ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s key findings on two periods of nationalism and state-building in Saudi Arabia as reflected in different responses to each period of regional unrest and conflict in Yemen. It offers potential avenues for its application to future research on legitimation strategies, nationalism, and foreign policy in other authoritarian regimes. This includes comparisons with ontological challenges to Emirati legitimacy, including its own relationship with Islamist and post-Islamist opposition, and corresponding aggressive nationalism. It also gives the example of comparable ideological failures and increased aggression in Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and Erdogan’s Turkey. Finally, it situates the case of Muhammad bin Salman’s manipulation of Saudi ontological insecurity since the Arab Spring within Ivan Krastev’s work on post-ideological protest to pose the question of how a new wave of contentious politics is linked to a new class of brutal dictators, in the region and beyond.
