The past ten years have witnessed substantive steps toward political liberalization in the oil-exporting countries of the Arab Gulf (Teitelbaum, 2009). In both Bahrain and Qatar, the arrival of new and more youthful leadership has resulted in constitutional reforms and the reinstatement of limited electoral politics. These political reforms unquestionably opened important new arenas for political contestation. At the same time, however, both governments have pursued policies of naturalization and citizenship manipulation that significantly impact the rules for political participation. By strategically expanding (in the case of Bahrain) and narrowing (in the case of Qatar) citizenship rules, the sectarian and tribal composition of citizens has been altered to a degree that has the potential to alter electoral returns in these small city states. In Bahrain the strategic naturalization of Sunni tribesmen, primarily from Saudi Arabia and Syria, has been used to increase the size of the Sunni population relative to the Shia majority. Moreover, these new citizens have been integrated into political districts strategically to affect the electoral balance in key contests. In Qatar, a new citizenship law issued in 2005 created new categories of citizenship based on when citizens arrived in the historic territory of the emirate. These new “tiers” will create different levels of political rights as the emirate moves towards elections for its consultative council. Moreover, tribal membership has become a relevant attribute in setting in electoral districts. This comparative study of political liberalization in Qatar and Bahrain – with reference to earlier experiments in Kuwait - suggests that sectarian and tribal issues enter into electoral politics not only through the gerrymandering of electoral districts, but also through manipulation of citizenship rights. Based on field research conducted in all three countries, this paper bases its analysis on interviews with political society leaders and government officials; data from Bahrain parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2010, and Qatar municipal elections in 2005; and primary source documents including citizenship laws in all three countries. Its conclusions suggest that studies of citizenship rules and their political usage will broaden our understanding of techniques of electoral authoritarianism (Schedler, 2006; Levitsky and Way, 2010). It further cautions policymakers in the realm of democracy promotion to focus not only on electoral procedures but also on the broader issues of political participation in assessing the success of efforts at democratization.

Two defining characteristics of the UAE are the numerical minority status of its local population, and the hierarchy of ‘citizenship, migration, and residency systems’ among locals, expatriates, and migrant laborers. In response to their growing minority status, many Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, including the UAE, have become more stringent about their citizenship, nationality, and employment policies. Local populations increasingly have been nationalizing employment, restricting certain positions and professions to members of local populations. The natural questions to follow are: Why have UAE nationality and citizenship laws diverged from the anticipated ‘opening’ of nationality and citizenship policies that some assumed would accompany globalization? In the specific context of the UAE, what factors have shaped and changed these hierarchies over time? The theoretical literature that has addressed the liberalization of citizenship, migration and naturalization has predominately revolved around two poles relating to globalization: those factors that encourage liberalization (Soysal, 1994; Sassen, 1996), and those circumstances that contribute to its retrenchment (Ong, 1996; Hansen, 2002). In the specific context of the UAE, and the Gulf more generally, some have argued that the nature of the rentier economy lends itself to citizenship, migration, and nationality systems which limit the distribution of state benefits to the smallest pool of individuals possible. The following discussion, however, illustrates how the ‘tiering’ of rights associated with different resident communities is not a new phenomenon or exclusively associated with modern conceptions of globalization or oil rents. A cursory investigation of how nationality was constructed in the UAE illustrates how the British played an important role in the construction of nationality and ‘tired-citizenship, nationality, and residency system’ during the 1900’s leading to the establishment of the Federation of 1971. Through a ‘historical institutionalist approach,’ this paper endeavors to elucidate how this ‘tiered system’ put in place by the British would become an intrinsic dimension of the state-building process, and would lay the groundwork for the economic, political, and social organization of citizenship, nationality and migration systems in the given context. This paper will draw on archival research conducted at the Center for Documentation and Research in Abu Dhabi, UAE in 2008, Al-Jumaa Majed Center in Dubai in 2009, and archival research conducted at the National Archives of the UK during the summer of 2010.

The Saudi Shi’i opposition towards the Saudi state has changed dramatically since 1989. Having followed a more revolutionary line supporting Khomeini before, it increasingly focused on the emancipation of the Shi‘i minority in Saudi Arabia by means of demanding civil rights and religious pluralism afterwards. During the 1990s this change allowed them to return from exile, but only during the 2000s did their new strategy begin to have effect and did they succeed in breaking down their isolation and build new coalitions with certain sections of the Sunni intelligentsia. Several reasons were responsible for this new development. After 9/11 Saudi Arabia was put under Western pressure to reform. But it was especially the attacks in 2003 and the crowning of Prince Abdallah in 2005 that brought about a change in the cultural and political atmosphere. The National Dialogue provided coverage for Shi‘i intellectuals and leaders such as Hasan al-Saffar, Tawfiq al-Sayf and Muhammad Mahfuz to promote their agenda against intolerance, religious extremism and discrimination. Their demands for equal rights, equal opportunities, toleration and the acceptance of “difference” (ikhtilaf) was now covered by a national tendency to acknowledge the radical dimension of Wahhabism. They argued that the religious, cultural and political base of Saudi society and political system should be fundamentally reformed on the basis of citizenship and a new relationship between state and citizen. This paper will deal with the changes of political concepts and strategies of the major Shi‘i thinkers and leaders after 1989. It is based on in-depth research of the major books and newspaper articles of specific thinkers as well as the debates and responses of their Sunni (Salafi) opponents and Sunni liberal supporters. It will try to gauge their success by analyzing several cases that show how far their strategy of seeking to improve their own situation and breaking down their isolation by calling for general reforms and universal civil rights have been adopted by others who support a discourse based on citizenship as ground for national unity.

Citizenship is best understood by looking both at whom it embraces and whom it leaves out. Therein lies the politics of citizenship. What is interesting about the oil states of the Arabian Peninsula is that they exclude the very people on whom they depend for economic prosperity. I examine the discourse of citizenship in these states. My focus is on how ideas of citizenship bounce off those who excluded from its benefits; namely, the bidoon and documented migrant laborers. I have two objectives. I document the size and diversity of both groups. There are, conservatively, 14 million documented workers. They constitute 34% of the combined population. There are also many bidoon, an under-studied population. I carefully delineate the multiple origins of bidoon within and across states. This matters because origin directly affects their status vis a vis citizens. Second, I examine the debates on citizenship and highlight three parts of the politics of citizenship: cultural insecurity, population management and prospects for naturalization. Perceptions of cultural insecurity are fostered by dependence. There is a growing sense of the marginalization of citizens within their own land. The perception of cultural threat is expressed through myriad new regulations and social antipathies toward noncitizens. The flip side of this is a plethora of efforts to educate locals about the meaning of their national culture. There is finally recognition that decades-old indigenization policies have failed. The question then becomes one of population management. How will these states reduce friction yet maintain control over workers? There is significant international pressure to reform the conditions of work and residency, and more specifically, to regularize the status of the bidoon. I examine pressure points, issues of contention and policy innovations. Finally, citizenship passes through blood and naturalization is extraordinarily difficult to attain. There is heated debate about relaxing the restrictions on it. I compare the rules on naturalization across states. For certain categories of bidoon, there are many gradations along the way to being granted the rights of citizenship. Local populations and governments are still struggling with the substance of rights of national citizenship in an old-fashioned territorial state even as new globalized spaces and actors are evolving beyond it. Just as there are hybrid forms of power and authority beyond states and markets, so too, there may be hybrid forms of citizenship and membership that take form and content in the demographic imbalance of the Arab Gulf.