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Late Development and Rents in the Arab World
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Abstract: Debates about the rentier state, or what is more broadly termed “the resource curse,” are picking up steam. Several current and forthcoming studies engage different aspects of the general question: to what extent does a developing state’s access to significant exogenous revenues (oil, mineral export, foreign aid, and so on) account for domestic political patterns such as authoritarian regime durability. An ironic aspect of this debate is that while much of the original rentier scholarship was developed by Middle East specialists, scholars extending those findings today are generally not Middle East specialists while many of the skeptics are. This paper provides a critical review of the debate from the perspective of a Middle East comparativist and suggests new avenues of research by returning to what I term “revised rentier theory.” Three variables are discussed in the context of modern Middle East politics: the importance of pre-rent socio-political relations and institutions, regional patterns of conflict and security, and disaggregating rent types and variation in their decline. The basic claim is that understanding the importance of rents to politics requires augmenting current tests of whether exogenous rents are probabilistically causal with micro-level analyses of how rents interacted with specific socio-political and historical settings. In other words, access to exogenous rents in the Middle East is a feature of late-development.
Introduction
Over the last decade, a steadily widening debate has evolved from the study of the
political-economy of the Middle East. At stake is the extent to which rentier state theory—a
cluster of literature arguing that the character of a state’s revenue determine its basic politics—accounts for some the region’s most popular dependent variables, including
patterns of political liberalization, regime stability, and fitful economic development. While there is much to criticize about the study of Middle East political-economy (Waldner, 2003),
the broadening debate surrounding rentier state theory seems a bright spot. Middle East specialists and non-specialists have produced or are producing methodologically diverse tests
of the link between access to exogenous rent and domestic political-economy outcomes (Herb, 2004a, 2004b; Shrank, 2003; Sachs and Warner, 1999, 2001; Ross, 1999, 2001; Smith,
2004a, 2004b).
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Outside the academic debate--perhaps to the detriment of the debate itself--
popular journalists and policymakers are attracted to the idea that the region’s problems can
be reduced to oil revenues or what is commonly termed the “resource curse” (Judis 2003, Birdsall and Subramanian 2004).
The purpose of this paper is to take critical stock of the debate and suggest new
avenues of research by revisiting some of the neglected aspects of rentier state theory
1
Scholars of the developmental state in Asia have also begun drawing on the rentier state literature, see:
Richard F. Doner, Bryan K. Ritchie, and Dan Slater, “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental
States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective,” forthcoming in International Organization 59, 2 (Spring 2005).
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2
Abstract: Debates about the rentier state, or what is more broadly termed “the resource
curse,” are picking up steam. Several current and forthcoming studies engage different
aspects of the general question: to what extent does a developing state’s access to significant
exogenous revenues (oil, mineral export, foreign aid, and so on) account for domestic
political patterns such as authoritarian regime durability. An ironic aspect of this debate is
that while much of the original rentier scholarship was developed by Middle East specialists,
scholars extending those findings today are generally not Middle East specialists while many
of the skeptics are. This paper provides a critical review of the debate from the perspective
of a Middle East comparativist and suggests new avenues of research by returning to what I
term “revised rentier theory.” Three variables are discussed in the context of modern
Middle East politics: the importance of pre-rent socio-political relations and institutions,
regional patterns of conflict and security, and disaggregating rent types and variation in their
decline. The basic claim is that understanding the importance of rents to politics requires
augmenting current tests of whether exogenous rents are probabilistically causal with micro-
level analyses of how rents interacted with specific socio-political and historical settings. In
other words, access to exogenous rents in the Middle East is a feature of late-development.
Introduction
Over the last decade, a steadily widening debate has evolved from the study of the
political-economy of the Middle East. At stake is the extent to which rentier state theory—a
cluster of literature arguing that the character of a state’s revenue determine its basic
politics—accounts for some the region’s most popular dependent variables, including
patterns of political liberalization, regime stability, and fitful economic development. While
there is much to criticize about the study of Middle East political-economy (Waldner, 2003),
the broadening debate surrounding rentier state theory seems a bright spot. Middle East
specialists and non-specialists have produced or are producing methodologically diverse tests
of the link between access to exogenous rent and domestic political-economy outcomes
(Herb, 2004a, 2004b; Shrank, 2003; Sachs and Warner, 1999, 2001; Ross, 1999, 2001; Smith,
2004a, 2004b).
1
Outside the academic debate--perhaps to the detriment of the debate itself--
popular journalists and policymakers are attracted to the idea that the region’s problems can
be reduced to oil revenues or what is commonly termed the “resource curse” (Judis 2003,
Birdsall and Subramanian 2004).
The purpose of this paper is to take critical stock of the debate and suggest new
avenues of research by revisiting some of the neglected aspects of rentier state theory
1
Scholars of the developmental state in Asia have also begun drawing on the rentier state literature, see:
Richard F. Doner, Bryan K. Ritchie, and Dan Slater, “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental
States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective,” forthcoming in International Organization 59,
2 (Spring 2005).
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