Conquests and Rents: A Political Economy of Dictatorship and Violence in Muslim Societies

This webinar, co-organised with the Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Economy Seminar Series, Department of Government, LSE, is the launch of Faisal Z. Ahmed's book Conquests and Rents: A Political Economy of Dictatorship and Violence in Muslim Societies (Cambridge University Press).

Tragically, dictatorship and civil strife have led to less developed, less democratic, and more conflict-prone contemporary Muslim-majority societies. Ahmed argues, however, neither Islam nor aspects of Muslim culture are the cause. Grounded in a positive political economy approach, Conquests and Rents investigates why these societies are predisposed to political violence and low levels of development.

Focusing on the role of political institutions and economic rents, Ahmed argues that territories where Islam spread via military conquest developed institutions and practices impervious to democracy and more prone to civil war, while societies in non-conquered territories developed governance structures more susceptible to democracy when rents decline.

Conquests and Rents introduces a novel theoretical argument, with corroborative qualitative and statistical analysis, to examine the interplay of the historical legacy of institutions from the premodern period and contemporary rent streams in Muslim-majority societies.

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Meet the speakers

Faisal Z. Ahmed is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. His research largely probes the strategic interactions of political actors and the international economy. Some of this research features in two books, The Perils of International Capital (Cambridge University Press, 2020) as well as Conquests and Rents: A Political Economy of Dictatorship and Violence in Muslim Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Other strands of his work explore topics in development, political violence, international economic law, and the political economy of migration. Faisal is currently working on projects related to political connections and globalization, geopolitics and political violence, and the political economy of bureaucrats. His work is interdisciplinary and has been published in various journals, such as the American Political Science Review, American Economic Journal – Macroeconomics, Explorations in Economic History, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.

Steffen Hertog is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics & Political Science. He was previously Kuwait Professor at Sciences Po in Paris, Lecturer in Middle East political economy at Durham University and a post-doc at Princeton University. Steffen’s main interest lies in Gulf and Middle East political economy, with a specific focus on the political economy of public sectors, state-business relations and labour markets. He has a subsidiary interest in issues in the socio-economic and psychological roots of highly asymmetric political violence ("terrorism"). He is the author of Princes, Brokers and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia (Cornell University Press, 2010), co-author, with Diego Gambetta, of Engineers of Jihad: the Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education ( Princeton University Press, 2016), and has most recently published a short monograph entitled Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism (Cambridge University Press 2023).

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