From the Editors

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الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة

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UAE

Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (April 13)

0 Apr 13 2012 by Arabian Peninsula Page Editors

[Document Restoration Center. King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, Riyadh. By Rosie Bsheer]

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.] "Bahrain Grand Prix in doubt amid tension over hunger striker," a report on the likelihood of canceling race due to concerns over the Abdulhadi al-Khawaja's life and increasing violence in Bahrain. "UAE detains 6 activists critical of rulers," an AP news article on the detention of six UAE activists who were ...

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Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (April 2)

0 Apr 01 2012 by Arabian Peninsula Page Editors

This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.

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Pioneer Bloggers in the Gulf Arab States

3 Dec 20 2011 by Sultan Al-Qassemi

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 did to the moribund government-controlled television channels of the Arab world. Today the number of Twitter and Facebook users in the Gulf is estimated to be in the ...

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

1 Sep 14 2011 by Adam Hanieh

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 struck by the centrality of the Gulf to the political economy of the region as a whole. This was true not just concerning migration and remittance flows between the Gulf ...

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

2 Jul 19 2011 by Michael Busch

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 forced prostitution of women but represents the problem of coerced labor of both women and men around the world. Despite these progressive shifts, however, the new report ...

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

0 Jun 02 2011 by Ahmed Kanna

[Migrant workers in Dubai waiting for buses to their labor camp. Image from impactlab.net]

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 and his loyalists. Bahrainis, Omanis, and Yemenis, and most recently Syrians, have taken to the streets en masse, and have been met by the bullets and security ...

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Migration: The Arabian Gulf story

1 Apr 01 2012 by Hussain Ahmad

When I arrived in the Gulf fourteen years ago, my perception of this region was the same as that of millions of other migrants, that this is a place where we can easily earn enough to achieve financial freedom. But over the years, a different gulf has been haunting my thoughts: that between expectations and reality. In other words, the fact that many who come looking for gold are having to satisfy themselves with coal. There are around twenty million migrant workers in the Gulf and many millions had ...

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Tribalism in the Arabian Peninsula: It Is a Family Affair

10 Feb 01 2012 by Sultan Al-Qassemi

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 ...

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Will the Gulf Countries Escape the Revolutionary Fires?

1 Sep 26 2011 by Mahmoud El-Wardani

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 ...

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

0 Aug 17 2011 by Ahmed Kanna

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 ...

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Traffic Jam

0 Jun 28 2011 by Michael Busch

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 ...

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

1 May 02 2011 by Hanan Toukan

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 ...

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