Beyond the Autonomous Rentier State: Parliamentary Politics and National Identity in Kuwait

Abstract

Oil‐rich Middle Eastern states are frequently characterised by the supposed formativeness of ‘rent’. Rent generated from hydrocarbon resources is often evoked to explain the enduring formation of ‘autonomous’, often authoritarian states, detached from a broader body politic. As this paper argues, monarchical and oil‐rich Kuwait does much to problematise these causal logics of rent and its anti‐democratic payoffs. Instead, I locate a particularly active parliament and citizenry, who, along with South Asian migrant workers, are reconfiguring the state‐society relationship, leading to new kinds of popular, democratic politics.