Citizenship as political tool: the recent turmoil in the MENA and the creation and resolution of statelessness Zahra al Barazi and Jason Tucker1 Jawad Fairouz was an elected Member of Parliament (MP) in Bahrain between 2005-2008, exercising the most fundamental privilege of a citizen – representing the voices of other fellow citizens. This article explores the shift from being a citizen to how a state can exclude its citizens, not only from their nation-state’s citizenry, but from the nation-state system as a whole. Further to this it explores the opposite, of when the boundaries of citizenship can be shifted to (re)include those excluded from the system, showing the manipulation of citizenship as a political tool. In 2012, whilst on a visit to London, Fairouz received a phonecall from his family in Bahrain to inform him that he was no longer considered a citizen of the country. The authorities had stripped him of his nationality, making him a stateless person. Citizenship has commonly been used as a political weapon, and sometimes a direct and devastating consequence of this is rendering individuals, groups or even entire populations stateless. This article, by considering the concept of citizenship through a legal standing where citizenship is the legal bond an individual holds with a state – reflects upon the exclusion of persons from the entire nation-state system, when citizenship is wielded as a political weapon. More specifically we look at both the creation and resolution of stateless cases through the manipulation by states of its ‘citizenry’ during the recent turmoil in the Middle East. From these examples a key commonality can be drawn out, the exclusion/inclusion of those based on a perceived lack/sufficient loyalty to the nation-state. Although everyone is perceived to belong to a nation-state, statelessness is a global phenomenon, affecting approximate 15 million persons worldwide.2 Statelessness, which is a legal concept, is when a person is not considered as a national of any country under the Zahra al Barazi is a Researcher and MENA Expert at the Statelessness Programme, Tilburg Law School . Jason Tucker is a PhD candidate from The University of Bath looking at statelessness in Lebanon 1 UNHCR place the number at 10 million, and here we also include the 5 million stateless Palestinians under UNWRA’s mandate. 2 -1Electroniccopy copy available available at: Electronic at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2376426 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2376426