Conceptualizing the Qatari-African foreign policy and economic relations: the case of soft power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a case study approach, this article examines the shifting dimensions of Qatar’s international relations strategies with select, geo-politically important African states, including primarily the latter’s private sector and civil society, and focusing on the current or potential use of soft power in particular. To start, this article presents a comprehensive overview of soft power, including its international relations theory-based historical origins; definitional boundaries; associated tools and mechanisms; and the concept’s pragmatic problems and limitations. Second, the article offers several best practice case studies, including the United Kingdom and China, from which core lessons on soft power development and application can be gleaned. This will advance from a list of seven key lessons that any prospective soft power state should consider. Following this, the article engages in an examination of available evidence outlining Qatar’s attempted soft power action on the African continent and, particularly in Sudan, Somalia, Mali and Tunisia, arguing that it relies extensively on “carrotdiplomacy” or the influencing of others backed by material and financial resource inducements. Finally, five problems and roadblocks affecting Qatar’s approach to international relations will be presented, followed by alternative (soft) power-based strategies, which could be explored by its government and leadership.Keywords: Soft Power; Qatar; Africa; Sudan; Somalia; International Relations; United Kingdom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".