نشریه علوم سیاسی
سال دوازدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 48، زمستان 1388)

Since political philosophy has a philosophical character, it is tied with other important branches of philosophy. Political philosophy has a closer relationship to epistemology, philosophy of ethics, and political anthropology than other branches of philosophy. The present paper, concentrating on the relationship between the Islamic and political philosophy and epistemology, is to study the epistemological dimensions of this political philosophy and to show that the expurgation and classification of the Islamic political philosophy is based on solving what kind of epistemological issues. The paper, first, argues that political philosophy is founded on epistemology, then, refers to some of the main epistemological issues which are the prerequisite of Islamic political philosophy, especially to their normative and value dimensions. Afterwards, the paper elaborates on foundationalism as opposed to the pragmatistic justification of political theories, the problem of the realizability of religious propositions, the problematic of inferring 'out' from 'is', the origin of our knowledge of ethical premises, and selecting teleology or dutifulness.

Since his lifetime, John Locke's ideas have always been considered as the main basis of liberalism by Western writers and analysts. From a different perspective, the present paper is to critically study the foundations of his ideas in the realm of political philosophy and show some their shortcomings and contradictions to which less attention were paid. After having a glance at Locke's cognitive and ethical bases, the first part of the paper deconstructs the foundations of political society and government in his political thought, with topics such as ownership, freedom, tolerance, and the relationship between and religion and the state being studied in the second part of the paper.

The present paper is to explain the characteristics of political justice in discourse of Jurisprudential Political Islam. According to political justice, a country should be managed in a way that people be able to live in a just condition. Equality, freedom, security, and convenience, which are natural rights every individual in the society should enjoy, provide such just atmosphere. In addition, political justice has characteristics, such as equal political participation, equal political selection, and political security for all, which are elaborated in this paper.

The significance of the Iranian Constitutional Movement is now lost under the dust of its fate and the theoretical challenge it posed did not flow in bed of the religious history in Iran. Nor did the related Fiqh-based debates continued. However, the descriptive-analytic studies done in this regard were also performed in the light of socio-political perspectives. Thus, this paper is an attempt to propose a model based on Fiqh to study the Constitutional Movement in Iran and to emphasize on the religious aspect of this movement and the necessity of considering the role of this tradition to solve today's problems.

The concept of democracy has faced many ups and downs in the Middle East and gone through much change. Although the challenges of democracy can be observed in many of the Middle Eastern states, the tensity of such challenges is different in different countries in the Islamic world with respect to their historical, cultural, and economic background. The major hypothesis is that political development and expansion of democracy in the world is the cause of opposing movements in all the Islamic world countries, but the institutionalization of democratic processes is based on a procedure going through which requires more study and precision.

Since the actors of international arena try to use all their possessions, moral values, whether in a divine or in a civil guise, are taken into consideration. Thus, the three pillars of international relations; i.e. power, security, and peace; become quite legitimate. Due to the fact that violation of order is not necessarily punished in the international arena and bigger countries have more opportunity to legitimize their moral values due to their volume of power and control of international organizations, one should realize that morality has a contextual characteristic. As a result, if moral values are helpful, they are used, and if they make it costly or impossible to achieve one's goals, they are undermined.

Concerning theoretical impact, the Iranian Islamic Revolution is a turning point in stimulating the wave of independence and freedom seeking movements in the Caucasus area. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the southern Caucasus countries, despite the existence of an appropriate atmosphere, not only was the Islamic Republic of Iran not much successful to play a major role in the political developments in the area, due to internal and external reasons, except the case of intermediation in the Qarabaq issue, but its influence gradually declined after the independence of the countries in the area. In addition, the Iranian policy-makers, too, did not play an active role in the developments of the northern Caucasus republics governed by Russia. Thus, the present paper is devoted to the impact of the Islamic Republic of Iran on, and its role in, the area.