Gulf Cooperation Council and the Challenges of Establishing an Integrated Capability for Upholding Security.

摘要

The Gulf Cooperation Council's abysmal performance during the last 30 years clearly demonstrates that the member-states of this alliance remain unprepared to seriously commit themselves to the establishment of a credible joint defense force able to facilitate the goal of collective security for which the GCC was established in the first place. This thesis seeks explanations as to why the GCC has made little progress in establishing mechanisms to provide collective security for its members through the lenses of neorealist theory and regime theory. Neorealist theory explains the GCC's stumble on the path to achieving collective security by expecting that the GCC would not succeed if there were other options for security, but it fails to explain the causes that led the GCC member-states to seek other security options. Applying regime theory in the case of the GCC will identify the GCC's reasons for seeking other security options. This thesis hypothesizes that the GCC failed to guarantee security to its members due to its weakness as a regime, explained by regime theory, which led the GCC member-states to seek other security options provided by external power through bilateral security agreements, as predicted by neorealism.