Evolution of the concept of power and its impact on the regional security strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran

The diversity and multiplicity of meanings and the transformation of concepts is one of the main features of the knowledge of international relations. In the age of globalization, there has been a tremendous change in the sources and types of threats, and power as a tool to repel threats is considered one of the most important and central concepts of international relations. Despite the fact that the traditional understanding of the concept of power (especially in realist theories and influenced by them) in international relations has been a mostly hardware and static understanding, but nowadays the concept of power has faced serious changes. Today, with the intensification of international interactions, the acceleration of institutional changes, the development of the process of global interconnection, the importance of norms and the increase in the role of non-governmental actors, and the development of information and communication technology, the way of perception of power and the mechanisms of its application have also changed and become more complicated. Based on this, despite the predominance of the realism approach in international relations, the definition of power as an ability focused on force has been seriously criticized and a new evolution has been created in the concept and application of power. In this regard, concepts such as soft power and smart power have been proposed. Considering this issue, the main goal of the current research is to review the evolution of the concept of power and its effect on the regional security strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In this article, with a descriptive-analytical method, we are looking for an answer to the question, what effect did the evolution of the concept of power have on the regional security strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran? The findings of the research show that the evolution of power and the ineffectiveness of hard and soft power have led the Islamic Republic of Iran to multiple sources of power and their intelligent combination in the international arena, and the simultaneous pursuit of these two dimensions of power (hard and soft) It has provided the ground to improve the status of this country and deal with regional threats.