A Comprehensive Security Regime in the Gulf Region: Prospects and Challenges

Abstract

In international politics, regional initiatives to establish peace and security have been recognised as more appropriate and pragmatic in the present complex interconnected interdependent security scenario. Regional security regimes initiated and promoted both by regional and extra-regional powers for resolving, preventing and managing crises that had grown and nurtured in the regional landscape. Conceptually, comprehensive security regimes, the hybrid of both idealist and realist schools of thought of international relations, are preferably the unique one among all other security regimes. The best example of a comprehensive security regime is the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Practically, the dynamic nature of Gulf regional security has become a matter of discourse to ponder upon whether the region is transforming itself on various fronts or whether regional security regimes should be explored to overcome the ongoing multiple security challenges on multidimensional aspects. Scholars have recognised Gulf security as a sub-regional security complex of a larger area which must be dealt with separately. Thus, using this conceptual framework the paper attempts to explore the feasibility of the establishment of a comprehensive security regime in the Gulf Region which can address all three levels of insecurity, regional, state and individual thereby transcend the state-centric approach to security and create security based on multi-sum principles and not on zero-sum calculations.