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Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 1 (2014), 179–18 ISSN 2169-4435 MEHRAN KAMRAVA & ZAHRA BABAR, eds., Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (London: Hurst & Co., Ltd., 2012). Pp. 242. $40.000 cloth. ISBNN 9781849042109. REVIEWED BY SHARON NAGY, Clemson University, email: snagy@clemson.edu In the months following the release of Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf, media outlets (mostly from the UK) once again turned an eye to the conditions and circumstances of laboring migrants in the Gulf States. There seems to be no apparent connection between the release of the book and the attention being paid to laboring conditions. Rather, this is the latest spate of attention paid to the Gulf over the past few decades. Hardly the darling of scholars or journalists through most of the twentieth century, the region comprising the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) has, since the invasion and liberation of Kuwait in 1991, intermittently and with increasing frequency drawn the attention of the rest of the world. And, labor migration, migrants, as well as the practices and policies through which their lives are shaped are among the topics frequently interrogated in global conversations about the Gulf. The round of discussion generated in the later months of 2013 may be attributed to the recognition that Qatar’s plans to host the 2022 World Cup necessarily entail the continued use of foreign contract labor coupled with continued concern by international humanitarian organizations about reported abuses of labor in the region. It is not unusual that major sporting news and events bring important political, social and human questions to the attention of new audiences. It is at just such a moment, that a general reader on the labor migration in the Gulf can be useful providing context, chronology, and nuanced discussion to balance the brevity common in news media accounts of migration and its constituents in the Gulf. The contract (and informal) labor of non-citizens is an important and well-entrenched feature of the economies of the Gulf 180 Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 1 (2014) and foreign, non-citizen residents an established feature of Gulf cities and societies. Foreigners comprise more than 50 percent of the workforce in all of the GCC states and as much as 80 percent of the overall population in cities such as Doha, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The high ratio of citizens to non-citizens creates circumstances and raises challenges for the range of stakeholders from laboring migrants to policy makers, from recruitment agents to human rights observers, from local citizens to sending communities. These circumstances also suggest the importance of the region for the readership of this journal and our understanding of migration in the twenty-first century. Students and scholars of other points in the global flow of people will find much of interest in the scholarship on the Gulf. Scholars of the region recognize that their field is still relatively new and far from comprehensive. Individual scholars have examined particular issues, communities, processes, or locales, and in the last decade, a network of scholars and venues for collaboration have begun to bring these scholars and their work into conversations moving us toward a more comprehensive, multi-disciplinary understanding of migration through the Gulf. Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf is the result of one such initiative and representative to the growing scholarly literature within the study of Gulf migration. Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf is the result of a series of working group meetings convened by the Center for International and Regional Studies of Georgetown in Doha, Qatar between 2010 and 2012. The book is a collection of papers written by a small group of scholars who are representative of, some of them leaders among, a community of scholars who have, like the international media, shifted their attention and honed their focus on the Gulf since the 1990s. The working group included anthropologists, sociologists, demographers, and political scientists and each paper is supported by empirical data derived, in some cases, from considerable ethnographic observation, interviews and spatial analyses. Some of the authors, specifically Ahmed, Bristol-Rhys, Gardner and Mahdavi, have been studying in the Gulf for...

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