On September 9th 2025, Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Africa’s largest hydropower project (1). Sitting on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border, GERD is designed to generate about 5,150 megawatts of electricity: enough, in time, to fulfill all of Ethiopia’s energy needs and even export power across the region (2). The project has been a national rallying point for over a decade, financed largely at home and framed as proof that development and decarbonisation can move together (3).

Yet, the dam was never just a domestic story. Egypt depends on the Nile for the vast majority of its water, and Sudan’s flood management and agriculture are tightly linked to its seasonal flows. For both countries, the core concern is not simply how much of the Nile water Ethiopia will use, but the timing of releases from a very large upstream reservoir in dry years (4). In a drought, late or low releases risk complicating irrigation calendars, drinking water supply, and power generation downstream. That is why both Sudan and Egypt have pressed for a binding operating agreement, and why Ethiopia’s insistence on sovereign control has felt threatening even as Ethiopian officials insist that the project will be run in a way that avoids harm (4,5). The recent inauguration made those competing narratives unavoidable and pushed an engineering milestone into the realm of regional security (6).

The GERD dispute is an important case to consider in a warming world. Investments and build-out of hydropower facilities are only increasing globally, and so are the disputes surrounding them (7). Analysts warn that the combination of increasing climate volatility, inexperience with scarcity, and weak cooperative habits can turn routine negotiations around energy systems like these into system-level risks, weakening the resilience of entire regions to shocks (8). This article considers the GERD as a harbinger of how twenty-first-century water disputes will be fought. It conducts a comparative study of similar regional river disputes, and asks what we might learn from them. Might it be possible to turn dams of conflict into infrastructure for building and sustaining peace?

Beyond the Nile: where the same pattern is emerging

The Nile is not exceptional as a geopolitical flashpoint. Further to the East is the Brahmaputra or Yarlung Tsangpo river. Rising in Tibet, the river runs through India’s northeast and into Bangladesh, supporting tens of millions of people and some of South Asia’s most flood-prone plains (9). China has built several hydropower stations on tributaries and along the upper mainstem of the river, and has begun construction on a contentious “super-dam” at the Great Bend (10). India’s fear of the “super dam” is not only of reduced dry-season flows, which would directly impact crops and irrigation; it is also the fear of politically contingent flood-season warnings (9,10). Beijing and Delhi have conducted seasonal data-sharing, but these have also seriously lapsed during times of political crises, underscoring how quickly water information can become a strategic lever. In this way, the timing of information—and the trust that it will continue despite border tensions—remains a sharp vulnerability that climate volatility amplifies (11, 12).

Another example is that of the Tigris-Euphrates river. Turkey’s large number of dams, including the Ilisu dam on the Tigris, has severely impacted downstream countries Iraq and Syria (10, 13). The NGO Save the Tigris reports that up to 40% of water flowing into Syria and Iraq has been disrupted (14). The reduction of water flows by the dams have acted as an increased pressure on top of climate-induced drought, salinity, and regional conflict (15). Ankara and Baghdad signed a cooperation framework in 2024, and officials have intermittently announced release understandings, but delivery of the agreement has been uneven. The same structural problems continue to recur: sparse, delayed, or disputed data; a lack of codified rules for times of crisis; and thin economic linkages between countries (13, 15). Moreover, climate projections for the future of the basin are grim, which means the cost of this ambiguity is rising (15).

Why these places become flashpoints

What turns a dam from a climate solution into a geopolitical risk is similar across contexts. Essentially, large reservoirs and dams convert seasonal rivers into controllable valves. In a national context, that control can be extremely beneficial. That “storage” capability can be used in controlling the impact of floods, moving wet-season water into dry months, and dispatching electricity when demand peaks (16). In a transboundary basin, however, the same capability can be used, or perceived as being used, to hold power over neighbouring countries: who decides when water moves, and according to which rules? This geopolitical threat can be further intensified by climate volatility (17). For instance, when climate shifts intensify monsoon swings and multiply drought risks, hydropower output becomes less consistent and more weather-sensitive. This in turn could impact farmers’ livelihoods, and thereby cause social and economic strain domestically. It is very easy, once these domestic tensions exist, for regional conflicts to become exacerbated (18).

There are three repeating patterns, similar across these cases, that may explain why countries have repeatedly failed to weather their respective river disputes. Firstly, law and politics have lagged behind operations: negotiators argue over historic rights and treaty lineages while engineers lack agreed-upon rules, meaning these rules are not built-in to operations from the beginning (5, 6, 10). Secondly, data regimes are sparse, delayed, or split across rival platforms; without release schedules, every sudden stage change can be read as a signal rather than a hydrological response (6, 11, 12) . Finally, there are too few economic linkages that make predictability beneficial for both sides: if only one side has something to gain, then the process becomes extractive and tensions will inevitably arise (10, 13, 15). The result of these failures is the same across basins: escalation thrives on ambiguity, and ambiguity is built into the way dams are currently governed.

What has worked when countries have cooperated

There are counter-examples, and they all share what is currently an unfashionable trait: they are operational first, political second. The Columbia River Treaty between the United States and Canada has, for decades, treated upstream storage not as a favour but as a service. Canada holds or releases water to create downstream flood protection and firmer hydropower, and that timing service is financially compensated by the US (19). Ultimately, the essential logic has endured because it solves real problems for grid operators and river managers on both sides of the border. This provides economic compensation for the actual companies involved, making it more likely for these companies and the communities who benefit from their presence (for example through increased employment and services) to advocate for stable working relationships between the countries (20). An updated deal is currently being negotiated between Canada and the Trump administration, and local governments on either side are highly involved in the negotiation process (21).

The Senegal River offers another lesson. Rather than fight over “shares” of the river, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal now co-own key dams through an independent basin organisation and allocate costs and benefits across irrigation, navigation, flood buffering, and power (22). This “benefit-sharing” approach has functioned to frame cooperation as a basket of services for all those involved (24). A similar example is that of Itaipú, the binational dam between Paraguay and Brazil, which has also managed to deliver cross-border baseload for decades under a joint company structure (25). Although recent renegotiations over pricing have been contentious, cooperation has continued (26). This demonstrates that long-lived deals can evolve without breaking when the underlying operations create daily value for both parties (27).

Finally, the Mekong—while still politically contested—demonstrates how information can calm cross-border disputes. Along the river a rapid increase in hydropower infrastructure, such as China’s cascade on the upper Lancang and dozens of projects downstream, has collided with ever-more erratic monsoons. Affected communities and governments alike in downstream Southeast Asian countries have worried about unpredictable flow changes and sparse, delayed information, which complicate flood preparedness and fisheries (28). In response, the Mekong River Commission has expanded public hydrometeorological data, and the independently-run Mekong Dam Monitor provides near-real-time satellite-based views of reservoir levels and river heights (29, 30). These tools do not settle issues of sovereignty, but they do replace rumours with pictures, graphs, and timestamps that multiple states can read together.

What these successes teach

The first lesson is that the “unit” of cooperation should be time, not territory. The Columbia model was successful because upstream storage and downstream benefits were converted into a schedule and a payment, with drought exceptions pre-agreed. The lesson then, is to shift the focus from binding legal agreements to working operational memorandum (5, 6, 10). This could begin in the case of the GERD, for instance, with defining a monthly water release regimen with public reporting and transparent exception clauses. This approach is substantively modest and politically achievable precisely because it does not force anyone to concede on history. The binding agreements can come into play further down the line, when trust has been given time and space to develop.

The second lesson is that transparency works only if it is routine. The Mekong’s experience points toward a workable rhythm: day-ahead and week-ahead release notices; feeds from national agencies; and third-party satellite verification written into the workflow. The informational gains of the past two years in the Mekong may represent the beginnings of a shared body of knowledge that lets neighbours prepare for floods and manage fisheries even as politics remain tense (29). There is also an opportunity for the environmental critique of dams to become a cooperation agenda. Large dams trap sediment, alter water temperatures and salinity, fragment habitats, and can even emit greenhouse gases in certain tropical reservoirs. If basins agree on a few simple ecological indicators and report them alongside release schedules, they create common facts to plan around and a shared standard to hold operators to (31).

The third lesson is that economic ties can function as peace infrastructure. This is because when mutual benefits are centered, grid operators, utilities, factories, and households become lobbyists for peace (22, 25). In the case of the Colombia River and the Senegal River, when international parties had economic gains to be made from cooperation, they acted as advocates for maintaining good relations (20, 27). The impact of these actors to promote peace through interconnection is variable in different contexts, but the impact of business leaders and local governments on regional decision-making can be significant (32, 33).

Beyond rivers: geopolitical infrastructure

There is a broader lesson here for contested infrastructure: binding legal agreements are often politically unreachable, but predictability and transparency are not. Publishing operating schedules, sharing data, embedding third-party verification, and tying in trade are the routines that make neighbours credible to one another under climate stress. If the aim is to keep food systems secure, energy transitions on track, and migration stable in a hotter world, a viable path is to downgrade the rhetoric and upgrade the routines.

The Nile could borrow that logic immediately, if all parties are willing to work for peace. Potential future export contracts between Ethiopia and its neighbours are likely as GERD’s energy output increases, but the success of this will be contingent on Ethiopia’s willingness to provide working operational memorandum and transparency. Simply put: operations must come first, and politics second. That is how dams stop being symbols of grievance and start functioning as points of cooperation, and even as ecological shock absorbers for whole regions. It will make these rivers governable—and in a century of climate stress, that is the difference between chronic crisis and a workable peace. Shall we?

This article is part of The Outside World, ftrprf’s very own research center.

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