The Stateless Bedouin of the UAE

Less than a quarter of the roughly nine million people who live in the Emirates are citizens. The rest are expatriates from almost every corner of the globe, ranging from wealthy businessmen to low-wage construction workers and housemaids. Along with rising immigration has come rising exclusion, which has a long history in the Emirates and throughout the Arabian Peninsula. For millennia Arab tribes populated the land that would become the seven emirates. Some of the tribes were nomadic, while others concentrated in cities. Because the territory lay at the nexus of trade routes between Europe and Asia, the British and Portuguese vied for control of it until the British prevailed in the early 1800s. Under this arrangement, a handful of coastal tribes accrued social and economic influence, and the British came to regard the heads of those tribes—the sheikhs—as political rulers.