Soft Power strategy of Saudi Arabia under the Vision 2030: Institution building and power conversion

Date

2026-1-2

Author

Atik, Emre Barış

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This thesis examines how Saudi Arabia's official soft power strategy evolved under Vision 2030. Through qualitative discourse analysis of official documents, institutional reports, news articles and secondary sources, the study traces the transformation from an implicit, religiously derived soft power approach to a deliberate, comprehensive strategy. It establishes a pre-2016 baseline and notes three systemic failures including credibility gaps between public diplomacy messaging and domestic reality, institutional fragmentation and overlap in bureaucracies, and constraints emerging from the path dependence caused by the post-1979 religious bargain, which suppressed cultural industries and prohibited leisure tourism. Due to these systemic deficiencies, the Kingdom faced a condition of "unrealized soft power" especially in the Western world, despite possessing potential resources. The findings reveal that Vision 2030 initiated fundamental institutional restructuring vis-à-vis soft power architecture. The Ministry of Culture, established in 2018 as Saudi Arabia's first standalone culture ministry, now coordinates eleven specialized commissions. The decades-long cinema ban was lifted; leisure e-visas opened the country to tourists for the first time; and high visibility investments were made in sports mega events and giga projects such as NEOM, which function as attention generating mechanisms supporting new strategic narratives painting the Kingdom in a pleasant light. Contributing to the soft power literature, this thesis argues that domestic institution building can function as a central component of soft power strategy rather than being merely a precondition, thereby extending existing theoretical frameworks by demonstrating how resource creation and conversion can occur simultaneously in cases where cultural sectors have been previously prohibited.

Subject Keywords

Soft Power, Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia, Public Diplomacy, Institution Building

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118293

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis