23 North Africa & the Middle East: Political Geography II –
Border Disputes
“Nations exist because people believe in them. Once the people of planet earth stop believing in nations and start practicing humanity, all borders will disappear for good.”
The history of the world is full of stories of disputed territories, sometimes even when agreements have been reached to settle these disputes. Not surprisingly, geographers seek to categorize these disagreements over geographic space.
First, a type of border disputes is positional. This type of dispute is odd, for it comes to pass in spite of existing documentation that was created to solve the border problem. In a positional border dispute, one country may choose to abrogate the existing treaty. (Abrogate is a fun word that indicates that one side arbitrarily and unilaterally quits the treaty on its own.) As mentioned in Chapter 21, the Shatt al-Arab (meaning the river of the Arabs) is the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. As such, it is a short physiographic border between Iran and Iraq before the stream empties into the Persian Gulf. This stretch of river has been subject to a positional border dispute. Given that the waterway had long been a line of contention in the region, the 1937 treaty between Iran and Iraq was considered to be salutary in ending confrontation. Unfortunately, in 1969 Iran abrogated the treaty, largely due to its dissatisfaction with the dividing line not following the center line of the river. In 1975, the treaty was adjusted to reach an accord, but in 1980 Iraq abrogated this new agreement. This became a key point of contention in the war between the two countries for most of the 1980s. Indeed, there was documentation to prevent conflict; however, it clearly failed in that endeavor.
Second, other types of discord over boundaries are territorial. One kind of territorial dispute is historical. In these cases, one of the parties to the conflict asserts a historical claim to the disputed lands. For instance, an ethnic group may assert rights to an area that is claimed to be part of their national homeland. A clear and obvious example is the dispute between Palestinians and Jews where both groups claim the same lands as their homeland. For a lengthier consideration of this dispute, see Chapter 15.
Another example is Kurdistan, a region that is not a country, but is a homeland. The Kurds are an example of a Stateless-nation. They are a nation or ethnic group with all the corresponding shared characteristics, yet they do not have their own country. Instead, the Kurds are split into Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. They have faced discrimination and persecution in these countries. This has produced violence between Kurds and other national groups, so that in Turkey the Kurds are labeled as terrorists. The Kurds would like to have their homeland became a country, but at least are pleased to have considerable local autonomy in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s repressive regime.
Quite an interesting claim in this category is Iraq’s assertion to jurisdiction over all of Kuwait. During the latter years of the Ottoman Empire, the areas of Iraq and Kuwait were combined in the Basra Province, an imperial sub-region. When the Ottoman Empire was broken down after World War I, the new Iraq pointed to the logic of transferring Basra intact from province to country. In particular, Iraq noted that the Ottoman-British Agreement of 1913 identified Kuwait as a district within the Basra Province. Especially in the 1930s, there even was some popular support in Kuwait for reunification. When Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, Iraqi leaders claimed territorial justification for the invasion.
An odd sub-category of the territorial dispute comes with the claim of geographic necessity. In this circumstance, the challenging side argues that it needs a piece of territory held by the other side. Sometimes this seems like a petulant child whining, “But I need it, mommy!” Iraq has very little coastline on the Persian Gulf. Indeed, that circumstance is disadvantageous. Warbah Island and Bubiyan Islands sit just offshore both of Kuwait and of Iraq; however, these small islands belong to Kuwait. Iraq has insisted that it needs these islands to enhance its coastal presence in the Persian Gulf. Naturally, Kuwait has rejected Iraq’s contentions of geographic necessity. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the First Gulf War in 1990, another of its rationales for incursion was the need to acquire these islands.
Third, the functional border disputes involve policy or land use practices at the border. These could be a simple as how passports and visas are implemented. Locating noxious facilities along borders could prompt functional disputes.
Fourth, the transboundary resource dispute may be quite difficult to resolve. Some natural resources are discrete and visible on the physical landscape. Forests contain finite and countable numbers of trees, so that timber resources ought to be manageable even if a border transects a forest. A tree on the west side of the border goes to the country west of the border. However, NAME is not known for forests, but rather for deserts. Sand is not countable, nor is it a marketable commodity. Uncomfortably for borders, the two key resources of NAME are liquids.
As discussed in Chapter 14, oil is the dominant economic resource of NAME. Oil is found under the ground or, even more complicated, underground and underwater. So, when drawing a border on the surface, oil below the surface cannot be seen. Of course, there are scanning techniques that can provide estimations of subsurface oil reserves. Nevertheless, oil is not like coal or iron ore deposits that also are below ground. Coal miners can dig under the surface in seams of coal, but the workers’ locations generally can be tracked, so that the sites of extracted coal are known. In this way, the ownership of the coal can be established. In contrast, oil is a liquid. It is extracted by drilling from the surface and pumping the oil upwards. It can be implied that oil below the surface well belongs to the owners of the well; however, as a liquid, oil can move laterally below the surface, so that oil literally could be sucked sideways across a surface boundary.
In fact, when the previously mentioned Iraqi invasion of Kuwait occurred, another justification cited by the invaders was the claim the Kuwait was ripping off Iraq by pulling oil laterally across the border to enrich their own wells. Thus, Iraq invaded to stop these thefts. Of course, it is very difficult to demonstrate the subterranean flow of a viscous fluid.
Water is the other valuable liquid in NAME, as water in desert regions is in short supply. In one way water is similar to oil, in that subsurface aquifers or wells cannot be seen from the surface nor their flows easily quantified. In addition, the movement of water on the surface – rivers – also can be problematic. Who owns the water in rivers? One example is the Jordan River, between Israel and Jordan. To their credit, these countries resolved the differences in this case, reaching a water-sharing agreement in 1994. In 2021, the countries expanded their cooperation in a water for energy deal, in which Israel will deliver desalinized water to Jordan in exchange for solar-generated electricity.
A combination of water and oil occurs in the Persian Gulf. There are oil reserves underground below the waters of the Persian Gulf. To which countries does that oil belong? According to the United Nations Law of the Sea, countries retain rights to resources in and below the waters within 200 miles of their coastlines. These are the exclusive economic zones (EEZ). However, in circumstances like the Persian Gulf, where there are fewer than 400 miles of water between countries, the respective zones are the halves of the distance between the countries. So, if the sea between two countries is 264 miles, then each country gets an EEZ of 132 miles. The width of the Persian Gulf reaches only up to 210 miles, so the principle of half and half applies. However, countries along the Persian Gulf chafe at these divisions, trying to enhance their zones by measuring from islands or low tide.
The types of border conflicts are easily highlighted in NAME, a region familiar to conflict, sometimes specifically over boundaries.
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Cited and additional bibliography:
Avis, William. “Border Disputes and Micro-Conflicts in South and Southeast Asia.” K4D – Knowledge, Evidence and Learning for Development, November 10, 2020, 1–24.
Klein, David. “Mechanisms of Western Domination: A Short History of Iraq and Kuwait ,” January 2003. http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html.
