Lebanon within the Gulf migration System: Peripheral incorporation and the Limits of labor migration governance alignment

Abstract

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries together constitute a migration hub with regional primacy and global importance. Since the 1970s, rapid growth, development, and oil-linked wealth in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have driven the emergence and evolution of a vast migration system, connected first through flows from Asia and other Arab states and later from sub-Saharan Africa and beyond (Valenta & Jakobsen, 2016). Today, the GCC is the world’s third-largest migration hub, after Europe and North America, and hosts around 10% of the global migrant population (UN DESA, 2024). Given this critical position in regional and global migration patterns, developments in labor migration and migration policy in the GCC can significantly influence and shape understandings of broader migration policy in the Middle East and the Global South (Thiollet, 2024)...