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Ed Webb

IS: the rentier caliphate with no new ideas - 0 views

  • It is clear from this trajectory that for all its denunciation of the territorial nation state, IS has followed its pattern faithfully.
  • As with any rentier state, IS has zealously acquired and guarded the assets that generate money. Most obviously this has been from oil extracted in Syria and in Iraq and sold to areas controlled by the Assad government, across the Turkish border or through middlemen in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
  • The IS ensures that there should be no challenge to its leadership in the areas that it controls, and uses force to establish new claims over its competitors. It was better organised financially than its rivals, showing an ability not simply to acquire, but also to distribute the money that flowed in.
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  • As with any rentier state, IS has zealously acquired and guarded the assets that generate money. Most obviously this has been from oil extracted in Syria and in Iraq and sold to areas controlled by the Assad government, across the Turkish border or through middlemen in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
  • The IS ensures that there should be no challenge to its leadership in the areas that it controls, and uses force to establish new claims over its competitors. It was better organised financially than its rivals, showing an ability not simply to acquire, but also to distribute the money that flowed in.
  • The IS ensures that there should be no challenge to its leadership in the areas that it controls, and uses force to establish new claims over its competitors. It was better organised financially than its rivals, showing an ability not simply to acquire, but also to distribute the money that flowed in.
  • The IS ensures that there should be no challenge to its leadership in the areas that it controls, and uses force to establish new claims over its competitors. It was better organised financially than its rivals, showing an ability not simply to acquire, but also to distribute the money that flowed in.
  • The IS ensures that there should be no challenge to its leadership in the areas that it controls, and uses force to establish new claims over its competitors. It was better organised financially than its rivals, showing an ability not simply to acquire, but also to distribute the money that flowed in.
  • The IS came to the fore in Syria, but it is in many respects a distinctively Iraqi organisation that emerged from the insurgency that developed after the US invasion of 2003.More specifically, it is a product of the sectarian politics of Nouri al-Maliki's Iraq
  • a familiar regional style of government: fuelled by huge oil revenues that he and his cohorts believed were theirs by right, he presided over an authoritarian government that played on his sectarian identity. He favoured those who identified with him and used various sanctions, including violence, against those outside the magic circle
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    It is clear from this trajectory that for all its denunciation of the territorial nation state, IS has followed its pattern faithfully.
Ed Webb

"Carbon Democracy" Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University on Vimeo - 0 views

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    The very smart Tim Mitchell presents the argument of his most recent book about the relationship between patterns of energy exploitation and democracy. Not the well-known rentierism argument, but a more sweeping political analysis of fossil fuels and 20th century democracy.
Ed Webb

Tunisia's transition has lessons for region - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

  • The question that arises today, in light of the current economic and financial crisis, is about the achievements of the transitional governments as to the persistence of “mechanisms of tyranny,” the mechanisms of an authority higher than the state.
  • some describe the transitional phase policies as a process of the “democratization of corruption.”
  • Freedom can only be materialized when the mechanisms of tyranny are dismantled, especially the financial mechanisms represented by the control exercised by small influential groups over rentier economic sectors. The latter are sectors where barriers to entry (natural or created) allow a higher than market value to be charged to consumers. Therefore foreign economic sanctions, policies of creating warlords with scopes of influence, and the dominance of specific groups on foreign aid will not bring about freedom, since all this sets the grounds for rentier economies that reinforce tyranny or create alternative tyranny.
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  • freedom may not be achieved if the state and its institutions collapse
  • Tyranny can develop even in light of partisan multiplicity and legislative elections, especially when those parties are not held accountable for their funding resources which are not transparently controlled.
arianny9

The Age of Rentier Capitaslism - 0 views

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/the-age-of-rentiercapitalism.html

politics economy rentier capitalism

started by arianny9 on 06 Feb 15 no follow-up yet
Ed Webb

Is Oman's model of governance about to shift? - 0 views

  • Like other Gulf states, Oman does not grant citizens freedom of expression or the right to choose their leader, but it does provide citizens a range of material advantages: public sector jobs, subsidies, free health care and education, a free plot of land, a pension and no income tax.
  • Oman’s public debt has skyrocketed since oil prices declined in 2014, going from less than 5% of Oman's gross domestic product to nearly 60% last year. Until 2023, annual budgets were already expected to be in the red. But the 2020 fiscal deficit is expected to be four times higher than previously forecasted because of the double shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and plunging oil prices, credit rating agency Fitch estimated.
  • the cash-strapped Omani government is expected to cut down on public expenditures and impose austerity measures. But such a move would revamp the model of governance that has prevailed since the late Qaboos bin Said ascended to the throne in 1970
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  • Public taxation is also increasing. A sin tax was implemented in June 2019 on products like sugary carbonated drinks and tobacco, and a serially delayed 5% value-added tax is expected in 2021. According to Salmi, electricity and water subsidies could soon be slashed and, in the long term, Omanis could see an income tax.
  • Above all, reforming the labor market — an unpopular move — would be the cornerstone of a post-Qaboos welfare state. About 43% of Omanis work for public entities. Abousleiman recommended economic diversification to foster private sector job creation and to further "relieve the expectations on the government to provide employment."
  • Following a field visit to Oman in 2019, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggested that the wages and benefits of the private sector need to align more closely with the public sector to make employment in the former more appealing.
  • Omanis who talked to Al-Monitor, as well as Mukhaini, believe any upcoming austerity measures "should not make the poor poorer and the rich richer," Mukhaini said.
  • According to rating firm S&P, the new ruler will face “a difficult trade-off” in the coming months to address high unemployment among youths, weak growth, and fiscal and funding pressures
  • Defense and security expenses account for over a quarter of Oman's annual budge
  • Oman — rated junk by the three major rating agencies — has several other options to fund its short-term ballooning deficit: Go further into debt; deplete its sovereign wealth fund; sell state assets; devalue its currency; and seek assistance from neighboring countries or international organizations.
  • Analysts believe Oman should build a model of governance tailored to the post-oil era. Along with a more stringent budget environment, the new leadership pledged to implement structural reforms to diversify the rentier economy and foster private sector-led growth.
  • To ensure political and social stability, Sultan Qaboos avoided controversial measures that could have triggered short-term political unrest
  • In 2011, at the height of the Arab uprisings, Sultan Qaboos promised to create 50,000 jobs and institute unemployment benefits in an attempt to defuse unprecedented nationwide protests.
  • the lack of economic reforms did not stop Omanis from loving the monarch, who built a modern state out of a medieval-like society he inherited in the early 1970s
  • Sultan Haitham bin Tariq "is already planting the seeds by cutting the royal expenditures tremendously,"
  • The relationship between state and society that Omanis have known for decades will likely never be the same
Ed Webb

Avoiding the Curse of the Oil-Rich Nations - opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com - Readability - 8 views

  • resource curse
  • Oil concentrates a nation’s economy around the state. Instead of putting resources into making things and selling them, ambitious people spend their time currying favor or simply bribing the politicians and government officials who control oil money. That concentration of wealth, along with the opacity with which oil can be managed, creates corruption
  • Money given out to citizens, of course, is money that the government can’t use to build schools, roads and health clinics. Spending it that way might improve social welfare even more than simply passing out cash — or it could if the government were actually doing it. But governance tends to be so poor in oil-rich countries, so inefficient and corrupt, that social welfare programs end up never reaching the poor
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  • The big exception is Norway, which had the foresight to become wealthy and democratic before striking oil. As almost all the world’s untapped oil reserves now lie in the developing world, Norway is not likely to have much company
  • Governments often try to save for lean years by paying a portion of oil revenues into a walled-off, legally untouchable fund. Unfortunately, temptation is often more powerful than the law. Venezuela’s oil fund, for example, has been raided6 (pdf, p 16) by Hugo Chavez, dropping from $6 billion to $3 million in the last decade — during a time of record-high oil prices
  • Taxes create accountability — citizens want to know how the government is spending their money. Substituting oil revenues decouples government from the people
  • Oil-to-cash programs are essentially unconditional transfers financed by oil. They can be targeted at the poor — like the cash transfers we know — or universal. It is obviously cheaper to pay only the poor. But universality helps the second goal of oil-to-cash: creating better government. If you want citizens to become effective watchdogs, it helps to include people with clout. Governments tend not to respond to the clamors of the poor
  • you want people to know they are paying taxes, and know exactly how much. “That’s exactly the point,” says Moss. “It creates accountability and forces tax authorities to build a sound, transparent system.” (This is plausible, but there is no evidence either way just yet that oil-to-cash programs would lead to better governance.
  • Distributing oil money to citizens is a big step, and oil countries and companies have rejected much more modest ideas that might put limits on their abilities to manipulate oil revenues. One that is gradually gaining ground is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative13, now implemented by 37 countries. Under the EITI, oil companies disclose what they pay to governments, and governments disclose what they receive. The EITI then compares and reconciles these figures
  • oil-to-cash is probably easiest to do in countries just starting to exploit oil — that way there aren’t entrenched interests guarding business-as-usual
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    Thanks to Meri for drawing this to my attention
Ed Webb

(Re)introducing Conscription in the Gulf: From Soft Power to Nation-Building - Arab Ref... - 0 views

  • In the Middle East, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring of 2011, and the subsequent foreign interventions in Yemen, Syria, and Libya, brought military preparedness and competence to the surface again. This led to a return of compulsory military service not only in countries that are at war and/or under the threat of military intervention but also in other countries. This was the case of certain Gulf countries including Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which historically seldom resorted to conscription.
  • Qatar introduced conscription in 2013, followed by the UAE in 2014. Kuwait, on the other hand, reintroduced it in 2014, having practiced conscription between 1961 and 2001. Until recently, these countries’ militaries were formed by a national officer corps, foreign - mostly Western- expert non-commissioned officers (NCOs), and foreign contract soldiers coming from different countries (Jordan, Yemen, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Oman)
  • In 2018, not long after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a blockade on Qatar, the Qatari government amended the National Service Law, introducing national service for women and extending its duration for men. While the national service remains voluntary for women over the age of 18, men are now expected to serve a year instead of three or four months. The new law gives eligible men only 60 days after they come of age to apply to the military and stipulates harsher punishment (up to three years in jail plus a fine) for those who fail to do so.
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  • Since the beginning of the 2020s, several articles5Jean-Loup Samaan, “The Rise of the Emirati Defense Industry,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 14 May 2019 https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/79121;  Elenora Ardemagni, “The UAE’s Military Training-Focused Foreign Policy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 22 October 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/83033; Melissa Dalton and Hijab Shah, “Evolving UAE Military and Foreign Security Cooperation: Path Toward Military Professionalism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 12 January 2021,  https://carnegie-mec.org/2021/01/12/evolving-uae-military-and-foreign-security-cooperation-path-toward-military-professionalism-pub-83549; Elenora Ardemagni, “ Building New Gulf States Through Conscription,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 25 April 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/76178; Elenora Ardemagni, “Gulf Monarchies’ Militarized Nationalism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 28 February 2019,https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/78472; Zoltan Barany, “Big News! Conscription in the Gulf,” Middle East Institute, 25 January 2017, https://www.mei.edu/publications/big-news-conscription-gulf; Dr. Eman Ahmed Abdel Halim, “Implementation of Military Conscription in the Gulf,” Future for Advanced Research Studies, 12 December 2016, https://futureuae.com/m/Mainpage/Item/2250/pressing-threats-implementation-of-military-conscription-in-the-gulf were written on the economic, social, and geopolitical reasons behind Gulf countries’ shift in military recruitment strategy. The security problems originating from Iran and Yemen, the willingness to exercise soft power in the region along with the volatile energy sector, and the ruptures within the rentier state model are put forward as the main justifications behind the Gulf countries’ developing defense industries and growing their armies. In this context, compulsory military service does play an important role, be it to increase the size of the army, cause deterrence in the region or create new job opportunities and a qualified workforce out of young citizens.
  • can also create intangible moral advantages, and thus have significant effects on these countries’ civil-military relations. The biggest reason for this is the symbiotic relationship that has formed over time between compulsory military service and national sentiment.  In this sense, introducing conscription shows an effort to turn these societies into nations where individuals would be bound to one another by national sentiment and not the rentier state model they have so far known.
  • To raise obedient and productive citizens who wore the same uniform, spoke the same language, and sang the same anthems, education became an important tool in the nation-building process.11Ayşe Gül Altınay and Tanıl Bora, “Ordu, Militarizm ve Milliyetçilik,” Iletişim Yayınları, (2002): 140. In Prussia, this “new form of nationalist socialization” was provided through military establishments with the hope that, after their discharge from military service, men would remain loyal to the state and transfer their sentiment and what they “learned” to the rest of the population.12
  • mandatory military service in these countries should not be seen as a way to efficiently raise strong and competent armies. First, like their Gulf neighbors, neither Qatar, Kuwait, nor the UAE is populated enough to sustain a competent standing army. Most of their populations are made of ex-pats who are not subject to conscription laws. Second, their current system of outsourcing military needs has proven to be efficient in the long run, with all three countries continuing to invest in contracting foreign soldiers to efficiently populate their armies. Therefore, the new conscription laws should be seen as a symbolic move to strengthen nationalistic bonds and ambitions.
  • paradoxically, the exact nationalistic sentiment and loyalty that the Gulf countries try to channel among their citizens can backfire if the people (including the conscripts) were to ever resent the rulers and their policies. This is rather contrary to the long-established coup-proofing strategies25After gaining their independence, most countries in the region (or rather individual leaders) have engaged in various coup-proofing measures to keep their militaries in check. There were different types of coup-measuring strategies. For example, until 2011, Hosni Mubarak, a military man himself, tried to keep the Egyptian military at bay by giving officers and the military institution economic benefits and providing an unfair competition. In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took a different approach and choose to ouster the military as an institution completely and empowered the police force. In Sudan and Libya, former presidents Bashar and Gaddafi took a more social approach and tried to counterbalance different groups of society, especially the tribal establishments, as a buffer against the military. In the Gulf, the ruling monarchs resorted to using foreign soldiers to keep the military away from social and political affairs as much as possible. that Arab countries followed over the years. However, given the low numbers of citizens that will be drafted each year, the risk of such revolts taking place remains low.
  • In Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar, there are legal sanctions in place against anyone who fails to enlist when they become eligible and conscientious objection is not recognized. This could cause or further the feeling of oppression and resentment and trigger protests and turmoil in these countries. However, at this stage, this risk is low but still a possibility as seen in Thailand, Israel, and Armenia
Ed Webb

Kuwait's PM says welfare state is unsustainable, calls for cuts | Reuters - 0 views

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    Kuwait has lagged peers like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in competitiveness and foreign investment. It has the most open political system in the Gulf Arab region but infighting and bureaucracy have slowed an economic development plan, announced in 2010, aimed at diversifying the oil-reliant economy.
Ed Webb

Prosperity in Sudan Wins Votes for Leader, Bashir - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Mr. Bashir probably could have won without rigging
  • Rare are pictures of him decked out in his military uniform or like an Islamic sheik, images he has projected before. Most posters today show him standing in front of icons of industry: a dam, a factory, a road, a steamroller.
  • Corruption is not a crippling problem here, as it is in neighboring Kenya, or in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, two African nations blessed with staggering amounts of resources but suffering from the so-called resource curse. World Bank executives say Sudan has some of the sharpest economic policy makers on the continent, who have invested wisely in infrastructure, education and the country’s agriculture industry.
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  • wealth here is not evenly shared. Mr. Bashir’s Sudan is a thoroughly militarized place, and the president’s troops are among the biggest beneficiaries of the boom, constantly getting new weapons, trucks, hospitals and other perks
Ed Webb

On Blaming Climate Change for the Syrian Civil War - MERIP - 0 views

  • the Syria climate conflict narrative is deeply problematic.[2] Not only is the evidence behind this narrative weak. In addition, it masks what was really occurring in rural Syria (and in the country’s northeast region in particular) prior to 2011, which was the unfolding of a long-term economic, environmental and political crisis. And crucially, the narrative largely originated from Syrian regime interests in deflecting responsibility for a crisis of its own making. Syria is less an exemplar of what awaits us as the planet warms than of the complex and uncomfortable politics of blaming climate change.
  • much of Syria and the eastern Mediterranean region experienced an exceptionally severe drought in the years before the onset of Syria’s civil war: the single year 2007–2008 was northeastern Syria’s driest on record, as was the three-year period 2006–2009
  • it is reasonable to say, per the Columbia study, that climate change did make this particular drought more likely
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  • The widely reproduced claim that 2 to 3 million people were driven into extreme poverty by the 2006–2009 drought was drawn, extraordinarily, from analyses by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) of pre-drought poverty levels.[4] The claim that around 1.5 million people were displaced was derived from a single humanitarian news bulletin, seemingly on the basis of a misreading of the UN’s estimate of those affected—not displaced—by the drought. Using Syrian government numbers, the UN actually reported drought-period displacement to be around 40,000–60,000 families.
  • A presidential decree in 2008, which tightened restrictions on land sales across the northeastern-most province of Hasakah, led to the extensive loss of land rights and was credited by some organizations as a key factor in the increased migration from northeast Syria prior to the war
  • during 2008–2009 rural Syria was hit by triple-digit increases in the prices of key agricultural inputs. In May 2008 fuel subsidies were halved, leading to an overnight 342 percent spike in the price of diesel. And then in May 2009 fertilizer subsidies were removed, causing prices to rise anywhere from 200 to 450 percent. The fuel subsidy cuts had particularly devastating economic consequences, especially for farmers reliant on cheap fuel for groundwater irrigation.
  • The fact that a number of neighboring countries experienced equivalent precipitation declines during 2006–2009—or in Iraq’s case an even larger decline—but no comparable migration crises, suggests at the very least that the migration from Syria’s northeast must have been caused more by these Syria-specific factors than by the drought.
  • Proponents of the climate conflict thesis typically claim that drought-induced displacement caused a “population shock” within Syria’s urban peripheries, exacerbating pre-existing socio-economic pressures. Yet Syria’s cities grew rapidly throughout the decade before the civil war, not only during the drought years. By our calculations, excess migration from the northeast during 2008–2009 amounted to just 4–12 percent of Syria’s 2003–2010 urban growth (and this excess migration was not all triggered by drought)
  • as Marwa Daoudy concludes in her new book on the subject, there is “little evidence” that “climate change in Syria sparked popular revolt in 2011”—but “a lot of evidence” that “suggests it did not.”
  • a deep and long-term structural agrarian crisis
  • it is evident that northeastern Syria’s agrarian troubles—and especially those in the province of Hasakah—went all the way back to 2000, and indeed earlier. Production of the two main government-designated strategic crops, wheat and cotton, was in decline in Hasakah from the early 2000s onward. Land and settlements were being abandoned there well before the drought. Net out-migration from Hasakah during this period was higher than from any other province. And the reasons for this lay not in the drought but in the contradictions of Syrian development.
  • an agrarian socialist development program, promoting rapid expansion of the country’s agricultural sector and deploying Soviet aid and oil income to this end. Among other elements, this program involved heavy investment in agricultural and especially water supply infrastructure, low interest loans for private well drilling, price controls on strategic crops at well above international market value, the annual wiping clean of state farm losses and, as already indicated, generous input subsidies
  • Environmentally, the model relied above all on the super-exploitation of water resources, especially groundwater—a problem which by the early 2000s had become critical. And economically, Syrian agriculture had become highly input dependent, reliant on continuing fuel subsidies in particular.
  • Within just a few short years, Syria embraced principles of economic liberalization, privatized state farms, liberalized trade and reduced price control levels. At the same time domestic oil production and exports fell rapidly, thus undermining the regime’s rentier foundations and its capacity to subsidize agriculture
  • Irrespective of any drought impacts, these developments essentially occurred when the props that had until then artificially maintained an over-extended agricultural production system—oil export rents, a pro-agrarian ideology and their associated price controls—were suddenly and decisively removed.
  • As Syria’s pre-eminent breadbasket region—the heartland of strategic crop production—Hasakah was particularly vulnerable to economic liberalization and the withdrawal of input supports. No other region of the country was so dependent on groundwater for irrigation, a factor that made it particularly vulnerable to fuel price increases. Hasakah’s groundwater resources were also exceptionally degraded, even by Syrian standards
  • The region was also deeply affected by intense irrigation development and over-abstraction of groundwater resources within Turkey
  • It was Ba’athist state policies which had turned Hasakah into a region of wheat monoculture, failed to promote economic diversification and facilitated cultivation ever deeper into the badiya (the desert) while over-exploiting surface and groundwater resources. Moreover, these measures were taken partly for strategic and geostrategic reasons, bound up with regime interests in expanding and consolidating Hasakah’s Arab population (its project of Arabization), in controlling and excluding the province’s Kurdish population and in extending its control and presence within a strategically sensitive borderland and frontier region. During the heyday of Ba’athist agrarian development, Hasakah’s population and agricultural sector expanded like in no other area. With the collapse of this development model, rural crisis and out-migration were the inevitable result.
  • After an initial reluctance to acknowledge the depth of the crisis in the northeast, the government eventually embraced the climate crisis narrative with gusto. The drought was “beyond our powers,” claimed Asad. The drought was “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with,” claimed the Minister of Agriculture. “Syria could have achieved [its] goals pertaining to unemployment, poverty and growth if it was not for the drought,” proclaimed Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah al-Dardari.[12] Indeed, as the International Crisis Group reported, the Asad regime would regularly take diplomats to the northeast and tell them, “it all has to do with global warming,” blaming what was in essence a state-induced socio-ecological crisis on climatic transformations beyond its control.[13] This shifting of blame is essentially how the Syria climate crisis narrative began.
  • Official UN reports on the crisis in the northeast, which were produced in collaboration with the Syrian regime, were predictably drought-centric, barely mentioning any factors other than drought, omitting any criticisms of government policy and ignoring the existence of a discriminated-against Kurdish minority
  • International media reports on the subject were similarly focused on  drought, no doubt partly because of media preferences for simplified and striking narratives, but also because they relied upon UN sources and took these at their word
  • The climate crisis narrative reached its apogee in 2015, in the run-up to the UN Paris conference on climate change, when countless politicians and commentators turned to the example of Syria to illustrate the urgency of international action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
  • regurgitated as a statement of fact in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and by Western liberal politicians and eco-socialist campaigners alike
  • climate change is also much more than a physical reality and looming environmental threat: It is simultaneously an object of discourse, debate and rhetoric, a potent meta-narrative that can be invoked for explanation, legitimation, blame avoidance and enrichment.
  • climate change is already regularly invoked to questionable ends across the Middle East and North Africa. It is used to explain away ecological catastrophes actually caused by unsustainable agricultural expansion, to make the case for investment in new and often unnecessary mega-projects, to obscure state mismanagement of local environmental resources and to argue against the redistribution of such resources to oppressed and minority groups
  • blaming climate change is often a distraction from the real causes of socio-ecological crisis
Ed Webb

Kuwait Muddles through Its Confusing Politics | Arab Center Washington DC - 0 views

  • the major issues that have dominated the first year of Emir Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah’s leadership and the prospects for Kuwaiti politics, which is once again in a state of ferment with no clear resolution in sight
  • Sheikh Sabah’s time as ruler was marked by an initial period of political deadlock that saw six parliamentary elections and more than a dozen cabinets come and go between 2006 and 2013, and then a calmer spell that culminated in the election of the National Assembly in November 2016, which became the first in nearly 20 years to serve its full four-year term.
  • relations between the government and the National Assembly have deteriorated in recent months to the point that, now, there is barely a working relationship at all
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  • fallout from the corruption cases overshadowed much of the final year of Emir Sabah’s life and has continued to loom over the opening months of the rule of Emir Nawaf al-Ahmad Al Sabah. The allegations, including one linked to the explosive fallout from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal and another over $789 million said to have gone missing from the Army Fund, have implicated members of the ruling family and senior officials and further sapped public trust. In a move unprecedented for Kuwait, the former prime minister, Sheikh Jaber Al-Mubarak, was detained in April 2021, as was Sheikh Khalid al-Jarrah Al Sabah, a former Defense (2013-17) and Interior (2017-19) minister. A leaked court document also indicated that Sheikh Jaber had repaid $180.7 million in funds that prosecutors had accused him of misappropriating
  • the fact that the Al Sabah quickly cohered around the choice of Sheikh Mishaal as crown prince in 2020 has only delayed the moment when the ruling family must identify a next generation of leadership to eventually take over from Emir Nawaf, who is 84, and Crown Prince Mishaal, who is 80
  • only transitioned from one generation to another twice in the past century, in 1921 and again in 1977
  • Sheikh Mishaal has become important, creating a National Security Council, under his leadership, in March 2021 and visiting Saudi Arabia at the end of May. Ties between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been strained by the prolonged shutdown of two oil fields in the Neutral Zone along their border and by a visit by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Kuwait in September 2018. This visit was cut short over disagreements that included Kuwait’s preference for a diplomatic resolution of the Qatar blockade
  • The fact that Kuwaiti politics was less stormy between 2013 and about 2019 did not, however, denote that any of the contentious underlying issues had been resolved, such as the relationship between the mostly appointed cabinet and the elected (and strongly populist) MPs
  • 38 MPs backed a motion to question the prime minister, Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid Al Sabah, over claims of constitutional irregularities in forming the government, leading ultimately to the cabinet submitting its resignation in January 2021
  • the replacement of four cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Interior, Anas al-Saleh—who had become a lightning rod for opposition criticism—failed to significantly placate opposition MPs, who sought unsuccessfully to block the swearing in of the new cabinet in April and criticized a decision to postpone all parliamentary questioning of the prime minister until 2022.
  • the political opposition in the National Assembly lacks consensus of its own on policy objectives and the degree to which it should negotiate with the government on specific issues. So long as there are no changes to Kuwait’s electoral law or to procedural (and constitutional) aspects of the way politics is conducted, and the government and parliament coexist, little in practice is likely to change. The populist streak that has long been such a characteristic feature of Kuwaiti politics continues to complicate efforts by the Kuwaiti authorities to respond to public policy challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price collapse of 2020 that, itself, followed years of growing budget deficits
  • Kuwait has not run a budget surplus since 2014 when the long oil price boom that began in 2002 ended, and fiscal deficits have risen sharply. Whereas officials in other Gulf states responded to revenue declines by scaling back subsidies and introducing a variety of new taxes and fees on their citizen and resident populations, the maneuverability of Kuwaiti authorities was constrained by the difficulty of securing National Assembly support for such measures
  • almost 72 percent of spending in the budget proposed in June 2021 will go to salaries and other entitlements
  • While Kuwait remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the authorities have had to resort to short-term measures, such as withdrawals from its General Reserve Fund, to plug spending gaps, actions that are poor substitutes for a long-term solution
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