The United Arab Emirates (UAE) that Calvert W. Jones describes in her book, Bedouins into Bourgeois, is in some ways a relic, a thing of the past. Her field work completed in 2010–11, with follow-up trips through 2014, predates some of the most important changes in the UAE's brief history, including its first major military intervention (and efforts at state building and reconstruction) in neighboring Yemen. The Emirati troops in Yemen included recruits from the introduction of national conscription in military service, begun in 2014. In the Emirates, there is now a new population of war veterans, some viewed as martyrs for their defense of the homeland, a service very few military personnel or diplomats considered a remote possibility before 2015. Second, the decline in global oil prices since late 2014 has led to a revolution in public finance in the Gulf states, in the reduction of subsidies on electricity, water, and fuel, along with hiring freezes in the public sector, and the introduction of a value-added tax on goods and services. The rentier model, as we have known it, is being dismantled, or at least reconfigured. And it is unfortunate that her 2017 publication could not address the impact of these changes on her thesis, but I suppose that is what a second book, or another scholar's investigation, might set out to do. The period of time that Jones describes becomes an important historical moment, especially in light of how rulers identify weakness in citizens, as if in some prescient preparation for the war and austerity to come. The unique timing of her investigation may be its enduring value as a window into the moment before everything changed for the UAE, along with her strong theoretical analysis of state tools of social engineering.
Jones sets out to explore how state social engineering projects to build a “pro-globalization” citizenry, mostly through secondary education, achieve some modest success in instilling a strong sense of patriotism, but fail in efforts to promote what she terms “pro-market” qualities such as entrepreneurialism, productive risk-taking, industriousness, adaptability, and lessened dependence on the state. Instead, Jones finds from her survey work among Emirati high school students a deepened dependency and sense of entitlement towards state resources. She terms this the “paradox of the entitled patriot.” Methodologically, one might question the use of children as survey respondents to make a broad assessment of state–society relations, as most teenagers worldwide tend to find work and self-reliance an unattractive alternative to the parental (or state) pocketbook.
Moreover, her survey work is supplemented with elite ethnography, notably with interviews with the ruler of the emirate of Ras al Khaimah. Again, here we have a possible selection bias, as her study of the relationship of the ruler to the ruled neglects some key power dynamics among Emirati ruling families within the federation. The ruler of Ras al Khaimah, in fact, has very little authority in any federal decision making—over educational policy, defense policy, or especially the federal budget. He is, in effect, a dependent on the state himself, as Abu Dhabi (and by extension its ruling family the Al Nayhans) is the center of the federal government and in control of the country's vast oil wealth. The northern emirates of Sharjah, Ajman, Ras al Khaimah, Um al Quwain, and Fujairah rely on the central government to cover their infrastructure expenses, and even to control their access and allotment of electricity through the national grid system. The domestic politics of the UAE do matter in an evaluation of social policy and social engineering, especially as policy formation is highly centralized in the office of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan.
As Jones reiterates in her theoretical discussion of what goes wrong in top-down social engineering design, the importance of local knowledge informs both policy and analysis of policy outcomes. In her understanding of how social policy is formulated, Jones has placed perhaps too little attention on the distribution of power within the UAE and who benefits, particularly in strengthening the hierarchy of leadership within the government. It is her anecdotal description of the prominence of Jujitsu as a national sport and part of secondary sports curricula that is most telling of this oversight. Modeling appropriate behavior, state-sanctioned masculinity, and the art of defensive control, the insertion of Jujitsu into national secondary sports curricula was a decision made by Mohammed bin Zayed, reflecting his own practice and his power to mandate somewhat arbitrary influence on the nation's youth.
On the question of social engineering of a “pro-market” mentality, there is also some important variation within the case. The UAE is the most diversified economy of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, but this is less due to the success of the national curriculum, or even the centralized authority of the Abu Dhabi leadership. Rather, it is the historical economic development model deployed in Dubai, which has little oil wealth and has devoted itself to a project of Arab liberalization driven by state-led real estate investment and, in many cases, gambles on tourism and openness, at least in the sense of its reliance on foreign human capital and idea flow. The proof is in the deal flow. In 2017 Dubai led the Middle East in investment flows and new company stock listings, mergers, and acquisitions, in both the number of deals and their financial value. Where there is entrepreneurship in the Middle East, it has thrived in Dubai, especially in e-commerce and fintech deals. The variation within the UAE suggests that something is driving this pro-market, entrepreneurial behavior, and that it is not necessarily dependent on—nor exclusive of—Emirati nationals. It is the complexity of demographics and openness to outsiders, which is both a policy and a culture, that has enabled this growth. Jones does not engage substantially with the issue of demographic imbalance, and how the embrace of foreigners (as much as 90% of the population in Dubai) works in parallel with proliberalization social engineering. The demographics of foreigners to citizens is not uniform across the UAE, and in her subsample space of Ras al Khaimah, the difference is notable.
Perhaps the most important tension in the making of citizens, regardless of the ambition by the state to make them “pro-market” or simply “patriotic,” is the effort to distinguish citizens from foreigners. In the cultural pressure to assume national dress (women in black abayas, men in white thobes), arguments over appropriate use of English in schooling, and stigma in assimilation through divorce rates and intermarriage, there are constant and sharp decisions citizens make in daily life over identity and their presentation and visibility as “nationals.” Jones is correct to investigate the drivers of these pressures, and to try and single out the state's role and interest in creating nationals of a certain economic and cultural perspective. This book is a unique window, both into a moment of state–society relations in the United Arab Emirates, and as a continuum of social theory studies that tries to isolate and measure the science of state-led social engineering. I recommend this book for its research design, strong theoretical grounding, and contribution to a growing rich ethnography of life in the Gulf states.
