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 鈥榮mallness鈥� in distinct, sometimes competing, ways. Some aim to transcend their smallness; others have embraced it. How can this variation inform small state scholarship? M谩t茅 Szalai鈥檚 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 鈥渃omplex model of size鈥� (CMS) (p. 4) to assess the perceptual, absolute, relative, and normative forms of smallness. [excerpt]