Kuwait is experiencing a quiet yet devastating escalation in nationality revocation policies, intensifying conflict against traditional peoples and migrant communities across the region. People who have lived in the country for years, as well as descendants naturalized generations ago, live under the constant fear of having their nationality revoked. Losing one’s nationality means losing access to fundamental rights, such as education, healthcare, housing, and employment. Those affected have no real possibility to challenge these decisions through the courts.
The World March of Women North Africa and Middle East (WMW-MENA) has denounced this situation in a statement of solidarity, warning that nationality is being turned into a weapon of political control and collective punishment. They emphasize that women bear the heaviest burden of this engineering of fear, trapped within laws that are unequal between men and women from the outset. To better understand the current context and how women across the region are organizing in response, we spoke with a World March of Women activist who requested anonymity for security reasons.
In the interview below, she explains how nationality revocation is tied to a broader rollback of democratic freedoms in Kuwait. The use of the law as an instrument of state control and the use of military force to assert regional domination are, she argues, part of the same logic of exclusion. She also discusses the legal inequality between men and women, which translates into concrete deprivation for children and families. Even in a context of enforced silence, forms of resistance persist.
What has changed in Kuwait’s nationality policy in recent years, and how are those most affected, especially women, experiencing what the statement describes as an “engineering of fear”?
We have reached this point because the government has transformed nationality—a right that, in principle, should guarantee protection and stability—into a tool of political and social repression. What we are witnessing today is far more than a legal review of past processes. Rather, it is the increasingly deliberate use of state power over nationality, placing hundreds of thousands of people under a permanent threat.
This policy cannot be understood in isolation from the broader political regression and growing authoritarianism that Kuwait has experienced in recent years. The country has witnessed a steady erosion of freedom of expression and political participation, alongside a systematic decline in democratic spaces and forms of popular participation. Student, trade union, and cooperative elections have been suspended or weakened, and, even more alarmingly, constitutional provisions have been suspended, and parliamentary activity brought to a halt. It is within this context of power concentration and erosion of oversight and accountability that nationality has been transformed into a tool of political coercion.
The most profound change in recent years is that nationality revocation has ceased to be an exceptional measure and has become a policy with broad social reach. When the state can arbitrarily strip individuals and families of their nationality after decades of official recognition, the message sent is unambiguous: national belonging is provisional, conditional, and revocable.
This is precisely what the notion of an “engineering of fear” seeks to capture. The issue extends far beyond those whose nationality has already been revoked; it concerns the paralyzing effect these practices have on society as a whole. When the right to nationality becomes unstable and one’s legal status is permanently under threat, fear itself becomes a mechanism of control. People begin to speak cautiously, refrain from making demands, and avoid challenging government policies because they know that one of their most fundamental rights can be taken away at any moment.
Women and families are those most deeply affected by this policy. The threat does not fall solely on the individual; it extends to the entire family. Women bear a disproportionate share of the psychological and social costs generated by this situation, particularly within a nationality law that is itself rooted in gender inequality, leaving many women and their children in situations of extreme vulnerability.
For all these reasons, what is taking place cannot be reduced to an administrative or merely legal issue. At its core, it is the instrumentalization of nationality as a mechanism of repression, a machinery that manufactures fear, produces instability, and keeps broad sectors of society trapped in a permanent state of anxiety and under the constant threat of losing their human and social security.
The statement points out that decisions to revoke nationality are excluded from effective judicial oversight, being classified as acts of sovereignty that are not subject to full judicial review. This means that entire families can lose access to employment, education, healthcare, housing, and even bank accounts, without any real possibility of legal recourse. What are the most emblematic cases illustrating this situation today?
What best expresses the gravity of this reality is that thousands of people affected by nationality revocation are effectively deprived of the right to defend themselves before the courts. The state does not merely decide to revoke their nationality; it classifies such decisions as acts of sovereignty, meaning that those affected are denied full judicial review.
This is particularly alarming because many of the cases now being targeted do not involve recent fraud or the irregular acquisition of nationality. We are talking about people who acquired nationality decades ago in accordance with the laws and procedures that were in force at the time. They have lived as citizens, studied, worked, married, raised families, and then, suddenly, found themselves stripped of their nationality without being given any meaningful opportunity to challenge the decision before an independent judiciary.
At the heart of the issue is the fact that the state does not want its relationship with citizens to be governed by rights and legal guarantees. Instead, it seeks to preserve its power to make final decisions without effective oversight. In this way, nationality becomes an instrument of arbitrary power, hanging over people while those affected are denied their most important means of protection: access to justice.
For this reason, the issue extends beyond those whose nationality has been revoked. It raises a broader question: should the state’s decisions concerning fundamental rights be subject to the rule of law and judicial oversight, or should they remain immune from any form of accountability? For us, this is the fundamental issue that the nationality revocation issue brings to light.
Kuwait’s nationality laws are structurally patriarchal: women do not have the same right as men to pass their nationality on to their children, making children’s legal status dependent on the male figure. How does this specific legal inequality affect the daily lives of Kuwaiti women and their children? And how does this patriarchal nationality legislation connect to other forms of control and dependence that women face across the region?
This discrimination directly affects women and their children because the state conditions most fundamental rights on citizenship. Education, healthcare, employment, and social security are not the only rights tied to nationality; the right to own property, establish businesses and commercial entities, and access numerous economic benefits and opportunities reserved for citizens also depend on it.
By being denied the right to pass her nationality to her children, she is, in practice, prevented from guaranteeing them access to these rights. A Kuwaiti man can pass on the full range of citizenship rights to his children. A Kuwaiti woman, despite being an equal citizen under the law, does not enjoy the same prerogative.
The harmful consequences of this discrimination have become especially evident in recent years with the rollback of rights previously guaranteed to the children of Kuwaiti women. One clear example is the recent revocation of free access to university education for this group, a regressive measure that lays bare the precariousness of their legal status. Rather than expanding rights and advancing equality, the state has restricted them, subordinating the future of thousands of students to their financial capacity rather than the state protection they are owed.
The impact of this legislation therefore extends far beyond the legal status of children. It shapes their educational, economic, and social trajectories throughout their lives. It also constitutes a form of discrimination against women by presuming that only men are entitled to transmit full national belonging and the complete rights of citizenship.
From a feminist perspective, this issue is not simply about acquiring nationality, it is about substantive equality itself. There can be no genuine equality in citizenship as long as Kuwaiti women are denied the right to secure for their children the same rights that Kuwaiti men can guarantee to theirs.
Kuwait is located in a region marked by decades of wars, occupations, sanctions, and military interventions—from Iraq to Yemen, from Palestine to Lebanon—and the militarization of the regional economy continues to advance. How do women in the region experience this overlap between the violence of domestic policies and the impacts of militarization and war?
We do not see nationality revocation policies, wars, and militarization as separate phenomena. On the contrary, we understand them as expressions of the same political and economic structure, founded in exclusion and inequality. Wars, occupations, and militarization do not emerge in a vacuum. They serve specific political and economic interests while, domestically, laws and administrative and security procedures are mobilized to manage populations and control rights and resources.
In Kuwait, this is evident in the use of nationality as a criterion for determining who is entitled to full rights and who can be deprived of them. Nationality is not merely a legal document; it is the gateway to education, healthcare, housing, employment, and economic and political rights. When it becomes a tool of exclusion or threat, it is transformed into a mechanism for controlling people’s lives and futures.
In both contexts, ordinary people bear the cost, and women bear the greatest burden. They endure the consequences of forced displacement, poverty, family fragmentation, and the deterioration of public services, while also bearing the burden of care work, unpaid labor, and the task of navigating crises produced both by armed conflict and by repressive state policies.
These policies are also deeply intertwined with patriarchy, which grants men greater authority within both the family and society, leaving women more vulnerable to economic and social precarity. It is therefore no coincidence that discrimination against women is embedded both in nationality laws and in the ways wars and militarization affect their lives.
We understand that the use of the law to strip certain groups of their rights within the state and the use of military force to impose hegemony over the peoples of the region are expressions of the same underlying logic: the concentration of power, wealth, and resources in the hands of a few while keeping other groups in conditions of subordination and vulnerability.
For this reason, the struggle for equality in nationality rights, for women’s rights, for social justice, and for an end to wars, occupations, and militarization is a single struggle against systems built upon hegemony, exclusion, and inequality.
How are women in Kuwait and across the region organizing? In what spaces is this resistance taking place?
It is difficult to speak about resistance without considering Kuwait’s broader political context. The problem is not simply that people are afraid; there are concrete reasons for that fear. In recent years, Kuwait has witnessed prosecutions, arrests, and convictions related to freedom of expression and political activism, including cases filed under national security charges. Many people know that speaking out publicly can carry very real consequences.
This environment has led many of those affected by nationality revocation policies—and even those who stand in solidarity with them—to avoid media exposure or expressing their views publicly, whether in official channels or on social media. When criticism can result in persecution or imprisonment, silence becomes, for many, a strategy for self-protection.
That does not mean resistance is absent. Human rights advocates, feminist groups, and solidarity networks continue to defend those affected, document violations, and denounce discrimination. However, they operate within a restricted space and face genuine risks, making the simple act of continuing to denounce these abuses a form of resistance in itself.
For this reason, the issue of nationality revocation cannot be separated from the broader struggle for civil liberties. Defending the right to nationality and protection from arbitrary decisions is inseparable from defending the rights to freedom of expression, organization, and dissent without fear of persecution.
