State Formation and Dispossession in the Arab Gulf: From Indigenous Tribes to Stateless Bidoon in Kuwait
Creators: Alshammiry, Areej 
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

<p>Between the 1960s and 1990s, the Bidoon (meaning, “without” in Arabic, that is, “without citizenship”) in Kuwait have gone from self-understandings as Bedouin nomadic tribes Indigenous to the Arabian deserts to state representations as “Illegal Residents” who face systemic oppression by the Kuwaiti state. Within a mere four decades the Kuwaiti state rendered the Bidoon a stateless population in Kuwait. How and why did this happen? This thesis traces the making of Bidoon statelessness by accounting for the processes of Bidoon dispossession and its inextricable links to Kuwaiti state-formation and British colonialism. It specifically asks the following question: How does the formation of the Kuwaiti state constitute the dispossession of the Bidoon? <br>
This thesis uses historical and discursive analytical approaches to draw on and analyze secondary literature, national policies, and treaties. It traces the relationship among British colonial expansion into the Arab Gulf region during the 19th and 20th centuries, the destruction of nomadic political economy, the introduction of oil-based capitalism, and the alienation of nomadic Bedouin tribes from lands and traditional means of living. The changes in nomadic Bedouin relationships to the lands, the thesis shows, not only happened in parallel but were a necessary form of dispossession upon which the rise of new and statist forms of political belonging that cut across tribal territories and kinship networks, and centralized sovereign powers were founded. These historical and material shifts are reflected in the politico-epistemological introduction of new international definitions of refugee, stateless, and citizen within an international state system that globally protected a system of private property (Fletcher, 2022). To assert its sovereignty as a newly independent post-colonial state, Kuwait embarked on a national project that erases its transnational history to produce a homogenized ethnonational community grounded in the domination of urban settler populations who abandoned their nomadic histories and epistemologies for a settled claim to national belonging. Parallel to this process, the Kuwaiti state introduced nationality and immigration regimes that rendered mobility without documents a crime, thereby labeling nomadic tribes “illegal” and systematically dehumanizing them. <br>
Rewriting a history of Kuwaiti state formation by foregrounding the founding dispossession of Bidoon nomadic populations is a significant task that allows us to address broader questions of where nomadic populations fit into statist categories of non/belonging. While scholarship and public sphere recognizes that most Bidoon are descendants of nomadic tribes who have been deprived of nationality in post-colonial Kuwait, most of the literature approaches their historical and contemporary exclusion through human rights, migration, and citizenship frameworks. Focusing on their experiences of discrimination and marginalization in Kuwait, the scholarship remains aligned with state-centric approaches to the problem, addressing the symptoms of statelessness under one regime without challenging the underlying foundations of membership into modern nation-states and their complex histories. Further, Kuwaiti state formation is viewed through a linear process of development, with little recognition that it is historically and structurally part and parcel of a violent global process of reconfiguration of lands into nation-states that replaced the centuries old traditional social and political organizations.<br>
Combining Marxian, post-colonial, and Indigenous decolonial theoretical frameworks, and using Said’s contrapuntal methodology, this thesis tries to understand Bidoon statelessness as a process of dispossession via Kuwaiti state formation. My purpose is to show the historical processes of colonial and capitalist state formation to argue that Bidoon dispossession and subsequent exclusion from membership into the polity is fundamental to the Kuwaiti nation-state.</p>