RESEARCH LETTER OF POLITICAL SCIENSE
Year:2006 | Volume:1 | Issue:3|Papers Count:7

This article seeks to survey the most important changes in the world order consisting of international, regional and national orders, in order to explain the challenges and opportunities of the Islamic Republic of Iran's desired order. Doing this, we first look at the international constraints on Iran and then look at its internal challenges. This article argues that in the shadow of changing world order, Iran is facing many bottlenecks which may cause it to loose some of its political, economic, military and cultural capacities. This show how urgent is to find a solution in order to establish an Iranian desired order.

There are various and contending theories of International Relations. All of them have claim of truth and a greater degree of explanatory power. But the question is how we can verify or falsify these theories and their hypotheses. According to the correspondence theory of truth in the philosophy of science, the theories accepted as true whose hypotheses and propositions have consistently and successfully passed a set of reasonable and valid tests. The main purpose of this article is to introduce and explain Boolean comparative approach for external testing of theories of international relations. The Boolean method is a synthetic strategy integrating the case-oriented with the variable – oriented approaches. Therefore, in this study, propositions of neo-realism, neo-functionalism and neo-liberal institutionalism are tested against the evidence of 12 cases or phases of European political cooperation's evolution.

One of the latest issues in social sciences regarding the concept of identity is to explicate the relationship between knowledge and power which has resulted in a kind of "cognitive revolution". In this regard, this article seeks to use new achievements in the literature about knowledge and power in order to clarify one of the most important puzzles about identity i.e., the emergence of new identity or identities. This article's main argument is that the relation between knowledge (or the structure of knowledge) and identity is the main context in which new identities emerge.

Based on political dimensions of the Quran, the tradition of Prophet Mohammad and method of Imam Ali, this article seeks to explicate two concepts of dignity and violence and their relations. This article has two main characteristics. First, it has considered both theoretical and practical issues in Islam and has gathered historical evidences for its arguments. Secondly, the article has an eye on the current issues in the Muslim world in order to suggest some solutions for its problems. The article has first considered the nature of dignity in Islam and whether it is a right or advantage, and then has tried to explain the relation between dignity and violence according to Islam.

Many scholars claim that the era of revolution has passed. They think globalization and democratization have prevented the occurrence of the great revolutions. In the new international system, the global webs of economic interest bind states together and democratization absorbs popular discontent. But, the main idea of this paper is to argue in opposite. It claims that economic, political and cultural globalization may lead to a global revolutionary crisis in coming decades. In this regard, two factors should be considered.First, transnational political institutions are creating a global condition for future revolts. Second, the legitimacy crisis within nation-states, make the world system quite vulnerable to crisis. So, the current situation seems to be calmness before the storm.

Democracy is one of the basic questions in contemporary Iran's political thought. Up to now, this question has received different answers by different approaches. Ejtehad (practicing religious jurisprudence) is one way to answer this question. This approach by employing methodological model of Ejtehad and referring to religious texts, tries to offer a competent answer to this question."Islamic Constitutional Government" and "Islamic Republic" are the most important theories of Islamic Political System. This essay explains these two theories and surveys their ability to answer the problem of democracy in Iran.