On 6 December 2018, an undergraduate at Texas A&M's branch campus in Doha, Qatar (TAMUQ), emailed the university community to protest the administration's decision to mourn the death of former US President George H. W. Bush by closing the campus for a day. She wrote:
As a student of TAMUQ, I am not proud that the university is turning a blind eye to the war crimes and racism of the 41st president of the US and instead presenting us with a hagiographic portrayal of his life. I don't understand why we're focusing on his “connections to TAMU” when most, if not all, of us students are not proud of those connections.
I find that incredibly disrespectful to the many families that he displaced and murdered. There are likely students at our university who have been and still are affected by the legacy of his war crimes.
I think that our university should encourage us to face inconvenient truths and to stand with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. Cancelling classes in honour of a racist war criminal feels a lot like standing with the oppressor to me.
Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great service to the Armed Forces of our country. Patriotism abounds at A&M.”Footnote 1 Meanwhile, Qatar hosts the largest concentration of US troops abroad. The US military's Central Command is at Al Udeid Air Base, not far from the Education City complex that hosts TAMUQ and several branch campuses of American and other foreign universities.Footnote 2 The students at these institutions are Qatari citizens, South Asian and Arab immigrants, and international students, primarily from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Requiring these students to commemorate the death of a man whose policies have directly or indirectly had an impact on their families’ lives highlights the way American branch campuses in Qatar are institutionalized sites of imperial citizenship formation: ideas and practices of citizenship that accommodate and normalize US imperialism among racialized subjects both outside of the United States and domestically. Yet they also are spaces where students formulate anti-imperial subjectivities, as the protest email clearly showcases. In this piece, we draw upon our extensive fieldwork (Danya is a geographer and Neha is an anthropologist) in Doha over the last decade to further explore these imperial contestations, as well as the ways that students are reconfiguring their relationships to Qatar.
Although studies of citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula consider how the relationship between subjects and the state is contingent upon immigration status, race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, marriage, urbanization, neoliberal forms of development, and politicization (themes also highlighted in this roundtable), citizenship scholars rarely consider residents of the Gulf as individuals who have felt the impact of US-led imperialism. In contrast, political economy and geography scholarship centers the role of US hegemony in the region, its impacts on the decisions that state actors make, and the ways that US financial institutions and markets are intertwined with Gulf economies, especially those of oil and gas.Footnote 3 As Gulf state rhetoric and investment has shifted in the last two decades toward knowledge economy projects, it is important to note the way that these development agendas have facilitated and reinforced the architecture of US power in the region. For example, the RAND Corporation, a think tank established to support warfare research of the US Armed Forces, developed Qatar's knowledge economy policy and education reform between 2003 and 2013. Similarly, Texas A&M's branch campus in Qatar was established in 2003 as the US was invading Iraq. Providing expertise in petroleum and chemical engineering, fields closely tied to the oil and gas industry, the branch campus further links the fossil fuel economies of the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf.
Similar to British and US oil companies, which simultaneously produced capitalist, racialized, and nationalist subjects, branch campuses are liminal sites of US empire and imperial citizenship formation. They are uniquely situated vis-a-vis both Qatari and US (both federal and state) sovereignties in ways that are not always clear to university or state actors. The debate over whether TAMUQ should memorialize Bush's death reflected this uncertainty about how each branch campus is subject to federal governance of US higher education, which is compounded for public universities as they also are beholden to US state laws. For example, students at TAMUQ are required, per Texas state law, to take a course that considers US state constitutions, with special focus on Texas. Meanwhile, employees at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar have to undergo US Homeland Security background checks, per Virginia state law. In the case of Bush's memorialization, Texas law prevailed when governor Greg Abbott proclaimed that all state agencies should be closed for the burial, and he was officially mourned in Qatar.
Branch campuses regularly operationalize these ambiguous legal geographies to justify institutional decisions and rhetoric about practically everything—holidays, research protocol, security, student affairs, employment, and more. For example, those hired locally in Qatar are not guaranteed the protections of the US legal system, such as equal pay and benefits; branch campuses are therefore able to take advantage of ethno-racial compensation hierarchies in Qatar to underpay or overexploit many employees in clerical, service, and maintenance positions, either directly or through outsourcing. When it comes to issues of national security, however, US federal and state law is implemented. Given recent Trump administration security restrictions regarding “foreign national involvement in teaching or research activities” through the Protect our Universities Act of 2019, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian nationals hired at US branch campuses are restricted from working on certain types of research projects.
The relationship between the branch campus and the home campus, however, is presented to the student body as seamless and resolved, since the branch campuses provide a mirror degree. Moments of student activism and protest demonstate that this is far from true. It is imperative to consider how higher education in Qatar produces not only forms of belonging and stratification in relation to the Qatari nation but also in relation to US hegemony. As we explore below, these forms of belonging have coalesced through both seemingly extraordinary moments of student protest and the everyday organizing of student clubs.
Northwestern University at Qatar: Protesting for what was Promised
This paper began as a frantic Twitter direct message exchange between us in November 2019, as Northwestern University at Qatar (NU–Q) students on Twitter began to expose racist and sexist comments and behavior that they had experienced from then Dean Everette Dennis as well as some faculty and staff members. Many of the students’ experiences echoed the findings described in Neha's ethnography about Education City and the reception the book had been receiving across the branch campuses.Footnote 4 We discussed the backlash of some white faculty (including refusals to engage with the text and one case of disinviting the author from a public talk), whereas faculty of color found that it validated their experiences of marginalization.Footnote 5 NU–Q's issues did not seem unique to that campus but systemic inside Education City, and we started to fold what students were exposing there into our broader conversation.
In response to the Twitter storm and ensuing letters from students, the Northwestern dean, along with the provost who was visiting from the Evanston main campus at the time, convened an emergency town hall meeting, at which students staged a silent protest. The meeting also was live streamed by some students, and during the course of the meeting over 1,000 people joined, several commenting that they were NU–Q alumni. Neha watched it in the early morning hours from the US while Danya watched it from Doha, and we discussed it as it happened.
The students had chosen a representative to speak on their behalf. In her statement, she laid out a series of demands addressed to the provost, which included a more representative faculty, better handling of Title IX cases, and accountability for discrimination against students by faculty and administrators. “We demand policy, and not just apologies!” she said. She highlighted ongoing experiences of marginalization, racism, and sexual harassment that students have faced at the hands of faculty and administration, noting that these are daily occurrences. In the Q&A session that followed, students pressed the administration on whether a search that was underway for a new dean would include diverse search committee members and job candidates, especially from the region. They also challenged a faculty member who was a focus of the students’ Twitter activism about comments she had recently made in her class that stereotyped Qataris. A few days later, the NU–Q student union held a meeting for students and asked them to anonymously write down their concerns. Student concerns included lack of diversity in faculty and courses, racial discrimination by faculty (as well as student to student), mishandling of Title IX complaints, censorship of student-run clubs by the university, and poor working conditions for student workers. At that meeting, the student union president told the attendees: “The administration, both here and in Evanston, I assure you, is definitely listening to us now.”Footnote 6
It was not surprising that student demands were addressed primarily to the provost of the Northwestern system and Evanston. Students were calling the US university to task for not living up to the liberal promises that it claimed to offer: nondiscrimination, equal rights under the law, racial and gender diversity, institutional transparency regarding legal protocol and hiring processes, and freedom of expression. The response from administrators and faculty, particularly at the town hall, was indicative of the way branch campuses flatten students’ challenges to institutions and appropriate them into narratives of educational success, which themselves are colonizing moves. After students calmly yet emphatically told a faculty member at the town hall how upset they were that she had used the term “Qatarded” in a blog post to discuss daily life in the country, and re-blogged supposedly humorous lists that contained derogatory stereotypes about Qataris and immigrant groups, the faculty member's response was that she was “proud” of them for exhibiting the wonderful education that they had received at Northwestern. This sentiment—that students were demonstrating their training in democracy, critical thinking, and free expression—was repeated by administrators at the meeting, and again in write-ups about the protest, social media postings, and personal conversations. Instead of taking responsibility for how they had failed the students, faculty and administrators managed to claim student protest as a moment of their own creation.Footnote 7
The inability to see the students in Doha as equal to those in Evanston became evident again a few months later when a new controversy erupted on Twitter about an NU–Q event in February 2020 featuring members of the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila. The band has openly gay members and considers its music political, producing songs that address gender, sexuality, climate change, state suppression, refugee activism, and Palestine. They were invited to speak about their role in Middle Eastern “media revolutions.” The event sparked anger among some conservatives in Qatar not affiliated with Education City, who felt that inviting openly gay speakers went against the country's values. This is a recurring subject of debate online in Qatar, especially on Arabic Twitter, and highlights rifts between segments of the citizenry who disagree about the trajectory of the country's development, its demographics, and what constitute the parameters of national culture. NU–Q and other Education City students for the most part defended the event in the name of free speech and tolerance and argued with detractors. At times the threads became vitriolic, with some non-Qatari students targeted as outsiders who did not have a right to be in the country, at which point other students spoke up to defend the idea that immigrants belong in Qatar too.
NU–Q ultimately canceled the event, citing security concerns, and announced that it would be relocated to the Evanston campus. Implicit in this decision was the message that gay speakers are safer in the US than in Qatar, and that the main campus, unlike the branch campus, is a site of free speech. In an interview with the Daily Northwestern newspaper, Northwestern's president Morton Schapiro noted the “different values” in Qatar and dismissed claims by the Qatar Foundation (the parastatal that funds and oversees operations in Education City) that the event's cancellation did not have to do with safety concerns, saying: “Did you see some of the blogs? Some of the things that people wrote? We had to protect the safety not just of the performers, but of the audience that was going to be on our campus . . . I hope to have them on campus and broadcast it back.”Footnote 8
The “clash of civilizations” framework through which this controversy was cast was due in part to the overlapping sovereignties at work in Education City. Based on pressure from external community members, the Qatar Foundation cited “Qatari law” in canceling the event, without further explanation. This was easily spun into “security concerns” by the Northwestern main campus administration. It was unclear who initiated the event's cancellation, or if it was a joint decision by both institutions. For the most part, branch campuses enjoy autonomy in event planning, hiring, and curricular choices. Decisions not to push back against the Qatar Foundation, or claims that certain choices are made to accommodate Qatari norms, lead to the scapegoating of Qatari culture as intolerant and unsafe. Given the climate of Islamophobia and white supremacy currently trafficking under the guise of free speech on US campuses, often overseen by campus police, the idea that Evanston would be a safer space for a Lebanese band to perform (provided they are able to procure visas) is arrogant at best.
The cancellation's imperial cast did not go unnoticed by students. Some cited the fact that highly controversial speakers who went against Qatar's supposed social and cultural values had been welcomed by NU–Q and other Education City campuses before, such as the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has openly advocated violence against Palestinians. Others felt that the decision to cancel the Mashrou’ Leila event did not represent the desires of NU–Q students and painted them in a negative light. In both the protest and the controversy around Mashrou’ Leila, NU–Q students showcased a different kind of belonging to Qatar, one that was not nativist but rather based on shared experiences and solidarities. Members of immigrant groups were offended by racism toward Qatari students, and Qatari students defended immigrant students online from fellow citizens. This activism emerged from the contradictory experiences of studying at a US university where the promise of liberal education simultaneously revealed deep imperial inequalities and led to the formation of new subjectivities and politicizations.
Student Clubs: Between Segregation and Solidarity
Student clubs are institutionalized spaces where students negotiate the limits of imperial citizenship and cultivate forms of localized belonging. Branch campuses advertise clubs and associations as venues for students to practice leadership and community building as important workplace skills. Administrators also describe clubs as spaces where students exercise the liberal tenets of US education, such as freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas. Administrators, however, understand these tenets as principles that have to be modeled for the student population. A student affairs employee explained in an interview with Danya why she was so happy to see students exercising their freedom of speech during the NU–Q protest: “When they get in trouble with something, students will say they have the freedom of speech, and I have to explain ‘that's not what it is.’” Staff and faculty both tend to see students, and particularly Qatari students, as subjects of authoritarian regimes who have to be repeatedly instructed how to properly practice academic freedom. However, when students actually exercise their academic freedom to organize collectively through clubs they “get in trouble” with the university, especially when they come up against its interests.
There are similar categories of student groups at each branch campus, including academic, extracurricular, athletic, and service clubs. Professional associations, such as the Society of Professional Journalists at NU–Q, the Carnegie Mellon Business Association, and the Society of Petroleum Engineers at TAMUQ, provide career development activities tailored to the majors offered at each campus. The most prominent nonacademic student organizations are identity-based clubs, such as the South Asian Society at Georgetown University–Qatar and the Sudanese Students Society at TAMUQ. Club activities culminate in an annual Education City–wide event, where student groups (organized by nationality and ethnicity) showcase their culture to the rest of the campus with food, music, poetry, and dance. The most ubiquitous identity-based groups are Qatari Student Associations (QSAs). In 2019, these clubs co-organized a Qatar Foundation–sponsored public event for Qatar's National Day called “Education City United.” Although non-Qatari students attended this event, Qatari students were its face, and the majority of attendees were Qatari students and their families. Framed by the branch campuses and the Qatar Foundation as a celebration of Education City's diversity and cultural heritage, these events depoliticize and essentialize difference and further entrench segregation between students.
Although identity-based student organizations put on the most visible events across Education City, student organizing is not limited to these cultural and nationalist projects. In interviews with Danya in 2019, a number of Qatari TAMUQ students expressed a lack of interest in the QSA. A junior explained why he was no longer an active member: “My first year I was really involved in the student body. I got an award for the most committed member of QSA. Then my second year, I realized every single event is always the same. It's nothing new.” A freshman explained her lack of interest, saying: “I'm not into nationalism.” Some of these once-active students eventually decided to establish new clubs that dealt with issues related to environmental and social justice.
As students express shared political interests and solidarities, they have started to form groups that transcend identity-based organizations. These multiethnic groups spread as students learn of clubs at another branch campus and decide to form a similar organization at their university. Although these organizations often frame their activities (sometimes strategically) as service, volunteering, or humanitarian work, such as the Recycling Tree Huggers at CMU–Q or the Peace Club at TAMUQ, many students involved in these groups are invested in organizing for structural change inside and outside of Qatar.
When students organize multiethnic clubs that highlight societal inequities, they come up against the limits of imperial citizenship and feel pressured by their institutions to reframe their organizing as cultural and identity-based rather than political; this is sometimes done in the name of not wanting to offend Qatari culture, presumed to be inherently oppressive (for example, when students want to highlight migrant labor concerns in the country or even on their campuses), but these are pressures that come directly from student affairs and other administrative staff, none of whom are Qatari or have any sustained interaction with the Qatar Foundation. Additionally, although many immigrant and international students are from elite backgrounds, there also are working-class and refugee students. When the branch campus administration indicates that something is too sensitive for the Qatar Foundation or against Qatari law, students, aware that this may not be true, are sometimes willing to accept these explanations due to their precarious positions, both in relation to Qatar and the US university (which has facilitated their student visas).
The pressure to depoliticize is most overt in relation to Palestine solidarity organizing, which attracts Palestinian and non-Palestinian students. Although there are Palestine-related organizations at three of the branch campuses, students have shared stories with us about how they have been policed when they organize Palestine solidarity events, told by administrators to remove references to apartheid, and make sure that events remain strictly in the realm of culture. These moves by branch campuses resemble the systematic intimidation and criminalization of student movements for Palestinian rights across US universities.Footnote 9 However, by strategically mobilizing ambiguity around the legal geographies governing the branch campuses, administrators have argued that students must censor their activities because of Qatar's legal restrictions on student activism. For example, when students at TAMUQ started a Palestine Solidarity Club (replicating an organization at the main campus), the university administration told them they had to immediately stop their social media activities and dissolve their organization because it was a political group that would have to be approved by Qatar's Ministry of Interior. The student organizers, regularly told that they have to comply with US law, strategically responded with TAMUQ's own geographical imagination of itself as an extension of US territory: “No, we're under Texas law.”
It is significant that the initial attempt of TAMUQ students to counter the administration's claim that their club would be illegal in Qatar was to state that they were not subject to Qatari law. Encountering US federal and state law from thousands of miles away in their daily interactions with student affairs and through official training and course requirements, students across Education City have regularly described their branch campuses to us as extensions of US territory. This description is a citizenship claim: they are students at a US university deserving of all the freedoms and protections that entails. In the aftermath of the NU–Q protest, even administrators and staff deployed this geographical imaginary, arguing that the students would never have been allowed to organize such a protest at Qatar University (the national university located in another part of Doha). Depending on the case at hand, administrators alternately place the branch campus within the United States (for example, to justify heightened security measures because of US technology export regulations) or in Qatar (to limit student organizing through clubs). At times, Qatari law is suspended, and at other moments it is enforced by US branch campuses. It is most common for administrators, however, to describe their branch campuses as a liminal space where Qatari and US legal systems are both at play, while simultaneously blaming Qatari society for the university's inability to live up to its liberal values.
The TAMUQ student organizers were only successful in countering the directive to dissolve their Palestine Solidarity Club once they reframed their association as identity-based: “We said, ‘But there is the Qatari Student Association and there is a Desi organization.Footnote 10 How come when it comes to Palestine we have to get approval from the Ministry?’” The group renamed itself the Palestinian Cultural Club, and was required by student affairs to include in their constitution that they are an “apolitical, cultural club” and that “No member has the right to open and engage in any political conversation.”Footnote 11 Although TAMUQ administrators blamed the location of the branch campus in Qatar for these restrictions, students were more likely pressured to formally depoliticize their organization and include these clauses in their constitution due to anti-boycott legislation in Texas. It is not accidental that Palestine reveals most starkly the limits of freedom of speech on offer to students at US branch campuses, as Zionism continues to be one of the strongest “manifest knowledges” of the American academy.Footnote 12 The efforts to organize clubs that move beyond identity and culture also reveal the ways that students are forming solidarity around issues of local significance that transcend the deeply segregated national and ethnic spaces of Qatar and Education City, and highlight how student affairs offices are invested in such essentialized and colonial understandings of diversity. Students at other branch campuses have shared stories with us about struggles they have faced to organize around environmental issues and workers’ rights at their universities. These clubs bring together immigrant, citizen, and international students around shared political interests, and in effect are sites of multiethnic citizenship formation, where students discuss and create Qatari futures together.
Conclusion: Shifting Forms of Belonging
As we were finishing this piece, protests erupted globally following the circulation of a video of the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020. Although anti-Black police brutality in the United States is systemic and the Black Lives Matter movement has been active since 2013, this particular murder, along with other state-sanctioned and extrajudicial killings that had occurred in preceding weeks, brought thousands to the streets. These uprisings prompted a shift in institutional rhetoric; universities, corporations, and even police departments started issuing statements condemning George Floyd's death and supporting #blacklivesmatter, including several of the home campuses of American universities in the Arabian Peninsula. Texas A&M announced a system-wide day of mourning for George Floyd, which included a release from work for all nonessential personnel and a memorial service on 8 June 2020. The Northwestern home campus issued a statement condemning the murder, as did Virginia Commonwealth University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Cornell University. It was not lost on students at the branch campuses, however, that their institutions have work to do in addressing the specific ways that racism and anti-Black sentiment manifest locally. Students at NYU Abu Dhabi, in the local newspaper, The Gazelle, published an analysis of the lack of Black representation among faculty and senior administration, and the erasure of Black students from the 2020 commencement magazine.Footnote 13 At NU–Q, the African Students Association issued a statement pushing back at the framing of the branch campus as a mere extension of the US university, which said: “We cannot settle for the statement issued by various leadership in Evanston, because NU–E and NU–Q are two different institutions that operate from different locations and in different contexts serving different student bodies. It is one thing to condemn police brutality in America, but it is another thing to recognize that racism and anti-blackness exist here in Qatar and at NU–Q.”Footnote 14
Education City's US branch campuses are set up to produce elite graduates who normalize imperial relationships and international hierarchies inside and outside of Qatar. This is not surprising; the branch campuses reinforce and reproduce exclusionary ideas about citizenship and racialized hierarchy in Qatar through depoliticized identity-based student clubs, admissions procedures, and instruction in the classroom. However, students also are formulating anti-imperial critiques and expressing solidarity between citizens, immigrants, and international students. These forms of belonging have coalesced through both the mundane everyday organizing of student clubs and seemingly extraordinary and historic moments of student protest.
As seen in the politicizations explored here, students ground their experiences in global understandings of social justice alongside localized mobilizations that highlight how imperial citizenship is intertwined with Qatari nationalism. Their critiques of the main campus's policies and relationship to the branch campus undergird students’ multiethnic approaches to localized politicization and forms of belonging in Qatar. In response to student resistance, the branch campuses reinforce their operations as a liminal imperial space: American exceptionalism abroad and its dependence on racialized hierarchies and whiteness ultimately remain intact.Footnote 15
In a follow-up email to the TAMUQ branch campus community about Texas A&M's day of mourning for George Floyd, employees were informed that the system-wide day off did not apply to them, since the memorial would be taking place after working hours in Doha. Apparently, in Qatar, some American lives are more worthy of mourning than others.
