ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical account of the state-building processes in South Korea and the Middle Eastern economies. It entails contextualizing South Korea’s emergence as a middle power diplomacy based on its own geopolitical challenges and discusses how the latter has informed South Korea’s Middle East policy. The historical account of South Korea’s state-building process is contextualized against the wider economic development of Japan and the newly industrialized countries. This is contrasted with the state-building processes and the history of economic modernization and liberalization of the resource-based industrializations of the Middle Eastern economies. By shedding light on the role of the state bureaucracy embodied by the developmental state paradigm and the structural characteristics and challenges of the rentier states, this chapter sets out to explain how industrialization and the maturity of state capacities of South Korea and the Middle East strengthened interdependent relations.
