The Aegean dispute is a set of interrelated controversies between Greece and Turkey over sovereignty and related rights in the region of the Aegean Sea. This set of conflicts has strongly affected Greek-Turkish relations since the 1970s, and has twice led to crises coming close to the outbreak of military hostilities, in 1987 and in early 1996. The issues in the Aegean fall into several categories:
- The delimitation of territorial waters,
- The delimitation of national airspace,
- The delimitation of exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and the use of the continental shelf,
- The role of flight information regions (FIR) for the control of military flight activity,
- The issue of the demilitarized status assigned to some of the Greek islands in the region,
- Turkish claims of "grey zones" of undetermined sovereignty over a number of islets, most notably the islets of Imia.
One aspect of the dispute is the differing interpretations of the maritime law: Turkey has not signed up to the Convention on the Continental Shelf nor the superseding United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which as of July 2024 has been signed by 170 parties, including Greece; as such, Turkey does not recognize a legal continental shelf and EEZ around the Greek islands.
Between 1998 and the early 2010s, the two countries came closer to overcoming the tensions through a series of diplomatic measures, particularly with a view to easing Turkey's accession to the European Union. However, differences over suitable diplomatic paths to a substantial solution remained unresolved, and as of 2023 tensions remain.