On 5 June 2017 Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, the internationally recognised government of Yemen and the government of eastern Libya (Tobruk) withdrew their respective Ambassadors from Doha, the capital of Qatar. Two days later the Kingdom of Jordan degraded its relations with the emirate. The conflict, led by Saudi Arabia and UAE, is not new. Indeed, it can be traced back to the 90s when Saudi Arabia supported a coup d’état in the neighbouring country to restore power by migrating that she had been overthrown by her son the previous year. The coup failed and the new emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, pushed ahead with an impressive development policy in the country characterised by attempting to evade the aims of the Saudi giant. Thus, the relationship between Qatar and Saudi Arabia was marked by a first diplomatic crisis between 2002 and 2008, a new coup attempt for which the Al- Thani family held the House of al-Saud responsible in 2005 and another diplomatic crisis in 2014 in the Arab uprisings and Qatar’s support through its media corporation, Al-Jazeera, for the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. However, the current crisis is more intense and deeper, as the withdrawal of their diplomatic representatives has led these countries to cut off all land, sea and air routes, leaving Qatar in isolation. Even more: they have called on Qatari citizens in their territories to leave them and have done the same with their own people in the small emirate. There have also been reports that Saudi authorities have not allowed Qatari citizens to enter the Greater Mezquita in La Meca as part of her pilgrimage to the sacred place. Isolation is not only political but also territorial: Qatar’s only land border is with Saudi Arabia and depends on 40 % of food imports from Saudi Arabia. Without support from other countries such as Turkey and Iran, the latter threatens the diplomatic crisis to lead to a crisis of internal social destabilisation. Department of the Middle East. Institute for International Relations