Fear of Iran and considering it as a threat are widely found among the Middle Eastern states as well as on the world scale. The author, in this paper, has explored the causes of this phenomenon and its repercussions for Iran's international status. The author argues that Iranophobia is derived from two categories of structural and non-structural factors. Strength, geographical proximity and aggressive power are among the structural causes of Iranophobia, whereas aggressive intentions and promotion of fear of Iran represent the non-structural causes of the phenomenon. According to the author, the repercussions of Iranophobia include the forging of a coalition with the United States at the pivot and the adoption of soft and hard balancing strategies for containing Iran.

Due to the culmination and continuation of Arab uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, once again the question has risen whether the scope of the uprisings will extend to other parts of the world, particularly in the Central Asia and the Caucasus. Tajikistan, in this region, has far more fragile situation than others and its most significant political-security event in the past was the civil war. Since then, drug transition has posed a remarkable security threat to the country. The July 2012 events in Badakhshan, not only revived the memory of the Tajik civil war in the minds, but showed the fragility of peace in the country. Thus, the study of the roots and consequences of Badakhshan event may largely reflect the political and security prospect in Tajikistan.

Religious tourism is a form of tourism receiving more attention nowadays, whose development is on the agenda. This research is conducted with the aim of designing a theoretical model of the development of religious tourism in Iran, through a qualitative grounded theory. To collect data, profound and unstructured interviews were conducted with 18 experts familiar with the subject. These interviews were analyzed through open, pivotal and selective coding. Some components were extracted from these basic concepts. These components were then classified under the heading of causal factors, pivotal phenomena, grounding conditions, interventional factors, strategies and outcomes of religious tourism development. The causative factors affecting the development of the country's religious tourism were identified in the form of "management of attractions and events", "management of advertisement" and "development of the infrastructure and services fulfilling the needs of religious tourists", and interventional factors including "rules and regulations" and "planning of Religious tourism grand policies" were identified. Grounding conditions included indicators of "cultural conditions" and "economic conditions", and strategies include "marketing", "improving the environmental conditions, "human resource and training", " public-private interaction for the development of religious tourism", "systemic outlook ", and" attraction of investors". The identified consequences included "increasing the remaining of religious tourists", "reinforcing the basic motivations of religious tourists", "increasing the number of religious tourists, " and "increasing the revenue from religious tourist’ s visit of the country. "