Not Little Sparta: Militarisation and the politics of constraint in Kuwait

This paper takes up a case of constrained militarisation in the most militarised region in the world. After decades of external threats culminating in the 1990 Iraqi invasion, oil-rich Kuwait launched a massive effort to modernise and expand its armed forces. By the 2000s, however, those efforts had stagnated, while its equally oil-rich neighbours in the Arabian Gulf initiated successful campaigns to upgrade their defence sectors. Prevailing theories struggle to predict this puzzling outcome. Kuwait has all the structural attributes that would facilitate rapid militarisation: it is a small state suffering from territorial insecurity, governed by a rentier authoritarian monarchy whose martial aspirations were supported by US hegemonic interests. To account for this counter-intuitive result, this paper presents domestic politics as a critical explanatory variable. Kuwait’s large-scale military build-up in the 1990s broached domestic political disputes, subjecting elite decision-making to popular pressures that ultimately scuttled the ruling monarchy’s ambitions. It delivers a focal case study of a failed US–Kuwaiti arms deal in the late 1990s to illustrate how internal contestation over domestic issues like corruption and fiscal mismanagement can restrict militaristic imperatives, even if the state leadership has the incentive and resources to pursue such policies.