Measuring the evolution of Arab States’ perceptions of the Iranian threat: a quantitative text analysis of Arabic-language state media, 2010–20

ABSTRACT

After the Arab Uprisings, inter-state relations in the Middle East became polarized between the two camps of the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Iran and its allies, which strengthened the threat perception of Iran among Arab states. This study aims to empirically elucidate the changes in the perception of threats against Iran among Arab states through a quantitative text analysis of major state media in 10 Arab states. Through this analysis, we first substantiated that the Arab threat perception of Iran increased, especially in GCC members, after the Arab Uprisings. Second, there were significant differences in threat perception, even among the GCC states, according to their political stance towards key events in international relations. We also propose a new empirical method for studying securitization in critical security theory based on quantitative text analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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⁵ Akbarzadeh, Middle East Politics and International Relations, 241–261; Stein, International Relations in the Middle East, 183–208.

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⁷ Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 46–86.

⁸ Vrushal T. Ghoble, ‘Saudi Arabia-Iran Contention and the Role of Foreign Actors’, Strategic Analysis, 43, no. 1 (2019): 42–53; Simon Mabon,　‘Existential Threats and Regulating Life: Securitisation in the Contemporary Middle East’, Global Discourse 8, no. 1 (2018): 42–58; Simon Mabon, ‘Muting the Trumpets of Sabotage: Saudi Arabia, the US and the Quest to Securitise Iran’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 5 (2018): 742–759; Ruth Hanau Santini, ‘A New Regional Cold War in the Middle East and North Africa: Regional Security Complex Theory Revisited’, The International Spectator 52, no. 4 (2017): 93–111; Simon Mabon, Samira Nasirzadeh, and Eyad Alrefai, ‘De-securitisation and Pragmatism in the Persian Gulf: The Future of Saudi-Iranian Relations’, The International Spectator 56, no. 4 (2021): 66–83.

⁹ Mabon, ‘Existential Threats’, 42–58; Simon Mabon, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Power and Rivalry in the Middle East. New Edition. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). One of the most well-known explanations for the escalation of the Saudi-Iran rivalry is the sectarian conflict theory: sectarian differences between Sunni and Shi’a are seen as the cause of the conflict, leading the two de facto Islamic states in the region, Saudi Arabia and Iran, to inevitably confront each other, both religiously and politically. While such explanations have primarily emerged in mass media, many critics in academia believe that they only sometimes accurately capture the reality of the rivalry. Keiko Sakai and Kota Suechika, ‘Sectarian Fault Lines in the Middle East: Sources of Conflicts or Communal Bonds?’ in Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics, ed. Larbi Sadiki (London: Routledge, 2020), 269–280. In reality, the causality is frequently observed as a reverse process; sectarian differences are often exploited by politics, with the emergence of ‘sectarianisation’ attempts, in which political actors strive to employ sectarian identity to efficiently promote mass mobilization. Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Moreover, compared to the ‘Arab Cold War’ of the 1950s and 1960s, when there was strong intra-Arab identity politics, there has been no appeal to Sunni or Shi’a from either of the camps in the recent conflict. Morten Valbjørn, ‘Dialogues in New Middle Eastern Politics—on (the Limits of) making Historical Analogies to the Classic Arab Cold War in a Sectarianized New Middle East’, in The Middle East: Thinking about and beyond Security and Stability, ed. Lorenzo Kamel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2019), 173–197; ‘What is so Sectarian about Sectarian Politics: Identity Politics and Authoritarianism in a New Middle East’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 19, no. 1 (2019): 127–149; ‘Beyond the Beyond(s): On the (Many) Third way(s) beyond Primordialism and Instrumentalism in the Study of Sectarianism’, Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1(2020): 91–107.

¹⁰ Shreen T. Hunter, Arab-Iranian Relations: Dynamics of Conflict and Accommodation (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 51.

¹¹ Mahjoob Zweiri, Md Mizanur Rahman, Arwa Kamal eds., The 2017 Gulf Crisis: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Singapore: Springer, 2021).

¹² F. Gregory Gause, III, ‘Balancing What? Threat Perception and Alliance Choice in the Gulf’, Security Studies 13, no. 2 (2003); F. Gregory Gause, III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–15; Raymond Hinnebusch, The International Politics of the Middle East. Second Edition. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); May Darwish, Threats and Alliances in the Middle East: Saudi and Syrian Policies in a Turbulent Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

¹³ Alireza Raisi, ‘Alliance and Sectarian Attitudes in the MENA: The Case of Arab Opinion towards Iran’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2023.2251120.

¹⁴ Marius Dragomir and Astrid Söderström, The State of State Media: A Global Analysis of the Editorial Independence of State Media and an Introduction of a New State Media Typology (Budapest: CEU Democracy Institute, 2021).

¹⁵ Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988), 124. See also Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 243–246.

¹⁶ Andrew Chubb and Frances Yaping Wang, ‘Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns on Foreign Affairs: Four Birds, One Stone, and the South China Sea Arbitration’, International Studies Quarterly 67, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad047; Rory Truex, ‘Consultative Authoritarianism and Its Limits’, Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 3, 2017: 329–61; Martin K. Dimitrov, Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europa and China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Barbara Geddes and John Zaller, ‘Sources of Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes’, American Journal of Political Science 33, no. 2, 1989: 319–47; Monroe E. Price, Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Daniela Stockmann and Mary E. Gallagher, ‘Remote Control: How the Media Sustain Authoritarian Rule in China’, Comparative Political Studies 44, no. 4, 2011: 436–67.

¹⁷ Marc Owen Jones, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media (London: Hurst, 2022), 7–12; Dragomir and Söderström, The State of State Media: 16; Marius Dragomir and Astrid Söderström, The State of State Media: A Global Analysis of the Editorial Independence of State Media based on the State Media Matrix (2022 Edition) (Budapest: CEU Democracy Institute, 2022), 23; Carola Richter and Claudia Kozman, ‘Introduction’, in Arab Media Systems, eds. Carola Richter and Claudia Kozman (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), xxviii—xxx.

¹⁸ Mansour and Thompson eds. Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa; Stephen Walt, Revolution and War: A Handbooks to the Breeds of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

¹⁹ Hunter, Arab-Iranian Relations, 139–141.

²⁰ Hunter, Arab-Iranian Relations, 169–175; Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei, Iran, Revolution, and Proxy Wars (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 127–165.

²¹ Maria-Louise Clausen, ‘Competing for Control over the State: The Case of Yemen’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 29, no. 3, 2018: 560–578; Marieke Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict (London: Hurst, 2017), 337–342; Marieke Brandt, ‘The Huthi Enigma: Ansar Allah and the “Second Republic”’, in Yemen and the Search for Stability: Power, Politics and Society after the Arab Spring, ed. Marie-Christine Heinze (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 160–183.

²² International Crisis Group, Iran’s Priorities in a Turbulent Middle East. Report no. 84 (Brussels and Amman: International Crisis Group, 2018).

²³ Akbarzadeh, Middle East Politics and International Relations, 200–215; Michael C. Hudson, ‘The United States in the Middle East’, in International Relations of the Middle East. Fifth Edition, ed. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 368–393; Lynch, The New Arab Wars, 18–25.

²⁴ Akbarzadeh, Middle East Politics and International Relations, 253–256; Stein, International Relations, 192–207.

²⁵ Mabon, Nasirzadeh, and Alrefai, ‘De-securitization and Pragmatism’, 67–68.

²⁶ Adam Tarock, ‘The Iran Nuclear Deal: Winning a Little, Losing a Lot’, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 8 (2016): 1408–1424; Riham Bahi, ‘Iran, the GCC and the Implications of the Nuclear Deal: Rivalry versus Engagement’, The International Spectator 52, no. 2 (2017): 89–101.

²⁷ Clausen, ‘Competing for Control over the State’, 560–578; Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, 337–342; Brandt, ‘The Huthi Enigma’, 160–183.

²⁸ Prasanta Kumar Pradhan, ‘Qatar Crisis and the Deepening Regional Faultlines’, Strategic Analysis 42, no. 4 (2018): 437–442; Jane Kinninmont, ‘The Gulf Divided: The Impact of the Qatar Crisis’, Research Paper (London: The Chatham House, 2019) (https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publications/research/2019-05-30-Gulf%20Crisis_0.pdf).

²⁹ Hunter, Arab-Iranian Relations, 169–175; Seliktar and Rezaei, Iran, Revolution, and Proxy Wars, 127–165.

³⁰ Matthew Kroenig, ‘The Return to the Pressure Track: The Trump Administration and the Iran Nuclear Deal’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 29, no. 1 (2018): 94–104; Steven Simon, ‘Iran and President Trump: What Is the Endgame?’ Survival 60, no. 4 (2018): 7–20.

³¹ However, statements by the leaders of the US and Iran showed a clear intention not to escalate the military confrontation. On 8 January 2020, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared the completion of retaliation, with only a principled reference to the ‘corrupted US presence in the Middle East must end’. Mehdi Khalaji, ‘New Khamenei Speech Underlines the Importance of Popular Support for the Regime’, Policy Analysis/Policy Watch no. 3237, Washington D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (2020) (https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/new-khamenei-speech-underlines-importance-popular-support-regime). President Trump, reiterated his earlier view that he did not want total war with Iran, while ordering the killing of Commander Soleimani for ‘actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region’. Morgan T. Rees, Ideas and the Use of Force in American Foreign Policy: Presidential Decision-Making in a Post-Cold War World (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021): 149–164.

³² Stein, International Relations, 183–208.

³³ Dragomir and Söderström, The State of State Media, 4–14.

³⁴ When retrieving data from Dow Jones Factiva Analytics, it was found that the original data was missing and not all articles from all newspapers for all time periods were retrieved. For more information, refer to Table 2.

³⁵ After reading and corpusifying the data, a stopwords dictionary called Marimo (https://github.com/koheiw/marimo/blob/master/yaml/stopwords_ar.yml), created by one of the authors, was employed to remove grammatical terms. A tokenization process was then conducted. The total number of words in the corpus is 8,020,726,949,939, and the total number of tokens is 18,399,581.

³⁶ For more information on LSS and its algorithm, refer to Kohei Watanabe, ‘Latent Semantic Scaling: A Semisupervised Text Analysis Technique for New Domains and Languages’, Communication Methods and Measures 15, no. 2 (2021): 81–102. Note that this paper discusses the analytical design used in Kohei Watanabe, ‘Measuring News Bias: Russia’s Official News Agency ITAR-TASS’ Coverage of the Ukraine Crisis’, European Journal of Communication 32, no. 3 (2017): 224–241, where threats were plotted from newspaper reports and regression analyses were conducted based on them.

³⁷ The Yemeni newspapers used in the analysis are affiliated with the Hadi government (anti-Houthi), as shown in Table 2. These newspapers are likely to have increased threat reporting against Iran, which supported the Houthis.

³⁸ Two Qatari newspapers were used in this analysis but were not included in the corpus, as it was not possible to obtain articles from either newspaper for a period of approximately two years and 11 months, from January 2012 to November 2014. Hence, the plot for this period is swept out but did not statistically affect the analysis discussed below, as there is no LSS score for that period.

³⁹ As a ‘small state’, Jordan has placed great importance on its alliance with the regional powers as well as global superpowers, especially its friendship with the US, in order to maintain its regime, but at the same time, consideration for anti-US and anti-Israeli feelings and attitudes within the Middle East region and at home was inevitable. Curtis Ryan, ‘The Foreign Policy of Jordan’, in The Foreign Policies of Middle East States. Second Edition, eds. Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2014), 133–155.

⁴⁰ In addition to this, both the GCC and non-GSS states had to some extent, heightened threat perceptions of Iran at the time of the Soleimani assassination, which led to the vitalization of IRGC oversea activities in the region and the establishment of the Houthi ‘salvation government’, which led to the expansion of the Iranian influence in Yemen.

⁴¹ Thierry Balzacq, ‘The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context’, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 2 (2005): 171–201; Adam Côté, ‘Agents without Agency: Assessing the Role of the Audience in Securitization Theory’, Security Dialogue 47, no. 6 (2016): 541–558.