Abstract
In early March 2010, Baroness Shriti Vadera, a former Minister of International Development under the British government led by Gordon Brown, boarded a plane to Dubai on a hastily-arranged and high-profile consulting project to advise the government of Dubai (in particular, the ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and members of the Dubai Supreme Fiscal Committee) on its relationship with creditors to Dubai World, the state-related entity in need of approximately USD26 billion US dollars to restructure its debt obligations. The unofficial task was to smooth over relationships with several British banks which held Dubai World debt, some of those banks having been recently acquired by the British government in its own financial “restructuring” after the mortgage-backed securities crisis of 2008. Vadera represented the interests of the British government and financial establishment — though this was not her title or her official duty. Her task was to advise the Dubai government on how to better manage communications and negotiations with its key creditors and to quickly have the lenders come to a settlement on the restructuring of the debt. The government of Dubai offered her this position for her global reputation for negotiating on behalf of sovereign entities, and also on the intervention by recommendation of members of the British government, particularly of senior Labor party members, including Lord Peter Mandelson.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On the concept of transformation in the Gulf, recent work by a number of scholars edited by David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen addresses the issues of internal demands for change and external pressures for change and reform facing Gulf states. The authors focus more on the singularity of the Gulf monarchy political structure. See Held and Ulrichsen(2012) The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order. New York: Routledge.
Rentierism, as a conceptual framework, will be discussed later in this chapter. For a foundational definition of the concept and argument, see Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (eds) (1987) The Rentier State . New York: Routledge.
Albert O. Hirschman (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
For a theoretical statement and review of the concept of path dependency, see Paul Pierson (2000) “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, pp. 251–267;
Kathleen Thelen (1999) “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics”, Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 2, pp. 369–404;
also, P. J. DiMaggio and W.W. Powell (eds) (1991) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Douglass C. North (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Douglass C. North, John J. Wallis and Barry R. Weingast (2009) Violence and Social Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 15.
Sean Foley (2010) Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam. Boulder: Lynne Reinner, p. 44.
Andrea Rugh (2007) The Political Culture of Leadership in the United Arab Emirates. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 4.
Data are provided by the UAE Ministry of Economy in a recent paper by Nico Vellinga, “Trade Liberalization and Taxation: A Multi-Sector Dynamic CGE Model for the United Arab Emirates”, Working Paper No. 6, Institute for Social and Economic Research, Zayed University (2010). Interview with Mouawiya Alawad, Dubai, March 2012.
W.W. Rostow (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. New York: Cambridge University Press;
also see D. Lerner (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society. Glencoe: Free Press;
Seymour M. Lipset (1960) Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City: Double Day Press.
Samuel Huntington (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Peter Evans, Deitrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds) (1985) Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See for example, work by Anne Krueger on the concept of rent seeking. Anne O. Krueger (1974) “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society”, The American Economic Review, Vol. 64, No. 3, pp. 291–303.
Thomas Biersteker makes this point more eloquently in his article “Evolving Perspectives on International Political Economy: Twentieth-Century Contexts and Discontinuities”, International Political Science Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, January 1993, pp. 7–33.
David Woodruff (1999) Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Elliot Posner (2005) “Sources of Institutional Change: The Supranational Origins of Europe’s New Stock Markets”, World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 1–40.
See for example, work by: Adam Przeworski and F. Limongi (1997) “Modernization: Theories and Facts”, World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 155–183;
Carl Boix and Susan Stokes (2003) “Endogenous Democratization”, World Politics, Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 517–549;
also, Joseph Siegle, Michael Weinstein and Morton Halperin (2004) “Why Democracies Excel”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 5, pp. 57–71.
Collier P. , Elliott, V. L., Hegre, H., Hoeffler, A., Reynal-Querol-M. and Sambanis, N. (2003) Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. New York: Crown Business Press, pp. 41–43.
For a more rigorous academic statement of their argument, see Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foundational conceptions of the Constructivist approach include, Alexander Wendt (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Peter Katzenstein (1996) Cultural Norms and National Security. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
See Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (2003) Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan and Wæver articulate some of the first understandings of regional security orders or complexes in the international relations literature. They define a regional security complex as “a set of units whose major processes of securitization, de-securitization, or both are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed or resolved apart from one another”, (Buzan and Wæver 2003: 44). For a more recent theoretical articulation of regional security complexes applied to the Middle East and Gulf more broadly,
see Derrick Frazier and Robert Stewart-Ingersoll (2010) “Regional Powers and Security: A Framework for Understanding Order Within Regional Security Complexes”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 16, pp. 731–755.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen and David Held (eds) (2012) The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
See Jim Krane, “The Basis of Abu Dhabi’s Quest for Renewable Energy and Policies Required to Meet its Goals”, Working Paper No. 10–08 (2009) Dubai School of Government. For a broader argument on the concept of rentierism and patronage systems affecting Dubai,
also see Christopher Davidson, Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Hazem Beblawi, “The Rentier State in the Arab World”, in Giacomo Luciani (ed.) (1990) The Arab State. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 87–88.
Michael Herb (2005) “No Representation without Taxation? Rents, Development and Democracy”, Comparative Politics, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 297–316.
For more discussion on this literature, see Herb, “No Representation”. On the Major Theorists of Democratization and Problems of Natural Resource Wealth, see Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Also see Ronald Inglehart (1988) “The Renaissance of Political Culture”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, pp. 1219.
And, see Seymour Martin Lipset, Kyoung-Ryung Seong and John Charles Torres (1993) “A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy”, International Social Science Journal, Vol. 45, pp. 166.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Karen E. Young
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Young, K.E. (2014). Introducing the Concept of the Majilis and the Market. In: The Political Economy of Energy, Finance and Security in the United Arab Emirates. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021977_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021977_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43777-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02197-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Intern. Relations & Development CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)