It's the "Great British Week" in Bahrain – an event designed to celebrate Britain's "friendship" with the repressive Gulf kingdom and secure some lucrative business deals. Staying well away from the protests and teargas, a red London bus is touring the streets and Prince Andrew (the...

Seven public relations firms – mostly British or American – are vying to win a contract from Bahrain's repressive government.  Western PR companies have often been criticised in the past for taking up lucrative assignments aimed at polishing the kingdom's tarnished image. In Bahrain itself...

Bahrain has announced wide-ranging new “security” measures which the prime minister says will give the authorities more power to “combat the scourge of terror and maintain security and stability”. Khalifah ibn Sulman al-Khalifah, who is an uncle of the king and has served as prime...

The right of people to get together and organise themselves in pursuit of shared interests is one of the building blocks for a free and open society. It is also something that Arab regimes fear, since active citizenship undermines their authority. Consequently, many of them have introduced laws...

When a Gulf regime needs to state in public that relations with its most important ally are "robust and strong", we can be pretty sure that something is amiss. Thus, Bahrain's insistence that all is well between Washington and Manama comes amid increasing friction between the two...