Beyond Hard Power: Qatar's Non-Traditional Security Strategy in a High-Risk Neighborhood

Abstract

Qatar is one of the most fragile geopolitical areas in today's Middle East, a region of great power where it is sandwiched between greater neighbors and subjected to blockade politics and regional conflicts involving the GCC states and Yemen, Syria and Iran. In spite of such exposure, Qatar has so far eschewed the use of traditional military deterrence as the major means of survival, instead developing a unique security architecture based on economic leverage, mediation diplomacy, media influence, and strategic hedging. It poses a fundamental question: How is Qatar able to build and maintain a sustainable security policy in a region experiencing high threat without relying on hard-power balancing? This research asks this question theoretically by applying securitization theory (the Copenhagen School) in explaining security as more of a political phenomenon, as a product of framing economic, environmental and identity issues as existential issues that require an extraordinary response from the political actors. In its application to Qatar, it is argued in the study that the presence of non-military tools in Qatar's foreign and security policy-such as LNG diplomacy, Al Jazeera's discursive power, conflict mediation from Afghanistan to Sudan and alliance diversification-can be understood as effective alternatives to the conventional deterrence strategy. The research methodology is qualitative, and the design is single-case, in-depth case study, with Qatar as an instrumental case to study how a small state responds to existential vulnerability in a risky neighborhood. In this design, the 2017-2021 Gulf blockade is the key empirical event, which is the process of Qatar's securitization of economic and diplomatic isolation, and its subsequent mobilization of non-traditional security tools in response. The study explores the NTS policy record of the state of Qatar, and by comparing the account presented in this episode to the state's foreign policy record in general, it offers a securitization-based approach to the literature on NTS in Gulf foreign policy and small-state security strategy, providing a framework of understanding for how states lacking material power can build security beyond conventional deterrence.