Unofficial citizens: Indian entrepreneurs and the state-effect in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 79, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 122-139

  Vora, Neha ^a  

^a TEXAS A AND M UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959328109     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547910000281     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. For more on nonelite experiences of Indians in Dubai, see Syed Ali, Dubai: Gilded Cage (London and New Haven, 2010);
2. Karen Leonard, "South Asian Workers in the Gulf: Jockeying for Places," in Globalization Under Construction, ed. R. W. Perry and B. Maurer (Minneapolis and London, 2003);
3. Sulayman Khalaf and Saad Al Kobaisi, "Migrants' Strategies of Coping and Patterns of Accommodation in the Oil-Rich Gulf Societies: Evidence from the UAE," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1999): 271-98; (Pubitemid 30045281)
4. Neha Vora, "Producing Diasporas and Globalization: Indian Middle-Class Migrants in Dubai," Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2008), 377-406;
5. Neha Vora, "The Precarious Existence of Dubai's Indian Middle-Class," Middle East Report 252 (2009): 18-21.
6. However, economic liberalization projects are not uncommon to countries with repressive or authoritarian regimes. See for example Aihwa Ong's work on Singapore. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovreignty (Durham and London, 2006).
7. Several theorists have noted difficulties in studying "the state" because, rather than being a material reality, it is an abstraction. Philip Abrams, for example, argues that the state is an ideological belief and that academics who study it both take it for granted and legitimize it. It remains, however, largely undiscovered in the literature and is instead an effect of the scholarship itself. Philip Abrams, "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State," Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 58-89.
8. Similarly, David Nugent argues that the "state" cannot be extracted from its context by exploring how state formation in Peru relies upon particular conditions of possibility in which people need to be continuously convinced that the state is indeed unified and autonomous. David Nugent, "Governing States," in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. D. Nugent and J. Vincent (Oxford, 2004).
9. Akhil Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State," American Ethnologist 22 (1995), 375-402.
10. Here, I draw upon Abrams's as well as Mitchell's definitions of the "state-effect" in order to consider the state (as well as the economy) not as unified bounded entities but as effects produced through the convergence of various discourses, actors, and practices. Timothy Mitchell, "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics," The American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77-96;
11. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).
12. Madawi Al-Rasheed, ed., Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (London, 2005);
13. Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides, eds., Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture (Miami, 1991).
14. Khaldoun Hasan Al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula (London and New York, 1990).
15. N. Janardhan, "Redefining the Rules of Engagement for Expatriates in the GCC Countries," paper presented at The Global Gulf conference, University of Exeter, July 4-6, 2006.
16. See, for example, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 13 (2000), 291-343;
17. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham and London, 1999);
18. Saskia Sassen, "Beyond Sovereignty: De Facto Transnationalism in Immigration Policy," in Worlds on the Move: Globalization, Migration, and Cultural Security, ed. J. Friedmann and S. Randeria (London, 2004).
19. Comaroff and Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism," 333.
20. Paul Dresch, "Debates on Marriage and Nationality in the United Arab Emirates," in Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, ed. P. Dresch and J. Piscatori (London, 2005).
21. For more on substantive citizenship, see Nina Glick-Schiller and Georges Fouron, Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home (Durham and London, 2001).
22. Howard Aldrich and Roger Waldinger, "Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship," Annual Review of Sociology 16 (1990), 111-35;
23. Ivan Light and Parminder Bhachu, eds., Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital, and Ethnic Networks (New Brunswick and London, 1993);
24. Min Zhou, "Revisiting Ethnic Entrepreneurship: Convergencies, Controversies, and Conceptual Advancements," International Migration Review 38:3 (2004): 1040-74. (Pubitemid 40015101)
25. Anannya Bhattacharjee, "The Habit of Ex-Nomination: Nation, Woman, and the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie," in Emerging Voices: South Asian Women Redefine Self, Family, and Community, ed. S. R. Gupta (Walnut Creek, CA, 1999);
26. Gayatri Gopinath, "Bombay, UK, Yuba City: Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 4 (1995): 303-21;
27. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham and London, 2005).
28. Embassy of India, UAE:,http://www.indembassyuae.org/induae-community. phtml.
29. Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge, 2003), 7-8.
30. E. Basile and B. Harriss-White, "The Politics of Accumulation in Small Town India," Bulletin of the Institute of Development Studies 30 (1999): 31-9;
31. J. Howard,M. Jones, "Jain Shopkeepers and Moneylenders: Rural Informal Credit Networks in South Rajasthan," in The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society, ed. Michael Carrithers and Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge, UK, 1991);
32. Sheila Smith, "Fortune and Failure: The Survival of Family Firms in Eighteenth Century India," in Geoffrey Jones and Mary B. Rose, eds., Family Capitalism (London, 1993), 44-65.
33. Willoughby estimates that based on 1.276 million Indian workers entering the Gulf in 1998, "the total amount of rent extracted that year from these workers would have been $1,741,740,000." John Willoughby, "Ambivalent Anxieties of the South Asian-Gulf Labor Exchange," American University Department of Economics Working Paper Series 24 (2005).