فصلنامه مطالعات عملیات روانی
پیاپی 29 (تابستان 1390)

Following the Islamic Revolution, the way was paved for people's participation in various fields, especially in the political arena, decision-making processes, policy making, and in managing the community. Hence, on average, these has been one election each year since the victory of the Islamic Revolution and people’s participation in the elections has continued to be a significant support mechanism for the existing political system. The Western states assumed that the events following the presidential elections in 2010, which resulted from some political elite’s negligence and ignorance, would diminish national trust, legitimacy, efficacy, and coherence between the people and the ruling system. Given that the security challenges of the elections can damage the core objectives of soft security, including national morale, trust, participation, solidarity, public opinion, political strength, etc., and considering the complexity of the atmosphere of the ninth parliamentary elections, the supreme leader has stressed guarding against the creation of a security atmosphere in the elections. Under this condition, some important questions arise: what are the opportunities and challenges of the coming elections? What kinds of strategies are needed to run lively elections with the maximum participation of people and with no security challenges? The present article delves into the ninth parliamentary elections and its likely security challenges following a soft security approach and provides some suggestions for guarding against the creation of a security atmosphere in the elections.

Islamic Republic of Iran has been faced with cultural attacks since the beginning of the second decade after the revolution and this attack has gradually changed into cultural assault, cultural massacre, and soft threat. Ultimately, following the formation of the cultural NATO front by the West, their soft war against the Islamic Republic of Iran began to take shape. Changing the beliefs, thoughts, behavior and, on the whole, the structure of the Islamic system are among the objectives of the soft threat and soft war. Accordingly, the pressing need for immunization of the Islamic community against the enemies’ soft threats calls for a serious investigation into the practices and tools required for accomplishing this objective. Mosques, as the origin of numerous public movements, seem to be the best circles which can help immunize people against soft threats. Hence, the present paper attempts to explicate the various roles and functions of mosques in fighting against the enemies’ soft threats.

The nature of the PEJAK terrorist group is among the topics which has not been sufficiently inquired into by researchers. Hence, the literature on this topic isn’t rich enough. This group, which is a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P. K. K), has failed to secure a place for itself neither among the people of Kurdistan nor the Kurdish groups and parties. Even the international backers of this group such as America, Germany and the Zionist regime avoid supporting it overtly. In fact, this group does not enjoy the least socio-political legitimacy. Drug trafficking, armed robbery and other crimes committed by this group make it look more like a criminal group than a political party; hence, the practices of this group seem to be more related to the field of organized crime than politics. Nonetheless, given that the enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran attempt to take political-security advantages of this group, researchers need to delve more seriously into its origin and behavior. Examining the formation and behavior of this group, the present article attempts to find out and introduce some of the covert aspects of the conspiracy of the West, America and the Zionist regime in supporting and directing this terrorist group.

Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution, the world of arrogance, which had suddenly been faced with a novel and unprecedented discourse, resorted, in vein, to a variety of strategies in order to block its ongoing movement. Supporting the domestic unsuccessful groups, such as the Monafeqin and the liberals, in order to make the revolution deviate from its course didn’t bear any fruit. The coup plot and local riots failed as well. Then, benefiting from international support, they imposed the longest war of the twentieth century on Iran. However, at the end of this hard war, the Islamic Revolution became stronger and they concluded that hard confrontation models could no more bring damage on it. Then, they decided to rely on soft strategies for confrontation. The supreme leader has been notifying the danger of this new type of war using such terms as ‘cultural attack’, ‘cultural assault’, ‘cultural NATO’, ‘soft war’, etc. since a long time ago. Relying on the guiding remarks of the supreme leader, the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, this article intends to delineate how the enemies’ hard war gave way to soft war. An attempt has been made here to utilize the native models of the concepts in question and, as far as possible, avoid referring to other sources.

Following the Islamic Revolution of Iran, America has never concealed its policy to support the movements aimed at creating disunity and the foreign plots aimed at changing the political system in Iran. In line with this policy and during the sacred defense, this country made the Iraqi regime run its propaganda in coordination with American propaganda policies in addition to imposing its policies on the world news media. Hence, the United States and all the Western and Israeli news agencies were operating as Iraqi propaganda machine. The most complicated PSYOP techniques were being designed and utilized by their experts in this propaganda campaign. This operation was conducted at different levels and in political, social and even economic arenas. Hence, the role of the Western media in running this dimension of the battle is believed to be of great significance. This article has a brief look into the most important features of America’s psychological operations during the sacred defense.

One of the common topics in political literature is power and its derivatives. Power approaches govern the international relations and foreign policy arenas. Hence, studying power and its various facets appears to be necessary. Following the consecutive failures and heavy material and spiritual losses, political actors came to ignore hard power and depend upon a more reliable and efficient type of power, which is known as soft power/war in political theories. On the other hand, it is obvious that benefiting from only hardware and physical resources isn’t sufficient in information and media age and users of power have to utilize modern technologies in information and communication fields so that the goals can be fulfilled with low material and life costs and a higher rate of legitimacy. To accomplish this, for the first time, soft power was introduced by Josef Nye by renovating the features of hard power. This kind of power makes use of some modern tools including psychological operations, spreading rumors, poisoned propaganda, cybernetics, media, satellites, intelligence combat, strategic deception, etc. Examining soft power and its various aspects, this article looks into psychological operations or war, rumor, and propaganda as functional soft power tools.

This paper intends to look into the unrests and protests in Yemen in the first half of 2011, which were formed in line with the modern Arabic revolutions in the region. To gain an accurate understanding of the developments in Yemen, first, the socio-political structure of this country will be introduced, so that the reader can easily put things into perspective. Then, following a discussion on the background of these protests, the roots of people’s dissatisfaction with Ali Abdollah Saleh’s regime, which was manifested in the recent protests, will be dealt with. The cause of the prolongation of the protests and people’s failure to overthrow Saleh rapidly is another issue in explaining which factors such as differences of perspectives, the practices of the opposition forces, and the role of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia as well as the U.S. concern over the Islamists’ gaining power will be considered.