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The Dangerous Game Theory Behind the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Water is a precious commodity that serves as the backbone for the socio-economic wellbeing of a functioning state. It is integral to numerous necessary processes such as food and energy production, sanitation, environmental sustainability, and of course, human consumption. Lack of access to clean water poses a serious threat to billions of people globally, and considering its scarcity, securing water supplies has become a matter of national security in the developing world. An instance of these concerns involves the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in East Africa on the longest and oldest river in the world, the Nile.

Since ancient times, Egyptian civilization has relied on the Nile to survive, and in the present day more than 30% of Egypt’s 100 million population work in the agricultural sector on the Nile. However, the origin of one of the Nile’s main tributaries is south of Egypt’s borders inside Ethiopia, who plans to use the immense energy gained from constructing a dam to bring its people economic development and lift them out of poverty. Preexisting claims on the water rights of the Nile were established in colonial times and refined in the 1959 agreement between Egypt and Sudan, which gave Egypt vast control over infrastructural developments, and the ability to veto any major projects. This agreement, however, never included Ethiopia or other countries upstream, who consider this agreement to have been unfairly drafted and anachronistic, as it included references to the colonial period.  Unfortunately, these conflicting interests have not been resolved by any meaningful compromise, and as more of the dam reaches completion, tensions have only arisen between the two nations.

In relation to some of the topics of Game Theory we discussed in class, we can view this failure to achieve a compromise as part of a payoff matrix, where the greater good of the region is threatened by the potential of high payoffs for one side. Additionally, when viewed as a geopolitical catalyst for potential further conflicts we can understand the relations between the countries as positive and negative edges in a graph. In between Egypt and Ethiopia is Sudan who, although they stand to lose some agricultural productivity, is not nearly as reliant on their agricultural sector as Egypt and was mostly neutral in the initial phases of the dispute. However more recently, they have sided more with Ethiopia as Ethiopia promised to share some of the power generated by the dam. By looking at this three-node graph alone we can determine that initially, it was unbalanced because it is difficult to maintain positive relations with two countries that are involved in a major conflict, and now that they have sided with Ethiopia, the graph has become balanced. On a larger scale, elements of the Middle Eastern proxy war also relate to this concept of a balanced network as Israel and Saudi Arabia, and Turkey and Iran form into two groups that either support Egypt or Ethiopia and on a global scale, as the threat of an Egyptian diaspora could disrupt much of Europe and the Western sphere, the United States has issued a withdrawal of economic assistance to Ethiopia, while China, another global power competing against the United States, is partially responsible for the conflict as they have contributed to funding the dam.

 

Reference: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/08/05/the-controversy-over-the-grand-ethiopian-renaissance-dam/

 

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