Guest Contributors

Antía Mato Bouzas, London Metropolitan University and Lorenzo Casini, University of Messina

Migration is one of the constituent features of Gulf societies in the contemporary period. Over decades migrants from different origins have contributed, as nowhere else in the world, to the modernization and nation building projects of the Gulf Arab states. However, migrants’ presence and activity largely go unnoticed in the way these different countries articulate a national identity based on elements of tribal authenticity, traditional notions of hospitality and a cosmopolitan ideal of tolerance. Interestingly, this nationalistic rhetoric of hospitality and openness has also been appropriated by a section of the migrant population in the Gulf, generally among highly skilled workers.

Like other movements of migrants to developed countries, migration to the Gulf is organized along the logic of the “guest worker” or the Gastarbeiter (known as the kafala system), although it differs from these movements on the issue of the possibility of sociopolitical inclusion in the receiving society. Gulf migration poses some questions for the study of ethnicity and nationalism because migrants cannot attain citizenship in the Gulf states, unless very exceptional cases, and migrant population constitutes the majority of the society in the smaller Gulf states such as UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait. Although demographics play a role in understanding the prevailing context, there are other issues that shape this phenomenon such as racial hierarchization and class division of migration in the Gulf, how migrants shape their migrant identity vis-à-vis their places of origin, and the rights and feelings of Arab national minority community in some states. There is a strong hierarchy to this migrant system in which Europeans and Americans occupy top positions, and a racial component, which reproduces orientalist views that correlate types of workers with specific jobs. This segmentation is reflected in a language that classifies a variety of self-definitions and the identifications of others as ranging from “expatriates” and “migrants” to “temporary workers”.

The distinction between citizen and noncitizen is equally crucial to understanding the specifics of Gulf migration and to the construction of a racialized Arab Gulf identity. This distinction functions similarly to other segregated societies, such as in the case of the legally sanctioned apartheid system that existed in South Africa, or in the structural differentiation between Palestinians and Jews that exists within Israel. In the Gulf, however, the central issue of discrimination has to do with the foreign nationality of migrants and the particularities of the kafala labor system that almost reduces migrants to a commodity. Even though the migrant foreigner is erased from what could be defined in the Lefebvrian sense as the abstract space of economic management, he or she cannot go unnoticed in the streets and in the urban landscapes of Gulf cities. Migrants appropriate and shape those places, and in so doing, they fully inhabit Gulf space, such has been exemplified by Mato Bouzas’ article on migrants from the Karakoram Mountains.

Gulf migration has been a topic of interest (in macroeconomic terms) for economists and demographers for decades because of the importance of remittances for the development of the developing countries sending migrants to the Gulf region. The social dimension of migration has been addressed by Longva in her pioneering ethnographic study on Kuwait, Walls Built on Sand (1997), in which she demonstrates how migration plays an essential role in politics and nation building processes in the Gulf. However, it was not until very recently that scholars like Zahra Babar, Andrew Gardner, Attiya Ahmad and Neha Vora have begun to examine the transformative aspects of migration processes and how they impact the development of specific forms of belonging by different groups of migrants. These forms of belonging denote attempts at incorporation in a context of clear exclusion and are articulated through notions of globality, either through cosmopolitan views of Muslim belonging, or through patterns of consumption and entrepreneurship in these neoliberal contexts. 

Our co-edited book Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space: social, political and cultural dimensions (Berghahn Books 2022) contributes to this new wave of literature on migration to the Gulf by addressing how migration relates to issues of place-making and of the transmission of knowledge in the region, as well as how the Gulf exerts an influence on the regions that migrants come from. By relating migrants’ experiences to the general context of the Gulf, the book makes sense of how Gulf governments attempt to portray the Gulf as an “open” and “cosmopolitan” space while at the same time maintaining segregation and exclusion at the societal level. On the one hand, the definition of Gulf migration as “temporal” appears problematic because this allegedly temporary system has reproduced permanent states of precarity over time. On the other hand, the long existing sediments left by generations of migrants in Gulf societies—composed of their transfer of knowledge, their lives in specific city areas, their memories, their appropriation of places—that are characteristic of social diversity in the Gulf, are removed in the framing of a contemporary Gulf cosmopolitanism.