Abstract

In recent years, Kuwait, like other Gulf states, has faced international scrutiny over its treatment of migrant workers, particularly within the framework of the Kafala sponsorship system. Reports of wage theft, restrictive mobility, and sudden deportations are often discussed as contemporary crises, yet their origins lie in much older patterns. The exponential growth of the oil industry in the Arabian Gulf during the mid-20th century transformed the region’s economies, societies, and labour systems. In Kuwait, as in other Gulf states, the rapid expansion of oil extraction and export created a labour demand far beyond what the local population could meet. This gap was filled largely by migrant workers from the South Asian subcontinent and neighbouring Arab countries.
This thesis argues that the legal, economic, and social frameworks governing these migrant labour forces were not created in a vacuum but were rooted in colonial-era labour regimes. While much existing scholarship centres the Kafala system as the principal mechanism of exploitation, this study moves beyond Kafala as a singular explanatory frame to examine the broader historical, political, and economic structures that made such systems possible and enduring. These regimes, inherited and adapted by newly independent Gulf states, perpetuated exclusionary practices that tied the migrant worker’s value to their productivity in the oil economy while denying them pathways to permanent residency, political rights, or social integration.