From periphery to centre: the Arab Gulf in the global formations of race, citizenship and migration

This article centres the Gulf as a key site for expanding the conceptual and geographical scope of ethnic and racial studies. The meaning and material dimensions of difference in the region continue to be approached ahistorically and through methodological nationalism, often detached from longer histories of imperial governance, as well as from the everyday practices through which race is produced and contested. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork with young people in Dubai, the article traces how racial formations are constructed and reworked across imperial governance and contemporary discourses of belonging. The article examines what race does: how it structures access to rights, legitimises hierarchy, and organises social and economic relations through categories such as “migrant/citizen” and notions of lineage and authenticity. Race thus emerges as a relational, materially grounded, and historically contingent form of power that takes different forms across contexts while remaining embedded in regimes of mobility, settlement, and citizenship.