Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Decisive Kingdom From Soft To Hard Power, Abdullah Ali Asiri

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This is a political science thesis that traces a transition in the foreign policy of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia from reliance on soft power to reliance on hard power in cases where the Saudi state is in confrontation with Iran. In theory, the research contextualizes this transition based on Joseph Nye’s concepts of soft and hard power. The thesis uses case analysis approach to manifest the transition in reading and analyzing six cases based on one major hypothesis that measures Iran threat as prominent in those cases. It concludes that since 2010, Saudi Arabia foreign policy began to shift …