Introduction
In the final instance, national development is evaluated based on interpretations of what comprises an asset. Historically, the likes of land, natural resources, and industrial, financial and human capital productivity were classed as pristine assets and valued as such[1]: From their relative endowments, countries were located along a spectrum ranging from most developed to late developing. With the introduction of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, a new class of assets was added to the mix. In tallying developmental balance sheets today, non-commodities like clean air, transparent governing institutions, health and education services, and social equity also factor in.
For the residents of a country, access to particular assets and the revenue claims and/or quality of life enhancements they convey is mediated by an assortment of social and institutional factors. Different configurations of variables including class; citizenship; cultural norms; and marriage, family, and labor laws determine how asset ownership is allocated in a given place.[2] Moreover, irrespective of place, gendered dynamics imbricate the asset allocation process to one degree or another.[3] The connection between such gendered schema and larger projects of national development is laid bare in the services that marriage and motherhood offer to the nation: Preserving collective identities, fostering patriotism, and charged with (unpaid) responsibility for social reproduction, these gendered social institutions are irreplaceable fundaments of modern nation states.[4]
Within the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)[5], two variables are jointly most responsible for mediating access to state-controlled assets: nationality and gender. Together, those variables determine the distribution of what my co-author Charlie Dannreuther and I have called citizenship rents (CR).[6] CR are financial flows that move from state to citizen in the form of entitlements, employment, and access to state-subsidized goods, labor, and business opportunities.[7] In the GCC, citizen rents are an essential mechanism of contemporary governance. At a basic level, they underpin both economic growth and socio-political stability: Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the GCC’s authoritarian regimes are sustained on the distribution of these rents, the logic of which is governed by chauvinism and social conservatism.
Building on earlier works on Kuwait, this essay probes how CR functions in Bahrain and Oman. It specifically considers the tensions that are created as governors try to preserve social peace via CR while transitioning the national development strategy to a liberal modality.
GCC Development Models and Citizenship Rents
State institutions, especially those governing citizenship and labor rights, create and protect the conditions for asset accumulation. For citizens, these institutions determine the routines and rules that constrain uncertainty and set parameters for the relation between capital and labor.[8] The manner with such institutions fulfill these functions is shaped by prevailing social hierarchies.[9] In the case of Gulf, the hierarchies in question are structured rigidly along gender and nationality-based cleavages.
As has been discussed, historically, the distribution of oil rents—the spread of which was mediated on the basis of gender and nationality—adhered the social foundations of the state in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Though women’s access was often indirect, petroleum earnings enabled an extensive system of entitlements impacting nearly every aspect of a citizen’s life. Receipts from oil, gas and derivative products sustained everything from state provisions of education, healthcare, housing and employment to the subsidization of energy and food. They also underwrote swift and sizable jumps in quality of life in a second way: By funding citizen-nationals’ exploitation of migrant labor, household workers most of all.[10]
Table 1: Macroeconomic dimensions of select GCC states
| Indicator | Bahrain | Kuwait | Oman |
| GDP Per Capita (USD, PPP, current prices, 2025)* | 29,890 | 31.680 | 20,230 |
| Oil rents as % of GDP (2021)+ | 10.9 | 27.6 | 23.5 |
Source: *IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2024); +World Bank Open Data, Oil rents (% of GDP), 2021.
Precise data on citizenship rent flows are difficult to obtain. Taking expenditures on public sector wages and subsidies as a proxy, however, we can derive ballpark figures. In Kuwait, citizenship rents, thusly defined, accounted for 71 per cent of the budget in 2020/2021. In nominal terms, this translated to USD 75 billion.[11] As lesser oil producers with larger populations, the corresponding figures for Bahrain and Oman are not as high.[12] Especially since the mid-2010s, both countries have needed cut back on the provision of public employment.[13] Nevertheless, citizenship rents remain a significant distributive mechanism.
Gendering Claims to National Assets
In addition to nationality, as mentioned, the flow of citizenship rents within all three countries has been heavily mediated by gender. Functionally, the patterns of mediation observed served to entrench social hierarchies and in so doing, to buttress political stability.[14]
In the first instance, the primary mechanism limiting women’s access to citizenship rents is constitutional law. Through legal provisions defining the family as the primary unit of society and jus sanguinis laws attributing exclusive rights to men when it comes to conveying citizenship onto children[15], women’s membership in the nation—and by extension, ability to assert claims on national assets—is fundamentally subordinate.
As the articles below make plain, family is encoded as a patriarchal structure within the constitutions of Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. For women, this conditions and degrades citizenship rights: It is from incorporation within a natal family (e.g., citizenship of her father) and later, a procreative family (e.g., citizenship of her husband) that a woman accrues legal standing.
| Table 2: Constitutional Articles focusing on the Family Unit |
| Bahrain (Article 5a): The family is the cornerstone of society, deriving its strength from religion, morality and patriotism. The law preserves its lawful entity, strengthens its bonds and values, under its aegis extends protection to mothers and children, tends the young and protects them from exploitation and safeguards them against moral, bodily and spiritual neglect. |
| Kuwait (Article 9): The family is the foundation of society; its mainstays are religion, morals and the love of country. The Law shall preserve its entity, shall strengthen its bonds and shall, under its aegis, protect mothers and infants. |
| Oman. (Article 12): The family is the basis of the society, and the Law regulates the means for protecting it, preserving its legitimate entity, strengthening its ties and values, safeguarding its members and providing suitable conditions to develop their potential and capabilities |
| Source: The Constitute Project (link). |
By subsuming individual rights beneath those of the family unit, these legal arrangements reduce women’s ability to independently make claims on citizenship rents or any other form of political and economic resource. This is expressly revealed in many public policies. Entitlements, including loans for marriage and home buying, are targeted at men as the de jure head of household. Male guardianship laws grant husbands, fathers, brothers, and sometimes even sons the authority to discipline women and control access to family assets, inclusive of spousal maintenance flows.[16] Laws on inheritance grant male heirs superior property claims to female heirs (and assign male spouses superior inheritance rights to female spouses).[17] Law and custom also obstruct women from working in industries and/or functions which might make their fulfilling of family obligations more difficult. For instance, in Oman (and Kuwait), women are disallowed from working at night,[18] in what are deemed “dangerous” sectors,[19] and in industries which could compromise reproductive health.[20]
Ultimately, women’s right to claim CRs within our case study countries is conditional. Specifically, it is conditional on their acceptance of a social role that is subordinate and in keeping with patriarchal traditions.
Attempts at Model Switching
For the past half-century, the funding and circulation of citizenship rents were fundamental to social orders and development models in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. Claims on rents—made on the basis of (male) national membership—ordered economies, defined class structures, and set individual life trajectories more so than did labor.[21] Labor and the market more generally were, in many senses, the domains of migrant workers and oriented toward providing different degrees of services to different classes of citizen nationals.
In recent years, GCC governments, including those of Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman, have attempted to enact switches in their development models. Mindful of the finitude of petroleum endowments, policymakers aligned economic strategies more closely with liberal principles. Grand planning documents announced over the past decade universally target economic diversification, external competitiveness, improved labor productivity, and higher levels of economic participation. With an eye toward fiscal responsibility, they also propose subsidy and entitlement reductions along with diminutions to public sector employment. Just as critically, there have been concerted efforts in all three countries to cull the rolls of national citizenries. The last of these initiatives is undertaken in order to mitigate the social and political tensions being created by the wider transition to liberal market economies: In reducing the numbers able to make claims on citizenship rents, the distribution of those rents can be extended further into the future.
In Oman, Royal Decree 17/2025 has raised the bar for acquiring (and maintaining) citizenship going forward. In Bahrain, while new legislation has not been introduced, an old decree from 1959 retains for the sovereign the right to strip an individual of citizenship in the event where the latter is deemed to threaten the interests of the state. It is in Kuwait, however, where citizenry culling has been advanced most aggressively. Upon the passage of Decree 116/2024 on December 23, 2024[22], the Kuwaiti National Assembly accelerated an ongoing crackdown on citizenship naturalization processes, expressly targeting those made citizens through marriage. Because Kuwaiti women cannot extend citizenship to their spouse or children[23], the Decree Law is de facto aimed at foreign women married to Kuwaiti men.[24] What is more, this Decree, like a similar one introduced in August, contains retroactive application. As such, it threatens to denaturalize any woman who acquired citizenship through marriage after 1987. To date, more than 32,000 women have been subjected to citizenship reviews under the Decree Law’s terms, and in the first month of 2025 alone, 2,500 lost their citizenship.
As the example of Kuwaiti women attests, many aspects of Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait’s attempts at development model switching are hurting women. In addition to citizenship loss, the state abdicating its role as an employer is likely to prove especially damaging. For women, societal acceptance of public sector work combined with superior benefits and workplace protections to render state employment the optimal choice for entering the labor market. Indeed, it is largely by virtue of opportunities with government ministries that female participation in the Bahraini and Omani economies reached a critical mass. By extension, it was opportunities with government ministries which offered the primary means for women accessing citizenship rents.
The value of state employment for women can be discerned through a handful of simple statistics. It is visible in the fact of women representing 42% of the public sector workforce in Oman, despite having a labor force participation rate of just 32%. It is demonstrated by the fact of Bahraini women representing 56% of the employees on the state’s payroll.[25] It is perhaps made most plain, however, by the wage premium that public sector employment offers women of the two countries. In Oman, average public sector earnings are 97% higher than average private sector earnings. Disaggregated data on female earnings is not available, but it can be assumed to correspond with this gap. In Bahrain, meanwhile, though public sector workers as a population enjoy a 15% bump on their private sector counterpart, for females, the average public sector wage is nearly double that of the average private sector wage. (In Bahrain, women in the public sector also actually earn better than do men: The median wage of a Bahraini female state employee is 4.3% higher than the corresponding figure for male state employees.) In view of the data, it is no exaggeration to say that public sector work has effectively provided the sole path to gainful employment for Bahraini and Omani women. As the state now reduces its hiring with an eye on fiscal consolidation, it is therefore women who are disproportionately injured.
Conclusions
The extraction and processing of petroleum-based resources in the Gulf has always required domestic quiet. Traditionally, quiet was purchased through repression, on the one hand, and the entrenchment of chauvinism and patriarchal conservatism on the other. In the case of the latter, by distributing citizenship rents—rents that were themselves mediated by gender and nationality—a rigidly hierarchical social order could be buttressed. With this order in place and attendant levels of political stability, oil and gas production was able to proceed with few hiccups. The financial valorization of these countries’ largest national assets—namely, oil and gas—have therefore been indelibly tied to the chauvinism and patriarchal conservatism mentioned above.
Looking forward, it is unclear that post-colonial arrangements will hold. In obstructing the flows of citizen rents which have previously undergirded state-society relations, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman’s attempts at enacting a developmental model switch could well threaten social and political stability.[26] As the switch in development model proceeds, fewer ‘insider’ citizens will be able to make claims on national asset holdings. The number of ‘outsider’ citizens, meanwhile, will grow. With the latter category, we can refer to citizen nationals without meaningful access to citizenship rent flows. Practically speaking, this encompasses not only women, the traditional subordinates of the citizen national population: It also includes men outside the labor force or pushed into working in the private sector. Historically, private sector workers in Bahrain and Oman retained access to job opportunities and wages superior to those on offer to the migrant workers which populate many industries of the private sector. As such, while excluded from the full benefit regime that state employment guarantees, they were still of the privileged classes. More recently, however, the structures which previously divided labor markets into two—one for citizen-nationals, one for foreigners—have weakened, pushing ‘outsider’ citizens into competition with non-nationals. By forcing earning potentials down, this development is reducing ‘outsider’ citizens’ ability to make claims on the surplus value that migrant worker labor produces: The resources needed to enjoy the sub-market price goods and services migrant workers provide—including domestic work—are growing scarcer. It is not difficult to imagine that this could spark embers of popular discontent.[27]
The concept of citizenship rents offers critical insights into the functioning state-society relations in much of the Gulf. It also grants insights into the inequalities that have been constitutive of these societies since the age of oil production began. Yes, there are “new insider-outsider cleavages” emerging today due to ongoing attempts at development model switching.[28] Nevertheless, one should not forget the old cleavages—namely those defined by gender and nationality—which have long since structured these societies.
[1] Albertus, M. (2025). Land Power: Who has it, who doesn’t, and how that determines the fate of societies. Basic Books: New York.
[2] See Pagano, U. (1991). “Property rights, asset specificity, and the division of labor under alternative capitalist relations,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 15(3), pp. 315-42.
[3] Bessiere, C. & Gollac, S. (2023). The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
[4] Radhakrishnan, S., & Solari, C. (2023). The Gender Order of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
[5] The GCC is comprised of six nation states located in the Arabian Gulf Peninsula: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
[6] Dannreuther, C. & Langworthy, M. (2024). “Rentier capitalism, social reproduction, and the limits of liberalism: Mapping gendered asset value in Kuwait,” New Political Economy.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Dannreuther, C. (2024). “Power in the future of work: Production, reproduction, and reconstruction.” Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 5(2), 329–350.
[9] In twentieth-century European states development of political compromises validated power structures through supporting political agendas for translating labor value into accumulated wealth to benefit capital owners. “At a basic level the state was the concrete expression of the social forces that reproduced labour value because it promoted the fiction that surplus value extraction was a legitimate way to coordinate a society.” See: Balibar, E. (2017), The philosophy of Marx. Verso Books.
[10] Ennis, C. (2020) “Citizenship without belonging? Contesting economic space in Oman.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 52, pp. 759-764.
[11] Palier, B., Rivka, A., and Louer, L. (2021). Kuwait’s welfare system: Description, assessment and proposals for reform. Sciences Po & KFAS.
[12] Ali, O. & Elbadawi, 1. (2016). “The political economy of public sector employment in resource-dependent countries.” In Understanding and Avoiding the Oil Curse in resource-Rich Arab Economies, ed. Hoda Selim and Ibrahim Elbadawi, pp. 103-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[13] Hertog 2025.
[14] Dannreuther & Langworthy 2024.
[15] Kuwait Constitution (1962); Bahraini Citizenship Act of 1963; Omani Constitution (1996, rev. 2011).
[16] See for example, Human Rights Watch (2023). Trapped: How male guardianship policies restrict women’s travel and mobility in the Middle East and North Africa. New York.
[17] Ibid. Relevant legal provisions are as follows: Bahrain (Constitution of 2002 Article 5(d) and Civil law No. 19/2001 Article 909); Kuwait (Personal Status Law Articles 299, 300, and 307); and Oman (Personal Status Laws articles 241-256).
[18] Royal Decree No. 656/2011 Articles 1-2 in Oman and Kuwaiti Labor Law Article 22.
[19] Kuwaiti Labor Law No.6 of 2010, Article 23.
[20] World Bank (2024). Women, Business and the Law 2024.
[21] Ennis, C. (2020) “Citizenship without belonging? Contesting economic space in Oman.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 52, pp. 759-764.
[22] This Decree modified the original Amiri Decree N0. 15 of 1959.
[23] As set out in the 1959 Law, Article 2.
[24] Note that the children of mixed marriages, provided the father is Kuwaiti, do retain citizenship rights under Decree 116.
[25] Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2024). “Women’s Rights.”
[26] Hertog, S. (2025). “When rentier patronage breaks down: The politics of citizen outsiders on Gulf oil states’ labour markets.” Studies in Comparative International Development. Published online, Feb 4, 2025.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Hertog 2025, p. 1.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Cover Photo Attribution: Al Jazeera English, “Protests in Bahrain”, 2011.