As explained at the outset, the assumption underlying this analysis is that the balance sheet of a social movement is determined by a complicated set of interactions among its basic ideological and operative features, the political opportunity structure (POS) that it faces (on whose nature it has almost no influence), and its reading or the framing of the POS. It has also been maintained that the conventional understanding of the POS by social movement theoreticians as referring mostly to systemic features, such the level of state repression exerted in the specific political system, the structure of the ruling elite, or the stability of the system, is lacking. This is because it missed a crucial factor – the societal one, namely, general public opinion, against which background social movements develop and that they all address, whether as their direct target or as a means of influencing decision makers. This composite, state-centered, and proximate POS in its turn determines the myriad openings and constraints that affect the bottom line of the balance sheet, that is, the movement's success or failure.

When studying a specific movement, the analyst must examine the entire repertoire of factors and highlight the most relevant components of the POS that, in the specific case under investigation, provide the best explanation. Analysts should not automatically follow the “shopping list” that the classic POS theorem puts forward.

The Israeli Peace Movement: Basic Features

The Israeli peace movement clearly puts forward all the features of a social movement as defined previously. The movement challenges national perceptions and tries to bring about policy changes in a critical realm; its members have a sense of common purpose even if they sometimes disagree on the specific “formula” for peace; solidarity among activists and groups is marked by organizational and social interaction; and it has sustained interactions and activities that go back several decades. Clearly, as most definitions of a social movement stress, it is organized around a conflict; in fact, it focuses on two conflicts: the Israeli-Arab conflict, and, no less important, the conflict with its rivals on the Israeli right.

The detailed description and analysis of the various peace groups past and present below might create the mistaken impression of a massive political force – recall that the movement has always been numerically small. It ranged from several tens of activists in the 1920s and 1930s, to hundreds in the 1950s and late 1960s, to thousands and even a few tens of thousands in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the early 1990s (most of them supporters), to a few thousand and even less in the late 1990s, and even fewer than that in the 2000s. Against this factual background, the assessment of the movement's tactical and strategic achievements should be measured and evaluated.

The story of the Israeli peace movement in the Oslo era is agonizing yet fascinating. After all, rarely does a small and poorly resourced social movement face a situation in which some of the main pillars of its agenda that were formerly widely rejected are suddenly integrated into formal national policy. However, this is exactly what occurred when the Rabin government, elected in 1992, presented its blueprint for peace and launched the Oslo process a year later. When this happened, the peace movement was presented with at least three dilemmas: first, it had to choose between the normal organizational (and human) tendency to claim “copyrights” – in this case for the political breakthrough that Oslo embodied – and the realization that the less it is associated with this strategic shift, the better the chances that the process would gain wide public support. Second, the government takeover of the peace agenda raised questions about the movement's raison d'être. The second dilemma therefore became, should the peace movement dissolve itself or search for a new set of aims? Third, once the decision was made to continue its activity, the movement had to redefine its relations with the political establishment and the mainstream, because for the first time in its history, it found itself in concert, in principle at least, with decision makers and large public sectors and not on the side of the opposition. This change called for a basic transformation of the movement's state of mind.

This final chapter examines the making of Manama as an oil town and capital city. The focus is the impact of state intervention on the built environment and on urban life, and the contrast between these developments and those in the agricultural hinterland of Bahrain. The impact of oil did not trigger a new dialect of urbanisation, in the sense that it did not radically transform the patterns of settlement which had become apparent in the nineteenth century. Cultivators, turned into oil workers, continued to reside in their ancestral towns and villages, some of which were absorbed into Manama's metropolitan area after the oil boom of the 1970s. Awali, the first modern oil town (madinah al-naft) in the Gulf, built in 1937 by the American-owned BAPCO, developed as a ‘neocolonial’ settlement, a gated community which housed a new class of European and American technocrats who run the industry.

Oil revenue and state centralisation did not efface the traditional political and socio-economic differences between Manama and the rural areas inhabited by the indigenous Shi‘i population. Rather, they enforced a new set of inequalities. In the oil era, historical legacies and inequalities continued to be enshrined in built environments and social landscapes, as they had been in the days of pearling. Manama became the harbinger of Bahrain's modernity as well as that of the entire Persian Gulf.

Between the accession to power of Shaykh ‘Isa ibn ‘Ali Al Khalifah in 1869 and the establishment of municipal government in 1919, the growth of Manama reflected the evolution of Bahrain's pearling and entrepôt economies and the increasing importance of the Government of India in fostering its semi-autonomous position within the Al Khalifah domains. At the turn of the twentieth century, the urban layout revealed the relative weakness of the tribal administration and the critical role played by trade and immigration in the expansion of the previous decades. Unlike Muharraq, which developed around the residences of the Al Khalifah family, Manama did not have a clearly defined administrative and political centre. Its configuration was to a great extent the result of the spatial and demographic requirements of the maritime economy which dominated urban life. The successive waves of rural and overseas immigrants and the increasing volume of trade were matched by the development of the harbour and the markets, fostering the growth of residential districts along the seafront.

While the town developed gradually throughout the nineteenth century, its political and social orders crystallised in the years of the pearl boom, particularly after the 1880s. In this period the accelerated development of the harbour, markets, neighbourhoods and religious institutions unveils the ‘dynamics of power’ which characterised the rise of a powerful merchant class and the contest, as well as the symbiotic relationship, between merchants and rulers on the one hand and the Al Khalifah and British agents on the other.

Challenging the received wisdom on the Gulf

Over the two centuries between the Al Khalifah occupation and independence from British control, urban development and urban life in Bahrain continued to mirror the broader social and political transformations of the coastal regions of the Persian Gulf. Before oil the dynamics of these frontier societies were expressed in the visual and cultural language of expanding port towns in a way which resembles – albeit in a different economy of scale – the growth of Gulf cities in the age of oil and globalisation. In approaching the city as a separate theme in Gulf history, this study has revisited the political and social evolution of Manama and Bahrain in the age of tribal expansion, British rule and oil. The analysis of Manama's urban history as the world centre of pearling, the hub of British imperial influence and the capital of the modern state of Bahrain challenges standard portrayals of the politics, society and urbanism of the Gulf littoral.

Manama and its agricultural hinterland constitute an excellent vantage point for observing the multiple facets and composite nature of state and nation building in the Gulf before and after oil. The interface between tribe and state in Bahrain, and more generally along the Gulf coast, has thus to be understood in the context of the complex society of its historic port settlement.