Introduction

The Gulf countries have become an increasingly lucrative market for the international arms trade, especially since the shrinking of Western defence budgets raised their profile as a market in the global export race. Amidst the literature on security relations of the Gulf with outside powers, however, few publications aim to explain the incentives driving this trade beyond security motives on the part of clients, and economic determinism on the part of suppliers. This paper, which focuses on evolving trends of the arms trade with Qatar and the UAE, aims to fill this gap by offering an overview of their multifaceted internal and international drivers and the way it has impacted the rules of the regional and global security game.

The Gulf region has been one of the world's top arms markets for a long time. This is not surprising given the “triangular contest for influence among Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia which helps explain the Iran-Iraq War and Saddam's invasion of Kuwait”1 amidst the Gulf “regional security complex” – generated by “the interaction of anarchy and geography”. To be sure, many academic works on the arms trade from the 1970s to the mid-1990s used this region as a case study. But it is worth noting three points. First,

Second, most of the literature from the Cold War focused on the competition between the two superpowers and how it played out in the arms trade to Third World countries. Thus, analyses tried to understand the sellers’ motivations rather than the buyers’ perception. Third, even in academic works that did focus on regional arms recipients rather than arms donors, authors mostly covered the three main actors of the Gulf security complex – Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia – as opposed to the smaller Arab Gulf States.

Now, Qatar and the UAE have both moved their way up on the international arms trade ladder for a while – as early as the 1980s, they were both in the top five countries in the world when ranked according to military spending per capita and today they remain some of the world's biggest spenders in this area.