For over fifty years, Gulf studies has been dominated by a focus on oil that has distracted attention away from a nuanced understanding of state-society relations in favour of overly deterministic and totalising accounts centred on oil. In this presentation, Tony Allison argues that the time has come to move away from oil (and rentierism) and examine other theories or concepts that can better account for aspects of Gulf state-society relations. As such, Tony applies performance legitimation, the idea that countries can gain legitimacy via the efficacious provision of goods and services, to the Gulf states. He does so by examining how Gulf governments provide socio-cultural goods and services to their citizens, and how, by conceptualising such provision through the lens of performance legitimation, we can better understand the relationship between Gulf states and society. Moreover, such an examination expands the horizon of performance legitimation, which until now has been focused on socioeconomic, political and environmental policies. Thus, by moving beyond oil, not only can we better account for socio-political phenomena in the Gulf, but we can also use Gulf studies to (re)conceptualise wider political science concepts and ideas.

Tony Allison is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic studies. His research focuses on state-society relations in the Arabian Peninsula,
centering on socio-cultural contestation and government responsiveness. In 2021, Tony’s honors thesis won the AAIMS Riaz Hassan Prize for Best Honors Thesis.