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Tribalism in the Arabian Peninsula: It Is a Family Affair

[Image from the 2010 Al Qa'qa', a TV show funded by Qatar. Image from unknown source.]

Across the Arabian Peninsula and stretching well into North Africa and Sudan, there is a common bond, perhaps only behind religion and language in importance, that binds Arabic language speakers together. Museums across the Gulf proudly display lineage maps illustrating the family trees of ruling members, linking them through lines and photos from bygone centuries up to the current leader. Major financial institutions in Dubai and Bahrain display in their offices large-scale maps detailing prominent ruling family members of the Gulf States, including their marital, government, and business affiliations. Tribalism in modern day Arabia is alive and well. In this article, I ...

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Will the Gulf Countries Escape the Revolutionary Fires?

[Flag of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Image via Google Images.]

Moataz Salama, Al-thawra am el-eslah: al-kehyar al-aamen le dual al-khaleej (Revolution or Reform: The Peaceful Choice for Gulf Countries). Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies – Strategy Papers No 221, 2011. Moataz Salama in this remarkable study concludes that it is very difficult for the Arab Gulf countries to catch the train of revolutions that so far cross five Arab countries in the unfolding Arab Spring. One might have expected that the sparks of nearby revolutionary fires would have set light to one of these countries. The study doesn't attempt to research the conditions of one particular country, but considers all the countries of the Gulf ...

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New Texts Out Now: Ahmed Kanna, "Dubai, the City as Corporation"

[Cover of Ahmed Kanna's book

Ahmed Kanna, Dubai, the City as Corporation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.         Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Ahmed Kanna: This is my first book. It emerged from my dissertation research. When I first started studying anthropology in graduate school, I thought I would do fieldwork in Lebanon and on Levantine cultures (having spent a couple of summers traveling and living in Damascus and especially Beirut). At around the same time (early 2000s), I started getting interested in the literature on the sociocultural dimensions of architecture. I had the good fortune of having ...

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Traffic Jam

[Cover of Pardis Mahdavi's book

Pardis Mahdavi, Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. In the ten years since Bill Clinton signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) into law, human trafficking has been transformed from a public policy backwater into a critical component piece of national security. At the time, TVPA provided the capstone to a growing international movement dedicated to combating the trade in people. It explicitly criminalized all forms of human trafficking, promised a wealth of tools to remedy the phenomenon, offered abundant resources to protect its victims, and mandated the production of an annual Trafficking ...

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Boat Rocking in the Art Islands: Politics, Plots and Dismissals in Sharjah's Tenth Biennial

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On April 6th, Jack Persekian, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and Art Director of the Sharjah Biennial was summarily dismissed by Sharjah ruler Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi. The Foundation is the umbrella organization that oversees the reputed Biennial. The reason, according to the Foundation’s statement, was the “public outcry” in response to a work exhibited in the Biennial. Although initially left unidentified, within days it became clear that the main work at the centre of the controversy was Algerian artist and writer Mustapha Benfodil’s work entitled “Maportaliche/Ecritures Sauvages” (It Has No Importance/Wild Writings). Benfodil’s piece, ...

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Pioneer Bloggers in the Gulf Arab States

Long before Facebook updates and 140-character tweets, a number of cyber activists defined the landscape of non-government led opinion in the Gulf Arab states. In less than a decade, a group of bloggers—many of whom have never met—has paved the way for the emergence of the “other opinion” that was and continues to be largely missing from the government controlled Gulf Arab media. The shake-up to traditional media that these blogging pioneers caused was no less significant than what Al Jazeera’s arrival ...

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New Texts Out Now: Adam Hanieh, "Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States"

Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Adam Hanieh: Although this book is very much focused on the political economy of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman), it has its origins in the six years (1997-2003) that I lived in the West Bank, Palestine. During that time, I had the opportunity to travel throughout the Middle East, and was repeatedly ...

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Trafficking and Foreign Labor in the Gulf: An Interview with Pardis Mahdavi

Earlier this month, the US State Department released its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, an inventory of the world’s efforts at combating the global trade in people. The 2011 report marks a turning point of sorts for US foreign policy. For the first time ever, the new TIP includes an assessment—if predictably positive—of Washington’s own attempts at battling trafficking at home. More encouraging still, the report reflects the explicit recognition that trafficking is not only about the ...

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The Arab World's Forgotten Rebellions: Foreign Workers and Biopolitics in the Gulf

The Arab world is undergoing a potentially world-historical transformation. The Tunisian street vendor Muhammad Bouazizi’s self-imolation, following mistreatment by state authorities in late 2010, sparked a deluge of populist anger and activism that has toppled the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively, soon to be followed by street demonstrations and battles across the region.  At the time of this writing, Libyan rebels in alliance with a NATO coalition are battling Qaddafi ...

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