درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In the wake of the capture of Iraqi lands, especially Mosul by the ISIS, the talk of disintegration of Iraq was ever more serious in political circles. The idea is still at issue even after the collapse of the ISIS and its defeat in Mosul. The main objective of this study is to examine whether ethnic and religious conflicts are powerful enough to lead to Iraq’s disintegration. Considering the recent developments in Iraq with pretexts of ethnic and religious conflicts, the question considered in this article is whether this situation could pose a threat to the territorial integrity of Iraq or not? Monitoring the positions of internal groups of Iraq, U.S. interests as well as neighboring countries including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey indicates that disintegration of Iraq would not be beneficial for these countries and it will cause farther violence in the region. In this research, the roles of certain Foreign & domestic or International & national elements in the Iraqi politics and society are being analyzed. A study of the effect of the three variables of Kurds, Sunnis and Shias on Iraqi disintegration or integrity indicates that the Kurd variable has the largest contributing effect on Iraq disintegration while the other two variables show lesser potential for driving the country towards disintegration. Nevertheless, the interests of the regional and trans-regional states combined with the geographical situation of Iraq as a landlocked territory prove to be an obstacle in the way of disintegration of the country. According to the findings of this research, the territorial disintegration of Iraq does not seem to be a viable scenario and territorial integrity of Iraq is more consistent with the objectives and interests of local communities and foreign governments. <br />  <br /> 

Since the 18th century, the western world has gone through political and economic alterations. Gold has been of economic importance over thousands of years in several civilisations. It gained international economic significance during the 19th century, when several countries officially adopted the Gold Standard. With the world becoming more intertwined, gold has found new importance for economies and investors alike. It has been a safe haven during a time of economic crisis which has been reflected on its price. This paper examines the development of gold in a changing global, political and economic environment. For investors it has become a safe haven during the crisis, but how reliable is gold? How far can investors predict gold’s worth in times of crisis and what kind of crises drives gold? The interplay of global players, governments, their policies, currency strategies and large private investors have complicated the predictability of the gold price. Hence, the present study is aimed to analyze the reliability of gold when countries are headed into crises as well as economic and political impacts on the gold price, using content and data analysis method based on library resources<strong>.</strong>

From emergence of ancient civilizations in pre-history era to the dawn of early 21st century in contemporary history, the world has witnessed a variety of ways according to which members of international community tried to solve their disputes and find peaceful solutions for their conflicts. However, a very recent mechanism, which proved to be fruitful, is moving towards integration and convergence within the region they belong to.  <br />Defining and drawing the lines of common interest is the first step in this long road. It is the objective of this paper to explore that how moving towards regional integration based on geographical closeness, cultural interaction, and economic cooperation can create the framework for a geopolitics in the Middle East leading to a new regional subsystem in international system ending decades of bloody wars and costly destruction and promising a better future with peace, stability and welfare for its nations. The paper also argues that a minimum level of mutual understanding, mutual trust, and political will, and less intervention by outsiders are among necessary preconditions for this process to begin. The paper finally evaluates the challenges facing this approach from an Iranian perspective. <br />  <br /> 

Security doctrine is an official viewpoint in expression of national security considerations; a viewpoint, which is planned, based on different foundation & considerations of political units. This doctrine is operated within strategic solutions format and tries to maximize the security of the territory as the most important political concern in general meaning and geopolitics in particular meaning by offering decision-making strategies to the country leaders. In this regard, studying the security doctrine strategic solutions in geopolitical discourse of the transition period with emphasis on the 4 theories of environmental, economical, locative-spatial and cultural, are the main issue of the current article. The importance of the issue is the final goal of geopolitics as a science of locative-spatial study of the political phenomenon with emphasis on the power, security maximization by the territory capacities.  Based on the above mentioned, identifying the security strategic solutions is required in the views of this science. The main question is about, what are the security strategic solutions in the above-mentioned geopolitical view? The author is explaining his hypothesis based on descriptive and analytical methods by using library resource tools, as below: "Security strategic solutions of changing the current situation, peace and preemptive war are suggested for the views of geo-ecology, geo-economy, locative-spatial and geo-culture." The current results show that every geopolitical theorists needs to suggest territory safety secured by different security strategic solutions with a particular focus in order to success in operational fields.

The current article aims at studying the elements of continuity and change in Iran’s foreign policy toward the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis during Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hassan Rouhani’s administrations. It tries to answer the question as to which factors have contributed to continuity and change in Iran's foreign policy toward the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis between 1997 and 2018? The article shows that although the principles of Iran’s foreign policy toward the South Caucasus and the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis have not changed during this period, the changing role of the external powers – Russia and the West – as well as different foreign policy priorities defined by the three administrations, have caused changes in Iran's approach to this issue. An inductive approach and a qualitative research method has been used in this article. Official documents, news and research articles have been used as the main sources of data in this article.

In recent decades, the role-playing of the media has paved the way for the emergence of a new discourse named popular geopolitics that has the potential to link public opinion to geographical policies. Researchers in the context of popular geopolitics seek to evaluate methods of representing geographical phenomena and geopolitical events in media such as cinema. The current study, given the significance of The Concept of the Political as a kind of discourse in popular geopolitics and its impact on public opinion, seeks to choose the Middle East geopolitical region as the subject of the Hollywood cinema representation to examine the structures that try to guide public opinion and increase its power in the region with the help of The Political tools such as political romanticism and political theology. In this context, selected works of cinema made during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama between 2000 and 2015 have been selected for this analysis.

Human life is tied with space through spatial emotions and the sense of place. Although existence of spatial emotions plays a vital role in the creation of space and in some ways reflects the presence, tale, culture, and feeling in the place and space and in this way assists man in there, in some situations this issue can lead to some challenges which are rooted in discriminative approaches that divide humanity into "us" against "others". In the critical human geography and critical geopolitics, scholars mentioned numerous factors which are influential in this dividing. One of the main factors which plays a significant role in this process is "geographical imagination" which obtains semi-logical reasons for a group of individuals and some states and powers to exclude other social, political, and ethical groups from "us". This subject can influence people and encourage them to ascribe wrong facts to individuals who are categorized as "others" and misattribute their spaces and places as dangerous locations. This spatial approach, consequently can result in labeling some spaces as "spaces of fear" and through this generates a wide range of social, economical, political and spatial problems and restrictions for individuals who are considered as "others or them".

This study focuses on the democratization in Iran from 1909 to 2013. I show that Iranian society experienced four waves of democratization. I argue that although Iran has experienced long-run processes of democratic change, the country has not yet been able to establish a democratic system. Meanwhile, these long-run processes of democratic change have led to long-lasting institutional change, realizing some of the minimum criteria of the transition process, including periodic elections. I set out a theory by which democratization increases parallel to the degree of socio-economic development. Importantly, I argue that successful democratization hinges on political elites strategically choosing to refrain from repression. The strategic choices made by the élites determine the main process of the transition stage. I use a novel dataset collected from 33 parliamentary and 11 presidential elections. Using multiple linear regression model, I find that socio-economic development and elite agency explain 0.42 percent of the variation in electoral participation and 0.62 percent of the variation in electoral competition. When elites decide to repress oppositional forces, the democratic transition index decreases by an average of 13.93 units.

Borders which are specified by natural, man-made or contractual terrain specify the sovereignty limit of a state in a territory and with passing a line-like distance and the border line between two countries we will reach another state with a different political structure. The sensitivity of the border concept and the huge effects it has one national security and wars and conflicts and as well as on interactions between the countries has attracted a special attention toward it. Political geography as the main knowledge regarding the studies about the border possesses a more extensive background comparing to the other related sciences. Typology studies and classification of the borders with studying border from physical or cultural point of view and classifying it based on border conflicts have allocated a special place to them. In line with this, Jones has provided his classification of borders according to their relationships with the type of border conflicts. Considering this approach, the international borders of Iran also, as the lines confiding the territories of this country, have formed a significant part of the academic and geographers, and especially political geographers have conducted management studies in Iran and a large part of these studies. In this study, we intend to classify Iran’s border in terms of Jones perspective with the use of analytical method and from political geography viewpoint. <br />  <br />