Migrants, Markets, Brokers and States: lliberal Migration Governance in the Gulf

• In Event: Migration States in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Immigration politics in the Global South are understudied, and the Arab Gulf is generally excluded from contemporary debates on migration governance in spite of the magnitude of immigration flows and immigrants’ communities in the region. This article answers several empirical questions and brings seemingly exotic contexts into theoretical discussion on the illiberal structures and practices of migration governance. What has been the role of colonial and post-colonial states vs non-states institutions in shaping the volume and composition of migration flows to the Gulf? What institutions have controlled and organised migrants’ lives over time? Three political sequences in the Gulf history correspond to shifting migration systems/geographies: the colonial phase where State building processes and economic development were designed by foreign oil companies in alliance with local political and economic elites (1930s-1960s), the post-colonial phase where migration were driven by regional dynamics of pan-Arabism and the politics of the oil “boom” of 1973 (1960s-1990s) and the “sovereign turn” of the 1990s which shifted the Gulf migration corridors towards Asian and politicised migration management. This most recent historical sequence shows the emergence of illiberal migration states which use retaliatory migration diplomacies and discriminatory labour policies to control migration flows and immigrants’ lives and reshape the political economy of rentier states.

Author

• Helene C. Thiollet, Sciences Po