For decades, Kuwait stood apart from its Gulf neighbors. Today, a sweeping political transformation is putting that distinction to the test.
The Cradle
Last month, The Economist published an investigation into political and social developments across the Persian Gulf during the months surrounding the US-Israeli war on Iran. Among the countries examined, Kuwait stood out.
The report cited human rights organizations that say roughly 70,000 people – around 16 percent of Kuwaiti citizens – have been stripped of their nationality as part of a campaign launched in May 2024 by Emir Mishal al-Ahmad al-Sabah.
Kuwaiti authorities have argued that the measures target cases of dual nationality, unlawful acquisition, or naturalization files under review. Human rights groups, however, say the campaign has widened to include broad categories of citizens and naturalized persons, raising serious questions about legal safeguards and the avenues available for appeal and review.
Those groups, including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, have also warned of the humanitarian and social consequences of citizenship loss, from restricted access to basic services to the erosion of civil rights.
What is happening in Kuwait?
As the public sphere narrows and citizenship revocations expand, critics argue that the country is moving toward a model closer to the Gulf’s tighter security states, risking the loss of one of the key features that long distinguished the Kuwaiti experience from its regional surroundings.
The current campaign is part of a broader political shift that began under Emir Mishal al-Ahmad, rooted in the ruling establishment’s conviction that the Kuwaiti political model – built for decades on a balance between the executive and parliament – had reached an impasse.
From the state’s perspective, repeated clashes between successive governments and the National Assembly disrupted development projects and economic reform, and plunged the country into recurring political crises.
Critics of this approach argue that what began as an effort to overcome political paralysis has gradually become a reordering of the relationship between state and society, reducing the space for political action while centralizing decision-making at the expense of the democratic margin for which Kuwait was known.
What is taking place, then, is not simply an attempt to solve an institutional crisis. It points to a transition toward a more centralized model of governance – one less tolerant of political pluralism. Kuwait’s distinctiveness never rested only on the presence of an elected parliament.
It also lay in the existence of a space for public debate and political accountability that allowed society to participate in managing disputes within the system. Shrinking that space may prove counterproductive over time. Weakening the institutions that mediate between state and society risks pushing social and political tensions outside the constitutional channels that once absorbed them.
On the social level, the expansion of citizenship revocations and the narrowing of the public sphere carry consequences far beyond those directly targeted. A growing sense of legal uncertainty, fear of losing acquired rights, and declining trust in institutions all affect social cohesion and the relationship between citizen and state.
Much of the criticism directed at the authorities stems from concern that this shift could dismantle one of Kuwait’s most important pillars of historical stability: the relative balance between political authority and society.
In a Carnegie Endowment study published in 2025, Omar al-Jasser and Nathan Brown argued that what is happening in Kuwait is not limited to the suspension of parliamentary life, but extends to a deeper transformation in the relationship between the state and citizenship itself.
It further argues that bypassing parliament has allowed the authorities to implement substantive policies affecting the political and legal identity of the state, reflecting a wider drive to centralize power and weaken the oversight mechanisms that long characterized the Kuwaiti experience.
The roots of paralysis
Still, explaining the Kuwaiti crisis simply as a result of parliamentary disorder is incomplete and ultimately misleading. Kuwait’s political system was never based on a parliamentary majority that forms a government and is then held accountable by the opposition.
It rested instead on a different equation, one in which the executive branch – managed by the Amiri Palace – retained the stronger position while parliament enjoyed broad powers of oversight and objection. Over time, that arrangement became a constant source of tension.
Governments were formed without a stable political balance, while the National Assembly retained powerful tools of obstruction and interrogation without possessing the actual authority to govern or assume responsibility for decisions.
In that sense, the clash between institutions was not an aberration. It was part of how the system worked. Parliaments were dissolved again and again, governments were reshuffled or forced out, and recurring political crises were managed as tools of balance rather than treated as signs of a deeper structural flaw.
What is happening now looks less like an attempt to solve a passing crisis than a broader revision of that model, one that shrinks parliament’s room to maneuver and reconcentrates power in the hands of the central state.
Returning to the issue of nationality, it cannot be separated from the broader political shift underway in Kuwait. What is unfolding is, in effect, a redrawing of the boundaries of belonging – of who counts as part of the Kuwaiti political community and who does not.
When citizenship, the highest legal bond between individual and state, is opened up to review on this scale, the issue becomes part of a wider effort to recast the relationship between the state and society.
Seen from this angle, the recent decisions appear to extend a path that began with the suspension of parliamentary life and the narrowing of the political sphere. The aim is a more disciplined, less objection-prone political order.
But if the authorities are indeed reshaping the relationship between state and society in this way, why now? What is Kuwait so afraid of that it is prepared to abandon, step by step, the political model that long set it apart from the rest of the Gulf?
Why is Kuwait moving in this direction?
The piece published by The Economist linked growing pressure by Gulf rulers on their populations – Kuwait included – to their inability to control the external threats facing their states as a result of their alignment with the US-Israeli war on Iran and the region, together with the repercussions that followed.
On that reading, Kuwait has not responded to regional turmoil by pulling back in order to protect domestic equilibrium. It has moved in the opposite direction, toward deeper involvement in regional conflict alongside the US and toward heavier internal repression.
This path threatens Kuwait on two fronts. The first is external: direct exposure to regional fallout, illustrated by Iranian targeting tied to the presence of US interests and military bases on Kuwaiti territory, and Kuwait’s transformation into a platform for war on Iran.
The second is internal: mounting social fragility produced by the disruption of domestic balances – a fragility that could erupt at any moment.
In that sense, any serious shift in the regional balance of power could quickly reverberate at home, leaving Kuwait to absorb both external pressure and internal strain at once.
Can Kuwait absorb the consequences?
The government’s shift toward more centralized rule is not limited to the repositioning of political decision-making. It is also accompanied by an increasingly restrictive management of the public sphere, a broader use of repression and control, and an expansive redefinition of the boundaries of citizenship, including those tied to belonging and political participation.
Yet even if this approach resembles models seen in states such as the UAE or Saudi Arabia, that does not mean Kuwait possesses the same capacity to bear the political and social costs. Those models emerged in different contexts, shaped by differences in state size, the nature of the social contract, the scale of available resources, and the ability to manage domestic balances through broad economic and institutional tools, even if they too remain vulnerable to internal strain.
Kuwait’s political order, by contrast, was built on a different balance between state and society, where parliament and the public sphere were not window dressing but part of the mechanism through which stability was maintained.
The Kuwaiti model that prevailed was not the product of chance. It emerged with the formation of the state itself and answered a political and social need central to its stability. Efforts to shift that model toward tighter centralization – while hastily redefining the relationship between authority and citizens and doing so at a particularly dangerous regional moment when Kuwait is already deeply entangled – carry serious risks.
Kuwait lacks the demographic, geographic, and even economic buffers needed to absorb the repercussions of such a transformation, particularly given how heavily it would be affected by any prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
At the very least, the result could be a sharp rise in internal tension, the erosion of social balance, and greater vulnerability to sudden regional or domestic shocks.
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