March 20, 2026. It is the first day of Eid al-Fitr in Abu Dhabi, and it looks as if the entire city is converging on the corniche. Walking up from the underground pathway, I make my way between couples holding hands, young and old; families with strollers; and boisterous friend groups; all dressed up and waiting for their turn to snap a picture, sitting on the fountains’ edges or posing next to the mosaic walls. The crowds that stretch along the beach reflect the diversity of the city’s population: dresses and languages from all over the Arab world, South Asia, and Africa. A few men are swimming in the fresh seawater while kids run around, screaming and giggling. The small coffee shop on the beach is busier than I’ve ever seen. A dense crowd leans onto the balustrade to contemplate the sea view, while some groups turn around, photographing themselves against Abu Dhabi’s skyline.
Today would be like any other public holiday, if not for a sense of suspended respite: there have been no emergency “potential missile threat” alerts on the phone, no sounds of interception in the city center since yesterday evening. The war has replaced the weather in everyday conversations: “No alerts today,” the building’s receptionist greeted me earlier as I went out. “Yes, it seems quiet.” In one of the corniche parks, a Filipino couple, visibly pregnant, beams with joy, surrounded by bundles of blue and pink balloons. Just as I walk past, their friends start a countdown. The only explosion I end up hearing today is the popping of confetti cannons, followed by a loud cheer: it’s a girl. – Laure
War is generally portrayed as a political and military event, a sudden disruption of the status quo. Yet, for those who inhabit places affected by war, it manifests rather as an atmosphere – that is, as a reconfiguration of daily life and spatial practices, as a new framework that shapes social relations. The beginning of the current Gulf war sent shockwaves across the UAE, a country that has built its international image around the notion of safety, a discourse also widely embraced by its residents. As Israel and the US began bombing Iran on February 28, 2026, Iran’s military retaliated with drone and missile strikes targeting not just Israel but US allies in the region, especially the GCC states. Among the latter, the UAE stands out both for the high numbers of Iranian missiles and drones that targeted the country, and for the success rate of their interception, in part due to the US-produced THAAD system; according to official figures, around 92% of the strikes are being intercepted.
How have the UAE’s inhabitants experienced this new context? The question has been strikingly absent from media coverage. In the first week of the war, international media latched onto the images of European tourists and American citizens trying to get home, and their narratives of harrowing journeys boarding repatriation flights. These images reveal a singular bias: very few articles thought to inquire about the experiences of the citizens of the countries bearing the brunt of the attacks. In addition, the Gulf states house millions of noncitizen residents from around the world. In the UAE, they represent most of the population, around 90%; many of them have settled in the country and are now into their second, third, or even fourth generation. Almost two months after the beginning of the war, most of them are still here. In response to the international coverage, Emirati media have mobilized this fact, pointing out how repatriation flights soon turned out empty; or how Dubai’s airport recently recorded more entries than exits, while the strikes were still ongoing. In a society that is both highly diverse and highly fragmented, the politics of staying shed light on the complexities, nuances, and tensions that shape residents’ relationship to place, especially in the case of immigrant communities for whom formal citizenship remains unattainable. More broadly, they reveal the various global entanglements at the heart of Gulf societies, and the contradictions they produce.
The focus on the derided figure of the “influencer” in the international media coverage of the region is not entirely surprising. In the past two decades, many Gulf cities, with Dubai as their flagship, have branded themselves as global destinations for retail tourism and luxurious lifestyles. More recently, this orientation has been supported by state policies meant to attract wealthy foreign investors and high-skilled workers. These policies are part of the project of economic diversification; they acknowledge the necessity of foreign residents’ participation in the country’s economic future, not just as part of a temporary workforce, but also as part of an investor and consumer market. At the same time, the categories targeted by these policies have been the most privileged, hence the most globally mobile. In many ways, the current situation repeats the “expat flight” that followed the 2008 financial crisis – a moment when many Western expatriates left the country, leaving behind unpaid loans and mortgaged luxury cars. The wealthy influencers fleeing the UAE today, and the social media memes that mock them, are both blind to this history, however. The former see their own exposure to war as an incongruity; the latter mock their claims of displacement as inauthentic. At their core, they share a similar bias: the idea that war and refuge are supposed to happen only to specific, racialized, and classed bodies.
But those who can leave in the blink of an eye are a small, elite minority. For many others, this option is impossible; the trade-off would be too high in terms of job loss, they might not have access to their passports, or they simply do not want to leave. The current situation is reminiscent of another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, because it brings “essential” workers (literally) to the frontlines: those employed in the food industry, in the industrial sector, or in transportation, logistics, and delivery. These are typically low-wage occupations, many of which are regarded as unskilled (regardless of the level of skill they actually require). As industrial sites have been especially targeted by Iranian strikes, these workers, who in the UAE are mainly of South Asian, Arab, and African nationalities, bear the cost of others’ safety: they make up the bulk of the victims, alongside members of the Armed Forces (13 deaths and over 220 injured as of April 7, 2026).
Beyond essential workers, maintaining the continuity of work is a necessity for most migrants to the UAE, not just for their own survival, but for that of their families back home. Many do not have a physical home to return to: building a house in the home country is an aspiration or, at most, an ongoing project. Or, their homes and ability to reside in safety have been destroyed in their countries of origin. They have come to the UAE precisely to bring closer the realization of a secure home, often leaving a spouse behind or entrusting children to relatives. The countries of origin of most migrants are also the ones whose energy supply chains are most tied to the Gulf: places like India, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka were the first impacted by the rising cost of energy and the closure of some of the production sites. In Egypt, a major sending nation to the UAE, the war’s impacts—from rising oil prices, reduced tourism, and a decrease in remittances—is already signaling a potential economic crisis. When entire families depend on the remittances sent every month, leaving is not an option, regardless of the risks taken or the fear one might feel.
The diversity of the UAE’s residents, both citizen and noncitizen, reveals just how entangled the region was and continues to be with other parts of the world. The UAE is home to a broad middle-class that includes migrant communities with longstanding ties to the region. Their presence highlights how this place served as a historic crossroads for merchants and traders, sailors, and pilgrims within a vast Indian Ocean world, before the drawing of borders and the foundation of nation-states. Despite monolithic national narratives, Gulf citizenries are ethnically diverse because of these historical circulations as well, with kinship ties that extend to the other shore in current-day Iran, and from Zanzibar to Pakistan and Baluchistan, and even further into East Asia. They also include the early Arab migrant communities, in particular Palestinians who started settling in the region after the Nakba, some of whom became naturalized at the creation of the modern states. In parallel, continuing migration routes have led to the formation of substantial South Asian, Persian, Arab, and African diasporas. While those who came after the moment of state-formation have been excluded from access to citizenship, they have settled over several generations and developed friendships, social networks, families, and affinities in the region. For so many communities, the UAE and other Gulf countries have become new homes forged after displacement from other parts of the region. While these countries do not officially recognize the status of refugee, they have hosted high numbers of displaced people in the past decades. This situation is reflected in some of the memes that have circulated on social media, where people contrast the current situation with their previous experiences of war. In one of them, a Lebanese user posts a video of himself preparing a juice cocktail and lounging on a balcony chair during a missile alert. The stereotype of the Gulf as a sanitized place for luxury holidays is rewritten as a controlled atmosphere of war, where one can still chill outdoors. Such memes depict how many Gulf residents, in fact, are familiar with the sounds of missiles, and know what happens in the absence of aerial defense systems to intercept them.
March 2026 - The class is meeting on Zoom today as we have moved online since the start of the war. In the chat, a student types: “I just heard something.” Another types, “me too.” I have heard it too. Another student: “a couple of car alarms are going off in my neighborhood.” We take a short break to check in on loved ones and scroll through the news. Then we resume class. One of the students is a Palestinian woman who grew up in a refugee camp in Syria and is now resettled with her family in Abu Dhabi. “You think I’d be used to this by now, but it just hits differently here.” – Neha
These observations point to another set of paradoxical entanglements. The first one pertains to geography. The UAE has notably fostered its place within the global economy via the establishment of free zones: designated extra-territorial spaces within the nation’s borders that have substantially contributed to the economic success of a place like Dubai. Meanwhile, Gulf countries’ involvement in the current war is an outcome of another type of extra-territoriality: the large number of US military bases in the region, a result of the tight interconnection between arms sales, oil revenues, and geopolitical control since the 1960s. The defense systems intercepting Iranian strikes have been acquired from the US and Israel, the two countries that initiated the war that now requires the use of these very systems. These geopolitical entanglements expand far beyond the military sector, into various areas of cooperation that manifest in more mundane aspects of life.
As professors working for American universities in the region, we have been caught in these contradictions since we arrived—both having to defend the decision to live and work in the Gulf to Western academics who claim a moral high ground of liberalism and free speech (which over the last few years has continually proven itself to be false), and to negotiate in the classroom and in our everyday lives what it means to be living in a hyper-diverse society whose rhetoric and policies deeply impact our students and colleagues. This highlights a second entanglement, related to the UAE’s increasingly active role in regional geopolitics. Since the mid-2000s, the country has intervened on the regional scene – from Libya to Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Sudan – through diplomatic, financial, and military means. This political shift culminated with the normalization of the relationship with Israel, announced in 2020, which launched a new spur of military and intelligence cooperation between the two countries. This shift has elicited specific tensions and contradictions for many of the country’s residents, which the current war has made more salient, and more painful. Members of these diasporas are indeed not naïve; they are aware of the contradictions of this place. Our Sudanese and Palestinian friends, colleagues, and students are open about their conflicting feelings regarding the UAE’s role in what their homelands are facing. Lebanese and Palestinian residents are facing the consequences of Iranian strikes in the Emirates, while their families back home are subjected to Israel’s genocidal and colonial project. Iranian citizens who are now facing visa bans in the UAE have posted poignant testimonies on social media of their sense of belonging to this place. They described the guilt and shame they felt at seeing the country they formally belong to attacking their new home, and their heartbreak at the eventuality of being excluded. These dynamics are acknowledged beyond the communities directly impacted: the closure of the Iranian hospital in Dubai led many social media users of all nationalities to recollect their memories of, and attachment to, this longstanding establishment.
September 2024 - the mood is somber as I enter a group show at a gallery in Dubai’s Al Serkal Avenue Arts district. Israel has just bombed Lebanon, after killing several civilians by blowing up cell phones. I am standing next to an artist whose work is in the show. She is from Lebanon and is now stranded in Dubai–she had flown in just a few days prior for the show. How is she doing, I ask her? She’s worried about her family in Beirut, she tells me, but once it is safe she is bringing her parents to Dubai. She applied for a golden visa a couple of years ago as an artist, and therefore it will allow her to sponsor her parents. They will resettle in Dubai – Neha
Both the political contradictions and the costs of safety are extremely clear for most of the UAE’s residents. In recent years, anger towards the Gulf states’ politics has sometimes manifested in the Arab world through calls to boycott these countries. But these calls have had little purchase in practice, an effect of the deep entanglements of their populations. Stability and safety are not just government rhetoric; they are important factors that people weigh against political rights (which are often absent or failing in their home countries as well), and against the longer struggle required to emigrate to a place with the possibility of naturalization. These factors are central to migration choices, alongside the proximity to the home country, even when return has been precluded by war. Safety is what sustains and supports many communities at home and in diaspora; yet imperialist ventures like the US and Israel’s decision to attack Iran have made this safety particularly fragile.
This context is essential to understanding some of the patriotic narratives by noncitizens that have flooded the UAE’s social media. They note that life goes on almost as usual, make light of emergency warning cellphone alerts, caution their family members not to buy into Indian news claiming that they are in World War III, praise the UAE’s leaders, and thank the military. These posts are not simply an outcome of paid advertising or censorship; they reflect true affect, a sense of relief that their authors are not elsewhere, of fear for their relatives who are, and a reinforcement of their belonging here. While the state is indeed careful to curate an image of safety and business-as-usual amid the current crisis, it would be wrong to read these posts solely as iterations of official propaganda. Dismissing expressions of belonging as mandated loyalty shows a deep misunderstanding of the dynamics that make up Gulf urban societies.
I first arrived in the UAE in 2010, as the effects of the global financial crisis were still lingering. Dominant discourses in Western media then had a very similar tone to the ones I am reading now: a schadenfreude at the idea that the Dubai model could collapse, that paid little attention to the very real consequences of the crisis on those living here. Inside the UAE, however, what people were talking about was how many had left – they all had stories about a colleague from a Western country leaving the office one evening and never coming back. My interlocutors – young adults who had grown up in Abu Dhabi – all asserted, by contrast, their attachment to this place. They identified as Emirati citizens; as Lebanese and Egyptians “born and grown up here;” or as Palestinians “from Abu Dhabi,” among others. For those who did not hold a UAE passport, staying was an aspiration – uncertain and strategized about as a family, through complex calculations. For all, it was an assertion of belonging to place: to the city where they grew up and spent their formative years. – Laure
In recent years, government messaging in the UAE has acknowledged how essential noncitizen residents are to the social and economic stability of the nation. While the state’s efforts to attract investors and billionaires have been prominently documented, the recent reforms to migration and residency policies also acknowledge essential categories, such as healthcare workers and creatives. Official communications in the past few weeks have been careful to mention the importance of long-term residents; perhaps even tinged with a sense of anxiety as to what will happen to the country if these communities dissipate. After the announcement that travelers holding Iranian passports would not be allowed entry or transit in the UAE, the government thus responded to the shockwave this caused in the diaspora by issuing reassuring statements. Billboards across the UAE started exclaiming, “In the UAE, everyone is Emirati.” These images have been widely reshared on social media, by users jokingly announcing their readiness to receive the passport: these posts both acknowledge the messaging as rhetorical, while also making a claim of belonging. Images of Mohammed bin Zayed visiting injured South Asian expatriates in the hospital or shaking hands with African workers in the Dubai Mall are of course staged events, but they also reveal the necessity of these workers to the UAE’s day-to-day functioning. The billboards’ slogan has now changed to “Proud of the UAE.” These messages evoke a conditional inclusion: they acknowledge noncitizens as essential at the same time as they are reiterate an injunction to loyalty that also applies to citizens.
A flurry of messages came through that first week from other Western colleagues. Are you going home? Some of them had left on the first day through Oman, others had managed to get flights to Europe and then onward to North America. “My husband holds a Ugandan passport,” I had to remind them. Our green card application is indefinitely held up due to Trump's recent ban on several countries. He would not be able to join me. – Neha
The question that surfaced in the first days of the war among our friends and colleagues—are you going home?—was not merely a question of concern. It was a question structured by the unequal geographies of mobility that this war has laid bare. For some, “home” appears as an obvious elsewhere, reachable through the quick activation of a passport, a visa regime, or a repatriation route. For others, home is fractured, inaccessible, dangerous, or politically foreclosed. There may be no place to return to, no place one can legally enter, or no place that offers greater safety, dignity, or possibility than the one now under threat. In that sense, the war has not simply disrupted life in the UAE. It has illuminated the global entanglements through which a place like the UAE is made: as a node in overlapping regimes of empire, militarism, labor extraction, racial hierarchy, and migration control that distribute mobility unevenly and make both departure and return radically unequal.
Reading the present through the politics of staying also helps us move beyond two familiar distortions: the spectacle of elite departure and the easy dismissal of noncitizen nationalism as propaganda. Neither captures the dense social reality of Gulf life. What becomes visible instead are the forms of life that war throws into relief: long-built diasporic worlds, intergenerational attachments, obligations that stretch across borders, and everyday calculations of safety, intimacy, and survival. The UAE’s residents are not simply passive subjects of state-managed stability, nor are they naïve about the contradictions of the place. We live those contradictions intimately. Yet it is precisely from within those contradictions that claims to place are made. The politics of staying, then, names something more than immobility. It names the uneven conditions under which people are made to remain, the histories that make remaining meaningful, and the insistence—fragile, pragmatic, and sometimes defiant—that even here, under missiles and amid empire, belonging is being articulated in real time. To stay, in this sense, is to refuse the idea that the Gulf is merely a site of transit, extraction, or fantasy. It is to insist that it is also home.