Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Culture: to what extent can strategic culture help us understand the KSA’s strategic decision-making and behaviour with regard to its security policy?

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates the utility of the strategic culture concept in understanding threat-perception and strategic behaviour, insofar as the KSA is concerned. Many of the KSA’s critical junctures originate from sub-state actors and factors, supra-state ideologies, and non-state actors. The threat perception at these critical junctures required behavioural responses that balanced the often-competing demands (upon the state) or requirements (of these actors) by the ruling elite within the KSA. Indeed, the strategic culture concept has allowed this thesis to explore the linkage between cultural aspects internal to the KSA against its strategic choices and behaviours in relation to its foreign and security policies, primarily by analysing the construction of the KSA’s different identities. Specifically, the norms associated with being the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques, the de-facto head of the Wahhabi school of Sunnism, and its doctrinal hostility to Political Islam and pan-Arabism, have demonstrated behavioural trends, or a strategic approach which is highly centralized in order to omni-balance against these (often) competing, paradoxical and contradictory strategic challenges.