Who keeps the business running? Relational infrastructure and Indian migrant enterprise in Qatar

Migrant-run micro and small enterprises are a ubiquitous feature of Arab Gulf economies, but the migrants who finance and operate them are often not the people the state recognises as their owners. This article asks how migrants establish and sustain such businesses within Qatar's temporary migration system, through a qualitative study of Indian migrant entrepreneurs. Migrant entrepreneurship is generally understood as economic activity embedded in social relationships that give access to resources. Our concern is where this reliance enters the organisation of the enterprise. Migrant entrepreneurs rely on three sets of relationships: with citizen sponsors and intermediaries, within the migrant community, and across borders. We argue that these relationships take on an infrastructural role, which we call relational infrastructure. Entrepreneurship gives migrants authority over employees and some control over their stay, while relocating part of their precarity into the relationships through which the enterprise is organised.