MULTI CRITERIA ANALYSIS OF POWER ASYMMETRY IN ARAS TRANSBOUNDARY RIVER BASIN: DERIVING POTENTIAL HYDRO-HEGEMON COUNTRY

Abstract

Transboundary rivers are becoming a controversial issue due to the interactions among several players over water. Deriving the relative power of stakeholders in the tranboundary river basin is one of the critical factors that could affect the water negotiations. This research uses the TOPSIS method to derive power asymmetry in the Aras River basin shared among Turkey, Armenia, Iran and Azerbaijan. Power is subdivided into four main pillars, including geographical, material, bargaining and ideational. For each pillar of power, several numerical or linguistic criteria are defined and evaluated between countries. Overall ranking results show that Iran, with the relative power value of 0.79, has the highest potential hegemonic power, followed by Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with relative power values of 0.72, 0.40 and 0.30, respectively. In the last part, sensitivity analysis of the overall power ranking is also performed based on different weighting the four pillars of power. Results indicate that weight change in bargaining power has the most significant impact on the states' power ranking.

Keywords

• Hydro-Hegemon
• Transboundary River Basin
• Power Asymmetry
• TOPSIS.

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