The project aims to reconstruct Switzerland’s role in the Middle Eastern Conflict during the Cold War era, focusing on how developments in the Middle East and North Africa influenced the security and foreign policies of the Swiss Confederation throughout the postwar decades. 

Contrary to the prevailing narrative of Swiss Cold War policy as merely oriented toward the European theatre and East-West dynamics, this dissertation argues that the MENA Region served as a critical testing ground for Switzerland’s neutrality doctrine, repeatedly forcing Bern to navigate competing crises. Drawing on Federal Archives materials, diplomatic correspondence, and intelligence assessments, the analysis aims to fill a research gap by tracing Swiss responses to several pivotal junctures and their implications: the 1948, 1967, and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, Nasser’s non-aligned policies, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and finally the rise of religious extremism in the 1980s.

To protect the own population and assets without giving up its substantial economic interests, the Confederation discreetly aligned with Western security frameworks, while rhetorically distancing itself from great-power interventions. At the same time, Switzerland learned to exploit its mediation and cooperation efforts along with its humanitarian and good-offices diplomacy not merely as altruistic engagement but as strategic instruments for cultivating influence and intelligence access, eventually becoming a prestigious piece on the complex chessboard of the Cold War. While trying to maintain a credible neutrality, Swiss authorities had to face economic and political pressures, scandals, espionage, and terrorism. These foreign and domestic challenges, closely related to the MENA Region, compelled significant statecraft adaptations, precipitating lasting reforms within federal security and diplomatic architecture, while contributing to laying the foundations to post-Cold War frameworks or even anticipating them. 

Besides offering broader insights into how neutral states manage competing imperatives of economic interdependence, security alignment, and normative legitimacy in volatile and peripheral regions, this thesis reconsiders Swiss Cold War history by decentring Europe’s role and foregrounding the Global South's agency in shaping the Confederation’s policies.