Niche Diplomacy in Regional Crisis

This chapter examines how emerging Middle Eastern middle powers employ niche diplomacy during acute regional crises, with a focus on the Yemen war and the 2023–2025 Gaza conflict. It argues that these crises have become laboratories for differentiated diplomatic specialization, where states convert structural constraints into sectoral influence. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s shift from intervention to de-escalation, Iran’s strategic restraint, Oman’s quiet facilitation, and Qatar’s humanitarian mobilization collectively transformed a proxy battlefield into a multilayered arena of mediation, legitimacy performance, and humanitarian diplomacy. In Gaza, Egypt leveraged procedural mediation and institutional continuity; Qatar deployed access-driven diplomacy rooted in connectivity with Hamas and Western actors; and Türkiye asserted ideational leadership through moral entrepreneurship and humanitarian activism. Together, these cases illustrate a regional diplomacy defined less by coercion than by process management, visibility, and reputational signaling. This chapter concludes that Middle Eastern middle powers practice a distinctive form of collective niche diplomacy, realist in motive yet constructivist in method, through which influence is achieved by mediating, convening, and narrating rather than by dominating.