Recent reform of Saudi Arabia and its consequences on women’s status

Saudi Arabia has been known as one of the most conservative countries in the world in terms of women's rights in citizenship. But it has started to implement various reform policies since King Abdullah's accession to power in 2005. The recent reform policy toward women, however, had led to controversial debates among the religious authority and political parties, as well as scholars and ordinary Saudi people in terms of various spectrums of the religious and political, the modern and traditional, and Islamic and western. Taking the current Saudi women's situation into consideration, this article analyzes Saudi Arabia’s recent reform policy toward women from the citizenship’s point of view. There has been various research about women in the Middle East, but relatively few studies have dealt with Saudi women compared to women of other countries. This is mainly because Saudi society has very restrictive and rigid environment for conducting any research, especially under the situation that women’s issues are regarded as a sensitive subject, if not taboo. Therefore, recognizing difficulties of conducting fieldwork in Saudi Arabia in a practical level, this study mainly relies on literature review as a main source of research and will compare women's citizenship rights before and after the introduction of King Abdullah's reform policy in terms of civil, political and social perspectives.