Can Gulf cities be considered “sporting cities”? Local boosters seem to think so and planners across the Arabian Peninsula are increasingly working to reshape their cities as sporting hubs and cater to a sports-oriented “visitor class.” This paper examines the wide-ranging mobilities and materialities that planners in the Gulf Arab states have drawn on to do so, focusing on an ethnographic case study of the UCI Road Cycling World Championships in Doha in October 2016. Through participant observation and interviews with athletes, officials, spectators, and local residents during the event, I consider the impacts of planning and tourism policies in the Arabian Peninsula. In the past decade, planners across the region have actively promoted elite sport in their countries and, in turn, reshaped their cities as sporting hubs. In addition to promoting local tourist industries, hosting major sporting events also offers urban planners an opportunity to showcase their cities to the world through investing in iconic new venues and urban infrastructure. From impressive new Formula One tracks in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, to Qatar’s cutting-edge football stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Gulf states’ rapid development is a key geopolitical trope used in promoting these events. Advancing globalized elite sport is thus an important means to broadcast an image of Gulf cities as cosmopolitan and modern. While regional leaders have also promoted more nationalistically-oriented sports, like falconry and camel racing, globalized elite sports are of special interest because their promotion in the Gulf relies almost exclusively on foreign players or participants. Spectators, too, are often short-term tourists or non-citizen expats. Informed by research in political and urban geography, and taking the case of the UCI World Championships in Doha, this paper therefore asks: how is urban space transformed during the event, both materially and through the mobility of elite athletes and spectators? What images and identity narratives about Qatar generally, and Doha as a “sporting city,” do planners spotlight for the tourist’s gaze? And what are the broader political implications of shaping Gulf cities around the mobilities and materialities of elite sport? “Sporting cities,” I demonstrate, are key sites of geopolitical encounter: where subjects and spaces are not predetermined, but actively constituted through people’s differential movements in the pursuit of pleasure.

Women in the Gulf States have long been considered as oppressed and subjugated in terms of political participation, labor force participation, as well as their freedom of movement. This led to a status quo assumption of a gendered social structure of the Gulf society such as “Petroleum perpetuates Patriarchy” [Ross 2012]. However, it evoked skepticism, as some resource abundant economies in the Arab Gulf State displayed higher labor participation of women than other countries in the Middle East [Buttorff and Welborne 2015], and Gulf States in general witnessed rapid advancement of female education that went far as to outnumber male counterparts in tertiary education [Ridge 2014]. Along with such drastic socio-economic changes, Gulf women started to be considered as significant consumers, as well as entrepreneurs. It coincided with the growing commercial infrastructure, such as shopping malls and cafes, which capitalizes on the purchasing power of women [Le Renard 2011]. More importantly, such feminization of infrastructure is taking place under royal conglomerates patronage. This study examines the processes of women’s gaining of hegemony in the consumer market by looking at both female consumers and entrepreneurs within middle-class and upper middle-class urban spaces in Riyadh. The paper explores women’s consumption and spending behavior, in relation to their financial responsibility in supporting household. At the same time, the study interrogates emerging small and medium-sized enterprises that target female consumers in sex-segregated social settings where only women know women’s needs. Through investigations, it is clarified that socio-economic development in Saudi Arabia does not necessarily undo sex-segregation, but business growth catered to women provides more space for women in the public spheres. The paper also detects passive resistance to patriarchy, which constitutes an incongruous gendered relationship of dominate and dominated; although being reluctant/unwelcomed to be a provider/ bread-winner of the household, women are nonetheless establishing hegemony in the broader consumer market.

Charity as Politics ‘Writ Small’ in GCC States Charitable giving in the petro-monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula provides a rich ‘field’ for the (comparative) study of politics and state-society relations in the contemporary period. This is so for several reasons. First, being Muslim societies, people are expected to give charity regularly, to show their devotion to God by attending to the community’s welfare and assisting those in need. Second, as these are relatively conservative Muslim societies with regimes that assert their adherence to Islamic norms in governance, charitable giving is indeed prominent, extended in a variety of ways, and engaging ruling families, NGOs, and private citizens. Third, given that wealth is abundant, the possibilities for broad re-distribution and the enhancement of social welfare through charitable giving are vast. In this paper, I offer an overview and analysis of charitable giving in four Gulf monarchies – Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. On the basis of multiple field research trips and extensive interviewing, I explore the questions: who gives, how do they give (and why), and to whom do they give (and why). I highlight several key findings: first, despite abundant wealth and (supposedly) extensive giving, poverty persists in at least two of the four states -- Saudi Arabia and Oman; second, the largest, most active, and best endowed charitable foundations have been created by (members of) the ruling families (in Saudi Arabia and Qatar) or prominent political movements/associations (in Kuwait); third, private giving in all four countries tends to concentrate on family, tribe, ethnic community; fourth, with few exceptions, foreign migrant laborers are excluded from access to charity. These findings suggest that charitable giving, while intrinsic to the practice of Islam, may also be instrumentalized by various societal actors to advance particular political interests. It may be used as a tool for the purposes of: (1) gathering information about members of society, (2) asserting relationships of power, authority and control, (3) shoring up allegiance (to a ruler and/or an ideology), (4) consolidating the definition and/or boundaries of community. Indeed, on the basis of these findings, I argue that charitable giving in Gulf petro-monarchies today reflects politics writ small.

To understand the spatiality of all forms of government in an era of neoliberal globalization is a significant challenge facing ethnographers today. Anthropologists have largely addressed the issue by examining the bureaucratic practices or territorial jurisdiction of states. Others, such as Gupta and Ferguson, focus on how supranational or nongovernmental organizations, as transnational forms of governmentality, reshape “states’ abilities to spatialize their authority and to stake their claims to superior generality and universality” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 996). In this paper, I argue that incorporating Mahdavi’s (2016) notions of “(im)mobility” at the individual level provides further insight to states’ territorial authority. I use ethnographic data about US-born Muslims who have migrated to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), collected since 2015, to illustrate how government power is expressed through restrictions placed by the UAE, US, and other states. This argument is exemplified through one particularly messy example of a proposed marriage between a Muslim American living in the UAE, Leyla, and a Syrian living in China, Ahmed, an example which highlights the encompassing power of state policies as well as the self-governing practices of Leyla’s Muslim American community. Leyla’s fellow community members of US-born Muslims living in the UAE strongly opposed the vertically imbalanced marriage, often citing notions of “protecting Leyla’s passport,” a curious conception of assisting the state in limiting inclusion. Through this case study, I argue that the community’s reactions are an example of what Ferguson and Gupta (2002) call “de-statized” governmentality, which is to say that subjects are empowered to discipline themselves by attempting to limit who has access to citizenship. Ultimately, Leyla and Ahmed did marry, and their marriage, now impacted by Trump administration policies both domestic and foreign, demonstrates the changing nature of governmentality. Exploring the tension between the lack of mobility enacted by states’ policies of exclusion and reinforced by Leyla’s Muslim American community, on one hand, and the desire to move stirred by the nature of Leyla’s and Ahmed’s intimate relationship, on the other, allows us to both illustrate and extend Mahdavi’s notion of (im)mobility.

In the 1990’s, Saudi Arabia highlighted global tourism in all national development plans as a way to raise revenue and employ locals. Though a latecomer to the industry, the Saudi state built hospitality schools, initiated a new Ministry of Tourism, and forged networks of international tour operators. But just as tourism began to “take off,” the bottom fell out on September 11, 2001. The lucrative potential of well-heeled consumers from the United States, Western Europe and Japan collapsed overnight. This raised critical questions in the aftermath. What happens to the billions of dollars invested in transportation networks, hotel accommodations, site restoration and the hospitality industry? What happens to the extensive network of crony capitalism that had been forged? I identify three transitions that went into effect to protect these economic investments and political networks. They are, first, a shift from global consumers to local and regional tourists; second, a shift from commercial groups to religious tourists, and third, a spatial shift from site- seeing in urban centers to natural adventures. Tourism is now justified as a means of “teaching our youth about their heritage” and “extending hajj and umrah throughout the land of the holy cities.” That is a far cry from the difficult, cross-cultural global openings that were championed before political crisis. The literature on tourism and crisis emphasizes methods to rebuild economic profit. It sidesteps complex political questions that have sociopolitical repercussions. This analysis reinserts the explicitly political and contextual. These three transitions do indeed serve to protect massive infrastructural investment. As importantly, I argue that each of these transitions provides an avenue by which to avoid the complicated and tense encounters between citizens and international tourists, and among domestic elite. Changing the people (the consumers), plot (the narrative) and place (the sites of encounter) has softened the politics of tourism. I demonstrate that, because of place, Saudi Arabia was buffered from harsh realities and the zero-sum decision-making that would have prompted serious dissension among elites invested in the tourism sector. Analysis is based on extensive involvement in the tourist opening in Saudi Arabia in 2000 and on current interviews with Saudi tour guides, American tour operators and managers around the world, especially in Saudi Arabia. I conclude with brief instructive comparisons to Egypt and other Gulf states after the uprisings.