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Reviewed by:
  • Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai
  • Attiya Ahmad
Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai Pardis Mahdavi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 251 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-7220-4.

Have anti-trafficking initiatives, most notably the Trafficking in Persons report put out annually by the U.S. Department of State, improved the situation of transnational sex workers in Dubai? Pardis Mahdavi’s ethnography, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai, provides us with a resounding answer: no. Based on research she conducted intermittently between 2004-09, including interviewing foreign residents in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as government officials involved in anti-trafficking initiatives in both the UAE and the United States, Mahdavi underscores the fundamental disconnect that exists between the everyday lived experiences of transnational sex workers and discourses of trafficking promulgated by human rights organizations and state institutions. This disconnect, she argues, stems from the problematic assumptions that undergird anti-trafficking reports and policies, ones leading to the development of initiatives that perpetuate and, even worse, exacerbate the problems encountered by transnational sex workers in Dubai.

While “trafficking” can refer to a range of abuses experienced by individuals and groups across many sectors, Mahdavi points to how trafficking discourses focus almost exclusively on transnational sex workers in the UAE. These discourses are predicated on gendered, racialized, and Orientalist assumptions—where women, mostly young and from the [End Page 127] global South (most notably from sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian sub-continent, and Southeast Asia), are depicted as victims duped or forced into sex work. It is further assumed that sex trafficking is especially egregious in the UAE because of the region’s patriarchal and politically authoritarian nature. These assessments, Mahdavi emphasizes, are haphazardly constructed and based on speculation and rumor rather than on systematic in-country research. Far from an accurate assessment of the region, trafficking reports reflect religious and racial prejudices and are understood to be a tool of Western imperialism, used to paint adversaries in a negative light in order to wrest from them concessions, including favorable trade agreements.

The consequences of these anti-trafficking discourses are troubling. Mahdavi discusses how the UAE government’s implementation of anti-trafficking policy recommendations has worsened the situation of transnational sex workers. By encouraging restrictive and punitive measures, most notably the tightening of borders, the expansion of police involvement, and the deportation of sex workers, these policies have driven transnational sex workers further underground. They have made it harder for individuals and civil society groups already providing outreach services to sex workers to continue their work. Rather than “saving women,” Mahdavi points to how these policies have intensified the gendered and racialized power inequalities to which migrant women are subject, and have diverted attention and resources away from other more potentially successful initiatives.

Mahdavi argues that effective programs can only develop if we account for transnational sex workers’ experiences and place these experiences in the broader context of migrant and foreign residents’ rights in the UAE. Most sex workers, she tells us, are not trafficked, but migrate on their own accord, assisted by members of their families and communities. Drawn by the high incomes they envision earning in Dubai, these women engage in sex work in order to provide for themselves and their families. Few are at the mercy of recruiters or pimps, and, relative to foreign resident women in other sectors, most notably domestic workers, sex workers have relative autonomy over their time, activities, and resources. While some workers experience abuse and exploitation, this constitutes a particular instance and form of structural violence to which all foreign residents in the UAE are subject. Here, Mahdavi points [End Page 128] to the interrelation between the kefala system and trafficking. She argues that the kefala system—a citizen-devolved system of governance where foreign residents’ presence and ability to work in Dubai is contingent upon their being sponsored on a temporary two-year basis by an Emirati citizen—generates exploitative situations that render foreign residents vulnerable to trafficking. Rather than limiting the term trafficking to sex workers, Mahdavi argues that we should expand our use of the term to encompass all...

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