Strategic Studies Quarterly

Abstract The study is aimed at investigating the attitude adopted by the Chinese toward the issue of security. The main question is what approach and methods China has employed in recent decades to provide security in the country. The researchers argue that the new generation of Chinese leaders have realized the ineffectiveness of a negative attitude to security in this era and have adopted a positive stance in this regard, which calls for a comprehensive security approach and cooperation with the international community to address security challenges and ensure security. This way they have managed to deal with many of domestic and foreign security challenges at a lower cost.
 
 

Abstract   This essay is mainly pursues to analyze Iranian elections to explain the fact that, in addition to positive and security-building functions of elections in Iran, there are also election-related factors that prepare ground for different levels of political instability, social crisis and security challenges in the country. Those above mentioned factors are rooted in interactions between three electoral actors: 1) governmental administrative and monitoring institutions; 2) competition pattern of political parties and groups; and 3) electoral behavior of public and social groups. Applying David Sanders' approach, this essay explores security-political consequences and challenges of people's electoral behavior and pattern of electoral competition among political parties and groups on political instability indicators (political regime and socio-political solidarity).According to findings of our research, and based on framework of electoral actors interaction pattern, there have been a circle of security situation in Iranian elections consisting of a threefold pattern: 1) fairly calm elections; 2) challenging elections; and 3) electoral crisis. Considering the vulnerabilities of election system in Iran, it seems that electoral behavior pattern of actors tends to be more challenging and destabilizing.