What Is <i>Kafala</i> ?

Abstract The kafala system that governs labor migration in much of the Middle East is universally defined as a “sponsorship” system due to its legal requirement that all migrants have private sponsors. Yet nowhere in the translation-as-definition of kafala as “sponsorship” is there any indication of what kafala has done to the societies where it is practiced. This article turns to Lebanon to offer a conceptual framework that rethinks the kafala system not as sponsorship but as “national servitude,” meaning a system that divides society between nationalities who are meant to serve and nationalities who are meant to be served. Drawing on research conducted with African and Asian migrant workers in Beirut, the article frames kafala as a social consequence of the rise of Gulf capital and the attempted defeat of Third World internationalism in the Arab world. The kafala system, in other words, has not only embedded new forms of exploitation into everyday life, but might also be thought of as the violent insertion of servitude into the anticolonial vision of Arab, Asian, and African solidarity.