ABSTRACT
Led by Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has become deeply embedded in the contemporary system of international power, politics, and policymaking. In possession of the seventh-largest oil reserves in the world and strategically located at the southern end of the Gulf, the UAE has developed a global footprint in trade, financial flows, aviation, and logistics, as well as a transregional significance in labor migration and remittance flows. Long tied to the Global South through the generous provision of overseas development assistance, in the 2000s the UAE began to participate actively in the broader rebalancing of geo-economic power between West and East. Moreover, as a founder and active member of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and an integral cog in the regional security architecture of the Gulf, the UAE has, since 2011, engaged heavily with states impacted by the upheaval unleashed by the “Arab Spring.” This book charts the processes of historical and state formation and political and
economic development that have framed the rapid emergence of the UAE as a regional power with truly international reach. Only an independent state since 1971, the seven emirates that together constitute the UAE represent not only the most successful Arab federal initiative but also the most durable. An incremental pattern of nation-building has gradually grafted a common Emirati identity onto the seven emirates that, over time, has taken deep root, although differences do persist both in political outlook and economic prospect. Moreover, the impact of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath illustrated continuing imbalances between Abu Dhabi – home to 90 percent of UAE oil reserves, Dubai, and the five smaller northern emirates. Meanwhile, the post-2011 domestic security crackdown that targeted members of an Islamist group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood highlighted the sensitivity of senior officials in Abu Dhabi to the potential for politicization of social and economic disparities across the federation
even as the UAE emerged at the forefront of regional attempts to shape the direction of post-Arab Spring transitions in North Africa. An extensive literature has developed around the emergence and growth of the
UAE. Early volumes in the 1970s and 1980s constitute significant historical sources informed by participant accounts of many of the initial processes of state-formation and subsequent consolidation. Donald Hawley, a British diplomat who served as Political Agent in Dubai from 1958 to 1962, penned a historical account of the Trucial States that appeared in 1970, the year before the creation of the UAE itself.1 Seventeen years later, Abdullah Omran Taryam published a detailed history of the formation and formative years of the UAE that drew heavily on his own experiences in the first Cabinets of the UAE (as Minister of Education and Minister of Justice) and remains one of the most important first-hand accounts of the period available in English. Taryam’s work constitutes an indispensable guide to the troubled early years of the federation when its later durability was by no means assured, or even predicted.2
