Listen to an interview with scholar Mike Davis speaking on Dubai in 2008.
Dubai is famed internationally for lifestyles and modern monuments etched by extreme wealth, a city state in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that has become an unlikely hub for international finance. In a region bombarded by the chaos of the U.S.-driven ‘war on terror’, Dubai a small city state located on the edge of Iran and Iraq has become a city of glamor and glitz, a striking paradox that has enchanted many around the world.
Dubai’s shining exterior is quickly becoming world famous, including a series of three-hundred constructed islands mapping out the shape of world, an indoor ski mountain in the boiling temperatures of the Persian Gulf and the soon to be completed Burj Dubai, now the tallest man made structure in the world.
Behind Dubai’s famous monuments are many striking contradictions, most strikingly the massive non-citizen work force that is estimated at close to one-million people, laborers mainly from South Asia who work in conditions that multiple human rights organizations have condemned. In recent years the conditions facing non-citizen workers have begun to catch attention internationally.
As a city state, Dubai offers little possibility for democratic rights, as labor unions and political protest are outlawed and foreign workers are offered no possibility for citizenship. Dubai’s political and economic system is tightly controlled by a ruling monarchy, who have built what author and commentator Mike Davis has called a Sinister Paradise. Listen to an interview with Mike Davis on the contemporary contradictions surrounding Dubai today.
