@article{9619c1d037ce4f28baea7458095397bb,
title = "Laying it down in stone:: delimiting and demarcating Iraq{\textquoteright}s boundaries by mixed international commission",
abstract = "Mixed international commissions have been centrally involved in shaping the outer margins of the state territory of Iraq over the last century and ahalf. Laborious Anglo-Russian efforts to narrow the traditional Perso-Ottoman frontier in the seventy-year period before the Great War contrasted with the League of Nations' ostensibly speedy treatment of Iraq's more arbitrary northern and north-western territorial limits in the early inter-war years. More recently, a team appointed by the UN Secretary-General finalised definition of Iraq's international boundaries with Kuwait when teh emirate was liberated from Iraqi occupation in the spring of 1991. The article scrutinises the role played by these bodies in teh boundary evolutionary process from a review of their primary records. It highlights the fact that the evolution of Iraq's (and those of its Ottoman forbears) international boundarie sto the east, north and west was rarely straightforward and refelcted both regional considerations and imperial contexts. The problem of reconciling inadequate textual definitions with features on the ground has been a constant phenomenon. Deciding whether commissions actually delimited or demarcated territory was as valid a question following the UN's Iraq-Kuwait settlement as in teh mid-nineteenth century. Whether many historical treaty delimitations were ever designed to be anything more than territorial allocations is another theme explored in this article",
keywords = "Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Colonial boundary-making, frontiers, delimitation nad demarcation, League of Nations, United Nations",
author = "Richard Schofield",
note = "This was one of a number of articles I wrote over the last half decade in an attempt to make sense of territorial themes in Iraqi politics and history and its relations with surrounding states. In this, an analysis of the remarkable degree to which Iraq{\textquoteright}s current territorial limits have been shaped by mixed international commissions (albeit ones in which Britain has always had a leading hand), I come to certain conclusions about how the delimitation and demarcation process has worked and these don{\textquoteright}t necessarily support the conventional wisdoms. Among these are that delimitation is a distinct 2-stage process generally of diplomatic territorial deal and then (where it can be accommodated), refinement on the ground. Also, in recent decades, states and the UN itself have had to bridge the stages of delimitation and demarcation by introducing new stages of their own or by expanding the range of the original terms themselves in dealing with disputes and conflict over unclear and inadequate colonial boundary definitions. Because of my recognised position as a leading international expert on Britain{\textquoteright}s imperial boundary-drawing, I have been invited to act as adviser to several governments, law firms and oil companies on these matters. I presented my latest thoughts on imperial boundary delimitation, including a number developed here, as an expert witness in the 2008-9 Abyei arbitration in The Hague (PCA), while the July 2009 judgement in that case relied upon me for its definition of those troubled and troubling terms, delimitation and demarcation. ",
year = "2008",
month = jul,
doi = "10.1016/j.jhg.2007.11.002",
language = "English",
volume = "34",
pages = "397--421",
journal = "JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY",
issn = "0305-7488",
publisher = "Elsevier",
number = "3",
}