Old Boundaries for a New State: The Creation of Iraq's Eastern Question
This paper chronicles critical chapters in the delimitation of Iraq's boundaries with Iran and Kuwait, paradoxically in the period preceding the Great War. For such territorial definition took place before the Iraqi state was even formed, yet it would create many of the strategic problems that Iraq has since faced with its two neighbors. Narrowing the Perso-Ottoman land frontier in the mid-19th century had been an Anglo-Russian project, though it was largely Britain's interests that proved conclusive in its final settlement in 1914. The discovery of oil in Persia in the first decade of the 20th century added a new dimension to settling the southern end of the frontier along the Shatt al-Arab river. Britain's interest in maintaining the Persian Gulf as a British lake in order to defend British India was the chief determinant of the contemporary territorial definition of Kuwait. In shaping these territorial limits and dealing with the Ottoman Empire, Britain could not have realized that it was essentially creating the explosive contemporary strategic issue of Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf. With hindsight, it seems that Britain bequeathed to the Iraqi state an eastern question of its own.
« The Safavid-Ottoman Frontier: Iraq-i ‘Arab as Seen by the Safavids ». International Journal of Turkish Studies, 9/1-2 (2003), pp. 157-173.
Article consacre au regard des historiographes safavides sur la region de l’Erāq-e ‘Arab ou se situent les lieux saints du chiisme, religion officielle de la dynastie safavide. L’importance symbolique, religieuse, strategique, et economique de la region dans le contexte particulier du conflit frontalier safavido-ottoman est-elle percue par cette historiographie ? Si oui, comment l’est-elle et n’a-t-elle pas plutot ete forgee au cours du temps ? Dans ce conflit, les Safavides sont generalement...
Physical geography and law: The case of international river boundaries
The delimination of international boundaries in rivers and lakes are open to some unique questions. The natural, physical qualities of those geographical phenomena, which, as a part of state territory, in contrast to the definition of territory, is not immovable but movable and is even naturally a fluid element, gives it its unique characteristics. There are geographical, cartographical, even mathematical problems which the legal world had to deal with while dealing with boundaries in rivers and lakes. The two main problems are the exact location of the line and the changeable character of every river and lake, which could change the location of the line.Part of the Iraki-Iranian border runs along the Shatt al Arab river and its history reveals problems concerning the delimination of a boundary in rivers.