Since the liberation of Kuwait that ushered into a period of liberalisation and opened the country’s door to the scrutiny of international human rights organisations documenting among others, the issue of stateless people, the Biduns have become a visible and well-established category in the sociology of Gulf societies. They represent the people in legal limbo between nationals and expatriates in most of the Gulf countries. This paper will look, in detail, at the importance of the migratory environment in the handling of the issue of statelessness as the crux of the Kuwaiti national identity. It proposes to reflect on the regional context that presided over the emergence of the bidun phenomenon as a result of the closure of nearly impossible access to nationality. Based on the review of the press archives of Al Qabas in Kuwait, supplemented by qualitative interviews, the paper analyses the debate surrounding the question of inclusion into and exclusion from the nationality as it was posed at the outset of Kuwaiti constitution-based system, and argues that statelessness resulted from a political domestic conflict over entitlement to naturalisation: Kuwaiti Arab nationalists defended a strict implementation of the law that could eventually benefit Arab migrants, while the ruling family used the tribes and their transnational solidarity networks to enlarge its legitimacy basis. In conclusion it aims at drawing broader conclusions on how the evolution of the nationality in the international system, being less and less conceived in state-centered terms , has had consequences on the solution proposed by the state (offshore nationality) and the society (giving human rights to biduns) in order to get out of the conundrum.