STRATEGIC STUDIES OF PUBLIC POLICY (STRATEGIC STUDIES OF GLOBALIZATION JOURNAL)
Year:2020 | Volume:10 | Issue:35|Papers Count:17

The aim of this study was to evaluate the foreign policy of Islamic Repulic of Iran during the last four decades from the perspective of institutionalism. The main questions of this study is “ what are the basic institutions in the foreign policy of Iran? ” , and “ why these institutions do not achieve some of their foreign policy goals? ” . It was assumed that the parallelism in foreign policy-making institutions of Iran (religious, bureaucratic, democratic, and militaristic) and the non-observing of the institutional requirements by these institutions have led to their failure in achieving their foreign policy goals. The results showed that in the field of foreign policy of Iran, there is a coalition between bureaucratic, democratic, religious, and militaristic institutions which has led to complexity of foreign policy decision-making. The numerous institutions and decision-making centers has caused Iran’ s foreign policy sometimes to fail to achieve its goals. In other words, these harms not only cause failures, but also problems that brings a lot of dissatisfactions.

The victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the change in its relations with the international system, especially the West, as well as withdrawal from the alliance with the West, provoked anger of the U. S., because it weakened the US influence in Iran and, consequently, put pressure on Iranian regime. Sanction in various fields is one of the most important US tools against Iran; most of these sanctions are on Iran’ s aviation industry. In this regard, this study attempted to determine the effects and consequences of sanctions on the aviation industry of Iran by focusing on the main actors in the political and legislative structure of the U. S. including Congress, the Treasury Department, and Office of Foreign Assets Control. This study provides a more realistic picture of what the US government is doing about sanctions against Iran so that the policymakers have a more accurate knowledge of the matter and the origin of the sanctions on the aviation sector, pay attention to the destructive effects of the sanctions, and adopt and apply the best executive instructions in this regard.

Countries’ economic dependence on fossil fuel consumption has led to growing demand for a stable supply of oil and gas. Hence, energy pipelines have become very important as the most stable method of energy supply. The South Caucasus, despite its small area, is an important region for energy supply, but, due to the geographical constraints, its pipelines must pass through adjacent regions to reach the market. By making the best use of this situation, Turkey has not only become a transit route for energy in the South Cauca-sus, but also it provides part of its domestic needs. This descriptive-analytical study using quantitative and qualitative data, seeks to answer the question: What is Turkey’ s role in the energy geopolitics of the South Caucasus? and what are the consequences of this role for Iran? Using the two concepts of “ energy transit country” and “ energy hub country” , the hypothesis that Turkey has become a transit country for the South Caucasus was formulated. In the context of energy geopolitics and the theory of neorealism, it was argued that without Iran’ s participation in energy transfer projects, Turkey’ s regional influence would increase compared to Tehran, especially in economic terms.

The failure to form a balance of power against the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union for quarter century has been a new phenomenon in international relations. Liberal thinkers attribute this, in addition to the US’ s extraordinary military might, to a set of factors called “ soft power” . Establishment of international institutions, organizations and regimes, production of public security, financial, commercial and economic goods, multilateralism and avoidance of unilateralism, and domestic liberal structure are the main features of US soft power that have given the United States a position as a Liberal hegemony in the established international order. However, under President George W. Bush, unilateralism and indifference to certain international structures and institutions in American foreign policy cast doubt on pure optimism about the benign hegemony. After the presidency of Barack Obama and the inauguration of Donald Trump, he pursued a policy of “ America First” , a terrible retreat from many international institutions and regimes, refusal to produce public security and economic goods and ending what he called “ free riding” , economic nationalism, pure unilateralism in the international system, and ultimately disregarding the interests of other actors, including friends and allies, and posed a serious challenge to the liberal and benign hegemonic position of the country.

Iran's space program is one of the areas that have generally faced with a critical reaction from the U. S. and its allies. However, Iran has always stated that its space program has the necessary legal and international legitimacy and will continue to develop and expand it. This study aims to examine the legitimacy of Iran's space program and argues that the main goal of the U. S. is to represent Iran’ s space program as a threat to build an international consensus against it. This is a descriptive-analytical study and data were collected through library method (reviewing documents, online papers and statements of relevant authorities). The findings showed that the United States, focusing on a part of Iran's space program that is for launching Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV), intends to use it as a proof for development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) capable of carrying nuclear warhead and, thus, represent Iran's space program as a threat to international peace and security. The two main pillars of the U. S. strategy focus on the coverage capabilities of Iran's satellite carriers (to be represented as ICBM) and its cargo-carrying capability (to be represented as ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads).

The global economy has witnessed a complex and wide-ranging trade war between China and the United States since January 2018, and has now turned into a technology war with the sanctions on Huawei and ZTE companies. The US trade war with China is a zero-sum game with no winners and severely damage both sides. So the question is, why did the U. S. start a trade war against China, and what are the consequences of this trade war? The US trade deficit with China and the competition for dominance in the global economy is one of the reasons for this trade war, which, if continued and intensified, will reduce the growth of world trade and create two US-and China-centered economic blocs. The purpose of this study is to show that China’ s growth in recent years, especially after joining the World Trade Organization, has led the U. S to mention China as a strategic rival in its National Security Strategy document, and see it as a threat to US dominance in the global economy; hence, with the trade war against China, U. S is trying to curb China’ s growth.

The confrontation between U. S. and Iran has a relatively long history, and the recent challenges in the areas of military, nuclear weapons, proxy wars, missile programs, Zionist security, human rights claims and etc. have intensified it. The present study aimed to identify the key drivers of U. S. threats against Iran by combination of futuristic approaches including fuzzy delphi method and cross-impact analysis. By using the opinions of a panel of experts, 52 effective drivers were first identified, and after four steps of Fuzzy Delphi process, the number was reduced to 10. Then, with cross-impact analysis, the key drivers were determined. The results showed that “ proxy war” and “ Strengthening the military power of countries in the region” were the key drivers of U. S. ’ s military threat against Iran, due to their simultaneous impact and being located in the northeast region.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the typology of group conformity and its role in development of the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) group using qualitative method based on the grounded theory. The study population consisted of all national and international resources including articles, lectures, news websites and reports, interviews, videos, etc. produced during 2014-2018 (4 years) about the ISIS group. For sampling, due to the qualitative nature of the research, 42 resources that meet the inclusion criteria were selected for qualitative analysis. Based on the findings of the research, membership in ISIS group can be explained by the interaction of external situational factors and interpersonal factors, under the influence of ruling context and interventional variables using different strategies, such as informational conformity type in the first step and the continued activity of ISIS members under the influence of normative conformity type. Increased tension in social relationships and interpersonal personality are among the consequences of membership and continued activity in the ISIS group.

The main purpose of this study is to examine the new dimensions of security in the international agenda with emphasis on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Therefore, the main question of this study is what are the new dimensions of security according to these two documents? And what steps have successful countries taken in their policies in this regard? In this regard, this descriptive-analytical study aimed to investigate the evolution of the concept of security in the theoretical dimension of international relations (change from the narrow-based security to broad-based security), and report the practical measures taken in Japan, Sweden and Canada, which are the most successful governments from the three continents of Asia, Europe and the United States in the field of new dimensions of security, according to a 2018 UN report about ranking of countries based on progress in implementing SDGs. The Buzan’ s Copenhagen School was used to explain the concept of broad-based security. The findings of this study showed that, along with the evolution of the concept of security in the theoretical dimension of the international relations literature, some governments have taken very serious steps in their public policy and have been very successful.

The level of attention to the problems and challenges of oil revenues in Iran and, consequently, the governmentalization of the country’ s economy requires a revision of the structure and institutions in the country’ s economy. Iran has a land border with seven countries, especially Iraq, and water borders with a number of countries in Central Asia, Caucasian, and the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi market is a good opportunity to expand the export of Iranian products. The main purpose of this study is to identify strategic factors and emerging themes and challenges in foreign trade between Iran and Iraq. The used research method was the analysis of theme and statistical data of the Iranian International Trade Center. A semi-structured interview and purposive snowball sampling was conducted on 12 experts in the field of foreign trade and scholars with enough information about foreign trade in Iraq. We identified 10 important challenges after data saturation, including economic diplomacy, quality, added value, foreign direct investment, government support for infrastructure development and modernization, inefficiency of export management companies, lack of export diversification and economic complexity, and restructuring of the economy is based on the policies of the resistance economy. The results showed that the most important economic strategies and prerequisites for Iran’ s foreign trade were structural change and the use of indicators of economic complexity for producing products based on science and technology and domestic capacity.

Today, with the complexity and chaos in the international system, regions are greatly affected by the logic of complexity. One of the important regions affected by the security order complexity is the Middle East. This descriptive-analytical study aims to explain the Middle East security order in a complex situation. According to the complexity theory, this study tries to explain the complexity in the regions and then the Middle East is presented as a case. The question is: What are the principles of the Middle East security order in a complex situation? Hence, it was assumed that nonlinearity, dynamics, and being in chaos are the main features of the security order complexity in the Middle East. The results reported that the Middle East security order is nonlinear and based on a novel fuzzy logic.

Political participation plays a critical role in establishment, preservation, and perpetuation of democracy. In this regard, a lot of research have been conducted to address factors contributing to the political participation in Iran. In this study, we present a critical meta-analysis of studies on the political participation in Iran. By using a purposive sampling method, 13 papers were selected from among papers published in the last 10 years in local journals. Analysis in three main areas (definition of dependent variable, theoret-ical foundations, and theoretical framework) showed that the studies suffer from epistemological weakness in all areas. Most of these studies had been conducted micro-level analysis; their Literature Review section had no logical coherence; had no coherent theoretical framework; and there were methodological problems in different parts. The idea of political openness and, consequently, effective participation, as well as the media and membership in associations and organizations were the most important factors in increasing the normal political participation of people (voting behavior), while fatalism and feeling of powerlessness were the factors reducing it.

The question of the present study is that How Americans view Iran, and how Iranians can influence this view? We extracted more than 4000 items from numerous public opinion polls conducted from 1979 to 2017. The overarching observation is that Americans have a consistently negative view of Iranians, which does not seem to be changed for decades. The United States foreign policy has been in line with public opinion. Iran has been “ unpopular” for more than 70% of Americans at various times, and 70-90% of them have always considered Iran as a “ friend” or “ enemy” of the United States. The propaganda and inductions of anti-revolutionary media have played a major role in shaping this negative view of Iran in American public opinion. It seems that establishment of an institution for monitoring and managing the international image of Iran and responding to ambiguities in this field can improve the image of Iran to some extent.

Regarding the dramatic growth in the research of COVID-19, evaluating their impact identify the dimensions of existing knowledge for this virus and evaluation indicators and support policymakers in science and technology to make decisions and planning accurately. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the policy impact of health researches in the field of COVID-19 with an Altmetrics approach. Other objectives of the study include the study of the popularity of this subject in social media, governance systems, and policy documents that have benefited from these studies, their thematic dimensions, and the policy impact of COVID-19 clinical trial researches. This was an applied research conducted using Altmetric and content analysis indicators. Based on the above, all the researches of COVID-19 in Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane was extracted and observed in the Altmetrics database, which returned 4308 researches in COVID-19. 95% of COVID-19 research was mentioned on Twitter. Among them, %0. 01 referred to policy documents, of which %45 were related to Switzerland and %36. 6 to the United States. Seven of these were conducted as a clinical trial. Topics covered in policy documents of COVID-19 included public health services, clinical sciences, and medical microbiology. Current health systems have become entirely complicated due to various changes and faced several challenges. With the current pandemic, studying various aspects of COVID-19 can play a significant role in order to correctly identifying this virus, informing society, and providing proper guidance to solve health issues at the national and global levels. Using web metrics are useful in tracking the cultural, social, and policy dimensions of researches and monitoring user interactions on social media, especially Twitter, which is an attractive media for academic and non-academic users in a wide range of medical sciences. Moreover, the mentions of these researches in policy documents, in such a short time, express the importance of them at the high policymaking levels of countries, specifically those in clinical trials.

The COVID-19 has spread throughout the world, causing many problems for developed and underdeveloped countries and changing the existing systems and structures, including human lifestyles. Lifestyle can be divided into two distinct periods; before and after the COVID-19. From this perspective, the post-corona era means the beginning of a new and different era of the world. The purpose of this study is to investigate the dimensions of modern lifestyle in young people in the post-corona period conducted in Iran. This is a qualitative study with phenomenological approach. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview of 21 people in Neyriz, Fars, Iran who were selected using a purposive sampling method. After analyzing the qualitative data, six main themes were identified including health-centered lifestyle, family-centered lifestyle, media-based lifestyle, community-based lifestyle, culture-based lifestyle, and leisure-centered lifestyle, each which have subcategories. The COVID-19 outbreak, despite being a burden on society, provided a good opportunity to reconsider and rethink the lifestyle of young people faced with massive changes.

In the event of an epidemic crisis, such as the outbreak of the Covid 19 virus, the widespread consequences of the virus rapid spread in the fields of political, social, economical, health and medical will require governments, organizations and managers to make various strategic decisions. These crises cause many problems. Therefore, in the present study, a new method of strategic decision making called “ strategic loss” has been introduced and also its applications have been explained. The present research method is analytical description of the estimation type and also is a qualitative study that examining the literature of the subject with the method of thematic analysis. In addition, the different applications of this decision-making method are expressed. In addition, the strategies used to achieve the strategic loss have been investigated. The results show that the strategic loss decision-making method is used to take advantage of opportunities and pass with minimal damage from crises accompanied by multiple uncertainties. Finally, “ heroic flexibility” is introduced as one of the examples of this decision-making method.