So near, yet so far: an Egyptian perspective on the US-facilitated negotiations on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Abstract

Since construction commenced on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in April 2011, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have been engaged in an extended, and often arduous, process of negotiations on this project. Talks between the co-riparians of the Blue Nile have been conducted in a variety of forums and formats. Countless trilateral and bilateral meetings have been held, including at the level of heads of state and government, ministers of foreign affairs, and ministers of water affairs. The three countries held hundreds of meetings of governmental representatives and nongovernmental academics that deliberated on the engineering, technical and legal aspects of the management of the GERD. International and regional actors, including global powers such as the United States (Widakuswara, 2019) and Russia (Lavrov, 2020), and regional partners such as Algeria (Sudan Tribune, 2021), South Africa (Samir, 2020) and the United Arab Emirates (Reuters, 2021), have either participated in the negotiations or offered their good offices to mediate the dispute. The question of the GERD has also been on the agenda of several international organizations. The United Nations (UN) Security Council convened two sessions and issued a Presidential Statement on the GERD, the African Union (AU) facilitated numerous rounds of talks, and the League of Arab States has expressed concern at the lack of progress in the negotiations. Yet an agreement remains elusive. Here, we focus on the most fruitful chapter of the winding, more than decade-long GERD negotiations, which was the US-facilitated process that lasted from mid-October 2019 to February 2020. We do so not only in the interest of brevity given the difficulty of describing over ten years of negotiations in a single article, but also because examining these US-facilitated negotiations serves three purposes that reveal why the question of the GERD remains unresolved. First, recounting how these negotiations progressed will