The Many Forms of Iran’s Foreign Policy Seen Through Its Social Logics

The article argues that indeterminacy is wired into Iran’s foreign policy. It revisits the academic discussion on the topic from the vantage point of poststructuralist discourse theory. Specifically, it argues that the complexity observed in the foreign affairs of the Islamic Republic is due to the latter being a dividual actor. Its roles, interests, and policies are articulated in the framework of certain open-ended discursive regularities that are categorized here as the social logics of state sovereignty, resistance, and development. There is an incongruence between the key notions of these three social logics, leading to the emergence of potentially contradictory and inconsistent policies. In such a fragmented discursive terrain, there is a certain level of indeterminacy in how the three social logics are manifested in practice. The article also shows that this fragmentation is not disruptive for the discursive order of Iran’s foreign policy. The open-endedness of the social logics, their validation through repetition, and the sense of wholeness created by various nodal points help to perpetuate the existing discursive framework of Iran’s foreign policy.