Alex Boodrookas, Comrades Estranged: Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf (Stanford University Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Alex Boodrookas (AB): I started graduate school after living in Oman from 2010 to 2011, when I witnessed a remarkable popular uprising crushed by military force. As I immersed myself in the historiography of the Arabian Peninsula, I found that most works focused on state or imperial policy and relied on official archives. While valuable in many ways, this scholarship did not seek to explain the kind of popular activism that I myself had witnessed and wanted to better understand. I instead gravitated toward social histories that emphasized the agency of ordinary people. Some dated back decades to the work of scholars such as Helen Lackner, Fawaz Trabulsi, and Fred Halliday; more have emerged in the years since. During my dissertation research, I consciously tried to highlight hitherto neglected archives and historical actors. This led to quite a few dead ends, but also to many surprises, pushing my work in unexpected directions. Comrades Estranged draws on an array of Arabic-language sources that have previously received little attention—newspapers, memoirs, and oral history interviews—to center the role of social movements and non-elite actors in political and social change.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AB: Comrades Estranged emerged out of organizing work I took part in while in graduate school at NYU. I arrived in New York as the NYU Abu Dhabi campus was being built. Along with other students and faculty, I grew alarmed about its implications. The project was effectively a bureaucratic merger with an ambitious authoritarian regime that made no provision for the speech and organizing rights of workers, faculty, or students. These concerns later proved well-founded. But the experience also taught me a great deal. It demonstrated the extent to which the Persian Gulf reflects, and sheds light on, phenomena with global resonance, such as the deployment of citizenship as a category of exclusion, the use of deportation as a weapon against dissent, and the creation of divisive categories of race, nationality, and class. Consistent with a growing body of scholarship that critiques exceptionalizing representations of the Gulf, the university was no more amenable to labor organizing in New York than it was in Abu Dhabi, while the threat of visa denial or deportation hung especially heavily over the campus in Tel Aviv. Anthropologists, sociologists, and even some political scientists were beginning to address these questions, often with great insight. But when I went looking for historical works that could contextualize our organizing campaign, I found that only a handful used local sources or foregrounded popular politics. Comrades Estranged is, in effect, the book I wanted fifteen years ago.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AB: Comrades Estranged ties together histories of activism, citizenship, oil, and decolonization in the twentieth-century Persian Gulf. It traces three interrelated questions that dominated midcentury politics: Who has a right to citizenship? What rights should citizenship entail? And what rights should be granted to noncitizens?
The book weaves together two thematic arcs. The first traces the creation of an exclusionary regime of nationality laws, movement restrictions, and labor regulations, beginning as the British empire tightened its grip over the Persian Gulf during WWI. It argues that control over borders reshaped politics within them, building the foundations of authoritarian regimes that first emerged as deportation states. British officials worked hand in glove with oil companies, ruling families, business interests, and assorted “experts” to etch corporate strategies of labor control—arbitrary deportation, divide and rule, and contract labor—into the bureaucratic apparatus of Gulf regimes. Following political independence in the 1960s, the deportation state found new allies in well-connected employers who lobbied to transform noncitizen labor into an even more readily available and disposable commodity. Comrades Estranged therefore illustrates the limits of decolonization and the inextricability of empire, citizenship, class, and authoritarianism.
The central through-line and principal intervention of Comrades Estranged is its history of popular movements, with a focus on the especially rich example of Kuwait. Kuwaiti feminists condemned patriarchal legislation that denied nationality to the children of Kuwaiti women and noncitizen men. Anticolonial and pro-democracy reformers warned that a permanent underclass of noncitizen residents would undermine constitutional rule. Kuwaiti workers proved to be key actors. Beginning in the 1950s, workers launched a campaign of protests and strikes that built the foundations of a social safety net and positioned labor as the vanguard of decolonization. Perceiving that its strength depended on its inclusivity and inspired by principles of working-class solidarity, the Kuwaiti labor movement orchestrated perhaps the most powerful citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Gulf. In the aftermath of Kuwaiti independence in 1961, unions became powerful opponents of both absolutist rule and exclusionary citizenship, winning the desegregation of the oil industry and the nationalization of oil. In so doing, the Kuwaiti labor movement played a pivotal role in forging a global consensus that reshaped the postwar petroleum order—the idea that control over natural resources is a fundamental right of sovereignty. But while organized labor achieved its anticolonial nationalist objectives, its internationalist effort to transcend the boundary of nationality floundered. The failure to win rights for noncitizens fatally undermined the social movements that underpinned democracy in Kuwait. Comrades Estranged therefore illustrates both the power, and the limits, of citizenship and the nation-state as frameworks for political action.
Comrades Estranged makes a series of distinct but interrelated interventions. Rather than framing noncitizens as predetermined objects of study, it historicizes the process of their exclusion, tracing how noncitizens were produced as such—as temporary, structurally vulnerable, and excised from the body politic. This approach places citizens and noncitizens in the same analytical frame and demonstrates how both citizenship and denizenship—or the rights of noncitizens—were forged in tandem. In conceptualizing state formation as a dialectical process shaped by mass movements from the bottom up, Comrades Estranged argues that the benefits of the welfare state were not gifts from benevolent autocrats or the inevitable result of oil wealth, but rather the hard-fought victories of a sustained popular struggle. The book unearths a history of antiracist worker resistance and solidarity that both illustrates the relationship between race and nationality and prefigures arguments made by scholars of racial capitalism decades later. Finally, it traces how workers and their allies built the arguments behind oil nationalization and then took physical control of the production process, literally bringing it about. Together, these interventions center popular movements in the most consequential transformations of the midcentury Gulf.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AB: Comrades Estranged will be of greatest interest to scholars of the Persian Gulf and historians of labor in the modern Middle East. However, it will also appeal to specialists in the history of oil, immigration, labor, nationality, citizenship, and decolonization in other historical contexts. Because of its local source base, it is especially attuned to political debates in the Gulf itself, meaning that it should appeal to an audience outside the academy. I also wrote the book with labor and immigration activists in mind. The question of immigration has been an Achilles heel for labor movements around the world. The demonization of undocumented immigrants by the United Farm Workers in California left deep and permanent scars, while the use of Bantustans to transform Black workers into noncitizen contractors provided a veneer of legal legitimacy to Apartheid South Africa. The history of solidarity in Comrades Estranged represents a concrete historical example of how previous generations of labor organizers challenged the exclusions of nationality to build a more just and egalitarian movement.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AB: I am currently working on an article about the enclosure of national economic space in the Gulf, but most of my energies are directed towards organizing around issues of labor, asylum, and academic freedom. I view organizing as inextricable from my scholarship—the one informing the other.
J: What do you hope to see in future historical scholarship on the Persian Gulf?
AB: In recent decades, scholars have overturned many outdated paradigms in Gulf studies. However, there is still much space for new social histories featuring Arabic-language sources—especially given the existence of a vast and underutilized archive. Newspapers are an especially rich prospective source base, but memoirs and popular histories provide both invaluable information and a window into how historical events have been represented, contested, and understood. I think that oral history is perhaps the most important and underused resource in Gulf studies, especially as interviews preserve voices that would otherwise be lost. I hope that the field will, in future, include more scholars from and based in the region, working with local sources and engaging with questions relevant to their own lived experience.
Excerpt from the book (from chapter 5, “Are We Really Independent? | 1960–1965,” pages 125 to 129)
In the summer of 1964, the newly minted National Assembly of Kuwait gathered to discuss the draft of a new labor law. Nearly all of its elected members had come to the conclusion that revised legislation was necessary. Over the course of the previous year, an unprecedented succession of strikes had swept the country, bringing renewed attention to long-simmering worker grievances and leading Kuwaitis across the political spectrum to conclude that without a reformed legal apparatus to govern industrial relations, workers had few means of redress. A revitalized press, deploying the massively popular rhetoric of Arab Socialism, kept the labor question on the front page of Kuwait’s many newspapers. The National Assembly brought to power a cohort of Arab nationalist MPs who, though a minority in the chamber, had long been advocates of workers’ rights and were able to turn parliamentary attention to labor affairs. Reflecting the mood of the moment, even the most conservative members of the Assembly had grudgingly come to believe that something needed to be done, if only to fend off calls for more radical change.
Consensus collapsed, however, around several key issues—most notably, the position of noncitizen workers within organized labor. Saʿud al-ʿAbd al-Razzaq, the Vice President of the National Assembly, argued that it would be dangerous to allow noncitizens to join trade unions, especially given their numerical predominance in the private sector. Presuming that noncitizens would continue to sympathize with their home countries, he argued that their incorporation into the labor movement would create powerful domestic organizations under foreign control, thus undermining Kuwaiti sovereignty. Khalid al-Ghanim, one of the many MPs from elite merchant families, agreed, expressing a vague but widely held concern that allowing noncitizens to join unions could generate instability and strife (fitna). These elites, many of whom personally employed noncitizen workers on short-term contracts, were already uncomfortable with the legalization of trade unions, and viewed noncitizen membership as a profound threat to both their political and economic interests.
Mohammad al-Rashid, the only former oil worker in the legislature, most clearly articulated the position of the pro-labor Arab nationalists. He argued that denying rights to noncitizen workers would rebound on their Kuwaiti counterparts. How, he asked, could a strike succeed if it were limited to the minority of Kuwaiti workers, who could not shut down production on their own? Dr. Ahmad al-Khatib, now the Vice President of the Assembly and universally recognized leader of the opposition, agreed. Dressed in one of his trademark suits, he noted that many non-Kuwaitis had refused to participate in the recent strike at the Kuwait Oil Company because they feared retribution, undermining the power of the stoppage and, therefore, the rights of their Kuwaiti colleagues. Jassim al-Qatami made a complementary, if more cerebral, case, tracing the historical importance of worker solidarity across world history. Debate was somewhat derailed when he mentioned Karl Marx, which caused a stir amongst the assembled legislators. But he stuck to his position, reiterating that workers could only secure their rights within an inclusive movement. A number of early labor organizers—many of whom were themselves naturalized—attended Assembly sessions to lobby for the bill and against nationality-based restrictions on union membership. The Arab nationalists tied their case together with a central thread: the inextricability of the rights of citizen and noncitizen workers.
For anticolonial nationalists and their allies, the winning of Kuwaiti independence in 1961 was an enormous victory. It also represented a moment of promise. Under a relatively reformist Emir and a new constitution, the press flourished as never before, turning Kuwait into something of a political nexus of the Arabic-speaking world. The exclusionary citizenship regime enacted in 1959 faced its first challenge both in the press and in Parliament as it began to create a class of stateless people. A young generation of labor organizers took advantage of their newfound rights by forming the first legal trade unions in Kuwaiti history. By becoming the most trenchant critics of the racial segregation that permeated the foreign-owned oil companies, organized labor emerged as a cornerstone of the pro-democracy and Arab nationalist movements and constructed the case that would eventually lead to a Kuwaiti takeover of the oil industry.
A debate over the rights of two interrelated groups—noncitizens and workers—soon dominated the politics of the new nation-state. This struggle was pivotal in a country where most of the population, and the overwhelming majority of the private sector workforce, was not Kuwaiti. Feminists proved powerful critics of a nationality regime that often rendered the children of Kuwaiti women and noncitizen men stateless. Other social movements— from pro-democracy advocates to people of nomadic background—found themselves similarly excluded or marginalized by a deliberately hierarchical nationality regime. Activists believed that the battle over the outlines of citizenship would shape not just the rights of noncitizens, but the fate of the social movements on which Kuwaiti democracy relied. Despite occasional defections, the Kuwaiti trade union leadership fought to include Arab noncitizens—and, eventually, all noncitizens—in their movement. They viewed the issue as existential. Exclusion would create an underclass of poorly paid contractors, driving down wages for all workers, citizen and noncitizen, and disincentivizing the employment of better-paid citizens. It would also render strikes ineffective, thus dooming organized labor to irrelevance. Practical considerations meshed with ideological ones. The close relationship between the labor and Arab nationalist movements meant that both considered all Arabs, regardless of nationality, as their countrymen. The hardening of national divides thus generated an increasingly powerful movement to overcome them.
But despite the new freedoms of political independence, Kuwaiti reformers in the early constitutional period could not overturn the structural inequities that persisted from the imperial era. The same elites remained atop the same state apparatus. Legislation drafted and imposed under imperial rule was still in effect, often enforced by the same bureaucrats. The old merchant families dominated the new National Assembly and viewed movements for worker and noncitizen rights as an attack on their supply of cheap and pliable labor, while the monarchy, its insecurity only heightened by British withdrawal, framed mass political movements as threats to their power. The regime and its elite allies adopted many of the same stereotypes favored by their former overlords—Bedouin backwardness, nativism, patriarchy, and anticommunism. Even British influence persisted, as Political Agents-turned-ambassadors defended the interests of oil multinationals with the connivance of an increasingly invested United States. British-orchestrated coups in Sharjah in 1965, Abu Dhabi in 1966, and Oman in 1970 vividly illustrated what would happen if a Gulf state drifted too far from Anglo-American hegemony. In law and personnel, discourse and infrastructure, the long arm of empire remained largely intact. For Kuwaitis who had led the victorious fight for independence, what stood out was continuity, rather than change. Indeed, more than a decade later, in the midst of yet another battle in the seemingly endless war with the oil companies, a Kuwaiti paper could still publish the banner headline: “Are we really independent?”
For nascent trade unions, the contradictions of building an internationalist movement within the framework of the nation-state proved just as challenging as imperial continuities. Their ubiquitous call for “Arabization” and “Kuwaitization”—primarily a demand to desegregate the oil industry by replacing white managers with Arab and Kuwaiti workers—at times rebounded on other noncitizens, who lost opportunities for employment and advancement. In their critiques of contractors who hired undocumented workers, workers and their allies indirectly aligned with supporters of stricter immigration enforcement, reinforcing the very deportation state that disempowered their noncitizen colleagues. Perhaps the most glaring exclusion of organized labor was an inheritance from Arab nationalism—a profound distrust, even hatred, of Iranians, who often received more hostility than solidarity in the first years of independence. In the newly independent nation-state, labor seemed to win only when it pursued nationalist objectives or defended the rights of citizens. The often valiant efforts of labor organizers on behalf of their noncitizen colleagues met, in virtually every case, powerful opposition and eventual defeat. The result was that the structural fissure between citizens and noncitizens only grew wider, even as the labor movement became an increasingly prominent critic of the citizenship regime.
Kuwaiti independence was, in many ways, revolutionary. But the early constitutional era also underlined its limits. To paraphrase Frederick Cooper, Kuwaitis had won their sovereignty—but nothing else. The end of British suzerainty did little to stem the inequities of an international oil regime that benefited Anglo-American oil firms as much as, if not more than, oil-producing states. Their operations remained segregated, and their upper ranks dominated by managers in Britain and the United States. Nor was independence accompanied by a dramatic change in the domestic power structure. If anything, the new Kuwaiti constitution preserved the late imperial balance of power, epitomizing what Julian Go calls the “historical institutionalization” of a colonial instrument. While reformers hoped that the constitution would provide the foundation of a new, democratic order, its passage proved to be a high-water mark for Kuwaiti democracy. Kuwaitis also increasingly found themselves sundered from their fellow Arabs, as national interests trumped anticolonial solidarities. Thus, like their counterparts around the world, anticolonial nationalists in Kuwait would find that independence did not mean decolonization.