Can we still trust the State?

Kuwait is Purging its Citizens. For the past few months, this Emirate has been publishing lists of nationals stripped overnight of their citizenship. Some are even caught by surprise when they attempt to board an international flight, believing they are entering the airport as Kuwaitis, only to leave it stateless—not without having first been detained by the police. A mass of once-proud holders of what was, until recently, one of the strongest passports in the Middle East are now reduced to frantically scanning the names of their relatives, family members, and friends—including their own—to see if they appear on these infamous lists, which their authorities regularly publish.

Thus, the State has unilaterally stripped 42,000 Kuwaiti citizens of their nationality over the past six months, representing 3% of its population in a country of 1.5 million. In other words, every Kuwaiti is now affected and knows someone who has suffered this revocation of citizenship, which the authorities justify by claiming that two-thirds of these individuals obtained it “fraudulently.” Yet, Article 8 of the Kuwaiti Nationality Law unequivocally states that the wife of a Kuwaiti man is entitled to citizenship after 10 years of marriage. Nevertheless, an arbitrary decree now renders them stateless overnight because the overwhelming majority of these women—some of whom have been naturalized for several decades—had to renounce their original nationality to adopt Kuwaiti citizenship.

In a nation where 80% of the State’s budget is allocated to the public sector and social programs, these 42,000 individuals stripped of their citizenship face a double or even triple punishment, as they are now deprived of their financial resources, pensions, and other essential services provided by a State whose extreme generosity is intended to buy civil peace. The resulting anxiety and shock are further heightened by the fact that the children of these women stripped of their citizenship also lose their own. Is this the same country for which the Western world unhesitatingly mobilized and fought in 1991?

Its ruling Prince, Emir Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, suspended the country’s Parliament on May 10 for a minimum of four years, banned student elections and cooperative councils, and extended his own executive powers. As has been—and still is—the case across ages and nations, this arbitrary exercise of power is legitimized by a democracy, which, in the words of the Kuwaiti sovereign, “must not be exploited to destroy the State.”

In the world of 2025, citizenship is becoming a tool of political and social control within a broader framework of deliberate weakening of democratic institutions. These carefully calculated strategies are no accident and align with authoritarian practices, as seen in India, where the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) legalized Indian citizenship for migrants from several neighboring countries—excluding Muslims. Statelessness thus becomes a political weapon, serving as a mold for a global attempt to destabilize the most vulnerable. During Donald Trump’s first administration, a Task Force was even established to facilitate the denaturalization of certain American citizens. More than 100,000 visas issued to citizens of specific countries were revoked overnight, and his administration is preparing to do it again very soon. Yet, it seems we are merely at the beginning of this global authoritarian shift, where the State arbitrarily redefines who belongs to the national community, and where minorities (– women in Kuwait, Muslims in India, Latinos/Muslims in the United States, and perhaps soon Christians in Syria) continue to serve as institutional scapegoats. How many thousands of civil servants do the United States under Trump and Musk plan to dismiss?

Hence the question: Can we still trust the State? Once a marginal concern in liberal democracies, it now imposes itself in the face of the erosion of legal safeguards, the rise of authoritarian practices, and the undermining of fundamental rights. Once a core legal principle ensuring predictability and stability for individuals and businesses in the application of laws and regulations, legal certainty guaranteed clear, accessible rules applied consistently. Predictability, stability, protection against arbitrariness—legal certainty safeguarded against inconsistent decisions by the authorities, thus ensuring fairness and justice. Could the State now be becoming an agent of legal insecurity? In this light, Reagan’s famous statement, “The government is not the solution to our problem; the government is the problem,” delivered during his inaugural address on January 20, 1981, takes on a far darker meaning.