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This chapter focuses on South Korea’s newly found regional leadership, as the emergent middle power of East Asia, in order to advance regional integration and institution-building. Policy leadership is observed and analyzed from an international lens, linked to the literature of middle powers. The chapter first conceptualizes middle powers in connection with the issue of international leadership, since such states often play important roles in promoting cooperation. The chapter looks especially into South Korea’s foreign policy behavior toward East Asian regional processes and how it has manifested innovative and capable leadership. More specifically, the last three presidencies of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2002), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) are scrutinized in the hope of underscoring how their particular administrations, political leadership, and strategic approaches to foreign policy toward the region influenced South Korea’s regional leadership attempts and middle power status.

One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this paper is to study and specify to what extent Iran will succeed in being a regional hegemon. The paper is devoted to clarification of the constitutive elements for regional hegemony. These elements will be related to an actor’s perception of its role and regional perception, and how these hegemons exert power, do these work for the public good in the region (provision) and how this regional power projects power and exerts power to influence others’ preferences and values without reference to violence (projection). For the Middle East, Iran emerged as a key player in most regional conflicts and it tried to increase its sphere of influence as a regional hegemon. Therefore the question here would be: To what extend could Iran succeed in being a regional hegemon and what are the circumstances that could enhance or constrain this Iranian ambition? So the aim of the paper is to look at three dimensions in general and see whether Iran makes a plausible candidate for regional hegemony. The paper outlines the essential traits of a regional hegemon, and the main elements that constitute a regional hegemony such as perception, provision and projection, and then analyze how Iran follows those elements by analyzing internal perceptions of the Iranian elite about Iranian regional role, regional acceptance, provision of public good, projection and finally impact of the relation with external great powers. Through analyzing its regional strategy in Syria and Iraq since 2003, the year of invasion of Iraq, since ever a political vacuum was created, that enabled Iran to extend its regional influence, after the fall of its historical regional rival, Saddam Hussein baathi regime.

The study adopts an analytical framework of analyzing a regional hegemony strategy which is approached by Miriam Prys in her study “Hegemony, domination, detachment: differences in regional powerhood” to study and analyze Iran’s regional behavior as one of regional power that is seeking regional hegemony. This analytical framework is one of the most significant analytical tools that interests in the study of the behavior of regional power and identify the constitutive dimensions for regional hegemony such as self-perception, regional perception, provision and power projection.

The study concludes that there are obstacles completely in front of achieving the Iranian quest to regional hegemony over the Middle East. These are the continuing US involvement in the Middle East and the consequent tense relationship between Iran and the USA. It is most unlikely that Iran will be hegemonic state over the Middle East as long as there are refusal and resistance from other regional states for Iranian regional role; as each of regional powers has tools to contain the influence of the other. The Iranian regional behavior that is sectarianism-based, whether to protect Shiite shrines and holy places or to protect Shiites in the region, such policies deepen the ideological and sectarian conflicts. It also has not provided an attractive cultural model for the peoples of the region.

This paper enhances the deep analysis of the Middle East dynamics through the prospective of regional power. Also, the paper focuses on the analysis of the relation between great power and aspiring regional power and the impact on its strategies.

This study enhances the understanding of how Iranian decision-makers perceive their regional Iranian and the threats. Moreover, the tools that Iran uses its hard power and ideational one to create regional followers and change its allies’ normative and value systems to come in line with its national interests. Moreover, the study tries to measure the actual Iranian influence, its weakness and strength so that the Arab states and the West could behave in a fruitful way.

In the final analysis, the paper offers an insight into the regional behavior and the importance of external power in regional dynamics and to what extent the regional hegemon is applicable to Iran.

This paper aims to examine the regional dynamics that further consolidated Israel’s national security in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, reflecting upon the nuclear challenge between Iran and Israel and Iran's expanding activities in the region.

To prove the central argument, the study uses a conceptual framework that centers on deterrence as the main approach used by states to consolidate their influence in the Middle East region.

Iran's nuclear progress and influence in the region has strengthened Israel’s security and fostered an unprecedented open rapprochement led by USA efforts with the Gulf regimes.

The paper draws particular attention to the Iran–Israel nuclear competency, and the Israeli preferred policy options regarding Iranian activities in the region amid turbulent Middle East. In addition, the paper offers insight to the regional dynamics that further consolidated Israel’s national security in the region while maintaining a status of Arab vulnerability and backwardness.

This chapter attempts to uncover the decision code of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, based on 12 decisions he made concerning the Middle East during his third term as president, from 2012 until October 2015.

The study was carried out to understand Putin’s line of thought and decision-making, in light of Putin’s increasing importance throughout the last decade, globally and in the Middle East, in particular. After understanding the decision calculus of Putin, it might also be possible to predict his future decisions concerning the region.

Decision rules can be inferred by analyzing a set of decisions. Analysis of such decisions is made in this chapter using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method that uncovers historic decisions, and aims to peer into the mind of the decision-maker.

The results show the main decision rule for each of Putin’s decisions. The work proves that when it comes to foreign issues, the decision code which leads Putin in his decisions is rational. The results also reveal Putin’s strong desire to promote Russia and himself, while using holistic, maximizing, and compensatory processing, as long as his political survival is not compromised.

McKinsey partners, Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock and Emily Field are championing the premise that the need for a fundamental rethink of the role of middle management in today’s organizations is now more urgent than ever.

So what should the new blueprint be for middle management as the crucial link between the executive level and the front line S&L interviewer Prof Brian Leavy asks the authors of Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work.

Companies with top quartile management practices can have more than three times the return to shareholders than other companies.

Because of middle managers’ proximity to the front line, they have a helpful, realistic perspective on how new tools like generative AI should be adopted throughout the organization.

The authors found that middle managers deliver the most value to the organization when they can serve as coaches, connectors, talent managers and strategists. For senior leaders to truly put middle managers at the forefront, they must give managers space to grow and the license to manage in a way that works for them and their team.

At the turn of the decade the tendency of retrenchment in organisations appeared as a byproduct of an ongoing recession threatening with heavy consequences for the future. In the big organisations, like the Fortune 500 Companies, the number of people employed full time shrunk from 19% of the workforce two decades ago to less than 10% (Castro, 1993). Initially justified by marketing difficulties due to foreign competition, retrenchment has become fashionable and a kind of panacea, although actually only about a third of the companies which performed major lay‐offs reported increases in productivity and profits, while a plummeting morale surfaced in 80% of the cases. Therefore, more and more such organisations are getting, as it were, “lean and lame” (Henkoff, 1994).

The growth of the middle class has become a subject of growing fascination for scholars as of late, not just because the numbers are so astonishing but also because the patterns suggest a shift in both global demographics and the regional geographies of development. Recent estimates from the World Bank indicate that the world's middle class is expected “to grow from 430 million in 2000 to 1.15 billion in 2030”;¹ and that the greatest growth will occur in the developing world. While in 2000, only 56% of the world's middle classes lived in the developing world, this figure is expected to reach 93% by the year 2030 – with China and India alone expected to account for two-thirds of all this expansion.² What may be most striking about the middle classes are not merely their mind-boggling numbers, or their location in the developing world, or the fact that these particular class actors have been ignored for years in studies of late industrializers, or even the fact that the newfound interest in the middle classes comes on the heels of a controversy about the relevance of class in the contemporary era more generally (see Portes, 2000). Indeed, what may be most noteworthy is the set of adjectives that come attached to the study of middle classes, as well as the fact that these qualifiers are different than those employed in prior periods.

The objective of this article is to propose the use of nuclear power to provide electricity and wide‐scale desalination to meet future population growth in Israel and a Palestinian State.

The extent of future water and power shortages in Israel and a Palestinian States expounded in the article and various methods for alleviating these shortages are explored. Comparisons are made with historical approaches.

Nuclear pebble‐bed technology is found to be the most cost‐effective way to energize future water and power needs. It is safe, non‐polluting, and terrorist resistant.

This article makes the case that abundant water and power in the Middle East is both a pre‐requisite and a stimulant for peace in the region.

Iran’s potential to expand its natural gas exports has received a great deal of attention since Hassan Rouhani’s election in 2013. Rouhani’s presidency centered around adopting a foreign policy approach to actively promote a constructive engagement and dialogue with the West, as well as seriously pursuing diplomatic and prudent interactions with Iran’s immediate neighbors and beyond on an equal footing with a view toward advancing mutual accommodation, respect, and shared interests. This chapter’s central argument is that Iran’s ability to export natural gas to Europe depends largely upon maintaining stable and strong trade ties with Turkey. The cooperation between these two countries, despite competition and occasional frictions, could arguably foster a balance of power at middle-power level countries that will be necessary for an enduring stability in the region.