Aktivizam malih država i granice strateške autonomije: Ujedinjeni Arapski Emirati i logika kontroslisanog prekomernog regionalnog angažovanja
Small State Activism and the Limits of Strategic Autonomy: The United Arab Emirates and the Logic of Managed Regional Overstretch

Summary/Abstract: This article develops a neoclassical realist framework to explain how the United Arab Emirates (UAE), despite its small territorial size, limited manpower, and demographic constraints, has sustained an expansive pattern of regional activism across Yemen, Libya, and the Horn of Africa/Red Sea corridor. Situating the UAE within the post-2011 transformation of Arab regional order, the article introduces two interrelated conceptual innovations: managed strategic autonomy and managed regional overstretch. Managed strategic autonomy is distinguished from hedging, omnibalancing, and strategic diversification by its active intent to reshape the patron-client relationship rather than distribute risk or cultivate domestic legitimacy. Managed regional overstretch extends Kennedy’s classical overstretch theory beyond great-power hegemonic overextension to small states whose strain emerges through dispersion and institutional proliferation rather than resource depletion alone. Empirically, drawing on a structured, diverse-case comparison of three theatres selected for their variation in the concentration versus dispersion of strategic commitment, the article documents the UAE’s cyclical pattern of intervention, consolidation, and calibrated disengagement, anchored in time-stamped evidence: the 2019 Yemen drawdown; the 2020 Libyan repositioning following Turkish military intervention; the 2021 al-Ula reconciliation process; the 2022 Houthi strikes on Abu Dhabi; the 2023–2024 Red Sea shipping crisis; and the 2023 Sudan conflict. The article contributes to small-state IR theory, Gulf foreign policy analysis, and the overstretch literature and addresses the following falsifiable predictions: the UAE will sustain post-overstretch postures through commercial-infrastructure and partner-substitution instruments rather than direct military redeployment, and distributed overstretch in the Horn will delay recalibration relative to concentrated kinetic overstretch in Yemen.

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