"Yet many of the political reforms have stalled. Parliamentary elections, originally promised for 2005, have been postponed indefinitely. For the time being, despite Sheikh Hamad’s talk of elections, the country continues under the old, largely unaccountable system of governance, with virtually all major decisions emanating from the Emiri Diwan, the office of the emir.
According to Mehran Kamrava, the director of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Doha, the announced reforms were a way for the emir to secure international support while consolidating control over the fractious al-Thani clan; once that was done, the pressure was off. In a 2009 study of Qatari politics, Kamrava wrote, “the prospects for the political system becoming democratic do not seem even remotely possible.”
