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Abstract
Most of the Gulf states where foreigners make up the majority of the population value positively the diversity of their societies. Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates publicly celebrate this diversity as a new form of cosmopolitanism. However, in Kuwait the official narrative, shaped partially by public figures’ statements in the Parliament, represents the country’s demographic composition and the presence of a wide diversity of foreign communities as impeding its social harmony and economic prosperity. This article builds on Michael Herb’s work on identifying the source of the Kuwaiti idiosyncrasy in the system of political participation that gives nationals voice and precedence, and seeks to understand Kuwait’s peculiar discursive governance of diversity. It contends that the official Kuwaiti understanding of authenticity has led to a political culture that emphasizes exclusiveness and cultural nationalism. In the UAE and other countries, on the contrary, this authenticity is staged and endowed with self-Orientalizing overtones so that it works, in the official discourse, as a pre-condition for a new kind of consumerist universalism based on cultural pluralism. The article first presents the different discursive approaches to diversity in the four Gulf states with a majority of foreigners. It then compares Kuwait and the UAE, examining how the Kuwaiti political system enabled the issue of naturalisations –– embodied by the handling of the bidūn files –– to be constructed as a public issue, and posits that this played a significant role in Kuwait’s tenacious emphasis on exclusion and authenticity.
Notes
1 International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2015: Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility (2015), pp. 38–39.
2 Due to the Covid 19-pandemic, the World Expo 2020 was postponed to 1 October 2021–31 March 2022.
3 InterNations, “Expat Insider Report 2017: The World through Expat Eyes” (2017).
4 Arab Times, “Number of MPs Express Shock Over Latest Expat Insider Survey ‘Kuwait as the Worst Country for Expatriates’ – Report Contradicts Reality: Khalil Al-Saleh”, 3 September 2016.
5 In particular, the statement in the 2016 report mentioning that “a mere 35% of expats [said that] the locals are friendly in Kuwait” caused the anger of the Kuwaiti MPs [InterNations, “Expat Insider Report 2016: The World through Expat Eyes” (2016), p. 154].
6 Scherle and Jonasson, “‘1,001 Places to See Before You Die’: Constructing Oriental Holiday Worlds in European Guide Books – The Example of Dubai”, in Wippel et al., Under Construction: Logics of Urbanism in the Gulf Region (2014), pp. 147–60.
7 Since 2008, the Dubai-based PR consultancy ASDA’A BCW (BCW for Burson Cohn & Wolfe) carries out the annual “Arab Youth Survey” described on its website as “one of the most widely cited pieces of public opinion research on the region by media and policymakers across the world”.
8 This de facto excludes Oman and Saudi Arabia from the scope of this article, where foreign nationals represent respectively 45.4% (April 2016) and 32.7% (mid-2014) of the population according to the figures compiled by the Gulf Labour Markets and Migration (GLMM) Programme website, “GCC: Total Population and Percentage of Nationals and Foreign Nationals in GCC Countries (National Statistics, 2010–2016) (with numbers)”.
9 The term is first discussed in 2004, in Zachariah, Prakash, and Rajan, “Indian Workers in UAE: Employment, Wages and Working Conditions”, Economic and Political Weekly 39.22 (2004), p. 2229. It gained full currency in the literature a few years later. See: Forstenlechner and Rutledge, “The GCC’s “Demographic Imbalance”: Perceptions, Realities and Policy Options”, Middle East Policy 18.4 (2011), pp. 25–43.
10 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983), p. 1.
11 According to the Gulf Labour Markets and Migration (GLMM) Programme website, using the most recent national data between 2010 and 2016, the proportion of foreigners was 89.9% in Qatar (April 2015), 69.4% in Kuwait (March 2016), 88.5% in the UAE (mid-2010), and 52% in Bahrain (mid-2014).
12 The term “expat friendly” is used by international campaigners to promote Bahrain’s image and attractivity abroad.
13 Herb, The Wages of Oil: Parliaments and Economic Development in Kuwait and the UAE (2014). The book is an expansion of an earlier article by the same author, Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats: Political Participation and Economic Diversification in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates”, IJMES 41.3 (2009), pp. 375–395.
14 The analysis of this virtual public forum, requiring an additional methodological protocol, is left out of the scope of this article.
15 Best, “Constructing the Sociology of Social Problems: Spector and Kitsuse Twenty-Five Years Later”, Sociological forum 17.4 (2002), pp. 699–706.
16 The bidūn, short for “bidūn jinsiyya” or without nationality, are long-term residents of the Gulf states who have been denied citizenship in their generation-long place of abode, while the State of Kuwait considers these more than 100,000 people to be “illegal residents” on its territory.
17 In which the state, defining the issue as much as devising the public responses, has an advantage.
18 Likewise, in the case of the public issue of “road fatalities”, for instance, the responsibility of the problem is placed on the incivility and even criminal behaviour of some motorists. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking, Driving, and the Symbolic Order (1981); Gilbert and Henry, “La définition des problèmes publics: entre publicité et discrétion”, Revue française de sociologie 53.1 (2012), p. 44.
19 In Bahrain, some bidūn were granted citizenship on a case by case as early as 1987, according to personal interviews carried out with three bidūn stemming from Sunni families of South Iran (Manama, February 2006). No official figures could be found to assess the significance of these punctual naturalisations or their representativity. What is nevertheless better known is that the bidūn (irrespective of their confession) coming mostly from Iran, were naturalized later following the détente between the Islamic Republic and the Kingdom of Bahrain embodied by the King of Bahrain’s visit to Tehran in August 2002.
20 Since 2006, the Shiite opposition has accused the Bahraini government to naturalise Sunni foreign members of its armed forces to change the sectarian composition of the national population (see below).
21 Lori, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (2019), p.14.
22 To be noted here that the presence of bidūn exist also in Saudi Arabia, where individuals in administrative limbo will only express their grievances on social media. The situation differs in Oman where the imperial legacy in Eastern Africa led to a more inclusive nationality law at the time of nationality attribution.
23 The first articles dealing with the idea were by Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanism”, Social Text 31.32 (1992), pp. 169–186; and Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, Boston Review 19.5 (1994); See also: Cheah and Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (1998); Beck, World Risk Society (1999), pp. 1–18; special issue of the journal Public Culture 12.3 (2000); Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (2002); Breckenridge, Cosmopolitanism (2002); Meijer (ed.) Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East (1999).
24 Archibugi, Held, and Köhler (eds), Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (1998); Hutchings and Dannreuther (eds), Cosmopolitan Citizenship (1999).
25 Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms”, Public Culture 12.3 (2000), p. 577–589.
26 Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”, Public Culture 12.3 (2000), pp. 721–748.
27 For a critique of its superficiality see Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism”, South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002), pp. 869–897.
28 Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement”, Third World Quarterly 24.6 (2003), p. 1072.
29 Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East”, in Meijer (ed.) Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East (1999), pp. 15–33.
30 Ibid., p.29.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things-Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986), pp. 3–63; Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism”, Annals of Tourism Research 15.3 (1988), pp. 371–386.
35 With Bahrain being somehow an outlier. Beaugrand, “Émergence de la ‘nationalité’ et institutionnalisation des clivages sociaux au Koweït et au Bahreïn”, Chroniques yéménites 14 (2007), pp. 89–107.
36 Lionel Trilling, author of Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), as quoted in Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism”, p. 374.
37 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) as paraphrased in Appadurai, “Introduction”, p. 45.
38 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981) as quoted in Appadurai, “Introduction”, p. 45.
39 Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism”, p. 375. Like Sami Zubaida above, Appadurai noted: “Dealing with strangers might provide contexts for the commoditization of things that are otherwise protected from commoditization” [Appadurai, “Introduction”, p. 15].
40 Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats: Political Participation and Economic Diversification in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates”, p. 390.
41 Ibid., p. 391.
42 Appadurai, “Introduction”, p. 45.
43 Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism”, p. 375–376.
44 Ibid. p. 380; Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (2012).
45 Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism”, p. 1072.
46 The organization of global events like the Universal Exhibition in Dubai 2020 or the Football World Cup 2022 in Qatar are part of this strategy.
47 See Part III, entitled “Art Production and Exhibition: A Critical Engagement with Urban Developments”, in Wippel et al. (eds) Under Construction, pp. 161–232.
48 Laure Assaf and Sylvaine Camelin see in the space of the shopping mall a possible form of “cosmopolitan canopy”, as theorized by Elijah Anderson, as “a setting that offers a respite from the lingering tensions of urban life and opportunities for diverse people to come together” [Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (2011), p. xiv]; Assaf and Camelin, “Introduction”, Ateliers d’anthropologie 44 (2017).
49 Hvidt, “The Role of ‘Lavish Construction Schemes’ in ‘Late–Late–Late’ Developing Societies”, in Wippel et al., Under Construction: Logics of Urbanism in the Gulf Region (2014), pp. 31–43.
50 The Jewish families in Bahrain migrated from Iraq to escape religious persecution in the 1950s.
51 Simon Wiesenthal Center, “Bahraini King’s Declaration of Worldwide Religious Tolerance Unveiled at Historic Simon Wiesenthal Center Interfaith Event”, 14 September 2017.
52 Shaikha May, Minister of Culture in May 2014, on a project to renovate the synagogue in Old Manama, quoted in Toumi, “Bahrain Moots Renovation of Manama Synagogue”, Gulf News, 20 February 2014.
53 Salah Al-Bandar, a British strategic planning adviser and insider of the royal and ministerial circles in Bahrain made this policy public in 2006.
54 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (2008).
55 Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (2013); Koch, “Is Nationalism Just for Nationals? Civic Nationalism for Noncitizens and Celebrating National Day in Qatar and the UAE”, Political Geography 54 (2016), pp. 43–53.
56 Koch and Vora, “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula”, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15.3 (2015), pp. 540–552.
57 Ibid., p. 549.
58 See Shah, “Kuwait’s Revised Labor Laws: Implications for National and Foreign Workers”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 20.3–4 (2011), pp. 339–363.
59 This trend also affects Oman that announced at the time of writing its intention to create a long-term residency for expatriates and Saudi Arabia. See: Bsheer, “The Limits of Belonging in Saudi Arabia”, IJMES 52.4 (2020), pp. 748–753.
60 See: Ministry of Interior, Nationality, Passports and Residence Affairs, Bahraini Government website, “Self-Sponsorship Residence Permit”. In January 2021, the government made the application and renewal of this permit possible online whereas before the applicant had to attend in person or through a legal representative [Bahrain News Agency, “NPRA: Self-Sponsorship Residence Permit to be Processed Online”, 9 January 2021].
61 UAE Govt Portal, “Golden Visa: Long-Term Residence Visas in the UAE”.
62 UAE Govt Portal, “Provisions Allowing Foreigners to Acquire the Emirati Nationality, UAE Nationality”.
63 Gibbon, “GCC Countries to ‘Raise the Bar’ as UAE Adopts Strategy to Attract and Retain Top Talent”, Arabian business, 15 April 2021. This is in addition to measures taken by Dubai and Abu Dhabi to attract remote workers during the pandemic. The advertisement [Visit Dubai website, “Work Remotely from Dubai”], offers a “one-year virtual working programme” for $611 that grants, in addition to the visa, “access to all the standard services that residents benefit from, including telecoms, utilities, and schooling”.
64 Ministry of Interior, Departments and Committees, Qatari Govt website, “Permanent Residency”.
65 Ministry of State for Federal National Council Affairs, UAE Govt website, “Mohammed bin Rashid Opens FNC’s 2nd Ordinary Session”, 6 November 2012.
66 MacDonald, “Kuwait Doesn’t Want to be an Expat-Majority Nation Anymore”, Bloomberg, 3 June 2020.
67 In the sense understood by Gilbert and Henry in “La définition des problèmes publics: entre publicité et discrétion”.
68 The diplomatic spats with the Philippines in 2018 and Egypt in 2020 (supplying respectively around 250,000 and 510,000 workers) illustrate it, if needed. Relations with the Philippines deteriorated following the discovery in a freezer of the body of a Filipina domestic worker in early February 2018 –– leading, after a ban, to the conclusion of an agreement on 11 May 2018 offering more guarantees and protection to Filipino workers, which did not prevent yet another violent death of a Filipina in January 2020. The relations with Egypt, as for them, went through tensions, highly publicised, with the stopping of flights at the outset of the Covid crisis, Egypt seen as high-risk country.
69 According to Gulf News, 134,000 foreigners, mainly from India and Egypt, left the country in 2020, after the beginning of the pandemic, while at the time, the figure was officially estimated to reach 1.5m by the end of 2020. Al-Sherbini, “Covid-19: 134,000 Expats Left Kuwait in 2020”, Gulf News, 21 February 2021.
70 Gonçalves, “Kuwait to Cut Expat Numbers”, International Investment, 2 November 2020.
71 IndiansinKuwait.com, “Kuwait Plans Residency Cap to Limit Foreign Presence”, 12 June 2011.
72 Toumi, “Kuwait to Stop Hiring Foreigners in Public Sector”, Gulf News, 1 March 2010.
73 Dickinson, “Kuwait Plans to Cut 100,000 Foreign Workers a Year for 10 Years”, The National, 21 March 2013. Toumi, “Kuwait MP Calls for Deportation of 1.4 Million Expats”, Gulf News, 23 February 2014.
74 Central Statistical Bureau, Kuwaiti Govt, “Population Estimates in Kuwait by Age, Nationality and Sex at 1L1L2020” (2020); Central Statistical Bureau, Kuwaiti Govt, “Population Estimate for the Years 2012 to 2015”.
75 AlShehabi, “Histories of Migration to the Gulf”, in Khalaf, AlShehabi, and Hanieh (eds), Transit States: Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf (2015), pp. 3–38, p. 35.
76 MP Safa al-Hashem, elected in 2012 but failed to be re-elected in 2020, has become notorious for her anti-foreigner stances in the Kuwaiti Parliament. It is important to note however that these parliamentary statements and debates do not represent the whole spectrum of more tolerant attitudes towards non-citizens, but they are made highly visible and widely publicised, because they are uttered in Parliament precisely.
77 AlGhamdi, “GCC Residential Electricity Tariffs”, King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre, 13 August 2020. Tariffs are the same no matter the nationality in Bahrain (but also Saudi Arabia and Oman).
78 Todorova, “A Tariff Increase was Announced on Wednesday, with Some Costs for Expatriates Doubling”, The National, 13 November 2014. The differentiated price hike is presented in the English-speaking press directed at expatriates as a measure towards “reducing the carbon footprint” –– along with the fiscal burden.
79 This resulted in multiplying the water and electricity bills of foreigners by between four and seven times, respectively, in 2016.
80 Migrants-Rights.org, “What’s the Real Deal Behind Kuwait’s Segregated Health Care?”, 30 September 2016.
81 Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats: Political Participation and Economic Diversification in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates”, p. 387.
82 Ibid., pp. 388–390.
83 Herb, The Wages of Oil, pp. 162–365.
84 Herb, “A Nation of Bureaucrats: Political Participation and Economic Diversification in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates”, p. 392.
85 Vora and Le Renard “Who Is ‘Indian’ in the Gulf? Race, Labor and Citizenship”, Middle East Report, 16 June 2021.
86 As represented, for instance, in the focus on innovation and creativity promoted by the Museum of the Future in Dubai.
87 See the discussion of the xenophobic political culture in Kuwait in Al-Sabah, Blood and Soil: To What Extent Has Xenophobia Permeated Political Culture in Kuwait? The Case of the Bidoon, MSc diss. (2017).
88 Bishara, “The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History”, IJMES 52.3 (2020), pp. 397–412.
89 Cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014), p. 28.
90 Ibid., p. 112.
91 The official narratives are to be contrasted with scholarly historian works. See: Bishara, “The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History”; Al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (2016), pp. 71–90.
92 Ragazzi, “Post-Territorial Citizenship”, in Gupta and Padmanabhan (eds), Politics and Cosmopolitanism in a Global Age (2015), pp. 489–497.
93 Inscribed at an international level in the Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws of 12 April 1930.
94 Longva, Walls Built on Sands: Migration, Exclusion and Society in Kuwait (1997).
95 See the new legal categories of Non-Resident Indians (NRI) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) created to rekindle links with ethnically defined Indians living abroad, the PIO being granted visa and investment advantages without political rights.
96 For instance, India sent humanitarian aid to stranded workers laid off by building companies in austerity-hit Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2016.
97 The issue of sovereignty recognition has also become irrelevant with time.
98 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 5.
99 Neveu, Sociologie politique des problèmes publics (2015), p. 7.
100 See: Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait (2018), pp. 50–53 on the Northern and Southern tribes, pp. 108–110 on their differential naturalisations, and pp. 101–102 on administrative inconsistencies (the census authorities would register as “nationals” persons whom the institution in charge of resettling shanty residents in nationals-only housing schemes would not).
101 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 12. See also chap. 2: “Making the Nation: Citizens, “Guests” and Ambiguous Legal Statuses”, pp. 50–96.
102 Ibid., p. 95.
103 Al-Moosa and McLachlan, Immigrant Labour in Kuwait (1985).
104 The italic refers to the concepts used by Neveu, Sociologie politique des problèmes publics, p.18; by 1985, 30% of the 1.02 million expatriates in Kuwait had been born in the country [Shah, “Second-Generation Non-Nationals in Kuwait: Achievements, Aspirations and Plans”, LSE Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalization in the Gulf States 32 (2013)].
105 Beaugrand, “Politiques de non-intégration dans les monarchies du Golfe: Discuter les raisons de leur pérennité”, Transcontinentales: sociétés, edélogie, systéme mondial 8.9 (2010).
106 Ibid.; Birks, Seccombe, and Sinclair, “Migrant Workers in the Arab Gulf: The Impact of Declining Oil Revenues”, International Migration Review 20.4 (1986), p. 810.
107 Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait, p. 176.
108 Eldemerdash, “Being and Belonging in Kuwait: Expatriates, Stateless Peoples and the Politics of Citizenship”, Anthropology of the Middle East (2015), p. 91.
109 See: Ghabra, “Palestinians in Kuwait: Victims of Conflict”, Middle East International 397 (1991), pp. 21–22.
110 Those included Shiite Islamist MPs, a few members of the royal family and so-called liberal figures. For more details, see Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait, pp. 152–194.
111 Herb, The Wages of Oil: Parliaments and Economic Development in Kuwait and the UAE, p. 52.
112 Neveu, Sociologie politique des problèmes publics, p. 18.
113 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 13; chap. 5: “Taʾal Bachir (Come Tomorrow): The Politics of Waiting for Identity Papers”, pp. 160–194.
114 Ibid., p. 12
115 Neveu, Sociologie politique des problèmes publics, p. 18.
116 Ibid., pp. 183–216.
117 Al-Anezi, Al-bidūn fīl Kūwaīt (1994).
118 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 3. Lori mentions the case of a bidūn granted “a scholarship from the Ministry of Education to pursue his higher education in the United States” –– before the plan fell apart for want of being able to renew his passport.
119 Ibid., p. 12.
120 Author’s translation. Annex I: Law Pertaining to ‘Economic Citizenship’ in the Union of the Comoros (Décret N° 08-138/PR Portant promulgation de la loi N° 08-014/AU du 27 novembre 2008 relative à la citoyenneté économiques en Union des Comores) [Beaugrand, “Torn Citizenship in Kuwait: Commodification vs. Rights-based Approaches”, in LSE Middle East Centre collected papers, Challenges to Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa Region 2 (2015), pp. 19–36, Annex p. 86.
121 Nevertheless, this alternative solution seems to be only a new way of buying time: the question of the recognition of these Comorian passports by the international community –– notably in the case of asylum applications –– remains unresolved. Moreover, further to the obvious irregularities in the adoption of the scheme, the Assembly of the Union of the Comoros launched a parliamentary commission of enquiry on the law on economic citizenship, which issued its report in December 2017: its conclusions highlighted not only the lack of an adequate legal framework, but also the extent of public funds’ mishandling. They recommended the cancellation of all passports issued "in the framework of this vast fraud", and an amicable settlement with the UAE to “establish a definitive list of families who fall under the economic citizenship scheme and grant them a vested right” for fear of having to reimburse the $200 million paid by the UAE –– which has since evaporated. The report’s conclusions also suggested that the November 2008 law be repealed and replaced by a new legal framework in the future –– although this does not rule out the future use of citizenship purchases as a lever for development, even if the practice has come to a halt. Assemblée de l’Union des Comores, Rapport de la commission d’enquête parlementaire sur la loi relative à la citoyenneté économique. Rapport de synthèse (2017).
122 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 14.
123 For more technical details on the concrete arrangement of the scheme, see Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait, pp. 131–134; or Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (2015).
124 Musallam Al-Barrak, the then head of the parliamentary opposition in self-imposed exile until November 2021, is even said to have been approached by the authorities to publicly support this solution but staunchly refused. Interview with a member of the opposition, later in self-imposed exile, Kuwait, April 2014.
125 For a sociological history of the bidūn mobilization and its relationship with Kuwaiti nationals and societies, see Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait, pp. 195–220. The term “supporters” of the movement, that emphasises the fact that undocumented migrants are never alone in their mobilisation is borrowed from Siméant, La cause des sans-papiers (1998), p. 25.
126 To be noted that in addition to the fact that the naturalisation provisions of the nationality have never been applied, since decrees of naturalisation are the prerogative of the Emir, they have also been made more difficult throughout the year by the National Assembly, reducing the yearly number or adding new legal requirements, like for instance to be a Muslim.
127 On the basis of their inclusion in the 1965 census.
128 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p.6.
129 See: Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (2017), pp. 37–66.
130 Commins, The Gulf States: A Modern History (2012), pp. 11–12.
131 A hint towards the new Ministry of Happiness in the UAE that was created to address the wellbeing of both nationals and expatriates.
132 Neveu, Sociologie politique des problèmes publics, p. 185.
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Notes on contributors
Claire Beaugrand
Claire Beaugrand is a CNRS Researcher at IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL, Place du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, 75775 Paris Cedex 16, France; and Lecturer in Sociology of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4ND, UK; [email protected].