Revolutionary change versus counter-revolutionary status quo: Tracing the reactions of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the Arab Spring

By exceeding traditional molds of small states, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as two small states of the Persian Gulf, have conducted very interventionist and proactive foreign policy in response to the Arab Spring within the two region-wide confrontations between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary blocks. This thesis purposes to find a proper answer to the following question by firstly analyzing their foreign policies responses one by one, then comparing the roots of differences and similarities: Why and how did Qatar and the UAE as similar small states pro-actively take different revolutionary and counter-revolutionary positions as a reaction to the Arab Spring? To this end, this research wields the process-tracing method to identify causal mechanisms driving these policies and indicating manifestation of these policies at the operational level. Then, the results are compared focusing on their unit-level differences within the neo-classical realist framework. In this context, I argue that the systemic forces unleashed by the Arab Spring-led change created powerful incentives for these states' opportunistic power pursuit across the region. However, unit-level features as an intervening variable shaped their power and threat assessments regarding the Arab Spring-led regional change, which eventually produced their opposing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary positions.