Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt by Pascal Menoret (review)

Joyriding in Riyadh is a dazzling book. Based on four years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, Pascal Menoret has penned a gripping account of street politics, youth culture, and urban development in Saudi Arabia. Elegantly written and brimming with insight, Menoret’s work is among the best books ever written on Saudi Arabia. It also suggests new possibilities writing about a place that has stubbornly resisted scholarly innovation, and, where the complexity of social and political life remains largely unappreciated. Most work on the kingdom remains focused on Islamism, Islamist politics, or “security” categories that have been emptied of meaning. Menoret shows us that politics in Saudi Arabia are much more complicated.

Joyriding in Riyadh is primarily concerned with patterns of defiance, including the forms of political dissent practiced by socially and culturally alienated youth that emerged after the influx of massive oil wealth and with the design of Riyadh as a “modern” city in the 1970s. At the heart of the book are drifters and drifting, a style of driving that is simultaneously an expression of social despair, joy, power, and marks a kind of collective challenge to central authority. In particular, Menoret encourages us to see drifting not as a form of criminality, as Saudi authorities would argue, but as a rejection of the expectations of order that are typically demanded by police and state authorities who seek to assert centralized power over bodies, space, and social life in modern societies. The rise of drifting as a form of protest in Saudi Arabia was a rejection of local power, but it was also a response to global structural and political forces that brought modern Riyadh into being. Menoret argues persuasively that thanks to the role and influence of Western city planners and their Saudi counterparts, who sought to maximize their authority, drifting and the ways that state officials have sought to counter it were “embedded in global networks of power and knowledge” (p. 5).

Riyadh’s modern design, which aimed to sharpen and centralize the ability of authorities to control space, mobility, and bodies, involved a number of interconnected pieces. The most visible were material changes that intended to hasten settlement, to eliminate the kinds of human movements that challenge power (particularly those that were rooted in or that evoked nomadism in Arabia), and that made Riyadh manageable. These were primarily material, the remaking of neighborhoods, architecture, and the building of roads that would standardize movement and place. According to designers and authorities, the city’s design was also intended to hasten growth and economic opportunity. Alongside material changes, Riyadh also involved new forms of real estate, property, and finance, in which lending and debt became widespread. The new city not only failed to deliver on its promise, but also failed to mask the underlying political and police objectives, namely to strengthen control, that authorities sought to accomplish. Because of the imbalances and inequities that always come along with modern transformation as well as patterns of corruption that came to dominate Saudi Arabia’s political economy, many citizens of the new city were left behind. And many have remained left behind ever since, stuck in social and economic limbo, pressed to live in an energy-rich and wealthy state that promises opportunity, which, as it turns out, is elusive, subject to privilege, and unequally distributed. For many, the response has been defiance, but not the kinds we are often encouraged to expect in Saudi Arabia such as jihadism or terrorism.

Drifting emerged as a response to both new material conditions and to social and cultural crises, and in particular a sense of deep frustration that became part of Riyadh’s structural transformation. Indeed, in response to patterns of oppression and marginalization, some young Saudis used the city’s new roadways and car culture as a means to challenge police power, their subordinated status, and as a way to make sense of alienation and the...