Regional Report on Citizenship The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Zahra Albarazi 1. Introduction This report will introduce some of the most fundamental concepts, trends and challenges with regard to nationality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This region has always had a complicated relationship with the notion of nationality and which individuals and groups to determine as nationals. This is because states were formed and created in the same century that the region experienced substantial geo-political and social turmoil. Therefore, the understanding and definition of who is and who is not a member of each state has been challenging, and needs to be understood in its historical context. While each country has grappled in its own way with the development and implementation of domestic nationality legislation and polices, but there are some recurrent trends that resonate across the region. In Arabic, the word nationality translates as jinsiya. There are other Arab terms of nationality that refer to concepts such as identity, belonging and nationality, but the term jinsiya refers to the concept of a legal bond between an individual and a state, which is the term this report will focus its analysis on. This report considers the multifaceted reality of nationality in the following countries: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Bahrain and Kuwait. It begins by discussing the regional dynamics in the history of nationality regulation, particularly with regards to the questions of colonial history, migration, conflicts and more recent regional turmoil. It goes on to give a comparative analysis of the current laws on the acquisition and loss of nationality, included in the GLOBALCIT comparative databases.1 This covers the main modes of acquisition and loss of nationality. Although the report discusses the region’s laws and policies, it does not address how these are implemented in practice - which may paint a very different picture – and this should be kept in mind when contextualising the analysis. At the outset of the report, it is important to note that one consequence of the gaps and flaws in nationality laws is that the region hosts one of the largest populations of stateless 1 See http://eudo-citizenship.eu/ RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp. 2017/3- © 2017 Author(s) 1