I offer an overview and analysis of charitable giving in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and explore its linkages to politics. I study giving at home and abroad, by governments, non-governmental organizations, ruling elites, and private actors, and doctrinally connected giving. I examine how these entities give, to whom they give and why they give as they do. I highlight several key findings: First, in three of the four countries, the most active and best endowed foundations have been created by (members of) ruling families or prominent politico-religious associations; second, private giving tends to concentrate on family, tribe, ethnic community; third, religious precepts are routinely modified to appease a particular social category; fourth, with few exceptions, migrant workers are excluded from access to charity. These findings suggest that charitable giving, while intrinsic to the practice of Islam, may be instrumentalized to advance secular interests: 1) gather information about society, 2) assert relationships of authority and control, 3) shore up allegiance (to a ruler and/or an ideology), 4) consolidate a definition of community.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a study of Ukrainian refugees’ migration to Europe after Russia’s brutal attack on their country in February 2022. It shows that publics and elites across Europe’s political spectrum sustained extraordinary levels of support for the refugees’ inclusion, and deploys the book’s analytical framework to explain why. The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) provided Ukrainian citizens with immediate and collective protection and full social rights in EU member states. Public opinion data and political parties’ (including populists’) programs are used to account for positive reception of the refugees, based on their multiple sources of deservingness. Relying on UNHCR, OECD, and other studies of refugees’ reported experiences the chapter assesses progress in their social inclusion as well as deficiencies. It considers welfare nationalist grievances that have arisen in Europe and shows that governments have responded to them as ‘normal politics’ rather than by scapegoating the refugees. The chapter ends by comparing European responses to the MENA and Ukrainian refugee migrations, and externalization agreements to address the continuing problem of migration to Europe from MENA and other third countries.

India has been rapidly changing since globalisation, albeit not uniformly. In 2022, India has been found to be the most unequal country in the world (Chancel et al., 2022). This makes it critical to understand where the inequality came from: is it new or structural or something else? Several characterisations have been attributed to India's transformation since globalisation; some talk about rapid urbanization, fast growth with incoming global investments, the IT boom, and an expanding middle class, while another set of scholars highlight aspects such as the agrarian crises, farmers’ suicides, food insecurity, and corruption. The point, however, is to comprehend how each version of this story has a saga of unequal distribution within it, whether in cities or villages. India being the most unequal country in a Marxian term means certain classes are accumulating and others are not even able to reproduce themselves. This makes it even more crucial to look at ‘capital’, and how it is accumulating, which spreads across the urban and rural. This book offers an in-depth analysis of diversification and various sources of accumulation accessed by the agrarian proprietary class, and a discussion on the other two proprietary classes, the petty bourgeoisie and the capitalist. By disaggregating the sources along fractions of the agrarian proprietary class, it shows how the class adopted new means within agriculture and outside agriculture, to further accumulation during the 2004–2014 policy regime. The policies under scrutiny are agricultural and those related to rural population in general, such as Panchayati Raj institutions (PRIs), land acquisition and affirmative action in employment. The latter may serve caste groups but in addition contribute to consolidating class structure. What these policies demonstrate is the key role played by the state in the globalisation era, thereby maintaining a stable political settlement with the three proprietary classes. The state and the nature of the state are important questions raised in this book, thus ‘bringing the state back in’, as Skocpol (2010) once argued. This book's third contribution is that it brings an understanding of classes that does not begin from being informed by abstract categories but rather begins with the empirical observations that guide the formulation of the conceptual classes and fractions. Skocpol finds neo-Marxism's conceptualisation of state very abstract, therefore hard to be applied, and hence starting from the empirical to the abstract following a methodology of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) is an attempt to address that limitation.

Looking backward, we will document the communication successes of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, and highlight where things could have been better. Turning to the future, we shall build on this last 25 years and try to suggest the ways communication needs to evolve further.

Overview

This chapter addresses three primary concerns. First, what kind of political settlement is operating in the newly formed state of Chhattisgarh. Second, what has been the impact of (class) interest on the state apparatus with respect to agricultural policies. Third, in the era of liberalisation, has the market's free play caused a retreat of the state from the sector of agriculture? Additionally, with regard to the consequences of prevailing agricultural policies, if the existing three proprietary classes have transformed themselves, remained unaffected, or have been replaced by new classes since the formation of the state. Land acquisition policy and the political economy around it have been addressed as well. Simultaneously, the implications of these policies on the different fractions of rich farmers and their means of accumulation alongside the other two dominant proprietary classes – industrial capitalist and petty bourgeoisie – have been developed.

Chhattisgarh was created under the Madhya Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2000. Its creation was more a decision of the national political parties than having been driven by the struggle for regional autonomy under the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (Berthet and Kumar, 2011; Tillin, 2013). The popular story is that the high proportion of tribal (adivasi) population, who had a claim to a separate state, was the basis for the formation of the state. The new state would make things favourable for the tribal population, who would then be able to assert themselves more in the new political entity; this would turn development in their favour. However, arguably, this was not the only reason for the new state formation. The concentration of natural resources fostered the need to make the region into a political entity, so as to facilitate smoother economic access to the resources (Berthet and Kumar, 2011). The state has registered high incidence of food insecurity and low human development. What really has happened since to the political economy unfolds in the following sections.

Geographically, Chhattisgarh is divided into hills in the north and south and plains in the centre. The total population of the state is 26 million (approx.) as per the 2011 census. Scheduled Tribes, who form one-third of the population, inhabit the hills. The Scheduled Castes (11.61 per cent) and other communities, including the Other Backward Classes, form the remaining 55 per cent of the population and live in the central plains.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

This chapter describes how the relationship between government debt management and monetary policy has evolved since the late twentieth century. When the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee was established in 1997, the relationship was distant, but after the Global Financial Crisis, with the advent of quantitative easing, the relationship became a very close one, in which debt management objectives have been subordinated to monetary policy

The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

The task taken upon in the book was to demonstrate why, even in the globalisation era, the need to investigate the nature of the state and state– class relation remains pivotal, and to examine the extent to which the state is autonomous from proprietary classes, if at all. The point was to reflect on the agrarian transformation by asking questions about economic structures and their interplay with the state. The interplay is of two types: the differentiated effects of class on state apparatus and, therefore, on policy formulation, and the effects of policies on the agrarian classes. The aim was to document an empirically informed understanding of agrarian classes, and a differentiation within the agrarian capitalist class in particular to reflect on the growing inequality. The method followed was empirical observations based on which conceptual categories were drawn. The methodology is particularly important given that a critique of Marxist political economy has been that it has tended to generalize, particularly about the Global South, without paying enough attention to the empirical reality and cultural context (Skocpol, 2010; Poulantzas, 1973). To understand the role of the state, I scrutinized state agrarian policies between 2004 and 2013 and three other policies that relate to rural life and their effect on classes. The class structure cannot be understood without the employment reservation policy and PRI policy which cater to specific castes but, as demonstrated, foster accumulation. Hence a discussion on these policies was also included. In the Introduction, I asked: is the inequality new or structural? The answer is it is both.

The period is chosen to understand if the state made concerted efforts to bring the agrarian capitalist class into a political settlement through specific policies in reaction to the loss of the BJP in the 2004 general elections. The study thus adopted a triangular frame bringing together political– economic–social processes to understand the relations between class and state. This book raised four key questions which are answered in the subsequent sections. The book found four fractions of the agrarian proprietary class to be relevant – big farmer, landlords, gentleman farmers, and capitalist farmers – and their sources of accumulation and political bargaining. It showed differentiation within the class with only two fractions accumulating from agriculture directly.

One of the enormous contributions of the Monetary Policy Committee is simply to make interest rate decisions a systematic process reflecting the needs of the economy. Over 25 years, the MPC has, I think, proved a great success in institutional reform. Inflation averaged close to the 2% target, at least until 2021. People accepted that this was a good way of making technocratic judgements to meet a target set by Parliament. This chapter offers five lessons for the continuing conduct of monetary policy. Inflation targeting is a way of living not a theory of the monetary transmission mechanism; money matters; set policy in the world not in a model; abandon point forecasts and finally understand the real equilibrium or disequilibrium of the economy