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Middle East & North Africa
Deindustrialization in the Middle East and North Africa
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- Acknowledge and value women’s labor as a cornerstone of Moroccan agriculture. This can be achieved by ensuring that data collection, conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture and other relevant institutions, systematically captures informal labor, including agricultural work performed without formal contracts, and is disaggregated by gender to fully reflect the scale and nature of women’s contributions to agricultural production.
- Ensure women have equal access to technical training, leadership programs, and support for farm diversification or entrepreneurial initiatives.
- Make the contributions of female agricultural laborers visible in public and policy debates by:
- Launching awareness campaigns (radio, TV, social media, community events) to highlight their role in food security and rural economies.
- Drawing inspiration from initiatives like Tunisia’s “The Woman with the Headscarf,” honoring female agricultural workers.
- Supporting research and media projects that amplify their voices and experiences.
- Provide safe, reliable transportation to reduce the risks associated with overcrowded and unsafe vehicles. The state or local authorities should partner with cooperatives or private transport providers to create subsidized, safe shuttle services dedicated to transporting agricultural workers, especially women, to and from farms.
- Strengthen labor regulations to protect agricultural workers\’ health by:
- Increasing labor inspections, especially in remote areas, to ensure compliance with safety standards.
- Mandating employers to provide free protective equipment (gloves, masks, hats, appropriate clothing) for tasks involving chemicals or harsh conditions.
-
Middle East & North Africa
Invisible Hands: The Struggles of Female Agricultural Workers in Morocco
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Middle East & North Africa
Citizenship Rent and GCC Development Models: A Regional Comparison
Processes of deindustrialization have set the course for postmodernity. Though its impact varies with geography, it is deindustrialization which defines the conditions of social, political, and economic life across most the world today. This is certainly so in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There, premature deindustrialization bequeaths legacies of grave and enduring salience. In the economic domain, effects are observable in the region’s struggles with job creation, productivity, growth, and macrostability. Socially, they are present in MENA’s extreme levels of inequality. Politically, deindustrialization contributes to democracy’s recurring failures to launch.
This report takes identifying the drivers behind deindustrialization in the MENA as its primary task. Based on months of desk research and an extensive exploration of the historical archive, we trace causality across time and beyond the borders of the region. Findings are many, prominently including the following:
(i) The early onsetting of deindustrialization in the MENA was provoked by the global economy’s drift into stagnation beginning in the late 1960s.
(ii) Due to global issues of overcapacity and falling profit rates, securing the investment needed to nurture competitive manufacturing sectors has been exceedingly difficult.
(iii) Though global dynamics did make opportunities for healthy industrializing scarce, they did not condemn MENA countries to the fates ultimately suffered. Political choices and policy errors also played a role in shaping the course of events. Critical in these regards were modalities of state-capital relations, inadequate policy design, and a series of contingencies derived from the management of natural resource endowments.
(iv) Neoliberalism’s resolution of capitalism’s profitability crisis harmed MENA’s industrial prospects significantly. The deepening of global value chains over the past forty years has been detrimental to capital accumulation. The enforcement of intellectual property claims has obstructed traditional pathways to industrial progress. Furthermore, competitive pressures have forced firms to adopt capital intensive forms of production, limiting industry’s capacity to absorb greater shares of MENA’s workforce.
(v) The corporate welfarism that many MENA governments have institutionalized in hopes of attracting foreign investment in recent decades is fundamentally misguided: The extension of non-conditional benefits to corporate actors serves only to minimize the social and developmental utility of a prospective investment.
Looking ahead, it is plain that deindustrialization will continue weighing heavily on the region’s outlook. For a better future to be realized, local policy officials and members of the international community alike will need reckon with the factors compelling deindustrialization. Materially, this requires rethinking the terms and incentives governing matters of production, trade, and investment.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Introduction
Women agricultural workers are essential to the growth of Morocco’s agricultural sector, yet they continue to face significant challenges. These include insecure employment (lack of contracts, social protection, etc.), undervaluation of their work, and limited recognition. This policy brief examines these issues and proposes actionable solutions to enhance their working conditions.
The feminization of agricultural labor in Morocco
The agricultural sector holds an important and relatively stable position in the Moroccan economy, accounting for approximately 12.5% of GDP since the 2000s. It provides about 33.2% of total employment (in 2019) and 52.1% of female employment.[1] Seven main production regions can be identified: Saiss, Berkane, Tadla, Souss, Gharb, Loukkos, and Haouz. However, due to changes in water availability and quality, irrigation frontiers are shifting and expanding further south-east, towards areas such as Boudnib and Dakhla. These emerging regions are expected to become significant hubs, increasingly attracting agricultural labor.
Over the past few decades, rural women have entered paid agricultural labor on a large scale, responding to a rising demand for workers driven by agricultural intensification, the expansion of irrigated land, and the agricultural sector’s increasing orientation toward exports. These dynamics entrench a hierarchical and gendered labor structure specific to the agricultural sector. Men occupy the more technical, better-paid, and contract-based positions, while women remain concentrated in the lowest and most precarious tiers, with few opportunities for upward mobility. Although some women secure contracts on large farms, the majority work without legal protections, exposed to poor working conditions and socio-economic insecurity. They gather daily at the mouqef—informal labor markets located on the outskirts of the various small agricultural centers—where they are selected for daily work and transported in open vehicles to the fields.
Women agricultural workers in the Saiss region waiting at the mouqef to find a job for the day.
The faces of labor: characteristics of female agricultural workers
Women working in agriculture often have limited alternatives, as their wages are crucial for sustaining their families. Their generally low levels of education further restrict employment prospects. As a subpopulation, however, they are not homogenous. Despite facing common challenges, women agricultural workers are a diverse group, varying in marital status, age, and place of origin.
For many, earnings are not just supplementary but the main, or sometimes the sole, source of household income. Some are supporting families due to a sick or unemployed husband or father, while others have taken on this role after being abandoned by their spouse. This financial strain forces them to persist in difficult and often exploitative working conditions, with little choice but to accept low wages and poor labor terms. Furthermore, on top of paid labor, these women typically shoulder the additional burden of unpaid care work, returning home after long hours in the fields to care for children and other relatives while also managing household tasks.
The challenges and insecurities of female agricultural workers
Social stigma and lack of recognition
Ethnographic research among female agricultural workers in Morocco reveals the deep social stigma they endure within their communities. These women are often the target of gossip and derogatory labels such as “easy women,” “husband stealers,” or “distractions for farmers.” Their virtue is regularly called into question, particularly for those who seek daily work at the mouqef.
Naima, a 50-year-old agricultural worker from the Saïss region, captures this sentiment: “Here, it’s frowned upon (ayb) for a woman to work… If you work with a man, people will assume you’re his girlfriend.”
This stigma is closely tied to entrenched gender norms and cultural expectations in rural areas, where women must navigate social pressures while asserting their right to participate in agricultural labor.
Poor working conditions with high risks and insecurities
Women laboring in agriculture often endure long working hours. They often start early in the morning and end late in the evening. For those working in the mouqef, they must be there as early as 4 or 5 a.m., depending on the season, to find a job for the day.
In addition, many face different forms of harassment in the workplace, including verbal, sexual, and physical violence. Such incidents are rarely reported, as many women fear being blamed or further stigmatized. Transportation adds another layer of risk. With no safe or reliable options, women workers are packed into overcrowded vehicles or pickup trucks far beyond legal capacity.
The work environment on farms also poses serious health and safety risks. Women labor under extreme heat, prolonged sun exposure, dust, and frequent contact with industrial fertilizers. For certain tasks, such as onion transplanting or strawberry picking, workers are forced to remain bent over for hours at a time, leading to physical strain and long-term health issues. Compounding matters, women navigate these conditions while lacking essential labor protections such as social security and retirement benefits, leaving them vulnerable to illness, injury, or poverty in old age. Gender-based discrimination resulting in wage gaps and limited access to advancement opportunities further intensifies hardships. Together, these factors intensify the socio-economic precarity of women agricultural workers and reinforce the social stigma attached to their work.
Economic difficulties
As intimated, female agricultural workers face significant economic hardships. These largely derive from the precarious and seasonal nature of their employment. Daily wages are generally low, generally ranging from 60 to 100 Dirhams (6 to 10 euros) per day. Compensation does fluctuate with labor demand, though. During peak season, when demand is high, wages can jump as high as 150 to 200 Dirhams (15 to 20 euros) a day. During low seasons, however, many women struggle to secure any kind of employment—particularly older women, who are frequently passed over by employers. In the mouqef of Taoujdate, in the Saïss plain, for instance, it is common to see women, especially the older ones, still waiting past 11 a.m., hoping to be hired, even though the typical workday begins as early as 6 a.m.
| Voices from the Mouqef: Zahra\’s Journey of Survival I live in Bouderbala where I rent a room for 300 dirhams (about 30 euro’s) a month, but I am originally from Taounat. I have been here for 8 years. When I came, I was married, but now I am divorced. I have one child who is in the first year of middle school. I work to provide for his needs. I am 39 years old, but looking at me, you would think I am 50. It was my husband who brought me here to Taoujdate, and that’s where I started working in agriculture. My husband is also from Taounat. He used to beat and mistreat me. He would demand money from me to buy cigarettes and cannabis. And when I was late coming home from work, he accused me of cheating on him. I go to the mouqef every day. The time I spend at work depends on the opportunities. If I find work, I can stay at the workplace until 6 pm. For example, for weeding, we work from 6 am to 2 pm. Sometimes we work on a task-based basis; we finish a job, like loading a truck with onions, and then we leave. The availability of work at the mouqef depends on market dynamics. When there is high demand (for potatoes and onions) in the major markets, buyers (Kheddar) are more present and they need more labor. We are paid per task and earn between 80 and 120 dirhams per day (between 8 and 12 euros). We (female laborers) don’t like staying at the mouqef. It’s very humiliating (dem dialna taytih men lhya), but I have no other alternatives. If I could find another stable job, even if it paid only 50 dirhams a day, I would take it. At least I would be sheltered from the cold, the heat, and the people. Some women have gotten used to the mouqef, but I can’t. At the workplace, we face many problems. The other day, a farmer wanted to hit me. We work in mixed teams, made up of men and women. It’s better to work in mixed groups because the men help us with tasks that we can’t do alone. For example, for the onions, the women fill the crates, and the men load them onto the truck. However, the downside is that some men are respectful, but others are not. I would have liked to change this job, but I can\’t find anything else. |
Navigating vulnerability in times of crisis
The combination of precarious working conditions, low wages, and constant exposure to risk makes female agricultural workers acutely vulnerable. They are often among the first to feel the impacts of health, economic, and environmental crises.
This was made plain during the Covid-19 pandemic, as our Interviews attest. At that time, women agricultural workers were caught in a dilemma: risk exposure to the virus by continuing to work outside (thereby being able to provide for their families) or stay home to protect their loved ones.Zahra, an agricultural worker from the Saïss plain interviewed at the time, expressed this tension clearly: “We are afraid for ourselves and our families. If we bring back contaminated groceries or touch something infected outside, we could bring the virus home.“
The strict lockdown measures, which began on March 20, 2020, also had a direct impact on employment opportunities. With gatherings, including those at the mouqef, prohibited, many women were left without a way to secure daily work. Those who did manage to find jobs had to take detours along secondary roads to avoid detection by local authorities or walk long distances to reach farms.
Making matters worse, the lockdown coincided with a peak agricultural season across major farming regions. In the Saïss plain, it was the period for onion transplanting, while in Gharb, it marked the harvest of red fruits. Typically, high-demand season allows agricultural workers to negotiate better wages and save part of their income for the lean months ahead. However, during the pandemic, female workers were confined to their homes, unable to access the mouqef due to the ban on public gatherings.
Shifting Landscapes: Women laboring in expanding agricultural frontiers
Drought and shifting water availability have pushed some farmers to abandon agriculture altogether. In the regions affected, this has led to significant job losses for women workers. At the same time, agricultural frontiers are expanding into arid regions in the South and South-East of Morocco, areas that historically saw little farming activity. These emerging agricultural zones now generate a growing demand for cheap labor, much of which is filled by women.
For instance, near the oasis of Akka Ighane (a village located in the province of Tata, in the southeast of Morocco), women have recently begun working in watermelon fields, where agricultural jobs for women were previously scarce. While some workers expressed relief at finding paid employment, this new opportunity comes with heightened risks. In addition to the precarious conditions outlined earlier, women must now contend with the harsh environment of these arid zones, where springtime temperatures during the watermelon harvest can soar to 35-40°C.
Balancing drudgery and independence: the complex reality of women in agricultural work
Despite the precarious nature of their work, the experiences of female agricultural laborers are not exclusively negative. While many describe agricultural labor as tamara—a word denoting hardship and drudgery—some view it as a chance to reconnect with friends, share experiences, and temporarily “escape” family pressures. For many, it offers rare access to paid employment in rural areas where such opportunities for women are limited. Income not only provides a degree of financial independence but also enhances their influence in household decision-making. These women often carry personal ambitions, channeling their earnings into their children’s education to secure for them “a better future and the chance to obtain a respectable job later on”.
Conclusions and recommendations
Although women agricultural workers are essential to Morocco’s agricultural development, their working conditions are precarious, and their struggles rarely attract sustained public or political attention. It is only in the event of roadside accidents or when they fall victim to major crises, such as the mass contamination of female laborers in the food processing industry during COVID-19[2], that their plight receives media attention.
Localized initiatives—primarily led by civil society organizations—have emerged in key agricultural regions such as in the Souss. These include the Youda digital awareness campaign, launched by the Young Women’s Group for Democracy (GJFD). The campaign was launched to address domestic violence against female agricultural workers during the COVID-19 lockdown. A nationwide campaign was also recently organized by the National Union of Agricultural Workers of Chtouka Aït-Baha (in the Souss region). Running from December 16 to 29 of 2024, this campaign aimed to mobilize agricultural workers across Morocco, raising awareness and protesting against poor working conditions. It called for urgent reforms, including the protection of trade union rights, stronger labor safeguards, improvements to the compensation system for workplace accidents, and enhanced occupational health and safety.[3]
Despite the difficulties of their lives, women working in agriculture are not passive victims. Many actively develop strategies to protect themselves, improve their working conditions, and resist negative social stereotypes. At the mouqef, they often organize into groups and appoint a leader to negotiate wages and terms of employment, particularly during peak seasons when labor demand is high. Some also participate in collective actions, such as strikes, to challenge exploitative conditions, as demonstrated by the female agricultural workers of Chtouka Aït Baha.[4]
In order to address the challenges faced by women agricultural workers effectively, recognizing the heterogeneity of their experiences is a prerequisite. The reality is that women employed on large farms in the Souss region face conditions vastly different from those encountered by mouqef workers or women cutting alfalfa in oases in exchange for in-kind wages. In light of this, interventions must be tailored to the specific needs of each group of women workers. They also must be aligned with Morocco’s broader social policy framework aimed at supporting vulnerable populations.
For policymakers, we recommend that reform start from the following two premises:
Recognition and visibility:
Safe and Dignified Working Conditions:
[1] See: International Fund for Agricultural Development
[2] Solene Paillard, “Les ouvrieres agricoles toujours surexposees au risque de contamination au virus”, Medias 24 (September 3, 2024)
[3] Samir Lagsir, “Campagne nationale pour defendre les droits des travailleurs agricoles de Chtouka Ait-Baha due 16 au 29 decembre”, Medias 24 (December 22, 2024)
[4] [4] Abdel Latif Baraka, “Les ouvriers agricoles de Chtouka se mobilisent pour la justice sociale”, Hiba Press (November 25, 2024).
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In the final instance, national development is evaluated based on interpretations of what comprises an asset. Historically, the likes of land, natural resources, and industrial, financial and human capital productivity were classed as pristine assets and valued as such[1]: From their relative endowments, countries were located along a spectrum ranging from most developed to late developing. With the introduction of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, a new class of assets was added to the mix. In tallying developmental balance sheets today, non-commodities like clean air, transparent governing institutions, health and education services, and social equity also factor in.
For the residents of a country, access to particular assets and the revenue claims and/or quality of life enhancements they convey is mediated by an assortment of social and institutional factors. Different configurations of variables including class; citizenship; cultural norms; and marriage, family, and labor laws determine how asset ownership is allocated in a given place.[2] Moreover, irrespective of place, gendered dynamics imbricate the asset allocation process to one degree or another.[3] The connection between such gendered schema and larger projects of national development is laid bare in the services that marriage and motherhood offer to the nation: Preserving collective identities, fostering patriotism, and charged with (unpaid) responsibility for social reproduction, these gendered social institutions are irreplaceable fundaments of modern nation states.[4]
Within the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)[5], two variables are jointly most responsible for mediating access to state-controlled assets: nationality and gender. Together, those variables determine the distribution of what my co-author Charlie Dannreuther and I have called citizenship rents (CR).[6] CR are financial flows that move from state to citizen in the form of entitlements, employment, and access to state-subsidized goods, labor, and business opportunities.[7] In the GCC, citizen rents are an essential mechanism of contemporary governance. At a basic level, they underpin both economic growth and socio-political stability: Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the GCC’s authoritarian regimes are sustained on the distribution of these rents, the logic of which is governed by chauvinism and social conservatism.
Building on earlier works on Kuwait, this essay probes how CR functions in Bahrain and Oman. It specifically considers the tensions that are created as governors try to preserve social peace via CR while transitioning the national development strategy to a liberal modality.
GCC Development Models and Citizenship Rents
State institutions, especially those governing citizenship and labor rights, create and protect the conditions for asset accumulation. For citizens, these institutions determine the routines and rules that constrain uncertainty and set parameters for the relation between capital and labor.[8] The manner with such institutions fulfill these functions is shaped by prevailing social hierarchies.[9] In the case of Gulf, the hierarchies in question are structured rigidly along gender and nationality-based cleavages.
As has been discussed, historically, the distribution of oil rents—the spread of which was mediated on the basis of gender and nationality—adhered the social foundations of the state in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Though women’s access was often indirect, petroleum earnings enabled an extensive system of entitlements impacting nearly every aspect of a citizen’s life. Receipts from oil, gas and derivative products sustained everything from state provisions of education, healthcare, housing and employment to the subsidization of energy and food. They also underwrote swift and sizable jumps in quality of life in a second way: By funding citizen-nationals’ exploitation of migrant labor, household workers most of all.[10]
Table 1: Macroeconomic dimensions of select GCC states
| Indicator | Bahrain | Kuwait | Oman |
| GDP Per Capita (USD, PPP, current prices, 2025)* | 29,890 | 31.680 | 20,230 |
| Oil rents as % of GDP (2021)+ | 10.9 | 27.6 | 23.5 |
Source: *IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2024); +World Bank Open Data, Oil rents (% of GDP), 2021.
Precise data on citizenship rent flows are difficult to obtain. Taking expenditures on public sector wages and subsidies as a proxy, however, we can derive ballpark figures. In Kuwait, citizenship rents, thusly defined, accounted for 71 per cent of the budget in 2020/2021. In nominal terms, this translated to USD 75 billion.[11] As lesser oil producers with larger populations, the corresponding figures for Bahrain and Oman are not as high.[12] Especially since the mid-2010s, both countries have needed cut back on the provision of public employment.[13] Nevertheless, citizenship rents remain a significant distributive mechanism.
Gendering Claims to National Assets
In addition to nationality, as mentioned, the flow of citizenship rents within all three countries has been heavily mediated by gender. Functionally, the patterns of mediation observed served to entrench social hierarchies and in so doing, to buttress political stability.[14]
In the first instance, the primary mechanism limiting women’s access to citizenship rents is constitutional law. Through legal provisions defining the family as the primary unit of society and jus sanguinis laws attributing exclusive rights to men when it comes to conveying citizenship onto children[15], women’s membership in the nation—and by extension, ability to assert claims on national assets—is fundamentally subordinate.
As the articles below make plain, family is encoded as a patriarchal structure within the constitutions of Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. For women, this conditions and degrades citizenship rights: It is from incorporation within a natal family (e.g., citizenship of her father) and later, a procreative family (e.g., citizenship of her husband) that a woman accrues legal standing.
| Table 2: Constitutional Articles focusing on the Family Unit |
| Bahrain (Article 5a): The family is the cornerstone of society, deriving its strength from religion, morality and patriotism. The law preserves its lawful entity, strengthens its bonds and values, under its aegis extends protection to mothers and children, tends the young and protects them from exploitation and safeguards them against moral, bodily and spiritual neglect. |
| Kuwait (Article 9): The family is the foundation of society; its mainstays are religion, morals and the love of country. The Law shall preserve its entity, shall strengthen its bonds and shall, under its aegis, protect mothers and infants. |
| Oman. (Article 12): The family is the basis of the society, and the Law regulates the means for protecting it, preserving its legitimate entity, strengthening its ties and values, safeguarding its members and providing suitable conditions to develop their potential and capabilities |
| Source: The Constitute Project (link). |
By subsuming individual rights beneath those of the family unit, these legal arrangements reduce women’s ability to independently make claims on citizenship rents or any other form of political and economic resource. This is expressly revealed in many public policies. Entitlements, including loans for marriage and home buying, are targeted at men as the de jure head of household. Male guardianship laws grant husbands, fathers, brothers, and sometimes even sons the authority to discipline women and control access to family assets, inclusive of spousal maintenance flows.[16] Laws on inheritance grant male heirs superior property claims to female heirs (and assign male spouses superior inheritance rights to female spouses).[17] Law and custom also obstruct women from working in industries and/or functions which might make their fulfilling of family obligations more difficult. For instance, in Oman (and Kuwait), women are disallowed from working at night,[18] in what are deemed “dangerous” sectors,[19] and in industries which could compromise reproductive health.[20]
Ultimately, women’s right to claim CRs within our case study countries is conditional. Specifically, it is conditional on their acceptance of a social role that is subordinate and in keeping with patriarchal traditions.
Attempts at Model Switching
For the past half-century, the funding and circulation of citizenship rents were fundamental to social orders and development models in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. Claims on rents—made on the basis of (male) national membership—ordered economies, defined class structures, and set individual life trajectories more so than did labor.[21] Labor and the market more generally were, in many senses, the domains of migrant workers and oriented toward providing different degrees of services to different classes of citizen nationals.
In recent years, GCC governments, including those of Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman, have attempted to enact switches in their development models. Mindful of the finitude of petroleum endowments, policymakers aligned economic strategies more closely with liberal principles. Grand planning documents announced over the past decade universally target economic diversification, external competitiveness, improved labor productivity, and higher levels of economic participation. With an eye toward fiscal responsibility, they also propose subsidy and entitlement reductions along with diminutions to public sector employment. Just as critically, there have been concerted efforts in all three countries to cull the rolls of national citizenries. The last of these initiatives is undertaken in order to mitigate the social and political tensions being created by the wider transition to liberal market economies: In reducing the numbers able to make claims on citizenship rents, the distribution of those rents can be extended further into the future.
In Oman, Royal Decree 17/2025 has raised the bar for acquiring (and maintaining) citizenship going forward. In Bahrain, while new legislation has not been introduced, an old decree from 1959 retains for the sovereign the right to strip an individual of citizenship in the event where the latter is deemed to threaten the interests of the state. It is in Kuwait, however, where citizenry culling has been advanced most aggressively. Upon the passage of Decree 116/2024 on December 23, 2024[22], the Kuwaiti National Assembly accelerated an ongoing crackdown on citizenship naturalization processes, expressly targeting those made citizens through marriage. Because Kuwaiti women cannot extend citizenship to their spouse or children[23], the Decree Law is de facto aimed at foreign women married to Kuwaiti men.[24] What is more, this Decree, like a similar one introduced in August, contains retroactive application. As such, it threatens to denaturalize any woman who acquired citizenship through marriage after 1987. To date, more than 32,000 women have been subjected to citizenship reviews under the Decree Law’s terms, and in the first month of 2025 alone, 2,500 lost their citizenship.
As the example of Kuwaiti women attests, many aspects of Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait’s attempts at development model switching are hurting women. In addition to citizenship loss, the state abdicating its role as an employer is likely to prove especially damaging. For women, societal acceptance of public sector work combined with superior benefits and workplace protections to render state employment the optimal choice for entering the labor market. Indeed, it is largely by virtue of opportunities with government ministries that female participation in the Bahraini and Omani economies reached a critical mass. By extension, it was opportunities with government ministries which offered the primary means for women accessing citizenship rents.
The value of state employment for women can be discerned through a handful of simple statistics. It is visible in the fact of women representing 42% of the public sector workforce in Oman, despite having a labor force participation rate of just 32%. It is demonstrated by the fact of Bahraini women representing 56% of the employees on the state’s payroll.[25] It is perhaps made most plain, however, by the wage premium that public sector employment offers women of the two countries. In Oman, average public sector earnings are 97% higher than average private sector earnings. Disaggregated data on female earnings is not available, but it can be assumed to correspond with this gap. In Bahrain, meanwhile, though public sector workers as a population enjoy a 15% bump on their private sector counterpart, for females, the average public sector wage is nearly double that of the average private sector wage. (In Bahrain, women in the public sector also actually earn better than do men: The median wage of a Bahraini female state employee is 4.3% higher than the corresponding figure for male state employees.) In view of the data, it is no exaggeration to say that public sector work has effectively provided the sole path to gainful employment for Bahraini and Omani women. As the state now reduces its hiring with an eye on fiscal consolidation, it is therefore women who are disproportionately injured.
Conclusions
The extraction and processing of petroleum-based resources in the Gulf has always required domestic quiet. Traditionally, quiet was purchased through repression, on the one hand, and the entrenchment of chauvinism and patriarchal conservatism on the other. In the case of the latter, by distributing citizenship rents—rents that were themselves mediated by gender and nationality—a rigidly hierarchical social order could be buttressed. With this order in place and attendant levels of political stability, oil and gas production was able to proceed with few hiccups. The financial valorization of these countries’ largest national assets—namely, oil and gas—have therefore been indelibly tied to the chauvinism and patriarchal conservatism mentioned above.
Looking forward, it is unclear that post-colonial arrangements will hold. In obstructing the flows of citizen rents which have previously undergirded state-society relations, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman’s attempts at enacting a developmental model switch could well threaten social and political stability.[26] As the switch in development model proceeds, fewer ‘insider’ citizens will be able to make claims on national asset holdings. The number of ‘outsider’ citizens, meanwhile, will grow. With the latter category, we can refer to citizen nationals without meaningful access to citizenship rent flows. Practically speaking, this encompasses not only women, the traditional subordinates of the citizen national population: It also includes men outside the labor force or pushed into working in the private sector. Historically, private sector workers in Bahrain and Oman retained access to job opportunities and wages superior to those on offer to the migrant workers which populate many industries of the private sector. As such, while excluded from the full benefit regime that state employment guarantees, they were still of the privileged classes. More recently, however, the structures which previously divided labor markets into two—one for citizen-nationals, one for foreigners—have weakened, pushing ‘outsider’ citizens into competition with non-nationals. By forcing earning potentials down, this development is reducing ‘outsider’ citizens’ ability to make claims on the surplus value that migrant worker labor produces: The resources needed to enjoy the sub-market price goods and services migrant workers provide—including domestic work—are growing scarcer. It is not difficult to imagine that this could spark embers of popular discontent.[27]
The concept of citizenship rents offers critical insights into the functioning state-society relations in much of the Gulf. It also grants insights into the inequalities that have been constitutive of these societies since the age of oil production began. Yes, there are “new insider-outsider cleavages” emerging today due to ongoing attempts at development model switching.[28] Nevertheless, one should not forget the old cleavages—namely those defined by gender and nationality—which have long since structured these societies.
[1] Albertus, M. (2025). Land Power: Who has it, who doesn’t, and how that determines the fate of societies. Basic Books: New York.
[2] See Pagano, U. (1991). “Property rights, asset specificity, and the division of labor under alternative capitalist relations,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 15(3), pp. 315-42.
[3] Bessiere, C. & Gollac, S. (2023). The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
[4] Radhakrishnan, S., & Solari, C. (2023). The Gender Order of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
[5] The GCC is comprised of six nation states located in the Arabian Gulf Peninsula: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
[6] Dannreuther, C. & Langworthy, M. (2024). “Rentier capitalism, social reproduction, and the limits of liberalism: Mapping gendered asset value in Kuwait,” New Political Economy.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Dannreuther, C. (2024). “Power in the future of work: Production, reproduction, and reconstruction.” Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 5(2), 329–350.
[9] In twentieth-century European states development of political compromises validated power structures through supporting political agendas for translating labor value into accumulated wealth to benefit capital owners. “At a basic level the state was the concrete expression of the social forces that reproduced labour value because it promoted the fiction that surplus value extraction was a legitimate way to coordinate a society.” See: Balibar, E. (2017), The philosophy of Marx. Verso Books.
[10] Ennis, C. (2020) “Citizenship without belonging? Contesting economic space in Oman.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 52, pp. 759-764.
[11] Palier, B., Rivka, A., and Louer, L. (2021). Kuwait’s welfare system: Description, assessment and proposals for reform. Sciences Po & KFAS.
[12] Ali, O. & Elbadawi, 1. (2016). “The political economy of public sector employment in resource-dependent countries.” In Understanding and Avoiding the Oil Curse in resource-Rich Arab Economies, ed. Hoda Selim and Ibrahim Elbadawi, pp. 103-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[13] Hertog 2025.
[14] Dannreuther & Langworthy 2024.
[15] Kuwait Constitution (1962); Bahraini Citizenship Act of 1963; Omani Constitution (1996, rev. 2011).
[16] See for example, Human Rights Watch (2023). Trapped: How male guardianship policies restrict women’s travel and mobility in the Middle East and North Africa. New York.
[17] Ibid. Relevant legal provisions are as follows: Bahrain (Constitution of 2002 Article 5(d) and Civil law No. 19/2001 Article 909); Kuwait (Personal Status Law Articles 299, 300, and 307); and Oman (Personal Status Laws articles 241-256).
[18] Royal Decree No. 656/2011 Articles 1-2 in Oman and Kuwaiti Labor Law Article 22.
[19] Kuwaiti Labor Law No.6 of 2010, Article 23.
[20] World Bank (2024). Women, Business and the Law 2024.
[21] Ennis, C. (2020) “Citizenship without belonging? Contesting economic space in Oman.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 52, pp. 759-764.
[22] This Decree modified the original Amiri Decree N0. 15 of 1959.
[23] As set out in the 1959 Law, Article 2.
[24] Note that the children of mixed marriages, provided the father is Kuwaiti, do retain citizenship rights under Decree 116.
[25] Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2024). “Women’s Rights.”
[26] Hertog, S. (2025). “When rentier patronage breaks down: The politics of citizen outsiders on Gulf oil states’ labour markets.” Studies in Comparative International Development. Published online, Feb 4, 2025.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Hertog 2025, p. 1.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Cover Photo Attribution: Al Jazeera English, “Protests in Bahrain”, 2011.
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