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Mobile peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world have faced enormous pressure throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries to change their way of life, to settle down and remain in one place. The notion that a settled existence is more modern than a mobile one continues to dominate expert thinking as a continuation of late nineteenth-century social evolutionist theories of the progress of civilisation. Most of the modern nation-states of the Middle East have approached their mobile pastoral peoples with a determined view to making them stay put in one place and give up their pastoral subsistence livelihoods. Settlement schemes, it was assumed, would assure political and economic control over these difficult-to-emplace-and-control peoples. The development aid efforts, both bi-lateral and international, throughout the twentieth century followed these same biases and were designed to make mobile or nomadic peoples ‘modern’, using principles developed during the colonial era such as terra nullius, which declared all land not held privately as empty, and thus belonging to the state so that it could be disposed of or developed as the state wished. By the end of the twentieth century, most pastoral peoples’ grazing lands had been expropriated and sed-entarisation schemes of one sort or another were the mechanisms of choice. Pastoral peoples in Oman, however, had some success in challenging the notion of terra nullius in the deserts of the country. A younger generation of ‘citizen’ herders have been able to parlay further multinational oil industry intervention to support their continued mobility in the deserts of Oman and subsistence pastoral livelihoods.I begin the chapter with a brief examination of the ways in which mobile pastoral communities in the Middle East have faced and then navigated around government land expropriation and sedentarisation efforts to create multi-resource livelihood successes without always being forced to settle. I then examine the situation in Oman, where a more ‘enlightened’ state policy regarding settlement was enacted and where oil concerns have been paramount. Determined to provide social benefits to its mobile pastoral communities without forcing them to settle, the government of Oman extended basic services to these communities late into the twentieth century.

Abstract This survey is a review listing some key legislative and executive measures of the government of Oman in the year 2021–2022, which have relevance to mainly the rights of the migrant workers. Further, and in less detail, this survey also refers to some of the developments pertinent to the rights of women living in Oman. However, more generally these rights are less relevant to women who are not Omani nationals. Oman is a member country of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The GCC comprises six states in the Arab-Gulf region: Oman, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These oil-producing states have a significant proportion of foreign workforce in the population. Foreign workers work mostly in the private sector and are also residents in the host countries. At 46.5 per cent, Oman has a relatively lower proportion of migrants in its population among the GCC members (UN DESA, 2020). Therefore, a broader spectrum of governments’ measures relating to the issues like labour, entry and residence, and ownership of property or business touch the lives of the foreign/migrant workers or expatriates in the Gulf country. Governments’ initiatives targeting domestic workers are relevant also for women because they comprise the majority in this group. The survey notes that most of the governmental activity in Oman in the past year largely concern new laws or amendments of the existing legislation and regulations linked to labour and residency matters. Some of the more relevant ones that the survey has selected here confirms this. It also marks the period post the pandemic, which had posed considerable economic challenge for the government. Hence, as also some neighbouring Gulf countries, Oman has shown a balance of measures. On the one hand, to revive its economic dynamism and competitiveness by facilitating more ease and benefits to attract and retain foreign labour and investment in the country. On the other hand, with measures such as increased nationalization effort and support expressly favouring the national workforce to boost their more active participation in the labour market. The new labour law declared by the Omani government and its signing of the Maritime Labour Convention are a few notable highlights. The survey has essentially drawn on the government’s documents and announcements as available in English or translated text, in addition to information in the press and other relevant sources.

This chapter examines the impact of oil on the twin processes of state formation and space-making in the Trucial States and United Arab Emirates and Sultanate of Oman in the mid-twentieth century. In much of the literature on the history of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, these processes are linked through oil concessions. Concessions necessitated the demarcation of domestic and international boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula, a key part of the state formation process. This chapter looks instead at state formation through a new means of oil-fuelled mobility – automobility. Beginning in the early 1950s and surging dramatically at the end of the 1960s, the automobile rapidly displaced older modes of transportation, in the process becoming synonymous with modernisation and state-building. The automobile's speed and power sparked violence, necessitated new modes of regulation as well as a new road network, and made the state visible and tangible in even the most remote areas of the region. New boundaries between states were demarcated, with different rules for travel by car and by foot or animal. In the process, new understandings of space emerged, and state control over territory dramati-cally intensified. Eventually, it became both physically possible and morally permissible for UAE and Omani citizens (and others) to travel to places that had not been open to them before, while other patterns of circulation were closed off by a new international border; automobility and roads created both new freedoms and new restrictions. Through the lens of automobility, oil's role in state formation becomes more complex and contested, as various actors ranging from British Political Agents to local sheikhs wrestled with how new forms of movement ought to be governed.Two spatial imaginaries frame the chapter's analysis – the pre-oil dirah, rooted in seasonal migrations and kinship relations, and the nascent dawla (state), which required free movement within demarcated boundaries. The shift from the dirah to the dawla is traced through several episodes involving automobile travel. The potential of automobility to undermine the existing political and spatial order is seen in the 1938 Majlis Movement in Dubai and in a 1950 conflict in Shaʾam, in northern Ras al-Khaimah.

When Oman joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative to pursue economic diversification, the US intervened to stop it. Although the foundation stone for Chinese investment plans was laid in 2017, these projects were put on hold, while the US rushed to bolster its military presence in Oman. The article studies Chinese investment in Oman, accounts for what has developed so far, and highlights the reasons for which the US acted to stem the potential of non-oil development in Oman. The disruption of the China-Oman diversification project resembles the US’s targeting of China’s policy of expansion by mutual cooperation elsewhere, but with a twist: Oman sits close to two vital chokepoints, the Bab Al-Mandeb and the Hormuz straits. The article argues that such obstruction is central to the US’s mode of accumulation by militarism. Keeping Oman from auto-developing and building its autonomy makes of it a pliable client state ready to serve as an imperialist post to empire.

Geotourism is a form of natural area tourism that focuses on geology and natural heritage of the land. Geoconservation and geological heritage are considered now as a new challenge for geological research which concentrate on the preservation of sites of geological value. Oman is considered by geologists and geotourists as an open geologic book and a big wonderful outdoor geological Museum with unique geological features. The country offers many geological features which are spectacular or unique. The geological stories can be found everywhere in Oman, where one can explore the fascinating geology in one of the most varied and diverse landscapes – from gravel to sand to salt, Oman has a landscape, outcrop, archaeological sites, local culture and fascinating human stories or formation to suit everyone. Therefore, the country attracts more and more geosciences students to study geology in the field, as well as tourists to enjoy the spectacular scenery. As a consequence, thereof geological heritage is in danger of being destroyed due to lack of awareness, and the need to protect unique geological sites and landscapes.

Until 2018 knowledge of al‑ʿUlā County’s archaeology had been limited to a few key sites. Since then, an extensive archaeological landscape survey has been conducted on behalf of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) across a large area (3302 km2) centred in and around the al‑ʿUlā valley (excluding the oasis and the key heritage sites of Dadan, Ḥegrā (al‑Ḥijr), Qurḥ (al‑Mābiyāt), and Old Town), as a part of the broader Identification and Documentation of Immovable Heritage Assets (IDIHA) survey. The IDIHA project aims to identify heritage assets in advance of the anticipated increase in visitors and facilitate further research. Data collected through remote sensing and ground recording of sites has been integrated into a customized heritage geodatabase. Over 16,000 sites have been recorded in the main al‑ʿUlā valley over three years by the ground survey, demonstrating an intensive occupation of the area from the Palaeolithic through to the present, including a rich range of domestic, agro-pastoral (including water management), funerary, defensive, ritual/religious, infrastructure/transport, productive and hunting sites, as well as communication/artistic (rock art and inscriptions — the largest category in terms of overall numbers of sites). In parallel with the survey, targeted excavations explored a selection of mostly late prehistoric sites and feature types in order to develop an understanding of the chrono-cultural development of the landscape, adding considerable data to our knowledge of the archaeology of north-western Arabia.

This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article explores the writer’s experimentation with narrative and storytelling within the context of the Omani literary tradition. On the other hand, it examines modes of women’s empowerment that work through articulative and enunciative practices in the face of linguistic frustration.

"Ode à mon île" est un recueil de poème dédié à l'île de Djerba. Il vous emmène en voyage à travers mes souvenirs, les éléments, la vie, mon coeur et les lieux qui habite cette douce île

Littoralization and coastal dynamics in fragile island environments: the case of the island of Jerba (South-East Tunisia). Known for the wealth of its resources, the island of Jerba has always attracted the society of the past to settle there. Convinced by the fragility of the island environment, the Jerbian has developed a suitable way of occupying the space and appropriate know-how. The interior of agricultural land has always been favored at the expense of the infertile coastline and open to foreign invasions. Recently, the phenomenon of touristification of the east and northeast coast of the island has been established. At the same time, the coastline is increasingly occupied and a change in the mode of land occupation has occurred. The coastal area, formerly deserted, is increasingly in demand, which has upset the island environment. The rapid urbanization of beaches has reached a worrying stage. The low coasts of the island continue to lose their sandy beaches in a situation marked by the rise in sea level in relation to global warming. Obviously, a line mobility of the island's shoreline is established and evolving with accelerated speed, which has led to the continuous disconfiguration of the coastline. It is by extending the arrow of Borj Kastile, located in the southeast, that the island of Jerba could be connected to the mainland and therefore loses its island status.

Against the backdrop of the environmental crisis, the socio-economic, ecological and cultural importance of the coastal zone calls for greater awareness of how coastal resources function, evolve, are managed and enhanced. This study aims to develop a high-performance (semi-)automatic coastal monitoring method based on Landsat-5 and Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite images for spatiotemporal analysis of shoreline changes and erosion risk assessment along Jerba Island (Tunisia) using remote sensing data and geospatial tools. A comparative study between the band ratioing (BR) method and the pixel-based image analysis (PBIA) and object-based image analysis (OBIA) methods has led to the development of machine learning (ML), random forest (RF), deep learning (DL) and convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms. Using these classification methods, 15 different shorelines were successively detected in 1989, 2015 and 2023 and then compared with a digitized reference shoreline from the Landsat-5 and Sentinel-2 images. Following a quantitative evaluation, the accuracy of the classification model shows that the combined CNN-OBIA approach provided the least accurate results, with an overall accuracy (OA) index of 67%, while the OBIA-RF classification method provided the most accurate results (OA of 95%). This comparative study identified an accurate and improved extraction method for quantifying changes in the position of the shoreline on the east coast of Jerba Island, enabling managers to make better decisions on coastal protection and adaptation to climate change.