Introduction: new trends in Gulf international relations and transnational politics

Arabian Peninsula politics are in a period of enormous transformation. In the context of a new generation of rulers seeking legitimacy through ambitious foreign policy regimes, shifting relations with Iran, the 2017–2021 Qatar crisis, and ongoing conflict in Yemen, this article introduces the July 2021 special section of International Affairs, which examines how the Arab states of the Gulf are adapting to these new realities. Questions addressed include: how have transnational identities been manipulated by states during regional disputes? How have oil and gas revenues been redirected to build up religious soft power and enhance state branding efforts? In an increasingly authoritarian world, how has transnational repression interacted with politicized diasporas to impact opposition mobilization? And, how do disputes over airspace help us understand the process of sovereignty-building in the modern Middle East? In pursuing these questions, the special section challenges the particularism still apparent in many analyses of the Gulf region, and seeks to bridge International Relations with fieldwork-based Gulf studies. The research presented in the section highlights new findings within contemporary research on the Gulf that will be of interest both to policy-makers and others seeking to understand the long-term sustainability and balance of power in this critical region.

Playing Cosmopolitan: Muslim Self-fashioning, Migration, and (Be-)Longing in the Tajik Dubai Business Sector

Linking Central Asian and Gulf studies, this article explores how young, well-educated, and multilingual Tajiks involved in Dubai’s various business fields create, shape, and draw on a sense of cosmopolitanism to convert their uncertain status as “Tajik migrants” into that of economically autonomous “Muslim businessmen.” Specifically, Tajik migrants mobilize religion to claim belonging to Dubai as a “Muslim place,” while they simultaneously make sense of their experiences as Central Asian labor migrants in Russia and pious Muslim travelers in secular Tajikistan. “Playing cosmopolitan” is a transnational social project that merges the political project of branding the Arabian Gulf with the lived realities of a culturally diverse mercantile Persian Gulf. Thus, Tajik Muslims engage in alternative forms of belonging abroad. Pointing to the mutual conditionality of longing and belonging in migrant cosmopolitanism, the article offers a nuanced picture of everyday life in Dubai that goes beyond the “spectacularity” of the city, challenging the prevailing representation of Tajik Muslims’ engagement in transnational Islam as a security matter only.

Speaking of the City: Establishing Urban Expertise in the Arab Gulf

The Arab Gulf remains a marginalized, even unfashionable, area of research in the Middle East academy. In spite of—or maybe because of—this marginality, the region offers an interesting vantage point for reflecting on the production of knowledge about geographic and cultural regions. The frame of knowledge production casts into relief discourses of “the city” in Middle East, and particularly Gulf, studies over the past decade.

Issues in the Development of a Gulf Studies Program at the American University of Kuwait: an Ethnography

The most frequently asked questions regarding the phenomenon of American universities in the Arabian Gulf are: how good are they and how likely are they to endure? Already one of the first to enter the arena (George Mason University in 2005) was forced to close its Ras al-Khaimah campus in October of 2009 “after reaching an impasse with our partner over budget and control issues” (http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsrooms/740). GMU’s former students were directed to its American campus and seven other institutions within the UAE with whom GMU had teach-out agreements. One of these seven institutions has now closed as well: on 6 July 2010 Michigan State University (MSU) announced it was closing its undergraduate programs in Dubai. Its former students were offered a special package to attend the MSU campus in Lansing. As reported in the Lansing State Journal, the reason given was that the Dubai campus had “failed to attract sufficient numbers of students and was no longer financially sustainable.” It had just eighty-five students. However, MSU still had to pay between $1.3–1.7 million in “wind-down costs” (http://lansingstatejournal.com/article/20100706/NEWS01/307060031/MSU-to-close-programs-at-Dubai-campus).

Marine macroalgae from the Gulf of Carpentaria, tropical northern Australia

Over the last two decades, CSIRO surveys of the seagrass communities in the south-western Gulf of Carpentaria and at Groote Eylandt, the Northern Territory, have provided opportunities for the collection of marine macroalgae from this poorly explored, remote region. Although the cruises did not concentrate on macroalgal communities which typically grow on rocky substrates, 64 specific and subspecific taxa of marine Chlorophyta, Phaeophyceae and Rhodophyta were collected, including 30 species newly recorded for the Gulf. The majority of Gulf species also occur on the tropical eastern Australian coast. One hundred and thirteen macroalgal taxa are now known to occur in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the number from the present study supplemented by collections from the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition and from an ethnobiological study on Groote Eylandt during the 1970s. Twelve species are recorded by all three Gulf studies and 23 species are reported by two studies. The relatively low number of species common to more than one study is thought to result from each study's narrow sampling window which fails to adequately document the considerable spatial and temporal variability of macroalgal species. Accordingly, the number of species presently recorded for the Gulf is considered to be an underestimate of macroalgal biodiversity for the region. It is clear that further detailed taxonomic and ecological investigations are urgently required before the full extent of macroalgal biodiversity in tropical Australia can be appreciated.