The political science literature on Kuwait generally focuses on political institutions, political economy, and external threats to explain social change (Herb 2014, Yom 2016, Freer 2018). Foremost among the investigations is the study of how and under what conditions oil wealth payoffs have impacted the social, economic, and political structures of the small Gulf state. Yet there is a gap in the literature concerning the historical context of payments themselves, including the governance policies and the institutions used to distribute them. The most prevalent distributive institutions in Kuwait are the ‘cooperative societies’ which have been the major distributor of food (approximately 80% of all retail trade), textiles, and a wide variety of other neighbourhood services since the 1940s. Yet ‘coops’ serve multiple other functions, most importantly as municipal social centers, springboards for parliamentary election campaigns, and potential sources of campaign funding. Interestingly, they also have democratically elected boards and decision-making is carried out at the local level by a board of directors and general assembly. Coops are such central institutions that even when the Kuwaiti state was destroyed by the Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990 they survived and even flourished. According to Kuwaiti resistance source interviews the “Iraqi army wanted coops to be working so that they could show that life in Kuwait was normal and that everyday life was uninterrupted.” Since the 1990s repeated attempts by the state to limit the independent power of coops by increasing state oversight or privatizing individual cooperatives have failed. In this paper the author traces the history of the coops in Kuwait from the early 1940s by middle class townspeople to the present. The focus is on explaining how cooperative ideals, payments, and the larger Kuwaiti community were shaped over time by external Hungarian, Egyptian, and Russian socialist influences and Kuwaiti middle class social norms of Old Kuwayt town. This assists in explaining the context of the primary institution for transfer payments in Kuwait, the payments themselves, and the underpinning socio-political norms of modern Kuwaiti society. This paper is an important contribution to the literature as it provides critical new information about society in Kuwait by illustrating a new narrative for the development of middle class identities, coalitional politics, and how payments work contextually. The author conducted extensive in-depth fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and uncovered many new empirical sources that substantiate these claims as part of their ongoing dissertation work.

The paper aims to explore and critically inquire the sense of belonging between the non-citizen (expatriate population) in Kuwait. It will examine the subjectivity of the topic discussed such as the personal experience of belonging, what it means, while also look at the ill-balanced exercise of power in the socio-economic context when it comes to Kuwaitis versus non-Kuwaitis. These differences can become more complex when we include factors such as ethnicity and gender. Thus, this paper is going to examine these different groups and the dynamic claim to authenticity, voice, as well as their sense of belonging in Kuwait. Since the enactment of the Nationality Law in 1959; the population of Kuwait was roughly divided into three categories: Kuwaiti [provided that they prove their residency in Kuwait prior to 1920], Resident [non-Kuwaiti], and Stateless [those who failed to prove their affiliation with other nations nor Kuwait]. Therefore, the sense of belonging in Kuwait is relatively new in terms of ‘belonging to a nation’. Furthermore, it got more complicated with the Kafala system (sponsorship) that was implemented in order for a resident to live and work in Kuwait they have to be sponsored by a Kuwaiti. In order to capture this sense of belonging, the methodology used is a series of relaxed and in-depth interviews to reflectively inquire about the meaning of belonging in Kuwait. Along with personal observation and secondary research, this paper aims to provide a doorway on this matter. In addition, the paper intends to co-create with the interviewees a new meaning for belonging beyond the Kuwaiti citizenship. In conclusion, the paper’s goal is to critically inquire and collect the multiple realities around us in Kuwait.

This paper focuses on the Amiri Council-led Al-Shaheed Park’s ultra-green grass and lavish landscaping as an element that produces perceptions of corruption and a failing government in Kuwait amongst park users. From the ethnographic research, a relationship between greenery and Eden also comes up, highlighting strong feelings of affection towards Al-Shaheed Park and a want for more ‘green’ projects like it. This papers focuses on ethnographic data that shows how people create associations between greenery and government through certain comparisons. I unpack people’s comparisons of the seemingly ‘perfect’ park with other ‘poor-looking’ municipality-led public spaces at different scales, including streetscapes, neighborhood parks, and public beaches. “Why can’t other public spaces be like Al-Shaheed Park?” The comparisons bring up numerous political questions regarding irrational money distribution, corruption within the municipality, democracy, the role of the Amiri Council, and lacking public amenities. This paper also focuses on archival research and interviews with government employees, which problematically frame parks as modes of urban ‘beautification’ and ‘decoration’. On the contrary, the park signifies something deeper than aesthetics. It points out poor governance, and thus questions current Kuwaiti politics. Public parks stand as complex socio-political spaces with significant potential for people to take social risks in the hopes of enlightening a community. Yet, in an Amiri Council-led project like Al-Shaheed Park, this remains tough. This paper concludes that urban public parks may foster community engagement and thinking, and the constructed environment at large may perform as the terrain for political action in Kuwait, increasing its political agency. I suggest the importance of more municipality-led public parks in Kuwait due to their higher political potential, the significance of studying standing parks beyond beautification terms, and the need to find more sustainable ‘less green’ practices. While Al-Shaheed Park symbolizes a well-functioning successful public project amidst a time of urban stagnation, it highlights both unsustainable landscape architecture practices in a water deficient desert and a limited low-risk political space due to the Amiri Council’s role. Methodologically, this paper employs critical theories on public space and parks, field observations, interviews with public spaces users and governmental employees, and secondary sources from municipality archives including project documents, newspaper articles, and photographs. The ethnographic and archival research took place in Kuwait between January and August in 2019.

This paper aims to challenge the ways in which recognition is spoken about in frameworks of sexual rights. My intervention here is to show that there are different modes of queer being that are not only organised around questions of legal and civil recognition and a visibility that is articulated through a teleological narrative of ‘coming out’. I argue that such developmental frameworks of sexual rights operate on homonormative, homonationalist and orientalist terrains, further limiting our understandings of intimacies, queer subjectivities and queerness more broadly. Through looking at the active life of queer bodies in Kuwait, I discuss that in this context we cannot turn to the law for recognition because of its ambivalences, silences, and very real punishments. Instead, I look at the ways in which Kuwaiti queer subjects inhabit and negotiate norms through the creation, inhabitation, and movement across spaces. I develop an understanding of ‘spatial recognition’ to describe a form of recognition that is centred around agency, affect and spaces produced by social relations. This discussion will take place against the backdrop of a historicised socio-political context of Kuwait, including an analysis of law and meanings of sex/gender/sexuality.