Cultural security in the Islamic Republic of Iran

In today’s world, culture directs thoughts and behaviors and regulates relationships among individuals and different groups in society. Culture is the basis of influence in all areas of human biosocial, including the security domain. According to the author, security culture is a culture that determines our approach to security conditions. Security culture is the result of the sociology and social psychology of any nation and is a combination of ideas, narratives, mentalities and beliefs. For determining the role and place of culture in addressing the issue of social phenomena, the author asked the following two questions: What are the functions and approaches of social cultures? And what are the characteristics of Iran’s social culture? In order to answer these questions, the author studied the authentic Persian and English sources using the library method and extracted the necessary information. After studying the background of the study’s topic, literature and theoretical foundations of the study were prepared using the existing sources. In order to validate the findings, a researcher-made questionnaire was distributed among 45 experts acquainted with security and sociological issues of the country as the statistical sample. The general finding of this study is that the characteristics of the country’s security culture can be classified into two stages of “preservation of security” and “management of unrests”. In the first stage, the characteristics of “justice seeking” and “hope for the improvement of situations” and in the second stage, “separation from rioters” and “support of national calls” have a greater impact on the management of unrests. Also, in these two stages, there are some characteristics in common that are very important and among these characteristics, establishing the country’s security culture on “religion” has a decisive position.