Re-reading the Social and Material of Relations between Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia in the “Sazandegi Government”

Following the Islamic Revolution, Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia entered a decade of conflict and confrontation as a recurring pattern in their relations. But identity, geopolitical, and international developments in the 1990s resulted in a change in the recurring pattern governing their relations. The purpose of this paper is to re-read the relations of Tehran and Riyadh in the post-war period in order to analyze “how and due to which causes, the two countries moved from conflict and confrontation to improving their relations”. The question in this paper is “what factors caused the dominance of the co-existence pattern instead of conflict in Iran - Saudi relations between 1989 and 1997?” The finding of this paper, which is a descriptive - analytic study, and uses two approaches of social (constructivism) and material (realism), is that “the social structure governing the relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 1989 – 1997 led to an improvement in the anarchic international and regional environment, which had caused suspicions and mistrust of the two countries. Moreover, the change in the hostility between the two countries, caused the co-existence of them based on non-conflict of identity, and the transformation of geopolitical conflict into competition, despite the structural pressures.