Qatar’s National Vision 2030 has become a standard reference point for legitimizing almost every new development project, policy change, or institutional mission in the country since 2008. This short document highlights certain challenges the country will face moving forward—most importantly diversifying away from natural resource reliance into a new economy based on “human capital” while simultaneously decreasing the reliance on foreign workers. To this end, the state has invested heavily in the idea of a “knowledge-based economy” and implemented Qatarization policies to privilege citizens in all aspects of education and employment. The shift to a knowledge-based economy can therefore be read as yet another iteration of what Anh Nga Longva calls “ethnocracy”—the small minority Qatari citizen population reaps immense benefits from the state, while the majority foreign national population continues to experience forms of exclusion based on nationality and class, including geographic segregation, lack of access to citizenship, and dependence on the kafala system of labor sponsorship. In addition, state discourses, as several scholars have noted, erase the hybrid transnational past of Gulf societies and vibrant longstanding diasporic communities in order to maintain tight boundaries around citizenship and limit what Amelie Le Renard has called the “national distinction” of performing belonging and accessing invented traditions to a privileged few. In this paper, I trace how Vision 2030 differs from previous state discourses by carving out space for non-national belonging in Qatar’s future, redefining the terrain of ethnocracy to retain national distinction while also acknowledging the permanence of a transnational future. Focusing on my ethnographic research in the American branch campuses of Education City—the hallmark of Qatar’s knowledge economy—I argue that the university, despite Qatarization policies that privilege citizens, is also a key site for this increased official integration of certain non-citizens—specifically those born and raised in Doha—who have recently been afforded privileges that distinguish them from the “international” students who have come to Qatar in order to attain degrees. These foreign resident students are produced as a distinct “local” yet non-national group within Education City. Alongside the cross-national interactions and friendships that American branch campuses enable, shifts in policy and rhetoric that hail a new form of “local” subject signal a change in national identity that allows for transnational belonging within ethnocracy.

In early 1931, the Indian Khilafat Movement activist Muhammad Ali Jauhar was buried in a grave not far from Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. His death and burial in Islam’s third holiest city marked the passing of the most fervent supporter for the establishment of a republican government in the city of Mecca, which he had hoped would sit at the center of a global Islamic revival. Born of the Indian Khilafat Movement in the wake of the First World War, the idea of the Meccan Republic sought to take advantage of the rise of the Sa‘udi state and the conquest of Mecca and Medina by 1925 to formulate a new nomos of the world that would depart radically from the international system of nation states and European empire by rejecting the normative status of territory as the space in which sovereignty operated. In this paper I would like to argue that the Meccan Republic’s radicalism was located in the centrality of migration, rather than territory, to its constitution. It was not residence in the holy city that determined one’s belonging to it, but membership in the universal community of believers, brought together within the temporal and spatial boundaries of the annual Hajj pilgrimage. While the normative place of human mobility distinguished the republic from the post-Westphalian order of states, it was largely sympathetic to other transnational and even internationalist movements that arose out of the devastation of the First World War, whether Pan-Asianism, bolshevism, Pan-Africanism, or the universal humanism of figures like Tagore. While Muhamad Ali himself was buried in 1931, one could argue that the republic was officially buried a year later in 1932, with the foundation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its adoption of territoriality as a tool of sovereign power. What might a figurative exhumation of Muhammad Ali and his republic tell us about the modern Arabian Peninsula/Persian Gulf and the place of migration and diaspora in it? And in what sense would this recuperative move allow us to think about migration and transnationalism as modes of political possibility rather than as threats to sovereignty? On the basis of Muhammad Ali’s Urdu writings, I will chart the rise and fall of the Meccan Republic not only in its historical specificity, but in the broader context of global politics between the two world wars, with a gesture toward the present.

While many anthropologists have focused on the experiences of Global South migrants to the Arabian peninsula, in this paper I focus on my fieldwork among Western “expatriates,” and their interactions with other residents of Saudi Arabia, both citizen and non-citizen. This approach sheds light on trans/nationalism and social hierarchies in the contemporary Gulf states, and reveals renewed forms of imperialism. In the framework of workforce nationalization policies, it is often male Western “expatriates” who, as top managers in private organizations play an important role in choosing which nationals have “potential” and “deserve” to be employed. They participate in shaping the norms of behavior that are considered appropriate, and select those who are able to conform to these norms. For instance, in the joint-venture bank where I conducted field research in Riyadh, Western managers praised, among their Saudi subordinates, the women they described as "westernized" and "free" while they discriminated against the women covering their faces (the majority of Saudi female inhabitants of Riyadh). These norms, also shared by some Saudi top managers, have an impact on who, among Saudis, can have access to professional opportunities and make a career, in terms of class and gender. “Western” expatriates also participate in shaping hierarchies between nationalities. While the difference between nationals and non-nationals is partially inscribed on spaces and bodies through official dress codes and segregation rules, many (female and male) Western “expatriates” I met contributed to realizing this dichotomy through their lifestyles in gated communities and self-identifications: they identified as Westerners and designated the Saudis as others, often through gender stereotypes. They also participated in strengthening the hierarchy between different categories of non-national residents through their interactions with, and visions of, non-Western residents. This civilizational imaginary revealing forms of neo-imperialism contributes to shaping transnational societies of the Arabian Peninsula.