CMES seminar: New MECW-project: Elite mobilities

The Middle East has long been a key source region for elite clients looking for second citizenships and residences elsewhere. Lately, it has also become an important receiving region, with Turkey, Egypt and Jordan offering citizenship by investment, and UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia operate residence by investment programs. Yet, the Middle East is an understudied region in research on investment migration. The purpose of the research project is to contribute to knowledge in this field, focusing in particular on how investment citizenship programs affect the role of the state in the Middle East, from the perspectives of privatization, communication, and global hierarchization. The seminar presents our plans for the project.  

Sara Kalm, Markus Gunneflo and Leysan Storie (Lund University) will present Elite Mobility: Investment Migration in the Middle East.

Abstract: This project explores how neoliberal investment migration programs reconfigures the role of the state in the Middle East from the perspectives of privatization, communication, and global hierarchization. Through citizenship-by-investment and residence-by-investment programs (together referred to as RCBI), states “sell” citizenship and residency to the global elite in return for investments. While these programs have expanded globally since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, research has largely focused on Caribbean and European cases, leaving the Middle East underexplored despite the region’s growing importance as both an origin and a destination area for investment migrants.

The project is organized around three interrelated work packages. First, it examines the privatization of authority by analyzing the role and power of private intermediary firms in the investment migration industry (state-business relations). Second, it explores how RCBI programs reconfigure long-standing logics of belonging and citizenship through state communication and societal reception, with particular attention to the United Arab Emirates (state-society-relations). Third, it analyzes how Middle Eastern states deploy RCBI programs as strategic tools to influence their standing in a highly unequal global legal economic order (state-global relations).

Empirically, the project combines qualitative interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and digital ethnography. Theoretically, it contributes to literature on neoliberal statehood, citizenship, and global inequality. Beyond its regional focus, the project advances broader debates on deterritorialized elites, the “secession of wealth,” and the transformation of citizenship in an era of intensifying global inequality.

Coffee, tea and pastries will be served after the seminar.

Everyone is warmly welcome!