1
July 2021
No. 143
Crown Family Director
Professor of the Practice in Politics
Gary Samore
Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor
of Middle East History
Naghmeh Sohrabi
Associate Director
Kristina Cherniahivsky
Associate Director for Research
David Siddhartha Patel
Myra and Robert Kraft Professor
of Arab Politics
Eva Bellin
Founding Director
Professor of Politics
Shai Feldman
Henry J. Leir Professor of the
Economics of the Middle East
Nader Habibi
Renée and Lester Crown Professor
of Modern Middle East Studies
Pascal Menoret
Founding Senior Fellows
Abdel Monem Said Aly
Khalil Shikaki
Goldman Faculty Leave Fellow
Andrew March
Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow
Alex Boodrookas
Neubauer Junior Research Fellow
Huma Gupta
Junior Research Fellows
Hayal Akarsu
Mohammad Ataie
Youssef El Chazli
Ekin Kurtic
Reconceptualizing Noncitizen Labor
Rights in the Persian Gulf
Alex Boodrookas
O
ver the past several years, a number of Persian Gulf states
independently announced plans to abolish what is often
called the “kafala system.”
1
The term refers to regulations that
require noncitizen residents to be sponsored by a citizen or
citizen-owned business, usually their employer. Sponsorship
leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation and contributes to
the often abysmal conditions faced by noncitizen workers
across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar,
Bahrain, and Oman.
2
Even as millions of noncitizens make
up the overwhelming majority of the region’s private sector
workforce, they regularly face low wages, brutal living
conditions, and few opportunities to improve their situation.
These announcements followed in the wake of rising international attention
paid to the issue over the past decade, generated by worker protests, mass
deportation campaigns following economic crises in 2008 and 2020, and the
construction of a number of high-prole megaprojects, including the Louvre,
Guggenheim, and New York University branches in Abu Dhabi, as well as
World Cup stadiums in Qatar.
3
While a number of international organizations
and media outlets have greeted the reform announcements with great fanfare,
astute observers like Rothna Begum of Human Rights Watch and Vani
Saraswathi of Migrant-Rights.org have argued that the changes will do little
more than tinker with the apparatus of repression. Indeed, as Gulf states
have announced further details, it has become clear that proposed reforms
will loosen only a handful of the many laws and regulations deployed against
noncitizen workers.
4
This Brief unpacks three widespread misunderstandings about labor and
migration in the Persian Gulf. First, sponsorship legislation in the Gulf does
2
Alex Boodrookas is the
Harold Grinspoon Junior
Research Fellow at the
Crown Center.
The opinions and ndings expressed
in this Brief belong to the author
exclusively and do not reect those of the
Crown Center or Brandeis University.
not reect long-standing regional culture or tradition. Rather, it dates from the
imperial period, spread across the region in the 1950s, and reects the shared
economic interests of Gulf elites and multinational corporations. Second,
dismantling sponsorship will not bring an end to systemic exploitation of
noncitizen workers because what is called “kafala” is not in fact a single system;
it is a diffuse set of coercive mechanisms and practices imposed by different actors
at different times. Finally, though it is often claimed that Gulf citizens benet
from and hence support the continuation of sponsorship, there is a long history
in the Gulf of citizen workers allying with noncitizen workers to improve labor
conditions and rights for all. The divide over sponsorship is better understood as
one of class interests and racial hierarchy, not citizens versus noncitizens.
Although these common misunderstandings have been challenged by a number
of activists and scholars, they have proven remarkably durable in media and
policy circles. They also obscure potential paths to reform. An accurate historical
accounting buttresses the arguments of the skeptics and indicates that systemic
change will require not just sponsorship reform, but the disassembly of an
entrenched apparatus built up over the past century. But it also suggests that a
broad coalition of citizens and noncitizens across the Gulf have a shared interest
in reconguring the region’s labor regime. If past events are any guide, there is still
hope for substantive reform.
The Imperial Origins of Sponsorship in the Gulf
Press accounts, human rights reports, and academic scholarship regularly frame
sponsorship as an embodiment of Gulf culture, whether the residue of indenture
and enslavement, religious prescriptions regarding adoption and protection, or
Bedouin traditions of hospitality. But to describe sponsorship as a reection of
primordial culture is fundamentally ahistorical: By denition, sponsorship could
only have been institutionalized after the imposition of a regime of borders and
passports and thus only emerged during the twentieth century. Sponsorship is
a legal apparatus, not a cultural proclivity. Its origins can be traced back to the
British imperial era and its regional institutionalization to the 1950s and 1960s.
In his work on Bahrain, Omar AlShehabi dates the origins of sponsorship to
the late 1920s, when British ofcials allowed pearl boat captains to bring their
crews to Bahrain on the condition that they take “responsibility” for arranging
their departure at the end of the pearling season.
5
In the subsequent decades, the
British sought to control both labor activism and prices by institutionalizing a
system that required employers to apply for a “No Objection Certicate” (NOC)
before hiring workers abroad, and to pay a deposit to preemptively cover the cost
of those workers’ eventual repatriation.
6
NOCs were a long-standing if informal
mechanism designed to ensure that imperial functionaries were in agreement
before taking an administrative measure or approving a request; originally, they
could address anything from travel permissions to gun sales.
In effect, NOCs represented a suspension of the travel restrictions imposed by
imperial authorities during World War I, when governments around the world
imposed an unprecedented level of control over migration.
7
By midcentury,
however, No Objection Certicates had become xtures of nascent deportation
regimes springing up across the Gulf. They also proved remarkably durable: In
Qatar, for instance, they were only eliminated in 2020.
8
3
As they tightened their grip on Bahrain, the British
slowly imposed more onerous sponsorship regulations
that served as additional restraints on the rights of
noncitizen workers. It was a British ofcial, for example,
who in the 1940s rst ordered workers to obtain
permission from their employer before changing jobs.
But imperial authorities were not the only supporters
of sponsorship. The Bahrain Petroleum Company, a
subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, lobbied to make
it even easier to deport recalcitrant employees in order to
crack down on labor organizing, while local employers
found that arbitrary deportation was a valuable means of
keeping labor cheap and pliable.
9
Sponsorship, in other
words, was forged by an alliance of imperial authorities,
local regimes, and major employers, including British and
U.S. oil multinationals.
The appeal of sponsorship for imperial authorities, local
elites, and major employers led to its rapid spread across
the region after World War II. Kuwaiti authorities,
who enjoyed more independence than their Bahraini
counterparts, rst adopted a form of sponsorship in
1949 and amended it several times over the ensuing
decades. Although imperial ofcials did not draft the
Kuwaiti legislation, British technical experts and
diplomats lobbied for the imposition of increasingly
harsh restrictions on noncitizens, often using the rhetoric
of anti-Communism. Again, oil rms played a key role,
helping to connect the nascent Kuwaiti state to the
longstanding imperial system of Indian contract labor.
10
Jumping on the bandwagon, Saudi Arabia codied
sponsorship regulations in 1952. Then, in 1955, the British
Foreign Ofce worked with the ruler of Qatar to extend
sponsorship restrictions to his territory; one British
ofcial described them as “very necessary attempts to
avoid a oating, jobless and potentially criminal crust on
society here.”
11
By the time the last Gulf states obtained
their independence in the 1970s, sponsorship had been
embedded in legal systems across the region.
Finally, it is important to note that sponsorship
legislation was not unique to the Gulf but in fact
resembled migrant labor systems being institutionalized
throughout the world at the same time. In the United
States, postwar Germany, and apartheid South Africa,
governments instituted short-term labor migration
schemes at the behest of employers who lobbied for more
workers to offset alleged “labor shortages.”
12
In recent years, scholars of the Gulf have sought to
counter narratives of “exceptionalism,” which frame
the region as an aberration, an exception to global
norms, or a dystopian embodiment of stagnation
or repression.
13
Much of the discourse around labor
migration exemplies this tendency. Neha Vora and
Natalie Koch have persuasively argued that the term
“kafala” itself obscures the similarities between the
exploitation of noncitizen labor in the Gulf and that seen
elsewhere.
14
They are right: It looks little different from
its counterparts in other parts of the world. In short, the
Gulf’s sponsorship regulations are a legacy of the region’s
imperial past and of the exploitative migrant labor
regimes of the twentieth century.
Sponsorship as a Set of Mechanisms, Not a
System
Effusive praise for recent reforms, often trumpeted as the
“abolition of the kafala system,” gives the impression that
amending sponsorship legislation will radically transform
the lives of noncitizen workers. Unfortunately, reform
has not proven to be so simple. A succession of reform
announcements generated much press attention, but
little actual change on the ground.
15
Why is this the case? Although much of the discourse
surrounding labor in the Gulf is xated on sponsorship,
noncitizens face not a unied system, but a “diffuse set
of transnational practices that are in the hands of many
different actors.”
16
In most Arabic-language publications
historical debates over labor and migration have long
been more nuanced than the all-or-nothing analyses
favored by the contemporary international press. Rather
than grouping all questions of labor and migration
under the umbrella of “the kafala system,” articles in
Arabic have long distinguished between questions of
sponsorship, residency, and labor legislation—distinct
issues that intersect to disempower noncitizen workers.
Framing sponsorship as the root of the problem can
obscure, and even minimize, the array of coercive
mechanisms deployed against the region’s millions of
noncitizen residents. These were imposed at different
times and for different reasons, but all contribute to the
broader effort to keep noncitizen labor as cheap, exible,
and pliable as possible.
A useful way to understand these mechanisms is to look
at their distinct but interrelated histories. Nationality
laws, rst formulated by local elites and British ofcials
during the imperial era, make it nearly impossible for
noncitizens to be naturalized. These laws accentuate
perceptions of temporariness and precarity, even for
noncitizens whose families have lived in the Gulf for
generations. They also ensure that a large proportion
of the private sector workforce remains susceptible
4
to deportation, bereft of formal political rights, and
exempted from many of the protections of law.
17
Labor legislation across the region has protected
employers more than workers ever since the rst
regulations were drafted in the 1950s under the
supervision of British imperial labor experts and racially
segregated U.S.- and British-owned oil rms. The
difculty of obtaining residency rights without proof of
employment, as well as a ramped-up deportation state
held over from the imperial era, subjected workers to
the ever-present fear of expulsion, even when they were
simply seeking to exercise their legal rights. And even
where effective regulations exist, enforcement regimes
are spotty and penalties for violators ineffectual.
18
In short, as a number of advocates on the ground have
argued, the end of sponsorship would be only a rst
step.
19
Real reform will require more than just changing
sponsorship, and it will need to be accompanied by
tangible enforcement with real penalties for violators
The Fundamental Divide: Class, Not
Nationality
Much work on the Gulf is premised on the assumption
of a sharp dichotomy between citizens and noncitizens.
This is understandable; in much of the region, citizenship
often seems to determine everything, from where people
live and work to what they wear. Access to cheap
noncitizen labor, and to the lower-cost services that
that labor provides, is often described as another form of
“rent” for citizens.
20
And, indeed, many businesses, large
and small, are kept aoat by a deliberately low-wage
structure, while many Gulf residents enjoy the luxury of
hiring domestic workers and paying them rock-bottom
salaries.
21
But accounts that overemphasize the dividing line of
citizenship threaten to obscure two critical points. First,
citizens derive wildly unequal benets from underpaid
noncitizen labor. The main beneciaries are the biggest
merchants, landlords, and construction magnates,
along with the multinational corporations they work
with—many of which are not based in the Gulf at all.
Second, the systematic cheapening of noncitizen labor
undermines efforts to diversify Gulf economies, bring
citizens into the private sector, and combat youth
unemployment. Workers in the Gulf, both citizen and
noncitizen, thus have a shared interest in improving
conditions. The question of who benets from the
exploitation of noncitizen labor is determined not just by
nationality, but—perhaps even more fundamentally—by
class.
22
Evidence of this shared interest saturates the historical
record. A useful example is Kuwait, where a relatively
free press and a vocal opposition movement spearheaded
a heated debate over workers’ rights, labor law,
residency, and migration. During the 1960s and 70s,
a remarkably broad coalition of reformers, citizen
and noncitizen alike, began pushing back against the
increasingly coercive regime of migration and labor
control that was rst institutionalized in the 1950s.
Some of the strongest support came from trade unions,
whose leaders determined that their movement would be
strongest if it could unite a multinational working class.
They battled for the right of noncitizens to be protected
by labor laws and to join the labor movement as equal
members. Reformers also pushed for a permanent
residency visa without a sponsorship requirement, in
recognition of the fact that many noncitizen residents of
Kuwait had come to see it as their home.
23
Feminists too argued for more inclusive nationality
laws, so that the children of Kuwaiti women married
to noncitizen men would not be left stateless. This
reformist discourse beneted from the peculiar
economic conditions of the oil boom in the mid-1970s,
which triggered a regional labor shortage. In the end,
technocrats from various international organizations,
and even from within the Kuwaiti state itself, argued that
improving wages and working conditions would help
attract more workers to the Gulf.
24
But just as other countries around the world began to
wind down their guest worker programs, the Kuwaiti
state, along with its neighbors, doubled down on
temporary labor and repressed reformists and labor
activists.
25
In the 1970s, newspapers began printing a
slew of alarmist articles about the supposed demographic
and cultural dangers posed by Asian workers, helping
to accelerate the racialization of noncitizens. Gulf
states received support from major employers and
labor contractors, who led a well-connected lobbying
campaign designed to keep noncitizen workers in a
position of permanent precarity.
The oil boom solidied the alliance between the state
and major employers, with the former even acting as a
centralized labor broker itself. Tensions occasionally
surfaced in the ensuing decades. The 1991 Gulf War
brought unprecedented international attention to
the plight of noncitizen residents, just as the Kuwaiti
state came to care more than ever about its reputation
abroad.
26
But the state weathered the crisis by turning
5
unscrupulous recruiters into scapegoats and waiting
out the public relations storm.
27
To the present day,
the alliance between Gulf states and major employers
has proved strong enough to overcome both domestic
pressure and international criticism.
As this narrative makes clear, the issue was and is far
more complicated than a simple citizen-noncitizen
binary. In the Gulf as elsewhere, divisions of class
intersect with other hierarchies, notably those of
race. GCC citizens are not the only beneciaries of
labor exploitation. Well-paid noncitizen workers
in the Gulf, many of whom are white, also benet
from the low cost of services and of domestic labor.
U.S.- or Europe-based transnational corporations or
institutions with operations in the Gulf—including
FIFA, NYU, Halliburton, and the U.S. military—reap
tangible material benets from low labor prices. An
entire transnational recruitment industry, stretching
across the Gulf and South Asia, prots from its position
as brokers and intermediaries.
28
Finally, many elites
in states that send workers abroad siphon off money
from remittances.
29
The biggest beneciaries of labor
exploitation, then, are a constellation of elite individuals
and institutions scattered across the globe, with a
distinct concentration in Europe and North America.
Inequity in the Gulf, in other words, is intimately and
historically entangled within a global system of economic
inequality and white supremacy.
But even as a broad range of elites prots from
exploitation, other GCC citizens have found that
the devaluing of noncitizen labor has proven to be
detrimental to their own interests. Systemic wage
suppression lowers private sector wages for citizens
and noncitizens alike, while the relative cheapness
of noncitizen labor leads businesses to shun citizen
labor and thus contributes to a growing crisis of youth
unemployment.
30
Even some Gulf states themselves have
recognized that the deliberate devaluing of noncitizen
labor has generated economically damaging second-
and third-order effects. Saudi Arabia, for example,
has explicitly sought to reduce the differential cost of
employment between citizens and noncitizens as part of
its effort to encourage private sector growth and reduce
its citizen unemployment rate.
31
In short, GCC citizens
who live primarily off the products of their labor have
a vested interest in improving the wages and working
conditions of all of their fellow workers, regardless of
their nationality.
Conclusion
The sponsorship of noncitizen workers in the Gulf dates
to the imperial period and spread at a time when similar
guest worker programs existed in the U.S., Germany,
and elsewhere. If the condition of noncitizen labor rights
appears to be unusually bleak in the Persian Gulf today,
it is because increasingly powerful Gulf states have been
able to suppress movements that challenged coercive
regimes of migration and labor control—and because the
deepening racialization of noncitizens has driven an ever-
wider wedge between potential allies.
32
The narrow focus
on ending worker sponsorship obscures the transnational
alliances behind labor exploitation and minimizes the
extent to which many GCC citizens would benet from a
reevaluation of noncitizen rights. Glowing press coverage
of governmental statements reects yet another example
of historical amnesia.
There is one nal point that needs to be made. Reforms
to the labor system in the Gulf have never been driven
from the top down. Today, as in the past, calls for reform
continue to emanate from outside the state. Noncitizens
have repeatedly proven to be their own best advocates:
Noncitizen workers conducted a series of strikes in the
early 2000s, some of which included tens of thousands
of participants.
33
Mutual aid societies, often led by
noncitizens and linked to international trade unions,
have emerged to pool resources, raise awareness, and
build solidarities.
34
These organizers have found allies
elsewhere. New Gulf-based rights organizations like
MigrantRights.org, the Kuwait Social Work Society,
and the Kuwait Society for Human Rights have begun
to provide in-depth coverage of noncitizen labor issues.
Some Gulf labor unions have voiced support for reforms,
though they have largely abandoned the radical proposals
for reform they championed in the 1970s, and it is not
clear whether they will lend material aid to the reform
effort.
35
Allies today are more likely to be drawn from
new quarters: unemployed graduates, disillusioned young
people, and political radicals dissatised with a corrupt
and unsustainable status quo. While the Gulf faces a
rising tide of xenophobia and racism, it also continues
to host a remarkable array of popular movements and
courageous dissidents. If real reform does come, workers
will not have the state to thank for it.
Endnotes
1 David Conn, “Qatar to Abolish ‘Kafala’ Labour Next
January before 2022 World Cup,” The Guardian, October 16,
2019; and International Labour Organization, “Landmark
6
Labour Reforms Signal End of Kafala System in Qatar,” Press release, October 16, 2019.
2 “Reform the Kafala System,” Migrant-Rights.org.
3 Human Rights Watch, Exported and Exposed: Abuses against Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, and the United
Arab Emirates, vol. 19, no. 16(C) (November 13, 2007); Glenn Carrick and David Batty, “In Abu Dhabi, They Call It Happiness
Island. But for the Migrant Workers, It Is a Place of Misery,” The Guardian, December 21, 2013; and Vivian Yee, “Virus Forces
4 International Labour Organization, “Changes in the Labour Market in Qatar: Dismantling the Kafala System and Introducing
a Minimum Wage Mark New Era for Qatar Labour Market,” August 30, 2020; Ellie Aben, “Filipinos Celebrate End of Decades-
Old Kafala System in Saudi Arabia,” Arab News, March 14, 2021; Rothna Begum, “What Will It Take for Saudi Arabia to Abolish
Abusive Sponsorship System?” Human Rights Watch, October 30, 2020; “Saudi Arabia Announces Labour Reforms for Private-
Sector Workers, But Does Not Abolish the Kafala System,” Migrant-Rights.org, November 5, 2020; and Ali Mohamed, “The Flexi
Permit Experiment: No Kafala, but Poor Labour Practices Persist,” Migrant-Rights.org, April 12, 2021.
5 Omar Hesham AlShehabi, “Policing Labour in Empire: The Modern Origins of the Kafala Sponsorship System in the Gulf Arab
States,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48 (February 2019): 1-20. See also Omar AlShehabi, “Histories of Migration to
the Gulf,” in Transit States: Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf, ed. Abdulhadi Khalaf, Omar AlShehabi, and Adam Hanieh
(London: Pluto Press, 2014).
6 AlShehabi, “Policing Labour in Empire,” 7; and Alex Boodrookas, “The Making of a Migrant Working Class: Contesting
Citizenship in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, 1925–1975” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2020), chapter 1.
7 John Torpey, “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of
State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 256–70.
8 International Labour Organization, “Dismantling the Kafala System and Introducing a Minimum Wage Mark New Era for Qatar
Labour Market,” August 30, 2020.
9 Boodrookas, “The Making of a Migrant Working Class,” chapters 1 and 5.
10 Ibid., chapter 1.
11 UK National Archives, FO 371/149104, Criminal Case No. 145/60, H.B.M.’s Court for Qatar, Regina v. Abdul Rashid s/o Suleiman,
October 9, 1960, signed P. J. Davis.
12 Cindy Hahamovitch, “Creating Perfect Immigrants: Guestworkers of the World in Historical Perspective,” Labor History 44, no.
1 (February 2003): 69–94; Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992);
Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2011); and Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/
Guest Workers, trans. William Templer (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
13 Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2020).
14 Neha Vora and Natalie Koch, “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula,”
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15, no. 3 (December 2015): 540–52.
15 Ali Mohamed, “The Flexi Permit Experiment: No Kafala, but Poor Labour Practices Persist,” Migrant-Rights.org, April 12, 2021;
and Vani Saraswathi, “No Rights despite Reforms: On Qatar’s Labour Laws,” The Hindu, March 23, 2021.
16 Vora and Koch, “Everyday Inclusions,” 4.
17 Boodrookas, “The Making of a Migrant Working Class,” chapter 1. For the UAE, see Nora Lori, Offshore Citizens: Permanent
Temporary Status in the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
18 Ibid., chapter 7; and Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2007).
19 Migrant-Rights.org has strong coverage of enforcement issues in the contemporary era. For more of their coverage, see “Reform
the Kafala System.”.
20 Aya Batrawy, “Despite Wealth Gap, Ordinary Emiratis Ride UAE Gravy Train,” Times of Israel, November 4, 2014.
21 Mohammed Dito, “Kafala: Foundation of Migrant Exclusion in GCC Labour Markets,” in Transit States, ed. Khalaf, AlShehabi, and
Hanieh.
22 For examples of research that engages the intersection of class and nationality, see Adam Hanieh, “Overcoming Methodological
Nationalism: Spatial Perspectives on Migration to the Gulf Arab States,” in Transit States, ed. Khalaf, AlShehabi, and Hanieh; and
Faisal Hamadah, “COVID and Kafala,” MR Online, August 17, 2020.
23 Boodrookas, “The Making of a Migrant Working Class,” chapters 8 and 9.
24 Examples of many such articles can be found in the newspaper les at the Kuwait University Gulf Studies Center, particularly
le 3/zay/400, and the ILO archives in Geneva, particularly le TF 271-2-A-1-1.
25 An excellent rst-person account of this process is Ahmed Al-Khatib, Al-Kuwait Min al-Dawla ila al-Imara [Kuwait From State to
Emirate] (Beirut: Al Markaz al-Thakafy al-‘Araby, 2009).
26 See, for example, Germaine Greer, “Our Allies, the Slave Holders,” The New York Times, November 14, 1990; and Chris Hedges,
“Kuwait City Journal; Foreign Women Lured into Bondage in Kuwait,” The New York Times, January 3, 1992.
27 Articles on this debate can be found in the newspaper archive at the Center for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies at Kuwait
University, particularly in le 10/mim.
7
28 See Anjali Kamat, “The Men in the Middle,” Dissent, Spring 2015; and Darryl Li, “Offshoring the Army: Migrant Workers and the
U.S. Military,” UCLA Law Review 124 (2015): 124–74.
29 Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011).
30 Hanieh, “Overcoming Methodological Nationalism.”
31 Adam Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 224.
32 Neha Vora, Amélie Le Renard, “Who Is ‘Indian’ in the Gulf? Race, Labor and Citizenship,” Middle East Report Online, June 16,
2021.
33 Ahmed Kanna, “A Politics of Non-recognition? Biopolitics of Arab Gulf Worker Protests in the Year of Uprisings,” Interface 4, no.
1 (May 2012): 146–64.
34 See, for example, “Sandigan Kuwait: From Survivors to Defenders,” Migrant-Rights.org, July 23, 2018. A list of Gulf-based aid and
rights organizations can be found at https://www.migrant-rights.org/resources/.
35 “‘The Kafala Is a System of Slavery’: An interview with the Kuwait Trade Union Federation,” MigrantiRights.org, August 2, 2014,
and “Migrant Workers and Labor Unions in the Gulf: An Interview with Karim Radhi,” Jadaliyya Reports, June 23, 2014.
8
1
Reconceptualizing Noncitizen Labor Rights
in the Persian Gulf
Alex Boodrookas
Recent Middle East Briefs:
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