Middle East region

The Middle East and the Persian Gulf have witnessed an escalation in conflict and instability over the past few years where tense relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia has had an undeniable effect in creating such a situation. From Iraq to Syria and from Lebanon to Yemen, the two countries have been competing with each other. Furthermore, Tehran-Riyadh disagreement over energy strategy and nuclear activities has been other source of tension and confrontation between the two countries. There is a concern among researchers that how this crisis can be managed. While some scholars see hegemony of a superpower like the United States or a regional power as the best solution to handle this challenge and the others believe that collective security system is the best option, the research aims to illustrate balancing is the most possible and realistic scenario in the Iran-Saudi Arabia rivalry for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, first we canvass these two regional powers rivalry in historical context and then offer practical implications and recommendations to change the status quo and reach to the more stable region. The research method would be descriptive-analytical and the data is provided from library and Internet sources.

The current research explores the water crisis and the security in the Middle East region. It ad-dresses the challenges and solutions in terms of lack of available fresh water resources and its unbalanced distribution in the face of increase in water demand as a result of the industrializa-tion of societies, population growth and negative effects of climate change which leads to the occurrence of water scarcity and turning it into a global crisis. Hence, concerns about the lack of water resources in the world in recent decades have led to two general speculations about the future. Relations between governments should be formed around international water resources. One hand, there are those who predict that in the near future, water will be a reason for creating violent conflicts between governments. On the other hand, there are writers and theoreticians who believe in the "catalytic" nature of water for the approximation of governments and more cooperation in this field. The issue of water has emerged both in the form of war and coopera-tion. In the meantime, the need for water in the dry and water-scarce region of the Middle East, the weakness of the international water cooperation systems and the numerous political-economic and social tensions in it, have created the arena for the emergence of water-related security threats in this region.