International Journal of Refugee Law, 2026, Vol. 00, Issue 00 • 3 2. Bilateral responses to statelessness 2.1. In situ statelessness in the UAE and Kuwait A stateless person is ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’.10 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has a mandate to identify, prevent, and reduce statelessness, and to protect stateless individuals, identifies two broad groups of stateless populations: those in a migratory and non-migratory context.11 The latter group, also referred to as in situ stateless populations, are those who ‘have never crossed borders’.12 This group is further described as remaining in their ‘own country’—a country to which they have ‘long-established ties’, including ‘long-term habitual residence’,13 and is ‘in many cases the country of their birth’.14 The UNHCR recognizes that the majority of stateless people worldwide are in situ.15 Many situations of in situ statelessness are protracted, involving populations living without nationality over a long time, including over multiple generations.16 The bidun (also spelled as bidoon and bidoun and short for bidun jinsiya, meaning ‘without nationality’ in Arabic) of the UAE and Kuwait are two such protracted in situ stateless populations. Many of the bidun of the UAE are descendants of Arab tribal populations native to the Arabian Peninsula (the Bedouin), with long-standing connections to the territories on which the Gulf states are located.17 Notwithstanding these connections, the bidun have been denied nationality in these countries and, consequently, have been deprived of access to rights.18 For both populations, their statelessness is a product of the Gulf states’ restrictive approaches to defining their nationals and the inability of these groups to produce documentary evidence of their ties to these territories. The newly federated UAE finalized its nationality law in 1972. This law defined nationals as those who could demonstrate their lineage to an Arab tribe residing in a member Emirate Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (opened for signature 28 September 1954, entered into force 6 June 1960) 360 UNTS 117, art 1(1) (1954 Convention). 11 UNHCR (n 9) 25. 12 ibid 3. 13 ibid 26. 14 ibid 3. 15 ibid 3. 16 Adeyemi Saheed Badewa, ‘Statelessness, Development, and Protection of “Disadvantaged Groups”: Bridging the Post-2030 Sustainable Development Gaps’ (2022) 8 African Human Mobility Review 56, 65; ‘The World’s Stateless’ (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2014) Report 7. 17 Alejandro Salamanca Rodríguez, ‘Citizenship in the United Arab Emirates: A Spectrum of Categories’ Routed Magazine <https://www.routedmagazine.com/uae-citizenship> accessed 15 May 2024. 18 Nationality remains key to accessing rights in the Arab region: see Laura van Waas, ‘The Situation of Stateless Persons in the Middle East and North Africa’ (UNHCR, October 2010) 3; Abbas Shiblak, ‘The Lost Tribes of Arabia’ (Forced Migration Review) <https://www.fmreview.org/shiblak/> accessed 9 December 2025. 10 Downloaded from academic.oup.com/ijrl/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ijrl/eeag028/8767365 by guest on 08 October 2026 This article begins by outlining the background and the detail of the statelessness agreement made between the UAE and the Comoros, and that contemplated by Kuwait. Part 3 conducts a legal analysis of the UAE’s agreement with the Comoros. Part 4 contextualizes this agreement within the broader phenomenon of the turn to bilateral agreements in response to asylum seeking and irregular migration, and it identifies lessons from this comparison. Part 5 develops the argument that both contexts of bilateral agreements highlight the deterritorialization and commodification of protection, and it draws the implications of these trends for the nature of citizenship and asylum.