Dynamics Of Iranian National Security Strategy (1953-2007)

Although the third World states are large in quantity in the world, the national security studies on this kind of states have been neglected by IR scholars to a large extent. Because the security conditions of these states differed greatly from those of the U.S. and European states, so the approach like decion-making process, which is widely used in security studies of America and European states, can not be directly applied to analyzing the security policies of these countries, nevertheless other methods can be adopted to analyze the security policies of these states.This dissertation focuses on the national security strategy of Iran and its evolution. Located in the Middle East, Iran has been involved in the fierce competition with other countries. The tensions and controversies in the Iranian societal and political process are also prominent. As the consequence, international and internal factors should be included in the analysis of the Iranian national security strategy and its evolution. The dissertation attempts to adopt the method of dynamics to analyse Iranaian national strategy. This method classified the variables which affect the making of Iranian national security strategy into five levels, namely dynamics in the level of international structure, dynamics in the level of regional structure, dynamics in the level of Iranian domestic politics, dynamics in the Iranian society and Iran's strategic resources. The aim of the classification is to analyze how the changes and interactions of these variables drive the evolution of Iranian national security strategy.In the historical periods that the dissertation discusses, Iranian national strategy can be divided into four phases, namely the phase of alliance-building, the phase of Islamic revoltion, the phase of detente and the phase of balancing. The dissertation focuses on how the different dynamics function and interact in the four phases, and how the Iranian national security strategy evolves, which are pushed by the fuctioning and interaction of these dynamics. So after inspecting the static changes of dynamics in certain period and dynamic change in different periods, we can discover the driving forces behind the evolution of Iranian national security strategy.The research of the dissertation has the implications below. The dissertation has summarized the evolution of Iranian national security strategy, analyzed the national security strategy of Iran and its evolution by adopting the method of dynamics, and explored the usefulness of the method on analyzing national security strategies of the middle powers in the third world.