حمید حکیم

Geopolitical factors have always significantly influenced the politics and behavior of governments due to the continuity and stability of their effects. In Turkmenistan, due to the geopolitical characteristics of this country, examining and paying attention to these factors and their effects play an important role in terms of understanding and predicting the policies and behavior of Turkmenistan’s government. Also, these characteristics seem to become more important because of this country’s neighborhood and many commonalities with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The main question of this article is about the effects of Turkmenistan's geopolitics on the politics and the behavior of its government. Based on this study, it will be argued that Turkmenistan's geopolitics has, directly and indirectly, affected the politics and behavior of Turkmenistan’s government by creating threats and issues such as instability and insecurity. It has also caused authoritarianism and centralism in the government.

By the advent of various political currents in the realm of power, the Islamic Republic of Iran has witnessed the emergence of sub-discourses that preserve the principles and propositions of the Islamic Revolution's discourse but differ in the subordinate propositions and inter-discourse developments. The latest is a "Moderationist sub-discourse" that has overcome other sub-discourses as the eleventh state started working in Iran. An important aspect of these sub-discourses is the impacts on foreign policy, especially toward the neighboring countries. In this way, Georgia gets significant importance due to its geopolitical features and the great deal of historical, cultural, and civilizational commonalities to Iran. However, due to regional and international changing conditions along with coming up various foreign policy sub-discourses, the relations between the two countries have had lots of ups and downs. On the other hand, after the Russo-Georgian 2008 war, the Russian Federation has exerted great influence on Georgian foreign policy, including relations with Iran. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the question that, regarding the Russo-Georgian 2008 war, how has the Moderationist foreign policy discourse affected Iranian-Georgian relations? Findings of the study show that the presence of the Moderationist subdiscourse of Hassan Rouhani affected Iranian foreign policy and the pessimistic subjective impressions of the Georgian leaders toward the previous Iranian government regarding Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia. As a result, we have witnessed a relative improvement in the relations between two countries in 2013–2017 compared to the relationships of the 2008–2013 period. This research uses the descriptive-analytical method.

By the advent of various political currents on the realm of power, Iran has witnessed the emergence of sub-discourses that preserve the principles and propositions of the Islamic Revolution's discourse but differ in the subordinate propositions and inter-discourse developments. The latest is a “Moderationist sub-discourse” that has overcome other sub-discourses as the eleventh state started working in Iran. An important aspect of these sub-discourses is the impacts on foreign policy, especially toward the neighboring countries. In this way, Georgia gets significant importance due to its geopolitical features and the great deal of historical, cultural, and civilizational commonalities to Iran. However, due to regional and international changing conditions along with coming up various foreign policy sub-discourses, the relations between the two countries have had lots of ups and downs. On the other hand, after the Russo-Georgian 2008 war, the Russian Federation has exerted great influence on the Georgian foreign policy; including the relations with Iran. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the question, regarding Russo-Georgian 2008 war, how the Moderationist foreign policy discourse has affected the Iranian-Georgian relations? Findings of the study show that the presence of Moderationist sub discourse of Hassan Rouhani affected Iranian foreign policy and the pessimistic subjective impressions of the Georgian leaders towards the previous Iranian government regarding Russia`s 2008 invasion of Georgia. As a result, we have witnessed relative improvement in the relations between two countries in 2013-2017 compared to the relationships of the 2008-2013 period. This research uses the descriptive-analytical method.