An Analysis of Study Abroad: Understanding the State-Society relationship in Saudi Arabia. This paper examines how study abroad can be used to describe the state-society relationship in Saudi Arabia from the 1970s through the 1990s. Like many other Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia sent many (more than 9000) of its young people abroad to study since the 1970s to improve their abilities, particularly in the fields of education and economics. The Saudi government believed and continues to believe that using the experience of the developed nations to make improvements in these sectors is urgently needed for the welfare of its society. Study abroad was one of several channels by which the government sought to benefit from the knowledge and experience of Western nations in modernizing Saudi society. This is new research, that the Saudi Study Abroad and its impact on Saudi state and society had not been studied previously. The paper is divided into two sections, first is modernization, focusing on study abroad and state building. In this section, I showed the opinions of the ulama, the strongest opponents of the study abroad program, who opposed sending students overseas to study on religious grounds, while the state and most intelligentsia, who were the proponents, saw the urgent need for benefiting from the experience of developed countries. In state building issue, I discussed how the Saudi government needed to promote its economic and social developments to build a modern consolidated state. The second section of the paper is titled dominance and focuses on two themes: creating a new loyal technocratic generation and change management. The paper shows the significant role played by the returning students in running governmental institutions, including its ministries, which has strengthened the state’s dominance over the society. The paper also argues that the Saudi rulers have so far succeeded in managing changes through reconciling modernism and traditionalism. In my research, I relied on a number of written and oral primary sources including government documents such as Five-Years Plans, statistical reports published by the Higher Education Ministry, the Saudi Constitution, and Shura Council Law. Additionally, I used texts of fatwas relating to the matter of study abroad, issued by some Saudi sheikhs. I have also conducted interviews with M.A. and Ph.D. students from the Study Abroad program in the early 1980s. Additionally, I depended on published interviews with some ulama, and professors who graduated from American universities.

Drawing on the postcolonial critique of the nation as a discourse through which forces of domination and entrenched power relations are sustained and reproduced (Chatterjee 1986, 1993; Mufti, Shohat and McClintock 1991; Yuval-Davis 1997), in this paper I discuss the construction of national identity in contemporary Qatar by looking into several sites of cultural production controlled by the state. I argue that the most creative and disciplining potential of Qatari national identity is found at the intersection of three critical themes for the construction of the modern nation, namely: the struggle to attain national self-determination, the construction of “the other,” and the conception of the national subject and its duties with the nation. In addition to extensive digital archival research, this paper is based on four months of fieldwork in Doha, Qatar. During this period and through several tools of social inquiry, such as participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I approached some state-controlled sites of cultural production that have become critical for the construction of national identity in Qatar, such as museums and sites of cultural heritage that fall under the authority of Qatar Museums. I also approached national celebrations and commemorations, such as Qatar’s National Day and the National Sports Day. Access to these sites provided me with a representative account of the state-sponsored discourse on national identity, which has become a cornerstone in the new vision for the country after the coming to power of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in 1995. This paper is part of a broader engagement with the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East that, calling into question essentialist notions of national identity, opens the possibility to discuss the power relations reproduced by the discourse on the nation, and to highlight the violent implications posed by the reification of national identities, especially during periods of national liberation and top-down reform (Jankowski and Gershoni 1997; Gelvin 1999; Cole and Kandiyoti 2002; Göçek 2002; Zubaida 2002). This paper expands these scholarly debates to the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council by looking into the subject of national identity in Qatar, a country that has been relatively absent in the scholarly debates on nationalism in the Gulf, both at the regional (Dresch and Piscatori 2005, Alsharekh and Springborg 2008, Patrick 2009) and individual case-study levels (Koch 2015 for UAE; Longva 2006 for Kuwait; and Nevo 1998 for Saudi Arabia).

This paper examines the domestic political consequences of changes to the extensive welfare systems in place across the states of the GCC. Since the decline of oil prices in 2014, GCC states have shown a willingness to proactively push through some deliberate, carefully-crafted changes to their extensive welfare systems. As a result, slowly but surely the rentier social contract in the GCC is being re-written by the state. The paper relies on extensive empirical examination of policy adjustments instituted in most GCC states since 2014. These changes, the paper argues, are unlikely to endanger the state’s security and to make it vulnerable to domestic opposition. Two factors account for this: 1) the changes being made are incremental and are part of a deliberate state strategy to prepare the population for continued declines in oil and gas prices; 2) the changes maintain the rentier state’s robust welfare system. Some of these changes are to the labor sponsorship system (and its attendant economic consequences for nationals); encouragement of citizens to work harder and to tighten their belts if necessary; the introduction of compulsory military service; and layoffs of nationals at state-owned enterprises and parastatals. These measured recalibrations of the social contract, along with the states’ continued monopoly over coercive institutions, are likely to result in minimal or no political disruptions. The fact that the state is deliberately changing the social contract, and doing so only around the margins, is likely to enhance rather than endanger its long-term security.

This paper focuses on Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Entertainment, which was established in 2016, as well as this organization’s goal of transforming the state into a more neoliberal capitalist form of modern society, without any actual political transformations. Utilizing a cultural analysis approach, this study focuses on how, using the lens of the General Authority, we have an excellent opportunity to examine class conflicts and social struggles within the country as they are related to activities in which genders are allowed to interact, the cinema, and musical concerts. The paper surveys the content of the General Authority's programs as well as the roles of Westernization and neoliberalism in the General Authority’s plans and programs, especially as these plans and programs are related to attempts to modernize the country from the outside utilizing such things as showings of modern movies and musical concerts, which had previously been avoided in the country. Since the General Authority produces a Western model of cultural production, this study focuses on to what extent modernity would work without political transformations or political reform in an Arabic authoritarian regime. The paper argues that the new modernity of Saudi Arabia has become a political tool through which neoliberal capitalists can create positive relationships with Western powers and, through these relationships, gain political power within the country. Additionally, the General Authority has politicized the role of Mohammad bin Salman, the deputy crown of the country, in order to modernize the state. This decision was part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, a political message to outsiders that the country plans to transform from a kingdom to a country dedicated to social modernization and openness, while, at the same time, neglecting the insider. This plan also indicates that the country will rely on Western businesses to bring entertainment into the country instead of relying on local entertainment businesses to force the country to adopt neoliberal capitalism. The analysis of the cultural qualitative data shows how the General Authority’s programs used visuals, sounds, and the English language that did not mirror the social classes or gender gaps in society to enforce modernity in society, which is a schema that reflects Sharabi’s (1988) internalized modernity of the Arab state.