Customer Reviews

Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus

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This book along with "The Persian Gulf At the Millennium" was required reading for a class I took on persian gulf politics. It was developed out of the same project (Gulf/2000 project) as Millennium but it is somewhat more up to date (by five years). Like Millennium, it is a collection of essays from experts in the field except this book includes more scholars who are actually from the region. It has three essays given from an Iranian perspective which make it very relevent to politics and security issues of today. It also has essays from the Arabian perspective and discusses patterns in Gulf security. My personal favorite essay from this book though doesn't really have to do with security. It is the essay on the Gulf's ethnic diversity from M.R. Izady. Its a very interesting history of the people who live on the coastal waters of the Gulf. They are commonly called Gulfis and they have a rich history of sea trade that goes back to ancient times. They traveled and had influence on people who lived as far away as India, Indonesia, and even China. Whats more, they probably had more influence on the people in India and Indonesia than on the people adjacent to them in Persia (now Iran) and Arabia because the Gulf coast is largely isolated from the inland step by mountains on the Persian side and desert on the Arabian side. I really enjoyed that particular essay. The other essays in the book are also very good and insightful. Written by people who clearly understand issues in the Gulf, the book is an excellent collection of topics very relevent to the region today.