Crystal A. Ennis, Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies: Job Seeking and the Global Political Economy of Labour in Oman (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Crystal A. Ennis (CAE): The idea of this book is to retell the story of Oman’s modern economic development from the perspective of labor instead of oil—bringing in people from the margins of (global) political economy analysis. One of my interlocutors said “The story of Oman’s history and of development is the story of living and working. You want to understand the Omani story? Follow the workers.” This encapsulates the essence of my approach.
The seeds of this book were planted many years before I returned to academia to pursue a PhD. Between 2005 and 2008 I lived in Oman. I worked at Shinas College of Technology in a small coastal town up the coast from Sohar, which borders the United Arab Emirates. The departure point and enduring interests contained within this book were first inspired by my time living in a small agrarian neighborhood of Sohar and working in Shinas. I came to know many young Omani citizens during these years—from the many students I taught, to my neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Their stories and struggles of living and working, of battling unemployment, and the realities of the radical economic development transformation emerging around them in real time inspired my interest. The book is now dedicated to my former students.
My time in Sohar during these crucial years also meant that when in 2011 Sohar became the epicenter of the so-called Omani Spring, I was not so surprised.
When I returned to grad school in 2009, the scholarly interpretations of the Arabian peninsula—from analyses of development trajectories to the peoples and their cultures and histories—were at complete odds with the lived experience of the place. I was also frustrated by the absence of Gulf citizens in books purportedly about the country and society. Gulf citizens were often relegated to demographic footnotes or swept within broad orientalist caricatures of rich, lazy Arabs sitting atop a lucrative oil vat. At the time, there were only a few ethnographies that really took citizens seriously.
Moreover, a majority of the political economy scholarship on the country and region centers on oil and the alleged causal relationship between oil and political, economic, and social outcomes. While not denying the importance of oil, my rereading challenges these narrow narratives. While I ultimately did not work on this topic directly for the PhD, I returned to it again and again.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
CAE: Millennial Dreams is a global political economy analysis and labor history that centers the lived experiences of unemployment and work in Oman. It brings to the fore untold stories of workers and economic life, with a focus on the youth of Oman and their job-seeking struggle. Methodologically it “follows” workers to traverse Oman’s development story—its governance and labor resistance—over time. Most development studies’ scholarship on oil dependent regions, especially the Middle East, focus on oil and capital. Resource curse and rentier state literature dominate at the expense of accounts that understand labor and the human side of development within regional and global transformations. This recentering allows Millennial Dreams to unpack inequality, intersectionality, unemployment dilemmas, labor relations, social mobilization, infrastructural transformations, and the impact of neoliberalism on Oman and the wider region. It also allows it to speak to the authoritarian neoliberalism literature, and place the Omani experience within the Asian regional and global labor story. The book is situated within the new critical political economy turn in scholarship on the region. It thus builds on this scholarship while also speaking to literature on the rentier state and resource curse, on colonialism, on racial capitalism, and on labor organization and resistance.
You can also say this book is empirically concerned with taking Gulf labor seriously in development histories and economic governance discourses; and theoretically with taking labor seriously in the field of global political economy.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
CAE: This book connects to three themes in particular that are evident throughout much of my previous work. First, understanding the Gulf within global capitalism and how neoliberalism unfolds in the region. Second, critical examinations of economic development trajectories and reforms, analyzing both development discourses and outcomes around economic visions and plans. Third, understanding the governance of labor, and migration regimes in the regional and in global context. The book departs in how it allowed space to dig deeper into these themes and unpack the intersectionality especially of class, race, and gender. This enabled me to demonstrate how the geography of work and its global reconfiguration embeds economic life and the pursuit of work within regional and global ruptures and transformations. Intellectually, it also demonstrates my commitment to de-exceptionalizing Oman and the Arabian peninsula in development studies.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
CAE: As I was writing the book, I wanted it to represent as best as I could the experiences and diverse views I encountered during my long-term engagements with Oman. I hoped it would be accessible to many, and after translation to many more. Ideally, it will be of interest to individuals interested in topics on youth and unemployment, on resource-fueled development, on the social and environmental impact of radical infrastructural change, Gulf business, the Middle East, colonialism, and labor histories. I hope readers will gain insight not only into development policy making, but also into youth, job seekers, citizen and migrant workers, and entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial hopefuls.
In terms of academic audiences, Millennial Dreams will be of interest to scholars of labor, oil, development, migration, state building, youth, gender and work, the international political economy (IPE) of labor, and “everyday” global political economy (GPE). Most obviously, of course, it will be of interest to Omani studies, Gulf studies, and broader Middle Eastern studies communities.
In terms of impact, I want to challenge readers to dismantle assumptions about the economy, about Gulf citizens, and economic life in the region. When students study the rentier state, I want them to consider how it sits within the ‘global’ and think through rentierism in neoliberal contexts and under neoliberal conditions. The book challenges how people fit within these assumptions and unpacks the origin stories that led to discourses and stereotypes around Gulf workers. I would also like students and scholars to build on my discussions of class and intersectionality, and consider the lived experiences of economic citizenship. By including the lived experiences, perceptions, and resistance of job seekers and workers, I engage a GPE of the “everyday,” examining new sites of agency and contestation to understand how labor governance and reform unfold from the bottom-up and top-down. Overall, I try to offer a direction for future scholarship on the GPE of labor, demonstrating (a) how empirically grounded national and regional case studies can highlight and explain global patterns, and (b) how the present and future of work in local spaces are entangled within the trajectories of global capitalist development.
Each chapter tells a different piece of the larger story and can also be read or assigned to students as standalone pieces. For example, chapter three critically rereads the modern history of work in Oman, examining the histories of labor governance and resistance traced through three key legacies: colonial modes of circulating, disciplining, and classifying labor; the oil industry’s human resources policies; and the management of labor in national economic planning. Meanwhile, chapter five explores the perceptions of inclusions and exclusions embedded in the economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners, and shows us how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labor and class relations.
J: Can you tell us about the cover art?
CAE: The moving work of art featured on the cover is by the talented Omani artist, Raya Al-Maskari. I am extremely grateful to her for allowing me to use this work. The painting is entitled bāḥthūn ʿan āml, meaning “hope seekers,” which is a play on words in Arabic to bāḥthūn ʿan ʿaml, job seekers. I first saw it circulating on Twitter in in May 2021 during a round of youth mobilization around jobs. The painting, to me, exquisitely encapsulates both an awareness and a yearning for hope among a generation of citizens—a hope that is wrapped up in the dream of working.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
CAE: There are several directions in my current work that I am pretty excited about. First, my growing research agenda examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital platforms on workers and labor markets, and how immigration regimes change in response. I am building some larger comparative projects on this theme, but already have some preliminary work in the area including a recent article in the Global Labour Journal on female gig workers in Oman, based on a small case study of a female service from an Omani ride-hailing application, OTaxi. I also have a funded project with some colleagues that allows us to study migrant delivery gig workers in the Netherlands.
Second, I continue to study global migration governance and one of the ways is through membership in a consortium based at Lund University where we study non-Western migration regimes. My colleague Sherzod Eraliev and I have a forthcoming edited volume on the theme—stay tuned! This interest builds from my previous book, The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex, with Nicolas Blarel.
Third, I am continuing the archival research that was the foundation of chapter three of this book to examine the transnational histories of labor protests and solidarity, and the governance of labor, in the region.
Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion: Studying the Global Political Economy of Labour, selections from pages 282 to 289)
Following labour of various sorts – from business executives to taxi drivers, from administrators to entrepreneur hopefuls and job hunters – reveals another side of the development story in Oman and the region. The geography of work and its reconfiguration based on local and global transformations embeds the pursuit of work in the Omani story within regional and global ruptures and transformations. From Omanis who left Oman in pursuit of education and work in the early twentieth century and encountered ideas and ideologies that wrapped them up in the antiimperialist and liberation movements of the age, to Omanis who benefitted from the rapid expansion of economic opportunities after the first oil boom, to jobseekers today in pursuit of meaningful, comparable, and sustainable work and economic life: the story of Oman’s development is ‘the story of living and working’. Putting people first thereby recontextualises an appreciation of change and continuity. Young Omanis’ engagements with the labour market in Oman take shape within a world of dreams and expectations for the future, within a context of rapid growth and ongoing spatial and economic transformation, and within a space where wealth and success are visible to all but achievable to few. Including the lived experiences, perceptions, and resistance of job seekers and workers engages ‘global political economies of the everyday’ and asks ‘who acts’ alongside ‘who governs’ to reveal new sites of agency and contestation. This enables an understanding of how labour governance and reform unfolds from the bottom-up and the top-down.
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Three intersecting vectors run through this book, elucidating [its] argument and vision. Together they highlight how Gulf labour and Gulf classes must be understood within a wider global political economy of labour. The first establishes how the segmented labour markets of the region are embedded within global structures and processes, which in turn shape domestic and regional structures and the frames through which social relations and regulations unfold. The second vector suggests three historical junctures as especially important in shaping labour trajectories in the region. Finally, the third vector explains the liberalising and nationalising dialectic in labour governance.
The first vector directly speaks to the overarching argument and establishes the importance of the global and relational in traversing Oman’s labour market. A global, relational perspective takes seriously the multiple segmentations that structure the domestic labour markets of the Gulf but understands their functions and outcomes through the region’s embedding in the global political economy. Discourses grounded in the particularities of Gulf rentierism, tribal or cultural traditions, and rooted in isolated analysis of contained national spaces give the impression that labour and social relations in Omani and Gulf economies are a regional particularity. These explanations marginalize how entangled the region is in the development of global capitalism and elide how neoliberal ideologies and policies shape economic and labour governance in the region. The findings of this book therefore contest the conventional wisdom that Oman’s, and by extension the Gulf’s, labour markets are best defined as segmented spaces under the exclusive governance of the state. Oman’s labour market is segmented, but these segmentations are neither neat and tidy divisions that isolate labour nor unique spaces detached from the reconfiguration of the global labour market. Rather, these segmentations assume their structure in association with the spatial structuring of class across the global labour market and the state and capital’s impetus to discipline and control labour. The analysis of the Omani labour market shows the contours of a global labour regime that is a crucial accompaniment to the transformation of global capitalism in the very process of restructuring the social divisions of labour, its geographies, stratifications, and lineages of resistance. The trajectories and struggles of Omani labour today and over time speak to broader patterns of how capital seeks to control labour by promoting fragmentation and putting workers in competition with each other for the available jobs. The particular means and ways through which regional labour markets are segmented and governed are not isolated from capitalism’s larger fragmentations, but instead the ways labour is ‘gendered, racialised, ethnicised, tribalised . . . emerge as fundamental to the workings of the labour market’. This conceptualisation of Oman’s global labour market thus also speaks to Sassen’s ‘novel borderings’, which demonstrates that global processes and governance regimes take place at subnational scales, entering national institutional space and geographic territory.
Essentially, Oman’s injection in a global market for labour is not only part of its global character but also part of the system of organising and governing the economic life of the country. Understanding Omani millennials in the labour market as part of labour requires understanding the broader forces, mechanisms, and discourses that structure and govern them. This means understanding the broader labour relations and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, of privilege and access, and of marginalisation, exploitation, and suppression. These inform how people as labour behave, interact, and assign value ascriptions to forms of labour. These also shape business actors and employers and how they discipline, pay, recruit, ‘differentiate and differentially control’, and govern labour. And it connects to a wider global labour governance arena in which governmental and civil society actors operate transnationally and translocally.
…. The second vector delineates three historical conjunctures that play particularly important roles in shaping labour outcomes and trajectories in Oman and the region: first, the partial incorporation of Omani labour and the transnational Asian labouring classes into global capitalism through colonial development; second, the wider integration of Gulf economies and labour markets into global capitalism through the expansion of the oil industry, which increased the regional and global circulation of capital and labour; and third, the increasing embeddedness of the region in neoliberal capitalism, entangling the present and future of Gulf classes within the broader process of integrating the Asian ‘continent of labour’ into global capitalism. In examining the historical and contemporary experiences and records of labour, it is apparent that the structures of segmentation; racialised, gendered, and classed labour hierarchies; and labour regulation and governance have been directly informed by colonial capitalism, the legacies of oil industry recruitment and employment practices, neoliberal policies and discourses, and the integration of Oman in the GPE. While labour struggles and conditions occur in spatially specific ways, they are not unique. They exist globally.
This brings us to the third vector. The tensions around how to regulate the labour market – whether to liberalise or nationalise – and the competing global and local pressures that inform this tension show us something about labour’s power and potential in Oman. I have used the term ‘Oman’s global labour market’ to conceptualise both the empirical realities of diverse Gulf labour markets and the related developments throughout the world that have facilitated the emergence of a global labour market. Capital can access this market in two ways – through locating economic activities in lower-cost locations, on the one hand, or through recruiting from pools of international migrant workers, on the other. Gulf labour markets are competitive because they offer a space embedded within the economic transformation of Asia and because the Gulf economic model and migration regime is based on its access to abundant, flexible labour flows. The global labour market has inspired competing regimes for disciplining labour, on the one hand, and facilitating its mobility, on the other, and these regimes are caught in tensions between deregulating and liberalising in the interests of capital or protecting in the interests of social or environmental realities. The radical transformations of Sohar and Duqm provided vivid examples. This dialectic occurs at national and international scales of governance.
The story of Omani labour is thus also a story of pushback and how Omanis as social actors pressure the state to regulate in their interest. Omani labour – employees and job seekers – push for outcomes that generate employment or force capital to offer work, better pay, and career progression. Omani capitalists, on the other hand, push for open access to global labour pools and more flexible conditions domestically to allow them to hire and fire and pay workers less. International financial institutions and consultancies recommend the same. Yet rounds of economic reform are regularly confronted with social pressure to ameliorate the negative effects. The labour market reveals most clearly this social double movement. Contestation from Omani workers or job-hunters, or even the threat of agitation among these groups, prompts policy reaction. Notwithstanding a pattern of labour becoming more organised through the development of unions, most of labour’s power at the present rests in its ability to inspire policy change. Labour’s power is evident in the prospect of its discontent.
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Both economic structures and social policies around the world of work play a critical role in everyday life. The multi-scalar analysis that unfolded in the chapters of this book followed labour and labour regulation from the bottom up and the top town. It examined the intersections of global, regional, and local processes illustrating how the reconfiguration and structures of Oman’s global labour market impact young people’s dreams as well as their everyday experiences of the economy, institutional structures, and arrangements. At the same time, their experiences and perceptions shape their relations with others and their interpretations of economic outcomes. Across the different sites and spaces of investigation in this book, whether empirical sites like Sohar and Duqm, or themes like economic belonging, both the impact and power of different forms and levels of regulation as well as the presence of Omani labour become visible. Writing citizens into scholarly investigations of Gulf labour markets reveals how development occurs and affects different populations and classes unevenly and how class formation and social relations take shape in the labour market. It is only through understanding labour globally and relationally that we can attain a more rounded picture of what development means and how labour governance functions on the ground.