Surveillance, race, and social sorting in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made headlines for its use of mass surveillance technologies against UAE residents, as well as opponents externally. Under the guise of protecting national security, there has been a proliferation of state-led initiatives to monitor public spaces and online activity across the UAE, making the country an important laboratory for advanced surveillance tools. This article takes as a starting point that despite claims to being race-neutral and scientific, surveillance technologies have an embedded racial bias and operate according to context to (re)produce forms of state control and racial social relations. Reviewing the introduction of multiple surveillance technologies, this article traces the rationales used to racially order space and define deviance in the UAE context, emphasising questions of race, migration status and labour, to understand how the state defines, codifies, and regulates an ethno-racial hierarchy.