Contesting conceptions of the muslim world: the cases of Saudi Arabia and Iran during the first gulf war

Abstract

This thesis explores the construction of the Muslim world as a referent object in the Islamist security discourses of Saudi Arabia and Iran, adopting Bilgin’s analytical framework for its critical perspective on regional security. This framework challenges the traditional statist, military-focused Cold War Security Studies and emphasizes the co-constitutive relationship between (inventing) region and (conceptions and practices of) security. In so doing, Bilgin distinguishes between four regions as “geopolitical inventions of security”. One of these is the ‘Muslim World’, shaped by spatial representations and insecurities of different actors. Over the years, both Saudi Arabia and Iran have appropriated the Muslim world as their security referent. However, it remains unclear whether they share the same approach to the Muslim world or adopt similar approaches to regional security. In this thesis, I adopt the First Gulf War (1991) as a reference point, and apply this analytical framework to examine how these two actors articulate, define, and seek to secure the Muslim world through an analysis of their discourses.