ABSTRACT
Diaspora tends to emphasise emotional and affective ties existing within a dispersed community, and the sense of belonging that is, in turn, constructed in people’s everyday life. Based on fieldwork conducted among Pakistani middle-class migrants in Dubai, this chapter provides an understanding of the modalities of belonging of diasporic subjects in the Gulf States. The notion of diaspora is used as a framework to identify how those interviewed construct their sense of belonging in light of the hierarchies and exclusionary practices in place in the Gulf States. As such, diaspora emerges as a ‘strategic resource’, whereby the Pakistani middle-class migrants tend to preserve their Pakistani identity and background in such a way as to construct their sense of belonging within and beyond ethnic boundaries. In the Gulf States, where migration is characterised by temporariness, it emerges that Pakistanis’ temporary status does not impede them from forging attachments within diasporic communities, particularly when they use their transnational connections and networks in other countries to move and relocate themselves and their businesses somewhere else.
