From development aid to geopolitical leverage: the Aswan High Dam in global hydropolitics

The Aswan High Dam became a focal point where development, sovereignty and Cold War diplomacy converged. Drawing on US and British archival sources, this study reconstructs the negotiations over its financing and the withdrawal of Western support in 1956. It argues that Egypt’s pursuit of infrastructural sovereignty clashed with Western efforts to use aid as political leverage. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s management of the dam negotiations exemplified how post-colonial states could transform infrastructure into an instrument of autonomy, revealing the political dimensions of development and the limits of Western influence in the decolonizing world.