After the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power in 2002, Turkey's Middle East policy underwent a radical change. Erdoğan's readings of the Arab Spring events are a vivid example of Turkey's new foreign policy. In the last months of 2019 and 2020, Turkey took two other important steps that have attracted the attention of the international community: engagement in Operation Peace Spring in northern Syria without UN Security Council authorization, and steps to reach an agreement with the Libyan government on oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean in tandem with sending troops to Libya. Turkey's recent actions, which violate international law and UN resolutions, raise several questions: what changes have taken place in Turkey's foreign policy? What are its core drivers and main components? And what results will the new policy deliver in the future? We argue that Turkey's behavior conforms to the principles of offensive realism. The shift in Turkey's foreign policy and the trend toward offensive realism are rooted in the 2011 Arab Spring and subsequent events in the Middle East. The failed coup of 2016 accelerated these changes and pushed them in new directions. Turkey is now seriously aiming to maximize its power, particularly in the politico-military field, which could increase tensions in the sensitive region. We submit that Turkey cannot be guided by offensive realism in the long term, however.

Despite numerous studies of Iran in recent decades, the country’s concerted efforts to expand its medical diplomacy have been largely overlooked by experts and observers alike. This is despite the fact that the Islamic Republic has sought to employ medical diplomacy as a viable tool for expanding its soft power for a number of years. Over the course of the last two decades, in fact, Iranian authorities and health professionals have considered their medical advances to greatly add value to the country’s overall diplomatic profile. This article examines three basic questions: first, how has Iran used medical diplomacy to increase its regional influence in the Middle East? second, what are the factors that have contributed to the country’s success in this area? And, third, what are likely to be the regional consequences of Iran’s enhanced medical diplomacy in the future? The answers to these questions will present an overall picture of the current and future depth and voracity of Iran’s soft power.

Over the last three decades, the Middle East countries have frequently witnessed popular protests against the authoritarian regimes. The question is why these protests never come to a desirable end? Regardless of the role played by foreign actors in perpetuating the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, it seems that what causes the protests not to be pervasive and the political infrastructures not to collapse is that the protests have not been supported by the people’s majority. The present article argues that such a dearth of support refers to a fundamental cause that we named the fear cycle. This cycle includes the masses’ fear of the regime, fear of the movement’s failure and its dire consequences, and fear of the political system that is supposed to come to power after the overthrow of the incumbent government. The governments have an important role in creating and perpetuating this fear and turning it into a panic.

Nowadays the discussion of intellectual schools in the world, especially in the north of Africa is very important for the political analysts. The intellectual roots that existed in these regions from the beginning of independence were more toward the Islam. These roots mostly revealed themselves after the victory of Islamic revolution. The formation of Iran's Islamic revolution on the top of west and east blocks' mutuality was a paradigm of general direction of religions and Islamic values for forming the government. This article uses description-analytic method to investigate the effects of Islamic revolution on the Muslim's intellectual schools in the north of Africa. Two main questions are How and in what direction has the Islamic revolution happening affected the Muslim's intellectual schools in Libya and Tunisia? Findings of the research shows that with regards to the Muslim's intellectual backgrounds that before the Islamic revolution existed, in these countries Islamic revolution caused the reinforcement and doubled motivation for these groups. But, yet the reinforcement of the activity of these groups caused their mutuality with the government and increase of violence and insecurity.