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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2020
One would think that, after years of fieldwork and writing, I would be able to answer a pretty simple and straightforward question about who exactly I interviewed for my study of citizenship boundaries in the UAE: “Do you have any notion of the proportions [of interlocuters] of the different ethnic or descent lines that you spoke to?” This essay is about why it is so difficult to answer this question and the insights into citizenship that unfolded as I searched for an empirical answer. Spoiler alert: Answers to questions about “national” or “ethnic” origin are entirely dependent upon how we count—and miscount—time.
1 Lori, Noora, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 The term bidūn is often used to refer to stateless populations in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. It comes from the Arabic bidūn jinsiyya, which means without nationality.
3 The UAE federation was formed in 1971 as a union of Abu Dhabi (the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain (with Ras al-Khaimah joining in 1972). These territories were previously protectorates of the British Empire (Trucial States), from the mid-19th century onward.
4 In 2010 a special committee of the Ministry of Interior was set up to use DNA tests to identify the children of Emirati men (and foreign mothers) born abroad; “Committee Examines Claims of Children Abandoned Abroad,” National (newspaper), 16 January 2010, https://www.thenational.ae/uae/committee-examines-claims-of-children-abandoned-abroad-1.560275.
5 Elizabeth Cohen, The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
6 Joppke, Christian, “Citizenship in Immigration States,” in The Oxford Handbook on Citizenship, ed. Shachar, Ayelet et al. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 385–406Google Scholar.
