hegemony

The United States’ relations with Cuba are rooted in the US intervention in the process of Cuba’s independence from Spain in the 1890s. The US preserved its interest-based approach towards Cuba during the first half of the 20th century, which culminated in the Cuba’s counter-hegemonic revolution in 1959. This revolution led to more than fifty years of hostility between two countries, which took a new form under President Obama’s administration. Indeed, Barack Obama and Raul Castro surprised the world in 2014, announcing that they would reinstate full diplomatic relations and pacify bilateral tensions. Since World War II, United States has been the hegemon of the world relying on three pillars of its liberal bloc, i.e. liberal values and culture, economic and military capabilities, and international organizations. However, during Obama’s administration, the occurrence of events such as the rise of new economic powers, Global Financial Crisis and the rise of left-turn in Latin America caused some speculations about the declining US hegemony and its transition to leadership. However, qualitative content analysis of the US Inter-American policies indicates that US hegemony in Latin America including Cuba is deeply rooted in the early decades of US formation. Moreover, the continuation of US economic embargo on Cuba and its long-lasting military presence in the island indicate that Obama’s policy did not provide a leveled playing field to resolve Cuba’s problems. Hence, US leadership in Cuba and true and equal partnership between both countries still seem unattainable. 

Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel and his sole masterpiece, Invisible Man, is said to have been one of the world’s greatest African-American novels. It is replete with discussions of racial discrimination, identity crisis and studies of systematic (racial) exploitations. The depictions are coalesced with existential accounts of bodily sensations and struggles with the self and the society. But a more profound look at the context and deep structure of this novel can reveal its ideological and social critiques as well. In fact, Ellison had arguably acquired a well-versed knowledge regarding power-struggles within social systems prior to the development of this lengthy novel. Such issues, then, appear to be among the sidelights of this work. Ellison explores many political discussions of his predecessors and sometimes prophetically unearths many to-be-discovered issues and theories, years before their actual coinages by theoreticians and sociologists like Michel Foucault. With this hindsight, this article tries to study the novel’s oblique or direct references to social ideologies, hegemonies, and the theory of Panopticism at stake.

Economic sanctions imposed on Heterogeneousstates have played an important role as a tool of pressure in recent decades. Considering that most non-conforming states with the US are important players on the energy market, a large part of this country’s sanctions policy has been focused on the energy sector. With the evolution of the US shale oil industry, using energy as a tool of sanctions against target countries has received increasing attention by US presidents in recent years. The US is using the geopolitical shift as an international strategy to compete with other powers in the energy sector such as Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. The US aims to use its energy embargo policy to curtail the influence of these players on the energy market and prevent their anti-American policies by fermenting economic crises within these countries. The question arises as to the extent of the effectiveness and sustainability of this US foreign policy strategy in a transitional international order. The article hypothesis is that due to inefficient unconventional resources in terms of market crisis, the rise of counter-hegemonic coalitions, and geopolitical tensions in regions such as the Middle East, one cannot be too optimistic about the sustainability of this situation. The authors of the article will endeavor to explain the above hypothesis within the framework of the hegemony theory and by using the trend-analysis technique, while addressing the driving forces.

among different theories concerning the relation between spirituality or ethics and politics, the acceptable one is the inseparability of spirituality and politics. Because, based on a rational conception of the world, there is not any convincing justification for separation between the two categories. In a true understanding of religion, there is no separation between religion and politics and all religio-political principles, teachings, values must be simultaneously ethical, rational and just. Therefore, there is no space for any type of immorality, irrationality and injustice; because, they are against the world’s objective; meaning man’s highest perfection. If all are not just towards one another based on the Divine Revelation, man and societies cannot improve their spiritual aspects of life. The schools of thought which consider religion’s objective as mere individual salvation, neither pay attention to religion’s socio-political aspects, nor understand its socio-political dimensions. In between, the political systems and politicians that intend to acquire, preserve and increase more and more power, and know that the Divine Books and the Holy Prophets are the greatest obstacles on their way, try to hide the true understanding of religion and keep people ignorant about them. For them only the theories, which can explain dirty hands and legitimize the absolute authority of domination of wealth and power, are very beneficial and should be supported.

The relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been a confrontational one in the past four decades and been influenced by the nature of the Islamic Revolution and its derived system. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States tried to expand its ideals and structure of the desired order by using the power components in international system as a hegemonic power. However, Iran generally considers the US hegemony as a special type of domination and given the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran with a unique ideological discourse, the resistance against the domination hegemony is necessary and therefore counter-hegemonic strategies and policies have always been  Iranian policy priorities. This article aims to investigate the relationships between the two countries by using descriptive-analytical method in the framework of Neo-Gramscianism and in the hegemony power and counter-hegemony forms. The findings of the article show that in order to maintain its position of hegemony, the US has applied policies such as the coercive diplomacy, the soft warfare, de-legitimization of Iran and legitimization of the use of pressure through the international institutions against the country. In response Iran has tried to confront the US hegemonic position by adopting self-reliance policies, by making alliances and coalitions as well as pursuing independent political discourse in international system.