نشریه آینده پژوهی راهبردی
پیاپی 2 (تابستان 1401)

Instability in the West Asian region and increasing uncertainties have caused a large amount of the field of vision of political decision makers in the region to decrease. Accordingly, trend research has been considered as an approach that can increase the predictive power based on fixed variables. In such a situation, the main question is raised, what will the future of the West Asian region be like in the medium term?To answer this big question, global and regional political trends in the form of the critical process of political succession in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, the economization of political legitimacy and the fragility of governments with economic crisis, the place of science and technology in the future of regional power. E. the penetration of the Chinese governance model as an alternative to western liberal democracy in the region, environmental crises and new intellectual and social currents, and as a result the crisis of internal politics, fluidity of regional alliances and coalitions and the lack of trust in official regional structures and organizations such as the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council and their weakening are considered. In the upcoming study, a trend research approach was used to investigate political trends, which is based on documentary and library sources, as well as the approach of experts in the field of regional politics to the subject.

As China's foreign policy becomes more active, various regions, including the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, will also be affected. So, many questions are raised about the future of China's policy towards this region. With this explanation, it seems that the main question could be, what will be the future of China's presence and influence in the Persian Gulf region and the Oman Sea? In response, firstly, the actors involved in the issue, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, India, and the Zionist regime, will be identified. In the following, the upcoming scenarios will be discussed based on four key uncertainties, including the state of American military presence in the region, the state of Iranian-Arab tension, the type of strategic industrial cooperation between Beijing and the Arab countries, and the effectiveness of the maximum pressure campaign against Tehran. Based on this, the future research approach in the form of determining key actors, drivers, key uncertainties and designing scenarios will be the focus of the upcoming article, and at the end, conclusions and recommendations will be expressed.

Considering the necessity of scientometric research in the growth and development of all sciences, the purpose of this research is to review and analyze the articles related to this field. The research method is descriptive-applied and includes all the articles in the field of future studies of politics that were indexed in the Science Direct citation database from 1999 to 2022. After filtering the articles, 10319 of them were analyzed with the help of Excel and VOS Viewer software to analyze and display the data. The findings of the research show that the number of articles has been increasing since 1999 and 2020 had the largest share in the number of articles. Also, research articles with a number of 9500 articles, social sciences, and medicine with a number of 601 articles were ranked first. Also, 12 clusters were identified that the topics: covid-19, racism, misinformation, crisis communication, analysis of sentiments have diversity, as well as acculturation, leadership, identity, internet, the government were the aforementioned categories of this field and fields such as; Social solidarity, social participation, political trust, international public relations, collective effectiveness, transformative leadership, legitimacy, social vulnerability, human rights, cyberbullying, human capital and discourse analysis were given less attention. As a result, paying attention to new and hot research areas and neglected areas can be studied by researchers and those interested in this field.

The evolution in the identity of Japan's foreign policy after the catastrophic defeat in the Second World War took place in the form of a transformation in the concepts of Honor. The elites of Japanese foreign policy did not consider honor and credibility in foreign policy in violent territorial expansion, and by giving economic and peaceful content to the above two concepts, they adopted a different direction in Japan's foreign policy. Japan's regional Order building behavior in the form of establishing agreements and economic institutions and strengthening trans-regional economic alliances with the West has shown the objective manifestation of this evolution. The question of the current research is why and how the direction of Japan's foreign policy has changed from violent geopolitical expansion to peaceful geoeconomic expansion after World War II? The hypothesis proposed to answer the current research question is that the elite consensus change in Japanese foreign policy in the content of the two concepts of credit and honor, followed by a change in the identity, role playing and behaviors of Japanese foreign policy to a change from violent geopolitical orientation to It has led to peaceful geo-economics. This has been done through the strengthening of orderly geo-economic links at three domestic, regional and global levels. The research method is an explanatory article, and the data collection method is document-library.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has devoted an important part of its efforts to the policy of looking to the east by strengthening international alliances with the aim of weakening the structural pressures against it. prevent the structure of the international system. Russia, as a superior power in the international system, which has significantly improved its power in various economic dimensions, political and military influence, has received the attention of the policies of the Islamic Republic through the development of cooperation with this center of international power. part of Iran's national goals at the regional and international levels. On the other hand, Iran is considered an important regional ally for Russia to counter American influence in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Considering this importance, the goal of Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran should be to expand strategic relations with Russia, to reduce structural pressures against themselves, especially after Russia's special defense operations in Ukraine. By mentioning this question that along with the new opportunities and the deferred opportunities that exist from the past that were not used optimally, explaining how to efficiently converge in order to make the most of these opportunities can be a huge wall against the sanctions and various pressures of America and In this article, we will explain the West for Iran and Russia with a functionalist approach.

An effective foreign policy strategy is realized by using tools such as promoting economic diplomacy, developing cultural diplomacy and common civilizational and cultural communications, creating a balance of power in the international system, strengthening defense-military diplomacy, public diplomacy and digital diplomacy. In recent years, Iran's efforts to de-escalate tensions with Western powers and resolve the ambiguities of these countries regarding the nuclear program and other areas of tension such as regional activities, human rights disputes, and conventional weapons programs have not been successful. And as a result, the pressure caused by the sanctions on Iran's economy is still there. On the other hand, the developments of the international system during the last few decades, some of which have had a direct impact on Iran, have made the look-to-the-east policy more prominent and raised many questions in the context of the reasoning logic of this strategy, its strategic components, and its place in Iran's foreign policy. The important questions of this research include what is the look-to-the-east strategy in Iran's foreign policy, the strategic components and the future of this strategy in the 10-year horizon, which will be answered by using the concept of neo-regionalism as well as the strategic foreign policy model at two levels of governmental and international analysis. The basic hypothesis of the current research is that the look-to-the-east strategy is more than a choice of approach for Iran, it is a strategic requirement to confront the multilateral economic, political, military and security pressures.