The Kuwaiti population includes around 100,000 people - approximately 10 per cent of the Kuwaiti nationals -whose legal status is contested. Often considered `stateless', they have come to be known in Kuwait as biduns, from `bidun jinsiyya', which means literally `without nationality' in Arabic. As long-term residents with close geographical ties and intimate cultural links to the emirate, the biduns claim that they are entitled to Kuwaiti nationality because they have no other. But since 1986 the State of Kuwait, has considered them `illegal residents' on Kuwaiti territory. As a result, the biduns have been denied civil and human rights and treated as undocumented migrants, with no access to employment, health, education or official birth and death certificates. It was only after the first-ever bidun protest in 2011, that the government softened restrictions imposed upon them. Claire Beaugrand argues here that, far from being an anomaly, the position of the biduns is of central importance to the understanding of state formation processes in the Gulf countries, and the ways in which identity and the boundaries of nationality are negotiated and concretely enacted.

The Arab protest movements of 2010-2011 gave momentum and inspiration to unprecedented political mobilisations of migrants of Arab origin, whether first generation, second generation, or more, in Europe, North and South-America. This book analyses the essential yet understudied role of Arab diasporas during the Arab revolutions, dissecting the new forms of diasporic mobilisations that emerged during the 'Arab Spring' and that were borrowed as much from the home countries' repertoire of innovations as from global movements' tactics from Wall Street to Sao Paulo. This collection is a very timely and much-welcome contribution to our understanding of the nexus between immigration and integration. At a time when the engagement of European youth in faraway violent conflicts is hitting the headlines all over Europe, this book offers balanced and renewed academic perspectives on migrants belonging, analysing how migrants use political engagement to assert their belonging in newly-imagined home countries and, conversely, how they get involved in the politics of their origin countries to bolster their identity in host nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

The Kuwaiti population includes around 100,000 people - approximately 10 per cent of the Kuwaiti nationals -whose legal status is contested. Often considered `stateless', they have come to be known in Kuwait as biduns, from `bidun jinsiyya', which means literally `without nationality' in Arabic. As long-term residents with close geographical ties and intimate cultural links to the emirate, the biduns claim that they are entitled to Kuwaiti nationality because they have no other. But since 1986 the State of Kuwait, has considered them `illegal residents' on Kuwaiti territory. As a result, the biduns have been denied civil and human rights and treated as undocumented migrants, with no access to employment, health, education or official birth and death certificates. It was only after the first-ever bidun protest in 2011, that the government softened restrictions imposed upon them. Claire Beaugrand argues here that, far from being an anomaly, the position of the biduns is of central importance to the understanding of state formation processes in the Gulf countries, and the ways in which identity and the boundaries of nationality are negotiated and concretely enacted.