Facing the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries’ Illiberal Migration Regime: Making Sense of Kafala System and its Impacts on Migrant Workers

Abstract

This paper studies the kafala system and its socio-economic and human rights implications in the Gulf countries’ socio-economic and political governance architecture and its impacts on the migrant workers in the region. Methodologically and theoretically this paper is based on intersectionality theory to draw a nuanced understanding of how migrant workers in the Gulf region are exposed to layers of marginalities including gender, race, and class under the kafala migration governance regime. The paper also draws insights from Foucault’s analytical framework of biopolitics to offer a comprehensive account of how the authoritarian Gulf countries utilised kafala regime to regulate the migrant workers’ bodies and labour to protect the social order and exercise control. This paper explains the genesis of the kafala regime, and its rationalities that gradually evolved into illiberal migration governance regime affecting the migrant workers as the kafala becomes a regime of frontier production and consolidation of divides that are exclusionary and discriminatory migration governance regime.