Hydropolitics along the Nile

          Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! This will be my last entry on proxy politics and it will discuss Turkey's involvement in the Nile River Basin. It will also be my last entry on this blog. Turkey, the Middle East, and the Nile River Basin (Google Maps)   Turkey’s involvement is much more recent than that of the Gulf countries, but it is nonetheless important. The Turkish government started the ‘African expansion’ in 2003, a strategy aiming to develop economic and strategic relations with African countries, and the country is now a major investor in Ethiopia and Sudan ( Cascao et al. 2019 ). Ankara also used to have a good relationship with Cairo. However, the former’s support of Mohamed Morsi (from the Muslim Brotherhood) after the Egyptian revolution of January 2011 became a source of conflict after the coup in 2013. It led to damaged diplomatic relationships and interrupted economic investment with the majority of the USD 5 billion...

  Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! This entry will explore the proxy relationships between the Middle East and the Nile River Basin. Those two regions have been interacting for a long time now. Due to their proximity and common religious and cultural background, the Middle East and the Nile River Basin relationships can be traced back far in the past ( Cascao et al. 2019 ). However, I am interested in the more recent interactions. Those relationships now have a proxy nature and are impacting the Nile Hydropolitical Security Complex ( Idem ). The involvement of Gulf countries Countries of the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar) have to deal with a water-scarce environment. Growing food is therefore an issue. A useful but invisible and silent process that they have been using is virtual water ( Allan 1997 ). Importing food reduces the amount of water used. With the objective of minimising their food imports, the Gulf countries started heavily invest...