Posted by Amna Al-Thani at Sunday, April 3, 2011 9:08:00 PM EDT
There is this interesting just posted New York Times article titled “Qatar an Unlikely Champion of Arab Democracy. It states that Qatar has become a symbol of stability with its foreign politics, in an unstable region. It discusses Qatar’s recent intervention in Libya, and how Qatar has developed a status of neutrality, which has allowed it to broker political deals in Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan.
“Qatari officials say their policies are consistent with two long-held objectives: to emerge as a world player despite the Persian Gulf emirate’s tiny size, and to play off its stronger neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran, in order to protect its sovereignty and natural gas wealth.”
I think this section on how throughout history Qatar was played off dominant powers to protect its autonomy is relevant for those of you who are doing the history section for the Ethnography project.
“Historians note that throughout its history, Qatar has come under the sway of a variety of great powers, from the Portuguese, to the Ottomans, to the British, and the Qataris have sought to find ways to navigate diplomatically to protect themselves from encroachment. Fred Wehrey, a Persian Gulf specialist at the RAND Corporation, said that Qatar’s goal is “to try to engage great powers outside the region to play them off one another so they can actually have a foreign policy and carve out a space for sovereignty.”
However, I think that the situation in Bahrain should be put in it’s own context, it is not another Tunisia or Egypt. The article discusses how Qatar has kept Iran at bay, so it makes sense for it to defend Bahrain from external forces reinforcing this internal dissent.
Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/world/middleeast/04qatar.html
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