Making Space for the Gulf by Arang Keshavarzian offers a rich exploration of the varying ways the Gulf has been regionalized in the contexts of trade, imperialism, capitalism, and geopolitical strategy. By investigating the politics of knowledge production inherent in region-making, Keshavarzian interrogates the shifting and interconnected ways the Gulf was, and continues to be, imagined, enclosed, and made knowable. He does this by challenging notions of regions as fixed or geographically determined, and instead approaches regions as processes. This framing makes clear that the Gulf is not a bounded or immutable place, but rather a space continually shaped by an array of forces, including global capitalism, imperialism, and local social practices.
Written kaleidoscopically and recursively, Making Space for the Gulf engages multiple histories of the Gulf and moves fluidly through state, regional, and global scales. With this narrative style, Keshavarzian invites readers to think critically about how regions are made, emphasizing that region knowledge-making is inherently linked to struggles over power, capital, and sovereignty. By mapping networks and frictions across multiple scales, he illustrates how spatializing techniques—whether through geopolitical maneuvers, capitalist expansion, or urban development—are deeply entangled with political projects.
Each chapter looks at specific region-making projects, with attention to these projects’ histories and how these projects intersect with local and global processes. Chapter 1 considers historic connections around the Persian Gulf and beyond. This chapter focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how the Gulf was regionalized as a shared space that was generated by its physical environment and localized practices. Keshavarzian argues that historically this shared space was neither self-contained nor static. Rather, through exploring sea trade, imperial treaties, and complex webs of kinship, labor movements, and economic activities like pearling and debt bondage, Keshavarzian demonstrates that the Gulf was an interconnected arena.
Chapters 2 and 3 consider how this interconnected arena was regionalized by imperialism and cleaved through state formation. Chapter 2 focuses on imperialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this chapter, Keshavarzian looks at the intellectual and political labor that made the Persian Gulf a regionalized abstraction. Considering both British and American imperialism, Keshavarzian uncovers how geopolitical imaginaries were instrumental in the construction of the Gulf as a region defined by instability and threat—an area to be secured and controlled. He discusses how the Gulf was both abstracted and made legible through maps and imperial discourses. This territorialization of the Gulf was deeply enmeshed in the logics of imperialism, geopolitics, and capitalist accumulation. This process, which Keshavarzian calls “imperial enclosure,” continues to inform contemporary geopolitics and imperial interventions under the guise of security and stability. Although geopolitical imaginings of the Gulf “were struggles about encirclement and hegemonic integration,” they also facilitated other forms of place-making, including the formation of nation–states (121). In chapter 3, Keshavarzian examines intersections of empire, state formation, and internationalism by introducing the idea of “divided sovereignty,” or the fracturing of political authority between entities. This chapter describes how the Gulf's political boundaries were shaped by international treaties, local political movements, and changing citizenship laws. Using examples from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, Keshavarzian draws attention to the role of treaties, protectorates, and legal frameworks in both defining and undermining new state sovereignty, and he offers a nuanced analysis of how political authority was fragmented.
State formation was not only entangled with colonialism but also with the internationalization of capitalism, and the final two chapters of Making Space for the Gulf delve into the Gulf's place in global capitalism and the impact of neoliberal reforms. Chapter 4 turns to the rise of free trade zones (FTZs) in the Gulf, approaching them as sites of intense capitalist accumulation where global supply chains intersect with local political power. By examining FTZs within state, regional, and global contexts, Keshavarzian shows that these zones facilitate the flow of capital while simultaneously erecting new barriers. These barriers maintain existing social hierarchies and allow elites to accumulate capital. Through a study of two FTZs, Kish in Iran and Jebel Ali in Dubai, UAE, the author argues that these spaces are not simply economic zones but also political projects that consolidate state and local sovereignty through geo-economic strategies. In chapter 5, Keshavarzian examines the relationship between urbanization and capitalism, describing Gulf cities as places where regional spaces and urban form are brought together and investigating how urban spaces in the Gulf are central to global capitalism as well as the influence of global capitalism on urbanism in the Gulf. In this chapter, Keshavarzian also discusses earlier urban spaces in the Gulf, including port cities and company towns, to historically contextualize contemporary Gulf cities. Here we learn that not only oil wealth but also new property ownership regimes shaped these cities. Critically, the commodification of land and oil were dependent upon imperial and state projects and simultaneously buttressed those projects—revealing how past regionalization projects continue to shape the Gulf even as new forms of global capital and political power seek to redefine the region.
In the conclusion, Keshavarzian offers a highly personal account of how global, regional, and state projects in the Gulf have impacted him. Specifically, he describes his experience when, as a professor at NYU in New York, he applied to spend a year teaching at NYU, Abu Dhabi. Although NYU's Abu Dhabi campus was purported to enable the free movement of ideas and people, Keshavarzian was unable to teach there. His security clearance was denied, and no official reason was given, although Keshavarzian mentions that his birth in Iran, his family's Shia Muslim background, and his academic work on the Middle East may have played a role. This memorable story provides an illustration of how institutional and state practices erect barriers for some, while simultaneously facilitating the movement of others. I would have enjoyed reading more “on the ground” discussions, as I often felt there was a gap between the book's analysis of global capital, geopolitical maneuvering, and imperialism and the lived experiences of individuals and communities that shape and have been shaped by these larger processes. The absence of a direct engagement with the “everyday” feels like a missed opportunity to deepen our understanding of how forces such as imperialism and capitalism are constantly negotiated and contested at the individual and community levels. Including this would help us better understand how these forces are neither internally coherent nor evenly applied, and attention to the messiness of these forces would further strengthen the book's approach to regions as processes and enrich its discussion of sovereignty, private property, and labor.
A welcome contribution to the growing literature on the Gulf, Making Space for the Gulf challenges conventional understandings of the Gulf as a static, neatly bound place. Deeply concerned with the ways in which the Gulf has been shaped by imperialism, capitalism, urbanism, and geopolitics, this book provides a sophisticated critique of region-making projects, and it demonstrates how the Gulf has, in turn, shaped the contemporary world.
