Arabs and Asians in Qatar: Who does the dirty work? Existing scholarship on Gulf migration has underlined how nationality, language, religion, gender, and ethnicity have a significant impact on migrants’ experiences of living and working in the region. Systems of migration governance and patterns of international labor recruitment have evolved in alignment with the Gulf states’ particular economic, political, and socio-cultural interests at given historical junctures, all of which have made the issue of migrants’ nationality ever more salient. These national interests have led to the transition from Arab to Asian labor forces across the Gulf, and the majority of labor migrants to the region come from outside the Arab world. The paper examines policies and practices adopted by the state in Qatar to control the flow of foreigners, and pays particular attention to scrutinizing how and why Qatar has become more selective and politicized in negotiating labor migrants’ right to entry and residence based on their country of origin. Obtaining data on migrants disaggregated by nationality is no any easy task in Qatar, due to poor tracking mechanisms from sending states, as well as perceived sensitivities to publically sharing such data in the host state. This paper’s empirical contribution is in its presentation, of original, unpublished, disaggregated data on Arab and Asian migrants’ integration into Qatar’s labor market. The data provides substantial verification that Arab and Asian migrants in Qatar tend to predominantly work in different occupational sectors. A general interpretation of the data provided in this paper is that in percentage terms Arab migrants tend to occupy positions in sectors which are possibly at higher income and at higher skill levels than their Asian counterparts. The causal reasons for this variation may well be the cultural and linguistic skills and abilities that Arab migrants bring to their positions.

The discovery of oil in the mid-20th century in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council instigated decades of rapid economic development in the region. Key to this development agenda was the use of migrant labor to build infrastructure and fill middle management roles. Over time, as national populations have become more educated, the majority of public sector positions have been filled by nationals. However, the education sector has been unable attract nationals in sufficient numbers and continues to depend on migrant teachers (Ridge, 2014). In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), 90% of teachers in boys’ government schools and 20% of teachers in girls’ government schools were expatriate Arabs as of 2010/2011 (MoE, 2014). In Qatar, Arab migrant teachers comprised approximately 87% of teachers in government schools in 2013 (Social and Economic Survey Research Institute, personal communication, 2014). This study examines the status of Arab migrant teachers through both an educational and institutional lens. The research employs a mixed-methods comparative approach to investigate contractual agreements, employment experiences, and social integration of Arab teachers in both countries. The paper explores some of the challenges that arise as a result of reduced salaries, shorter-term contracts, and fewer promotional opportunities for Arab expatriate teachers compared to their national counterparts. It captures quantitative and qualitative effects through two main tools, surveys and in-depth interviews with Arab migrant teachers in the UAE and Qatar. The results of the study are consistent with literature on the economic motivation behind migration (Sharma, 2012). Arab migrant teachers come to the Gulf in order to make money and in turn to be able to provide more for their families. However, Arab migrant teachers are a unique and indispensable part of the Gulf population due to their shared language, culture and, religion. In the Gulf, there will always be a demand for the services of Arab migrant teachers due largely to the language factor. Examining issues such as how the uncertain employment conditions for expatriate Arab teachers manifest in their commitment to teaching, the paper concludes by providing policy recommendations for improving the conditions and output of Arab migrant teachers in the UAE and Qatar.

Existing analyses of monarchical robustness in the face of the Arab uprisings have largely focused on formal institutional mechanisms of survival. In both its dynastic and lynchpin variants, monarchies have so far managed to weather the storm of the Arab street. While dynastic oil-rich Gulf monarchies have largely used their hydrocarbon wealth, external ties, and interventions to stifle dissent (most notably in the cases of Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain). Lynchpin monarchies of Morocco and Jordan, poor in natural resources, have demonstrated greater institutional flexibility, and strategically inchoate protest groups. The paper first examines the different strategies for regime survival employed by monarchies in Morocco and Jordan. These include an astute management style of the different opposition groups, use of patronage, and a state-manufactured political legitimacy, which has placed, at least discursively, the monarchy above the political system. The study contends that monarchies' apparent "success" in staving off the tempest of the Arab revolts is not solely due to institutional or inherent regime-type considerations, but may also be a function of the weakness, and manipulation of local protest movements. Thus, the paper moves beyond formal institutional regime response to the Arab uprisings, and examines an area of research that has garnered scant scholarly attention: the micro-dynamics of the protest movements at the heart of the street revolts. Using the case of the February 20th movement in Morocco, the paper applies social movement theory as a conceptual framework to examine the movement’s strategies, frames of contention, and its internal forces challenging the state. Based on several interviews with leading (current and former) members of the Feb. 20th movement, the paper contends that the protest movement was, from the beginning, beset by ideological fissures, lack of consistent contestation strategy, internal disorganization, state penetration, and co-optation. The Feb. 20th movement was outmaneuvered, and even instrumentalized to provide sheepish reforms. The paper finally suggests that despite the failure of the February 20th movement, it has managed a discursive silver lining as it has elevated the anti-regime narrative to include dissent in areas previously considered taboo by the state in Morocco.

This paper examines the ways in which multiple border-crossings and their attendant anxieties inform understandings of citizenship and belonging among a small group of second-generation middle-class Indian migrants from Oman. Based on interviews conducted between November 2013 and January 2014, it aims to engage with a growing body of scholarship on the transnational lives of South Asian migrants in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years, several scholars have examined unofficial discourses and practices of citizenship among Indian migrants within the Gulf states (Vora 2013; Gardner 2010); however, much remains to be done on the complex ways in which these non-citizens simultaneously contend with the discourses and structures of the states to which they can lay juridico-legal claims as citizens. As Aihwa Ong (1999) has argued, nation-states have indeed responded creatively and effectively to transnational flows of human capital, shaping and being shaped by the strategies of their ‘flexible’ citizens. Drawing on Ong’s thesis, this study will explore the ways in which sending states continue to interpellate citizen-subjects outside their political boundaries through passports and categories of citizenship (such as the ones examined herein). In particular, I will look at the deployment of the socio-legal categories of the “expatriate” and the “NRI” (Non-resident Indian) by the Omani and Indian states respectively to manage a particular class of overseas citizens. These classed identities elicit specific performances, narratives, affirmations, and disavowals from my interlocutors in specific national contexts as they travel along multifocal itineraries. I will argue that the transmigrant subjectivities of my interlocutors are formed and reformed at the intersection of these gradations of citizenship/non-citizenship; in other words, it is the simultaneity of their operations that produces migrant subjects. The process of subject formation here involves a tension between being 'always-already interpellated' (in Althusser's formulation) by multiple state logics and contesting these very logics.

This paper explores the renegotiation of the social contract between states and their citizenry, and the subsequent contestation of traditional sources of state legitimacy in Morocco and Bahrain, respectively. Each monarchy is wrought with its own crisis of legitimacy, and for varying reasons. As such the authors of this paper seek to examine how the different political forces have respectively contributed to divergent outcomes and trajectories with respect to discourses on state legitimacy, social contracts and constitutionalism. The idea of renegotiating the social contract in the Arab World is not novel. In Toward a New Arab Social Contract, Lebanese scholar and politician Ghassan Salameh (1987) argued that the Arab world needs to draft a new social contract premised on constitutional legitimacy, and the protection of human rights and basic liberties of Arab citizenry. According to Walid Kazziha (2010), “the discourse did not penetrate and capture the imagination of the people, nor was it integrated into the political consciousness of Arab society,” due to the absence of a political constituency (p. 55). This paper argues that with the expansion of the public sphere, and newly politicized citizenry in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, we are seeing the emergence of a new political constituency. The emerging contentious spaces in the Arab public sphere —despite the state’s attempts at manipulations and interference— have become the loci for critical debate facilitating opportunities for the mobilization of popular support for the contestation of official narratives and common causes, such as the demand for structural transformation from dynastic rule to constitutional monarchies. Due to their role in constructing new identities and forging vocal oppositions that question traditional sources of state legitimacy and challenge the state, these new contentious spaces are engendering a shift whereby domestic, formal public spheres are supplanted by new contentious spaces. Inevitably, the discourse on a new social contract has lead to contestation of traditional sources of legitimacy for Arab monarchies — such as Bahrain and Morocco — and heated debate on the nature and parameters of a new social contract. Using original data from personal interviews with stakeholders (from state and opposition groups) and discourse analysis of digital media, this paper examines the appropriation and manipulation of new media by different political actors from across the political spectrum to construct multiple (and alternative) publics, question traditional sources of legitimacy, advocate for new social contracts, and reconfigure notions of citizenship and politics of contention.