Cultural Diplomacy of Seyed Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in International System

Document Type : علمی - پژوهشی

Authors

Abstract

The importance of cultural diplomacy for Islamic republic of Iran as a country of thousands of years of civilized culture, based on religious values and traditions, can not be ignored. But, a change in dialogues ruling foreign policy of Iran may lead to a change in the mentioned importance, ignorance, lack of utilization and vein achievements as well. As a matter of fact, each dialogue in Iran provides a different identity which leads to a specific attitude towards international system. To this end, the focus of Khatami dialogue is on modernity while Ahmadinejad emphasizes on tradition. Consequently, values and norms of Iran were approaching international values and norms while a great gap was seen in Ahmadinejad presidency. Based on structuralism, the current study is aimed to answer the question that on what bases were the action and the reaction of the cultural diplomacy of Iran to international system during presidency of Khatami and Ahmadinejad? Our hypothesis is that the affiliation of national and international structures during presidency of Khatami led to Kantian interaction while the gap between them during presidency of Ahmadinejad led to Hobbesian contrast. This study is of analytical-descriptive nature conducted as a desk research.

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