چکیده:
This article tries to apply discourse analysis، as a research framework، to Iran’s foreign policy. Discourse analysis of foreign policy mostly focuses on language and rhetoric used by policy makers. Discourse analysis is not only related to comments and speeches made by Iranian officials، it also puts to test behavior which takes place in social context. To this end، the author explores main political discourses shaping Iranian identity and foreign policy behavior since the Islamic Revolution. These discourses impose a particular revolutionary language on Iranian foreign policy، and give meanings to the country’s foreign policy behavior. This article assumes Iran’s foreign policy، initially and before starting its interactions with the international community، has been subject to revolutionary discourses as major resource for the country’s definition of its identity and interests. This discourse assumed to be a revolutionary identity: it is occasionally strengthened or moderated due to aggressive or non-aggressive normative environment at the international level. The discursive context at both the domestic and international levels will help us understand confrontational and non-confrontational relations between Iran and the western countries in post revolutionary era.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In order to explain Iranian foreign policy in post-revolutionary era, one should try to understand two important variants: first, basic discourses of the Islamic Revolution, and second, the nature of international normative environment.
The normative discourses of Iranian foreign policy mainly originate from political Islam, Shia religion, the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, speeches of Imam Khomeini and historical background.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a new set of normative discourses affected political rhetoric of the country’s foreign policy and transformed Iranian identity from a status quo pro-western to a revolutionary anti-western one.
In fact, the research argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran, initially, makes its priorities based on its domestic social discourses which shape the country’s post-revolutionary identity.
Accordingly, this study examines that on the one hand, identity of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been constructed by its normative discourses at domestic level, and on the other hand, the previously held identity affected by social interaction at the international level (mostly by its relations with the western countries in general and with the United States in particular).
Iran’s foreign policy discourse consists of several signifiers such as non-domination, independence, resistance, anti- arrogance campaign, nationalism, Islamic unity, and responsibility which all have been articulated around the nodal point of anti- western revolutionary identity.
The detailed analysis of theses discourses illustrates set of meanings attached to identity of the Islamic Republic of Iran which is the basis for interests and behavior of the state in foreign policy.