Foreign Policy in North Africa

Book excerpt: Foreign Policy in North Africa explores how the foreign policies of North African states, which occupy a peripheral and subaltern position within the global system, have actively responded to the constraints and opportunities stemming from multi-level transformations in the 2010s. What has been the extent of continuity and change in each country’s foreign policy-making and behaviour under such conditions? Which structural and agential factors explain the variations observed, or the lack thereof? Building on scholarship on foreign policy in the Global South and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as well as the international impact of the 2011 Arab uprisings, case studies on six different countries focus on a specific level of analysis for each. These range from the global (Tunisia’s financial predicaments and foreign debt negotiations) through the (sub)regional (Egypt’s relationship of necessity with Saudi Arabia, Algeria’s half-hearted policies towards the conflicts in Libya and Mali) to the domestic sphere (Morocco’s power balance between the monarchy and the Islamist-led government, Libya’s extreme state weakness and internal competition among proliferating actors), reaching also the deeper non-state societal level in the case of Mauritania. The volume concludes by examining post-2011 developments in the longstanding Algerian–Moroccan rivalry which hinders regional integration in the Maghreb. Foreign Policy in North Africa will be of great interest to scholars of North African politics and international relations, Middle Eastern and North African studies, foreign policy and global international relations. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of The Journal of North African Studies.