Toby Jones, assistant professor of history at Rutgers, criticizes the notion that the Saudis can be trusted to conduct their own internal reform:

The suggestion that the Saudis know what pace of reform the “traffic will bear” is hard to take seriously. Authoritarian states regularly claim to be “reforming,” a process that typically leads to a stronger authoritarianism in the end. Saudi Arabia is no exception. Ask any Saudi reformer, including Abdullah al-Hamid who is in jail for promoting reform while Islamic militants are rehabbed and freed from prison, if the state just needs more time and that it will get there.

It’s an interesting point, and a misleading one. Jones is right that authoritarian states shouldn’t be entirely relied upon to implement the kind of reforms that would intentionally undercut their own regimes. But he’s wrong when he suggests that the Saudis’ acts of ‘reform’ are merely cosmetic — cynical ploys to quell the criticisms of the international community — and that they can’t, ultimately, bring about any fundamental restructuring of the country’s power hierarchy.

Like Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the Saudis are genuinely engaged in a broad program of change — in large part because of their own perception of having fallen behind in areas such as education, economic growth, and modernization. But although the reforms aren’t designed to undercut the regime that put them in place, they may eventually do just that (much like the way in which Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost paved the way for the Soviet Union’s collapse.) Indeed, the game is a dangerous one – by attempting to keep up with other regional players, the Saudi monarchy is being forced to construct a more educated citizenry with greater ties to the West and more access to information. So, don’t be too disheartened about Saudi Arabia’s reform program: although the reforms aren’t designed to undercut the monarchy or transform the conservative social order, they are inadvertently “planting the seeds” — pardon the cliché — for long-term social and political change.