From Citizen to Stateless: The Quiet Crisis of Nationality Stripping in Kuwait and the Gulf
In the final months of 2024, the Kuwaiti government began stripping thousands of people of their nationality — many of whom had held Kuwaiti citizenship for decades. By early 2025, more than 40,000 individuals, primarily foreign-born women married to Kuwaiti men, have lost their citizenship, rendering them stateless overnight. This mass denaturalization, justified as a correction of “legal errors,” and ushered through amendments to the Kuwaiti Nationality Law, was implemented without a sitting parliament, judicial oversight, or public consultation.
For the affected individuals, the consequences of losing their citizenship and documentation have been devastating: revoked identification, loss of legal job access, frozen bank accounts, and the looming threat of permanent statelessness. While these changes have triggered outcry within Kuwait, the international community has largely remained silent. The Kuwaiti government’s actions reflect a growing regional trend of weaponizing citizenship revocation as a tool of control, exclusion, and gendered injustice. The crisis in Kuwait raises urgent questions about the legality of Kuwait’s actions, the role of international human rights law, and the global indifference to escalating exclusion across the Gulf.
The Legal Basis for Denationalization
Kuwait’s Nationality Law, enacted in 1959, grants the government expansive discretionary powers to revoke citizenship, often on vague grounds such as “threats to social structure” or claims of alleged fraud. The law has been amended over two dozen times, often with minimal transparency. The latest amendments, passed after the dissolution of Parliament in May 2024, further accelerated revocations and eliminated any form of judicial appeal.
Articles 7 and 8 of Kuwait’s Nationality Law, which governs naturalization through marriage, have been used to retroactively strip naturalized women of Kuwaiti nationality, even if their marriages, residency, and naturalization met all legal requirements at the time. Importantly, Kuwait’s nationality law, like that of most states in the Gulf Cooperation Council, does not permit dual nationality, so women who marry Kuwaitis and acquire Kuwaiti nationality must first renounce their original nationality. For many women from neighboring Arab or South Asian states, however, the reacquisition of nationality is restricted. Some are still married or residing in Kuwait with children who hold Kuwaiti citizenship. Without documentation, affected women cannot travel, access healthcare, own property, or, in some cases, even see their children.
The Kuwaiti government has offered no remedial scheme for denationalized persons to seek relief. Instead, it has promised to treat denaturalized individuals “as Kuwaiti citizens” without reinstating their citizenship — an Orwellian formulation that denies rights while offering rhetorical recognition.
A Regional Trend with Global Implications
Kuwait is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and lacks domestic legislation recognizing stateless persons.. Once nationality is revoked, individuals have no path to appeal, no international legal protections, and no formal status under Kuwaiti law. Despite having one of the world’s largest stateless populations (estimated to be over 92,000, primarily from the Bidoon community), Kuwait continues to evade accountability and is a leader in creating a regional backslide in citizenship rights and access to nationality. In February 2025, Oman’s Sultan Haitham Bin Tariq enacted changes to Oman’s nationality law, which imposed additional restrictions on naturalization (Articles 17,19, 22), further expanded the government’s power to revoke citizenship (Article 26) based on vague grounds like “offending” the Sultan or harming national interests, and changed the status of foundlings, and children born to Omani mothers and unknown fathers. Kuwait’s sweeping citizenship revocation provisions are also echoed by similar laws in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates.
Though often framed as technical or security-driven, these amendments to nationality legislation serve political purposes: as a threat, and a punishment for dissent, bid to reshape demographics, and police belonging. This quiet proliferation of denaturalization powers poses a growing threat and creates a dangerous precedent — not only for Gulf residents but for global human rights norms.
Race, Gender, and Belonging
Kuwait’s actions reveal entrenched hierarchies based on race, class, and gender, and the consequences of these revocations are profoundly gendered. Under Article 8 of the Nationality law, women are treated as conditional citizens: their nationality depends on the duration of their marriage, residency status, and ministerial discretion Male citizens, by contrast, can confer citizenship automatically to their children. Kuwaiti women who marry non-Kuwaiti men face similar discrimination: their children do not automatically gain citizenship and often fall into legal limbo.
This gendered and racialized structure has now produced a new “fourth class.” As Kuwaiti legal scholar Dr. Mohammed Al-Dallal warns, this new class comprises individuals who are not citizens, not legal residents, not foreign nationals, and not stateless in the traditional sense, but are instead entirely excluded from these formal legal categories. Many are mothers of Kuwaiti children but cannot obtain visitation rights or enforce custody decisions without documentation. As Dr. Al-Dallal argues, this is not merely a legal anomaly, but the creation of a deliberately precarious population excluded from the rule of law.
The rhetoric surrounding these revocations serves to reinforce and legitimize exclusion. Government officials and public commentators justify the policy as a means to “purify national identity.” This language not only echoes exclusionary nationalism but also cultivates a public narrative in which women are vilified — accused of fraud, deception or manipulation simply for asserting their legal status. Last month, a woman’s objection to her denaturalization through a post on X resulted in deportation and public shaming by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Interior. In this environment, statelessness functions not merely as a legal condition but as a powerful social stigma, one that is weaponized to further marginalize women and racialized minority groups.
International Inaction
Despite the scale and severity of the crisis, international institutions have remained conspicuously quiet — no significant statement has been issued by the United Nations, the European Union, or any major international human rights body. Beyond civil society reports, the issue remains largely invisible.
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, as the plight of stateless Gulf residents is rendered invisible by a mix of diplomatic deference and racialized apathy.
Without external pressure, Kuwaiti authorities face little incentive to reverse course. For the women and families affected, the result is indefinite limbo: unable to access the rights of citizens or the protections owed to non-citizens under international law.
Kuwait, like all states that undertake similar measures, must be pressed to reverse these revocations, restore due process, and end the persecution of those who speak out. Citizenship must never be weaponized to punish dissent or engineer demographics. No one should be made to live in legal invisibility.
