In 1969, a young 27 year-old army captain, Mu'ammar Qadhafi, staged a peaceful military coup against Libya's decentralized and pro-Western Sanussi Monarchy. Initially, Qadhafi's revolution sought to address the fundamental social inequalities that had arisen during the latter Sanussi period due to the discovery of oil and the deep unpopularity of the Kingdom's pro-Western foreign policies. As this new direction facilitated oil nationalization, Qadhafi remained quite popular until 1975. Thereafter, he embarked on a truly "revolutionary" project to recast Libyan society as well as its foreign alliance structure. Libya scholar Ronald Bruce St John asserts that in Nasser’s Egypt, a new constellation of foreign policies emerged prior to the revolutionary "theory" which was created to justify them. Conversely, he maintains, in Qadhafi's Libya ideology preceded foreign policy formation. In other words, in Nasser's Egypt, ideology was a fig leaf used to cloak the pursuit of Realpolitik interests. Conversely, Qadhafi's Libya was sui generis in its pursuit of foreign policy goals which ran directly counter to Libya's economic, strategic, and security interests. The origins of Qadhafi's "counterproductive" foreign policy decisions were similar to his espousal of economically damaging domestic ideologies: attempts to co-opt key segments of the population, while marginalizing opponents. In both realms it was Libya's oil wealth that provided the cushion to pursue such "counterproductive" policies. This paper will present novel archival research conducted in Libya prior to the 2011 uprisings. It will also deconstruct the Qadhafi regime's foreign policy formation apparatus to examine how the "personalization" of the Qadhafi regime allowed domestic and ideological calculations to trump strategic and security concerns. The paper will show that -- similarly to North Korea -- Qadhafi’s foreign policy was largely a vanity project: geared to project his desired self-image as a "great" world leader. Despite Libya's uniqueness, study of Qadhafi’s foreign policy formation processes is highly relevant for the study of other small, oil rich, geostrategically important polities which paradoxically oppose the very same hegemonic power upon whom they are reliant for purchasing their hydrocarbons. Qatari support of anti-Western Islamist movements from 2011 to the present comes to mind. Such "counterproductive" policies are clearly an example of the pressure that wealthy authoritarian states face to align their foreign policies with the biases of their populations, rather than their security or economic interests.

States must be able to credibly signal resolve to follow through on threats and promises if they are to avoid costly wars and establish stable peace. But not all states are created equal: International Relations scholars have long held that democratic leaders are able to convey their intentions with greater credibility than their authoritarian counterparts. The democrats' advantage derives from more transparent policy-making processes, and electoral accountability that exacts higher “audience costs” from leaders who renege on public commitments. The paper builds on studies that recently challenged this conventional wisdom. Scholars disaggregated the concept of authoritarianism to show that threats issued by most authoritarian regimes were taken seriously as frequently as those issued by democracies. The exception are personalist regimes (ruled by charismatic leaders with small winning coalitions) and hegemonic regimes (where opposition wins representation, but the incumbent’s hold on power is secure). In these regimes, the link between domestic audiences and leader performance is considered too tenuous for accountability in any meaningful sense. Quantitative analyses place Nasser’s Egypt squarely in the exception category, but this paper’s qualitative study of Nasser’s foreign policy behaviour differs. Based on archival and public documents, media reports and memoires, it argues that while Nasser was relatively free of institutional constraints, he was bound by societal constraints that credibly defined his room for manoeuvre on core issues. This is because Nasser’s personalist, hegemonic authoritarian regime was at the same time distinctively populist: a regime whose legitimacy rested on an unmediated bond between a charismatic leader and hitherto marginalised segments of society, increasingly engaged in the political process. Regime survival depended on inducing—rather than coercing—the masses to refrain from mobilising against it. Populism is, by definition, a system in which political commitments exceed available resources. Therefore, as his regime’s legitimacy base broadened, Nasser’s capacity to control it increasingly depended on his ability to deliver on ever-grander promises, and his room-for-manoeuvre progressively narrowed. The paper focuses on 1967-1970, a period strewn with belligerent and conciliatory moves that have baffled Nasser’s contemporaries and historians for their seemingly mercurial nature. It shows that when core values that are relatively enduring were at stake, such as Palestine, the credibility of Nasser’s foreign policy initiatives could be read in the context of change and regularities in his modes of engagement with the regime’s selectorate and legitimating public, with increasing accuracy over time.

How does public opinion guide foreign policy decision making in non-democratic contexts? The case of Jordan’s foreign policy towards ISIS (the Islamic State) as part of the American-led coalition to ‘degrade and destroy’ the group provides a useful case study to test competing hypotheses on the influence of public opinion in foreign policy. The Hashemite Kingdom’s actions – especially in the wake of the immolation by ISIS of the captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in February 2015 – seem to be linked to the changing position of public opinion. Did Jordanian participation in what had been up to that point a publically unpopular war change by the swing in public opinion set in motion by the burning of Jordan’s pilot? Research on the influence of public opinion on foreign policy does not assume that politicians respond reflexively to the public mood (or vice versa). Rather, a range of contextual intervening factors (salience, elite divisions, opposition mobilization, and institutional opportunities) influence the likelihood that a consensus in public opinion results in specific foreign policy choices. Based on studies of democracies and non-democracies (like Jordan) this paper hypothesizes that a constellation of these five variables that results in public opinion becoming constitutive of elite foreign policy decisions. Research has shown that governing elites are more likely to be constrained in situations where they face an issue of moderate salience, divisions exist among important political groups on how to react, opposition groups build a consensus within the public sphere about the issue—which consensus is translated into a mobilization of public opinion into the political arena—and institutional structures allow for mobilization and cannot be manipulated enough to limit opposition mobilization. This paper investigates if this chain of events proves constitutive of foreign policy decisions as well by tracing events against measures of public opinion in survey research and in public sphere debates in the media. It then compares this neo-classical realist derived hypothesis against competing hypotheses derived from structural realism (balance of power/bandwagoning; rent-security), and constructivist interpretations (state identity).

A clear understanding of Iranian foreign policy formulation and decision-making has long eluded political scientists and policy observers. The uneasy cohabitation of elected and unelected institutions, coupled with the truly supreme designation of the Leader in the Constitution, has led some scholars to argue that Iran’s theocracy must best be understood as a sultanate, not that different in its effects from the despotic periods of rule under the Pahlavi and Qajar dynasties preceding the Islamic Republic (Ganji, 2014). While it is certainly true that all meaningful power theoretically resides in the office of the Leader, given that his office is also a symbolic representation of the whole system (or nezam), such powers are very much circumscribed by considerations of legitimacy. In this sense, Iran’s case is not much different from other so called “competitive authoritarian” systems. Abundant evidence from political memoires, declassified documents, and secondary histories suggest there is extensive political in-fighting within authoritarian regimes, but there has been little advance in understanding how to think about such factional disputes, and their winners and losers. Recent work on authoritarianism has largely focused on two areas: the nature of the selectorate for such regimes (Geddes 1999, Bueno de Mesquita, et al 2003) and institutional constraints that authoritarian regimes accept in order to generate greater legitimacy (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007, Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009, Levitsky and Way 2010, Boix and Svolik 2011). This conceptual effort parallels attempts to quantify institutional constraints across states (e.g., Beck, et al 2010, Henisz 2010). Through a case study of Iran, this paper argues that existing typologies and indicators mask considerable variation in the actual functioning of the Islamic Republic’s arbitrary system of rule, variation with meaningful impact on foreign policy formulation and decision-making. To ensure the stability of the Islamic regime, the Supreme Leader must maintain the appearance of impartiality among different foreign policy factions. Yet, the arbitrary powers invested in his office can only be justified through the enforcement of certain “red lines”. The maintenance of this façade, in turn, is only possible if the elected institutions of the state yield a heterogeneous political landscape in which contestation and change remain as plausible in practice. In the case of the Islamic Republic, the resulting dynamic is in fact an instructive lesson in policy formation under conditions of competitive authoritarianism.

There has been a dearth of academic literature on the making of Palestinian foreign policy since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1993. Even though the PA is prohibited from engaging in foreign relations by the Oslo agreements, the Palestinian leadership has engaged in foreign relations through the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It would be fair to describe PA rule as authoritarian. There have not been presidential or legislative elections in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for a decade. Gaza and Areas A and B in the West Bank resemble police states where opposition is violently suppressed. Then there is the Israeli occupation now in its 48th year and a dysfunctional administration teetering on the brink of collapse. Palestine’s foreign policy is largely the province of the PLO that is dominated by Fatah and that still resembles and functions as a national liberation organization. In the international arena the PLO still plays a significant role in the formation of Palestinian foreign policy particularly in UN institutions. This was explicitly recognized by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 2012 in the resolution that accorded Palestine observer state status in the UN system. Drawing on empirical research, interviews, and publically available documents, this paper seeks to explore and explain Palestine’s statehood strategy at the United Nations since 2011. Was President Abbas’s decision to seek a UN Security Council resolution on ending the occupation in December 2014 and to join the International Criminal Court later that month the result of public pressure or were they calculated moves that had been long in the making? In answering this question, this paper examines how the PLO forms its foreign policy in practice and the way in which foreign policy decisions are made in Ramallah. The roles of Palestine’s various ministries and departments and the way in which the PLO engages with outside actors are explored to shed light on the extent to which the Palestinian leadership takes into account Palestinian public opinion when it comes to formulating decisions in the international arena. It will be argued that although Palestinian public opinion is taken into account in formulating foreign policy decisions, it is not the most important factor. Other considerations—financial, diplomatic, strategic, and the regional security situation—are given more prominence. But by far the most important consideration is the relationship between the PLO/PA and Israel.