Iran's Syria strategy: the evolution of deterrence

Photoshopped missiles and fallen Iran’s ballistic missile program and its foreign and security policy towards the United States under the Trump Administration

“…Five main aspects show Iran's new offensive approach: proxies, drone and naval warfare (speed boats), BMP and cyber technologies (Yossef, 2019). In addition to direct involvement by the IRGC forces in the war in Syria in support of Bashar Assad's regime since 2012, Iran has expanded its network of military allies beyond Hezbollah in Lebanon (Ahmadian and Mohseni, 2019).…”

Fluctuating Regional (Dis‐)Order in the Post‐Arab Uprising Middle East

“…At the latest after the end of the Cold War and until the first decade of the 21st century, the Middle East stood out as a world region whose hegemon, that is the regionally most powerful and dominating actor, was the USA (Beck, ; Gause, ). The merit of scrutinizing this important feature of the contemporary Middle East in this thematic section goes to Yom (), who discusses US Middle Eastern foreign policy and explains the end of American hegemony within the region.…”

“…Scholars have applied and tested theories of international relations to solve empirical puzzles looking at post‐Arab Uprising events, which Valbjørn (recently endorsed as a major desideratum of Middle East Studies. Current examples are Ahmadian and Mohsen’s () application of the logic of deterrence to Iran’s policy towards Syria, Cannon and Donelli’s () work on the dynamics of Middle Eastern regional security complexes, Demmelhuber’s () use of the hedging concept to analyse recent foreign policies of Saudi Arabia, Mabon’s () contribution on (de‐)sectarianization of Middle Eastern regional affairs, and Tsourapas’ () research on coercive migration diplomacy looking at Egypt, Jordan, and Libya.…”

Framers, founders, and reformers: Three generations of proxy war research

“…The starting point is that it has become common to refer to proxy wars as "under-analyzed" (Mumford, 2013) or "underconceptualized" (Tamm, 2014). On the one hand, this contrasts with the exceptional growth of the literature which has moved from big picture analyses (Groh, 2019;Borghard, 2014;Mumford, 2013;Hughes 2012), to in-depth case studies of particular proxy wars, from Cold War staples like Angola and Nicaragua (Hoekstra, 2018(Hoekstra, , 2019, to contemporary ones such as Afghanistan (Akbarzadeh & Ibrahimi, 2020), India-Pakistan (Biberman, 2019), and Iran's Middle East proxy adventurism (Ahmadian & Mohseni, 2019;Ostovar, 2018). On the other hand, it ignores the fact that scholars have come to agree on a set of core features for proxy wars: the role of the proxy as a third party fighting a war using support provided by a state or a non-state actor; the latter's provision of support as an indirect intervention; and an essentially relational interaction between parties (Groh, 2019, p. 29;Rauta, 2018, p. 457;Sozer, 2016, p. 643;Mumford, 2013, p. 11;Hughes, 2012, p. 11).…”