State religious authorities in rentier economies and the management of independent Islamism

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to theorize the relationship between religion and rentierism. Existing literature on rentier states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) focuses on the means by which oil rents facilitate economic and political co-optation while failing to address co-optation of the religious sector, which is arguably as important for government maintenance of social and political legitimacy. In this paper, which focuses on the post-2011 era, we assess the existing literature on this topic in order to identify important gaps, before assessing the means and mechanisms, as well as the comparative efficacy, of religious control across the six states of the GCC. We then draw conclusions about the ways in which control of rentier-funded religious institutions reflects the degree of political control exerted by governments in these countries more broadly, as well as how levels of rentier wealth can dictate the level of control over religious life. Specifically, we identify a trend towards greater centralization of control of the religious sphere and of political life in Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with a tendency towards co-optation in Kuwait and Qatar.     

Economic Statecraft,Structural Power,and Structural Violence in Sino-Kyrgyz Relations

Abstract

This article employs the concepts of structural power and structural violence to a undertake critical study of China’s use of economic statecraft toward Kyrgyzstan. The article argues that China’s reliance on economic exchange to secure its strategic ends in Kyrgyzstan has resulted in asymmetric economic exchange between the two states. Through this asymmetric exchange, China has gained influence over Kyrgyzstan’s domestic structures. Chinese structural power, in turn, contributes to violence across Kyrgyzstan’s structures of economy, environment, and society and within the country’s state-society relations. Structural violence within Kyrgyzstan also results in periphery instability and domestic insecurity for China. As such, the article argues that China’s use of economic statecraft to achieve its strategic aims in Kyrgyzstan is self-defeating.     

Can a rentier state evolve to a production state? An ‘institutional upgrading’ approach

ABSTRACT

Can a rentier state evolve to a production state? This article attempts to answer this question by analysing how historically states evolved to production states and by comparing their experience with today’s Gulf states. Although the Gulf states show some productive traits today, their mode of production largely remains ‘production with rentier characteristics’, that is reliant on oil-driven advantages. Their further economic diversification requires improved governance capabilities that enable their government to enhance human capital. Production states around the world acquired such governance capabilities through ‘institutional upgrading’, a replacement of clientelistic institutions with meritocratic ones. While clientelistic institutions tend to persist, such institutions were significantly reduced in these states through the exit of vested-interest players from major fiscal and organizational spaces. The exit appears to occur when these vested-interest players accept pain-sharing to ensure their protection in the context of the revealed vulnerability of their patron regime and when alternative productive gains are offered to them in lieu of conventional distribution. Presently neither condition is in existence in the Gulf states, which continue to be characterized by their direct and extensive distributional regimes. Without a prospect for immediate governance improvement, a realistic reform possibility lies in agency under institutional constraints.     

‘Reading the ads in al-Daʿwa magazine: commercialism and Islamist activism in al-Sadat’s Egypt’

ABSTRACT

This article probes the return of the Muslim Brotherhood to prominence in 1970s Egypt through a systematic analysis of advertisements in the organization’s flagship periodical, al-Da?wa (The Call). In every issue of the magazine, which was published between June 1976 and October 1981, entreaties to proper conduct and appeals to Islamic solidarity appeared alongside advertisements for everything from Pepsi to breakfast biscuits to automobiles. We utilize the methodological insights of social and cultural historians to the value of advertisements to cast new light on the reconstruction of the Brotherhood, its relationship with the diverse institutions comprising the Egyptian state, and on how the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision of piety both reflected and challenged a changing economic reality. Moving beyond a story of the Brotherhood’s return as a product of independent Islamist enterprise that had emerged due to both the Gulf oil boom and Egypt’s economic liberalization programme, significant public sector advertising in al-Da?wa, especially prominent across the most valuable advertising real estate, underscores both internal divisions within the Egyptian state as well as the tangible ways that various state institutions were patrons of religious change.     

Climate action versus inaction: balancing the costs for Gulf energy exporters

ABSTRACT

Climate change poses a strategic dilemma for oil-exporting states of the Gulf. By sapping global demand for crude oil, climate action threatens the economic rents that underpin their governance and regime legitimacy. However, the Gulf states are also among the countries most exposed to physical risks of a warming climate and thus would benefit most from reducing ongoing accumulations of carbon in the atmosphere and associated adaptation costs. In other words, the political and economic risks of climate action run counter to the physical and environmental risks. These bifurcated interests differentiate the Gulf producers from oil exporters in more temperate regions, which would experience milder short-run damage—or even benefits—from a warming climate. A successful economic diversification strategy could address both physical and economic risks but would require structural changes in rentier governance.     

The Development-Insecurity Nexus in China’s Near-Abroad: Rethinking Cross-Border Economic Integration in an Era of State Transformation

Surprisingly, perhaps, China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative expresses a familiar mix of the security–development nexus and liberal interdependence thesis: Chinese leaders expect economic development and integration will stabilise and secure neighbouring states and improve inter-state relations. However, drawing on the record of China’s intensive economic interaction with Myanmar, we argue that the opposite outcome may occur, for two reasons. First, capitalist development is inherently conflict-prone. Second, moreover, China’s cross-border economic relations today are shaped by state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses. Accordingly, economic relations often emerge not from coherent national strategies, but from the uncoordinated, even contradictory, activities of various state and non-state agencies at multiple scales, which may exacerbate capitalist development’s conflictual aspects and undermine official policy goals. In the Sino-Myanmar case, the lead Chinese actors creating and managing cross-border economic engagements are sub-national agencies and enterprises based in, or operating through, Yunnan province. The rapacious form of development they have pursued has exacerbated insecurity, helped to reignite ethnic conflict in Myanmar’s borderlands, and plunged bilateral relations into crisis. Consequently, the Chinese government has had to change its policy and intervene in Myanmar’s domestic affairs to promote peace negotiations.     

Re-conceptualizing civil society in rentier states

ABSTRACT

Civil society is typically understood as weak or irrelevant in Gulf rentier states, the assumption being that rent-derived wealth allows the state to co-opt or repress associational life. However, for all these claims about the relationship between rents and civil society, rentier state theory relies on a number of assumptions regarding the nature of civil society itself, specifically that civil society is, by definition, independent of the state, formal and public in organization, and pro-democratic in orientation. This article examines where relaxation of these assumptions allows us to better understand the political activities of civil society groups in Gulf rentier states, even as co-optative and repressive governance tactics continue to limit space for political activity. Instead of focusing on traditional forms of civil society, we should instead search for those parts of Gulf society that fulfil the function of civil society in terms of societal entities that act collectively to pursue a political purpose (including both engagement with the state over policy matters and debates on moral and social societal norms).     

Contending paradigms of Japan’s international role: Elite views of the Persian Gluf crisis

Japan’s dramatic ascent to the status of economic superpower raises significant questions about how it will wield the broader global influence ordinarily conferred by wealth. Its emergence as an economic leader coincides with the demise of the cold war. Taken together, these trends alter the basis of the long-standing U.S.-Japan relationship. While the security partnership is likely to continue as a force for regional stability in the post-cold war environment, it is simply natural that a prosperous, self-confident Japan will begin to assert an independent voice in international affairs. In this study the author examines Japan’s recent debate over its policy in the Persian Gulf crisis. Particular attention is given to five competing schools of thought that shaped the national debate among Japanese opinion leaders. Although Japan’s response to the Gulf crisis was marked by a series of false starts and confusion, it is likely that a new foreign policy paradigm will eventually emerge from the ongoing debate among the contending schools of thought identified by the author.     

Proliferation of neopatrimonial domination in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Literature on Turkey’s post-2011 authoritarian turn – especially after the eruption of the 2013 nationwide Gezi Protests – adopts modern concepts such as ‘dictatorship’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘one-party government’, ‘party-state fusion’, and even ‘fascism’ mainly in order to pin down the nature of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkish acronym) or depict the current character of Turkey’s regime. Through engaging the pre-modern concept of neopatrimonialism, which is derived from Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism, this paper argues that Turkey’s encounter with authoritarianism is deeply associated with the proliferation of neopatrimonial domination, into which the legacy of patronage politics, fracture of security power, and the metastasis of crony capitalism have been conflated. This article argues that neopatrimonial features have always, to a degree, marked state-society relations in Turkey. Furthermore, this article suggests neopatrimonial characteristics started to dominate Turkey’s modern legal structure under the AKP, which led to a state crisis culminating in the 2016 attempted coup. However, despite the fact that neopatrimonialism cannot be argued as a pathological deviation from modern-legal domination, this paper concludes that tension exists between the crony capitalism-based economic model of neopatrimonalism and Turkey’s decades-long market-based capitalism.     

Navigating a Highly Protected Market: China’s Chery Automobile in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

The economies of Malaysia and China have become increasingly integrated through trading and investment linkages. This article focuses on one aspect of this relationship, examining Chery, a Chinese car maker, and its internationalisation strategy and its localisation efforts in Malaysia. It does this by analysing Chery’s interaction with the host government, local partners and suppliers. Using an in-depth case study, it was found that Chery’s experience in navigating a set of complex state–society relations in Malaysia resulted from an adaptation of its business strategy to address protectionist and institutional constraints found in Malaysia. However, while relations between Chery, the local partner and government agencies have grown strongly, few interactions have evolved between Chery and local suppliers and national research and development facilities, limiting collective learning processes and production collaboration in Malaysia. The evidence also suggests that Chery’s present conundrum of low sales in the country could be solved through negotiations with the Malaysian government so as to evolve mutually beneficial partnerships with national automotive makers. The Malaysian government may also consider easing its protectionist measures to allow more foreign participation into the auto sector to stimulate growth and competitiveness.     

Religion and inter-ethnic violence in Indonesia

Commentators have long struggled to understand state-society relations in Asia within the framework of the dominant liberal-democratic conceptualisation of civil society. This article examines the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's theory of civil society for understanding contemporary Cambodia and Vietnam, with reference to both legal and social frameworks. Such an analysis illuminates important aspects of state-society relations in Southeast Asia that tend to be overlooked by dominant liberal and Marxist perspectives. This article argues, however, that the utility of Gramsci's conception of civil society for understanding state-society relations in Cambodia and Vietnam, by retaining the notion of civil society as a realm associatively separate from the state, is limited.     

哈萨克斯坦石油精英及其对能源政策的影响

哈萨克斯坦是一个经济结构严重受制于能源经济和依靠石油寻租的油气生产国。国有大型油气公司的高级主管对该国的能源政策具有举足轻重的作用。石油精英通过与政治精英建立非正式的关系网络,不仅影响本国能源部门的发展,而且还介入政治决策和政治制度。而哈萨克斯坦普遍存在着制度的不透明性、法律的不确定性和总统决定的随意性,助长并养成了非正式政治体制的固化,加强了威权主义的趋势,并进一步鼓励寻租和腐败行为的延续。     

Getting the economic context right: the WWI analogy and contemporary East Asia

ABSTRACT

World War I has become the “go-to” analogy for understanding the contemporary security dynamic in East Asia, especially as it concerns US-China relations and the possibility of war. However, this analogy fails to account for the fundamental changes in economic flows in the current environment, specifically the growth and proliferation of foreign direct investment (FDI). Capital flows were primarily portfolio investments in 1914, while FDI flowed from great powers to secondary, allied states. This is not representative of East Asia today, where FDI flows between possible belligerents in any future conflict and global value chains link states within and across regions. Ultimately, World War I may no longer provide a satisfactory analogy for understanding the impact economic interdependence has on modern war given FDI’s importance in the global economic system.     

Out of sight,out of mind: managing religious diversity in Qatar

Abstract

The small Gulf state of Qatar is today home to as many Christians, and as many Hindus, as it is Qatari citizens, making it one of the most religiously diverse states in the Middle East. A somewhat unintended consequence of the developmental trajectory Qatar has embarked on, like other emergent social realities religious diversity poses a threat to the identity of both the state and the small citizen population, and must be managed. This article explores how the state is responding to the challenge of religious diversity by looking at ‘Church city’, a recently built complex that houses several Christian churches on the outskirts of Doha. I argue that efforts to manage religious diversity are informed by notions of protection and segregation, as can be identified both in Islamic historical precedents, and in the state’s broader response to its developmental dilemma.     

Chinese Economic Development and the Environment

Abstract

Using the perspective of political opportunity structure, this qualitative survey of primary sources attempts to determine whether environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in Kazakhstan are achieving institutionalisation from the standpoint of representative democracy, or are being co-opted by a corporatist national government. Are ENGOs the harbingers of the democratisation of the country that many observers hope to see? Given increases in the nation’s budgets for the environment and easing of NGO/ENGO legislation, the institutionalising project would seem to have some prospects for success. Concomitantly, the participation of civic groups in the policy arena has contributed to better governance through experiments in new forms of state-society partnership. However, these partnerships have under-performed. Local governments face conflicting demands, while the insufficient administrative and technical capacity of state agencies highlights the need for capacity building. On the political level, authentic ENGOs must compete for policy inclusion with co-opted “front” organisations selectively favoured by the national government, at the same time that the government’s ambiguity towards ENGOs retards the latter’s institutionalisation. The immediate future of environmental civic society is uncertain.     

Appropriating and contesting ‘traditional Islam’: Central Asian students at the Russian Islamic University in Tatarstan

ABSTRACT

Based on an ethnographic case study of an Islamic university in Russia, I examine how the state-implemented and bureaucratized traditionalization of Islam in Russia affects the everyday life of Central Asian students and how this project ‘from above’ is entangled with their coping strategies. I show how religious education has become a resource for the state as well as for young students and their parents. The Russian state uses these official religious institutions to control the Muslim population by creating and promoting a state-approved version of ‘traditional Islam’ and producing official religious specialists. For the young Muslim students, however, Islamic education provides, in addition to religious knowledge, access to networks, social security and new economic opportunities. It thereby offers a way to cope with the uncertainty caused by high unemployment rates and other socio-economic difficulties among young people.     

Brexit,Development Aid,and the Commonwealth

Abstract

Development cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states has provided a vehicle for the UK’s ongoing relationship with the majority of the Commonwealth, although this was widely overlooked in the run-up to the UK referendum and its aftermath. Membership of the EU has provided the UK with the opportunity to collectivise its obligations to ACP Commonwealth states and a framework for its development cooperation relations across the Global South. This has augmented British leadership in global development and the alignment of development policy and practice at the global, regional and national levels. This paper argues that withdrawal from the EU would be a lengthy and costly process that threatens to undermine the UK’s position in global development, current levels and sources of development funding and existing and nascent trade relations. While this will present particular challenges for ACP Commonwealth states, there may also be opportunities to propose and advocate for alternative frameworks. However, recent changes to the UK’s post-referendum political leadership does not augur well for those hoping for a roll back of pressures for liberalisation and associated reforms.     

Following the Grain: State Formation and Trans-local Grain-trading Networks in the Philippines

With respect to the major approaches of state-society relations and Chinese business networks in Southeast Asia, two knowledge gaps are identified. First, little is known about how two sets of dualistic conceptual entities may be connected in the often-contentious state formation process between: (1) the ruling minority and ruled majority; and (2) the nationalising state and grain-producing frontiers. Second, very little is known about the role that the Chinese business networks played and how they contributed to the state formation processes. Using a Philippine trans-local grain-trading network as a site of investigation, the paper seeks to fill these knowledge gaps by delineating an integrative approach – designated as rhizomatic political economy – which argues that Southeast Asian state formation may hinge on the instrumentalisation of Chinese business networks and what is identified as their rhizomatic power/knowledge system. They are not just business-brokers in the trans-local grain trade that connects the national capital and grain-producing locales, but also serve as political brokers to implement state measures in regards to food and interior security affairs.     

Nigeria and South Africa: Collaboration or competition?

This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Nigeria and South Africa, arguably the two most prominent states on the African continent. Each of the two states continues to make attempts at extending its hegemony beyond its respective sub-region to emerge as Africa’s foremost state. These efforts are not pursued in isolation, but affect their bilateral relations and are tied to the guiding principles of the national interest. Through data gathered from secondary sources, we analyse the trajectory of the relationship between Nigeria and South Africa, from the intensely politically contentious to the strongest of warm relations. In the final analysis, the article concludes that collaboration and competition are critical variables in the conduct of inter-state relations. Nigeria and South Africa have an historic opportunity to collaborate in the current period, in order to promote the general interest of the African continent in the international system. Will their respective pursuit of their own national interests encourage, or derail, this role?     

Social Safety Net in Islam: The Case of Persian Gulf Oil Exporters

The Persian Gulf oil-exporting countries have had a poor record of managing their oil wealth to meet the basic needs of their citizenry and have failed in insuring an equitable distribution of income and opportunities. Government expenditures in the social sector can be characterized as wasteful and subsidies as regressive and for the more-heavily populated countries simply unsustainable. Set within the paradigm of Islamic economics, providing both normative and ethical guidance on the development of a just economic order, the issue of reforms to the social safety net is analyzed and how these oil exporters can better address the needs of the disadvantaged in an Islamic context is suggested.