Dr. Shun Watanabe is Researcher at the JIME Center, the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). He holds a Ph.D. in Area Studies from Kyoto University. His field of expertise includes politics and security in Jordan and the Gulf monarchies. In his latest book, Ruling Networks and Resource Distributions in the Contemporary Arab Monarchies: Struggle of an Oil Poor Monarchy, Jordan. (Kyoto: Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2022, in Japanese), he examines how Arab monarchies reformulate its authoritarian rule in the era of neoliberal reform, focusing on the case of the Jordanian monarchy.