In an effort to nationalize workforces, diversify away from finite oil and natural gas wealth, and reduce reliance on migrant labor, many Gulf states have invested millions of dollars over the last few years in producing indigenous “knowledge economies.” This form of economic development is manifested most visibly in the burgeoning institutions of higher learning in countries like Qatar, whose state-sponsored Qatar Foundation supports Education City, a compound that includes branch campuses of several prominent US universities. The paradox at the heart of this new knowledge economy is that, while its ultimate goal is Qatarization, it is underpinned by investment in the production of “global” citizens through a specifically American-style educational system: secular education, English-language instruction, co-educational classrooms, and faculty recruited mainly from North America. Thus this investment in “local” knowledge economy has also produced an ethno-national rubric of expertise, in which the labor required for transmitting higher education to Qatari citizens is predominantly North American. This paper explores, through ethnographic data collected between 2010 and 2012 at branch campuses in Education City, the negotiations and understandings of global and local that go into the production of Qatar’s new “knowledge economy.” In particular, I argue that while labor camps are often seen as the quintessential manifestation of migration patterns and social stratification in the Gulf, they cannot alone inform us of what migration, globalization, and localization mean in these places. In fact, new “expert camps,” as forms of both institutional and individual migration, are expressions of the ethnonational rubrics of employment and transnationalism that define the contemporary Gulf States and can inform us about the on-the-ground dynamics of national identity, belonging, class, social stratification, and citizenship, and how these are both reified and contested within emerging spaces of globalized higher education like Doha’s Education City.

Are security forces loyal to the state always instruments of top-down social control? When and how can an extensive and robust security apparatus provide the space for bottom-up forms of resistance to state policies? The dominant theories of authoritarian resilience suggest that a state’s security apparatus is an integral mechanism of top-down social control that is repressive of bottom-up forms of mobilization and engagement. In his study of civil society and state power in Jordan, Wiktorowicz (2000) challenges the assumption that grassroots organizing and a proliferation of civil associations necessarily promotes democratization. Instead he demonstrates that civil organizations in Jordan are embedded in a web of bureaucratic practices and legal codes that allow those in power to monitor and regulate the citizens’ activities. However, in the same way that the growth of civil society organizations is not simply a manifestation of bottom-up forces, the purposes and means through which security forces operate are not necessarily straightforward expressions of top-down power. This paper employs interviews and content analysis of newspapers, magazines, and online forums to map out contestations over the police’s enforcement of “decency” (or religious and moral codes of conduct) in public spaces in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I argue that as the police forces have become more and more involved in embedded surveillance and active policing strategies, they are also increasingly pulled into the role of alleviating the tensions and responding to communal struggles to define the UAE’s public sphere. Contestations over law enforcement are revelatory of larger debates about the role of foreigners in Emirati society and which modes of conduct should be acceptable the public spaces of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

In recent years, scholars in a variety of fields, most notably anthropology and gender studies, have pointed to the importance of the household as a dense space of everyday power relations—whether these be sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical or affective in form—through which gendered, racialized and classed differences and hierarchies are produced. This paper examines the importance of households to two sets of political discourses and projects in Kuwait, those of secular-liberals and Islamic reformers. I approach this topic from a somewhat oblique angle: by examining debates about the Islamic conversions of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait. Domestic workers from East Africa, and South and South East Asia are a ubiquitous and integral part of Kuwait. They comprise one-sixth of the total population and are employed in more than 90% of households. Whether it be cooking, cleaning or caring for children and the elderly, their work is crucial to Kuwait’s social reproduction. Over the past decade, it is estimated that tens of thousands of these women have taken shehadeh, the Islamic testament of faith. A widespread social phenomenon, these conversions have generated a great deal of debate centering on one question: why are these women adopting Islamic precepts and practices? Drawing on interviews I conducted with a panoply of social actors in Kuwait, both citizens and non-citizens, including employers, labour agents, embassy officials, human rights workers, long-term foreign residents, feminists and women’s activists, Islamic teachers and leaders, I trace both secular-liberals’ and Islamic reformers’ explanations of these conversions, and examine how they are underpinned by fundamentally incommensurable understandings of religion and the role of religion in public and political life—yet how they have seemingly complementary understandings of the role of households to their politics. For Islamic reformers, the household is fundamental and considered to be the starting point of their political projects. For liberal-secularists, the household is a realm that should be free from, and a limit point of state intervention. In my analysis I show how debates and questions circulating about domestic workers’ newfound pieties complicate these seemingly distinct and complementary discourses, and I discuss the ways in which the household has become a flashpoint for struggles over religion, secularism, biopolitics, and racialized relations between citizens and non-citizens in Kuwait.

While the Arab Gulf’s imperial geography has been recognized at the level of geopolitics, little if any work has connected empire to the daily, human geographies of the region. Scholarship on the intersection between urbanism and empire has tended to emphasize issues of surveillance and governance, assuming, whether intentionally or not, an imperial, “birds-eye” point of view. Such an approach both leaves much interesting material out of the analytical frame and privileges so-called central or major imperial cities. In this essay, I propose another frame for imperial urbanism, based upon Lefebvre’s (1991[1974]) related notions the “production of space” and “everyday space.” I take as my case study the city of Dubai, and specifically its spaces of “bourgeois gratification” (Ghirardo 1991) - “British pubs,” gated communities, shopping malls, and resorts. These, I argue, demonstrate that the city has been as profoundly shaped by its imperial legacy as have more recognizable imperial cities. Dubai today, and for a long time, has been a place where British and other Western expatriates feel that they can “escape” the stresses and constraints of life in the West. This, I show, is as much a product of the imperial encounter as are more recognizable products of empire, for example monumental architecture. Works cited: Ghirardo, D. (1991), Out of Site: A Social Critique of Architecture (Seattle: Bay Press); Lefebvre, H (1991/1974). The Production of Space. (Malden MA: Blackwell).