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Policing Internet fraud in Saudi Arabia: expressive gestures or adaptive strategies?

This paper contributes to current debates on the policing of Internet fraud by introducing the Saudi Arabian experience. Drawing on field research in the capital city, Riyadh, it assesses the extent to which the Saudi policing response to Internet fraud fits in with contemporary debates on cybercrime control within a late-modern penal framework as theorised in Western literature. It is argued that the only way in which Saudi cybercrime control strategies can be aligned with those followed by Western authorities is in relation to the state's ‘expressive gestures’. In contrast, there is little evidence of plural policing involving networks of calculation deploying instrumental ordering practices and risk-prediction technologies. In addition to the limited relevance in an autocratic society such as Saudi Arabia of the ideological, socio-economic and political conditions that facilitated the emergence of plural policing in Western societies, the Saudi police organisation also appeared unready to engage in networked policing of Internet fraud.