This article develops a theoretically grounded and empirically informed analysis of women’s entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia as a site of everyday politics, feminist contestation, and rights-based negotiation. Drawing exclusively on interdisciplinary scholarship spanning entrepreneurship studies, feminist theory, Middle Eastern studies, human rights law, and decolonial thought, the study interrogates how women’s entrepreneurial practices operate simultaneously within and against neoliberal, religious, and nationalist frameworks. Building on literature concerning women’s empowerment through entrepreneurship (Alkhaled & Berglund, 2018; Danish & Smith, 2012; Basaffar et al., 2018), social entrepreneurship (Bacq & Janssen, 2011; Calás et al., 2009; Datta & Gailey, 2012), and everyday politics in the Middle East (Bayat, 2013; Bayat, 2015), this research reframes entrepreneurial activity not merely as economic participation but as embodied and relational political practice.

The analysis situates Saudi women’s entrepreneurial engagement within broader global governance regimes such as CEDAW, neoliberal human rights discourse (Whyte, 2019; Tzouvala, 2020), and decolonial feminist critique (Vergès, 2021). It also considers the dynamics of religious reinterpretation (Wadud, 1999; Yamani & Allen, 2006), nationalist gendering (Yuval-Davis, 1997; 2003), and backlash politics (Tsujigami, 2009). Methodologically, the article adopts a critical interpretive synthesis and feminist co/autoethnographic lens (Coia & Taylor, 2007; 2013) to bridge macro-structural analysis and lived experience.

The findings argue that Saudi women’s entrepreneurship constitutes a form of “entrepreneurial citizenship” in which economic agency becomes a vehicle for incremental rights-claiming (Zivi, 2012; Zaeske, 2002) and embodied dissent (Fotaki & Daskalaki, 2020), even when articulated in non-confrontational or culturally embedded forms. Yet this empowerment remains ambivalent: entrepreneurship may reproduce neoliberal individualism and depoliticize structural inequalities (Whyte, 2019). The article concludes that women’s entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia should be understood as a complex assemblage of emancipation, accommodation, and transformation—simultaneously enabling personal autonomy and reconfiguring the boundaries of nation, religion, and global capitalism.

Women’s entrepreneurship, Saudi Arabia, feminist theory, everyday politics, decolonial feminism, human rights, neoliberalism

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