Arang Keshavarzian, Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Arang Keshavarzian (AK): The book tries to understand what it means for the Persian Gulf to be a region and how the multiple conceptions and social processes of region-making reflect struggles and generate conflicts. I have come to think of regionalism as aspirational, representational, and a set of structured practices that taken together help us understand the contradictory ways the Persian Gulf is viewed as a regional whole as well as fractured, jagged, and variegated. The Gulf region has simultaneously become globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along myriad juridical divisions and spatial enclaves, such as sovereign territorial states, free trade zones, and deeply segmented cities. This only becomes tangible by tending to different historical moments in the past century and a half, moving between locations on the coastline, and shifting between different geographic scales (e.g. the urban, national, imperial, international). Making Space for the Gulf became the venue for me to think through how the geography of the Gulf is drawn and what it reveals about political struggles unfolding elsewhere and an at other times. At its most ambitious moments, the book reflects on international capitalism and empire. Some of these struggles are material and territorial, as in clashes over natural resources, but others are about defining who belongs and can make claims to authority. Because I approach the Gulf as unbounded and socially produced, I contend that it allows us to learn about processes running beyond it.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AK: The structure of the book reflects the story I want to tell about space being relational and an outcome of social processes. It is organized as a set of interlaced analytical histories rather than chronologically. This allows me to explore the intersection between the Persian Gulf and its regionalism in relation to multiple political projects, ranging from imperialism (chapter 2), nation-state formation (chapter 3), the globalization of capitalism in the late-twentieth century (chapter 4), and urbanization (chapter 5). This structure reinforces the argument that the Gulf region shapeshifts and looks different depending on the geographic scale. Individually, each chapter is a portal, tracing historical processes of region-making and re-making as the Gulf was entwined with other scales and types of spatialized politics. Thus, historical episodes such as the founding of oil sectors or protest movements appear in more than one chapter and look different in light of the geographic scale foregrounded. This recursive telling of the Gulf’s history underscores the simultaneity of spatial politics or the sedimented manner in which regionalization happens.

This all means that each chapter is in conversation with relevant specialized literatures. For instance, the chapter on the Gulf, British empire, and US hegemony is steeped in conceptual and analytical debates about imperialism, geopolitical thought, and US global power. Chapter 3 is shaped by scholarship on decolonization, state formation, and international law. Meanwhile, chapters 4 and 5 engage scholarship on economic zones and transnational urbanism, respectively. I came to think of the project as both bringing the scholarship of different countries together (e.g. Iran and the Arabian Peninsula), but also reading across multiple disciplines and fields of expertise that are often isolated from one another.

I have benefitted enormously from research by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, urbanists, and others that allow me to connect places and moments together relationally and comparatively. The chapters synthesize a wide array of scholarship on specific cities, countries, and circulations commodities. Some of the works that I rely on are older publications that have unfortunately been forgotten or left unpublished. However, I have also benefitted from a new wave of research on the Arabian Peninsula looking at urbanism, migration, the political economy of oil, and social history. There is also good work that is influenced by “the oceanic turn” or invested in telling translocal histories. I marshal exciting new work on Iran foregrounding the oil industry, slavery, and the southern parts of the country. Unfortunately, many Arabists do not read the work on Iran and vice versa, so I hope the book serves as a historiographic bridge. I wanted to write this book partly to clear a space for conversations between historiographies and bodies of social scientific literatures—which rarely collide because of academic specialization and practices on the one hand and nationalist blinders on the other. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AK: There are some direct connections to my earlier work on the Tehran bazaar. While studying the structure and evolution of Tehran’s marketplace, I found myself traveling about seven hundred miles to the Persian Gulf to interview people and observe the movement of goods to and from the port cities, islands, and free trade zones in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf countries. Learning about these social networks piqued my interest in the history of these places and the circulation of more than just commodities. I began to wonder what people, ideas, and forms of capital moved to and from these areas, and what types of authority and political power were expressed across this body of water. This was clearly important not only to people living and working on its shores, but also to people in capitals far from the sea and across several decades, even centuries. However, thinking about society and politics as nationally framed was limiting.

At a conceptual level, writing Bazaar and State in Iran: the Politics of the Tehran Marketplace had already exposed me to theories of spatial politics and how place should be treated as a product of social activity rather than a ready-made object. By studying the 1979 Iranian revolution and the experience of capitalism and urbanization through the lens of Tehran’s covered marketplace, I had developed an affinity with ideas about the Gulf being produced as a regional space and contemplating how as a locus, means, and object of conflict it can reveal tensions at other scales and registers. 

Finally, some of the ideas about geography that animate Making Space for the Gulf also proved useful in another project on examining the 1979 revolution in Iran. Ali Mirsepassi and I brought together researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds to consider the following questions: in what sense, if at all, was the Iranian revolution global? How were its inspirations and organizational structures connected to places beyond its borders? What conceptions of the world existed in 1979 and how did understandings of Islam, colonialism, Third Worldism, development, and authenticity locate Iran in close proximity with societies and struggles elsewhere? What emerged out of our responses to these questions was Global 1979: Histories and Geographies of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Thinking globally enabled the twelve authors to ponder places and moments that are typically thought of as peripheral to the epic tumult of revolutionary politics. The collection of essays identifies different versions or visions of world society and therefore combines revolution-making and world-making without one necessarily preceding or containing the other. In my own contributions to the volume, I draw out the alternative visions of globalism and how they differ from prevailing accounts of the revolution that are wedded to nationalist historiography and a comparative approach treating nation-states as units of analysis. Echoing themes that are pivotal to Making Space for the Gulf, I contend that the global is not smooth, but uneven; it is not a singular scale, but multi-scaler; it is not a teleological end, but a layered history encompassing a simultaneity of events that tend to escape heroic or tragic accounts of revolution.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AK: I wrote this book to challenge those who are invested in viewing the Gulf from a single vantage point or shore: those who become agitated over the Gulf being called “Persian” or “Arabian,” or analysts who see it as needing to be secured by the United States or else it will be lost to one foe or another—the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Saddam Hussain or “the Ayatollahs” in the 1990s, or China at the current moment. I hope my approach will encourage them to not only think about the history and societies of the Gulf differently, but also to interrogate their assumptions about space being abstract and geography existing prior to human action. I hope students of politics will engage the book to think about how political struggles and social processes acquire spatial expression and vice versa. Geographers have a rich tradition of allowing us to see space as not simply a passive stage, and historians and others have also pushed us to de-naturalize nation-states or grapple with the limits of methodological nationalism. By this I do not mean that nation-states do not matter; they remain the preeminent political units of the modern world (especially see chapters 3 and 4). Instead, I hope that the book offers tools for readers to question and reformulate the conceptual boundaries between state and society, and politics and economics, by centering both struggles over space as well as spatialized politics in its many shapes and sizes.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AK: I do not have a full-fledged project before me, but I have the kernel of a question with roots in Making Space for the Gulf as well as our current historical conjuncture. The book is populated by many people who live in places beyond their birthplace. I have become interested in how people living outside of what they or others come to think of as “their homeland.” We have a variety of terms for them—migrants, exiles, diasporas, expats—and they have different sorts of relationships to their past and present homes. I am curious to make sense of how people move between these categories and what this means for politics. This partly reflects my own history as someone who left Iran as a child and saw how in the 1980s many Iranians abroad typically viewed themselves as exiles and living in alienation, or ghorbat. But the 2022-3 Women, Life, Freedom protests indexed a shift, with many Iranians speaking in terms of being a diaspora and wanting to emphasize responsibilities to both Iran and the US body politics. I am sure the story is more multi-faceted than this. I am interested in what this topic tells us about our contemporary capitalist world as much as the experience of any specific community of people.

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 4-5; and Chapter 4, pp. 141-142)

Despite the different ways that the Gulf was depicted by powerful forces—as the domain of Persians, Arabs, Americans, or the British or a puddle of an umbilical cord—they all imply that it is a bounded, immutable body that can be encompassed as a single geographic scale. It is defined either as a national space and an extricable rooted in the Persian or Arab nation or as a place of imperial domination on a geographic scale “above” or “beyond” the national. Out of various geographic imaginaries and imaginative geographies, the Gulf has been construed as being unstable, cosmopolitan, or pivotal for British Empire, for national self-determination, or for global capitalism. When people argue that the Gulf should be contained, secured, stabilized, or held in the bosom of a single nation or a part of the free world, they are building this on a host of assumptions about geography, society, and power.

The Persian Gulf is treated as a world region because these prevailing representations of the Gulf insinuate that whoever has the upper hand over this quasi-inland sea has access to and dominance over its littoral, the surrounding hinterlands, and a significant part of the globe. By the time US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger addressed the Congress, the stakes had swelled to encompass “the industrialized free world” or what today would be called “the global economy.” Attempts to define the Gulf as a region are linked to different hegemonic aspirations; they evoke and promote visions for what the Gulf should become and who should control it. Debates about who should or does control the Gulf typically also rest on the premise that it has a timeless essence or else a seamless linear trajectory from a local body of water to a British lake to a US-protected global lifeline. If empires and global hegemons conceive of history as a calling to fulfill their Great Power destiny, for Persian and Arab nationalists history is something to purify or escape.

Battles over the proprietorship of the Persian Gulf index a particular understanding of space, scale, and time. These contests mobilize a view of space as fixed, homogenous, and existing primordially or prior to human action. As the influential Dutch-born emigre geopolitical thinker Nicholas Spykman concluded in 1938, “Geography does not argue; it just is.” This abstract view of space, one that strips it from social complexity, symbolism, and multiplicity, has been buttressed by modern cartography and aerial views that make territory more quantifiable and concrete. It obscures societies living in the Gulf, placing them behind a veil of mathematical calculations that determine with precision the measurement of the land and the sea. It also owes much to classical geopolitics or the nineteenth-century study of relations between nation-states struggling to survive with different geographic endowments. Within their claim to being “scientific,” geopolitical thinkers take geography for granted, with the analyst as occupying the detached “god’s eye” view of “the world.”

The Gulf is abstracted as a frictionless surface easily traversed or a unified territorial object ready to be enclosed and captured, a compelling expression of what Henri Lefebvre described as “Space . . . becoming the principal stake of goal-directed actions and struggles.” Such a formulation encourages a view of the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint rather than a gateway and its shoals as a barrier rather than a porous membrane. Thinking about the waterway in this fashion “evokes the image of something physical and external to social context and to social action, a part of the ‘environment,’ a context for society—its container—rather than a structure created by society.” The Persian Gulf region is a two-dimensional plane emptied of people.

[…]

Making Space for the Gulf tunnels underneath these naturalized understandings of the Persian Gulf region as a location on maps or an abstract enclosure. I examine processes of region-making, or what I term regionalization, as they have unfolded from the mid-1800s to the present. I call for unmooring our perspective away from the position of a detached observer strategizing for territorial control or national honor and instead surveil the many investments in space necessary to sustain political power and capitalist accumulation or navigate struggles for upward mobility. By tracing how the littoral societies of the Persian Gulf were bound up with far-flung places via sea-lanes and credit lines, I document how they were gradually and unevenly integrated into and left their mark on the circuits of international capital and the designs of geopolitical strategists. The Gulf then comes into view as a mutable, created space that does not exist as a passive stage but is assembled out of human actions and relations as well as being constitutive of struggles. The societies of the Persian Gulf were not a backwater or latecomer but a site for purposive participation in the making of global capitalism. Spatial politics of the Persian Gulf are not a competition over a single object but a feature of layered and multiple, sometimes incommensurable, regional formations. The textured topography of the Persian Gulf has been overlain by histories of region-making and unmaking. I show the fault lines of Gulf geography were the outcome rather than the determinant of politics. Methodologically, the Persian Gulf does not function as a divide but rather a kaleidoscopic lens allowing us to view more than the sum of its parts; a social space and a world of a region.

[…]

In December 1978, as revolutionaries were on the cusp of deposing the monarchy, the shah began considering an extended vacation as part of some sort of political transition. He floated the idea of retiring either to his residence on Kish Island or to the nearby $200 million naval base in Bandar Abbas. In the 1970s, while Kish was being transformed into a free trade and touristic zone, other dimensions of Pahlavi internationalism materialized in the nearby naval base at Bandar Abbas with its barracks designed by Israeli architects and its harbor frequented by both US and Soviet warships. But in the winter of 1978–79, the shah stopped strategizing about how to be the policeman of the Gulf, and his thoughts were fixated on the Gulf littoral as a place of refuge. Fancifully or desperately, he even suggested to the US Ambassador that he would be willing to retire to a yacht in the Persian Gulf’s international waters. Maybe this was primed by the memory of his father, Reza Shah, traveling to Bandar Abbas in 1941 to depart from Iran for the last time after the Allied forces occupied Iran and forced him to abdicate the throne. In the midst of losing his grip on Iran’s political reigns, Mohammad Reza Shah, the person that had labored for two decades to be an indispensable guardian of the Gulf, came to view the southern shores as a safe house and location removed from national politics—a place that was so geographically marginal that revolutionaries would accept his presence there as an absence. However, as much as the shah tried to extend his authority to the shores of the Gulf and make it central to Iran’s sovereignty, the unrealized plot illustrated that the Gulf retained its peripheral qualities.

A few weeks after the shah suggested retiring to Kish and after he and his family left Iran to begin his exile in a host of different countries, Kish was again evoked as a national threshold and solution during the revolutionary situation. This time the US Ambassador reported that the last prime minister appointed by the shah, Shahpour Bakhtiar, and a group of generals in the National Security Council had devised a plan to divert the plane returning Ruhollah Khomeini from exile. The scheme was to close all of Iran’s airports and have the imperial air force intercept the plane, forcing the leader of the revolutionary movement and his closest confidants to land at Kish’s airport. At which point the pilot would be told to depart and the revolutionary leader and his entourage would somehow be held on the island until next steps could be taken. Despite this ploy to use the littoral as a liminal space to bide time, Khomeini’s plane landed safely in Tehran sixteen days after the shah had departed and less than two weeks before the ultimate victory of the revolution.

Despite all the economic and nationalist investments of the past century, Tehran’s relationship with the Gulf region was ambivalent and contradictory. Islands and shipping lanes were where sovereignty was projected, but in the midst of revolution Kish became the place for the outgoing sovereign to depart and the ascendant sovereign to be kept at bay. Both of these clumsy and unrealized plans evoked the long practice of exiling criminals and political dissidents to Iran’s geographic and political frontiers, with the coastal region as a particular stigmatized frontier where judges could send social pariahs.78 Kish, however, had become the border that defined the center, the edge of Iran that was thoroughly internationalized. The Persian Gulf’s coastline and its islands were a membrane-like buffer isolating certain objects while accommodating others. In conception and practice, this version of the Gulf is less a national border and international boundary than a corridor and seam acting as a conduit for some flows and a buffer against others. This is after all the logic of FTZs that has informed the development of Jebel Ali into a vital component of the Gulf as a global logistics space.

Excerpted from Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East by Arang Keshavarzian, published by Stanford University Press, ©2024 by Arang Keshavarzian. All Rights Reserved.