# Bargaining Power in Cooperative Resource Allocations Games
## 3 A Real-World Example: The Caspian Sea International Conflict  
Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world by area. With an area of 371,000 square kilometers. Caspian is home to different marine species and the major provider of caviar in the world [28]. Based on different estimations, the Caspian seabed is believed to have considerable quantities of crude oil and natural gas reserves [29; 30] that turns it into a major potential energy supplier. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Caspian Sea was bound by Iran and the USSR. The two countries had agreements in place, giving them equal rights to the Sea and its resources, including exclusive fishing rights within 10 miles of their shoreline according to the 1929 and 1940 treaties. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legal arrangement for governing the Caspian Sea became the subject of negotiations between Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan (Figure 1). Considering themselves as \"clean states\", the newly independent countries have argued that they are not subject to the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties, remaining reluctant to respect the agreements between Iran and their \"mother state\" and have not seen themselves. Thus, negotiations over determining a fair governance regime for the Caspian Sea have been going on for the last three decades, making this conflict one of the longest international conflicts among neighboring states over sharing and international landlocked body of water [31]. This has prevented the littoral states from full the exploitation of the Caspian Sea energy resources. Also, in the absence of effective governance system, Caspian Sea has been suffering from increasing environmental pollution and accelerated ecosystem degradation [32]. Figure 1: Caspian Sea’s and its five littoral states. Considering its abundant transboundary natural resources, the governance regime of the Caspian Sea that the littoral states will eventually agree to is strategically significant. Since the start of the negotiations, different resolutions have been proposed, each having implications for the conflict parties and how they benefit from its valuable resources. Due to its vast area and oceanographic characteristics, the Caspian Sea could be classified as a sea rather than a lake. In that case, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) can be applied as the governing law of the Sea [33]. Based on the UNCLOS, median lines from states' shorelines are considered maritime boundaries for the coastal state. Accordingly, the littoral states can gain from both the surface (e.g., sturgeon and navigation rights) and seabed (e.g., oil and gas) resources within the maritime boundaries [34]. Over the years, the negotiating countries have also discussed the option of governing the sea based on alternative mechanisms such as the Soviet division rule and the 1970 treaty [35], sharing it as a common resource (with equal division of its resource values), and applying various combination of rules for sharing the seabed and sea surface [36]. While there is no established consensus among all the littoral states on the Caspian Sea boundaries or resource allocation, military forces and international correlates seem poised to compete over the benefits of this international resource [37]. [PERSON] [38] states that neither of the territorial approaches nor any commercial and diplomatic agreement has fully surpassed the other ones in terms of their popularity for the negotiating parties. But [PERSON] and [PERSON] [39] claim that Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia have already agreed to solve their differences over the oil fields; however, Turkmenistan, Iran, And Azerbaijan, have failed to do so due to strategic political calculations. [PERSON] [40] argues that the existing literature misunderstand the nature of the game by excluding the differences in economics, history, and politics of the littoral states, thus cannot systematically promote the discussion.