The Middle East is a major and global migration hub, structured by massive migration fluxes to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and to the European Union and OECD countries. The region is a particularly relevant field to observe the various scales of migration flows. Firstly, the macro-sociological scale deals with institutional policies aiming to control emigrants and immigrants both in the host country and in the country of origin. Secondly, the meso-sociological scale focuses on transnational links – family, professional, cultural, or activist networks- which bridge the gap between home and host societies. Lastly, the micro-sociological scale envisions the impact of migration management and social norms over individual trajectories.
This panel present different research findings that articulate these different scales.
Identity rhetoric and utilitarian strategies informing migration policies in the region will be analyzed within their context of production and reception. Those policies will be confronted with migrants’ practices. One paper will particularly question the “transient” nature of flows and the temporary quality of labour immigration to the Gulf countries. This dominant representation of migrant workers backs up the “anti-immigration” and “anti-integration” policies developed by all GCC states since the 1950s. Both aiming to prevent importation of political and social dissidence and enhance State control over migration and immigrants, States in the GCC have invented and promoted indigenous forms of nationalism and national culture that exclude migrants’ from host societies. However, researchers have started to observe how migrants compose individually and collectively with constraining migration policies, as well as with contrasted expectations of relatives left behind, not withstanding their social routine and relations in the countries they settle in (for more or less long periods of time). Observing religious practices and conversions, education, language, cultural practices, consumption practices, housing and demographics, transnational religious economies will allow us to determine the impact of policies and constraints on migrants’ practices and their identities, resolving a classical structure/agency dilemma in the analysis of migration in the particular case of the Middle East.
The panel is also interested in migration as a matrix of national, local, class, gender, religious, or political identities, to be located within the intricate power relations, which frame the flows and are negotiated by migrants. As a conflicting political issue, migration is seen as alienation in public arenas: migration is often presented as a factor of moral and political decay in societies of departure, as a vector of transmission of “alien” practices and ideologies in societies of reception.
These perceptions will be compared ethnographical data about migrant trajectories, in order to stress the ambivalence of identifications linked to daily experiences of otherness. We can then analyze the equally ambivalent social repercussions of migration flows over societies of departure and societies of reception/settlement in the region.
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Dr. Helene Thiollet
The Middle East is a region of intense mobility, both voluntary and forced. In the region, the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) are the largest recipients of labour migrants in the world and have been a powerful magnet for regional migration since the beginning of tafra, the oil era. Arab, Asian and European migrants have converged to the Gulf countries bringing their social, gender, religious and political identity in countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where they ended up representing more than 80% of the countries population and 95% of the labour force in the UAE. This paper will focus on the social, demographic and political changes induced by migration in migrants’ communities settled in the GCC countries or transiting through them. The main findings it presents are the growing importance of long term residence of documented and undocumented migrants, contrary to popular discourses and representation of immigration as a short-term phenomenon. Recent data allow us to discuss the consequences of “incipient diasporas”(Myron Weiner) in the Gulf.
Political and social models of the GCC countries have designed migration as temporary with little of no prospect of legal integration, citizenship and permanent settlement, strongly emphasizing the social and spatial segregation of both categories. Migration management by Gulf states is geared towards “anti-integration” policies promoting urban segregation, little access to socio-economic rights and zero access to political rights. Researchers have emphasized the efficiency of the segregation models, of patterns of social exclusion and xenophobia. But one of the premises of both research and political discourses on migration to the Gulf is that immigrants have very little interaction with their host societies, considering both the policy efforts of the GCC states and ‘the exceptional closure of local societies' (Philippe Fargues) . Migration theory on the contrary has long been demonstrating the social impact of mobility on both host and home societies, and on migrants communities, looking both qualitatively and quantitatively at the consequences of material, cultural, financial, informational transfers on individuals and groups . Drawing on both quantitative data concerning his paper will explore the dynamics of social, demographic, political and cultural change induced by long-term sojourn of immigrants in the Middle East with a particular focus on migrants’ communities in the GCC countries.
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Miss. Lucile Gruntz
“It is a very transient life here; even love affairs do not last in the Emirates”, tells a 28 year-old Egyptian banker who grew up between Alexandria and Abu Dhabi. Migration is not only a matter of better job and money, but also of love and bodies. For Egyptian male labour migrants working temporarily in the EAU, mobility indeed triggers specific “subjectivation” processes, in the sense of Michel Foucault.
While confronting their own expectations with those of families left behind or brought along, of their home and host societies and states, individuals negotiate their manliness in the interstices of contradictory scales of power between Egypt and the Gulf. Coming of age by saving enough money to marry back home, in spite of increasingly tight control over foreign Arab workers in the Emirates; sublimating isolation and embodied experience of discrimination and domination while in “exile”; indulging into interlope leisure without breaking up with ideal manliness in Egypt, are not simple matters.
Through a multi-sited ethnography in Cairo, Abu-Dhabi and Dubai among male emigrants, immigrants and returnees, this paper focuses on the highly ambivalent gendered subjectivities produced by mobility. Together with class, nationality, race and age identifications, gender models and practices are reproduced, negotiated or even contested between Egypt and the UAE.
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Mrs. Delphine Pagès-El Karoui
The massive nature of Egyptian migrations over the last four decades has become a central element in the national imagination, cultivated by writers, filmmakers and journalists who themselves have very often been migrants at some time in their lives. If the topic is so successful, other than the fact that it represents a major social phenomenon, this is because it questions the foundations of the national imagination, which is deeply rooted in a patriotic view, but at the same time is torn between two poles, the Gulf on the one hand, and Europe and USA on the other.
Cinema, and literature as well, produce a critical vision of migration, in condemning both host countries and Egyptian society. Away from their homeland, migrants run the risk of losing their Egyptian identity under the influence of the more conservative values of the Gulf States, or the more liberal values of the West. At the same time, cinema and literature deliver a devastating criticism of the new Egyptian society born from the Infitâh, describing it as the collapse of traditional family and educational values, corrupted by easy money. Critical repertoires usually join forces in condemning the migrant as a vector of social change who threatens Egyptian moral values, and accuse the Egyptian government of being responsible for the death of young people who cross the Mediterranean Sea illegally, and of being incapable of standing up for the rights of Egyptian citizens living abroad. Beyond these criticisms, what is at stake is the redefinition of links between individual and collective identities, and ongoing reevaluation of the national ideal. Although the topic perfectly expresses the tension between identity and otherness common to all contemporary Egyptian literature and cinema, it has largely been unexplored by researchers.
Based on a corpus of Egyptian novels and films dealing with recent international migration, this paper aims to explore the nexus between migration and identity, through a comparative perspective. The recurrent question of identity is dealt with at four levels: the nation, the society, the family and the body of migrants. I will argue that the main representations of Egyptian migrations, both in the cinema and in the literature, are still embedded in methodological nationalism rather than in a transnational paradigm.
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Claire Beaugrand
Since the liberation of Kuwait that ushered into a period of liberalisation and opened the country’s door to the scrutiny of international human rights organisations documenting among others, the issue of stateless people, the Biduns have become a visible and well-established category in the sociology of Gulf societies. They represent the people in legal limbo between nationals and expatriates in most of the Gulf countries. This paper will look, in detail, at the importance of the migratory environment in the handling of the issue of statelessness as the crux of the Kuwaiti national identity.
It proposes to reflect on the regional context that presided over the emergence of the bidun phenomenon as a result of the closure of nearly impossible access to nationality. Based on the review of the press archives of Al Qabas in Kuwait, supplemented by qualitative interviews, the paper analyses the debate surrounding the question of inclusion into and exclusion from the nationality as it was posed at the outset of Kuwaiti constitution-based system, and argues that statelessness resulted from a political domestic conflict over entitlement to naturalisation: Kuwaiti Arab nationalists defended a strict implementation of the law that could eventually benefit Arab migrants, while the ruling family used the tribes and their transnational solidarity networks to enlarge its legitimacy basis.
In conclusion it aims at drawing broader conclusions on how the evolution of the nationality in the international system, being less and less conceived in state-centered terms , has had consequences on the solution proposed by the state (offshore nationality) and the society (giving human rights to biduns) in order to get out of the conundrum.
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Dr. Michael Farquhar
Since the early 1960s, the Saudi state has paid for tens of thousands of young men from around the world to undertake fully-funded religious training in institutions like the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), which was founded specifically for this purpose. This provision is framed by its backers as an act of da’wa, or religious mission – the idea being that graduates will subsequently promote “correct” belief and practice in their home countries or in other far-flung locations. In the eyes of less sympathetic observers, such initiatives reflect a broader project of Saudi cultural imperialism.
This paper explores the biographies and experiences of non-Saudis who have won scholarships to study at the IUM. I suggest that any effort to understand their cross-border trajectories and their diverse engagements with this missionary institution must indeed take seriously the question of their imbrication in “globe-spanning systems of power” (Glick Schiller 2005). However, if the notion of cultural imperialism provides a point of departure, it must be nuanced considerably in order to break with realist international relations theory and its privileging of the national state. In fact, the complexity and multivalence of the array of transnational flows of persons and ideas that both shaped and subsequently consolidated around institutions like the IUM belie methodologically nationalist imaginings of a one-way process by which a quintessentially Saudi Wahhabism has simply been packaged up and exported to the rest of the world.
I argue that the concept of transnational religious economies might offer a more promising basis for making sense of the globe-spanning systems of power at work here. By drawing on Gramscian modes of analysis, it is possible to think about religious economies in ways that escape the liberal conceptions of the market and of the human subject that underlie much previous literature on this topic. This approach to understanding transnational systems of power can also make room for agency exercised by migrant students. Furthermore, it can elucidate ways in which questions of power in this context relate both to culture, meaning and lived experience, on the one hand, and also to the vast quantities of material capital invested in projects like the IUM, on the other.
The paper draws on encounters with IUM students and graduates in London, Cairo and Riyadh, as well as Arabic-language primary sources including biographical materials, IUM syllabuses and the university journal going back to the 1960s.
