PATTERNS OF STATE-BUILDING IN THE ARABIAN GULF: KUWAIT AND QATAR (OIL, COALITIONS, RENTIER, MIDDLE EAST, PETROLEUM)

In the past few decades Kuwait and Qatar have experienced a radical but apparently smooth transition from protectorate poverty to petroleum prosperity. Rapid economic and social changes have been accompanied by remarkable political continuity at the apex of their systems. This thesis examines this apparent continuity in ruling regimes. Oil revenues, it argues, preserved continuity only at the very apex of the political system. This continuity was accompanied by the breakdown of the historical ruling coalition binding the amirs and the trading families and its replacement by a new, but ultimately precarious, set of coalitions: first, between the amir and the national population, through social services and direct transfers; second, between the amir and the ruling family, whose political role expanded. These changes were the result of oil: by freeing rulers from the need to extract resources from the population, oil freed them from their historical economic--hence political--dependence on the merchants, the group which had historically pressed its claims most effectively on the state. Instead a tacit deal developed between the amirs and the trading families: a trade of wealth for formal power. In exchange for renouncing their historical claim to participate in formal decision-making, the amirs guaranteed the merchants a large share of the revenues. Where economic elites once entered politics to protect their economic interests, merchants now left politics to preserve those interests.; Finally, the thesis argues that these new arrangements are only transitional adaptations. Distributive policies designed to ensure domestic peace have inadvertantly created relatively large and complex state administrations, or distributive states--unusual in that they emerged from the imperative to expend rather than extract revenues. As these institutions grow in size and complexity, they are becoming less amenable to control through ruling kinship networks. The ruling houses and the state administrations, though they coexist and exercise jurisdiction over the same populations, are not identical. A semiautonomous state apparatus carries within it the potential for developing its own loci of power, social relationships, and political ideals and goals. An unintended ramification is a potential loss of control over the population by the rulers as this control is increasingly mediated by a disloyal bureaucracy.