Out of politics, history, and time: stateless subaltern struggle, resistance, and refusal in the Arabian Peninsula

This thesis investigates the forms and possibilities of stateless subaltern politics. Through its ethnographic storytelling and oral and life history interviews, the research centres the subaltern life-worlds, rights politics, and political struggles of the once nomadic and pastoralist Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula who later became stateless Bidun Jinsiyya (without citizenship) in Kuwait. Despite their historical presence as nomadic Bedouin tribes indigenous to the Arabian deserts, they are now marked as ‘illegal residents’ by dominant oppressive statist institutional, documentary, and bureaucratic practices. This subjects them to systemic exclusion and state violence that permeates everyday life. By studying the historical particularities and contextual specificities of the Bidun’s statelessness, this thesis highlights the erasure of nomadic histories, epistemologies, and ways of being and living in the world. It reveals how the Bidun’s dispossession is shaped by colonial modernity, empire, capital, and nation-state territorialisation. With Bidun narrators, activists, protestors, political prisoners, and hunger strikers as the thesis’s chief protagonists, the research offers a careful accounting of their intergenerational and gendered struggles for citizenship, rights, and justice. It draws on Gramscian and decolonial theoretical approaches to focus on the Bidun’s subaltern self-activity, collective resistive practices, and politics of refusal, bringing them into view as active political subjects and historical protagonists. By centring their occluded and actively suppressed stories, political imaginaries, and vocabularies of resistance, the thesis explores how the Bidun articulate their struggles for recognition and existence against the state’s tenacious desire for their disappearance and erasure. In doing so, it theorises the vernacular concept of wujud (presence, being, and existence), exploring how the Bidun insist on their wujud in resistance and refusal of colonial and statist authority. The thesis examines how a politics of wujud moves beyond demands for inclusion into an existing citizenship regime, the universalised formulations of human rights, the limits of law, and the set terms of statist recognition. By telling stateless stories differently and emphasising the significance of questions of historical injustice, incessant violence, and moral harm, the research complicates the privileged Eurocentred political and critical theories often used in studies of statelessness, citizenship, and human rights. Furthermore, it contributes to the study of popular politics in the Middle East and critical Gulf studies.