Surveillance,race,and social sorting in the United Arab Emirates

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.

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 dissidents, but also Qatari and Saudi royals (Smith and Srivastava, 2019).

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 introduction of a biometric population registry, digital fingerprinting, facial, and retina recognition 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 telecommunications corporations like Etisalat and Du.

Conceptions of ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘global surveillance structure’, and ‘surveillance society’, although analytically differentiated, speak to the growing scholarly attention 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 scientific, 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 proliferation 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 technologies, 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 archipelagos’ 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 studied from a rentier state perspective, with a reliance on hydrocarbons as a central explanatory factor of regime resilience – daily modes of coercion, surveillance, and racialisation are often rendered invisible. 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.

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 global surveillance industry and the UAE’s geopolitical location within it. The following section focuses on the UAE’s introduction of a Biometric ID registry and ‘smart city’ infrastructures. Finally, the article turns to the UAE’s policing practices and counterterror legislation.

The research for this article was conducted during fieldwork in UAE between 2014 and 2018. It encompassed visits to labour camps in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and discussions with migrant workers at different income levels. It was instructive to see both the physical separation between migrant workers based on ethnicity and citizenship, but also the pervasive sense of ‘being watched’ among all interlocutors. In addition, I visited a number of heritage and police museums, which showcase policing history. My overall observations through field visits are supplemented by an analysis of Arabic and English materials from the UAE government and official media on new legislation and surveillance technologies introduced since 2014.

Race and the surveillance industry

The ‘global’ nature of the US led WoT is not simply related to its geographic scope of activity, but how other states have integrated its norms and operations. Although, the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were the obvious public manifestation, the build up of the domestic surveillance state came hand in hand. The so-called deradicalisation agenda targeted those racialised as Muslim (Kundnani, 2012); in turn, this intensified the use of securitised forms of identification and overall surveillance of the entire population. Within the field of surveillance studies authors point to the historical continuities of surveillance against enslaved, indentured, and racialised communities, but also the ‘newness’ of surveillance technologies that are able to store, compress, and aggregate data (Browne, 2015; Kundnani and Kumar, 2015).

The expanded place of surveillance within the ‘domestic agenda’ – combined with technological advances in data collection – has largely normalised the idea of constant data capture and gathering of personal information. Terms like ‘maximum-security society’ and ‘surveillant assemblage’ highlight the extent to which surveillance systems are imbedded in day to day interactions and urban geographies (Goold and Neyland, 2013; Haggerty and Samatas, 2010; Lyon, 1992).

Surveillance technologies are today easily commodified and circulate through the private surveillance industry. In the wake of the WoT, the rampant privatisation of warfare, from the use of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), logistics firms for the housing and feeding of troops, to contracting private surveillance firms, has helped to both grow and imbed this private surveillance industry well beyond conflict zones (Michaels, 2012; Moore, 2017). This broad surveillance infrastructure does not have a homogeneous impact however, and has acted upon and extended long standing racial logics, including the production of a racialised terrorist threat (Kumar, 2017). Since the beginning of the WoT, critical scholars have discussed its rootedness in anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism (Mondon and Winter, 2017; Sayyid and Vakil, 2010).

Whereas, the surveillance industry promotes, ‘a fantasy of purely automatic security apparatuses’ which are ‘purged of the inconsistences and biases of human intervention’ (Amir and Kotef, 2015: 677), research shows how racial biases are imbedded within such technologies (Browne, 2015; Magnet, 2011). The embrace of quantitative analysis and Big Data, often portrayed as neutral, enacts what Browne has termed ‘racialising surveillance’ which ‘signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance’ (Browne, 2015: 8). Indeed building on Fanon, Browne (2015: 109) posits that ‘digital epidermalization’ is the conversion of the raced body into data.

Part of the more aggressive turn to surveillance technologies has been the increasing use of biometric data at borders and governmental ID registries. There has been a marked experimentation with biometric registration in the humanitarian sector, with UNHCR leading the way for refugee registry (Jacobsen, 2017). Such surveillance systems, mapped directly onto the body, are used in a process of social sorting to capture personal data, identify and monitor ‘targets’. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (2005: 165) have argued that this is a process of ‘informatization of the body’, whereby ‘biometric technology represents a part of a process in which technologies are themselves incorporated into the bodily experience’. Overall, there is unprecedented access and ability to manage populations and, in turn, impact subjectivities. The biometric technologies at spaces like border crossings, prisons, police stations, and welfare offices, highlight how technology itself becomes the medium by which racialised and gendered bodies become legible to the state and disciplined by supposedly neutral algorithms (Eubanks, 2017; Greenfield, 2017; Noble, 2018). This inscription of state surveillance onto the body, in the details of daily interaction, produces a continuous insecurity and encourages self-disciplining.

Despite the international nature of the surveillance industry, much of the debate has centred around questions of privacy, civil rights, and racialisation within liberal democracies. My interest here is how the international transfer of such surveillance infrastructures operates. How do surveillance technologies, counterterror and police trainings, and deradicalisation programming impact the organisation of power and space in contexts outside North America and Europe? Like military aid, the circulation of surveillance technologies has been linked with the United States and European foreign policy imperatives, which include safeguarding the security of allied regimes. This, in turn, has promoted the expansion of the domestic security state in the context of ‘partnerships’ in the WoT, with states absorbing and reshaping its practices to suit their domestic context.

UAE: Colonial legacies and the surveillance industry

Becoming a ‘partner’ in the WoT has included an adherence to racial security narratives of Western civilisational superiority over a homogenised ‘Muslim’ threat. Yet, states that define themselves as Muslim, such as the UAE, were eager to join this partnership and continue to play an active role within it. This is where the racial narrative of the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ Muslim becomes essential, the idea of a ‘moderate’ and ‘tolerant’ Muslim (Maira, 2009; Mamdani, 2005) and significantly, a neoliberal Muslim society can be counterposed to threatening ‘others’. The UAE was able to embed itself as a ‘good’ node in the WoT – supporting regional military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and hosting military and private actors implicated in the WoT.

As Kanna notes, historically, the UAE merchant class ensured ‘stability’ by forming a close, politically dependent security relationship with Great Britain (Kanna and Hourani, 2014). The modern UAE nation state emerges as a node in British colonial networks owing to its position along the trade route with India. Its current governance arrangements and borders, based on hereditary, tribal ruling families in each of the seven Emirates, was indeed cemented through the ‘trucial system’ of 1835 establishing a British protectorate, whereby power was centralised with British allied sheikhs (Heard-Bey, 1982; Peck, 1986; Zahlan, 1978). Colonial legacies continue in the legal and administrative structures of the state, including the UAE’s discursive production as a free-trade haven open for investment and trade. This close (and continuing) relationship meant that the ruling families rely on external support and generally work to reinforce British (later the United States) interests in return for support against domestic opposition, whether against merchants seeking reforms (1930) or Arab nationalist and leftist movements (1960s).

Colonial legacies also persist in the ‘developmental blueprint’ and racial formation established under the British protectorate – based on oil production and, critically, a heavy reliance on imported labour ‘employed from the Asian Subcontinent mainly for the construction industries’ (Ramos, 2010: 56). The racialised and gendered Kafala system circumscribes relations between citizens, migrants, and the state in the UAE, tying labour directly to employers through a work-permit system to a Kafeel (sponsor) who is a UAE citizen (Khalaf et al., 2015). Scholars have cautioned, however, against the pervasive presentism that posits this Kafala system as some type of regional aberration and hangover from tribal relations, in reality, the Kafala system developed hand in hand with British colonial rule in the region. As Omar Al Shehabi has shown in the case of Bahrain, the regulations surrounding migrant labour were largely developed in relation to British commercial interests in the region (AlShehabi, 2019).

With the shift from British direct rule to US hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula, and the central reliance on oil in the global economy, the UAE ruling families persistently allied themselves with successive US administrations. Firmly standing in the US camp during the Cold War, the UAE supported US intervention in Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait, and later became an integral part of the WoT through direct participation in military operations, rendition programmes, and counterterrorism trainings. This relationship has entailed the continued transfer of military technologies, including surveillance technologies, to the UAE leading to an expansion in the capacities of the UAE security state to curb internal dissent and monitor the domestic population, made up largely of non-citizen migrant labour. Between 2013 and 2017, the UAE was the fourth largest arms importer globally (SIPRI, 2018). Thus, the so-called resilience of authoritarianism in the UAE is intimately entwined with specific enduring colonial legacies and US interests in the Arabian Peninsula.

In other words, authoritarianism and surveillance in states such as the UAE cannot be analysed in isolation, as if an aberration due to oil rents alone. It is intimately connected to the place of the UAE in the international power hierarchies and the circulation of security and counterterror modalities at a transnational scale. A focus on oil rents alone as a source of regime stability obscures the length to which the state cooperates with other private and international actors.

As the UAE strives to brand itself a liberalised, free market haven through a host of marketing campaigns and incentives to attract investments, the adoption of surveillance technologies comes hand in hand – acting to produce the space as a secure and multicultural harbour, in opposition to other parts of the region with continuing civil wars and external military interventions. The UAE invests in socio-technical systems, which manage borders and cities by simultaneously keeping out the large numbers of refugees contained in other areas of the region, while welcoming trade and investors. Surveillance systems, policing, counterterror legislation, and border control themselves play a branding effort – to position the state as ‘open for business’.

It is worth noting that one of the ways that UAE has extended its surveillance capacities and maintained very tight control over domestic communications is through its large holdings within the ostensibly private telecommunications industry, including its stakes in the country’s largest operators: Emirates Telecommunications Corporation (Etisalat) and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company PJSC (du). This allows for control over and restrictions on Internet calling services, including site blocking. In 2017, Skype was banned and later on Change.org was also banned for hosting a petition against blocking Skype. Therefore, the very nature of the governance structures, whereby, there is a little distinction between the state, ruling family, and private capital, allows for more intrusive and direct forms of discipline – making it very difficult to discern what public or private bodies have access to data, how it is being shared and to what end.

Biometric IDs and ‘smart’ futures

Internationally, biometric technologies are spreading from initial usage in policing borders, to become an integral part of state service provision through national biometric ID registries. Biometric documentation is constructed both as a security measure to identify residency status, but also promoted as a means of providing efficient services, enabling multiple governmental agencies to digitally capture and store fingerprints, 2D facial images and signatures, thereby integrating physical attributes into governance schemes and eligibility for service. In this way, Biometric IDs, ‘smart’ border technologies, facial recognition software are integral to processes of social sorting, urban segregation, and work to limit the space for dissent (physically and virtually), helping to entrench state security in every day life.

Biometric measures of population management are not entirely new – census categories, fingerprinting, birth certificates, passports have been used to manage state or resident relations through personal identifying markers (Mongia, 2018; Sengoopta, 2003). Newly developed biometric technologies, however, intensify processes of securitised governance, by aggregating, sorting, and storing more detailed information, making biometric identification a necessity for daily transactions and welfare provision and thus demarcating who is considered outside the bounds of citizenship and legality. In both India and South Africa, there are continuing attempts to connect biometric ID registries to welfare provision (Breckenridge, 2014; Rao, 2013), despite evidence that such immense biometric registration schemes are often stalled or completely fail (Donovan, 2015; Magnet, 2011). Norway, for example, has been attempting such a biometic ID registry and failing due to technical and budgetary difficulties (Mayhew, 2018). Even when ‘successfully’ implemented biometric registries reflect the racial and gendered biases of those developing them (Magnet, 2011). Interestingly, biometric IDs have been embraced with more enthusiasm in developing states promoting them as markers of modernity and development.

In the UAE context, the language of e-governance was used to introduce a resident registry system entailing a Biometric ID, advanced in terms of creating more efficient and integrated governmental services. This Biometric ID captures residents’ personal data and immigration status. It is issued by Federal Authority for Identity and Citizenship (FAI) and is a legal requirement for all UAE citizens and residents, with non-citizens requiring a letter from their employers to apply for the ID. It can be used as proof of identity at government ministries, and as a travel document for UAE citizens within the Gulf Cooperation Council allowing holders to pass through the domestic airport’s eGates. It is also linked to hospital medical files, insurance files, and can be used in several transactions with mobile phone corporations, to pay utility bills, fines, and registering cars. Not renewing the ID results in cuts to such basic services. This programme has gone furthest in associating biometrics with both state and corporate services.

While presented in the benign, technical language of modernisation, e-governance and efficiency, accounting for histories of colonialism, racial formation, and labour regimes, allows us to assess the ways Biometric IDs help buttress a highly stratified ethno-racial hierarchy, inscribed through migration status and unequal labour contracts.

Today, the percentage of the population that is non-citizen in the UAE is estimated at 89% – leaving the state to monitor and manage the status of the majority migrant population, socially sorting them into ‘expats’ – a racialised terminology reserved for the largely Western managerial class and ‘workers’ reserved for mainly South and Southeast Asian construction, service, and domestic labour (Jamal, 2015; Vora and Koch, 2015). Citizens, however, benefit from state subsidies and are overwhelmingly represented in the public sector. Thus, Biometric IDs, along with infrastructures of surveillance and policing are incorporated into this specific national context, localised and integrated into forms of governance and racial formation.

The UAE Biometric ID card itself contains a smart chip with biometric data, displays a digital signature, and a unique 15 digit number. By integrating the biometric ID into multiple ministries and corporations, such smart infrastructure systems are constantly producing and monitoring vast amounts of detailed data about residents – from daily movements to services accessed. This biometric data are indeed the new interface between the state and residents, or what Muller alluded to as the ‘biometric state’ (Muller, 2011) or ‘biometric future’ (Neyland, 2009). Although seemingly indiscriminate, translating the entire population into data flows, an ethno-racial hierarchy continues to structure such surveillance practices – sustaining and expanding processes of social sorting by class, race, gender, and status as a means of population management.

Citizenship, status, and control

At a practical level, initiatives imposing a biometric ID registry and smart city urban forms act as basic instruments of surveillance, but more importantly, they are an integral feature of how surveillance, citizenship, and racialised migration status intersect. Practices of smart border controls and smart cities regulate the mobility of citizens and noncitizens in distinct ways, permitting the state to constantly substantiate the migration status of the majority population. This means, for example, that a worker who attempts to escape from an abusive employer – or simply wants to move jobs without permission of their Kafeel – will see their biometric ID lose its validity, and will thus find it difficult to access any essential services. In this way, the biometric ID registry system acts to incorporate the citizen population into border policing, allowing status itself to be maintained through the Kafeel relationship. Globally, policies that are designed to exert control over migrants typically depend upon the active participation of institutions such as schools, hospitals, and landlords (e.g. the United Kingdom’s Hostile Environment Policy); in the case of the UAE, the process is entirely automated and routinised through the intersection of technology and status.

The high levels of control over migrant lives through the Kafala system are further ingrained, as technologies deepen the ability of the state and employers to control and determine status through biometrics. The biometric ID itself becomes the node, which determines all interactions with the state, integrating every relation, even with basic infrastructures like hospitals, telecommunications, and water, into its remit. Daily activity is rendered as data sets the state can utilise, helping to curb dissent in multiple ways, including the internalisation of the sense of ‘being heard and watched’ at all times, this was widely articulated in all my discussions with interlocutors during field visits.

In 2018, the state devolved issuing the ID card to companies who sponsor over 100 employees, allowing them to use Federated Artificial Intelligence (FAI) services to issue ID cards electronically. In this manner, the state further privatised the Kafala system, outsourcing surveillance and entrenching the unequal relations between migrants and citizens. This mode of delegating authority over migrant lives to citizens, through responsibility for work permits and IDs, acts to connect the citizen population to the ruling families and thus reinforces the existing racial hierarchy. As Ditto explains:

the unique characteristic of Kafala is that the state ‘delegates’ the authority needed for a migrant to enter the country to the local employer, who thus becomes the owner of the work permit. This delegation acts to fuse the power of both the state and employers, with both spheres controlling the right of entry of the migrant into the Gulf. (Dito, 2014: 81)

The biometric ID thus further implicates the citizen population in the management of migration, which in turn, is hierarchically ordered, connecting migration status and pay to race and ethnicity. The smart technologies and urban forms used expand the repressive apparatus of the state in monitoring the resident population, but also in maintaining the citizen or noncitizen binary. Urban structures and infrastructures, and the body, are all utilised as tools of surveillance to mark migration status and define deviance.

Smart cities

The shift to biometric technologies aligns closely with the drive towards smart cities, promoted in relation to UAE economic diversification efforts. In this manner, ‘dataveillance’ (Amoore and De Goede, 2005), gathering and analysis of electronic information on individuals, also expands spatially dictating forms of securitised urbanisation and mediating relations between residents and the state. In 2018, the Department of Urban Planning and Municipalities in Abu Dhabi launched the pilot phase of the 5-year plan for Smart Cities and Artificial Intelligence (2018–2022) named Zayed Smart City Project (UAE Government, 2018). The project, if completed, will manage the infrastructure by using information technology and the Internet of things. Dubai’s Smart City project, however, focuses on transforming about 1000 government services to ‘smart services’ in transportation, infrastructure, communications, economic services, urban planning, and electricity (Smart Dubai, 2018).

In the broadest sense, smart cities use data from connected technologies to seemingly aid in traffic flow and deliver public services. Laden with the language of modernisation, smart city measures are presented as those able to predict individual and/or crowd behaviour and manage circulation. In short, smart cities require the ‘pervasive and ubiquitous computing and digitally instrumented devices build into the very fabric of urban environments’ (Kitchin 2015: 1). This, in turn, demands the digital infrastructures and software technologies to monitor space (public and virtual) – smart technologies include closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance, facial recognition software, and, importantly, online interfaces that collect data and organise the relationship between governments and the public. Such forms of hyper techno-scientific urbanisation are encouraged in terms of predictive security, speed, and efficiency. Authors critical of the smart city concept and practice have argued that such cities often function to the benefit of capital flows as opposed to the needs of residents (Colding and Barthel, 2017; Kitchin, 2015). Notions of ‘security’ and ‘efficiency’ act as a façade for more intrusive governance practices and surveillance. It also involves placing urban development largely in the hands of private Artificial Intelligence and Security firms that create and manage the technologies of smart cities (Hanieh, 2018: 86–88).

In the UAE context, smart cities perpetuate the segregation of urban space along ethno-racial lines. While authors such as Kanna and Hourani (2014), Longva (2005), and Mahdavi (2010) have long noted the intersection of ethnicity and segregation in light of the Kafala system, smart city technologies enhance this spacio-social segregation, allowing for very little interaction between those considered citizens, expats, and workers except in the context of market exchange. Within the existing ethno-racial hierarchy, security narratives are not only articulated in geopolitical terms (e.g. in relation to Iran), but also in the domestic sphere as fear of a ‘migrant threat’. Often depicting a citizen minority concerned with their culture ‘being diluted’ or threatened by outsiders. The figure of the male ‘bachelor’ worker has played an important role in this process as Michelle Buckley (2014) has astutely argued; through this trope, we understand who is a legitimate ‘tourist’ or ‘expat’ and who is constructed as a threat. Such racialised notions of security are also deeply inflected by gender – images of run away maids and sex workers are a staple of the local media. Smart cities help to enact this racialised and gendered filtering system through surveillance technologies, ensuring a constant monitoring of this urban segregation, while also monitoring migration status. Laden with the language of ‘security’ on one hand and ‘efficiency’ on the other hand, the drive towards smart cities gives the UAE both the branding language of e-governance, while also enhancing its ability to monitor residents and ensure urban segregation.

In a few cases outside the UAE, residents have been able to contest smart city initiatives, which gave unprecedented levels of access to corporate entities developing the technologies. For example, a subsidiary of Google signed a public-private partnership with the city of Toronto to develop a neighbourhood with smart technologies – the agreement, however, did not specify what entity has data ownership (Dyer-Whitheford et al., 2019: 107). A campaign was launched to make the contract public and clarify the nature of the company’s use of private data. Although the matter is not resolved yet, the contestation generated an important debate about the often singularly utopic promotion of such smart neighbourhoods. In contrast, in the UAE campaigning, which questions smart city initiatives and the corporate footprint on the urban landscape, is not permissible. Moreover, the extreme entanglements between the ruling families, the state, security agencies, and telecommunications firms (with major state holdings) make it difficult to track and decipher data ownership. In this way, the UAE also functions as an ideal laboratory for private firms wanting to experiment with smart technologies without dealing with contestation from resident populations. Shifting the emphasis within surveillance studies to non-Western states like UAE may indeed be very instructive of how ‘biometric smart futures’ are proceeding when unhampered by dissent, and likely to re-circulate back in more intensive forms.

Managing the security state

The drive towards hyper-surveillance of the UAE resident population needs to be analysed in relation to the broader geopolitical context. The ethno-racial hierarchy discussed earlier is buttressed by the UAE’s position as an important node in the transmission of surveillance logics and technologies through transnational circuits, which involve both state and private actors. The transfer and enhancement of counterterror legislation, policing practices, and surveillance technologies has been central to UAE’s governance model and geopolitical role. More specifically, the transmission of surveillance techniques has advanced along multiple regional wars allowing cities like Dubai for example, one of the seven Emirates of the UAE, to emerge in hothouse fashion as a regional hub for private security companies. Behind the often glossy images of a tourist destination, the expansion of the security state has continued apace with external state and corporate support.

The significance of the UAE’s location slightly south of the Straight of Hormuz, a vital maritime chokepoint, has impacted its governance structures, urban development, and, centrally, geopolitics. The UAE is expanding its own power and playing a decisive regional role – this is evident in the growing influence over multiple industries beyond their borders (construction, telecommunications, agribusiness, etc; Hanieh, 2018; Henderson, 2019). The post Arab Uprisings period, in particular (2011–2012), has seen an intensification of the UAE’s regional role and reliance on War of Terror rhetoric, with a rising number of direct military interventions, in Yemen and Libya, for example, as well as support for allied regimes like Egypt (Ziadah, 2019). On the geopolitical level, Coates-Ulrichsen (2018) has described ‘the emergence of a hyper-hawkish geopolitical axis running from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi’. This geopolitical axis has involved a realignment of Saudi-UAE interests, with tensions growing vis-à-vis Iran and Qatar and closer links with Israel culminating in a the signing of the normalisation of relations agreement between Israel and the UAE. This, in turn, has had significant, yet under examined, implications for the operations of the domestic security state.

The ways in which the uprisings jumped across regional borders, including states within the Gulf Cooperation Council like Bahrain and Oman, made ruling families fearful of popular anger and calls for political change. When in March 2011, 132 individuals signed a petition calling for constitutional reform and increased political participation in the UAE, 94 were quickly arrested or stripped of citizenship and deported, accused of belonging to Dawa’t Al-Islah (a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot according to the state). This wider geopolitical context is reflected internally in multiple ways – with increased surveillance of the domestic population, updated cybercrime and counterterrorism regulations, and moves to intensify integration into international policing and counterterror programming.

Policing

The UAE benefits from the circulation of policing techniques from other states with large security agencies that transfer electronic surveillance capabilities and training. This functions through security cooperation agreements, development assistance, and contracts with private security firms. For example, ‘a defence industrial partnership’ was signed between the United Kingdom and UAE, following a visit by former Prime Minister David Cameron (Kelly and Stansfield, 2013). The Defence and Security Organisation, an organisation within the UK Department of International Trade, responsible for promoting the exports of the United Kingdom’s security sector, identifies the UAE as one of its priority markets. The geopolitical tensions between the UAE or Qatar and UAE or Iran have played well into the hands of states and private corporations invested in such exports.

Policing practices are also an important export avenue between the United Kingdom and UAE. The UK College of Policing is involved in sending and receiving personnel for training. Such activities are supported on the UK side by a cross-departmental Stabilisation Unit, supplying both serving and retired officers to international policing missions (Ellison and Sinclair, 2013). While administered by new formations or ministries, such policing collaborations speak to the continuity of colonial relations. Visiting the Police Museum in Dubai, for example, it is striking how the history of British training and equipment for UAE domestic police is proudly displayed. The museum flaunts a collection of British made weapons and communication devises, as well as the pictures of British commanders who helped to establish and train the first UAE police forces (Rossiter, 2014).

Along with policing practices, the UAE is increasingly integrating surveillance technologies into its police services. For example, the ‘Community Protection Face Recognition’ initiative integrates facial recognition technology and biometric software scans of individual faces for analysis and identification. The ‘Falcon Eye’ system receives a live feed from visual surveillance equipment controlling roads. Although ostensibly for traffic violations, it is continuously monitoring the domestic population. The company behind the Falcon Eye is Switzerland-based Asia Global Technology (AGT) owned by former Israeli intelligence agent Mati Kochavi (Donaghy, 2016). The state of Israel and Israeli private security firms registered elsewhere play an important role in the global circulation of surveillance technologies utilised to monitor and curtail dissent (Gordon, n.d.; Stevens, 2011; Zureik, 2001). Even though diplomatic connections between the UAE and Israel were formally banned such secretive trade have long connected the UAE to private entities linked to the Israeli intelligence community. With the normalisation of relations between the two states, dubbed the Abraham Accords, these collaborations around surveillance technologies are due to increase.

Counterterror legislation

Counterterror legislation has been another central element of the overall UAE strategy to curb internal dissent, while aligning with the racialised logics of the WoT. One of the ways in which the modalities of the WoT have circulated globally is through the proliferation of counterterror and cybercrime legislation (Lumina, 2007). In rewriting counterterror laws, states have expanded the definition of terrorism to target legitimate forms of dissent. In the UAE, this has included any form of protest. Terrorism Law No. 7 issued in 2014 by UAE president, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan broadly defines a ‘terrorist outcome’ as, among other things, ‘stirring panic among a group of people’ and ‘antagonizing the state’ (Article 1; UAE Ministry of Justice, 2014). Article 14 sets the death penalty or life in prison for anyone who acts with intent ‘to undermine the stability, safety, unity, sovereignty, or security of the State’ (Human Rights Watch, 2014). Clearly, such sweeping definitions of terrorism target all manner of protest and dissent.

The law also allows the courts, upon request from the office of the public prosecutor, to order travel bans and surveillance on persons ‘deemed dangerous from a terrorism-related perspective’ and to prohibit them from residing or visiting specific places, and contacting specific people (UAE Ministry of Justice, 2014). Significantly, there is no individual right to appeal. This far-reaching law has implications for the citizen population in terms of limitations on political rights and freedoms, but crucially also impacts the migrant population as it criminalises forms of labour protest by including them as ‘antagonising’ behaviour.

Moreover, the cybercrime law targets online activities including any rhetoric that may offend the state, ruling family or religious institutions. In May 2018, human rights activist Ahmed Mansour was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment on cybercrimes charges in the UAE following a series of closed proceedings. Prior to his conviction, The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto, uncovered that the UAE government had deployed spyware purchased from Israeli company NSO Group to hack Mansour’s mobile phone (Marczak and Scott-Railton, 2016). In this case, we see the open utilisation of cybercrime laws along with data obtained through spyware technology purchased from a private entity. The UAE’s conflict with Qatar has involved an expansion of the cybercrime law to criminalise ‘sympathy for Qatar’ (broadly defined) punishable with a prison sentence and a fine (Reuters, 2017)

The UAE is also inserted into global circuits of counterterror initiatives, such as the 2011 Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), a body meant to ‘fight terrorism around the world’. In 2012, as joint chairs with the United Kingdom, Abu Dhabi hosted the first meeting on Countering Violent Extremism, a working group for the GCTF (Reuters, 2017) and launched the Hedayah centre ‘which aims to counter violent extremism’ by sharing best-practices internationally (Hedayah, 2018). Through such initiatives the UAE aims to position itself centrally within counterterror networks globally, gaining legitimacy for its efforts, while at the same time maintaining tight control over the resident population and ensuring migrant labour protest is treated within the logic of counterterror initiatives. Relatedly, on the domestic front, the UAE also established the Sawab Centre which monitors and restricts ‘violent extremist messaging on the internet’ (UAE Embassy, 2015). This allows for wide surveillance of Internet usage under the guise of combating extremism. Such international counterterror networks aim to standardise definitions of extremism and responses to it, yet they are clearly integrated into specific localised politics and reinforce existing racial logics. Such notions of extremism are themselves socially constructed and bound up with the racialising discourses of the WoT.

Conclusion

This article has set out to examine how the global expansion of surveillance technologies settles in non-liberal democracies located outside of the core Western states that have typically formed the focus of much academic work on ‘surveillance capitalism’. The UAE provides a particularly instructive example in this respect. As a hereditary monarchy and Muslim-majority state, the country has historically played a central role in US political hegemony across the Middle East areas. Today, the UAE itself has emerged as a principal regional power, intervening in the numerous political struggles that have hit the region post-2011. These processes have been accompanied by a rapid and highly pronounced expansion of surveillance technologies throughout the country.

The UAE experience provides three critical insights into the literature on surveillance and racialisation. First, it confirms that such technologies are not applied in a blanket or neutral manner, but ‘penetrate differentially’, depending upon existing racialised categories extant within the state. Second, these categories must be understood alongside the ways that citizenship regimes exist. In the UAE, surveillance has both unfolded as a means of repression against citizens and non-citizens alike, but has simultaneously acted to reinforce the power of citizens over non-citizen migrant labour. Work on surveillance needs to move beyond a predominant focus on the power of the state, to pay more careful attention to the ways that the citizen or non-citizen relation is constructed in particular contexts.

All of this is significant given the move towards ‘smart cities’ and related urban development models. Once again these models can be found outside the core Western states; indeed, the non-liberal political structures of places such as the UAE can mean that shifts in urban planning can occur very rapidly and with a little to no popular oversight. It is necessary to reflect more closely on the role of surveillance within these urban models, and the ways they serve to accentuate pre-existing racial, gender and class hierarchies in city spaces. The role of telecommunications firms is of specific importance here – the UAE example confirms the centrality of these firms to how the infrastructures of surveillance come into being.

Finally, studies of these processes need to go beyond a focus on what goes on inside national border to examine the wider historical and global connections that mediate how surveillance technologies land in particular spaces. The UAE’s previous position within Britain’s colonial empire has structured institutions of control (e.g. the kafala system), and thus, profoundly shaped the character of surveillance in the country. At the same time, the global circulation of these technologies depends upon – and serves to precipitate – new alignments of states themselves, both at the regional level (e.g. Israel) and globally (e.g. the United States).