Caspian Sea Geopolitics With Emphasis on its Legal Regime

Throughout the cold war the Caspian Sea was part of the Soviet Union’s overall security zone. Moscow attached so much importance to this zone that it totally ignored its southern Caspian neighbor, Iran, when it came to dividing and using the landlocked sea’s surface and bed. The central Soviet government strictly supervised the oil exploration and decided on the share of each of the three remaining states that made up its political and security sovereignty zone. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the cold war, however,re-defined power’s sole in international relations replacing geostrategic factors with geo-economic ones. That is why the world powers have now shifted their focus on getting access to energy resources. Lying between the Persian gulf and the Caspian Sea where 75 percent of the earth’s energy resources lie Iran enjoys a sensitive strategic and geopolitical situation which has tied its security to that of the region and the rest of the world. It therefore feels relatively immune from the superpowers’ security harassment knowing that its stability cannot be threatened seriously by others. At present the main hurdle for the exploration of the Caspian oil and gas resources is the lack of consensus among the now five states rimming the disputed body of water and the absence of a legal regime. This research attempts to clarify the geo-political situation of the Caspian Sea and how its new geopolitics play a role in the establishment of a legal regime. The global developments in the 21st century are rapidly replacing the geo-strategic concepts and applications by their geo-economic counterparts prompting us to expound on the Caspian Sea region’s geo-strategic and geo-political features in the first place and then its legal regime.