Book review : The foreign policy of smaller Gulf states : size, power, and regime stability in the Middle East

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of scholarship on the smaller Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The five have wielded their ‘smallness’ in distinct, sometimes competing, ways. Some aim to transcend their smallness; others have embraced it. How can this variation inform small state scholarship? Máté Szalai’s The foreign policy of smaller Gulf states is a timely and thorough book that contributes to the theorisation and evaluation of state smallness. Szalai uses a framework he terms the “complex model of size” (CMS) (p. 4) to assess the perceptual, absolute, relative, and normative forms of smallness. [excerpt]