مطالب

The depth and extension of Iran’s controversial connections with its proxies have caught eyes and thoughts. While much ink has been spilled to Iran's regional policy, the majority of these analyses, either intuitively or deliberately, build their explanation on the so-called ‘Persian-Shia offensive intentions’. Conversely, the present paper seeks the roots of Iran's regional policy in its specific geography and history. From this perspective, Iran’s regional policy is inseparable from its geopolitical strategies. To shed light on these strategies, the paper begins with the rise of the Persian Achaemenes until the establishment of the Islamic Republic, focusing on major driving forces behind Iran’s regional policy and strategies. The paper elaborates on a foundational concept of ‘strategic loneliness’, as Iran’s permanent feature, by highlighting the country’s curse of geography and its long-standing historical insecurity. In following, it shows the consequential impact of Iran’s strategic loneliness for the country’s non-state foreign policymaking strategic connections with military non-state actors—in the containment of its regional enemies. The paper ultimately argues that while this policy has kept Iran’s national integrity and security while entrapped the country in a durable ‘geopolitical predicament’ and deepened regional crisis in the Middle East.

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has been affected by economic sanctions imposed by Western countries especially the U.S. Since 2006 and with increasing Iranian nuclear standoff with the P5+1 group, the United Nations has frequently imposed economic and financial sanctions against Iran. As a result of these international restrictions and their management by an international organization, Iran's exports have been heavily reduced. Given the sanctions on the oil industry in Iran and the lack of a comprehensive model of export performance of Iranian petroleum products in the sanctions period, this research can help improve and develop this industry in international markets. The research method is phenomenological and the statistical population includes export and marketing managers and oil industry experts. Non-probable sampling and snowball sampling methods were used in this research. In this qualitative study, semistructured in-depth interviews were used to gather information, and 7 in-depth interviews on saturation law were conducted. Structural, internal, interpretive, and descriptive validity were used for validation. For surveying reliability, revision while coding and surveying by another informed person were used to ensure correct coding. This research uses a qualitative study to determine the effect of returning sanctions on the export performance model of Iranian petroleum products. After open, pivotal, and selective coding and the use of Atlas quality software, the background of Iran's oil products export performance in sanctions is market orientation, company resources, marketing mix, macro environment, and items of Iranian oil products export performance in sanction includes: financial performance,customer satisfaction and customer retention in sanction situation. Most of the previous studies have focused onpositivism and quantitative research methodology while we used the qualitative and mixed-method in this research. 

Today's world is struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, as one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. During the lockdown caused by this disease, many financial losses have been inflicted on people and all industries. One of the fastest ways to save these industries from the COVID-19 or any possible pandemic in the future is to provide a reliable, fast, smart, and secure solution for people's health assessment. In this article, blockchain technology is used to propose a model which provides and validates the health certificates for people who travel or present in society.  For this purpose, we take advantage of blockchain features such as being unchangeable, errorless, distributed, and a single point of failure nonexistence, high security, and proper use in protecting people's privacy. Since a variety of antibody and human health proving tests against the virus are developing, this study tries simultaneously to design an integrated and secure system to meet the authenticity and accuracy of different people's health certificates for the companies requiring these certifications. In this system, on the one hand, there are qualified laboratories that are responsible for performing standard testing and also providing results to the system controller. On the other hand, entities that need to receive health certificates must be members of this system. Finally, people are considered as the end-user of the system. To provide test information for the entities, the mechanism of KYC tokens will be used based on the Stellar private blockchain network. In this mechanism, the user will buy a certain amount of KYC tokens from the system controller. These tokens are charged in the user's wallet, and the user can send these tokens from his wallet to any destination company, to exchange the encrypted health certificate information. Finally, considering the appropriate platform provided by blockchain technology and the requirement of a reliable and accurate solution for issuing health certificates during the Covid-19 pandemic or any other disease, this article offers a solution to meet the requirements.

This study examines conceptions of outsiders to the polity, focusing on the lexical items migrant(s), refugee(s), and exile(s) in both internet- and print-based sources. Drawing primarily on a subsection of the Genealogies Internet Corpus consisting of left-wing sources, I argue that left-wing politics is currently caught up in the rhetoric of the right and of mainstream institutions in society, largely reproducing the same discursive patterns even as it sets out to challenge them. Dominant patterns in left-wing Internet sources reveal, for example, that the economic migrant vs. political refugee distinction enforced by mainstream institutions remains largely intact, that the assumption of a “refugee crisis” unfolding in Europe is accepted at face value, and that the left is entangled in the same politics of labeling imposed by the right, reproducing designations such as “undocumented migrants” uncritically. Refugees and migrants, moreover, are represented as victims with no agency, are discussed in legal terms that serve to dehumanize them, and are repeatedly “quantified” as a homogenous and potentially problematic category. Acknowledging the contagious nature of dominant discourses and the difficulty of finding an alternative language with which to argue against established institutional rhetoric, the study further explores historical models that appear more consistent with the values espoused by left-wing politics today. It examines a subcorpus of modern English translations of ancient Greek texts such as Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and Herodotus’s Histories to demonstrate the viability of adopting a different conceptualization of refugees and other outsiders to the polity that may be drawn from classical antiquity—and/or from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century receptions of texts originating in classical antiquity—and the possibility of developing an alternative discourse with which to speak about migrants in the present.