Abstract
In recent years, the study of citizenship, residency, and migration in the Middle East has become a key scholarly question related to a number of traditional academic concerns: security, democratization, rule of law, wealth creation, exploitation, nationalism, and national identities. In the Arab Gulf region, this focus has been all the more prevalent in countries, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar, in which more than 90 percent of their resident populations are expatriates and in which these extreme population dynamics have visibly changed the social–economic fabric for any visitor to witness.
In this context, Noora Lori goes one step further in this remarkable new addition to the scholarship on citizenship and the Gulf. Her extensive study of the UAE’s bidun (from the Arabic: without citizenship) population that has been issued passports from the Union of Comoros Islands, focuses on a group numbering somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 in a state whose citizens number about 800,000. The crucial anomaly is that many of the bidun lived on the territory when the UAE obtained independence in 1971. To put this observation into context in the UAE, a federal state constituted by seven sheikhdoms, nationality is granted as an act of loyalty at the level of one of the seven sheikhdoms, to be confirmed by the federal state by the issuance of a “family book.” This family book traces the family lineage to one of the Arab tribes living on the territory in 1925. A family book is crucial for permanent residency rights, employment, health care, education, and many of the substantial financial transfers that this oil-rich state provides. Only the federal Ministry of Interior, controlled by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, is entitled to issue this important document.
The book’s main purpose is to analyze and explain the process through which one part of the native Emirati population only obtained what Lori calls limbo status over decades. It is worth pointing out that many of these individuals had been issued UAE passports in the past through one of the seven Emirates, only to have those passports withdrawn at a later point in time. Furthermore, a good number of them had family members, such as mothers or cousins, who were “full” citizens. In her analysis, the issuance of Comoros passports to the bidun consolidated this limbo status yet also included an important novelty as it used a foreign state to “outsource” these individuals’ nationality status.
Lori contends that the bidun question involves an important colonial legacy over jurisdiction when many individuals came to what was then the Trucial States from other parts of the British Empire, especially British India. Britain claimed protection status for these British subjects, in an effort to avoid local tribal jurisdiction. Furthermore, different visions of what the nation was, based on Arab tribal lineage or based on the protection status given by rulers of the seven emirates, compounded the issue of legal uncertainty. The ruler of Dubai, for example, granted protection to a large number of Persian merchants, ethnic Indian refugees fleeing Idi Amin of Uganda, and a multitude of other groups throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Oil income furthermore started to play an important role in defining nationality at the sheikhdom level: Oil-rich Abu Dhabi has faced mounting migratory pressure from the Northern sheikhdoms since the 1960s and attempted to define its own citizenry restrictively. In turn, this decision encouraged the Northern emirates to define their own citizenry more broadly, only to have this arrangement overturned once the state was founded in 1971 and the issuance of family books became crucial.
The power politics between the Abu Dhabi-controlled Federal Authorities and the Northern Emirates is one of this book’s intriguing highlights, especially as Lori is able to demonstrate that the eternal wait for the family book primarily concerns applicants from the Northern emirates and how some bidun feel that their lot has become much worse with the death of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Rachid Al Maktoum, in 1990. The author furthermore theorizes how the needs and abilities of twenty-first-century digital identification technology and visa-free passport schemes have changed the uncertain status of a population that has been waiting for decades to have their family books issued, as they now become permanently temporary. Security questions surrounding the high number of migrants who entered the UAE through its guest-worker scheme also enabled individual members of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, who occupied strategic posts in the Interior Ministry, to once and for all “sort out” the Emirati bidun question by issuing foreign passports. That this solution is in no way permanent, however, is also clear from Lori’s analysis of the legal text that commits the Comoros Islands to issuing passports without allowing these passport holders to reside on the islands. Clearly, the lack of permanence raises questions about these passports’ renewability and what citizenship rights, if any, passport holders can obtain for themselves and their offspring. That, as appears to be the case, the passport is just another way of making hopefuls of Emirati citizenship wait even longer, promising them a family book if they prove to be law-abiding residents, appears clear to all participants in the process, not least the recipients of these passports.
The book’s many assets include a focus on what this temporary status means for the affected people. The author draws on 68 interviews conducted in the UAE and abroad. Lori shows how waiting for the situation to improve grinds people down and how it leaves incredible paper trails from marriage, birth certificates, school attendance, and so on, where all must be documented. Far from being “undocumented,” her study shows, people in such situations are obliged to spend an enormous amount of time and money to document their presence over decades.
In short, this book is a remarkable piece of scholarship. It theorizes the question of precarious citizenship among settled groups and migrants that do not fit the historical narrative of postcolonial states. It shows how precarious citizenship evolved historically and how contemporary migration “management” tools, such as the issuance of biometrical identification cards, compounds these individuals’ precarious citizenship status. Most importantly perhaps, the book accounts for the disturbing effects that bureaucratic practices have on the lives of people in countries that have the means to integrate these people in their citizenship regimes but choose not to do so.