Identity has been an issue for me since I was born. I lived in my homeland as an ‘illegal resident’ for thirty-five years. Then I have become an exile in the very state whose colonial history resulted in alienating my indigenous Bidoon community in Kuwait. Now I am due to be granted asylum or a deportee.

This background provoked me to investigate the cause of four diasporic Bidoon participants doing political activism during the COVID-19 pandemic. I did so through an ethnographic study adopting Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981:84) concept of chronotope: the “intrinsic connectedness” of time and space. The study aimed to understand why the participants undertook political activism during a global crisis, how their positions were ‎(re)articulated and what forms of governmentality were at play. Observation and interview data from the participants’ discursive and semiotic practices were analysed focusing on how time and space were constitutive of their identity constructions. The analysis illustrated how the Bidoon’s cause is emblematic of minoritisation processes inflicted on the community across histories and geographies. More importantly, it revealed that the Bidoon perpetuated their reality by: i) doing activism only during crises; ii) marginalising subgroups of their community; and struggling for and not against ‘nationality’. Therefore, I call for moving from demanding nationality into defying its use in controlling liberties. In particular, I advocate the Bidoon’s indigenous identity to be the basis for reclaiming equal access to symbolic and material resources.