An Empirical Analysis of Studies on Iran's Foreign Policy

Scientific products, especially academic articles, can be regarded as one of the major indicators of the status of a field of study. This article, by focusing on articles published in Iranian peer-reviewed journals, seeks to present a critical evaluation of the field of foreign policy analysis in Iran. Since the major interest in this field is Iran's foreign policy, 135 articles with such a focus published from 2009 to 2014 were evaluated. The articles were analyzed in terms of their methodological approach, theoretical frameworks, research strategy, types of data, and topics. The findings show that although in some aspects most of the articles follow a general positivist approach, other characteristics of articles do not match this general orientation. Realism has been proved to be the main theoretical framework applied, FPA approaches have been applied in few cases, and little has been done to develop an endogenous theory to explain Iran's foreign policy.