the most interesting bit for me was that by outsourcing civil society to foreign "mercenaries", it was essentially easier for the regime to maintain power.
> And that pattern is completely normal in these states. It’s easy to think of it as kind of mercenary in some sense. And that’s not, I think, a false analogy. And it creates a variety of different sorts of conflicts in a sense but also advantages because one of the things that this means is that you don’t get the buildup in many of the Gulf states of civil society in the form that we understand it. You don’t get the uppity lawyers, the difficult journalists. That is contained by the fact that the vast majority of the people in those kinds of positions don’t have citizenship rights. So for the point of view of the stability of the regime, it actually has an upside. You might say they are less loyal, but they’re also more disposable. This is part of the mercenary model, and we should take the mercenary analogy seriously because it’s really in the military that is most pronounced.
> And that pattern is completely normal in these states. It’s easy to think of it as kind of mercenary in some sense. And that’s not, I think, a false analogy. And it creates a variety of different sorts of conflicts in a sense but also advantages because one of the things that this means is that you don’t get the buildup in many of the Gulf states of civil society in the form that we understand it. You don’t get the uppity lawyers, the difficult journalists. That is contained by the fact that the vast majority of the people in those kinds of positions don’t have citizenship rights. So for the point of view of the stability of the regime, it actually has an upside. You might say they are less loyal, but they’re also more disposable. This is part of the mercenary model, and we should take the mercenary analogy seriously because it’s really in the military that is most pronounced.