Nomads and the Struggle for a Legal Identity ‘remote’, were often divided by borders, calling into question the proper authority to register nomads. In British North Borneo, for example, few inhabitants received documents or any official acknowledgement of their status until just before the end of the colonial period, leaving mass civil registration, including a determination of the status of populations in border zones, for the post-colonial period. 7 In many Gulf states, British colonial administrators vested power to issue British documents with urban Sultans and Emirs, rather than nomadic Bedouin leaders. 8 Urban rulers could establish legal identity and even issue British identity documents to groups over whom they arguably had no jurisdiction, like the Bedouin. 9 In French West Africa, colonial administrators began registering the sedentary population following the enactment of the 1946 Constitution of the French Republic, 10 but they administrated nomadic populations separately and struggled to control their movements. 11 While separate administration appeared to offer nomads more autonomy, it left them out of the developing administrative state. According to the governor of French Soudan, which would become Mali, ‘such [registration] … could be accomplished only for the sedentary part of his population, step by step, and at high cost’. 12 Colonial independence would see a continuation of problems for nomadic communities in establishing their legal identity, including widespread discrimination against nomads and the division of nomad territories by borders. 13 Undocumented nomads risked being labelled as foreigners or as stateless persons. Registration committees set up by the Kuwaiti government, for example, closely interrogated Bedouin claims to Kuwaiti civil registration, even as the settled, urban population easily qualified under the law. 14 Some Bedouin with documents showing that they owned property in Kuwait were prevented from registering. 15 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 The Naturalisation Ordinance, Ordinance No 1 of 1931 (North Borneo), cited in Laurie Fransman (ed), Fransman’s British Nationality Law (3rd edn, Bloomsbury 2011) 141, 697. See also North Borneo Cession Order in Council (1946) (United Kingdom); Mathews Thomas, ‘Is Malaysia’s Mykad the “One Card to Rule Them All”? The Urgent Need to Develop a Proper Legal Framework for the Protection of Personal Information in Malaysia’ (2004) 28(2) Melbourne University Law Review 474. John Harding, ‘Matters Colonial, Consular and Curious’ in Peter Hinchcliffe, John T Ducker, and Maria Holt (eds), Without Glory in Arabia: The British Retreat from Aden (Tauris 2013) 279, 280. ibid 281−83. See Constitution of the French Republic, Journal Officiel 28 October 1946 (France) arts 80−82. ibid arts 76, 78 Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton University Press 2016) 154, citing the Governor of Sudan. Kuwaiti independence was achieved by the termination of the Anglo–Kuwaiti Agreement of 1899 by the Kuwaiti Emir and Britain over a number of years, ending in 1961. James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2006) 319. See also Michael Casey, The History of Kuwait (Greenwood Publishing Group 2007) 21. Claire Beaugrand, Statelessness and Transnationalism in Northern Arabia: Biduns and State Building in Kuwait, 1959−2009 (PhD dissertation, London School of Economics 2010) 81– 84, 124−25. See also Farah al-Nakib, ‘Revisiting Hadar and Badu in Kuwait: Citizenship, Housing, and the Construction of a Dichotomy’ (2014) 46(1) International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 5, 12. Beaugrand, Statelessness and Transnationalism (n 14) 124. See also Marie Lund-Johansen, Fighting for Citizenship in Kuwait (Masters Thesis, University of Oslo 2014) 25; Al-Nakib (n 14) 12. 339