Migration and Citizenship in Eastern Arabia: A Review of the Field  (©Background)

In recent decades, the study of migration in eastern Arabia and the Persian Gulf has become one of the most dynamic subfields of Gulf studies. This essay introduces its major debates and themes by focusing on three foundational works that opened the door for a new generation of critical scholarship: Andrew Gardner’s City of Strangers (2010), Neha Vora’s Impossible Citizens (2013), and Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (2009).

Representing a range of disciplines and approaches, these works have transformed the study of migration, and of the Persian Gulf writ large, in several ways. First, they challenge Gulf exceptionalism—the idea that the region is somehow distinct from the rest of the world because of unique cultural or historical characteristics. Press coverage juxtaposing eye-catching megaprojects with the exploitative conditions facing noncitizen workers often stereotypes the Gulf as a contemporary iteration of “Oriental despotism,” in the process eliding the historical contingencies and global forces that shape the region. These authors explicitly overturn exceptionalist narratives by framing the Gulf as a valuable site for understanding migration, exclusion, and citizenship more broadly. Second is the importance of theorizing urban space alongside migration. Spatial segregation, housing, land ownership, and the built environment shape subjectivities across the region; thus, by necessity, struggles for the “right to the city” are inextricably intertwined with the question of migration. Finally, the concept of citizenship has itself become a nexus of debate. As a legal category, an object of study, and a mechanism of both exclusion and of participation, myriad conceptualizations of citizenship impact not only the field of Gulf studies, but everyday life and politics in the region writ large. While historians arrived late to the conversation, current historical work has destabilized and interrogated several of the core tenets of the field, opening new avenues for future research.

Before the turn of the twenty-first century, migration in the Gulf was usually understood within the frameworks of economics, human rights, or diaspora studies. Early ethnographic or social scientific accounts of specific noncitizen communities remain invaluable, especially as many rely on primary source material available nowhere else. Shafeeq Ghabra’s Palestinians in Kuwait (1987), for instance, is a rich and at times deeply moving account based on dozens of interviews with members of a Palestinian community tragically shattered by aftermath of the Gulf War. Some of the most thorough research of this genre can be found in unpublished dissertations, such as Mohammad Taghi Razavian’s “Iranian Communities in the Persian Gulf” (1975), a “migration geography” based on extensive interviews with Iranian immigrants—a community that has been subject to remarkably little English-language scholarship. Such works provide a revealing window into the lives of noncitizen residents during the rapid transformations of the oil boom era.

Early efforts to reconceptualize Gulf migration emerged from the literature on human rights. This body of scholarship homed in on the structural disempowerment and exploitation faced by noncitizen residents. An early example of the genre was Anh Nga Longva’s Walls Built on Sand (1997), which deploys extensive fieldwork to argue that Kuwait is a “plural society” characterized by “the stratified coexistence of ethnic groups” and “the apparently exclusive concern for profit” (p. 4). Many of these works have been produced by political scientists and sociologists, as discussed below. However, one of the earliest and most influential is Andrew Gardner’s City of Strangers (2010), an anthropological study of the Indian community in Bahrain.

Gardner’s key category is “structural violence,” which, he argues, permeates everyday life for noncitizen residents of the Gulf (pp. 2, 49). Following Longva, Gardner focuses on the sponsorship system as “the keystone in the systemic and structural violence levied against foreign workers in the Gulf” (p. 29). In brief, sponsorship—an immigration regime prevalent across the Gulf states and often Anglicized as the “kafala system”—ties noncitizen residents to their visa sponsor, usually their citizen employer. Gardner lays out how sponsorship provides spectacular and arbitrary powers to citizen-sponsors while placing noncitizens in a position of subservience. Foundational to the regime is the threat of deportation, which is effectively handed over to the citizen-sponsor. This threat is made all the more serious because many noncitizens arrive in the Gulf already in debt to their recruiter, meaning that deportation can mean financial ruin for them and their families (p. 60). As many workers are housed in isolated labor camps and bussed in to work from outlying areas, they find themselves spatially and socially segregated from the rest of society—especially men classified as “bachelors,” a gendered form of exclusion that Gardner highlights (pp. 65-66). Legal worker protections usually go unenforced, as workers with grievances are often deported before they can seek recourse (p. 53). Labor nationalization policies, designed to encourage economic diversification by incentivizing citizens to work in the private sector, mean that noncitizens face systemic discrimination in hiring (p. 147). And bans on noncitizen land and business ownership mean that upward mobility or economic independence are effectively unattainable for most noncitizens (p. 86). Thus even diasporic elites find themselves enmeshed in the same “webs of dominance” as their most impoverished countrymen (p. 71).

Gardner’s account adds valuable nuance to older works in this genre by placing sponsorship in the context of neoliberal globalization, British imperial policy, and corporate practice (pp. 4, 80). These structural conditions generate the racialization of marginalized groups (pp. 114, 152)—a theme that has become increasingly central to the study of migration in the Gulf following the publication of America’s Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis (2007). Gardner also challenges economic frameworks of migration based on the prototypical liberal image of individual subjects. Instead, Gardner highlights how Indian workers are enmeshed in broader family, communal, and regional relationships that shape their interpretations of their own material interests (p. 61).

The study of noncitizen exclusion and exploitation remains a focus of more recent work. Natasha Iskander’s Does Skill Make Us Human argues that the concept of skill is not, in fact, an evaluation of individual ability, but rather a central means of divesting racialized subjects—in this case, predominantly South Asian workers—of their political personhood, which she sees as “a structural feature of capitalist systems” (p. 257). Like Gardner, who describes noncitizen workers as “bonded labor” unable to “act as free agents on the labor market,” many scholars ask if noncitizens are truly “free” labor—an essential point in human rights law (Gardner, 85). This is the central question of Unfree, by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, on domestic workers from the Philippines. These works have proven especially valuable to human rights organizations or labor organizers seeking to understand, and then reform or dismantle, systems of exclusion, or to those seeking to nuance the stereotypes of “modern-day slavery” that proliferate in the press.

A related but distinct literature is comprised of anthropological accounts that use focused ethnographic case studies to draw out the agency of noncitizens and complicate the citizen/noncitizen binary. Neha Vora’s Impossible Citizens (2013) is an especially elegant and influential example. Focusing on middle-class Indian residents of Dubai, Vora challenges many of the commonplace understandings of migration in the Gulf by placing class at the center of her analysis. She describes her noncitizen interlocutors—including business owners, gold merchants, and members of Indian families long resident in old Dubai—as “quintessential citizens” (p. 1). To do so, she defines citizenship as “not simply a matter of having or not having legal membership” but rather as “a shifting and dynamic form of legality, membership, state-making, and governance” (p. 5). These middle-class Indian residents of Dubai adopted a form of belonging that Vora describes as “consumer citizenship” (Chapter 4). In so doing, they themselves play a key role in producing a state-endorsed neoliberal ideology that “allowed simultaneously for a national identity purified of foreign elements and a neoliberal economy in which foreigners were welcomed” (p. 118). Such a framework would equally apply to the Iranian community, with its own longstanding ties to both sides of the Gulf.

Vora’s account challenges a simplified binary often drawn between homogenous groups of privileged citizens and transitory, oppressed noncitizens. Noting that the Indian diaspora in Dubai is linked to the Indian Ocean world through longstanding networks of trade and migration, she finds that many view Dubai as “an Indian city” where “permanent temporariness” is crosshatched by a deeply rooted sense of belonging (p. 3 and Chapter 2). Mechanisms of exclusion are not merely top-down and state-led initiatives, but driven by noncitizens themselves. Her middle-class interlocutors are “integral to the legitimacy of the Emirati state through their practices of governance over other migrants,” by, for instance, “acting as kafeels [sponsors] by proxy for their citizen business partners, who often exist on paper only” (pp. 93, 110). Noncitizens employed as managers can effectively take on powers usually reserved for citizens. Even racialization is at least in part the product of noncitizen agency: Vora suggests that “middle-class Indians also blamed migrants for the racism they experienced in their own lives, arguing that because uneducated and unskilled workers constitute the majority of South Asians in the Gulf, people assume all Indians are uneducated and unskilled” (p. 131). Thus, rather than viewing the exclusions of citizenship as purely a state-driven phenomena, Vora argues that “the disavowal of belonging by Indians themselves becomes all the more necessary for the production of a bounded citizenry” (emphasis hers, p. 6).

Impossible Citizens remains a model for scholars looking to move beyond the lens of noncitizen exploitation. Vora’s later work elaborates on her critiques of Gulf exceptionalism and uncritical narratives of noncitizen exclusion (Vora and Koch, 2015). Though not focused on migration, Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City As Corporation (2011) centers class analysis to provide a novel and theoretically compelling account of urban space and state formation in which noncitizens are central actors. Noora Lori further complicates the citizen/noncitizen binary in Offshore Citizens (2019) by using innovative fieldwork to illustrate how many residents of the United Arab Emirates have found themselves in a “permanently temporary” citizenship status. Statelessness, which is widespread across the Gulf, has also been subject to increasing attention, as scholars including Claire Beaugrand (Stateless in the Gulf, 2017) and myself (Comrades Estranged, 2026) have traced how the category emerged, and has been contested, over the course of the twentieth century.

Until recent years, historians were notably absent from these scholarly debates. Although the Gulf has long been nexus of migration—crisscrossed by merchants, sailors, pearl divers, and enslaved people—historians overwhelmingly focused on trade, imperial policy, and tribal politics. Many relied on British sources that provide, at best, a skewed portrait of non-elite life in the Gulf. The best works on migration, such as Matthew Hopper’s Slaves of One Master (2015), generally focused on the period before WWII. This neglect had a detrimental effect on other fields, as anthropologists and sociologists were forced to rely on a historiography that failed to contextualize contemporary migration. But recent years have witnessed new historic scholarship distinct from diasporic histories, focusing not just on “migrants” per say, but on the process of their exclusion. Some predate the new millennium, most notably a series of useful articles by Ian J. Seccombe and R. I. Lawless. Most, however, emerged in the past twenty years.

Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (2009) proved to be a groundbreaking work. While primarily an urban history, Fuccaro’s decision to focus on “cosmopolitan Manama” rather than more provincial Muharraq means that migration and exclusion are necessarily at the center of her account (p. 9). Indeed, she argues that “it was the changing social, legal and political position of Manama’s migrant workers which measured the pace of state and nation building in Bahrain” (p. 221). Her early chapters map out life in a linguistically diverse port town, where “perceptions of outsiders and insiders were blurred” and “no collective name denoted ‘immigrant’” (pp. 69-70). The ensuing narrative traces how the categories of citizen and foreigner were forged by an array of actors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Imperial policy is essential to the story. Fuccaro sees the Bahrain Nationality Law of 1937 a turning point, shattering the longstanding ties of kinship and migration that had long connected Manama to the rest of the Gulf (pp. 13, 123, 177). Deploying a classic imperial strategy of divide-and-rule, the British granted special privileges to non-Arab minorities—recruiting them into the police, granting them extraterritorial jurisdiction, or providing special access to jobs (154-158). In so doing, they led residents of Bahrain to associate non-Arabs with not just foreign-ness, but with imperial domination, exacerbating cleavages between various communities (p. 190). Land proved an invaluable mechanism. The British and their monarchical allies restricted land ownership to Bahraini nationals and thus forced mercantile elites—who long deployed their mobility as a political bargaining chip—to accept national subjecthood or abandon their property (pp. 207, 210).

Especially important is Fuccaro’s argument that the exclusionary regime of nationality was in part forged from the bottom up. This becomes apparent in her history of the powerful mass movement against British imperialism from 1954-1956. Fuccaro notes that Bahraini anticolonial activists adopted a form of pan-Arabism that could be highly exclusionary. While she highlights the cross-sectarian nature of anticolonial organizing, stereotyping and discrimination against Persians, Indians, and Jews often marred efforts to forge an inclusive coalition (pp. 186-188, 208). Anti-Iranian feeling proved especially influential in forging the exclusionary citizenship regime, as Lindsey R. Stephenson elaborates in Belonging on Both Shores (2025). The result was a radical transformation in understandings of belonging and the creation of the category of the non-national.

Following Fuccaro, Farah Al-Nakib’s Kuwait Transformed (2016) examines how housing policy and urban planning segregated not only citizens and noncitizens, but reinforced divides within the citizenry itself. My own work, Comrades Estranged (2026), draws on local Arabic-language sources to flesh out the contested history of Gulf citizenship in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Fuccaro, I see imperial policy as critical, but I also highlight a range of often neglected actors: corporate officials, noncitizen Arab technical experts, and local employers. Race is a key category in my analysis, augmenting nationality as a crucial weapon in a corporate and imperial strategy of divide-and-rule. I most break from the existing historiography by tracing how popular and social movements contributed to, and contested, the creation of the Gulf citizenship regime—including anticolonial activists, Arab nationalists, feminists, and, especially, trade unionists. I argue that class solidarity cut across the boundaries of nationality with an account of how Kuwaiti trade unionists orchestrated arguably the most powerful citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in Gulf history. Its defeat, I argue, undermined the interdependent rights of both citizens and noncitizens.

More recent work suggests a turn towards historicizing and complicating received categories with series of theoretical pivots. The first is an effort to study not just “migrants” per say, but the process of their exclusion, highlighting contingency and agency rather than understanding foreign-ness as a primordial characteristic of life in the Gulf. Second is the connection between citizenship and race, as new conceptions of the latter have emerged alongside evolving legal categories and social expectations. Finally, there is a call to discuss citizens and noncitizens in the same analytical frame. Though often made, it is rarely followed, and much work remains to be done incorporating noncitizens into the central thread of social and political history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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