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.
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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.
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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,
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Also see Ronald Inglehart (1988) “The Renaissance of Political Culture”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, pp. 1219.
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© 2014 Karen E. Young
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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
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