UAE isn’t brainwashed, Western commentators are lazy
Somewhere in the last two decades, a diagnostic habit settled into Western commentary on the Gulf states.
First, observe a population that does not organize its political life around contested elections. Second, note the absence of protest movements resembling those familiar from European and American history. Third, conclude that the population cannot think critically about its own government.
The word that typically surfaces is “brainwashed.” It appears in opinion columns, Reddit threads, think-tank asides, and the remarks of otherwise careful journalists who would never apply the same category to their own audiences.
The diagnosis is applied most consistently to the United Arab Emirates. And it is applied with a confidence that has always been inversely proportional to the diagnostician’s familiarity with the place.
Consider who lives there.
Emiratis, UAE citizens, make up roughly 12% of the UAE’s total population. The remaining 88% are expatriates from more than 200 nationalities.
Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Egyptians, Europeans, Africans, other Arabs.
These people come from democratic republics, military dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, and post-colonial states with every imaginable configuration of press freedom, civil society, and opposition politics. They arrived with their own frameworks for evaluating governance, their own experiences of state failure and state success, their own calibrated skepticism. And they stayed, year after year, navigating a society built on terms they understood well enough to accept.
The brainwashing thesis requires you to believe that all of these people, from all of these traditions, with all of these reference points, have been neutralized by the same mechanism. That the Kerala schoolteacher and the British banker and the Egyptian engineer arrived with functional critical faculties and then lost them on contact with a desert climate and generous infrastructure spending.
Read that slowly.
The claim is lazy in a way that reveals more about the claimant than the subject.
The UAE did not emerge from the European nation-state tradition. Its political architecture grew from tribal governance structures organized around consensus, kinship obligation, and reciprocal accountability.
The majlis, the traditional gathering in which a ruler or tribal leader received community members and heard grievances, was the central institution. It predates any constitution. It operated for centuries across the Arabian Peninsula, recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage in 2015 for its enduring role in social and political life. Authority in this system flowed from proximity and reputation within a community, from a leader’s demonstrated capacity to mediate disputes and distribute resources fairly. The relationship between ruler and ruled was direct, personal, and continuous in a way that representative democracy, by design, is not.
When Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum established the federation on December 2, 1971, they were tribal leaders building a state, uniting seven emirates that had operated as separate entities under British protection. They were not candidates winning an election. The legitimacy they carried came from a different tradition, did different things, and was recognized by people who understood exactly what they were recognizing. Zayed pursued consensus among the other rulers as a matter of political method, and the other rulers elected him president unanimously. That process looks nothing like a democratic mandate in the liberal sense. And it was never trying to.
The Western observer typically knows this and proceeds as if it does not matter. The absence of contested elections becomes the only relevant variable. Everything else about how a society organizes accountability, distributes resources, maintains social cohesion, or manages the relationship between authority and population falls out of the frame. What remains is a binary; elections or delusion.
This is where the diagnosis becomes self-sealing. Any accommodation with the system becomes confirmation that critical consciousness is absent.
People do not march, so they cannot see clearly. They do not organize opposition parties, so they have been captured. There is no observable behavior that could falsify the thesis. A population that is satisfied with its government reads as proof of manipulation. A population that is dissatisfied reads as proof that the system is failing. The framework admits no outcome that could suggest a society has simply arrived at different political arrangements through a different history and found them, on balance, worth maintaining.
And the people deploying this framework are rarely interested in falsifying it. The brainwashing thesis locates critical consciousness precisely where the observer already stands. Western liberal democracy becomes the standard against which all political life is measured, and wherever that standard is absent, so is the capacity for independent thought. The comfort of the diagnosis is its circularity. It requires no knowledge of tribal governance, no engagement with the concept of shura, no reading in Gulf political history, no conversation with the people it purports to describe. It asks nothing of the person making the claim. It asks everything of the people being claimed about.
Meanwhile, the commentators who describe Gulf media environments as closed operate within ecosystems whose own limitations are, by now, extensively documented. Major Western outlets spent the better part of two years avoiding the word “genocide” to describe events in Gaza that the International Court of Justice found constituted a plausible risk of genocide, that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch eventually classified as genocide, and that a leaked New York Times memo explicitly instructed reporters to avoid naming as such. A BBC study found the network used the word “genocide” on social media just twice between October and December 2023, while interrupting guests more than a hundred times for using the term. CNN staff went on record describing internal editorial decisions that consistently favored Israeli government narratives over field evidence. This is the media environment from which lectures about captured populations originate. The selective application of skepticism is what allows the critique to feel like analysis when it functions closer to self-congratulation.
The democracy test keeps getting administered by people who have stopped grading themselves. Netanyahu faces bribery, fraud, and breach of trust charges in an ongoing corruption trial. He has sought a presidential pardon without admitting guilt, sought to have the underlying criminal statute abolished through coalition legislation, and has been repeatedly accused of prolonging military operations to delay court proceedings. His coalition voted unanimously to fire the attorney general leading the prosecution and advanced bills to weaken judicial authority. The leader of what is routinely described as the Middle East’s most vibrant democracy governs while facing ten years in prison. And the observers who would immediately diagnose any Gulf state exhibiting equivalent behavior as authoritarian describe this, instead, as a complicated domestic political situation.
Different societies built different relationships between rulers and the ruled. Those relationships carry different histories, different logics, different mechanisms for maintaining accountability and distributing the costs of political life. The question worth asking about any political system is what it actually does, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost. That question takes longer than the brainwashing diagnosis. It requires sitting with the unfamiliar long enough for it to become legible on its own terms rather than as a failed version of something else.
Most people do not do that work. Because the alternative is easier and feels like insight. You note the absence of something you recognize, you name that absence a pathology, and you move on, confident in the clarity of your own political tradition, a tradition whose outcomes you have quietly stopped examining with the same rigor you demand of everyone else.