A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwate... more A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, 2014
This article investigates Modi’s rise to power as strongman leader of the world’s largest secular... more This article investigates Modi’s rise to power as strongman leader of the world’s largest secular democracy. Deploying ‘bhakti’ or devotion as an analytical category, it brings an unusual perspecti...
This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illust... more This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Duba...
This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders... more This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from trans...
This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders... more This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, religious communities, and trade. Flagging this partnership as the key to understanding the changing twenty-first century international order, we follow how informal diplomats provide strongmen much-needed flexibility and openness in their foreign dealings. This agility, we suggest, is afforded by their earned status in the moral economy of 'network societies'. Held together by interpersonal bonds rather than abstract national belonging, trust rather than law, and patronage rather than taxation, network societies conjure a state-society covenant markedly different from one between a liberal state and its citizen. By shifting the focus from state institutions to the social life of networks, we place the strongman-informal diplomat partnership within longer histories of diasporic networks and imperial brokerage. Combining this long durée approach with a granular reading of everyday politics, we develop an ethnographically and historically informed inquiry into the two ubiquitous figures of twenty-first-century and lay out a programmatic agenda towards an anthropology of international relations.
This article investigates Modi's rise to power as strongman leader of the world's largest secular... more This article investigates Modi's rise to power as strongman leader of the world's largest secular democracy. Deploying 'bhakti' or devotion as an analytical category, it brings an unusual perspective to contemporary Indian politics that looks at it from outside the electoral practices and institutions of the nation-state. Fundamental to understanding Modi's political authority is Swaminarayan Sanstha, a powerful Hindu ascetic order tracing its origins to nineteenth-century Gujarat. Following its nearly two century-long transnational trajectory through the diasporic and religious networks of the Gujaratis, I illustrate how the Swaminarayans emerged as a social platform for Modi's political aspirations and mobilized the Hindu diaspora in a host of capacities to serve as his informal diplomat corps. By transferring their networks and assets to Modi's political project, the Swaminarayans, I argue, are reconfiguring the Indian state and its constitutional vision for society into a sacral Hindu state for a 'bhakt nation. '
Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore, 2018
We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monisha... more We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monishankar Prasad on the significance of Oman's diasporic community in weathering the Qatar blockade. The authors argue that mercantile networks of diasporic communities have helped Oman respond to the diplomatic challenges thrown in its path by the blockading parties of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Obama administration's signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 marked a shift in America's M... more The Obama administration's signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 marked a shift in America's Middle East policy, hinged on an alliance with Saudi Arabia and military protection to the Gulf states. Seeking to deter Iran and fill in regional security gaps left by the United States, Abu Dhabi has laid the foundations for a new geopolitical order we call the Southern Tier. At the core of this emerging maritime order stretching out in a broken continuum of ports, naval bases and strategic locations across the Indian Ocean is DP World, Dubai's global port operator, and its logistical assets in East Africa. Abu Dhabi's militarisation of Dubai's ports network against rising regional threats is the focus of this article. As Britain was preparing for its military exit east of the Suez, its diplomats in the Foreign Office warned the incoming Americans of two key issues in the Middle East. 1 The first was the danger of a serious conflict between the Arabs and the Iranians, a conflict that could potentially culminate in the Persian Gulf's invasion by the latter. The second was the Gulf states constantly feuding among themselves, with an ambitious Abu Dhabi vying for control over Bahrain and Qatar. Fifty years later and as the American regional security cover wears off, history has turned full circle. An Iran finding its way on the back of new commercial and military partnerships with Turkey, Russia and others, and the splintering of the GCC following the Qatar blockade both point to old problems rising from the tombs of the past. Iran's regional ambitions and the growing encirclement of the Persian Gulf by its Shi'a allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are pushing Abu Dhabi once again to rise to the challenge.
Multiple Modernities in Asia, ed. William S.W. Lim and Jeremy Y.T. Chia (Singapore: Asian Urban Lab), 2018
Abstract
Dubai in the early years of the 21st century embarked on a path of exponential urban gro... more Abstract Dubai in the early years of the 21st century embarked on a path of exponential urban growth. Its building spree was nothing short of a miracle, prompting critics and observers to remark that Dubai had fast-tracked from the 19th century to the 21st century in a single generation. Seen through its architectural and urban forms, Dubai is a modern city in the Middle East comparable to cities in the west. Yet there was something about its trajectory and pace of urban development that provoked suspicion, particularly among those trained to seeing modernity as a teleological end to a certain kind of history. Neither history nor the temporality of history in Dubai sat well with modernity's conceptions of the two. Oil seemed like a plausible answer to bridge the gap, except it had very little role to play in making the city what it is today-- a fact that sets Dubai apart from other cities in the Middle East.
The paper attempts to rethink Dubai's modernity with a radically different concept of space and time as tools of writing history. If space, as geographers have long argued, has agency, it is imperative that we look at cities not as the repositories of forces that have emerged in the west but as active processes of history with the potential to impinge on such forces. Dubai, as the paper illustrates, evolved as a key constituency of commerce in the western Indian Ocean during and after empire. Its geographic and historic ties, despite its being lodged within the oil rich Middle East, lie with western India--these ties metamorphosing through the latter half of the twentieth century into labour migration and gold smuggling. The two way exchange between Dubai and parts of western India addressed in the paper is premised on the concept of Polanyi's human economy; it shows how economic processes defining Dubai's growth remain embedded in cultural and social transactions between people moving back and forth across the region and not in a distinct realm of the economy as modernity has taught to believe. Modernity, seen with a critical eye on 21st century Dubai's urban practices, thus reveals itself not as a cultural homogenization of urban space or a flattening out of cultural values towards a liberal field of play for economics, but as an intersection of culture and economics in intriguing ways. It is this intersection that provides alternate notions of modernity as well as concepts for the writing of urban history, both of which may be useful in understanding better the pasts and futures of other cities in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monisha... more We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monishankar Prasad on the significance of Oman's diasporic community in weathering the Qatar blockade. The authors argue that mercantile networks of diasporic communities have helped Oman respond to the diplomatic challenges thrown in its path by the blockading parties of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A SHY AND MATURE STATE IN THE GCC Of all the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, the Sultanate of Oman has remained by far the least visible in the international domain. Despite shared economic and political features, including an oil-based economy and monarchic rule, Oman has shied away from the infrastructural, political, and financial excesses of its neighbours like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Neither can it lay claim to breathtaking marvels found within a city like Dubai nor be criticised for blatant human rights violations, as in the case of Saudi Arabia or even Qatar. On the foreign policy front, too, it has stayed rather quiet, committing to the agenda of no state in particular while showing remarkable empathy with those that have been ravaged by humanitarian and other kinds of crises, whether in the region or beyond. Oman's mature approach to problems both at home and internationally has earned it a certain moral and cultural distinction, a trust and respectability enabling it to play the part of an informal mediator in several high profile diplomatic interlocutions. 1 Can Oman transform this
The Dubai model of development has garnered much attention among political analysts, planners and... more The Dubai model of development has garnered much attention among political analysts, planners and policy advisers. Built on a strategically nurtured public-private partnership in investment and infrastructure development, it offers lessons for cities, particularly those in Asia aspiring to greater economic growth. In this first article of the series, Nisha Mathew discusses some of the complex strategies and nuances underlying the Dubai model by probing into the city’s historic gold retail trade, with Indian mercantile networks at its helm. It focuses on the way the state in Dubai incorporated these networks as part of its urban core and capitalised on their many strategic possibilities.
A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwate... more A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, 2014
This article investigates Modi’s rise to power as strongman leader of the world’s largest secular... more This article investigates Modi’s rise to power as strongman leader of the world’s largest secular democracy. Deploying ‘bhakti’ or devotion as an analytical category, it brings an unusual perspecti...
This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illust... more This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Duba...
This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders... more This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from trans...
This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders... more This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, religious communities, and trade. Flagging this partnership as the key to understanding the changing twenty-first century international order, we follow how informal diplomats provide strongmen much-needed flexibility and openness in their foreign dealings. This agility, we suggest, is afforded by their earned status in the moral economy of 'network societies'. Held together by interpersonal bonds rather than abstract national belonging, trust rather than law, and patronage rather than taxation, network societies conjure a state-society covenant markedly different from one between a liberal state and its citizen. By shifting the focus from state institutions to the social life of networks, we place the strongman-informal diplomat partnership within longer histories of diasporic networks and imperial brokerage. Combining this long durée approach with a granular reading of everyday politics, we develop an ethnographically and historically informed inquiry into the two ubiquitous figures of twenty-first-century and lay out a programmatic agenda towards an anthropology of international relations.
This article investigates Modi's rise to power as strongman leader of the world's largest secular... more This article investigates Modi's rise to power as strongman leader of the world's largest secular democracy. Deploying 'bhakti' or devotion as an analytical category, it brings an unusual perspective to contemporary Indian politics that looks at it from outside the electoral practices and institutions of the nation-state. Fundamental to understanding Modi's political authority is Swaminarayan Sanstha, a powerful Hindu ascetic order tracing its origins to nineteenth-century Gujarat. Following its nearly two century-long transnational trajectory through the diasporic and religious networks of the Gujaratis, I illustrate how the Swaminarayans emerged as a social platform for Modi's political aspirations and mobilized the Hindu diaspora in a host of capacities to serve as his informal diplomat corps. By transferring their networks and assets to Modi's political project, the Swaminarayans, I argue, are reconfiguring the Indian state and its constitutional vision for society into a sacral Hindu state for a 'bhakt nation. '
Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore, 2018
We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monisha... more We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monishankar Prasad on the significance of Oman's diasporic community in weathering the Qatar blockade. The authors argue that mercantile networks of diasporic communities have helped Oman respond to the diplomatic challenges thrown in its path by the blockading parties of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Obama administration's signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 marked a shift in America's M... more The Obama administration's signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 marked a shift in America's Middle East policy, hinged on an alliance with Saudi Arabia and military protection to the Gulf states. Seeking to deter Iran and fill in regional security gaps left by the United States, Abu Dhabi has laid the foundations for a new geopolitical order we call the Southern Tier. At the core of this emerging maritime order stretching out in a broken continuum of ports, naval bases and strategic locations across the Indian Ocean is DP World, Dubai's global port operator, and its logistical assets in East Africa. Abu Dhabi's militarisation of Dubai's ports network against rising regional threats is the focus of this article. As Britain was preparing for its military exit east of the Suez, its diplomats in the Foreign Office warned the incoming Americans of two key issues in the Middle East. 1 The first was the danger of a serious conflict between the Arabs and the Iranians, a conflict that could potentially culminate in the Persian Gulf's invasion by the latter. The second was the Gulf states constantly feuding among themselves, with an ambitious Abu Dhabi vying for control over Bahrain and Qatar. Fifty years later and as the American regional security cover wears off, history has turned full circle. An Iran finding its way on the back of new commercial and military partnerships with Turkey, Russia and others, and the splintering of the GCC following the Qatar blockade both point to old problems rising from the tombs of the past. Iran's regional ambitions and the growing encirclement of the Persian Gulf by its Shi'a allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are pushing Abu Dhabi once again to rise to the challenge.
Multiple Modernities in Asia, ed. William S.W. Lim and Jeremy Y.T. Chia (Singapore: Asian Urban Lab), 2018
Abstract
Dubai in the early years of the 21st century embarked on a path of exponential urban gro... more Abstract Dubai in the early years of the 21st century embarked on a path of exponential urban growth. Its building spree was nothing short of a miracle, prompting critics and observers to remark that Dubai had fast-tracked from the 19th century to the 21st century in a single generation. Seen through its architectural and urban forms, Dubai is a modern city in the Middle East comparable to cities in the west. Yet there was something about its trajectory and pace of urban development that provoked suspicion, particularly among those trained to seeing modernity as a teleological end to a certain kind of history. Neither history nor the temporality of history in Dubai sat well with modernity's conceptions of the two. Oil seemed like a plausible answer to bridge the gap, except it had very little role to play in making the city what it is today-- a fact that sets Dubai apart from other cities in the Middle East.
The paper attempts to rethink Dubai's modernity with a radically different concept of space and time as tools of writing history. If space, as geographers have long argued, has agency, it is imperative that we look at cities not as the repositories of forces that have emerged in the west but as active processes of history with the potential to impinge on such forces. Dubai, as the paper illustrates, evolved as a key constituency of commerce in the western Indian Ocean during and after empire. Its geographic and historic ties, despite its being lodged within the oil rich Middle East, lie with western India--these ties metamorphosing through the latter half of the twentieth century into labour migration and gold smuggling. The two way exchange between Dubai and parts of western India addressed in the paper is premised on the concept of Polanyi's human economy; it shows how economic processes defining Dubai's growth remain embedded in cultural and social transactions between people moving back and forth across the region and not in a distinct realm of the economy as modernity has taught to believe. Modernity, seen with a critical eye on 21st century Dubai's urban practices, thus reveals itself not as a cultural homogenization of urban space or a flattening out of cultural values towards a liberal field of play for economics, but as an intersection of culture and economics in intriguing ways. It is this intersection that provides alternate notions of modernity as well as concepts for the writing of urban history, both of which may be useful in understanding better the pasts and futures of other cities in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monisha... more We conclude the 'Cities and Networks' Series with a co-authored piece by Nisha Mathew and Monishankar Prasad on the significance of Oman's diasporic community in weathering the Qatar blockade. The authors argue that mercantile networks of diasporic communities have helped Oman respond to the diplomatic challenges thrown in its path by the blockading parties of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A SHY AND MATURE STATE IN THE GCC Of all the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, the Sultanate of Oman has remained by far the least visible in the international domain. Despite shared economic and political features, including an oil-based economy and monarchic rule, Oman has shied away from the infrastructural, political, and financial excesses of its neighbours like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Neither can it lay claim to breathtaking marvels found within a city like Dubai nor be criticised for blatant human rights violations, as in the case of Saudi Arabia or even Qatar. On the foreign policy front, too, it has stayed rather quiet, committing to the agenda of no state in particular while showing remarkable empathy with those that have been ravaged by humanitarian and other kinds of crises, whether in the region or beyond. Oman's mature approach to problems both at home and internationally has earned it a certain moral and cultural distinction, a trust and respectability enabling it to play the part of an informal mediator in several high profile diplomatic interlocutions. 1 Can Oman transform this
The Dubai model of development has garnered much attention among political analysts, planners and... more The Dubai model of development has garnered much attention among political analysts, planners and policy advisers. Built on a strategically nurtured public-private partnership in investment and infrastructure development, it offers lessons for cities, particularly those in Asia aspiring to greater economic growth. In this first article of the series, Nisha Mathew discusses some of the complex strategies and nuances underlying the Dubai model by probing into the city’s historic gold retail trade, with Indian mercantile networks at its helm. It focuses on the way the state in Dubai incorporated these networks as part of its urban core and capitalised on their many strategic possibilities.
The dizzying pace of events churning the Middle East since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 has le... more The dizzying pace of events churning the Middle East since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 has left experts at a loss for adequate frameworks of analysis. From the multi-front wars in Syria and Yemen to the Iran nuclear deal and the Qatar crisis, there has been an active re-alignment of Cold War alliances and geostrategic partnerships that defies our conventional view of the region as shaped primarily by oil, religious politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Iran moves closer to Turkey and Qatar, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia deepen their strategic ties with Israel beneath the chaos and debris of war, the political fault lines are being redrawn. Signs of a new regional order are becoming visible on the horizon.
We in the Arabia-Asia research cluster at the Middle East Institute and the Alagil Arabia Asia Chair Programme at the Asia Research Institute conceptualise this emerging geopolitical order as part of an East-West, Asia-Europe/Africa geography of trade, energy and strategic partnerships dividing the Middle East along a horizontal line: a transcontinental axis on the Northern Tier, and a maritime axis along the Southern Tier. Having charted the course of diplomatic and political developments in the Northern Tier defined by Iran, Turkey and Russia at a workshop organised by the Middle East Institute in the past year, we move on to the Southern Tier and the turn of events bringing it to life for the Asia Research Institute’s Muhammad Alagil Arabia Asia Annual Conference this year.
At the helm of the Southern Tier and driving the maritime order in the Middle East is the UAE, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Israel. A string of ports, special economic zones and naval bases, stretching out from Jabal Ali and Jeddah to Doraleh (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland) and eventually Limassol and Benghazi (Libya) in the Mediterranean, a Middle East with arms spreading across the wider arc of the Indian Ocean to as far as India, perhaps even Southeast Asia, is Abu Dhabi’s game plan for commercial dominance and global supply chain preeminence in an age of big power rebalancing and rivalry.
Abu Dhabi seeks to graft this maritime order onto a map of port operations, shipping lanes and logistics corridors that an ambitious Dubai Ports World had come up with as part of its business strategy in the mid-2000s. As the global recession of 2008-9 hit Dubai’s expansion plans, and more states began to compete for domination of the global supply chain trade, Abu Dhabi stepped in with a bailout and proceeded to rebuild DP World’s network, adding a dimension of military protection. We see the unusual partnerships it has entered into with countries within and beyond the Middle East as pathways to this goal which Abu Dhabi, with its limited naval and strategic capacities, cannot accomplish on its own. Abu Dhabi’s interests notwithstanding, its strategy makes political and strategic sense to its allies, especially with the US drawing down its military presence and Iran and its partners threatening commerce in the Persian Gulf.
We invite participants to flesh out the framework of the two-tiered Middle East and test its analytical limits from the economic, political and security perspectives of different states, and in relation to questions of national, regional and global significance. How resilient can alliances within each of these tiers be, particularly when players have as many differing goals as they have shared ones? Can carving up the Middle East roughly into a transcontinental axis and a maritime one stimulate peace instead of war, and avert the risk of a larger conflict between nuclear armed states in the region? How will a two-tiered Middle East hold out to players like China and Russia that are seeking to expand their footprint in the region as well as the Indian Ocean world at large? Will Abu Dhabi and its partners look to these states to replace the US in its role as the military hegemon in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, or will it re-define the receding security architecture on a new and unfamiliar set of terms?
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Papers by Nisha Mathew
Dubai in the early years of the 21st century embarked on a path of exponential urban growth. Its building spree was nothing short of a miracle, prompting critics and observers to remark that Dubai had fast-tracked from the 19th century to the 21st century in a single generation.
Seen through its architectural and urban forms, Dubai is a modern city in the Middle East comparable to cities in the west. Yet there was something about its trajectory and pace of urban development that provoked suspicion, particularly among those trained to seeing
modernity as a teleological end to a certain kind of history. Neither history nor the temporality of history in Dubai sat well with modernity's conceptions of the two. Oil seemed like a plausible answer to bridge the gap, except it had very little role to play in making the city what it is
today-- a fact that sets Dubai apart from other cities in the Middle East.
The paper attempts to rethink Dubai's modernity with a radically different concept of space and time as tools of writing history. If space, as geographers have long argued, has agency, it is imperative that we look at cities not as the repositories of forces that have emerged in the
west but as active processes of history with the potential to impinge on such forces. Dubai, as the paper illustrates, evolved as a key constituency of commerce in the western Indian Ocean
during and after empire. Its geographic and historic ties, despite its being lodged within the oil rich Middle East, lie with western India--these ties metamorphosing through the latter half of the twentieth century into labour migration and gold smuggling. The two way exchange
between Dubai and parts of western India addressed in the paper is premised on the concept of Polanyi's human economy; it shows how economic processes defining Dubai's growth remain embedded in cultural and social transactions between people moving back and forth
across the region and not in a distinct realm of the economy as modernity has taught to believe. Modernity, seen with a critical eye on 21st century Dubai's urban practices, thus reveals itself not as a cultural homogenization of urban space or a flattening out of cultural values towards a liberal field of play for economics, but as an intersection of culture and economics in intriguing ways. It is this intersection that provides alternate notions of modernity as well as concepts for the writing of urban history, both of which may be useful in understanding better the pasts and futures of other cities in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Dubai in the early years of the 21st century embarked on a path of exponential urban growth. Its building spree was nothing short of a miracle, prompting critics and observers to remark that Dubai had fast-tracked from the 19th century to the 21st century in a single generation.
Seen through its architectural and urban forms, Dubai is a modern city in the Middle East comparable to cities in the west. Yet there was something about its trajectory and pace of urban development that provoked suspicion, particularly among those trained to seeing
modernity as a teleological end to a certain kind of history. Neither history nor the temporality of history in Dubai sat well with modernity's conceptions of the two. Oil seemed like a plausible answer to bridge the gap, except it had very little role to play in making the city what it is
today-- a fact that sets Dubai apart from other cities in the Middle East.
The paper attempts to rethink Dubai's modernity with a radically different concept of space and time as tools of writing history. If space, as geographers have long argued, has agency, it is imperative that we look at cities not as the repositories of forces that have emerged in the
west but as active processes of history with the potential to impinge on such forces. Dubai, as the paper illustrates, evolved as a key constituency of commerce in the western Indian Ocean
during and after empire. Its geographic and historic ties, despite its being lodged within the oil rich Middle East, lie with western India--these ties metamorphosing through the latter half of the twentieth century into labour migration and gold smuggling. The two way exchange
between Dubai and parts of western India addressed in the paper is premised on the concept of Polanyi's human economy; it shows how economic processes defining Dubai's growth remain embedded in cultural and social transactions between people moving back and forth
across the region and not in a distinct realm of the economy as modernity has taught to believe. Modernity, seen with a critical eye on 21st century Dubai's urban practices, thus reveals itself not as a cultural homogenization of urban space or a flattening out of cultural values towards a liberal field of play for economics, but as an intersection of culture and economics in intriguing ways. It is this intersection that provides alternate notions of modernity as well as concepts for the writing of urban history, both of which may be useful in understanding better the pasts and futures of other cities in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
We in the Arabia-Asia research cluster at the Middle East Institute and the Alagil Arabia Asia Chair Programme at the Asia Research Institute conceptualise this emerging geopolitical order as part of an East-West, Asia-Europe/Africa geography of trade, energy and strategic partnerships dividing the Middle East along a horizontal line: a transcontinental axis on the Northern Tier, and a maritime axis along the Southern Tier. Having charted the course of diplomatic and political developments in the Northern Tier defined by Iran, Turkey and Russia at a workshop organised by the Middle East Institute in the past year, we move on to the Southern Tier and the turn of events bringing it to life for the Asia Research Institute’s Muhammad Alagil Arabia Asia Annual Conference this year.
At the helm of the Southern Tier and driving the maritime order in the Middle East is the UAE, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Israel. A string of ports, special economic zones and naval bases, stretching out from Jabal Ali and Jeddah to Doraleh (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland) and eventually Limassol and Benghazi (Libya) in the Mediterranean, a Middle East with arms spreading across the wider arc of the Indian Ocean to as far as India, perhaps even Southeast Asia, is Abu Dhabi’s game plan for commercial dominance and global supply chain preeminence in an age of big power rebalancing and rivalry.
Abu Dhabi seeks to graft this maritime order onto a map of port operations, shipping lanes and logistics corridors that an ambitious Dubai Ports World had come up with as part of its business strategy in the mid-2000s. As the global recession of 2008-9 hit Dubai’s expansion plans, and more states began to compete for domination of the global supply chain trade, Abu Dhabi stepped in with a bailout and proceeded to rebuild DP World’s network, adding a dimension of military protection. We see the unusual partnerships it has entered into with countries within and beyond the Middle East as pathways to this goal which Abu Dhabi, with its limited naval and strategic capacities, cannot accomplish on its own. Abu Dhabi’s interests notwithstanding, its strategy makes political and strategic sense to its allies, especially with the US drawing down its military presence and Iran and its partners threatening commerce in the Persian Gulf.
We invite participants to flesh out the framework of the two-tiered Middle East and test its analytical limits from the economic, political and security perspectives of different states, and in relation to questions of national, regional and global significance. How resilient can alliances within each of these tiers be, particularly when players have as many differing goals as they have shared ones? Can carving up the Middle East roughly into a transcontinental axis and a maritime one stimulate peace instead of war, and avert the risk of a larger conflict between nuclear armed states in the region? How will a two-tiered Middle East hold out to players like China and Russia that are seeking to expand their footprint in the region as well as the Indian Ocean world at large? Will Abu Dhabi and its partners look to these states to replace the US in its role as the military hegemon in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, or will it re-define the receding security architecture on a new and unfamiliar set of terms?