I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of Revue Méditerranée for their generous and helpful comments. I am also grateful to Marouane Laouina, for his endless curiosity and his keen sense of observation, which have informed some of the insights in this paper; as well as to Amer Salmeh for sharing much useful information. Many thanks go to John O’Brien, Mustafa Yavas, and all the participants of the writing workshop organized by the Culture & Diversity Cluster at NYUAD in Spring 2024. Their valuable feedback helped bring this text from the very early draft they read to what it is now.
- 1 (Al Kamālī 2021, 52); English translation: (Al Kamali 2024, 49–50).
“At that time, the official gave his opinion (…):
‘For those who want to pray, there is a mosque, and for those who want alcohol, there is a hotel. The choice is up to them. (…) We make the choice available to you, because we want commerce and wealth. (…) How long will you keep saying “We aren’t everyone else”? Wake up – the world is changing!’”
Reem Al Kamali, Yawmiyāt Rōz [Rose’s Diaries]1
- 2 “Staycation” is a term used by resort hotels in the UAE to refer to packages intended for residents (...)
1In February 2024 was announced the opening of the first brewery in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Named Craft by Side Hustle, the establishment is located under a hotel, in the free zone of Al-Maryah Island, and opens directly onto the alleys of a shopping mall. Though the hops are imported from Pennsylvania, the products’ marketing and packaging make heavy use of symbols associated with the UAE: cartoonish camels are scattered on the brand’s website, and the brews’ names, from “Sandstorm” to “Staycation” and “Massage card ninja,”2 reference various aspects of daily life in the Emirates.
2The creation of the brewery would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. The production of alcohol had been prohibited by law in the UAE since the 1960s; a licensing system restricted who could legally purchase and consume alcoholic drinks; and their sale was limited to specific places, mainly hotels, strictly separated from family-oriented leisure sites like the malls. From 2019 onwards, however, a major shift took place. In the emirate of Abu Dhabi, a series of laws and decrees entrusted the regulation of all matters related to alcoholic beverages to the Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) which, in Fall 2020, announced the abolition of the individual alcohol license. A few months later, DCT issued new regulations, among which the “Fermentation Permit:” a new type of commercial license which allowed for the first time the production of alcohol on Emirati soil, and made possible the existence of the brewery.
- 3 The proscription of alcohol and gambling is explicit in the Quranic verses; the two are often menti (...)
3The news of the opening was met with mixed reactions. On the social media pages of local news agencies, a few users lauded what they saw as “progress:” they would finally be able to enjoy something different than the industrial beers dominating the market. A majority, however, deplored a move they perceived as going against the UAE's Islamic identity, since alcohol is explicitly proscribed in Islam.3 These commenters often brought up other recent projects which they perceived as going against Islamic norms – notably a casino set to open in 2027 in the northern emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah.
- 4 Alcohol had been legally proscribed on Saudi territory since 1952. While the store is only accessib (...)
4Whether they celebrated or condemned the news, the reactions to the brewery’s opening all shared a similar assumption: they saw this event as representative of a broader shift in the policies of the Abu Dhabi government, and of the UAE more broadly. In the recent years, debates around the place of alcohol have often been used as a proxy to discuss the Arab Gulf states’ political projects, both internally and in international media. Alcohol has also been mobilized by these states to project specific images onto the global stage. The decision to ban it in the stadiums hosting the 2022 World Cup in Qatar made the headlines in the foreign press, who portrayed it as a tension between the emirate’s global ambitions and its conservative mores (Panja 2022); while Qatari media pointed out it had increased the safety of female fans and reduced the number of violent incidents (Adil 2022). Conversely, the establishment of a liquor store in Riyadh’s diplomatic quarter, in January 2024, was widely interpreted as a sign of Saudi Arabia’s broader “opening” to foreign tourism and investments, and as a departure from its previous rigorism (Jansen 2024).4
5Alcohol consumption and its availability on a given territory therefore convoke conflicting representations, which go far beyond religious norms to engage with notions of modernity; morality; lifestyle; public order; and health. At the same time, scholars of the Islamic Middle East have unanimously pointed out how the question of alcohol is marked by “ambivalence and ambiguity” (Matthee 2014). Alcohol has never been absent from the region, and the regulations around drinking have historically signaled a regime’s positioning across a multiplicity of domains – among which the spectrum between secular and religious order is merely one dimension (Biçer-Deveci and Bourmaud 2021, 10).
6Recent changes around alcohol regulations in the Gulf states make these questions particularly timely. The Gulf and Arabian Peninsula are largely underrepresented in the field of alcohol studies, and tend to be described as a “dry” region mainly marked by prohibition – despite much more contrasted landscapes (Matthee 2014, 2021). At the scale of the Middle East, scholarship on the contemporary period has long focused on the increased restrictions around drinking which followed the Islamic revival of the 1970s and the public debates they engendered in Egypt, Turkey, or Iran (Matthee 2014; Gangloff 2015; Foda 2019). In this context, the UAE represents an interesting case study: alongside Bahrain, it is one of the Gulf countries where alcohol was already widely available, and which was home to an important nighttime economy and nightlife-related tourism, especially in Dubai. The most striking aspect of the recent changes is thus less the growing availability of alcohol than the departure from the norms that previously organized urban life in UAE cities – norms which were based on a separation between drinkers and non-drinkers. In a nutshell, what changed is the public dimension of alcohol (Biçer-Deveci and Bourmaud 2021).
7How can we make sense of these transformations? What do the shifting territories of alcohol reveal about the Emirati state’s project, and about the public for whom the capital is being developed and envisioned today?
- 5 In addition to anonymizing my interlocutors, I have decided not to mention the institutions and est (...)
8I explore these questions by tracing the geographies of alcohol in the UAE capital. This approach looks at alcohol both as a substance and as a practice, examining “the availability and the modes of management of alcohol, as well as the uses associated to it” (Bonte and Bruckert 2021, 7). In order to analyze the evolution of these geographies, I rely on research conducted at two different time periods. The first one is an ethnographic study carried out between 2010 and 2016 among young adults, Emiratis and Arab expatriates who grew up in Abu Dhabi. I focused on their experiences of the city and approached drinking mainly through the angle of sociality in bars, clubs, and other social spaces – a leisurely, and in many cases transgressive, practice. The second period (2019–2024) involves semi-directed interviews with bar managers and a policymaker;5 ethnographic observation in both old and new establishments of alcohol sale and consumption; and an analysis of the policies produced by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, whose circulars are publicly available.
9Building on the academic literature on capital cities, I show how these changing geographies of alcohol index broader transformations in the Emirati state’s political project.
10Indeed, capitals distinguish themselves through specific “politics of space” (Minkenberg 2014): projects of urban transformation in capital cities materialize national political agendas. Scholars have shown how these cities do not simply reflect or represent the state, but co-constitute it: their urban design, planning, and architecture actively contribute to shaping political power in ways that are historically and geographically situated (Minkenberg 2014). In this sense, capital cities’ urbanism does not only address city-dwellers, but also the national territory at large (Koch 2018). Tellingly, the shifts I examine have been initiated in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, rather than in Dubai. This could appear surprising: the presence of alcohol is both more visible and less contested in Dubai, where the share of the national population is the lowest in the country, and where tourism has long been a major source of revenue. That they first took place in Abu Dhabi informs us their embeddedness in the state’s project.
11In the academic literature, this co-constitution of political power and the capital city has been studied mainly through the prism of master planning on the one hand (Vidal 2002; Elsheshtawy 2004); and of architecture, in particular monumental or spectacular architecture, on the other (Koch 2018). Exploring the place of alcohol in an Islamic country highlights another aspect of the capital city’s urbanism: the moral dimension of the production of space. Political projects are always also moral projects, delimiting the ethical orientations that their proponents consider desirable or abject. By characterizing the territories of alcohol as a moral geography, I bring to the forefront the question of who the city is being transformed for, and who is being construed as the moral “other” in this process.
- 6 While the notions of the “global city” and the “world-class city” have been studied separately in t (...)
12Throughout this paper, I argue that, in Abu Dhabi, the recent transformations of the territories of alcohol mark a reversal in the values and representations associated to drinking within the state’s project. While alcohol was first construed as a necessary evil related to the structural presence of foreigners in the UAE, and thus as exogeneous to Emirati society, it is now conceived as a marker of the global capital and the world-class city in the making.6 Its wide availability and growing publicness are thus portrayed as essential to achieve this status. These transformations are taking place against the backdrop of the project of economic diversification inaugurated in the mid-2000s, whose main purpose is to prepare for the depletion of oil resources by investing in new economic sectors.
13In order to develop this argument, I trace the relationship between these dominant representations of alcohol and their translation into “drinkscapes” (Jayne, Valentine, and Holloway 2011, 7). This notion depicts “all the places where alcoholic drinks are available, sold, or consumed in a given territory” (Bonte and Bruckert 2021, 16). I focus here on formal commercial spaces such as liquor stores, bars, pubs, and clubs. I first show how dominant legal and social representations of alcohol as exogeneous to Emirati society were concomitant to the production of drinkscapes that are both discrete and discreet, characterized by their urban dispersion and invisibility. I then examine how, in practice, this resulted in a landscape of bars and clubs that is both highly segmented, and characterized by its diverse frequentations and the mobility of drinkers across these spaces. Finally, I turn to the current expansion of Abu Dhabi’s drinkscapes as a result of top-down planning, and analyze the ambivalences at the heart of the political project they embody. I argue that alcohol has become an index and a catalyst for the project of economic diversification, through its construction by the Emirati state as essential both to the development of the tourism and real estate sectors, and to the importation of a highly-skilled global workforce. The new geography of alcohol thus reveals how this project produces specific moral norms which delineate who gets to take part in the world-class capital.
“I think most of the bars in the UAE in general are just trying to, let's say, grab as much of local residents as they can. (…) Apart from dining out, drinking is also one of the main hobbies in the UAE. So yeah, it's a necessary evil.”
Interview with a bar manager, Abu Dhabi, 2019.
- 7 The WHO evaluates an average (over three years) “alcohol per capita” (APC) consumption in liters of (...)
14The depiction of alcohol as a “necessary evil” by the European manager of an upscale bar in Abu Dhabi convokes the ambivalent status of alcohol discussed in introduction: while proscribed in Islam, which is designated by the UAE constitution as the official religion, alcohol is also widely available in the country. In 2018, a World Health Organization survey found that the UAE had the highest alcohol consumption per capita in the Middle East: 2.5 times the amount of Lebanon, and almost twice that of Turkey (World Health Organization 2018, 344).7
- 8 Alcohol was already indirectly taxed through the “tourism tax” applied to hotel restaurants and bar (...)
15Alcohol is thus a lucrative business. Shortly after the publication of the WHO report, the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism announced a 30% tax on liquor. While taxation is recommended in the report as an incentive to reduce consumption, it is also a way for governments to derive income: this is particularly notable in the context of the UAE, a rentier state where no taxation system existed until the 2010s.8
- 9 This idea is echoed in the memoirs of American urban planner Michael Dempsey: “One of Abu Dhabi’s g (...)
- 10 These figures reflect the population of Abu Dhabi’s urban region, according to official data (Stati (...)
16But the necessity of the “evil” of alcohol is not just a question of economic benefits: the quote above also represents it as indispensable to entertain “local residents” (by contrast to tourists).9 This designation refers to a population mainly composed of foreigners, who make up around 89% of Abu Dhabi’s inhabitants;10 the result of both large-scale labor migration and exclusionary citizenship policies. This foreign population has itself long been painted, in the state’s discourse, as a “necessary evil” (Vora 2013, 13). Just like the migrants who make up the workforce needed for the country’s development, then, alcohol is construed in the UAE as a “foreign matter” (Dresch 2006) which needs to be contained and managed through spatial patterns of segregation and dispersion.
17In a chapter of Rose’s Diaries, a novel by Emirati writer Reem Al Kamali set in the 1960s, the young female protagonist, Rose, overhears a conversation about alcohol between the older women in her household. They worry that liquor is becoming too easily available, and that young men might succumb to the temptation. Rose then imagines the story of the first hotel serving imported liquor along the Dubai Creek, and how this puts an end to the local practice of making alcohol out of fermented dates or apples. The fictional hotel owner, depicted as a Syrian man, begs the authorities to let him import liquor, which he argues is a necessity to keep British patrons coming and staying in his establishment. His request is approved regardless of the protestations of Emirati families (Al Kamālī 2021, 46–52).
18The association between alcohol and foreigners is a longstanding one in the Arabian Peninsula. The region indeed distinguishes itself from the rest of the Middle East through the absence of a substantial local production, beyond the fermented drinks described in the novel (Matthee 2014). Alcohol is essentially an imported good and one that is heavily controlled, when not prohibited – like in the “dry” states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. At the same time, tales of smugglers and black markets, of homemade products, and of illegal but tolerated drinking in foreign embassies and expatriate compounds have long been part of the region’s lore, and show how alcohol’s legal status does not strictly overlap with its actual availability.
- 11 TDIC at the time; this authority became the current Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) in 2018 (...)
- 12 The license allowed its carrier to buy alcohol in their emirate of residence for up to 20% of their (...)
19The construction of alcohol as an exogeneous substance is also visible in the laws regulating it, which restrict its consumption to specific categories of the population. In 1965, while Abu Dhabi was still a territory of the Trucial States under British control, a Law on Alcoholic Beverages distinguished between foreigners on the one hand, who could consume and serve drinks as part of “private hospitality,” and “nationals of the Arabian Peninsula,” for whom this was prohibited (Figure 1). After the foundation of the UAE in 1971, this distinction was legally formalized in a 1976 law through the implementation of an individual liquor license, necessary both for purchase and consumption – i.e., the license was legally required to drink at a bar, though this was never verified in practice. Initially delivered by the Abu Dhabi Police, the license was moved online in 2012 with the creation of a Special License Office. This move corresponded to a change in governance: the competent authority in matters related to alcohol went from the Ministry of Interior to the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority.11 Unlike other official government platforms, the License Office’s website existed solely in English, with no Arabic version. Obtaining the license involved criteria of age (being over 21); residence (holding a valid residence visa); income (earning over 3,000 AED, around 785 Euros, per month);12 and religion (being non-Muslim). The latter category was largely intersected with nationality: citizens of majority Muslim states needed to provide evidence of their affiliation to another faith in order to qualify – for example, an Egyptian Copt would need to show a certificate from their church.
20The evolutions in this legislation reflect the important demographic and social change undergone by Abu Dhabi after the beginning of oil exploitation and the formation of the state. The fact that, by the 1970s, the ban on liquor concerned all Muslims is a sign of the massive migration flows which took place within a decade, and brought diverse migrant communities to the country. Regulations around the individual license also revealed the constructs of nationality and citizenship that emerged alongside the newly-formed state. The provisions which allowed for non-Muslim citizens of Islamic countries to obtain the license were not made available to UAE nationals, who, until today, are constructed in hegemonic official discourse as Arab and Muslim; a definition reflected notably in the nationality law (AlMutawa 2016; Akinci 2019).
Figure 1. Main evolutions of the regulations around alcohol in Abu Dhabi
Source
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1965 : Law on Alcoholic Beverages
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1976 : Law on alcoholic beverages (and subsequent amendments)
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2019 : Law on Curating alcoholic beverages (and subsequent Circulars by the Department of Culture and Tourism, 2020-2021)
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Import and distribution
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Upon permission of the Ruler ; the British residency can also issue authorizations.
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- Type A : License to import liquor - Type B : License to sell liquor to third parties from a shop or warehouse
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- Import, Re-Export and Storing (Distributor) - Retail Shop - Online Applications
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Service
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Foreigners are allowed to serve and consume alcohol in the context of “private hospitality” (‘alā sabīl al-ḍiyāfa al-khāṣa), except for nationals of the Arabian Peninsula.
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- Type C : License to serve liquor within a hotel, club, or restaurant
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- Hotel Establishment - Social and Sport Club - Independent Outlets - Tourism District License - Temporary License - Airports License
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Consumption
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Type D : License to purchase liquor
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No consumer license.
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Production
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Prohibited
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Prohibited
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- Fermentation permit
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In bold : most notable developments after 2019.
- 13 In the case of individuals on a spouse or student visa, or certain professions, a letter of “non-ob (...)
21The rules attached to the liquor license thus reflect the ambivalences surrounding alcohol. On the one hand, alcohol is legally, socially, and politically constructed as an exogeneous substance, reserved to specific categories of foreigners. On the other hand, alcohol is treated, in the law like in dominant representations, as a necessity both to foster tourism and to entertain the large population of foreign residents, whose labor is structurally indispensable to the country. It is thus widely available: the salary threshold required to obtain the license made it accessible to anyone starting from low-income service employees, but excluded the categories with the lowest incomes, such as domestic and construction workers or taxi drivers. These regulations hint at the stratifications that structure the category of foreign residents through intersections of social class, gender, legal status, and national origin.13 They are also consistent with global representations of drinking: the refined consumption of the elites has historically been set against that of the working classes, often associated to excess and unruliness (Zubaida 2014, 212–213).
22The association of alcohol with the “other” is a recurrent dimension of Islamic societies, as is its translation into urban space. Scholars have shown how taverns and bars, in the Ottoman empire, were typically located in the Christian neighborhoods and run by various non-Muslim minorities (Matthee 2014, 110–111); which did not prevent, of course, the presence of Muslim patrons. In places where “the massive presence of alcohol is a colonial legacy” (Bonte and Bruckert 2021, 12), these establishments are mainly set up in the “European” town, and colonial authorities themselves often enforced spatial segregations, which tend to perdure in the postcolonial era (Znaien 2021; Goreau-Ponceaud, Bautès, and Raj 2023).
- 14 Before 2020, there were very few stand-alone establishments able to obtain a license to serve alcoh (...)
23In Abu Dhabi, this geography of alcohol is distributed in a manner which reproduces the spatial segregations between nationals and foreigners. As the main establishments allowed to serve alcohol until recently, hotel compounds often license multiple bars and night clubs on their premises.14 Their spatial distribution thus underlies the territories of alcohol consumption.
24On the main island of Abu Dhabi, certain districts concentrate both liquor stores and hotels, while others can be described as dry neighborhoods (Figure 2). The former correspond to the dense downtown area, where commercial spaces are located alongside the residential buildings where mostly expatriate populations live (Khalaf 2006); while the latter are the historical settlements of the national population (Al Nahyan Camp to the east and Al Bateen to the west).
25A similar logic informs the urban development which took place from the 2000s onwards, and expanded the city onto the mainland and towards the semi-artificial islands that surround it. Liquor stores are mainly located either in the industrial free zones (Musaffah) or in majority-expatriate residential communities, like the gated communities along the strip of Al Raha. Symmetrically, the suburban towns meant to house the national population on the mainland, like the older Bani Yas or the more recent Khalifa City, remain mostly dry.
Figure 2. The territories of alcohol in Abu Dhabi (2024)
- 15 Historians have analyzed how the “company towns” reproduced American suburbia for Western oil engin (...)
26This moral geography is the result of policies of centralized urban planning implemented since the early 1970s and which, in the Gulf region, find their genealogy in the segregated urbanism introduced by the American and British oil companies over the course of the 20th century (Vitalis 2006; Fuccaro 2013).15 Residential segregations are driven by the state, which governs the distribution of land and housing to the national population (Reisz 2007; Elsheshtawy 2008). Since the 1980s, Abu Dhabi’s urbanism has developed along the principle of “zoning” – i.e., the division of urban space into functional zones defined through their use: residential, mixed use, commercial, etc. (Elsheshtawy 2008; Bani Hashim 2019). The islands of Yas and Saadiyat exemplify this separation of functions: planned respectively as an entertainment and a cultural district, their focus is placed on commercial establishments meant to attract both tourists and residents – which explains the relative rarity of liquor stores. Both also showcase waterfront promenades where alcohol can be served outdoors in public – a very recent development, to which I come back in the last section of this paper.
27The territories of alcohol in the Emirati capital thus constitute a scattered archipelago. Most emblematic of this archipelago are the island resorts, mainly patronized by Abu Dhabi residents. Al Maya island, to the southwest of Abu Dhabi, hosts the oldest of these resorts, opened in the late 1990s; a more luxurious one was inaugurated on Nurai island, to the north, in 2015. These resorts generally offer day passes or memberships whose prices vary according to the season, and which include both boat transfer and access to the pool and beach. While families also visit, much of the marketing is oriented around the pool bar, DJ sets, and themed parties, seeking to attract a rather young, single, drinking crowd. In many ways, these resorts formalize the leisure practices of Western expatriates in the 1960s-70s, whose recollections of life in the UAE often include sailing to nearby islands for alcohol-fueled weekends of beach camping.
28These parties can also take more transient forms, via yacht parties or desert raves – either outings organized by private friend groups, or larger events convened by production companies. Raves and music festivals on the islands or in the desert have become particularly popular in the recent years, and often involve the consumption of both alcohol and drugs. In all of these cases, the liminal character of their location – an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi, the desert, or the sea – frames these practices: alcohol can flow because it is de-territorialized, taking place away from the eyes of city-dwellers.
29Alcohol is thus both condemned and widely available in the UAE; a tension which was resolved through its portrayal as a “necessary evil” associated with the majority foreign population. This ambivalent status is translated into Abu Dhabi’s urban space, where it contributes to the making of “parallel cities” (Mermier 2015, 74–79; Gasparotto 2021b, 97). The term depicts how different regimes of norms coexist within a given urban space, without necessarily (or ever) crossing paths. In Abu Dhabi, this moral geography is inscribed in the planification of the city itself. Top-down urbanism both acknowledges and spatializes the variations in moral norms among the capital’s diverse urban communities.
- 16 Women represent 36 % of the total population of the Abu Dhabi emirate, and this rate falls to 33% a (...)
30Abu Dhabi’s parallel cities thus echo national segregations: licensing authorities ensure that alcohol is kept away from the residential spaces of the national population. This moral geography also extends to leisure spaces, along wider lines that intersect nationality, gender, religious affiliation, and familial norms. Hotels, with their bars and clubs, are indeed separated from the sites of leisure catering to families – notably the shopping malls, which are patronized both by nationals and a wide range of foreign residents. The spaces of alcohol consumption are predominantly masculine spaces, even though there are female customers: a factor both of the imbalanced sex ratio (men make up two-thirds of the foreign residents),16 and of the fact that drinking remains a masculine activity in many of these residents’ countries of origin (Bonte and Bruckert 2021; Goreau-Ponceaud, Bautès, and Raj 2023; Bonte 2024). This gendered dimension contributes to the association of bars and clubs with sex work – all the more so as this activity, often equally portrayed as a “necessary evil,” is heavily repressed on the streets or in other public spaces. In turn, the conflation of hotels with alcohol, foreign men, and sex work places them beyond the norms of accessible leisure for many categories of the population in Abu Dhabi, in particular Muslim women (Assaf 2013). For others, they become a space of transgression of moral and social norms.
- 17 Free zones are delimited areas where some of the country’s regulations and laws do not apply, notab (...)
- 18 The UAE’s federal law makes the regulations on alcohol the prerogative of each of the seven emirate (...)
31Two remarks can conclude this section. First, the norms around alcohol are not the only ones to delineate parallel cities: a similar analysis could be applied to norms of modesty and to the separation of the beach, for example – as a place of near-nudity – from the rest of the city. Second, these parallel cities take advantage, in a sense, of an already segregated geography. It is not surprising, in this context, that the brewery discussed in introduction would be located within the economic free zone of Al Maryah island, a space that is by definition extra-territorial.17 This differentiated geography finds an echo at the scale of the UAE’s national territory, where laws related to alcohol vary according to each emirate and shape nighttime mobilities across their borders.18 A similar phenomenon can be described at the scale of the broader Gulf region: the island of Manama, Bahrain represents this extra-territorial space for Saudi citizens, who cross the causeway in search of weekend entertainment (Mermier 2016; Sauser 2019).
32Scholars of the Middle East have shown how the place of alcohol, across the region, is characterized by another paradox: the distance between discursive norm and practice, in other words, between visibility and secrecy. This paradox is summarized by Emmanuel Buisson-Fenet when he recounts the discourses of young Tunisians, who portray their society as one where “numerous practices are tolerated or widespread, under the condition that they remain secret” (Buisson-Fenet 1997, 11). Historians further demonstrate how political and moral authorities in the Middle East have always been more concerned with regulating the visibility of alcohol than the drink itself: what is at stake is the public dimension of drinking, and the political communities and social hierarchies it delineates (Biçer-Deveci and Bourmaud 2021, 12).
33In Abu Dhabi, this second set of tensions takes on a specific form, due both to the prominent role of the state described earlier, and to the diversity of norms around alcohol consumption within the capital’s population. In the following paragraphs, I show how this produces a particular landscape: while top-down regulations cultivate the invisibility of alcohol, this secrecy paradoxically favors the practice of drinking, which is only transgressive for specific categories of the population. As a result, bars, pubs, and clubs constitute both highly segregated and highly cosmopolitan environments, where social boundaries are simultaneously (re)produced and bypassed.
34Prior to the recent reforms, indeed, alcohol was both widespread and invisible in Abu Dhabi. The sites of alcohol sale and consumption were not only scattered, but also visually separated from the rest of urban space. Liquor stores, located in areas of high residential density, are until today enclosed by opaque walls and heavy doors; when paired with a supermarket, they feature a separate entrance and signage. Bars, which until 2020 were mainly located in hotels, were never visible from the outside. Many of the older hotels of Abu Dhabi thus have large internal courtyards where restaurants and bars’ terraces are located (Figure 3). Most hotels also refrain from serving alcohol in the lobby. This enclosure reinforces the impression of an archipelago: unlike in other contexts, there is no possibility for drinkers to “spill over” onto the sidewalks and into the public spaces of the neighborhood (Gasparotto 2021a, 102; Bonte 2024, 138–139).
Figure 3. Inside courtyard at Le Meridien hotel, Abu Dhabi, with the hotel building in the background encircling the bars and restaurants serving alcohol.
26 October 2024, photo by Laure Assaf.
- 19 Ḥijāb is a general term for the modern Muslim veil, which encompasses multiples styles and practice (...)
35The accent put on visibility is especially apparent in the way the individual liquor license was enforced before its abolition. As discussed above, the license excluded a large segment of the population of Abu Dhabi – either because, as Muslims, they were not legally allowed to apply for a license, or because they hesitated to ask for one, for instance out of fear that their sponsor or employer would come to know about it. In practice, this meant that many people purchased and drank alcohol without a license, and that few establishments checked for it. As is the case in other Muslim contexts, what was then policed was less the illegal consumption of alcohol than the visibility of the transgression (Biçer-Deveci and Bourmaud 2021, 4). Because Emirati citizens were assumed to be Muslims, bars and clubs in Abu Dhabi prohibited the national dress, the ‘abāya and dishdasha, on their premises, or prevented their wearers from sitting at the bar counter. In a few cases, this ban was extended to the ḥijāb.19 Bar managers justified these rules through the “spot checks” regularly conducted by the authorities, which could affect the renewal of their own license to serve drinks. Implicitly, inspectors thus also relied on visibility to assess compliance: the presence of signage indicating these dress codes; the absence of customers wearing clothing that could identify them as Muslims. This norm of visibility extended to law enforcement: while the police rarely checked whether or not patrons were legally allowed to drink, there were multiple instances of arrests related to public drunkenness – a more important transgression in the eyes of the law.
Figure 4. Band playing in front of ads for special discounts and alcohol brands in Cheers, Al Ain Palace Hotel, Abu Dhabi.
13 September 2024, photo by Laure Assaf.
36Furthermore, alcohol is visually absent from the urban landscape of Abu Dhabi through a ban on publicity. Public marketing for alcoholic brands is prohibited. On the photos of bars and nightlife displayed for example on the hotels’ websites, the bottles are edited out or blurred. Much of this marketing is thus taking place on the establishments’ social media pages and in the bars themselves, where posters and/or screens often advertise promotions (Figure 4). Liquor companies also market indirectly, by sponsoring hotel parties and music festivals under names that reference the brand without explicitly advertising it (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Advertisments for events in Dubai which feature recognizable alcohol brands’ logos, without picturing alcohol or indicating the brand name : from left to right, Corona beer, Glenfiddich whisky, and Smirnoff vodka.
37The norms regulating the (in)visibility of alcohol in the city are not fixed: they tighten or expand depending on the rhythms of urban life, notably events and religious festivals. Punctually, alcohol is introduced for concerts or sports competitions, where it is sold in a space clearly delimited from the one reserved to families. Its sales are also seasonally restricted: typically, bars’ opening hours used to be limited during Ramadan, and Islamic holidays were considered “dry nights” – i.e., times when these establishments could not serve alcohol. Although the Abu Dhabi emirate has stopped announcing dry nights for religious occasions in the recent years, they remain instituted for periods of official mourning.
38Control over the visibility of alcohol is thus largely an outcome of top-down policies that further ensure the containment – both in time and space – of this necessary evil. This focus on visibility sometimes translates at the scale of individual practices: from the opaque bags within which city-dwellers carry out bottles in public space, to the series of precautions taken by those for whom it is also a transgression of familial and religious norms – for example, asking for a dark cup instead of a clear glass while out at a bar, or hiding the bottle in a closed cabinet at home, so that family members would not see it (Assaf 2017).
39Alcohol is indeed a marker of social boundaries, in Abu Dhabi like elsewhere. Historian Sami Zubaida (2014) shows how the transgressive character of this drink in the Muslim world has made it a staple of both luxurious cafés and hidden back-shops. This description is particularly relevant for the UAE, where alcohol demarcates in theory (according to the law) between religious communities. In practice, however, the materialization of these boundaries in urban space has both served broader patterns of segregation, and revealed much more porous boundaries at the scale of individual and collective practices.
- 20 Friday-Saturday were the weekend days in the UAE until 2022, when it was changed to Saturday-Sunday
40Friday mornings used to be a moment when these boundaries were most apparent.20 While many Muslim residents of Abu Dhabi converged to the mosque, hotel restaurants and pubs organized a “Friday brunch:” an event featuring an often-lavish buffet accompanied by an open-bar option. Hotel brunches are generally expensive, with prices going from 250 to over 600 AED (65–155 Euros). They target and attract a specific crowd: marketing images showcase smartly-dressed, professional-looking, mostly – but not always – White men and women, in short what sociologist Saba Le Renard identifies as “Westerners” (Le Renard 2021). Importantly, this group does not refer to a fixed racial or national origin, but to a constructed category characterized by a “structural privilege” within intersections of nationality, race, and class. Friday mornings thus materialized in urban space a social boundary, neatly separating at a concomitant time the two highly polarized spaces of the mosque and the hotel.
41Looking closely at the drinkscapes of Abu Dhabi, however, brings to light more nuanced patterns. Friday mornings did not only separate between brunch-goers and mosque-goers, but also between those who consumed and those who served alcohol during this time. The opening hours and the frequentation of bars and clubs indeed reveal differentiated rhythms that are highly shaped by class differences.
42The more costly establishments, located in the luxury hotels that are today most numerous on the newly-developed islands around Abu Dhabi (Saadiyat, Al Maryah, and Yas), tend to host tourists throughout the day. They start receiving local patrons from the end of the afternoon, when middle- and upper-income professionals come for after-work drinks, before pursuing the evening elsewhere. These establishments increasingly distinguish themselves through their specializations: wine or champagne bars that organize tasting evenings; jazz bars; pubs serving specific brands of artisanal beers while South African, North American, or European live bands are playing musical standards.
43By contrast, less expensive bars, many of which are concentrated in downtown Abu Dhabi, especially in the older immigrant neighborhood known as Tourist Club Area (now Al Zahiyah), are most lively at later hours, from midnight to 3 or 4 AM, after the work shifts of their customers – many of whom are clerks, service employees, or technical workers. In these establishments, the hotel is often secondary to the commercial spaces, which drive most of the profit. Far from the specialization of the more upscale bars, they concentrate a diversity of commercial and recreational functions, blurring the differences between categories such as bar, pub, karaoke parlor, club, or restaurant (Figure 6); and the drinks served tend to be the well-known, global alcoholic brands. Their frequentation varies visibly depending on the time of the month, with a thinner crowd in the week before salaries get paid: for most of their customers, drinking is a cost taken from living expenses, rather than spare money.
Figure 6. The G.O.A.T. pub, World Trade Center, Abu Dhabi, 29 September 2024.
Open from 12pm to 4am. On the left: bar area with screens displaying a sports channel. On the right: the dance floor and a Filipino live band playing a mix of English-language pop-rock songs. On the other side of the bar, not pictured, is a separate, better-lit section with several dart boards.
44The spaces where alcohol is served and consumed are thus located on a spectrum, with hierarchies of social class and occupation as a structuring principle defining their clientele. In Abu Dhabi and the UAE more broadly, these are strongly intersected with nationality, race and ethnicity – though in ways that are not fixed.
- 21 Interview conducted in March 2019.
45This intersection was particularly explicit in the discourse of the manager of an upscale bar located on one of the islands: “We focus on more high-end guests. A lot of Germans, Russians, this type of region.” He explains how his bar is meant for customers “with a steady income, with, let's say, a bit of class to it. [So] we are getting quite a lot of Lebanese because when they go out, they tend to be a bit classy.”21 The combination of material conditions (having a stable income to afford expensive drinks) and representations that mobilize vaguer constructs (being “high end” or “classy”) reflects the structure of social hierarchies in the UAE. The constructed category of Westerners aptly describes the way this manager perceives his ideal guests: Lebanese are only included insofar as they have expendable income and display “class” – a term describing certain forms of self-presentation (dress codes, etc.) that are essential to the definition of this category, as is drinking alcohol (Le Renard 2021, 79–81). Of course, this description implicitly rejects other national groups outside of these boundaries.
46Bars in Abu Dhabi often seek to attract specific professional categories – an attempt both to gain new customers in a highly competitive environment, and to shape their clientele according to these hierarchical representations. They do so through targeted promotional campaigns, for example “Teachers’ night” – a category particularly attractive because it is a group composed mainly of young, single, Anglo-Saxon individuals with disposable income; a self-identified group within which information circulates quickly; and a feminized profession, thus serving the purpose of also attracting male customers. Another staple across all bars and clubs are indeed the “Ladies’ nights,” evenings when women can obtain free drinks or discounts. Attracting female customers is a major stake for many establishments, as their presence not only brings in men, but also curbs suspicions of allowing sex work. It is important to note that there are no differences in the prevalence of sex work between upscale and cheaper establishments : across the spectrum, some attempt to prevent this practice, while others do not. At the same time, the market of sex work itself is structured by racial and national hierarchies (Mahdavi 2011). This makes the spaces of alcohol consumption less hospitable for many non-Western women, whose presence might be immediately associated to sex work in the eyes of the staff and patrons, regardless of their actual occupation.
- 22 As the same manager puts it: “if people are able to afford the price of a glass of wine or a beer [ (...)
47Beyond the most upscale spaces, whose prices and distance from the city readily make them inaccessible to a large segment of the population,22 one can find in Abu Dhabi a huge diversity of establishments, varying in cost, size, function, as well as in the types of drinks served and entertainment offered.
- 23 Amapiano is a Zulu term, referring to a South African genre of house music.
48Some of them explicitly operate as diasporic spaces. One hotel of downtown Abu Dhabi, for example, offers on each floor a commercial establishment targeting a different migrant community. A Filipino restaurant occupies the ground floor; the mezzanine floors propose both a small pub and an Indian nightclub, which mostly plays Bollywood music and occasionally hosts Thai or Dancehall parties; and the rooftop pool bar is dedicated to Afrobeats and Amapiano.23 While all customers are welcome, these constitute rather homogeneous spaces, where members of a diaspora can be among themselves (entre soi).
- 24 The exportation of Filipino bands is a widespread phenomenon across South Asia and beyond, which fi (...)
49Other establishments seek to cater, by contrast, to a wide diversity of populations. These include pubs and sports bars, where a majority of men of various backgrounds hang out, alone or in groups – a sort of counterpoint to the alcohol-free shisha cafés. They also include the numerous bars featuring Filipino music bands, whose wide repertoire allows them to adapt their songs to cosmopolitan audiences. Geographer Anjeline de Dios has shown how these bands are marketed abroad as at once high-quality, cheap, and flexible: they perform “high-skilled work in low-skilled labor conditions” (De Dios 2016, 183). Indeed, these musicians tend to master an impressive range of music genres, from hip hop and heavy metal to globalized American and Asian pop hits.24 As de Dios indicates, they are also trained to interact with audiences – celebrating birthdays, acknowledging regulars or greeting new customers, and playing songs requested by audience members. In Abu Dhabi, many of these bands have learnt songs in Arabic and in the other languages spoken by the capital’s inhabitants. The bars they perform in tend to attract a particularly diverse crowd, through their long opening hours, relatively cheap prices, and music performances.
50This brief typology of the establishments serving alcohol in Abu Dhabi is necessarily reductive, but shows how social and spatial boundaries are produced at the scale of these spaces themselves, beyond urban planning. In many ways, this landscape reflects the “segregated cosmopolitanism” (Mermier 2015, 213; Thiollet and Assaf 2021, 7–12) which characterizes everyday interactions in Gulf cities. This modality of urban life describes how, in highly segregated urban environments, encounters with the city’s diversity do arise, but remain within specific temporal and spatial boundaries which allow them to take place. As we’ve seen, the sites of alcohol consumption reproduce and enforce class boundaries – both through material barriers and through the representations associated to bars and their clientele. Within these boundaries, however, their invisibility and enclosure from the rest of urban space paradoxically foster encounters across diverse crowds. The moral segregation which characterizes Abu Dhabi’s urban space allows the appropriation of these spaces by diverse categories of residents, beyond their intended users; including by residents for whom these practices constitute transgressions of legal or moral norms (Assaf 2024).
51The context described so far is rapidly transforming, along with the capital’s global ambitions. In September 2020, the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) sent out a circular canceling the need for the individual liquor license. The announcement was explained in the press as part of a process of clarification of the rules around drinking for both tourists and residents. Many people perceived the announcement as simply sanctioning a situation that already existed in practice: since few of them were using a license, it changed little for most drinkers.
52At the same time, this became the first step in a series of transformations which both furthered previous dynamics, and introduced significant changes. They essentially reversed the place alcohol had occupied so far in Abu Dhabi. This reversal is especially salient in the new spatial boundaries framing alcohol’s sale and retail: “Premises must be located at least 150 meters away from places of worship and/or educational institutions” (DCT, Circular No. 3/2021). While spaces of alcohol consumption used to constitute a discrete archipelago, clustered within hotels, this new rule – aligned with global standards – turns the mosque and the school into isolated islets. This shift is symptomatic of the broader framework within which the changes to alcohol regulations are embedded. Indeed, the transformations I have traced so far index deeper-seated policy changes, tightly intertwined with the Emirati state’s economic and political project. But alcohol is “not just a commodity among others” (Obadia 2021, 33), as we’ll see through the tensions that have accompanied these top-down policies, even within the institutions in charge of implementing them.
53As the distance rule shows, the new regulations promulgated from 2020 onwards prominently served to expand the territories of alcohol, in ways that detract from their previous delimitations – both in terms of governance and within urban space itself.
54In official discourses, the expansion of the territories of alcohol has been justified through its framing as tourism development. Since the turn of the 21st century, the emirate of Abu Dhabi – and the federal UAE government – has indeed embarked on a project of economic diversification. Laid out in the Economic Vision 2030 along with its urban development plan, this project aims at reducing the dependency on oil by fostering investments in new economic sectors (The Government of Abu Dhabi 2008; Urban Planning Council 2010). The emergence of new leisure and commercial spaces responds to this objective: making Abu Dhabi a destination for international tourism is an essential aspect of the preparation of the post-oil era outlined in these plans. Indeed, these plans foreground the necessity to make Abu Dhabi “a global capital” (Urban Planning Council 2010, 1), and to ensure the development of a “world-class” economy and infrastructures (The Government of Abu Dhabi 2008, 78, 90).
55In 2019, a new law established the Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) as the institution in charge of alcohol regulation (Figure 1). All alcohol-related matters thus fell under DCT’s prerogatives, including those not directly tied to tourism, like importations or the retail and distribution sector. A policymaker I interviewed, who worked on the new regulations, explained that the previous confinement of alcohol to hotels was the result of “an informal consensus” rather than a written law. By clarifying the rules, DCT hoped to “take tourists out of the hotels,” i.e., incentivize them to go out in the city for longer periods of time, rather than come back to their hotel to drink.
- 25 Tourists thus represented less than 40% of customers, while according to the same manager, they mad (...)
- 26 Interview conducted in April 2019.
56In many ways, this framing around tourism can be read as another formulation of the “necessary evil” rhetoric. One of my interlocutors suggested that DCT had been entrusted with this matter because other government authorities refused to deal with alcohol. Some government employees might be unwilling to work on such regulations on moral and religious grounds. Tourism is thus a convenient framework for these transformations. In practice, however, there was a consensus among the bar managers I met that Abu Dhabi residents (as opposed to tourists) composed the majority of customers in bars and restaurants; one of them evaluated this proportion at around 60%.25 The same manager portrayed the relationship between these new regulations and the process of economic diversification through a different angle: he saw them as a way to capture the income of expatriate workers, making sure that “people who work in the UAE spend the money they earn in the UAE.”26 Facilitating alcohol consumption in commercial spaces would be in service of this objective.
57A major feature of this expansion of formal drinkscapes is the creation of new types of leisure spaces, in particular seafront promenades. Located in residential and touristic districts – Mamsha on Saadiyat island and Yas Bay Waterfront on Yas island – these promenades, inaugurated respectively in 2020 and 2021, are lined up with restaurants and bars with outdoor terraces (Figure 2). They involve the consumption of alcohol in public, visible by passers-by – thus departing significantly from the principles of invisibility and enclosure that structured the territories of alcohol described above. In addition to these promenades, new developments involve the merging together of spaces that used to be neatly separated: the shopping malls, which were typically family-oriented, alcohol-free zones, increasingly include a wing where alcohol is served (World Trade Center Mall) or waterfront restaurants serving alcoholic drinks (Galleria Mall on Al-Maryah island).
58The emergence of these new territories, right after the changes in the regulations on alcohol, is not a coincidence. The expansion of Abu Dhabi from the main island towards both the mainland and the nearby semi-artificial islands involves semi-public real estate developers who have been granted entire districts by the Abu Dhabi government for large-scale development. Typically, these developers help facilitate bureaucratic tasks, including the acquiring of commercial alcohol licenses for the different outlets on the sites they develop. They have also increasingly taken part in urban planning and urban governance itself, with a progressive delegation of power from the state to the developers (Stadnicki forthcoming).
59Mamsha and Yas Bay are direct examples of the importance of these economic actors, both in materializing the state’s project and in shaping policy itself. Indeed, both districts operate through a new type of commercial license also introduced in the DCT guidelines: the “Tourism District License.” This category allows the licensing of entire “entertainment and tourism districts,” rather than having to obtain a new license for each outlet. The policymaker I interviewed explained that this new license emerged as a result of DCT being approached by the developer Aldar Properties. Aldar is a company founded in 2004 that has now become the main real estate developer in Abu Dhabi – and whose Chairman, Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, is incidentally also the Chairman of DCT. At the time DCT was drafting the new regulations, Aldar was developing Mamsha and seeking alcohol licenses for the promenade’s restaurants. According to my interlocutor, the government institution responded to the developer’s demand, illustrating how developers have gone from being intermediaries between the outlets and the state, to political agents in and of themselves, actively making the law (Stadnicki Forthcoming). They have certainly been instrumental in portraying the availability of alcohol as essential to the success of these new districts.
60The geography of alcohol in Abu Dhabi has thus evolved in close connection to the emirate’s economic diversification project, in tension with the previous definition of alcohol as a foreign substance in need of being contained. Such an evolution raises the question of the intended public for these new developments.
61Indeed, while tourism is prominent in framing the official discourse on alcohol, other desired publics soon emerge. A few minutes into the interview with the policymaker mentioned above, they brought up, without prompt, the recent changes in visa policies implemented by the UAE state – in particular the creation of “golden visas” and of new residency schemes based on skill and capital. Indeed, economic diversification policies have recently informed a change in migratory policies that target highly-skilled, wealthy professionals encouraged to settle, invest, and consume in the UAE. In a context where all foreign residents had to depend on a sponsor (kafīl) for their residence, and to renew their visa within one to three years (depending on occupation), the golden visas, introduced in 2019, open up the possibility of longer-term residency: ten years, sponsored directly by the UAE state. They only concern specific professional categories, defined by wealth and skill: investors, entrepreneurs, and “outstanding talents” (athletes, scientists, inventors, creatives, etc.). Since their creation, a series of other residency schemes has been announced.
62My interlocutor analyzed the new DCT regulations on alcohol as “coherent” with these initiatives. The reforms to alcohol regulations help, in their terms, “provide more amenities that will cater to them [the recipients of these new schemes].” In this sense, alcohol becomes a revealer of how the state constructs these desirable talents that it seeks to reel in, who are assumed to be drinkers or comfortable with the presence of alcohol. The idea that making alcohol more available will foster the recruitment of foreign talents – implicitly associating these talents to the West or, at the very least, to non-Muslims – is aligned with analyses of the “world-class city.” Urban scholars have shown how this notion is an aspirational claim, used to drive projects of both urban and social transformation (Ghertner 2015). Interestingly, this project is carried out in Abu Dhabi by, in my interlocutor’s words, “[making] available what you can find elsewhere.” Alcohol is thus portrayed as a necessary feature of the world-class city; and as essential for the Emirati capital to become one. It is not anymore a regrettable byproduct of the presence of a massive foreign workforce, but an instrument in making the city desirable in the global competition for select, highly-skilled professionals and investors.
63Most studies of the world-class city have focused on the counterpoint to its aspirational visions: the ways in which “citizens not deemed ‘world class’ (…) are likely to face increasing exclusion and state repression” (Birkinshaw and Harris 2009, 6). Looking at the shifting territories of alcohol in Abu Dhabi thus also offers insights into how these transformations contribute to the otherization of certain segments of the population – both nationals and foreign residents who do not belong to the categories highlighted by the golden visas.
64Though public discontent cannot be voiced in the authoritarian context of the UAE, alcohol is one of the domains in which conflicts might emerge. Indeed, the changes described throughout this paper are not all well received by the population. The new regulations, which allowed much easier access to alcohol retail licenses, resulted in a surge of liquor stores around Abu Dhabi after 2020. According to the policymaker cited above, one of them involved a retail shop created “in a very communal area,” a residential neighborhood. The families residing around complained specifically about the queue that regularly formed in front of the shop. In response, the authorities worked with the store owner to change its location.
65In the case of the new leisure and commercial developments highlighted above, they might give way to forms of self-exclusion rather than outright conflicts. These developments are notable because they constitute a major change from the previous principles that organized the urban landscape of Abu Dhabi. Norms restricting the visibility of alcohol were previously framed as keeping it away from the eyes of families, and especially children. Waterfront promenades like Mamsha or Yas Bay thus establish new moral norms for their visitors: consuming the world-class city, being a part of it and enjoying its amenities, implies being at ease with the sight of alcohol consumption. Muslim residents, and in particular Emirati nationals, who for decades had been explicitly banned from entering bars while wearing the national dress, are thus prompted to display tolerance towards these practices.
66This observation adds a new layer to the notion of the world-class city and, concomitantly, claims of a “right to the world class city” (Birkinshaw and Harris 2009). These terms are usually mobilized to describe exclusionary projects of urban development, and the responses and resistances to these projects put forward by disenfranchised residents. The case of Abu Dhabi indicates how the making of the world-class city can also take on a moral dimension. In this context, exclusion adopts the more subtle form of self-exclusion: it is less about removing people from the newly-developed spaces, than about delimiting who is comfortable around the practices displayed there. Access to the world-class city thus relies on a shift in moral values. This is particularly interesting when contrasting it with dominant representations of alcohol in the Muslim world, where drinking is often portrayed as a sign of “Westernization” (Buisson-Fenet 1997, 2), and where this label is used to disqualify drinkers. In Abu Dhabi, such a discourse is now being reversed: the foreignness of alcohol is construed as desirable, and those who want to avoid it, or make it invisible, are the ones at risk of disqualification for not being ready to take part in the world-class capital.
67Here too, alcohol works both as a revealer and a catalyst of this political, economic, and social project. The expansion of its territories resonates with broader changes to the rhythms of urban life; notably what I name the de-publicization of Islamic norms in Abu Dhabi. Indeed, religion is increasingly depicted in the state’s discourse as a private practice; and a number of policies have effectively removed its most visible, public dimensions – through the change in the weekend, which makes the Friday prayer the middle of a workday, or the withdrawal of rules preventing public drinking and eating during fasting hours in the month of Ramadan. These evolutions are taking place against the backdrop of an official narrative which prominently foregrounds the notion of tolerance as a defining characteristic of the UAE nation. This state discourse, which emerged around 2015 and became particularly prominent from 2019 onwards – exactly at the time when the developments described here were initiated – is in large part related to the UAE’s geopolitical endeavors. But it is also an attempt to shape the subjectivities of its citizens and residents, who are encouraged to embody this tolerance in their daily interactions. Such a discourse effectively preempts criticism of the policies related to alcohol: the availability of this substance is now presented, in official discourse, not only as a part of the celebrated diversity of UAE society, but as a step towards realizing its desired future.
68The geography of alcohol is a “political geography” (Bonte and Bruckert 2021, 5). This stands particularly true in capital cities, where urban transformations operate as an index of the state’s political project. In Islamic societies, the ambivalent status of alcohol and the focus on visibility bring urban space to the center of both the regulations on alcohol and their contestations. Looking at the territories of alcohol and their evolutions thus informs us on the orientations of this state project, and on the moral and political communities it delineates.
69In Abu Dhabi, the geography of alcohol has undergone tremendous changes in the past decade, and even more so in the past five years, following the abolition of the individual liquor license in 2020. These evolutions underlie a drastic shift in the official representations of alcohol: while it had been treated for nearly fifty years as a necessary evil, a foreign substance needed to entertain and keep in check a growing foreign workforce, it is now considered as a necessary feature of the global capital, available for those who want it – based on individual, private choice. Concomitantly, those who are not at ease with the frequentation of leisure spaces where alcohol might be present are increasingly excluded from the making of the Emirati capital as a world-class city. The dynamics analyzed throughout this article thus encourage us to explore the ways political power mobilizes moral geographies in order to define both its ideal subjects and their “others,” who are prompted to self-segregate, away from the flagship spaces of the world-class capital.
70These transformations are particularly striking in Abu Dhabi because of their rapidity. While alcohol had never been rare in the emirate, nor in the country, it has become prominently visible in public, touristic spaces within the span of a few years. It is still early to determine the consequences of these changes, and the forms of reception they will elicit on the long-term. These developments are likely to bring about a hierarchy of taste that is already observable in the transforming frequentation of some of the spaces described throughout this article. As the economic diversification strategy has prompted UAE investments in high cuisine and fine dining, upscale restaurants that serve alcohol have multiplied, and have become respectable places to eat regardless of one’s relationship to alcohol. Its combination with upscale dining might thus make it acceptable as a form of social distinction for the upper classes. In parallel, those who reject the coexistence with such practices might be increasingly excluded. What is certain is that the new orientations revealed through these shifting territories of alcohol are here to stay: in November 2024, the Heineken brand announced the opening of a brewery in Dubai for the following year.27