ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 argues that the Arab uprisings represented an ontological threat to the Saudi regime, and that an ensuing sense of threatened legitimacy helped to facilitate the rise of a more overtly repressive and aggressive leadership within the regime. This stems from the nature of the post-2011 threat as diffuse and non-ideological. The chapter begins by historically situating the rise of Islamist opposition to the Saudi monarchy, showing how the regime responded with repression, co-optation, and limited reforms throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. It then shows how the more fluid nature of ideational challenges embodied in the regional Arab uprisings has made them more difficult for the regime to counter: the evolution of Islamist opposition towards a post-ideological oppositional discourse was made all the more threatening by the electoral victories over longstanding authoritarian allies in Egypt and Tunisia. Furthermore, the non-revolutionary, peaceful nature of opposition makes the threat more challenging to the regime’s legitimacy. Unlike the “foreign” ideology that Nasserism embodied, these discursive challenges overlap with the Saudi regime’s identity claims, thereby rendering its infrastructural power ineffectual. It is within this formative moment of ontological insecurity that Prince Muhammad bin Salman was able to manipulate a greater affinity for sectarian, anti-Shi’a discourse and foreign aggression in order to garner support. This further reinforced the trend towards a new Saudi nationalism begun in the 1990s, in a particularly militaristic and exclusionary direction.
