MARGINALIA: Is Geography Neutral?

DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 7 March) – In the language of maps, we often assume neutrality. A river flows where it flows. A mountain stands where it stands. A gulf is simply a gulf.

But Social Constructivism reminds us that even geography has never been neutral. Names are not innocent labels; they are narratives.

Take the familiar terms “Middle East” and “Far East.”

Middle to whom?

Far from where?

From the vantage point of London and Paris, perhaps. But for someone in Manila, Tokyo, or Jakarta, the phrase “Far East” is not merely distant; it is misplaced. What is “east” to Europe becomes simply “home” to Asia.

The same logic applies elsewhere.

The Near East, a term used in early twentieth-century European diplomacy, referred largely to lands of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, viz., Anatolia, the Levant, and parts of North Africa. Near to Europe, that is.

Then there is the naming of oceans and seas. The name of the South China Sea does not come from either the Philippines or Vietnam, even if their coastlines dominate large portions of its waters. The Indian Ocean is defined by the name of one civilization, though it washes on Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia and Australia.

Names encode power.

Cartography often follows empire.

The Persian Gulf is a striking illustration of this truth.

Long before modern geopolitics, classical geographers had already fixed its name. Greek historians like Herodotus and geographers like Strabo referred to it as the Sinus Persicus, meaning the Persian Gulf. Roman maps followed suit. Likewise, medieval Muslim geographers called it as Bahr Fars, or the Sea of Persia.

Even the name that persisted in European cartography for centuries, from Renaissance atlases to colonial naval charts, remained unchanged.

It was a name that remained remarkably stable for more than two thousand years.

Until politics intervened.

The turning point was the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.

And as the Islamic Republic emerged, its posture toward Western hegemony vengeful and confrontational, the symbolic battlefield spread beyond diplomacy and economics to language itself.

Gradually, many Western media outlets and political institutions began abandoning the historically established term. The phrase “the Gulf” gained prominence in political discourse, particularly during the [Perian] Gulf War of 1990–1991.

Even regional institutions adopted the truncated label. The Gulf Cooperation Council, founded in 1981 by six Arab monarchies perched along the banks of the waterway, gave that the ambiguity institutionalized.

Even more aggressive was the push in some Arab nationalist circles to rename it the “Arab Gulf.”

The dispute even reached the realm of cartographic authority. In 2004, the National Geographic Society stirred controversy when an atlas of the body of water was labeled “Persian Gulf,” with “Arabian Gulf” in parentheses. The action drew diplomatic protests from Iran, which contended that the alternative labeling was an offense to historical and international conventions.

So it is that the United Nations has repeatedly reaffirmed that “Persian Gulf” is the historical and therefore official name, in international documentation.

But the politics of renaming lives on.

This is exactly where Social Constructivism as a framework comes in handy.

In Social Constructivist thought, geography is socially constructed meaning in contrast to just physical space. Names are produced by power, sustained by institutions, and normalized through repetition. When states or media outlets or international organizations change a name, even from “Persian Gulf” to the less risky “the Gulf,” they are not just depicting geography. They’re involved in the shaping of political reality.

Maps are not simply reflections of the world, in other words. They furthermore shape the way the world is understood.

Now, the debate is back in fashion under renewed geopolitical tensions.

The Persian Gulf opens at its narrow mouth, the Strait of Hormuz, to the Arabian Sea and beyond that the Indian Ocean. About one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows through this narrow maritime corridor, making it among the most strategic chokepoints in the global economy.

With the current closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the ongoing US-Zionist war of aggression against the Islamic Republic, geography says it must call the real name the gulf that it deserves, because it is Iran which is currently controlling the strait and determining whether ships pass through it or not.

And from a Social Constructivist perspective, this moment is telling.

Territory, and who controls it, is not simply a military or economic strategy; it also sustains the narratives woven into geography. The actor at any given location inevitably shapes the way that place is discussed, reported on and remembered. In that sense, geography and discourse move together.

The “Persian Gulf,” therefore, is not simply a vestige of ancient cartography. It is also a living reminder that political power, historical memory and geographic naming are still entwined.

The strait serves as an object lesson in the fact that maps are not just geographic metaphors; they are instruments of strategy.

And the gulf it protects already had a name long before modern propaganda, long before the era of oil, even long before Jesus was born.

Names carry memory.

They hold the echoes of civilizations, trade routes and cultural exchanges over generations. To remove a name is not just to change a map; it is an effort at a quiet rewriting of history.

The Persian Gulf is not just a geographical feature. It is a testament to the resilience of historical memory in the face of shifting winds of politics.

And this returns us to the starting point of this reflection.

Social Constructivism teaches that the meanings attached to places are never neutral. They are made, to challenge and to be challenged. So the argument about the Persian Gulf is not just an argument. It’s a story of how history, identity and power contest the language through which we describe the world.

And maybe this is the lesson geography has to tell us:

Maps may be drawn by power, but time has its own cartography.

#PersianGulf #Geography #Iran #MiddleEast #SocialConstructivism

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]