O Conselho de Cooperação do Golfo e sua atuação na manutenção do status quo na Primavera Árabe

Abstract

The Arab Spring, known for popular mobilizations in favor of changing the political status quo in the Middle East and North Africa, offered new perspectives and diagnostics on the political future in the region. The political phenomenon achieved the geopolitical areas of the Middle East and acquired different trajectories of social mobilization and altered domestic status quo. In the Persian Gulf region, characterized politically by the existence of Sunni monarchies, the who suffered major mobilizations was the Bahrain, whose domestic political situation is marked by dispute Sunni and Shiite. Consequently, such sectarianism offers a destabilizing effect on the status quo in the Persian Gulf monarchy. The mobilization of containment of the political elites monarchical occurred through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose member states are Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait, with a military intervention in Bahrain and used coercion to suppress the protest movements . This paper argues that the efficiency of the Gulf Cooperation Council in curbing the protest movements in Bahrain occurs first, because of the political concern at the threat ideological Shiite Iran , which delegitimize the Sunni monarchy in the Gulf . This concern leads the states to cooperate and coordinate policies deeper within the international organization, characterized by an externality common to be contained. Second, the Gulf Cooperation Council presents itself as a well-established institutional framework, characterized by stable negotiation arenas and continuous expertise in the production of information and institutional diversity. These features offer efficiency in policy coordination in various arenas of negotiation, but mainly on security issues, especially in aimed at maintaining the status quo. In this sense, the Gulf Cooperation Council is an important variable to explain the containment of protest movements in the Persian Gulf and provider of conservative policies, managed collectively by its member states and able to maintain autocracies. Thus, for the achievement of research, methodological question was used specialized articles and books and secondary data derived from specialized bibliographies and official websites of the Gulf Cooperation Council. For better visualization of the data, we used the Software MapViewer 7.0 for thematic maps.