Princes and Fractured Kingdoms: A Comparative Analysis of Regime Resilience in Sudan and Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Religious ideology serves as an important tool to maintain a regime’s resilience, especially when it is used as a foreign policy. This process has not been theorized by scholars of International Relations and Comparative Politics in a way that could explain how a regime can maintain its coherence through using foreign policy. Alongside the use of findings of previous studies, the objective of this study is to provide a new theoretical perspective for the study of that policy option. It applies that perspective through using Sudan’s support for the Eritrean Islamist Jihad Movement (EIJM) and Saudi Arabia’s backing of armed Islamist movements in Syria as case studies. It uses the case studies to explain how both Omar Hassan Ahmed Al-Bashir of Sudan, and King Abdullah Ibn Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, maintained the coherence of their regimes that were plagued by factional rivalries which threatened to destabilize them, and ultimately remove the leaders from power. Likewise, both leaders used Political Islam, that was advocated as a foreign policy by the competing factions within their regimes, and which explains their support for the armed groups in Eritrea and Syria, respectively. This study provides insights for Comparative Politics and International Relations, Area Studies, Civil- Military Relations, and the intersection between African and Middle East Politics.