Riyadh Cityscape
(Borrowed from "Encyclopedia Brittanica)
When I first began working on this project I wanted to investigate the political situation unfolding in Catalan, Spain. However, I was having trouble finding exactly what to focus on in the vast possibilities held within those events, and with many of my classmates focusing on the same topic and being approved. While this was going on, one day I saw an interesting notification from CNN on my phone saying that 11 Princes had been arrested in Saudi Arabia, but I never heard anything else about the event. My curiosity engaged, I changed my topic from the Catalan political mess to the Saudi Arabia political mess because I wanted to learn more about this seemingly random event on the other side of the world and no one else seemed to have heard about it.
When getting some preliminary research done to be able to create my research question, I found out that most of the princes that had been arrested were billionaires so I thought that they would easily have an economic impact if they were arrested for corruption, one way or another. When I submitted my research question for approval, I was approved, but with a caveat, if the corruption didn't have anything to do with the economy then it could be impossible to draw a connection to an economic impact from the arrests. With this in mind, I went into the research process, nervous about my possibility of success. Luckily, the arrests were about money, and a whole economic reform program.
Camels in the Arabian desert
(Borrowed from "iExplore")
As I began to research the arrests, it became clear that there were three things I should focus on about the event, the arrests themselves and the potential repercussions on the global scale for Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030, the reform program, and the view that it was all a power grab by the Crown Prince. Research was slow-going. It was hard to find useful articles and I quickly had to switch from databases to Google as my search area because of the recentness of the event. Even then finding articles was hard. I kept finding the same information on many of the articles I would read through and I had to nit-pick all the information I found to avoid having 5 index cards with the same information on them. A few times however, I did find an article with a treasure trove of information that I could use. None of the information I found during my research was what I expected. As I continued, I learned more and more about reform in Saudi Arabia, not the negative effects I expected from multi-billionaires being arrested and having their assets frozen. Towards the end of the research period given to us I started to freak out. I went away on a church retreat during the weekend before our research was due and I still had to fill out 8 index cards, a lot for my research speed up until that point. One night of searching through the internet later, I had all the information I needed to compose my paper. Since researching and writing my paper, many of the officials arrested during the purge have now reached settlements with the government, giving the government back some of the money embezzled by the accused. Some however remain locked up in the Ritz Carlton hotel with reports that they have been tortured coming out in the press. However, the purge still remains with little coverage and little attention has been drawn to it, and Riyadh has not released much information on the subject. Regardless, the Crown Prince's Vision 2030 plan continues onward with women being allowed to drive by June 2018 and plans for the megacity Neom continue.
Header image borrowed from "Newsx.com" : http://www.newsx.com/world/saudi-arabia-arrests-11-princes-in-anti-corruption-sweep