The modern state, whatever its ideological clothing, has always revolved around a single organizing center: the population. From classical liberal theory to modern governance studies, the state exists to manage, discipline, and extract from a defined body of people. In the language of Michel Foucault, the emergence of modern power is inseparable from the emergence of “population” as an object of knowledge and control; measured, categorized, regulated, and optimized. Whether framed as a nation bound by identity or a workforce mobilized for production, the population is the substance through which the state becomes real.
Today, a quiet but profound mutation of this foundational idea is emerging to decouple the state from its population, or at least to radically stratify it. This transformation, witnessed in some Gulf monarchies, resonates with a growing body of thought in Silicon Valley and libertarian techno-political circles, where the burdens of citizenship are increasingly seen as inefficiencies to be engineered away.
A few years ago, American entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan released his call for what he called the “network state.” In his vision, the state is no longer a territorially bounded polity composed of citizens, but a digitally coordinated community of aligned individuals that can eventually acquire physical territory. This formation is selective, voluntary, and exclusionary. It does not inherit a population; it curates one. The network state is designed to escape what Srinivasan implicitly treats as the central problem of modern governance: the obligation to serve a heterogeneous, often unproductive, and politically demanding populace.
A parallel ambition is found in the seasteading project of Patri Friedman, who imagines floating jurisdictions in international waters; states without history, without entrenched populations, and therefore without political inertia. Both visions share a common premise that sovereignty should be modular, optional, and above all, efficient. The ideal polity is one that minimizes its exposure to the unpredictability of mass society.
These ideas, often dismissed as speculative or utopian, are finding their most concrete approximations not in experimental ocean platforms or blockchain communities, but in the political economies of Gulf monarchies, particularly in the recent political proceedings in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
Over the past few months, Kuwait has undertaken a tightening of the boundaries of citizenship, including measures that effectively purge or downgrade at least 70,000 persons of the population whose claims to nationality are deemed ambiguous or politically inconvenient. The logic underpinning this process is that Kuwaiti citizens are increasingly treated not simply as members of a national community, but as stakeholders in a resource-based enterprise. Oil wealth functions as a collective asset, and citizenship becomes the mechanism through which shares in this asset are distributed. Those outside this privileged circle involving migrant workers, stateless persons (called in Kuwait as Bedoon) , and other non-citizens, even those who died defending Kuwait against the Iraqi invasion, constitute a secondary layer; a labor force instrumental to the functioning of the system but excluded from its distributive core.
The United Arab Emirates takes this model through a different register. Rather than focusing primarily on the internal policing of citizenship, the UAE is engaged in a broader project of redefinition transforming the state into a global entrepreneurial hub, increasingly detached from traditional markers of Arab identity. Its foreign policy, economic strategy, and cultural positioning all point toward a deliberate rebranding from a nation-state embedded in a regional and historical context to a platform-state embedded in global flows of capital, technology, and logistics.
Here, too, the population is stratified with precision. Emirati citizens, a small minority, occupy the position of ultimate beneficiaries, analogous to shareholders in a highly profitable corporation. The vast majority of residents, composed of expatriate workers from across Asia, Africa, and beyond, are integrated into the system strictly as labor inputs. Their presence is conditional, limited, and apolitical.
What unites these cases is a specific reconfiguration of the relationship between state, capital, and population. The traditional tension within the modern state, between the profit logic of capital and the solidarity logic of political community, is being resolved through eliminating the latter to valorize the former.
These emerging formations echo, perhaps unintentionally, the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, who has argued for a return to forms of governance resembling corporate monarchy or what he called “neocameralism.” In Yarvin’s schema, the state is best understood as a joint-stock company, governed by a sovereign executive and evaluated primarily on its efficiency and profitability. Governance collapses into management, and citizenship, in such a system, resembles shareholding through “hard money.” For neoclassic economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school of economics, hard money refers to a form of currency whose value is anchored in a scarce, non-arbitrary asset—historically gold or silver—limiting the ability of governments to expand the money supply at will. Yarvin’s call for a return to this hard money practically transforms banknotes from state-moderated money supply and wealth distribution into stocks or bonds.
In the Gulf context, oil, and increasingly sovereign wealth funds and strategic investments, serves as the material anchor of this system. The result is a hybrid formation that might best be described as a “company-state.” It retains the formal attributes of sovereignty, but internally operates according to a logic closer to that of a corporation.
This model enables rapid decision-making, long-term strategic planning, and a high degree of insulation from the political volatility that characterizes mass democracies. It aligns governance with capital accumulation in a way that minimizes internal contradiction. From the perspective of efficiency, it is undeniably attractive. Yet the costs are equally significant, if less immediately visible. By severing the link between state and population, by redefining the latter as either shareholders or labor inputs, the company-state erodes the very foundations of political community. Solidarity becomes a privilege rather than a principle. Rights become conditional. Belonging becomes transactional.
This model raises broader questions about the future trajectory of the state itself. If the Gulf represents a frontier, an early adopter of a new form, then the implications extend far beyond the region. As technological, financial, and ideological currents continue to converge, the temptation to reimagine the state as a lean, profit-oriented entity may grow stronger in other contexts.
The experiments unfolding in the Emirates and Kuwait are not merely regional phenomena. They are signals of a world in which the attributes and burdens of population are no longer taken as given, and in which the state, long defined by its relationship to its people, may be on the verge of becoming something else.
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