Workers, oil, and autocracy in Bahrain
2026-06-16
Many scholars have argued that either the political economy of oil or the oppression of migrant labor has led to widespread social demobilization in the Gulf states. However, these accounts have never addressed the counterexample of the Bahraini labor movement. Asking what factors made unionization possible in Bahrain, this paper shows how oil-led industrialization both enhanced workers’ structural power by building a heavy industrial base and undercut their associational power by driving migratory flows large enough to reorganize and resegment the labor market. Thus, unionization has been possible due to a specific trajectory of industrialization that produced a heavy industrial base but did not fully replace citizens in key productive sectors. This argument shows the limits of oil-exceptionalist theories, modifies top-down theories of migrant labor in the Gulf, and highlights the key role of royal families in the politics of repression.