Abstract
What happens to organized protest in an era of global suburbanization? After World War II, Cold War experts depoliticized urban spaces and imposed the notion of “development” as a deterrent to collective action. This article is based on four years of fieldwork in Riyadh and on archival work in Athens and Paris. It examines the making of Saudi suburbia at the hands of Cold War experts, and analyzes Islamist action (al‐‘amal al‐islāmī) in the local and global context of its emergence: the new suburbs that were engineered by urban planners, developers, and builders. [suburbia, Islamism, activism, elections, urbanism, Salafism]