Women, Power, and Mohammed bin Salman does not ask merely whether conditions for Saudi women have improved. Its more difficult question concerns the power that produces reform and determines its boundaries. Do the changes underway amount to legal and social emancipation, or to a controlled modernisation that expands work, mobility and consumption while keeping political initiative and independent organisation under close supervision?

That question gives Ahmed Arar Mohammad Al‑Atawneh’s book its analytical strength. He neither compresses recent Saudi history into a triumphant narrative of liberation nor dismisses the material effects of reform because it was driven from above. Reform, in his account, can transform women’s everyday lives while remaining part of a political and economic project whose meanings and limits are defined by the state.

Beyond liberation and repression

The author rejects two ready-made verdicts. The first treats recent measures as a near-total break with the past and presents the political leadership as the sole source of change. The second regards every reform as empty publicity because the political system restricts dissent and autonomous activism. Each position captures something real, Al‑Atawneh argues, but neither explains the whole transformation.

The end of the driving ban, broader access to passports and travel, the opening of new professions and the relaxation of segregation in parts of public life are not merely symbolic. Being able to reach a workplace, university, court or airport changes the practical meaning of adulthood. Personal income may redistribute bargaining power within a family. Public visibility also matters in a society where women’s presence outside traditionally prescribed roles was long treated as a moral and political question.

Yet expanding these capabilities does not abolish inequality. Employment may grow without full equality in family law. Some functions of guardianship may be weakened while its logic remains embedded elsewhere. A woman may become less dependent on male relatives while becoming more directly connected to the digital and administrative institutions of a centralised state.

From “protective patriarchy” to state-managed individualisation

The book describes a movement between two gender models. Al‑Atawneh calls the older model “protective patriarchy”: male authority was justified through the language of protection and responsibility rather than the explicit ownership of women. The ideal woman was imagined as family-embedded, spatially regulated and represented in important areas of life through a male guardian.

This order is not presented as the residue of an unchanging culture or the automatic consequence of a single religious rule. It was historically produced through the modern state, religious institutions, the oil economy, education, bureaucracy and family structures. Reform therefore cannot be narrated simply as a modern state rescuing women from a traditional society. State institutions helped consolidate the earlier order before redefining the model of womanhood that national policy would recognise and reward.

Al‑Atawneh describes the emerging model as “state-managed individualisation”. The woman confined to the domestic sphere is no longer the principal symbol of social virtue. Public discourse increasingly celebrates the educated worker, executive, entrepreneur, athlete, artist and digitally visible citizen. The state gives women greater capacity to deal directly with institutions, while retaining the authority to define the political language of reform and the legitimate channels through which rights may be claimed.

This concept is more precise than saying that patriarchy has simply ended. Authority has been redistributed. The mediation of male relatives has receded in travel, employment and government services; women’s decision-making capacity has expanded; and central state power has simultaneously grown. The movement is not a straightforward passage from dependence to freedom, but a transition from extensive familial and religious mediation towards a more direct relationship between the individual and the state.

The productive woman of Vision 2030

In the book’s account, Vision 2030 is more than an economic diversification programme. It is a project for reclassifying the behaviours, institutions and identities required by the new Saudi economy. Women occupy a strategic position because their participation in the labour market is tied to growth, localisation and reduced dependence on oil.

The official justification for women’s public role has consequently changed. Employment is no longer framed primarily as an exception that must be balanced against protection and family order. It is presented as a contribution to national responsibility. This vocabulary has social consequences: a woman can describe professional ambition as participation in national transformation, and a family can regard a daughter’s education and career as evidence of modernity, patriotism and success.

But turning women into “human capital” raises an essential rights question. Is a woman valued for her productivity, or because she is a person and citizen? What of women outside high-growth sectors, women with disabilities, poorer and rural women, or those who undertake unpaid care? Economic empowerment may itself become a new standard against which women are judged, replacing the expectation of obedient domesticity with an equally demanding image of constant achievement and productivity.

Guardianship as a network of power

One of the book’s clearest arguments is that guardianship should not be understood as a single law. It operated through a dispersed network of administrative procedures, family authority, courts, employers, hospitals and social expectations. Its strength lay in this diffusion. A woman might be unable to identify one rule that constrained her because the obstacle could take the form of an institutional policy, a precautionary demand for male permission or a family threat.

Al‑Atawneh therefore distinguishes between abolishing guardianship and weakening it. Travel and mobility reforms removed important functions, but gender-differentiated authority remains within marriage and parts of family law. The result is a hybrid landscape in which an adult woman may be treated as an independent person in banking, work, travel and public services, yet encounter unequal legal roles in family formation.

The book also insists that a formal right is not automatically usable. A woman may legally drive but face family opposition. She may be permitted to work without having affordable transport or childcare. She may hold a passport but lack the income required to travel. Legal reform removes significant veto points, but practical independence continues to vary by resources, class, region and family context.

Education and the pre-2016 contradiction

The transformation did not begin in 2016. Saudi Arabia had already expanded women’s education over several decades. Universities produced generations of qualified women with professional ambitions while the labour market and public sphere remained too narrow to accommodate them. The state recognised women’s competence through education while administrative and social arrangements restricted the use of that competence.

This contradiction helped prepare the ground for reform. It became increasingly difficult to maintain that women were capable of mastering medicine, science, law or engineering but incapable of deciding whether to drive or travel. Saudi families were not encountering women’s employment for the first time: female doctors, teachers, academics and businesswomen predated Vision 2030. What changed was the breadth of sectors available and the public visibility of women within them.

Centralised leadership accelerated a transformation whose social and economic conditions had accumulated over many years. Recognising that fact does not diminish the importance of political decisions. It prevents history from being written as though Saudi society had remained motionless until reform was officially announced.

Activists and the reform paradox

The book assigns Saudi women an active place in this history. Campaigns against the driving ban and guardianship, petitions, legal arguments, writing and digital debate preceded recent decisions by years. Activism did not always take the form of a licensed organisation. It appeared through online campaigns, individual initiatives, religious and legal argument, and everyday choices that gradually enlarged the boundaries of the socially possible.

Here Al‑Atawneh identifies the “activist paradox”. The state adopted demands historically associated with women’s activism while independent advocacy and political organisation became more dangerous. The official message is not that women do not deserve the right, but that the state decides its timing, framing and authorised channels.

This analysis preserves the complexity of political memory. Reform is inseparable from the speed of decision-making under Mohammed bin Salman and from the political branding attached to it. It also belongs to a longer history of women who experienced restrictions, named them and converted private grievances into public claims. The state may absorb an earlier demand, but absorption does not erase those who articulated it or the risks they assumed.

What counts as empowerment?

Al‑Atawneh evaluates empowerment through four dimensions: capability, status, voice and security. Capability asks whether women can move, work, study, own property and make decisions. Status concerns their social and legal recognition as adults. Voice measures their ability to define interests publicly, organise, criticise policy and influence institutions. Security asks whether rights are protected from arbitrary reversal by relatives, employers, officials or political authorities.

This framework shows why no single indicator is sufficient. Rising labour-force participation is a substantial achievement, but it does not measure equality within marriage, protection from violence, job quality, wage gaps or freedom of expression and association. Capability may advance rapidly while political voice remains limited and the institutional guarantees surrounding rights remain less secure than the opportunities currently available.

A concise book with a wide argument

The book’s principal strength is the clarity of its framework and its ability to connect law, economics, family, ideology and women’s activism within a single interpretation. Its language avoids both official celebration and automatic condemnation. Political motives do not invalidate the material consequences of reform, just as material consequences do not prove that equality has been achieved.

The breadth of the subject inevitably carries a cost in a volume of 102 pages. Questions ranging from state formation and religious authority to family law, labour markets and digital activism could each sustain a much longer study. The book is therefore most persuasive as a concentrated synthesis that offers concepts and research directions, rather than as an exhaustive social history or a field-based investigation of differences among women across class, region and generation.

That limitation helps define the book’s value rather than negate it. It equips the reader with a vocabulary for understanding reform that is genuine but managed, and individual freedom that expands without necessarily becoming autonomous collective power.

From granted rights to guaranteed rights

The decisive distinction is between a right granted by authority and a right guaranteed by institutions. Saudi women’s opportunities have expanded in ways that cannot reasonably be denied. Choices that appeared remote only a few years ago have become ordinary for a new generation. Their durability, however, depends on whether they become consistent legal guarantees across employment, family life, personal security and public voice.

At its core, Women, Power, and Mohammed bin Salman asks readers to understand reform as a field of social struggle rather than a gift from a single actor. The state can set rules and redraw the limits of possibility, but women use new opportunities to renegotiate family, work and public life. Over time, those consequences may exceed the political design that initiated them.

The book deserves attention not because it provides a final verdict on Saudi Arabia, but because it asks the right question. The issue is not only how much freedom women have acquired, but who defines that freedom, who guarantees its continuity, and whether expanded individual capability can develop into equal citizenship and an independent collective voice.