Rentierism’s Siblings: On the Linkages between Rents, Neopatrimonialism, and Entrepreneurial State Capitalism in the Persian Gulf Monarchies

Abstract

This paper examines rentier state theory (RST), and specifically “rentierism” as a more refined and nuanced variant of RST, arguing that while rentierism provides considerable utility in explaining the state-society relationships of the contemporary Arab states of the Persian Gulf, it is insufficient as a stand-alone explanation, and needs to be considered as a political dynamic of the state-society relationship, rather than as a structural explanation for the state itself, as early RST more ambitiously sought to do. Rentierism therefore needs to be utilized in combination with two other explanatory frameworks, neopatrimonialism and state capitalism. In effect, these are rentierism’s theoretical “siblings”: they sharpen a rentier analysis by providing greater nuance about how elite networks, business-government relations, and personalized politics operate and interact in the allocative settings of the Gulf, as well as illustrating both the scope and the limits of rentierism as an explanatory framework.