While both Rustam and Dilshod have built successful careers as middlemen in the Dubai business community, we do not want to one-dimensionally celebrate the opportunities that result from Tajiks’
involvement in the Dubai business. The flexibility Tajik middlemen show while pursuing their entrepreneurial strategies and finding their niche in the vibrant Dubai business scene is subject to the precarious and uncertain conditions set by rapidly shifting global markets and changing (trans-)national migration regimes. Stressing the ‘translocal’ dimension of the Tajik Dubai business, in this chapter we explicitly want to point to the complex interplay of opportunities and limitations that shape the livelihoods of Tajik middlemen in the Dubai business community (Bromber 2013, Freitag and von Oppen 2010). In this context, migration studies have extensively discussed transnationalism and translocality as a lived reality shaped by the migrant’s multiple situatedness or connectedness in, or with, ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Smith 2011). This may lead
eventually to the individual’s engagement in transnational lifestyles, or
‘habitus’ (Kelly and Lusis 2006). This gives Tajiks the opportunity to move flexibly in and across the United Arab Emirates and Tajikistan, to link family with business partners, and thereby enables them to ‘[try] to make the best of their stay in Dubai, while focusing on investments back home and expanding their business networks’ (Pelican 2014:294–95).
Tajiks also respond directly to their precarious status in Dubai as
‘foreign migrants’. As mentioned above, this status is structurally promoted by the kafala sponsorship system and an immigration regime that excludes non-Emiratis from access to citizenship and defines all foreigners in relation to ‘labour’ only (Ahmad 2012). Tajiks are therefore only ‘temporary visitors’ in Dubai, whose long-term residence is tied up with access to formal employment (Vora 2009, Gardner 2012).
Consequently, the Dubai business is a highly volatile field. After it was announced that Dubai will host the next World Expo in 2020, the police intensified their street raids around Al-Nasser Square to clear street workers (kamak) without a working licence from the area in order to make it more tourist-friendly. This action led to a rapid increase of deportations of Tajiks and other Central Asians in the winter of 2013–
2014 and fuelled the fear of deportation for Tajiks working in Dubai. At the same time, the current economic crisis in Russia has led to a striking slump in the number of Russian tourists and thus forced many Tajiks working in the tourist sector to look for new job opportunities outside the Emirates.
Struggling with these problems, Tajiks in Dubai simultaneously have to cope with a new wave of migrants from Tajikistan and Russia, who stimulate the ‘homegrown’ urban fear of ‘ruralization’ through the arrival of migrants from remote areas to the urban setting of Dubai. Due to the economic crisis in both Tajikistan and Russia, many unskilled and badly educated young men from rural areas try to become successful in running a business in Dubai. While some of the young men use their family connections, others utilize their social networks (odnoklasnik) and move directly from Russia to the Emirates. Still others come to Dubai after having been deported from Russia. Badly skilled, inexperienced, and without the necessary language proficiency, they face difficulties in gaining a foothold in the established Dubai business world and overwhelmingly become involved in undocumented street
work as kamak. The Russian tourist sector, therefore, has become a highly competitive field. Many established middlemen complained to us about the youngsters’ crude and ill-mannered behavior, as these relative newcomers hang around in large groups in front of hotels and shops and lack the work ethic of the Tajik community that operates in Al Nasr Square. Thus, they fear that the newcomers could frighten away the tourists and jeopardize the good reputation Tajik middlemen have among Afghans and Iranians in the Emirates, or, as a concerned middleman working as kamak and tourist guide at Al Nasr Square has put it:
‘We Tajiks are everywhere! But everywhere our reputation (obrū) is very low (past). In Russia, they call us churky (wooden stump). Many of us come from rural areas. We are (a) poor (nation). Many (Tajiks) came to Dubai also in the hope to get respected […] as Muslims, because Dubai is an Islamic country. […] we worked hard to gain standing here. We are educated, have good manners (odob), we are urbanites (shahry). That’s why Afghans, Iranians, and even Arab migrants (migranty) show us respect. They trust us and do business with us. But now they (the newly arrived Tajik youngsters) come directly from the villages. They’ve never lived in a city, they aren’t educated, they speak with loud voices and shout, are dressed like farmers (dehqonho), and they violate our rules […].
They will destroy our businesses and tarnish our reputation’ (Dubai, 2013).
As a consequence, many Tajik middlemen seek to leave the kamak business and instead increase their investment in Afghan or Iranian business connections. In this context, the perceived shame of Tajik identity is increasingly detrimental to Tajiks’ self-perception as economic middlemen in the Dubai business world and eventually led to a heightened identification as ‘Muslim’, rather than ‘Tajik’.
On translocality
This chapter has explored the translocal livelihoods of well-educated, mobile Tajiks working in the United Arab Emirates ever since the Dubai boom that reached Tajikistan in the late 1990s and connected local markets and households with the global flows of wholesale and retail trade, as well with the thriving Gulf tourism industry. Tracing how our interlocutors operate as economic middlemen and mediators, this
chapter has depicted the economic mobility of Dubai’s Tajiks between their ‘homes’ in Tajikistan, the migrant community in Russia, and various formal and informal business sectors in the Gulf. As the three selected ethnographic case studies have illustrated, Dubai is a key site of economic linkages spanning national and cultural boundaries, and it offers a wide range of work availabilities for Tajiks, particularly in the tourist and trading sectors. Pushed by Russia’s recent attempts to restrict residency status for Tajik and other Central Asian migrants who are not citizens of a member-state of the Eurasian Economic Union, Dubai has become an alternative destination for many skilled and unskilled Tajiks. As we have shown, Tajiks invest their cultural and social capital in multiple ways and they successfully integrate into various economic sectors. As they are familiar with the Russian language and culture, they connect Afghan and Iranian entrepreneurs with the booming Russian-speaking tourist market in the United Arab Emirates. Crossing cultural boundaries through their language proficiency, translocal business networks, and religious identity as Sunni-Hanafi Muslims, many Tajiks connect people, places, and markets at ‘home’ with those in the Middle East and Eurasia. In their brokerage position, they create as well as move in translocal spaces which can facilitate economic success, social mobility, and the amassing of wellbeing and belonging. This creates a setting in which Tajiks creatively and innovatively involve themselves in processes of globalization (see also Henry Alff in Chapter Five).
However, local migration regimes such as the United Arab Emirates’
limited residency permits for ‘foreign migrant workers’, as well the fragile economic situation at ‘home’, push many Tajiks in Dubai into the status of undocumented workers facing uncertainty and vulnerability.
We therefore argue that the livelihoods of Tajik middlemen in Dubai are characterized by complex processes of negotiation between multiple opportunities and constraints. Thus, translocality is a possibility, i.e., an urban setting that facilitates the pursuit of a livelihood outside the limitations created by economic, migration, and deportation systems.
But the Dubai business is at the same time a highly volatile field that creates new, uncertain, and precarious working conditions for Tajik migrants. Translocality is therefore both produced and experienced by our Tajik interlocutors as a social reality that is formed by the creative and flexible combination of economic strategies, mobile experiences,
and cultural competencies by which Tajiks in the Gulf try to ensure the sustainability and success of their mobile livelihoods shaped by incomplete post-Soviet nation-building projects and the precarious outcomes of the global economy.
Conceptualizing ‘translocality’ as a research perspective also allows us to critically scrutinize hegemonic theories of migration and globalization. As a consequence, this chapter has put emphasis on how translocal connections and transfers between Central Asia, Russia, and the Gulf are socially constructed by non-elite and non-state actors, who in the academic literature are often one-dimensionally portrayed as peripheral actors moving in marginal urban spaces (see Smith 2011). Emphasizing their capacity to connect, mediate, and expand, we have explored how Tajiks in Dubai play a pivotal role in shaping the circulation and transfer of consumer goods, people, knowledge, and ideas. Obviously, Tajiks’ involvement in the global trading and tourist business is not a unidirectional transfer process from the Gulf to Tajikistan. The Tajik Dubai business covers multidirectional transfer processes, in which Tajik middlemen substantially contribute to the transcultural and transnational urbanism and cosmopolitanism of Dubai’s city spaces and business sectors. Hence translocality as a research perspective opens up new epistemological avenues into understanding globalization not merely by focusing on macro- or meso-level processes termed as ‘Gulfization’ or ‘Dubaization’ in the fields of the economy and urbanization (Wippel et al. 2014). With its focus on Tajik middlemen, this chapter has instead argued for a ‘social history’ of the Tajik Dubai business ‘from below’ (Freitag and von Oppen 2010:5) written from the perspective of actors who are not integral parts of the Gulf’s interregional economic and social past (Osella and Osella 2012, Vora 2013), but who, through their cultural and business ties, actively connect to it. Furthermore, by becoming involved in and expanding the Russian tourist business, Tajik middlemen become influential actors in shaping translocal relations in Dubai’s informal economy. This leads us to support Neha Vora’s critical response to dominant academic representation of the Gulf as ‘exclusively Middle Eastern’ (Vora 2013:3).
Finally, we have argued that the Tajik Dubai business is ‘translocal’
because the economic activities Tajik middlemen are involved in are embedded, yet also ‘emplaced’ in a complex configuration of spatial
relations between people, places, and markets in Central Asia, Eurasia, and the Gulf. These configurations also include Tajiks’ spatial experiences tied to these places. We thus associate being a middleman with the capacity, and the awareness of the capacity, to cope with uncertainty and volatility in geographic settings far from ‘home’. Showing a cultural competence, or ‘a built-up skill in manoeuvring more or less expertly with a particular system of meanings and meaningful forms’ (Hannerz 1990:239), Tajik middleman open up new economic paths into the vibrant Dubai business. In the process, they connect, mediate, transfer, and translate their academic and business knowledge into culturally and economically different local contexts.
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