THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF IRAN

Abstract

With a territorial span of nearly 1,648,195 km² and a population circa 87 million, Iran, also called Persia, has long chanced upon the ebbs and flows of political history and is within the ranks of countries fit for scrutinization and studies apropos of political geography and geopolitics. From the premodern era up to the modern age, Iran has been the subject of revolutionary changes in the inception and genesis of social-political systems and political organization of space. The geographical placement of Iran and the manner of its lodgment on earth has granted it a somewhat peculiar quality in terms of geopolitical and geostrategic significance: Iran is located within the Middle East, but is historically rooted to Central Asia and Caucasus, with shared past narratives with Southern Asia and India. On the other hand, Iran is connected to Europe through Turkey and with a share of more than 50% of the strategic water reserves of the Persian Gulf has access to international waters. In this light, it is quite conspicuous how Iran is located in a very fragile and sensitive location as concerns political geography and geopolitics. Iran is also quite unique in terms of domestic geography in that it possesses both a considerable number of geomorphological and topographic units as well as a myriad of cultural and social geographies, each of which are, in a certain way, connected to histories and regions beyond its political borders. The political geography of Iran has also been highly influenced, both negatively and positively, by the continuance of abundant sources of petroleum and gas energy in conjunction with certain underground mines. These rather exceptional features within and outside the borders of the country have engendered a multitude of phenomena relating to political geography as well as the numerous supplemented geopolitical occurrences. Such issues lend weight to the study of the political geography and geopolitics of Iran so as to better comprehend the nation and the country.