World Sociopolitical Studies
Volume:4 Issue: 4, Autumn 2020

Afghanistan is a country besieged by years of instability and unrest as a result of the weak governments that have seized power, especially after King Zahir. Mohammad Asef Soltanzade’s “Brazen Bulls” is the story of the tragedy that befalls a country similar to Afghanistan. The story is an allegory of the atrocities committed against the civilians and the civilians who resort to extreme forms of violence to counteract the government and occupied forces’ measures. The novel has propensities for dialogical analysis as a result of the voices that represent different discourses in the present-day Afghanistan. This paper is an attempt to link the text of the novel to the discursive and social practices that gave rise to the emergence of such novels. It aims to illustrate the way in which literary products could engender discourses that are necessary for forcing effective changes in hegemonic discourse over time. The methodology used to fulfill the purposes of the paper and generate discussion is the critical discourse analysis endorsed by Norman Fairclough.

Signing a preferential trade agreement between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) has created a suitable context for the expansion of trade interactions between the countries of this region. With respect to this context, this paper examines food trade potentials between Iran and Russia as two neighbors with significant economies. Product codes are chosen from the 21 categories of the integrated tariff system based on the global definition of food. Data analysis is based on four trade criteria including the Allen cosine measure, the Revealed Comparative Advantage measure, the simple estimate of trade potential measure, and the Drysdale index over the years 2001–2017. These indices illustrate that Iran and Russia have high trade capacities for some items in certain food groups, and that they can facilitate the process of economic integration through reinforcing regional interactions and intra-region trade expansion, while safeguarding national interests and improving national security. The paper concludes that Iran’s food exports to Russia in a particular set of commodity codes enjoy the potential of expansion due to structural similarities between the countries’ food exports, the increasing trend of Iran’s food export potential to Russia, the increasing advantage of these commodity codes in Iran’s export to the world, and the increasing trade expansion opportunities from Iran to Russia.

In today’s world, which is rife with civil wars, terrorist activities, and different forms of violence, peace has become a complex concept, affected by various social, economic, cultural, political and psychological factors. One of the states of the society, which may pave the way for conflict or other forms of violence is anomie. Anomie, as a societal state, in which there is a threat of violence, war or terrorist activities, provides a rich area of study to develop deeper insights into conflictive contexts. After developing a theoretical framework and using formerly developed measurements and sequence results, we conduct two studies to further investigate the relation between anomie and peace/conflict. Results indicate that internal peace is associated with the breakdown in leadership and social fabric (Study 1A). Therefore, dysregulated and disintegrated societies as the result of breakdown in leadership and social fabric respectively, pave the way for direct and indirect violence. In addition, our results illustrate that anomie has an important role in predicting the contexts where conflict exist (Study 1B). Findings indicate that anomie data can be useful to forecast the contexts in which there is a potential conflict. They also highlight the importance of anomie in being peaceful or conflictive in societies.

Islamic feminism is one of the movements that developed in reaction to the revival of political Islam in post-Islamic Revolution Iran (1979). The present study attempts to seize the major nodal points around which this discourse has been formed. Using Margot Badran’s theory of the convergence of secular and Islamic feminisms, this study also explains the tenets of Islamic feminism in a country where filling the gap between the secular and the Islamic is rejected. It focuses on the analytical articles published by Zanan and Zanan-e-Emruz magazines as two prominent platforms for Islamic feminists to highlight their answers to the modern concerns of Iranian women. The results indicate that the major discursive nodes include: a) women’s Ijtihad and the re-interpretation of the holy texts with a women-friendly outlook, b) human equality exempt from sexuality, c) demands for a conventional notion of justice, and d) recognition of women’s socio-political capacities vis-à-vis their family identities.

The rise of the far right is one of the significant challenges facing European countries;  the growing Eurosceptic and nativist attitudes in Central Europe have resulted in transforming regional alliances according to anti-immigration concerns. Despite the fact that the Visegrád 4 group, (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia), was founded in the early 1990s with the aim of detaching itself from the legacy of communism and pushing towards the Western liberal democracy, it has recently become a base to oppose EU and promote nativism and illiberal democracy. Adopting a descriptive-analytical approach, this paper reviews the rise of nativism and Euroscepticism with a historical perspective, through an examination of the political geography of Central Europe. Findings reveal that the influxes of refugees to Europe and increasing xenophobia, along with cultural concerns, specially about Muslims, have been the driving force behind the growth of the far-right parties. Additionally, the geopolitical situation of these countries and the external borders of the European Union have an important role in turning the refugee crisis into a driving factor of Euroscepticism.

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the deposition of the pro-American Pahlavi regime in Iran, an interest in the country as a mythical, complex, and conflict-ridden place has magnified among the American public. Exilic Iranian memoirs began to emerge after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and surged after September 11, 2001, claiming to provide an authentic depiction and explanation of the  Iranian society and politics and the ways in which it relates to the West and Western interests. The present article aims to analyze the ways in which post-Revolutionary Iran has been framed through memoirs written by Iranian-Americans. Through a framing analysis of fifteen selected memoirs on Iran,  the article identifies and presents six main frames in the analyzed texts based on Edward Said’s Orientalism. The paper concludes that instead of providing a more or less objective depiction that acknowledges the diversity and heterogeneity of the Iranian society and politics, the selected texts reflect the existence of an industry of memoirists that produce content depicting Iran in an orientalist way. Such an approach further inhibits any meaningful understanding and rectification of the existing misconceptions.

This is an open access work published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) Distinguished Professor Amin Saikal is a prominent Australian Middle Eastern politics scholar and media commentator, so his views on the Islamic Republic of Iran reach a wide audience. His view of Iran is one of an outsider, which entails certain limitations in terms of lived experience and cultural knowledge, but he is a native Persian speaker as well as an experienced researcher with first-hand experience of Iran. Saikal’s writing style and choice of content bridges his academic specialisation and extensive media and political commentary experience. Iran Rising thus has less theoretically sophisticated aims and a wider scope than a purely academic work, but seeks to offer a credible and well-informed portrait of the last four decades of Iranian politics, especially foreign policy. In line with Saikal’s blended approach, as well as his choice of the realist paradigm, Iran Rising recounts the main Iranian political headlines since the Islamic Revolution, molded into his jihadi-ijtihadi framework and illustrated by statistics and figures. The book is comprised of two parts, bookended by an introduction (chapter 1) and conclusion (chapter 8). The first part of the book is shaped by the interplays set out in chapter 1 between what he calls Iranian leaders’ jihadi and ijtihadi approaches—equivalent to Principlist- and Reformist-leaning policies respectively—domestic and foreign policies, and regional and international relations. Chapter 2 recounts the main reasons behind the shah’s fall, the key events on the path towards the revolution, and how Khomeini emerged as revolutionary leader. In chapter 3, Saikal describes Khomeini’s political endeavours after coming to power, and divides them into the two categories of jihadi and ijtihadi. The fourth chapter conceptualises Khamenei’s constant approach as leader as jihadi, and describes the fluctuating policies of the first four presidents serving under him, whom he classifies as pragmatic (Rafsanjani), ijtihadi (Khatami), jihadi (Ahmadinejad), and an “ijtihadi-inclined” (120) pragmatist (Rouhani). The second part of the book is thematically rather than chronologically organised, and applies Saikal’s jihadi/ijtihadi conceptualisation to foreign policy. Chapter 5 offers a critical assessment of the Iranian economy in light of liberal capitalist trends, Iran’s hard power capacity in view of its experience and status as a middle power, and the nation’s soft power efforts to promote its unique Islamic government system in opposition to Western hegemony. In chapter 6, Saikal considers Iran’s utilization of these resources in the region, tracking its combination of defensive, conciliatory and assertive measures towards its neighbours one by one. Chapter 7 follows a similar approach but discusses Iran’s relations with the big powers, giving particular focus to US-Iran interactions and the nuclear negotiations. The conclusion presents the writer’s assessment of the Islamic Republic’s key successes and challenges to date, predicting continued oscillations and friction between the jihadi and ijtihadi approaches rather than any system collapse in the foreseeable future. As the scope suggests, Saikal’s book is not designed to analyse the ins and outs of four decades of Iranian politics comprehensively; indeed, some key personalities and events are mentioned briefly or not at all. There is significant overlap between Iran Rising and Saikal’s earlier Iran at the Crossroads (2016), especially in part one. However, Saikal’s more recent work offers more details of the last four decades and adds a discussion of Iran’s capacities and interactions with the wider world in addition to the high-profile nuclear negotiations featured in Iran at the Crossroads. This means that readers with an interest in Iran-US interactions, particularly during the Rouhani-Obama era, may find Iran at the Crossroads more useful. On the other hand, part two of Iran Rising will assist readers wanting to gain a broader picture of Iran’s capacities and its interactions with nations in the region and the world in addition to the nuclear issue and the US. Saikal’s approach, style and choice of content also distinguishes his book from those of other authors. Whereas Axworthy (2009) chooses vignettes and portraits of episodes of Iranian-Shia history since Karbala, Saikal restricts himself to the headlines of the last forty years. While Adib-Moghaddam (2009; see also Adib-Moghaddam 2021) mounts probing theoretical arguments drawing on the critical studies tradition, Saikal makes a realist case. Despite Pargoo and Akbarzadeh (2021, 4) problematizing the “polarised image” of Iranian political factions in their study of presidential campaign discourses, Saikal divides Iranian politics into jihadi and ijtihadi. Compared to often unsuccessful attempts to apply Western-origin labels such as “right” and “left” to Iranian politics (Dowlatabadi, 2021), one advantage of the jihadi/ijtihadi categorization is that both words come from the world of Islam. Each term has a connection to Shia jurists in the sense that both the declaration of a defensive jihad and ijtihad ruling derivation are duties that only a faqih is qualified to undertake. In using these terms, Saikal recognizes the Islamic nature of the Republic, and can be said to acknowledge tangentially its system of the guardianship of the jurist. At the same time, Saikal’s categorization, like any attempt to divide Iran or Iranian politics into two, glosses over the multifaceted and dynamic nature of the world we, and indeed Iranians, live in. While a politician’s faction may certainly affect their policy preferences at particular times and under particular circumstances, dualizing Iranian politics risks producing simplifying assumptions and thus simplified conclusions about what, to borrow from Mir-Hossein Mousavi, is someone else’s “family dispute.” In Iran Rising, Saikal navigates a large volume of material relevant to four decades of Iranian political history in just over 300 pages. His jihadi/ijtihadi framework has some limitations, for example in terms of its tendency to pigeonhole Iranian politicians, but overall his narrative is less polarised than much of the material a Western audience is likely to have been exposed to. Its straightforward language and realist approach make Iran Rising highly appropriate as a media resource or undergraduate textbook for Western students, and the book achieves its goals in this context.