Saudi Arabia

The year 2016 witnessed a dramatic economic transformation in Saudi Arabia that triggered unprecedented political changes. Vision 2030, released at the end of 2015, created a roadmap to wean Saudi Arabia off its oil-based economy. Empowering women and materializing their potentials was one of the main objectives of Vision 2030. In addition, a state-commissioned McKinsey report stressed...

Malik Nejer is one of Saudi Arabia’s top cartoonists and force behind the hit animated YouTube series, “Masameer.” He was drawing animations for an advertising agency, while producing animated videos for YouTube on the side, when floods claimed the lives of over a hundred people in Jeddah in 2009. Nejer posted an animated video for...

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz is conducting a six-country tour of Asia that will take him to Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Japan, China, and the Maldives. Aside from its monthlong duration, the trip is significant for the commercial and strategic messages it conveys in the context of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious program of economic reform and...

Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Khaled al-Sabah’s visit to Tehran on January 25 was officially billed as a bilateral meeting, but also widely reported to have included a broader outreach to Iran by Kuwait’s partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Iran’s major regional rival, Saudi Arabia. The GCC was at least in part responding to...

Relations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia – a key feature of the Middle Eastern political landscape and a pillar of Arab security – took another body blow on January 16 when Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court rejected Cairo’s plan to transfer control over two uninhabited, but strategically located, Red Sea islands to Riyadh. The Egyptian-Saudi partnership...

New Lebanese President Michel Aoun visited Saudi Arabia on January 9 in an effort to heal a rift that has been damaging to both countries’ interests but, until now, did not seem readily resolvable. How did relations become so strained and how much progress has Aoun’s trip yielded?

The Saudi budget for 2017 demonstrates that fiscal reform works; at least, it shows that with a reduction in spending will come a decline in deficit.

Global oil markets have gone from strength to strength following an unprecedented level of cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers to reduce global oil supplies in an effort to shore up prices and resuscitate their ailing economies. The alliance of oil-producing countries, which accounts for around 60 percent of global oil supplies, has pledged...