Book Review on the Occasion of 40th Anniversary of Iran Iraq War: Iraq’s Aggression against Iran and the United Nations Position مقالة

The proliferation of various scholarly literature about anniversaries and centenaries pertaining to international politics and International Law, specifically concerned with wars and the concept of aggression, often misses one of the pivotal moments of Middle East’s legal, regional, security, and political order: the Iraq-Iran War, the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Iraq’s Aggression against Iran and the United Nations Position, emanating from a local concern (that, for this book, I define as Iranian academia and society), is an exception within the broader global knowledge production: it is gripping legal documentation of the eight-year war. The volume’s determination to cover the details of the Iraq-Iran war over vast swathes of legal documentations and political statements limits its ability to engage with broader analysis and body of literature. The updated edition could have been an opportunity for a critical review of the extant literature, since the last version, and historiography on Iraq-Iran war: how the aggression and this war were studied in Iran and elsewhere.