With the beginning of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010, many countries in the regions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) lost their political stability and faced social turmoil. Therefore, countries like Syria or the Iraq are now facing civil wars between several different types of terrorist groups. Organisations like the Islamic State (IS) used the permanent instability to occupy broad regions in these countries. The siege of these terrorist organizations also affected international companies that settled in the MENA region. This thesis puts its focus on the location strategy of international oil companies (IOCs) and how the political instable conditions in these regions affect these strategies. Due to a superior endowment of natural resources, the MENA region is a lucrative choice for energy companies. The IOCs for these studies were chosen based upon the amount of produced Barrels of Oil Equivalent (BOE) per anno and their pre-existing engagement in the MENA states. As a basic underlying model to carry out the analysis for this thesis, the Diamond Model created by Michael Eugene Porter was used. This model, was published in the report of “The Competitive Advantage of Nations: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance” in the 1990s. In order to be able to measure the impact of political instability on the location strategy of IOCs, an exogenous parameter of the model - “the government” - took on a major role. Furthermore subject-specific literature was considered. First, a taxonomy was applied on the MENA states to cluster them among their country risks into predefined categories. In a second step, the changes in the location strategy of the IOCs were analysed. By merging the results of the taxonomy and the changes in the location strategies, this thesis shows a sustainable impact of the political instability on the strategic location strategy of IOCs in the MENA region. |