Making Modernity in Saudi Arabia: Technology, Territory, and Global Networks of Control
Location
King Building 243
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-27-2018 11:00 AM
End Date
4-27-2018 12:20 PM
Abstract
As states attempt to frame themselves as modern, what price do civilians pay? For centuries, the Middle East has been framed by Western writers as a homogenous and pre-modern region, dominated by tribal dynamics and structurally immune to globalization. While a large amount of this rhetoric has dissipated, academics, politicians, and the media continue to stress the exceptional nature of Saudi Arabia’s relationship to modernity. The Kingdom is often framed as a site of paradox, at once authoritarian and neoliberal, integrated within the international community through global flows of capital while remaining domestically repressive. Through situating Saudi Arabia’s current political environment within global networks of technological and territorial control, this project aims to destabilize conceptions of Saudi Arabian exceptionalism and highlight the way liberal democracies enable authoritarianism.
Keywords:
urban development, modernization, Middle East studies
Recommended Citation
Cravens, Madeleine, "Making Modernity in Saudi Arabia: Technology, Territory, and Global Networks of Control" (04/27/18). Senior Symposium. 11.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2018/presentations/11
Major
Politics
Advisor(s)
Mike Parkin, Politics
Project Mentor(s)
Sarah El-Kazaz, Politics
Mike Parkin, Politics
Zeinab Abul-Magd, History
April 2018
Making Modernity in Saudi Arabia: Technology, Territory, and Global Networks of Control
King Building 243
As states attempt to frame themselves as modern, what price do civilians pay? For centuries, the Middle East has been framed by Western writers as a homogenous and pre-modern region, dominated by tribal dynamics and structurally immune to globalization. While a large amount of this rhetoric has dissipated, academics, politicians, and the media continue to stress the exceptional nature of Saudi Arabia’s relationship to modernity. The Kingdom is often framed as a site of paradox, at once authoritarian and neoliberal, integrated within the international community through global flows of capital while remaining domestically repressive. Through situating Saudi Arabia’s current political environment within global networks of technological and territorial control, this project aims to destabilize conceptions of Saudi Arabian exceptionalism and highlight the way liberal democracies enable authoritarianism.
Notes
Session I, Panel 3 - Political | Confrontations
Moderator: Zeinab Abul-Magd, Associate Professor of History and Chair of International Studies