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Nearly 90 percent of residents in Dubai are foreigners with no Emirati nationality. As in many global cities, those who hold Western passports share specific advantages: prestigious careers, high salaries, and comfortable homes and lifestyles. With this book, Amélie Le Renard explores how race, gender and class backgrounds shape experiences of privilege, and investigates the processes that lead to the formation of Westerners as a social group. Westernness is more than a passport; it is also an identity that requires emotional and bodily labor. And as they work, hook up, parent, and hire domestic help, Westerners chase Dubai's promise of socioeconomic elevation for the few. Through an ethnography informed by postcolonial and feminist theory, Le Renard reveals the diverse experiences and trajectories of white and non-white, male and female Westerners to understand the shifting and contingent nature of Westernness—and also its deep connection to whiteness and heteronormativity. Western Privilege offers a singular look at the lived reality of structural racism in cities of the global South.

Chinese in Dubai tells the fascinating story of the Chinese in the most prominent global city of the Arabian Gulf--their history, struggles and contributions--against the backdrop of a shifting global political economic order with the rise of China.

A stirring account of the experiences of migrant domestic workers, and what freedom, abuse, and power mean within a vast contract labor system. In the United Arab Emirates, there is an employment sponsorship system known as the kafala. Migrant domestic workers within it must solely work for their employer, secure their approval to leave the country, and obtain their consent to terminate a job. In Unfree, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the labor of women from the Philippines, who represent the largest domestic workforce in the country. She challenges presiding ideas about the kafala, arguing that its reduction to human trafficking is, at best, unproductive, and at worst damaging to genuine efforts to regulate this system that impacts tens of millions of domestic workers across the globe. The kafala system technically renders migrant workers unfree as they are made subject to the arbitrary authority of their employer. Not surprisingly, it has been the focus of intense scrutiny and criticism from human rights advocates and scholars. Yet, contrary to their claims, Parreñas argues that most employers do not abuse domestic workers or maximize the extraction of their labor. Still, the outrage elicited by this possibility dominates much of public discourse and overshadows the more mundane reality of domestic work in the region. Drawing on unparalleled data collected over 4 years,this book diverges from previous studies as it establishes that the kafala system does not necessarily result in abuse, but instead leads to the absence of labor standards. This absence is reflected in the diversity of work conditions across households, ranging from dehumanizing treatment, infantilization, to respect and recognition of domestic workers. Unfree shows how various stakeholders, including sending and receiving states, NGOs, inter-governmental organizations, employers and domestic workers, project moral standards to guide the unregulated labor of domestic work. They can mitigate or aggravate the arbitrary authority of employers. Parreñas offers a deft and rich portrait of how morals mediate work on the ground, warning against the dangers of reducing unfreedom to structural violence.

Dubai, the City as Corporation reveals the role of cultural and political forces in shaping the image and reality of Dubai. Ahmed Kanna offers an instructive picture of how different factions have participated in the creation and marketing of Dubai, providing an unparalleled account of how the built environment shapes and is shaped by globalization and neoliberalism in a diverse, multinational city.

Personal experience informs a discussion of the Indian middle class in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which has been hit particularly hard by the global economic crisis. It is argued that even during the boom, the Indian expatriates struggled with socioeconomic challenges, eg, wages & racism. Adapted from the source document.

Hvidt argues that a critical juncture took place in early twentieth century when the ruler of Dubai chose to provide economic incentives to the Persian-based merchant class to relocate to Dubai. Because of the success of including the merchant class from Persia and other successful state interventions in the economy, the belief is that the state not only could but should influence the future development.

\"When people in Dubai decide to do something, they never go halfway. Dubai is an oil-rich area in the Middle East, located on the Persian Gulf. Dubai recently announced plans for a massive undertaking called the 'Mall of the World.' Scheduled to open in the year 2020, it will be an entire indoor city, air-conditioned and built to withstand the high temperatures of Dubai.\" (NewsCurrents Read to Know) Read more about this shopping mall. Other \"firsts\" in Dubai are described.

Local stock and property prices have since swooned, and the tempo of arrests for alleged business misdeeds ranging from a dud check -- a criminal offense here -- to serious fraud has picked up sharply. Only a tiny minority has been picked up by police but, says a longtime foreign resident who runs a company here, It's all a bit scary.

To [Sharaf] and others, Dubai is the answer to the Arab world's ills, so diverse that conversations in taxicabs are sometimes a patois of Arabic, English and Hindi. Its architecture suggests Pharaonic ambition; at 3 billion square feet, the amusement park known as Dubailand will be three times the size of Manhattan, complete with a replica of the Eiffel Tower and a 60,000-seat stadium. The city's growth, vision and dynamism -- to advocates, at least -- chart a way forward for Arab development independent of the Bush administration's emphasis on democratic reform. Arab expatriates who have flocked here declare Dubai a success and say that the Arab world needs a success story. It is remarkable how little U.S. policy figures in conversations here. The dispute this winter over a Dubai company's plans to manage six U.S. ports was seen less as an insult and more as a failure of Dubai officials to market themselves and master public relations. Religion comes up usually only in the context of illustrating Dubai's tolerance. Unlike in Egypt, Lebanon or Syria, almost no one mentions the Bush administration's talk about democratic reform. Politics, in fact, is rare in Dubai, where power resides with a single family, the Maktoum clan. In this city of transients, 85 percent of its workforce foreign, politics hardly exists. For [Nasser Saidi], the Lebanese economist, the reasons for Dubai's transformation from a sleepy, pearl-diving village to a modern metropolis are many. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, rich Arab states began investing in their region and Dubai, in particular. Oil prices have unleashed a spending and investment boom in the Persian Gulf on par with the 1970s. The city-state has invested in infrastructure -- only China has more cranes, and Dubai's ports can unload a ship in 24 hours, on average 12 faster than Rotterdam. There is little official corruption, less political instability, and Dubai ranks high in surveys on rule of law and regulatory quality. Money-laundering -- residents describe multimillion-dollar houses paid for in cash, sight unseen -- has come under growing scrutiny, Saidi said. Then there is the rare combination of highly skilled workers and cheap laborers, like [Amin] and [Miah]. \"It's as though you could say, 'Let me take 100 million Chinese and put them in the United States,' \" Saidi said.