Describing a country as a “land of paradox” is a horrid cliché of foreign policy writing, but it’s unfortunately how we must begin our examination of Bahrain. The tiny Middle Eastern nation is majority-Shia yet ruled by Sunnis, wealthy yet with a very high unemployment rate, an island that often seems enveloped Lesotho-like by Saudi Arabia. Bahrain tends to get lost in our discussions about the Middle East, blurred in with that agglomeration known as the “Gulf States,” though during the Arab Spring, at least for a couple weeks, it came front and center.
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