As part of its monthly lecture program, on Monday, 25 March 2024, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies hosted Mira Al Hussein, research fellow at Edinburgh University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World. She gave a lecture titled “Western Immigrants in the Arab Gulf Countries in Western Academic Literature: A Critical Approach from a Gulf Lens”, moderated by ACRPS researcher, Alanoud Abdulla Al-Khalifa.

Al Hussein began her lecture by providing an insight into the past through the encounters between the Gulf region and Western travelers and army officers, which precede the discovery of oil. Romanticized histories involving British army officers reinforce orientalist depictions of Arabs and Arabia in Western films and literary works. The presumed ability of such individuals to “go native”, by dressing like their hosts, adopting their language and customs, had set them up as authorities on the region. Their essentializing and exoticizing narratives of Arab purity and homogeneity would later be adopted by the post-colonial Gulf states, which relied on such depictions in the manufacturing of their nations’ genealogies, and would later inform everything that has been written on the Gulf and its history, erasing by that the diversity of the Gulf that was very connected to the Indian Ocean, the southern coast of Iran, and the wider region.

Apart from self-published memoirs, scholarly literature on Western expatriation and the lived experiences of Western migrants in and to the Gulf remain scarce. Al Hussein surveyed these scholarly works wherein she indicated that Western migrants are the subject of an anthropological gaze that is authored by compatriots rather than being mediated by an outsider. Insider studies, therefore, raise important questions about disclosure and mediated works about “others”.

Al Hussein noted how the people coming to the Gulf are often being thought about as new immigrants who have arrived because of the oil. However, thinking critically about this tells how this is most applicable to Westerns, some of whom had actually arrived earlier as missionary workers. In this context, she elaborated on the categories used to describe different people who are non-citizens to the Gulf, for instance “expatiates” that is often used to refer to high-salaried foreigners, Westerns specifically, but sometimes Arabs as well. She refused using “residents” to refer to Western immigrants because of their “holiday” lifestyle settings that does not makes them “residents” in this sense. Al Hussein further added the words “migrants” and “migrant workers”, and stressed her inclination to using “migrants”, without differentiating Westerns from migrant workers, because primarily, remittances are sent home by Westerners as well.

Al Hussein discussed privileged mobilities in the context of Western immigration to the Gulf, which renders Westerners very visible, racially marked, and racially othered. One marker of difference, she suggested, is compounds, where Westerners live. The dearth of information regarding the compounds – or the gated communities as they came to be known – in the Gulf represents a hurdle for scholars who wish to trace back histories in different Gulf states. Compounds were meant to enable “transportability” of a certain lifestyle to an environment otherwise unconducive to Western sensibilities. Compounds were meant to shield Westerners from the outside world, dubbed by some as conservative, very backward, and primitive. Compounds, therefore, were meant to have everything within and self-sustaining in a way that Western expatriates would not feel the need to step out.

With the windfall from consecutive oil booms, which helped Gulf states frog leap through their development process, attracting a skilled labor necessitated the construction of residential neighborhoods that reflected the type of workers Gulf states were aiming to attract. Al Hussein noted that while low paid workers were sequestered away, confined to the outskirts of Gulf cities, compounds remained geographically central. Self-sustaining gated communities, particularly in more conservative Gulf states, were consequently meant to afford residents more social freedoms relative to the environment outside of these communities. In relatively liberal Gulf cities, Al Hussein remarked, living in gated communities became a status maker.

Al Hussein concluded her lecture by addressing how Western consultants and experts are helicoptered in Gulf institutions and bureaucracy, allowed to offer opinions and put visions authoritatively, despite lacking the knowledge and the necessary background on the region. At the same time, Western immigrants in the Gulf benefit from an image of professional expertise – a lingering legacy of a colonial era that saw a local population lagging behind in industrial knowledge that tipped that capital balance toward the Global North. Similarly, the image of the uneducated, underperforming Gulf citizens is an image mediated by Gulf ruling elites who relay this kind of image to their Western advisers and consultants. Western consultants, thus, perform a buffer role, shielding ruling elites from accountability for when their policy adventurism backfires.