Download or read book Saudi Arabia in Transition written by Bernard Haykel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making sense of Saudi Arabia is crucially important today. The kingdom's western province contains the heart of Islam, and it is the United States' closest Arab ally and the largest producer of oil in the world. However, the country is undergoing rapid change: its aged leadership is ceding power to a new generation, and its society, dominated by young people, is restive. Saudi Arabia has long remained closed to foreign scholars, with a select few academics allowed into the kingdom over the past decade. This book presents the fruits of their research as well as those of the most prominent Saudi academics in the field. This volume focuses on different sectors of Saudi society and examines how the changes of the past few decades have affected each. It reflects new insights and provides the most up-to-date research on the country's social, cultural, economic and political dynamics.
Download or read book Saudi Arabia in the Balance written by Paul Aarts and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saudi Arabia in the Balance brings together today’s leading scholars in the field to investigate the domestic, regional, and international affairs of a Kingdom whose policies have so far eluded the outside world. With the passing of King Fahd and the installation of King Abdullah, a contemporary understanding of Saudi Arabia is essential as the Kingdom enters a new era of leadership and particularly when many Saudis themselves are increasingly debating, and actively shaping, the future direction of domestic and foreign affairs. Each of the essays, framed in the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, offers a systematic perspective into the country’s political and economic realities as well as the tension between its regional and global roles. Important topics covered include U.S. and Saudi relations; Saudi oil policy; the Islamist threat to the monarchy regime; educational opportunities; the domestic rise of liberal opposition; economic reform; the role of the royal family; and the country's foreign relations in a changing international world. Contributors: Paul Aarts, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Rachel Bronson, Iris Glosemeyer, Steffen Hertog, Yossi Kostiner, Stéphane Lacroix, Giacomo Luciani, Monica Malik, Roel Meijer, Tim Niblock, Gerd Nonneman, Michaela Prokop, Abdulaziz Sager, Guido Steinberg
Download or read book Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia written by S. Izraeli and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Yizraeli deciphers the complex dynamics of a major Middle Eastern power by focusing on the role of Saudi royal family decision making in the building of a modern state. In great detail, she traces the internal deliberations that took place in the formative years of the kingdom, when the priorities and rule of the state were defined. In a document known as the "Ten Point Programme," first presented in a 1962 speech by Crown Prince Faysal, the royal family placed limitations on potential social change and thwarted any reform of the political system. This explains why, even though Saudi Arabia tries to mend past errors (particularly with regard to its educational system), the fundamentals of the regime fail to evolve. Whether Saudi Arabia can modernize without major social and religious upheaval remains to be seen, yet Yizraeli's research tracks several key avenues the regime may follow and the possible responses of its powerful elite.
Download or read book Counter Narratives written by M. Al-Rasheed and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-17 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saudi Arabia and Yemen are two countries of crucial importance in the Middle East and yet our knowledge about them is highly limited, while typical ways of looking at the histories of these countries have impeded understanding. Counter-Narratives brings together a group of leading scholars of the Middle East using new theoretical and methodological approaches to cross-examine standard stories, whether as told by Westerners or by Saudis and Yemenis, and these are found wanting. The authors assess how grand historical narratives such as those produced by states and colonial powers are currently challenged by multiple historical actors, a process which generates alternative narratives about identity, the state and society.
Download or read book State Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia RLE Saudi Arabia written by Tim Niblock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saudi Arabia is one of the most important countries in the modern world. Not only does it possess some 25 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, it also plays a crucial role in the wider Gulf region where over 50 per cent of proven reserves are located. Developments in Saudi Arabia will inevitably affect the economic well-being of the Western industrialised world, Japan and much of the Third World. At the same time, Saudi Arabia is ruled in a traditional way by an all-powerful king and royal family, and is one of the key countries of Islam, the Holy City of Mecca being within the country’s boundaries. The inroad of modern Western forces into this traditional Islamic society is underlined by the fact that may key posts are filled with imported Western workers. This book, first published in 1982, containing contributions by the world’s leading Middle Eastern experts, provides a comprehensive overview of important social, political and economic developments in Saudi Arabia. The opening chapters consider the formation of the Saudi State, and the bulk of the book surveys key themes such as political opposition, the oil industry, energy policy, banking, external relations and the future direction of development.
Download or read book A Most Masculine State written by Madawi Al-Rasheed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book goes beyond conventional tropes describing women in Saudi Arabia to probe the historical, political and religious forces thwarting their emancipation.
Download or read book Politics Society in the Contemporary Middle East written by Michele Penner Angrist and published by Lynne Rienner Pub. This book was released on 2013 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge examination of the domestic politics, now thoroughly revised to reflect the events of the Arab Spring.
Download or read book Governance and Domestic Policy Making in Saudi Arabia written by Mark C. Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saudi Vision 2030 and the National Transformation Plan 2020 are governmental initiatives to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy and implement nationwide social changes. Media and scholarly attention often describe the success or failure of these ambitious visions. This book shifts the focus to instead examine and evaluate the actual processes of domestic policymaking and governance that are being mapped out to achieve them. The book is unique in its breadth, with case studies from across different sectors including labour markets, defence, health, youth, energy and the environment. Each analyses the challenges that the country's leading institutions face in making, shaping and implementing the tailored policies that are being designed to change the country's future. In doing so, they reveal the factors that either currently facilitate or constrain effective and viable domestic policymaking and governance in the Kingdom. The study offers new and ground-breaking research based on the first-hand experiences of academics, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners who have privileged access to Saudi Arabia. At a time when analysis and reportage on Saudi Arabia usually highlights the 'high politics' of foreign policy, this book sheds light on the 'low politics' to show the extent to which Saudi policy, society, economics and culture is changing.
Download or read book Saudi Arabia written by Mordechai Abir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This much-revised edition of Professor Abir's Saudi Arabia in the Oil Era now includes consideration of both Gulf Wars. Abir examines the social and political forces that have shaped Saudi Arabia, including the impact of Islam and of Westernization, drawing heavily on Saudi sources. There is also essential analysis of regional security dilemmas and of the country's prospects in the post-Gulf War era.
Download or read book Over stating the Arab State written by Nazih N. Ayubi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1996-12-31 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author's objective within this book is to place the Arab world within a theoretical and comparative framework that avoids both orientalist and fundamentalist insistence on the utter peculiarity and uniqueness of the region. The book focuses in detail on eight Arab countries.
Download or read book Archive Wars written by Rosie Bsheer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s efforts to construct and disseminate a historical narrative to legitimize its rule. The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites’ project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state’s response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation. Praise for Archive Wars “An instant classic. With incredible insight, creativity, and courage, Rosie Bsheer peels away the political and institutional barriers that have so long mystified others seeking to understand Saudi Arabia. Bsheer tells us remarkable new things about the exercise and meaning of power in today’s Saudi Arabia.” —Toby Jones, Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia “There are now two distinct eras in the writing of Saudi Arabian history: before Rosie Bsheer’s Archive Wars and after.” —Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania, author of Oilcraft “Archive Wars explores with conceptual brilliance and historical aplomb the various forms of historical erasure central not just to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but to all modern states. In a finely-grained analysis, Rosie Bsheer rethinks the significance of archives, historicism, capital accumulation, and the remaking of the built environment. A must-read for all historians concerned with the materiality of modern state formation.” —Omnia El Shakry, University of California, Davis, author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
Download or read book The Arabian Peninsula written by Derek Hopwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the Arabian Peninsula is the heartland of Islam and of the Arab world, for decades it did not receive the attention it deserves from scholars and writers. The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, Oxford, jointly organized a series of seminars, culminating in a conference at which the papers in this volume (first published in 1972) were discussed. Together they constitute an authoritative statement of our present knowledge of several areas of the Peninsula, with particular emphasis on the Gulf States. Three chapters trace the history of Oman from pre-Islamic times to the recent past, and in so doing emphasize the theme of continuing conflict between sultan and imam. Other chapters examine the Gulf and the Peninsula from the standpoint of inter-Arab and of international relations. The third section of the book is devoted to a discussion of the increasing rate of social change in the area, and the final section deals with problems of oil and state and of economic development.
Download or read book Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia written by S. Izraeli and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Whether Saudi Arabia can modernize without major social and religious upheaval remains to be seen, yet Yizraeli's research tracks several key avenues the regime may follow and the possible responses of its powerful elite."--P. [2] jacket.
Download or read book Saudi Arabia in the Oil Era RLE Saudi Arabia written by Mordechai Abir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saudi Arabia has undergone a rapid social and economic transformation. When Ibn Saud declared the nation a unified kingdom in 1932, the majority of its population was nomadic and lived in a state of poverty or semi-poverty. Now the processes of modernisation, financed by the exploitation of the country’s vast oil reserves, have produced a prosperous and predominantly urban population. However, this social change has not been without its tensions; the emergence of a rising middle class has called into question the monopoly of power of the House of Saud, its involvement in the kingdom’s economy and its oil and foreign policy, while the rapid urbanisation of the rural population has eroded the traditional social structures and has not solved, but in some cases promoted, social division. This book, first published in 1988, explores the recent history of the Saudi oil state in an analysis of the struggle for social and political power in modern Saudi Arabia.
Download or read book The Politics of Truth Management in Saudi Arabia written by Afshin Shahi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the management of ‘truth’ in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, this book aims to investigate the ways in which the official ‘truth’ is constructed and institutionalised in the country. The Politics of Truth Management in Saudi Arabia argues that there are two interrelated notions which articulate the ways in which ‘truth’ is conceptualised in Islam. One, at macro level, constitutes the trans-historical foundational principles of the religion, a set of engrained beliefs, which establish the ‘finality’, and ‘oneness’ of Islam in relation to other competing narratives. The other, at a micro level, takes place internally to find ‘truth’ within the ‘truth’. Unlike Islamic truth at the macro level, which is entrenched, the Islamic truth at the micro level refers to the various attempts by different agencies to claim to have found the ‘truth’ within the ‘truth’. Wahhabism, which is the product of an eighteenth century revivalist movement, is portrayed as the most ‘authentic’ reading of Islam. It is seen as the raison d'être for the prevailing political mechanism in the country and is introduced as an example of truth management at the micro level. Arguing that truth is not born in a power vacuum and often its construction and institutionalisation signify domination in one way or another, this book will be of interest to students of Religion, Politics, and Saudi Politics more specifically.
Download or read book A Society of Young Women written by Amelie Le Renard and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cities of Saudi Arabia are among the most gender segregated in the world. In recent years the Saudi government has felt increasing international pressure to offer greater roles for women in society. Implicit in these calls for reform, however, is an assumption that the only "real" society is male society. Little consideration has been given to the rapidly evolving activities within women's spaces. This book joins young urban women in their daily lives—in the workplace, on the female university campus, at the mall—to show how these women are transforming Saudi cities from within and creating their own urban, professional, consumerist lifestyles. As young Saudi women are emerging as an increasingly visible social group, they are shaping new social norms. Their shared urban spaces offer women the opportunity to shed certain constraints and imagine themselves in new roles. But to feel included in this peer group, women must adhere to new constraints: to be sophisticated, fashionable, feminine, and modern. The position of "other" women—poor, rural, or non-Saudi women—is increasingly marginalized. While young urban women may embody the image of a "reformed" Saudi nation, the reform project ultimately remains incomplete, drawing new hierarchies and lines of exclusion among women.
Download or read book Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia written by S. Izraeli and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2012 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides readers with the essential context and background for a real understanding of modern Saudi Arabia. Yizraeli examines a rarely-studied topic: Saudi royal family decision-making in the process of building a modern state. She tracks in detail the internal deliberations in the formative years of development in the Kingdom, when priorities were defined. This unique strategy was first formulated by the royal family in a document known as the 'Ten Point Programme', which was delivered in a speech (Nov. 1962) by Crown Prince Faysal. In practice, this strategy placed severe limitations on potential social change and thwarted any reform of the political system that might have been expected had such development been carried out by more western-oriented countries. While Saudi Arabia today tries to mend past errors, particularly in its educational system, the fundamentals of the regime have remained as they were shaped during the formative decades of development. Whether Saudi Arabia will be able to modernise its society without social and religious upheaval still remains to be seen, but the course this modernisation takes will be determined by the events outlined in this book.
