Download or read book The Report Bahrain 2015 written by Oxford Business Group and published by Oxford Business Group. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The kingdom rose to prominence as the region’s financial hub in the 1970s and today, despite increasing competition from its neighbours, it is bolstering this position as it leads the way in the Islamic banking segment, hosting the highest concentration of Islamic financial institutions globally. The takaful segment represents one of the fastest growing segments in Bahrain’s insurance sector, itself boasting the highest insurance penetration rate in the GCC. Meanwhile a rising population is driving housing and transport infrastructure in the country with private contractors benefitting as a result. Looking forward, these expansions to rail and air links should boost the kingdom’s tourism offering, with tourism’s contribution to GDP expected to grow significantly over the next 10 years, while elsewhere the projects will drive Bahrain’s role as a regional logistics centre, with the kingdom aiming to position itself as a key entry point to the GCC moving forward.

Download or read book Bahrain s Uprising written by Ala'a Shehabi and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the extensive coverage of the Arab uprisings, the Gulf state of Bahrain has been almost forgotten. Fusing historical and contemporary analysis, Bahrain’s Uprising seeks to fill this gap, examining the ongoing protests and state repression that continues today. Drawing on powerful testimonies, interviews, and conversations from those involved, this broad collection of writings by scholars and activists provides a rarely heard voice of the lived experience of Bahrainis, describing the way in which a sophisticated society, defined by a historical struggle, continues to hamper the efforts of the ruling elite to rebrand itself as a liberal monarchy.

Download or read book Bahrain written by United States United States Department of State and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The investment climate in the Kingdom of Bahrain is generally good, and has remained relatively stable in the last year. Bahrain has a liberal approach to foreign investment and actively seeks to attract foreign investors and businesses. In an economy largely dominated by state owned enterprises (SOE's), the Government of Bahrain (GOB) aims to foster a greater role for the private sector in economic growth. The efforts focus on encouraging foreign direct investment in Bahrain, including in the information and communications technology (ICT), education and training services, tourism, financial services, business services, healthcare services, energy, and aluminum sectors. The U.S.-Bahrain Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) entered into force in May 2001 and the U.S.-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement (FTA) entered into force in January 2006. The BIT provides benefits and protection to U.S. investors in Bahrain, for example, most-favored nation treatment, the right to make financial transfers freely and without delay, international law standards for expropriation and compensation cases, and access to international arbitration. The BIT guarantees national treatment for U.S. investments across all sectors, with very few exceptions. American firms interested in selling products exclusively in Bahrain are no longer required to appoint a commercial agent. Bahrain allows 100 percent foreign-ownership of new industrial entities and the establishment of representative offices or branches of foreign companies without local sponsors. Under the U.S.-Bahrain FTA, Bahrain is committed to enforcing world-class Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection. Despite the GOB's transparent, rules-based government procurement system, U.S. companies have reported operating at a perceived disadvantage compared with other firms in certain government procurements. Some businesses report contracts are not always awarded solely based on price and technical merit. Many ministries require firms to pre-qualify prior to bidding on a tender, often rendering firms with little prior experience in Bahrain ineligible to bid on major tenders. U.S. firms sometimes report perceived high-level corruption is an obstacle to foreign direct investment. Petty corruption, however, is relatively rare in Bahrain. The bureaucracy is sometimes inefficient, but generally honest. Giving or accepting a bribe is illegal, although relevant laws are enforced with some degree of inconsistency. In February 2011, a period of political and civil unrest began in Bahrain. While the situation today is quite different and far more stable than in 2011, demonstrations continue to occur, occasionally developing into violent clashes by demonstrators against police. These violent clashes, when they occur, sometimes make travel in and around parts of Bahrain potentially dangerous. There are no indications that Westerners or U.S. citizens are being targeted directly, but there have been isolated incidents in which protesters voiced anti-U.S. sentiments and burned U.S. flags. The unrest has had a limited impact on American businesses in Bahrain. The Kingdom of Bahrain held Parliamentary elections in November 2014, during which the business community played an active role. These were the first elections held since constitutional reforms enacted in 2012 gave the legislative branch powers to discuss and approve a Government Action Plan (GAP). In February 2015, the newly-elected parliament approved the 2015-2018 GAP, which included plans to build 25,000 housing units, additional infrastructure development, and minor health care reforms.

Download or read book The Report Bahrain 2011 written by and published by Oxford Business Group. This book was released on with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Group Conflict and Political Mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf written by Justin Gengler and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Invaluable to anyone wanting a fuller understanding of the economic, political, and religious tensions within Bahrain.” —The Sociological Imagination The oil-producing states of the Arab Gulf are said to sink or swim on their capacity for political appeasement through economic redistribution. Yet, during the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, in Bahrain and all across the Arab Gulf, ordinary citizens showed an unexpected enthusiasm for political protest directed against governments widely assumed to have co-opted their support with oil revenues. Justin Gengler draws on the first-ever mass political survey in Bahrain to demonstrate that neither is the state willing to offer all citizens the same bargain, nor are all citizens willing to accept it. Instead, shared social and religious identities offer a viable basis for mass political coordination. Challenging the prevailing rentier interpretation of political life in the Gulf states, Gengler offers new empirical evidence and a new conceptual framework for understanding the attitudes of ordinary citizens.

Download or read book City of Strangers written by Andrew M. Gardner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner explores the everyday experiences of workers from India who have migrated to the Kingdom of Bahrain. Like all the petroleum-rich states of the Persian Gulf, Bahrain hosts an extraordinarily large population of transmigrant laborers. Guest workers, who make up nearly half of the country's population, have long labored under a sponsorship system, the kafala, that organizes the flow of migrants from South Asia to the Gulf states and contractually links each laborer to a specific citizen or institution. In order to remain in Bahrain, the worker is almost entirely dependent on his sponsor's goodwill. The nature of this relationship, Gardner contends, often leads to exploitation and sometimes violence. Through extensive observation and interviews Gardner focuses on three groups in Bahrain: the unskilled Indian laborers who make up the most substantial portion of the foreign workforce on the island; the country's entrepreneurial and professional Indian middle class; and Bahraini state and citizenry. He contends that the social segregation and structural violence produced by Bahrain's kafala system result from a strategic arrangement by which the state insulates citizens from the global and neoliberal flows that, paradoxically, are central to the nation's intended path to the future. City of Strangers contributes significantly to our understanding of politics and society among the states of the Arabian Peninsula and of the migrant labor phenomenon that is an increasingly important aspect of globalization.

Download or read book Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain written by Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-01 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the culture, society, politics, and economics of Bahrain have been transformed, driving its global ambitions while retaining to a degree the rule of law and cosmopolitanism. Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain examines the transformation of Bahrain from the 1930s, from a regional trading port and then an important oil producer into the financial hub for the Gulf and into a global centre of Islamic finance. It focuses on the changes and tensions that transformation brought to Bahrain's political, legal, economic, religious, and social structures. In this book, Rajeswary Brown explores the rising force of youth populism driven by the persistence of poverty and unemployment, notably among rural Shi'ite communities and unemployed middle-class youth, as well as examining Bahrain's skillful reconciliation of the demands of Islamic faith, expressed in the Sharia, to the requirements of modern financial capitalism. In this, Bahrain's experience can be set against the modern history of much of the rest of the Middle East, most strikingly with respect to the position of Islamic charities, notably in Syria, comparisons of which are fully explored here.

Download or read book World Report 2022 written by Human Rights Watch and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.

Download or read book Freedom in the World 2015 written by Freedom House and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 877 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fourteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

Download or read book The Responsibility to Protect written by SONJA GROVER and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the views of various international law and human rights experts on the contested meaning, scope of application, value and viability of R2P; the principle of the Responsibility to Protect . R2P refers to the notion that the international community has a legal responsibility to protect civilians against the potential or ongoing occurrence of the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, large scale war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. R2P allows for intervention where the individual State is unable or unwilling to so protect its people or is in fact a perpetrator. The book addresses also the controversial issue of whether intervention by States implementing R2P with or without the endorsement of the United Nations Security Council constitutes a State act of aggression or instead is legally justified and not an infringement on the offending State’s sovereign jurisdiction. The adverse impact on global peace and security of the failure to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes has put in stark relief the need to address anew the principle of ‘responsibility to protect’ and the feasibility and wisdom of its application and this book is a significant contribution to that effort. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights.

Download or read book Education in the Arab World written by Serra Kirdar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Education in the Arab World is a critical reference guide to development of education in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. The chapters, written by local experts, provide an overview of the education system in each country, as well as discussion of educational reforms and socio-economic and political issues. Including a comparative introduction to the issues facing education in the region as a whole, this book is an essential reference for researchers, scholars, international agencies and policy-makers.

Download or read book The Report written by and published by Oxford Business Group. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economics of Renewable Energy in the Gulf written by Hisham M. Akhonbay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) has been at the epicenter of global energy markets because of its substantial endowment of hydrocarbons. Yet countries in the region have also stated their intent to be global leaders in renewable energy. This collection explores the drivers for the widespread adoption of renewable energy around the GCC, the need for renewable energy and the policy-economic factors that can create success. All six countries within the GCC have plans to include renewable energy power generation in their energy mix for various reasons including: a growing demand for electricity because of increasing populations, an increasing government fiscal deficit due to inefficient subsidies, the need to diversify the economy and global pressure to meet climate change requirements. However, the decision of when and by how much to introduce renewable energy is fraught with complications. In this book, a stellar cast of regional policy and academic experts explore the reasons behind these renewable energy plans and the potential impediments to success, whether it be the declining cost of producing energy from hydrocarbons, an infrastructure which needs to be updated, social acceptance, lack of financing and even harsh weather. Weighing up all these factors, the book considers the route forward for renewable energy in the Gulf region. The Economics of Renewable Energy in the Gulf offers an excellent examination of the adoption of renewable energy in the area. It will be of great interest to academic researchers and policy makers alike, particularly those working in the areas of energy economics, public policy and international relations.

Download or read book World Report 2015 written by Human Rights Watch and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories is put into perspective in Human Rights Watch’s signature yearly report, which, in the 2014 volume, highlighted the armed conflict in Syria, international drug reform, drones and electronic mass surveillance, and more, and also featured photo essays of child marriage in South Sudan, the cost of the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia, and religious fighting in Central African Republic. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken in 2014 by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report 2015 is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.

Download or read book Sectarian Gulf written by Toby Matthiesen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As popular uprisings spread across the Middle East, popular wisdom often held that the Gulf States would remain beyond the fray. In Sectarian Gulf, Toby Matthiesen paints a very different picture, offering the first assessment of the Arab Spring across the region. With first-hand accounts of events in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, Matthiesen tells the story of the early protests, and illuminates how the regimes quickly suppressed these movements. Pitting citizen against citizen, the regimes have warned of an increasing threat from the Shia population. Relations between the Gulf regimes and their Shia citizens have soured to levels as bad as 1979, following the Iranian revolution. Since the crackdown on protesters in Bahrain in mid-March 2011, the "Shia threat" has again become the catchall answer to demands for democratic reform and accountability. While this strategy has ensured regime survival in the short term, Matthiesen warns of the dire consequences this will have—for the social fabric of the Gulf States, for the rise of transnational Islamist networks, and for the future of the Middle East.

Download or read book The Art of Resistance in Islam written by Yafa Shanneik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining different forms of resistance among Shi'i women in the Middle East and Europe, this book studies the performance of sectarian and gender power relations as expressed in Shi'i ritual practices. It provides a new transnational approach to researching gender agency in contemporary Islamic movements in both the Middle East and Europe.

Download or read book Tweeting to Freedom written by Jim Willis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an insightful and comprehensive look at the issues regarding the use of the Internet and social media by activists in more than 30 countries—and how many governments in these countries are trying to blunt these efforts to promote freedom. The innovators who created social media might never have imagined the possibility: that activists living in countries where oppressive conditions are the norm would use social media to call for changes to bring greater freedom, opportunity, and justice to the masses. The attributes of social media that make it so powerful for casual socializing—the ability to connect with nearly limitless numbers of like-minded individuals instantaneously—enables political activists to recruit, communicate, and organize like never before. This book examines three aspects of the use of social media for political activism: the degrees of media freedom practiced in countries around the world; the methods by which governments attempt to block access to information; and the various ways in which activists use the media—especially social media—to advance their cause of greater freedoms. Readers will learn how these political uprisings came from the grassroots efforts of oppressed and unhappy citizens desperate to make better lives for themselves and others like them—and how the digital age is allowing them to protest and call attention to their plights in unprecedented ways.