| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue revisits the ideas of rentierism, or rentier state theory (RST), advanced in Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani’s edited volume The Rentier State (1987), with particular focus on countries in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula.1 Rentierism/RST, a theory that posits negative effects of external income and its distribution on political liberalism and economic development, has been serving as the dominant intellectual frame of reference for studies of resource-dependent countries in the Gulf and wider Middle East and North Africa region over the past three decades, both for scholars elaborating on it and for those critical of it.
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