Dubai: Anxious but Functioning
The second dispatch in our series from Umaima Baboojee, Resilience Advisor at Fixinc and Unbreakable Ventures.
Umaima is based on the ground in Dubai. What follows is drawn from her correspondence over the past fortnight following on from her first piece, The Iran War From Dubai: What Your Newsfeed Is Not Showing You
The Return to Normal
Dubai looks normal again. The roads are moving, sports clubs are open, people are back at dinners and gatherings, and the emergency alerts that once jolted residents awake at 3 or 4 a.m. appear to have stopped. But “normal” in the UAE right now is not the same thing as ease.
A few weeks ago, the mood here was different. When the war opened, the group chats lit up constantly. People were refreshing news feeds at midnight, debating whether to book flights, pulling their kids from school pickups early. The television stayed on, not as background noise, but as vigil. There was a specific kind of fear that comes not from knowing what will happen, but from not knowing how bad it might get.
That first phase has passed. What replaced it wasn’t confidence. It was adaptation. Somewhere in the middle stretch, a quiet shift happened. People stopped treating every alert as a potential escalation and started filing them alongside the other anxieties of living here: traffic, visa renewals, the cost of rent. The disruption had become, uncomfortably, routine.
Now, in the last week or so, even that has eased. The emergency alerts that once jolted residents awake at 3 or 4 a.m. appear to have stopped. People I know are back at padel courts and bowling alleys, and back at Friday brunches. The news cycle, which once ran on a constant loop in living rooms, has been turned down.
We know what’s happening. We don’t need all the details anymore.
Schools, Students, and a Quiet Exhaustion
Schools across the UAE resumed in-person learning on April 20, ending seven weeks of remote classes that left families drained and frustrated. But the reopening has landed with more skepticism than relief, not least because it came just two days before the ceasefire is set to expire today, April 22 (The National, April 20, 2026).
The logistics were chaotic. The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) initially confirmed that school buses would not run on reopening day. Then, on April 18, the Ministry of Education reversed the decision and gave the green light for buses to resume, leaving families just two days to rearrange transport plans (The National, April 18, 2026). Not all schools opened on the 20th either. Each institution required individual KHDA clearance following inspections and staff safety training, and some had not received approval in time.
The safety measures inside schools tell their own story. Blue tape now marks safe zones across corridor floors and classrooms. Schools have designated shelter-in-place areas in large interior spaces without glass windows. Evacuation routes are mapped and clearly marked, and some schools have secured agreements with nearby supermarkets and mosques to serve as off-site shelters if buildings need to be evacuated (The National, April 17, 2026).
Students received safety briefings and practice drills on their first day back. Outdoor activities remain suspended. Some canteens are closed.
Beyond the logistics, there is a deeper exhaustion. Major international exams have been cancelled across the UAE for 2026. For other qualifications, schools and awarding bodies are still working out how grades will be determined, with approaches ranging from evidence portfolios to other forms of assessed coursework.
The predictable result: motivation has collapsed, particularly among younger students who were already harder to engage through a screen. The first week of in-person learning is not focused on academics at all. Schools are prioritising emotional regulation, routine, and reconnection. Academic gap-filling starts the week after. Staff training on day one included breathing techniques and strategies for helping distressed pupils.
Officials reported over 80% attendance at KHDA-cleared campuses on day one. But that figure only counts schools that opened and students still in the country. A significant number of expatriate families left the UAE when the attacks began and have not returned.
People I have spoken to describe families who vacated apartments, pulled their children from school, and flew to India or back to home countries because they could no longer take the mental toll. Some are waiting weeks to see whether the ceasefire holds before booking return flights.
Parents who did send their children back are not celebrating. They are watching the clock.
“I do feel a little worried about them returning after what happened,” one parent told Khaleej Times, “but I trust they’ll be well cared for. If anything happens, we can always return to distance learning”.
The mood among those still overseas is starker. Several parents I know have said plainly that they will not return until a proper diplomatic agreement is in place, not just a fragile, time-limited ceasefire. For them, the repercussions of this conflict will linger regardless of what happens this week.
The core tension is timing. The ceasefire announced on April 7 expired April 22. Schools opened two days before that deadline. Every institution has been told it must be ready to switch back to remote learning at any moment. Whether the reopening survives the week depends on a diplomatic outcome that nobody in the education system controls.
The Surface and the Texture
The surface reads as stability. Malls are open. The metro runs. Restaurants are full enough. But the texture has changed. Dubai Mall, which on a normal weekend you’d avoid for the crowds, is manageable now. Weekend traffic has thinned noticeably. One friend who works in retail at Dubai Mall told me that staff have reached the point of trying to convince their own colleagues to buy things, just to keep the numbers up.
Hotels and hospitality venues are pushing staycation deals, co-working packages, and discount offers with an enthusiasm that tells its own story.
The Fazaa scheme, which offers subsidised experiences for the first sign-ups, is part of the same effort: keep people spending, keep sentiment up, keep the economy visibly moving.
There are quieter signals too. The Burj Al Arab has announced 18 months of renovation. Residents raise an eyebrow at that. Eighteen months is a long time for a renovation. The luxury retail corridors are the most telling: the footfall has dropped sharply, and Dubai’s entire identity is built on that segment. Hospitality is absorbing losses during what should be peak tourist season, before the heat makes the city uninhabitable for visitors. That window is closing without the tourists to fill it.
Markets have recovered faster than people have. UAE financial indices surged after the April 7 ceasefire, with Dubai posting its largest single-day gain in six years (AGBI, April 2026). The ADX climbed 4.75% over the past month (Trading Economics, April 21, 2026). But the optimism is evaporating. As of April 21, oil prices have surged back above $95 a barrel, peace talks have stalled, and Trump has warned the ceasefire is "highly unlikely" to be extended (TheStreet, April 21, 2026). The gains of the past two weeks may not survive the next two days.
At sea, caution hasn’t fully disappeared. Major shipping actors remain wary around Hormuz, and uncertainty around navigation risks persists. The investor recovery and the social mood are moving at different speeds.
The Cyber Layer and the Language of Calm
The cyber dimension is one that most residents are now living with quietly. The Road and Transport Authority (RTA) app went down. Banking apps have been intermittent. Officially, the story is one of resilience. The UAE is handling hundreds of thousands of attacks per day, and the framing in official communications is always active, never passive. Not we are being attacked but we are managing the volume. Residents I spoke to noticed this.
“Even if it’s something bad,” one person said, “they will make it seem good.”
That instinct, to read the register of official communications and understand what sits underneath, is now a background skill that most people here have quietly developed.
It’s part of a broader information landscape that nobody fully trusts. People are drawing from government announcements, local outlets, Reddit threads, Lovin Dubai, and Western media, and they distrust each source in a different way. Government statements are considered reliable but curated. Western coverage is seen as sensationalised. Social media is unverifiable.
“No one really knows what’s going on.”
What nobody does is say any of this publicly. The GCC’s long-standing culture of political caution hasn’t changed. If anything, the war has made people more careful. People speak in closed circles. They share opinions in private conversations, in apartments, in cars.
Online, they’re careful. “You cannot incite public disruption,” one person explained, matter-of-factly, as though describing a weather pattern. “That’s always been there. It’s not new.” The distinction between what is said in a group chat and what is said on a public platform is one that residents maintain almost instinctively.
Contingency Thinking Behind Closed Doors
The more honest conversations are happening behind closed doors, and they’ve shifted in the last few weeks from immediate safety to longer-term financial anxiety.
People are talking about what to do if the banks fail, not because they believe it’s imminent, but because contingency thinking is how you manage living in a place where you don’t control the variables. Some residents have sent money back to family in other countries. Others have been buying gold: portable, convertible, not dependent on an app that might go down. The logic is old. In a war, you hold what you can carry.
Employment anxiety runs through every sector and every demographic, and this is one of the things that surprises people who assume it maps neatly onto expat versus local.
Emiratis are worried too. Business owners who considered themselves insulated are now watching their pipelines and asking the same questions as junior employees.
Events and marketing, two industries that are foundational to how Dubai presents itself to the world, have been badly hit. International acts and large-scale productions have been cancelled or pushed to later in the year. The workers in those industries, often on flexible or project-based contracts, are the most exposed.
The workers I spoke to described an environment where the choice being offered is salary cut or termination, and when someone agrees to a cut, there is no legal recourse.
“You can’t fight it if you agreed to it,” one person said.
Whether layoffs are widespread or concentrated is genuinely hard to verify. What’s clear is that people believe they are happening, and belief shapes behaviour.
There’s also a visible population shift that is hard to quantify but hard to ignore. The empty parking space next to mine, same car, same spot, not seen in four weeks. “I’m pretty sure that person left.”
It’s not clear how many people have gone, or how permanently. The consensus is that most are waiting rather than relocating, holding elsewhere until the picture clarifies, then coming back. Dubai pays well. People don’t leave easily.
The Nightclub at 2:30
The image that stays with me from this whole period is a nightclub, sometime around 2:30 in the morning. Music, a crowd, the specific unreality of a Dubai night out in full swing, and then an alert arrives. Not panic. Not chaos. People check their phones; staff move us indoors. Then, when it passes, they go back. Back to the music, back to the dancing, back to the drinks.
That moment contains everything about where the UAE is right now. The procedure has been learned. The response is calm, almost practised. Life continues. But the alert still came. The door to indoors was still used. And everyone in that room knew, without saying it, that it could come again.
Everyone Is Emirati
There’s a phrase being used in state messaging lately. “Everyone is Emirati,” a kind of manufactured solidarity between nationals and long-term residents. It’s a subtle signal: the UAE is trying to build a narrative of shared endurance. Whether people believe it or are simply living alongside it is a different question.
What most residents seem to have arrived at is something simpler and more honest. They feel physically safe. The state has demonstrated, repeatedly and visibly, that its defence systems work.
But physical safety and psychological ease are not the same thing. The early initiatives such as free therapy and community support programmes have mostly wound down. The understanding now is that this is the new reality, and everyone has to find their own way through it.
Dubai still looks normal on the surface. Underneath, people are recalculating risk, quietly, privately, and with the particular discipline of a place that has always made stability look effortless, even when it isn’t.
Umaima Farhan is a Resilience Advisor at Fixinc and a regular contributor and Advisor to Unbreakable Ventures. She is based in Dubai. Read the first dispatch in this series, The Iran War From Dubai: What Your Newsfeed Is Not Showing You.
 |
|