In an international arena dominated by a few strong states, the foreign policies of the world's weakest states tend to be dismissed as irrelevant. But it is these weakest states that often generate the world's greatest challenges, including cross- border and civil wars, pandemics, and humanitarian disasters. It is only by understanding how weak states come to generate foreign policy that we can develop effective strategies for dealing with them.

Nussaibah Younis uses the case of post-invasion Iraq to develop the tools by which weak state foreign policy can be analysed and understood. Tracing Iraq's relationships with major neighbouring countries and world powers in the twelve years since the invasion of Iraq, she shows how Baghdad's evolving state weakness influenced its foreign policy behaviour. Her volume deals with the Arab World's response to the invasion of Iraq and its fuelling of domestic militancy in Iraq, it maps out Iran's extensive involvement in the Iraqi civil war, it explores the tumultuous relationship between Ankara Erbil and Iraq, and ends with an in-depth discussion of Iraq's responses to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. The study offers detailed and original narratives of these major developments in Iraqi domestic and foreign policy based on dozens of high profile interviews, including with the former Iraqi Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.