No Arab Spring In Saudi Arabia?

"Saudi Arabia is simply a very different society from Egypt, Tunisia or Syria," says Dr Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Gulf Research Centre, Dubai.There is activism. The women working on the jigsaw are all involved in campaign groups, arguing for the right for women to vote in forthcoming municipal elections. Dina, who recently returned to Saudi Arabia after four years at a US college, says "nobody was doing much campaigning" when she left but now "lots is going on". Last month, several dozen women openly drove cars in defiance of custom, if not law.Such feelings explain, at least in part, why, while the rest of the Arab world is in ferment, Saudis, of whom 70% are under 30 and 35% are under 16, have remained largely quiet. Despite overseas attention focused on a few incidents of protest, scores of interviews over two weeks in deeply conservative areas, the capital, Riyadh, and relatively liberal Jeddah have revealed a country in which a growing desire for reform is a very long way from anything approaching mass dissent. Read More.