International Quarterly of Foreign Relations

International Quarterly of Foreign Relations

The new emerging middle powers within the new Middle East: UAE and Qatar

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Mehdi Zibaei
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Science, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran
Abstract
Ensuing the Arab Uprisings, regional order that is calling the New Middle East has gone through the playing of new emerging middle powers such as UAE and Qatar. From the component of power, these states unlike their predecessor as with Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria lack normal prerequisites for morphing into regional actors. The main question here is why these players have expanded the range of their actions from the Persian Gulf sub-system into the great Middle East. It seems that it did not spill over the Arab uprisings into UAE and Qatar provided the opportunity for them in the light of weakening other rivals such as Egypt and Iraq that engaged by this turmoil to morph into the regional actors. While studying the trajectory of changes in their foreign policy behaviors implies that ambitions for enhancing their ranks within the regional international relations ladder. This work intends to study the dislocating among regional players after the Arab uprisings and focusing on the dominant trends of both mentioned new emerging powers. This will do by the conception of regional middle powers in IR.
Keywords
Middle power
Middle East
Regional power
UAE
Qatar
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