مطالب

By the advent of various political currents on the realm of power, Iran has witnessed the emergence of sub-discourses that preserve the principles and propositions of the Islamic Revolution's discourse but differ in the subordinate propositions and inter-discourse developments. The latest is a “Moderationist sub-discourse” that has overcome other sub-discourses as the eleventh state started working in Iran. An important aspect of these sub-discourses is the impacts on foreign policy, especially toward the neighboring countries. In this way, Georgia gets significant importance due to its geopolitical features and the great deal of historical, cultural, and civilizational commonalities to Iran. However, due to regional and international changing conditions along with coming up various foreign policy sub-discourses, the relations between the two countries have had lots of ups and downs. On the other hand, after the Russo-Georgian 2008 war, the Russian Federation has exerted great influence on the Georgian foreign policy; including the relations with Iran. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the question, regarding Russo-Georgian 2008 war, how the Moderationist foreign policy discourse has affected the Iranian-Georgian relations? Findings of the study show that the presence of Moderationist sub discourse of Hassan Rouhani affected Iranian foreign policy and the pessimistic subjective impressions of the Georgian leaders towards the previous Iranian government regarding Russia`s 2008 invasion of Georgia. As a result, we have witnessed relative improvement in the relations between two countries in 2013-2017 compared to the relationships of the 2008-2013 period. This research uses the descriptive-analytical method.

This paper examines US general election debates to discover whether or not the Republican and Democratic candidates equally present Iran as a major US foreign policy issue. Petrocik’s Issue Ownership theory was employed as the theoretical framework of this paper. The Issue Ownership theory asserts that since American voters perceive the Republican and Democratic parties to handle different sets of political, social, and economic issues better than their opponents, each party will highlight and emphasize issues that they are regarded to own during elections. In this regard, Petrocik’s theory predicts that since the Republican party is perceived to handle foreign policy and national security-related issues better than their Democratic opponents by American voters, their candidates are more likely to bring up foreign policy-related issues while Democrats are more likely to avoid such issues during presidential campaigns. Overall, 13 US general election debate transcripts from among the 16 General debates held from 2004 to 2016 were selected for analysis using the Critical Case Sampling approach. The analysis, which utilized the Critical Framework Analysis method, resulted in seven major thematic categories concerning Iran: nuclear program, threat, sanctions, negotiations, war, Iran’s influence, and sponsorship of terrorism. The study finds that although Republican candidates did present Iran as a major foreign policy issue more frequently than their opponents in US general election debates, there was an element of convergence on Iran. Therefore, contrary to what the Issue Ownership theory would have predicted, the Democrats did not typically avoid nor show any hesitancy in talking about Iran.