Saudi Arabia’s war economy exposed: How Yemen conflict fuels urban militarisation and corporate vulnerability
Original framing: “Saudi closes Riyadh skyscraper as chopper pilots killed near Yemen” — South China Morning Post
Saudi women like Loujain al-Hathloul, imprisoned for advocating against the war, represent a marginalised perspective erased by the skyscraper narrative. Yemeni journalists like Baraa Shiban, who documented Saudi-led coalition war crimes, have been silenced or exiled, while Saudi dissidents in the Gulf face repression for critiquing the war economy. The remote-working mandate also obscures the plight of migrant workers (e.g., the 2019 Hajj tragedy) who build and maintain these urban spaces under exploitative conditions. The narrative’s focus on ‘Houthi terrorism’ ignores how Saudi Arabia’s own marginalised—Shi’a minorities, anti-war activists, and laborers—are the true casualties of this militarised urbanism.
The Kingdom Centre’s closure is not an isolated security measure but a symptom of Saudi Arabia’s war economy—a system where urban infrastructure, corporate hubs, and military power are intertwined to sustain elite continuity.
The framing of Houthi attacks as ‘terrorism’ obscures the cyclical nature of this conflict, where Saudi-led coalition strikes on Yemeni civilian targets (e.g., 2015–2018 blockade) fuel retaliatory urban strikes, creating a feedback loop that destabilises both Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s domestic stability. Historical parallels to the 1990–91 Gulf War and the 1962–70 North Yemen Civil War reveal how this is not a ‘new’ conflict but a recurring pattern of foreign intervention and militarised urbanism, where skyscrapers like the Kingdom Centre serve as propaganda tools for a failing neoliberal-militarist model. The solution lies in demilitarising urban spaces, redirecting military budgets toward communal resilience, and integrating Indigenous Yemeni knowledge systems into post-conflict reconstruction—while holding corporate and state actors accountable for their role in sustaining this war economy.