Mobilizing Belonging in Times of Crises: Sentimental Governance and Political Participation in Gulf Autocracies

Scholarship on Gulf autocracies has long portrayed political apathy as a defining feature of authoritarian subjecthood, explaining regime resilience primarily through repression, co-optation and material redistribution in rentier states. This paper challenges this perspective by arguing that contemporary Gulf regimes increasingly rely on sentimental governance as a strategy of crisis management. In the face of overlapping global and regional crises, most notably climate change and the anticipated post-oil transition, civic engagement is no longer treated as a threat to regime stability but as a necessary resource for mobilizing the populace to navigate uncertainty and sustain political order. The paper draws on extensive affect-ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, analyzed through a mixed-methods research design that enables a systematic examination of how affective strategies are deployed, received and contested across different Gulf contexts. Theoretically, it shifts attention from dominant material and institutional explanations of authoritarian durability to the affective foundations of political participation. While constructivist approaches have emphasized norms and ideological interpellation in the formation of political subjecthood, they insufficiently account for how political projects are experienced and made meaningful by citizens. This contribution argues that such meaning-making is mediated through emotional repertoires; socially shaped and flexible knowledge stocks that structure how political stimuli are felt, interpreted and evaluated. Sentimental governance operates by strategically activating these repertoires not only through emotionally charged narratives, symbols and leadership performances, but also through state-sponsored memory practices and participatory events in which citizens are invited to enact their belonging. These practices enable individuals to repeatedly experience, rehearse and normalize affective attachments to the nation, thereby embedding sentiments of national belonging, moral obligation and collective destiny in everyday political life. Rather than suppressing political engagement, regimes seek to affectively channel it in ways that align citizen subjectivities with state-led transformation agendas. The sentimental thus functions as a form of “social engineering” aimed at stabilizing political order under conditions of heightened uncertainty. Comparative analysis reveals significant variation in the effectiveness of these strategies. While sentimental governance has successfully fostered participation and legitimacy in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Kuwaiti case exposes its limits. Here, contested political subjectivities and the misalignment between state-led sentimental strategies and existing emotional repertoires of its people undermine affective mobilization, generating legitimacy challenges that may constrain regime crisis management and open space for political contestation. By introducing sentimentality as a distinct analytical category not yet established in political science research, this paper contributes a novel framework that travels beyond the Gulf context and speaks to broader debates on political participation, crisis governance and authoritarian resilience across regions. It challenges assumptions of political passivity in autocracies and offers a more fine-grained account of how power, belonging and participation are negotiated and reshaped in times of profound regional and global crisis.