فصلنامه روابط خارجی
پیاپی 23 (پاییز 1393)

Research Fellow at the Institute for Middle East Strategic Studies (IMESS) in TehranWhat impact has the Syrian crisis had on Iran-Turkey political relations? Some analysts argue that divergence in Iranian and Turkish outlooks and roles played in the Syrian crisis have adversely affected their bilateral relationship. But the authors believe that in spite of the conflict in Iran’s interests and Turkish policies towards Syria, their broader relations in other areas –security and economy- have prevented the rupture of political relations. In this regard, after briefly describing the nature of the Syrian crisis, Turkish foreign policy strategy in the Middle East will be explained. Then, Turkish-Syrian relations prior to the outbreak of the crisis will be analyze, followed by a discussion of Iranian and Turkish foreign policies towards the Syrian crisis and their impact on their mutual relations. The authors will conclude that although the Syrian political crisis has given rise to certain tensions and adverse consequences in their political relations, their bilateral ties have persisted as manifested in high-ranking diplomatic meetings between their political authorities and in ongoing deliberations on important regional issues.

This paper aims to answer this main question that how recent Turkish foreign policy toward Iran can be analyzed? In this regard, this paper tries to analyze Turkish foreign policy toward Iran in terms of dual concepts of securitization and desecuritization. In this respect, the hypothesis of this article is that over the recent years, Turkey’s foreign policy towards Iran have been formed based on desecuritization of domestic and foreign issues. Turkey’s internal problems extensively had influenced Turkish foreign policy toward Iran in the past. However, in the first decade of the 21st century, this strategy was transmitted to desecuritization process. In fact, this change in Turkey is a consequence of the process of the country’s accession to the EU and the Justice and Development Party's rise to power, in 2002. Desecuritization has been the dominant trend in the two states’ relations before the Arab revolutions. However, after the Arab revolutions, particularly following the Syrian crisis, there has been a possibility to move from desecuritization to securitization.

The United States policy towards Iran has been driven by geopolitical considerations during the Obama tenure; consequently, the bilateral relations between Tehran and Washington have been a dependent variable to geopolitical competitions. The Islamic Awakening in the Middle East and North Africa left important imprints on the geopolitics of the region and thereafter on the nature and domain of Iran-U.S. competition. The most noticeable characteristic of this phenomenon was that people turned into the primary and active actors of the regions’ political scene. As a result, geopolitics of the region underwent changes by this previously absent factor. In fact, the Islamic Awakening has shifted the balance of power in the regional countries internal politics in favor of people who have long been discursive addressees of the Islamic Republic of Iran and to the detriment of the U.S. allies in the region i.e. the despotic rulers. In other words, the waves of the Islamic Awakening placed Islamic Republic of Iran in powerful and the United States weak positions. As a result, in the midst of regional revolutionary developments, the United States found Iran one of its most important rivals and took measure to counter the Iranian influence. Intensification of counter-Iranian measures was even seen as one tactic to manage and divert the Islamic Awakening. The present article seeks to deal with the issue of the impact of the Islamic Awakening on the U.S. policy towards Iran. The hypothesis the article follows is that “the United States’ failure to anticipate and manage the Islamic Awakening in the Middle East and North Africa led to intensification of its offensive policy towards Tehran with the aim of countering Iranian use of the new regional opportunities and also introducing the Islamic Revolution model as inefficient to the peoples of the region.” This strategic approach was manifested in the policy of sanctions intensification.

NATO's military intervention in Libya (2011) as the first case of using military force in the framework of responsibility to protect entailed many legal and political challenges, especially in the realm of legitimacy. With a special emphasis on the responsibility to protect doctrine, this article tries to briefly discuss that intervention in terms of its legitimacy and its political aspects and also to present a legal analysis of the intervention. Along these lines "understanding the subject, understanding the rule, applying the role on the subject and conclusion" are considered as the four stages of the legal analysis. Studying "NATO's air raids on Libya", "establishing a no fly zone", and "regime change issue" are the subjects of analysis, and to understand the rule, the tenets of "1973 UNSC resolution" and "principles of responsibility to protect" are examined. Then, by applying the appropriate rules on the subject of analysis, the authors conclude that 1973 UNSC resolution –which was exposed to many interpretations – was enforced by NATO on the basis of some interpretations which are contrary to the letter of that resolution. On the other hand, the overthrow of Kaddafi's regime enforced or facilitated by NATO was in contrast with the principle of responsibility to protect and NATO's declaration. Therefore, many legal disputes and ambiguities were raised about the NATO's performance in Libya.

Many of International Relation and Foreign Policy scholars use concepts such as power, security or interests to describe act of actors. In the other hand, members of non-conventional stream of IR in a reaction to the main stream, effort to describe "how to constitute the concepts". But, there is a third way that describe act of actors with other concepts such as "reputation restoration". The hypothesis of the article is: "the reputation restoration is the final goal of Iran in its efforts in nuclear program". The main question of the article is the methods of the restoration. The article recognitions two processes of such a restoration: reputation restoration from shame and reputation restoration from insults and uses the components of the processes in two eras of the program.

Differences between naturalists and their opponents gave rise to different methodological approaches to understanding social relations and phenomena. This diversity of approaches manifested itself, especially in the study of international relations, in the fourth debate. However, the common feature of all these perspectives arising from the specifications of modern science is neglecting an explanation based on a relationship between efficient and final causes. The question is that is it possible to obtain a more appropriate understanding of phenomena and behaviors in social sciences including international relations? The author claims that paying attention to this linkage, expressed as teleological explanation, would bring about a special kind of explanation which compensate the failures of a constructivist and interpretative understanding and mush contribute to the understanding and analysis of important issues in this realm including the causes of conflict and cooperation, on the one hand, and give attention to the evolutionary and deliberative dimensions of this relationship and the impact of ends on constructing the identity of factors, the depth and extent of the rules of the game, agency structure, action process and imposition of its moral and normative constraints, on the other hand. This article describes teleological explanation by using an argumentative method and studies its implications for the study of international relations and its impact on analysis in this field of study.

The critical theory, on the basis of prescriptive power in the realm of international relations, seeks to deal with the emancipation of men from all structural and identity bonds, considered scared, under some hegemonic concepts. This goal is pursued by relying upon a form of epistemology formulated by the first and second generation theorists of Frankfurt epistemology. The importance and necessity of studying this kind of epistemology and its impact on international relations theory have prompted the authors to show the impact of an emancipatory epistemology on international relations theory from a certain perspective, on the one hand, and to study the contribution of the critical theory of Frankfurt school in the realm of international relations, on the other hand. Therefore, the question posed by the authors is that what are the effects of epistemological features of the critical theory on international relations theory? The hypothesis advanced by the authors is that the impact of these features captures a wide range of issues such as state identity, gender, poverty and inequality, war and peace, etc., in the form of different theories.