[This is Part 4 of a multi-part roundtable on “Denaturalization in Kuwait.” Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5 here.]
Arabian Peninsula Page Co-Editors (AP): What connections can you make between the denaturalization of naturalized wives, political dissidents, and those naturalized “for honorable services” such as artists, athletes, and military men?
Saher Sawdawi: Unfortunately, no coherent rationale threads these categories of denaturalization together. The government itself appears to recognize this incoherence, if only inadvertently, by contradicting itself with each successive announcement and press conference convened to address the matter. The initial framing rested on the claim that the ministerial orders or Emiri decrees by which citizenship had been granted were unconstitutional, not legally binding, or obtained through fraud and misconduct. Yet such justifications collapse under any sustained logical scrutiny. They serve, in my reading, less as legal reasoning than as rhetorical scaffolding: a discursive ground from which the government cultivates support within society by fragmenting the public through a vocabulary of short, effectively charged slogans such as “safeguarding,” “purifying,” and “reclaiming the nation,” without ever specifying from whom or for whom this nation is being safeguarded, purified, or reclaimed. These blurred lines are not, I would argue, accidental. They are precisely the conditions of possibility for a project of social re-engineering of such scale. If anything unites the naturalized wife, the dissident, and the celebrated artist or athlete, it is not a shared offense but a shared expendability: each was once wanted by the state and is now, by some shifting measure, deemed no longer needed. The absence of a coherent connecting thread is itself the connection.
And the project does not respect the old boundaries between groups. The same logic that has long rendered migrants disposable under the kafala system and held the Bidoon in unrecognized limbo now reaches citizens themselves. The slogans of “purifying” and “reclaiming” draw a single line through all three, sorting non-citizen, stateless, and citizen alike into those who belong and those who can be unmade. What appears as three separate policies is better read as one continuous economy of belonging, in which the state reserves the right to decide who counts.
Claire Beaugrand: The campaign paints with the same brush very different situations. Interestingly, the authorities use the same justification of rooting out “fraud,” “fraudulent practices,” and “fraudsters,” that they resorted to against the Bidoon in their post-1990 policy aimed at delegitimizing their claim to Kuwaiti nationality. Accused of treason during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (as they held the majority of the lowest-ranking posts in the army), they were portrayed as “cheats or fraudsters” hiding and lying about their original nationality as well as “parasites” profiteering unduly of Kuwait’s money– all derogatory representations that served to other them from Kuwaiti society. In a society rife with wasta or passe-droits, the Foucauldian concept of illegalisms would be specifically heuristic for looking at how “illegal” practices are viewed differently by institutions depending on the type of individuals or entities involved or how “illegal activities” are dealt with through differentiated approaches. While “fraudulent acquisition of nationality” is officially cited as a prominent justification for revoking citizenship, nationality is also stripped from those who have acquired it perfectly legitimately and from those who criticized the emir, which is characterized as a threatening act to state security.
Beyond measures to chase supposed irregularities, the campaign is an attempt at changing the composition of the citizenry and at slimming it down as per political and security calculations, in addition to playing the role of suppressing all forms of opposition through both actual revocations of nationality and the constant threat of being subjected to them. The different categories of denaturalized persons give clues about the desired citizen body that the Kuwaiti authorities aspire to shape by returning to the âge d’or of the (illusion of the) 1920 citizen core– with its origins in the mists of time being preferably Arab tribesmen from Najd, in a gross simplification of history.
First, the targeting of (potential) political dissidents, be they exiled, tribal or Shiite in the current context of the war on Iran, points towards a defining of citizenship in terms of allegiance and loyalty. Second, the fact that foreign wives (articles 7 and 8) bore the brunt of the policy hints at the gendered dimension and the patriarchal understanding of the citizenry whose boundaries are being reshaped: access to exclusionary citizenship is thus conspicuously tied with biological fatherhood embodying the virilism of the heteronormative nation–which is far from unique to Kuwait. This is confirmed by the denaturalization of the category of children born of Kuwaiti mothers and foreign fathers in early April 2026, showing how maternal lineage does not count. The two combined denaturalization targets converge towards endogamic practices notoriously encouraged by the Gulf states through the state welfare allowances. Thirdly, the denaturalization of those naturalized for “honorable services” rendered to the state sends a double signal, both ethnicist and populist: on the one hand, no merit, emotional attachment or devotion to the nation can trump the biological determinism despite the public outrage provoked by the denaturalization of iconic cultural, religious, and sports figures (the actor Dawood Hussein, the singer Nawal Al-Kuwaitiya, the influencer Noha Nabil (among Forbes’ Top 10 Most Influential Arab Women in Social Media in 2017), the Islamic preacher Tariq Al-Suwaidan, the 1982 World Cup goalkeeper for Kuwait, footballer Ahmed Al-Tarabulsi.) On the other hand, nobody will be spared especially when it comes to elites, celebrities, athletes or those close to or within the power circles. The posthumous denaturalization of the father of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the UK, Badr al-Awadhi, or the late Major General Turki Ghannam Al-Mutairi, former commander of the Amiri Guard under Emir Jaber, that affected all their dependents showed that no service to the state itself and its national representation could shield from the bloodline and tribal logic of the lineage (nasab).
This clearly goes against any form of supposed civic nationalism and the reward for talents with nationality seen elsewhere in the region and the world. Even more, it undermines the logic of nationalist ideology that, for sure, promotes differences but also condemns states, to quote Fred Halliday, “by the logic of the contemporary world to perform similar functions,” like having national artists, football team and top civil servants.
Ali M: Analytically (if not legally) the revocation campaign links these groups together through a shared logic of conditional and reversible citizenship. Naturalized Kuwaitis are derivative citizens (in the case of wives or descendants) or discretionary citizens (in the case of honorable services). They differ from “foundational” citizens or Kuwaitis “by origin” (bil-ta’sees), which the nationality law gives by lineage to those whose families resided permanently in Kuwait before 1920. Most political dissidents who have been stripped of their citizenship were from naturalized or contested backgrounds, namely tribes who were naturalized in the early oil decades by government decree rather than for honorable services. In none of these cases is citizenship rooted in descent alone, but in some form of state approval. This makes it easier for their citizenship to be revoked. They are expendable. The mass revocations of citizenship from all these groups make it easier to conceal whether any single group is being specifically targeted and, simultaneously, to garner support for a broader and more coherent nativist agenda of “purification.”
Citizenship in Kuwait must now be understood not in terms of service to the state but in utility to the state. And utility can now only be seen in relation to this nativist agenda. Silencing political dissidents might seem like an obvious (if egregious) example. The revocation of the citizenship of people who openly oppose the regime serves not only to repress political dissent but also to permanently silence and discipline those who might criticize the regime’s policies (including its citizenship policies). But what of naturalized women and those who received citizenship for honorable services, including beloved artists and athletes (like football players who took Kuwait to its only World Cup finals in 1982), as well as great doctors, intellectuals, and scientists? The revocation of their citizenship, too, reveals the application of different modalities of state power. Article 9 of Kuwait’s 1961 Constitution (mostly suspended now) indicates that “the family is the foundation of society; its mainstays are religion, morals and the love of country. The Law shall preserve its entity, shall strengthen its bonds and shall, under its aegis, protect mothers and infants.” In this context, the naturalization of the foreign wives of Kuwaiti men served to foster family unity and stability. Their denaturalization now indicates that the protection of family bonds, and of mothers, are no longer a state priority, whereas regulating family and reproduction to ensure that Kuwaiti men no longer marry foreign women and have children that are not fully Kuwaiti by origin is a higher priority. “Honorable services” Kuwaitis represent a more symbolic recalibration of state priorities. Whereas once these individuals helped construct a national image of Kuwait as a modern, progressive society (an identity that Kuwait once proudly promoted), they no longer align with the homogeneous, insular, and nativist identity that state discourse now openly espouses. Kuwait’s national image has been reimagined, and in this new picture, none of those services that once animated national pride serve any political, social, or cultural purpose.
Alex Boodrookas: For decades, debates over nationality in the Gulf have revolved around typologies of noncitizens or stateless people whose exclusion from the national community was seen as especially unjust: stateless soldiers, promising high school graduates denied a secure future, or professionals with valuable skills or credentials but who felt insecure in their attachment to Kuwait. What ties most, though not all, of these people together is their exclusion from a patriarchal and jus sanguinis—by blood—conception of nationality. I was most struck by the targeting of women who acquired nationality through marriage. This harkens back to press debates over the so-called “marriage crisis” of the 1960s and 1970s. Conservatives warned of the danger of Kuwaiti men, often studying abroad on scholarships, marrying noncitizen women, who were stereotyped as hypersexual, immutably foreign, and interested only in the financial benefits of Kuwaiti nationality. Kuwaiti feminists adopted—but reconfigured—the discourse to condemn the patriarchal nature of Kuwaiti nationality law. This first understanding of the “marriage crisis,” however, would endure, becoming a recurring justification for narrowing access to Kuwaiti nationality. For many, the “foreign wife” became an object of scorn, a stereotype that the regime is once again deploying for its own purposes. Military men often benefited from the sympathy of conservatives otherwise disinterested in nationality reform—though many Bidoon members of the armed forces faced mounting discrimination and systematic dismissal beginning in the 1980s. As for political dissidents, the very first Gulf nationality laws were drafted in no small part to enable their denaturalization and deportation. I am struck by the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much more open public discussion about nationality, accompanied by an expectation that reforms were not just possible, but even likely. The breadth of its current denaturalization campaign speaks to a remarkably uncompromising attitude of the regime as well as the narrowing of the political discourse.
AP: How do you read the timing of this campaign? Locally, it came after suspending the constitution and the parliament, but regionally, it was taking place during the Gaza genocide?
Alex Boodrookas: The Gaza genocide has certainly heightened tensions between the people of the region and regimes allied to the United States. Kuwait is no exception, especially given its fraught history with Palestinians: while many Kuwaiti individuals and social movements have long been vocal supporters of the Palestinian cause, the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after the 1991 Gulf War is widely seen as a vicious and unjustified reprisal for the PLO’s decision to side with Saddam. My impression, however, is that the current campaign can best be understood in the context of a prolonged period of jockeying between the regime and the opposition during which the ruling family resorted to increasingly violent and repressive measures. If one wanted to attempt a periodization, it could plausibly be dated to the 2011 protests and the Bidoon activism that followed. Combined with the suspension of parliamentary rule, the denaturalization campaign can be seen as the regime returning to the era of unconstitutional authoritarianism in the 1970s and 1980s. Anyone voicing opposition to the regime has to contend with the threat of denaturalization—potentially alongside their entire families. Crackdowns on democracy have historically targeted both noncitizens and citizens, and this one has been no exception.
Claire Beaugrand: The timing of the campaign is linked to two temporalities: on one hand, there’s Kuwaiti political time, on the other, the current global moment of “conservative revolution” or “authoritarian backlash” and the violation of international law are all enabling circumstances— of which the Israeli wars on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran are part and parcel.
First, as per the Kuwaiti political temporality, the campaign of denaturalization which started in March 2024 came to fulfill the vision of the new Emir who reached power in December 2023, a vision shared by his support base. The Emir Mish'al, stemming from a security background, has been a silent observer of the decade-long institutional crisis that has gradually led to the deadlock in Kuwait’s semi-democratic political system. His redefinition of the citizenry carries a political meaning, namely the clear willingness to put an end to the double process of political democratization and socio-economic integration of the lower and middle classes, that was unique to Kuwait in the context of the Gulf region.
An insidious conventional wisdom, widespread in the Gulf and internalized by Kuwaitis themselves, had it that the Kuwaiti parliamentary system is dysfunctional and to be blamed for Kuwait’s supposed economic backwardness, relative to her neighbors. This interpretation vilified parliamentarism and political pluralism especially when compared to countries where no such freedom exists. The Kuwaiti political system had indeed reached an impasse because of the contradiction inherent to the powers of the parliament, having the authority to debate bills, question and censure ministers, including the Prime Minister, but not the authority to form a government emanating from and fully responsible to its majority.
Yet this impasse is the result of gradual political gains and historical processes that have disconnected interests defended by MPs in the Parliament from those of the elites in the government. The political deadlock between the executive and legislative branches reflects a longer-term sociological phenomenon, i.e., the social and economic integration and politicization of the middle and peripheral classes. These classes can be defined negatively, as initially excluded from the historical core of Kuwaiti society living within the walls of the port city prior to 1920, as imagined—and documented—at the time of independence. This original core which was granted first-class citizenship or citizenship by foundation (bi-ta’ssis) that cannot precisely be revoked, was initially the only one entitled to engage in politics alongside or as counterweight to the royal family. The Nationality Law distinguishes between article 13, which lists circumstances in which the Kuwaiti authorities may withdraw the citizenship of a naturalized person and article 14 that governs the termination applying to original Kuwaiti citizens.
Yet other political forces emerged from the tribal circles of the periphery, brought into the fray by members of the royal family in search for political supportand gained political clout. Jaber al-Ali is notorious for having granted nationality and political rights to members of Southern tribes in his bid for succession in the late 1960s-1970s. Initially subservient to the Al-Sabah family, to whom they owed their integration into the citizenry through naturalization, they became increasingly assertive for three reasons: their growing demographic weight, their politicization via Islamist movements since the 1980s, and the role they played during the Iraqi invasion when the ruling elites mostly fled the country. The return of these elites was made conditional upon the restoration of full parliamentary life (suspended unconstitutionally in 1986) and citizens’ political participation. As part of this commitment, a 1994 decree amending Article 7 of the Nationality Law, counted the descendants of naturalized citizens as first-class citizens entitled to exercise their political rights upon reaching the age of majority whereas naturalized citizens had to wait for a period of 30 years. The MPs representing these rising middle classes have been pushing for greater openness and social diversity within Kuwait’s political elite: feeling excluded from the influential and lucrative positions benefiting from oil revenues, they have been calling for greater transparency in the management of public funds and a fairer redistribution of wealth in their favor, particularly through welfare state benefits, which has led to their demands being labeled ‘populist’.
In the face of the ever-bolder moves of the “opposition,” referring to the MPs refusing to systematically support government policies perceived as favorable to the select core of historical elites, the new Emir of Kuwait seems to have drawn drastic conclusions regarding the lack of merit in political pluralism and, by extension, social integration. His approach calls for a return to the status quo ante, before the political integration of larger peripheral parts of the population. Faced with the rise of peripheral classes in the political arena opened up by the parliament, who no longer hesitate to adopt a confrontational stance or even engage in bargaining with the royal family, he has chosen to redefine the contours of the citizenry according to a restrictive vision, which favors “authentic” citizens and understands citizenship in terms of political loyalty, preferential economic redistribution and patrilineal descent. While Kuwait that has been made to believe that her pluralist political system is the cause of her economic backwardness aligns herself with the other Gulf states, the country nevertheless stands out due to the rather backward-looking nature of its national vision. In contrast to her neighbors, that just as strictly limit the size of their citizenry but look at the future through investment-based naturalization programmed designed to attract the talent needed for their economic diversification, Kuwait appears to be going backwards by undoing its own past policies.
The second temporality is the current global moment of “conservative revolution” or “authoritarian backlash”. The Gulf states and Kuwait particularly, due to the experience of the Iraqi invasion, are sensitive to the international gaze and condemnation, as their security has relied on foreign interventions, themselves dependent on foreign public opinions. Yet the current international environment and the constant violation of international law by Israel, that is not only tolerated but applauded by the US under the presidential mandates of Donald Trump himself actively working towards the undermining of the human rights regime, provided the enabling circumstances to the deployment of such a campaign. The genocide in Gaza helped distract the international attention from Kuwait but its impunity also set a precedent and incited to the most blatant disregard for human rights.
Saher Sawdawi: The timing of this campaign falls at a dangerous conjunction of domestic and regional fragilities. It is a moment in which the local and the regional reinforce each other’s silences. Domestically, the campaign follows years of political deadlock between the legislative and executive branches. Between the start of the pandemic and March 2024, Kuwait witnessed four parliamentary elections and six successive cabinets, a sequence no reasonable measure could call stability.
Regionally, the timing is, if anything, more telling. As Gaza endures its genocide, the international order itself sits at a friction point, caught between the receding claim of a rules-based world order and the ascendant logic of a zero-sum one. This framing, coupled with the unfolding of the US–Israeli war on Iran, places the revocation campaign near the bottom of the agenda for any actor engaged in the global political economy. In this sense, the timing is not coincidental but strategically legible. The campaign moves under the cover of a world looking elsewhere, and a domestic public stripped of the institutional means to look back.
Ali M: Both the suspension of Kuwait’s democratic institutions as well as the Gaza genocide (and the more recent Iran war) together created a permissive environment, both inside and outside Kuwait, for such extreme measures that would otherwise have provoked stronger resistance and scrutiny. The suspension of parliament and most articles of the country’s constitution were essential for creating a national environment in which the government has unchecked power to impose its administrative will on society. While the nationality law provides no clear legal recourse anyway to challenge state revocations of citizenship, the suspension of constitutional politics (including press censorship) has created a pliant environment in which very few citizens feel safe to speak out openly or publicly against the government’s actions. The regime faces fewer institutional constraints, such as parliamentary interpolations of the Ministry of Interior which would have likely occurred if the national assembly was still in session. Denaturalization, in other words, has become a tool of regime consolidation at a time when the usual channels of political bargaining have been deliberately suspended.
The timing of the Gaza genocide remains relevant as it displaced regional and global attention away from sustained international scrutiny on the internal politics of other Arab states, Kuwait included. As a former US Ambassador to Kuwait put it: “Parliament was dissolved in Kuwait and hardly anyone noticed.” Perhaps even more significantly, the live-streamed genocide unveiled how far states can push the bounds of global political and legal impunity and act in complete violation of international law without accountability; it also exposed the absence of much international capacity or will to impose the law. Kuwait’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website claims that, “since its independence and the adoption of its constitution in 1962, the State of Kuwait has been keen on promoting and protecting human rights by including in the constitution many articles and texts that are consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations and relevant international charters and conventions.” The site lists the international conventions and treaties to which Kuwait is committed, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. And yet the current citizenship revocation campaign violates most of these charters, including Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” But international human rights law is constrained by state sovereignty, relying on national enforcement rather than robust international authority. As noted by Boston University International Human Rights about Kuwait’s citizenship revocations: “Despite the scale and severity of the crisis, international institutions have remained conspicuously quiet ... This silence is not neutral; it functions as a form of tacit approval. Gulf states remain shielded from global scrutiny thanks to their economic power, control over energy resources, and diplomatic ties with the West. ... Without external pressure, Kuwaiti authorities face little incentive to reverse course.” On June 18, 2026, The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, expressed “serious concern” over the fact that Kuwait’s mass citizenship revocations “have a devastating and disproportionate consequences on women and children.” While she urged Kuwait’s authorities to suspend further withdrawals and “put in place a comprehensive, independent and effective review process of all affected cases, and restore nationality to those who have been arbitrarily and retroactively deprived of it,” the government has neither responded nor paused its campaign. Both the Gaza genocide and Kuwait’s mass denaturalization process have thus unequivocally exposed the paralysis of international legal mechanisms.
The war against Iran that began in late February 2026 added a new dimension to the circumstances in Kuwait. During the weeks that Kuwait was under Iranian missile and drone attack, the revocations were paused. The crisis created a manufactured consensus framed around the need to close ranks to protect Kuwait from external harm. As soon as the attacks ended, however, the government once again began its controversial campaign, now focusing primarily on dual national Kuwaitis who were told they must revoke their second citizenship or be stripped of their Kuwaiti one. Under the cover of crisis, such exceptional measures to “purify” or protect the national body from external harm are perceived as more defensible, as had been the case with the expulsion of more than 400,000 non-Kuwaitis in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi invasion in 1990. Amid renewed tensions with Iran after a drone attack severely damaged Kuwait's airport in early June, a recent list of revocations included members of many prominent and historic Kuwaiti families of Iranian descent.
More from the “Denaturalization in Kuwait” Roundtable
Part 1: Understanding Citizenship
Part 2: Reconsidering Citizenship