The great majority of the world's legally sovereign states are small. The conventional view among scholars and policy-makers has been that size is the determining factor of state-behavior and that the lack of surplus capabilities in small states limits their capacity to act autonomously both at home and abroad.

The co-authors acknowledge the constraints of "smallness," but at the same time, this book argues for a more nuanced view of small states. In doing so, the authors frame their discussion in terms of the extensive and constantly evolving theoretical literature on small states.

They also draw on a wide-range of small state case studies, with a special focus on the recent blockade of Qatar, to analyze the opportunities as well as challenges that small states must deal with as economic and foreign policy actors in the contemporary global system.