One of the most serious challenges for Kuwait’s ‘Vision 2035’ economic reforms is the transformation of its oil dependent economy to a more dynamic private sector-led one. In the current system, public and private companies run on monopolies, subsidies, and a general lack of competition. Very rarely are employees fired; absenteeism and inefficiency are rife; and workloads are incredibly light. The issue of productivity strikes at the heart of work life where economic incentives and employment may not be linked. Notable scholars like Hossein Mahdavy, Hazem Beblawi, and Giacomo Luciani have argued that resource booms induce a ‘rentier mentality’; a myopia or sloth that comes from not having any economic incentive to work. As MaryAnn Tétreault once said, ‘the recipient is morally defective’, essentially selling their integrity, citizenship, and principles for a ‘plum job…The lazy and shiftless get government jobs and the economy staggers under their dead weight’. Despite widespread use, these ‘mentalities’ remain more of a fable rather than a product of empirical observations. In practice, these often-cited claims are inaccurately directed solely at nationals, while foreigners working in the country are often treated as immune (if not simply ignored), which has its own orientalist connotations. Do people in oil states think they’re lazy? Is the rentier mentality a poor method of classifying individuals? What are some of the micro-level causes of inefficiency in Kuwait other than regime maintenance? To investigate the roots of the rentier mentality, which I frame as cultural rather than simply politico-economic, I conducted a survey between April and November 2018 that collected over 400 responses. A second and third wave of follow-up surveys will be conducted from February to November 2019. The current results raise fundamental questions about expatriates’ role in Kuwait and the self-awareness of residents both citizen and expatriate alike, and delve further into the ‘insane dependency’ created by state welfare benefits and the “punch in and punch out” mentality of jobs. Furthermore, the results of the survey fit with a conceptualization of rentier mentality that accounts for culture, instead of predominantly political economic concerns. This also moves away from treating the study of psychology as orientalist by allowing people to speak for themselves, instead of simply accusing them of damaging the fabric of their societies. Being lazy is not in ‘the Kuwaiti DNA’ as one respondent noted, nor is it something that revolves around personal choice or state policy in isolation.

“Sohar is the next Dubai,” was a common local refrain across the Al-Batinah governorate of Oman in the 2000s. Today, Duqm holds the promise of the future. It is currently undergoing radical transformation from a small fishing village to an enormous special economic zone (SEZ). This paper rests within the context of national strategic visioning and planning, and examines particular sites targeted for radical transformation in response to economic change imperatives. Rentier states like Oman are supposed to have content populations, yet the level of social agitation, especially around jobs, is intensifying. This paper examines such puzzles, and asks why economic development plans in rentier economies that appear to respond so clearly to labour market challenges, fail so dramatically to address them evenly across sectors and periods. It centres on the city of Sohar as a critical case of rapid economic transformation and socio-economic disjuncture. Starting in the 2000s, Sohar transformed from a small coastal town to a city today that is almost unrecognisable from just 15 years ago. Yet Sohar was also at the heart of the Omani Spring in 2011, reflecting the wider Arab uprisings that year. Economic disenfranchisement and a lack of opportunities for local youth were at the core of concerns. Such industrial development then, and the SEZ in Duqm today, are supposed to generate growth and jobs. Labour nationalisation policies and SME promotion are supposed to facilitate this process, but have resulted in mixed outcomes for the economy and society. Building on multi-year ethnographic, semi-structured interview, and survey research, this paper interrogates the nexus of economic development planning and youth socio-economic expectations. It contributes to development scholarship on economic transformations, and labour market research in rentier economies.

Middle East oil producers are undertaking fundamental transformations of their rentier economies, including through new taxes and reductions in welfare subsidies that have supported citizens for generations. Reforms aimed at deficit reduction pose serious challenges for authoritarian states whose citizens are accustomed to generous financial patronage in return for political allegiance. However, a scarcity of reliable opinion data means that we know very little about how citizens view these changes, and how public opinion might serve to constrain or facilitate development toward a post-rentier society. This paper investigates public preferences towards fiscal reform in the quintessential rentier state of Qatar. We utilize two rare national surveys of Qatari citizens that assess preferences via novel choice experiments. Our results highlight the importance of perceived distributive equity in shaping public attitudes toward restructuring the rentier state. We find that rentier citizens have a strong preference for universal subsidies and a corresponding aversion to targeted benefits and elite discretionary and international spending. Notably, citizens also view the loss of existing subsidies as more problematic than the implementation of new forms of taxation. Finally, we identify a subset of older and poorer citizens who reject all approaches to fiscal reform.

While considerable revisions of rentier state theory have advanced this body of literature, the relationship between rentierism and religion remains under-theorised. Much existing scholarship focuses on the ability of regimes benefitting from hydrocarbon rents to co-opt potential political opponents and economic competition, largely ignoring their dominance of the religious sector. Indeed, rentier state theory presumes that government autonomy extends beyond economics into politics, and theorists like Hertog (2011) have rightly demonstrated the extent to which state autonomy has been overstated in the political economy sphere and in society more broadly. As he explains, the state puts limits on its own authority during the state-building period through its creation of clients, which require distributive obligations, even though they provide political support. While such obligations tend to be described as primarily affecting economic and political life, I argue that rentier states of the Arabian Peninsula also have significant distributional relationships with the religious sphere, which allow for general co-optation of this sphere yet also bind leaders in the Gulf to appear, at least to a certain extent, to adhere to basic tenets of Islam. Co-optation of the religious sector is by no means unique to the Gulf states, as bureaucratisation and the propagation of authoritarian structures across the Arab world enhanced state authority over religion over the course of the twentieth century. This situation allows states, in turn, to co-opt popular religious leaders as a means of enhancing their legitimacy within society and heading off potential grounds for protests from the religious sphere. I hope to discover what is unique about countries with distributive capabilities due to hydrocarbon wealth versus other types of authoritarian states when it comes to control of the religious sphere by examining existing literature linked to the rentier state, empirical observations about the role of state religious authorities in Gulf societies, and results of a survey conducted in December 2017 by YouGov measuring the influence of religious authorities in Gulf states. Certainly, rulers of the wealthier Gulf states are in a position to finance large mosques and religious schools within their own borders, in addition to funding religious education abroad. We hope to determine how effective religious co-optation is in reality, its political and social consequences, and what it means for rentier state theory.

Using a social network analysis of workplace interactions among primarily white-collar employees at a Kuwaiti construction company, this paper examines everyday life and work in the state of Kuwait through a systematic focus on individual and interpersonal behavior. The findings from this exploratory study raise an important concern regarding the level and subjects of study when scholars speak of life in rentier societies such as those of the GCC. Specifically, by extending the analysis to non-citizen residents, this paper sheds light on an aspect of state-civil society relations, that although crucial, has been generally overlooked in the political science and macroeconomic literature on the region. Rentier theory-based scholarly investigations of non-citizen populations in the GCC, unless explicitly focused on migration and migrant experiences, have limited their analyses to the macro-level and to the generalized implications of institutional forces such as the kafala system. Rather than speaking in broad terms of how the ratio of nationals to non-nationals along with resource- and ethno-protectionist citizenship policies circumscribes migrant experiences and socio-political action, this paper uses empirical data to concretely visualize the subtleties of everyday life in a specific social space. An online survey of top and mid-level staff at Sadeer Trading and Contracting Company allowed respondents to self-report their workplace interactions with colleagues along four interaction types: work-related communication, formal collaboration, informal socialization, and aspirational collaboration. Individual attribute data on age, nationality, place of birth, years of residence in Kuwait, family life, and employment at Sadeer was also collected and used to contextualize the network data. The survey yielded four networks, capturing over 500 unique interactions among individuals of over half a dozen nationalities. The subsequent analysis of interpersonal interactions at Sadeer, while not directly generalizable to other organizations or spaces, offers caution against traditional approaches that marginalize the role of non-citizens in analyses of state-society relations and political action in Kuwait, but also in the GCC more broadly. Far from being peripheral outsiders, non-citizens, as illustrated through the case of Sadeer, are active participants in Kuwait’s social life, contributing to transformations in norms and practice in complex ways. For scholars seeking an honest empirical validation of rentierism as a feature of life in the GCC, it is, therefore, necessary, as this paper will demonstrate, to systemically map out everyday, micro-level interpersonal dynamics in a manner that puts data before theoretically-biased assumptions about whose actions matter and whose do not.