The discursive construction of national and tribal identities in Saudi Arabia: a discourse-historical approach

Alshamrani, A. (2026) The discursive construction of national and tribal identities in Saudi Arabia: a discourse-historical approach. PhD thesis, University of Reading. doi: 10.48683/1926.00129013

Abstract/Summary

In Saudi Arabia, modern statehood coexists with longstanding tribal affiliations. Both national and tribal identities function as prominent discursive constructs through which members of Saudi tribal communities articulate their sense of belonging. This thesis draws mainly on Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) as the overarching framework, while also employing tools from Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (MCDS), to examine the discursive construction of Saudi national and tribal identities in the context of contemporary national reforms and nation-rebuilding efforts driven by the Saudi Vision 2030 policies. It investigates the construction and recontextualisation of discourses on national identity from top-down and bottom-up perspectives, identifying intertextual and interdiscursive relations between discourses produced at the institutional and grassroot levels. It also explores bottom-up discursive constructions of tribal identities to understand how Saudi individuals with tribal affiliations position their national and tribal belongings relative to one another. Given the pivotal role of education in nation-building (Wodak et al., 2009; Billig, 1997), this study focuses on the field of education. Top-down discourses were explored through analysing corpora of multimodal texts drawn from Social Studies textbooks published in 2022 by the Saudi Ministry of Education for third-grade intermediate students in mainstream education. Bottom-up perspectives on national identity were accessed through interviews with Saudi teachers and learners who were engaging with the analysed multimodal texts at the time of the interviews. As all interviewees identified as members of tribal communities, their accounts also provide insight into bottom-up constructions of tribal identity. The findings support existing DHA research on national identity. Top-down discourses employ classical macro-strategies of positive self-presentation and construction of sameness to promote unity, pride, political continuity, and shared religion, culture, and history. Bottom-up discourses show alignment with some top-down linguistic and argumentative patterns and, at the same time, introduce additional positionings to the top-down model of national belonging. In particular, interview accounts more explicitly construe Saudi society as united yet internally diverse, i.e., ethnically, culturally, tribally, and linguistically. Their accounts represent broader and more diverse understandings of the Saudi nation. The findings also show that tribal identity is discursively constructed through references to genealogical continuity and the concept of aṣabiyyah, defined in this thesis through Al Ghathami’s (2009) reinterpretation of Ibn Khaldūn’s (1377) aṣabiyyah as lineage-based social cohesion and collective solidarity within the national community rather than as hostility towards or harm to others. Interviewees’ accounts on tribal identities foreground lineage-based forms of solidarity and kinship-oriented belonging as salient identity resources. Most importantly, tribal identity is not positioned as oppositional to national identity; rather, it is often articulated as complementary. As tribal and national identities are discursively constructed, participants often employ discursive strategies that legitimise tribal belonging, align it with national unity, and position tribal histories within wider narratives of the nation. A dual sense of belonging emerges, in which loyalty to tribal members coexists with loyalty to fellow nationals. Interestingly, some aspects of tribal culture were found to extend to the national level; for example, the principle of reciprocal obligation is rearticulated as participants, in practical terms, discursively defended the Saudi nation’s reputation and international image while constructing rulers and government officials as providers of care and protection, an arrangement analogous to the sheikh-tribe relationship in pre-nation Arabian tribal structures. This study examines how collective identities are discursively constructed and negotiated through institutionally situated and socially influenced practices that navigate the dynamics between unity and diversity alongside tradition and modernity. It offers insight into the ongoing constructions of prominent social identities in Saudi Arabia within a rapidly transforming sociopolitical context that is led by Vision 2030’s objectives for national reforms and social cohesion. Additionally, this study proposes a methodological approach to recontextualisation in which DHA is extended through incorporating tools from CL and MCDS to systematically examine how discourse is selectively reproduced, reconstructed, appropriated, omitted, reshaped, or contested across contexts and modes of communication.

Item Type	Thesis (PhD)
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/129013
Identification Number/DOI	10.48683/1926.00129013
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Date on Title Page	August 2025
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