Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Defining the Model of Arab Statehood

The authors explore the genesis and peculiarities of the Saudi political system, considered as one of the statehood models that emerged in the Arab world in the twentieth century and is experiencing its crisis in the 2010s–2020s. They use a hybrid methodology that combines History and Political Sciences. This combination allows them to trace the genesis and evolution of the political system in the long-term retrospective. The sources for the historical part of the article include diplomatic documents from the USSR and Saudi Arabia that describe Ibn Saud’s measures to form the institutes of political administration in the Kingdom and its administrative territorial structure. Drawing on these documents, in the politological part of the article, the authors identify three clusters of elements of the Saudi political model: universal, which has parallels in the history of various states, Arab-Muslim, corresponding to the respective political culture, and specifically Saudi. The authors provide other examples when the aforementioned elements of statehood played a system-forming role and demonstrate the peculiarities of the Saudi mix of traditional and contemporary statehood elements. They propose to introduce the notion of a specific Arab model of the multi-component genesis of the state and show how such genesis influences the further development of the political system.

Saudi Arabia, Nejd, Hejaz, Karim Khakimov, multi-component state