مجله رهیافت های سیاسی و بین المللی
سال پانزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 76، زمستان 1402)

The geo-economic rivalry between the United States and China revolves around the framework of infrastructure initiatives, driven by their geopolitical significance. From the perspective of the United States and the West, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was seen as an aggressive move that could potentially challenge their dominance in the international economic order. Consequently, they prioritized significant infrastructure projects to control China's expanding influence. In this current study, we seek to answer the question, "What impact will the U.S.-China geo-economic rivalry have on the international economic order?" The hypothesis posits that, "Despite the economic and trade power expansion facilitated by the Belt and Road Initiative and China's economic penetration, the current superiority of the United States and the West, along with their capacity for restraint in response to proposed initiatives, ultimately prevents the decline of the liberal international order." Analysis, using an analytical-explanatory approach and drawing from written and online sources, suggests that given the objectives and significance of the initiatives proposed by the United States and the West, as well as their dominance in the global economy and technology, and considering China's structural challenges and differences with its neighbors, the West will ultimately maintain its dominance in the international economic order.

Russia's attack has military consequences not only for Europe and the world but also for the exit door. The political-security relations between Iran and Russia have also been affected by this war. Iran is important against war in two ways. First, Iran's direction in this war affects the relations between the two countries. Second, this issue affects Iran's position in the international system. The main question of this article is "How has Iran's behavior been regarding the war and what effect has it had on its relations with Russia?" The authors assume that "Iran has been cautious about the dangerous war, that is, on the one hand, it has not condemned Russia's involvement in the government, but it has also not supported it." This policy is followed to maintain the relations between the two countries. The people who in this article, the theoretical commentator of neoclassical realism, examine the Islamic Republic of Iran against the war and its impact on Iran's relations with Russia. This research shows that Tehran has found war as a factor in improving and developing relations with Moscow. However, the nature of these relationships does not change fundamentally. From Iran's point of view, the drivers and pillars of relations with Russia are stable. Russia's relations are one of Iran's most important geopolitical partners and it has followed one of its strategies. The method of this research is qualitative with descriptive-analytical.

The present article aims to examine the dynamics arised from the AUKUS Treaty on Australia's deterrence and its link with the USA' capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region. The main question is how Australia will fulfill its deterrent role in this region with the AUKUS agreement, and what capabilities and opportunities Australia gains to shape its security environment. The main argument is that the AUKUS agreement creates a defense capability for the evolution of Australia's defense and security strategy, allowing it to adapt its strategy to the cross-domain deterrence of the USA and the United Kingdom as a naval power emerges with a modern fleet. By activating power dynamics in the form of centrality in the Oceania cluster and power linked to the USA' security network in the Indo-Pacific, it controls order through conventional deterrence against China. The research findings show that the AUKUS agreement, by creating synergy between various military and non-military domains, will disrupt the regional order in the region from a "geography of peace" to a "geography of conflict" and cause function of order on the edge of chaos. The article is using the content analysis method of qualitative data collected from reports, national defense documents, updated defense strategic documents 2020 and Australia's maritime security strategy 2022, comments of Australian government officials, the analysis of experts and experts in East Asian defense issues and security study centers have been used.

According to statistics and reports of international organizations, the progress of democracy has been stopped for years and the stagnation, decline and regression of democracy in the world has accelerated. In this article, we tried to answer this question in an explanatory way that why democracy declined in the world? According to the research results, it can be said, changing citizens' attitudes about democracy, mistrust of elected officials, abuse of power, the success of authoritarian models of governance, globalization, neo-liberalism and growing inequality, the Internet and virtual space have weakened and declined democracy. In addition to the decline of democracy in developing countries, the problems of advanced countries such as the increase in living costs, despair of improving living conditions, increasing inequality and polarization of society have led to an increase in populism and the gaining of power by extreme right parties. These parties are against democratic procedures, equality, rights of minorities and immigrants. As a result, it should be said that authoritarianism is increasing and authoritarian leaders in the West are gaining power. Democracy became popular and universal at a time when Western civilization was at the peak of its power and influence. The increasing power of countries like China shows the success of non-democratic models. The West and America in particular are no longer ideal and the developing countries see their ideal somewhere other than the West. In such a situation, the shine of democracy is declining even in the West.

Following Salaf Saleh is the motto of many Sunni Islamic groups in the present era. Emphasizing the issues of polytheism and its examples, monotheism and how to achieve it, as well as fighting heresies in Islamic society are considered to be the most important goals of these Salafist groups. However, in practice, there are differences and, as a result, categories in this current of thought. The importance of the topic is that, on the one hand, in the last few decades, there have been many political developments in the region and the Islamic world, and on the other hand, there have been changes in the field of thought, which requires a new typology of these currents. Therefore, the basic question of the article is that "according to the intellectual and political developments in the new Salafism, based on what criteria can an objective and appropriate classification of contemporary Salafism be presented?" The proposed hypothesis is that the four criteria of "time", "belief", "political" and especially "sovereign unity"( Monotheism of Sovereignty) provide an inclusive and appropriate typology of this movement. For this purpose, by referring to the YouTube social network, audio and video data of prominent contemporary Salafist and non-Salafist scholars have been collected. In the following, they have been analyzed using the qualitative content analysis software Max QDA 2020. The results show themselves in the form of a flowchart, according to which currents of contemporary Salafism follow four paths, which are: fundamentalism, reformist pragmatism, revolutionary pragmatism and jihadism.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of "life" with its political force, at the center of social and political campaigns around the world with the demand of "life", and this has made the necessity of analyzing the political agency of "life" in the political science inevitable .In order to analyze the political agency of life in our time, the hypothesis of this paper is that with we encounter an ontological turn that "Economy" should become a political phenomenon. This is not through an interpretation of economics as the knowledge of maintaining "balance" in the performance of an "economic enterprise" which is dominant in conventional (mainstream) economics; And it is not achieved with an understanding that considers economy and politics as two areas independent of each other, the superstructure or infrastructure of a social order; Rather, it requires the analysis of how the "person" is politicized through the economization of his approach to "the culture of the self". An analysis that is finally an area of political knowledge that has been able to include the economic issue within its scope, that is, it considers the economic drive as the guiding factor of governing "self" which is a part of the general regime of governance. We have proposed a form of "critique of political economy" that will be able to interpret the realm of general economic categories as the realm around which the struggle for the production/reproduction of individual and social life takes place

One of the important aspects of investigating social participation is to explain the type of view and approach of national policies to this concept and its various dimensions. Different institutions in Iran adopt policies at different levels. Focusing on the Meta policies of Iran in various fields, this research aims to investigate the dimensions, considerations and approach of these policies towards the issue of public participation. For this purpose, in the first step, the Meta policies of the Islamic Republic were selected at two levels: the general policies approved by the leader of the revolution and the development program laws approved by the parleman. In the second step, the text of each of the related policies, involved in 52 general policies announced by the leadership (45 thematic general policies and 7 general policies of the development program) and 6 economic, social and cultural development programs approved by parleman were examined. In this review; All dimensions and considerations related to the categories of "People's participation", "Cooperative sector participation", "Private sector participation" and "Non-governmental sector participation" were identified and extracted. The results show that the biggest dimension of people's participation is "implementation of policies" and there is more capacity for people's participation in economic sectors. Some weaknesses are also seen, such as low attention to the role of people's participation in agenda setting, design, evaluation and providing feedback on policies, on the one hand, and low capacity building on the fields and platforms of creating people's participation in the policies under review.

Political sociology has experienced many changes throughout history, and the latest example of these changes is the cultural turn. The cultural turn in political sociology may not be the same in all societies and may differ from one society to another. The article seeks to show to what extent the cultural turn in Iran's political sociology has occurred in the last two decades and what components it depends on. If a cultural turn has occurred in Iran's political sociology, to what extent does political and social construction contribute to it? The data of this research has been collected by using various new theories, semi-structured interviews, expert questionnaires, writing slips from texts and documents. Also, the fuzzy Delphi technique is used as the methodological framework of the article. The evaluations showed that the cultural turn in Iran has occurred and 21 components have been identified. These components can be used as a model in measuring the degree of cultural turn in Iran's political sociology. If we consider political sociology as the relationship between government and social construction, 20 of the 21 identified components are related to social construction and 1 component is related to political construction. The results of the research show that in Iran's political sociology, the fundamental change and transformation that happened was in the social structure and the political structure did not undergo fundamental changes.