Understanding the Gulf's new Syria policy: power, identity, or economy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent decision on the part of the Gulf states to provide political, logistical, financial, and military support to the Syrian opposition, represented politically by the Syrian National Coalition, represents a significant shift from its historical policy towards the regime in Damascus. Prior to 2009, the Gulf sates, led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were providing support to the Assad regime in the form of financial investment in order to promote a policy of Arab solidarity that was largely designed to prevent Syria from building close relations with Iran. However, months after the Arab Spring began, Syrian opposition began receiving military support from Riyadh and Doha. This thesis explores the reasons behind this shift by closely examining the decision-making and policy processes that led to the new policy vis-Ã -vis Syria on the part of the Gulf states. This study explores the factors behind this policy change through the lens of three prominent theories in international relations: neorealism, constructivism, and the political economy approach associated with World Systems Theory. To evaluate the utility of neorealist approaches in understanding the shift in the Gulf states' policy towards Damascus, this study examines the content and analyzes the relevance of a series of cables from Wikileaks, spanning from 2006 to the present. To study the pervasion of constructivist influence, religious sermons (khutbahs) of Gulf Imams in the period before and after the onset of conflict in Syria are examined. In order to shed light on the economic factors that may be associated with the new Gulf-Syria policy, this thesis examines the relationship between the volatility of international energy markets, rentier politics, and the competitions between regional actors over two pipeline projects designed to run through Syrian territory: one initiated by Iran and the other by its regional rivals, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. The study finds that the decision-making process associated with the Gulf's new Syria policy has been shaped by a combination of factors. These include the strategic and security concerns of Gulf states related to the rising influence of Iran in the region, the crucial role played by Sunni-Islam as a legitimating ideology, and the economic benefits that Saudi Arabia and Qatar would potentially receive with the emergence of a Gulf-friendly regime in Syria. In conclusion, any evaluation of this new Gulf-Syria policy through strictly dichotomous applications of neorealism, constructivism, and political economy provide an incomplete picture. Instead, this study shows that this shift was a result of a mix of motives and factors, and that key conceptual insights from all three theoretical approaches should be combined in a synthesis so as to more fully understand the Gulf's new Syria policy.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".