Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf. Edited by Abdulhadi Khalaf, Omar AlShehabi, and Adam Hanieh.

Abstract

In the introduction to ‘Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf’, a new edited volume on migration to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Omar AlShehabi writes that the region’s policies have, over the past century, transformed the Gulf into a space that resembles ‘a collection of scattered “labor camps”, rather than a set of cohesive and integrated societies’ (p. 5). The aim of the volume, dispatched very effectively, is to interrogate the creation of these social spheres—these disparate ‘labor camps’—and to situate them in the political economy of the GCC. Essays in the volume take the line between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’, so uncompromisingly drawn by GCC governments, as their starting point, and explore how distinctions of race, class, gender, and expertise further partition those who live and work in the Gulf into groups with different relationships to the local economy. In this endeavor, the volume, when taken as a whole, looks across scale: it considers at once the macro political and economic structures that shape the societies of the GCC, and the micro everyday social and cultural interactions through which those structures are assigned meaning. In its bifocal approach to migration, the volume makes a unique and valuable contribution to the emergent literature on the Gulf.