Mehran Kamrava Speaks At 13th Annual Foreign Policy Conference of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Mehran Kamrava, Director of CIRS, presented a paper at the 13th Annual Foreign Policy Conference of the Heinrich Böll Foundation on “Democracy and Security in the Middle East – How are Germany and the EU Responding to the Upheavals in the Arab World?”, which was held in Berlin on November 8 and 9, 2012. Dr. Kamrava’s paper was title, “High Moderninst Development int he Persian Gulf,” which highlighted that Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are engaged in fostering rapid development and are busily embarking on a number of developmental agendas. In both cases, the state’s developmental agendas, aimed at bringing about a “high modernist” society, are invariably executed through state-controlled or state-funded and sponsored institutions, with most combining to form the state bureaucracy and a smaller portion ending up as quasi non-governmental organizations, parastatals, and publicly endowed foundations. Although across most parts of the developing world, and practically all over the Middle East, state bureaucracies are known for inefficiency and waste, in Qatar and the other small sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf the size of population and the scales involved tend to magnify the extent of state capacity in relation to society. In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that the smaller states of the Persian Gulf have necessarily more efficient or capable state bureaucracies as compared to the much larger ones of Iran, Syria, Egypt, or Algeria, for example. What makes them more effective in carrying out their agendas—in fact, significantly more effective—is the much smaller scale of their obligations and the infinitely smaller menu of demands on and tasks before them.