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Does war make states? Rentierism and the formation of states in the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2011

Rolf Schwarz
Rolf Schwarz*
Affiliation:
Middle East Faculty, NATO Defense College, Via Giorgio Pelosi 1, Rome, Italy
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Abstract

The famous dictum that ‘war makes states’ has received renewed interest with the experience of state failure and state collapse in many parts of the Developing World. Historical studies have shown that the activity of war-making was an essential ingredient of the process of state-making in early modern Europe. The history of state-making in the Arab Middle East shows that rentier states defy the ‘war makes states’ theory. This article compares four states from the Arab world, two having been exposed to the experience of war-making (Iraq and Jordan) and two not (the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia). The comparison of these four states shows that rentierism serves as an obstacle to the formation of legitimate and institutionalized states. However, the availability of external rents also allows state institutions and patronage channels to continue providing general welfare. Thus, rentierism produces a twin phenomenon of state weakness and life support for potentially failed states. It is only when war-making is employed in rentier states as a strategy of state-making that states fail and break.

Keywords

warfailed statedevelopment
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 419 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2011

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