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Political Science in the United States has focused too much on variable-oriented, quantitative methods and thus lost its ability to ask “big questions.” Stein Rokkan (d. 1979) was an eminent comparativist who asked big questions and provided such qualitative tools as conceptual maps, grids, and clustered comparisons. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), arguably the first social scientist, also asked big questions and provided a universal explanation about the dialectical relationship between nomads and sedentary people. This article analyzes to what extent Ibn Khaldun's concepts of asabiyya and sedentary culture help understand the rise and fall of the Muslim civilization. It also explores my alternative, class-based perspective in Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment. Moreover, the article explores how Rokkan's analysis of cultural, geographical, economic, and religio-political variations within Western European states can provide insights to the examination of such variations in the Muslim world.

The aim of this chapter is to show how new players in an emerging market, through their multinationals, have strategized and operationalised their international interests. This international context consists of various stakeholders: states, civil society organisations, multinationals, local communities and institutions which define and regulate the power relations. This study highlights how CNPCIC, a Chinese multinational owned by the state, designs and implements its proclaimed ‘win-win’ cooperation strategy with its host country and the local community for an oil extraction project – called the Rônier Project – in southern Chad.

The analysis is based on a case study approach, especially concerning the town of Koudalwa, the oil-producing area in southern Chad. The author conducted qualitative research to collect the data, using ethnographic strategies consisting of field research, interviews with stakeholders.

Negative externalities as consequences of practices from CNPCIC underlie environmental degradation, socio-economic conflicts and governance problems, despite the existence of an alleged regulatory framework, the role of which is to avert the ‘resource curse’.

Organisations of local and international civil society oscillate between the logic of cooperation, alliance and confrontation with their main stakeholders, CNPCIC and the government.

The ‘win-win’ cooperation advocated by China is implemented in the form of commercial cooperation with full mercantilism where CNPCIC benefits from oil, the Chadian state benefits from oil revenue in the form of royalties and other stakeholders, such as the local communities, only benefit from a fraction of the revenues. The chapter concludes that, within this oil project, CNPCIC developed a corporate diplomacy stance within which, according to the circumstances, predation, philanthropy and strategic alliance are valued at the expense of corporate responsibility despite civil society advocacy for a responsible extraction.

Some stakeholders of the project declined the invitation to participate in the research. This may have influenced its findings.

The value of this chapter resides in the use of various theories (corporate diplomacy, stakeholder theory, resource curse) to explain the practices and interests of stakeholders within an oil project at different scales, both local and international.

As components of society, social classes contain individuals who are carriers of productive relationships. In the era of global capitalism, chains of accumulation are functionally integrating across borders and regions – uniquely altering the formation of productive relationships. How can we understand class relations in the global era, and in the context of regions and countries in Oceania and Asia? How do transnational capitalist-class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization? How have state apparatuses and other institutions in this part of the world become entwined with new transnational processes? To begin to consider these questions, this paper provides an overview and summary of studies on transnational class relations and the associated political economic changes occurring across areas of Asia and Oceania.

Purpose – This chapter examines the impact of oil price volatility on domestic political stability in a key supplier state.

Methodology – This chapter uses prospect theory to analyse socio-political instability based on significant changes in a supplier state's largest revenue source. Prospect theory posits that decisions are framed around a pivotal reference point which may or may not correspond to the status quo, but which nonetheless directly affects risk appetite. This analysis uses Iran as a case study, and relative oil price as the reference point to analyse risk-acceptant decision-making surrounding the 2009 Presidential election.

Findings – Dramatic economic context could be a contributing factor to risk-acceptant behaviour in domestic politics. Specifically, volatile price swings in Iran's main source of income, oil, which contributes over 80 per cent in direct and indirect revenue, and perceived external decline therein, may have been a destabilising factor. Combined with loss aversion, this context may have facilitated measures beyond those dictated by rational utility calculus to secure conservative rule in the 2009 election, and in the ensuing unrest.

Research Limitations – Prospect theory is difficult to test outside of carefully framed laboratory experiments. Although its insights have been applied to investment behaviour, management and domestic politics, in conflict studies, robust empirical support remains underdeveloped. Moreover, since prospect theory is an individual model of decision-making, difficulties arise when dealing with nation states with multiple centres of power.

Implications – Prospect theory may be a useful analytic tool for analysing risk-acceptant decision-making in the context of dynamic economic situations.

Originality – Although this analysis complements research on rentier state theory, prospect theory integrates recent developments in behavioural economics and political psychology that may offer a new way to conceptualise the role of expectations and choice framing in decision-making which drives political stability.

A growing literature links oil to conflict, particularly civil war. Greed/opportunity, grievance, and weak state arguments have been advanced to explain this relationship. This chapter builds on the literature on oil and conflict in two important ways. First, I examine a novel dependent variable, domestic terrorism. Much is known about the effect of oil on the onset, duration, and intensity of civil war, though we know surprisingly little about the potential influence of oil on smaller, more frequent forms of violence. Second, I treat oil ownership as a variable, not a constant, coding oil rents based on ownership structure. This is contrary to other related studies that assume oil is necessarily owned by the state. Using a large, cross-national sample of states from 1971 to 2007, several key findings emerge. Notably, publicly owned oil exhibits a positive effect on domestic terrorism. This positive effect dissipates, however, when political performance and state terror are controlled for. Privately owned oil, on the other hand, does not correlate with increased incidences of terror. This suggests that oil is not a curse, per se.

The purpose of this chapter is to critically examine the extent to which oil multinational corporations (MNCs) can be both money makers and peace makers in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and to consider its implication for the role of business in conflict mitigation in resource-rich African countries.

The chapter presents a theoretical analysis based on secondary data and empirical research.

There is now an emerging consensus that business can be peace makers and money makers in developing countries as part of their social responsibility. However, the tendency to explore business-conflict linkage largely from a business perspective and to see conflict as an “incidence” that business has to respond to, as opposed to a “dynamic process” that is a function of the breakdown of stakeholder relationship, limits our understanding of the relationship between business and conflict. Focusing on the Niger Delta in Nigeria, it is argued that the contradictory tension inherent in the peace making efforts of oil MNCs and the nature of their core business activities (i.e., oil extraction) limits the incentives and undermines the capacity of oil MNCs to be peace makers.

The chapter contributes a critical perspective to the literature on business and conflict informed by nearly two decades of empirical research undertaken by the author in Africa. It analyzes how contextual factors in resource-rich African countries, previously neglected in the literature, influence both the willingness and ability of business to contribute to peace. It concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications for the role of business in conflict zones.

Education and human capital development are seen by the government of Saudi Arabia as vital to the aim of gaining knowledge economy status. Although financial investment has been evident in education and human capital development in Saudi Arabia for many years, knowledge acquisition, production, and diffusion remain problematic. The strategy that underpins the shift to a knowledge economy is based on the assumption drawn from human capital theory that education can transform individual productivity and therefore promote economic development. However, the links between education and economic growth are not as linear as this framing of education suggests, but depend on complex social processes. Within these processes, individual understandings of knowledge and knowledge creation are crucial. The implications of this for Saudi Arabia are discussed with reference to the work of Knorr Cetina (2007) on knowledge cultures and David and Foray (2002) on knowledge communities. A transition to a knowledge economy is more likely to occur when cultural and social conditions enable the development of knowledge cultures and knowledge communities.

The popular uprising, the Aragalaya, was a response to a debt crisis as well as a catharsis of accumulated public discontent, which overlapped with the pandemic. A key lesson from the pandemic was the need to strengthen state social provisioning capacities to protect the health status of citizens. In addition, enhancing local economies and sustainable livelihoods is central to avoiding the vulnerabilities of international migrant labour and tourism. The limitations of representative politics highlight the need to strengthen democratic social movement politics. Along with cross cultural alliances, building multi-class alliances is central for strengthening politics of redistribution. In a context of integration of party politics with criminal networks, demilitarisation as well as the abolition of prisons is indispensable for democratisation. In a global scale, democratising financial markets and platform economies suggests regulation and regional experiments not simply by the state but also multiple publics. In demanding participation in representative institutions, the Aragalaya combined a protest movement with a sense of commons. In turn, it pointed towards the possibilities of a public-driven economy based on the democratisation of the state as well as markets. In framing this movement as a ‘struggle of love’, it revitalised the realm of life politics and alternative pleasures of life.

While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

Research on institutional logics has missed the opportunity to understand how and why societies may fundamentally differ in their material and symbolic systems. In this chapter, the authors offer a qualitative examination of the implementation of infrastructure public–private partnership (PPP) projects in the Arab state of Qatar. The authors illustrate how the macrofoundations of Qatari society are rooted in the notion of tribe, an inter-institutional system under which the intertwined institutional orders of the state, the market, and the family have historically developed and operated. Their study sheds light on how these macrofoundations shape the processes and mechanisms that underpin the resistance to the introduction of innovative organizational forms. The chapter makes two contributions. First, it identifies how “foreign” organizational forms rooted in Western institutional orders trigger adverse reactions from societies characterized by different institutional orders. Second, it demonstrates the challenge of implementing PPPs in an institutional context that is unfavorable to them and where actors seek to preserve the supremacy of the extant inter-institutional system.