On the surface, the brief succession crisis that gripped Kuwait in January 2006 ended in the arbitrary replacement of one member of the ruling Al Sabah family with another. When Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmad al-Jabir died after a long illness on January 15, he was succeeded by the crown prince, Sheikh Saad al-Abdallah al-Salim, himself in the throes of a lengthy sickness and suffering also from senile dementia. Politicking ensued inside the ruling family, and on January 29, former Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jabir took Sheikh Saad’s place and made his first speech as Kuwait’s new ruler. But in between the two successions, the Kuwaiti parliament exercised its independent constitutional powers, demanding that the infirm Sheikh Saad yield. For the first time in an Arab monarchy, an elected body effectively deposed the monarch, and empowered a new one, without anyone firing a shot. For years, members of the opposition in Kuwait have derided the ruling family’s occasional endorsements of democracy. Opposition activist ‘Isa al-Sarraf put it this way: “For the Al Sabah, democracy is not a strategy. It is a tactic.” In other words, the trappings of democracy are acceptable, as long as they do not interfere with the family’s perceived right to rule Kuwait as it chooses. To be sure, one way to read the story of the Kuwaiti succession is that the ruling family merely failed to head off crisis by resolving internal differences before they went public. But there is another way to tell the story, giving a prominent role to a parliament that, armed with a constitution, a law of succession and a canny speaker, used the tug of war inside the ruling family to force a mutually agreeable resolution. The Kuwaiti succession is, in fact, a tale of two transitions: one between emirs and another from a dynastic monarchy to a strengthened constitutional monarchy. Full Text >>