[This is Part 2 of a multi-part roundtable on “Denaturalization in Kuwait.” Click here to read Part 1, including the series introduction. The remaining pieces of the roundtable series will published on Jadaliyya in the coming days. Check this article for links as they become available.]
Arabian Peninsula Page Co-Editors (AP): What are some of the critical ways of understanding citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula, and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these interventions address the limitations of more traditional approaches?
Claire Beaugrand: Anthropologists have challenged and refined the binary of nationals and non-nationals. When I embarked on the study of the Bidoon, I was influenced by the book by Anh Nga Longva’s Walls built on Sand (1997) who was the first to cite her interviews with Bidoon in the post-invasion period and most importantly to think of nationals and non-nationals in a relational way, through ideas of ‘plural society’ and ‘contradistinction’. I recall this specific quote: “Even more than the privileges it imparted, what really gave citizenship its significance was the presence of the disproportionately large noncitizen population.”
My initial research intuition was to explore the grey area between insiders and outsiders and the in-betweenness between citizens’ and aliens’ statuses. I endeavored to look at the border zones from the vantage point of the margins, which went against the short-sightedness of looking at citizens solely when thinking about Gulf societies. This, in result, allowed me to document the diversity of statuses rather than reinforce the supposed egalitarian trend identified by citizenship theories.
Yet my intellectual entry point into the topic was not located in citizenship studies but in the theories of nationalism, which provided a critical approach to the study of state- and nation-building. As a student of Fred Halliday, my interest lied with nationalism as both the political ideology that underpins the modern state system and the political movements that seek “to assert one common, timeless, unitary identity.” While modernist scholars in nationalism highlight the social constructedness of nations, through the drawing on and reformulating of the past, I observed through the same process of reinterpreting the past, the manufacturing of aliens via the construction of illegality and the resulting illegitimating of claims. My research delved into the ways in which migration, mobility, class, gender, and tribal affiliations create a complex variety of unequal statuses, among citizens, Bidoon, and non-citizens alike.
Away from state-centered approaches, other critical ways of understanding citizenship raised the questions of claim-making and lived experiences of belonging. New approaches by architects, particularly Yasser Elsheshtawy, as well as urban historians and anthropologists, based on the earlier scholarship of Henri Lefebvre, put emphasis on the urban dimension of belonging. This opened avenues to explore the links between identities and territoriality, urbanities, and spatial imaginaries. It has also shifted the research focus onto the actors themselves and the ways they experience places, appropriate their living environment or feel dispossessed of it, which forms the basis of claim-makings.
The shift of focus from legal approaches to embodied actors and their individual practices has been at the heart of a new critical understanding of citizenship in political theory more widely, as encapsulated, for instance, in the notion of “acts of citizenship” coined by Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen. This new conception defines citizenship as constituted through disruptive actions creating political subjects and not solely by the top-down granting of a status by the state, which somehow broke the monopoly held by citizens on the political. I used this framework to analyze Bidoon activism, mobilization, and protest. In her study of Dubai’s Indian diaspora, Neha Vora radically revisits the understanding of the political, divorcing it from solely citizens as defined by the law, demonstrating how “foreign residents participate in the production of the legitimacy and sovereignty of the nation-state from the site of exception” and how Indian migrants—as the majority of the population in the UAE bolster the country’s economy and even determine its very existence— are impossible citizens.
Saher Sawdawi: A post-constructivist approach offers the most critical framework for engaging with citizenship in the Arabian Peninsula. By this I mean an approach that takes the constructivist insight (that citizenship is made rather than given) as its starting point, shifting attention from the state’s act of making to the ways subjects themselves live, contest, and remake their belonging. If citizenship as an ideal is, in some sense, a utopian concept, then any critical study of it must be willing to enter the spheres of lived experience in which citizenship is practiced, claimed, and quietly reshaped by those who live under its terms. This is not quite the same as entering the interior life of thought and feeling, which opens onto the related but distinct terrain of identity and belonging. The two are easily run together, yet only the first shapes citizenship directly; the second shapes how citizenship is felt and inhabited. Traditional approaches, anchored in juridical taxonomies and the question of formal membership, are equipped to register neither. Holding these registers apart is part of the analytical work itself, since the conflation of citizenship, nationality, identity, and belonging remains one of the most persistent confusions in the study of the subject.
An attentiveness to lived experience refuses the asymmetry that traditional scholarship reproduces between the sovereign-as-dominant and the subject-as-recipient, and repositions the analytical gaze alongside, rather than above, those whose belonging is in question. It treats subjects not as data points along the inclusion/exclusion line, but as knowing interpreters of their own condition.
What such orientation makes visible is something the dominant frameworks have tended to render invisible: under the pressure of restrictive nationality laws, alternative social phenomena are quietly emerging, affiliations, solidarities, and vernacular practices of recognition that gesture toward a sense of belonging not yet captured, and perhaps not capturable, by the official narrative of who counts. These are the small, often unaccounted forms of resistance that accumulate in the margins of a legal order; they are the way social life insists on exceeding the categories prepared for it.
It is here that the underexplored dimension of citizenship comes into view: belonging. To take belonging seriously is not to substitute it for citizenship but to treat it as one of the arenas in which citizenship is contested and made. Approached this way, belonging releases citizenship from its juridical capture and holds it open rather than settled. This reorientation is not without precedent; a growing body of work on migration and non-citizens in the Gulf has placed belonging, rather than legal status, at the center of analysis.
This matters all the more in the Arabian Peninsula. The model inherited from Western scholarship, in which citizenship is a bundle of civil, political, and social rights, presupposes a secure legal status from which those rights flow. That presupposition does not hold where the state can dispose of migrants at will and penalize its own citizens with statelessness. Once legal status itself becomes unstable, belonging is no longer a soft supplement to rights but the ground on which membership is actually claimed, as recent research shows: through everyday acts, the region’s non-citizens assert locality rather than nationality.
This is where critical interventions earn their force: not by replacing one definition of citizenship with another, but by reopening the question itself, and by insisting that the conventional legal definitions implied by the region’s nationality laws cannot be the final word on who, in this place and at this moment, can be said to belong.
Ali M: While most traditional scholarship on citizenship in the region tends to either focus on “national” issues or “migrant” issues, inadvertently affirming the citizen/non-citizen binary, more critical interventions analyze Gulf Arab societies as a whole, where questions of rights, experiences of belonging, and access to opportunities are closely intertwined and are constantly in flux for all who live and work in the region. This body of literature also includes analyses of people who exist beyond the binary, namely the Bidoon, integrating them into the region’s history and culture rather than treating them as “outsiders” as imposed by their legal status. And just as the category of “citizen” is differentiated and unstable (by gender, class, tribal vs. urban), such body of work shows that even the terms used to categorize non-citizens are problematic: “expatriates” referring to Western and other middle class or elite residents, and “migrants” used mostly for “unskilled” or “bachelor” labor. These terms imply temporariness or transience, but many non-citizen individuals and communities in the region exhibit a degree of permanence and integration elided in the prevailing language of Gulf migration where, for instance, the term “immigrant” is rarely used precisely because this term is associated with a legal status rather than feelings of belonging or claims-making. In the Gulf, where non-citizens form demographic majorities, social life cannot be understood purely through legal nationality categories.
Alex Boodrookas: As Gulf studies has expanded over the past few decades, citizenship has been one of its central objects of study. Scholars including Neha Vora, Natalie Koch, and Attiya Ahmad have expanded the lens of political participation to demonstrate how noncitizens shape the political process, make claims to belonging, and engage in protest even in the face of structural exclusion. Studies that take social class seriously, notably by Michelle Buckley, Ahmad Kanna, and Adam Hanieh, further complicate the citizen/noncitizen binary and illustrate how the exclusions of nationality enable both capital formation and economic inequity. Scholars of urban space, such as Nelida Fuccaro, Kaveh Ehsani, and Farah Al-Nakib, have traced how a variety of social hierarchies, including citizenship, were etched into the built environment of Gulf cities. Finally, new efforts to historicize nationality have pushed back against the field’s presentism: Nora Lori on “permanent temporariness” in the United Arab Emirates; Omar AlShehabi on how British imperial authorities used nationality as part of their divide-and-rule strategy in Bahrain; Claire Beaugrand on the Bidoon in Kuwait; and Lindsey R. Stephenson on the breakdown of trans-Gulf Iranian connections.
But despite much new and valuable work, historical studies of citizenship continue to rely on the imperial archive and focus on state policy. There is still little understanding of how residents of the Persian Gulf shaped citizenship regimes from the bottom up. My work addresses this lacuna. It benefits from the relative political openness of midcentury Kuwait, which generated a rich archive of newspapers, memoirs, and other Arabic-language sources. I argue that while powerful business interests lobbied to create an underpaid and structurally disempowered noncitizen working class, many Kuwaitis did not act as single-minded rent-seekers but instead fought for a more open and equitable citizenship regime. Kuwaiti feminists criticized patriarchal nationality legislation that left the children of Kuwaiti women and noncitizen men without Kuwaiti citizenship. Anticolonial and Arab nationalists fought for the naturalization of Arab immigrants, and later, with the increasing popularity of Arab socialism and Marxism, for other longtime noncitizen residents. While xenophobia certainly was a powerful force, even many Kuwaitis who supported the drafting of nationality laws did so in the hope of reining in the monarchy’s use of naturalization as an arbitrary form of patronage or to ensure the accuracy of voter rolls—and therefore the legitimacy of elections. Noncitizens and stateless people became powerful advocates themselves, contributing to popular debates that directly shaped policy. It was the category of labor, I argue, that posed the greatest challenge to the exclusions of nationality. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Kuwaiti labor movement became a powerful advocate for noncitizen rights, demanding workplace protections and social welfare legislation that protected all residents of Kuwait, regardless of nationality. Their failure undermined the power of the social movements on which Kuwaiti democracy relied, thus demonstrating the fundamental interdependence of the rights of citizens and noncitizens. This history makes clear that citizenship in the Gulf should be understood from both the top down and the bottom up.