Abu Dhabi’s drive for defence industrialization: paramountcy of the economic diversification agenda

Defence analysts and Gulf area experts are taking increasing note of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) rapidly expanding defence industry sector. Up until the late-2000s, the UAE possessed nothing that could be described as a defence industry; today it manufactures–indigenously and in partnership with foreign firms–an array of comparatively sophisticated weapon systems for a new entrant in the market. This article investigates what is behind this ambitious drive towards defence industrialization. Rather than see this move as mostly motivated by security or prestige concerns, as some observers do, we link it more directly to Abu Dhabi’s decades’ long economic diversification agenda.