Introduction: Ethnographic Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in the Gulf: State Narratives, Individual Trajectories and Transnational Connections

Abstract

This introduction offers a general framework to this Special Section which aims to unpack the ambivalences of cosmopolitanism in the Gulf region. It argues that cosmopolitanism is a heuristic concept for the critical analysis of extreme urban diversity in non-Western, non-democratic contexts. Indeed, it acts as a tool for exploring the tensions between logics of exclusion –– underlined by policies that maintain foreign residents outside of the citizenry –– and logics of integration, triggered partly by the competition among global cities to attract talents. While this introduction outlines the many theoretical debates surrounding the notion of cosmopolitanism, the five articles adopt an empirically-grounded approach to display new interdisciplinary perspectives on cosmopolitanism in Gulf societies, based on two overarching observations. First, they deconstruct state narratives of cosmopolitanism as a normative political discourse, with its lexicon of tolerance, diversity and coexistence. Second, they advocate for an understanding of cosmopolitanism built upon the study of individual representations, trajectories, and practices rather than as an ideal of coexistence and openness to the other.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• Gulf
• global cities
• urban diversity
• migration
• transnational

1 Introduction

Located in one of the most urbanized regions of the world, major Gulf cities are characterized by the impressive diversity of their residents, due to a massive influx of international migrants starting with the oil booms of the 1970s. In the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), one in two inhabitants are foreigners. The smaller states are in a unique demographic situation, since the vast majority of city-dwellers are foreign residents: they make up 53% of the total population in Manama (Bahrain), 70% in Kuwait City, 86% in Doha, 89% in Abu Dhabi and 92% in Dubai.¹ This last figure explains why a 2015 report by the International Organization for Migration labeled Dubai the “most cosmopolitan city in the world”.² For some scholars, contemporary Gulf cities thus embody a new form of cosmopolitanism, detached from the historical cases of colonial Alexandria or Levantine port cities. To describe this model, Amar and Singerman crafted the concept of “petrol cosmopolitanism”, although the notion did not gain much traction –– maybe because of its imprecision, since the authors refer to architectural forms and geopolitical orientations, but do not actually address urban diversity.³ On the contrary, Sulayman Khalaf puts diversity at the core of the Gulf city model by considering cosmopolitanism as one of its defining features, alongside modern and vertical urbanism, a car-driven built environment, high energy consumption, and a strong segregation.⁴

Gulf governments deal with this cosmopolitan situation through exclusionary migration policies. Despite recent reforms to the kafāla system in all GCC countries, the majority of the foreign workforce remains in a permanently transient status, with their residence depending on employment, and renewed every one to three years.⁵ The restriction of access to citizenship creates a strong divide between nationals and foreigners that deeply structures the highly hierarchized Gulf societies.⁶ The numerical importance of foreigners has been construed as a double threat to both emerging national identities and the integrity of local populations. This ambivalence is apparent in urban space: while some residential areas are segregated according to hierarchies of nationality (especially in neighborhoods planned for citizens), others exhibit a large diversity of nationalities of the same social class. These spaces are adjacent to more public and commercial places like shopping malls, where these diverse populations meet without necessarily mixing.⁷

However, at the same time that Gulf states exclude most foreign residents, they seek to harness their consumption and purchasing power, especially with regard to the wealthier categories of expatriates. In line with the diversification strategy adopted since the 2000s to sustain post-oil development, the sectors of finance, real estate, tourism, education, art, and culture have been at the forefront of Gulf economies.⁸ Exclusionary migration policies thus started to appear counterproductive to economic goals in the long run. In the 2000s, as Dubai was establishing real estate as a strategic sector, it started to open property ownership to foreigners. Since then, most of the GCC countries have implemented schemes to attribute extended residency through “golden visas” (or consider doing so, in the case of Kuwait), and in some cases citizenship, to specific categories of wealthy or highly qualified expatriates.

Illustrating this shift, cosmopolitan narratives which had previously been erased are now included in the branding of Gulf cities such as Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi, which have been marketed as major financial and cultural hubs where “the world meets”. Through global logics of consumption, these cities “capitalize” on the diversity of their populations and use their urban landscapes to materialize this new ideology.⁹ They aim to attract and retain foreign investors, skilled expatriates, and global tourists, in competition with other global (or globalizing) cities like Singapore or Hong Kong. The United Arab Emirates in particular have developed their international image around the idea of their openness to the world; both promoting universalist discourses on culture and the arts (as exemplified by the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum) and mobilizing the rhetoric of “happiness” and “tolerance”. The latter aim to distinguish the UAE from a region whose global image is associated with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and to gloss over the country’s bad reputation in terms of human rights –– especially as regards humanitarian reports on the exploitation of unskilled workers which, paradoxically, have become more prominent as the country markets itself on the global stage.¹⁰ Similar dynamics can be identified around the organization of the football World Cup in Qatar, or the Expo 2020 in Dubai. The latter, as demonstrated by Delphine Pagès-El Karoui,¹¹ acts as an urban laboratory of these new expressions of cosmopolitanism: among the Gulf metropolises, Dubai is indeed the one that most embodies tensions and contradictions between logics of global consumption on the one hand, and of exclusionary migration policies and spatial segregation on the other.

2 Situating cosmopolitanism in the Gulf

The papers presented in this special section came out of two conferences held in 2017, which examined Gulf cosmopolitanism in a comparative perspective.¹² At the time, two recent comparative papers had questioned the use of the notion of cosmopolitanism and the logics of inclusion and exclusion in the Gulf. In an effort to unpack the literature’s two hegemonic concepts, kafāla and ethnocracy, Neha Vora and Nathalie Koch observed a “shift in focus from exclusion to inclusion” towards foreign residents in the Emirates and Qatar, but without challenging the existence of an exclusionary system.¹³ Laure Assaf and Hélène Thiollet undertook a comparative endeavor to analyze what they label “cosmopolitanism in denial”. The expression refers to a paradox: while Saudi Arabia and the UAE enforce exclusionary policies towards foreigners, both also publicly endorse cosmopolitan claims at the level of state discourse. These claims are rooted, for the former, in Islamic universalism and, for the latter, in a discourse of tolerance towards religious diversity.¹⁴ These discourses are not without effect on migrants’ and citizens’ practices and subjectivities, which resonate –– and, at times, come into tension –– with everyday encounters with urban diversity.

The papers in this section further explore the ambivalences of cosmopolitanism in the Gulf region, which is understood as a tool for exploring the tensions between logics of exclusion and integration, and between local, national, and global forms of belonging and identification. We argue that cosmopolitanism is a heuristic concept for the critical analysis of extreme urban diversity in non-Western, non-democratic contexts, where for decades there has been no plan to integrate foreign residents and where globalization and competition between cities now trigger the need for some change in the paradigm of non-integration. While these characteristics might seem contradictory to the ideals of equality, freedom, and hospitality that are generally associated with the notion, we contend that cosmopolitanism –– understood not as a normative ideal but as a problematized concept –– is precisely a conceptual tool which allows to question such situations and explore their ambivalences. Before turning to the contributions of this special section, we delve into the various academic debates that have surrounded this notion.

In the wake of global studies, the cosmopolitan turn was initiated by the pioneering work of Ulf Hannerz,¹⁵ followed by other anthropologists,¹⁶ sociologists,¹⁷ philosophers,¹⁸ and geographers.¹⁹ Initially, its classical meaning among the Greek cynics expressed the feeling of being a citizen of the world, detached from any local ties and particularisms. Nowadays deeply intertwined with globalization, the notion can be used loosely as a synonym with various concepts including global, transnational or hybrid. Among these multiple definitions, cosmopolitanism can be applied to (1) a person “willing to engage with otherness” and interested in the diversity of the world²⁰ or an individual identifying as a citizen of the world, (2) a space characterized by the presence of a heterogeneous population or/and deeply opened to the world and adopting foreign cultural forms and ways of life,²¹ or (3) an ideology or a political project claiming the need to go beyond methodological nationalism to shape new forms of governance for our globalized world.²² Globally, the notion of cosmopolitanism has been used to express the capacity to jointly consider unity and plurality, so well encapsulated by Kwame Appiah’s laconic formula that cosmopolitanism equals “universality plus difference”.²³ It also expresses the dialectics between global and local: “cosmopolitanism can be seen as constituting a field of tensions that arises whenever the local and the global come into contact”.²⁴

Social scientists have widely criticized the concept of cosmopolitanism for its loose definition and its multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. Three common critiques of cosmopolitanism accuse the concept of being too theoretical, too elitist and too Eurocentric. It is also frequently associated with overly theoretical approaches that tend to disregard social reality. Calls for a conceptualization of cosmopolitanism rooted in a more empirical approach are numerous.²⁵ Researchers emphasize the idea that cosmopolitanism is expressed through forms that vary over time and space.²⁶ Some combine this demand for empiricism with the desire to break free from its normative dimension, inherited from Kant. Others have dismissed it for its elitist approach,²⁷ although several works have shown that cosmopolitan attitudes are not limited to privileged social classes: Pnina Werbner thus evokes a “vernacular” or “working-class” cosmopolitanism.²⁸ Ulf Hannerz himself, in a later article,²⁹ revisited his seminal typology between cosmopolitans, transnationals and locals and agreed that cosmopolitans are not exclusively a privileged elite. Post-colonial scholars have also criticized the colonial nature of the concept³⁰ and its overly Eurocentric character.³¹ All of these general criticisms have been applied to the Middle East by historians and anthropologists³².

Although Peter Coulmas has written a history of cosmopolitanism,³³ to our knowledge no synthesis has yet been produced of the many ways that the concept has developed specifically in various cultural areas. In such a geography of cosmopolitanism yet to be written (but which David Harvey called for long ago),³⁴ the Mediterranean and the Middle East occupy a central, often paradigmatic, position³⁵ whose main milestones have been traced by Franck Mermier.³⁶ As he shows, the concept has been largely used by historians of various eras, either to question a Muslim cosmopolitanism³⁷ or to analyze cities with a strongly diverse population, mostly Mediterranean ports or large cities of the Ottoman Empire, where minorities played an active role in urban governance.³⁸ During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alexandria was established as the archetype of the Mediterranean cosmopolitan city, and its colonial cosmopolitanism has been widely debated.³⁹

In describing contemporary spaces or individuals, social scientists of the Middle East may also use a different meaning of cosmopolitanism, one tied to places or people strongly connected to globalization rather than urban diversity. In his book Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East, the American anthropologist Mark Allen Peterson uses cosmopolitanism to define the identity practices of a specific social class: “Members of what I'm calling the cosmopolitan class seek to incorporate this modernité into their everyday lives primarily (but not exclusively) through consumption. Yet it is primarily locally that this cosmopolitan class harvest the fruits of is transnational modernity, because participation in global flows is a circuitous route to a significant place in local class and status hierarchies”.⁴⁰

3 Contributions of this special section

While acknowledging the many debates among theories of cosmopolitanism, the articles gathered in this special section adopt an empirically-grounded approach to cosmopolitanism in the Gulf. Spanning the fields of political science, geography, and sociology, they offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the representations, trajectories, and practices of cosmopolitanism in Gulf societies, based on two overarching observations.

The first is that the notion of cosmopolitanism as a normative political discourse –– with its attendant lexicon of tolerance, diversity, and coexistence –– exists as a vernacular discourse in the Gulf region today. This discourse is mobilized under various forms and for various purposes by certain governments and by certain categories of the population. Looking at the mechanisms of this mobilization and exploring when, how, and by whom this notion is or is not adopted are thus important elements in understanding how both ruling elites and ordinary residents think about and relate to the linguistic, ethnic, national, and religious plurality of Gulf populations. From this point of view, Claire Beaugrand’s examination of the situation in Kuwait is a fascinating counterpoint to that of the United Arab Emirates, which is the main setting of most of the texts in this special section. While both countries showcase a de facto “cosmopolitan situation”⁴¹ and similarly exclusionary politics, the UAE has elevated “tolerance” to the rank of a national political agenda, whereas Kuwait is distinguished by the openly xenophobic discourse of some Members of Parliament and certain social media influencers (although others have denounced these discourses). Although this situation might appear paradoxical considering Kuwait’s more participative political system, Claire Beaugrand demonstrates how the erasure of foreigners’ contributions to the Kuwaiti economy and its broader cultural identity is in fact an outcome of this very political system’s exclusivity.

The second general observation builds on recent work advocating for an understanding of cosmopolitanism based on the study of individual trajectories, practices, and discourses, rather than as an ideal of coexistence and openness to others. Defined as an ambivalent set of tensions between inclusion and exclusion, the notion of cosmopolitanism is indeed a productive analytical tool for exploring certain professional milieus and migrant communities within urban societies in the Gulf. Andrew Gardner pays attention to the way segregation actually contributes to cosmopolitan conditions, inspired by his longstanding fieldwork in the Industrial Area of Doha. Focusing on everyday migrant experiences of segregation in the peripheral enclaves, he conceptualizes the relationship between cosmopolitanism and migrants’ segregation, offering an ethnography of cosmopolitanism from below.

The four remaining articles focus on the United Arab Emirates, around two types of populations: artists and art entrepreneurs in Dubai and their transnational connections with Iran and India, and French residents of Abu Dhabi.

Artists’ trajectories are markedly transnational, and have become increasingly so with the globalization of the contemporary art market. While state-funded museums have been given much scholarly attention in the Gulf region, and while the reception of art and cultural productions has been the focus of an earlier special issue of the Journal of Arabian Studies⁴² in this issue Amin Moghadam examines an oft-forgotten category of art entrepreneurs. He shows how art professionals in Dubai frame cosmopolitanism –– understood as the familiarity with and ease of navigation between various groups and contexts –– as an added value for themselves, as it participates in building transnational networks for artist training and the circulation and marketing of works of art. While the Iranian cultural entrepreneurs he studies make use of their movement between Tehran and Dubai to construct their own status in the art milieu, Aurélie Varrel explores how cosmopolitan trajectories can become a subject for artists themselves. Through her analysis of the “Binary states” exhibition, presented at the Kochi Biennale (Kerala, India) in 2016–17, she shows how Indian artists and curators had devised an alternative narrative on migration between India and the UAE that received an ambivalent response from its Indian audience due to this narrative’s framing within debates about urban diversity and migration in the Gulf. Interestingly, the groups examined in both articles belong to migrant communities who have long-standing historical ties with the UAE, and whose members occupy a variety of positions within UAE society, from stigmatized lower-class jobs to prestigious business elites. These artists and cultural entrepreneurs, through their membership in a privileged professional milieu characterized by its cultural capital, thus occupy an ambivalent position in this society, one that makes it particularly crucial for them to appropriate the discourses and practices of cosmopolitanism.

The last two articles focus on French residents of Abu Dhabi. This group, which comes under the category of “Western expatriates” (a social classification that is widely recognized within the UAE),⁴³ has been studied less than its British counterpart,⁴⁴ whose relationship with the Gulf region is more directly framed by post-colonial dynamics. While existing work focuses on Westerners’ privileged position within social hierarchies and the reproduction of this status through intimate relationships, the articles in this issue take an original approach by looking at how these residents understand cosmopolitanism in their everyday lives and how they use these understandings as a framework for their interactions with other groups and as an instrument of distinction within the community of French residents. Clio Chaveneau and Hadrien Dubucs develop a typology of French migrants’ attitudes towards cosmopolitanism and demonstrate how these attitudes are informed by individual migration trajectories, and how they contribute to shaping people’s social lives, friendships, and outings in Abu Dhabi. In parallel, Claire Cosquer examines how cosmopolitan desires (or their absence) are construed as a specific form of capital within the educational choices of French residents. In this instance, cosmopolitanism becomes an instrument of both social reproduction and practices of distinction within the French community in the Emirati capital.

Taken together, the articles in this special section aim to bring new empirical material to discussions of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Gulf societies. We hope that they will inspire the collection of further comparative data on categories of Gulf residents that have been little studied to date, and complicate the use of cosmopolitanism in state narratives as well as withing its scholarly understanding.

In particular, we hope these texts pave the way for further research on cosmopolitanism in the Gulf beyond the UAE’s main cities, which we acknowledge as a limitation of this special section. The discrepancies in research available on the region are certainly due, in part, to the prominence of the notions of diversity and tolerance in the official discourse of the UAE government in the last decade, and the concomitant necessity for scholars to address and confront these discourses. But they are also a reflection of how research on the region is generally oriented, and indeed in recent years scholars have started paying closer attention to the fact that migrants are more than a structural but interchangeable component of Gulf societies. Several works have acknowledged that many foreign residents settle for long periods of time in these societies, and thus contribute to shaping them, and have begun exploring the ways that foreigners have developed senses of belonging to the Gulf cities in which they live, but not to the national community, which remains inaccessible to them.⁴⁵ While most of these works are focused on the UAE and, to a lesser extent, Qatar, we hope that the contrasting example of Kuwait in this section will be an invitation to pursue comparison.

4 In lieu of a conclusion: reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic

The first draft of this introduction was written in 2020, just after the irruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we are still witnessing some of its consequences, the COVID-19 pandemic might offer a productive lens through which to examine the place of foreigners in Gulf societies and the dialectics between exclusion and inclusion, and between the local and the global, which are at the heart of the notion of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, in the Gulf just like elsewhere in the world, the pandemic has been both a new phenomenon –– forcing states to adapt their healthcare systems and their economies –– and a revealer of pre-existing social and political tendencies.

First, the sudden halt in international flows of people and goods considerably threatened the economic model of these emergent global cities. The pandemic heavily impacted some of the major sectors on which Gulf countries rely for economic diversification, especially tourism and real estate: the rescheduling of the Expo 2020 in Dubai (delayed to 2021–22) is the prime example. Moreover, for a time it disrupted the usual regulatory mechanisms of the kafāla system, which ensures the “flexibility” of the workforce and has helped these economies to absorb the shocks of previous economic crises by sending unemployed migrant workers back to their countries of origin rather than supporting the costs of unemployment.⁴⁶

Secondly, by spreading within national borders, the pandemic somewhat reconfigured representations of foreigners as a health threat. Indeed, previously Gulf countries had notably managed epidemic prevention by using health criteria to filter migrant workers entering the country. Every foreigner has to undergo testing for tuberculosis, hepatitis, and HIV, among other illnesses, before being granted a residence visa or its renewal. Such medical tests not only fuel the idea that foreigners may be the ones bringing diseases into the country, but also foster the idea that they can be avoided. The halt to international travel in the first months of the pandemic stopped all circulation, thus forcing Gulf states to deal with this new situation.

Unsurprisingly, many Gulf states reinforced exclusionary discourses and practices by adopting repressive stances towards the poorer categories of migrant workers, who were seen as the main carriers of the virus, especially when labor camps became clusters for the epidemic as a direct consequence of camp housing and living conditions. In Qatar, the police rounded up a number of Nepalese laborers and deported them to their home country.⁴⁷ In most countries, foreign residents who had traveled abroad and had their flights cancelled were prevented from returning for months, and many lost their jobs as a result. The duration of this ban varied widely from country to country and from one professional group to the other, according to their “essential” character in national economies. The pandemic widened inequalities within Gulf societies as everywhere else, leaving the poorer categories of migrants without “good options”, which highlights their status as “unwanted” in both their host society and in their country of origin.⁴⁸ At the same time, other categories of migrants were hailed as heroes: at the very time the UAE started flights repatriating unemployed Indian construction and service workers, the national media saluted the chartering of planes to bring in Indian doctors and nurses.

Meanwhile, in keeping with sanitary measures, Gulf states often adopted a pragmatic stance. In Abu Dhabi, announcements were published in English, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu to explain that the government teams conducting systematic testing in industrial areas like Mussaffah (where most unskilled workers are housed) would not be checking visa status –– a pragmatic acknowledgement that the pandemic was now a matter of public health and took precedence over strict migratory policies.

The pandemic thus illuminated the variety of ways through which Gulf countries perceive and represent the diversity of their populations, and manage foreigners and nationals alike. In the hard times born of COVID-19, the tensions between inclusion and exclusion are even higher. By providing a conceptual tool to articulate and explore these tensions in urban contexts, the notion of cosmopolitanism is particularly relevant to the exploration of relationships to alterity and the coexistence of various communities in contemporary Gulf societies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laure Assaf

Laure Assaf is Assistant Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies and Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE, [email protected];

Delphine Pagès-El Karoui

Delphine Pagès-El Karoui is Professor of Geography at INALCO, 2 Rue de Lille, 75007 Paris, France, [email protected].

Notes

1 For the figures regarding Manama, Kuwait, and Doha, see Gulf Labour Markets and Migration, “Percentage of Nationals and Foreign Nationals in GCC Countries’ Population (Latest Year Available, 2010–2016)” (2017). As for Abu Dhabi and Dubai, figures come from their respective statistic centers: Abu Dhabi Statistics Center, Statistical Yearbook of Abu Dhabi 2017 (2017); and Dubai Statistics Center, “Number of Population Estimated by Nationality-Emirate of Dubai (2019–2017)”.

2 International Organization for Migration, “Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility”, World Migration Report 2015 (2015).

3 Amar and Singerman (eds), Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (2006).

4 Khalaf, “The Evolution of the Gulf City Type, Oil, and Globalization”, in Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and Al-Mutawa (eds), Globalization and the Gulf (2006).

5 Al-Shehabi, Khalaf, and Hanieh (eds), Transit States: Labour, Migration & Citizenship in the Gulf (2015); Elsheshtawy, Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia (2019).

6 Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait (1997); Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait (2017); Lori, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (2019).

7 Assaf, “Le shopping mall comme moment urbain: Pratiques citadines et transformations des espaces marchands aux Émirats arabes unis”, Ateliers d’Anthropologie 44 (2017).

8 Mirgani, “Introduction: Art and Cultural Production in the GCC”, Journal of Arabian Studies 7.1 (2017), pp. 1–11.

9 Koch, “Capitalizing on Cosmopolitanism in the Gulf”, Current History 118.812 (2019). Pagès-El Karoui, “Cosmopolitan Dubai: Consumption and Segregation in a Global City”, in Lejeune, Schmoll, Thiollet, Pagès-El Karoui (eds), Migration, Urbanity and Cosmopolitanism in a Globalised World (2021).

10 Pagès-El Karoui, “Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism from Above in Dubai: Forging Landscapes of Tolerance and Happiness in a Global City”, City: Analysis of Urban Changes, Theory, Action 25.1–2 (2021), pp. 171–186.

11 Ibid.

12 The first conference, organized in Paris on 11­–12 October 2017, was entitled Cosmopolitanism Revisited: Comparative Perspectives on Urban Diversity from the Gulf and Beyond. The second, called Migrants in Global Cities: Experiences from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, took place on 30–31 October 2017, in Singapore. See also Lejeune et al., Migration, Urbanity and Cosmopolitanism in a Globalised World (2021).

13 Vora and Koch, “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula”, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15.3 (2015), pp. 540–552; Koch, “Is Nationalism Just for Nationals? Civic Nationalism for Noncitizens and Celebrating National Day in Qatar and the UAE”, Political Geography 54 (2016).

14 Thiollet and Assaf, “Cosmopolitanism in Exclusionary Contexts”, Population, Space and Place 27.1 (2021).

15 Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture”, Theory, Culture and Society 7.2–3 (1990).

16 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996); Nava, “Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference”, Theory, Culture and Society 19.1–2 (2002), pp. 81–99; Werbner, “Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds”, Social Anthropology 7.1 (1999), pp. 17–35; Werbner, “The Dialectics of Urban Cosmopolitanism: Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Cities of Strangers”, Identities 22.5 (2015), pp. 569–587; Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”, Theory, Culture and Society 23.2–3 (2006), pp. 496–498.

17 Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies”, Theory, Culture and Society 19.1–2 (2002); Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism”, South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002); Sennett, “Cosmopolitanism and the Social Experience of Cities”, in Vertovec and Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (2002), pp. 42–47; Delanty, Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (2012).

18 Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, Boston Review 19.5 (1994); Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006).

19 Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils”, Public Culture 12.2 (2000); Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009).

20 Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture” (1990).

21 Latham, “Sociality and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: National, Cosmopolitan and Local Imaginaries in Auckland, New Zealand”, in Binny, Holloway, Millington, and Young (eds), Cosmopolitan Urbanism (2006).

22 Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006).

23 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, p. 202.

24 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (2009).

25 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism; Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination; Skrbis, Kendall, and Woodward, “Locating Cosmopolitanism: Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category”, Theory, Culture and Society 21.6 (2016), pp. 115–136.

26 Escallier, “Le cosmopolitisme méditerranéen: réflexions et interrogations”, Cahiers de la Méditerranée 67 (2003); Eldem, “Istanbul as a Cosmopolitan City: Myths and Realities”, in Quayson and Daswani (eds), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (2013).

27 Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers”.

28 Werbner, “Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds”; Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”.

29 Hannerz, “Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics”, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 107.3 (2006).

30 Veer, “Colonial Cosmopolitanism”, in Vertovec and Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (2002), pp. 165–182.

31 Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies”, History Compass 6.5 (2008); Zeng, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: Concept and Approaches”, The Sociological Review 62.1 (2014), pp. 137–148.

32 Driessen, “Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered”, History and Anthropology 16.1 (2005); Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism”.

33 Coulmas, Les Citoyens du monde: histoire du cosmopolitisme (1995).

34 Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils”.

35 For example, in Vertovec and Cohen's foundational work Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, the only article that explicitly refers to a regional version of cosmopolitanism is that by Zubaida, “Middle Eastern Experiences of Cosmopolitanism”, which evokes these experiences through the double example of an individual –– the Muslim reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897) –– and a city –– Cairo [Zubaida, “Middle Eastern Experiences of Cosmopoltanism”, in Vertovec and Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (2002), pp. 32–41].

36 Mermier, “Urban Cosmopolitanisms in the Arab World: Contributing to Theoretical Debates from the Middle East”, in Lejeune, Pagès-El Karoui, Schmoll, and Thiollet (eds), Migration, Urbanity and Cosmopolitanism in a Globalized World (2021).

37 Meijer, Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East (1999); Ernst and Martin (eds), Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism (2010); Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (2015); Maclean and Ahmed (eds), Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past (2013).

38 Lafi, “Mediterranean Cosmopolitanism and Its Contemporary Revivals: A Critical Approach”, New Geographies 5 (2013); Lafi and Freitag, “Cities Compared: Cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean and Adjacent Regions”, HAL Open Science (2006); Freitag and Lafi (eds), Urban Governance Under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict (2014).

39 Ilbert, Yannakakis, and Hassoun (eds), Alexandria 1860–1960: The Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan Community (1997); Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism”; Fahmy, “For Cavafy, with Love and Squalor: Some Critical Notes on the History and Historiography of Modern Alexandria”, in Hirst and Silk (eds), Alexandria, Real and Imagined (2004).

40 Peterson, Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East (2011).

41 Agier, Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition (2016).

42 Mirgani (ed.), “Art and Cultural Production in the GCC”, CIRS Special Issue, Journal of Arabian Studies 7 Supp 1 (2017).

43 Le Renard, Western Privilege: Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai (2021).

44 Walsh, Transnational Geographies of The Heart: Intimate Subjectivities in a Globalising City (2018).

45 Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (2013); Assaf, Jeunesses arabes d’Abou Dhabi (Émirats arabes unis): Catégories statutaires, sociabilités urbaines et modes de subjectivation, PhD diss. (2017).

46 Hanieh, “Overcoming Methodological Nationalism: Spatial Perspectives on Migration to the Gulf Arab States”, in Al-Shehabi, Khalaf, and Hanieh (eds), Transit States: Labour, Migration & Citizenship in the Gulf (2015).

47 Wright, “No Good Options for Migrant Workers in Gulf COVID-19 Lockdown”, MRP: Middle East Research and Information Project, 30 April 2020.

48 Ibid.