In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora argues that although excluded from de jure citizenship, Dubai's Indian residents enact everyday forms of belonging that make them de facto citizens of the region. Media and state-driven discourses often depict Indian residents, who constitute the majority of Dubai's population, as “guest workers” or “migrant workers,” a temporary presence whose significance is reducible to their laboring, in particular construction and domestic work. Rather than simply reproducing or rejecting these discourses, Vora contextualizes them historically, and critically analyzes how they buttress myths of Dubai's exceptionalism while simultaneously eliding the emirate's everyday functioning. Ethnography is key here. Vora's focus on the ordinary and oft-overlooked peoples, places, and practices of the region helps her to recoup the space between de jure and de facto citizenship in Dubai, and convincingly demonstrate the ways in which this space is crucial to our understanding of the region's politics of belonging and exclusion.

Impossible Citizens presents readers with an expansive understanding of citizenship, one attentive to what Vora refers to as citizenship's multiple, shifting, and often conflicting logics, as well as how these logics are imbricated in different forms of governance. Vora walks us past Dubai's glittering skyscrapers and heritage windtowers (mālqaf / bādgīr) into the bustling heart of the city, its historic residential and market neighborhoods where Indian businesses, languages, cuisines, clothing styles, music, and peoples are ubiquitous. These seamlessly interwoven features of the urban landscape index the ways in which Dubai's diasporic Indians not only produce substantive and urban forms of citizenship, but also how they produce the city itself—or, as Vora incisively states, how Dubai is itself experienced as an extension of India by all of the city's residents. Her argument marks the geographic reversal of Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella's analysis of Indian Muslim Malayali cosmopolitan imaginings—where members of their community see themselves more as an extension of the Arabian Peninsula than of the subcontinent.

Dubai's Indian diaspora has not simply emerged in the wake of the country's post-oil boom, a period marked by rapid state development and the massive influx of migrants. Drawing on the work of historians, Vora underscores how Dubai's Indian diaspora has developed through an established history of interregional connections that have long knit together the Indian Ocean, whether through merchant trade networks, pearling networks, imperial and colonial systems, and more recently, in the mid to late 20th century, gold smuggling and trading. These layers of historical interconnections not only underscore the ways in which Dubai has developed through past interregional relations (and continues to be produced through transnational ones), they also engender a sense of cosmopolitan belonging among Dubai's Indian diaspora, one predicated on historical memory and nostalgia. Here Vora focuses on the experiences of Dubai's upper-middle-class and elite Indian businessmen who have dominated the country's gold trade for decades—an insightful analysis that illustrates several of the book's main arguments. These longstanding residents, many of whom have established a multigenerational presence in the region, operate their businesses with a great deal of autonomy under the patronage of their Emirati employers—a freedom they contrast with the more restrictive nature of the Indian marketplace. These businessmen articulate cosmopolitan belongings to the region, ones predicated on their personal interrelations with their Emirati partners, and their sense of Dubai as a historically “rugged lawless” and “golden” frontier of the subcontinent full of economic possibilities (pp. 92, 93). Yet, as Vora notes, they simultaneously disavow de jure citizenship, thus reproducing and legitimizing the Emirati's state's exclusionary policies through their own self-segregation. These elite businessmen further contribute to the state's authority by overseeing the everyday governance of their employees, typically fellow ethnonationals.

In addition to examining overlapping and sometimes discordant logics of citizenship, Vora's analysis is also attentive to generational shifts. Younger members of Dubai's Indian diaspora, many of whom are born and raised in the Emirates and have never known another home, articulate their belongings in radically different terms than do their parents and older generations. Many describe themselves as “second class citizens” (p. 148), a form of belonging predicated on racial consciousness and liberal discourses of rights. Vora attributes this shift to increased public interactions between Dubai's Indian diasporic youth and Emiratis, in particular at newly established higher educational institutions that have proliferated throughout the region. In these spaces they experience direct forms of racial discrimination and practices of self-entitlement from their Emirati peers that butt up against the liberal and cosmopolitan forms of subjectivity they are being disciplined into—a jarring experience leading many young diasporic Indians to recognize and push back against their “second class” treatment and status.

Impossible Citizens pushes us to consider contemporary forms of citizenship beyond national identification and juridicopolitical designation—a concept of citizenship, Vora correctly notes, with imperial genealogies masquerading as a neutral category. Vora's discussion of the substantive, urban, cosmopolitan, and “second class” citizenship of Dubai's Indian diaspora powerfully underscores the many ways in which these purportedly “temporary labour migrants” are fundamental to Dubai's past, present, and future. While the book's overall argument is compelling and well substantiated, further analytical clarification about the interrelationship between the concepts of belonging, citizenship, and governance—terms that are often used interchangeably or discussed as a series in the book—would help the reader to better grasp the nuances of the book's arguments, including why Vora's reconceptualized understanding of citizenship has more purchase than does belonging, a term more commonly used in analyses of diasporic formations. Vora's analysis is also notable for its deft interweaving of critical theory, postcolonialism, and transnational feminism, a sophisticated theoretical approach that not only pushes scholarship on the Greater Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean regions, but also ensures the book's broader relevance to scholars across a broad range of disciplinary and regional fields.