Özgür ÖZDAMAR and Sercan CANBOLAT, Leaders in the Middle East and North Africa: How Ideology Shapes Foreign Policy

It is almost always the case that any Introduction to International Relations course teaches the contributions of Kenneth Waltz to the field, firstly through his grandiose formulation of a theory: it should be simple, parsimonious, abstract, and accordingly, one needs to move away from reality as much as possible to increase the theory’s explanatory and predictive capacity. Moving the individual and state level of analyses aside, Waltz simplifies his theory of international politics at the system/structural level and, with his neorealist theory becoming the dominant approach for a large part of the twentieth century, it put the state in a sort of black box, purposefully ignored individual actors, and targeted the maximum degree of abstraction as possible. In Leaders in the Middle East and North Africa: How Ideology Shapes Foreign Policy, which consists of seven chapters (one introduction chapter, four empirical chapters, one theoretical conclusions chapter and one policy implications chapter), Özdamar and Canbolat aim to shed light on foreign policy belief patterns of leaders in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), highlighting divergences across them and comparing them to the average world leadership. In the process, and in total opposition to Waltz’s claim, the authors argue that advancing “the actor-specific empirical studies zeroing in on agent behaviors and decisions in the future” is “the only way for IR to establish itself as a scientific discipline” (p. 148). In other words, as opposed to the structural approaches, the authors propound that less abstraction and a more actor-specific, nuanced, and tailored approach would provide significant opportunities for the IR discipline to be scientific.