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Justin Gengler is Research Program Manager at the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) at Qatar University, where he heads the SESRI Policy Unit. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2011 from the University of Michigan. Gengler’s research focuses on mass attitudes, political behavior, and group conflict in the Arab Gulf states. He is the author of Group Conflict and Political Mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf: Rethinking the Rentier State (Indiana University Press, 2015), and publishes regularly in both scholarly and policy fora on topics related to sectarian politics, Arab Gulf public opinion, and survey methodology in the Middle East context.
Sectarian Backfire? Assessing Gulf Political Strategy Five Years after the Arab Uprisings
The division of citizens into confessional and other group constituencies, rather than some spontaneous outpouring of primordial hatred, was in fact a calculated survival strategy employed by frightened regimes under siege. It was and remains one premised on forestalling the emergence of cross-cutting societal factions that could challenge the political status quo, coalitions that—unlike narrow sectarian groups—could claim to represent the will of all the people and mobilize a broad base of support in pursuit of those claims. But has playing the sectarian card paid off?
