A Comparison of Foreign Policy Discourses in Sociology Textbooks during the Presidencies of Khatami and Ahmadinejad

Public attitudes toward foreign policy issues are part of the political culture of every country, and are influenced by the process of formal education and the curriculum adopted by schools and universities. In countries such as Iran with political electoral systems, in which rival political groups have reached no consensus on foreign policy approaches, issues and concepts, it is highly likely that  changes in the executive branch would be followed by fundamental changes in the way the textbooks are designed to provide the students with knowledge about the theoretical and real-world examples of foreign policy challenges. Under different presidents, students might be confronted with different and sometimes conflicting types of values and attitudes toward foreign policy. These changes have been viewed as necessary in order to educate the younger generation to be prepared for foreign policy challenges. When Mohammad Khatami came to power as president in 1997, major changes took place in Iran's domestic and foreign policies, and in turn they led to changes in the content of high school sociology textbooks to reflect new values and attitudes. At the end of Khatami's presidency and the beginning of Ahmadinejad's presidency in 2005, the same books underwent fundamental changes as a new discourse of foreign policy emerged in the Islamic Republic of Iran. These changes indicate the lack of a grand strategy in defining the principles of domestic and foreign policy in a way which is not subjected to the whims and wishes of the dominant political faction and key leaders who win the presidential elections. This variability in the principles of domestic and foreign policy leads to continuous changes in the values and attitudes towards foreign policy issues and challenges in the process of political socialization. The main  objectives  of the authors are to study Iran’s high school sociology textbooks during the presidency of the reformist Khatami’s presidency and compare them to the era of fundamentalist Ahmadinejad.The main research question is: What has been the impact of the change of dominant political faction in the Iranian executive branch on the foreign policy discourse in the high-school sociology textbooks? In their hypothesis, the authors argue that changes in the foreign policy discourse of Iran’s presidency  markedly influence the high school curriculum. Qualitative content analysis method was used to compare the text of three sociology books published in Khatami's era with the same titles in Ahmadinejad's era. The content of each textbook, including text, images and symbols had to be considered as units of analysis in order to investigate major similarities and differences in how foreign policy issues were depicted in each textbook. The main findings indicate a fundamental difference in the patterns of political socialization and political culture related to complex foreign policy issues during the two periods. Although the textbooks  of both time periods reflected  a critical approach to the West, Khatami era’s textbooks was based on the policy of accepting and interacting with the Western world, while Ahmadinejad era’s approach was mostly to criticize the West and emphasize the obstacles in the interactions between the Western countries and the Islamic world. Furthermore, concepts such as diplomacy and international institutions were among the topics mentioned in the Khatami’s textbooks, which provided students with a model of active foreign policy in the international system. In contrast, the textbooks of the Ahmadinejad period indicated the difficulties of cooperation with international institutions and considered confrontation with the key international actors highly likely.