مطالب

In this, the concluding episode of the series of our studies into Caspian political geography, I will try to discuss, after briefly assessing the background to what has been known in the past twenty years as ‘the legal regime’ of the Caspian Sea, the latest development in Iran’s perspectives of the shaping of maritime political geography.  In the 1990s, as the world order began to shift, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Caspian Sea’s position in global geopolitics also changed. In debates over geo-legal delimitation of the Caspian Sea in the wake of the Soviet collapse, Iran articulated a position sometimes identifiable with Russia’s initial approach—that the Caspian Sea should be a condominium or an ‘area of common use’ for the littoral states. In late 1996 Tehran argued that the Soviet-Iranian treaties of 1921 and 1940 should determine the legal status of the Caspian Sea as a condominium. Slow progress in hammering out a legal regime on that basis was almost brought to an end for Iran in mid-1990s as outside influence increased over the Caspian oil resources pertaining to states other than Russia and Iran. By 1998 Iranian government shifted its position to a complete curve up of the sea in equal shares for the five coastal states. In May and September 2002, Russia signed protocols demarcating its relevant maritime areas of the Caspian Sea with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, respectively. Meanwhile, academic delegates from the Caspian littoral states in an international seminar at Mazandaran University on the Caspian Sea - Babolsar, October 19–20, 2003 - issued a declaration, on the initiative of this author which put forward a solution on the basis of  a) creation of a strip of offshore zone 25–45 miles from the coastline into the sea to allow an exclusive economic zone for each of the five littoral states, &b) creation of a common use zone in the remaining body of the sea to allow equal rights of use for commercial, navigational and other maritime activities by each of the five . In the latest development, together with the other four states, Iran signed on September 29, 2014, a declaration whereby it was agreed that: there will be two fixed zones determining the legal status of the sea: a zone of state sovereignty and a zone with exclusive fishing rights. These two zones will be 25 nautical miles: a 15 miles territorial sea for each state from their shoreline, and a 10 mile exclusive fishing zone.

This research paper investigates the complex relation between United Arab Emirates (UAE) and their armed forces. While in the Seventies the process of state-making was primarily rent-driven, deeper federation-building efforts has now been focusing on modern integration among the seven armed forces. From a domestic perspective, this strategy has enhanced Abu Dhabi’s neo-patrimonial supremacy on the military system. Armed forces play also a crescent role in the new UAE foreign policy, oriented towards "ambitious engagement" through defense expenditure, cooperative security with Western powers and Nato, regional military assertiveness in the Middle East. Moreover, UAE armed forces and the domestic arena have a circular relation, since pilots and soldiers, due to their commitment abroad, have been gradually becoming vectors for UAE federal consciousness, fostering collective identity and so contributing to enhance Abu Dhabi’s political weight within Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Through qualitative analysis, this paper problematizes the role and evolution of UAE armed forces, in a framework of complex realism.

The four principles of medical ethics -- autonomy, justice, non-maleficence, and beneficence -- can be interpreted as being based on a respect for human life.  Human life, however, is also understood to be multidimensional.  Like folk psychology, medical ethics understands there to be physical, social, mental, and metaphysical/spiritual aspects of human nature. These four categories are a very useful framework of analysis for the larger fields of moral and political philosophy.  The four principles of medical ethics are also compatible with four concepts of equality derived from four different moral and legal systems in Western Civilization which had their separate foundations in religion (Canon Law), nature (Roman Law), society (English Common Law), and the individual (Social Contract Theory). There is, thus, a relationship between the concept of a respect for personal dignity and our common humanity in medical ethics and the concept of equality in the Western liberal political tradition. Medical ethics bring some coherence to the moral categories. They are, also, one source of an applied moral philosophy that can enable cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. Medical ethics have, at least, the capacity to provide a well-balanced source of accommodation in a pluralistic global community, without alienation or coercion.

Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, on account of the entire challenges EFL learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supports in the procedure of teaching listening are proposed by experts in the field. This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts. It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts. To do this, subjects first took a TOFEL test, which served as a pre-test, to make it possible to have homogeneous learners in a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, some pre-listening tasks, through which the learners received general prior information about the content of the listening texts, were performed. Then, they listened to and answered some multiple-choice comprehension questions which asked for the specific information in the listening texts. However, the control group’s listening comprehension tasks were destitute of pre-listening activities. The results of the analysis of the data obtained at the end of the experiment revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group. It also showed that females outperformed the male group. In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.

The male-female differences in burnout and its possible effect on EFL teachers’ performance has not received much attention in the literature of burnout. To address this issue, the researchers conducted this study to investigate the effect of burnout and, more specifically, its three subcomponents–Emotional, Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and Personal Accomplishment (PA)–on the teaching performance of male and female EFL teachers in an L2 teaching/learning context. The participants of this study were 30 (15 males and 15 females) English teachers of five private language institutes and 150 students of the same teachers. The data were collected through the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES) and Characteristics of Successful Iranian EFL Teachers Questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis, independent-samples t test and descriptive statistics were used in the data analysis process. The results showed that burnout does not influence the teachers’ performance in a significant way. Additionally, it was revealed that there was no significant difference between the levels of burnout in male and female teachers. The findings challenge the common belief that burnout can greatly affect the teachers’ performance and that female teachers are more likely to experience burnout than male teachers, revealing instead that burnout does not significantly affect the performance of teachers and there is no significant difference between male and female teachers in their levels of burnout.