Máté Szalai is a senior lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest and a senior research fellow at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Hungary. He was a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Besides the general political, economic and social developments of the Middle Eastern and North African region, his primary fields of research include Small State Studies, the Persian Gulf, and the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. He is co-author of the book entitled The Caliphate of the Islamic State, published in 2016.

Introduction 1. The four types of state size and the foreign policy of small states 2. Applying small state theory to the MENA region 3. The relative and normative size of smaller Gulf states 4. Absolute size, perceptual size, and regime security in the smaller Gulf states 5. The foreign and security policy history of smaller Gulf states (1968-2011) 6. Smaller Gulf states in the age of regional uncertainty (2011-2021) Conclusion - Size, power and regime stability in the Gulf