Editorial Note: Persian Gulf Studies  (©Background)

Persian Gulf Studies
/Editorial Note, vol 2, issue 2

** Special issue advisors: Arang Keshavarzian and Kaveh Ehsani

In recent years heat waves, droughts, sandstorms, toxic pollution, and more have made the lives of people living in and around the Persian Gulf challenging. Ongoing political crises and rising poverty in Iran and Iraq, the populous northern shore of the Gulf has given rise to extreme social inequalities that add fuel to the region’s already volatile geopolitical divisions. For many these crises have not led to a sense of a shared present or future as the prevailing notions of national exceptionalism and state responsibility have restricted perceptions of politics within the orbit of the national scales rather than the wider Persian Gulf regional. Even as Israeli missile and drone attacks targeted Iran, Qatar, and Yemen, it was forgotten by most that it was GCC states that had helped organized diplomatic channels between the US and Iran that were scuttled by the 12-day war, or that many Iranians turned to Bushsher and Bandar Abbas to secure safe passage across the Gulf.

Imperial ambitions, by Europeans and local leaders, as well as decades of wars and militarization, have naturalized the idea that the Persian Gulf is a divide and boundary encircled by a series of enclosed political units or nation-states. Geopolitical thinking assumes all this and seeks to devise a “science” to win a completion over space. Meanwhile, Rentier state theory, a popular lens to study the political economy of oil, proposes a model of the world in which oil is exported and bundles of capital are recouped by treasuries in ways that are ahistorical, mechanistic and quite magical. The implication being that rentier states are isolated from their societies as well as each other as they function in a unified international market.

Given all this, it is not surprising that much of what describes itself as “Persian Gulf Studies” and increasingly in the Anglo-American world, simply as “Gulf Studies,” is narrowly focused on the Gulf as a boundary that needs securing or a space that must be stabilized. So this sort of Gulf Studies study “threats to the region” and forces of instability to oil markets or or challenges to political status quo, or the ruling regimes.

When policymakers look across to waters of the Gulf from Tehran to Abu Dhabi or Riyadh to Baghdad and so forth, it is almost exclusively in terms of rivalry and lessons to teach and sometimes lessons to learn. A lot has changed since Abbas Massudi, the close confidant of the Shah, traveled to Eastern Arabia and wrote three travelogues, explaining all that Kuwait, Bahrain, and Dubai can learn from Iran. Now Iranian political elites imagine either building new megacities on the coast or desalinating water and pumping deep into the Iranian plateau on the model of rich southern Gulf monarchies. The fascination with modernization—whether expressed as a patronizing imaginary of instructing neighbors in development, as a display of accelerated modernization to rivals, or as an unacknowledged admiration for such rapid progress—has circulated among rulers and populations on both shores of the Gulf over the past half-century, persisting despite political transformations on either side.

Rather than treating the Persian Gulf as a region already divided into separate and autonomous units, we follow recent developments in critical Gulf studies to not begin with nation-states as the first or only political unit and to explore related and connected histories that both bring places together and result in differentiation within societies and between them. We focus on the multiple faces of the Persian Gulf in this issue and explore them through reviews of English and Persian books, journals, PhD research projects, documentaries, and interviews with authors. The reviews on selected materials examine trajectories of modernization, the violence of extraction, the movement of people, labor, capital, and commodities, and the sea as the foundational space of these structuring factors. The reviews further explore the social relations and imaginaries that shaped the Gulf, embedded it in political projects, defined its place in national economies, and guided the production of knowledge about it. A common theme across the pieces is that despite social, cultural, and political differences between the societies encircling the Persian Gulf, there is an intellectual and political utility in examining them together and interconnected.

The Dialogue section features two interviews with authors. In the first interview, Azam Khatam examines recent developments in Gulf Studies in a conversation with Kaveh Ehsani and Arang Keshavarzian, the special advisors for this issue. It highlights a new wave of scholarship and its defining works, which seek to understand the region’s dynamics and structural forces beyond previously established static assumptions. These studies explore exchanges among local communities, the circulation of Gulf capital, labor migration, environmental crises driven by extractive industries, and the conditions under which academic institutions and civil society can engage in meaningful dialogue about these forces and their associated challenges.

The second, conducted by Arang Keshavarzian with Mehran Kamrava, a professor at Georgetown University Qatar and Director of the Iranian Studies Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. They trace the development of Gulf Studies—first in the United States and later at Qatar University. Kamrava reflects on the differing perspectives Iranians and Arabs bring to the region and the preconceptions that often hinder collaborative research.

The Iran Social Sciences section features five book reviews, one journal review, and a review of oil-related documentaries.

In the first review, Hamidreza Yousefi traces Kharg Island’s transformation—from a site of political exile in the 1930s to the island becoming Iran’s leading oil export terminal by 1960—and its impact on the intellectual imagination of Iranian intellectuals, drawing on two exile memoirs by Enjavi Shirazi and Karim Keshavarz, along with social monographs by Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Khosrow Khosravi.

In his review of the 17-volume Geography of Iran by Hajali Razmara (1937), Kaveh Bayat examines the official defensive–military perspective on Iran’s southern coasts during the interwar period, with particular attention to the volume on Iran’s claimed islands in the Persian Gulf. He argues that Razmara’s geographical survey, framed through the lens of border protection, underscores the strategic importance of these islands for defending Iran’s coastal provinces and warns of the risks posed by their depopulation due to out-migration at the time.

In “The Identity Politics of a Body of Water,” Shima Vezvaei examines the emergence of Persian Gulf studies in Iranian universities. She focuses on teaching and research at two coastal universities—Bushehr and Hormozgan—and considers the supporting role of Shiraz University, the History Department at the University of Tehran, and the Iranology Foundation through their conferences and publications in shaping these curriculae. Vezvaei ultimately identifies three overlapping agendas shaping these academic activities: economic competition with the southern Gulf states, the production of identity-oriented knowledge for political purposes, and the advancement of critical scholarship.

In his review of Kaveh Ehsani’s 2019 book The Built Environment and the Making of the Industrial Working Class in Iran, Aidin Torkameh argues that the book constitutes a kind of local history of oil-based capitalism in Khuzestan. He finds the work successful in depicting the processes of land expropriation and the transformation of labor relations through the built environment of the “oil complex.” He regards it as a novel analysis of the urban transformation of Abadan, showing how the coerced commodification of urban space and everyday life served as the backdrop for the formation of the working class and the emergence of housing as a social question.

Mahbubeh Mirzaei, in her review of Roya Khoshnavis’s The Mirage of Crude Oil (2023), praises the book’s contributions to understanding oil literature before and after the Revolution. She emphasizes Khoshnavis’s innovative readings of its social dimensions and thematic breadth—covering oil workers, urban life, and the experiences of marginalized women and children—while questioning the characterization of this body of literature as one of “decline and illusion.”

In his review of Persian Gulf Quarterly, published by the Iranology Foundation in Iran, Behrang Sedighi notes that while the journal seeks to promote research on the region, it remains uncertain about its own focus and how to define the Persian Gulf as a subject. According to Sedighi, different issues of this quarterly feature an eclectic mix of articles, including on diplomacy, oil and energy, defense and security, and southern cities architecture and ethnographies.

Last but not least in this section is Sanaz Sohrabi’s review of three documentary films by Ebrahim Golestan on oil and the Persian Gulf. Sohrabi traces the evolution of these works—from the portrayal of an industrial project in From a Drop to the Sea (1957), to the depiction of the violence of extraction against natural and human environments in A Fire, and finally to the representation of oil workers’ suffering under the unbearable heat of the South in Wave, Coral, Rock (1962). She argues that these films played a pivotal role in ushering in the Iranian New Wave cinema.

The World and A Region section features six book reviews, four summaries of groundbreaking Doctoral research projects, and one journal review.

Rohan Advani, examines Money, Markets, and Monarchies—the third book by Adam Hanieh (2019)—which discusses the expanding role of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states in shaping the political and economic dynamics of the Middle East amid the gradual retreat of the United States. Hanieh argues that this growing influence is fundamentally tied to the GCC’s substantial share of banking and financial capital across the Arab world. This review was originally published in MERIP.

Ehsan Siahpush, in his review of Arang Keshavarzian’s Making Space for the Gulf (2023), highlights the book’s departure from traditional approaches that treat oil as ontologically central, assume the naturalness of nation-states, or ascribe fixed cultural and political identities to the Gulf. Keshavarzian instead frames the region as constituted by flows of people, goods, and capital, structured through specific spatial technologies, each explored in depth in individual chapters.

The review of Noora Lori’s Unregistered Citizens (2019) highlights her innovative analysis of the challenges faced by the bidūn, the population without residency documents in the UAE. In a country where 90 percent of residents are migrants, the bidūn’s exclusion from citizenship—despite their longstanding residence predating the UAE’s 1971 independence—illustrates the exclusionary logic of nationhood underpinning the sheikhdom’s modernization.

Alex Boodrookas reviews the recent books on labor migration to Eastern Arabia, including Andrew Gardner’s City of Strangers (2010), Neha Vora’s Impossible Citizens (2013), Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (2009), and some others. He argues that sponsorship work-visa system systematically maintains migrants as precarious, denies them access to citizenship rights, and facilitates rapid capital accumulation by the state through recruitment and deportation.

Chelsei Mueller’s The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf  (2020), reviewed by Arang Keshavarzian and originally published in Iranian Studies, contributes to our knowledge of the diplomatic history of the region under British domination. The review emphasizes Moeller’s argument that centuries of interconnectedness and mutual dependency in the Persian Gulf were transformed into Arab–Iranian geopolitical rivalry during the interwar period. The author links the rise of Arab nationalism in the Gulf’s Arab sheikhdoms to Reza Shah’s nationalist policies, which simultaneously facilitated British imperial intervention in regional affairs.

The selected journal for this section is the special MERIP issue on “Post–Fossil Politics,” published in Summer 2024, summarized here in Persian. The issue examines the ambitious often overstated decarbonization projects initiated by the GCC; the major limits of solar energy production; the challenges posed by extractive agribusinesses seeking to secure the Gulf’s food supply; the initiatives aimed at disrupting the armament supply chain to Israel and protecting the ecology of Kurdistan; and the emergence of environmental science fiction that reflects the region’s mounting ecological anxieties.

This section ends with summaries of four doctoral dissertations. Gabriel Young’s State, Land, and Labor in the Making of Peripheries in Iraq: The Case of Basra explores how conflicts over date cultivation and oil extraction in the province of Basra reshaped the Iraqi state in the twentieth century. He asks how and why the shift in the key export commodity in Basra coincided with the erosion of its once-robust civil society, turning a vibrant provincial center integrated into Persian Gulf trade into an extractive periphery at the margins of the Iraqi state.

Scott Eric’s doctoral project examines the transformation of the sea in the Persian Gulf. Since 2020, he has conducted ethnographic and historical research on maritime ownership in the southern Gulf and is preparing his first book, Taming the Sea: Environment, Enclosure, and Extraction in Southeastern Arabia. Drawing on interviews with fishermen in the UAE and Oman, he asks a seemingly simple question—who, besides God, can “own” the ocean?—and shows that the answer is far more complex than it appears.

In “The Making of a Migrant Working Class: Contesting Citizenship in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, 1925-1975,” Alex Boodrookas mobilizes an array of Arabic and English sources to trace the origins of the labor regime and visa-work sponsorship system that has been critical for the GCC states. In the process, his dissertation, which is centered on Kuwait, describes the origins of what he calls the “deportation state” but also a forgotten era in the 1940s through the 1960s when class solidarity overcame attempts by multinational firms and states to divide workers through nationality and race.

Aghil Daghagheleh’s Indigenous Refusal: Arab Minority and the Formation of Modern State in Iran is a historical and ethnographic study of how Arab communities of Khuzestan negotiate state power and resist its practices by framing themselves as the “Indigenous communities of the region, embedded in the ecological world they inhabit: in the land, the marshes, and the rivers, to name a few. Their claim of indigeneity is inseparable from a strong sense of refusal: a refusal of the state’s claim to sovereignty over the region; a doubt about the imposed meaning of Iranian citizenship; a rejection of what they see as exogenous forces seeking to displace and uproot them; and a refusal of the narrative that incorporation within a centralized nation state was salvation and modernization rather than catastrophe. This refusal is an ongoing attempt to protect indigenous autonomy and a way of life embedded in the local ecology.