Bedouins into Bourgeois: Remaking Citizens for Globalization

Description

How are state leaders adapting their citizen-building strategies for globalization? What outcomes are they achieving, and why? Bedouins into Bourgeois investigates an ambitious state-led social engineering campaign in the United Arab Emirates, where leaders aimed to encourage more entrepreneurial, market-friendly, patriotic, and civic-minded citizens. Extensive ethnography - including interviews with a ruling monarch - reveals the rulers' reasoning and goals for social engineering. Through surveys and experiments, social engineering outcomes are examined, as well as the reasons for these outcomes, with surprising results. This fascinating study illustrates how social engineering strategies that use nationalism to motivate citizens can have paradoxical effects, increasing patriotism but unexpectedly discouraging or "crowding out" development-friendly mind-sets.

Calvert W. Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She focuses on new approaches to citizen-building within a context of globalization and the nature of citizens' economic, social, and political engagement, with emphasis on the Middle East. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, Connecticut and holds masters' degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in information management and the University of Cambridge in international relations.

'Today leaders in many lands face conflicting tasks of inspiring national loyalty while also educating their citizens for success in the global economy. Calvert W. Jones' methodologically and substantively innovative study, Bedouins into Bourgeois, persuasively analyzes important current strategies for doing so, and their unanticipated consequences. A fascinating and invaluable work for all who are interested in citizenship, political development, globalization, the Arab world, and much more.' Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania 'Bedouins into Bourgeois offers a unique window into the making of citizens in a rapidly evolving Middle East. With innovative fieldwork and a sharply conceived theoretical lens, this path-breaking book sheds light on the paradoxical effects of the efforts of the rulers of the United Arab Emirates to shape a new kind of citizen.' Marc Lynch, George Washington University, Washington DC