Book Launch | Crystal Ennis | Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies
- Date
- Wednesday 9 April 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden - Room
- Faculty of Law Room
Chair: Emily-Anne Wolff (Leiden University). Introduction by Crystal Ennis.
Discussants: Faisal Hamadah (Maastricht University) and Vineet Thakur (Leiden University).
Followed by drinks.
Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies retells Oman's development story from the perspective of labour instead of the traditional focus on oil. Focusing on the experiences of workers, jobseekers, and the governance of labour markets, Crystal A. Ennis offers a fresh perspective on regional development and rentier neoliberalism in the Gulf. Highlighting Oman's position within global capitalism, Ennis makes a compelling case for de-exceptionalising the Gulf, arguing that the region's labour markets are global and subject to similar pressures as other global economies. Moving beyond oil also allows Ennis to focus on the social conditions of Oman, where over sixty four percent of the population are under the age of thirty. The contemporary governance, regulatory, and resistance milieu around work has lineages that extend from the colonial and oil industry labour practices and discourses through the era of neoliberal reform to the present. Ennis offers a rich analysis of the historical lineages of labour governance, class formation; and, following protests after 2011 as youth unemployment soared in the region, how authoritarian states react to public pressure and social unrest around perceived economic decline.
Crystal Ennis teaches Global Political Economy and International Relations at Leiden University. She currently serves as associate editor of the International Studies Review and president of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. Crystal is author of Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies: Jobs Seeking and the Global Political Economy of Labour in Oman (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and co-editor of The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex (Bristol University Press 2022). Her publications have also appeared in New Political Economy, Global Labour Journal, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Third World Quarterly, among others.
This event is organized by LUCIS and L-PEG.