نشریه مطالعات بین المللی
سال سیزدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 52، Spring 2017)

The Japanese government established the well-organized comfort system served by women during the Japanese colonial period, in which about 200,000 women were both physically and mentally abused by Japanese soldiers. In a bid to solve the “Comfort Women” issue between the victims (comfort women) and offenders (the Japanese government) during World War II, several justice mechanisms such as trial, tribunal, reparation programs, and resolution have been applied with no fruitful results. In addition, the Japanese government has never given a formal apology accompanied by a descent compensation through the public fund, despite the acknowledgment of wrongdoing by Japanese officers. The research question of this paper is about what makes the Japanese government refuse to offer a formal apology to comfort women for war crimes committed during World War II.This paper investigates the three factors discouraging the politics of apology. Those factors include stateled ideology, cultural, and geopolitical elements, which are deeply rooted in the regional politics in East Asia. East Asian countries share similar requisites, which are conducive to the development of the regional politics. The paper shows the politics of apology in Japan’s “Comfort Women” case reinterpreted within the regional context of structural, social, and geopolitical complexities unsuitable to reconciliation.

Russian military deployment in Syria should not be considered as the core goal of Moscow’s diplomacy but its instrument. It is also a serious mistake to present Russian efforts in the country as the result of a game of “chicken” between Moscow and the West. Moscow is playing a different type of game that could be characterized as “geostrategic poker”, where the Assad regime is logically considered Russia’s main stake. This stake allows the Russians to influence the situation on the ground and demonstrate their importance in the international arena by positioning Moscow as one of those players without whom the Syrian question cannot be solved. By increasing military support to the Syrian government the Russian authorities simply strengthened their stake. Now they are starting to reveal their hand. The latest developments also show that Russian stance on Syria is determined by the interplay of the complex factors among which the growing security concerns are of the main importance. The Kremlin is worried that the fall of Assad will inevitably bring radical Islamists to power in Syria. This, in turn, will lead to the further destabilisation of the situation in the Middle East inevitably affecting the Muslim regions of Russia. At the same time, this does not mean that Moscow supports Bashar Assad as a person. On the contrary, the Kremlin accepts the possibility of the post-Assad Syria and Russian contacts with the Syrian opposition also demonstrate that Moscow is open to the dialogue. By September 2015, on the eve of Russia’s dramatic military moves, the Kremlin feared that Assad’s regime was on the verge of collapse. The assessment was that the existing levels of military, technological, and financial assistance by Russia to the Syrian regime would only prolong its agony and not save it. Moscow could not afford losing its stake in the Middle East. Intervention was based on a choice between a “bad” and a “very bad” scenario: either a costly military operation to support Assad, or doing nothing as his power crumbled. The Russian leadership was also motivated in part by its perception of what had happened in Libya and Iraq, where—in its view—nothing good came of the complete destruction of the old regimes. It did not want to see the same happen to Syria as, from the Kremlin point of view, this would mean the turning of Syria into another regional source of instability and jihadist threat..

The article deals with enemy images in east and west and their historical invention. Connecting the reader to current controversies about “Muslim bans”, the article guides the reader through the nexus of power and knowledge with a particular emphasis on the discourse of Orientalism and Occidentalism.This type of discourse is retroactive, not only because of its ideological content;, it is in fact and quite directly retroactive. Above everything else, the idea that there are essential, unbridgeable differences between cultures and by extension human beings is simply false. This urge to identify us in strict opposition to others has to be resisted, firstly because it is a false polarisation and secondly because it negates the prospect of dialogue and sustainable peace.

War on terrorism, as the motto which formed the cornerstone of global policies of former neo-conservative administration of the United States, is increasingly becoming ineffective in Afghanistan with the dreaded consequence of spilling over into Pakistan. This inevitable consequence of War on Terrorism in Afghanistan has brought the West face to face with the ‘nest of terrorism’ that CIA built in Pakistan’s socalledmadrasasof extremist Wahhabi teachings in the first place, with the enthusiastic assistance of Nawaz Sharif’s government in Pakistan, the AlSaud of Saudi Arabia and the Al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates in late 1990s. In their evil planning they found it necessary to invent a state history for Afghanistan based on former British colonial designs for the region during their geopolitics of Great Game with Russia in 19th century. They invented the Afghan state by putting together territories they severed from the veiningPersian Empire of the time. This process of state-manufacturing in Afghanistan though served the colonial purposes at the time, never proved to be working in the sense that is expected of a genuinely founded nation and nation-state. The ills of this ill-designed state will naturally disallow any remedy that is not based on a genuine state-building process in that country. To produce such a remedy Afghanistan needs to address the ills of its state-structure by pinpointing the centrifugal forces that drives various ethnicities apart and to try and find some kind of accommodation among components that makes up the state of Afghanistan. The best method to achieve this in today world of politics would probably be a genuinely designed federalism.

The history of international relations represents in vain, that the countries when faced with crises, have made many errors. Most of the decisions of countries have usually lead to huge disasters for the international community. This article utilizes the theory of the international community to acknowledge the dysfunctionality of states’ attention to spending for the wars, siege, and boycott, and torecognize JCPOA’s negotiations as a result of cooperation and power. Using force against Iraq and Afghanistan had no consequent but to help grow terrorism in the world. However, negotiations and granting a positive role to an international actor can help the state to cooperate with the international community. The result of this action would be a stable peace. The Vienna agreement, similar to the Vienna Congress, will start a new era in international relations. This is a new era will be based on dialogue, cooperation, respect and adhere to the principles of international law, and respecting the interests of great powers. The author believes thatthe international security and peace in the world would last, as long as international actors support the JCPOA.