Public Diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran vis-à-vis the Islamic World: Challenges and Threats

The values and concepts promoted by the Islamic Revolution and its lofty ideals have given rise to an innovative notion that has played an effective role in international relations and developments. The semantic commonalities and close religious and historical background have made this role of considerably more effects in the Muslim world. Public diplomacy seeks to shape public opinion and serve national interests. keeping this in view, the Islamic Republic of Iran, too, has paid substantial importance to the role of public diplomacy with regards to the implementation of its foreign policy and conveying the message of the Islamic Revolution. The present research work, which has been drafted in a descriptive-analytical methodology by resorting to library text including books, papers, documents, and speeches seeks to examine the public diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran vis-à-vis the Islamic world and within the framework of soft power. By the same token the objective is to discuss the adopted strategies and to assess their functionality. The question that the present study intends to answer is: what are the challenges of the public diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran vis-à-vis the Islamic world. In order to answer this question, attempts have been made to categorize and analyze the challenges of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s public diplomacy with regards to the Islamic world both internally and externally. The hypothesis is that non-prioritization of goals, neglect of research work, existence of parallel institutions, insufficient use of cyberspace and soft power in the area of information, use of mechanical and mass media, insufficient allocation of budget, unqualified of manpower and weaknesses of mass pose major challenges in this area. As regards the foreign relations aspect, mention may be made of political and economic pressures and sanctions, enmity of certain religious inclinations and false foreign propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran with the objective of destroying its image at the international level.