The Grassroots Politics of Authoritarian Renewal in Saudi Arabia

• In Event: Authoritarian Statecraft 2.0

Abstract

Authoritarian nationalism is on the rise across the world. Political scientists have charted its growth from China and Russia to Hungary and Turkey, where critics are branded as traitors and supporters rally to legitimize the regime’s rule. However, a critical piece of this story is still missing: it has yet to be established how nationalism matters to the stability of regimes in power, where the legitimating narratives come from and who they are supposed to appeal to. Traditional approaches suggest they spring from the head of the ruler and then are designed to attract everyone. In contrast, building on extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, this paper shows first, that nationalist discourses produced by cultural entrepreneurs enable regimes to make novel legitimation claims that justify their rule. Second, rather than to appeal to all segment of society, these discourses strongly mobilize a small group of citizens to defend the regime against criticism, effectively stabilizing the regime in power. I call this two-fold process ‘authoritarian renewal’. During this process, a top-down revolution occurs, wherein regime leaders replace cultural elites with sympathetic allies and in doing so, modify the narrative script for authenticating and legitimating substantive changes to society and policies, resulting in a fundamental overhaul of the roles of state and society in maintaining regime power. The paper demonstrates that these ‘revolutions from above’ require grassroots, pro-regime cultural entrepreneurs – intellectuals, journalists, or Twitter activists – who willingly craft new narratives of “the nation” and defend the nation—and by extension the regime—whenever necessary. Political leaders and state institutions then adopt and amplify these narratives, allowing their supporters to police the social media sphere as a standing digital pro-regime army. However, this cyclical dynamic presents rulers with a trade-off: while the pro-regime cultural entrepreneurs might help ensure that the new narratives appeal to a wide audience and curtail any critique, they may also push the reform agenda beyond officials’ desires, outpacing and even contradicting government policy.

The first part of the paper establishes that Saudi pro-regime nationalist activists (the so-called “Watanjiyya”) emerged as a bottom-up reaction to the Arab Spring (2011) in defense of the regime, pre-dating the state-led national identity project under Prince Mohammed bin Salman since 2015 by many years. This demonstrates that the Watanjiyya are not just a result of MBS’s policies. The second part finds that the Saudi state depends on the Watanjiyya to implement effective Information Operation campaigns on Twitter, while the Watanjiyya use this space to write their own more radical agenda into the campaign, radicalizing state and society. The paper draws on more than 90 original interviews with Saudi nationalists conducted across Saudi Arabia between November 2021 and April 2022, original data from Saudi online forums and the Saudi Twitter sphere, using a mixed-methods research design. The paper demonstrates how nationalism as ideology helps the regime to identify and mobilize supporters in society who are driven by the belief in the legitimacy of the regime and how it opens a space of contestation between the state, its critics and supporters over what it actually means to be Saudi at the same time. It highlights the relevance of bottom-up movements for the stability of autocratic regimes beyond mere state strategy.

Author

• Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd, University of Cambridge