IRAN’S DRIVING DETERMINANTS OF ENLARGEMENT TOWARDS AFRICA

CASE STUDY OF NIGERIA, SENEGAL AND GHANA

Abstract

The study is to concretize Iran’s outreach strategy, which is tried to be confined within its own borders, through the conventional tools that it believes to be effective, and especially to verify the problematic of whether political Islam is an influential tool in the region in question. In this context, it analyzes Iran’s Africa policy through the theory of underdevelopment and the Third World by combining historical, religious, economic and strategic perspectives, utilizes the case study method and focuses on Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana. The main findings of the article are Africa, although decolonized, is still fragile and vulnerable to intervention; as in other regions, religion is the soft underbelly of the people here, and Iran is one of the states that is trying to fill the void in the region in the current geopolitical conditions.

And Iran invests particularly in education and language policies in the cultural sphere, while in the religious realm, it seeks to establish an ideological sphere of influence by promoting the discourse of the “axis of resistance” through the Shiite sect. This strategy is employed not only at the regional level but also on a global scale to legitimize its anti-Western rhetoric and to mitigate the effects of international sanctions. At the same time there has been a lack of previous studies focusing solely on three countries within the scope of the theory and methodology used in the study, it is thought that the article will fill the gap in literature in terms of reaching more objective information by using sources from different languages.