Public Affairs

CGS at AUK hosts Dr. Phillipe Fargues

09th Apr 2019 | by the Department of PR & Marketing

The Center for Gulf Studies (CGS) at the American University of Kuwait (AUK) hosted a lecture by Dr. Phillipe Fargues, a visiting Professor at the Kuwait Program at Sciences Po and a Senior Fellow at the European University Institute. The talk, entitled “Shaping Smart Cities? How Migration and Education Policies Meet in the Gulf States” examined the GCC’s responses to its demographic challenge as well as the sustainability of the resulting form of social segmentation. It was held in collaboration with CEFAS, Sciences Po, KFAS, the French Institute, and the French Embassy. The lecture attracted both the AUK community and the public, in addition to special guests such as Her Excellency French Ambassador Marie Masdupuy.

Dr. Fargues began his talk by explaining the GCC’s demographic predicament, whereby the GCC States are demographically small relative to their large resource potential. This led to economic dependency on imported labor, creating non-national majorities. This disproportion of nationals to non-nationals could be a future challenge, particularly relative to geographic neighbors, such as Iraq and Iran.
 
Further, he discussed Kuwait’s response of introducing the nationalization policy, which aimed to localize the public sector. He predicted that the policy’s ineffectiveness was due to not aligning local skills with employers’ needs. Alternatively, he proposed that a naturalization policy may be a possible sustainable solution.

The Gulf States are supplementing the localization approach through migration and education policies in an effort to construct post-oil knowledge-based economies. Such a fast and steady development of school education among nationals has enabled most citizens to receive higher education and have access to social mobility. On the other hand, he argued, migration policies have filtered those eligible to stay on economic criteria de facto linked to education and skills to stay within the state, thereby creating a population of settled non-citizens mostly belonging to educated middle and upper classes. In contrast, most low-income workers are comprised of non-nationals who are temporary residents. This has resulted in a distinct segmentation between those who stay, such as the nationals and educated high-income migrants, and others who do not, such as the low-income migrants.

If left unresolved, the speaker warned of the potential social and political tensions that could arise. Such tensions may exist between power structures and knowledge structures, whereby current regional constructs may become further challenged.
 
“The Center for Gulf studies welcomes collaborations with various local and international cultural and educational institutions,” commented the CGS Director, Dr. Shareefa Al-Adwani.  “For Dr. Fargues’s talk, we worked with several of these institutions to ensure his talk would provide different and original ideas on the Gulf with which our community may engage and discuss.”

Philippe Fargues is a French demographer and a senior Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI-Florence). He was the founding Director of EUI’s Migration Policy Centre and held senior positions at the National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris and the American University in Cairo and taught at Harvard and various universities in France, the Middle East, and Africa. His most recent publications include: Migration to the Gulf – Policies in Sending and Receiving Countries (with N. Shah, GRC-Cambridge, 2018), Skillful Survivals – Irregular Migration to the Gulf (with N. Shah, GRC-Cambridge, 2017), and Mass Migration and Uprisings in the Arab Countries: An Analytical Framework (International Development Policy, 2017).
 

Dr. Phillipe Fargues during the lecture

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