On June 25th, 1985, John B. Kaboré, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Cooperation for Development and External Relations, issued an internal memo to all Assistant Directors General, carbon-copying all staff members in the Culture department. This memo related the Director General’s instructions on the use of the term ‘Persian Gulf.’ The memo mandated the use of the term in all Secretariat documents, except in official communications with states that preferred alternative designations, in which case diplomatic flexibility was advised.1 The unspoken subtext was that, in correspondence with Iraq and other Arab countries, UNESCO’s officials were to use the term they preferred, which was ‘Arabian Gulf.’

Advocates of the term ‘Persian Gulf’ often cite its usage by Greek geographers Strabo and Ptolemy and Arab geographers Agapius and Ibn Khaldun, dating it to antiquity. At the time of its designation, the term was an accurate reflection of contemporaneous geopolitics, wherein the Persian Empire extended across much of the classical world.8 Alternative designations, like the ‘Gulf of Basra’ or simply ‘the Gulf,’ have emerged during the last several centuries, though none have achieved as widespread acceptance.

With the rise of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism in the 1960s, the term ‘Arabian Gulf’ began to gain traction with countries across the Arab world.4 5 This popularity was reinforced by the support of Western powers who, seeking to strengthen alliances in the oil-rich region, also began using ‘Arabian Gulf’ in some contexts.10

In 1985, Kaboré was writing on behalf of then-Director General of UNESCO Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, who was under scrutiny—mainly in American media—for a “peculiar form of tyranny” in using UNESCO as a platform with an anti-American agenda.9 Although the claim that UNESCO was operating with an overtly anti-American agenda may be far-fetched, the organisation certainly began to diverge more from American policy aims in the 1980s. This paralleled a wave of decolonisation around the world, which had as one of its main criticisms that international and intergovernmental organisations were functioning as instruments of powerful Western states.

Compounding this tension, both the United States and UNESCO had mutual concerns over the Americans’ financial contributions to UNESCO (or lack thereof) and, consequently, the American role in the organisation in the last decade of the Cold War. In 1984, these concerns ruptured, and the United States left UNESCO; the United Kingdom followed shortly after in 1985. When the two countries left, they immediately reduced UNESCO’s operating budget by one third—this has both implications and consequences for the case study discussed in this article.

Distributed six months after the United States left UNESCO, Kaboré’s memo may have been an innocent attempt to standardise the use of a contentious term, or it could be seen as a strategic move in a web of dynamic geopolitics. As the US and UK, among other Western countries, largely supported Iraq in its war against Iran, UNESCO’s effort to respect Iraq’s preferences could have been a ploy to curry favour with the powerful Western states that were major, now former, financiers of the organisation.

More likely, UNESCO took these steps to improve relations with the entire Arab Middle East. It is worth recognising that UNESCO, together with UNDP, ICCROM, and the Iraqi government, had established in Baghdad in the early 1970s a Regional Training Centre for Conservation of Cultural Property in Arab Countries.7 In operation for the rest of the decade and the first years of the 1980s, the Centre closed during the war with Iran as the Directorate of Antiquities’ budget was slashed to cover war expenses, specialists were drafted to the front or fled the country, and the war became characterised by attempts to militarise and propagandise cultural heritage. The Centre also failed to consider the needs of the region’s educated specialists and intelligentsia, compounding the damage done to the fields of heritage management and conservation in Iraq. Perhaps UNESCO’s memo of 1984 was issued with this failure in mind and a newfound appreciation of Iraqi and Arab expectations.

This policy, aimed at maintaining consistency while accommodating diplomatic sensitivities, soon became contentious. Roughly eighteen months later, on November 13th, 1986, the Permanent Delegate of Iraq to UNESCO wrote to the Director-General to contest the use of the term ‘Persian Gulf’ in a mission report by two consultants who travelled to Baghdad earlier that year.2

Although the consultants defended it as the most widely accepted term and alleged they used it apolitically, the Iraqi delegate and his government interpreted the use of ‘Persian Gulf’ as evidence of UNESCO’s bias towards Iran. This came at a particularly tense political moment, six years into the Iran-Iraq War, which had been devastating both countries since 1980. Well into a conflict that had drawn international attention and flared regional rivalries, the Iraqi government was visibly sensitive to semantics that could indicate bias, particularly from an intergovernmental organisation that espoused neutrality.

For Iraq, the use of the term ‘Arabian Gulf’ served as a symbolic rejection of Iranian influence. The Iran-Iraq War, which began with Iraq’s invasion of Iran on September 20, 1980, was not just a contest over territory but over regional dominance. Iraq sought to position itself as the preeminent regional power, challenging both Iran’s historical claims and its contemporary influence.3 6 As a matter of legitimacy, the term used to designate the gulf is seen as an extension of that state’s sovereignty. Consequently, as historian Clifford Bosworth has suggested, Arab states bordering the Gulf adopted the term al-Khalij al-Arabi (Arabian Gulf) in part as a tool in their “psychological war” for political influence.4 The enlargement of state sovereignty, therefore, leveraged both physical and symbolic factors through the annexation of territory as well as naming rights to the gulf that lapped at the shores of both states. For its part, Iran viewed any deviation from the internationally accepted ‘Persian Gulf’ as a denial of its own history and legacy.

UNESCO’s stance in 1985 illustrates the challenges faced by international organisations when navigating sensitive geopolitical issues. The memo’s directive to use ‘Persian Gulf’ reflected historical and academic consensus, but its allowance for alternative terms in bilateral contexts revealed a pragmatic approach to diplomacy. However, this balancing act left room for missteps. Whether due to ignorance or oversight, the consultants’ failure to account for Iraq’s preference provided the country’s delegate with an opportunity to challenge UNESCO’s neutrality.

At the same time, it highlighted the difficulty of maintaining impartiality in a region and political context where language carried significant political weight. The United States, a key actor in Gulf politics, has similarly recognised the gravity of naming conventions.

In recent decades, although official state documents refer to the ‘Persian Gulf,’ several branches of the American military have been instructed to use the term ‘Arabian Gulf’ when present in the region. A spokesman of the United States’ Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, recognised, “It is commonly understood to be a friendly gesture of solidarity and support for our host nation of Bahrain and our other Gulf Cooperation Council partners in the region to use the term they prefer”.10 This shift, particularly in the immediate wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, is emblematic of a broader strategy to strengthen ties with Gulf states and reflects the same priorities that led to UNESCO’s 1985 memo.

Although this article has problematised the UNESCO consultants’ use of the term ‘Persian Gulf,’ it is worth pointing out that they technically did not commit any diplomatic faux pas and, in fact, did everything just as instructed by UNESCO. The memo of 1985 established that UNESCO officials should use the term ‘Persian Gulf’ unless in correspondence with a state that preferred a different term.

However, the consultants’ usage was not in correspondence—it was in an internal report that should not have been shared with Iraq and Iran to begin with. In the 1980s at least (I can’t comment on the situation today), it was UNESCO protocol to not forward mission reports to the countries concerned, as this could undermine the organisation’s efforts to operate independently of states’ respective national agendas. Had the report remained internal to UNESCO, the term choice of ‘Persian’ or ‘Arabian’ Gulf (either of which would have had consequences for UNESCO’s relationship with one of their Middle Eastern partners) would not have ruffled any feathers. Therefore, the problem was not necessarily of word choice, but rather the disclosure of documents that should have remained internal.

The controversy over naming the Gulf represents the ways in which language is inextricably linked to questions of identity and power. For Iraq and other Arab states, adopting ‘Arabian Gulf’ is a way to assert political and cultural sovereignty. For Iran, defending the ‘Persian Gulf’ is equally tied to its sense of history and legitimacy. UNESCO’s involvement, while ostensibly neutral, reveals the difficulty of separating semantics from geopolitics. The broader lesson is that language is frequently appropriated as a tool of political influence—hence the parable comparing the mightiness of the pen with that of the sword.

This issue, though rooted in the 1980s, continues to resonate today. The dispute over the Gulf’s name is not just about terminology but about the deeper struggles for identity and dominance that define the region. For organisations like UNESCO, the challenge lies in navigating these disputes without exacerbating them—a task that, as history shows, is easier said than done.

References

1 Memo on the Utilisation of the Term “Persian Gulf,” 25 June 1985, folder reference 069:7 A 218/101 (55+567) Part I, file reference CPX/RIO/1/643, UNESCO Archives, Paris, France.
2 Letter from Aziz A. A. Haidar to Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, 13 November 1986, folder reference 069:7 A 218/101 (55+567) Part II, file reference 52/86, UNESCO Archives, Paris, France.
3 Abdi, Kamyar. 2007. “The Name Game: The Persian Gulf, Archaeologists, and the Politics of Arab-Iranian Relations”. In Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (eds).
4 Bosworth, C. Edmund. 1980. “The Nomenclature of the Persian Gulf” in Cottrell, Alvin J. (ed.) The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
5 Goodarzi, Jubin M. 2006. Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East. London: Tauris Academic Studies.
6 Koszinowski, Thomas. 1993. “Iraq as a Regional Power” in Derek Hopwood, Habib Ishow, Thomas Koszinowski (ed.s) Iraq: Power and Society. Oxford: Ithaca Press. 283-301.
7 Leeson, Madison. 2022. “UNESCO-UNDP Programming and the Iraqi Response, 1958-1979.” In Global Humanities: Observing Cultural Diplomacy. Washington, DC: Meridian Center for Cultural Diplomacy. ISBN 978-0-99-614491-9.
8 Levinson, Martin H. 2011. “Mapping the Persian Gulf Naming Dispute”. ETC: A Review of General Semantics 68(3): 279-287.
9 Lewis, Flora. 1984. “Foreign Affairs, Airing UNESCO's Closets”. The New York Times, 1 March.
10 Zraick, Karen. 2016. “Persian (or Arabian) Gulf is Caught in the Middle of Regional Rivalries”. New York Times, 12 January 2016.