Over the past several years, it has become impossible to ignore the role of the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). References to petrodollars, petro-power, and Gulf-peddled sectarianism are constant, yet somehow simultaneously elusive. It is increasingly common knowledge that the GCC and the United States work in lockstep, but the mechanisms for that cooperation can be unclear, and that lack of clarity can be extremely damaging. So one rationale for this section was to address that lacuna in the wider left literature on the region, particularly as the weight of the GCC in global capitalism becomes heavier and heavier.

Paralleling that gap in knowledge of how power operates is a gap in knowledge about ongoing labor and political struggles within the GCC. Of course, strikes by oil workers and others have been constant since the inception of the oil era, pace the claims of rentier state theory. Indeed, explicitly revolutionary struggle has been immensely strong in the peripheral regions of the Gulf. An exclusive emphasis on an excessively amorphous Gulf power masks both the details of that power, on the one hand, and the depth and history of resistance to it on the other.

The issue addresses two main topics. Omar alShehabi’s article is on Bahrain: how sectarianism has weakened social revolt, both there and regionally. He shows how this happened through the fascinating life story of a political activist named Ibrahim Sharif. Sharif used to be linked to the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), and went on to play a leading role in the protests that began in 2011. Through Sharif’s story, alShehabi explains how the Bahraini regime has been able to turn sectarian affiliation into corrosive sectarianism, keeping people fragmented, and thus unable to present a common front against the major center of power: the Bahraini state.

Though Bahrain is one of the lesser-discussed of the larger revolts of the “Arab Spring,” what has happened there shows how breaking through sectarian divisions is crucial to any regional social transformation. Through his very detailed account, alShehabi highlights the salience of the sectarian divide and how it has erupted in the region, cleaving through the regional social fabric. The piece also implicitly addresses the rise and fall of Arab nationalism and Arab leftism as the banners of regional anti-systemic movements, by showing how sect has frequently replaced nation or class as a point of unity.

Adam Hanieh’s article focuses on the GCC’s development into a major center of capital accumulation. He also shows how its capital circuits have increasingly enveloped corporations and states in the wider region, with massive foreign direct investment in Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and elsewhere. What that means is that challenges to domestic economic power within any regional state are also challenges to the Gulf circuits, which extend to those domestic political economies. For that reason, there has been extensive Gulf involvement in regional repression. For example, the GCC states have been central to ensuring that an elite transition contained the Egyptian revolt and maintained the basic structures of ownership and accumulation intact.

Hanieh’s article also touches on the incredibly important and long-standing issue of migrant workers and the creation of the regional labor pool. Of course, this is not new. Egyptian and Palestinian migration to the Gulf have been longstanding, and indeed contributed to the Palestinian capital accumulation which supported the national project at certain points. But the movement of laborers within the region has become increasingly intense lately, given increased labor needs within the GCC states and also elsewhere. Hanieh also shows how regional downturns in overall economic activity affect those flows.

For example, he discusses how the class power condensed within the GCC resolves social contradictions on the back of an increasingly international pool of expendable migrant labor, running from Yemen to South Asia. In that way, he makes transparent the immanent ways in which labor unrest immediately becomes a transnational phenomenon, both within the region as well as in a belt running from North Africa all the way to the Filipino archipelago.

Another crucial issue is how the Gulf states have melded seamlessly into US capital circuits. This occurs through petrodollar recycling and arms sales. This phenomenon is also visible on the political plane, where shared interests dictate conjoint policies. In that way, he makes visible the manner in which the United States has offloaded its regional foreign policy onto the Gulf states, which have happily taken it up. Through this regional framework, he shows how simply using the nation-state as the unit of analysis eliminates the possibility of understanding contemporary regional political economy.

Both articles also bring into sharp relief the importance of the state, its role as the guarantor of the regional order, and its centrality to organizing both regional oppression and accumulation in the region. For that reason, struggles like the one in Bahrain acquire incredible importance, and so face enormous repression. And that repression assumes regional form at rapid velocity, as shown by the Saudi buttress to the Bahraini regime’s 2011 crackdown.

Jacobin’s previous publications on the region have been overwhelmingly focused on Palestine and the Special Relationship. With this issue, we are starting a process of broadening our scope to offer our readers a regional perspective. Speaking generally, we have been trying to publish work on the MENA region that uses a political economy approach or is otherwise radical in its critique of law, or its treatment of leftist currents in the region.

Although there has been a massive turn towards political economy, and especially materialist analyses of the region, amongst newly-minted doctoral students, much of that work is only slowly starting to percolate to area specialists, and has yet to make its way to a general readership. One index of this is that since the so-called “Arab Spring,” there have been only a small handful of stand-alone books that use a materialist approach to analyze the region, and Hanieh has written one of them! So this is a small effort, and also a down payment on what we plan to run in the future—that is, a more structural perspective on regional developments and regional struggles.

We hope that these essays will benefit specialists concerned with Gulf issues, as well as the MENA region more broadly, along with activists as well as general-interest readers. We agree with Hanieh’s call for more, and more targeted, solidarity. We feel that often, with the exception of Palestine-related politics, solidarity can become gestural, lacking real means for engagement. But there are very substantive campaigns to be built in support of political prisoners in Bahrain and elsewhere. Such work is not needed solely in support of those resisting state repression on the political level.

Labor struggle in the region is practically invisible in the Anglophone press, with the exception of Al Akhbar and Gulf News. So it would be great if this issue provokes a wider interest in concrete work to both support and make visible the ongoing struggles in the Gulf.