Six Saudi women on the front page of the country's main newspaper, three of them with their hair uncovered. In 2014 the photograph would have been unthinkable. In 2019 it was a novelty; in 2026, unremarkable.
That is the change Kingdom in Motion is about - and the question it asks: how did this country get here in less than a decade, what does it cost, and where does it go next?
Saudi Arabia, Sven Otto Littorin argues, is neither Monte Carlo in the desert nor Mordor with air conditioning. It is something more interesting and more consequential: a civilization spanning millennia, a religious tradition fourteen-hundred-years old, a three-hundred-year alliance between sword and pulpit, and a hundred-year nation-state - trying to become a different country before the oil money runs out.
A former Swedish Minister for Employment and one of the first foreigners ever directly employed by the Saudi Ministry of Labor, Littorin has spent nine years inside the rooms where Vision 2030 is set. This is his account of the Arabia that was, the Arabia that is, and the Arabia that may yet be.
