Colonial Labor Hierarchies and the Limits of ‘Modern Slavery’ Discourse in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Migrant Labor Policy: Structural Legal Continuities and the Case of Saudi Arabia and Qatar

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Publicado en:ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025)
Autor principal: Musharbash, Leena Musa
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100 1 |a Musharbash, Leena Musa 
245 1 |a Colonial Labor Hierarchies and the Limits of ‘Modern Slavery’ Discourse in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Migrant Labor Policy: Structural Legal Continuities and the Case of Saudi Arabia and Qatar 
260 |b ProQuest Dissertations & Theses  |c 2025 
513 |a Dissertation/Thesis 
520 3 |a The kafala system, the legal regime that governs transnational labor migration across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – binds migrant workers’ legal status to their employers and systematically institutionalizes conditions of racialized labor dependency and control. Although recent legal reforms, such as Saudi Arabia’s Labor Reform Initiative and Qatar’s FIFA-driven labor regulations, are internationally acclaimed as structural advances in labor market modernization and migrant rights, these reforms operate as strategies of containment that are strategically calibrated to absorb international scrutiny by satisfying the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and U.S. Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report compliance benchmarks, which deflects attention away from the structural asymmetries that sustain the Gulf political economy. By shifting governance responsibilities onto private actors, subcontracting networks, and humanitarian intermediaries, these surface-level reforms continue entrenching employer dominance by obscuring state accountability and reproducing selective enforcement mechanisms (Zhang et al., 2024; Al-Esmael et al., 2017; Jureidini, 2010; Rohendi, 2023). Reform efforts perform compliance as action rather than dismantling the foundational racial and economic hierarchies that render migrant workers disposable, which reinforces the Gulf’s integration into global supply chains while simultaneously maintaining the underlying colonial logics of labor exploitation. Therefore, Gulf labor governance must be understood as an integrated technology of global racial capitalism that converges legal, corporate, and humanitarian mechanisms to stabilize and perpetuate extractive labor relations under the guise of progressive reform – not as a series of isolated legal updates that incrementally advance worker protections or meaningfully redistribute power within the global economy. 
653 |a Geography 
653 |a Middle Eastern studies 
653 |a Economics 
773 0 |t ProQuest Dissertations and Theses  |g (2025) 
786 0 |d ProQuest  |t ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global 
856 4 1 |3 Citation/Abstract  |u https://www.proquest.com/docview/3219203913/abstract/embedded/L8HZQI7Z43R0LA5T?source=fedsrch 
856 4 0 |3 Full Text - PDF  |u https://www.proquest.com/docview/3219203913/fulltextPDF/embedded/L8HZQI7Z43R0LA5T?source=fedsrch