Research Context: The Political Economy of the Arab Gulf Region

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the Gulf region’s political economy along with its principal characteristics. The purpose is two-fold: It establishes a historical and geographical context for this book, and it introduces the main societal relations that interdependently shape the TNE-based strategies of the governments in Doha, Dubai, and Ras al-Khaimah. This chapter is not intended to exhaustively analyse all aspects of the Gulf region’s political economies; rather, it serves as a more detailed introduction to their key elements than that which the individual articles in Chaps. 5-7 provide.