politically dependent debtor states. According to Lenin rentier states were a “state of parasitic, decaying capitalism, and this circumstance cannot fail to influence all the socio-political conditions of the countries concerned”. The modern meaning of “rentier states” was first defined by Hossein Mahdavy in his economic analysis of Iran. He defined rentier states as countries that receive on a regular basis substantial amounts of external rents. External rents are in turn defined as “rentals paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments to individual concerns or governments of a given country”. According to Mahdavy the payments for the passage of ships through the Suez canal and the payments to countries in the Middle East to allow the passage of oil pipelines are forms of external rents. Also the revenues of the export of oil can be seen as external rents. Mahdavy denies the idea that oil royalties are a compensation for the extraction of resources. He shows that in the Middle East governments and companies are able to make larger profits through monopolistic positions and price fixing. He also shows that within the Middle East there is no significant relation between oil export and production processes of domestic economies. The use of the term “rentier states” became well known through the works of Beblawi and Luciani. They expanded on the more economic analysis of Mahdavy by looking at the potential social and political effects of rentierism and focused on how rents were distributed and generated. According to Beblawi an essential characteristic of rentier states is the fact that only a few are engaged in the generation of rent (wealth) and a majority involved in the distribution or utilization of it. Often it is the government that is the main recipient of the external rent. It is precisely these characteristics that bring forth a specific rentier mentality. Different from conventional economics is that this mentality breaks from the work-reward system. In a rentier state income or wealth is gained not from productivity or risk bearing, but rather from chance or situation. Other usage Rentier state theories can also be applied to nations which trade on their strategic resources, such as an important military base: Egypt and Jordan have traditionally extracted strategic rent from the United States given their regional geopolitical importance. Semi-rentier states tend to rely on migrants' remittances or international economic aid, such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. States hosting forcibly-displaced population