Product Description: Dubai is a remarkable success story. From its origins as a small fishing and pearling community, the emirate has gone from strength to strength, having established itself as the premier trading entrepot of the Arabian Gulf and, in more recent years, having boomed into a massive metropolis of some two or more million people, most of whom are expatriates engaged in an increasingly diversified economy that has become synonymous with startling and innovative architecture...read more

A rising economic power, Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, is poised to become a major player in the fortunes of both Third and First World countries. Abu Dhabi owns more than 8 percent of the world's oil reserves, has close to one trillion dollars to invest in sovereign wealth funds, and is about to implement a masterful set of economic initiatives that will yield even greater returns.Abu Dhabi has begun to eclipse its partner city, Dubai, in terms of sheer wealth and cultural and infrastructural development, opening the world's first Ferrari theme park and erecting satellite branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. Author of the best-selling Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success and an expert on Gulf politics, Christopher M. Davidson tracks Abu Dhabi's remarkable growth from a modest, eighteenth-century sheikhdom to its present opulent state. He recounts the dramatic efforts made by the emirate's dynastic family to retain their power, detailing the system of "tribal capitalism" they created in order to reconcile old political allegiances with modern engines of growth. Davidson concludes with potential challenges to Abu Dhabi's political and economic success, including a weakening of civil society, invasive media censorship, an ongoing labor crisis, increasing federal unrest, and persistent underperformance in the education sector.

Product Description: A multiregional analysis of the inscrutable institutions determining the stability of world power. Controlling the world's largest hydrocarbon reserves while playing decisive roles in both Middle Eastern and global political outcomes, the six traditional monarchies comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council -- Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- are shocking underestimated and misunderstood by today's western powers...read more