This paper revisits Saudi Arabia’s religious statecraft through the lens of Pax Wahhabica, interrogating the transnational diffusion, strategic reconfiguration, and evolving instrumentalisation of Wahhabism as a modality of imperial theopolitics and a conduit of ideological projection. Tracing Wahhabism from its eighteenth-century roots, through its Cold War entrenchment as a bulwark against secular nationalism, to its post-9/11 fragmentation, this study offers a conceptual re-evaluation of Wahhabism not as a fixed theological doctrine but as a malleable constellation of norms and discourses continuously calibrated to state interest. Theoretically anchored in soft power analysis, constructivist norm diffusion, Gramscian hegemony, and Foucauldian governmentality, this paper examines how religious norms are mobilised through affective discourse, institutional socialisation, and securitised governance to advance regime resilience. Through empirical case studies on Bosnia, Indonesia, and Nigeria, it elucidates how Wahhabi norms were localised, hybridised, and, in some instances, weaponised against their progenitors. Finally, this paper examines the domestic reconfiguration and international repositioning of Wahhabism under Muḥammad bin Salmān, arguing that contemporary Saudi theopolitics marks not the abandonment of Wahhabism but its reconversion into a strategically curated, domesticated ideology. Pax Wahhabica, thus, persists—not as an unbroken theological doctrine but as a hybrid ideational empire in which Islam is strategically retooled as an instrument of hegemonic statecraft.
Naveed S. Sheikh (Fri,) studied this question.