NOTE: This episode is an audio version of our video “Arang Keshavarzian: Space and Regionalism in the Persian Gulf” from June 15, 2026. Click here to watch the original video.
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In this episode, Professor Arang Keshavarzian discusses the historical context of contemporary issues in the Persian Gulf.
This episode is the sixth in a series that aims to educate the public about the history, past and present, of the US relationship with the Middle East from different perspectives. This lecture series is part of a broader research initiative "Rethinking US Middle East Policy: Past, Present, and Prospects", a collaboration between Security in Context and the Arab Studies Institute.
Arang Keshavarzian is a professor at New York University. His fields of research and teaching are comparative politics of the Middle East with a focus on issues related to political economy, contentious politics, spatialization of politics. Much of his research and writing focuses on modern Iran and the Persian Gulf.
His 2024 book, "Making Space For the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East," reveals how for over a century capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have conditioned and been shaped by different understandings of the Persian Gulf as a region. From this vantage point the Gulf comes into view as a mutable, unbounded space and a dynamic assemblage of social relations, rather than a fixed object, timeless national territory, or civilizational boundary. His approach reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along myriad national divisions and enduring inequalities.
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