by Jeanne Jackson-DeVoe

A group of eight Woodrow Wilson School students and professors had a rare opportunity to see firsthand some of the inner workings of Saudi Arabian society and politics during a week-long visit to Riyadh from May 22 to 29.

Accompanied by former Lecturer of Public and International Affairs Christopher Boucek and WWS Acting Dean Nolan McCarty, the group made the most of their time in the kingdom’s capital, where they met with about 25 different groups including princes, ministers, journalists, western diplomats, senior Saudi officials, leaders of non-profit groups, and numerous others to discuss some of the crucial issues facing Saudi Arabia as well as the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

The trip was the culmination of Boucek’s fall seminar Saudi Arabia: Security, Energy, and U.S. Policy, which focused on the security and stability of Saudi Arabia and its policy relationship with the U.S. Each student studied different policy issues, and so each came to Saudi Arabia with a different perspective and different questions.

“I’ve said all along you really have to go see it,” said Boucek, who was at the Woodrow Wilson School for two years prior to taking his recent position as an associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. “I think Saudi Arabia especially is a place where it’s very easy to have one set of understanding that boils down to sand, Islam, and oil. When you stop thinking that, you can actually appreciate the kind of challenges and problems going on in the country.”

Boucek had spent more than a year trying to arrange the trip for the students and to get a group to sponsor them. The King Faisal Foundation, a Saudi-based international philanthropic organization, agreed to sponsor the students’ visas and assist with transportation. Boucek emphasized that the group be able to set its own schedule. Eight out of 10 students in the seminar went on the trip, which was fully funded by the University.
 

Boucek, along with Ph.D. student Jeff Colgan and recent WWS graduate Amy Schedlbauer MPP ’08 (who is a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State), discussed the trip in a slide show and lecture on June 20 at the School’s Robertson Hall. They showed slides of Riyadh, a modern city with its skyscrapers and palm trees, as well as slides of Old Riyadh, where the Masmak Fortress was an example of the mud buildings that made up the city in the 1930s.

The kingdom has developed quickly due to its status as the number one oil exporter in the world. But it remains a traditional, tribal society and, even as it has modernized, has held on to its traditions. Its harsh punishments of criminals, including capital punishment and floggings, have been criticized by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But Schedlbauer explained that there is a large conservative Muslim population that wields a lot of power, so even those advocating change must move slowly, or the conservatives “could put an end to everything.”

The division between men and women in Saudi Arabia was striking. “The segregation of men and women cannot be overemphasized,” Colgan said. When the group visited the newspaper al-Hayat, for example, an editor introduced them to five fully veiled women journalists who were in a separate newsroom.
 

The segregation extends to shopping malls, restaurants, and universities. The majority of receptionists and secretaries in offices, and perfume salespersons at department stores, are men. Even McDonald’s has separate sections for men and for women and families. Women cannot drive and most do not go out in public by themselves without a male member of their family; many women, therefore, have drivers who take them from place to place. But in families that cannot afford a driver, the man of the house must come home to drive children to school or take women shopping.

The status of women ultimately may change because of economic realities, Schedlbauer said, since many large Saudi families cannot live on one income. The women students visited Al-Nahda, a women’s charity that helps poor and abused women, providing educational programs and placing women in jobs.

The students also met with representatives from two recently formed human rights groups: the National Society for Human Rights and the government-sponsored Human Rights Commission. Human rights is a new concept in Saudi Arabia, Colgan said, noting that the kingdom banned slavery less than 30 years ago, in 1962. Both human rights groups have limited powers, but the Commission has been working on informing Saudis of their legal rights.
 

The Princeton delegation received a warm welcome from members of the Majlis ash-Shura, the Consultative Council, a legislature made up of 150 members appointed by the king, who stopped legislating to greet them. The king must approve the laws passed by the Majlis, but they do not have any power to allocate money; members of the Majlis disagree about whether they should have that power.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest exporter of petroleum and oil is “the main engine of the country,” Schedlbauer said. The kingdom currently produces 9.5 million barrels a day and its goal is to increase capacity to 12 million barrels a day by 2009, according to the New York Times. Dean McCarty noted that Saudi officials expressed little sympathy for American complaints about the price of oil, because they felt Americans should be drilling offshore to produce oil themselves.

The subject of the Iraq war also inevitably came up; Saudis said they deplored the fact that the U.S. had invaded Iraq, but they also don’t want to see the U.S. leave Iraq in its current state of upheaval. That tempered their view of the U.S. presidential candidates. “They say Obama has great ideas, but we really want continuity,” Colgan said.

Those insights were what made the trip worthwhile. The bonds formed with so many Saudi Arabian groups will make it much easier for the next group of Princeton students to visit Iraq, Boucek said, and added that he hopes the trips continue in his absence. “Policy students need to go out and see the world,” he said. “For these students Saudi Arabia isn’t going to be an abstraction; it’s going to be real.”

photos provided by Jeff Colgan