Colonial Coups and Popular Sovereignty

Unlike revolutions, coup d’états are undertheorized in imperial and national histories as single case events and analyzed by social scientists through the prism of democratization theory. Based on research he recently published in the American Historical Review, Abdel Razzak Takriti challenges these approaches. By closely examining two major British coups in the Gulf Trucial States of Abu Dhabi and Sharjah in the 1960s, Takriti will discuss how the useful concept of “colonial coup” can help us better understand the reshaping of sovereignty in the post-WWII era.

Associate Professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti is Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History and Director of the Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston. He is the author of the award-winning book Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 (Oxford University Press, 2013 and 2016) and the co-author (with Karma Nabulsi) of The Palestinian Revolution website learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk, which recently won the 2019 Middle East Studies Association of North America's Undergraduate Education Award.