Strategic Diplomacy

With the complexity of the international system and being in a state of transition, the evolution of regional systems and the foreign policy of countries requires structural adaptation to the strategic requirements of such a transition. What springs from these developments is that the classical analytical thinking of regionalism and the linear conception of foreign policy does not meet the complexities of the uncertainty age. Therefore, this fundamental question has been raised as the present study's direct engagement: How will Iran's foreign policy strategy as a multi-neighboring country with diverse and heterogeneous ones be reconstructed in the context of a complex international system? The paper's major reason lies in multiplex networked regionalism that will serve us as a suitable theoretical model so well to go beyond the linear thinking to the region and outline proactive regionalism based on multi-neighborhood foreign policy. Research findings by using the abduction method, show that drawing Iran's multiplex networked regionalism requires putting innovative and adaptive strategic diplomacy on the agenda and drawing a strategic partner’s map based on smart synerg, which emphasizes the equifinality and dynamic equilibrium between Geopolitics, Geo-economics, and Geo-cultural dynamics.

The main goal of the research was to Identification of strategic elements of sports diplomacy based on soft power in expanding Iran's international relations with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In the first step, by examining the theoretical foundations and research literature, a questionnaire related to the foundation's data theory was designed in order to extract the components of the strategic model of sports diplomacy in facilitating Iran's international relations with the countries of Qatar and the UAE, and information was collected by conducting 16 interviews with experts in this industry. In order to test the model, the community of experts active in the sports industry was used. The following categories of Media policy, Sports cultural diplomacy; Sports economic and commercial diplomacy; Sports public diplomacy; Sports platform diplomacy; Sports political diplomacy and Strategic sports diplomacy were used to design the model. For testing the relationships, Spearman's correlation test method, structural equation model and regression were performed on the data. Results indicate that economic diplomacy, strategic diplomacy and political diplomacy constitute the basis of the model.