NATO is once again in the spotlight. A NATO summit concluded on Monday 14 June 2021 in Brussels, ending with important decisions charting the Alliance’s path over the next decade and beyond. NATO has served as a pillar of stability and security for more than seven decades, while the world has become more complex, with a host of new players, threats, and challenges. Allied leaders endorsed an ambitious NATO 2030 agenda to ensure that NATO can meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. While the Alliance concluded to improve NATO’s political consultations, collective defense, and resilience, leaders agreed upon providing better training and capacity building to its partners in order to stand up for the rules-based international order. In light of these commitments, TPQ’s Summer 2021 issue serves as a starting point for a well-informed debate by synthesizing and comparing expert discourses from a wide range of NATO member and non-member states on key issues concerning NATO's future. As we address the issues at stake, we also seek a better mutual appreciation of divergent geographical, historical, and political perspectives. This special and timely issue has been published in collaboration with NATO, our longstanding partner. Mircea Geoana, NATO Deputy Secretary General, expresses that the security environment has never been more uncertain and contested than it is now, due to the emergence of global competition and a wide variety of complex threats. He underlines the importance of NATO summit in Brussels last June, at which the Alliance's leaders made bold decisions to adapt to a more unpredictable world and to ensure that its one billion people will be safe for the next decade and beyond. In his view, the Transatlantic Alliance will remain capable of coping with today's challenges and future-proof against ones yet to come through an ambitious and forward-looking agenda. When President Biden visited Brussels in June, he declared, "America is back." According to Jamie Shea, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO, this also means that NATO is back, as Biden reaffirmed the U.S.' solemn commitment to the defense of its European allies and Washington's willingness to once again lead a transatlantic alliance that was heavily criticized during the Trump years. He writes that at first sight, this is all good news for NATO; but could it turn out to be a mixed blessing for the Europeans in the longer run? He analyzes whether the NATO 2030 initiative is up to the task and if it provides the right answers. Due to NATO's reliance on space assets for operational effectiveness and the increased vulnerabilities of those assets, the militarization of outer space presents a range of policy and legal challenges. Having to rely on space-based assets and services to conduct military operations has proven to be NATO's Achilles heel as rivals work on counter-space techniques. Aurel Sari, Associate Professor of International Law at University of Exeter and Hitoshi Nasu, Professor of International Law at University of Exeter ask given the vulnerability of space-based assets and services to hostile interference, under what circumstances the collective defense commitment as set out in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT), arises in space.

Following up on the Winter 2020/21 edition, TPQ’s Spring 2021 issue continues with the series of debates that we hope to ignite on “systems in decay,” and the shifting world order at large. On that note, this edition inquires, “Where Do We Go from Here?”—exploring the deteriorating state of human rights across the globe, from social injustices in the US, to Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, and to the Chinese government’s growing repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Our authors also discuss how the US's foreign policy is evolving, along with its societal values and political principles, amid ongoing tensions within both its borders and outside of them. In this special issue, Delise O'Meally, CEO of the Institute for Sport and Social Justice, explains how sports can serve as a social institution, one especially suited to spur systemic change in society. O'Meally analyzes the role sports has played in the fight against racial injustice, starting in 1968 when John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists at the Olympics, to 2020, when US sports leagues showed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. While underlining the universality of sports, O'Meally illustrates how sports, with its shared values of teamwork, unity, mutual aspirations, and respect, can advance positive social change. As part of a multi-part contribution, TPQ Publisher, Kemal Köprülü delves further into the systemic problems, including corruption, biased media, and the lack of accountability, that plague American politics. While reflecting on US policies and their domestic and international ramifications in modern history, Köprülü asserts that America is far from being “back”—and, in fact, is at its weakest. As the specter of a rising China and its connections to Democratic politicians and donors becomes increasingly apparent, Köprülü argues containing China during Biden's presidency will be impossible. Despite their efforts to divert attention away from China and toward Russia, Democrats’ corrupt acts will come back to haunt them, Köprülü writes—especially ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections. Noting that the Chinese government’s oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples has reached unprecedented levels since late 2016, Maya Wang, senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch, highlights that the Chinese government has committed, and continues to commit, crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. Wang points to how the response—or lack, thereof—of Muslim-majority countries has been particularly disappointing, including Turkey, whom many had hoped would take a clearer stance against these human rights abuses. However, Wang notes, it is not too late. The Turkish government still has the chance to adopt concrete policies both domestically and internationally, including through individual sanctions, trade restrictions, and measures, to protect the Uyghur and Turkic diaspora in Turkey.

This book critically develops and discusses Iran’s geopolitical imaginations and explores its various foreign-policy schools of thought and their controversies. In doing so, the book covers Iran's foreign policy and international relations from "9/11" all the way to Rouhani’s rise (late 2014). Accounting for both domestic and the international balance of power, the book theorizes the post-unipolar world order of the 2000s, dubbed “imperial interpolarity”, examines Iran’s relations with non-Western great-powers in that era, and offers a critique of the “Rouhani doctrine” and its economic and foreign-policy visions. Forged in the fires and intense deliberations of a PhD, undertaken at a most unique institution of higher learning in the world, Ali Fathollah-Nejad has produced one of the most informative and evocative studies of Iran’s foreign policy and international relations to date. Framed in a highly original theoretical approach, Ali’s nuanced analysis, drawing on a lorry load of primary and secondary sources, details the process and context of policy in the Islamic Republic, thus producing an unrivalled and lasting account of modern Iran’s worldview and the behaviour of this revolutionary state in a fast-changing world. —Anoush Ehteshami, Professor of International Relations & Director of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University (UK) Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Iran in an Emerging New World Order flashes out the key drivers behind Iran’s international relations since the mid-2000s. Providing evidence for the material and geopolitical significance of Iran’s identity constructions, the book enriches the debate on the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy and bridges the divide between the discipline of IR and area studies. —Fawaz A. Gerges, Professor of International Relations & inaugural Director, LSE Middle East Centre (2010–13), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); author of the forthcoming The 100 Years' War for Control of the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2021). Ali Fathollah-Nejad has established himself as one of the most insightful observers of Iranian politics. Providing the analytical background to his assessments of Tehran’s foreign policy in the 21st century, this book comes out opportunely at a time when a new U.S. administration is about to re-engage with Iran. —Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) University of London A decisive contribution to two avant-gardist fields of knowledge: Critical geopolitics and Iranian foreign relations. Anyone interested in cutting-edge research that brings together International Relations and Iranian Studies will revel in this important book. —Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, Department of Politics and International Studies & former Chair (2012–18), Centre for Iranian Studies, SOAS University of London One of the few to have a thorough, beyond-the-headlines and forward-looking grasp of Iran, Ali Fathollah-Nejad offers a brilliant analysis of what is in store for Iran. A must-read for anybody interested in geopolitics. —Florence Gaub, Deputy Director & Director of Research, European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), Paris It is no longer possible to think of any nation-state without simultaneously seeing the reflection of an entire changing world in it. Ali Fathollah-Nejad’s prose and politics in Iran in an Emerging New World Order is the state-of-the-art mapping of the epistemic shift that seeks to understand the global in the local, and the domestic in the foreign. The result is a mode of supple and symbiotic thinking that reveals the way transnational politics dwells on the borderline where the fate of nations unravels into the fold of a dysfunctional disorder that has become the fact of our fragile world. —Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University Iranian politics, outside of a small group of specialists, remains poorly understood. Iran in an Emerging New World Order helps demystify this subject. Thoroughly researched, very accessible and packed with insights, this book, focusing on the Ahmadinejad period, is highly recommended. It makes an important contribution to the study of internal Iranian politics, Iran’s foreign policy orientation and the international relations of the Middle East. —Nader Hashemi, Director, Center for Middle East Studies & Associate Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver Ali Fathollah-Nejad has produced an academic work that is, from my viewpoint, so far the most comprehensive one concerning Iranian standing in regional and international politics, its new political élite and their attitude towards the West and the world order. —Farhad Khosrokhavar, Professor in the Sociology of Contemporary Iran & Director of Studies at EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, France Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic’s initial foreign policy was based on the rejection of the bipolar international order under the banner of a “neither East nor West” policy. By the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar order, the Islamic Republic tried to adjust its approach to deal with the United States as a hegemonic power. Iran shifted its foreign policy toward the East as soon as the international order moved from unipolarity in the early 2000s. Why did Iran turn its foreign policy, and what were the consequences and ramifications of this shift? Iran in an Emerging New World Order dives deep to answer these questions. Iran in an Emerging New World Order is a comprehensive and critical review of Iran’s foreign policy in post-unipolar world. As a delightful read full of important information and analyses, the book explores the domestic, regional, and international dimensions and ideational and material factors that shape and impact the Islamic Republic’s geopolitical imaginations and foreign policy controversies. Fathollah-Nejad explores Iran’s foreign-policy transformation from a unipolar to a (what he cautions as an increasingly but not fully-fledged) multipolar order, and its relations with non-Western great-powers in the 21st century. Written with clarity, Iran in an Emerging New World Order is a must-read primer for anyone interested in Iranian politics in particular and Middle East politics in general. —Saeid Golkar, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; Senior Fellow on Iran Policy, Chicago Council on Global Affairs & author, Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Post-Revolutionary Iran (Columbia University Press, 2015) A competent, engaged and impressive study of Iran’s foreign policy and its place in the world. Ali Fathollah-Nejad’s most important quality is that he looks with a wide lens and sees not just Iranian politics and foreign policy (in which he is clearly an expert) but the dynamics of the broader world and changes in the international system. This book is thus a must-read for those interested in Iranian foreign policy but also in shifts and changes of the international system into the second decade of the 21st century. —Arash Azizi (New York University), author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions (Oneworld Publications, 2020) In presenting Iran as sets of complexities – within and how it acts externally; how it represents itself and is represented by others; its myriad political and religious cultures, and how these shape the state and its international relations – and locating those within a constantly-changing global environment, Fathollah-Nejad provides us with unique and alternative assessments of how Iran’s foreign policy is shaped within the context of what he calls “Imperial Interpolarity”. The creative interplay of these various factors makes this an indispensable text for anyone wishing to understand Iran and its international relations within the current global political environment. —Na’eem Jeenah, Executive Director, Afro–Middle East Centre (AMEC), Johannesburg & advisory board member, World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) A magnificent and conceptually powerful book; an eye opener for those who essentialize the role of Iran in contemporary International Relations. This landmark study covers the complexity of Iran’s cultural geopolitics and the diversity of its interlocutors in 21st-century world politics. The book is useful for delving into the internal dynamics of Iranian politics and its connection with the spheres of power in international relations. It is a very methodical book. Theoretically flawless. A deep, brilliant and enlightening academic text. —Moisés Garduño Garcia, Professor in the Center for International Relations, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) In this book, Ali Fathollah-Nejad goes beyond the usual one-dimensional view that dominates the study of Iran’s foreign policy and presents a comprehensive framework explaining the interrelated role of socio-cultural, economic and geopolitical elements in shaping the Islamic Republic’s foreign-policy orientation. The book also focuses on a crucial period involving two critical transitions: a systemic transition from the unipolar to the post-unipolar world order and a domestic one from a hardline to a more moderate worldview. All this makes the book a valuable contribution to the field. —Hamidreza Azizi, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Middle East and Africa Research Division, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) & former Assistant Professor of Regional Studies, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran (2016-20) Iran in an Emerging New World Order provides a timely and original account of foreign-policy making in the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially the turbulent first decade of the new millennium. —Kamran Matin, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Sussex University & Associate Research Fellow, Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) Ali Fathollah-Nejad’s Iran in an Emerging New World Order builds on a reliable scientific approach and an informed overview of Iranian foreign policy. It identifies and examines the different factors which orientate it, such as its various schools of thought and their debates, the élites’ role, the interplay between structure and culture, and the one between internal and external realms. Furthermore, it casts light on the evolution of Tehran’s choices, including its “look to the East”. In this new book, Fathollah-Nejad has provided a challenging study which demonstrates the need to go beyond conventional framings, to include political culture, and provides a new evaluation of Iran’s international relations. This is an original and significant contribution to the literature on international relations, the workings of the Islamic Republic, and the understanding of the latter’s regional and global actions. —Firouzeh Nahavandi, Professor of Sociology of Development and Political Science & Director, Institute of Sociology & Director, CECID (Center for International Cooperation and Development Studies), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), as well as President, Graduate School of Development Studies of French Community of Belgium Through its careful analysis of a modern political culture in Iran gestated in the context of an encounter with European colonial modernity and evolved in correspondence with a catalogue of internal and external others, Ali Fathollah-Nejad’s timely book places contemporary geopolitical concerns against a much-needed backdrop of colonial and anti-colonial histories. —Siavash Saffari, Associate Professor of West Asian Studies, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Seoul National University If you really want to dive deep into Iran and understand the reasons why its leaders are operating in the current crisis, this is the book you should read. It teaches analysts and policy-makers to understand the past to act wisely in the future. —Susanne Koelbl, award-winning Foreign Correspondent, Der Spiegel

Turkey's enthusiastic embrace of the Arab Spring set in motion a dynamic that fundamentally altered its relations with the United States, Russia, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and transformed Turkey from a soft power to a hard power in the tangled geopolitics of the Middle East. Birol Başkan and Ömer Taşpınar argue that the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) Islamist background played a significant role in the country's decision to embrace the uprisings and the subsequent foreign policy direction the country has pursued. They demonstrate that religious ideology is endogenous to—shaping and in turn being shaped by—Turkey's various engagements in the Middle East. The Nation or the Ummah emphasizes that while Islamist religious ideology does not provide specific policy prescriptions, it does shape the way the ruling elite sees and interprets the context and the structural boundaries they operate within.

This volume discusses the development of governmental proto-bureaucracy, which led to and was influenced by the inclusion of professional agents and spies in the early modern English government. In the government’s attempts to control religious practices, wage war, and expand their mercantile reach both east and west, spies and agents became essential figures of empire, but their presence also fundamentally altered the old hierarchies of class and power. The job of the spy or agent required fluidity of role, the adoption of disguise and alias, and education, all elements that contributed to the ideological breakdown of social and class barriers. The volume argues that the inclusion of the lower classes (commoners, merchants, messengers, and couriers) in the machinery of government ultimately contributed to the creation of governmental proto-bureaucracy. The importance and significance of these spies is demonstrated through the use of statistical social network analysis, analyzing social network maps and statistics to discuss the prominence of particular figures within the network and the overall shape and dynamics of the evolving Elizabethan secret service. The Eye of the Crown is a useful resource for students and scholars interested in government, espionage, social hierarchy, and imperial power in Elizabethan England.

The book considers the main arms exporting countries, including China, Russia, and the US, as well as several European states, and the policies each employs in deciding advanced weapons sales to key regions of the world. It examines whether such sales are inherently stabilising or de-stabilising regarding regional security. Regions reviewed in detail include the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. Combat aircraft sales are a focus for the volume given both their practical and symbolic importance. The volume focuses on the behaviour and policies of the main arms exporting nations since the end of the Cold War, shifts in their arms export policies, and the tensions that can emerge within or between countries over proposed arms sales. It also considers the impact of countries that were previously only recipients of advanced weapons moving to develop their own defence industrial base.

A history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt based on first-person interviews with Brotherhood rank-and-file members.