Abstract
Keywords
This book examines the interacting processes of international labor migration and the construction of a postcolonial city-state within the context of neoliberal development. Dubai’s mode of neoliberal globalization acts as a frame through which low-wage migrants’ experiences are interrogated. The dual processes of neoliberal development and international migration are rapid, intense, and highly visible in Dubai. Understanding Dubai’s present mode of development and labor migration first requires an appreciation of its geopolitical and historiographic context. The book highlights the significance of migrant workers in the construction of the modern emirate and how this group has been systematically excluded from mainstream narratives of development and charts the changing trends of labor migration to the region in general and Dubai in particular.
This book is an interdisciplinary text situated at the intersection of research on labor migration, contemporary urban studies, and processes of globalization and neoliberal development. It brings the ethnographic and everyday into studies of globalization and neoliberalization in the Gulf. The book presents migrant employment and exploitation, in addition to larger economic forces, as markers of global cities. It focuses on the consequences of migration for the sending state and aspects of reintegration into the home village. This book makes a significant contribution to the literature on both labor migration and global cities by highlighting conceptualizations by the migrant worker. Low-wage migrants are typically portrayed merely as victims of forces of global capital and lacking significant forms of agency. This book demonstrates that they display remarkable modes of human agency and empowerment, thereby showcasing possibilities for challenging and resisting discrimination. The work reflects an acknowledgment of migrants’ agency as well as their relative lack of power within migrant contexts.
The chapter ‘Dubai as a Metaphor’ deals with discursive constructions of Dubai. It dissects how Dubai has usually been represented in both popular and migrant discourses. The chapter examines how neoliberal development rhetoric is embraced by the state and performed in ways in which a desirable image is crafted for a global audience. Dubai’s attempts to mold itself into a global city such as London or New York are discussed through its attempt to draw international capital and labor. Migrants are drawn to Dubai largely because of its presentations of postcolonial, non-Western modernity. The chapter also demonstrates that the city’s aggressive development, evidenced in the built environment, can be read as a form of cultural expansionism. Finally, the chapter shows how Dubai’s meteoric rise and fall on the world stage has been seized on by commentators as a cautionary tale against the excesses of greed and megalomania. By functioning as a symbol for such diverse discourse, Dubai has evolved into a symbol of global resonance.
The chapter ‘Migrants and the State’ examines migrants’ relationships with both receiving and sending states. It unpacks the legal, political, and everyday discriminatory frameworks in Dubai and how they are inscribed on low-wage migrants. Through detailed, moving ethnographic accounts, the chapter demonstrates how migrants in Dubai are stratified along multiple intersecting lines of race, class, nationality, gender, and immigration status. The real consequences of these divisions to migrant workers in terms of abuse and the denial of rights are brought to light. The chapter also provides a balanced account of the structural inequality that characterizes the lives of low-wage migrants in Dubai. Most popular and academic accounts attribute the situation of exploitation of low-wage migrants to the lack of enforcement and care by the government of the United Arab Emirates, as well as the lack of political pressure from the international community and rights organizations, but they neglect to consider the role of sending state. This chapter gives a more complete account by exploring the role of middlemen agents and embassies, as well as the need for a more transnational conceptualization of rights to deal with the problem of low-wage migrant exploitation. In the context of global neoliberal restructuring, this chapter calls for more international governance mechanisms to ensure low-wage migrant rights are protected.
The chapter ‘Neoliberal Narratives’ examine low-wage migrants’ constructions of masculinity, femininity and empowered selves, their reaction to their marginalized situations, and the possibilities for reinvention that Dubai represents. Through analysis of regular routines, discriminatory practices, and enforced discipline, the everyday infantilization and emasculation of low-wage migrants by employers is extensively discussed. The chapter also shows that migrants’ subjectivities are shaped by their immersion into modern contexts of neoliberal rationality. The chapter focuses on the ways in which these altered conceptions of self are incorporated into ways of dealing with difficult and exploitative migrant life in Dubai. These new ways of governing the self, learned by low-wage migrants, are encouraged by employers, charity workers, and middle-class migrants. Thus, the chapter charts the creation of low-wage migrant narratives of self that subtly challenge employers’ and the state’s constructions of them as disposable, dangerous, and having no other need except to accumulate capital. The neoliberal ideology that constructs them merely as workers is therefore reappropriated in empowering ways.
The chapter ‘Divided City’ uses the built environment and everyday mobilities in the city to analyze inequalities in the emirate. It understands how space and movement in the city reflect, reify, and create divisions through the exclusion of certain groups deemed undesirable. The chapter examines how these practices are sustained through state-led neoliberal actions, which result, for example, in the construction of gated developments. The chapter examines two different types of gated community: a middle-class luxury development and a labor camp. They are the dominant residential forms in Dubai and are a prominent feature in the everyday lives of migrants. The consequences for low-wage migrants of living in such spaces, such as alcoholism and depression, are discussed. It is not just in living arrangements, however, but also in their ability to move around the city that migrants are segregated. The unintended consequences of this sociospatial polarization and control of space in terms of the formal practices that migrants develop are also interrogated. Finally, the shopping mall, the most important leisure space in Dubai, is examined as a public space that encapsulates and embodies hierarchies of everyday life in the emirate.
The chapter ‘Social Networks’ examines informal social networks among migrants in Dubai. A theoretical framework of informality is used to understand the social networks that develop outside the neoliberal frames of efficiency and competition that the state uses to manage migrants. Cross-cultural and co-ethnic networks can act in both productive and abusive ways for migrants. The chapter emphasizes how these networks often function as coping mechanisms and forms of care in day-to-day life for migrants in Dubai. Through ethnographic case studies ranging from hometown associations to rotating credit unions, this chapter shows how low-wage workers rely on affinities and altruistic acts to survive the difficulties of migrant life. In doing so, the chapter maintains that possibilities for creating a caring city exist even in Dubai.
The conclusion draws the themes of the book together to illustrate how this study of migration in Dubai is relevant to discussions of international migrant labor rights and a wider social justice agenda. In doing so, the author makes the argument that frameworks outside the nation-state are the most productive in creating circumstances that encourage better provision of low-wage migrant rights, welfare, respect, and social justice. It is also suggested that it is normal, unregulated, and organic forms of sociality that make a city a livable and pleasurable space, especially for low-wage and marginalized groups. Finally, possibilities for future research are suggested.
This book interrogates the everyday experiences of migrants who labor in Dubai and the structures that shape their stories using neoliberalism as a conceptual frame to understand processes of city building, labor migration, and migrant lives. The book provides a nuanced assessment of engagements with processes of neoliberal development. The exploration of neoliberalism has been undertaken through a variety of empirical frames: popular discourses and representations of Dubai, the layered structures, low-wage migrants, the polarized sociospatial relations in the city, and informal migrant networks. The book presents a significant part of the urban landscape and migrant experiences under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The work brings a range of blogs on Dubai into mainstream research on contemporary globalization and neoliberalism in an interdisciplinary mix that draws from sociology, geography, cultural studies, and anthropology. Migrant Dubai is highly recommended for the people interested in gender and global migration studies, and it is an invitation for future scholars and researchers to explore global financial crisis, migrant experiences, and socioeconomic polarization of global cities. I would particularly recommend this book to several groups of faculty members, student scholars, and researchers interested in empirical research methods. It is well-written, well-planned, and rich in theoretical and practical interpretation. No doubt the issues raised will enrich our intellectual and academic ideas about Dubai’s liberalization and restructuring within the longer trajectories of globalization and migration that have taken place in the emirate and within the region.