مجله رهیافت های سیاسی و بین المللی
سال دهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 55، پاییز 1397)

Regions can be objectively characterized in terms of geographical proximity, political-economic interaction, actors’ attributes, and shared values and experiences. Thus, although we have witnessed four models of theorization on the formation of regions and states’ regional tendencies in the international realms, theoretical reflection on regions’ behavior has been deliberately and directly addressed by rare scholars on regional studies. Having drawn on a descriptive-analytical method and some theoretical scholarship on IR and Regional Studies, the article seeks to develop a theoretical model explaining both relations among regions and variations in their behaviors towards each other. in this framework, drawing lessons learned from pathological evaluating conventional IR theories on regional behavior, and pursuing a normative purpose regarding the necessity of developing an eclectic theory, it concludes  that within different temporal and spatial contexts, different regions usually display distinctively different behaviors in terms of being affected by power- interest- and identity-related considerations operating at intra-regional, inter-regional, and trans-regional levels.

In the field of Islamic political philosophy, there is a relatively new interpretation of Alfarabi’s political philosophy that uses the Foucault’s discourse analysis to see unknown aspects of the Alfarabi’s political idea; the aspects that show the historical relationship between “power” and “knowledge” in Muslim societies. Based on this interpretation of the Islamic political knowledge in general and Alfarabi’s idea in particular, we are faced with the “authoritarian” aspects of Alfarabi’s idea of “The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City”; the idea that arises from the structure of the political power of the Alfarabis’s era, and is formed to expand the hierarchical notion of political order instead of shaping a critical knowledge. In this article, the epistemological foundations of such interpretation are the main issues that will be under discussion in two parts: the “ideological” dimensions of Alfarabi’s political idea and the ways in which Foucault’s discourse analysis can be applied. As far as these issues are concerned, it seems to be some ambiguities in aforementioned interpretation.

The concept of the public sphere is one of the most important terms in the theoretical field of politics as well as in the encouraging deliberative or associative democracies. But the fluidity and disturbance of the articulation of this concept by political thinkers, drawing its main lines and linking it inevitably with other important concepts such as politics and freedom. Therefore, in this paper, by adopting an approach to historiography of ideas based on textual reading, the author has sought to question the ideas such as the public sphere, the political and freedom in thought of Hannah Arendt. It has been argued that the concept of the public sphere is affected by the modernity and the emergence of totalitarian ideologies and mass society, which tends to weaken the realm of political action, and ultimately leads to the collapse of the political. Understanding this, would lead to strengthen the concept of the public sphere as a ground for redefinition of the political in a human-based and friend-based context and ultimately more possible access to democracy.

The success of the right wing populists in Europe and the USA, the left wing populists in Latin America and the populist leaders of parties and different movements in all over the world indicates that populism has once again returned in the spotlight of the contemporary politics. Its main idea is based on the claim of the representation of people or operating in the name of people as the ordinary people or the mass and the contrast with elites, the deep-seated organization or the power block. The political discourse of populism is made by the dualism of “us” and “them”. Here, populism is not an ideology, but a political logic that is a kind of thinking about politics. Specially, the ground of the formation of the new populism- such as the right wing populists in Europe and Northern America- has a connection with the widespread phenomenon of liberal globalization that has special and wide economic, social and cultural features. The scientific scrutiny of this phenomenon and paying attention to its roots is necessary as the first step for the understanding of populism in these countries. The current research, alongside the reading of the theoretical concepts of populism, studies the populism in Europe and the U.S.A and its features, and tries partly to show the background of its formation in these countries.

Developments in the North Africa and the Middle East region in 2011 in Arabic countries include of substantial gaps and challenges in the political, social and economic structure of the Arab world. What happened in the Arab world after 2011 in the form of their natural structure and functionality could extend to the other areas of the Arab world, but Saudi Actions changed the rules of the game. In the new situation, Saudi Rulers perceived the threat and demonization of Iran as their main interest and security policy. In such a condition, international relations theorists refer to it something beyond the cold war between the two sides. This article seeks to examine the conflict formed between the two regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and accordingly, the question is that the tension between the two sides will be assessed by which theoretical analysis capabilities. The hypothesis of the study is that the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia in recent years and months, the realistic framework in its classical form can explain the situation better than Identity-based Security approaches.

The purpose of this research is the analysis of the carnivalesque in folk culture and the study of the possibility of resistance against predominate-monophonic political power. Predominate paradigm in the thinking area of new age introduces language as a new instrument of world-understanding and takes the language positional and a result of its social context. Voices indicate different interests, profits and ideologies and thus language is known as the area of social-political litigations. According to Bakhtin's opinion, there are two discourses in every society: serious and informal (humour). The first one mostly denotes governorship and power state that is interpreted stern and silent. The second discourse expresses usual life, language and folk literature and popular festivals. Bakhtin interprets carnivals or festivals of humour as the best position of manifestation and formation of resistance and realizing the polyphony and thus democracy. In this research, we had an inquiry to find and analyze the components of carnavality like as polyphony in order to the assessment of the formation of resistance in utterance based on sociological description. According to Bakhtin, there is an obligatory relationship between the emergence of polyphony in autocratic situation and irony in utterance. This research assumes that this relationship is necessary for possibility of resistance in utterance.