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Callum Copley is a researcher, writer, and editor whose work explores how speculative fiction articulates materialist perspectives. His research often engages decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological viewpoints, with a particular focus on world-building as a practice. He is the co-founder of Schemas of Uncertainty, a research initiative examining the role of prediction in contemporary society, and the editor of Reworlding: Ramallah, Short Science Fiction Stories from Palestine (Onomatopee, 2019). 

For issue #116 of The Internationalist, Copley writes the first part of his two-part series on examining artificial island structures. Here he looks at Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island created through land reclamation, exemplifies a utopian vision of luxury and exclusivity while masking exploitative labor conditions under the Gulf’s Kafala system.

Part One: The United Arab Emirates

Planting a Palm 

In June 2001, Nakheel Properties, the second-largest property developer in the UAE, began construction on three artificial archipelagos off the coast of Dubai, known collectively as The Palm Islands. Palm Jumeirah, the smallest and, to date, only completed part of the Palm Islands project [1], was constructed through land reclamation using millions of tons of rock and over 120 million cubic meters of sand from the Persian Gulf. Employing a technique known as 'rainbowing', sand was precisely sprayed into place with dredging pipes guided by GPS technology, then compressed using vibro-compaction for increased stability. 

Completed in 2007 and now home to over 25,000 people, Palm Jumeirah alone has created 1,380 acres of new land and almost doubled Dubai’s coastline, adding 56 km to the original 70km. This artificial extension naturally allows for an explosion in the available beachfront property, with ‌4,500 residential units and 28 hotels. 

“The unique island is home to some of Dubai's top luxury resorts”, explains Nakheel’s promotional material, with “fantastic fine dining options...more than 80 restaurants, lounges and other attractions.” [2] This dramatic expansion in real estate and hospitality feeds into the UAE’s long-term strategies, which have seen its economy diversify from relying on oil exports to increasingly incorporating tourism and real estate as critical components. This has resulted in 17 million international visitors in 2022, up 19.4% (year on year) and surpassing their pre-pandemic record. [3]

“Today, ‘warm water’ islands are often the objects of what may be the most lavish, global and consistent branding exercise in human history,” writes island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino, "They present themselves—and find themselves presented—as locales of desire, platforms of luscious paradise, habitual sites of fascination, emotional offloading or spiritual and psychological pilgrimage.” [4] This is set in contradistinction to the ostensibly busy, overwhelming and stressful lives visitors live at home. Palm Jumeirah presents itself as just such a place. We see quite plainly, in its marketing, that it is framed as an idyllic locale where residents and visitors can escape into luxurious isolation, with every need met. [5]

However, it is not exactly the typically imagined tropical island. Despite its lengthy beaches, Palm Jumeirah is predominantly an urban space filled with modern infrastructure. This matters little to the fantasy that surrounds such islands, though, claims Peter Renfield, who writes: “The representational industry is nevertheless cluttered with islands that suggest themselves as (ideally) empty spaces, waiting and wanting to be possessed and tinkered with.” [6] 

Regardless of how sufficiently tropical or not any given island is, its very structure as a space physically separate from a familiar mainland, its “bounded materiality,” [7] imbues it with an array of qualities and possibilities it might not actually possess. “Indeed, there is a real quandary in discussing islands as a form with a suggestively simple geography,” writes Baldacchino “—what could be neater than a piece of land surrounded by water?—because the preciseness, isolation and separation that the definition invariably evokes is shaped by nostalgic desire.”

When it comes to unpacking the place these types of islands hold in the popular imaginary, though, there is much more to it than mere topography. “The island is a trope,” writes Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey “, and for the West, its spatial fetish is tropical due to the long history of European colonization of Caribbean and Pacific archipelagoes. [8] This long European history of colonization and the attendant myths, legends, rumours, and fantasies have, over the centuries, formed a Western relationship with the island that persists to this day, and the two powerful allegorical modes that are closely tied to islands, utopia and dystopia, arise from this context. [9]

Sir Thomas More’s 1516 work of fiction and socio-political satire, Utopia, written at the very beginning of the modern colonial period, portrays a fictional island society and its religious, social, and political customs via a frame narrative. However, it is the island itself—its geography and its origins—that I wish to focus on here. 

In an early chapter, our narrator details how the island was formed:

“[T]his was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus, that conquered it … brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into … good government … Having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug … and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he, beyond all men’s expectations, brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours, who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were struck with admiration and terror.” [10]

The eponymous island utopia isn't originally an island at all, then. The fifteen miles of water separating it from the mainland were not naturally formed, but created by the forced labour of native people and others under the orders of a conquering invader. As China Mieville puts it in his introduction to the novel, “The splendid – utopian – isolation is part of the violent imperial spoils. The classic reactionary attack on the utopian impulse is that it is, precisely, no place, impossibly distant. But, disavowed and right there, in More’s foundation, myth of the dream polity is a very different unease: that, wrought by brutality, coerced from above, it is all too close.” [11]

The site of Utopia wasn’t found already existing in the world; instead, it was formed by the labour of individuals under duress. If we return to projects like the Palm Islands, which I argue represent a utopian and imperialist vision of private ownership control, I suggest such projects inevitably reproduce the deeper and more violent structures of colonization, much like More’s imagined Utopia. 

Although engineers from the Dutch contractor Van Oord, which specialises in land reclamation, oversaw the technical aspects of The Palm Islands, some of the 500,000 migrant construction workers in the country carried out the day-to-day construction. In 2019, the UAE had the second-largest international migrant population in the world, with non-citizen migrant workers constituting 90% of the country's workforce (and 99.5% within the private sector). [12] Such numbers are not unusual for the region. Established in 1981 by Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was formed to precipitate closer collaboration on economic and political issues, and, as such, the situation of migrant workers, both on paper and in practice, is very similar across its member states. 

The Kafala system, a legal framework that governs the relationship between migrant workers and their employers within the GCC [13] was established to provide cheap and accessible labour for areas experiencing substantial economic growth and has played a significant role in the rapid economic development of both the UAE and region. [14] Finding its roots in the management of 20th-century enslaved pearl hunters in the Persian Gulf, The Kafala system requires migrant workers to gain in-country sponsorship from their employer, who then becomes responsible for their visa and legal status. Within the UAE (and the GCC more broadly), these workers are generally men and arrive from South Asia, in particular India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. [15] Recruiters often charge an upfront fee of up to $4,000 to secure employment, and then in order to pay, workers often sell their homes or take out loans. [16]

A typical contract will last between one and three years and on average, a construction worker is paid only $175 per month, [17] meaning they arrive already heavily indebted and unable to negotiate over the terms of their contract. According to other international rights advocates, “the Kafala system exposes migrant workers to abuse in many forms, including exploitative working conditions, poor living accommodations, restrictions on freedom to organise or bargain collectively, and nonpayment of salaries.” [18]

Migrant workers in the UAE, as with other GCC countries, are denied outright the right to own property and are usually forbidden from bringing family members with them to their country of employment. Most live in overcrowded labour camps such as Sonapor or Al Quoz, on the periphery of the city, where they exist both physically and socially, segregated from the rest of the society. Workers have routinely had their passports, identity and travel documents confiscated by their employers to prevent them from returning home. Under this system, where the worker cannot leave, the employer retains near-total power over their workers’ movements and entire existence.

Despite the vast amount of capital the UAE has at its disposal, it is upon these exploited workers and their labour that it depends to realise the 11,755 active construction projects [19] underway in the UAE (4,792 of which are in Dubai alone). Construction on these projects proceeds round-the-clock, thanks to rules permitting twelve-hour shifts, and many workers, despite ostensible safeguarding regulation, work seven days a week, sometimes continuously for weeks or months without taking a day off. [20] The work is manual and arduous, often carrying heavy or hazardous materials for hours on end in the baking sun, where, over the summer months, temperatures can reach 55°C (131°F) in the shade with humidity levels of 80 percent. 

To protect workers from the midday sun, the UAE Ministry of Labour banned outdoor work from 12:30 to 4:30 PM in July and August in 2005; however, this was shortened to 12:30 to 3:00 PM the following year, after construction companies successfully lobbied for the change. Despite this regulation, many construction workers still spend up to 14 hours a day at job sites, facing severe risks of heat stroke, dehydration, and hospitalisation for heat exhaustion and cramps. Heat-related illnesses are the primary health issues construction workers face, with one report finding that an average of 5866 non-nationals from south and southeast Asia have died each year in the UAE between 2010 and 2019. [22]

The poor working conditions and low pay enabled by The Kafala system are well documented, with Human Rights Watch describing the situation for migrant workers as “less than human” in a 2022 report. Despite protests and reforms to the Kafala system in other GCC states—such as Bahrain, which banned the practice in 2009 and whose Minister of Labor described it as "not much different from a system of slavery"—there is no sign that the UAE government intends to follow suit. [23] In June, the UAE only went as far as adopting a new bill that provides domestic workers specifically a legal minimum of paid leave, paid sick leave, 12 hours daily rest and other rights by bringing its laws into consistency with the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Domestic Workers Convention. [24]

The World, or The New New World 

“Next to the ship,” Elizabeth DeLoughrey posits, “the island is perhaps the most essential constellation for figuring the planet. Due to the part-for-whole function of allegory, the island concept of bounded space has been a popular synecdoche for our “Earth Island.” This spatial allegory of finitude has become all the more relevant in an era in which Anthropocene scholars warn of humans reaching the limits of their “planetary boundaries.” [25]

It is fitting, then, that one of the more recent Nakheel Properties projects is The World Islands, which consists of 300 artificial islands arranged in the shape of the world. Construction on the archipelago began in 2003 and used a process much like that employed for the Palm Islands. 700 million cubic meters of sand and rock were transported into a development area of six by nine kilometres and sculpted into shape, adding approximately another 232 kilometres of shoreline to the city. 

Unlike the Palm Islands, these largely private islands are sold as individual, self-contained units rather than plots on the trunk or one of the fronds.“While the islands are created for privacy and exclusivity,” states the only available online listing for one of the islands “the thoughtful infrastructure is designed for the safety and convenience of investors, residents and visitors — an infrastructure that allows you to relax and leave the mainland behind.”  [26] As such, these islands are sold in an undeveloped form with the intention that the buyer may create whatever they desire on them. 

This might be a tourist destination, as was the case for the Irish business consortium Larionovo, who purchased the Ireland island and planned to construct an Irish-themed resort there. ‘The Island of Ireland’, as it was to be called, included a large internal marina, apartments, villas, a gym, a hotel, and, of course, an Irish-themed pub. [27]  A late addition to the design was a recreation of Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway, though this announcement came just a few months before a provisional liquidator was appointed to the consortium, and the project was cancelled.

In January 2014, the Kleindienst Group announced the launch of "The Heart of Europe" project, a development encompassing seven islands (Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Ukraine, Main Europe, Switzerland, and Monaco) within the European section of the World. The luxury resort claims that it would provide a fully immersive European experience, featuring real outdoor snow and stores accepting only the Euro as currency.

It also announced plans for Raining Street, the “world’s first temperature-controlled street” that uses “Pioneering German technology” to recreate the climate of Southern Europe. This stretch of road would automatically shower down artificial rainfall whenever the outdoor temperature exceeded 27 degrees Celsius. Initially slated to open in 2020, this has reportedly been delayed due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

According to promotional material for the World more broadly, “An array of island parcels means an array of possibilities. Engineered to be flexible and designed to be unforgettable: a blank canvas in the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf. An incomparable destination.” [28] This language of a ‘blank canvas’ reveals one of the most “significant components of the contemporary intoxicating ‘lure’ or ‘fascination’ of islands”. “Islands suggest themselves as tabulae rasae” claims Baldacchino “potential laboratories for any conceivable human project, in thought or in action.” [29]

The buyers of an island in the World do not just get a spot on an artificially extended shoreline—a private beach spawned just for them (as they would on a Palm property)—but instead are provided with the chance to stake claim to an entire island, an untouched oasis.  

According to one scholar in 2015, marketing copy on the official website (now defunct) read, “A journey. A saga. A legend. The World is today’s great development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own”. [30] This framing exemplifies what Baldacchino has said of islands more broadly, that “rendering the island in this way serves to lure its visitors into a sense of mastery and authoritarianism that smacks of neo-colonialism and plays to a deeply held need for control.”

As academics Stefan Gössling and Geoffrey Wall write, islands are “...beautifully poised and self-contained nuggets of experience” with the “possibility of claiming an understanding of the totality of the locale as [a] trophy: after all, a small island is a place that you can get your arms, and mind, around. [31] To visit, let alone own, an island of this kind, then, is to conquer it somehow. To make it known to oneself in its entirety and, therefore, master it. “The eighteenth-century colonial encounter with the Pacific Islands,” writes Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, “allowed for the western circumnavigation of the globe and to render it as a finite space. The Pacific Islands were vital to European allegories of romance, utopia, dystopia, and modeling the island as the world.” [32]

In More’s fiction, as with real artificial islands, the technical efforts needed to create them represent another valence of the colonial mindset. The pushing back of the very tides displays a level of dominance and hubris over the natural world that is indicative of the Western colonial project. In creating an island from scratch, one has total control, not of its inhabitants and its resources, as would be the goal during a colonial conquest, but instead of its shape, size, topography and environment. If the insular structure of any island beckons greater malleability and control by its rulers, as Baldacchino has argued, then, when it comes to creating an island wholesale, these impulses must be felt all the more. [33]

Seen from above today, The World is a collection of sandy shapes that are hardly recognisable as representative of our planet. Overall, The World project has succumbed to the same financial problems as The Palm Islands, and to date, only two islands have been fully developed. The first, Lebanon Island, features a show home, and the other, Island Michael Schumaker, belongs to the former Formula 1 driver, who was gifted to him by Dubai's crown prince.

The twenty or so islands that constitute North America appear to be a collection of disunited island states. This particular cluster is, however, not for sale; it is, in fact, a resort named Coral Island that the Nakheel Group is itself developing.  The entire continent of Africa has once again—eerily Reminiscent of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885—been carved up. This time, along entirely different lines, it is left as a series of sandy enclaves to be purchased by the highest bidder. 

To raise another Latin expression used during the European colonisation of the “New World”, this fresh land could be labelled terra nullius (nobody’s land). Heavily employed in the doctrine of discovery, the term was used to justify claims on territory which belonged to no state. Based on the Roman legal concept of res nullius, terra nullius evolved by analogy and was used for centuries to justify the colonisation of land before being incorporated into international law in the 19th century. Often, it was employed when those taking land did not recognise the sovereignty, and often the humanity, of those who already inhabited it, essentially erasing their existence. 

Today, when the colonial horizon of earlier centuries has long since vanished, I would argue that, consciously or not, The World Dubai is an expression of a longing for the lost fantasy of claiming unconquered land. In the realm of exclusive real estate, what could be more exclusive, more utopian than an island nation? In a time when no more islands exist to colonise, one must make more islands to enact such a fantasy. Buyers of these islands receive not only a private island but a scale model of a sovereign country, each of which, in their bounded materiality, acts as an allegory of the planet as a whole. What The World offers, then, is an opportunity for the world to be colonised once more, this time as a microcosm.

Notes:

[1] The remaining archipelagos, Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira, designed to be 50% and 800% larger (respectively), have yet to be completed, with work halting in 07/08 due to the global financial crisis, when property prices on the islands fell by 40%.

[2] “Palm Jumeirah | Iconic Manmade Island | Visit Dubai.” n.d. https://www.visitdubai.com/en/places-to-visit/palm-jumeirah-2. 

[3] “Annual Visitor Report 2023 | Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.” n.d. https://www.dubaidet.gov.ae/en/research-and-insights/annual-visitor-report-2023.

[4] Baldacchino, Godfrey. 2019. “Island Images and Imaginations: Beyond the Typical Tropical.” In Springer eBooks, 301–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_14.

[5] https://www.visitdubai.com/en/places-to-visit/palm-jumeirah-2

[6] Redfield, Peter. 2000. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French

Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[7] Baldacchino, Godfrey. 2019. “Island Images and Imaginations: Beyond the Typical Tropical.” In Springer eBooks, 301–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_14.

[8] DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005582.

[9] DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005582.

[10] More, T., Le Guin, U. K., & Miéville, C. (2016). Utopia. Verso.

[11] Miéville, C. (n.d.). Close to the Shore. Introduction.

[12] Sönmez, S. et al. (2013) Human rights and health disparities for migrant workers in the UAE, Health and Human Rights Journal. HHR. Available at: https://www.hhrjournal.org/2013/08/human-rights-and-health-disparities-for-migrant-workers-in-the-uae/ (Accessed: December 18, 2022).

[13] Argonaut. 2023. “Constructing Power: The Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the UAE  — the Argonaut.” The Argonaut. November 27, 2023. https://the-argonaut.com/comment-4/2023/1/2/constructing-power-the-exploitation-of-migrant-construction-workers-in-the-uae.

[14] Khalaf, Isabella. 2021. “Migrant Crisis in Dubai.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, December 21, 2021. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b36142b521b545d192e959e3445718a7.

[15] Froilan T. Malit Jr. and Ali Al Youha. “Labor Migration in the United Arab Emirates: Challenges and Responses.” migrationpolicy.org, August 27, 2021. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/labor-migration-united-arab-emirates-challenges-and-responses. 

[16] Sönmez, S. et al. (2013) Human rights and health disparities for migrant workers in the UAE, Health and Human Rights Journal. HHR. Available at: https://www.hhrjournal.org/2013/08/human-rights-and-health-disparities-for-migrant-workers-in-the-uae/ (Accessed: 27 Jan 2025).   

[17] Argonaut. 2023. “Constructing Power: The Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the UAE  — the Argonaut.” The Argonaut. November 27, 2023. https://the-argonaut.com/comment-4/2023/1/2/constructing-power-the-exploitation-of-migrant-construction-workers-in-the-uae.

[18] Froilan T. Malit Jr. and Ali Al Youha. (2021, August 27). Labor migration in the United Arab Emirates: Challenges and responses. migrationpolicy.org. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/labor-migration-united-arab-emirates-challenges-and-responses

[19] WAM https://www.wam.ae/en/details/1395302650097 (Accessed: Jan 28, 2025).

[20] Sönmez, S. et al. (2013) Human rights and health disparities for migrant workers in the UAE, Health and Human Rights Journal. HHR. Available at: https://www.hhrjournal.org/2013/08/human-rights-and-health-disparities-for-migrant-workers-in-the-uae/ (Accessed: Jan 28, 2025).

[21] ibid

[22] Vital Signs (2022) THE DEATHS OF MIGRANTS IN THE GULF. rep. Vital Signs. Available at: https://fairsq.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Vital_signs-report-1.pdf. 

[23] Argonaut. 2023. “Constructing Power: The Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the UAE  — the Argonaut.” The Argonaut. November 27, 2023. https://the-argonaut.com/comment-4/2023/1/2/constructing-power-the-exploitation-of-migrant-construction-workers-in-the-uae.

[24] https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/07/uae-domestic-workers-rights-bill-step-forward

[25] DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005582.

[26] World Island Project (D98) United Arab Emirates, https://www.privateislandsonline.com/asia/united-arab-emirates/world-island-project-d98

[27] Healy, B. (2007, March 16). The other “Emerald isle” is in the Persian Gulf. Irish Independent. https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/the-other-emerald-isle-is-in-the-persian-gulf/26270957.html

[28] “The World Islands | Visit Dubai.” n.d. https://www.visitdubai.com/en/places-to-visit/the-world-islands.

[29] Godfrey, Baldacchino. (2006). Islands, Island Studies, Island Studies Journal. Island Studies Journal. 1. 10.24043/isj.185. 

[30] Gupta, Pamila. 2015. “Futures, Fakes and Discourses of the Gigantic and Miniature in ‘The World’ Islands, Dubai.” Island Studies Journal 10 (2): 181–96. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.326.

[31] Gössling, Stefan, and Geoffrey Wall. 2007. Island Tourism. In A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader, ed. Godfrey Baldacchino, 429–453. Luqa and Charlottetown: Agenda Academic and Institute of Island Studies.

[32]  DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005582.

[33] Godfrey, Baldacchino. (2006). Islands, Island Studies, Island Studies Journal. Island Studies Journal. 1. 10.24043/isj.185.

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