Current Developments in Eastern Mediterranean (Cyprus) in the Context of Chicken Game Theory

The Mediterranean region has vital in terms of international politics. Today, the dispute over maritime jurisdiction boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean region seriously destabilizes the region. Other players and actors who have interests in the Eastern Mediterranean where actors come across in the respect of two main actors of the region including the Greek Cypriot administration and Turkiye to support or not to support these two actors can change the superiority of balance in the region. In order to evaluate this situation in the region from the perspective of international relations, the prisoners dilemma game was chosen in general, but the differentiation of the situation in the region over time revealed the necessity of analyzing actor behaviors by choosing different games. In this context, this study attempts and differs from the other studies in analyzing the developments in the Eastern Mediterranean by using the chicken game. The chicken game can be used for situations that have the potential to produce different results. The Chicken Game is used to understand the situation of mutual threat perception and to have opinions about the actors’ decisions. In this fiction, the parties will either cooperate or will not cooperate and one of the actors will be chicken while the other will be a hero or vice versa. The fact that the parties do not give up their claims raises the conflict potential, which is the worst possibility. In this direction, in the light of the problems regarding the maritime jurisdiction boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, if the parties do not take a step back from their theses shows that these developments can be examined in the context of Chicken Game. Therefore, the aim of this study is to address the developments in the Eastern Mediterranean in the context of the chicken game in international relations. As a result of the study, it was concluded that Chicken Game may be a suitable theory for evaluating the developments in the Eastern Mediterranean.