Between 1957 and 1966, dozens of nationalists exiled from Bahrain adopted Kuwait as a refuge and base for their campaign against British colonialism in their homeland. Their experience illustrates how Kuwait served as a hub for anti-colonial groups, particularly from the Arabian Peninsula. Joining a diverse Arab migrant community that nurtured movements such as the Palestinian Fatah and Dhufari revolutionaries, the Bahraini exiles benefited from Kuwait's open and sympathetic environment and easy access to other Arab countries. Kuwait's Bahraini exile community emerged with the arrival of activists from the Committee of National Union (CNU) in 1957. Longstanding 'translocal' networks linking them to Kuwait facilitated their acclimation. Influenced by Kuwait's pan-Arab environment, some CNU exiles joined the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), a cross-border group with great influence in Kuwait. In 1959, the MAN established a branch in Bahrain, which became the country's foremost nationalist group. The Bahraini MAN retained Kuwait as a base, its leaders seeking refuge there in 1963. In 1965, Bahraini exiles and Kuwaiti allies effectively mobilized in support of the March Intifada, a mass anti-colonial uprising in Bahrain. Subsequently, British pressure and growing authoritarianism in Kuwait undermined the Bahraini nationalists' position, leading to mass expulsions in 1966.

In 1950, a group of young Bahraini intellectuals began publishing a magazine entitled Sawt al-Bahrain (Voice of Bahrain). It was the second periodical in the country's history and the first to be completely controlled by Bahrainis. Its goal was to promote a patriotic and nationalist agenda and create a space for the dissemination of ideas amongst the nascent intelligentsia in Bahrain and the broader Gulf region. The magazine came to be distributed in most major Gulf coastal cities, Riyadh, Mecca and Medina, Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, the Levant, Sanaa, Tunis, Zanzibar, Karachi and London. It was thus not simply a local publication concerned solely with Bahrain, but rather built bridges between Bahrain and the broader Arab world. Using Sawt al-Bahrain as a case study, this paper highlights how educated Bahrainis articulated their political identity and contended with modernity through the press. It also draws a connection between the magazine and Bahrain's reformist movement in the 1950s. This paper follows Benedict Anderson in considering the role of the intelligentsia in the colonial world to be 'central to the rise of nationalism.' Additionally, the paper expands on Anderson's arguments on the relationship between print media and nationalism. Anderson portrays the consumption of print media as a one-way process in which individuals, through the act of reading the newspaper, become part of the 'imagined community' of the nation. This paper analyses how those same readers can also become producers of media. By publishing Sawt al-Bahrain, the Bahraini intelligentsia inserted themselves within the Arab press scene as interlocutors. They engaged with Arab peers and showcased their belonging to the larger Arab nation, as well as their understanding of what it means to be modern Arab citizens.

The international relations literature on Arabism overwhelmingly views the behavior of Arab states through an instrumentalist lens. This article departs from this approach, arguing that Kuwait's Arabist foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s largely stemmed from its distinctive history, which produced a prevailing pan-Arabist current in society evident in the mainstream press and official discourse. A combined historical-sociological and constructivist approach is used to disentangle the relationship between history, identity, and foreign policy.

Youth movements in the Gulf have been effective but ephemeral, some times manipulated by established groups or succumbing to social divisions.