Security and Development; The Impact of National Security Discourses on Development Plans In the Islamic Republic of Iran

Security and development are two important and crucial issues for governments in the current world and for this reason, thinkers have made lots of efforts to explain the nexus between them. Establishing this relationship is difficult in developing countries like Iran, due to the overcoming of security approaches and security priorities on development. Considering the importance of the issue, in this study we have examined the impact of security discourses on development plans in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The main question of the research is how have national security discourses influenced development plans in the Islamic Republic of Iran? In response to this question, it is emphasized that the contradiction between identity-based security discourse and developmental security discourse has caused inconsistency in content and lack of achievement to goals of the development plans in the Islamic Republic of Iran. To examine this hypothesis, using discourse analysis method, the first attempt was identifying identity-based and developmental security discourses and those attitudes toward security and development through the historical and theoretical reviews. In the next step, by analyzing the content of development plans and considering their performance, we have shown that the reason for not achieving the goals of development plans was the contradiction between those and the security discourses.