پیروز مجتهدزاده

The region of the Persian Gulf can be seen as a geopolitical arena in which the Arab-Iranian relations are shaped. As one of world’s primary and most significant source of fossil-energy exports, the Persian Gulf cobbles together Iran and the seven Arab countries of the region in a geopolitical cradle in which they enjoy similarities in economic and strategic life, as well as security concerns. Accordingly, the challenges of maritime political geography seem to be quite dependent on an established set of standards and agreements in order to remain on solid grounds. Currently, these challenges manifest themselves in four major categories, with substantial geopolitical consequences between the Iranians and the Arabs of the region, and the complexity of their relationships. These include: Religious Controversies, which concern the sectarian geopolitics; propagates under Jordan-Israeli concoction of “Shiite Crescent”;and Territorial Contentions with theirmajor controversy over the naming of the Persian Gulf. This article examines the process of territorial conflicts, proceedings, and eventually the settlements over the maritime areas of the Persian Gulf in the past five decades. The arrangement of the maritime political geography in the Persian Gulf is a fitting example of former disputes over the border and boundaries within the maritime regions of the world.  

War on terrorism, as the motto which formed the cornerstone of global policies of former neo-conservative administration of the United States, is increasingly becoming ineffective in Afghanistan with the dreaded consequence of spilling over into Pakistan. This inevitable consequence of War on Terrorism</em> in Afghanistan has brought the West face to face with the ‘nest of terrorism’ that CIA built in Pakistan’s so-calledmadrasasof extremist Wahhabi teachings in the first place, with the enthusiastic assistance of Nawaz Sharif’s government in Pakistan, the Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates in late 1990s. In their evil planning they found it necessary to invent a state history for Afghanistan based on former British colonial designs for the region during their geopolitics of Great Game with Russia in 19th century. They invented the Afghan state by putting together territories they severed from the veiningPersian Empire of the time. This process of state-manufacturing in Afghanistan though served the colonial purposes at the time, never proved to be working in the sense that is expected of a genuinely founded nation and nation-state. The ills of this ill-designed state will naturally disallow any remedy that is not based on a genuine state-building process in that country. To produce such a remedy Afghanistan needs to address the ills of its state-structure by pinpointing the centrifugal forces that drives various ethnicities apart and to try and find some kind of accommodation among components that makes up the state of Afghanistan. The best method to achieve this in today world of politics would probably be a genuinely designed federalism

In this, the concluding episode of the series of our studies into Caspian political geography, I will try to discuss, after briefly assessing the background to what has been known in the past twenty years as ‘the legal regime’ of the Caspian Sea, the latest development in Iran’s perspectives of the shaping of maritime political geography.  In the 1990s, as the world order began to shift, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Caspian Sea’s position in global geopolitics also changed. In debates over geo-legal delimitation of the Caspian Sea in the wake of the Soviet collapse, Iran articulated a position sometimes identifiable with Russia’s initial approach—that the Caspian Sea should be a condominium or an ‘area of common use’ for the littoral states. In late 1996 Tehran argued that the Soviet-Iranian treaties of 1921 and 1940 should determine the legal status of the Caspian Sea as a condominium. Slow progress in hammering out a legal regime on that basis was almost brought to an end for Iran in mid-1990s as outside influence increased over the Caspian oil resources pertaining to states other than Russia and Iran. By 1998 Iranian government shifted its position to a complete curve up of the sea in equal shares for the five coastal states. In May and September 2002, Russia signed protocols demarcating its relevant maritime areas of the Caspian Sea with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, respectively. Meanwhile, academic delegates from the Caspian littoral states in an international seminar at Mazandaran University on the Caspian Sea - Babolsar, October 19–20, 2003 - issued a declaration, on the initiative of this author which put forward a solution on the basis of  a) creation of a strip of offshore zone 25–45 miles from the coastline into the sea to allow an exclusive economic zone for each of the five littoral states, &b) creation of a common use zone in the remaining body of the sea to allow equal rights of use for commercial, navigational and other maritime activities by each of the five . In the latest development, together with the other four states, Iran signed on September 29, 2014, a declaration whereby it was agreed that: there will be two fixed zones determining the legal status of the sea: a zone of state sovereignty and a zone with exclusive fishing rights. These two zones will be 25 nautical miles: a 15 miles territorial sea for each state from their shoreline, and a 10 mile exclusive fishing zone.