In an attempt to illuminate the politics of development in Saudi Arabia, the book under review examines top-down processes of socioeconomic transformation and the ways in which the Arabian American Oil Company and U.S. administrations produced and shaped them. Doing so allows the author to explore the fraught relationship between Al Saʿud's regime and the society it came to rule through the theoretical lens of state formation and nation-building. The latter framing mechanism, according to Sarah Yizraeli, transcends the teleological and Eurocentric notions that modernization theory mobilizes, namely, that “Western-style” economic development enables more liberal and “modern” forms of political, social, and cultural transformation. Instead of projecting a universal conception of modernization on the Saudi experience, the author claims to take up modernization on “Saudi terms.” Reaching beyond the arresting grip of “Western theories,” Yizraeli explains that the adoption of Western technologies and practices of governance, coupled with the maintenance of “traditional” social, cultural, and political structures, constituted the hallmark of Saudi Arabia's petro-development trajectory. The attendant “defensive change” that Al Saʿud deployed was thus a strategy for safeguarding the family's political survival, one that nonetheless furthered the entrenchment of the official religious institution as well as the family, tribe, and clan system. Bringing royals, elites, state-allied religious leaders, oil executives, and U.S. bureaucrats into direct confrontation, the author argues that this 20th-century struggle has not only shaped the current Saudi state form but also indirectly engendered the 9/11 attacks.

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation, Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia opens with a fleeting, empathic gesture to the ways in which pre- and post-9/11 media representations of Saudi Arabia have distorted the image and workings of the oil state. In what subsequently reads as an embattled tale of “progressive” heroes versus “traditional” villains of modernization following the capitalist exploitation of Saudi petroleum, the author ultimately replicates the very narrative of development that she critiques and sets out to challenge. The culprit in her story of global finance capitalism and its local manifestations in Saudi Arabia is the state-sanctioned conservative religious establishment that Al Saʿud relied on to legitimate the discursive formation of the modern state. Senior religious scholars, according to Yizraeli, opposed at every turn the suggested “progressive” modernization policies of Aramco, successive U.S. administrations, and even certain Saudi rulers. Undermining the development trajectory, Yizraeli argues, was their attempt to carve a space of power while molding everyday social life in their preferred image. They therefore maintained their monopolistic control over pivotal sociocultural institutions—education, the law, and the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—thereby stunting real social progress.

Ruling members of Al Saʿud, in their paternalistic tribalism, are similarly culpable for the developmental state of affairs. The main problem, as Yizraeli sees it, is that Al Saʿud emerged as the sole arbiter over the process of development, the result of the lack of indigenous efforts at “economic and social progress” followed by accumulation of petro-wealth in Saudi state coffers. Saudi Arabia's “traditional tribal culture of governance” then “plac[ed] the burden of responsibility for development squarely on [the royal family] as the steward of the state” (p. 4), particularly as the rentier state emerged in the 1960s. In prioritizing their hold over political and economic power, the rulers necessarily privileged forces that supported the status quo at the expense of political and social change. In this narrative, elite rivalries reign supreme, and Yizraeli regularly touches on the formative power struggle between Saʿud and Faisal as well as their respective “conservative” and “reformist” supporters, a theme she covered extensively in the late 1990s (see The Remaking of Saudi Arabia: The Struggle Between King Saʿud and Crown Prince Faysal, 1951–1962 [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998]). Despite various critiques of the conceptual framework of this previous work (Madawi Al-Rasheed, Middle Eastern Studies 35 [1999], 193–98; Gwenn Okruhlik, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 34 [2000], 290), the same theoretical flaws and methodological inconsistencies inform the work at hand and its conclusions. For instance, the author continues to present the dichotomous juxtapositions between “East” and “West,” “traditional” and “reformist,” “conservative” and “progressive,” as universal and self-evident.

In this vein, Yizraeli posits members of Al Saʿud who allied with Faisal in the 1960s as “reformist” when it is these very figures who ruled the country with utter disdain for the population and the environment. That Faisal entrenched Saudi Arabia within the U.S. imperial camp for the sake of his personal political career, overthrowing his brother Saʿud and foreclosing the diverse nonofficial conduits of sociopolitical expression, is absent from Yizraeli's narrative. In addition, she undermines the political influences of the various oppositional, anti-imperialist mobilizations that have long marked the popular landscape in Saudi Arabia with their demands for political participation and social justice. Instead, the U.S. government and Aramco, despite their utilitarian and expedient interests, emerge as the harbingers of modernity. Their policies always appear as “progressive.” Yizraeli does argue that while Aramco was one among many of modernity's agents in Saudi Arabia, it was not the sole “motor of change,” as is often depicted. For the author, it was the U.S. government, at least until 1963, that pushed for political, economic, and importantly, sociocultural reform to improve the lives of the subject population. Thereafter, submitting to Al Saʿud's pressure, both state and company limited their interventions to developing the economic and financial infrastructure that the oil economy required.

Such historical credulity buckles when viewed from Saudi Arabia, whether in its state and private archives or on its streets. The oral history and documentary record there lays bare the myth of Faisal as a heroic “modernizer” and sole author of the Ten Point Program that much of Saudi historiography, including Yizraeli's account, hinge on and propagate. It shows that the struggle over the Saudi state form was multi-sited and cut across class, region, and religion. Importantly, the record evinces how successive U.S. administrators and oil company executives actively inhibited noneconomically driven social and political change in order to maintain the “stable” and dependable rule of pro-U.S. members of Al Saʿud. If empire appears in Yizraeli's account as apolitical, benign, and necessary for the modernization process, the author's uncritical use of imperial archival sources is equally troubling. Yizraeli follows in the footsteps of many scholars of Saudi Arabia who have used diplomatic and oil company records. While they recognize the inherent bias in such sources, they continue to use them to construct a top-down history in which diplomats and oil company officials are the primary protagonists. This is a far cry from reading Saudi history on “its own terms,” if indeed we can separate out such a discrete realm.

Since the turn of the century, scholars of the Arabian Peninsula in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular, have produced sophisticated and critical literature that has challenged entrenched understandings of the relationship between oil and politics, namely the rentier state theory. Although published in late 2012, Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia—which synthesizes a tremendous amount of earlier secondary literature—does not make use of much of this new and exciting body of work. Yizraeli actually perpetuates the twofold tragedy of rentier state analysis: On the one hand, the “politics and society” in the book's title is restricted to elites, the experiences of ordinary people somehow remaining incidental to the inexorable flow of history. On the other hand, the theory's fictive, popular political apathy resurfaces as part and parcel of an oil rentierism that these scholars have labored to dispel. What emerges is thus a reduction of political life to a rather apolitically framed process of development measured against a universal secular ideal that the author initially sets out to challenge. One can only hope that the ongoing, popular political mobilizations in Saudi Arabia, which have persevered despite unfathomable counterrevolutionary forces, can succeed where the accessible evidentiary terrain seems to have largely failed: to force an analytical shift in scholarly approaches to Saudi Arabia, one that seeks to locate the country within broader circuits of capital, labor, political sociability, religion, knowledge, and violence, to name but a few.