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Environmental sustainability and human settlement are tightly intertwined with water. Therefore, water has had a history-maker function throughout the history of ties between human communities and politico-spatial units. Over the past decades, water consumption has increased in parallel with a reduction in the levels of these strategic resources, thereby orientating the hydro politics-based foreign policy of nations, particularly in low-precipitation regions. In this vein, Iraq’s geographical position is such that several seasonal and permanent rivers running in western Iran flow into its western neighbor, providing for water supply security in some eastern regions of that country. Over the past one and a half-decade, drought-stricken Iran has moved to harvest water flowing out across its western borders, which has consequently reduced water inflow into Iraq and stirred up hydropolitical tensions between the two nations. This research aims to identify effective driving forces in transforming hydropolitical tensions to water cooperation between Iran and Iraq. The functional data required for this research has been gathered by the library-survey method (interview and expert forum) to be analyzed with a combined quantitative-qualitative approach and applying structural analysis. The research found that water diplomacy has a strategic role in reducing hydropolitical tensions.

As an academic field in the study of politics through geographic and naturalistic approaches, geopolitics gives various explanations to political phenomena. In addition, security studies are a new sub-branch of international relations that deals with security issues. Geo-security is a new interdisciplinary field of study that deals with the security of geographic relations between countries. It is a sub-concept of geopolitics. In an attempt to analyze geo-security, you can see that it consists of three main concepts: territoriality, conflict, and scarcity. Borrowed from geopolitics, social science, and economics, these concepts emphasize continuum relations of nation-states from war to peaceful settlements. Conceptualization of geo-security necessarily needs to claim that it can make a new understanding of relations among nations. The present research aims to analyze Iran’s foreign policy towards its neighboring countries. The findings not only show all the main issues about Iran’s relations with its neighbors, but also help to manage these relations and make a shift from a conflictual approach to a cooperative one.

The Middle East today can be considered an area with the features of chaos due to its geopolitical structure, complex historical identity and decades of crisis. In this volatile area, security has undergone an extensive alteration, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, as a major actor and historical activist, needs certain behavioral patterns to correspond to the situations and trends of security chaos. The present paper seeks to identify the elements of Iran's regional behavioral patterns in the Middle East security chaos. It is hypothesized that Iran needs to take advantage of patterns of constructive interaction, balancing, geopolitical stability, and Interactive Order-Building to play a regional role in this chaos. A descriptive-analytical method and theoretical modeling is employed to account for the historical process of chaos in the Middle East and Iran's chaos management model in foreign policy.

Central Asian and Caucasian countries are among the countries that have faced numerous ups and downs in the process of nation-building, and they are currently facing various challenges, particularly in the geopolitical arena. Since nation-building is a process greatly influenced by a country's historical roots and events, Central Asian and Caucasian countries have unique coordinates despite sharing a part of history. This article examines the nation-building process in Central Asian and Caucasian countries through a comparative approach. It focuses on the practical geopolitical challenges of nation-building in these two regions. The study findings indicate that Due to differences in the social context, historical processes, and geopolitical features, Central Asia and the Caucasus countries have gone through two different patterns of nation formation. In particular, Central Asian countries face significant geopolitical challenges during this process. 

Looking at the studies and analyses conducted in the field of Iran's issues with the world, we see the ignorance of Iran's geopolitical aspect. The concern of the present study is why Iran, despite its geopolitical importance, is always analyzed in terms of ideology and political Islam in the international arena? However, given the current geopolitical components and even its future geopolitical advantages, Iran has a potential and actual position and importance at the regional and international levels. The purpose of this study is, first, to highlight the more deliberate neglect of Iran's geopolitical aspect as an existing problem and to show some of its most important effects, and second, to highlight the geopolitical nature of Iran. The data collection method is descriptive-analytical, and they have been analyzed in the framework of the theory of "Geopolitics: The Impact of Politics on Geography" and the analytical framework of "Hermeneutics of Reflection". Based on the analysis of the effects of Iran's geopolitical neglect and with a look at the historical course (contemporary history), the research findings are a set of "historical" and "geopolitical" symbols and signs revealing the importance and determination of Iran's geopolitics, its precedence on political, ideological, cultural aspects, and the error of degradation in terms of geoculture. The result of this study is to ignore Iran's geopolitical aspect, reduce Iran's effective acting power in the international arena by introducing it more as an ideological actor, and put all the pressure on the Islamic Revolution, political Islam and the Islamic State.

Today, the Baltic Sea has become the epicenter of the European crisis. The Baltic Sea is the only region where NATO has a land border with Russia, increasing the region's sensitivity. The slightest incident can turn into a full-blown war in the region. Russia's complex security challenges, the region's geopolitical situation, and the Baltic states' defense vulnerabilities have raised the need to revive NATO's military presence and strengthen deterrence against Russia. In the light of interpretive structural modeling, this study seeks to answer the question of what effect Russia's escalating activities in the Baltic Sea have had on the effectiveness of NATO's deterrence strategy in the region. Given the theoretical framework of broad deterrence, it hypothesized that Russia's security strategy in the three areas of conventional, nuclear, and hybrid threat had led NATO to move toward broad deterrence based on the threat of punishment and denial. However, both types of deterrence do not have the quantity and quality necessary to fully contain Russia in the region, as in the Cold War. In order to measure efficiency according to the research method and its extended formulation, the indicators of credibility, communication, and capability are used. The findings show that deterrence through punishment is much more pronounced than deterrence through denial and that the normal state of deterrence in NATO is highly vulnerable to Russia. Weaknesses in capability and communication have also led to the fragility of NATO's deterrent credentials in the region, making the Baltic Sea very sensitive and critical.

Secularism is a political ideology that disintegrates religion from state governance. While secularism may work for countries where the majority professed religion that has no specific legal system viz. Christianity, it begins to exhibit its ineptness in countries that either have a multicultural identity or adopt a systematic religion like Islam as its official religion. To unravel this, secularism acquiesced to embody two divisions of secularism entailing freedom of religion and freedom from religion. The objective of the writing is to resolve the conflicts of the secularism ideology in multicultural state.  The methodology adopted in the research is doctrinal legal research which employed qualitative research. For multicultural counterparts, the absolute disintegration of religion raises difficulties, hence, they opt for the secular concept of freedom of religion. However, from the Islamic perspective, secularism contrasts with Islamic teachings as it is conclusive in every aspect of human life. It has its own foundations and laws that shall be followed at all times. Additionally, the impacts of secularism on the social, educational, and moral aspects have made its germaneness be put in question. Thus, there must be a law to regulate the abovementioned matter in order to ensure the community live with peace and harmony

The Middle East and North Africa regions have been the focus of security crises since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Although insecurity has not been restricted in this region, its effects are evident in other regions of the international system, especially in the European countries. With this in mind, the main question of the present article is how can a comprehensive model be presented to fundamentally resolve the security issue in the region. The result of this study is that "regional awareness" is a concept on the basis of which one can find a way out of the existing security impasse. In fact, the results are based on the fact that native solutions to the security of the country, instead of rental security, bring peace and security to the region. In this regard, governments, intellectuals, and people must engage in regional negotiations to fulfill their national interests.