Ahmad Benswait is a stateless Kuwaiti doctoral researcher of identity politics, statelessness, and forced displacement at University College London’s Department of Culture, Communication, and Media.
In May 2024, only months after coming to power, Kuwait's new ruler, Emir Mishal al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, dissolved parliament and suspended constitutional articles imposing any checks on his power, further eroding the country's semi-parliamentary system. Nearly a year later, in his Ramadan address to the nation in late March, the emir emphasized that these measures were necessary to "treat a chronic disease that has afflicted the body of democratic practice and destroyed it." But it is mostly women, not a "disease," that have been targeted. In recent months, tens of thousands of Kuwaiti nationals have been stripped of their citizenship, accelerating a decades-long drive to denaturalize certain Kuwaitis, many of them women.
I write as a witness to the arbitrary deprivation of nationality in Kuwait, where I was born in 1984 and grew up finding myself denied the right to belong to my homeland. Classified as "stateless," my life has been marked by a lack of basic human rights— from the child labor I was forced into starting when I was five years old, to a continuous struggle with political repression since the popular uprisings that swept the region in 2011.
In 2019, I moved to the United Kingdom to seek international protection due to the risks I faced in Kuwait based on my stance against the persecution of my stateless Kuwaiti community, known as the Bidoon. As a social scientist at University College London since 2020, I discovered that statelessness in Kuwait is a product of the undemocratic, restrictive design of Kuwait's 1959 nationality law, which excludes people native to Kuwait for ethnic and sectarian reasons. My current doctoral research investigates the role of the Kuwaiti regime's political use of nationality in making statelessness the global crisis it has become, creating more displaced people and refugees.
My publicly engaged research put me in direct contact with people who have been stripped of their Kuwaiti nationality and scapegoated by a regime vowing to "hand over Kuwait to its original people, clean and free of the impurities that have clung to it." Those affected include originally Kuwait-born stateless Bedouin women, including my cousins; nationals of countries that no longer exist, such as the Soviet Union; and individuals of other nationalities like Palestinians, Americans, British and Spanish who married Kuwaiti men and settled in Kuwait up to four decades ago. These women acquired Kuwaiti citizenship per Article 8 of Kuwait's 1959 nationality law, which the government recently and retroactively scrapped from 1987 onward.
The arbitrariness of the Kuwaiti government's measures is evident in how these affected women often only find out about their loss of citizenship from Kuwait's official government gazette or social media. No appeals, objections or procedural protections are afforded. Reflecting on the way she was denied due process, one affected woman told me, "The government simply Selected All + Deleted our lives." Others were stripped of their citizenship while receiving medical treatment overseas or visiting their children abroad. Some received the devastating news the same day their Kuwaiti husband died.
Despite the gravity of the situation, civil society in Kuwait has not spoken up. In fairness, their silence reflects the climate of fear and repression in the country.
- Ahmad Benswait
To justify stripping women of their acquired Kuwaiti nationality, the government relies on a 1987 decree by the emir, known as Decree 41/1987, which was introduced during an earlier suspension of parliament. That law stipulates that spouses of Kuwaiti men should be naturalized by decree from the emir rather than a ministerial decision. However, that law was reversed by parliament in 1995. In fact, the government's new decree-law, known as No. 116/2024, expands the executive authority's power to revoke citizenship and removes any safeguards against statelessness. This approach suggests that the government is not interested in abiding by legal protocols—it is doing away with them. The government has sold this to the public by conflating the arbitrary revocation of women's citizenship with claims it is combating "fraudulent" acquisition of Kuwaiti nationality and cases of illegal dual citizenship.
Despite the gravity of the situation, civil society in Kuwait has not spoken up. In fairness, their silence reflects the climate of fear and repression in the country. Civil society is simply not allowed to push back. In December 2024, a women's association called off an event on the citizenship revocations, under government pressure. Similarly, anyone commenting publicly on the government's measures, including on social media, have faced censorship by Kuwait's State Security apparatus. A former member of parliament, Saleh al-Mulla, was even sentenced to two years in prison for "challenging the authority of the emir" in a tweet.
Only one woman who was stripped of her citizenship has broken the silence, though at a high price. On March 8, Salwa Al-Sayed spoke out against racial and sexist slurs received online during her participation in a public Space event on the Article 8 issue hosted on X, formerly Twitter. Less than 24 hours later, the official X account of Kuwait's Ministry of Interior posted the following statement: "A woman whose Article 8 Kuwaiti citizenship had been revoked was arrested after she criticized government decisions on social media. She was referred to the Deportation and Temporary Detention Affairs Department, pending deportation to her country of origin."
The Ministry of Interior's X post included a three-second voice clip of Al-Sayed saying in Arabic, "I want to return to my Kuwaiti nationality whether everyone likes it or not." The voice clip appears to have been recorded from the online event on X, in which Al-Sayed spoke, and was used by the ministry to frame her as "challenging the state." The Ministry of Interior's post, which has been viewed more than 2 million times, drew jeering commentary from Kuwaiti accounts on X mocking her Egyptian-Kuwaiti accent.
On March 14, Al-Sayed spoke in a new Spaces event on X for the first time after disappearing. She alleged that the minister of interior himself, Fahad Yosef al-Sabah—who also serves as deputy prime minister—and his officers had "harassed" her verbally and physically. The interior minister interrogated her directly, she said, and threatened to "hang her by the legs." Ministry officers searched her in "invasive and humiliating ways," she alleged. While detained, a security officer forced Al-Sayed to clean the floor, she said, and she was not given access to her prescribed medication.
On March 10, the Kuwaiti government ordered Al-Sayed to be deported to Egypt immediately. She says that she was driven to the airport with shackles on her hands and feet and was given no opportunity to say goodbye to her daughters. Her Kuwaiti bank accounts have also been frozen, and her unpaid wages withheld. Her story is all-too common among women in Kuwait who have had their nationality arbitrarily revoked. As Human Rights Watch has detailed, Kuwait's restrictive nationality laws continue to "create new cases of statelessness," violating the rights of the Bidoon, while Kuwaiti authorities "prosecute and target outspoken members of the Bidoon community."
It is not just vulnerable, law-abiding women whose rights are being sacrificed for the sake of the ruling Sabah family and its empty gestures about Kuwait's so-called political openness. It is any claim that Kuwait is committed to a shred of democracy, the rule of law, or fundamental rights and freedoms at all.
- Ahmad Benswait
The Kuwaiti government's mass denaturalization measures do not consider any of the legal, social, economic and humanitarian consequences, nor the impact on those affected. Some women in Kuwait have compared their feelings of waiting apprehensively for their names to be published in denaturalization lists to "being on death row." Divorcees and widows are often targeted by vicious media slurs branding them "cheats" and "gold-diggers," among other insults.
These women now grapple with uncertainties about their human rights and their futures. Their jobs have been undermined by demotions and transfers from stable to casual contracts. Their social insurance and pension payments have been disrupted. Their right to travel is restricted because their Kuwaiti passports have been blocked and they have no clear pathway to re-acquire passports from their countries of origin, as they renounced their citizenship decades ago per the Kuwaiti government's requirements for citizenship.
Some women feel like hostages as the government may not let them travel freely or explore legal and advocacy options. Others worry they will be held in Kuwait until they pay their loans and mortgages. They are scared by the government's tightening of Kuwait's residency law and bankruptcy law in tandem with mass denaturalization. As "deportable foreigners" in Kuwait, these women live in constant fear.
In context of growing international coverage, and the upcoming September 2025 visit by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, the Kuwaiti government established a "grievances committee" to review the revocations. The move is questionable at best, considering the unlikely prospect of any woman's article 8 nationality being reinstated after the government abolished the article.
Ultimately, the mass deprivation of citizenship in Kuwait suggests a much deeper issue: a manifestation of a conflict within Kuwait's ruling class, namely between those relatively more open to other cultures and those who are not. As the exiled Kuwaiti intellectual and dissident Mohammad al-Matar writes, "The cause of Kuwait's decline and deterioration is not the National Assembly, as some claim," referring to the emir's dissolution of parliament. "Rather, it is the [ruling] family conflict that has ravaged the country and brought it to this level of chaos and collapse—and sometimes even madness—because it is a purely self-interested conflict in which the state and its institutions have become tools used to achieve personal gain."
If that is the case, it is not just vulnerable, law-abiding women whose rights are being sacrificed for the sake of the ruling Sabah family and its empty gestures about Kuwait's so-called political openness. It is any claim that Kuwait is committed to a shred of democracy, the rule of law, or fundamental rights and freedoms at all.
