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This article proposes three evolutionary games to study secularization. The games assume that there is a severe competition for a resource defined as the material wealth a society produces. Successful strategies emerge out of the process, become the authority, capture and allocate the resource. Individuals who prefer a heavier or lighter weight of religion within the organization of the polity respectively named as religious and secular types can become wealthier and be emulated in the population depending on their initial proportions in the population. The society can evolve into a stable division of secular and religious types or can evolve opposite directions toward secularization. Impostors who misrepresent their religious preferences can invade a population that is equally halved into religious and secular types. No evolutionary stability is reached if impostors make no mistake in misrepresenting their beliefs; otherwise secular or religious strategies become evolutionarily stable.

This paper proposes a simple two-person game of one-sided incomplete information in extensive form to understand strategic choices made in the Turkish-Syrian linkage between water and terrorism. Turkish intelligence established Syrian support of a terrorist group that aims at an independent Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia. Yet, Turkey frequently stipulates the cessation of this support for negotiating with Syria a water agreement over the Euphrates. The game presents Turkey as a player having superior information. Syria is assumed to be uncertain about Turkish preferences with respect to the mutual conflict. This analysis identifies three pooling equilibria indicating that Syrian beliefs do not matter.

Chapter 9 The issues of water and territory dominate relations between Syria and Turkey, upstream and downstream riparians in the Euphrates and Tigris basin. This chapter propose an evolutionary game to explore eventual trajectories of riparian relations. Turkish hawks are defined as those Turkish foreign policies that support no water concessions. Turkish doves can instead support the flow of an increased amount of water to Syria on the basis of an international agreement. Syrian hawks are those Syrian foreign policies that do not recognize Turkish sovereignty over Hatay—also known as the Sandjak of Alexandretta. Syrian doves can in turn accept that the territory belongs now to Turkey. It is found that evolutionary stability does not depend upon the values territory and water represent for the fitness of Syrian and Turkish foreign policies. No evolutionary stability is possible unless doves are cooperative towards hawks. If doves are cooperative towards hawks, the unique evolutionarily stable outcome implies their extinction. Riparian relations will ultimately evolve into mutual intransigence.

Conflicts over the delimitation of territorial waters are abundant around the globe. Greece and Turkey, two NATO allies, are no exceptions. The delimitation of territorial waters and continental shelf, the status of islands, islets, and flight control zones and corridors in the Aegean Sea constitute constant sources of friction between them. We offer an evolutionary game model to explore for directions their relations can take including chances of new crises and the revision of the status quo. We find that crises constitute a norm in bilateral relations of the two littoral states. The crisis equilibrium indicates routinized practices involving first displaying then falling back. Hence aggressive behavior can be periodically observed but the current status quo will persist. A revised status quo becomes a likely prospect only if both countries were posited as single unitary actors maximizing their expected utilities.

The issues of water and terrorism are often linked to each other in negotiations between Turkey and Syria, the upstream and the midstream riparians in the Euphrates River basin, respectively. This issue linkage and a deep rooted territorial conflict mark these countries’ bilateral relations. This article explains and predicts the riparians’ propensity to end the issue linkage unilaterally. The results demonstrate a multiplicity of conditions for such behavior. The common view asserting that Turkey has a more powerful position follows a specific set of conditions. The conclusions do not preclude a Syrian superiority over Turkey, or an equality between the riparians in terms of resistance to the temptation to concede unilaterally.