Arabian Boundaries 1966-1975

This substantial documentary collection (16 volumes of texts and 2 of maps) was released by Cambridge University Press in May 2009. The product of a four-year research effort, it covers in vivid detail the most tumultuous decade in the territorial evolution of the Arabian peninsular states, one that was dominated by Britain’s departure as protecting power from the region in the 1967-71 period. Many difficult questions had to be broached during this half-decade and in the years immediately before and since. In some cases, as with the dispute between Iran and the UAE over the Lower Gulf islands, Britain felt that an accommodation of sorts had to be concluded before it left formally as colonial power. In others, such as a long-running dispute between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it was considered that the remaining insecurities posed by an ultimate failure to settle could be lived with. Emphasis in the post pax Brittanica period (1972-75) would fix upon the northern Gulf, where territorial disputes had always been viewed as more genuinely destabilising. The dramatic shift in the conduct and pattern of regional territorial geopolitics occasioned by the major Iran-Iraq rapprochement of 1975 dominate the endpoint of the series.

Richard Schofield, editor of the series, comments: “Many of the major questions thrashed out during the project period loom large as regional issues late in 2009. In the light of renewed Iraqi statements about its southern boundaries with Kuwait, BP seems a little nervous about the concession it acquired during the summer of this year for Iraq’s super-giant Rumaila oilfield. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are still trying to update and refine their bizarre treaty settlement of 1974, while Iran and Iraq have to reference attempts to clarify territorial definition on the package they agreed back in 1975.”
 
Arabian Boundaries 1966-1975 is edited by Richard Schofield, founder of the MA Geopolitics, Territory & Security, Department of Geography.
 
http://www.archiveeditions.co.uk/