[This is Part 3 of a multi-part roundtable on “Denaturalization in Kuwait.” Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5 here.]
Arabian Peninsula Page Co-Editors (AP): How does the recent denaturalization campaign in Kuwait (which began in March 2024) challenge or complicate your study of citizenship, statelessness, and migration in the region?
Ali M: Kuwait’s current denaturalization campaign began in March 2024 with a few dozen citizenship revocations mainly targeting high-profile political critics, opposition members, and their families. By late 2024, the government began stripping the citizenship of women married to Kuwaiti men as well as Kuwaitis who had been naturalized for “honorable services to the country”— both of which were legal paths to citizenship per the 1959 Nationality Law (Articles 8 and 5 respectively). The revocations also included Kuwaitis who allegedly obtained citizenship through fraud. More recently, Kuwaitis who hold dual nationalities have been targeted, and potentially all naturalized citizens are in line to be denaturalized. As of June 2026, more than 70,000 citizens have been denaturalized, though the number is significantly higher as all descendants of denaturalized citizens are stripped of their citizenship. Potentially hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis have lost or are at risk of losing their citizenship (the number of citizens at the end of 2025 was roughly 1.5 million).
This denaturalization campaign disrupts many of the assumptions that have structured how scholars study citizenship, statelessness, and migration in the Arabian Peninsula. The stripping of citizenship of tens of thousands of Kuwaitis of diverse categories completely upends older models that view citizenship primarily through the rentier state model. Whereas once citizenship was granted en masse to buy loyalty through political inclusion, now citizenship is revoked en masse to silence dissent and sustain a much narrower definition of national belonging based on “purity.” The denaturalization campaign also disrupts any semblance of a clear binary between fixed conceptions of citizen and non-citizen in the region. The unprecedented number of revocations reveals that citizenship is reversible and deeply unstable. While this had been true in the past in relation to political dissidents, the mass scale and unpredictability of revocations witnessed since March 2024 challenge the very idea of Kuwaiti citizenship as a relatively secure, albeit highly exclusive, status anchored in both law and lineage. Under the current regime, the message has been clearly delivered that nobody in Kuwait is safe, not even long-standing naturalized citizens or citizens by “origin.” Kuwaiti citizenship can now only ever be understood as provisional and contingent, subject to political authority.
The current revocation campaign also obviously collapses the boundary between “citizen” and “stateless” or Bidoon, as many denaturalized citizens who do not have access to alternative nationalities are effectively made stateless overnight. This includes women who legally acquired citizenship through marriage and were at the time of naturalization forced to relinquish their former citizenship, and who have now been stripped of their Kuwaiti citizenship and can no longer reinstate their former status. Statelessness in Kuwait is, therefore, being actively produced under the current circumstances.
The boundary between citizen, migrant, and deportable subject is therefore more fluid than previously studied in the context of the Gulf. While most Gulf scholarship assumes that migration flows inward (with foreign workers entering the region), now former citizens are being pushed into previously unimaginable circumstances of having to seek residency permits or foreign passports, which will inevitably lead to an increased flow of migration outward. Kuwaitis—like other Gulf nationals—very rarely emigrate, given the enormous benefits that come with being a citizen. But in this new precarious reality, more Kuwaitis—even those whose citizenships have not been revoked—will likely start to imagine emigration (and naturalization elsewhere) as a way of securing a more stable future for their children.
But to avoid falling into the same trap of viewing citizenship in the Gulf as a totally exceptional case, we must also view Kuwait’s current revocation campaign in relation to wider global processes. What is happening in Kuwait right now, tragically, is not unique. The extension or revocation of citizenship rights have always been used as tools of political power and repression around the world throughout history (for instance, the Rohingya have been denied citizenship in Myanmar since the 1982 Citizenship Law established a strict, race-based, three-tiered system). Countries like the United Kingdom and the United States have also implemented strategies to restrict citizenship, setting dangerous precedents toward denaturalization. Since 2025, the second Trump administration has sought to end birthright citizenship (protected by the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution) and make naturalization harder to obtain by cancelling interviews and oath ceremonies and changing eligibility requirements. The administration has simultaneously expanded the criteria for denaturalization to potentially be used against individuals critical of the administration. In recent weeks, the Justice Department has filed several dozen denaturalization cases, aiming for 250 cases by this fall. In the UK, a recent report by the Runnymede Trust and Reprieve found that nine million British citizens, approximately thirteen percent of the population, are at risk of being legally stripped of their citizenship. Under current law, British citizens can lose their nationality if the government has “reasonable grounds for believing” they could claim citizenship from another country, even if they have never lived in that country or do not identify with it, effectively leaving them stateless.
Laws and precedents either exist or are being created globally to allow for mass denaturalization if or when those in power decide to use such tools for political gain. Mass deprivation of nationality has been a far less common, though not entirely eradicated, practice in the world since the Second World War, but Kuwait may potentially be “a harbinger of diminished respect for norms against large scale deprivation of citizenship” around the world today. As more countries lean toward the kind of xenophobic nativism we see in Kuwait, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, millions of people globally are finding themselves at risk of becoming stateless, to a degree not witnessed in generations.
Claire Beaugrand: The recent denaturalization campaign in Kuwait has oddly given renewed relevance to my work on the Bidoon that started almost twenty years ago. While at the time some Kuwaitis felt little concerned by the conundrum of the Bidoon I was studying, the issue has come closer to their lives and the realization that they themselves could be or are effectively made Bidoon is painful – all the more so as the Bidoon had been subject to policies aimed at othering and vilifying them. Striking is the state’s similar framing of statelessness and denaturalization in terms of “fraud” to delegitimize claims.
This unprecedented wave of denaturalization brought me back to what first led me to study the Bidoon, namely nationalism. I entered the field with this intellectual puzzle: why would a state refuse to include people that were undeniably integrated into its society at a time when it sought to hide the so-called “demographic imbalance” that fragilized the legitimacy of its sovereignty as per the then prevailing nationalist and international norms? What we see happening is the exacerbation of nationalism into the radical ethnic, nativist, and patriarchal type. It pushes a notch further the purification of the nation that had started with the emergence of the modern state, actively producing difference by establishing distinct, non-overlapping categories of citizens and aliens, erasing the multicultural context and streamlining multiple ethnic, linguistic, geographic, and racial identities into one unitary identity. The modern state had re-organized social hierarchies existing in the pre-modern state era through reworked notions of prestige and genealogical purity around ruling families as the locus of ultimate power, with the vexed question of the Bidoon bearing witness to this exclusionary process set in motion by tribal and dynastic paternalism. The novelty of this campaign of mass denaturalization is that it does not content itself with excluding, but it does purge the nation from the members it had gradually included. It seeks to undo the past policies that enabled some form of integration and come back to an imagined original 1920 picture of the city—stripped from the richness of its multicultural background, “the original ‘snapshot jus soli principle’ understood in a strict literal sense, with a subsequent narrow jus sanguinis application where nationality is only transmitted by the [male] genitor”.
The nation is understood in strictly ethnic terms, which recalls the conceptions held in the post-WWI period and the fascist state policies of the interwar period, which triggered Hannah Arendt’s political theory on statelessness, and the easy reversibility of naturalization casts doubt on discourses of civic nationalism in the region. Yet while it clearly engages dialogically with historic precedents, this Kuwaiti defensive or besieged nationalism is to be located, borrowing Jean-François Bayart’s term, within the current historical moment of the “conservative revolution” unfolding against the background of new technological art of the war, the digitalization of societies and their policing, the deepening of economic integration into international markets, the climate crisis, and growing international migration. Its defining feature, to quote Bayart, is “to combine the revolutionary idea —severed from the ideological monopoly of the left— with the preservation or restoration of so-called traditional values and with a fundamentalist, völkisch definition of the nation or rather of its supposed people”.
The Kuwaiti campaign borrows its feature of attributing political misfortune and the perceived economic decline of the country relative to her Gulf neighbors, to an Other coming from within, and developing identitarian fundamentalism, insisting on the authenticity and purity of the people to be saved possibly through eugenics. What appears very prominently in this campaign is the blind faith put in technology having the power to assert the absolute determinism of biology (jus sanguinis), to define belonging understood as birth and bloodline. This stress laid on bloodline reinforces the gender dimension of the citizen understood as male— and heterosexual, as already highlighted by Madawi al-Rasheed in A Most Masculine State. It also illustrates the state’s elbowing out religious authorities when it comes to defining the model of the desired family, excluding practices that were widespread in the past, of adoptive, affective, social or legal parents to restrict it all to the biological tie.
Alex Boodrookas: I see the recent denaturalization campaign as representative of historical precedent, with the significant exception of its scale. The Kuwaiti state has long sought to legitimate itself by claiming to be the guardian of Kuwaiti nationality, and it did so again in 2024. This discourse is inherently gendered and patriarchal, echoing an old commonplace that Kuwaitis are “one family”—and thus implicitly positioning the monarch as the national pater familias. Efforts to enlist ordinary Kuwaitis in the campaign by encouraging them to report “fraudulent” citizenship cases reflect the fact that the citizenship regime has always been shaped by popular pressures and that Kuwaiti officials and bureaucrats have long been its enforcers. The fact that the denaturalization cases have caused little international blowback—which, given the global surge in authoritarianism, is unsurprising—further demonstrates that the Kuwaiti state feels that it can act with impunity in the current moment.
Saher Sawdawi: The denaturalization campaign is of a magnitude comparable to the Gulf War of 1990–91. Kuwait survived an existential rupture then, when the Iraqi occupation dissolved the institutional fabric of the state for seven months. The current campaign poses a challenge of comparable existential weight to the idea of Kuwait, with one crucial and worrying distinction: the threat is no longer external but domestically planted and cultivated from within the very institutions entrusted with safeguarding the country.
The aftermath of 1990 is instructive precisely because of its restorative impulse, though that impulse was double-edged. Inwardly, the post-occupation moment produced a reactivation of the constitution after six years of suspension, a call for general elections, and the formation of what was arguably the most participatory cabinet in Kuwait's history, half of whose members were elected representatives who had crossed from parliament into government. The trajectory then appeared outward and reparative: a movement toward greater inclusion, toward the broadening of the political community and even the unifying of the types of citizenship, a question Kuwait has returned to now in drafting a new taxonomy of subjects under the new Nationality Law.
Yet that same period had a darker side. Even as the state restored constitutional life for its citizens, it expelled the greater part of its Palestinian community, a population of roughly 400,000 reduced within months to a small remnant, on a collective suspicion of disloyalty during the occupation. Inclusion, in other words, always ended at the edge of citizenship. What makes the current moment so analytically and morally complicated is that this exclusionary logic, once reserved for non-citizens, has now been turned inward, against citizens themselves. The most challenging dimension of these revocations, in my view, is not the act itself but the “day after,” the question that hangs in the air once the process is declared complete: Then what?
Kuwait already carries one of the largest stateless populations in the world relative to its total citizenry. Estimates put the stateless Bidoon population at more than 100,000 set against a citizenry of around 1.5 million. It is a condition that has persisted since the inception of the nationality law in 1959, with no meaningful avenue toward naturalization. This longstanding fact is not merely a political or social complication; it is, more fundamentally, an ethical and moral one, a quiet wound that the country has learned to live with rather than to address. The recent revocations now layer themselves atop this older sediment, and they do so as the deliberate outcome of a political choice rather than as an inherited apathy. These revocations are enacted under the slogan of “cleansing,” a vocabulary whose violence cannot be sanitized by its administrative packaging. One might object that fraudulent naturalization cannot simply go unanswered, and this is true enough. But accountability and erasure are not synonyms: fraud can be met with civil penalties, with the preservation of children's nationality irrespective of a parent's wrongdoing, and with revocation reserved, if at all, for the gravest cases and only under the supervision of a competent court. To collapse that spectrum into a single, judicially unreviewed instrument is not to punish fraud but to mistake erasure for justice. Where, after this, is trust in one’s government to be found? Such expedient acts erase the very ground on which any meaningful citizenship must rest: the confidence that institutional integrity will outlast the political moods of whoever happens to hold power.
It is worth noting that stateless Kuwaitis have, for decades, demonstrated a profound resilience in the face of systematic erasure and rejection, particularly in their encounters with the juridical system, where access to administrative courts has long been foreclosed to them. The recent revocations follow a strikingly similar pattern: they too are enacted outside the oversight of judicial power, severed from the corrective legal review. The revocations will not, in fact, cause the revoked to cease to exist. On the contrary, much like the stateless Bidoon, who across decades of legal exclusion have forged durable forms of belonging that no nationality law could grant or annul, the revoked will forge new versions of what it means to exist despite, and perhaps because of, their exclusion. Resistance and resignification tend to be the unintended inheritances of every project that imagines it can simply legislate people out of belonging.
AP: In what ways is the denaturalization campaign underway in Kuwait (a) connected to the Bidoon struggle that emerged in the wake of the Arab uprisings and (b) deployed as a state weapon for political reasons, similar to how regimes in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia have historically deployed denaturalization against political dissidents?
Alex Boodrookas: I think that the protests of 2011 and the surge of Bidoon activism that followed are the essential immediate context for understanding the current denaturalization campaign. At the same time, the use of denaturalization against political opponents is nothing new. In fact, my work argues that British imperial authorities introduced the legal category of nationality in the Persian Gulf to create the figure of the deportable alien, providing legal cover to an imperial state that turned to deportation as its catch-all solution to a variety of problems. Imperial authorities freely deported dissidents, sex workers, people with incurable illnesses, or criminal suspects whose guilt could not be proven in court. It was, in short, a powerful weapon of arbitrary rule. Deportation and denaturalization have been essential to Gulf states from their inception. What we are seeing now is a new iteration of a longstanding trend that was central to the formation of the Gulf states.
Saher Sawdawi: The campaign and the Bidoon struggle are related but not identical, and two distinctions clarify how. The first matter to unpack is that the method that the Kuwaiti government has historically used to deal with statelessness stems from what I call the fetishized collective fantasy of Kuwaiti identity. It is a fantasy in which exclusion is the default operating principle, and inclusion is reduced to a kind of historical chimera, nostalgic in essence yet selectively deployed according to contemporary conditions and whims. The boundary of belonging is simply being redrawn: where once the line excluded only the stateless, it now also encircles the legally-naturalized Kuwaitis who, by some shifting and unaccountable measure, no longer fit the criteria of the imagined community.
The second matter, however, marks a critical sociological distinction. The Bidoon have long inhabited a liminal space in both the institutional and social spheres of Kuwaiti society. They are present, but never quite admitted; visible, but never quite recognized. The revoked population, by contrast, are very much integral to, and embedded within, the core of those same institutional and social spheres. By every expectation, this asymmetry should make resistance more likely, not less. And yet here is the dissonance I find most striking: there is no meaningful mobilization to counter their erasure.
This absence of visible struggle in response to the denaturalization campaign can be attributed to several converging conditions. The first is structural: the suspension of the Constitution and the dissolution of parliament, which together have evacuated the political field of any form of immunity, representative voice, or institutional shelter from which mobilization might be launched. The second is comparative: the Bidoon struggle during the Arab uprisings unfolded alongside citizen-led protests against a government widely perceived as corrupt at the time. It was precisely this overlapping tension, gathered under the regional umbrella of the uprisings, that nurtured a fragile but real sense of solidarity across categories of belonging. Today’s conditions are starkly different. The institutional suspension, the regional unrest abroad, most acutely the witnessing of the genocide in Gaza, and the evident trend towards reactionary politics in the international order all conspire to produce an atmosphere profoundly stultifying. To this must be added a final, more technical instrument of silence: the newly enacted State Security law, which restricts juridical recourse for relevant cases and forecloses any avenue to the cassation court, and which has already demonstrated a quiet, chilling effectiveness in curbing meaningful expressions of solidarity or opposition.
This silence raises a question the campaign’s defenders rarely confront: is denaturalization here functioning, as it has elsewhere in the Gulf, as a political weapon? It clearly retains that function. A number of prominent critics and activists have been stripped of citizenship, often under vague legal disguises: among them Tariq al-Suwaidan, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, and Omar al-Thuwaini. In this respect the campaign continues a long regional practice, in Kuwait as in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, of wielding nationality against dissent.
Two things distinguish the current moment: magnitude and register. The scale far exceeds the targeted revocations of the past, and the logic has widened well beyond the punishment of dissidents. Alongside these older political cases now sits a far larger identitarian project, organized around the diffuse and unfalsifiable criteria of the fetishized fantasy of who properly belongs to Kuwait. I would not say, then, that these revocations are not political. Depoliticization is itself a political act: to recast the stripping of citizenship as administrative “cleansing” or “purifying” is how the campaign launders its politics into the neutral language of bureaucracy and belonging. What has changed is not that the revocations have ceased to be political, but that their politics now runs on two registers at once: the old logic of silencing dissent, and a newer one that targets citizens less for anything they have done than for who they are imagined to be.
Claire Beaugrand: Citizenship revocation has been widely used to discipline citizens and silence political dissidents in the Gulf; this has particularly been the case at times of crisis, for instance during the Iran-Iraq war, or in the wake of the 2011 mobilizations. In the latter cases, the denaturalization came as a sanction usually linked to security-related charges—sometimes as part of a trial— that were extended along an anti-terrorism legal arsenal.
What seems peculiar to this denaturalization campaign is its scale: we are not talking about individuals selected to serve as an example and punished publicly to for having disobeyed the sovereign— a ostentatious logic reminiscent of the medieval conception of justice in the overture of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish—and all the more so that at times the sovereign extended his magnanimity by forgiving and reinstating some into the nationality. The denaturalization, in their number and process, are systematized—as in the birth of the modern prison, to stay with Foucault. The current campaign endeavors to reverse the historical process of democratization that became visible in the 2011 mobilization moment in Kuwait, when not only citizens led by parliamentarians, deemed the "opposition," challenged the idea of politics understood as loyalty to a government, but also the Bidoon constituted themselves as political subjects and started to express new radical ways to conceive citizenship, based on presence and inclusion.
Ali M: The Bidoon issue, which has existed in Kuwait for decades, certainly escalated in the wake of the Arab uprisings. According to Claire Beaugrand, Bidoon activists in 2011 increasingly framed their claims in terms of universal rights, dignity, and legal equality rather than discretionary state benevolence. Faced with growing international scrutiny amid regional uprisings, the Kuwaiti government pledged to solve the Bidoon crisis within five years, though most promises remain unfulfilled. In fact, since 2011 there has been an increase in the harassment, arrests, and now citizenship revocations of those who advocate for Bidoon rights. In 2014, amid ongoing political contestations in Kuwait between the regime and leading opposition figures, the government revoked the citizenships of dozens of Kuwaitis, many of which revocations were found to be for political reasons. So, far from resolving the Bidoon crisis as promised in 2011, the politically motivated revocations of 2014 indicated that the regime was prepared to add denaturalization—alongside other silencing strategies such as censorship, detention, and constitutional suspension—to its arsenal of weapons against its political adversaries.
What is new in the current denaturalization campaign is its sheer scale and social breadth. Over the past two years, potentially hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis (when considering dependents) have been affected by these revocations, which are taking place amid unprecedented democratic backsliding. It is now impossible for the government to claim that this is about cracking down on fraud in nationality files. This is explicitly a political “purification” campaign that is not only meant to silence critics but to remind the entire citizenry that their membership in Kuwaiti society is conditional and reversible. That is, this has gone beyond the weaponization of citizenship against individual political dissidents toward neutralizing political plurality more broadly. Demographically, many of the first Kuwaitis to be denaturalized were of tribal background, as well as many Islamists—two groups that formed the basis of mass political opposition to the rulers over the past two decades. Most of these are the very same people (namely tribes from beyond the borders of Kuwait) that the government naturalized in the 1960s and 1970s to bolster the power of the ruling family against the country's more democratically inclined urban population, and at the expense of the existing stateless population. This about-face is prevalent in the regime’s own rhetoric that clearly describes this campaign as a means of “returning Kuwait to its native people, clean and free of the impurities that have clung to it.”
More from the “Denaturalization in Kuwait” Roundtable:
Part 1: Understanding Citizenship
Part 2: Reconsidering Citizenship