Richard Schofield

Richard Schofield studied geography and the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Durham. In the early 1980s, he worked as a Senior Research Assistant in Durham University’s Geography Department and collaborated with Dr Gerald Blake in a major archival research project on Arabian Boundaries, the success of which allowed for the institution of Durham’s International Boundaries Research Unit in 1989. 7 Following his well-received book on Kuwait-Iraq disputes, Schofield joined the SOAS geography department as a part-time Research Fellow, acting as Deputy Director of its active Geopolitics Research Centre. After the launch of SOAS’s MA programme in International Boundary Studies in 1997, he took up a lecturing post in the Geography Department to convene the program. A year earlier he had founded the triannual journal, Geopolitics (formerly Geopolitics and international Boundaries), published today by Taylor and Francis but originally by Frank Cass. He and the International Boundary Studies masters program made the short hop down to the Strand in 2001 with the merger of the SOAS and King’s geography departments. Schofield edited Arabian Boundaries 1966-1971, recently published by the Cambridge University Press. The product of a four-year research effort, it covers in vivid detail the most tumultuous decade in the territorial evolution of the Arabian peninsular states, one that was dominated by Britain’s departure as protecting power from the region in the 1967-71 period