 1), for example, refer to nonmaterial domestic modes of active mobilisation and emotional engagement in contemporary autocratic regimes (in their case, Russia after 2014) that try to inspire feelings of trust, pride and hope regarding the leadership. Other studies have focussed on affective behaviour of protest movements against existing political orders (Pearlman 2013). It comes with no surprise that these trends build on vivid debates about different forms of legitimation in autocratic regimes and the consensus among autocracy scholars that legitimacy is not an oxymoron when studying non-democratic regimes.

In order to deconstruct this phenomenon in twenty-first-century autocracies that are undergoing a transformation of autocratic rule (Morgenbesser 2020), this article aims to introduce sentimentality as a conceptual approach that offers a more fine-grained explanation of ‘meaning-making on a collective level’ (Bens and Zenker 2019, 96) for the sake of consolidating autocratic rule.¹ We understand sentimentality as a relational code of communication relying on a broad set of emotional repertoires that oscillate between the present and the past and allow certain forms of relationality between different temporal dimensions. They are experienced on an individual level but are reciprocally interwoven with the collective level; in other words, they are a social–relational phenomenon (Bens and Zenker 2019, 97). The concept of sentimentality is inspired but goes beyond debates around nostalgia, foundational myths, collective memories and retrotopian thought that have entered the literature on autocracies in more recent years without reflecting on the initial debates around these terms in neighbouring disciplines (eg philosophy, and literary and cultural studies). Sentimentality is used to deconstruct rising forms of top-down initiated storytelling about the nation, the collective we-identity and a new sense of national identity that relies on relicts, patterns or newly interpreted parts of the past.

Our contribution thus not only adds to the aforementioned literature on the transformation of autocratic rule and the role of nonmaterial factors but also makes a more general claim to understand the recent trends in personalisation of autocratic regimes that are a topic of vivid contemporary debate in the literature (Grundholm 2020; Leber et al. 2022). We provide empirical evidence by looking at three dimensions in which we assume forms of sentimentality that allow us to show how these forms are used for a collective meaning-making and, lastly, for the consolidation of autocratic rule. It not only allows us to show that nonmaterial factors are part of a ‘soft package’ in autocratic regimes but also provides us with a sharper lens through which to understand various modes of autocratic durability and how authoritarian rule becomes subjectively felt as legitimate by the people.

Firstly, sentimentality is channelled through actors and used to create, for example, national icons, heroes and/or role models. We give empirical evidence by looking at how the Emir of Qatar used the country’s blockade from 2017 to 2021 (first and foremost by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, UAE) as a stage to stylise himself as a heroic national icon. He presented himself as the father of the nation and the saviour who freed the suffering nation from the stranglehold of neighbouring states. Secondly, sentimentality is transmitted in spatial contexts. We look at cultural heritage sites to show how repertoires and relicts of the past are re-configured for the construction of a national identity. Thirdly, sentimentality is mediatised and disseminated via channels of communication. We look at various national development plans in the Gulf monarchies (eg Saudi Arabia’s and Qatar’s Vision 2030) that all share one common objective: to create trajectories for the national transformation into a post-oil economy, or at least one that is less dependent on resource-related businesses. Yet despite their visionary outlook into the future, they all draw on repertoires of the past.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. The first section outlines different threads in the literature on autocracies, shows to what extent nonmaterial factors have been sufficiently taken into account and postulates the necessity to think beyond the material bias in contemporary debates on the ‘menu of autocratic innovation’ (Morgenbesser 2020). The second section introduces sentimentality as a conceptual approach to explain top-down-initiated storytelling in relation to other existing concepts and presents its analytical potential. This will lead us to empirical spotlights on the Gulf monarchies in order to present evidence for our argument on the role of sentimentality in autocratic regime survival.

Autocracies in the twenty-first century – what we know

Research on autocracies has gained tremendous momentum over the last 10 to 15 years. Several overlapping trends have contributed to that: on the one hand, halting democratisation processes worldwide and frictions in consolidated democracies have nurtured the debate on democratic backsliding and the crisis of democracy. Whereas in earlier years this regression of democracy (Erdmann and Kneuer 2011) was conceptualised along diminished subtypes of democracy (see eg Merkel 2004), more recent contributions implicitly go one step further and try to tackle the threshold between democracies and autocracies by re-introducing² the concept of ‘soft authoritarianism … to capture the current fuzziness of democracies sliding into authoritarian rule’.³ At the same time scholars warn about the trap of a paradigmatic understanding of backsliding as if the crises of democracy lead to full autocratisation (Cianetti and Hanley 2021, 66–80).

On the other hand, rising autocratic protagonists who portray their non-democratic governance model as being superior and a tangible assumption that autocratic regimes do not face an endogenous instability (Merkel 2010, 57ff.) have brought to the forefront the question how to better understand this ‘transformation of autocratic rule’ (Morgenbesser 2020, 1053). While the first two trends have sparked vivid debates among scholars working on democracy and democratisation, the remaining trends have become a springboard for a differentiated literature on autocracies and the underlying factors of stability. After decades of normative dichotomies, as if autocratic legitimation remained an oxymoron (for a critique see Gerschewski 2018) or as if autocracies faced some kind of intrinsic instability and the quest for legitimacy thus remained a domain of democracies, there is an emerging consensus that any regime type needs some legitimation strategies (Beetham 2013). Yet it is exactly this mode of legitimation that needs to be better deconstructed in order to explain how autocrats stay in power. The scholarly debate is rich and diverse in differentiating distinct modes of autocratic durability such as repression, cooptation and legitimation (Gerschewski 2013), but it is also crystal clear that these ‘pillars’ interact and are interwoven and dependent on the subtype of the regime (Geddes 1999).

Schlumberger defines eight thematic fields⁴ in this differentiated literature and implicitly presents a table of literature oscillating between actors, institutions and structures in the quest for the sources, mechanisms and factors of autocratic durability (Schlumberger 2017). While the classical works on autocratic regimes have a strong bias regarding material factors of regime survival, it took some time until the rapidly evolving literature on the transformation of autocratic rule – strongly impacted by Heydemann’s seminal work on ‘authoritarian upgrading’ (Heydemann 2007) – began gradually taking into account how nonmaterial factors play a role: Von Soest and Grauvogel (2017, 291) incorporate identity-based legitimacy claims next to procedural and performance-related narratives. The authors rightly refer to the role of a foundational myth as a powerful state-building narrative of incumbent regimes in countries after shrugging off colonial penetration. Yet not only defining moments in state-building or independence wars can nurture power legitimation narratives, as has been shown by the so-called ‘October generation’ of Egyptian politicians that had been claiming victory over Israel in the Yom Kippur War (the October war in Egyptian history books) in 1973. This politics of history is also visible – though only in more recent years – in Saudi Arabia, with an increasing deliberation of national heritage in order to go beyond state-sanctioned historical narratives that are built on the nucleus that the ruling family as founders of the nation represent the nation (Bsheer 2020, xiii).

Other scholars looked at the role of more contemporary events that become contextualised with historical reference points. Greene and Robertson (2022) show for the Russian case after the annexation of the Crimea in 2014 the role of emotions in building support for the ruler in their mission to restore the ‘historic return of lost territory’ (Greene and Robertson 2022, 41). Hellmann goes one step further with his analysis of how the communist regime parties in North Korea, China, Viet Nam and Laos create a narrative of heroisation in relation to the historical past (Hellmann 2021).

Research on the international dimension of authoritarianism has also shown that ideational factors, the attractiveness of a regime type based on a common set of legacies and set, are important feeders and facilitators of cooperation among autocratic regimes (Kneuer and Demmelhuber 2020, 45; Gill 2020; Sørensen 2017). Gurol (2023) shows how China was among the first to capitalise on the global crisis mode in the early months of the pandemic 2020 by using it as a window of opportunity to promote certain narratives regarding its supremacy and heroism in fighting the pandemic. We can thus assess an emerging field that acknowledges the role of emotions, feelings, nostalgia, etc. Yet the differentiation remains a lacuna, ie when, why and how emotional repertoires are used in the field of autocratic rule.

The temptation of sentimentality in autocracies

The ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2008) in humanities and social sciences starting in the mid-1990s has only recently found its way into political science with all its sub-fields. A plethora of different modes in the broader camp of emotions and affective behaviour have been developing and have been incorporated in current debates on the crisis of democracy and the role of identity politics therein (Fukuyama 2018). At the same time the various terms of and around emotion, such as feeling and affect, differ not only historically (Frevert et al. 2011) or between languages (Wassmann 2017) and cultures but also between disciplines (Engelen 2007), making it even more challenging to understand the role of emotion in politics in a cross-regional comparative perspective. For example, in Modern Standard Arabic, there is no single word for the sentimental/sentimentality since it is covered by different conceptualisations primarily along two root words: on the one hand, it is related to the feeling and emotion of the individual or the collective (عاطفي), and, on the other hand, it is situationally, affectively and performatively directed outward both individually and collectively – in language usage, usually with negative connotation (انفعال). Both conceptualisations are flanked by other neighbouring terms (eg compassion شفقة and pathos هوى). There is certainly a consensus that, on the one hand, emotion can be taken as a ‘rooftop category’ with different subfields that requires a careful reconstruction and disentanglement of linguistic-historical linkages in order to pick out one element, to position this element vis-à-vis other central terms in the field of emotion, feeling or affect in order to show the analytical potential. On the other hand, a cultural hermeneutic approach is essential to avoid any hidden or implicit normativities of the term when operationalising it in a different cultural setting (here, the MENA region).

In referring to sentimentality we follow Bens and Zenker (2019) who state that the sentiment ‘connects cognitive processes of forming opinions and judgments with affective and emotional dynamics’. At the same time ‘sentiments do not only seem to exist on the individual but also on the collective level’. In other words, by using sentimental repertoires, meaning-making on a collective level is possible and wanted, as ‘sentiments can potentially transport structures for meaning-making through time and space – and can sometimes travel with great historical depth’ (Bens and Zenker 2019, 96f.). Inspired by Bens and Zenker, we go one step further insofar as we understand sentimentality as a relational code of communication relying on a broad set of emotional repertoires that is always oscillating between the present and the past. Emotional repertoires are specific knowledge stocks that give individuals and collectives ‘the agency and security to represent, negotiate, and thus regulate felt experiences in socially and culturally appropriate ways’ (von Poser et al. 2019, 241). They are shaped by socialisation processes and therefore remain flexible throughout life. Emotional experiences draw on these bodies of knowledge and conditioned schemas to respond to affective stimuli and express affective reactions. Emotional experiences outside the repertoire may well occur (Slaby 2014, 42), whereupon these knowledge stocks can change (Bens et al. 2019, 107–108). In this context, the nature of the experience increases the probability of success in transforming the emotional repertoire. Sentiments, in particular, regulate what people feel about the meaning of a given context and thus contribute to making sense of the world around us (Bens and Zenker 2019, 98). Hence, when affective stimuli encounter our emotional knowledge stocks, sentiments generated or triggered in the process represent the key category to understand how these stimuli are internalised, altering not only our understanding of the world but moreover our emotional conditioning with regard to how we will affectively respond in future events. However, sentiments are relevant in this respect for another reason. According to Bens (2019, 209), they outlast the incidents in which they are produced. Thus, they generate a bridge from past events to the present, thereby transferring meaning. These processes may happen in different fields such as all forms of media, different spaces from sport venues to monuments and heritage sites (including the contest about the content, Bsheer 2020) or can be channelled by and through actors. This understanding is inspired by the works of Assmann (2006) and the differentiation into different porous layers of memories – ie individual, social, collective and political/national – that are interwoven and correspond as transmission belts.

These acts share a common temporal dimension, ie they are done at the same time or within a distinctive temporal sequencing. We perceive these acts as practices, both discursive and non-discursive (Pritz 2022), meaning ‘that the doings and sayings composing them hang together’ (Schatzki 2002, 77). This can happen in the field of ritualised behaviour of a group of people sharing a common feeling or may happen in a football stadium by singing the club’s anthem or the national anthem, or around ritualised acts in confessional settings. It may happen in the field of politics in which actors offer a narrative of unity and identity by relying on events in the past (see the works on collective memories: Hellmann 2021; Zubrzycki and Woźny 2020). It may take place in media, consumerism or branding and can also – last but not least – be manifested with a material dimension, eg spaces, places, monuments or traditional clothing. These mentioned dimensions – actors, media and spaces – are porous and in part overlapping and differ in their target group, ie the group of people that performs and shares practices of sentimentality or that is being addressed. However, all dimensions share the same objective in fostering a collective we-identity that may be taken as additional feeder of consolidating autocratic rule.

The mobilising effect of sentimentality is a tempting feature for political actors. They allow a joint narrative, to share common feelings and memories and to use them as a means to foster shared feelings of being part of the same collective we-identity. This multi-scalar mode shows a broader phenomenological scope than the literature on ‘rally around the flag’ momentums around event-driven references has shown (Dickinson 2015). This is all based on a broad set of emotional repertoires already existing within the targeted audience and is then purposefully activated for political ends.

Since these practices of sentimentality can happen in different fields, the fostering of this collective we-identity can be achieved in rather subtle terms. This does not mean that ritualised practices around national unity days or holidays are something different; they also manifest shared practices and memories. Yet practices of sentimentality may also happen in a more subtle way while having the same objective. They have a mobilising effect – in other words, they serve as an instrument of social engineering that allows the definition of who is part of the in-group. This temptation does not apply only to autocracies that face proto-national identity structures due to a more recent state-building. It is also used by autocratic regimes that have to compensate for the lack of other stability resources. The speech of Chinese president Xi Yinping on the 100^th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party shows how picking out elements of the past of sorrow and trauma are recalibrated as a template of reference for the contemporary society. The objective is unity, standing together in order to make it impossible that history – the century of humiliation (Wang 2014) – repeats itself:

The Party has in the people its roots … it stands with them through thick and thin and shares a common fate with them. … A century ago, China was in decline and withering away in the eyes of the world. Today, the image … is one of a thriving nation that is advancing with unstoppable momentum toward rejuvenation. (Xinhua 2021)

In a nutshell, sentimentality in autocratic regimes is more than an act: we understand it as a conceptual take that understands different repertoires of the past (national traumas, sorrows, junctures, triumphs, etc.) as sources that may be instrumentalised in the present for the objective of regime survival (motive). These sources feed and complement the narrative of national identity/we-identity and possibly compensate for failures in other fields of autocratic rule (strategy). This is done by different practices (acts) encompassing a wide spectrum of socio-cultural and political fields that are aimed at variable audiences (target).

The temptation of sentimentality and regime survival in Gulf monarchies

The Gulf monarchies are currently experiencing a phase of regional turmoil leading to profound economic, geopolitical and social change. On the one hand, open regional rivalries and subtle frictions are challenging an Arab Gulf state identity (khaleeji) as a shared value, thus resulting in increasing nationalisation, while on the other hand, demographic stress factors, among others, raise the question of the core of cohesive national identities in times of (generational) transformation processes (Ardemagni 2019, 2). Ambitions to promote we-identities and thus to foster a stronger sense of national belonging indicate a policy shift in the course of which political mobilisation is perceived as highly beneficial to the regime rather than a threat (Diwan 2016, 1). This development is embedded in the contestation of the social contract in the wake of multiple crises, such as the upcoming post-oil era (Beck and Richter 2021), which makes active participation of the population in stabilisation processes more necessary than ever, which in turn might lead to greater political engagement. This new nationalism, characterised by its participatory nature, calls on citizens to support their country and its leaderships (Diwan 2016, 1), and is therefore dependent on generating group loyalties. This is challenging insofar as each national society in the Gulf is made up of complex layers of identity, be they global, transnational Arab, Islamic or Khaleeji, national or even (sub-)regional. In the course of that, researchers like Thompson (2019, 18) thus rightly raise the question of the extent to which these can be considered a ‘melting pot’ of multilayered identity constructions, while each layer serves as a tool for (differing) political agendas in the individual country contexts. Adding to this existing complexity are demographic factors that influence state–citizen relationships. Many of the Gulf states, especially the UAE and Qatar, have a high proportion of foreign citizens living in the country. Given the fact that identities are shaped by in- and out-group dynamics and that the collective addressed by political governments is in most cases a minority in its own country (except for Saudi Arabia and Oman), the question of the composition of collective we-identities in the Gulf arises, as well as the exclusion of significant populations and how this affects the regime’s aim of ensuring regime survival by feeding narratives of a collective community and identity. Additionally, a particularly young population can be found on the peninsula. Here, the respective target groups are worth observing with regard to the temporal dimension of political and social change. The extremely rapid transformation processes in the Gulf have taken place notably over the last two decades and thus within a single generation. Especially young adults between 20 and 40 have actively experienced and accompanied entire transformation processes and policy changes. Consequently, we can observe the phenomenon that young people in particular reminisce sentimentally about past times, whether about events within their own generation or indeed those they did not experience themselves. In doing so, the Gulf youth supposedly draws on a collective memory transgenerationally transmitted, as Assmann (2006) describes it, probably due to shared sentiments that are induced and kept alive by their political leaders. Hence it is exactly this generation – and this becomes visible in the following empirical spotlights – that is one of the most important target groups in the Gulf monarchies.

Actors – the saviour of the nation

The practice of sentimentality as an emotion-mobilising function is strongly dependent on the concrete motive of the sending side and therefore the intention of the actors disseminating it. Affective ties are thus generated not only on the basis of collective communities, but also by means of iconised central political actors. National identities are therefore often built around prominent personalities or ‘founders of the nation’ (Diwan 2016, 6). The Gulf monarchies are no exception, although both offensively communicated strategies as well as more subtle forms can be found here. The enormous variance of this fans out in examples like the personality cult around Sultan Qaboos in Oman or Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whose Emirati citizens refer to themselves as ‘sons of Zayed’. The role of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is of exceptional impact. His forced reinterpretation and staging, including self-dramatisation, in the light of Saudi founding fathers with reference to their relevance and successes in pre-oil times furthers the current economic diversification strategies and policy ambitions of a post-oil era envisioned under him. The strategic harnessing of past events and junctures as sources and their re-contextualisation for current restructuring processes, as a strategy of its harnessing, primarily target the generation that will shape the country in the future.

An especially overt example hereby, increasingly recognised in the literature, is the role of Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in the wake of the Gulf crisis of 2017. While the political consequences of the four-year-long blockade have been studied in length, social ramifications that might outlast the crisis even after the reconciliation in al-Ula in 2021 are the subject of current debate. The blockade not only failed to weaken the Qatari state and ‘coax it back into the uniformity of the Gulf Arab world’ but also led to a growing sense of unity and the formation of a new Qatari identity away from transnational joint tribal heritages with its gulf neighbours and rather entwined with the ‘royal face of resistance’, the Emir himself (Griffin 2018). This development transcends pure elite politics as top-down regime stimuli by manifesting itself in outpourings of nationalist sentiments and grassroots’ expressions of nationalist support for its political leader (Freer 2017). A portrait of the Emir, drawn by Qatari artist Ahmed al-Maadheed in celebration of the Qatar National Day on 18 December 2016 – one year before the blockade – became the symbol of this reignited and somewhat transformed identity movement. His artwork, titled ‘Tamim the Glorious’ (تميم المجد), has since adorned not only coffee mugs and stickers (Bradshaw 2019) but also house walls and vehicles, and became the slogan of a movement of national pride offline (Griffin 2018) as well as online, being one of the most highly trending hashtags in the Qatari Twitter sphere. This circumstance illustrates the relevance of actors as protagonists of sentimentality and therefore embodiments of (collective) identity constructions and their role in affective surges.

In an attempt partially similar to the Qatari case, the Bahraini regime also stages the ruling family as key actors of a nation, thereby using past repertoires. Ideas of a collective community and its heritage are based on contestation due to the country’s sectarian society (Freer 2019, 12). Organised for centuries in the form of smaller disjointed groups, the Bahraini society, which until then had existed under the regional leadership of smaller sheikhdoms, was grouped for the first time in 1787 under a new ruling dynasty – the Al Khalifa family (Dayaratne 2016, 130). National identity movements had until then been characterised less by a demarcation against external or other groups and more as ‘an internal manifestation that gathered the “self” of smaller groups whose sense of a larger nation had almost been absent’ (Dayaratne 2016, 130). However, this identity-related negotiation process ended with the arrival of the Al Khalifa family, who – from the perspective of Shiite segments of the population – are seen as a foreign domination. The new ruling elite refers to their arrival as al-fātih (opening), a term that encompasses the fights of the Muslim armies in the seventh century entailing an opening of Islam (Freer 2019, 10). This term is ‘a euphemism for the conversion and, upon refusal, subjugation of non-Muslim peoples’ (Gengler 2015, 39), thereby implying an arrival of ‘true [sunni] Islam’ to which the (infidel) Shi’a population must submit. By harnessing an emotionally charged and religiously connotated term that can draw on emotional knowledge stocks of the Muslim populations through their entrenched and extensive acquaintance with their religious founding histories and using that as a historical source, Bahrain’s political leadership stages itself as the sole core figures of a collective community, thereby following a motive of ‘excluding Shi’i citizens from the national myth’ (Freer 2019, 10), which results in a sharp ingroup–outgroup divide between the Indigenous population⁵ and the ‘true’ Bahrainis in the regime’s sense. Bahrain’s attempt to construct collective we-identities through sentimentalised storytelling is therefore highly exclusionist and intertwined with elitism and those great traditions and past events that match the narrative. The political leadership is attempting a balancing act between the modern Al Khalifa era and the inclusion and assimilation of those traditions that existed before but underpin this strategy. The tradition of pearl divers, their craft and their traditional shipbuilding are absorbed, and sub-elites, such as the sea captains nūkhidhah, are integrated into national storytelling (Dayaratne 2016, 135ff.).

Although the stimuli for generating meaning-making on a collective level are sent from above, their potential success cannot be investigated without a bottom-up analysis. Past repertoires as sources for sentimentality must be practised and acted upon. Hereby, they are transmitted in spatial contexts where they aim to address the population on an affective level, generating and mobilising emotions while triggering participatory acts and interactions with its materialised dimensions.

Materialised dimensions: spatial contexts

The scholarly research on the spatial dimensions of cultural heritage and identity constructions is currently flourishing. Influential works capture both participatory top-down projects such as festivals and art fairs (eg Diwan 2016; Koch 2018; Griffin 2018; Al-Sharekh and Freer 2021) and the role of more materialised levels such as national museums and monuments that bridge past events and the present national society, aiming to activate and influence emotional knowledge stocks by generating sentiments via symbolism and the articulation of national affiliations (Bounia 2020; Demaria et al. 2022). Museums especially, as cultural representations, serve the idea of constructing national consciousness and – following Anderson – create imagined communities (Al-Ragam 2014, 1). Heritage sites including their displayed artefacts are captured by Heersmink (2021, 11) as ‘evocative objects’, meaning they evoke emotional links to the past and while interacting with them, integrate information in the embodied brain and in the object to construct personal or collective memories. Following that, ‘if the collective memories constituting one’s cultural identity are distributed, then cultural identity is distributed, too’ (Heersmink 2021, 11). Hence, memory is a volatile concept, that ‘is envisaged as an active force field of competing discourses within which individual and collective acts of remembrance are constantly re-negotiated, re-elaborated and recounted in often conflictual and contested narratives’ (Demaria et al. 2022, 2). Spatial heritage sites can therefore be considered ‘socially produced and productive’, being materialised mediums where meaning is physically constructed (Stanek 2011; Al-Ragam 2014, 1) and constantly re-negotiated rather than petrified. Spatial transformation and physical display therefore trigger formative collective experiences aimed at generating feelings of belonging (Diwan 2016, 5). However, heritage narratives, especially those featured in physically limited spatial sites, incorporate a struggle over the inclusivity of the past (Hightower 2018) as well as collective oblivion. In other words, nonmaterial factors may also materialise in order to produce and transmit sentiments.

Museums as storage of collective memory

In that regard, the National Museum in Doha, newly built in March 2019, recalls the Bedouin period through its shape of a desert rose, using it as a source to brand a new national symbol. Through the exposition of material as well as nonmaterial heritage of a past Qatari culture, which conveys a romantic as well as nostalgic idea of the historical population and its traditions, the exhibition leads up to the challenges and triumphs of the modern Qatari state. This is ultimately said to have been shaped by the continuity and relevance of the Al Thani family, to whom a (final) exhibition space is dedicated (Bounia 2020). Four exhibition rooms chronicle the efforts of the ruling families to fend off past incursions by the Ottomans and the British, as well as regional crises such as the territorial occupation of Qatar by the first Saudi state from 1797 to 1818, and the first destruction of Doha by Bahraini forces in 1847. The third section thus recounts conflicts in the region that bear an enormous resemblance to the recent crisis in the Gulf (Mitchell 2021, 938). Hence, historical ruptures and sorrow may serve as a source to legitimise Qatar’s current policy choices. The regime is following a strategy of emphasising the role of the ruling family as successfully countering hardship and betrayal and by purposefully using the historically negatively connotated term ḥiṣār for blockade to specifically address an affective memory level of its citizens regarding previous political aggressions (Mitchell 2021, 939–943) and to underpin the narrative of a new Qatari we-identity while consolidating the rule of the Al Thani family. The transmitting side of such strategies is increasingly well researched. Less well illuminated, however, is the response of the civilian population. Mitchell’s field research revealed that indeed after only one visit, visitors recognised a larger historical pattern of interregional conflict that spans the centuries, which was in turn communicated in the form of sympathy for the Qatari government and people and statements about their collective pain (Mitchell 2021, 942f.). This suggests that sentiments regarding collective suffering and belonging are successfully generated, which is interesting since the historical reference points to which the narrative refers were not experienced by the visitors themselves and are thus based on intergenerational memory effects and thus affective empathy with the supposed previous generations.

Moreover, the Saudi Crown Prince is rethinking nationalism by using the existing heritage to shape a new national narrative on a collective Saudi identity. In the course of this, MBS uses and extends the strategies of his predecessors, but excluding those aspects, like Wahhabism, that do not underpin his vision of a vibrant cohesive nation. He eagerly promotes a renewed national narrative in continuity with King Fahd by pushing a Najdi cultural heritage, the geographical origin of the Al Saud family, and King Abdullah’s rehabilitation of heritage sites like the archeological Nabatean site of Mada’in Salih, the historical Jeddah and the Dir’iyyah district (Dazi-Héni 2019, 3f.). Reminiscing and re-inventing predecessors for current-day policymaking is nothing new, not even in the Saudi context, but it is the cautious extraction of different past repertoires put into a colourful mosaic of pre-oil storytelling and heritage narratives linking it to (youth) visions, that makes MBS’ ambitions so unique. In alignment with Vision 2030 he announced plans to transform existing museums and build new exhibitions, focussing on Saudi Arabia’s cultural identity. Existing museums in Riyadh, including the National Museum and the Masmak Fort Museum, will be completely remodelled under the commission’s new plan. It will also expand dozens of other museums across the kingdom by 2024 and set up new ones by 2030. Meanwhile, museums and exhibitions are becoming more interactive. Gokcigdem (2016, xxvii) underscores the effect that lived experiences can have in generating feelings of connectedness and compassion. Accordingly, good storytelling is at the heart of the mediation of this participative act, which is why curators have recognised the immense value of experiential learning and thus interactive practices.

Kuwait, however, represents a case completely diametrical to its regional neighbours. The Iraqi invasion in the course of the second Gulf War in 1991 proved to be a national folk trauma that, with the destruction of cultural sites among other things, sparked a process of national identity seeking within the population that has been ongoing ever since (Montgomery 2015; Fabbri 2020, 126). The plundering and loss of Kuwait’s cultural treasures and artefacts as well as national archives is compromising the emirate’s historical memory that would connect the Kuwaiti society to its own narrative past and collective identity (Montgomery 2015, 61–63). Kuwait’s National Museum and the House of Islamic Arts are, probably due to the lack of artefacts, rather more focussed on natural history and science than heritage preservation (Al-Sharekh and Freer 2021, 77f.). Kuwait is a prime example of how sentiments are generated in the face of loss.

Transmitting sentimentality: shared practices in festivals and events

Even though grassroots initiatives can also be incentivised and ‘planted’ by the state, the question arises how citizens and individuals actually internalise stimuli of sentimentality, which appeal to them on an affective level and thus generate collective emotions and, finally, identities. Participatory festivals therefore aim at practising the narratives of national belonging. This collective practice of a shared cultural past leads to episodic memory (Heersmink 2021, 5). Events and experiences can be relived in the course of reminiscence processes, stimulating this form of memory especially during sport events, festivities and cultural events. In contrast, collective semantic memory functions for those past repertoires that we have not experienced ourselves, such as general knowledge or events of the deeper past. But how do experiences that do not stem from our own generation become accessible and usable for present-day citizens? Drawing on niche construction theory, Heersmink (2021, 12–15) differentiates various sorts of social construction phenomena, where one type of construction processes relates to our cultural identities. Whereas cultural artefacts and institutions function as storage of collective memories, festivities work as transmitters, horizontally within the same generation, as well as vertically from one to another. Hence, cultural or collective identities emerge when those collective memories are retrieved and constructed by integrating information from biological memory with information from artefacts and experiences of others in the form of shared practices (acts), thereby integrating individuals into the active involvement in/of the past by imagining and sharing sentiments.

The UAE is in that regard a highly interesting case due to its significant demographic challenges, especially its particularity of an extremely high percentage of expatriates and foreign workers and a young generation (Ardemagni 2019, 16). Both lead to a fear of loss of cultural heritage and a sense of collective identity among Emirati citizens (Diwan 2016, 3; Sabban 2018). Therefore, national celebrations, national days and heritage villages became interactive events where citizens as well as foreigners are supposed to practice a common belonging (Diwan 2016, 6) and actively imagine themselves as part of one social community (Koch 2018). Festivities like the Qasr Al Hosn Festival, Sheikh Zayed Heritage Festival, Sultan bin Zayed Heritage Festival and Sharjah Heritage Days ‘bring alive the UAE’s heritage and give the chance for the new generation to experience and value it’ (UAE Gov 2022). The former, for example, consists of five different festival zones that include various heritage sites from desert Bedouin life to the traditional fishing experience to architecture and archaeology, experienced through live activities and embodied by ‘authentic’ people/performers (Sankar 2016). This applies also to the Jeddah Heritage Festival, including participatory simulations of archaeological sites with 5D virtual glasses or Hejazi folklore. An interesting example is the Janadriyah national heritage and culture festival, that showcases camel- and horse-racing events, tribal poetry and music, sword dancing, and crafts such as pottery, regional costumes and cuisine and carpet-weaving. However, this is not only subject to approval but also meets with resistance from parts of the population. A ‘fetishisation’ of tribal culture and therefore invention of tradition has been part of the bigger critiques of the last few years (Black 2013). In the course of that and additionally criticised are the historical ‘orientalist’ depictions of the region and national Gulf identities, that are portraying bedouin practices and bedouin Arabs as the original and ‘authentic’ inhabitants (Hawker 2004), which in turn reproduces the idea that the Gulf societies are relatively homogeneous (Alshawi and Gardner 2013).

Specifically booming are high-prestige sport events. Those serve as a playing field for the stimulation of emotions such as the creation of a cultural heritage by triggering collective memories of communal reactions/responses (Griffin 2018). Heritage sports in the UAE serve as more bottom-up sources of nationalism for the participants, who are either primary practitioners or audiences. Organised by state authorities like the Cultural Programs & Heritage Festivals Committee Abu Dhabi, falconry festivals revisit the affection of the founder of the state to falconry and camel racings are intended to let people participate in alleged traditions. Even though these are fabricated traditions, their goal is to link the camel as an icon of Emirati heritage to national identity. Due to their participatory nature, these acts aim to induce sentiments that possess the ability to shape emotional repertoires of the individual participants and, in the course of this, the meaning of those events for the wider populace.

Narratives of collective we-identities

The playbook of using repertoires of the past to foster collective we-identities is particularly evident in the national reform programmes. Underlying them is the common motive of creating pathways for national transformation to a post-oil economy, or at least to an economy less dependent on commodity-related businesses. Despite visionary outlining of the future, they all draw on the repertoire of the past to achieve this goal via mediatised channels of communication. Hence, codes of sentimentality can be found that reflect those national ambitions and policy initiatives as well as implementations deriving from them. Comparable sentimentally coded stimuli of national unity and cultural heritage can be discovered. Among them are references to their vibrant, cohesive societies (مجتمع حيويّ/متلاحم) with solid structures (بُنيانهُ مَتين) and deeply rooted national identities (هوية وطنية عريقة/قَقيَمُهُ راسِخة) as well as a proud traditional and cultural heritage إرث/انتماء ثقافي وتاريخي)). Accordingly, the goals and political ambitions outlined in the so-called Visions are to be realised in light of these aspects and contribute to their preservation, especially in a post-petroleum era (Saudi Vision 2030 2021, 11ff.; UAE Vision 2021; Qatar National Vision 2030 2008, 3ff.; Kuwait Vision 2035 2021). The examples listed induce the assumption that these could be selected stimuli of so-called social engineering strategies as a top-down effort to influence society. In the Emirati case, the ruling family is communicated as having built ‘cradle-to-grave welfare states, often in previously impoverished societies’ (Jones 2019, 6). Now in the face of multiple crises including an emerging post-petroleum era, and therefore the contestation of the social contract as a rent-based one, the regime aims a social engineering campaign of citizenship and remodelling an Emirati identity in favour of greater economic self-reliance. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Vision 2021 and the UAE Centennial 2071, whose aim it is to create ‘social cohesion’ and instil an ‘Emirati moral values system in future generations’ (UAE Centennial 2071 2022), is targeting the younger generation of employable citizens. In addition, the Saudi Vision is in line with the country’s search for status in the post-oil era (Perthegella 2019, 23), making it the ultimate reference for a future nation (Dazi-Héni 2019, 4). As mentioned before, MBS uses the supposed prosperity of pre-modern societies to legitimise current policy ambitions of his post-oil age reign. In doing so, he uses various past repertoires, such as cultural heritage and collective identities, to generate sentimentalities to appeal to the population on an affective level and thus create a new ‘vibrant society’ that binds people more strongly to the regime and supports its continued existence under himself.

Sentimentally coded narratives of a pre-oil age, which seek reference points in the past in order to realise current policy ambitions, run as a common thread through the agendas of the Gulf monarchies. Here, however, the various narratives differ. Whereas Bahrain is trying to change the historiography of the pre-oil era, which decisively forced a Sunni-focussed Bahraini identity process and tries to erase the relevance of a pre-oil population, the Kuwaiti regime is attempting to include the previous pre-oil society. The political elites here use a historical Bedouin–settler division (banu and hadar) to reinforce the narrative of a jointly formed nation, with the core element that ‘all Kuwaitis are originally from elsewhere and have formed Kuwait together’ (Hafidh and Fibiger 2019, 116). The hadar are therefore defined as Kuwaitis ‘whose forefathers lived in Kuwait before the launch of the oil era (1946)’ and shaped the country by bedouin craft and heritage (Freer 2019, 13). Kuwait, therefore, not to the extent of Bahrain but still, promotes wilful forgetting of certain aspects of the country’s past through acts of repressive memory erasure (al-Nakib 2021). In addition, a change in strategy can be tracked here. While the advent of oil wealth altered urban forms in Kuwait and erased the pre-oil past, by creating new cities and portraying this part of history as ‘a period of suffering and hardship’, re-visioning and re-inventing the past started in the 1980s and occurred especially after the Iraqi invasion (Al-Sharekh and Freer 2021, 72–75). Although the majority of Kuwaitis at the time appeared to be positive about demolition, the rapid changes did raise concerns that ‘a different identity could be imposed on local traditions’ (Fabbri 2020, 7).

It is becoming increasingly evident in the respective national reform programmes that the performative aspect of collective we-identities often appears linked to tribal traditions and tropes. Al-Sharekh and Freer (2021) show how the resurgence of the political significance of tribal identities is most evident where crises arise, the state becomes fragile, and/or political vacuums open up. This re-emergence of tribal powers at the time of political crises suggests that, rather than being assimilated into the state structure to the point of ultimate extinction, as was the case in the Gulf in the days of the rentier states, tribal affiliations tend to be concealed and exploited. As illustrated in the course of the materialised dimension of sentimentality, former super-rentier states apply a selective use of supposed tribal traditions to reinforce or fragment national identity, meanwhile using national branding and heritage projects that focus on a desert past. In so doing they are linking the previously mentioned narratives to bedouinism and so-called ‘tribal values’, and thus building a bridge to identity and recognition politics, which is in turn connected to debates and struggles about present-day membership, nationality, citizenship and identity (Elgenius 2015, 146; Al-Sharekh and Freer 2021, 70).

Conclusion and the journey ahead

The concept of sentimentality in autocratic regimes helps us understand how affective and emotional dynamics shape normative processes of collective meaning-making. Multiple crises and therefore ongoing regime transformations challenge state–society relations in Gulf autocracies: new modes of regime survival are needed. We endeavoured to go beyond the material mainstream in autocracy studies and focussed on the role of nonmaterial modes and their respective mobilising effects for regime stabilisation. We attempted to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the transformation of autocratic rule and to make a more general claim to understand the recent trends in the personalisation of autocratic regimes in the Arab Gulf region. This not only allowed us to show that nonmaterial factors are part of a ‘soft package’ in autocratic regimes, but also provided us with a sharper lens through which to understand various modes of autocratic durability and how authoritarian rule becomes subjectively felt as legitimate by the populace.

We introduced sentimentality as a relational code oscillating between the past and the present and how it defines a form of relationality between temporal dimensions. Our research was guided by the assumption that actors, spatial sites and the mediatised channels of communication are platforms of observation and different dimensions of how sentimentality is used, disseminated and perceived by the targeted citizens. This focus on the sending site raises further questions how these stimuli are perceived and possibly internalised by the respective citizenship populace. It also raises the question to what extent this increasing subjectivisation of the citizens might eventually turn out to be a Pandora’s box. Our findings on shared practices in festivals and cultural events have shown first circumstantial evidence, though more systematic research is needed in that regard. Such a survey-based endeavour remains a difficult journey in non-democratic regimes, although there is an emerging scholarly debate with promising results. More scholarly work on the nonmaterial dimension in autocratic regime survival is needed. The journey has just begun!

Acknowledgements

This article is based on the Research Training Group ‘The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics’ (RTG 2726) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. We thank Katharina Nicolai, Sarah Pritz and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number RTG 2726.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Demmelhuber

Thomas Demmelhuber is Professor of Middle East Politics and Society at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). Since 2015, Demmelhuber has also been a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Natolin (Poland). Demmelhuber’s research focuses on state, power and politics in the Middle East from a comparative perspective including international actors such as the European Union. Recent publications include the Routledge volume on ‘Authoritarian Gravity Centers. A Cross-Regional Study of Authoritarian Promotion and Diffusion’ (co-edited with Marianne Kneuer, 2020).

Antonia Thies

Antonia Thies studied Arabic studies and economics at the University of Applied Sciences of Bremen and at al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, as well as Middle Eastern studies (major: political science) at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Since 2022, she has been a research associate in the DFG Research Training Group ‘The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics’. Her research interests include authoritarian regime resilience, identity constructions, affect studies and politics of emotions.

Notes

1 This article is part of a larger research project that builds on fieldwork observation in the monarchies of the Arab peninsula and various modes of qualitative content analysis of media sources (including social networks).

2 Soft authoritarianism has been already widely debated, in the 1990s, when dealing with the non-democratic development state in Asia and the alleged role of cultural specifics.

3 https://www.uni-bremen.de/kultur/forschung/forschungsprojekte/research-group-soft-authoritarianisms (accessed 15 May 2022).

4 Types and characteristics, state–society relations beyond formal institutions, political economy approaches, international dimensions, performance and concepts of regime and states.

5 Members of this group often refer to themselves as Baharna, thus identifying themselves as original inhabitants of the island and to distinguish themselves from the modern term ‘Bahraini’ spread by the Al Khalifa family (Gengler 2015, 40; Freer 2019, 10).