July 11-13, 2023, Cambridge UK

3 DAYS / 10 Workshops
MORE THAN 200 ACADEMIC PAPERS

The Rentier State at 25: Dismissed, Revised, Upheld?

“The Rentier State”, edited by Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, was published 25 years ago. At the time, neither Beblawi nor Luciani were aware of the article that Hussein Mahdavi had published in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East edited by M.A. Cook and published already in 1970. Nor were they aware of the parallel elaboration of Lisa Anderson in her article “The State in the Middle East and North Africa,” Comparative ...


“The Rentier State”, edited by Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, was published 25 years ago. At the time, neither Beblawi nor Luciani were aware of the article that Hussein Mahdavi had published in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East edited by M.A. Cook and published already in 1970. Nor were they aware of the parallel elaboration of Lisa Anderson in her article “The State in the Middle East and North Africa,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 20, No. 1, October 1987. Anderson, in contrast, was aware of Mahdavi and quotes him, but was not aware of Beblawi and Luciani. She also writes: “The notion of the rentier state is one of the major contributions of Middle East regional studies to political science, and the literature on the impact of externally generated revenues, particularly those produced by exports of oil, is relatively well developed.” So the rentier state is a paradigm that has had more than one father, and possibly it is 42 rather 25 years old, but there is no doubt it has become “normalized” as a standard concept in the toolkit of area scholars as well as comparative political scientists. In these decades, authors have variously argued against the validity of the rentier state paradigm, adapted it to specific circumstances and realities in regions different from the Middle East, or simply continued to refer to it. But is it still a useful tool? The proponents of this workshop, working in association or separately, have attempted to go beyond the rentier state, studying ways in which continued, long-term rent recycling can change the nature of state-society and state-business relations away from the original model of autonomous state and politically marginal society, and ways in which the state could 2 evolve from being rentier into being a state supported by the domestic economy through taxation.

The workshop invites all who have entered this debate in some form – attacking the theory, proposing adaptations or simply using it – to propose papers, aiming at reaching an updated view of the rentier state. Papers can focus on a single country case or propose cross-country analyses for specific aspects of the rentier state theory.




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Workshop

Directors


Prof. Giacomo

Luciani

Adjunct Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies -
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies



Steffen

Hertog

-
The London School of Economics and Political Science


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