Ports & the Politics of Scale in the Persian Gulf: Urbanization in the Long 20th Century

Arang Keshavarzian will examine the changing urban morphology of the Persian Gulf port cities as a vehicle to trace the shifts in the global and local political economy. He will explore how the forces that de-couple ports from cities, namely containerization and state-building, reconfigured both the cities and the social relationships within and across the Gulf region.

Thus, the Gulf was an arena and participant in the fashioning of multiple waves of globalization and forms of cosmopolitan urbanism and their attendant exclusions and inclusions.

Arang Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. He earned his PhD in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: the Politics of the Tehran Marketplace and articles in edited volumes and journals, including Politics and Society, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Geopolitics, Middle East Report, and Economy and Society. He is currently conducting research on a project examining imperialism and capitalist integration from the vantage point of the circuits of exchange, movement, and control in the Persian Gulf.