Authoritarian Developmentalism in the Digital Age: Selling Techno‐Futures and State Capitalism in the Gulf

ABSTRACT Authoritarian developmentalism, like developmentalism more broadly, draws its strength from political narratives about “progress” and techno‐optimistic stories about the future. Defining ideal futures is always political, and in the digital age, these ideals are dominated by new technologies and globalized economies. This article revisits authoritarian developmentalism research to consider how it works alongside the technology sector. Through a joint case study of post‐oil development agendas in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and their tech‐focused urban boosterism schemes in Neom and Dubai, I show how authoritarian leaders draw on established patterns of promoting state capitalism, while also following global trends of promoting innovation economies and investing in the latest digital technologies like AI. And even as developmental regimes continue to frame their modernization agendas around the promise of national prosperity, today's authoritarian developmentalism is necessarily global as state leaders are pulled into the reward circuits of the technology sector's increasingly international hegemony.