Identifying the Key Drivers of Conflict in West Asia and Preparing a Scenario Portfolio
Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Assistant Professor, Asian Cultural Documentation Center,, The Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies
2 PhD in International Relations, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
West Asia as a region has always witnesed conflict and crisis due to various ideological, geopolitical, economic and political reasons. Various causes have been mentioned in connection with the formation of behavioral patterns of different local to global actors in the West Asian region. This article tries to answer three basic questions in this field: First, what are the key drivers of conflict in the West Asian region? Second, what are the possible scenarios of conflict in the West Asian region? And third, what are the optimal strategies to settle the conflict in this region? The present research is applied in terms of type and is futures studies and analytic in terms of nature and method. At first step, this article tries to identify the drivers of the conflict by referring to experts in this field and analyzing the findings using MicMac software. After identifying the key drivers, strong scenarios are determined by Scenario Wizard software. The research findings show that out of a total of 876 situations on the scenario portfolio, 592 are critical situations (67.5%), 284 are static situations (32.4%), and 12 are favorable situations (0.1%). Therefore, critical situations occupied a major part of the scenario portfolio. Finally, by considering the most possible scenarios and emphasizing the key drivers of conflict, some strategies are presented to settle the causes of conflict in West Asia.
Keywords
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