Labour importism: its rise and reproduction in the Arab Gulf States

This article explores labour importism (LI) as a process of labour provisioning whose organising principle is the importation of temporary migrant workers. The analysis is developed around the Arab Gulf States (AGS), the most notable cases of LI in the post-war era. To begin, LI is fleshed out through a ‘history of the present’ genealogy that excavates archival material of the British colonial bureaucracy, the first to systematically administer LI in the AGS. Its lineages are traced from the fin de siècle until the 1970s, the pivotal decade in which LI expanded at scale and was institutionally embedded across all the AGS, continuing to shape migration policy until today. The article then analyses the contemporary social reproduction of LI using the lenses of social difference, global labour arbitrage based on unequal exchange, and super exploitation. As an empirically derived, analytically versatile and spatio-temporally dynamic conceptualisation, LI can overcome the shortcomings associated with state, market, or capital accumulation-centric approaches to labour migration in the AGS and beyond.