dispatches from voluntary exile

Photo by Piotr Chrobot on Unsplash

I was not planning to write this post. I have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline - something on why elites fell for Epstein despite the obvious warnings, another on the anthropic fight, a belated thank you to Henry Farrell for discussing my work - but none of them feel right at the moment.

My home is being bombed and I don’t know what to do about it.

A Highway of Broken Dreams

I grew up in Dubai before it was “Dubai.” The line I often give people is that when I was growing up I thought a 15 minutes drive was the end of the world. When one of my best friends moved across the city, when I was five, I cried for days unable to imagine how we could survive such distance.

By the time I got to high school, roughly a decade later, it would take 15 minutes just to get from my parents home to the highway.

My parents love to remind me that I used to say that I wanted to be the ruler of Dubai. Around when I was six. But it was instrumental. The line that nearly immediately followed was that I wanted that stature so that I would have enough money to buy Manchester United. I didn’t know about politics or the monarchy. I did know the power of money. That was all by social design. In retrospect at least.

I did love the people, the food, the smells, the planes. That much I can still say with honesty. Without flinching. Independent of self-loathing.

But I then I went and got a good liberal arts education and it destroyed my conceptions of the place. Revealing the underbelly of globalization that I was winning from. The obscenity of global finance and the destruction of 2008. The dreams and simultaneous suffering that were eradicated as Dubai was forced to halt its countless construction projects.

Inevitable contradictions

I was in the US and I was starting to take on its nominal values. I didn’t realize how much that meant you had to be comfortable with hypocrisy - forgive me, I was 23. But I was feeling like I had found a new home, a new love, a new set of obsessions that would carry me forward. Ground me.

And then Trump’s first electoral victory came through. I walked along the greens of Georgetown, making eye-contact with every non-white person (there were not all that many of us out that morning), saying I fear for you. But I see you too.

It was the contradictions that stopped me from loving Dubai. The glitz. The influencers. The pristine beaches only made pristine by an ardent underpaid workforce that ought to work for the CIA since you can somehow never see them.

But I obviously wouldn’t be sitting here, typing for you, talking to you without the place. My dad got fired from his hotel job but decided to stay and try to bet on himself. My mother did promotions in shops as I roamed the aisles. It was the place I played football in concrete parking lots and cricket in alleys that I now know were hotspots to pick up prostitutes.

That was only a few minutes away from the markets where I would spend hours hunting for cheap, fake jerseys and knock-off DVDs before I was eventually made a product of the internet.

That coincided with the opening. The full embrace of real estate, global capital fueled growth. And everything changed for my family and me. I moved to an “American” school - which had 80+ nationalities and more Canadians than Americans - triggering the tragic accent I now can’t escape.¹

But it was still the place I would go play basketball next to a mosque before getting “chicken zinker” burgers. Where I would somehow spend 8 hours at a mall with 4 different starbucks locations interspersed with playing pool. The place I nearly got arrested in because I made out on a beach. The place where, as a 15 year old, I partied in a suite in the Burj Al Arab because my friend’s dad ran the hotel.

The home where I could find every type of shawarma and yet the south indian kind - the “mallu” kind - remained my favorite (is this racist? I don’t even know anymore).

The place I first fell in love. The city where Russians would flee and nearly takeover after the invasion of Ukraine. My theoretical home becoming overrun by the people whose corruption I had spent the last decade studying, documenting, occasionaly despising.

But it only really hit home when I was at a boutique restaurant. A 12 seater run by an up and coming chef - the rare one who grew up in Dubai - located in a neighborhood that till my last trip still looked like the Dubai I had grown up in. Now overtaken by the more staple shadows of skyscrapers.

Me and my parents, a couple of Emiratis, and the majority from Moscow. I was shaken. This wasn’t my place anymore. I had disavowed it. But surely it couldn’t be theirs.

And then I saw the menu where I found an homage to the “chicken zinker” and I nearly cried.

Embracing the mess

I’ve spent a large chunk of the last few years in therapy. One of the recurring themes I’ve had to deal with is sorting out, for lack of better terms, how to ground myself. “To love myself” (ugh). Because how can someone who has an incredibly addictive personality still be a devout disciplinarian. Or how can someone who purports to care about social equality still be trying to maximize their paycheck. Or an individual walking past a homeless person feeling compelled enough to give them money but not enough to invite them into your home.

Ironically, Dubai has no homeless people. By design.

I’ve made a lot of progress on this front. Figured out how to be the version(s) of me I want to be. Accept, live, be empowered by the contradictions. But why can’t I be like my friend who recently visited Dubai for the first time and chose to see the beauty of hundreds of nationalities living in the same space, of a place that took on the West’s colonial hypocrisy and milked it for all its worth?

Or at least be someone who sees that alongside the underbelly.

And is fine with the lack of logic. Plausibly even revels in it.²

Stages of grief

I teach the undergraduate International Political Economy module at the LSE. I try to be myself - maybe the biggest compliment I’ve received all year was when a friend of mine attended a class and said I lectured like I speak to her. The same version of me. Congruence.

On the first day of class, I’ve started to tell students a bit about my background. A bit of the story I’ve just told you. About how I am the product of globalization. How I’ve won from it and I could just as easily be construed as a symbol for the world is turning inwards.

This week I had to lecture on the developmental state, the miracles of East Asian growth. My most left-leaning lecture on the specific conditions that lets an empowered, “embedded autonomy” government push us up the economic ladder. I’m not sure my student could tell, but it made me sick.³

As the American state starts another invasion. As my home is caught in crosshairs. As my family lives in a place famous for fireworks lives through a deadly, more honest, version of those infamous images.

Maybe all of this will be moot by the time I apply for my citizenship in the UK later this year. Maybe I will be grounded by finally having full political rights in a place where I reside.

But for now, I just can’t stop feeling that my “home” is being bombed. As my niece is woken up from “too much thunder.”⁴ And I, Professor of International Relations at the LSE, have no idea how this story ends. How I feel myself clinging for an optimistic outcome even though my theories say I should know better.

Because for now my home is being bombed and I don’t know what to do.

P.S. For those wondering this was a bit less cathartic than I hoped it would be. Maybe hitting the send button will be.

1. In London parlance this is often construed as “international school” accent which I find mildly more flattering than “American”

2. I’m still not sure anything better captures the contradictions of growing up in Dubai than a scene in Peter Pomeranzev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible where he (ironically given the content of this piece) describes a dance scene between a Russian oligarch and a young woman. They exchange eye-contact: a look that represents the recognition that by a flip of a coin their places in the economic hierarchy could have been flipped.

3. I swore a lot more than usual tbf.

4. My family is as well as can be at the moment.