This paper both acknowledges the seminal contribution of Mary Ann Tétreault to the scholarship on Kuwait’s democratic dynamics and shows how my own work on the biduns (stateless people) in Kuwait pushes and explores the path she set fifteen years ago. In doing so, it mainly focuses on her book Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (2000), complemented by her work on the marginalization and enfranchisement of Kuwaiti women. Tétreault’s most robust argument in Stories of Democracy is on the inability of the Kuwaiti government, however autocratic its tendencies, to absolutely neutralize opposition to its authority, or the tenacity of “would-be citizens demanding civil and political rights” (2). Her work widened the research focus of Kuwaiti politics beyond the sole emphasis on the merchant elite and its constitutional bargain with the ruling family. She included other actors and their attempts at constituting themselves as fully-fledged “citizens” rather than mere “subjects”, noting the rise of government-supported tribes and devoting particular attention to Kuwaiti women. In the latter case, she showed how the issue of gender pitted different groups in Kuwait against each other (secularists vs. religious-minded, male vs. female), and how the power relations of domestic forces evolved over time until the granting of women’s political rights in 2005. She also took into account non-parliamentary means of political resistance, highlighting the role of “protected spaces” of home and mosque. My forthcoming book takes this enquiry a step further by examining another disenfranchised group excluded from the Kuwaiti polity. Through the use of in-depth qualitative interviews complemented with researches in press archives, I focus on the biduns’ stubborn, decade-long claims of belonging to the Kuwaiti nation. Like Stories of Democracy, the book examines practices of resistance to the state’s autocratic and often repressive measures. It concludes that the gradual engagement and political awakening of the biduns owed much to the resistance practices developed in the “protected spaces” identified by Tétreault: the private sphere of Kuwaiti homes, historic clubs, and lawyers practices. I also explore the gradual rise of the Bedouin periphery that Tétreault touched upon. However, my research expands Tétreault’s work by debunking the democratic myths that, built on the very exclusion of biduns, form the basis of Kuwaiti nationhood. I show how excluded voices have tried to timidly contest these national myths and to re-imagine an alternative Kuwaiti past in which they better fit.