Rentier capitalism, social reproduction, and the limits of liberalism: mapping gendered asset value in Kuwait

This paper introduces the concept of citizenship rent to help explain the apparently contradictory coexistence of liberalising economic reforms and the entrenchment of patriarchal values. Citizenship rent (CR) is defined as the financial flows that move from the state to the citizen in the form of entitlements, employment, and access to state-subsidised goods, labour and business opportunities. Our innovative proposal substitutes transaction cost economics’ assumption of market selection for a selection by patriarchy to show how gender plays a central role in the reproduction of the asset specificities that increase transaction costs. This illustrates how an extractive, asset-based economy, like Kuwait's, can afford to double down on conservative social values, even at a considerable fiscal price, as long as the transaction costs of getting oil to the international markets are not increased through social disruption or political uncertainty. Rather than examining how women’s social reproductive work subsidises social and political stability, CR reveals women’s role in sustaining assets valuable to the state. This paper demonstrates that a close examination of the social values that inhibit transactions can also reveal patriarchal structures in rentier capital and exhibit a need to further analyse the patriarchal transaction costs that shape and sustain societies.