The Persian Gulf has established itself as a strategically significant waterway that can influence global energy markets with its immense hydrocarbon exportations. It can also provide vital transportation routes to numerous markets given its geographic location. Indeed, it has come to represent universal desires such as prodigious wealth and diversity but also some of the more adverse ones such as violence, fanaticism, and corruption. Such duality while seemingly contradictory in nature can in fact be viewed more as a complementary and reciprocal relationship given the domestic and region-wide interactions of the Persian Gulf area, especially with regards towards resource nationalism. However, before investigating such phenomena it is beneficial to gain an understanding of the littoral states of the Persian Gulf. The following chapter will provide a brief history of each country from the founding of its modern independence in the international system along with economic statistics, demographics, social factors, and military details that grant further insight to the respective state. Hence, brief coverage of governmental structure will also be mentioned as well as specific intrastate and interstate issues, which will then lead to collective regional tensions in the Persian Gulf. The framework to be analyzed in the thesis will be resource nationalism, which has been described as the case in which governments and/or ethnic groups lay claim to natural resources located in their territory for the purpose of ownership and control (Nurmakov in Overland, Kjaernet, and Kendall-Taylor 2010: 20–21). Applications to the countries of the Persian Gulf are numerous, but particularly relevant with the petroleum sector since all the littorals possess oil and gas deposits that greatly contribute to economic affluence.