Rahel Aima wrote “The Khaleeji Ideology” to talk about the gulf-futurism in Dubai and, to some extent, Saudi Arabia. While her case study is focused on the spaces and projects in other states, a lot of her argument is also widely applicable to Qatar. Aima criticizes the “idea of fully-automated luxury environmentalism” as the goal to which the state is striving, as “it embraces technocratic solutions to ecological threats, and champions a self-fulfilling pragmatism: technology might not be able to save the world, but perhaps it can maintain life as we enjoy it in the present.” The gap between the external identity of the state and the internal lived experience within the state further widens in this embracing of gulf-futurism.
Gulf-futurism and the Khaleeji Ideology, as described by Aima, espouses the myth that we won’t have to change our lifestyles in order to save the planet, and this enables the extravagance and luxurious lives that most citizens engage in, as well as the continued growth of consumerism. There is a comfort found in the state’s vague branding of ecological consciousness in the Vision 2030 that provides no real promises of what material changes are being made. There is no social push for environmentalism that is proportional to the increasing threat of climate change. This vagueness allows for people to believe that the state is working for them, and will save them and their luxurious lives. As long as everything looks and feels the same in the present, there is no push for change because the only future orientation that is provided through the state is an indefinite ideal of continued lifestyle and an increasingly technocratic world that will dispel all effects of climate change. As Aima says, “the Khaleeji Ideology is most effective on an aesthetic level.” There is no information about the goals of the state regarding climate change that go beyond this or have any depth. In doing so, the state subsumes ecological consciousness as part of their identity, as part of their goals for the future, but this is discontinuous with the reality of the situation.
Part of the reason why gulf-futurism is insufficient is because of how much it relies on the state to be the savior, on “one man, one vision, one government to carry it out, and people from everywhere else to build it—not just as temporary workers but future residents too.” This mode of government is incompatible with the revolutionary nature of work required to sufficiently mitigate climate change. As long as the burden of this work is placed on a government to which people do not have access or ability to demand more, we will not see much change aside from claiming eco-consciousness as part of the state’s identity in an effort to appeal to the changing tide toward sustainability. But this sustainability is not substantial or effective – or at least not as effective as it needs to be. The changing physicality of the Gulf, like the new proposed Saudi city NEOM, is supposedly futuristic because of its aesthetic and the sci-fi imagery it invokes, but as Aima says, “how can it be sci-fi without social justice?”
The most poignant question in all of this, and the biggest criticism of gulf-futurism is, “how can one call for any kind of futurism when the Earth itself has no future?”
