On May 14, 2022, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (commonly known as MbZ) officially became the third president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) following the death of his half-brother Khalifa. In effect, the announcement acknowledged a reality of Abu Dhabi politics obvious for the past decade; MbZ was already the de facto ruler of the country.MbZ and his inner circle’s steady conquest of power within the UAE has been the topic of many journalistic articles in recent years, but the book by Matthew Hedges is the first attempt to date to provide an academic account of the rise of Abu Dhabi’s strongman.1 Hedges posits that the rise of MbZ reflects a deeper transformation of the UAE political system. Founded in 1971 as a Federation between seven Emirates, the UAE was historically the result of a compromise between the oil-wealthy capital Abu Dhabi, the merchant city of Dubai, and the poorer and more conservative Emirates (Sharjah, Fujairah, Umm al Qawain, Ajman, and Ras al Khaimah). Hedges emphasizes the idea that UAE security priority has been primarily a domestic one, a trait common to authoritarian regimes.In other words, the imperative of its rulers was less to deter an unlikely attack from a regional power like Iran or Saudi Arabia, than to prevent internal unrest. This fear of regime instability was exacerbated after the Arab revolutions of 2011, which brought about a harsh response from the UAE government. Under the leadership of MbZ, Abu Dhabi responded at home by jailing representatives of the local Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, Al Islah, and human rights activists such as Ahmed Mansoor. Abroad, the UAE reacted by supporting counterrevolutionary forces across the Middle East, particularly in Egypt where the Emiratis backed (politically and financially) the military coup of ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi in 2013.During that period, Hedges argues that MbZ reshaped the institutions of the country according to his own political preferences, building what the author calls a system of “neo-corporate praetorianism” (13–18). The theory explains that the Emirati sovereign built a policy network that relied on the armed forces and technocrats that together control the five key sectors of society: the military, the domestic surveillance apparatus, the industry, the economy, and the religious establishment.Hedges’s model is a significant departure from past explanations on the nature of power in the UAE in the era of Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founder of the State and MbZ’s father. Emirati politics were traditionally depicted as a complex system with the monarch relying on mechanisms of interdependence involving the ruling families, the major tribes, and the merchant families. In contrast, MbZ has earned an unprecedented concentration of power that sidelines many competitors including the ruling family of Dubai, Al Maktoum, and the members of rival branches within the Al Nahyan family in Abu Dhabi.After introducing his theoretical framework, Hedges delves into the details of four of those sectors, though, unfortunately, the religious establishment is not covered in the book. First, we discover how MbZ, as a man of military background, used the armed forces to consolidate his grip on power. The UAE Armed Forces are generally portrayed as an effective army able to conduct complex operations that earned them the famous nickname “Little Sparta.” Previous scholarship provided keys to understand the development of the UAE military strategy and the role of MbZ throughout that process,2 but Hedges shows how the push for modernization and the various reforms implemented by the Emirati military apparatus were first and foremost about expanding the influence of MbZ and providing a stepping stone for his greater ambitions.The following chapter examines the development of the surveillance system established in the UAE, which the author describes as a form of “digital authoritarianism.” This resonates with recent scholarship on the growing sophistication of surveillance and disinformation policies in the Gulf (see the work of Marc Owen Jones).3 Hedges emphasizes the idea that the UAE public space has been severely reduced in the past decade because of several interrelated trends. Local media outlets are owned by companies with close ties to the ruling family, preventing any expression of dissent. The legal framework regulating surveillance of the population and justifying prosecution has been expanding, thanks to a wide range of what is deemed a matter of national security. Surveillance techniques also improved thanks to the massive technological investments in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For instance, Hedges makes the compelling case that the e-government services provided by the Emirati administration aim primarily at monitoring the social activities of citizens and residents.In the next two chapters, Hedges explores the ways MbZ strengthened his control of the economic structures of the UAE, starting with the oil sector through the appointment of one of his closest advisors, Sultan Al Jaber, at the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. To that aim, the author dissects the organizational charts of the UAE’s biggest companies and sovereign wealth funds like Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Mubadala, and Abu Dhabi Investment Council. He highlights how a small group of individuals controls most of those entities.Some aspects covered here are well known. Much has already been written about the five full brothers of MbZ, sometimes called the “Bani Fatima” in reference to their mother, and their influence across government: Mansour, deputy prime minister; Tahnoun, national security advisor; Abdullah, foreign minister; Hamdan, former deputy prime minister; and Hazza, deputy chairman of Abu Dhabi Executive Council. The book highlights numerous details showing how MbZ is also preparing one of his sons, Khaled bin Mohamed, for high-level responsibilities and possibly as his future successor.Hedges nuances the network analysis by also pointing out the profiles of influential individuals such as Sultan Al Jaber (not only the CEO of ADNOC but also the Minister of Industry) and Khaldoon Al Mubarak (CEO of Mubadala as well as chairman of Abu Dhabi Executive Affairs Authority) outside of the ruling family and with relatively weak tribal connections. For Hedges, the trajectory of both Al Jaber and Al Mubarak is evidence of an evolution toward a more technocratic logic in the Abu Dhabi networks of power.Overall, the book offers an in-depth analysis of Abu Dhabi’s policy circles that is closer to the sociology of elites than to International Relations scholarship. Hedges’s investigation is mainly, if not exclusively, based on open-source materials available through the websites of government and private entities. The forty-page appendixes at the end of the volume reflect the depth of research carried out by the author. For instance, Hedges retrieved all the instances of media reports announcing UAE soldiers killed in action during the war in Yemen. Based on the background of those men, he built a database highlighting how most of them originated from the poor northern emirates such as Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah. Admittedly, one may cringe at the absence of any material in Arabic (Hedges acknowledges from the first page that he does not speak the language), something that unfortunately has become frequent in scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula.In fact, this methodological limitation makes the story behind the writing of the book even more puzzling. Although this review aimed to discuss the book for its own value, it is hard to read and reflect on Hedges’s investigation without thinking about the heavy price that he, as a young PhD student, paid for it. In April 2018, after conducting fieldwork in the UAE, Hedges was arrested at Dubai International Airport and held in prison for months. Fearing for his safety, his family eventually publicized the case that became a major issue at the center of UK-UAE diplomatic relations. Forced to respond to the international outrage, the UAE sentenced Hedges in November 2018 to life imprisonment under the charges of espionage; a few days later he was pardoned.The case has had consequences on the very topic Hedges was researching. Soon after his release, the UAE penal code was modified to deter future research on topics related to the political structure of the country. Even if Hedges’s investigation was based on material available to everyone, the stern response from the UAE security apparatus appeared to validate his argument—that the biggest security concern for Abu Dhabi was indeed domestic stability. The very fact that his work, though based on public data, was considered a threat to the regime put into perspective the difficulties of researching not only the UAE but the regimes of the Arabian Peninsula as a whole.Despite its incredibly painful genesis (or perhaps because of it), the book is not flawless. It sometimes reads like an unedited version of the author’s PhD dissertation. Theoretical considerations and empirical evidence can appear disconnected from each other. The first chapter offers a lengthy literature review which is then followed by subsequent chapters providing a fastidious prosopography of the Al Nahyan family (which might recall the dullness of old-fashioned Sovietology). The conclusion could have expanded on the findings of Hedges’s investigation, as it leaves the impression of a remarkably detailed description of the power structure in the contemporary UAE but one that lacks broader reflection on its implications for Gulf studies and political science.In its most interesting sections, Reinventing the Sheikhdom echoes Christopher Davidson’s recent book, From Sheikhs to Sultanism (published only a few months before Hedges’s work).4 Like Hedges, Davidson posited the emergence of a new form of authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia and the UAE that did away with the traditional monarchical and tribal mechanisms. Hedges’s idea of neo-corporate praetorianism may also resonate with Asian experiences of authoritarianism, particularly in China, where domestic stability has long been a similar concern, if not obsession, of the Communist Party. The rise of Xi Jinping also relied on a power network that overlapped political, military, and industrial sectors.5 The book would have benefited and left a stronger impact on the reader had it included such comparative considerations.Notwithstanding these reservations, Matthew Hedges’s monograph, both in its raw content and in its difficult, life-threatening, genesis, is a valuable piece of scholarship for people studying both the evolution of politics in the Gulf region and also for those thinking of the nature of politics within authoritarian regimes, as well.