2017/09/20 by Rosie Bsheer · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Socioeconomic Development in MENA #Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts #Islamic Studies and History #Reactionary #Left-wing politics #Politics #Communism #Authoritarianism #Monarchy #Political economy #Capitalism #State (computer science) #Political science #Law #Sociology #Democracy
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtx057
openalex publication_date 2017/09/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/27
This article examines the silenced history of popular leftist movements in mid-twentieth-century Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it takes up the co-constitutive relationship between popular politics and state formation, a relationship that has done much to shape contemporary Saudi Arabia. We often associate Saudi Arabia with regime politics rather than bottom-up social forces, and with radical Islam rather than radical leftist politics. This article argues that the politically reactionary, religiously conservative, authoritarian monarchy that we are familiar with today, and with which we associate “Islamic fundamentalism,” was not always an inevitability. It was produced in the context of Cold War Arabia in response to the radical movements that challenged the strengthening forces of authoritarianism, US imperialism and unfettered oil capitalism in the 1950s. Through a critical reading of rarely utilized Saudi Arabian primary sources, the article engages the emergence of clandestine socialist, communist and Arab nationalist political parties that threatened Al Saud’s monarchy, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) and US dominance in Arabia. It shows how together and separately, these reactionary forces crushed the popular movements, foreclosed progressive politics in Saudi Arabia and elided these events in Saudi and US historiographies in order to to maintain their interests in a tense Middle East caught in the web of Cold War politics. Unearthing the lost archives of the Saudi Left, this article presents a more complex social history of Saudi Arabia, one that situates the kingdom in the history of US imperialism and the global Left and forces us to reconsider the multiple forces complicit in producing the counterrevolutionary Saudi state.