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Hydropolitical conflicts between the Eastern Nile countries over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) are systematically analyzed at three points in time: just before the announcement of construction by Ethiopia on April 11, 2011, before the negotiations in early January 2014, and late August 2014. Hypergame theory, as developed within the framework of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution for handling misperceptions, is used to gain strategic insights into these conflicts and to ascertain the possible resolutions of the disputes. In all of three conflicts, the key decision makers are Egypt and Sudan, the downstream countries, and Ethiopia, the upstream nation. The findings from the analyses demonstrate the significant utilization of strategic surprise, a decisive act in which a decision maker intentionally exercises a course of action in the dispute that is hidden to its opponents in order to attempt to reach a more desirable outcome for itself. In particular, both Egypt and Sudan were caught by surprise when Ethiopia publicly announced on April 11, 2011 that it was going to build GERD, since no prior notification was given. Because Ethiopia was aware of Egypt and Sudan's misperception this dispute is modeled as a second level hypergame. The conflict investigations also show that the geopolitical and economic changes in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia allowed Ethiopia to construct the dam without any harsh confrontation with Egypt and Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the proposed alternatives for sharing the Caspian Sea from the social planner's or systems-level perspective with respect to the stakeholders' utilities from the oil and natural gas resources of the sea. Different multi-criteria decision-making methods, namely dominance, maximin, lexicography, simple additive weighting, and TOPSIS are applied to determine the social planner's ranking of these alternatives. Results suggest the Condominium governance regime as the most promising division method. Bankruptcy rules and cooperative game theory methods can be considered as the other socially optimal resolutions to the conflict over sharing the Caspian Sea energy resources among its five littoral countries. Consideration of these methods in negotiations may help with resolving the existing deadlock, which has been in place for two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]