Marginal Inclusion: The Omani Border Towns Outside Oman

Oman’s borderlands with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are beset with curiosities. At a time when the Omani state has been pursuing policy to incorporate peripheral, non-coastal regions into the Sultanate of Oman’s national territory, inhabitants of the Omani border towns of Buraimi and Madha continue to espouse border visions that clash with those advanced by the state. Border-dwelling Omanis young and old imagine the Omani hinterlands both as separate from contemporary Oman, but also as part of a historical formation called Greater Oman or the Coast of Oman. In doing so, these Omanis defy the imperial border epistemology that Sultan Said bin Taimur and Qaboos bin Said inherited from British imperial officers seeking to secure oil concessions in the mid-twentieth century. 

This dissertation argues that the recent materialisation and securitisation of the Oman-UAE border, alongside discursive, legal, and infrastructural attempts to anchor the Omani body politic, have not diminished the strength of these border visions. It narrates and explains the history of this border in order to highlight the disruption and violence that imperialist borders cause from the moment they are drawn. In this case, these borders have enclosed tribes that historically enjoyed greater political manoeuvrability and mobility, and made them what I call “placeholders.” Drawing on 17 months of fieldwork in Oman and archival research in the United Kingdom, this dissertation explodes the belief that all enfranchised Omanis benefit equally under Oman’s rentier state and shows how muwāṭinīn (“citizens”) in the borderlands – and beyond – cultivate their own ideas of what it means to belong in a new nation-state.