During the first half of the 1970s, a coalition of pro-democracy activists, feminists, and workers in Kuwait led perhaps the most powerful movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian Gulf. This paper traces the history of their movement, which forged new and potentially transformative solidarities across the boundaries of nationality. Their agenda exemplified their ideologically inclusive orientation: to create a pathway to permanent residency and naturalization; to provide nationality to the children of Kuwaiti women and noncitizen men; and to improve the lives of noncitizens, especially in the workplace. The paper demonstrates that the rights of citizens and noncitizens were inextricably intertwined. It argues that debates over citizenship and nationality shaped not just the lives of noncitizens, but the future of democracy in Kuwait. The category of class most effectively transected the exclusions of nationality. The coalition was spearheaded by the trade union movement, which understood that its power was directly proportional to the size of its membership, and its ability to incorporate Kuwait’s enormous noncitizen workforce. Workers and their allies sought to unify a fragmented and unequal set of Kuwaiti labor laws that provided special privileges to citizens, and even went on strike to defend the rights of their noncitizen comrades. They also challenged the economic arguments used to defend the systematic exploitation of noncitizen labor, noting that because employers were structurally incentivized to hire cheaper and more vulnerable noncitizen labor, improving the wages and working conditions of noncitizens could help solve a growing problem of youth unemployment. They faced opposition from a powerful coalition led by major employers and their allies, which tried to make noncitizen labor even cheaper and more available by launching state-led efforts to expand the geographical range of the labor recruitment system. In addition to being a novel contribution to the historiography of the Persian Gulf, this research overturns the narrative that xenophobia and self-interest generated mass popular support for exclusionary nationality laws, and demonstrates how citizens in the Gulf fought back against the oft-discussed exploitation of noncitizen workers. It therefore holds interest for scholars of migration, citizenship, labor, and leftist movements. The sources of this paper include memoirs, newspapers, oral history interviews, and extensive archival research, overwhelmingly in Arabic, across Kuwait, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

While men and women increasingly aspire to practice egalitarian gender divisions of labor in families, this desire conflicts with the neoliberal organization of work and care. Gender, work, and family scholars, therefore, ask: How do institutional constraints reshape increasingly egalitarian work-family aspirations? Drawing on interviews with 64 Emirati women and men, including 19 parents, in the United Arab Emirates, I examine the cultural impact of neoliberal institutional constraints on work-family aspirations, emotions, and family relations. I find that even as women increasingly join the formal labor force, institutional factors constrain young adults’ work and family aspirations, leading some women to postpone marriage and others to modify their career aims, while guiding men to focus on caring for their families solely through financial provision. Most women and men wish to share responsibility for childcare and breadwinning with a spouse. With public nurseries limited and largely inaccessible, neither women nor men want to rely on nannies or nurseries, potentially unreliable, expensive options for outsourced childcare. Across class lines, fears of economic insecurity drive young Emirati men to relinquish their progressive desires for present, emotionally involved fatherhood. Men’s concerns are rooted in rising costs and standards of living and neoliberal economic change, which drive many men to commute during the workweek for higher wages in masculinized occupations concentrated in geographically remote and urban centers; some migrate with their nuclear families away from family who might have provided kin care. Meanwhile, women anticipate needing to choose between work and family, finding that even historically feminine occupations demand longer hours and offer diminishing benefits to support work-family balance. The emotionally charged process of closing the distance between work-family aspirations and institutional constraints has relational consequences. Feeling disappointed and frustrated by their constrained choice, many Emirati men expect their wives to make reciprocal gendered sacrifices. These men feel it is fair for women to step back from their careers to provide the emotionally connected parenting men want to give their children. Thus, despite many families depending on women’s financial contributions, men’s emotional expectations of their wives reinforce the structural forces pushing women to step back from paid labor. While grieving their gendered sacrifices, young Emiratis “fall back” into quid-pro-quo gendered divisions of labor. Building on Gulf studies of gender, work, and family, these findings emphasize how egalitarian work-family aspirations, without institutional support, can generate conceptions of sacrifice and fairness that reproduce inegalitarian gender divisions of labor.

Background: Theory about fathers' involvement and coping during the period of pregnancy and childbirth is underdeveloped, and few studies have been undertaken in the Arab world. Due to financial need and societal pressure, Qatari’s report the importance of both parents working to support the family. Therefore, fathers’ role as traditional breadwinners has changed to some extent to dual-earner couples. Research has shown that parents struggle with work-life balance after the transition to parenthood in Qatar. This presentation will concentrate on a subsection of findings from a qualitative exploratory and descriptive study about first-time fathers' involvement in pregnancy and childbirth in Qatar. The research question included: What are participants' views about and recommendations for paternity and maternity leave in Qatar? Methods: Purposive and snowball sampling were employed, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 Qatari and 13 non-Qatari Arab fathers, and 12 Qatari and 13 non-Qatari Arab mothers, and 10 Maternal Health Professionals (n=60). Participants' views, experiences, and recommendations for maternity and paternity leave in Qatar were explored. Content and thematic analysis were undertaken. Key Findings: Qatari and non-Qatari Arab husbands' roles and potential ways of supporting their wives during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum are changing towards more involvement in areas such as emotional/psychological, health, household, and social support. The main themes emerging from the interviews entailed: 1. Maternal leave is critical and should be extended; 2. Employers threaten and discriminate against pregnant and nursing mothers; 3. Parents advocate for enhanced parental leave to protect families; 4. Paternity leave is important and should be a legal option for all fathers, and 5) Family journey--husband and wife adjust together to the new routine and live the family experience. Almost all of the interviewees considered the approximately 2-month maternity leave granted to women insufficient, and most said that there should be an option for men to take paternity leave. Specific reasons for these recommendations will be presented. Furthermore, the recommendations will focus on how social policies can be more inclusive of citizens and residents in a Muslim country where family is considered the foundation of society. This research adds to the growing body of evidence in Qatar pointing to the work-life conflict families face (Blaydes, Gengler, & Lari, 2021; DIFI, 2019; Naguib & Madeeha, 2023) and the need to reassess current policy through a family-sensitive lens (Gilbert & Brik, 2020).

Oman today is an absolute monarchy, with the country's legislative and executive powers vested solely in the person of the sultan. The previous sultan, the late Qaboos bin Sa'id (r. 1970-2020), introduced different forms of representative councils, whose authority was limited to consultation and advice, through which the Omani population could exercise a modicum of democracy. The extension of the franchise to all adult Omanis in 2003 marked a milestone in this process of democratisation, but in the four elections under Sultan Qaboos voter since then, turnout plummeted, to below 50% in 2019. The combination of the form of government and low participation in ostensibly democratic mechanisms typically lead to characterisations of the Omani people as politicallly disengaged or unready for democracy. In this paper, based on a fieldwork spanning a decade (2011-2020), semi-structured interviews with Omanis across the country, and quantitative analysis of elections and election turnouts in Oman, I offer an alternative analysis of the refusal of younger Omanis to participate in elections and broader withdrawal from the political sphere. I reflect on the optimism in the wake of the 2011 Omani spring and the pessimism and outright cynicism that sprung from the widespread disillusion that followed. The consultative council's lack of real power is but one factor for the electorate's abstention: I argue that conceptions of what it means to be a good citizen likewise causes Omanis to turn away from the ballot box. This paper draws on and contributes to an emerging literature on silent citizenship (Gest and Gray 2018), arguing that intentional withdrawals from the political sphere, or “silence”, can and should be understood as another way of cultivating a political identity in unequal circumstances. It ends with a consideration of the most recent election under the new sultan, Haitham bin Tariq, and what we might expect to happen during his rule.

The UAE has targeted the tourism and hospitality sector as part of its economic diversification away from hydrocarbons, yet at present only 1% of this sector’s employees are nationals and the tour guide profession is one vocation where the UAE government wants to recruit more nationals. The purpose of this research is to assess the factors that will influence the likelihood of national tourism students considering the tour guide role as a career. A model that incorporated the Career Decision-Making Profile alongside context-relevant factors was developed. Survey results (n=186) show that various CDMP traits such as one’s willingness to compromise and independent decision making, make this job a more likely prospect. The nature of this job is considered attractive by tourism students, but entrenched public sector preferences and societal sentiment on the ‘appropriacy’ of nonconventional career paths, reduces the likelihood of this vocation being considered.