Bidoon: Kuwait's Stateless Bedouin Population

The Bidoon — short for the Arabic bidoon jinsiyya, meaning "without nationality" — are an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 long-term residents of Kuwait who have no citizenship in any country. They are overwhelmingly descendants of nomadic Bedouin tribes who did not register during the registration drive that followed Kuwait's independence in 1961. Between 1961 and 1965, citizenship committees worked to enroll the population, but the teams did not reliably reach remote desert encampments, and many tribal communities did not grasp the long-term significance of formal registration in a state apparatus they had little prior contact with. The window closed, and those who missed it were retroactively reclassified by the state as "illegal residents," despite multi-generational permanent presence on Kuwaiti soil. The practical consequences of Bidoon status are total exclusion from civil life: no national ID, no passport, no legal right to work in the formal economy, no public education, no public healthcare, no property ownership, and no marriage without special government permission. Many live in informal encampments and segregated neighborhoods at the edges of Kuwaiti cities. Because they never possessed full citizenship in the first place, the Kuwait Mass Citizenship Revocation Campaign (2024-2025) does not technically "revoke" their status — instead, the new legal framework formalizes and entrenches their permanent exclusion. Bidoon communities also exist in smaller numbers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, with similar legal limbo.