[This is Part 1 of a multi-part roundtable on “Denaturalization in Kuwait.” Read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 here.]
In March 2024, four months after the accession of Mishal al-Ahmed al-Sabah (b. 1940) as the new ruler of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government embarked on a mass denaturalization campaign that has since impacted more than 200,000 people. This campaign is the result of an unconstitutional overhaul which saw the dissolution of the parliament, the suspension of the constitution, and the amendment of citizenship laws. The earliest targets of the denaturalization decrees were women who had gained citizenship through marriage, as well as Hakim al-Mutairi, the head of the Salafi Ummah party, who has been living in exile in Turkey. Although naturalized women are believed to be the largest impacted demographic, the campaign has also systematically targeted Kuwaitis for political dissent. Among the legal pretexts weaponized in this campaign are allegations of forged citizenship claims, possession of dual nationality, and treason. Moreover, the new amendments have deemed past naturalization based on marriage, having a divorced or widowed citizen mother, or the provision of “honorable services for the state” illegitimate and therefore subject to retroactive reversal.
The most catastrophic dimension of the campaign is the fact that it functions as a measure of collective punishment, stripping entire lineages, living and dead, of their citizenship; confiscating their passports; seizing their properties; and freezing their bank accounts. Those targeted have lost employment as well as access to healthcare, education, housing, and basic civil documentation. Effectively, the campaign has actively expanded the Bidoon demographic, which previously accounted for 120,000 of the country’s five million population. Moreover, because Kuwaiti law prohibits dual nationality, many previously naturalized citizens were required to renounce their original citizenship in order to acquire Kuwaiti nationality. Consequently, several foreign states have been assisting in such cases by working to restore original citizenship to those left entirely stateless.
The campaign's regional reverberations were felt last April, when the Bahraini king issued a royal decree stripping 69 citizens and their dependents of their nationality for allegedly expressing pro-Iranian sentiments. This development stands alongside another systematic campaign by the Bahraini regime, which has weaponized naturalization to engineer the country’s demographics and consolidate loyalists within the police and military forces. Although the weaponization of citizenship and denaturalization are in no way new to the GCC states, the current campaigns are unprecedented in their sheer scale. The Kuwaiti government continues to issue contradictory statements regarding how it intends to address the situation of tens of thousands of people stripped of their citizenship, raising a series of troubling questions: What does this political vision achieve beyond terror, social fragmentation, and enforced silence? What does the state gain by dismantling the wealth of and security of its population, and what does this measure reveal about its underlying economic condition? How will this campaign interact with an increasingly volatile regional landscape shaped by the ongoing US-Iran war?
For this roundtable, we circulated seven questions among four scholars, including two Kuwaiti academics writing under pseudonyms for their security. The result is a rich discussion that offers a profound critique of traditional approaches to the study of citizenship in the GCC; explores the shifting, fluid boundaries between citizenship, statelessness, and migration; and contextualizes citizenship as a form of political violence the context of the 2011 uprisings, the Gaza genocide, and the US-Iran war.
Arabian Peninsula Page Co-Editors (AP): Historically, what have been some of the dominant analytical approaches to the study of citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula?
Alex Boodrookas: The field of citizenship studies has long suffered from conceptual fuzziness. The term can refer to de facto political participation, de jure rights, membership in a political community, or any combination of the above. The political philosopher Linda Bozniak describes a divide between studies of citizenship, which discuss political participation, and studies of nationality, which center exclusions from the body politic. Given the large noncitizen population in the GCC states, most but not all works on the region fall into the latter category.
The first wave of scholarship on Gulf citizenship can be categorized into one of three subfields, some of which only tangentially address the concept itself. The first centers migration, usually based on contemporary fieldwork and focused on a particular diasporic group. The second frames citizenship as a synonym for political rights and participation, stressing how residents of the Gulf conceptualized, and fought for, essential liberties—Kuwaiti diwaniyyas or parliamentary elections being favorite examples. The third tries to pin down the slippery concept of identity, tracing how residents of the Gulf states came to think of themselves in national terms. Many of these works have stood the test of time: accounts of political contestation by Falah Al-Mdairis, Jill Crystal, and Mary Ann Tetreault; rich ethnographies of the Palestinian and Iranian diasporas by Shafeeq Ghabra and Mohammad Taghi Razavian, respectively; and Ian J. Seccombe’s work on labor migration are among the most notable, even if they did not always frame citizenship as their object of study.
These approaches to the study of citizenship in the Gulf share two notable limitations—presentism and statism—that are the predictable result of their sources and methodology. There was, and still is, a relative paucity of historical research. Most studies, especially on migration, are based on contemporary fieldwork. Those historical works that do exist overwhelmingly rely on English-language and imperial sources that minimize contestation, sideline non-elite agency, and center the role of state actors. In this vacuum of research, scholars have generally assumed that Gulf citizens have been motivated by a combination of economic interest and xenophobia. Citizens are caricatured as “homo economicus,” rent-seeking subjects determined to maximize their individual share of the region’s oil wealth with the passage of restrictive nationality legislation. This one-dimensional portrait not only misses a rich history of debate and dissent, but also papers over fissures within citizen and noncitizen communities—especially those of class and gender.
Claire Beaugrand: Citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula has mainly been approached through the lenses of the state as it was defined as a legal status binding an individual to a sovereign state. As such, it has been one of the key concepts used to apprehend and describe the structure of Gulf societies. It formed the basis for the sacrosanct dichotomy between nationals and non-nationals as well as the touchstone for inclusion and exclusion in the polity and in the nation.
First, following the approach theorized by British scholar T.H. Marshall, citizenship has been conceived in terms of the types of rights it provides the nationals with. According to Marshall, three types of citizenship rights - civil, political, and social rights- have been gradually gained in England since the eighteenth century, and their incremental acquisition marked a trend towards a new egalitarian and legally defined form of community membership that emerged alongside the modern state. In the broader theoretical context of rentier economies and the abstract notion of "social contract" in the Gulf monarchies, scholars mainly concerned with the social transformations induced by oil noticed the significance of the social rights and welfare benefits bestowed to citizens exclusively, and the limited civil and political rights they had, if any. This rights-based approach provided the broad conceptual framework for the Rentier State theory, where political rights are bartered for social rights in the reversed order of what Marshall’s theory had suggested. It explained, in a purely derivative way, the absence of political participation, civil society or more egalitarian society.
Scholars specializing in the Middle East further discussed and nuanced the relationship between the citizen and the state as the guarantor of individual rights in the region. The two seminal books (Citizenship and the State in the Middle East and Approaches and Applications and Gender and Citizenship Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East) published on the topic in 2000 highlighted how citizenship is mediated by other intermediary groups and ties of kinship, tribe, patriarchal and religious forms of belonging or allegiance— all consistently privileging the male citizen. In their respective contributions to the volumes that dealt with the Arabian Peninsula, anthropologists Anh Nga Longva and Soraya Altorki took citizenship in the region on its own terms. They noted how it is not universal or “an abstract institution that comes with a string of political rights and responsibilities attached to it.” It is mediated by ideas of authority, legitimacy, and allegiance that vary according to social and historical circumstances and—in the case of Kuwait studied by Longva—according to the sociological categories and class (hadhar and badu). In the Gulf countries, one important aspect defining the state is through its leadership and the personalization of power inherited from the British colonial period. The Gulf ruling families have consequently favored the understanding of citizenship through the concept of taba’iyya –translated as the “following” of, or “allegiance” to, a leader, inspired by the tribal conception of political community—to shore up their legitimacy and their endeavor at nation-building. For Soraya Altorki, there were no Saudi female citizens to be found in Saudi Arabia, only female subjects, owing allegiance to patriarchal authorities both at the level of the family and the state.
Second, citizenship has overshadowed other concepts like class, gender, ethnicity, or race, through which to analyze the structure of Gulf societies and make sense specifically of the numerical significance of “foreigners” in disciplines like political economy or migration studies. Most research did somehow replicate the clear-cut binary set up by the discourse of states engaged in the process of nation-building and the homogenization and essentialization it implies. Social scientists often studied “Gulf societies” by carving out and separating the minority of nationals from the majority of non-citizens, the latter being in turn studied separately through their unidimensional contribution to the economy.
Reifying the binary between “nationals and foreigners” contributed to de-historicizing its active state-led production, erasing the contingent nature of bordering the nation, and hiding the process of social reconfiguration affecting individuals’ identification, as well as the great variety of statuses it resulted in. Focusing on the concept of citizenship also gave the national body an illusionary form of homogeneity that served nationalism and national identity-building. It obscured two core taboos, the nepotistic or clientelist relationships and social inequalities existing among nationals as well as the contingent nature of the nation itself.
Saher Sawdawi: The prevailing analytical approaches to citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula have been deeply rooted in ethnic and sectarian frames of reference, frames that are themselves inseparable from the historical genealogy of nationality laws in the region. These laws are perceived as affairs solely within the jurisdiction of a sovereign, specifically the governments of these nations. The power of granting, withholding, and revoking citizenship has functioned as a foundational instrument in the construction of the nation-state. Within this logic, the drawing of lines between inclusion and exclusion is not incidental; it is the very mechanism through which the citizenry is summoned into existence.
This mechanism, however, is a historically recent invention: most of these nationality laws were promulgated only at the turn of the twentieth century, nascent in the long history of human societies and nation-states. The presence of colonial powers in the region, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the universality of the United Nations after World War II necessitated the application of citizenship, thereby integrating these nations into the new world order and facilitating their participation in the global economy.
Yet what began as an instrument for entering that order soon turned inward. Citizenship in the region has become entangled with the project of nation-building to such a degree that it has hardened into what I would describe as a fetishized collective fantasy— one that saturates institutional architectures and seeps into the inner lives of social subjects alike. This fantasy operates through a logic of exclusion that disqualifies anyone who fails to conform to the image of the authentic citizen: those who acquired their nationality only after the formative period of state-building; those who married non-citizens and extended their citizenship to a spouse or child; those whose tribal or sectarian lineage places them outside the imagined ethnic core; and the long-stateless Bidoon, who were never admitted into the citizenry at all. According to this predominant fantasy, these categories do not truly belong to the nation-state, and some of the most vocal proponents of this fantasy have long called for the denaturalization of citizens who belong to these groups.
The dominant scholarly approach mirrors this political genealogy. It tends to be traditional, juridical, and dyadic, reducing the question of citizenship to a dichotomy of powerful sovereignty and powerless subjects. As such, the citizenry is treated as the product of selective construction rather than as the outcome of a contested arena in which consensus, negotiation, and inclusion might yet be cultivated. This blind spot is especially consequential in a region where citizens are a demographic minority, outnumbered by long-settled migrant populations that the juridical frame can register only as temporary. No framework that treats citizenship as a fixed list of members can adequately explain a society organized this way.
Ali M: While there is much diversity within dominant analytical approaches to studying citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula (rentier state, the binary of citizen vs. non-citizen, tribalism and kinship), and though this scholarship has evolved over time, much of this traditional scholarly (and non-scholarly) analysis of citizenship in the Gulf Arab states tends to overemphasize the region’s exceptionalism. Gulf citizenship regimes are assumed to be incomparable and unrelatable to those imposed and practiced elsewhere in the world due to the high levels of oil wealth that give rulers unrestricted power and control over their populations, extreme demographic imbalances between citizens and non-citizens, and the seemingly profuse nationalist/nativist sentiment expressed by Gulf citizens themselves. More recent scholarship on these issues have challenged many of these assumptions by looking at everyday practices of belonging, identity, and claims-making not only by citizens, but also by diverse groups of non-citizens.