Introduction: Factors Affecting the Gulf’s Future

Abstract

How will global economic and political cycles and inequality, still existing restrictive gender norms (UNDP, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Human Development Report. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York (2019). Available at http://www.hdr.undp.org/), and value change affect the future of the region, which had combined proven reserves of 497 billion barrels of crude oil, which represents approximately 34% of the world’s estimated proven crude reserves, and which is the EU’s sixth-largest export market (€78.1 bn of exports in 2019, +5% over 2018)? In this chapter, we present the starting points of our analysis: the global world political and economic environment which the Gulf will most probably face in the near future and the foreseeable emergent real vacuum in world affairs and global leadership; and the multivariate analysis of civil society in the countries of Gulf by international comparison. Here, in the introduction, we present an outline of the social scientific scenery in which this book is located, all characterized by the quest for evidence-driven debates about the realities of the Gulf region by international comparison. The chapter briefly introduces the decisive factors, discussed at length in this book with a wealth of new original, global time series analyses and opinion-survey-co-driven evidence. We highlight, among others, the necessity of the multivariate analyses of opinions on religion, gender, and the desire for democracy, based on World Values Survey data, underlining the general approach of this book in the framework of the recent United Nations Human Development Report, 2019 with its emphasis on inequality and still existing restrictive gender norms.