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Unsettling State: Non-Citizens, State Power

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Unsettling State: Non-Citizens, State Power UNSETTLING STATE: NON-CITIZENS, STATE POWER AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES by Noora Anwar Lori A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Baltimore, Maryland October, 2013 ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines the development and enforcement of citizenship and immigration policies in the United Arab Emirates in order to revisit an enduring puzzle in comparative politics: why are resource-rich states resiliently authoritarian? The dominant explanation for the ‘oil curse’ assumes that authoritarianism emerges because regimes ‘purchase’ the political acquiescence of their citizens by redistributing rents. However, prior to the redistribution of rents comes the much more fundamental question of who will be included in the group of beneficiaries. I argue that oil facilitates the creation of authoritarian power structures because when political elites gain control over fixed assets, they can more effectively erect high barriers to political incorporation. By combining stringent citizenship policies with temporary worker programs, political elites develop their resources while concentrating the redistribution of assets to a very small percentage of the total population. In the UAE, this policy combination has been so effective that non-citizens now comprise 96 percent of the domestic labor force. The boundaries of the UAE’s citizenry became increasingly stringent as oil production was converted into revenue in the 1960s. Since oil reserves are unevenly distributed across the emirates, the political elites who signed concessions with successful oil prospectors have since monopolized control over the composition of the citizenry. As a result, domestic minorities who were previously incorporated by smaller emirates who did not discover oil have since been excluded from the citizenry. The enforcement of stringent citizenship and temporary worker policies led to the growth of an extensive security apparatus. This apparatus prevents the formation of horizontal ties by seeding out political dissidence and labor strikes through the deportation or denaturalization of agitators. The vast majority of the population is now not necessarily temporary, but permanently deportable. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT: ........................................................................................................ ii LIST OF TABLES: ................................................................................................. vii LIST OF FIGURES: ............................................................................................... vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Oil and Unsettling State Power ............................... 1 1.1. Revisiting Oil and Authoritarianism .............................................................................. 2 1.2. Fixed Assets and Barriers to Incorporation .................................................................... 4 1.3. Isolating Causality ......................................................................................................... 6 1.4. Approach and Case Selection ....................................................................................... 13 1.5. Chapter Summaries ..................................................................................................... 21 Chapter 2 The ImmiGration Curse: Fixed Assets, Stringent Citizenship, and Temporary Workers ....................................................................................... 1 2.1. Economic Development and Democratic Citizenship: The ‘Deviant’ Middle East ........... 2 2.2. Political Culture: ........................................................................................................... 6 2.2.1. Causal Mechanism: Civic Attitudes drive Democratization .......................................... 8 2.3. Rentier Theory: ........................................................................................................... 14 2.3.1. Causal Mechanism: Economic Redistribution produces Political Acquiescence ........ 18 2.4. Citizenship and Redistribution ..................................................................................... 22 2.5. Is the “Resource Curse” an “Immigration Curse”? ........................................................ 27 2.6. State-building with Fixed Assets: Stringent Citizenship and Temporary Labor .............. 31 iii 2.6.1. InterveninG Variable: Citizenship as Political Closure ................................................. 34 2.6.2. ConditioninG Variables: Capital Mobility and TiminG of Population Growth .............. 42 2.7. Concluding Remarks: ................................................................................................... 48 Chapter 3 Making Citizens and ‘Guests’: Erecting a System of Citizenship as Political Closure ........................................................................................... 50 3.1. The Division of Jurisdiction: Political Controls over Migration in the Early Oil Period ... 56 3.1.1. Precursor to ‘Citizens’ vs. ‘Guests’: The Order in Council ........................................... 57 3.1.2. Nationality Clauses and Political Control of MiGrant Flows ........................................ 63 3.2. Labor Strikes and the Subversive Threat of Arab Migration .......................................... 66 3.3. Policing the Shoreline .................................................................................................. 69 3.4. Policing the Interior: Domestic Identity Checks ............................................................ 72 3.5. Challenges to a Common Citizenship and Policy ........................................................... 75 3.5.1. Trucial State Passports and Visas for Iranians ............................................................ 77 3.6. Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................... 83 Chapter 4 Permanently Deportable: The Formal and Informal Institutions of the Kafala System ........................................................................................ 86 4.1. Guest Workers vs. Permanent Migrants: How Temporary is ‘Temporary Contractual Labor’? ............................................................................................................................... 91 4.2. Formal Institutions of the Kafala: Building and Enforcing Temporary Residency .......... 95 4.2.1. The Ministry of Interior and Centralized Administration ............................................ 97 4.2.2. Citizen-Sponsors and Dispersed Enforcement .......................................................... 101 4.3. Informal Institutions: Navigating and Subverting Temporary Residency ..................... 104 4.3.1. Duration of Residency and Settlement ..................................................................... 105 iv 4.3.2. Family reunification: Spouses and Children .............................................................. 110 4.3.3. Hierarchies of Non-Citizen Residency ....................................................................... 114 4.3.4. Citizen-Sponsors and Extensions of Residency ......................................................... 116 4.4. Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................. 119 Chapter 5 Tracking Transient Flows: The Political ManaGement of Guest workers and the Growth of the Security Apparatus .................................. 121 5.1. Social Origins of Institutional Change: Construction Boom and Demographic Imbalance ........................................................................................................................................ 124 5.2. Policing Imbalance: “Family Social Security” and a New Policing Strategy ................. 126 5.3. Managing Heterogeneity: Legibility and Surveillance ................................................. 134 5.4. Security and Criminal/Cultural Population Management ........................................... 139 5.4.1. Criminalization of Irregular MiGration ...................................................................... 140 5.4.2. Naturalization as National Security .......................................................................... 141 5.4.3. ManaGinG Moral/Cultural TransGressions ................................................................. 146 Chapter 6 Offshore Citizenship: A Market Solution to the ‘Problem’ of MiGrant Incorporation ............................................................................... 151 6.2. Endogenous Institutional Change: Political Entrepreneurship and Offshoring ............ 160 6.3. The Problem .............................................................................................................. 164 6.3.1. The Official Population Categories: Citizens and Guest-workers .............................. 165 6.3.2. The Multi-level Naturalization Process ..................................................................... 168 6.3.3. In between population categories: The unresolved cases ........................................ 170 6.4. The Solution .............................................................................................................. 171 6.4.1. Step 1: Identity Standardization Drive .....................................................................
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