5 - Armed Nonstate Actors’ Foreign Policy

Summary

Chapter five focuses on the leadership of armed nonstate actors in the MENA, with an emphasis on the foreign policy conceptualizations of leaders. The chapter starts by accounting for the genesis of ANSAs in the region, and their emergence and increasing significance for MENA politics is stressed. The authors also give the psycho-biographies of the top executive leaders of ANSAs: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS, Abdullah Öcalan of PKK, Salih Muslim of PYD, and Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. Lastly, the chapter discusses the operational code results of the studied ANSA leaders and elaborates on their implications for MENA and world politics. The discussion focuses on what kind of leadership ANSAs produce and what it means for states that are trying to contain or negotiate with them. The chapter also addresses the question of what these results mean in terms of FPA’s actor-specific approach as opposed to IR theories’ actor-general explanations of world politics