ABSTRACT
One of the least explored aspects of the relationship between foreign and domestic policy, where a static view has generally prevailed, concerns the dynamic effects of institutional change and regime change – discontinuity at the internal level – on the states’ foreign policy behavior. Starting from a basic framework of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), this chapter will examine how the political transformations in North Africa since the 2011 uprisings affected foreign policy in five countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. The heterogeneity and asymmetry of the domestic changes that these states have witnessed are recognized from the outset, as is the fluid and open nature of the current situation in the region, which only allows identifying some broad trends and drifts. The main argument defended with this empirical stocktaking, based on press articles and topical analyses, is that these countries’ pressing financial constraints and security imperatives in their borderlands ultimately prevented any change of direction or transgression of the existing patterns in their foreign policies, in spite of the accession of some new actors into the decision-making structures. In short, structure prevailed over agency.
