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This paper provides a conclusion to a special issue of Mediterranean Politics that has sought to promote critical approaches for a better understanding of spatial process in some of the Middle East region's most prominent in-between spaces. Following recent efforts to observe bordering processes in and around the region, this collection develops the possibility that a subtly different process of territorialization is taking place in those spaces where state power is most challenged, compromised, and uncertain–frontierization. In assessing its possibilities, this paper highlights the significant record of past geographical approaches to borderlands but also selectively explores the established phenomenon of in-betweenness in the evolution of the regional territorial framework. It concludes by suggesting that any fresh consideration of contemporary spatial process should engage with geography's long tradition of studying borderlands as cooperative features and more recent multidisciplinary coverage that tends to view them today as spaces of insecurity in state margins beyond the reach of state authority. Any reinvigorated borderland studies–to which the idea of frontierization might well have something to say–needs to be multidisciplinary but also would do well to further develop agendas for exploring these regions that have been around for some time.

This paper chronicles critical chapters in the delimitation of Iraq's boundaries with Iran & Kuwait, paradoxically in the period preceding the Great War. For such territorial definition took place before the Iraqi state was even formed, yet it would create many of the strategic problems that Iraq has since faced with its two neighbors. Narrowing the Perso-Ottoman land frontier in the mid-19th century had been an Anglo-Russian project, though it was largely Britain's interests that proved conclusive in its final settlement in 1914. The discovery of oil in Persia in the first decade of the 20th century added a new dimension to settling the southern end of the frontier along the Shatt al-Arab river. Britain's interest in maintaining the Persian Gulf as a British lake in order to defend British India was the chief determinant of the contemporary territorial definition of Kuwait. In shaping these territorial limits & dealing with the Ottoman Empire, Britain could not have realized that it was essentially creating the explosive contemporary strategic issue of Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf With hindsight, it seems that Britain bequeathed to the Iraqi state an eastern question of its own. 3 Maps. Adapted from the source document.