A Comparative Analysis of Global Participation, Economic Stability, Governance, and Security in European and Middle Eastern Microstates

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of political stability, economic strength, international participation, and security of microstates in both Europe and the Middle East. The 2 two regions tend to have significant amounts of microstates compared to other regions in the world, and to many scholars, they believe that microstates tend to have a weaker economy, fragile stability, unsecure borders, and poor global participation due to their size and the regions they are in which consists of global powers. This study challenges these postulations by analyzing global alliances, economic strategies, global diplomacy, and domestic policies that these microstates tend to have. At the same time, some of these microstates tend to have different successes and downsides in which some microstates could have a robust economy, but at the same time it would have brittle domestic policy and the opposite. The major question in this thesis would be whether there is a difference between microstates in the Middle East and Europe in regard to their economy, security, governance, and global participation using a comparative case study, this thesis will analyze selected microstates in Europe such as Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg, as well as microstates in the Middle East such as Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar.