The “Resource Trap” and Economic and Political Challenges in the Post-Arab Spring Middle East

This chapter overviews the development of political economy for the post-Arab Spring Middle East through threefold. First, we review the notion of the rentier state and its evolution to the current late rentierism and introduce the institutional approach of the interaction between political and economic institutions to analyze how rentier states were formed and entrenched. Institutional incompatibility between Islamic belief and the order of nation-states becomes the root causes for the formidable obstacles for the political and economic reform in the Middle East. Waves of external influences from globalization and democratization gradually morphed into the internal uprising as the Arab Spring indicated. Second, we analyze the economic challenges for the post-Arab Spring Middle East states on issues of exercising economic diversification and managing the sovereign wealth fund (SWF) for the rich oil-resource countries. Third, we show the challenges of the Middle East’s democratization after the Arab Spring. Although the Gulf states’ dedication to be a model of an entrepreneurial and responsive state for the Middle East, the recent trend of de-globalization and democratic recession presages uncertainty about how the future will unfold for the Middle East.