Autocracies and the temptation of sentimentality: repertoires of the past and contemporary meaning-making in the Gulf monarchies
Journal: Third World Quarterly
Year: 2023

The scholarly debate on the durability of autocracies is vivid. It has explored a broad spectrum of regime types and respective sources and mechanisms of regime survival. A bias towards the strong effect of material means of regime survival, for example repression, cooptation or output-legitimation, is striking. In resource-rich Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, this has been deeply rooted in the logic of rent economies. Only recently have nonmaterial factors of authoritarian power