BOOK REVIEW OFFSHORE CITIZENS: PERMANENT TEMPORARY STATUS IN THE GULF BY NOORA LORI (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS) 302 PAGES. PRICE £75.00 ISBN 9781108632560 THOMAS MCGEE * The situation of governments saying neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ to requests for membership in their citizenry bodies is the lived experience for many in the Gulf region of the Middle East. With naturalisation possibilities restrictively managed, many are left to wait almost indefinitely. Indeed, a peculiar characteristic in several of the relatively newly-founded Gulf states is that non-citizens far outnumber citizens of the country. For instance, in the United Arab Emirates (‘UAE’), which became an independent state in 1971, non-citizens account for almost 90 per cent of the total resident population. Largely excluded from formal integration, guest workers and domestic minorities can thus sometimes find that temporary residency becomes a permanent legal status. What then motivates political elites to enact policies that defer the outcomes of naturalisation and legal integration processes and leave significant sections of the population in a state of limbo? This riddle is one of the intriguing research questions of Noora Lori’s recently published book Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf. 1 Citizenship in the oil-rich Gulf, she explains, comes with significant benefits by way of access to generous social services, including health, education and housing. But then why would governments not simply reject naturalisation claims outright? Taking on the UAE as her case study, Lori argues that ‘policy-makers often find it more politically expedient to postpone the larger questions about belonging and address the more immediate issues of identity management by creating short-term, renewable legal statuses’. 2 Lori draws on examples of various groups affected by such policies, including the stateless bidūn (referencing the Arabic term for ‘without’ nationality) and those who hold a citizenship issued by one of the federal emirates but awaiting recognition by the Ministry of Interior in the capital, Abu Dhabi. She goes on to explain that these practices of deferral have the advantage of ‘placat[ing] competing factions that seek to expel or incorporate certain groups’. 3 At the same time, the issuance of temporary statuses serves to police the population by incentivising good behaviour and obedience to the state in anticipation of the eventual reward of Emirati citizenship. 4 Hence, as Lori argues throughout the work, delays to naturalisation outcomes should not be understood as the exclusive * 1 2 3 4 The author is a PhD researcher at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne’s Law School, Australia. t.mcgee@unimelb.edu.au. Noora Lori, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press 2019). ibid 6. ibid 30. ibid 13.