Public Diplomacy and Regional Leadership Struggles: The Case of Saudi Arabia

Indonesian state and non-state actors are increasingly engaging in an Islamic peace diplomacy with global ambitions. By promoting moderate interpretations of the faith, they seek to weaken Arab dominance within Islamic discourse and rebrand Indonesia as a role model for the Islamic world.

The war against Ukraine has created possibilities for emerging actors in Africa – such as Iran and Turkey – to scale up their engagement with the continent. This Focus deals with the question of how the changing global dynamics are allowing Iran and Turkey to boost their ties across the African continent.

This GIGA Focus sheds light on the new Iranian conservative president Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi, and his doctrine of “pragmatic revolutionism.” The author analyses what the Iranian Asia-oriented foreign policy entails geopolitically and geoeconomically, and suggests how the multilateralist tendencies can be used by policymakers.

Public diplomacy looms large in the foreign policies of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Zooming in on these states’ engagement with the African continent, this GIGA Focus Middle East explores the role played by real and alleged non-state actors in autocratic public-diplomacy efforts.

This article seeks to identify ways in which the foreign policy power hierarchy inside the Islamic Republic of Iran can be explained. It uses high-level diplomatic meetings as observable evidence in a novel analytical framework to identify the scope of competition and hierarchies in foreign policy decision-making processes. Results reveal that diplomatic activities of key foreign policy decision makers did not noticeably diverge.

Indonesian state and non-state actors are increasingly engaging in an Islamic peace diplomacy with global ambitions. By promoting moderate interpretations of the faith, they seek to weaken Arab dominance within Islamic discourse and rebrand Indonesia as a role model for the Islamic world.

The war against Ukraine has created possibilities for emerging actors in Africa – such as Iran and Turkey – to scale up their engagement with the continent. This Focus deals with the question of how the changing global dynamics are allowing Iran and Turkey to boost their ties across the African continent.

This GIGA Focus sheds light on the new Iranian conservative president Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi, and his doctrine of “pragmatic revolutionism.” The author analyses what the Iranian Asia-oriented foreign policy entails geopolitically and geoeconomically, and suggests how the multilateralist tendencies can be used by policymakers.