'In/Definitive Return': Rethinking Aging and Retirement in the Gulf

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Jul 29, 2025 Arabian Peninsula
The LED sign that reads When will you return is an installation that is part of a project called The Circle Game hosted in AlSerkal Avenue, Dubai, a poetic reflection on the processes of arrival and return, transience, and permanence. Photo taken by İdil Akıncı. The LED sign that reads When will you return is an installation that is part of a project called The Circle Game hosted in AlSerkal Avenue, Dubai, a poetic reflection on the processes of arrival and return, transience, and permanence. Photo taken by İdil Akıncı.

"In/Definitive Return": Rethinking Aging and Retirement in the Gulf

By : İdil Akıncı

Archiving the Past in Times of Change


“When did you arrive?” and “Will you return?” are questions long embedded in the everyday conversations of Gulf residents, both new and old. These questions, often seen as bookending a residents’ trajectory, take on new meaning as growing number of older residents and shifting visa regimes and policy reforms unsettle the once presumed link between retirement and return.

Retirement has historically offered the latter question a definitive answer. Among middle-income migrant families, retirement has traditionally meant departure, a return to the “home country” after years of residence and labour. The end of work marked the end of renewable residencies, a loss of income, and the beginning of a life stage lived elsewhere. For many first-generation ‘oil boom’ migrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, now approaching or already in retirement, remittances and planning centred on futures outside the Gulf, signalling that ‘aging in place’ was never integral to the migration trajectory or imaginary in this region.

Yet demographic data across the Gulf complicate tropes of migration as perpetually youthful and transient. Older non-citizen residents now comprise a notable segment of the population: nearly half of Qatar’s residents aged 75 and above are non-citizens; and in Kuwait, it’s over a third. Meanwhile, younger generations increasingly express a desire to remain beyond their working years. A 2020 survey found that 70% of UAE residents hoped to retire in the country, though many also reported being financially unprepared and anticipated working past retirement age.

Amid these demographic shifts, we see in places like the UAE the introduction of longer-term visas, such as the golden visa and retiree visa schemes, alongside selective pathways to citizenship and voluntary pension schemes, all of which signal the permeability of permanence and the open-ended nature of the question of ‘retirement return’. The golden visa, introduced in 2019, offers 5- or 10-year renewable residency to select groups such as investors, property owners (with assets worth AED 2 million or more), students, teachers, and frontline workers. It enables holders to live, work, and study in the UAE without a national sponsor and includes the right to sponsor family members.

The retiree visa, launched in 2020 in Dubai, and expanded to UAE level in 2024, offers 5-year renewable residency to those aged 55 and over who meet specific financial criteria, such as property ownership, savings, a minimum monthly income, and private health insurance. Both visas mark a departure from employer-linked sponsorship, allowing residents to prolong their stay beyond working years, though both remain closely tied to financial self-sufficiency.

These shifts produce stark juxtapositions. On the one hand, the UAE, particularly Dubai, is actively courting international retirees, viewing their financial capital as a resource for economic diversification. The city promotes itself as a premier destination for affluent retirees seeking lifestyle or amenity-led migration, where leisure, security, healthcare, and comfort are central aspirations. Some of these retirees arrive independently; others follow their adult children, entering under golden visa schemes or as dependents of financially secure younger, family members who work in the UAE. This emerging group is increasingly visible in elder care services and community initiatives tailored to older adults. At the same time, many low to middle-income long-term residents approaching retirement in the UAE face an uncertain future, marked by financial concerns, both in the UAE and their home countries. The result is a widening gap between the aspirational retirement narratives marketed to the financially self-sufficient and the lived realities of multigenerational families navigating retirement with limited resources.

It is within this shifting landscape that my research explores the ‘afterlives of retirement’ among middle-income families who have spent most, if not all, of their working lives in the UAE and whose families now span two or three generations. I focus on the emotional and material impacts of retirement not only on those retiring but also on their adult children, many of whom were born and raised in the UAE. I examine how decisions related to relocation, caregiving, finances, and residency are managed, and how ideas of home and return are negotiated at a collective level within migrant families. Overall, a key question drives this research-what does it mean to grow old in this context?- a question that is conspicuously absent both in policy and in the academic literature on migration in the wider Gulf region.

This research grew out of earlier work I began in 2013 with young adults born and raised in the UAE, initially focused on how they made sense of home, belonging, and imagined futures. As I followed their lives over time, our conversations gradually shifted to include their aging parents and the growing uncertainties around retirement. What emerged was a more intergenerational story, one in which decisions about staying or leaving were deeply entangled with the retirement planning, or lack thereof, of an older generation, who, in turn, often based their decisions on their children’s future plans. Aging and retirement, I came to see, are not individual concerns but a ‘family matter’ in this context.

As life trajectories unfold and retirement and settlement policies in the UAE continue to shift, documenting the experiences of aging among long-term migrant families becomes increasingly urgent. These accounts raise critical questions often overlooked in migration scholarship on the Gulf: Who is able, and who chooses, to age in place? Who has alternatives, and what are the emotional or material costs of those options?

Multigenerational Ruminations around Aging and Retirement


For many long-term residents in the UAE and across the Gulf, the idea of "returning home" after retirement is far from straightforward. This is especially the case for those with children and grandchildren still residing in the UAE. In many cases, younger family members, often UAE-born, act as legal anchors, enabling aging parents to remain through their employment-linked residencies or by financially supporting them if they return to countries lacking robust social security systems. However, many who have the option to stay face a high cost of living and expensive health insurance premiums after retirement age, leading many to have to return. Whether adult children stay in the UAE or leave for work, education, or long-term settlement also shapes older generations’ retirement decisions. Often, family unity is the strongest anchor to the UAE. And when parents rely on their children’s sponsorship, a decision to leave may leave no option but to return ‘home’.

At the heart of these considerations lies a deeply human need: the desire to remain close to loved ones while growing older. My research shows, proximity to family, connection to a familiar place, and aging in an environment that feels like home are central to how many envision a good life in later years.

This is not to suggest that all long-term residents wish to remain in the UAE after retirement. For some, return represents a long-anticipated opportunity for rest and reconnection with a homeland and families left behind decades ago. Instead, I draw attention to options, choices, and the degree of volition in retirement decisions, including the prospect of return. For those who have already returned, other challenges may arise, such as how to maintain ties to the Gulf where children continue to live and how to manage finances. These include navigating visa applications, re-entry, and duration of stay, as well as access to old age benefits and care in countries of origin. For those from war-torn countries, return is often not a viable option. For example, Syrians who reached retirement age during the war have faced particularly complex circumstances, especially those without a plan B, such as property, investments, stable jobs, working-age children to help extend their visas, or a second passport to fall back on. From 2020 onwards, some of these families were able to prolong their visas thanks to golden visas, such as doctors and other frontline workers who were granted these visas during the pandemic, or those who switched to sponsorship by their children who had acquired golden visas. My research highlights how families with limited options and resources develop strategies for retirement and old age.

Family circumstances, shaped by health, death, employment, education, or onward migration, continuously reconfigure retirement decisions in ways that defy linear or individual planning. It is these everyday negotiations and long-term strategies that my research seeks to capture, particularly how notions of home and return take on new meaning at the threshold of retirement.

 Less visible in popular discourses, forms of internal relocation within the UAE and transnational aging reveal alternative trajectories of retirement that further complicate the idea of return, and the fact that aging and migration are increasingly entangled in the Gulf.

From İdil Akıncı’s public programme Afterlives of Retirement: A Multigenerational Archive of Aging and Migration. Pictured: a hand-drawn tourist map of Ajman, created by a long-term resident who arrived in Dubai in 1980 and has since passed away. As families today move between emirates for work, education, and caregiving, digital maps have replaced paper ones, shaping new forms of home-making that stretch across Sharjah, Ajman, Dubai, and beyond. Yet this map endures as a quiet relic of a time before GPS, and as a tribute to the many residents who helped build the UAE’s infrastructure, lovingly preserved and shared by the mapmaker’s daughter.

Internal Relocation: A Second Migration


For many long-term residents, remaining in high-cost cities like Dubai after retirement is financially unfeasible. In response, internal relocation, moving to more affordable emirates such as Sharjah, Ajman, or Ras Al Khaimah, has become a practical strategy. This internal migration challenge dominant notions of “onward” or “stepwise” migration, concepts traditionally associated with Gulf migrants moving through the region en route to Europe or North America for long-term security. Here, the movement is within national borders, driven by economic necessity and family proximity rather than global mobility.

For some, internal relocation is not merely a cost-saving measure, it is a response to a deeper structural dilemma: the absence of a viable return. Many migrants come from countries affected by political instability, protracted conflict, war or economic crisis, or find that conditions in their countries of origin have deteriorated by the time they reach retirement age. In such contexts, return may be not only unappealing but also unsafe or outright impossible. Elsewhere, the absence of reliable healthcare, social security systems as well as family and community support makes aging in one’s country of origin both financially and physically untenable. At the same time, remaining without sufficient income is increasingly difficult. In response, older migrants turn to a range of strategies to remain: applying for golden visas, establishing small businesses, continuing to work past retirement, or being sponsored by adult children. Relocating to a less expensive emirate allows these limited resources to stretch further and creates a more sustainable path to aging in place.

Real estate companies have begun marketing emirates like Ras Al Khaimah as retirement-friendly destinations for global retirees, especially following the introduction of retiree visas. Yet long-term residents have long engaged in what I call a “second migration,”  as a means to remain close to loved ones, extend their savings, and avoid the emotional and social isolation that often accompanies return. For adult children, particularly those in middle-income professions, these relocations are also a way to ensure aging parents can remain nearby, preserving a sense of continuity and care in later life.

Transnational Aging


A second dynamic is that of transnational aging, where retirees divide their time between the UAE, their country of origin, and other places where their adult children have migrated. Some maintain their UAE residency through periodic visits; others return on tourist visas to provide care for grandchildren or to remain connected to a place they still consider home.

This pattern mirrors transnational aging trajectories observed in Europe. There, the idea of a definitive return once shaped the experiences of guest workers, many of whom migrated from countries like Turkey in the 1960s and 70s to fill labour shortages. But over time, that narrative eroded as families settled across generations, and the so-called temporary destinations became places where people aged, raised children, and built lives.

Studies from Europe show how, as time passed, older migrants often aged “in between,” negotiating fragmented family geographies, residency rules and access to care and pensions. For many, the notion of a definitive return became a myth. This complexity is amplified for their children and grandchildren, born and raised in Europe, for whom the idea of return holds little coherence, they were never migrants to begin with.

Similar dynamics are unfolding in the Gulf. As the first generation reaches retirement age, the UAE is now home to multiple generations of residents, many of whom have no country to “return” to. For many, their attachments are rooted in the UAE, and futures often by the search for permanence.

A still from the 1987 Turkish film Kesin Dönüş (“Definitive Return”). A short excerpt from the movie was screened as part of the “Afterlives of Retirement: A Multigenerational Archive of Aging and Migration” public programme. In 1980s Turkey, kesin dönüş became a powerful concept in popular discourse and cultural products, reflecting the hopes of migrant workers returning home after years abroad. The film follows a Turkish family in the Netherlands, tracing how the idea of return evolves from a concrete plan to a complex emotional journey and a narrative shaped by generational shifts, reunions, and loss of life. It speaks to a shared human experience of being caught between multiple worlds.

Property Ownership As an Investment to Permanence


For descendants of the first generation, now in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s, the idea of return is often implausible. While some may have moved abroad for study, work, or citizenship, their sense of home remains tied to the UAE. In fact, several return after years abroad, seeking familiarity, community, and the lifestyle.

Yet the prospect of retiring in place is not straightforward. Media reports estimate the annual cost of retirement in the UAE at AED 240,000-expected to nearly double by 2045. On online forums like Reddit, UAE residents frequently ask: Is Dubai a city for retirees? How do you afford it? How do you plan for your or your parents’ retirement?

Like elsewhere, property ownership is marketed as a key asset for retirement planning. But in the UAE, it also signals residential security in a context where permanency is not guaranteed. For many UAE-born residents, getting on the property ladder, something rarely pursued by their parents who typically rented until they left, has become both a financial and emotional milestone. For some, it is seen as a tangible commitment to the only home they have ever known, and a way to say: we’re here to stay and invest, signalling to a subtle, but powerful narrative change across generations.

This desire, however, collides with a rapidly overheated property market. Since the pandemic, real estate prices have soared, fuelled by international capital flows and Dubai’s growing appeal as a global lifestyle destination.

Recent reforms, like the voluntary end-of-service scheme and more affordable housing and healthcare for senior residents, signal for more options for planning a future in the UAE. But the emphasise on individual responsibility for retirement security remain. Furthermore, in retirement planning, property ownership is ideally one that generates passive income rather than being occupied, which requires alternative investments.

A still from the public programme Afterlives of Retirement: A Multigenerational Archive of Aging and Migration. In the background, two retirees share a final dance in their UAE home before returning to India, moving to the same song, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, that they danced to as a young couple upon arriving in the 1970s. Nearly fifty years on, younger generations take to online platforms to reflect on retirement, looking for advise on retirement planning for themselves and their parents, indicating a surge in desire to remain in the UAE in later life.

Why Does Thinking about Aging and Retirement in the Context of Gulf Migration Matter Now?


For many families now spanning generations in the Gulf, the traditional binaries of “home” and “host” countries no longer hold. Retirement, too, no longer signals a straightforward return decision. For long-term residents, return is not always a physical departure but, as Walsh and Näre (2016) note, “a key idea, event, or concept” through which belonging is continually negotiated, regardless of whether return ever occurs or is even feasible.

These trends compel a rethinking of how we conceptualise migration to the Gulf. The growing visibility of retirees and retirement aspirations among long-term residents in the UAE further unsettles dominant portrayals of the region as a space of youth and transience.

Yet despite these realities, migration and aging are still dealt with as separate demographic realities: migration as temporary; aging, as sedentary. In practice, however, we see extended presence, intergenerational care, and emotional investments in place. As migrants remain beyond retirement, via internal relocation, intergenerational sponsorship, continued working years or cross-border ties, they reshape the meaning of home and challenge the assumption that life after retirement and aging inevitably happens elsewhere. Aging thus becomes a crucial lens for understanding the quiet, sustained processes of belonging that unfold beneath formal regimes of temporary migration.

With increasing life expectancy and a growing older population, the question "Where will I grow old?" becomes not only logistical but existential. Needs, attachments, and constraints subtly shape these decisions, influencing not just outcomes but also the terms on which choices are made or postponed. Much of this is grounded in the way migration discourse and governance contour the way we are ought to relate to work and place. Once the employment contract ends, what persists? How do attachments to place endure beyond formal labour?

For some of long-term residents, the desire to remain increasingly extends into the afterlife. Some envision not only aging in the UAE but being laid to rest there, a difficult and often unspoken aspect of growing old. This quiet yet profound aspiration challenges dominant narratives of temporariness, revealing enduring attachments that span both life and death. To wish for one’s final resting place to be near family and in the city one lived and worked in expresses a claim to belonging that transcends legal status, a desire to remain part of a social world, even in absence.

As policies governing aging and migration shift, this research offers an archive of how retirement has been experienced and imagined by first-generation migrants and their children in the post-oil boom era. Rather than treating this moment in UAE migration history as fixed or final, these narratives illuminate how past experiences can inform future challenges, particularly as aging becomes a growing reality in a region long imagined as transient. They also reveal how experiences of aging and retirement are continually reassembled and reinterpreted, whether by different groups living through the same moment or by the same communities across generations.

"I hope I can grow old in Dubai". One of many notes left by visitors who visited the public programme.

[Disclaimer: As part of a multi-phase project on aging and retirement in the UAE and to mark this growing interest in the subject, I recently held a public programme at AlSerkal Arts Foundation in Dubai (13 April 2025) titled Afterlives of Retirement: A Multigenerational Archive of Aging and Migration. It featured media content on aging and retirement, photography, audio and video material from a decade long ethnographic work that document how migrant families in the UAE negotiate questions of aging and retirement. Some of the images accompanying this article are drawn from that programme, which seeks to honour the multigenerational life histories that shape aspirations and experiences of retirement in the UAE.]
Oct 17, 2024 Lebanon
Nora Jaber By :
Nora Jaber

Women, Workers, and Dis/Empowerment in Saudi Arabia

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has implemented major changes to its gender and labor policies, rearticulating the role of Saudi women and migrant workers in the economy. Women’s empowerment is at the heart of the Saudi state’s post-Vision 2030 narrative, the government’s strategic blueprint for social and economic development, designed to diversify the economy and reduce dependence on oil. The Vision’s success depends on increasing the number of Saudi citizens in the workforce and reducing reliance on migrant workers in various sectors. Because of this move toward “Saudization”, there has been a significant focus on redefining the role of Saudi women and realizing their untapped economic potential. Gone are the days when Saudi women were relegated to the domestic sphere, constructed as mothers and caretakers of the home and the nation. The ideal Saudi woman is now an active participant in the country’s economy.

The neoliberal state feminism that underpins Vision 2030 equates women’s empowerment with their potential as successful economic actors. The “free” Saudi woman is one who accumulates rights and opportunities that enable her to flourish within a capitalist market economy. Saudi women are now promised that, with the right level of ambition and the support of the state, they can be and do anything—as long as it bolsters the state’s image as a hub of progressive modernity and contributes to its economic growth. The state has invested heavily in promoting the achievements of particular Saudi women through advertising, making their leadership and participation in certain industries including science, technology, sports, and the arts hyper visible. The fact that many working Saudi women are employed in less lucrative jobs and earning relatively low wages is overshadowed.

To facilitate women’s participation in the workforce, the Saudi state has implemented various measures and legal reforms. It has opened many new job sectors for women including in the service industry, the legal sector, and the military. It also enacted labor law reforms, introducing protection from employment discrimination and other measures to make the private sector more attractive to Saudi citizens. Additionally, the state undertook reforms to improve women’s rights more broadly. These include granting women the right to drive, implementing anti-harassment laws, and reducing the scope of the Male Guardianship System (MGS), a framework of laws and policies that subject women to the control and authority of male relatives, to grant women more legal autonomy and independence. Together, these measures have allowed women to overcome major barriers that hindered their economic participation.

For this, the Saudi state has been globally celebrated, including by international institutions. And this is no surprise – the gender reforms announced by the state, and formulated with the help of consultancy firms, largely align with the United Nation’s women’s empowerment agenda, which adopts a liberal model of gender equality that works to include ambitious women within the existing capitalist order, leaving its structural inequalities intact. Importantly, although the state has made a major effort to portray these measures as purely top-down initiatives, human rights groups, international organisations, and the media have also acknowledged the role that Saudi women themselves have played in advocating for these changes over decades, particularly their campaigns against the ban on driving and the MGS.
An uncritical celebration of Saudi Arabia’s women empowerment agenda overlooks how rights gains for some Saudi women, and their increased inclusion in the workforce, may produce and entrench other forms of marginalization and exclusion, which particularly affect migrant workers.

What is obvious from these celebratory accounts is that gender reforms in Saudi Arabia are almost always discussed only in relation to Saudi women, rendering their implications for non-citizens invisible. While improving the rights and status of Saudi women is certainly necessary, the empowerment of Saudi women as visible economic actors is linked to the reconfiguration of the country’s labor regime and has exclusionary effects on the migrant working class, in particular. Moreover, the limited accounts of Saudi women’s activism do not address how Saudi women themselves continue to participate in the exploitation of migrant workers, particularly through the Kafala framework, a set of laws and policies that regulates the ability of non-citizens to work and reside in the country.

An uncritical celebration of Saudi Arabia’s women empowerment agenda overlooks how rights gains for some Saudi women, and their increased inclusion in the workforce, may produce and entrench other forms of marginalization and exclusion, which particularly affect migrant workers. It ignores the limits of adopting gender reform policies that do not extend protections to all women and workers and fails to account for the impact they might have on a global scale, especially in the global south. This calls for a broader reflection on what emancipatory possibilities are foreclosed by liberal feminist justice frameworks that seek autonomy and equality for some, within unequal structures, rather than more meaningful forms of transnational solidarity that work to dismantle those structures.

State Feminism and Its Discontents


The state’s promotion of a liberal discourse of gender equality draws on a colonial Orientalist logic that presents the Arab state as the primary agent for progress and development, whilst constructing “society” as a homogenous block that remains traditional (read backward) and resistant to progressive change. To consolidate this state-society distinction, state officials have tried to portray governmental reforms, particularly around women’s rights, as entirely top-down initiatives bestowed upon society for its own benefit. For example, in 2018, the government invested heavily (£1m) in an international marketing campaign which included large posters displayed around London containing the hashtag #ANewSaudiArabia and the words “He [the Crown Prince] is bringing change to Saudi Arabia.” It also adopted repressive measures to further conceal the role that civil society actors and women’s rights activists had played in demanding these reforms, and to deter them from demanding more. Upon lifting the ban on driving and reducing the scope of the MGS, for example, the government targeted women who had been involved in campaigns challenging those restrictions for decades prior. To this day, some of the women and men who had been advocating for change from below remain imprisoned or under travel bans.

The idea of Saudi women as passive victims must be and has been challenged, but this is not enough. It is necessary to go further and reflect on how Saudi women have bought into state feminism and contributed to the reproduction of unequal social relations. In other work, I have analysed different modes of Saudi women’s activism to show how, like other Gulf feminisms discussed by Kareem (2016), it has largely followed a liberal model of feminism that remains constrained within, and reproduces, the bounds set by the state. Saudi feminism, too, has advocated mainly for the “Woman citizen,” “searching for an ‘equality’ that includes only her [the Saudi woman].” In campaigning for rights, autonomy, and economic independence, Saudi women have appealed to the state and its carceral impulse as the ultimate protector from “social” harms and violence. They have invoked a rights-based discourse that predicates access to rights upon citizenship, reproducing citizen/non-citizen hierarchies, through which unequal class relations are deeply constituted in the Gulf.

Saudi women’s rights activists have also conflated the interests of a narrow group of relatively privileged women with a singular category of “Saudi woman.” In their petitions for reform, for example, I have shown how, in claiming rights on behalf of the ‘Saudi woman” who seeks autonomy, independence, and  economic success, they have sought to improve the lives of elite and middle class Saudi women at the expense of working-class people and migrant workers in particular. Several petitions relied on racialized tropes about migrant others, constructing male domestic workers as sexual predators from whom Saudi women required state protection. In addition to reproducing notions of the racialized other as irredeemably violent and criminal, and of Saudi women as disempowered victims in need of saving, they entirely overlooked the harms migrants, both women and men, are subjected to on an individual and structural basis, including at the hands of Saudi women. For example, what is notably absent from Saudi women’s campaigns to enter the workforce is a recognition of the domestic care gap that may grow as more Saudi women enter the workforce, and be filled, in many instances, by working-class migrant women whose lives and bodies are pervasively constrained by the Kafala system and its intertwined structure of labor exploitation and immigration control. That the empowerment of some women depends on the exploitation of others is overlooked.

A Changing Labor Landscape


One of the main goals of Vision 2030 is to increase the number of Saudi citizens, including women, in the workforce. While Saudi Arabia will continue to rely on migrant workers in particular industries, such as construction, this is an important shift because like other Gulf states, Saudi Arabia has heavily relied on foreign labor following its discovery of oil in the 1930s. The 1950s and 1960s saw the Gulf states shaken by strikes led by oil workers who demanded an end to the exploitative work and living conditions in the work camps of British and US oil companies. Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf monarchies, responded to these strikes with severe political repression as well as by instituting what Hanieh (125) describes as “a distinctive form of labour relations as a means of ensuring subordination,” widely known today as the Kafala system.

The Kafala system is not unique to Saudi Arabia and is not conceptually different from other immigration policies around the world. Broadly, it exists as a racialized labor regime grounded in the unequal global distribution of resources that has effectively transformed parts of the global south into cheap labor reserves. However, its regulations and entanglements with specific racialized and gendered particularities in different contexts shape its contours in Saudi Arabia. The state’s formalization of a tiered labor regime guarantees a division between Saudi and non-Saudi workers, giving the former better working conditions and benefits. This consolidated Saudi Arabia’s reliance on temporary migrant labor, which, in 2013, constituted around 89% of the private sector workforce.

In effect, the Kafala system has created a cheap, deportable, and highly precarious and exploitable migrant working class. It ties the worker’s visa and legal residence in Saudi Arabia to a particular Saudi sponsor for a limited duration, giving Saudi citizens and companies excessive control over the migrant working class. Workers are recruited through private agencies at high fees and are often also made to pay for their own visas. Once they arrive in the country, the nature of their work is often different and lower paid than promised. In many cases, their passports are also confiscated, making their ability to change work or leave the country nearly impossible. While Saudi Arabia announced that it has eased restrictions on migrant workers, including granting them the ability to switch jobs and to travel without “exit authorisations,” the structure of the system remains intact.

The Kafala system, which works through a combination of high immigration control and low labour protection, was intended to ensure the compliance of migrant workers and quell the possibility of unionizing and other forms of dissent, as they could be easily deported upon any minor violation of their contract. The nature of the system and the stark power imbalance it entrenches between Saudi citizens and migrant workers has led to high levels of exploitation and abuse of various forms, particularly of domestic workers, especially women, who are very isolated, making them an easier target that is more difficult to detect. This is also true of undocumented workers who may have either escaped exploitative or abusive working conditions or who remain for other reasons after the end of their contract and lawful residence. In October 2023, the state passed a new law (in force from September 2024) to improve protections offered to domestic workers, such as prohibiting the confiscation of passports and establishing maximum working hours. However, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms appear weak, which has raised doubts about its effective implementation.

Since its inception, the Kafala system has allowed for a visible division in the categories of work that different groups occupied. Saudi citizens (mostly men) worked in the public sector while migrant workers, many of whom are from global South countries that had been severely impoverished through colonial rule and by post-1970s neoliberal policies, were ultimately pushed into the private sector. Therein, they were given little workplace protections, no real restriction on working hours, and no minimum wage, making it highly unattractive to most Saudi citizens. Saudi women, on the other hand, were largely relegated to the home, tasked with domestic social reproduction duties, with the help of female domestic workers for those who could afford it. All of this was facilitated by oil wealth, which allowed the state to subsidize goods and services, making it possible for many Saudi families to live more comfortably on one income. In recent years, the declared move to reduce reliance on oil appears to have made this political economic model untenable, leading the state to shift its accumulation strategy and attract more Saudi citizens to work in the private sector.

To do so, the government has made several changes. It sought to make the private sector more attractive by pushing businesses to increase wages and by enforcing new labor standards. It also revived King Abdallah’s Nitaqaat program, initially announced in 2011 and designed to deliver “Saudization” by incentivizing private companies to hire more Saudis and penalizing those with low rates of Saudi workers. Finally, the state turned to Saudi women, a significant labor power reserve. This has led to a reduction in Saudi women’s unemployment rates. Between 2017 and 2023, women’s labor participation rose from 20.2-34.5 percent, a much-celebrated achievement of Vision 2030.

Based on preliminary qualitative research I have done, including questionnaires and informal interviews, there is an emerging link between increasing the number of working Saudi women and its effects on the lives and livelihoods of migrant workers and their communities. Although more research, including quantitative, is needed to offer a more comprehensive analysis, it appears that several of the jobs Saudi women are now working in, particularly customer-facing roles, were previously largely occupied by male migrant workers. One important reason for the previous lack of Saudi women in these roles is, as Le Renard (2013) shows, that the previous rules around gender segregation in public spaces excluded Saudi women from most jobs where they would interact with men. As Saudi women enter mixed-gender work environments, they compete with men for the same jobs. In some industries that were previously largely occupied by male migrant workers, such as retail and hospitality, this has led to Saudi women replacing them.

Given the structural constraints of the Kafala system, the unemployment of migrant workers may have far reaching effects, including deportation. Many migrant workers have lived in Saudi Arabia for decades and would have to re-build entire lives and communities in “home” countries that they may no longer have links to. Children of migrant workers who were born in Saudi Arabia may never have had a connection to those places at all. Moreover, this may further impoverish communities in their home countries who rely on remittance flows. Some may need to stay illegally, in constant hiding from state authority, losing access to healthcare and other protections or services, while risking deportation, detention, and being forced to pay fines and fees. This would push them into an ever-growing informal work sector, where labor is even cheaper, and where exploitation and abuse are heightened.

Beyond Dis/Empowerment


Celebratory accounts of Saudi women’s empowerment have portrayed the changes as overwhelmingly positive. The state has equated women’s empowerment through economic independence with the overall prosperity of the nation. Women’s rights activists have reinforced this neoliberal narrative in their own campaigns for reform. In these accounts, the nation becomes a place made by and for citizens who bear the responsibility for their own flourishing and for that of the nation. The state’s role becomes a remover of obstacles to economic success under capitalism. The overrepresentation of migrant workers in certain industries and societal patriarchal control become barriers to be taken down by the state’s ever-growing carceral arm. In these accounts, the costs of liberal gender equality agendas, for non-citizens and for working class communities, are effaced. This raises serious questions about the limits of women’s empowerment, who it can serve, and who it harms. What Saudi women have achieved through increased access to the workforce is not liberation. Rather, they have been allowed to participate more visibly in a system that is predicated on gendered, racialised, and class-based oppression and exploitation.

While Vision 2030 is leading to a reconfiguration of the role of Saudi women and migrant workers in the workforce, that Saudi women play an important role in the exploitation of migrant workers is not new and has always been built into the Kafala system. The women’s empowerment narrative only presents Saudi women as victims in need of saving or empowerment by the state, obfuscating how Saudi women themselves have participated in the exploitation of others. This highlights the importance of interrogating liberal gender reforms, which only benefit a small portion of Saudi women rather than transform the social relations that subordinate women and workers to different degrees.

Despite its claims to benefit the nation, women’s empowerment as it is promoted by the state and celebrated globally, will continue to benefit only a portion of privileged Saudi women who align with the state’s Vision, while reproducing the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of migrant workers. Saudi women need to move beyond liberal feminism’s model of seeking more visibility and access within neoliberal state and private structures. This means that rather than limiting campaigns to “women’s rights,” they must organize for fair and equal working conditions for all, regardless of nationality, and against the institution of citizenship through which class is so heavily constituted in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf.

Fair and equal treatment of migrant workers is a feminist issue. There is a lesson in this for all who seek liberation rather than selective empowerment: to think more expansively about forging local and transnational solidarities that interrogate and work to dismantle the unequal social relations through which the Kafala system and other forms of exploitation are sustained.

[Thank you to the editors at Jadaliyya for their time and feedback. A special thanks to Francesco Amoruso, Mira Al-Hussein, Robert Knox, Adam Hanieh, and Jamal Abu-Eisheh for comments on early drafts. Thanks also to Idil Akinci-Perez for creating a space for me to think through this with brilliant women scholars on/of the Gulf.]