An Exploratory-Structural Analysis of Securitization of Irans' Threat in Arab Countries

Inherent dynamism, the interaction of interests, multiplicity of actors, and universal adjustment in the security patterns of countries has brought about radical security changes in the west Asia region in the last decade. Among them, however, the security contradiction between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been amongst the most important ones that, due to Saudi’s part role in constructing Iran as a security threat among Arabs, added to the security intricacies of the region and in addition to the parties involved, affected some Arab countries to a greater extent. Despite that, the literature studying this issue is scarce and the thin bulk of research conducted around it suffers from some methodological and epistemological deficiencies. Thus, the present research has been an attempt to employ the theory of security construction in Copenhagen school and employ some methodological innovations in humanities, particularly exploratory and structural interpretation, and validating findings through appropriate software and experts’ judgment to identify main components and variables in this threat construction. It was revealed that Saudi’s construction of Iran as a threat had three main components of ontology (including 2 variables), epistemology (including 4 variables), and methodology (including 7 variables). Also, structural interpretation showed that these variables are distributed in a group of critical variables, target variables, risk variables, output variables and leverage variables. These findings were discussed from a variety of perspectives.