Mobile peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world have faced enormous pressure throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries to change their way of life, to settle down and remain in one place. The notion that a settled existence is more modern than a mobile one continues to dominate expert thinking as a continuation of late nineteenth-century social evolutionist theories of the progress of civilisation. Most of the modern nation-states of the Middle East have approached their mobile pastoral peoples with a determined view to making them stay put in one place and give up their pastoral subsistence livelihoods. Settlement schemes, it was assumed, would assure political and economic control over these difficult-to-emplace-and-control peoples. The development aid efforts, both bi-lateral and international, throughout the twentieth century followed these same biases and were designed to make mobile or nomadic peoples ‘modern’, using principles developed during the colonial era such as terra nullius, which declared all land not held privately as empty, and thus belonging to the state so that it could be disposed of or developed as the state wished. By the end of the twentieth century, most pastoral peoples’ grazing lands had been expropriated and sed-entarisation schemes of one sort or another were the mechanisms of choice. Pastoral peoples in Oman, however, had some success in challenging the notion of terra nullius in the deserts of the country. A younger generation of ‘citizen’ herders have been able to parlay further multinational oil industry intervention to support their continued mobility in the deserts of Oman and subsistence pastoral livelihoods.

I begin the chapter with a brief examination of the ways in which mobile pastoral communities in the Middle East have faced and then navigated around government land expropriation and sedentarisation efforts to create multi-resource livelihood successes without always being forced to settle. I then examine the situation in Oman, where a more ‘enlightened’ state policy regarding settlement was enacted and where oil concerns have been paramount. Determined to provide social benefits to its mobile pastoral communities without forcing them to settle, the government of Oman extended basic services to these communities late into the twentieth century.