Discourse Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Regional Conflicts Case Study: Syrian Civil War (2011-2020)

Since 2011, the land of Syria has become a place for the war of discourses, each of which considers itself right and the other wrong, and seeks to reject the other. In the middle of this field, the Islamic Republic's approach to the foreign policy discourse in the Syrian civil war is defined by relying on the discourse of revolutionary Islamism in defense of the Baathist government of Syria. For regional powers (such as Iran and Turkey) and extra-regional powers (such as America and Europe), in addition to the significance of geopolitical, geostrategic and geoeconomic interests in which Syria is at the center of, the occurrence of the Syrian civil war (2011-2020), the formation of the center of the crisis between Sunni and Shia fundamentalist Islamic discourses, such as ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (representing the Sunnis) versus Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran (representing Shia Islam) and sending Muslim jihadist forces from all over the world to that place, attracted attention twofold to Syria. But in this field, the Islamic Republic was directly pressured by the liberal discourses of the Western countries due to its role in the Syrian civil war, and the moderate Sunni fundamentalist forces were directly supported by the Western countries. Based on a descriptive-analytical view based on discourse theory and the conflict between the discourse of the Islamic Republic and the discourses of Islamic fundamentalists and Western countries, this article seeks to answer the question of how we can evaluate the discourse governing Iran's foreign policy in the crisis of the Syrian civil war? To answer, the hypothesis is proposed that the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on the sign of the negation of sovereignty contained in the constitution, has started to fight with discourses to achieve hegemony in the region, which are in conflict with the hegemony of the discourse of revolutionary Islamism.