Remembering 'The Blockade on Qatar': National Memory and the Assemblage of the Event

Abstract

Amidst the reinvigoration of the discourse on national identity in Qatar since mid-1990s, the governments of neighboring countries, such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, announced the cessation of diplomatic relations and the stoppage of any exchange with Doha in June, 2017. Since then, the "blockade on Qatar" has become a fact in the public imaginary in Qatar as it operates as an important event around which time is organized. Thus, rather than an externally-imposed political event that triggered an automatic reaction from the affected parties, the blockade has been creatively integrated into ongoing imaginaries about the nation, which turns its meaning into a matter of political contestation. Drawing on the field of memory studies and, more specifically, on the literature about the national politics of collective memory, this chapter looks at the process through which a series of diverse, and sometimes even diverging, actions are constantly put together in order to assemble "the blockade on Qatar" as a single, compact and self-evident event that never took place nonetheless. In other words, rather than looking at how the blockade produced nationalism, this chapter looks at how nationalism produced the blockade.