MARY ANN TÉTREAULT, Stories ofDemocracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2000). Pp. 318. $18.50 paper.

Extract

In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an “insider's guide” to the private and public spaces in which struggles over communal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait. Tétreault is careful to call her text “Stories of Democracy,” as she realizes the reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil, under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, the merchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and in different contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civic association, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that “democracy” is a “concept that ‘moves' depending on one's assumptions” (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles the politics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison to explore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politics resembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis “one of the longest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics” (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaiti politics “a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices” (p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphors when she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are “the product of a domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family” (p. 206).