Wujud: A political philosophy of justice and presence in the Arabian Peninsula

This article sets forth the Arabic vernacular of ‘wujud’ (presence, being, and existence) as a concept that articulates political and social struggles for citizenship, rights, and justice. Through an account that centres the subaltern life-worlds, rights politics, and political struggles of the once nomadic and pastoralist Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula who later became stateless Bidoon Jinsiyya (without citizenship) in Kuwait, I examine the conceptual, philosophical, and political work that ‘wujud’ does by tracing how it appears as an empirical finding in this specific location of statelessness and nomadic history. The article presents wujud as a crucial concept that places emphasis on the significance of questions of historical injustice, incessant violence, and moral harm in subaltern struggles. Drawing on an ethnographic and oral life history project concerned with the intimate documentation and storytelling of the Bidoon’s everyday lives under intergenerational and gendered conditions of statelessness, I investigate the political possibilities opened up by their conceptual vernacular of wujud through examining the specific ways in which it is invoked. In theorising the insistence on wujud as an insistence on presence, being, and existence in resistance and refusal of statist and colonial authority, I argue that studying wujud can bring into view alternative political imaginaries of citizenship, rights, and justice emerging in different sites of subaltern struggles against historical injustice, erasure, denial, and continuous violence. I posit that wujud is a concept that captures a political philosophy of justice and presence that moves beyond demands for inclusion into an existing citizenship regime, the universalised formulations of human rights, the limits of law, and the set terms of statist recognition. In its move towards telling stateless stories differently, the article further complicates the privileged Eurocentred political and critical theories often used in studies of statelessness, citizenship, and human rights.