Persian Gulf

Iran’s Territorial Disputes with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates

Border Disputes, Cultural Geography, Southwest Asia and North Africa / By Martin W. Lewis

As explained in last Friday’s post, tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia run deep. Iran’s relations with several other Arab countries of the region are also strained, due in part to active and potential territorial disputes in the Gulf region. The small island country of Bahrain, where a Sunni Muslim political establishment rules a Shiite – Read More

What’s In A (Place) Name? The Gulf Controversy

Cartography, Geopolitics, Place Names, Southwest Asia and North Africa / By Martin W. Lewis

In mid-January 2010, the Islamic Solidarity Games—scheduled to take place in Tehran in April—were cancelled over a toponymic dispute. The Iranian organizers of the athletic competition insisted on labeling the body of water located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula the “Persian Gulf” in their promotional materials. The event’s organizing committee, based in Saudi Arabia – Read More

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About GeoCurrents

GeoCurrents is dedicated to exploring the geographical and historical patterns that underlie the world’s current events and that structure global and regional relationships. Maps are used in all posts not merely to show where events occur, but also to illustrate the processes involved.

GeoCurrents tries to avoid taking sides on contentious issues, seeking rather to foster an enriching exchange of information and ideas. As its scope is both fully global and deeply historical, the author is usually operating outside of his own fields of expertise. As a result, mistakes and simplifications can be expected. Corrections and elaborations are more than welcome in the comments section. Comments with insulting or abusive language, however, will be deleted.

Readers interested in opinion-based essays by Martin W. Lewis will be able to find them on his personal webpage [currently under preparation].

For more about GeoCurrents and its author, please visit this page.

About The Author

Martin W. Lewis is senior lecturer emeritus at Stanford University, where he taught world history and world geography from 2002 to 2022. He earned a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and previously taught at George Washington University and Duke University. A list of his published works will soon be made available on his personal website [currently under preparation].

GeoCurrents’ Conceptual Concerns

GeoCurrents is concerned about almost anything that has a geographical expression and hence can be explored and elucidated through maps. Topics of interest range from the deadly serious to the quirky and whimsical.

Many GeoCurrents posts take on issues of political geography, ranging from wars and ethnic conflicts to electoral returns. Behind these writings is a conviction that the basic world political map is unduly simplistic, making the world seem much more orderly than it really is. A book-length elaboration of this thesis – entitled Seduced by the Map – will be available on the author’s personal webpage by the end of 2023, if not earlier. The introduction and initial chapters on this book can be found on this website. A summary of the main arguments in Seduced by the Map can be found here.

The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics	Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (6th Edition)
The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography	Green Delusions