Within the influential literature on the ‘rentier state’ in the Middle East, there remains a significant gap regarding the role and importance of international variables. The rentier state that arises from the extant literature is typically depicted as politically autonomous, not only from their own society but also from foreign political influences (the exception being those that impact the fiscal basis of the regime). Yet the region in which RST was first formed, the Gulf, is critically shaped by international and transnational social, political, and security interests, not only the international political economy of rents. This paper addresses this gap, presenting an in-depth case study of an archetypal ‘extreme’ rentier state to examine how the state negotiates labour reform in light of competing and contradictory domestic and international social pressures. Specifically, the paper focuses on the debate over migrant labour rights and the Qatar 2022 World Cup that drove the creation of a revised labour law in 2015. As the paper explores, external and transnational pressures compete with domestic forces to shape state-society relations. The influx of migrant workers into Qatar over the past few decades forms an important element of the state’s ‘late rentier’ development strategy, yet has simultaneously driven small-scale social mobilisations challenging a key state policy objective; this suggests that the implemention of a ‘late rentier’ development strategy can, paradoxically, contribute to the emergence of societal dissatisfaction. In the case of 2015 Qatari labour reform, complete overhaul of the labour system is unlikely to occur solely as a result of external pressure, particularly where the state must remain responsive to its domestic citizenry, who are concerned about what reform might mean for their status in a country where they are already vastly outnumbered by migrant workers. Without theoretical space for these international and transnational dimensions of state-society relations and, crucially, the interaction between these international variables and domestic societal actors, RST risks overemphasising the autonomy of the state, whereas it seems more likely that oil and gas-rich Gulf states are not isolated politically, economically, or socially, from regional and international pressures. International variables, then, must be more directly integrated into the core understanding of state-society relations in rent-rich states.