Surveillance, race, and social sorting in the United Arab Emirates
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211009719 |
| Author | Rafeef Ziadah |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211009719
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(4) 605 –620
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211009719
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Surveillance, race, and social
sorting in the United Arab
Emirates
Rafeef Ziadah
SOAS University of London, UK and King’s College London, UK
Abstract
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made headlines for its use of mass surveillance technologies
against UAE residents, as well as opponents externally. Under the guise of protecting national
security, there has been a proliferation of state-led initiatives to monitor public spaces and online
activity across the UAE, making the country an important laboratory for advanced surveillance
tools. This article takes as a starting point that despite claims to being race-neutral and scientific,
surveillance technologies have an embedded racial bias and operate according to context to (re)
produce forms of state control and racial social relations. Reviewing the introduction of multiple
surveillance technologies, this article traces the rationales used to racially order space and define
deviance in the UAE context, emphasising questions of race, migration status and labour, to
understand how the state defines, codifies, and regulates an ethno-racial hierarchy.
Keywords
migrant labour, race, smart cities, surveillance, United Arab Emirates
Received: 24th September 2020; Revised version received: 8th February 2021; Accepted: 23rd March 2021
In recent years, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made headlines for its use of mass
surveillance technologies against UAE residents, as well as opponents externally. In
December 2019, the New York Times reported that popular chat application ToTok was
being used by the UAE government to track user data, including conversations, locations,
and images (Mazzetti et al., 2019). In 2018, media reported on a lawsuit filed in Israel and
Cyprus against Israeli spyware company NSO, for selling the Pegasus programme to the
UAE – a programme used at the time to record smartphone conversations, of UAE dis-
sidents, but also Qatari and Saudi royals (Smith and Srivastava, 2019).
Corresponding author:
Rafeef Ziadah, Department of International Development, King’s College London, Bush House, North East
Wing, 40 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG, UK.
Email: Rafeef.Ziadah@kcl.ac.uk
1009719POL0010.1177/02633957211009719PoliticsZiadah
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics
606 Politics 44(4)
Under the guise of protecting national security, there has been a proliferation of state-
led initiatives to monitor public spaces and online activity across the UAE, making the
country an important laboratory for advanced surveillance tools, including the introduc-
tion of a biometric population registry, digital fingerprinting, facial, and retina recogni-
tion at border crossings and within cities. Utilising a discourse of modernisation and
e-governance, resident biometric data are shared across ministries, as well as major tele-
communications corporations like Etisalat and Du.
Conceptions of ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘global surveillance structure’, and ‘surveil-
lance society’, although analytically differentiated, speak to the growing scholarly atten-
tion to surveillance technologies and their infiltration of daily life (Kundnani and Kumar,
2015; Wood, 2009; Zuboff, 2019). This article takes as a starting point that surveillance
‘penetrates differentially’ (Fiske, 1998), that despite claims to being race-neutral and sci-
entific, surveillance technologies have an embedded racial bias and operate according to
context to (re)produce forms of state control and racial social relations. I engage with the
literature on surveillance, racialisation, and gender (Browne, 2015; Dubrofsky and
Magnet, 2015) bringing its insights into the postcolonial context of the United Arab
Emirates (UAE).
While emphasising the racial sorting embedded in and maintained by surveillance
technologies, the bulk of critical writing on the subject has tended to focus on the prolif-
eration of such technologies in liberal democracies (Haggerty and Samatas, 2010). By
centring the UAE, this article questions what can be revealed about the circulation of
racialised coercive technologies and discourses at a global scale? How do they ‘land’
according to context and act to securitise urban space and regulate the lives of residents?
My emphasis here is on the localised manifestations of global racialised security tech-
nologies, under the guise of the War on Terror (WoT) although embedded in much longer
colonial histories. I aim to examine how such logics are localised and ‘reproduced in
relation to the manifold raced markets’ whereby ‘race functions in structural and agential
ways, integrally producing and being reproduced by our global political economy’ (Tilley
and Shilliam, 2018), at the same time, creating what Amar has called ‘security archipela-
gos’ composed of segregated urban spaces (Amar, 2013).
There has been an emergent interest in UAE’s international relations and political
economy, especially in the wake of the country’s intensified regional role post the
2011/2012 uprisings (Hanieh, 2018; Ulrichsen, 2018), yet, the mass surveillance of the
UAE’s resident population has not featured centrally in existing analysis. Typically stud-
ied from a rentier state perspective, with a reliance on hydrocarbons as a central explana-
tory factor of regime resilience – daily modes of coercion, surveillance, and racialisation
are often rendered invisible. Reviewing the introduction of multiple surveillance tech-
nologies, this article traces the rationales used to racially order space and define deviance
in the UAE context, emphasising questions of race, migration status and labour, to under-
stand how the state defines, codifies, and regulates an ethno-racial hierarchy.
I make the following two interconnected arguments: the circulation of surveillance
modalities to the UAE has expanded the domestic security state with techniques utilised
to both discipline the citizen population, but also to enact racialised and gendered coding
that criminalises citizen and non-citizen dissent, reinforcing an urban segregation between
the UAE’s largely migrant labour community and Emirati citizens. Second, this needs to
be understood in relation to surveillance strategies embedded within larger transnational
relationships of the WoT and a growing surveillance industry, promoted by a network of
states and corporate actors. The article begins with a broad theoretical discussion of the
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