denationalised based on disloyalty, to later being nationalized to build loyalty. In Syria, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were denaturalized in the 1960s amidst an agenda to Arabize the region. The Syrian government introduced a census in Decree No. 93, issued in August 1962, where everyone in the mainly Kurdish area of Al-Hassakah was required to prove long-term residence in the region – the purpose they said was to identify illegal infiltrators. Many people were left out of this census for various reasons, such as the inability to provide the requested documents, a lack of knowledge about the census and the inability to register. 19 (The procedure was carried out so arbitrarily often brothers from the same family were awarded different statuses.) For fifty years, hundreds and thousands of Kurds were left stateless, and in Syria this meant being left with little access to any basic rights, with the government simply ignoring any national or international pressure to resolve the stateless problem. However, in 2011 when the government first felt that it was facing internal opposition at the beginning of the uprising, it very quickly announced Presidential Decree no. 49 which granted the 'ajanib' group of stateless Kurds and their descendents (those who had attempted to register in 1962 but were unsuccessful) Syrian citizenship. The regime clearly viewed this as an opportunity to quell mounting opposition amongst the Kurds who were often traditionally seen as anti-regime. Many of these stateless persons who remained in Syria have successfully been able to acquire this citizenship. This (de)naturalization shows how fluid the shift between removing and offering citizenship based purely on ‘loyalty’ can occur in a state. Summary The examples of Bahrain and the UAE show the reduction in the ‘citizenry’ to delegitimise dissenting voices amongst their citizens, the case of the Bidoon of Kuwait and the Syrian Kurds shows a reversal in policies of exclusion as the boundaries of citizenship are being manipulated as a political tool to include certain populations to quell civil unrest. What all the above examples show is that perceived (dis)loyalty to the state is used as a means to (de)naturalise persons or populations. This loyalty does not however have to be based on credible evidence but on temporality political needs. (Dis)loyalty can be labelled on a population based on criteria such as ethnicity (in the case of the Kurds) or religion (in the case of the Bahraini Shia’a) or on individual’s political position (in the case of the UAE and Bahrain). What these examples show is that there is a dangerous norm taking place in the current socio-political turmoil in the MENA with regard to creating statelessness. If states continue to see denaturalisation as a powerful temporary political weapon, the worry is that we may see expanded targeted withdrawal of nationality done under vague accusations of threatening state security or homogeny. With increasing sectarian tensions in the region and the polarization of states, denaturalisation leading to statelessness could become increasingly prevalent as a solution to reinforce the narrative of the nation through the contraction of states citizenry. 19For more information see Albarazi, Zahra, The Stateless Syrians (May 24, 2013). Tilburg Law School Research Paper No. 011/2013, research conducted by Thomas Mcgee -7Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2376426