Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula

Abstract

Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non-citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non-citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state-and nation-building projects. Aiming to advance scholarship on belonging in the GCC states, in this paper, we propose a shift in focus from exclusion to inclusion in the way research questions are asked about Gulf societies and the people who reside in them. Doing so, we suggest, requires unpacking two hegemonic concepts in the regional studies scholarship: 'ethnocracy' and kafala. In their current usage, both terms have become 'black boxed', or reified, such that scholars have largely come to accept and reproduce the exceptionalism of the Gulf and refrain from asking a number of critical questions about the region, which might highlight the GCC states' fundamental normalcy. Through a reflexive approach that draws from our own previous and current research in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, we suggest ways that we might move beyond the rigidity of exclusion-centred narratives about the Gulf and instead consider the various ways that Gulf nationalisms themselves hail the non-citizen presence, and how non-citizens participate in discourses and practices of nationalism as well as statecraft in ways that cannot be reduced to nationality, class, race, or religion.

Masculinity, Migration, and Forced Conscription in the Syrian War

“…The lives of Syrian men in Qatar can reveal something of the heterogeneity of the sponsorship system and the inadequacy of describing it solely through the migration experiences of the “quintessential low‐paid construction worker in the Gulf” (Vora and Koch 2015, 545). Low‐paid male workers in the construction and cleaning industries generally live in crowded if not substandard housing conditions in labor camps on the peripheries of cities (Babar and Gardner 2016), are often recruited and exploited by so‐called middleman brokers and agencies in their home countries (Jureidini 2014), and regularly find employment with agencies who then subcontract their labor to employers for various periods of time (Gardner 2018).…”

Transport Infrastructure and Logistics in the Making of Dubai Inc.

“…The labour regime thus not only ossifies class relations within an ethnoracial hierarchy, it also works to consolidate the power of the ruling family. Although some authors have argued that exclusionary practices similar to the kafala system exist elsewhere and do not make the region exceptional (Vora and Koch, 2015), it is rather the specific ratio of citizen to non-citizen labour that is exceptional, with non-citizens making up the majority of the population but lacking basic rights and having no avenues for naturalization (especially in the lower strata of the workforce). The mass deportation of migrant labour during Dubai's financial crisis targeted mainly low-wage workers, but also categorically exposed the matrix of control governing labour relations, where some migrant families may indeed reside in Dubai for generations, yet have no right to naturalize and no protection from expulsion.…”

Is a “critical” area studies possible?

“…''Deep listening'', for me, is a prerequisite to empirically driven advances in geographic theory: it entails reducing one's research-dictated thematic filters to listen as broadly as possible to what situated actors are saying in their interactions with ''us'' as scholars. It entails reading past formulaic media presentations of particular places-whether these are cities reduced to fantasy as in Astana (Koch, 2012) or countries reduced to sites characterized solely by exclusion and oppression as in the Gulf states (Vora and Koch, 2015).…”