Statelessness and Solidarity in the 20th-Century Persian Gulf

As immigration to the Persian Gulf states boomed in the 1960s and 1970s, the Kuwaiti labor movement launched the region’s most powerful citizen-led campaign for noncitizen rights. Drawing on a range of Arabic- and English-language sources, including newspapers, memoirs, oral history interviews, corporate records, and imperial archives, this paper examines why Kuwaiti unions embraced an increasingly internationalist vision of labor rights—a path not always taken by organized labor.

Union advocacy for noncitizens emerged from a moment of political radicalism in the midcentury Gulf. In the 1950s, early Kuwaiti labor activists saw advocacy for Arab noncitizens as part of a broad wave of Arab nationalism and anticolonialism. With the collapse of Arab nationalism in the late 1960s, workers abandoned their exclusion of non-Arab workers and embraced Third-Worldist, internationalist, and Marxist visions of social change. Rather than seeking to build a “labor aristocracy” of citizen workers, they argued that the rights of citizens and noncitizens were fundamentally interdependent—that an underclass of structurally disempowered and underpaid noncitizens would not only threaten the livelihoods of Kuwaiti workers, but undermine the social movements that sustained Kuwaiti democracy. This belief led them to advocate for sweeping reforms to a sweeping nationality regime that denied naturalization to the region’s residents and left hundreds of thousands of people—usually Kuwaitis of nomadic background and Palestinians—entirely stateless.

This narrative challenges the stereotype of Gulf citizens as individual rent-seekers, showing how the citizenry was riven by divides of class and often motivated by collective visions of social justice. It also suggests that the potential for solidarity across the boundaries of nationality has always existed even in the “permanently temporary” migration regimes of the Gulf.