Gulf Technostates: Science, Modernity, and Expertise
Panel 073, sponsored byAssociation for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS), 2019 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 15 at 12:30 pm
Panel Description
Technocentric visions of modernity stretch across history and the globe, and have a rich record in the MENA region. In the Gulf specifically, modernization campaigns of the postcolonial era have consistently been tied to science, technology, and education. To the extent that political authorities have tied their legitimacy to achieving technocentric visions of modernity, local governments might be defined as "technostates," those in which science and technology are just as much "instruments of power" as they are the means of achieving "political authority and credibility" (Jones 2010, 15). While technostate ideals are readily apparent in the region's "National Visions" (e.g. Qatar National Vision 2030, Saudi Vision 2030, UAE's Vision 2021, Oman's Vision 2040), these agendas unfold through a range of planning schemes at multiple scales. Across the Gulf, such plans are inconsistently engaged by differently positioned actors and sectors, and with differing degrees commitment on the part of those tasked with implementing them. Over the past 10 years ago, Gulf studies scholars have critically examined the multiple spatialities, temporalities, and materialities of technopolitics in the region, though not all articulate their work through this conceptual umbrella. This session unites scholars from anthropology, geography, and history to examine how the "Gulf technostate" is imagined, practiced, experienced, and transformed, historically and today. Through case studies from across the Arabian Peninsula, this panel explores the following questions: how are Gulf technostate ideals mobilized by ordinary citizens and otherwise-defined subjects of states? What is their role in constituting, interpreting, and/or reworking the projects of techno-modernity? Do individuals in the region come to internalize these habits and govern themselves through the logics promoted by Gulf technostate visions? How do differently-positioned actors imagine their place within the many scales and spatialities at which state power is expressed? In what ways do their decisions and affective commitments work against or with the political orders that narratives of techno-modernity actively work to conjure? How do these aspirations intersect with other forms of geo-power and discourses, from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, state sovereignty, religion, heritage and tradition, social justice, human rights, or environmental sustainability? In what ways do the symbolic and financial opportunities afforded by developmentalist rhetoric in the region translate in the specific materialities, built landscapes, and institutional arrangements? What other knowledges have these technostate visions of modernity opened up or set in motion unintended by planners - natural, technical, social, political, of the self, or otherwise?
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Neha Vora
-- Co-Author
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Feras Klenk
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Calvert Jones
-- Presenter
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Dr. Andrea Wright
-- Presenter
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Dr. Natalie Koch
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Dr. Gokce Gunel
-- Discussant
Presentations
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Dr. Calvert Jones
Gender segregation is a cornerstone of the techno-political order in much of the Middle East and North Africa. In most Arab countries, for example, the public schooling system in which young citizens are socialized daily for more than a decade is segregated by law. Yet in the Gulf, segregation covers a much broader terrain, cutting across not only schools but also hospitals, restaurants, shops, government offices, buses, and parks, among other public places. While religious conservatives argue that spatial and technical segregation safeguards the moral fabric of society, critics claim the opposite, suggesting that it blocks the formation of a healthy public sphere.
Yet gender segregation as social engineering has received only limited scholarly attention. This paper seeks to inject some rare empirical data into the debate, combining experiments in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with qualitative fieldwork evidence. Consistent with critics’ arguments, findings suggest a set of moral and civic costs linked to the gender-segregated status quo, with the implication that desegregation—or greater “gender mixing” in the local parlance—would indeed lead to moral and civic dividends, such as greater open-mindedness, tolerance, ethics, and law-abidingness. Findings challenge both the expectations of religious conservatives in the region as well as social dominance theory more broadly, and contribute to our knowledge of state-led social engineering and its implications.
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Feras Klenk
With low oil prices, rolling budget deficit, and a saturated public sector in Oman, discussions about the need for “change” and “action” have become ubiquitous. They have centered on skill building, improving employee work ethic and morale, government reform, and accountability. In 2013 Sultan Qaboos, the ruler of Oman announced his support for small and medium enterprise development and entrepreneurship by creating a fund to financially support and guide entrepreneurial initiatives (e.g., start-ups). This was part of a larger strategy to diversify the economy away from fossil fuels. With the Sultan’s personal backing, an entire ecosystem made up of different actors (e.g., universities, public authorities, private training programs, tech funds) from public and private sectors have rapidly emerged in the country with the center of gravity in Muscat. This assemblage of institutions is supposed to create a society of entrepreneurs, encourage them, and coordinate their activities to boost the national economy, reduce overall government spending, and create more jobs. The desire to create an “entrepreneurial society” showcases the technostate logics of development embedded in the state planning process and entrepreneurship as the latest global economic fad.
This paper approaches Oman’s entrepreneurship policy as part of the country’s state-led developmental strategy (e.g., 5-year economic plans) and fits comfortably with its plans to build a knowledge-based economy. Like other Persian Gulf states, Oman has attempted to transform its oil-based economy into a knowledge-based one by making significant investments in higher end paired with changes in the private sector. This is done to produce the “human capital” with the right skills and mindsets for the new economy, centered on cognitive abilities and increase the dynamism of the private sector. As this paper argues, this plan is in tension with Oman’s political economy, a terrain is dominated by large private monopolies, state owned enterprises, and timid capitalists.
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Dr. Andrea Wright
Indian laborers working in the Gulf are often the objects of technostate development projects. As laborers and migrants, they are managed and surveyed as they work to build and maintain the structures that are symbolic of modernity. From the perspective of Indian migrant laborers, they often see themselves as participating in these Gulf-based projects, but also as contributing to alternative modernization projects. During fieldwork in India and the United Arab Emirates, workers told me, with sincerity and excitement, that they were going to “make India modern.” This concept was difficult to precisely define, as some workers understood modernity to mean helping their families’ economic position. In that context, modernity meant clean water, a consistent supply of electricity, fast cars, and high-rise buildings. But “making India modern” also implied other, more difficult to articulate dreams; it was far away, hard to reach, and not fully known. In conversations, as I sought to understand what people meant by “making India modern,” I learnt that modernity was hierarchical and a process that involved several steps. For many, freedom was the central feature of modernity. This freedom was described as living in a city; doing what one wants; love matches, as opposed to arranged marriages; and having enough capital to buy the accoutrements seen on TV shows and on display in malls. It also involved “getting fat” and wearing shiny shirts and large watches. For many young Indian men facing limited opportunities in their home villages, migration to the Gulf offered opportunities to fulfill their dreams and “move forward and up” in what they saw as the graduated hierarchy of modernity. This paper shows how the Indian migrant workers with whom I worked shaped and re-evaluated their dreams of modernity while working in the Gulf. In particular, the paper focuses on how migrants’ dreams were impacted by their everyday interactions with governance practices and corporate management. This examination illuminates how technostate visions often rely upon relationships between corporations and the government and highlights the role of labor within this context. The paper concludes with a discussion of how migrant laborers’ own dreams of modernity can be understood to be in conversation with, but not necessarily subsumed by, technostate logics
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Dr. Natalie Koch
Co-Authors: Neha Vora
This paper explores multiple spatialities and subjectivities of Gulf "technostate" ideals through the case of American and American-style higher education in the region. American university globalization has increasingly targeted and been courted by authoritarian states. While the reasons for these partnerships are manifold—including the ease of top-down large-scale monetary investment, “knowledge economy” development strategies, social engineering programs, and other corporate and imperial entanglements—an overwhelming discourse has emerged around higher education initiatives in places like the Arabian Peninsula, China, Singapore, and Central Asia, which juxtaposes liberalism (in the form of higher education) with the illiberal, authoritarian contexts it is supposedly encountering within the framework of neoliberal globalization. While critics in the American academy have pegged these projects to increasing corporatization of academia, with some also arguing that they are linked to US imperial interests in a post 9/11 era, we have found in our research within branch campuses in Qatar and the UAE that Western educators are motivated by a complex set of interests that include neoliberal and imperial inclinations but are not reducible to them. More importantly, by focusing on the discursive rather than empirical elements of this research, we highlight how the notion of “liberal education” operates as a global discourse of power through American branch campuses in the Arabian Peninsula and by extension other nondemocratic states around the world. Specifically, we argue that the very concept of authoritarianism is discursively produced in and through these university projects, and simultaneously builds (upon) an idealized narrative about the national self in the United States that erases existing and emerging inequalities—indeed, authoritarianisms—within the home spaces of American academia.
