“3. Dubai” in “A Global Idea”
3 DUBAI
Pivot City
If Amman has played a key role as a gateway city to the Middle East for the global youth development complex, Dubai has performed an equally important but quite different kind of gateway role to the region. While Amman has served as an incubator for piloting, adjusting, and Arabizing youth development discourses, policies, and practices, it is Dubai that has been the primary pivot for disseminating these youth policies and practices across the Middle East and North Africa region. When the Young Arab Leaders announced its first action plan at a World Economic Forum meeting on the Dead Sea in Jordan in 2004, it was headquartered not in Amman in but Dubai (Streams of Progress 2020). Though Queen Rania of Jordan was a major player in the creation of the YAL, the organization was established not under the patronage of the Hashemite royal family in Jordan but of Sheikh Mohammed Al-Maktoum, the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai (Khaleej Times 2004). The first chair of the group was Mohammad el Gergawi, the CEO of the Dubai Development, and Investment Authority (World Economic Forum 2004).
Young Arab Leaders, like the Young Presidents Organization and Young Entrepreneurs Association discussed in the previous chapter, is a particular kind of “youth” organization, whose membership is comprised of political and economic elites and civil society leaders from across the Arab world who have come together under the headline banner of a mission of “youth empowerment,” and who hope to “serve as role models” for Arab youth and “catalyze the entrepreneurial and professional development of Arab youth and prepare them to be the leaders of tomorrow” (Entrepreneur 2016). Headquartered in Dubai Internet City—an information technology park and free economic zone in Dubai—Young Arab Leaders has grown to become one of the largest networks of business and political leaders in the Arab world.
Along with other Dubai-based organizations, like the Mohammad Ben Rashed Al Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, it has played a pivotal role in extending the reach of the youth organizations, policies, practices, and discourses piloted in Jordan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, throughout the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. By 2022, “YAL membership accounted for 5000 business and civil society leaders from across all the Arab countries,” Saoud El Kassem, a member of YAL in Dubai, told me (personal interview, March 2022). When Injaz began to expand beyond its initial base in Jordan to other countries in the Middle East, it was with the sponsorship and support of the Young Arab Leaders. Indeed, the partnership with Injaz set up in 2005 was the first official partnership undertaken by the Young Arab Leaders and is emblematic of the new youth development complex starting to take hold throughout the region at the time. At the YAL Forum in 2006, director of Injaz Al Arab Soraya El Salti was given the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award by the organization (Jarrar 2015).
In some ways, Dubai is an unlikely place to become a key pivot or hub city for the spread of the youth development complex in the Middle East. It has one of the oldest populations in the region, and its age profile stands in marked contrast to most other Middle East nation states. There is no “youth bulge” in Dubai as we find elsewhere. In Jordan, for example, over 54 percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five, a figure similar to many Middle Eastern countries today; but in Dubai, just over 22 percent of the population is under twenty-five (Index Mundi 2019). Nor has the “youth issue” been seen in Dubai as a pressing social policy concern as it has in other countries in the Middle East, whether out of worries of economic struggles, social unrest, or terrorism and security threats. “There are not many youths in Dubai, youth unemployment is not high, and we do not have the youth problem as other Arab countries do,” says Saeed Al Muntafiq, the first director of the Young Arab Leaders (personal interview, April 2007).
In other ways, however, Dubai as a principal youth development hub for the Middle East makes perfect sense, as it is one of the most dominant and globally oriented cities in the entire region. What we find in Dubai is the same bifurcation of youth discourse observed in Amman, although it has been constructed in a slightly different manner. Within the city state of Dubai itself, youth has been taken up as a key framing rhetoric for articulating and legitimating the aspiration and vision of Dubai elites to establish Dubai as a global city that will play a leading role in shaping the future of the Middle East as a core and vital component of the global capitalist economy. This is exemplified by the establishment of the Young Arab Leaders and Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, as well as the Youth Hub and Arab Youth Center established by Sheikh Mohammed al Al-Maktoum in 2017 as “an incubator for young people to foster their skills and talents,” and the Young Arab Media Leaders, established in 2020 (Daqeeq 2021; Gulf News 2017). On the other hand, the youth who are the principal subjects and targets of the youth development, empowerment, and entrepreneurship programs that the Young Arab Leaders promote and support—the sons and daughters of the Arab poor, working, and middle classes—are primarily located elsewhere, outside of Dubai, spread across the different countries that make up the Middle East region.
Dubai as a Hub City for the Middle East
In contrast to the other two cities discussed in this book—Washington, DC, and Amman—Dubai is a city that has been widely studied in the global cities’ literature. There is some debate in the literature as to whether Dubai should itself be considered a global city ranking alongside London, New York, and Tokyo (Brook 2013; Marchal 2004; Pacione 2005); whether it should be seen as located on a trajectory of likely being a future global city, a global city of tomorrow or a “global city becoming” (Shaw and Enhorning 2009); or whether it should be viewed as a classic case of a gateway city that links peripheral regions into global city networks and the core of the world economy (Scholvin, Breul, and Diez 2019; Scholvin 2019a; Scholvin 2019b; Scholvin 2020).
This debate is not that important for the purposes of this book. Certainly, when it comes to the global circulation of ideas such as is happening with the rise and spread of the global youth development complex, Dubai plays a clear gateway, hub, or pivot role, helping spread discourses, policies, and practices produced in global ideas cities like Washington, DC, and disseminating these to the rest of the Middle East and North Africa region. It may be that, in other respects, Dubai plays more of a global than a gateway city role. After all, the global cities literature demonstrates there often is a disjuncture in the type of role different cities play in managing and directing worldwide flows of capital, as compared with ideas, ideology, media, arts, and so on (Appadurai 1996 Yeoh, Huang, and Willis 2000).
Two points can be made clearly about Dubai in relation to its status as a global and/or gateway city. First, the aspiration to become and be internationally recognized as a global city is absolutely central to the social politics of elites in Dubai. “For almost half a century now,” writes Sofie Nilsson and Bryans Mukasa (2015), “Dubai has been pursuing world city status, emerging as a small trading port and fishing village in the 1900s into a major global tourist destination, financial center, and rising real estate powerhouse today.” Dubai’s race to “establish itself as the image of the 21st century global city” is characterized by a “centralized and hyper-entrepreneurial approach” (Acuto 2010). This approach is set by Dubai’s ruler, Muhammad Bin Rachid Mohammed Al-Maktoum, and his “race for excellence.” As Al-Maktoum (2006) writes:
I … conducted a meeting for my ministers in which I asked each ministry to choose one or two indicators from international reports to which they would commit to ranking first in the world by 2021. They were surprised by this demand. Some of them asked me if they could be among the top ten rather than first, and many put together rationales for why this wasn’t possible. I rejected all their excuses because I wanted to break the glass ceiling, they had built for themselves. We are not less than others. Those who are in first place are not more efficient, intelligent, or capable than we are. The ministers finally agreed to take on the challenge (43).
This race to be always number one has led to what Mike Davis (2007, 54) describes as a “frantic quest for hyperbole” in Dubai. The city embraces the performance of “global spectacle” by constructing spectacular infrastructural projects and promoting mega-events that gain global media attention and attract foreign investors, corporations, workers, and tourists” (Short 2004). It also has meant that political and economic elites in Dubai are constantly on the lookout for new “global” ideas, whether in technology, architecture, logistics, education, and so on, that they can bring to the city and embrace as their own. In other words, it is not just that global cities play a key role in facilitating the global circulation of ideas. The aspiration to be a global city can amplify this global circulation of ideas as well.
Second, a key part of this global aspiration in Dubai is to establish the city as the premier gateway between the global economy and the Middle East and North Africa region. In investment and media analysis, “gateway” is one of the most widely used attributes promoted by both outside investors and political and business elites within Dubai. “Gateway between East and West,” “Gateway to the Arabian Gulf,” “Gateway to the African Continent,” “Gateway to the Middle East Market,” Gateway to the Middle East and Central Asia,” and “Gateway to the Emirates” are just some of the phrases used to describe Dubai in this way (Duncan, 2018; Fairservice, 2001; PRNewswire, 2019; Scholvin and Draper, 2012). “Dubai’s location is a gateway into and out of the African continent,” claims Hamad Buamim, CEO of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce. “Historically, Dubai has always been a major transit point for goods and trade flows from Africa,” and today, “global firms looking to do business in Africa can use Dubai as a stable and secure base, and likewise, African firms can use the emirate to reach other global destinations” (Scala 2021, 3). Dubai can lay claim to being a vital gateway to an extensive hinterland that reaches well beyond the immediate Gulf area because of its extraordinary infrastructure, advanced banking sector, free market laws, and economic liberalism. Adam Hanieh (2019, 3) argues that Dubai is now the principal “center for logistics and transport” and “center for service provision and … knowledge distribution” in the Middle East. Dubai has the world’s busiest airport for international passengers (Ulrichsen 2016); while Jebel Ali is considered to be the fourth largest container port in the world (Hanieh 2019). It also has now positioned itself as the “world’s largest humanitarian logistics hub,” serving as a base for the provision of humanitarian aid across the world through its logistics capacities (Hanieh 2019, 246; Ziadah 2019).
Dubai has been a globally oriented and connected city for centuries and has long had a highly liberalized trade-based economy and society. Since the late nineteenth century at least, merchants and workers, as well as goods and ideas, have circulated extensively between the port town and the rest of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean and South Asia (Al-Maktoum 2006). But the transformation of Dubai over the course of the twentieth century from a relatively “unknown Persian Gulf city to the forefront of consciousness in global urbanism” is generally attributed to at least three key factors (Sigler 2013, 625). First, Dubai has long provided an oasis of stability within a region subject to regular and prolonged turmoil. Ahmed Kanna (2007, 1) captures this situation very well: “Before the 1970s, trade in the village was largely limited to re-export of petty commodities like watches, house appliances and gold. After the oil boom and the ensuing events, Dubai became a veritable island of stability in an ocean of political turmoil. By the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and neoliberal restructuring in India and various African nations was guiding the capital ‘freed’ from these countries, increasingly, to Dubai. More capital—financial and human—arrived by way of Iraq, owing to that country’s hideous experiences since 1991.”
Dubai has effectively specialized in connecting nearby regions where free markets have been restricted by social unrest (e.g., Iraq), autocratic leadership (Iran, Saudi Arabia), red tape (India), or a combination of all three (former USSR) (Fleming and Hayuth 1994). Second, Dubai occupies a key geostrategic location on the Persian Gulf that has long made it pivotal for both old (British) and new (American) colonialist and neocolonialist interests in security and protecting vital trade routes and oil supplies (Coles and Walsh 2010; Hanieh 2019; Kanna 2011; Zahlan 2016). Today, the United States not only uses Dubai as a key site for its foreign policy negotiations in the Gulf region but also as the home for a large American naval base (IDSWater.com 2020). Third, the discovery of oil led to massive wealth for the emirate and enabled a systematic and highly successful policy of Dubai’s political leadership to deploy their oil riches into diversifying their economy beyond oil into post-industrial service and knowledge industry development in sectors from finance and banking to tourism and luxury consumption to international higher education to export zone manufacturing (Buckley and Hanieh 2014; Ewers 2017; James 2008; Peterson 2009; Reed 2006). Today, only a small fraction of Dubai’s revenues come from oil. Oil production, which once constituted more than 50 percent of the Dubai economy, now contributes only 1 percent (Pohl 2004).
All this has given Dubai a distinctly global appeal. The city state now boasts of having five times more foreign owned company headquarters (at least 1,300 companies in total) than any other country in the Middle East (Intelligence FDI 2013). Dubai is highly attractive to rich and powerful property elites and global high net worth individuals (Citi Bank and Knight Frank 2010; Moonen and Clark 2013). The city has attracted leading global petroleum companies and many industry expatriates (Hanieh 2019). It also has attracted the attention, interest, and engagement of the youth development complex that has been spreading across the Middle East since the late 1990s. As is the case for global political and economic actors in other sectors, for the network of nonprofit institutions, donor foundations, state agencies, and multinational corporations that comprise the youth development complex, it is the particular combination of financial, social, and symbolic capital or power that may be found in Dubai that has been central to the role the city has come to play in this complex as a key gateway, hub, or pivot city.
The Youth Development Complex Scales Up to the MENA Region
Injaz UAE (United Arab Emirates) set up its headquarters in Dubai’s Knowledge Park in 2006, one year after it had established its new partnership with the Dubai-based Young Arab Leaders (personal interview with Soraya El Salti, July 2010). As in Jordan, Injaz was able to link into a larger social and educational reform project in Dubai, known as Emiratization, that had been launched in the late 1990s in response to local complaints that Dubai’s own citizens often were being excluded from the rapid economic development underway in the city state at the time, and that seemed to be benefiting a mushrooming population of Western expat workers, instead. Some have claimed there is only one Emirati national for every fifty expatriates working in Dubai’s private sector; and surveys of private sector employers in Dubai have found that employers tend to view local workers as lacking the productivity, quality, and efficiency of foreign workers (Mohammad 2013; Randeree 2009; Simpson 2020). Emiratization involved securing commitments from private companies operating in Dubai to employ a certain number or proportion of local citizens, while at the same time working to ensure that Dubai citizens were provided with the education and training that would meet the needs and demands of these employers (Mohammad 2013). Injaz’s role in this larger project was to focus on schools in Dubai, where it was responsible for developing entrepreneurial and leadership skills in Dubai’s school-age children, from an early age onward (Al-Ali 2008; Kanna 2011; Modarress, Ansari, and Lockwood 2013; Randeree 2009). “It was normal for Injaz to be part of the Emiratization programme, which is about giving nationals employability skills to work in the global economy, and this is what Injaz did in Jordan, this is the ethos of Injaz,” explains Khaled El Saheb, the deputy director of Injaz Al Arab (personal interview, September 2006). The Emiratization plan opened the schools in Dubai for Injaz to train children and youth in employability skills as of 2006.
However, despite its involvement with the Emiratization reform project, Injaz’s principal rationale for being in Dubai was not—unlike its role in Jordan—actually to reach out to engage with local youth in the city state. Rather, it was to establish a close physical proximity and social and financial engagement with Dubai political and business elites, who could support its project of expanding its programming across the Middle East and North Africa region. Even though the Middle East regional headquarters of Injaz—called Injaz Al Arab—remained based in Amman, Jordan, it was Dubai that played the pivotal role in enabling the organization to scale its operations up to encompass the whole of the Middle East (personal interview with Soraya El Salti, July 2010).
Other organizations working in the youth development complex would subsequently follow the lead set by Injaz and open offices in Dubai for much the same set of reasons and purposes. For example, when EFE opened its office in Dubai in 2016 and set up an office in Dubai’s International Humanitarian City, it was not to open just another national chapter of the organization but, rather, its primary hub office for the entire region. “EFE’s UAE Hub,” the organization’s website declares, “serves as a regional base for creating initiatives, partnerships and visibility that will increase youth employment across the Middle East and North Africa” (EFE.org 2019). “It is now that we can claim we have access to all Arab youth,” declares Salvatore Negro, CEO of EFE Europe, for “having an office in Dubai is a key to opening doors in the rest of the Arab world” (personal interview, November 2019).
For the youth development complex’s Middle East expansion agenda, two organizations in Dubai were central, both of which are deeply embedded within the political and economic leadership structure of Dubai: Young Arab Leaders and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Young Arab Leaders, as noted earlier, is a Dubai-based organization established in 2004 that brings together political, business, and civil society leaders from across the Middle East under the banner of a broad “youth empowerment” agenda (YALeaders.org 2014). To this end, YAL links their members with Arab youth, through hosting TV shows, webinars, and face-to-face meetings and workshops. Here, they share advice on how to start a business, succeed in business, and become successful entrepreneurs. YAL provides internships for Arab youth in their members’ own businesses and institutions; they connect youth with mentors in their areas of interests; and they provide scholarships for Arab youth to the Dubai Business School as well as the Olayan School of Business at the American University of Beirut (YAL 2015). When YAL was launched, its board of trustees included Sheikh Mohammed al Al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai; King Abdullah II of Jordan; and Sheikh Selman bin Issa Al Khalifeh, the crown prince of Bahrain (Al-Bawaba 2006).
The organization also is richly supported by grants from multinational corporations with headquarters in Dubai, many of which have executives and senior managers who are themselves members of the Young Arab Leaders and participate actively in its networking functions. The largest of these grants was the creation of Alf Yad (One Thousand Hands) in 2007 as a YAL regional program to support young entrepreneurs with a fund of $27 million, managed by Daman Investment, a Dubai-based corporation (Middle East Company News Wire 2007a). YAL also is supported by Chrysler and Halliburton (both of which have contributed $100,000 each to YAL), as well as McKinsey, Booz, Allen and Hamilton, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Dow Chemicals, Shell, Deloitte, HSBC, Aramex, and Citibank (Gulf News 2007; Middle East Company News Wire 2005a). The American University in Dubai sponsors ten scholarships through YAL for young regional entrepreneurs to study business (Middle East Company News Wire 2005b). In addition to its headquarters in Dubai Internet City, YAL has chapters in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, and Qatar (Gulf News 2008a).
The establishment of the Young Arab Leaders at the 2004 World Economic Forum in the Dead Sea in Jordan marked the growing symbolic centrality of “youth” as a key development discourse in the Middle East, but also its often-remarkable malleability. When YAL was founded, the upper age of its membership was set at thirty-nine years (personal interview with Rami Makhzoumi, April 2007). But as Saeed Al Muntafiq, the first director of YAL and head of Dubai’s Development and Investment Authority, explains, this age cut-off was soon deemed to be premature:
Two years later, we realized that 39 is too short and extended the age of the members to 49. I am 42, I feel young, very young, I never felt younger before.… Exceptions can be made, too, by members of the board to accept young Arabs above 50, and we are thinking about raising it [the upper age limit] to 53.… We discovered that some of the members that are still young and can give so much to the organization were to be out of the organization because they reached the age limit, 49. We thought of a more working definition and 53 seemed reasonable, after all 53 these days is still young, do not you think so? (personal interview, April 2007).
This process of continually reworking and shifting upward the upper age limits of youth until it takes over the greater part of an individual’s working adult life raises the question of why the social category of youth is needed in the first place, and what cultural or ideological work it is doing. Al Muntafiq himself offers some clues: “If YAL is about change and change is about youth, it is hard to make a change, [especially] an ambitious change like YAL sets itself to do, then 49 is reasonable” as an upper age limit of youth (personal interview, November 2006). YAL’s upper age limit for members was thirty-nine in 2005, but was subsequently raised to forty-nine, with a note that exceptions to this cap can be made for individual applications (YALeaders.org 2020). As seen in the context of Amman, embracing an identity of youth enables leading elites to claim an immediate affinity with youth in the Middle East of much younger ages and from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds while also standing in to symbolize desired political, social, and economic goals of change, transformation, development, and modernization.
The second key organization in Dubai for the youth development complex is the Mohammad Ben Rashed Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, a charity targeting youth established by Sheikh Mohammed Al-Maktoum in 2006 with a founding endowment of $10 billion US, said to be “the most generous in the history of the Middle East and the Muslim world,” and one of the “most generous in the history of charities” globally (Gulf News 2007). The foundation is linked to the Dubai government and, hence, most of Dubai’s executive leaders are ex officio members of the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. The CEO of the foundation is Jamal Bin Huwaireb, who was previously minister of education in Dubai (mbrf.ae 2022). As Sheikh Mohammed announced at the inauguration ceremony of the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation (an event attended by King Abdullah II and Queen Rania of Jordan), “the Foundation’s mission is to invest in knowledge and human development, focusing specifically on research, education and promoting equal opportunities for the personal growth and success of our youth” (Black 2007). Through this youth development work, the broader aim of the foundation is to create a “knowledge-based society throughout the region” (Black 2007). Both the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation and Young Arab Leaders work as official sponsors of Injaz in Dubai; and Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation and YAL members serve as directors for Injaz in the city. However, as will be seen, the importance of YAL and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation for Injaz and other organizations in the Middle East youth development complex extends well beyond such ties of overlapping personnel and official sponsorship.
That the offices of EFE, Injaz, the Young Arab Leaders and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation are based in Dubai’s Knowledge Park, the adjacent Dubai Internet City, in Dubai’s International Humanitarian City and International Financial Center respectively is not a coincidence (International Humanitarian City 2021; Emirates News Agency 2017a). After all, these areas represent the globality of Dubai, as well as its role in the Arab region.
Dubai’s International Financial Center (DIFC) was established as a special economic zone in 2004, to serve as the financial hub for Middle East, African, and South Asian markets. The center is home to the headquarters of many large multinational corporations operating out of Dubai, and the offices of 3,644 companies, with over 24,000 employees (DIFC.ae 2021; International Investment 2022). Dubai’s International Humanitarian City is another icon of the globality of Dubai, said to be “the largest humanitarian hub in the world,” and host to a wide range of international organizations such as the United Nations, and nongovernmental organizations, of which EFE is but one example (Emirates News Agency 2017b).
Dubai’s Knowledge Park, created in 2003, is, likewise, said to be the largest cluster of international universities and training centers in the world (Business Wire 2018; Emirates News Agency 2017b). Indeed, the entire mission of Dubai’s Knowledge Park directly echoes the core focus of the youth development complex in the Middle East that has been assembled by Injaz, EFE, and many other linked organizations. As Sheikh Mohammed stated at the opening ceremony of Dubai’s Knowledge Park in 2003, in the Middle East, “one third of the population is under 15 years of age, or more than 50 million people, and will enter the labor market by 2010,” and “by 2020, this figure will increase to 100 million.” To avoid an “explosion in unemployment,” the Middle East region needs to move to become a “knowledge society” that can create millions of new highly skilled jobs and ensure its “burgeoning population” is provided with the skills and knowledge needed to perform these jobs through a rapid reform and improvement of its entire “education system” (Al Karam and Andromeda 2006). The creation of the Knowledge Park and the project of attracting international universities and education and youth development organizations in Dubai form a central component of this greater Middle East knowledge society strategy (Bayut 2020).
As in Amman and Washington, DC, the close spatial proximity of all these organizations facilitates the exchange of ideas in lunches, seminars, coffee breaks, and informal chats in elevators and common areas. Inhabiting the same building as more than three thousand large private sector corporations also facilitates gaining access to funds for these NGOs, one of the main infrastructures for the spread of ideas.
Dubai’s International Financial Center, for example, regularly creates initiatives that seek to foster the exchange of ideas and formation of partnerships between professions working for different organizations and corporations based in the center. In 2006, the International Financial Center launched “a series of capacity building workshops,” which were then transformed into the Dubai International Financial Center’s Education Center in 2007. The focus of this education center is on “strategy, leadership, finance, marketing, human resources and governance” (Middle East Company News Wire 2006b, 2007c). The center provides training, run by the London School of Economics as well as the Queen’s School of Business, for YAL members as well as regional youth on scholarships provided through Injaz and Emiratization programs (Middle East Company News Wire 2007c). In 2021, Sheikh Mohammad launched the Dubai International Financial Center Innovation Hub, which acts as an incubator for start-up companies. Some of the young entrepreneurs invited to participate in the hub are sponsored through Injaz, in conjunction with its partnership with the Young Arab Leaders (International Finance 2021).
The Networked Power of Dubai
“If it were not for the Young Arab Leaders in Dubai,” says Soraya El Salti, the first director of Injaz Al Arab, “it would have been impossible [for Injaz] to reach the high profile international figures that could open up the ministries [of education] and schools, and help us start NGOs in countries where there were no laws for that, such as KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]” (personal interview, July 2010). Indeed, the opening of an Injaz office in Saudi Arabia is testament to the importance of Injaz’s relationship with the Young Arab Leaders. The youth organization was the first foreign NGO allowed to operate across the country and the first NGO given access to schools through an MOU with the Ministry of Education (Bashraheel 2010; Al-Bawaba 2010a; Al-Bawaba 2010b). Salti explains how Injaz was able to launch its youth entrepreneurship programs in Saudi Arabia:
After trying various channels for three years in Saudi Arabia … we finally found the perfect champion, Abdul Kareem Abu Al-Nasr [a member of the Young Arab Leaders and CEO of the National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia]. When we flew to Saudi Arabia … to sign a partnership with the National Commercial Bank to start Injaz officially in five Jeddah schools, he sent us to meet the bank’s state-of-the-art CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] team. It boggled our minds to find such excellence and to hear about the bank’s hunt for strategic solutions to the issue of the unemployment of youth in the country. Pleased with the cause, they began championing [Injaz] by sponsoring the pilot in two schools of the JA Master Entrepreneur Class. Our host Al-Nasr summed up his feelings passionately, “What a great mission to unite us Arabs together for the sake of our youth!” (personal interview, September 2013).
When Injaz Al Arab was first launched in 2001, Salti explains, “We struggled to spread the ideas and find the connections” and gain a foothold in other countries beyond its pilot chapter in Amman. It was only after Injaz Al Arab was adopted by the Dubai-based Young Arab Leaders that there was a sharp increase in the number of countries and students across the Arab region participating in Injaz programs. “A year after the adoption by YAL of our organization, we started chapters in almost every country in the [Arab] region,” says Salti, “and the number of youths we served grew from around forty to more than eighty-four thousand” (personal interview, September 2013). In fact, the only new chapter established before the connection between Injaz and the YAL was set up was the chapter in Lebanon, which was sponsored by the Rotary Club in Beirut (Injaz-Lebanon.org 2022 a, 2022b).
As a hub city, Dubai attracts business, civil society, and political elites from across the Arab world; and global NGOs and multinational corporations often choose to situate their regional headquarters in the city. Both YAL and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation have sought to capitalize on these social networks, holding regular forums, workshops, award ceremonies, and networking events for their elite members and supporters in Dubai. It is at these events that youth development organizations like Injaz are able to meet and develop relationships with partners and sponsors who can enable their expansion to new locations throughout the Arab region. “Aside from Lebanon and Dubai, every single chapter of the fourteen [Injaz Al Arab national] chapters were started through YAL members we have met during the YAL forums and networked with,” says Injaz Al Arab’s Soraya Salti (personal interview, September 2013).
Relationships with members of the Young Arab Leaders and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation help facilitate the regional expansion of the youth development complex in a number of different ways. In part, this is done through facilitating introductions to and brokering relationships with key leaders in state governments and ministries of education. At the first YAL forum in Dubai in 2005, Sheikh Mohammed al Al-Maktoum announced the partnership with Injaz: “The Arab world, over the ages, has made significant contributions in the sciences, literature and the arts and we must do everything that is necessary to ensure that as a people and a society we can continue to make even greater contributions that will both benefit our own region and the world over. We are confident that YAL and our partnerships with groups like Injaz can provide much support to this effort” (Al-Bawaba 2005, 7).
In this same forum, the princess of Bahrain, Sheikha Hassa bint Khalifa Al-Khalifa, directly echoed Al-Maktoum’s words, stating: “We are delighted to gather together in order to underscore our support and commitment to the mission and goals set forth by YAL and mirrored by Injaz that have been created to support our youth and help drive the advancement in the Arab world.… I am not only pleased to become a member of YAL, but also by the cooperation that will ensue between YAL and Injaz in Bahrain and other countries (Al-Bawaba 2005).
In part, this support is by directly sponsoring or partnering with organizations like Injaz, contributing funding, material resources, and staff volunteer hours to support youth development and entrepreneurship programs on the ground. For example, Injaz Bahrain was invited to showcase their entrepreneurship program within the Global Entrepreneurship Week organized by Young Arab Leaders in Bahrain. YAL members were invited to come to the Bahraini School, where students “were given the opportunity to present their own budding business ideas and have them reviewed by entrepreneurs” (Al-Bawaba 2010b, 6). Many of these YAL members later became funders for Injaz. In part, it is by lending a stamp of approval, legitimacy, status, and importance to the youth development work being done by Injaz and other similar organizations. “By having high profile businessmen as our sponsors,” says Khaled el Saheb, a deputy director of Injaz Al Arab, “we get many others joining it, as it becomes a form of prestige, as Injaz is sponsored by royals, like the Queen [Rania of Jordan], the Al-Maktoums, and the Al Thanis of Qatar” (personal interview, October 2013).
It is not just the Young Arab Leaders that has played a pivotal role in enabling the expansion of Injaz and other similar youth development organizations throughout the Arab world, but the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, as well. As Injaz Al Arab deputy director Khaled El Saheb explains: “The relationship between Injaz and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation is an organic one. They both work for the same end, promoting entrepreneurship and innovation for the knowledge society. They both have the same governance set up, with public private partnerships. It has been the case for every single Memorandum of Understanding that Al-Maktoum signs with [private sector] corporations involving youth training or teacher training, that Injaz gets involved at the local level” (personal interview, October 2020).
In 2008, for example, the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation helped broker a new relationship between Intel Corporation and ministries of education in sixteen different Arab countries that created a partnership that would enable Intel’s Teach program, which trains teachers how to better integrate computers and technology into their classrooms, to expand throughout the Arab region with an aim of eventually reaching two million teachers. The Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation then invited Injaz Al Arab to provide youth enterprise education in primary and secondary schools in these same countries, as well as later becoming involved in the teacher training initiative itself. Conversely, Intel agreed to contribute one thousand hours of its own staff time to provide volunteers for Injaz’s school-based entrepreneurship workshops. Intel Corporate Affairs Group Director for the Middle East Ferruh Gurtas highlighted the value to Intel of the partnership with Al-Maktoum and Injaz, stating: “We are excited about the possibilities of reaching millions of Arab children through the Intel Teach Programme and firmly believe that organizations such as Intel, Injaz and MBR Knowledge Foundation have a key role to play in societal transformation. Young people are the key to solving global challenges.… That is why Intel is directly involved today in education programmes, advocacy, and technology access to inspire tomorrow’s innovators” (Middle East Company News Wire 2009a, 2009b).
A similar pattern followed in a partnership between the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation and Phillips Corporation in 2008 to create and promote a network of Arab entrepreneurs in the Middle East. Once the partnership had been set up, the MBR Knowledge Foundation involved Injaz Al Arab in the provision of enterprise training workshops. In the words of Rima Khalaf, CEO of the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, the “partnership with Phillips is in line with the Foundation’s priority to build a network of key stakeholders comprising major corporations, NGOs, associations, and education institutions across the Arab world for the purpose of encouraging and supporting Arab entrepreneurs” (Middle East Company News Wire 2008). One of the central NGOs in this network was Injaz.
The Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation also has helped Injaz Al Arab develop close working links with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in the Arab region, which, in turn, has helped Injaz build its legitimacy in working with schools, universities, and Arab governments. The MBR Knowledge Foundation has had a series of partnerships with the UNDP to train teachers in countries throughout the Arab region, including Oman, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco, and Algeria, and also to promote projects of youth and women’s empowerment (Maktoum Foundation 2011). InjazAl Arab’s Khaled El Saheb describes how Injaz is then brought into the picture: “The Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation helped Injaz Al Arab to access [government] ministries of education throughout the Arab region. The Foundation then sets up an agreement with the UN to train teachers in technology, or empower women, and then by default, Injaz, who is already present in these institutions, takes the lead in such training” (personal interview, October 2020).
It was the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation that nominated Injaz to be part of the United Nations’ Global Compact to work on promoting the UN’s sustainable development goals throughout the Arab region, which is mostly comprised of a voluntary network of private sector CEOs (Business Wire 2018). Injaz became one of the only NGOs in the Arab world to be directly involved with the Global Compact, giving it high status access to both corporate and state leaders throughout the region. Indeed, it was partly this involvement with the UN that also helped Injaz to finally gain direct access to schools in Saudi Arabia, after years of trying to negotiate such access without success (Business Wire 2018).
As a result of the sponsorship and support from the Young Arab Leaders and Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation in Dubai, Injaz has grown from its first pilot operations set up in Amman in 1999 to become one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the Arab World working on youth development issues just two decades later. According to Injaz, it is now “the largest non-profit organization dedicated to overcoming unemployment in the [Arab] region” (Injaz Al Arab 2022). Much of this expansion occurred over a five-year period immediately after Young Arab Leaders adopted the organization in 2005. Injaz opened new chapters in Kuwait and Oman in 2006; in Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in 2007; in Yemen in 2009; Egypt and Tunisia in 2010, and Algeria in 2019. By 2022, Injaz had partnerships with more than four thousand two hundred schools and 345 universities in the Arab region, along with four thousand companies who provide eighty-eight thousand private sector volunteers to help run its youth enterprise workshops and seminars. It had worked directly with more than four million Arab children and youth (Injaz Al Arab 2022). Injaz Al Arab states it has been ranked among the top two hundred NGOs worldwide for the past several years and has been awarded numerous international prizes for entrepreneurship and leadership (Injaz Al Arab 2020).
In most of the countries in which it works, Injaz has signed official MOU agreements with national ministries of education (or other related ministries). This means Injaz does not work as an outside visitor to schools and universities in the region but is an integral part of national education systems, working from the inside as a partner of the state, charged with providing core elements of the curriculum, teacher training, and student education on behalf of the government. In 2017, for example, the ministry of education in Qatar signed an MOU with Injaz Qatar to establish a “partnership and continuous cooperation between both parties and to support and to implement the foundation’s programmes in the schools of the country”; more specifically, Injaz would be empowered to “strengthen the life skills, spread financial and economic awareness, support entrepreneurship, achieve readiness for university studies and encourage joining the labour market” for students in “public and private preparatory and high schools in the State of Qatar,” with the aim of preparing “world citizens that serve the civil and economic needs of the State of Qatar and excel as members and individuals of the society” (Peninsula 2017). Similar MOUs were signed between Injaz and the ministries of education in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Injaz Al Arab 2016; Injaz Al Arab 2019). Due to the embedding of Injaz through these kinds of arrangements with states, the boundaries between where the work of the state ends and the nongovernmental organization begins is becoming increasingly blurred.
Injaz and the rest of the youth development complex have provided Arab policymakers and corporate and educational leaders with a whole linked set of concepts centered around youth to make sense of the connection between national populations, education, and the economy: youth bulge, youth unemployment, youth development, youth entrepreneurship, youth leadership, and so on. Almost all this regional success has been directly enabled by the Young Arab Leaders, the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, and their leading members. The MOUs Injaz has signed with ministries of education in the Gulf States, for example, as former Injaz Al Arab deputy director Khaled El Saheb explains, has “of course been facilitated by Al-Maktoum’s adoption of Injaz Al Arab, and his involvement in teacher training in most of the Arab countries as part of the Foundation’s focus on [developing the regional] knowledge economy” (personal interview, October 2020).
While the expansion of Injaz across the Arab region came through its official adoption by the Young Arab Leaders, EFE was not officially adopted by YAL, but similarly made its way to many Arab countries through the direct support and sponsorship of individual YAL members. When EFE set up its regional office for the Middle East and North Africa in Dubai in 2016, it did so under the royal patronage of Sheikh Nahyan Mubarak Al Nahyan, minister of culture, youth, and social development for the United Arab Emirates, and Sheikha Jawaher Bint Mohammed Al Qasimi, wife of the ruler of Sharjah and chair of the Supreme Council for Family Affairs (Zawya 2016). EFE’s high-profile launch event in Dubai was held in the Burj Khalifa, with over two hundred business, civil society, and government leaders in attendance. In the ceremony, Sheikh Nahyan said:
It is a great pleasure to celebrate the launch of the regional hub of Education for Employment (EFE) Program in the UAE. The vision of EFE focuses on the greatest need in the Arab World—to empower youth with skills and opportunities to build careers that create a better future for themselves, their communities, and the world. EFE’s dedication to the employment of young men and women coincides with our national commitment to building and maintaining a knowledge based economy and achieving full employment for our young people.… As a country concerned about the economic and social health of our region, the United Arab Emirates is grateful for what EFE has accomplished. We are pleased that the UAE will provide assistance, training, expertise, and network to support EFE affiliates in the Middle East and North Africa (Zawya 2016).
EFE created a Network Affiliates program that established formal partnerships with leading corporations and foundations in the United Arab Emirates. It was these partnerships that often were instrumental in enabling the organization’s expansion to other countries around the Middle East and North African region.
Though smaller than Injaz, EFE now operates in eight Arab countries—Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates—where more than one hundred and ten thousand youth have participated directly in its job placement and entrepreneurship programs (Marwan 2016). EFE’s expansion to these countries “grew exponentially after 2016,” notes EFE CEO Salvatore Negro, “partly because the economic situation required more efforts to train youth [in the region], but mostly because the UAE hub and its office in Dubai gave us access to the networking and partnerships we needed to expand” (personal interview, November 2019). As Malika Maasari, CEO of EFE Morocco explains, the EFE regional hub office in Dubai has been vital for supporting the work of EFE in Morocco, since “many MNCs [multinational corporations] have their regional offices and even their global offices in Dubai, and then open branches in Morocco later” (Zawya 2016). If partnerships can be set up between EFE and these corporations at their headquarters in Dubai, it makes it that much easier to construct parallel and subsidiary private sector partnerships with the same corporations in different chapters as well. For example, funds for EFE Morocco from Boeing, Mastercard, and CitiBank were secured through the EFE headquarter in Dubai (MCA Morocco 2020).
The Financial Power of Dubai
Ideas, even at their most compelling and intrinsically persuasive, always require an infrastructure of some kind to be able to travel around the world, and infrastructures need to be supported by what are often significant amounts of material and financial resources. In this, the youth development complex in the Middle East is no different from any other network engaged in the dissemination of ideas, discourses, policies, and practices. Funding and resources are essential. Though the initial funding for many of the organizations engaged in the youth development complex came from different agencies of the US government, there was a need, as discussed in previous chapters, to diversify and expand organizational funding streams beyond this original source, for a number of reasons. US government funding tends to shift with changing national foreign policy priorities, and, thus, often comes in short, intense, but discontinuous spurts of investment. Also, US government funding and sponsorships are a distinct liability for the organizations working in the youth development complex in the Arab world and, thus, securing regional financial and material support was essential, not just for operational needs but for building local legitimacy, as well. Further, since a central claim in the youth development discourses being propagated by organizations like Injaz and EFE is the value and necessity of direct private sector engagement and partnership for reforming education systems and empowering youth, securing their own extensive networks of private sector partnerships was both materially and ideologically important. For meeting these pressing financial needs and interests, Dubai was pivotal for enabling the youth development complex to be able to afford its rapid expansion across the Middle East region.
Dubai acts, in general, as a financier to the Arab world and regions well beyond, and its political and business leaders have long clearly recognized finance as being a central tool of building regional and global power and influence. Dubai is sometimes referred to as the Gulf Tiger for its hegemony in trade, technology, and finance (Chen 2022). In 2003, the city state created the Dubai International Financial Center, a multibillion-dollar real estate development consisting of a clustering of fourteen tower centers around a fifty-story high headquarters, and staffed by teams of financial analysts and lawyers deliberately headhunted around the world from organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Dubai International Financial Center is a free trade zone with no corporate income taxes, along with other business friendly benefits. It has been successful in attracting banks and financial companies from around the world to set up headquarters in Dubai, where they provide financial services throughout the Middle East, North and East Africa, and South Asia (Al Jabri 2012; Hanieh 2019; Krishnan 2018; Strong and Himber 2009; Will 2017). Both political and business elites in Dubai use their financial wealth to support extensive philanthropic ventures that support civil society institutions and projects that align with their own more general interests, ideologies, and agendas.
The establishment of the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation with a $10 billion endowment is a clear example of this; and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation gives the ruling family of Dubai enormous reach and leverage over youth and other civil society projects throughout the Arab world. Other philanthropic ventures include Dubai Cares, the Emirates Foundation, the House of Charity Foundation, and Noor Dubai (Zaatari 2017).
Likewise, financial and other multinational companies based in Dubai also engage extensively in corporate philanthropy in the region—something facilitated by the passing of a new law in Dubai in 2018 enabling the creation of foundations for charitable purposes in the International Financial Center (Salem 2020). Sometimes they do this in partnership with or through supporting organizations like the Young Arab Leaders and Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Indeed, both these organizations work not just as social networks but as vital networks of financial capital linking together the state with the private sector and civil society. In other instances, private sector corporations set up their philanthropic and corporate social responsibility projects, and/or directly partner with and support independent organizations, such as Injaz, EFE, and other entities working in the regional youth development complex.
Almost all the partnerships described in the previous section that were either directly set up with or facilitated by the Young Arab Leaders and the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation for Injaz, EFE, and other organizations in the youth development complex have a direct and significant financial component. But beyond this, Dubai—both as a concentrated city space of global capital and as an intentionally organized social network in the form of entities like the Young Arab Leaders and Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation—offers Injaz Al Arab, EFE, and the youth development complex access to the regional headquarters of large numbers of multinational corporations, who also themselves enter into direct relationships with these youth development organizations.
Injaz Al Arab, for example, has two categories of private sector partnerships: Main Partners and Partners. Main Partners adopt a particular program or set of programs run by Injaz, and provide funding, volunteers, and, often, other infrastructural support over an extended period of time (typically for ten years or more). The Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, thus, has adopted Injaz’s high school–based “Be Entrepreneurial” program in all the chapters Injaz operates throughout the Arab world (Injaz Al Arab 2015). The Honkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC, likewise, has adopted Injaz’s “More Than Money” program—which teaches children “how to learn the significance of money management”—in all of Injaz’s Arab region chapters (Injaz Al Arab 2015). As Abu Jaber, Kwauk, and Robinson (2016, 11–12) note, a central factor in Injaz’s effective scaling up of its programming throughout the Arab region has been its model of seeking not just financial support but partnership and sponsorship arrangements with corporations:
A key aspect of INJAZ’s model was its leveraging of the larger business community in its programming. INJAZ’s private-public alliance … was motivated by more than INJAZ just seeking the cash contributions of companies interested in engaging in corporate social responsibility. Instead, private sector partners are involved on many different levels, adding value to INJAZ’s programming by transferring their business knowledge and skills to students as mentors, investors (in young entrepreneurs), donors, and inspirational leaders.… To help ensure the sustainability of INJAZ’s operations, INJAZ packaged its programs in ways that made it more appealing to the private sector to not only help sponsor its programs in schools but also to adopt schools and programs as their own.
Of the seventeen Main Partners Injaz Al Arab had in 2020, thirteen have their Arab region headquarters in Dubai, including not just BNY Mellon and HSBC, but other companies such as Mastercard, MetLife, Microsoft, CITI, and JP Morgan (Injaz Al Arab 2021). Injaz Al Arab also has private sector Partners, who do not adopt specific programs but support the work of Injaz in the Arab region through general operating grants. Once again, of the twenty-eight current Partners of Injaz Al Arab, twenty have their Arab region headquarters in Dubai. These include companies such as Bechtel, Deloitte, Marriott, Exxon Mobil, and McKinsey (Injaz Al Arab 2015).
What we find here, then, are global and regional circuits of financial capital directly intersecting with and supporting global and regional circuits of ideas and discourses central to the reproduction and extension of global capitalism in the Arab world. This has significant implications for understanding how ideas circulate in the global and regional political economy. Dubai becomes the center or pivot where the youth development complex really starts to move beyond its origins in agendas that often were set out and led by different agencies of the US government, as discussed in chapter one. The US government continued to play a dominant role in the piloting of youth development discourses, policies, and programs in Amman, Jordan, through the interventions of USAID and the US embassy, as was seen in chapter two.
But while the US government, without doubt, has a strong presence in Dubai—and, indeed, the close relationship between the US government and Dubai is a major factor in enabling Dubai’s role as a pivot or hub city for the regional dissemination of ideas, discourses, policies, and programs related to youth development—Dubai really is the place where other dominant actors start to take hold of youth development discourse and propel it forward as part of their own agendas. It is the financial wealth and support of state and business elites in Dubai that gives the youth development complex the material resources it requires to be able to expand across the Middle East and North Africa region, but also a presence that stands well apart from and beyond the US government. The reason, of course, youth development discourse is so readily taken up by these actors is that, as discussed in the introduction and throughout this book, it is a discourse that directly supports these actors’ individual and collective interests, ideologically and politically, but also materially and financially. Of course, whether and how youth participants in these programs blindly take up these agendas and interests is quite a different question.
The Symbolic Power of Dubai
Finally, in addition to its social and financial capital, Dubai and the youth development complex offer one another important symbolic capital that each is able to mobilize in pursuit of their shared and individual interests and agendas. Symbolic power refers to the “power of constructing reality” and “making people see and believe,” or the power “to intervene in the course of events, to influence the actions of others and indeed to create events, by means of the production and transmission of symbolic forms” (Bourdieu 1991, 166–170; Thompson 1995, 17). As Graham Meikle (2009, 4) observes: “Institutions such as the media, universities, schools, government, and religious organizations are all in the symbolic power business.… Their work is the exercise of symbolic power—the creation and distribution of symbolic content; the exchange of shaped information; the expression of cultural skills and values.… Symbolic power is the power to name, to define, to endorse, to persuade.”
At the most mundane level, Dubai provides the youth development complex with invaluable source material that it can produce and use in its youth enterprise and business education workshops to inspire and entice youth throughout the Arab region. What Dubai offers to youth curriculum developers in Injaz and other similar organizations is the combination of Arab location, origins, and identity with clear economic success stories of astonishing levels of wealth and well-being, along with close connections with centers of economic and political power throughout the world. Indeed, there are few other cities in the Arab world that could provide better source material for supporting the work of the youth development complex. For programs that seek to teach entrepreneurship skills and habits to youth, Dubai is the epitome of the “entrepreneurial city” (Harvey 1988; Harvey 1989). Dubai’s leaders are well aware of this image and eager to cultivate and promote it. As Sheikh Mohammed al Al-Maktoum (2019, 46) writes in My Story: “Today, many Arabs see our country’s development as the most successful in the region. In annual surveys, thousands of young Arabs report that they wish their countries would follow our nation’s model which constitutes a true beacon of hope. Many aspire to move to the UAE so they can achieve their dreams and realize their ambitions. Today, Dubai has become a global economic icon.”
Injaz Al Arab and other organizations in the youth development complex, thus, make extensive use of the personal and professional success stories of members of the Young Arab Leaders, and other political and business leaders in Dubai, as the source material for their trainings, to provide inspiration and motivation and a sense of possibility and opportunity to Arab youth. For example, at the Injaz Career Forum in Dubai in 2021, Fahad Al Banna, senior manager of Dubai Port, presented the story of Dubai Port as a success story of entrepreneurship, claiming: “Dubai Port was an idea, it was a passion, it was a vision and now we are a huge global company.” “If you have an idea, do not let the idea be defeated, stay positive, stay optimistic, persevere and work hard,” Al Banna said, “if the first idea does not work, the second idea or the third will” (Al Banna 2021).
It is ironic that Dubai Port is heavily funded by the state, suggesting there is a missing story not being told here about public sector intervention and support. We use these stories, says Injaz UAE CEO Razan Al Bashiti (2021), to tell youth that “if they could do it, you can too, you just need to persevere, take risks, be open to change, and learn how to work in the global economy.” These success stories, of course, do not talk about the elite social background and cultural capital of many of the individuals profiled, who are, instead, presented as being entirely self-made, as the story of Dubai Port above illustrates. In addition to this curricular representation, Dubai offers youth organizations a rich array of business networking events and spectacular global events to which they are also able to invite young workshop participants to attend.
Conversely, the framework of youth being widely promoted by the youth development complex has been deeply appealing to political and business leaders in Dubai for representing and articulating their own visions of the role of Dubai, both regionally and on a global stage. Dubai is, thus, not just presented by its leaders as a global city, a gateway city, an enterprising city, a city of spectacle, and a city of finance and business. It also is presented as a young city, a city of and for youth, a city of the future (Khan 2021). This is apparent in the development of the YAL organization itself; but it is further manifest in many other ways, as well. Dubai’s political and economic leaders market the city as being “young and tech savvy,” a city that is appealing to young professionals, because “it is the most progressive place in the Gulf where men and women can walk freely without control,” where “there is infrastructure that supports youthful life,” and where “it bridges East and West, attracting businesses from a range of European and Middle Eastern markets”(Asda’a 2020; Masoudi 2020). Sheikh Mohammed Al Al-Maktoum claims the United Arab Emirates “was established on ‘young ideas,’ ” and that it is “the youth ‘who manage the ambitions of its peoples.’ ” He says, further: “From exploring space to managing our nuclear reactors, and establishing sustainable economic development, we believe that the ideas and energy of the youth are the fuel that moves us in the journey of achieving all our goals.… Our trust in them [youth] is immeasurable, as they continue the legacy of our forefathers” (Khaleej Times 2020; Khaleej Times 2021).
In 2019, Dubai launched a new Youth Hub, which it characteristically called “the best Youth Hub in the world.” The Youth Hub is intended to be “a home for Youth to connect them to people, power and potential,” and “to connect Youth to each other, bounce thoughts back and forth, and launch-spring their ideas.” The Hub was launched because “the chief belief of the UAE leadership … is that young people can design the solutions to our greatest challenges” (Youth Hub 2020; Khaleej Times 2021).
There is another sense, as well, in which the symbolic power of Dubai plays a vital role in supporting and enabling the expansion and embedding of the youth development complex throughout the Arab region. Dubai has actively sought to become not just a primary economic and financial center for the Arab world but a knowledge center or knowledge hub as well (Khaleej Times 2021). In part, this has focused on the construction of Dubai’s Knowledge Park, the successful attempts to attract internationally renowned universities and educational institutions to set up branch campuses and offices in Dubai, and a high profile project of attracting and retaining the top intellectual and cultural talents from around the world (dubbed by Sheikh Mohammed Al-Maktoum as “Brain Regain,” to counter the “brain drain” that afflicts many countries in the Arab world (Al-Maktoum 2014). One consequence of this has been ready and easy access for the youth development complex to university campuses, educational institutions, and companies, and curriculum and pedagogy developers in the city of Dubai itself—some of whom end up working in partnership with Injaz, EFE, and other youth development organizations. In 2017, for example, EFE as well as Injaz Al Arab, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Cornell University’s branch campus, based in the Knowledge Park in Dubai, to work together to train people to work in the hotel industry, as part of the Tahseen program funded by Marriott International (Arab News 2016).
But Dubai also has sought to become a knowledge center or hub for the Arab region by producing knowledge and ideas explicitly about and for the Arab world that can inspire and guide the future development of the entire region, in the model of Dubai itself. “Man’s development depends on the power of his ideas and his ability to spread them from one person to another across deserts, continents and oceans,” Sheikh Mohammed al Al-Maktoum has declared. “Science and knowledge” are fervently embraced and promoted by the ruler of Dubai, “as they are the sole, constant, dominant weapons” in life (Al-Maktoum 2020). This project has been led by the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, which changed its name in 2014 to the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, and has produced, over the past decade and a half, a series of Arab Knowledge Reports (AKR): the Arab Knowledge Report 2009: Towards Productive Intercommunication for Knowledge; the Arab Knowledge Report 2011: Preparing Future Generations for the Knowledge Society; and the Arab Knowledge Report 2014: Youth and Localisation of Knowledge (Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation 2009; Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation 2011; Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation 2014). The Arab Knowledge Reports are modelled on the Arab Human Development Report series launched by the United Nations Development Program in 2000; and, indeed, not only are they produced in a partnership between the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation and the United Nations Development Program, the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation recruited the founder of the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) series, Rima Khalaf, to serve as its CEO in 2008–2009 and help launch its own Arab Knowledge Report series (Gulf News 2008a). In effect, what Dubai has tried to do as a knowledge hub for the region is to take ideas and discourses about the Arab world that originated elsewhere—and especially in the United States and North America—and repackage these as its own ideas and discourses, which are then re-exported to the rest of the Arab region. The Arab Knowledge Reports have been a successful enterprise, with millions of downloads and extensive media coverage; these reports also are now widely cited in media, policy, and academic studies of the Arab world as providing vital source statistics and other material (Pagliani 2010). In 2014, the UN general secretary praised the report and the leadership role of Dubai in promoting knowledge economy (United Nations 2014).
The Arab Knowledge Reports produced by the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation take the work and ideas of the youth development complex and extend them to a wider audience. The first Arab Knowledge Report, published in 2009, profiled the Princess Basma Centre for Youth Resources in Amman, which has worked as the national partner of the International Youth Foundation since 2004, as a “pioneering institution and shining example” of the kinds of development projects most needed for the Arab world, noting its focus on “youth programmes” and its “creative and empowering curricula” (Maktoum Foundation 2009, 84–85). The second Arab Knowledge Report, published in 2011, likewise pointed to the work Injaz was doing in promoting large-scale ICT education across the Arab region. “The programmes Injaz and Nateza enabled approximately 15,000 students and 150,000 men and women working in the education fields to benefit from the subsidy offered by the Telecommunication infrastructure fund to cover parts of the costs of computer acquisition,” the report noted, and “the number of Injaz programme beneficiaries is expected to reach 50,700 students by the end of 2014” (Maktoum Foundation 2011, 414).
But it was the third Arab Knowledge Report, published in 2014, where the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation came to embrace fully the centrality of the youth development model for the Arab world as a whole. Here, we are told that “Arab youth are the main pillar” for “establishing the knowledge society” in “every nation and the most important resource to invest in for achieving integrated and sustainable development” (Maktoum Foundation 2014, 3). Arab youth “are the most powerful age group in society, with the greatest impact on determining the overall developmental course and trends as well as on instilling change and hope for progress in the Arab future” (3). The report observed that “the last two decades have witnessed a significant increase in youth institutions,” as “many specialised youth organisations and institutions concerned with youth affairs have emerged in many Arab countries” (166). In its final, concluding chapter, the report argued that “building national institutions for the integration of the youth” was one of the most important priorities for the future development of the Arab world. It called for public-private partnerships to create “developmental institutions” that would: “grant the youth the opportunities to deal with an informal education and training system, enabling them to obtain degrees and experiences that the government and the private sector acknowledge. These would act as systems that motivate integration and positive participation … that address the development of entrepreneurship and respond to the local needs of the youth … [and] that provide information about the labor market, guidelines for career paths, knowledge of available job opportunities, especially in the private sector, as well as the requirements for obtaining these opportunities” (198–199).
In other words, the series of Arab Knowledge Reports produced by the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations Development Program, effectively lead up to a call for all Arab governments, as well as international development organizations operating in the region, to support and engage with the discourse, policies, and programs developed by the youth development complex in Jordan, Dubai, and beyond. In 2015, UNESCO took the 2014 Arab Knowledge Report as the basis for developing knowledge societies throughout the Arab region, noting the report’s emphasis on the importance of “integrating youth in the development process” and ensuring that “young women and men, as key social innovators and drivers of change, should be central contributors” to the establishment of these societies (Emirates News Agency 2015).
At the same time, the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation’s Arab Knowledge Reports link this youth development discourse with a parallel, overlapping, and wider set of ideas, discourses, policies, and programs that center on the political and ideological project of developing a knowledge society and economy throughout the Arab region. The Arab Knowledge Reports promoted the concept of an Arab Knowledge Index, according to which all Arab countries can be measured and ranked in terms of how far along they are in terms of becoming knowledge economies. The index focuses on the key areas of education, research and innovation, information and communication technology, and governance (El-Khoury 2015). Not surprisingly, Dubai comes out at the top of the Arab Knowledge Index, which reinforces and legitimates its claim to be the model for future development for all other countries in the region (UNDP 2021).
The reports also point to the common set of problems that are claimed to be holding other Arab countries back from developing into full knowledge economies, and which are framed as a series of “gaps,” “lacks,” or “lags” inherent in traditional Arab culture, society, and economy. These include gaps between the private and public sectors, gaps between what the market needs and what education provides, and gaps between the Arab world in general and the rest of the global economy (Abu-Lughod 2009 Sukarieh 2012a). There is something allegedly lacking or wrong with “traditional” “Arab culture” that needs to be fixed. It is in the upbringing of contemporary Arab youth where the Arab Knowledge Reports identify the most pivotal site for the interventions necessary to transform Arab countries into full blown knowledge societies (Abu-Lughod 2009 Sukarieh 2012a). “Traditional upbringing methods are still prevalent” in raising new generations of children and young people in the Arab world, the reports warn, and, as a consequence, “studies and research have found that there are traditional elements that characterize the identity of the Arab youth and affect their visions and priorities” (Maktoum Foundation 2014, 71–73). This traditional Arab culture leads to “personal inertia,” and is “rarely exposed to the forces of change,” and is leading to “a deficiency in the ability of the youth to assume their historical responsibilities in the transfer, localization and employment of knowledge in the Arab region to keep up with global developments” (7). What is needed, then, is a new set of “development cultural policies” that can “renovate culture and values” among Arab youth and “form a mind-set linked to science and modernity among young people” (72). This, of course, is exactly what the youth development complex claims it is seeking to do throughout the Arab world.
What the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation’s Arab Knowledge Reports accomplish, in summary, is to help tie the ideas, discourses, policies, and programs promoted by the youth development complex into a parallel but discrete set of discourses, policies, and programs centered around the ideas of a knowledge economy, a knowledge society, and knowledge-based development being produced and disseminated out of Dubai as a pivotal knowledge hub of and for the Arab world. The Arab Knowledge Report 2014: Youth and Localisation of Knowledge, thus, talks of the importance of what it variously calls “the tetrad of knowledge, globalisation, youth and development” that are “the four dimensions that ought to be integrated in order to ensure success of the transfer and localisation of knowledge and to establish a knowledge-based progressive society,” and elsewhere, the “triad of knowledge, youth, and sustainable development,” or the “triad of financial wealth, human-youth wealth and the global knowledge revolution” (Maktoum Foundation 2014, 25, 189, 198, 205). This, finally, is one of the most important links vital to the successful and effective spread of new ideas and discourses into a particular region of the world. For rather than pushing forward ideas and discourses in isolation, through their engagement with the Al-Maktoum Knowledge Foundation and Young Arab Leaders in Dubai, the youth development complex finds itself working in tandem and direct connection with a related set of ideas and concerns about the development of knowledge-based societies and economies. The ideas and discourses of youth and youth development echo, merge with, and are reinforced by these ideas and discourses of the knowledge economy.
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