We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001-2014. Particularly, we dissect in-depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state-finance-real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.

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This study focuses on what has become commonly known as the ‘demographic disorder’ in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). At the general level, the ‘demographic disorder’ refers to the over-reliance on expatriates – in various areas and prominently within labour forces (both highly specialized as well as unskilled) – in GCC societies, where expatriates constitute a majority of the population in four of the GCC countries and a majority of the labour force in all six member states. This study focuses particularly on demographic developments and trends over the first decade of the new millennium, especially the phenomenon of ‘international mega-real estate’ projects aimed at expatriates. This phenomenon has taken central stage in four countries of the GCC (Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the UAE), where the policies and actions of decision-makers have been squarely directed towards making these projects primary engines of growth in their respective economies. The central thesis of this study holds that these mega-real estate projects signal a qualitative shift in the manner in which decision-makers view the issue of the ‘demographic disorder’. While the overreliance on expatriates was previously seen as a necessary and unavoidable by-product of economic growth that had to be tolerated and regulated in order to meet the dictates of economic production, migrant inflow of a very specific and peculiar kind has now been adopted as a central goal required in order to fill these newly constructed cities and to boost economic demand and consumption in the region.

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