Managing Regional Conflict: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Embargo of Qatar
| Author | Rory Miller |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12674 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
Managing Regional Conflict: The Gulf
Cooperation Council and the Embargo of Qatar
Rory Miller
Georgetown University in Qatar
Abstract
This article will explore the arrangement of and relations between states inside ROs as they move from conflict to negotiation,
as well as the different types of negotiations that they choose –bilateral, mediated, multiparty, or hybrid. In doing so, it will
illuminate the opportunities that exist at the regional level to develop inclusive regional frameworks for mediation and negoti-
ation and, in the right circumstances, effective security communities. Broadly defined, a security community exists when sover-
eign states can overcome a lack of mutual trust and difficult regional environments to develop new forms of cooperative
security that prioritize self-restraint and the peaceful resolution of differences and reduce the expectation of the need to resort
to organized violence to settle interstate disputes (Adler and Barnett, 1988; Adler and Greve, 2009).
Principles
This article explores the factors –structural and otherwise –
that both facilitate and constrain the move from conflict to
negotiations of state actors linked formally in inter-state
arrangements and institutions on the regional level. Tradi-
tionally, regional organizations (ROs) focused on economic
or political objectives and very few had an explicit mandate
to act in peace and security. More recently, ROs have
increasingly been used by member states to facilitate their
involvement in conflict management, giving some structure
to peace efforts that individual state’s efforts lack (Abbott
and Snidal, 1998). In the process, they have come to be
viewed as ‘indisputable actors...from the outbreak of a cri-
sis to the reconstruction efforts in the aftermath of a con-
flict’(Tavares, 2009). As yet, there is no consensus as to
whether this rising involvement of ROs in the management
of conflicts, both violent and non-violent, is a positive devel-
opment or a ‘complicating impediment’in the move
towards peace and harmony (Dembinski and Schott, 2014;
Hough, 2015; Soderbaum and Tavares, 2009). As such, the
ways that ROs mediate and negotiate conflicts can illumi-
nate our understanding of the importance that sovereign
member states attach to formal regional institutions as con-
flict management tools (Bercovitch & Jackson, 2007).
ROs have been successfully involved in mediation and
multiparty negotiations of inter-state and intrastate conflicts
among their own members (extra-regional conflicts are not
addressed here). In Central America, the Organization of
American States (OAS) played a role in negotiations in El
Salvador, Nicaragua and Paraguay. In West Africa, the Eco-
nomic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) inter-
vened in the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. However,
ROs can also be a ‘source of disorder’and may even proac-
tively attempt to turn their region into an ‘enclave of
reaction,’creating, in the process, an inhospitable environ-
ment for conflict management (Fawcett, 2004). Furthermore,
they face a structural challenge that undermines their effec-
tiveness: they are not supranational corporate entities but
‘meeting places for sovereign states’(Amoo and Zartman,
1992). Their members have different, and often competing,
values and beliefs, interests and threat perceptions, and
operational and institutional capabilities.
In considering these issues, this article will focus on an
important contemporary conflict in one RO in particular: the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the negotiating choices
facing the six GCC member states –Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain –
since June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain
broke off diplomatic relations with Qatar and placed it
under a complete economic and cultural embargo.
Despite its far from perfect record as an actor in peace
and security, prior to the current crisis the GCC had earned
its reputation as the ‘first meaningful semblance’and ‘most
successful example’of a regional security institution in the
Middle East (Legrenzi and Calculli, 2013; Maoz, 2010); the
collective embargo is widely regarded as the ‘worst split’
and ‘gravest internal row’since the GCC’s establishment in
1981 (Cafiero and Karasik, 2017; Riedel, 2017); and the fail-
ure of the GCC to facilitate negotiations during the current
crisis has undermined its future viability and threatened
regional stability.
The scholarly literature on conflict management, espe-
cially the comparative literature on ROs as conflict manage-
ment instruments, has paid very little attention to the GCC
(Wallensteen and Svensson, 2014). Yet this case study is of
particular interest because over the last four decades GCC
member states repeatedly used a full array of negotiation
methods to manage internal disputes. In contrast, during
two years of the current conflict since June 2017, there was
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12674
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue Supplement 2 . June 2019
36
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