Nawaf Obaid: Why Saudi Arabia is Stable Amid the Mideast Unrest
[The writer is a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies and is pursuing a doctorate on the rise of Saudi nationalism at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London.]
Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have toppled their regimes. Unrest continues in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Algeria and Oman. Yet the host of the world's largest energy reserves and the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia, remains conspicuously quiet.
Saudi Arabia shares some characteristics that have been causes for unrest - such as high unemployment among its youth and public-sector corruption - but the kingdom has strengths its neighbors lack. Its strong economy and weak opposition are clear. Less understood in the West is another critical element: a nationalism that has been fostered by and is strongly linked to the monarchy. These qualities make it highly unlikely that the unrest in other Arab countries will spread to the kingdom....
Historically, Saudi Arabia has been dominated by allegiance to tribe and region. The most serious threat to Saudi leadership in the past decade may have been posed by al-Qaeda, but that group lost whatever public support it had after a series of bombings in Riyadh in 2003. A concerted counterterrorism effort, supported by the population, wiped out the group's network in the kingdom by 2006. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, a growing nationalist sentiment has been binding together Saudi society. External threats, such as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and, more recently, the rise of Iran and its anti-Arab policies, coupled with internal crises such as the al-Qaeda bombings have bolstered this patriotism....
Read entire article at WaPo
Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have toppled their regimes. Unrest continues in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Algeria and Oman. Yet the host of the world's largest energy reserves and the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia, remains conspicuously quiet.
Saudi Arabia shares some characteristics that have been causes for unrest - such as high unemployment among its youth and public-sector corruption - but the kingdom has strengths its neighbors lack. Its strong economy and weak opposition are clear. Less understood in the West is another critical element: a nationalism that has been fostered by and is strongly linked to the monarchy. These qualities make it highly unlikely that the unrest in other Arab countries will spread to the kingdom....
Historically, Saudi Arabia has been dominated by allegiance to tribe and region. The most serious threat to Saudi leadership in the past decade may have been posed by al-Qaeda, but that group lost whatever public support it had after a series of bombings in Riyadh in 2003. A concerted counterterrorism effort, supported by the population, wiped out the group's network in the kingdom by 2006. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, a growing nationalist sentiment has been binding together Saudi society. External threats, such as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and, more recently, the rise of Iran and its anti-Arab policies, coupled with internal crises such as the al-Qaeda bombings have bolstered this patriotism....