ABSTRACT
This book attempts to synthesise the critical study of culture with empirical analysis of conflict in the Persian Gulf. It takes anarchy to be constituted in a cultural context where different constructions of identities engage, compete and sometimes clash with each other. It will become clear that both history and our method privilege interaction between the three main protagonists – Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia – but our analysis is not meant to exclude the other littoral states, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait. Some might argue that the subject is too large or too small: that ‘region’ is in itself a problematic abstraction or that the international politics of the Persian Gulf cannot be satisfactorily analysed in isolation from the ‘Middle East’. I understand that there are contending definitions of what constitutes ‘region’, and to make a case for analytical autonomy of the Persian Gulf does not mean that there is no interconnectedness between this part of the world and Palestine/Israel, North Africa, Central Asia or other areas. It will become clear that during some periods and political developments I will go beyond the analytic delineation, for instance when the Second Persian Gulf War or competing ideological narratives in the Islamic worlds are discussed. I argue, however, that it would be misleading to subsume constitutive events such as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iran-Iraq war and even the Iraq-Kuwait crisis under a ‘Middle Eastern’ meta-narrative, just because analysis of the Persian Gulf is not departmentalised and institutionalised or because political rhetoric and media representation suggest abstraction from the particular in favour of the general. It is my proposal that for the purpose of this study it is sufficient and necessary to discuss the international politics of the Persian Gulf without explicitly positioning the analytical focus within a wider ‘Middle Eastern’ discourse. A line has to be drawn somewhere and this is where I choose to draw it, partly because of the limits of my own knowledge.
