Racialised institutional humiliation through the Kafala

Abstract

ABSTRACT The kafala system of migrant sponsorship prevalent in the Middle East has long been the subject of scholarly and public scrutiny, due to the high level of reported abuse of migrant workers. Prevalent analyses of the kafalaview it as a rentier system that offers economic opportunities for both non-national migrant workers and citizen sponsor-employers, despite the inherent structural asymmetries that bias the overall economic benefits towards the latter. However, the racialised incorporation of African and Asian migrant workers within the kafala is rarely considered in such analyses. Drawing on intersectional, critical race perspectives, this paper ‘de-centres the white gaze’ in the scholarship on race and migration by first, shifting the geographic locus outside Europe/America to analyse racialisation of migrant workers in the Middle East, and second, by drawing on scholars from the global South who theorise systematic humiliation as a manifestation of deeply unequal societies. The paper illuminates the operation of the kafala as a racially stratified occupational hierarchy of migrant workers that is legitimated by an hegemonic ideology and practices of degradation, diffused coercion and state enforcement. The paper also ‘de-exceptionalises the Middle East’ to argue that while these racialised hierarchies of difference in the kafala sustain and expand the possibilities of capitalist accumulation through the expropriation of migrant labour, they are not unique to the Middle East.