Clientelism has long been acknowledged as an intrinsic part of Near Eastern politics, but our understanding of it has suffered from a state-centric perspective that regards patron-client relations as a vestige of traditional peasant society. While more recent scholarship has sought to endow patrons and clients alike with more agency, arguing that clientelism is a rational strategy when faced with states that limit the scope of issue-based political participation, both perspectives ultimately fail to explain how clientelism can co-exist with ideological mass parties and aggressively modernizing states. Comparing Turkey and Syria, I argue that political clientelism is a mode of state-society interaction that neither state elites nor non-state individuals have the power to control. Consequently, to fully understand its implications for political participation, neither state-centric nor rational-choice frameworks suffice. Instead, patron-client interactions should be seen as re-articulating the boundary between state and society through a continuous bargaining over symbolic capital and material benefits. As such, relationships established through clientelism are prior both to policy formulation and rational calculation, constituting the framework within which the scope of participation and mobilization is defined. Employing a historical institutionalist perspective, I trace the emergence of this mechanism back to the Tanzimat, the formational period for what would later become Syrian and Turkish state elites. Bound by parallel career trajectories and a common ethos of state loyalty, a loose network of Arab and Turkish officers and bureaucrats came to monopolize the Ottoman state’s symbolic capital, but did so at the cost of consolidating access points to state resources for wider groups of society. While this elite’s dramatic shift from a shared Ottomanism to Turkish and Arab nationalism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has been the subject of several studies, the long-term state building efforts that followed would not have been possible without the continuous cooperation of dispersed patrons with privileged access to symbolic and material state resources. By combining recent work on Ottoman state-society relations with evidence from anthropologists observing state-led mobilization efforts during the twentieth century, I seek to understand the broader institutional basis of Near Eastern state-society relations in the twentieth century.

The five oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf littoral have long faced a unique security dilemma, in that they are geopolitically vital but strategically weak states whose ruling regimes lay vulnerable to both domestic opposition and foreign aggression. How have these tiny states endured in the face of such challenges? Realist theories of international relations ignore domestic politics and instead point to Western hegemony: because these states carry critical oil reserves, Britain and the United States have ensured their survival through repeated interventions. The problem with such grand macrostructural accounts is that they ignore issues of domestic autonomy, in particular the capacity of these regimes to manipulate the international system and forge bargains with external patrons on their own terms. Rather than treat the littoral kingdoms as appendages to Western imperialism, we need to specify the historical process by which local rulers developed their sovereignty over time—that is, how they safeguarded internal territory, fended off domestic opposition, and evaded foreign predation. This paper responds to this challenge by comparing the evolution of the five Gulf sheikhdoms over the twentieth century. Draw upon new fieldwork combined with careful historical analysis, it argues that these dynastic regimes have been masterful diplomatic players, using foreign policy to reinforce their domestic security. Early on, Gulf sheikhs established patron-client relations with Britain in order to gain protection from regional powers like the Ottomans. Yet such cliency relations were informal, as these states never faced colonial exploitation or subjugation. Instead, domestic leaders negotiated maximal autonomy to govern their indigenous societies without foreign interference, only surrendering to Britain indirect mechanisms of control like military basing rights and diplomatic residency. Since the 1970s, Gulf rulers have replicated this pattern of “informal” empire with the US, giving America a similarly extensive network of regional bases and military privileges but allowing no intrusions into their internal politics. In essence, the clientelistic arrangement of informal empire is historically contingent yet logically appropriate. By surrendering a slice of territorial sovereignty to external patrons, Gulf leaders have effectively purchased the right to be left alone. They have not only secured international legitimacy and protection, but they have also carved out freedom to use newfound oil revenues to bolster traditional social interests while reconfiguring national economies to satisfy capitalist development. Such a strategy has minimized domestic opposition and produced long-term stability, resulting in the durable monarchical states that today crowd the Gulf littoral.

Foreign donors with substantial ground operations in war-torn countries face a fundamental dilemma: reconstruction, state-building, and late development can be a politically costly process, and occasionally aid recipients have access to sufficiently large amounts of foreign aid that they can “buy” institutions rather than creating or re-building them from local resources. In these cases, donor-supported "parallel institutions" perform the essential functions on the state in specific sectors, thereby relieving recipient governments from developing their own institutions, domestic revenue sources, and expertise. This paper examines the nature of U.S.-financed parallel institutions in post-war Iraq and South Korea. In Iraq, U.S. advisers continue to staff key ministries at the national level, while U.S. military units and Provincial Reconstruction Teams provide decentralized infrastructure supported by new, American-backed provincial councils. Alternatively, in postwar South Korea, the state gradually assumed responsibility for planning, financing, and implementing infrastructure projects, as well as assimilating pilot planning agencies originally housed within the U.S. aid program. This paper also explains how political factors affected the longevity of parallel institutions in both cases. Why does Iraq continue to depend on parallel institutions at all levels of government while South Korea eventually assumed responsibility for its own institutions? First, parallel institutions at the national level are more durable when leaders rely on state-based patronage to stay in power. Second, parallel institutions at the local level are more durable where national leaders do not decentralize resources and authority to local governments. In Iraq, the presence of U.S.-backed parallel institutions at the national and provincial levels allows leaders to bypass politically painful reforms, such as imposing meritocratic employment schemes; they also allow sectarian groups embedded at the national level to preclude the rise of rival sects at the local level. American parallel institutions were short-lived in South Korea because appointment and promotion in the civil service was meritocratic and competitive salaries could be financed through domestic revenue sources; there was also little fear of rival power centers arising in local government, with the landlord class destroyed by land reform and no ethnic conflict to speak of.