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National Narrative, Role & Foreign Policy: Kaabt Al-Mathium & Qatar’s Foreign Policy during Arab Spring
Abstract
Previous research on Qatar’s foreign policy has generally focused on economic strength, mainly liquified natural gas and non-material approaches like branding strategies. Nevertheless, the importance of regime and its dominance on shaping the nation and its history can also find its way into foreign policy domain. This paper aims to focus on national narrative as a major factor in explaining the foreign policy of Qatar during Arab Spring. The paper will work on developing a framework that can understand the national narrative that the government shapes depending on internal and external circumstances. Process tracing and case study methods will be in place to refer to the development of Qatari national day as the main institutional framework which the government uses to modify national narratives. The plan then is to put the framework into test by looking at Qatar’s decision to side with people’s demands against regimes during Arab Spring. Moreover, the paper will draw on information that the researcher already collected during fieldwork in Qatar between March and August 2021. The paper will be divided into three parts: national narrative, role theory, and Qatar’s new role. The potential of narratives is demonstrated by focusing on national day narrations as advanced by the Qatari government, which also emerge in foreign policy behaviour. Since introducing the idea of national day in 2007, many stories, traditions, and values have been introduced to public as part of the shared national identity. One of the major values has been Kaabt Al-Mathium or heaven for oppressed people, which has been introduced as part of Qataris’ values and it was initially taken from one of Qatar founder’s poems. This value indicates a basic humanitarian role, which is about offering help to others. Here, Qatari policymakers aim at conceiving and cementing a new regional role for Qatar as Kaabt Al-Mathium. This part of the paper will discuss how a national-inspired value with a tribal dimension has been transformed to be a foreign policy role. To do this, the paper will combine the interpretive narrative analysis with the symbolic-interactionist role theory. Role theory has recently received scholarly attention as a theoretical approach that has the necessary conceptual apparatus to understand decision making, actors and the relationship between states. The focus will be on the role making process in symbolic-interactionism to better understand how Qatari policymakers have relied on the historical and national dimensions to justify their 2011 actions.
Discipline
International Relations/Affairs
Geographic Area
Gulf
Qatar
Sub Area
Foreign Relations