The Gulf Family

To cite this publication: “The Gulf Family,” CIRS Summary Report no. 26 (Doha, Qatar: Center for International and Regional Studies, 2020).

In times of rapid social change, socioeconomic difficulty, or political crisis, the family question comes to the fore, especially for conservative actors within a society. Many states experience conservative backlash against the “modernization” of the Arab family. Studies on the transformation of family structure and relations within the family must be studied alongside the persistence of traditional values from one generation to the next. What is of greater interest than an account of family demographics is the extent to which the traditional tribal and kinship structures prevail, if in fact they do, for what reasons, and at what cost to their presence in the global market in which the Gulf states have made themselves key actors. This report summarizes the research conducted in the CIRS initiative “The Gulf Family.”

The complete research articles appear in articles appear in “Family in the Arabian Peninsula,” a special issue of HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World (2018).