In Kuwait, 24-year-old Fatima mourns the loss of her university education. Despite earning a 96 percent on her high school exams, a score that would normally guarantee a medical career, her status as a Bidoon with an “unspecified nationality” will leave her dreams unrealized. For Zahir, more than 20 years of service in the Kuwaiti army was not enough to make her Bidoon husband a citizen. He remains illegible in the eyes of the nation he defended, precluding Zahir from accessing the healthcare she needs to treat her diabetes.
The hardships faced by Fatima and Zahir are the consequences of a country so desperately intent on protecting its lavish social security infrastructure that it leaves scholars, veterans, and children behind in favor of maintaining privileges for those considered “authentic citizens.”
Those “authentic citizens” are individuals who settled in Kuwait before 1920 and remained until a nationality law was instituted in 1959. This already-exclusive group has recently shrunk: Kuwait has created new stateless groups in addition to the Bidoon to preserve authentic citizens’ high standard of living. By decreasing the quantity of social security recipients, Kuwait can afford to raise the quality of benefits given to the lucky few—benefits including free schooling, a monthly allowance, life-long medical care, and guaranteed employment, among others. Specifically, Kuwaiti citizens are given financial support for each child, housing, and cost of living. They receive free consultations, surgeries, treatments, and subsidized medicines—all courtesy of the Kuwaiti government. Additionally, Kuwait’s strong pension and retirement systems allow Kuwaiti citizens to retire at 55, receiving a pension equal to 80 percent of their final salary annually. This lavish infrastructure is built upon the reinforcement of Bidoon statelessness, rewarding their labor with little to no rights.
The Bidoon are an Arab minority in Kuwait who face statelessness due to their inability to register for citizenship when Kuwait gained independence in 1961. Originally a nomadic people, many Bidoon individuals lacked the documentation to follow this procedure or were not aware they needed to register themselves. As a result, the Bidoon have faced over 60 years of discrimination and hardship. In Kuwait, legal status and recognition is passed down patrilineally, meaning children born to Bidoon fathers automatically inherit stateless status. After Kuwait’s independence, the Bidoon population was initially exempt from the Law on the Residence of Aliens and were designated special Article 17 passports conferring them the freedom to travel. Although the Bidoon lacked the right to vote, they had free access to public education, employment, and healthcare like Kuwaiti citizens. They wore the same police uniforms, worked in the same government offices, and were largely treated as equal members of society.
However, during the Iran–Iraq War, the Kuwaiti government passed a number of laws which gradually stripped Bidoons of their rights and dignity. In 1986, following suspicions of Bidoon involvement in the car-bomb assasination attempt on Kuwait’s Emir, they were reclassified as “illegal residents” and given six months to scramble for documentation proving their legal status. Though Bidoon soldiers made up 85 percent of Kuwait’s army during Iraq’s invasion, they were accused of collaborating with the invaders and promptly discharged following the country’s liberation in 1991. The war and resulting regional tensions has led Kuwait to view the Bidoon as a threat to national security, believing them to be secret Iraqis, Saudis, Iranians, and Syrians who hid their original identity documents to benefit from Kuwait’s oil wealth and robust welfare. Though Bidoons fought on Kuwait’s front lines, nationalist anxieties and conceit rebranded them as internal enemies. Today, Bidoons are treated as illegal residents. They are not issued any legal documents (birth, marriage, and death certificates), lack access to free public education, and are denied the healthcare that Kuwaiti citizens receive.
The Kuwaiti government and its citizens brand the Bidoon as opportunists, describing them as “an army of locusts.” They claim that the Bidoon do not integrate into Kuwaiti culture and their men practice polygamy to gain more monthly income from Kuwait’s family allowance system. They also think that Bidoon who lack education are a huge strain on the state, sharing the general opinion that “[Kuwaiti citizens] have worked for three hundred years to build this society” while the Bidoon simply profit off it. This mindset further contributes to the current discrimination against Bidoons.
While some Bidoons possessing 1965 census papers have been issued green ID cards providing minimal rights—like registering for private school and requesting basic civil documentation—on a case-by-case basis, those who lacked papers have been issued yellow or red cards. The obstructive nature of Kuwait’s national ego ensures that the process of obtaining and renewing these security cards is exhaustive. Bidoon are taken for private interviews, questioned about the status of their extended family, and required to renew their cards every one or two years depending on the class of their card. Further, corruption allegedly enables those with connections to receive their cards immediately while others never do, prioritizing exclusivity over justice.
Bidoon leaders and activists also allege that the Kuwaiti government has engaged in underhanded, illicit tactics to remove any possibility of citizenship. Officials supposedly required Bidoons to sign blank documents to receive government benefits from the Central Agency. Afterwards, the Central Agency would overlay them with letters confessing to alternative nationality.
The lengths to which Kuwait will go to protect their social security infrastructure is evident in the now-dormant Kuwait-Comoros deal. In November 2014, Kuwait attempted to procure citizenship for the Bidoon from the East African island-nation of Comoros, functionally exporting the problem of statelessness. This pursuit was not benevolent—it was a cowardly attempt to shift the responsibility of Bidoon statehood away from Kuwait. Rather than legally recognizing the group or providing a path to naturalization, Kuwait offered Comoros hundreds of millions of dollars for a wholesale citizenship deal. This deal would have made the Bidoon a foreign population in Kuwait, holding Comorian citizenship but contributing to the Kuwaiti economy. Their material circumstances would remain largely unchanged. This plan was driven by the cold logic that providing welfare for the Bidoon was still more costly than a multimillion dollar deal with Comoros.
Though this deal was eventually axed in 2016, the attempt demonstrates Kuwait’s desperation to maintain its citizens’ standards of living. Recently, the crisis has expanded beyond the Bidoon population in a deliberate effort to cull citizenship numbers as Kuwait has begun retroactively stripping citizenship for the express purpose of “purify[ing] national identity.”
Over three percent of the Kuwaiti civilian population have been impacted by these policy changes. Decisions are often made with almost no judicial review and striking opacity in the revocation process. Those who lose Kuwaiti citizenship face “civil death:” restricted freedom of movement, withheld passports, cancelled documentation, and economic insecurity become their new realities.
Women have been disproportionately affected. In 2024, Kuwait updated their citizenship rules to state that “foreign national women marrying Kuwaitis cannot acquire Kuwaiti nationality.” By now retracting the citizenship of naturalized women without due process, the state essentially treats them as conditional residents rather than members of the community. Now, even Kuwaiti-born men can only transmit nationality to their children and not their spouses.
Kuwait has also started clamping down on other regulations, such as the prevention of dual citizenship and the requirement that an individual must reside in Kuwait for twenty years before even being allowed to apply for citizenship. Taken together, these policies become intersecting strategies designed for lasting exclusion. Citizenship becomes hard to acquire but easy to strip.
Kuwait’s narrowing definitions of citizenship violate international law.
The UN Refugee Agency’s guidelines on nationality prohibit depriving nationality in a situation that leaves an individual stateless. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s guidelines also mandate fair hearings and procedural safeguards when considering such a retraction. These are rights of which the Bidoon and other emerging groups of stateless citizens are deprived.
By making citizenship retractable and conditional, Kuwait sets a precedent where inalienable rights are reduced to a commodity that can be bought, sold, and stolen at whim. Citizenship is used as a means for Kuwait to protect itself rather than its citizens, creating a dangerous reality where undesirable groups can be legislated out of existence by using a lack of citizenship as justification. When a nation begins viewing citizenship as a luxury commodity rather than a right, it trades the humanity of its most vulnerable groups for a lavish lifestyle. For Kuwait, Fatima’s education and Zahir’s health are the price paid to preserve an immense national ego.