Since the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to the state of Qatar in 2010, the highly restrictive and oft-exploitative laws that govern temporary labor in the Arab Gulf monarchies have come under mounting scrutiny from international rights NGOs and Western media outlets alike. While much anthropological and sociological work has been devoted to understanding how these kefala (sponsorship) regimes operate in practice, much less attention had been given to the political and economic interests that underpin migrant labor policies. While some works have noted the business community’s interest in importing low-cost labor and national populations’ effective acquiescence, existing models do not fully account for policy change. Yet change has occurred all the same, with Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates all adopting new sponsorship laws over the past decade. In seeking to provide a more nuanced explanation of existing variations in the Gulf’s sponsorship laws, I examine available data regarding the size and composition of migrant workforces as well as the legal texts that govern these labor regimes. Ultimately, variation in legal regimes can be largely explained in terms of Gulf states’ efforts to attract and retain skilled workers as well as the degree to which migration policymaking is isolated from the influence of domestic pressure groups. This suggests that, rather than converging a “reformed” labor system in the Gulf, sponsorship system are instead evolving along different pathways dictated far more by domestic institutions than international pressure. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of these findings for future political advocacy efforts with respect to migrant workers’ rights in the Gulf.

Drawing from ethnographic and archival research, I examine the different ways in which climate-related disasters are made into problems for public discussion and action in Oman. Here, I focus on the use of words and images in the public representations of Cyclone Gonu’s (2007) wide-spread destruction across Oman’s newly developed urban environments and coastal highways. I find that one pattern of discourse treats climate-related disasters as problems of proper management, where scientific expertise and efficient bureaucracies can be used to rationalize future cyclones as calculated risks. Another pattern treats cyclones as adversaries to “the people.” Here, cyclones are awesome, uncontainable tests for the nation. Images of the distribution of aid and the rebuilding of roads are thus narrated as a confirmation of Omani strength of character and love of country. These patterns of thinking exist in tension with one another, but nonetheless inform a common way of discussing the dangers of climate change, and potentially other sources of future uncertainty in the Sultanate: Oman’s precarious future is both disavowed and confirmed within the flurry of public discussion that these ecological spectacles evoke. I conclude by reflecting on the kinds of citizenship this tension encourages in the context of Oman’s recent history of rapid economic growth and uncertain future after oil, and zoom out to consider what this means in a time where development and state-building are now being couched in terms of disaster resilience and sustainability by the United Nations and World Bank.

In the Arab Gulf states, the overwhelming majority of the urban built environment has been constructed since 1950 – meaning settlements were largely built for cars, instead of being retrofitted for them. This, when combined with the influence of post-World War II planning, means that a significant percentage of land in Gulf metropolitan areas is low density, resembling what is globally imagined as “suburban.” Despite rapidly increased use of towers and apartment blocks since the 1990s, this suburban image persists throughout media coverage of, and the academic literature on, the region. Unsurprisingly, much commentary on the desirability of Gulf urban landscapes has depended upon which widely available epistemology about the “suburbs” differently positioned actors subscribed to – e.g., a realm of spacious infrastructure functionality or, alternatively, one of stifling, auto-dependent gendered isolation. By drawing on the presenter’s coded archive of more than 1000 newspaper stories from the 1940s onward concerning economic development in the Gulf (drawn from both inside and outside the region), as well as participant observation of contemporary Gulf landscapes and their diverse residents, this paper analyzes how images of sprawling auto-centric development have fed, and sometimes redirected, attempts to locate the Gulf as an “Other” type of urban space, subject to “market Orientalism,” where in emerging markets are imagined as slightly “off” copies of what is most desirable. The Gulf’s citizen-majority, low-density, urban zones – which signaled the “inevitable” coming of “progress” in the 1950s – have since not only come to be seen as a sign of the region’s lack of readiness to accept “urban best practice,” but also, the seemingly opposite position: a sign of the region’s full acceptance of individualized and hierarchalized global neo-liberal consumption.

A great deal of existing scholarship on the Gulf states concerns means in which hydrocarbon wealth has shaped political dynamics. Such analysis, however, fails to take into account the centuries-old importance of tribal actors in policymaking. This paper will examine the means in which tribes have become clients of rentier regimes as well as the extent to which they maintain their status as independent actors by looking specifically at the Kuwaiti case. Kuwait is in some ways an anomaly – a wealthy rentier state with a vocal parliament containing political blocs ranging from Salafis to secular liberals. In such an environment, where electoral politics are the centre of political life, tribes have managed to maintain their political standing through informal institutions like diwaniyat and (technically illegal) tribal primaries in which tribes determine which candidates they will support in parliamentary elections. Kuwaiti tribes have thus adjusted to their political climate, maintaining cohesion in a system which has historically fostered ideological, rather than clan, identification. In response, the government has tried to mitigate tribes’ political power in recent years by cracking down on previously outlawed tribal primaries and by redrawing electoral districts to limit tribal influence. Nonetheless, tribes have persisted as influential political actors in Kuwait, as well as elsewhere in the Gulf. The Kuwaiti case, exhibiting relatively open political system, provides the most transparent case for the examination of how oil reinforces existing societal divisions, rather than washing them away with rent money. We anticipate that similar processes take place in other states in the region, yet in a less institutionalised and clearly observable way. While existing literature has documented the government’s co-optation of the Kuwaiti merchant elite with the advent of oil wealth, tribes have largely been excluded from discussion about patronage in oil wealthy states. This paper, then, will trace the degree to which Kuwait’s powerful tribes have been courted by the state or have been allowed to maintain autonomy from it. In our analysis, we also assess the extent of influence held by independent political movements, in particular of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi strands, in tribal areas, as well as the degree to which such groups operate as homogeneous political actors.