Kafala and Social Reproduction: Migration Governance Regimes and Labour Relations in the Gulf

With its roots in a system of imperial labour governance that ‘delegated responsibility over the conduct of individuals to other parties’ (AlShehabi 2019), kafala has often been understood as a policy by which states in the Gulf regulate, police, and exploit migrant labour. This chapter instead works to develop a concept of kafala as a migration governance regime, a way for states to integrate citizens as actors in the migration governance complex and, in doing so, obfuscate questions of accountability, transparency, and regulation. This is most keenly seen in the case of domestic workers who stand to benefit the least from recent reforms to kafala across the region. By focusing on the ways that kafala integrates individual households into the migration governance complex, this chapter aims to foreground the importance of the socially reproductive work done by migrant labourers to the Gulf, and attempts to explain the mechanisms through which their work sits outside the purview of the state’s governance of migrant labourers to the Gulf. The chapter attempts to explain the mechanisms through which domestic work is often excluded from wider considerations regarding migrant labour, even as domestic work is the most common form that migrant labour takes.