نشریه مطالعات بین المللی
سال پنجم شماره 3 (پیاپی 19، زمستان 1387)

U.S. unilateralism, as demonstrated in an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, has raised several concerns in the international community. One such concern relates to the issue of what constitutes a threat to international peace and U.S. security. Another concern pertains to the rights of the victims of war. The latter concern has been examined in this paper. Waging war in Iraq has amounted to the denial of one of the major principles of the UN Charter: non-combatant immunity. The protections of the victims of war have gained the status of customary international law and have long been guaranteed by treaty. The violation of the principle of non-combatant immunity (the victims of war) in the Abu Ghraib Prison has also raised another set of concerns. This paper argues that intervention and occupation in the name of humanitarian causes are warranted on the grounds of preventing injustice and human suffering. Preemptive strikes, however, pose different questions and present difficulties hard to tackle. Policies that intend to justify preemptive strikes for the sake of exporting democracy or altering a regional political landscape are difficult to defend. To address these issues, we rely on an interdisciplinary approach that draws on insights from public law, international relations, legal and normative philosophy, and international humanitarian law, and international law.

How is a region defined? Who delineates it, and for what purpose? These are some of the questions that are at the center of this article which provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the way ‘regionness’ is defined with regard to western Asia. To that end, it assesses concepts developed within the fields of International Relations (IR), Area Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Political Science. Departing from a critical engagement with the theory of regional security complexes put forward by theorists of international relations, it presents an alternative, cultural explanation of the way regions are constituted with particular emphasis on the security dynamics in western Asia.

In Iran, both the literature on and exercising of simulation models in International Relations are so fragile. This is the reason for which we were not able to find more than a few articles or books in this field. Meanwhile, from the progress in simulation models within international relations, we were able benefit from other sciences. Simulation models could be applied similarly in international relations. This paper attempts to provide an intrerdisciplinary approach to international relations simulation with emphases on methodology, knowledge, surveys, and researcher academic backgrounds.

A critical and practical analysis on intertnational relations shows that experts in this field could not predict three revolutions, including the Chinese revolution, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the collapse of the USSR. In this paper, the author presents an interdisciplinary theory on deconstruction that will answer the demands necessary for reviewing and analyzing issues within international relations. This theory shows that we need multi-perspective, interdisciplinary studies to analyze international issues. Regarding this theory, an a priori mind could help the researcher.

Philosophy, history and sociology have had an effective influence in international relations. This is the realistic nature of international relations—that it relies on other sciences. The social sciences have a history of integration within international studies. First, the philosophy of sciences and anthropology were beneficial to its study, and then history and finally sociology were integral to the discourse of international relations. The latter, sociology, had the greatest influence, offering new methodologies and analytical tools to perceive power, state, dominance, and political parties. For these reasons, the stability of international relations has been largely dependent on sociology. This paper will attempt to analyze the interdependence of sociology and international relations.

Globalization, no matter how it is defined, has definitely caused developments requiring further investigation. These developments may have significant repercussions for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This article seeks to analyze the relation between globalization, on the one hand, and the discipline of International Relations (IR), on the other. The main question we try to answer in the article is as follows: what are the major interactions between globalization studies and the discipline of International Relations and how these have been conceptualized. We argue that IR has been greatly affected by the globalization studies in recent decades. IR’s major concepts have been redefined and its main theories revisited.

In this article the relationship between economy and international relations – as a means of reflecting the interaction between the state and market in the international arena – is discussed from the international political economy point-of-view. With respect to a new world order and economic dominion on an international level, it seems that international political economy has obtained great importance, so that – according to economic reciprocal correlation and its effect on international domain – international relations can not merely be recognized as a geostrategic competition among states. Rather, economic subject matters, new communication channels, and new cooperation patterns created some new global politics in which international political economy and international organizations can play important roles.

Voting as a political participation is a reality in each country. This phenomenon is influenced from different scientific fields, such as economics, social and personal indexes. This is the reason why we should rely on several sciences for analyzing the voting practices. Some of these sciences include psyhcology, economics, sociology, and history from which we will draw and analyze from an interdisipinary view. This paper will review how a voter acts, specifically his patterns, interests, dependencies and motivations. Using the US elections as a case-study, the author concludes that without an interdisciplinary study one is not able to fully analyze the act of voting.

This paper discusses how, during the 1960s, international political economics came to be an interdisciplinary science. Its interdisciplinary nature enables the author to seek comparisons from related fields. Yet, in this analysis, the author finds that international political economics failed to discuss the issue of poverty. This silence has challenged the author to hypothesize that international political economics should be critically reviewed to include theories on market economy and development. In addition, the author is concerned with the impact that international relations has made international political economics. The author concludes that without an interdisciplinary study, one is not able to gain valuable feedback from international political economics.