The Making of a Migrant Working Class: Contesting Citizenship in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, 1925-1975.  (©Background)

This dissertation traces how citizenship and migration shaped the politics of the midcentury Persian Gulf, with a focus on Kuwait. It begins with the emergence of the deportation state in the aftermath of WWI and ends with the nationalization of Kuwaiti oil in 1975, when the region’s most powerful labor movement won its most significant victory but lost its longstanding effort to unite a multinational working class. The dissertation argues that the major transformations of the twentieth-century Gulf—the disintegration of British imperial sovereignty, the formation of autocratic states, the inrush of hydrocarbon wealth, the rise of mass politics, and the nationalization of oil—hinged on a heated struggle over the meaning and outlines of citizenship. It has now been heavily revised, expanded, and rewritten to become the core of a new book manuscript entitled Comrades Estranged: Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf (Stanford University Press, 2026).

To excavate a new history that places the struggles of working people at the forefront of social and political change, the dissertation utilizes an array of private archives that have heretofore received little attention. It foregrounds sources produced in the Gulf itself, especially newspapers, memoirs, and local histories, some of which are not publicly available. It also integrates oral history interviews with political activists, noncitizen workers, and labor organizers. These fine-grained, Arabic-language sources enable a novel account of Gulf history that highlights the role of social movements, especially organized labor.

The narrative begins at the turn of the twentieth century with a history of the deportation state. Initially deployed to silence political dissent, an array of local, corporate, and imperial elites found that expulsion could be deployed as a sweeping mechanism of social control and labor discipline. Cheap, efficient, and unencumbered by the inconvenience of legal due process, deportation allowed a stripped-down imperial apparatus to displace, rather than address, issues of poverty, disease, and dissent. In the aftermath of WWI, local and imperial officials enshrined wartime emergency legislation into the foundations of their rule with the region’s first nationality laws, which effectively denaturalized many “undesirable” groups. Iranians came under exceptionally close scrutiny, as the British and their local allies sought to counter Pahlavi claims to Bahrain by forcing Iranian residents to either adopt Bahraini nationality or abandon the archipelago altogether. Arabic-language journals and local histories from Kuwait demonstrate that corporate and imperial efforts were facilitated by local political and economic elites who embraced a narrow and exclusionary view of nationality based on genealogical conceptions of belonging. Thus, imperial officials and their local allies designed nationality not to delineate the category of the rights-bearing citizen, but to create the figure of the deportable alien.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Anglo-American oil firms and their local and imperial allies deployed nationality and race to maintain their autocratic hold over political power and oil wealth. To prevent their local workforce from shutting down production during strikes, oil companies relied on their white “senior staff” to serve as strikebreakers, trusting that white supremacy would supersede class solidarity. Increasingly autocratic ruling families arbitrarily disbursed the benefits of citizenship, including passports, jobs, and contracts, creating an arbitrary form of patronage that reinforced hierarchies of kinship, class, and gender. Local legislation legitimated corporate strategies of divide-and-rule that cleaved citizens and noncitizens, public and private sectors, and white- and blue-collar workers. Thus, on the eve of independence, Kuwaiti elites baked corporate and imperial strategy into the foundation of their legal apparatus and became powerful advocates of the status quo.

The central through-line, and principal intervention, of the dissertation is its account of how popular movements challenged the exclusions of citizenship and race. Once introduced into the regional lexicon, citizenship became a nexus of contestation. While some Kuwaitis defended the deportation state—especially Arab nationalists who expressed open animus towards Iranians—a coalition of reformers mobilized the egalitarian discourse of citizenship to call for representative government, social welfare, and political independence. Prominent among them were anticolonial Arab nationalists, led by the famous opposition leader Dr. Ahmad al-Khatib, who supported self-determination and democratic rule. In the 1950s, they allied closely with workers, who launched a campaign of protests and strikes that won a sweeping series of reforms—including workplace protections, formal political participation, and a more equitable distribution of oil wealth. By formulating and popularizing critiques of racially segregated Anglo-American oil firms, workers helped win Kuwaiti independence in 1961.

The category of labor emerged as the most powerful counterweight to the exclusions of citizenship. Legislation in the 1960s legalized unionization and collective bargaining, and Kuwaiti unions quickly emerged as some of the most vocal supporters of constitutional rule, the redistribution of wealth, and the inclusion of noncitizens in both organized labor and the welfare state. In so doing, they both benefitted from, and contributed to, a wave of popular support for “Arab socialism,” and allied with labor movements across the Arabic-speaking world—most notably in Egypt. Despite vicious state repression, oil workers became a powerful force in Kuwaiti politics during an escalating series of strikes in the late 1960s, during which they won enormous popular support by positioning themselves as the foremost opponents of neocolonialism in the oil industry.

By the early 1970s, a remarkably broad coalition of reformers argued that persistent “labor shortages,” the plight of a growing number of stateless people, and abysmal private-sector wages and working conditions could be simultaneously addressed by reforming the nationality regime. This coalition, spearheaded by organized labor, represented perhaps the most powerful citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian Gulf. By seizing physical control over oil production and popularizing arguments of resource nationalism, Kuwaiti oil workers won the nationalization of oil, in the process becoming key actors in the global movement for resource sovereignty. The dissertation thus intervenes in the global historiography of oil by framing nationalization as a bottom-up social movement.

But by the late 1970s, the popular challenge to the nationality regime was defeated by a powerful coalition of economic and political elites. Organized in Chambers of Commerce and business lobbying associations and allied with newly resurgent conservative movements—most notably Islamic activists—well-connected employers successfully fought to make noncitizen labor even more available and exploitable. In a pattern replicated across the Persian Gulf, the influx of wealth generated by the newfound power of oil-producing countries would be accompanied by a new wave of migration. The fracturing of the labor and reformist movements along the lines of nationality divided the most forceful proponents of both democracy and social justice, inaugurating a period of authoritarian consolidation that undermined the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike.