Introduction

Middle East and North Africa region has been going through major transformations since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. MENA has witnessed the rise of political Islam as a strong challenger to mostly autocratic secularist regimes since the 1950s. After decades of autocratic rule and economic hardships a series of loosely related protests, namely Arab uprisings, led to revolts, revolutions, coups, and civil wars since December 2010. In this chaotic political environment there are four ambitious regional powers—Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—that work hard towards influencing and surviving this transformation. Against this background, this study poses three sets research questions. First, what are the foreign policy roles of these four states; what specific roles they propose regarding the region (regional roles); which of those regional roles are traditional, which of them are new; what do they implicate and what are the material and ideational sources of these regional roles? Second, we ask whether these roles cause a domestic debate at the state level or do all domestic actors accept them? By engaging the domestic debate in role formation we highlight the ‘role contestation’ scholarship. Third, we focus on whether these roles are accepted regionally and globally or there is opposition to them from external actors. We highlight the role conflict hypothesis by focusing on a state’s foreign policy roles and whether regional actors accept these roles or not. Lastly, we focus on Syrian civil war as a foreign policy case study that illuminates the given country’s foreign policy actions vis-à-vis the regional transformation. The dependent variable, foreign policy action, is explained by foreign policy role conceptualizations and their material and ideational sources. Syrian civil war as part of each chapter evaluates the relationship between role conceptions and role enactment.