Reinventing the Sheikhdom: Clan, Power and Patronage in Mohammed bin Zayed’s UAE by Matthew Hedges (review)

In Reinventing the Sheikhdom, Matthew Hedges makes a persuasive case that the United Arab Emirates has been transformed over the decade since the Arab Spring from a collection of seven emirates into a far closer approximation of a unitary state based on Abu Dhabi and dominated by Shaykh Muhammad bin Zayid Al Nahyan. Hedges was detained in the UAE in May 2018 while conducting fieldwork for the doctoral thesis, which forms the basis for the book. He was accused of spying for the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service and sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2018 before being released and deported amid an international outcry. In this first book since his release, Hedges examines how mechanisms of power and control evolved in the 2010s to create a new political reality that was itself rooted in changing considerations of regime security across the UAE.