“I feel a book like this was long due” was the reaction of a Dubai‑born Indian research student with whom I discussed the content of the latest book by Amélie Le Renard, Le privilege occidental [the Western privilege] that analyses the enabling factors of the economic and racial domination of the Westerners living in Dubai. Undoubtedly a welcome contribution —in particular to this mature student, author of an earlier piece who related wittily the following lived experience:

> 1 Quadri, Sana, “The myth of the cultural melting pot” Exposé, Student magazine, University of Exeter (...) “the corporate world is perhaps the only place one can expect a real intermingling of cultures in a cosmopolitan city like Dubai. But it’s also where one sees the worst forms of segregation. A Westerner is likely to earn at least 10 per cent more than their Asian counter part for the same job in the United Arab Emirates. […] The multinational company I worked for close to a decade had a majority of British expats in managerial positions. Therefore, they would not really join you for lunch in the first place. Most would heat their food up and go back to their offices to eat. Maybe, I guess, because they wanted to afford us the privacy to be able to gossip behind their backs.”1

How this segregation and transnational forms of social hierarchisation are produced and reproduced in the global city of Dubai? This is the question that Amélie Le Renard addresses in her new book, looking critically at the material and ideational conditions underpinning the Westerners’ hegemony at the global level. To do so, she follows a postcolonial feminist approach, which distinguishes her from the prevailing existing literature that deals with class, employment, race or gender issues in migration but separately. This approach leads her to see in the coloniality and its racial ideological foundations, the epistemological —rather than chronological, roots of the privileges of Westerness, constructed as inherently more advanced and technically and professionally superior. The intersectional approach further leads her to pay particular attention to transversal forms of oppression, intertwined between race, class, sexuality and gender occurring both in the corporate and intimate spheres. The latter division structures the book in two main parts ‑the privileges enjoyed on the labour market (chapters 1‑4) and the constitution of distinctive lifestyles and intimacies (chapters 5‑8).

How then is the “Western privilege” constructed, performed and regulated in Dubai? To start with, the definition of Westerness seems problematic and elusive. Yet, as emphasised by Stuart Hall (p. 9), it posits a sense of superiority that is rooted in colonial history and legacy. Acknowledging this difficulty, Amélie Le Renard adopts a working definition of “Westerners” based on an internationally recognised legal status, namely the possession of a so‑called “Western” passport. These passports represent a major dividing line at the global level since they command people’s mobility and access to territories as well as their living conditions abroad —what the current research on double citizenship or citizenship’s purchases clearly demonstrates. Furthermore, this very definition raises the crucial question of the relation between Westerness and whiteness. The two do not necessarily overlap, Westerness being associated above all with a particular cultural content (p. 14) and certain superior skills and expertise (chapter 1). Yet, while the national status providing access to advantages prevails, the racial factor also interplays to set some limits to these advantages, since the non‑white Westerner keeps facing the threat of being incidentally subalternised (chapter 4). Constructing Westerners (in their diversity) into a dominant social group contributes to the marketing of Dubai as an attractive, multicultural and tolerant city. This is achieved through systematic material and economic privileges, varying according to the type of contract —local or expatriate, that include higher salaries for equivalent positions and faster career progression through numerous opportunities to change jobs (chapter 2).

2 Marchal, Roland (dir.) Dubaï, cité globale, Paris : CNRS éditions, 2001. 3 Kanna, Ahmed, Dubai, The City as Corporation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 4 Vitalis, Robert America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, Stanford : Stanford Univer (...) 4Dubai, the archetype of the “global city”,2 offers a vantage point from which to observe the reconfigurations of global social hierarchies (p. 7). As a hub of global trade routes, the city attracts migrants from all over the world, endowed with varied levels of qualification and representing more than 90% of its three millions inhabitants. International migration seems to be structured by the neo‑liberal ideology that dictates the laissez‑faire of market forces. All foreign residents, considered “temporary”, can lawfully stay in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) if they have a valid employment contract. Yet the market does not play freely and it is rather bent to serve above all the objectives of the “corporation‑city”3 —whose attractiveness relies on the presence of white Westerners as sales arguments for the Dubai brand. The Dubai government shapes unequal globalization as much as it embraces it, by promoting dynamics of classification and hierarchization that set or maintain Western nationals at the top. The “Western privilege” is not only inherited from the British colonial racialising of the workforce and the later “industrial imperialism”4 —as, upon independence in 1971, the British‑supported dynasties allied with the international capitalists. It is not only perceived and constructed as inherited as a justification for the advantageous status of Westerners today ‑ even though it is now the (or rather some of the) nationals who occupy the top of the hierarchy often referred to as ethnocracy. It is actively and deliberately reproduced.

5 Ahmed, Sara, The Promise of Happiness, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 5Westerners are expected to reproduce it through their behaviours and their “performing the Westerness” (chapter 3). Some interviewees, for instance, note that the companies use their Westerness to beautify their corporate image (p. 77). Le Renard thus broadens the study of the Westerners’ legal and socio‑economic advantages, to include their discursive or affective dimensions. She focuses on the way Western residents are tacitly expected to work on their bodies and emotions to conform to stereotypes of gendered Westerness —including soft skills like mastering the elevator pitch or some form of Anglophone humour. Following the postcolonial queer theorist Sara Ahmed who analyses the Promise of Happiness5 as an affective internalisation of social norms, Le Renard dissects the feeling of “achievement” (réussite) that binds the dominant group together and is made of a mix of high “quality of life” and selective security understood as the absence of social tension and the distance from regional conflicts, the securing of private property and safe access to public spaces for women (chapter 8). All in all, they buy into the official rhetoric of the Dubai emirate that created in February 2016 a Ministry of Happiness and, as a surveillance state, tolerates zero activism or criticism —another internalised norm that may explain the formal character of the relationships between the author and the interviewees who are probably aware of processes of security clearance and/or deportation, for instance, and that Le Renard deplores (p. 27). Under the concept of “epistemology of malaise” (p. 26‑29), she describes the uneasiness of carrying fieldwork among people towards whom she feels noticeably no empathy and the difficulty to find the right distance between her object and her analysis. While the scholarship on migration has tended to overemphasize the structural forms that disempower migrants’ agency, on the contrary, this research clearly emphasizes the active individual role of Westerners in decision‑making positions in the perpetuation of their domination in Dubai (p. 15).

In the second part devoted to the intimate sphere, the author distinguishes two profiles, the “guest families”, led by males on expatriate contracts (chapter 5), and the, somehow younger, bachelors pursuing a local career (chapter 7). While the origins and status of foreign workers in Dubai are very varied, one discriminatory factor among employees is the salary threshold imposed by the Emirati state intervening in intimacy, to be allowed to bring one’s family in the country. Eventually only selected foreigners can enjoy the “family friendly” character that Dubai boasts about.

In the guest families, the men usually hold managerial positions requiring mobility and long hours, while women have had to put their careers on hold or give them up altogether —which devalues their social worth in an environment where working is overrated. As for the bachelors, they lead a hedonistic life characterized by luxury and ostentation to such an extent that night‑time sociability —experienced as accessible even if it isn’t for the vast majority of Dubai residents, sometimes pushes some of them to live above their means.

Here the author notes the discursive efforts that Westerners deploy to assert their distinctiveness and domination. In the first case, the gender division of labour in the household is presented as a concerted and egalitarian choice, as opposed to what is perceived as an unequal marital relation within Emirati couples, on the one hand. On the other, the Western masculinity is thought as dedicated to wife and family, as opposed to deviant masculinity of Indian low‑skilled bachelors, as inferred by the author (p. 154). Likewise, women morally justify the resort to domestic employment (chapter 6) by thinking themselves as better and caring employers as opposed to others, even if they can’t help feeling uneasy at the deference expressed by their maids and at this “spectacle of exploitation” (p. 183) that ought not be part of their children’s education. Finally the author sees in the Western bachelors’ longing for authentic love relationship a way for them to identify with a distinctive Western heteronormativity (p. 210) —just as she had detected in the exceptionalist discourse, held by white Westerners questioning the true multiculturalism of Dubai, a way to distinguish themselves as Westerners (p. 140).

6 Hoang, Kimberley Kay, Dealing in Desire : Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of (...) 9Amélie Le Renard’s book is undoubtedly a great contribution to the sociological literature on the Gulf. All the more so as her research praxis ultimately seeks to question the knowledge production on the region within the academia that has both enjoyed and invisibilised its structurally privileged position by focusing on subalternised groups (p. 15). The book is based on an ethnographic fieldwork, mostly during three stays in Dubai, consisting in observant observation in networking events and 98 interviews ‑ 58 with French nationals who all succeeded in their search for a relatively stable job (p. 100), and 19 holding another Western passport. In line with the postcolonial feminist approach, she could have included some of the voices of other non‑subaltern groups —mid‑to‑upper class perspectives sharing some privileges (family life for instance) if not all, like the one opinion expressed in the incipit. A contextualization of Westerners in relation to other privileged or elite groups would have made it possible to further refine the nature of the privilege of the category studied. It could have helped draw more precisely the contours of these Westerners and their occupations, for instance, their work in consultant jobs with no upfront capital investments, as opposed to non‑Western elite businessmen who may have built their enterprise —but also possibly the variety of the “Westerner” group (the French community alone counting more than 23,000 in 2017) and the complexities of the individual trajectories. Finally, it could have helped identify situations when, humorously or symbolically, Westerners or others start to question this “Western privilege” and make it crack —like Hoang shows in the case of sex workers in Vietnam.6 These are research venues to be further explored by building on Le Renard's precious work.

<footnote n="1">1 Quadri, Sana, “The myth of the cultural melting pot” Exposé, Student magazine, University of Exeter, 9 March 2020, p. 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Marchal, Roland (dir.) Dubaï, cité globale, Paris : CNRS éditions, 2001.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Kanna, Ahmed, Dubai, The City as Corporation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Vitalis, Robert America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2007.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Ahmed, Sara, The Promise of Happiness, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Hoang, Kimberley Kay, Dealing in Desire : Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work, Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.</footnote>