Within the UAE’s COVID-19 Response, Abu Dhabi Places Itself First

A photograph taken in April 2018 reveals the Abu Dhabi skyline at dawn.

(Rustam Azmi/Getty Photographs)

Within the United Arab Emirates, diverging home COVID-19 methods may undermine the federal authorities’s nation-building mission and probably mobilize a inhabitants that has thus far remained largely absent from politics. The COVID-19 pandemic has handed the United Arab Emirates its first true nationwide emergency since 1971. And the nation’s seven emirates haven’t handled the disaster equally. Initially, the nation took a strict lockdown-heavy strategy when the primary wave of the virus hit the Arab Gulf within the spring of 2020. However by the autumn, Dubai and the northern emirates had all reopened their borders to vacationers and largely normalized their economies. The nation’s capital emirate of Abu Dhabi, in the meantime, has maintained strict border controls all through the pandemic, utilizing its deep pockets to prop up its economic system. This divergence in COVID-19 methods has threatened the United Arab Emirates’ notion of nationhood, with residents unable to freely enter their capital…