Explaining the Sovereignty Holy Defense Decision-Making Process with a Grounded Theory

Holy defense, like majority of the general governance areas of society, has been full of decisions made by policymakers, actors, and beneficiary groups at the macro level. The focus of managerial research of the holy defense so far has generally been on how to manage and decide at the level of military operations, but this study focuses on how to make major (governance) decisions regarding it at the level of high-ranking national and military officials and tries to answer some questions such as "what are the factors affecting the decision-making of politicians and commanders of the holy defense?", "what are the influential actors in the governing decision-making process of the holy defense?", and "what are the steps of sovereign decision-making process of the holy defense?" These questions ultimately provide the answer to the main research question: "What are the dimensions and components of the sovereign decision of the holy defense?" For this purpose, and due to the lack of relevant theoretical and research background, the application of a qualitative approach and a Grounded theorizing method based on the viewpoint of "Strauss and Corbin" was included in the research agenda. The results of the research by conducting interviews with the governing actors of the Holy Defense (mostly with members of the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarter during the Holy Defense) as well as conducting a separate study on the decision-making process for the adoption of Resolution 598 and other written documents led to the formation of 996 key points in the form of 142 concepts as well as 43 abstract categories. These categories were then classified into 6 sections defined in the major coding paradigm of research. Finally, the theoretical propositions of the research were obtained by performing selective coding in the form of 5 theorems and 12 theoretical sub-theorems.