Bedouins into Bourgeois is a fascinating account of the challenges facing state leaders who engage in citizen-building strategies in a globalized world. Focusing on the oft-neglected case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Calvert W. Jones presents a methodologically sophisticated study that is well versed in literatures on nationalism, citizenship, globalization, and social psychology. Her writing is absorbing and accessible, whether she is presenting ethnographic material or experimental results. This is without doubt a well-crafted and original piece of scholarship.
Jones dubs the challenges facing UAE leadership that of “making of citizens, 2.0,” entailing the construction of a people who will be entrepreneurial, innovative, risk-taking, and patriotic; that is, a people who will help the UAE diversify its economy and sustain itself beyond its reliance on the oil and gas sectors. In their efforts to mold the hearts and minds of their people, UAE leaders engage in a series of social engineering projects, which include educational reform, public spectacles, official symbolism, and propaganda. To gauge both the intended and unintended effects of these state-led social engineering initiatives, Jones disaggregates the state–citizen relationship into its national, civil, political, and economic dimensions. She finds that the projects show signs of success on the first two measures, instilling patriotism, tolerance, and civic-mindedness in the citizens. They backfire, however, on the political and economic dimensions, fostering an interest in individual political participation despite the leaders’ hope for a politically neutral citizenry. Rather than inspiring young people to engage in entrepreneurial activities, moreover, the educational reforms intensify their belief that they have a right to a government job. The social engineering projects, Jones concludes, create “entitled patriots.”
The first chapter provides a theoretical overview, engaging with scholarship on social engineering, citizen-building, and nationalism. The literature review is attuned to important debates on development and expertise, such as the complexities of what constitutes success and failure in social engineering projects, as well as questions about experts’ lack of or command over local knowledge practices. Chapter 2 turns to the goals of UAE’s social engineering campaign by drawing on ethnographic evidence from palace settings, as well as findings from interviews conducted with education reformers and foreign experts. Citing conversations from dinners held at the Ruler’s Palace in Ras Al Khaimah, for instance, Jones depicts the self-presentation of the leaders as cosmopolitan reformers who are nostalgic about their own educational studies in Western countries. These conversations, she argues, are emblematic of their “very real ‘love affair’ with the West” (p. 49). The elites’ presentation of themselves is a deliberate and stark juxtaposition to what they describe as the “rentier mentality” of UAE youth and their “rentier-style sense of entitlement and listlessness,” which is “marked by a lack of personal drive, individual sense of purpose, and motivation to achieve, which contrasts sharply with their idealized image of how people are in the West” (p. 51). The elites intend to rectify these ostensible behavioral shortcomings by implementing a set of social engineering projects that aim to create a knowledge-based economy in the country through the creation of responsible, self-disciplined, and innovative citizens.
Chapter 3 is a detailed account of educational reforms, ranging from changes in civics curricula and textbooks, the conversion of the language of instruction from Arabic to English in many primary and middle schools, and the implementation of a K–12 national curriculum that emphasizes a “standards-based” philosophy by introducing a continuous assessment system. Chapter 4 makes compelling use of a wide array of visual evidence gathered from state-sponsored spectacles, festivals, and competitions, as well as the analysis of various monuments, installations, and other types of public symbolism. Both chapters nicely capture the symbolic and pedagogical aspects of the educational initiatives, matching them to the stated goals of the reformers. Motivational posters in government schools, for instance, aim to combat “what is perceived as a culture of entitlement—especially when it comes to widespread expectations among youth for high salaries, short working hours, and ample vacations” (p. 118).
Chapters 5–7 shift gears methodologically as they detail the outcomes of the social engineering efforts by reporting the findings of the surveys and experiments that the author conducted on a few thousand UAE youth across the country. The control groups are students in traditional schools that encourage rote memorization, and the treatment group consists of students in the new public schools whose curriculum emphasizes “creativity, problem-solving, and student-centered teaching methods” (p. 135). The surveys reveal that while the students acquire tolerance, civic-mindedness, and a qualified interest in political participation, the projects do not have the desired effects on their attitudes toward the availability of government jobs and business start-ups. The students also become more nationalistic, confident, and proud, which further undercuts the likelihood that they will become the “global citizens” that the leaders hope to create. Still, Jones sees the potential for a “gentle” variety of social engineering to become more “politically palatable,” given recent work underscoring the importance of “building character skills, as well as cognitive ones, for later-life success in earnings and other areas” (p. 29). Accordingly, the book concludes with a series of experiments conducted in the UAE and Jordan, with the aim of exploring alternative social engineering schemes that use “process-oriented” methods rather than the current system of compliments and rewards that inflate the students’ sense of their own abilities.
One may question the book’s seeming confidence in the language used by the existing projects’ creators and implementers. The leaders’ self-presentation as benevolent reformers who are invested in improving their citizens’ ability to survive and compete in a post-petroleum world seems to be taken at face value, along with their dismissal of the students as entitled youth who take public sector job security for granted. Yet this may be an effect of the different set of methodologies used to uncover the perspectives of the rulers and of the students, which results in a disconnect between the perspectives of different classes. Whereas the stated intentions of the elite are presented through close ethnographic detail and open-ended interviews, there is very little qualitative evidence provided for the students’ reactions to and reception of the social engineering projects or the depiction of themselves as “bored, unfulfilled, unproductive citizens, albeit relatively well off” (p. 173).
Jones finds further proof for the perception of the students as “entitled” youth in the scholarship on the “rentier citizen” (144). In fact, much in the analysis rests on the rentier state theory, which posits that oil revenues and other rent paid by foreign individuals will encourage states to embark on large public expenditure programs without having to tax their citizens. Such arrangements, this literature maintains, lead to social apathy and inertia, as well as a lack of political reform. But as critics have pointed out, rentier theory assumes the state to be somehow autonomous from the class relations of society (Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, 2011). Reliance on this literature has the effect of obscuring the political and economic investments of the ruling class and does not call into question their insistence that the only way to imagine a post-petroleum future is through the encouragement of “human capital,” market metrics, and the creation of an entrepreneurial citizenry.
It may also have the unintended effect of seemingly endorsing the elites’ condescension toward entitled and lazy citizens, who are rendered individually and culturally responsible for problems such as high unemployment rates and indebtedness. Jones is careful to distinguish her analysis from this “tendency to psychologize” (p. 173), pointing out that her aim is not to “blame” or to “essentialize” society (p. 4) and that she is not making “deterministic assumptions about culture or economic structures” (p. 29). But the repeated references to rentier culture and rentier mentality as obstacles to the flourishing of a “creative Arab renaissance” in the book may suggest otherwise. They also end up erasing the different meanings that “development-friendliness,” “critical thinking,” and “creativity” might take on, as they historically have across the Arab world, beyond those envisioned by the self-avowedly market-oriented UAE elite.
Jones’s seeming praise for the leaders’ “new paternalism,” whereby they wish to “enhance citizens’ autonomy and freedom to act… by opening doors, praising citizens, and providing them with everything they might need to succeed” (p. 172) is leveled by her careful criticism of the nationalism fostered by the social engineering schemes. Still, the book presumes a “more mature international system” (p. 14), in which “war-readiness” is less important than “market-readiness” (p. 15) and where “national identities are largely given, war is less frequent, and the global economy is more competitive than ever” (pp. 16–17). But the UAE’s recent participation in the brutal Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen suggests that the professions of UAE elites should not all be taken at face value.
The question of the “given-ness” of national identities might also be called into question in a setting like the UAE where citizens make up less than 12% of the population. Although Jones praises the social engineering projects for promoting “tolerance” (pp. 64, 118–19), it may have been helpful to highlight the exclusionary and discriminatory nature of certain higher education initiatives, which have been built through violations of migrant workers’ rights and normalized and enforced through the state security apparatus. Leading Emirati academics who have been critical of the state have been detained, and foreign students and faculty who are found to have undesirable religious affiliations have been expelled from universities or not permitted into the country at all.
One may disagree with some of the normative commitments that underpin the book’s analysis and recommendations. Jones’s defense of “gentler social engineering projects” undertaken by authoritarian rulers is left largely implicit, resting on their own self-presentation and on broader assumptions about the ostensible pathologies of “rentier citizens.” Her suggestion that the analysis could provide valuable lessons for other “imperfect political contexts” might also lead us to ask what are not “imperfect political contexts.” Certainly liberal democracies, where government jobs can no longer be taken for granted, are deeply imperfect and have seen similar citizen-building strategies that increasingly encourage humans to envision themselves in terms of capital investment, profitability, and marketable skills. This raises the question of whether social engineering in the UAE is a particular feature of so-called rentier states or is a manifestation of a broader global project.
Bedouins into Bourgeois is an important and original piece of scholarship that effectively uses multimethod approaches and insights from theories of nationalism, citizenship, and expertise. Its investigation of the goals and unintended effects of social engineering projects in the understudied UAE context is urgent, revealing the complexities entailed in leaders’ attempts to motivate people to accept reduced job security and to participate in competitive labor markets.
