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SHAPING THE SAUDI STATE: HUMAN AGENCY'S SHIFTING ROLE IN RENTIER-STATE FORMATION
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Journal Article
SHAPING THE SAUDI STATE: HUMAN AGENCY'S SHIFTING ROLE IN RENTIER-STATE FORMATION
2007
Overview
The article offers a revisionist account of how the modern Saudi state emerged in the 1950s
and 1960s. Differing with structuralist “rentier-state” accounts, I contend that individual agency
has been very important in shaping the Saudi bureaucracy as oil money gave unique, although
temporary, autonomy to princely elites to organize the state around their personal interests.
Emerging institutions functioned as power tokens, leading to a fragmented administrative setup in
which ministries serve as “fiefdoms” and bureaucratic capacities vary strongly from one institution
to another. Through state growth and the “locking in” of distributional commitments, the autonomy
of princely elites to redesign the state has strongly declined over time, meaning that many early
institutional decisions have permanently impacted the shape and capacities of today's Saudi state.
Vis-agrave;-vis rentier theory, I demonstrate that regime autonomy is not constant over time and that the
quality of institutions is historically contingent and not determined by oil, which merely enlarges
the menu of institutional choices available to rentier-state elites.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
