When rentier patronage breaks down: the politics of citizen outsiders on Gulf oil states’ labour markets

In oil-rich Gulf monarchies, fiscal constraints and demographic growth are leading to the exclusion of young citizens from the established social contract as government jobs—the dominant channel of patronage in the region—are becoming unavailable to them. We show that such outsider citizens constitute a new, politically consequential social class that is exposed to a much less attractive private labour market where they compete with low-cost migrant workers. The dualization of labour markets for citizens provides a new lens for understanding regional political unrest since the late 2000s and new group interests emerging around labour and migration policy, in which labour organizations representing outsiders have started to display solidarity with migrant workers. The new insider–outsider cleavages require a revision of rentier state theory’s claims about (the absence of) class formation and the role of inequality in rentier politics. They help us expand and refine Eurocentric theories of labour market dualism.