The role of colonial knowledge in building the Arab Gulf’s migration regime
Abstract
In this paper, I examine how the British Empire in the Arab Gulf created colonial classifications between Gulf Arabs and South Asians. The British racialised the Gulf Arabs in a way which presented them as an eternal, homogeneous, and ‘pure’ group. This racialisation contributed to the exclusion of others within the Gulf, most notably South Asian migrants. Firstly, I discuss some of the gaps within the literature which include the erasure of race and colonialism. Then, I identify how these gaps can be remedied using a Decolonial framework. Based on these theoretical foundations, I interrogate the racialisations of Gulf Arabs and how these racialisations influenced the migration regime in the Gulf. Lastly, I examine how South Asians were racialised in the Gulf. I conclude that the exclusionary migration regime in the Arab Gulf is built on the foundations of the racialised colonial classifications of the British Empire.
Citation
Alnuaimi , H 2022 , ' The role of colonial knowledge in building the Arab Gulf’s migration regime ' , Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies , vol. 16 , no. 4 , pp. 382-401 . https://doi.org/10.1080/25765949.2022.2151079
Publication
Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2576-5949Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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