Statecraft in the Middle East: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and Security by Imad Mansour (review)

This book’s title is catchy and appealing. All too often statecraft is discussed, usually in approving terms, in relation to how powerful states behave in international relations in defense of their national interests. It is a term less commonly applied to developing countries or today’s global south, whose foreign policy-making performance is not regarded to be on par with the powerful. Hence a conceptualization of Middle East statecraft is attractive in breaking down an enduring stereotype about how and where statecraft is performed.

The book itself is also attractive in bridging the literature on domestic politics and foreign policy in a way that some other titles on Middle East politics and international relations do not. For too long, as the author points out, there has been a tendency for international relations scholars to bracket the domain of domestic politics and focus on so-called systemic factors. This approach inevitably tells us some of the “big things” we need to know about how states behave but leaves out a lot out of inconvenient details that are important and interesting to area studies and foreign policy specialists, like Imad Mansour. For this reason, area studies scholars are often rightly impatient with the parsimony — for which, read: over-simplification — of international relations colleagues when it comes to understanding their region. Hence the long-standing and much debated International Relations–area studies divide.

It is worth acknowledging, however, that quite a bit has been done to close the gap, perhaps more than the author acknowledges. The work edited by Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami on the foreign policies of Middle East states, for example, now in its second edition,¹ receives little explicit mention. And there are other works on the international relations of the Middle East that have attempted, albeit imperfectly, to marry the domestic and international. Still it is undoubtedly true that much bridging work remains to be done. Where the volume delivers added value in this regard is in developing the idea of a “societal narrative” as an explanatory tool of statecraft, to help explain the linkages, but also the continuities, in the domestic and external behavior of major Middle East states. Indeed, this is the most important and innovative contribution of the book, one which is made explicit in the research question posed, namely, “How do dominant societal narratives, as ideational structures, influence governments’ foreign and domestic policies in modern states?” (p.3). It seeks to answer this question through six carefully crafted case studies.

In speaking of the role of ideas in foreign policy making, the book nods to the constructivist literature in International Relations, which precisely emphasizes how states’ identities and personalities (which, in turn, underpin societal narratives) shape and inform their international behavior. It is just a nod, however, as beyond the brief mention on page 7, little is actually said about constructivism and its uses except through the (admittedly important) references to the work of Michael Barnett in the Middle East context. If narratives are indeed so important in state-craft, as the author convincingly asserts, it would be helpful for the reader to learn a bit more about other works that advance such a claim and the theories upon which they rest.

While the introductory chapter is perhaps a little thin in the above respects, the underlying approach, which informs the six country studies on Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran respectively (which constitute the bulk of the book), is a fruitful one. Each country is analyzed through the state-craft prism established in Chapter 1 by looking at its external and domestic policy narratives and their linkages over time. And the timeframe — 60 years — is long enough to demonstrate the compelling finding of “clear and strong continuities across moments of great upheaval” (p. 5). This is fascinating in the case of Iran, for example, where even after a major social revolution in 1979, dominant societal...