Oman’s population is a youthful one. Like their peers globally, jobs are at the forefront of many young people’s minds. Life choices consume the imagination with visions of what can be. What do you want to do with your life when you finish school, when you finish college or university? What kind of job do you want? These are the questions asked of young people the world over. With over 64 per cent of Oman’s population under the age of thirty, dreams of the future might just be a national pastime.Footnote ¹ Yet, increasingly, young people’s dreams are being fractured by the reality that jobs are neither as plentiful nor as secure as they once were, that even the possession of a university or college degree or diploma does not necessarily improve one’s chances on the labour market.

This book is interested in young adults in the labour market in Oman. While it centres on Oman, and Omanis, this is very much a story relevant for Gulf economies and for oil-dependent and foreign labour–dependent countries elsewhere. A dominant feature of Gulf economies since the early twentieth century has been the presence of, and economic dependence on, hydrocarbon export. This unsurprisingly structures much political economy analysis of the region, with questions probing the causal relationship between oil and various economic and political outcomes. Yet in most of these inquiries, Gulf citizens fall to the background. What happens when we shift the entry point from oil to human beings, or in this case, from one factor of production to another – labour? Fresh insights can be derived by asking new questions and reorienting our research. Such analytical shifts do not mean hydrocarbons hold less importance but signal that we lose valuable comparative insights by focusing on one analytical puzzle and emphasising exceptional narratives rather than comparative and transnational ones.

This book represents a new direction in international political economy (IPE) research on the Gulf. In it, I shift from the rentier state entry point in scholarship on oil-exporting countries and begin with labour. That is, this book shows how to take labour seriously in Gulf development governance discourses and does this by dislodging labour from the margins of IPE analysis. Centring Omani voices, experiences, and economic governance histories, I explain the ways through which Oman’s young citizens navigate and interpret the labour market in parallel with the conditions and trajectories that have shaped the contemporary labour market milieu. My central argument is twofold. Oman’s labour market is global; and Omani labour must be understood globally and relationally – within and beyond segmentation. Explaining the position, experiences, and contradictions of Gulf labour, especially of youth, requires grounding an understanding of locally segmented labour markets within the wider global political economy. It also requires understanding labour and class relations amongst citizens and foreigners. The ways millennials perceive economic life and the governance of their participation in it are shaped by the constitution and reconfiguration of the global labour market, the ways governance unfolds at multiple scales, and the promises and discourses concerning national development. Gulf labour markets are both a direction for global labour and a space of formation for the global labour market and for class. In the chapters that follow, I unpack this argument through seven sub-arguments:

• Gulf labour markets are global and subject to capitalist pressures present in labour markets globally. Simultaneously, Gulf labour markets and economies present economic nationalist sentiments and pressures.

• The presence and formation of a global Gulf labour market mediates and shapes the ways in which Gulf labour of any citizenship performs labour and participates in economic activities. This global character is therefore a key component of class formation and social relations.

• Labour’s contemporary governance, regulatory, and resistance milieus have lineages that extend from the colonial and oil industry labour practices and discourses through the era of neoliberal reform to the present.

• Gulf economies are both rentier and neoliberal. Rather than challenging neoliberalism, rentierism has gone to bed with it. The labour market and related economic reform areas illustrate this dysfunctional relationship well.

• Young Omanis, despite their legal belonging vis-à-vis political citizenship, face multiple exclusions in their economic citizenship.

• Millennial citizen expectations take shape in the interaction of perceived outcomes from economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and government responsibilities for governing hydrocarbon windfalls.

• Evidence from Oman suggests that Gulf states react to public pressure during periods (or expected periods) of social unrest especially around issues of national unemployment. Three policy reform areas highlight these reactions: (1) labour nationalisation, (2) labour migration control, and (3) entrepreneurship promotion.

Centring the Omani story, often relegated to the margins of Gulf and Middle East Studies scholarship, and centring labour illustrates other dimensions of the development trajectory and the transnational, shared connections and transformations of local and regional economic life and its governance. Uniquely, this book treats Gulf labour markets as part of the story of global labour, viewing connections between transformations across multiple levels of global labour governance. It takes citizen youth seriously and enters its analysis with the largest generation in the region at the core. By looking at young citizens in the labour market, we are able to understand Gulf economies in ways previously unexplored. The Sultanate of Oman takes centre stage as the empirical focus and driving data. Through this case and this book, I demonstrate how using labour as a departure point provides novel interpretations of economic transformations, economic history, and economic policy in the Gulf. This exhibits the potential and value of including the region in debates on the comparative and global political economy of development.

1.1 Setting the Stage

Youth economic dreams emerge in the context of a country and region that has experienced dramatic economic growth and social change over the past fifty years. Parents and grandparents of today’s millennials witnessed a visible expansion of economic opportunities and radical improvements in human development indicators. Literacy rates in Oman leapt from 36.2 per cent in 1980 to 96 per cent in 2017, with youth literacy at nearly 99 per cent today. Life expectancy increased from 50 years of age in 1970 to 77.9 in 2019.Footnote ² Oil-led growth supported quality infrastructure, health care, and educational development. It also underpinned the establishment of a large public sector that became a major employer of citizens across the country. From serving in burgeoning national bureaucracies, an expanding security apparatus, and various functions in the local baladīyyāt (municipalities), public sector employment expanded alongside the employment and economic opportunities in the oil industry. Millennial dreams have been influenced by such expectation structures.

The uprisings of 2011 abruptly attuned the Omani and Gulf political space to potential political outcomes of unrequited millennial dreams and expectations. The size and scale of the protests and level of civil unrest between February and May represented one of the largest and most widespread social movements in Oman since the end of the Dhofar war in 1976. Among the economic demands were loud calls for jobs, for social protection for the unemployed, for increasing the minimum wage, and for more higher educational opportunities. Government officials were surprised and alarmed by the intensity of the demands. Protests emerged across most of the major population centres including Muscat, Salalah, and Sur, but they were most severe in Sohar. The promised employment opportunities from economic windfalls after years of reform and economic investment in diversification initiatives and industrialisation in places like Sohar were not trickling down. Educated and unskilled young people alike felt ignored and isolated from systems and institutions perceived as corrupt, lacking transparency, and exclusionary to young citizens.

Today, millennial dreams continue to emerge in a context of high youth unemployment in the country and wider Arab world and in a context of uncertain economic futures under post–oil wealth conditions. Omani youth unemployment is felt everywhere: 90 per cent of Omani families have jobseekers in them according to the latest census.Footnote ³ If 2011 made policymakers more acutely aware of youth labour market demands, the long 2010s should have driven the message home. Trending social media hashtags between 2017 and 2021 in Oman included ʿUmānīyūn bilā waẓāʾif (Omanis without jobs), bāḥthūn ʿan ʿamal yastaghīthūn (Jobseekers are calling out), and mwūlāy at-tawẓīf maṭlabunā (My lord, jobs are our demand). The census shows that it takes over half of Omani jobseekers three or more years to find a job. This rises to 67 per cent for those looking for their first job.Footnote ⁴ Estimates of youth unemployment in the country are inconsistent and controversial. Calculating from the official census data shows an unemployment rate of 8.02 per cent, with unemployment among those aged fifteen to thirty-four reaching 17.10 per cent.Footnote ⁵ A World Bank report claims youth unemployment may even be as high as 49 per cent, and recent ILO data estimates the percentage of youth not in employment, education, or training is 22.6 per cent.Footnote ⁶ What is clear from these estimates and from conversations with young people, their families, and employers around the country is that these issues are real and feel palpable among youth. Indeed, 74 per cent of the country’s registered jobseekers are under the age of thirty.Footnote ⁷ Dreams risk turning into disillusionment and disenfranchisement.

In addition to being young, Oman’s population is also diverse. This diversity stems not only from its own population but especially from the vast number of foreigners flocking to the country for economic opportunities. Only a little over half of Oman’s population are citizens, a feature that the government is keen to emphasise. That is, it wishes to highlight that there are more citizens than foreigners in the country in contrast with the much larger demographic ‘imbalances’ in some of Oman’s smaller Gulf neighbours like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. Local dailies regularly mention this feature, and the welcome page of the National Centre for Statistics and Information keeps readers abreast of the current numbers with a live population clock.Footnote ⁸ Yet the country looks less demographically ‘balanced’ with a view of the private sector labour market, where Omanis only hold 12.5 per cent of jobs.Footnote ⁹

Herein lies an enduring policy paradox at the heart of economic governance in Oman. Local and international capital interests demand access to global, competitively priced labour flows while, at the same time, unemployment among educated graduates rises. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain face similar tensions. Even in wealthier members of the GCC, demands for youth employment have emerged, often alongside more xenophobic concerns about cultural erosion or economic leakage from remittance flows. Here, the pressure is not as much about jobless rates as the creation of meaningful jobs in the context of bloated, redundant public sectors and unfulfilled dreams of potential and contribution.Footnote ¹⁰ Such demands underline how the expectations of what the state should provide, and the conditions it should create, are powerful drivers of social sentiment and pressure points. This paradox also lays bare the tension between neoliberalising pressures, rentier economic characteristics, and nationalist regulatory pressures. That is, when does the state regulate in favour of protecting citizen labour, and when does it do so to accommodate private sector interests? This tension is a thread running through this book, present from the historic context wherein today’s labour structures emerged, as we see in Chapter 3, through to the present.

1.2 Understanding Labour in a Rentier World

Gulf labour markets are intensely global. It is one of the first things outside observers notice about Gulf cities when they visit. The sheer diversity and visibility of multiple ethnicities from across the Indian Ocean and the Middle East make these economic spaces instantly interesting. Yet IPE scholarship on the region is dominated by the analysis of another major feature of Gulf economies – the importance of oil and gas in the modern development story.Footnote ¹¹ Rentier state literature has provided rich theorising on the region over several decades, advancing our understandings of how oil rent impacts politics, economics, and society in resource-dependent economies.Footnote ¹² Newer generations of scholarship on the resource curse from both quantitative and qualitative traditions, which Sean Yom calls ‘revisionist’, have developed sophisticated and increasingly nuanced theorising on rentierism that IPE scholarship draws on.Footnote ¹³ Outside of this contribution, however, IPE has largely ignored the region.Footnote ¹⁴ This book does not disregard rentier state research but instead shows how IPE scholarship can also be enriched by situating other units at the centre of analysis, in this case, labour.

Certainly, Gulf labour markets are impacted by the huge role of hydrocarbons in the modern development of the region. Since the oil discoveries in the early twentieth century and especially following the first oil boom beginning in 1973, the heightened importance of oil and its dominance in the regional economic landscape necessarily influenced the type, availability, and structure of work. The influx of oil income not only funded institutional growth and the development of huge public sectors but also increased the demand for labour across many sectors of the economy. The birth and growth of extractive industries in the region created the foundation for two addictions that have become deep structural features of Gulf economies – an addiction to oil revenue and to foreign labour. It is both using these resources productively and shaking these addictions prodigiously that consume the economic planning policy space.Footnote ¹⁵

In fact, when you speak to policymakers, business owners, or managers in Oman over the last decade, the almost universal comment is that creating employment is the major national concern. Oman is among the countries Herb describes as ‘middling’ rentiers, which he contrasts with the wealthier, ‘extreme rentiers’ Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE.Footnote ¹⁶ Extreme rentiers are those that are extremely hydrocarbon wealthy with small populations; and middling rentiers – Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia – are those with relatively lower resource income but larger indigenous populations to employ. Oil rents, as Herb argues, facilitated ‘badly distorted’ labour markets in the extreme rentiers.Footnote ¹⁷ While his work focuses on extreme rentier cases, this book attends to a middling one. Herb’s focus on the labour market to study the relationship between political outcomes and rentierism, one of the rarer political economy works to do so, is important but still begins with oil. Here, I instead centre the margins, labour and Oman, to trace other trajectories alongside and beyond, as well as before and after, oil.

Domestic and regional structures of oil economies do not materialise in a vacuum and thus are not the whole story influencing the shape of labour markets in the region. Movements of capital and labour from and across the region are features intimately tied to global economic transformations, vital for understanding Gulf political economy. Scholars like Hanieh, Khalili, Mitchell, and Vitalis have made essential contributions to what transformations in oil and capital have meant for the region and the global political economy.Footnote ¹⁸ In particular, Hanieh’s starting point of capitalism and Khalili’s on logistics and transportation infrastructure demonstrate clearly the crucial advances we can make in examining the region in transnational and global patterns by varying our departure points and primary analytical foci. With a view of the global economy, Hanieh has documented how the Gulf is ‘fully capitalist and subject to the same dynamics as other neighbouring states’.Footnote ¹⁹ Such dynamics portended dramatic shifts in global production networks based on capital’s search for cheaper more flexible labour. This story of global labour, and the re-erosion of labour’s power relative to capital, has underpinned and perpetuated systems of hierarchy, unequal power, and structural exclusions in Gulf political economies.

In conversation with this literature, I view Gulf labour markets as global. They exist within the ‘global economy that is part of the actual essence of the Gulf itself’.Footnote ²⁰ Drawing on an expanding scholarship on the international political economy of labour allows me to develop and substantiate my conceptualisation of global Gulf labour markets in contrast with their usual description as particular national spaces.Footnote ²¹ The shape and the past, present, and future of labour in the Gulf is tied up in the development of what Henk Overbeek calls ‘a global labour market’.Footnote ²² That is, the trajectory and continuity of the Gulf’s reliance on low-cost, available, and flexible labour from across Asia is entangled within Asia’s transformation into ‘a continent of labour’.Footnote ²³ As Daeoup Chang has persuasively shown, the development and rise of Asia has lifted people out of absolute poverty by creating jobs but simultaneously pushed the labouring classes into various forms of wage labour and capitalist social relations where the vast majority of Asia’s labour force suffers under low paying, insecure, and informal jobs.Footnote ²⁴ Many turn to internal and external migration, where West Asia is a major destination.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, the Gulf space is an embodiment of how globalisation and neoliberalism ‘integrates an increasing proportion of the world population directly into capitalist labour markets and locks national and regional markets into a global labour market’.Footnote ²⁶ This is visible in workplaces and labour policy-making spaces in the Gulf.

The course of Oman’s capitalist, labouring, and job-seeking classes are bound up within this global labour market. Through a domestic lens, the record of Oman’s economic and labour market reforms has been decidedly uneven and frequently contradictory. More and more young Omanis are graduating from higher education institutions, and like their peers globally, they expect this to pay off in the labour market. Yet many increasingly find not only a hostile employment environment but also contracting state benefits. What explains the weak labour market outcomes and expectation gap for millennials in Oman? Gulf labour markets are situated in a limbo space, confronting their position in a global labour market and the struggles of citizen labour and migrant labour for better lives and livelihoods. They face intense neoliberal pressures for economic growth, visible through pressures from international institutions to liberalise and deregulate labour markets, from businesses for cheap labour, and from regional competition to be the most attractive markets for FDI and business operations. Simultaneously, they face pressures from below that push for regulation that privileges citizens in the economy and reserves jobs and benefits for them. One can in fact observe a form of Polanyi’s double movement’Footnote ²⁷ around Omani labour, where the first movement involves individuals decrying political control and pushing for greater market dominance, while the second involves citizens seeking to reassert control over the market or, at least, find their place within it. This book details this story.

Conventionally, ‘organized labour has been concerned that the liberalisation of national economies shifts the balance further in favour of capital over labour’.Footnote ²⁸ The means and mechanisms of this concern evolves differently in the Gulf labour space where the possibilities and potential for collective action are more difficult, fragmented by the structures of the labour market.Footnote ²⁹ Here, labour is segmented across multiple ethnic, class, skill-level, and gender lines, as explained in Chapter 2. The interests of different labour market constituents divide their organisation and demands, and any resultant empowerment usually involves the disempowerment of another. This fragmentation does not remove contestation but means scholars need new tools and approaches to view and interpret it.

The high degree of stratification in Gulf labour markets is in many ways an exceptional feature of the regional political economy. Yet this social ordering is not only endogenously created but also reflects structural features of the global labour market. Indeed,

The segmentations in Gulf labour markets correspond to these broader divisions, inclusions, and exclusions. Regulatory measures that constrain or liberate labour inevitably impact certain classes more powerfully than others. The stratification within Gulf political economies also fragments any empowerment that can be derived from regulatory change. That is, measures that protect national labour often erodes the empowerment of foreign labour and vice versa. Such division and differentiation mean any collective action is more commonly found within a singular segment rather than across a wider, unified labour. This is elaborated in greater detail in Chapters 3–5.

When a population is so young, particular socio-political and economic concerns inform policy and civil society discourses, such as the promise of economic growth or the threat of social unrest. A young population can be an economic blessing or a curse, we are told, and one would expect global political economy (GPE) scholarship might also find reason to examine issues of youth or demography in the region. Yet, peculiarly, these matters are rarely given attention.Footnote ³¹ Young Gulf citizens open up the so-called black box of policy-making and politics in Gulf states in ways that other approaches and entry points have been unable to accomplish. Rentier theorising on the Gulf has been so adamant that citizens are apolitical, disinterested in political change, and unengaged in policy matters (unless they are technocrats involved in its construction), that scholarship has failed to understand the political economy transformations as they matter to some of the region’s major constituents.Footnote ³²

Much of this exclusion stems from a failure to engage with insights from other fields or view the Gulf as part of a wider global economy when oil is not the central unit of analysis. I identify three layers of this neglect. First, studies of Gulf economies almost entirely ignore Gulf citizens, outside passing remarks on their concentration in public sector employment and weak representation in the private sector.Footnote ³³ Political economy work that does consider Gulf labour is primarily descriptive of the segmentation between expatriates and citizens.Footnote ³⁴ Deeper, idiographic work in anthropology rarely engages with IPE and tends to focus on singular migrant communities.Footnote ³⁵ Second, labour is marginalised in IPE research in general.Footnote ³⁶ Third, studies of labour and class relations in oil economies are sparse and accompanied by claims of their weak salience to analysis.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, much political economy literature on the Gulf treats the region as exceptional across global cases but generalisable at the regional level. This not only ignores the substantial diversity across and within Gulf states but also isolates them from meaningful cross-regional comparison.Footnote ³⁸

Shifting the focus in rentier state literature from oil to labour aids in resituating the Gulf within comparative and global political economy analysis. This shift, alongside integrating methods from economic anthropology with IPE, allows us to take the voices of youth as agents in economic development more seriously. This contributes to understanding Gulf development challenges within the story of global capitalist expansion, the rise of neoliberalism and its tensions with economic nationalism, and strains in globalised labour markets. Building from here, the project connects Gulf development trajectories to scholarship on authoritarian neoliberalismFootnote ³⁹ and asks what explains the persistence of regulatory interventions in the face of pressures toward deregulation and flexibilisation of the labour market. Who wins and who loses from these tensions and the tendency toward one or the other? It examines what the global nature of Gulf labour markets means for its participants and what this means for domestic political economy within Oman.

At the crux of this research agenda are two real-world, global problems – youth unemployment and socio-political tensions around migration. Youth unemployment has been signalled by international financial institutions and consultancies as both a policy problem and opportunity to promote market-friendly reforms and business-friendly economies. The Arab world is no exception. Youth unemployment is rising in several resource-abundant Gulf countries alongside growing numbers of migrant workers. Tensions develop from the marginalisation of Omani youth in the private sector and the exclusion of non-nationals from political belonging. Yet scholarship views young Gulf citizens as reluctant to engage in the private sector because of a ‘rentier mentality’ associated with the ‘resource curse’,Footnote ⁴⁰ or, more crassly, a so-called Arab disease.Footnote ⁴¹ Such essentialisation limits the comparative appeal of work on the region. Crucially, many of the aspirations, expectations, and worries young people express are reflective of (disenfranchised / non-elite) youth globally – especially in welfare states with certain expectations of public goods delivery. This is not to say various impacts of oil dependence have not made their mark. The economic structures that derive from oil and foreign labour dependence are visible. However, by focusing on authoritarianism and elite preferences, such scholarship has failed to include a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of economic change in the region – and to probe youth views on oil, rentierism, or uncover their employment preferences, expectations, and aspirations.Footnote ⁴² It is incumbent on IPE scholars to not only engage with statist and institutionalist perspectives but also directly interrogate issues of youth, gender, segmentation, inequality, and opportunity in labour markets. It is time to treat the region as more than an oil spot not only to expand analysis of the region and its integration in the global economy but also to generate grounded solutions to tangible problems.

1.3 Gulf Millennials?

At the heart of the book sit the voices and perspectives of young Omanis – in particular the millennial generation.Footnote ⁴³ Following Sukarieh and Tannock, I understand youth and millennials as a social category influenced by the structures of capitalism, where it is essential to give ‘renewed attention to global political economy’ and to the ‘social construction of youth in a global context’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Doing so grounds our understanding of ‘the shifting terrain on which youth is understood, invoked and experienced’ by Omani millennials and how ‘youth’ is engaged in economic and labour market governance by local and international policymakers.Footnote ⁴⁵ I use the term ‘millennials’ loosely, roughly corresponding with international usage that speaks of the demographic born between 1980 and 2000.Footnote ⁴⁶ I use millennials to refer to young people both preparing to enter the work force and in the early stages of their labour market participation. That is, those over eighteen years of age and usually under the age of thirty-five participated in interviews, focus groups, and surveys. These research tools focused on perspectives, expectations, and engagements in the labour market, looking at a range of stages including students of technical colleges and universities, school leavers, unemployed youth, new entrants to workplaces, and those nearing the end of the early career to mid-career period.

The term millennials is more commonly used in reference to this generation in the West. The Gulf social and historical space does not attach the same meaning to recent generational labels such as Baby Boomer or Generation X, which refer to particular socio-political and historical contexts. Indeed, the millennial generation in the Middle East is at the same time a baby boom generation. It is regularly referred to as a youth bulgeFootnote ⁴⁷ and makes up the largest demographic group in Oman. As Figure 1.1 illustrates, over 73 per cent of Omanis are under the age of thirty-five.

Figure 1.1 Omani population pyramid.

Calculated from NSCI, Statistical Year Book 2019

Overall, I think generational terms and definitions offer sketchy typologies of limited analytical value. Yet broad-brush generalisations of millennials in the West, and all the critique of their inappropriateness, reflects in some ways a dialogue of the deaf between generations. I find similar stereotyping dialogues in Oman and the Gulf between generations but also between expatriates and citizens. Such sweeping generalisations, whether about young people in America or young people elsewhere, tells us something about expectations and perceptions and how these, however imperfect, influence policy discourse and the policy-making space. Thus, the term millennial in this text may be apt in more ways than one.

In early Western writing on millennials, the generation differentiates itself from previous ones largely by the economic and technological repercussions of the Internet.Footnote ⁴⁸ Some writers add to the technological divide and suggest a greater civic-mindedness and strengthened sense of community at both local and global levels in comparison to previous generations.Footnote ⁴⁹ These broad characteristics could also be applied to other socio-political spaces transformed by increased connectivity and technological change. The Gulf region has one of the highest mobile usage and social media penetration rates in the world. Young people there tend to be early adopters of technology.Footnote ⁵⁰

More specifically, comparisons can be drawn between depictions of millennials by older generations. In Western economies, millennials are criticised for an alleged sense of entitlement, high expectations of the job market, and an apparent need for praise and affirmation.Footnote ⁵¹ One of the common accusations is that ‘childhoods of constant praise, self-esteem boosting, and unrealistic expectations did not prepare [millennials] for an increasingly competitive workplace and the economic squeeze’.Footnote ⁵² In the workforce, Western millennials are criticised for ‘demanding too much too soon’ and wanting to be ‘CEO tomorrow’.Footnote ⁵³ Along with expecting higher pay, flexible work schedules, rapid promotions, and more vacation and personal time, there is a prevailing perception that millennials ‘desire to shape their jobs to fit their lives rather than adapt their lives to the workplace’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Many of these hyper-capitalist criticisms mirror those toward Gulf millennials. In personal interviews, individuals from earlier generations often shared similar sentiments. Business managers regularly claimed that millennials frequently changed jobs ‘in pursuit of higher salaries’, wanted to ‘get a profit fast’ without working particularly long or hard.Footnote ⁵⁵ Omani young people, I was regularly told, had unrealistically high expectations for pay, job title, and flexible working hours. Even Omani employers claimed the ‘new’ generation were presumptuous and thought employers should work around their schedule, adjusting for personal commitments and family obligations.Footnote ⁵⁶ Many interviewees suggested that higher levels of education came with a sense of entitlement to better jobs despite lacking practical experience. Everyone spoke of how technology had changed the mode of communication, connectedness, and social openness.Footnote ⁵⁷ I do not think it useful to stress the similarities too much. There are significant differences and diverse historical paths that led to the types of expectations as well as the perceptions of older generations toward millennials. However, some of the implied meaning behind the term also paints a picture that is illustrative beyond a simple age category.

Further, understanding youth and millennials, and centring on the issue of employment that consumes them, requires understanding the confluence of interests (political, economic, and ideological) surrounding the issue area, the global context in which job seeking and youth unemployment exists, and the labour market struggles of all ages and generations in conversation.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Oman, even the term baṭāla (unemployment) itself is politically sensitive and seen as taboo in official and policy spaces. Bāḥthūn ʿan ʿamal (jobseekers) is used instead to refer to the unemployed.Footnote ⁵⁹ Since they constitute the bulk of the unemployed and a major source of pressure on the state, al-shabāb – youth – are the target of national discourse and policy-making around the labour market. Even the National Centre for Statistics and Information started producing regular reports on youth and the labour market over the last ten years.Footnote ⁶⁰ The experiences of millennial jobseekers, and multigenerational labour struggles, need to be understood within a multi-scalar, structural, and historically specific analysis of the material and discursive conditions of their lives in local, national, regional, and global contexts.

1.4 A Note on Method

Oman is a valuable case not only because it is under-researched but also because it is considered a laboratory of reform within the Gulf.Footnote ⁶¹ Its more limited hydrocarbon earnings suggest Oman must prepare for a post-oil future more urgently than many Gulf counterparts. Reforms attempted in Oman are sometimes considered test cases for rolling out new policies on socially complicated portfolios like labour. Focusing on one of the middling rentiers, and starting with labour instead of oil, gives IPE scholarship a new angle of approach for examining not only how labour is governed but how young nationals engage with the bifurcated and globalised labour markets of the region.

I make two distinct methodological choices in this work – centring the margins by focusing on labour and embedding the study in global development trends and transformations.Footnote ⁶² The first allows me to centre Omani experiences and voices, while the second allows me to escape the methodological nationalism that characterises much of the rentier state and political economy scholarship on the Gulf.Footnote ⁶³

Omanis of varying social classes have described to me the history and present of Oman as a ‘labour country’. Taking inspiration from my interlocutors and the experience of working with Omani youth, I find understanding the global political economy of the country requires understanding the human beings that contribute to it. That is, one can learn a great deal about the present and past of the economy by ‘follow[ing] the workers’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Today, this also includes understanding the unemployed. What I hope my work does – and what I’m calling for intellectually – is to ground our scholarship in the human experience even when we are discussing economic governance; that is, do not just look from the top down but also engage the bottom up. Processes of governing, and discourses on, labour are not radically new but rather part of longer historical processes of governing and framing labour by colonial, nationalist, and neoliberal forces and processes. Taking a longer view shows this continuity and change. Analysis from the top down shows the evolution of policy choices. Analysis from the bottom up allows us to read the landscape through the eyes of actors and visualise it as a ‘contradictory space of social struggle and asymmetrical power relations, engaging through contingent analyses of inherently messy socioeconomic relations and cluttered institutional environments’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The millennial labour story is embedded within the longer story of Omani workers and economic life.

Furthermore, I intentionally engage the term Global Political Economy (GPE) instead of IPE to indicate my orientation to the field as transdisciplinary and interested in multi-scalar and multi-relational analysis.Footnote ⁶⁶ I build on a new tradition of scholarship that views the region as neoliberal in its orientation and entrenched within global capitalism.Footnote ⁶⁷ By understanding Gulf labour markets as global, we can offer more convincing explanations for their transformations and contradictions, the facilitation of particular labour regulatory regimes, and their embeddedness in global economic trends. It is the ghettoisation of Gulf studies, forged by a belief in their remarkable exceptionalism, that stymies theorising and explanations of social and economic processes that are possible through comparative analysis and transnational and global lenses. I galvanise this lens in the analysis of youth in the Omani labour market, which facilitates important insights on the development and consequences of the global labour market, capitalist class relations, and labour governance patterns.

The theme of employment took centre stage in my engagements with young people even before I began formally analysing them. When I first lived in Oman, I worked with college students for two years in my capacity as a lecturer. Engaging with young people is always future oriented, especially among students. Like the questions we ask about what they plan to do with their lives, they too are wondering, worrying, and dreaming about the future. In college, they often want to talk about this with others. I spent hours listening to young women and men talk about their dreams and their expectations about the future – including ideas of family, of love (and secret love), and, always dominating the conversation, jobs.

Realities on the ground challenge long-held scholarly evaluations of Gulf societies, politics, and economic change. Young people’s views and dreams told me one thing. Media, consultancies, and policymakers (both foreign and local) report another. Young people are regularly referred to as ‘lazy’,Footnote ⁶⁸ ‘choosy’,Footnote ⁶⁹ and ‘reluctant to take up jobs’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Employers and foreign analysts habitually suggest that nationals are not ‘ready to take over’ jobs in the private sector.Footnote ⁷¹ At the same time, Omani youth complain that employers do not want to hire them and, when they do, do not give them meaningful work or any at all. I listened to many stories of jobs that require the employee to fill a seat at a desk while not having any work to do. This is what Steffen Hertog calls ‘phantom employment’ where a national receives a salary but is given nothing to do or is told to stay home.Footnote ⁷² However, the most persistent complaint is the difficulty of getting a foot in the door. There is a widespread perception that the private sector systematically discriminates against Omani young people and only those with the right connections can surmount this. This sense creeps into anti-immigration accusations that expatriates holding managerial positions privilege their nationality and recruit only friends or family members from their home country.

Jobs and labour market problems were persistent anxieties during my regular returns and periods living in the region since 2005. The global financial crisis that began in 2007 and the uprisings that rocked the wider Arab world in 2010 and 2011 pushed such concerns to the forefront of the global imagination and heightened the empirical importance of understanding young people in the Gulf. When I first started my doctoral work in 2009, I was discouraged from focusing on the region’s youth. By the time I returned to the Gulf for my field research, the Middle East was already in the throngs of the uprisings. But the so-called Gulf exceptionalism meant I should not centre on youth but instead on the rentier state and its policy measures. I therefore analysed policy spaces that were critical to the future of a youth-filled region – the development of an innovation-driven, knowledge economy. At the same time, I continued gathering data and engaging with millennials. This ultimately only formed one chapter of my dissertation, with the rest saved and analysed for this book project. Following my year of dissertation field research in 2011–2012, I spent approximately another twenty-five months in Oman between 2013 and 2020.

This book is concerned with taking Gulf labour seriously in development governance discourses. It is based on this multi-year field work including around two hundred open and semi-structured interviews, eighty responses to written digital surveys, focus groups, five-years of ethnographic observations over a period of thirteen years, and historical records in physical and digital archives.Footnote ⁷³ I have made use of multiple methods to analyse these sources, including process-tracing, qualitative content analysis within a discourse analytic approach, and contrapuntal reading.Footnote ⁷⁴ A discourse analytic approach is a more qualitative form of content analysis that alongside looking for patterns and consistency of words also embraces sensitivity to the meaning, usage, and context in which words are used.Footnote ⁷⁵ This approach matches well with contrapuntal reading, and its emphasis on giving voice to multiple contexts and perspectives. Edward Said introduced contrapuntal reading as a method in literary analysis to account for different structures, ideas, and discourses that are silenced through the way literature exclusively privileges the perspective and experience of the coloniser or imperial power.Footnote ⁷⁶ The term is borrowed from music and refers to the relationship between themes, the ‘independent yet harmonious lines in a musical composition’, which, when extended to social science analysis, proposes reading to connect multiple experiences, contexts, and scales.Footnote ⁷⁷ That is, in this analysis, source material from multiple perspectives are analysed to understand the history and context behind policy, as well as the history and context of resistance over time. I explain my application of contrapuntal reading to GPE explicitly in Chapter 3’s historical analysis.

Research participants can be organised in five broad categories: (1) millennials / youth; (2) government officials and policymakers; (3) entrepreneurship and employment initiative actors; (4) employers, recruitment agents, and human resource professionals; and (5) unions and labour and civil society actors. The first category of millennials, described in Section 1.3, sit at the heart of the inquiry. I held interviews, focus groups, and countless informal conversations with young people.Footnote ⁷⁸ I also distributed a digital survey aimed at understanding perspectives and experiences on the labour market. I spoke with young people in colleges and universities across the country; jobseekers and also individuals in their early and mid career; aspiring entrepreneurs engaged in one of the many training, incubation, or other entrepreneurship promotion activities; and entrepreneurs themselves. I intentionally engaged across socio-economic classes, regions, and urban/rural divides.

Second, formal interviews, informal conversations, and participant observation (in the form of policy dialogue, conferences, workshops, and meetings) were held with active and retired, senior, and mid-level policymakers and bureaucrats in the various ministries and government bodies responsible for commerce and trade, labour, education, and economic planning. This category has significant overlap with the third: those who ran and implemented various entrepreneurship promotion initiatives from training and funding to incubating start-ups. Some of these are private and non-governmental, but many were connected to government bodies, educational institutions, or banks. The fourth category includes business owners and employers. This includes businessmen and -women from historic business families, chamber of commerce officials and committee members, established entrepreneurs, and other employers. Given the size of the state, each of these categories overlap and evolve as individuals move in and out of business and government or have one foot in the door of each. It also includes the human resource professionals responsible for recruitment, training, and retention in mid-sized and large companies. Finally, I spoke with unions, union members, civil society organisations, and labour rights activists and their networks.Footnote ⁷⁹

1.5 Reading the Book

The arguments presented at the start of the chapter are elaborated on and interwoven into the analysis throughout the chapters of this book. Together, the book weaves Omani labour market constituents into a wider tapestry of regional labour trends and the global labour market. It illustrates how the Omani labour market is globalised but also rentier and neoliberal and how it struggles with the path dependencies of its reliance on foreign labour and oil but also grapples like other labour markets globally with the pressures of global capitalism. It does this through a history of labour market policy and development planning, an exploration of sites of radical economic transformation, and examinations of labour market belonging and economic citizenship and of entrepreneurship and self-employment initiatives.

Akin to other labour markets wrestling with competitiveness and balancing meaningful, sustainable employment, workers in Oman’s labour market confront varieties of exclusions and struggle to negotiate their belonging in various economic sectors. Citizens and non-citizens perceive their influence and privileges, and their exclusions and precarities in multiple ways. Such tensions give rise to economic nationalism. At the same time, millennial citizen expectations form out of an interaction between what society expects the government to provide through their governance of hydrocarbon revenues and what economic globalisation promises to young people globally. Comparison influences expectations, not just within domestic and regional contexts but from the interconnected hyper-global world as well.

In this work, I explore labour contestation among Omani citizens in a globalised labour space where labour’s power is not so much in the strength of its organisation but in the threat of its discontent. Connecting domestic labour issues with global economic trends allows us to better interpret relevant changes in today’s connected economies. It also offers new insights into the international political economy of labour.Footnote ⁸⁰ Moreover, throughout the book, I explore the origins and conditions that have led to the governance and regulatory contradictions that have come to characterise Omani and Gulf labour markets. These inquiries lay the foundation for the two critical, overarching claims of the book.

First, I call for citizen labour to be brought into international political economy scholarship on the Gulf. By starting with labour rather than oil, we introduce new critical insights to understand the Omani and wider Gulf economy. It brings human beings back into our scholarship in places where they have been marginalised. Importantly, here it de-exceptionalises the ‘Gulf citizen’.

Second, I contend neoliberal capitalism has become an integral part of the Gulf development story.Footnote ⁸¹ That is, rentierism has gone to bed with neoliberal capitalism. It is not at all surprising that rentier states manifest authoritarianism when one considers how much state intervention transpires to create regulation to ‘liberate’ the market and facilitate patterns of accumulation.Footnote ⁸² The state wields its power on behalf of capital and the pursuit of profit through the way it regulates (and forcibly deregulates) economic activities. This view contrasts with prevailing literature on Gulf IPE where rentierism and neoliberalism came to be regarded as separate detached phenomenon until the recent turn’s focus on capitalism in the Gulf. It is perhaps no surprise that this is the case. In classic literature on rent, all competing schools of thought, from neoclassical and Keynesianism to Marxism, agreed that rent was at most a residual phenomenon within capitalism and most agreed it was ephemeral.Footnote ⁸³ In the march toward competitive market futures, manifestations and patterns of rentierism were going to dissipate. Yet as studies such as Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century show, rent continues to be important in contemporary capitalism.Footnote ⁸⁴ Definitions of rent include both those that consider income received by a landowner for letting out property and those that consider rent as excess profits more broadly. In this book, I follow Christophers’ definition of rent as ‘income derived from the ownership, possession or control of scarce assets and under conditions of limited or no competition’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This definition is especially useful for three reasons. First, it includes all forms of assets, including not just land but also intellectual property patents. Second, it is built on a foundation in which market conditions exist through which rent income is realised. Third, it sufficiently incorporates rentier states without exceptionalising how rent functions within global capitalism.

Rent-seeking too is a key feature of neoliberal capitalism, as actors seek to earn wealth through extracting rent from resources, contracts, land, labour visas, patents, and the like. The centrality of neoliberal capitalism to Gulf development underlies regulatory tensions between the impulse of generous social welfare, on the one hand, and the logic of economic profit maximising, on the other. This tension becomes visible by a focus on the labour market and the various economic reform measures. This runs as a thread throughout this book. Rentier neoliberalism emerges as a form of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, where authoritarian statisms are clearly intertwined with neoliberal reforms.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, the embeddedness of the Gulf in global capitalist markets, in hydrocarbon trade but also in global production networks, entrenches the countries of the region within a global neoliberal logic that pursues profit and durability at all socio-political costs.

In Chapter 2, I lay the contextual groundwork substantiating my claim that the Omani labour market is global and subject to both neoliberal and nationalist forces. Development planning, economic ideologies, and regulatory frameworks interact, shape, and institutionalise economic structures and economic life. I unpack the Omani labour market, zooming in on its structure, demographics, organisation, and regulation. Through presenting the backdrop to the labour market, I detail its segmentations, structures, and challenges. I also explore the processes of class formation, the role of wages in a global labour market, and the patterns of labour market regulation and reform. I pay specific attention to labour nationalisation and labour sponsorship regimes and how the regulatory regimes governing citizen and foreign employment interact.

Chapter 3 takes a step back to assemble the historical context around work in the modern history of Oman. Through re-reading development history by starting with labour, it explores both Omani modern work history and labour market governance. The chapter argues that the contemporary governance, regulatory, and resistance state of affairs in Oman has lineages in the past. These extend from the colonial and oil industry labour practices and discourses through the era of neoliberal reform to the present. In particular, the chapter sets up the backdrop to the regulatory frameworks that shape and constrain how citizens and non-citizens engage and have engaged in the economy over time and how their labour has been governed. Tracing the lineages of differentiation and resistance in the labour market reveals how segmentation, differentiation, discourses of workers, and labour resistance, as well as the pressures for both liberalisation and nationalisation have a much longer history than is usually told. It contradicts exceptionalist narratives of Gulf labour market governance and shows transnational and global historical connections with patterns of recruitment and employment. The politics of work and its regulation that began in the late colonial period in the wider region have continuities in present-day Oman. Earlier practices and patterns around employment and immigration governance have imprints on the structure, regulatory space, and collective memory of the Omani labour market today.

Chapter 4 explores sites and projects of radical transformation, focusing on Sohar and Duqm. These two cities offer examples of two extreme cases of economic transformation and social impact – one a location that is a population centre and another that is remote. Both cities became cornerstones of national development imaginaries in development plans, where the development of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) with logistics infrastructure like ports and major industrial activities are supposed to be key diversification drivers that will generate non-oil growth and private sector expansion. It begins with the city of Sohar, which rapidly transformed from a small coastal town to a city and national industrial hub in the 2000s. The promise of Sohar raised expectations yet its limited and uneven benefits shattered them. In the face of all of this growth and change, Sohar was at the heart of Oman’s ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011. Ten years later, in May 2021, Sohar emerged again as the starting point of protests that continued for a few days in several cities. Economic disenfranchisement and a lack of opportunities for local youth were at the core of concerns. Duqm today epitomises the promise of economic development for the national future. It is undergoing radical transformation from a small fishing village to an enormous SEZ, with investment from China, India, Japan, Belgium, Kuwait, among others. Through the Sohar and Duqm accounts, I ground the argument about Oman’s global labour market in empirical examples of spatial transformation. The case studies offer concrete examples of Oman’s integration into global value chains and the material outcomes and ramifications of neoliberal policies and development plans. The chapter argues that the expectations of young citizens take shape in the interaction of the promises of economic development’s trickle-down effect, of globalisation, and of government responsibilities for governing petrol wealth; and their reactions emerge from their perceived right to, or exclusion from, these returns. Continuing the patterns examined in Chapter 3, these cases also show how capital works to avoid labour disruption and therefore draws on the global labour market for both a supply of labour and also for an enhanced capacity to control workers and secure seamless operations.

Chapter 5 builds on the disconnect between economic promises and expectations to explore the construction of belonging and contestation of economic space among diverse Omani millennials. Centring on belonging, class, and social relations, it examines how forces of inclusion and exclusion play across both national and expatriate divides in Gulf economies. Nationals in Oman may have citizenship and permanence in the country but are marginalised in economic production by their weak representation in the private sector. Non-nationals, although comprising the majority of private-sector workers, in many ways ‘belong’ in different sectors of the private sector yet have no political claim on permanence in the country. The divisions within these groups construct different senses of belonging and not belonging, resulting in tenuous economic citizenship and practices of othering. I argue, first, that perceptions of belonging and unbelonging emerge from the structures of segmentation and the tension between neoliberal reform and labour protection, and second, that class is key to understanding these patterns. These findings not only shed light on the competing pressures in the governance of Gulf labour markets but also contribute to scholarly understandings of economic citizenship and Gulf labour-market complexities in a globalised context.

Chapter 6 focuses on entrepreneurship promotion among millennials and women – two overlapping constituents who are disproportionally represented among the jobless demographic. In Oman, like in neighbouring Gulf states, the promotion of entrepreneurship – small- and medium-sized enterprises – has been a key state strategy over the past decade as both a vital component of innovation policy and as an alternative career path for citizens. If you cannot get the market to hire the citizen, perhaps the citizen can make their own market. The proliferation of neoliberal growth discourse across rapidly developing economies is obvious in the promotion of entrepreneurship and celebration of individual enterprise. Oman’s embrace of an entrepreneurial market discourse may seem peculiar next to the preponderance of the state in political and economic spaces. Yet it is perhaps this policy discourse that most clearly underpins the rentier-neoliberal marriage and the making of rentier neoliberalism. This chapter demonstrates how Omani youth and female entrepreneurs confront competing tensions within three intersecting political economy logics: the logic of the economic structure, the logic of development narratives, and the logic of socio-economic organisation. Rather than resolving labour market issues, this chapter shows how most forms of entrepreneurship reproduce the same dominant, segmented employment patterns in the wider economy. Meanwhile, new entrepreneurs are still subject to the same regional and global inequalities and patterns of capital accumulation.

By centring the margins of labour, the book responds to Adam Hanieh’s call to study the Gulf within a view of ‘capitalism as a social system’ with attention to ‘class relations in Gulf society’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Following this, the Conclusion reflects on the lessons learned throughout this book. To take stock of its central claims, it identifies and reviews three intersecting vectors that run through the book – (1) the embeddedness of segmented labour markets within global structures and processes, (2) the key historical junctures shaping regional labour trajectories, and (3) the liberalising/nationalising dialectic in labour governance.