Kuwait

The territory of present-day Kuwait lies at the head of the Arabian Gulf, a coastal zone whose archaeological record stretches back to the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The island of Failaka, a few miles offshore from Kuwait City, was an outpost of the Dilmun civilisation that flourished in the third and second millennia BCE, linking Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley through maritime trade. After the campaigns of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, Failaka was settled by Greek colonists who knew it as Ikaros, leaving behind a fortified temple complex; the surrounding mainland later passed under the influence of successive regional powers, including the Seleucids, the Characene kingdom of Mesene, the Sassanian Persians, and, from the seventh century CE, the early Islamic caliphates.

For much of the medieval period the area was sparsely populated desert and shoreline on the periphery of larger empires. It came under nominal Ottoman authority in the sixteenth century as part of the province of Basra, though direct control was always thin. The town of Kuwait itself was founded in the early eighteenth century, when sections of the Bani Utub confederation migrated from the interior of Arabia and settled around a small fort, the kut, that gave the settlement its name. In 1752 the Al Sabah family was selected to manage the affairs of the new town, beginning a dynastic line that has ruled ever since. Kuwait grew into a prosperous entrepot of pearling, dhow-building, and long-distance trade between India, Persia, and Ottoman Iraq.

Concerned by Ottoman encroachment and by Russian and German railway ambitions in the Gulf, Sheikh Mubarak the Great signed a secret agreement with Britain in 1899 that placed Kuwait's foreign relations under British protection in exchange for a subsidy. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913 delineated Kuwaiti territory, and after the First World War the protectorate became formal. Borders with Najd were fixed at the Uqair Conference of 1922, which also created neutral zones to the south. Commercial oil was discovered at the Burgan field in 1938, though large-scale exports were delayed by the Second World War; revenues from the 1950s onward transformed the sheikhdom from a struggling pearling port into one of the wealthiest states per capita in the world.

Kuwait achieved full independence on 19 June 1961, with the termination of the British protectorate, and promptly faced an Iraqi territorial claim that was deterred by British and later Arab League forces. A constitution adopted in 1962 established an emirate with an elected National Assembly, making Kuwait one of the earliest Gulf monarchies to institute a parliament. The assembly was suspended twice, in 1976 and 1986, amid tensions over press freedom and regional security during the Iran-Iraq War. On 2 August 1990 Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed the country; a United States-led coalition expelled them in February 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, after which the Al Sabah government returned and rebuilt.

The post-liberation decades have seen recurrent friction between the ruling family and the National Assembly, frequent cabinet reshuffles, the extension of full political rights to women in 2005, and successive successions within the Al Sabah line, most recently the accession of Emir Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah in 2023. Kuwait today is a constitutional emirate in which the Al Sabah dynasty holds executive power alongside an elected legislature, a structure that frames the institutions described in the rest of this dossier.