RESEARCH LETTER OF POLITICAL SCIENSE
Year:2007 | Volume:2 | Issue:2 (7)|Papers Count:6

While discussions of the state and its structure continue to remain at the heart of political science's themes, there are certain debates on the decline of nation-states. The paper's main question includes whether the Westphalia state, which has passed the stages of its development, has come to an end, or we witness another stage in evolution of this political pattern. Considering the roots of nation-states' developments, the author seeks to reconsider structural transformations of states in three dimensions of concept, structure and political theory. On this basis, we see shift in the organic concept of state to a mechanical one, then change in the structure of large state to small state and finally, we witness shift in maximal theories of state into minimal theories of state. The last part of the paper addresses s1ructural challenges ahead of nation-states.

Johan Rawls' political philosophy has played a major part in discussions of liberal reading of justice in the past three decades and his justice theory has left significant impact on the formation of concepts applied in prevalent arguments within everyday debates respecting justice and, politics in the contemporary West. For this reason, his works, particularly A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism have been identified as the most important works of 20th century political thoughts. In the Law of Peoples, Rawls generalizes the theory of justice as fairness to the sphere of international relations and law, thus making these discussions notable in philosophical terms. This paper first explains briefly the framework and main discussions of the Law of Peoples. In the, second part, some critiques of Rawls' discussions in the book are mentioned, and the third part assesses Rawls' theory from the perspective of its purview in the relations among the peoples.

This is a report from an. experience in was conducted as a two-credit course entitled Workshop and laboratory of Political Science for a number of Faculty of Economics and Political Science's students, at Shahid Beheshti University. The framework of the workshop was a result of experience with applied training of political knowledge and analysis taught to hundreds of experts and managers of the executive and political bodies within the past two decades. In this paper, the author describes two of the examinations that were conducted and the objectives and conclusions thereof The other parts of the paper include collective visit, along with the students, of the faculty and observing its building from inside and outside as a simple and static analogy of structure and order as well as dispatching the individual students to Tehran's different streets and neighborhoods in order to observe and record human and social relationships for understanding dynamic order.

This paper is concerned with understanding Islam's tendency to war and violence by examining the wars waged by the holy Islam's Prophet. The author believes that direct reference to the Koran and the Prophet's deeds (Sunna) and re-reading them could help resolve the today's problems of the Muslim societies. This paper, first, deals with the nature of the Prophet's wars by analyzing the social and cultural conditions dominating the Prophet's era as well as with structural and substantive analysis of his wars. The two other parts of the paper involve an analysis of the Prophet's significant wars with the pagans and infidels, and an examination of the Prophet's conflicts and skirmishes with the Jews, which are dealt with briefly.At last, the author tries to offer a general conclusion of the aforementioned discussions.

What methods have been used in the area of Iran's political sociology whose most important goal is to study the relationship between the state and society? This article seeks to study and critique responses to the said question in Amir Mohammad Haji-Yousefi's paper entitled Typology of Methods for the Study of Iran's Political Sociology, published in the first issue of this quarterly, though this writing goes beyond just critiquing that paper. In his paper, Haji-Yousefi suggested that generally four methods have been used in study of Iran's political sociology including political culture and elitism, class analysis, political economy, and discourse analysis. Offering an overview of Haji- Yousefi's paper, the authors of this paper have stressed on the necessity of expanding the sphere of his four-item typology to other works on Iran's political sociology. Consequently, this effort needs three other approaches are added to the current typology: descriptive historical approach, analytical-explanatory approach, and social movements approach. Moreover, this paper has reexamined such concepts as ontology and epistemology and has formulated the contours of some concepts including method and approach.

Since the concept of revolution, though begins from a mental point, sets out to bring about a fundamental change in the structure of society and the world, will create particular concerns for the international system notably for the large powers as a phenomenon opposing the status quo. Studying Iran's Constitution Revolution and the American Independence Revolution in analytical and descriptive method, this paper seeks to explore the role played by the international system, the great powers' interests and degree of efficacy of this role in the advent of these two revolutions. On this ground, the international system and influential powers are able to intervene in the general factors of the advent of revolution in various diplomatic, financial and even military ways. By granting aid or cutting it of, they can increase or decrease public discontent, the government's financial weakness, enhance or undermine militant groups' organization and idealist thoughts, thus contributing to the success or failure of government in suppressing the revolutionaries.