well welcome again to those of you just joined us um uh to tonight's round table discussion on the arab spring 10 years on my name is jonathan hill and i am director of the institute of middle eastern studies at king's college london the institute has been around for two or three years and provides a focal point for middle east research and events across king's college there's all sorts of interesting activities taking place in a number of departments and by a range of academics and phd students if you are interested in the region therefore i urge you to keep an eye on our twitter account at king's middle east or to check out our website for events that are taking place and are coming up such as tonight's round table discussion it is my very great pleasure to introduce the host of uh tonight's event sir mark lyle grant he is going to chair the event um so mark qualified as a barrister before having a long and distinguished career in the foreign commonwealth development office of of the united kingdom and was serving as a uk's ambassador to united nations at the time that the arab spring took place um he also served as national security advisor to david cameron and theresa may and therefore is perfectly placed to provide an expert view on what was happening in the region of this at this critical time before i hand over to him though just a few words about about housekeeping and how the uh the event will will run um at the bottom of the screen you will see a q a function if you have any questions or comments for the panelists please can you type them into there and they will do their best to answer them once they've finished speaking if there is somebody in particular who you would like to respond to your question please can you specify who that is um the panelists are going to speak and then there will be a q a session a q a session so hopefully um or your or your questions and thoughts will be addressed great so without any further ado i will hand over to sir mark thank you very much well thank you very much jonathan and good afternoon good evening everybody um as jonathan mentioned i was the british ambassador to the united nations in 2011 and i can still remember the sense of excitement at developments in the middle east and north africa at that time you know tunisia egypt libya syria there seemed to be a clamor for democracy a push back by ordinary citizens against autocratic and often corrupt leadership parallels were drawn with the liberty of eastern europe in the 1990s and it seemed natural for western democracies to be on the side of the protesters but in retrospect i don't think we fully understood the dynamics all the likely consequences of the arab spring in 2011 egypt jordan yemen and morocco looked to be the most likely candidates for political change the gulf states everyone thought that they would be able to pay their way out of the protests more securecratic ones like libya algeria syria would be able to suppress any protests by force and this analysis proved only partly correct looking back i find it interesting that the only countries in the region relatively untouched by the protest movements were all monarchies and it'd be interesting to speculate on the reason for that but also the west and or certainly the united kingdom didn't anticipate fully firstly that the islamists were best placed to benefit from the sudden overthrow of long-standing leaders in the region including through the electoral process and secondly the inherent difficulty of a move to democracy in countries with such weak institutional history because we had a belief at the time that democracy itself was such a strong motivator that that would be enough once the ball started rolling and thirdly i think we didn't anticipate fully that western involvement and especially military involvement could actually make things worse so looking back 10 years on the arab spring looks very much like a false dawn the region looks less stable more divided and certainly not more democratic than it was in 2011. the traditional arab powers never have been weaker you know the traditional powers like egypt syria iraq and libya all weakened for one reason or another and it is non-arab players like israel turkey iran even outsiders like russia and china increasingly calling the shots in the region and arguably there have been wider implications too as events surrounding the arab spring have actually weakened support for the post-second world war rules based international order weakening it to the benefit of countries like china now that's just a practitioner's view but to discuss these issues this evening and indeed many others we have a very distinguished panel of academic experts they will make some introductory comments and then we shall open up the discussion to include the audience so first i'll turn to professor yaroon gunning yerun is a professor of middle eastern politics and conflict studies in the institute of middle eastern studies at king's college and his research focuses on political mobilization with a specific focus on the interplay between islamist social movements democratization religion political contestation and violence in the middle east so over to you your roon thank you very much and thank you for organizing this event um i in the short time available i want to highlight three points and i will focus on protest dynamics and especially in egypt and lemon let me just share my screen for a couple of slides i want to show to start with there we go i hope that this is visible first i want to say that the arab uprisings are not over the first wave was followed by subsequent protests most dramatically in algeria sudan lebanon and iraq where leaders were forced to step down syria yemen and until recently libya are still embroiled in civil wars in morocco egypt jordan and the gulf regimes have sought to stifle protests with tactics varying from cooperation to brutal repression according to a clad which is one of the most comprehensive protest data sets available all arab countries have experienced protests small and large in the past three years from a few in in the gulf which you can see on the right to many in of course algeria lebanon sudan and iraq but also in morocco and and tunisia less so egypt and jordan and then an outlier for the gulf in bahrain also many of these protests are still ongoing for example in lebanon where covert and the port explosion have exacerbated the financial collapse and so you can see that protests have been heating up in the last couple of weeks again africa showed that they see their professional identity as linked to their political loyalties and they perceive their roles as preachers of the public opinion rather than mere reporters of fact this is why this role is ambiguous as they act both as supporters of change but also as supporters of autocratic former autocratic structures finally i can say today that uh the media landscape shows a continuous confrontation between structural constraints and an essent agency of change uh replicating uh very much the dynamics in the political arena and the current gloomy uh condition uh can be understood as a victory for former autocratic cultures but however uh the resilience of the asians of change whether in the community of media or the civil society and the creativity of the expressions of descent the resilience all this indicates that that this struggle is still ongoing it's not yet settled in one or in another uh direction and i would refer here to one quotation from a journalist i recently interviewed from tunisia saying to me we are finally part of the public debate in tunisia we are not a strong agent in this arena but we are supported by the few gains from the revolution alba they are very fragile to continue this fight and thanks to the support we are not alone in this battle uh i would stop here uh hope i you know i did not uh i was limited to the time allowed and thank you thank you very much indeed fatima and uh i'll turn back now to uh yerun who's back with us apologies that you were cut off in uh in mid florida but you want to continue now i i will uh yeah i don't quite know what happened but anyway to continue sir um i was saying that the arab uprisings are are not over and showing how protests were still continuing but i think it's important to see that these protests share similarities across the last decade in the structural conditions that people face and in the borrowing of slogans and tactics both between protesters and between elites there are of course differences between protest waves the 2019 protests tended to demand more far-reaching change and between countries who protests whether protests are party-led or grassroots the relationship between armed forces and regime the type of political system all of which affect protest outcomes however i would argue that there are enough similarities to see the protests as part of a regional series of revolutionary or protest episodes and moreover that they are part of a global wave of protests in 2019 41 countries experienced significant protests and 110 since 2017 these protests have been shaped by global dynamics including the effects of neoliberal policies championed by the imf and international elites which then are often carried out by kleptocratic local elites arab protests have influenced global protests and vice versa and arab regimes meanwhile draw international support including for the security forces and are embedded in transnational capital so the uprisings must be seen in a global context as well my second point is that although structural conditions may shape protests protests need agency to work the first uprisings showed the importance of networks but not necessarily as expected in syria for example the initial uprising in daraa was carried by clan and cross-border smuggling networks not the protest networks typical in social movement studies tunisia did not have the well-developed networks that egyptians had built during the 2000s but the networks that formed during the 2008 strike women's groups and familial links facilitated the protests spread mass protests also need non-activists but predicting when this occurs remains difficult and so much is contingent conversely the egyptian regime's clampdown on oppositional organizations has meant that today's dire structure conditions have been met with relatively limited protests both in number and duration the disruptive nature of the earlier protests have put off many non-activists particularly where protesters occupied public spaces for programming periods where protests did reach hundreds in 2019 for example it was often because of the presence of mobilizable networks they're not necessarily activists for example factory workers or neighborhood groups organization is even more important post-protests one reason that the egyptian protest networks failed to shape post-revolution politics is that they did not succeed in shifting from street protests to formal organizations capable of winning elections this was part ideological many were self-consciously anti-hierarchy part organizational that emerged as fluid semi-underground networks special items in street politics in lebanon the 2019 protesters early on emphasized the importance of organization in part because of the experience of those who've begun to shift from street protests to political organization during the 2016 and 2018 elections the 2022 elections are one focal point to organize around but much depends on whether they succeed in forging unified party positions from diverse protest networks and classes this leads to my final point tension between classes all the protesters in 2011 egypt were united in their opposition to mubarak they did not have unified political demands the majority were motivated by economic grievances only a minority by political reform with serious implications for the protest outcome in lebanon the 17 october revolution saw unprecedented participation of the poorer classes crucial for protests success but the poor are also most dependent on the clientelistic system that upholds the political elite one reason that tripoli became an epicenter of revolution with mass support from the poor is that protesters set up revolutionary kitchens and provided second-hand clothing to make protests possible and it helped also that local politicians initially tried to co-opt the protests rather than suppress them in beirut meanwhile the roadblocks set up downtown became flashpoints for the poor who could not get to work further complicated by political sectarian dynamics with some parties mobilizing the poor against the protests the poor ended up selectively supporting protests that did not overtly go against their party bosses thus limiting support for the more reformist demands of the protest movement to be successful in changing the political system protesters need to find alternative ways to provide the desperately needed the desperately needed services that currently are in control of the political elite without creating new sectarian clientalistic dependencies this is particularly important for winning elections with which historically depend on clientelism and the establishment of crowdfunded grassroot networks providing food during the covit epidemic or helping rebuilding areas destroyed by the 2020 port explosion may be an important step in that direction as is reviving and transforming workers unions thank you and i'm looking forward to discussing these things further thank you very much uh iron for that very important analysis of some of the different uh forms of protests that took part in the in the arab spring um i'll now pass to dr shiraz maher is a lecturer in non-state actors in the department of war studies and is director of the international center for the study of de-radicalization and radicalization indeed he is a historian by training and is primarily interested in the development of islamic political thought particularly the use of theology by reactionary and militant movements and he has a particular expertise in the syrian civil wars thank you very much apartment for organizing here well in my remarks um i wanted to focus very specifically on assyria that's the country that i've been working on for much of the last 10 years and to contextualize that within the context of the border arab uprisings which a number of my colleagues are talking about today i really wanted to in that context as well focus in on the word lexi which is part of what we're discussing today and somakin's opening remarks mentioned that there was an air of excitement and there was a sense of optimism and indeed momentum for the uprising in tunisia but then i think that those feelings became even more um acute and accentuated once uh we began to see uh illusory movement emerging in egypt and so once we get to syria and we've seen a number of these uprisings begin and take place in some places even conclude relatively swiftly across north africa and even qadhafi was out october 2011 then there is a sense of momentum uh and feeling that that these regimes will fall there was a sense that bashar al-assad would also have his time of numbers and there were various predictions being made at that point about the extent to which the regime was shaking and of course a number of very high profile defections coming in at that time one of the things i think that you could see in the way that syrian regime was able to begin and to maintain its crackdown against that protest movement was that it was quite successful in fracturing the movement and never really allowing it to develop critical mass as we saw uh come about elsewhere and so quite early on you began to see the movement from this uh non-violent protest movement i think it's important that we understand so in that context that what has happened in syria since 2011 has not been one thing it's not been static uh war or the uprising or the conflict however you want to characterize it has not been one thing it's been different things at different times and taken on different forms and shapes at different moments and so to that end you saw this movement um start to to accept a reservation of violence in the first instance with things like the free syrian army and then others uh sort of syrians more broadly and ultimately foreign fighters as well and so the first point was i think if we're looking at the legacy of what syria did um we'd already seen some recourse to violence in libya this became more pronounced more protracted and much more wide scale in syria and so in that first sense you you see that movement towards and that reservation of violence as they say in that context the second point is that the enduring nature then of what took place in syria and the way that the conflict became so protracted and as i say again operating on scale that was pretty unprecedented compared to what had occurred uh in its neighbors syria really represented the open of those arab uprising the sort of contestation of where things might go hadn't immediately failed it had clearly not succeeded either and there was this hustle taking place between uh two sides i think and i'll finish on this point just to give time to the q a um what we can see is that the sort of consequences and the legacy that comes out of this are multiple and then they take hold then in a number of different ways you have the breakdown of the chemical weapons taboo happening in syria through the repeated use of those weapons by the regime and um its ability to to continue and persist down that road particularly with very little uh pushback so you saw a really significant uh moment in terms of again sir mark was saying in his opening remarks referring to the international rules-based sort of this part of a much broader assault that we've seen on that uh international law space all have taken place by a number of different states and actors um in recent years and in syria that was particularly pronounced and very obvious as they say in relation to the chemical weapons taboo we also have the unprecedented and historic mobilization of foreign terrorist fighters who mobilized from all over the world to travel to join groups sunni and shia but primarily of course in the context of which we've looked at them joining sunni groups on the grounds there and again in a scale and tempo and flow uh that eclipse even afghanistan in the 1980s um in terms of the tens of thousands of individuals who progressed out there and you know that is one element of the conflict which persists and remains with us today although uh isis doesn't have its territorial counterfeit we know that there are tens of thousands of women and children currently being detained in northeastern syria and around ten thousand men two thousand of whom are foreign uh be also being detained by the syrian democratic forces the sdf in the northeast uh idlib in the northwest as well of course remains a pocket of control by hashem and so again a number of uh non-state active groups present and maintaining a presence there so that's also very very important and then the final point again as has been mentioned by my colleagues that you've seen a shuffle in terms of some of the state actors who have risen to the ascendancy as a result of some of the political turbulence that has occurred in the region after 2011 then again i think you can see that most clearly in syria where russia has of course emerged as one of the most prominent uh players and important actors in that conflict a renewed uh um presence of iran of course their pre-existing connections those ties have been deepened strengthened and in many ways has been instrumental in helping bashar al-assad perpetuate and maintain his government and then of course we have the turks and other one as well who are again incredibly invested in what is happening in syria and so it does represent uh um a kind of microcosm of the broader issues i think syria that we're seeing uh taking place elsewhere and the consequences of what has transpired there have of course had global resonance so i'll stop there and hand back to use the mark thank you very much uh for those insights into the syrian civil war and linking it to some of the wider geopolitical dynamics as well um we're getting a lot of questions already in the q a but please do keep those coming so that we can get straight to them um after our next two panelists have spoken so i'll turn now to dr nina musgrove and nina's research focuses on the western approaches to hamas following hamas's political participation in 2006 including how hamas navigated sectarian cleavages in the middle east following the outbreak of the syrian civil war and her latest book which looks at hamas during the arab spring period is going to be published later this year nina over to you thank you so mark um it's very nice to see you all thank you so much for the introduction um yes so i'm speaking today about palestine so not hamas specifically and this is very interesting because um i'm sure if some of you kind of looked at the the agenda for today and you thought all the arab spring and palestine well it didn't happen there um so i'm going to talk to you about why the arab spring has still been important for the palestinian territories even though it did not quite reach so i'll speak about a few different things one about the conjecture about the about the palestinian territories in the arab spring about you know there were some questions about why it didn't reach the territories and whether it was going to and there was some conjecture in 2019 and 2020 more specifically that it would reach the the territories um and so and then i'll speak about i have to go back to um a landmark kind of time in 2006 and talk about why um that particular date was important um and then i'll speak about two specific case studies which are are specific to hamas which kind of linked to the arab spring um so i'll start beginning so the conjecture about the palestinian territories in the arab spring yes it was arguments that the arab spring that was going to finally take place in the palestinian territories and their arguments in particular that it but it may not because of the pressure of occupation and how palestinians were more concerned with um getting rid of the of the occupation as they saw it um i'm more concerned with their sort of general um domestic politics um and national unity than they were with actually getting rid of their own leaders um so there was an argument that there was a reluctance to remove the political elite through violent means um um and one of the main arguments about um came from aaron david miller when he quoted yasa arafat he said you shouldn't wait for revolutions in palestine palestinians will always be angrier at the israelis than they'll ever be at me and he said so far if it's arafat's been right on target however i don't disagree with any of these points but one one thing that i think is really important to go back to when we think about the arab spring is specifically the importance of hamas electoral victory in january 2006. um and the significance of this was he had the example of a group which had been deemed terrorist um he went down down the political route and won these elections which were announced in january 2006. so the significance was it was it was a group deemed terrorist going down the political route um and it was a group that was embracing political islam um and there was a feeling in the palestinian territories that the people had finally spoken um so it would be a huge conceptual and factual leap to argue that the palestinian territories had already had their version of the arab spring but if we think about what the arab spring was for rather than what it was against then we can see that the palestinians had already expressed their dissatisfaction with inequality and authoritarianism and very importantly endemic corruption and so these are all things that during the arab uprisings were the main bones of contention um but they did this and they had the opportunity to do this through democratic rather than violent means um and they did this in the context where they were also supported by the west and particularly in the us in the context of fostering democracy in the middle east following 9 11. so so if we look at this as the context as to why we had we had a group go down this political route and we cut forward to the arab spring we can see then that hamas in particular was extremely supportive of the arab spring it voiced its support for um all the revolutions it considered itself a vanguard of democracy so it could saw itself as a head of the curve from its from his own experience and when i spoke to them they would say you know we got there first we've been doing this for a while they consider themselves a more sophisticated organization than other jihadist groups so they took particular umbrage in this regard about being compared to it to be compared with other groups such as al-qaeda and isis and so so that was very very important because they thought they'd done it already so from some res in some respects while the palestinian territories did not have an arab spring they had their own process where these issues were addressed um so if we look at then so if we look at hamas specifically and we look to two very different case studies in particular we'll talk about egypt and syria with egypt um when when the freedom and justice party came in in egypt hamas i i think was slightly a bit naive here it put a huge amount of affiliation on its muslim brotherhood affiliation and background because we have to remember that that hamas is an offshoot of the muslim brotherhood rather than a faction of it um and it was started to be the jihadist um the palestinian jihadist wing of the brother of the brotherhood in palestine so it put a lot of weight um on this affiliation and thought that um egypt coming into power was going to be extremely beneficial for hamas and for the palestinian cause and it turned out that it massively overstated the the strength of this relationship and each and the freedom and justice party had a lot less interest than hamas had anticipated so from from that perspective there was a lot of conjecture that her master's now isolated but it turns out in the longer one it wasn't but at the time it was a lot of the conjecture was that hamas is now isolated because it put too much weight in this relationship but then with syria and shiraz has just spoken to you about the case of syria but with syria what happened was her master's hamas had its external bureau in damascus and and took the view that it could not be seen to be supporting the assad regime because it had turned against his own people so it felt it would be completely hypocritical to stay and support the assad regime when it itself had been such a so pro-democracy had gone down the democratic route itself um and could not be seen to be engaging in this um and also had a huge distaste for sectarianism which did not want to get itself embroiled into um so there was a time where hamas in particular seemed it was quite isolated and it got it got into trouble with iran and uh relations at syria are massively strained over time these relationships have started to repair themselves slightly um so overall while the palestinian territories haven't had an irish spring i think it's very important to see that it has it has been affected and a group like hamas for example um has not become the argument that it has been isolated has become less of a has become less of a robust argument over time due to hamas ability to maneuver in the region and to reformulate its regional alliances and particularly closer in the middle east rather than more broader internationally so i'll leave it there for questions thank you thank you very much uh nina for reminding us that the palestine although not apparently from outside being directly affected actually was quite heavily affected by the arab spring dynamics uh elsewhere um our final panelist is dr andreas krieg andreas is a lecturer in the defence studies department of kings and a fellow of the institute of middle eastern studies and he spent more than 10 years living studying and working across the middle east north africa region and his research looks in particular violent non-state actors in the mena region and their competition with state authority to provide communal resilience so over to you andreas great thank you very much much sir mark um so i only have five to seven minutes and so i was going to talk about more whitely how the arab spring impacted the gulf but i i will be more selective so you know when we look at the gulf um you know the gulf was obviously proven to be a lot more resilient in many ways than other parts definitely the old powerhouses of the arab world and i would slightly disagree to say that the arab world as a whole all the power houses disintegrated i'd say that the the center of gravity of the arab world has shifted from the likes of uh syria egypt iraq um or libya to the shores of the gulf and um that that had to do with the fact that despite the fact that obviously grievances existed and still exist across the gulf and also despite the fact that the rentier system the rented states of the globe the arab monarchies are struggling we're struggling to provide uh what they promised to provide in the beginning um they were still able to deal with the grievances that existed across the gulf more effectively than those regimes that uh ultimately failed or are still struggling to cope amid um the the public uh the weight of public pressure um and you know the grievances that exist particularly in saudi in oman and also in bahrain are very similar to the ones that we already outlined here mostly socio-economic in nature do with corruption but also to do with uh participation and uh the feeling of being alienated by elites and not being able to contribute um to um to policymaking um what happened though is with you know all these old powers is disintegrating two particular players i think came out as the great winners when it comes to the arab spring from the gulf so the old powerhouse of the gulf was saudi arabia and the two smaller states like qatar and the united arab emirates came out from the arab spring as a more as more independent players more powerful players in many ways and more deterministic and and a lot more proactive players um and there is something that i i wrote about in my recent book divided golf there is something that's dividing the gulf and that's particularly the two visions two ontological predispositions about how to structure uh and rebuild the arab world after the revolutions and that ontological clash this ideological clash is between doha and abu dhabi in particular qatar and the united arab emirates and they have two entirely 180 degrees uh opposite visions of how to restructure the arab world how to provide for the needs of of the arab people and um on one hand you have that activism of qatar and on the other hand you've got this counter-revolutionary activism almost the opposite of activism coming from the uae and initially uae and qatar were obviously on the same side both of them were were asked by the uk and nato to support the operation in libya but very early on in 2011 both kind of went to opposite directions qatar ideologically uh not very strategic but very ideologically in support of the people as they said um they were help trying to help trying to build trying to empower the people versus the old regimes uh the previous emir was very much in favor of trying to usurp and overpower these old regimes providing a more more inclusive political um system for the arab world that he would describe as democracy but i think you know most countries would also say today this had nothing to do with with democracy but it's more about social justice more about empowering the people and thereby empowering the people also against the old regime um and the problem with that obviously was the countries weren't strategic the countries were as blue-eyed in many ways as most partners in the west uh in terms of thinking where this was going to go even their support obviously for political islam and islamic movements as somewhat a a kind of placeholder for for this vacuum that was created through the toppling of regimes was also very blue-eyed very naive not really thinking far ahead of where this would end up um obviously ending up in a slippery slope that by 2013 14 seeing the countries withdrawing from the from the arab spring and withdrawing their activism and saying you know we kind of failed um and at that point 2013 we're seeing the emiratis appearing on stage as the count director counteracting um that activism that came out of particular from qatar but also obviously supported by turkey um and obviously what the emiratis are looking at they're looking at the arab spring as not as an opportunity as the country saw it but as a fundamental risk and threat to the old order of the arab world so they were very much and are still very much interested in restoring the old order of author return stability while the caterings were thinking stability in the region could only be established um by uh empowering the people and creating more sustainable social political relations uh which which are based on pluralism and engagement the the emiratis are looking at this as as the exact opposite they're saying empowering the people will lead to revolution will lead to insurgency will lead to terrorism and will lead to weak states so you know the the emirati approach is very much a state-centric one rebuilding the old state and in many ways very much anti-islamism but anti-islamism is obviously just one element of this it's not just being against islamism per se but it's against being civil against civil society against the empowerment of the people and basically restoring order by creating and putting in place certain strongmen um of the likes that were actually toppled during the revolutions because they're the only ones who can put a lid on what are essentially a very very unstable at times in the in the wider arab world and so this is basically what led to the divide in the gulf in the rift that caused the gulf crisis between 2017 and earlier this year but it's also something that divides the entire region the entire region has now been polarized around on the one hand people saying we need to empower people we need more liberalization part of that is obviously people are saying we need to also have a place for political islam in this because they are representing part of that voice part of the mood of the arabs so to speak and on the other hand we have those who say we don't want empowerment more we don't want political islam we don't want more liberalization because more liberalization more empowerment of the people will lead to more more chaos so we want to go back to some sort of stability i think some of it we're seeing uh we've been seeing in egypt in 2013 with in the aftermath of the uh of the of the military coup where people were real were saying we actually want to go back to some sort of stability now uh even if that means we're we're making some of the some of the things that we developed and achieved are being made um redundant or undone uh in the course of this and uh i think this divide is somewhat and you know i don't want to get into we can talk about this in the q a but this is kind of that divide that leaves the arabs at the moment very very divided on depending on you know what side are you on and there's unfortunately through polarization of social media as well there's very little middle ground of compromise um in in most of these and the counter revolutionaries in most of these crises the counter revolutionaries seem to be winning um and you know the the idea of an arab winter is pretty much reality for the time being but i'm i'm probably more optimistic to say that in the long run i don't think that these arthritarians arthritis that came back after the arab spring are the ones that bring in sustainability in the region i think they will bring more instability and eventually would probably lead to another arab spring 2.0 3.0 uh you name it i'll leave it at that thank you very much thank you very much indeed andreas for that uh oversight on the on the gulf dynamics there are some questions coming in about uh regionalism and we'll come back to that uh a bit later but i want to start with a question a broader question uh which perhaps for yerun to answer which is coming from muhammad tawfiq ali about the impact or non-impact perhaps of the kovid 19 pandemic on the uprising and the end game for iraq syria lebanon's the sort of popular me uh uprisings that are still going on the remnants of the arab spring will the uh kobe 19 pandemic do you think have any impact at all um i think it's very good question but what's interesting if you look at lebanon um for example you can see that that covert has exacerbated uh the financial crisis and the inequalities and so it has given people more anger and more grievances and you can see that in some areas there's there there's more protests on the back of what happened with kovitz on the other hand covet has also made inequalities worse and so people who were poor are even poorer which means they're more dependent on the on the clientelistic systems that are in place and therefore it is more difficult to protest against those systems because then you would have the the kind of the source would would be would be cut off from you so i think a lot will depend on whether the grassroots um opposition will manage to kind of create the structures that can sustain protests that can sustain the poor and and and help them also in in that kind of the workplace therefore they can sustain this mobilization or whether the kind of existing system will just um throttle its and uh and therefore the protests will run out of steam so i think there's a kind of a um a two split there just um thinking sideways about jordan i mean one of the reasons that we had did this recent um sort of um cool proofing you know where the the the king uh um sort of house arrested the the the crown prince or the former crown prince um that was partly to do with with the reactions to covet um and and particularly um uh where people died because of lack of oxygen and uh prince hamza went to visit them uh days before the king visited them so you can see how kovitz can provide flash points um and and if these these crises are um are then being kind of mobilized by the protesters then they could so fuel further protests but i think the key issue is still the county the economic structure on it underneath it that people who could get poorer will will wouldn't be more um they would like to protest but they might also be more dependent on existing structures good thank you very much for that um we have a question for madeline uh mesogian uh sort of two linked questions actually about the media which perhaps for fatima to to answer initially she points to the fact that uh the financial independence of the media is very important if it's going to not be captured by particular sponsors and what are the prospects for a seriously sort of independent media in the middle east and adds the point about the european union's flirtation with turkey which is one of the worst abusers of of journalistic freedom and what is that is doing to the supporters of a free media in the region fatima do you want to try that yes um it's very difficult i mean economic sustainability for independent media is extremely difficult from my research most of uh media stakeholder interview in this sector uh they rely on funding from international organization that are supporting uh media freedom against a very dangerous game because in countries like morocco or egypt you can you can be accused of being a traitor and of all kind of conspiracy i mean it's by law not allowed to have external funds so it's a very precarious uh situation and unless they build sustainability it's very difficult to continue uh especially that the regimes most of in most of the places they are able to manipulate uh advertising uh revenues in places like algeria or morocco there were directives to sponsors to advertisers that if you put money in this kind of media then your business will be cut off from the country and it was even in the media so it's it's not something secret uh now uh media development agencies uh i mean are are trying to help and they are trying to uh bring a kind of coalition of this agent for change of these voices for change uh to work together but uh i would say i mean it's a it's a very difficult uh struggle some of them had to leave the region and uh or their countries and work from abroad uh and some of them like mother muscle they are in egypt they are facing tremendous uh pressure including potential detention unrest in egypt we have at least 20 journalists in prison and definitely situation is not better in uh in turkey uh unfortunately my research is very much focused on north africa so i cannot give more details about the situation in turkey wise not not very much better than what it is in in other uh uh regions in zamayna in other countries it doesn't sound as though you're very optimistic no i am i am optimistic because i mean it's a struggle it's ongoing it's not uh it's not yet the end of it and and uh people like me like your guests and yourself we know that there are i mean as counter-revolutionary forces are uh steel strong entrenched so it's not an easy fight and i think what the second if we can call them the second wave of uprising what they learned that this is not an easy uh battle and it's not enough to go into social media and uh to have online active cyber activism to change the situation on the ground uh we need more we need planning we need organization we need coalitions uh we need to be able to negotiate so it's very difficult thank you um we have a question from hassan foies which is about syria and saying that uh it goes wider than syria though in fact that whether the link between the arab spring and the genesis of isis and whether one spawned the other or how that interaction uh worked um and how it will develop in the future um shivaz do you want to have a crack at that to the syria focus sure thank you um i suppose there's a few things there's a few different ways to unpack the phenomenon of isis if we want to put it in that way we you know it has clear intestines in obviously the 2003 war in iraq with obviously not just the rival in iraq but also other sunni groups jihadist groups that were fighting at the time which began to recognize the need to work together and to coalesce in order to um be able to resist the surge and various gains that the us was making in terms of trying to push them back but the real uh moment of you could say hybridity and coming together for these groups was um the cat their capture and detention and bringing together in kambuka where a number of these individuals have the opportunity to strategize about what life would look like if they were able to get out and uh to regroup as it happens of course that that is precisely what happened they had the ability and i think this is important in the context of even other things not related to this topic talking about a potential u.s withdrawal from afghanistan or elsewhere to think beyond the immediacy of a political cycle or something like that they were able to sit in iraq and to simply wait to capitalize shouldn't opportunity present itself and of course that's precisely what happened in 2011 across the border in syria you begin to have this breakdown of society that's moved towards editing towards increasing desperation uh the unraveling of civil society a greater sectarian turn into that conflict as i said uh courses too and reservations for violence within the context of that uprising and it was a perfect opportunity for isis to go in there and uh to exploit that situation which they did to to to great effect so i'm not sure you know to what extent events may be elsewhere in the broader region in egypt for example or things had a direct impact on isis i think the move towards violence in libya showed that there may be instances because you'd had tunisia in egypt up until that point which had gone on largely without violence there were obviously sporadic um instances of violence in egypt but nothing of the intensity that we saw uh in libya and certainly not what we saw later on inside syria so um that sense of okay maybe it may be acceptable to fall back on a violent response and there may be a legitimate moment in which to fight and here's what the contours look like i think all of that benefited isis the final point i'll make is and i think this is really important for current understanding is if you look at the two major urban centers in which uh isis has has a foothold in the past obviously in mosul and in raqqa then the sort of underlying structural issues that uh the populations of those places were feeling and were exposed to have been accentuated not uh diminished as a result of our own military coalition and and its activity but also in terms of everything else that has followed and that is whilst you can't characterize these conflicts and situation in iraq or in syria as a straightforwardly ethnic issue as a straightforwardly sectarian issue as a straightforward jihadist issue that all of these things are present in different forms and interact with one another in different ways certainly the story of mosul and raqqa is of the vulnerable sunni poor in those in those cities who um have largely seen those cities blown up who um are as desperate if not more desperate than they were prior to the rise of isis and we have once again brought all these guys together in the sdf detention camps in northeastern syria and house them um in a pretty insecure way with no long-term plan so just as the way they reappear and re-emerge from kambuka they could get again reappear re-emerge from these camps in uh northeastern syria and reimpose themselves over as they say these desperate areas where the vulnerable and poor sunnis uh are based and it seems you know to that extent so we haven't learned really the lessons that we should have learned after 2003 and and that's a very dangerous precedent absolutely well thanks uh for that um hassan actually asked a second question about palestine which nina might want to uh tackle which is that had there been a sort of successful arab spring movement in in palestine would the palestinian movement itself uh have advanced its cause any more than it has to date thank you for the question hassan um okay so again i can unpack this question if the arab spring had taken place and was successful well that would depend first of all in what kind of um trying to pull up the question again sorry um that would depend on how that would have that would have come about um so if there had been an arab spring movement and a democratic cohesive organization well it's just hard to see how that would have played out so it's quite hypothetical but um what did happen was that uh while they had democratic elections they had a split between the two between hamas and the incumbent political party futta um which resulted in a kind of a mini civil war about a year and a half after the elections which resulted in hamas driving fatah out of the gaza strip militarily so they became sort of two separate kind of parallel governing bodies and they took a long time to really sort of form or still have to form a functioning unity government which means that they have been completely split um anyway so in theory it was supposed to be a democratic system but it hasn't worked out that way so some a lot of people now will say that yes one of the reasons that they're not making the kind of headway they would like to be is because of the split within their own domestic politics but your question about if they've had an arab spring movement it's harder to answer because it depends how that would have played out and what how that would have emerged and i can't quite answer that part of the question i hope that happened thank you thanks nina um we have a question from omri brinner about uh regionalism um this is perhaps for andreas um because he asks whether the threat of popular movements the threat that that posed to the regimes across the region has it actually promoted increased cooperation between countries and there's any sense of regionalism and i'm interested in this question particularly because i've been struck by the the the arab world being further apart from unity than it's perhaps ever been i mean arab league seems to me to be completely absent from the international stage at the moment and although the the gulf cooperation council has sort of patched up its differences uh nonetheless other splits particularly between the sunnis and the shears have opened up even in the gulf so uh andres do you think uh this has been made worse by the arab spring or is there still any chance of some sort of pan-arab unity thank you that's a great question like i said i mean this division this ideational division is something that is divided the arab league but it's also divided the gcc frankly despite the fact that we've had some sort of reconciliation um happening over the turn of the year between december and january the in the gulf cooperation council you know none of it is has really been fixed while qatar is now talking to saudi arabia the the ultimate fault line and uh division is still remains between doha and abu dhabi and there is actually no real communication going on both sides do will not concede on you know ideational grounds on on where they think the the region should move and obviously the two um qatar's obviously being a lot less activist than they were in the first phase of the arab spring and in many ways they've withdrawn but the uae are probably the most powerful arab country i would say uh at this moment in terms of how they use the capacities that they have and the capabilities that they have and how willing and assertive they are and actually putting them deploying them elsewhere outside the region um so in industries in this respect i do think that this clash over ideology of not having a strategy or grand strategy of where you know the country should move to or where the region should go to uh will lead to more uh has led to more polarization will continue to polarize domestically as well in each single arab state um and has definitely completely divided the region i think there is not a single so that's ideology if we look at interest and geo strategic interest as well i don't think there is a common geostrategic interest that unites the arab world there is not even a common threat perception that unites the arab world at this point in time and um obviously extra regional players such as united states russia iran also play a very important role in this because they don't really bring about a certain umbrella that anybody can or anybody is willing to unite under and then there isn't a common threat perception even when it comes to iran you know there's a lot of arab states who see this as an as an opportunity to actually deal and reach out to iran there are others who wouldn't reach out to iran at all and uh there are some who are somewhere in the somewhere in the middle um and then obviously and i don't think that has necessarily something to do with the arab spring that the arab spring comes at a time um when the international order as a whole is disintegrating um and you know state centrism has somewhat ceased to exist and states compete with non-state actors and you know gray zone operations are continuing across the region as we speak i mean you know israel is attacking iran and vice versa there's cyber attacks going on all that is contributing to a sense of states and countries no longer being as powerful as they were in the past and then obviously many regimes being weakened by by by social mobilization on the ground so uh on on so what what were the constants in this arab world for for many decades have now ceased to exist or when they still exist they have to compete with a lot of uh other constants and other units of analysis if you will which are no longer based on states or territory but they're based on you know being transnational organization uh what have you not so the arab spring has just contributed on top to what is already a disintegrating regional order thanks andreas um paul arts has asked a question specifically to uh yaroon um asking him whether he could elaborate a little bit on the organizational deficiencies and on the tension between classes that you touched upon in your talk and the background to his question uh is around the whether one of the main causes of the failed failure of the uprisings is the poverty of protest i.e there's been lots of protests but not much social content what's your take on that you're in yeah um i think it's a very interesting um um comment that's that's that phrase the poverty of protesters by margaret mandur and it's based on a gramscian analysis um but what's interesting i think is is that if you look at the middle east um and middle east is not unique in this but but a lot of protest movements of the last 20 years have been um overtly of non-ideological and um they've been against one big thing but then not entirely clear what would be in its debt so for example the um the global justice movement has been sort of anti-neoliberal globalization um and it's under this anti kind of label it it can mobilize a lot of different groups that may not agree on any anything else but it may they all agree on they don't like um neoliberalism but then what do you do when you want to build something in instead and it is the same you can see in egypt you can see in lebanon um in other places in the middle east that it is easier for protest movements to mobilize around this of non-ideological core it's much more difficult to then develop a program for what to do next um and i think one of the things that that mandurah mentions in his article um where he talks about this poverty of protest is that there hasn't really been um sort of a a clear ideological development of thinking beyond the immediacy of we don't like this regime we want more more say in politics uh there's been no thinking in terms of the kind of structural changes that need to happen in order for uh more democratic politics to emerge and i think this goes back to my early point about uh the the the importance of of of um um clientelism and and how to become the political parties are are very much kind of in control of society because of these these patron client relationships that can go vertically unless um people become less dependent on those and you have alternatives and you have different structural changes that make it possible for people to come to vote more independently you will not have this kind of change that a lot of these protesters will want to have um yeah i think that's that's probably the main point thanks very much there's a question here uh perhaps uh best for fatima to answer about tunisia and saying how did tunisia escape an increase of authoritarianism it's an anonymous question that's come in uh it is it is as successful uh change of regime or transition or transformation but it's a very precarious um it's a very precarious one i mean many uh different um element um help this transition first to have a a weaker army and security forces compared to egypt for example you have a solid elite good education system a relatively small country with uh no sectarian divides as you can see in iraq or in lebanon however it's it's a very fragile uh process it's tunisian suffer today from corruption uh from poverty from uh lack of economic solution high level of unemployment uh continuity of elites a new system of clientelism uh whereas a consensus between uh political party is uh is undermining democracy in a way that is not about ideology or political leaning is much more about interest and about having a part of the cake and media is also engaged in this new system of clientelism is part of it so it's a very complex uh scene and when i asked my uh interviewees about how they see the future of this transition or or democratic consolidation uh there's lots of anxiety lots of question mark about how it could survive uh while there is uh um insisting that although we have lots of voices of nostalgia to the old uh regime a lot of capture of politics and media tunisian are still very much attached to the uh freedom and they consider this is uh the main gain from the revolution anything could can be said today it's a public debate um we have a kind of revival of journalism a very pluralistic political scene but it's a it's a very fragmented one as well uh uh which means that i mean there are real threat uh about the future especially within the economic difficulties that are very and it became even worse during the pandemic thanks very much fatima um another anonymous question here um about the syrian iranian alliance and how it has changed over the course of the civil war and arab spring um one for you shiraz i think yeah i think as i said in my remarks in relation to the syrian iranian relationship it has intensified and deepened and strengthened as results that's obviously been there for a number of years and for you know those who are not watching the region or who are so familiar with it it's obviously one of the the key points and i suppose countries with which uh iran has been able to use an air bridge hezbollah hezbollah is a very important uh um proxy for iran and it's been one of the the primary ways as they say via syria you've been able to see um um the iranians sorry the iranians maintained the neighborhood so syria has always been uh important the maintenance of that average has been important since uh the conflict began but you know again there are multiple dimensions uh to this conflict there is a religious component to this and clearly we saw the rise of uh very very sectarian millionaire movements isis attacking shia shrines sheer holy sites um as you've seen in the past after 2000 in iraq and so um obviously iran had an interest in protecting both sides and having fighters on the ground in order to protect both sides and then have been relatively successful in doing doing so in uh syrian context um and then it's obviously as i say about maintaining and enhancing those the structures of power that it's been able to uh enjoy the increased intensity and tempo in iraq and obviously in syria as well so i'd say that's the primary issue we've seen obviously the need to to rely upon the russians and to bring them in but clearly there's a good relationship there as well um so i think russia coming in has been single most dynamic factor in helping bashar al-assad you know turn the tide of this conflict and turn it away from the attritional phase that it was in through much of 2013 14 and 15 to one where he's been able to to wage a more revanchist element of the of the campaign pink iran was primarily able to stop the rot he was able to stop the march on damascus that had looked uh potentially possible um at one point but it wasn't able to reverse the gains and uh and that's where again iran's i think goodwill and and relationship diplomatic relations with russia were able to say you know have have a piece of his play too and come in reverse uh that's when you saw the reverse of the uh the conflict so i'd say that's the primary way of change i haven't been i'd suggest fundamental changes but enhancement and the deepening of pre-existing uh relationships that are already there and interests that were already there for iran to pursue okay thank you very much um and there's a question here about libya um what do you think libya would look like in the present had the west not militarily intervened and is any way to predict this um that's a question i might try and answer myself because personally having been there at the start as it were in new york i mean i'm convinced that had there not been any military intervention by the west then there would have been a great deal of bloodshed um in benghazi and almost certainly the start of a more or less full-scale civil war in libya how that would look 10 years on of course is a much more difficult question to answer and i would be it would be difficult for me to put my hand on my heart and say that libya would be better or worse off than it would have been sort of ten years later but i am certainly convinced that many many people would have died who hadn't died i don't know whether anyone else fatima or anyone wants to say a better answer to that question uh i think it's difficult to answer this question to predict um well is it is it would it be better to keep kazafi and the old regime i mean i would say no uh definitely not how the uh the operation how the change of regime happened i mean this is where we should look back to lessons uh learned and to see whether the international community has provided real genuine support for libya for the civil libyan civil society uh to help them grow go through this uh difficult time and to avoid the outbreak of civil conflict but i think andreas had something as well to say if i may and just a very quick one obviously it's an hypothetical one and i get this question quite a lot at the royal college of defense studies especially from our african members who are very much in favor of saying we shouldn't have removed qaddafi should have stayed in power then we would have had more more stability i say to that um i think this is the one case where the west actually took a a at least initially a very decisive approach in trying to say we're willing to obviously in a bit of mission creep saying first we want to protect civilians and then say we we want to we topple the regime as well and support the opposition and actually doing so militarily um in other cases such as syria we we we set we thought it would be too costly to actually do it and we didn't and all we did is a bit of salami tactics here and there without getting into the details of it but i think the the alternative to libya the way it has unreveled would have been a syria two which would have been i would argue more messy because the regime was already collapsing anyway it was on the brink of collapse and obviously um you know it would have taken a lot longer to topple the regime the regime would have been able to to reinforce using mercenaries from sub-saharan africa and so on so forth uh i think syria is a get good case study of what happens when the west stays fairly out of it and looks from from the onset and just you know gets involved whenever it suits them in a very tactical or operational but never in a strategic way and the mess of the civil war of syria although i don't want to compare i think is a lot worse than the mess that we're seeing in libya despite the fact that libya is obviously very messy that's why i have five cents to that okay we have about uh ten minutes left now so i'd like to ask uh the panelists uh all to chip in on on uh some final general questions that have been coming in um from the uh the audience um the first is around us american influence in the region um how crucial is the united states to sustaining current regimes is the u.s losing influence and will the biden administration be any different from the trump administration in that respect and the other question is a broad one around the arab spring um would you personally characterize it as a failure and will there ever be an arab summer um who wants to kick off on that nina do you want to have a crack at those questions sorry thank you sir mark um well thinking about us involvement because i was going to put my hand up and then i remembered that actually when i think about the palestinian territories it's not it's a bit of a different angle to the question one thing about u.s involvement um which has been very pertinent to the case of the palestinian territories back in 2006 of spring has been the opposition to hamas as a as a democratically elected um political party there so that has been very pertinent um but i'm not speaking to the us but more broader than that and then the other part of your question is whether the arab spring has been a failure and will that ever be an arab summer um not in the near future i would say anyone else who wants to go next you're really putting me on the spot with that one fraz why don't you have a go at those questions i think fatima's got her hand up so uh flatman uh fatima or shiraz i mean i will be very short i don't like the expression of spring or summer or winter it's a movement of transformation that was led by an appeal a call for dignity uh from people it was not expected uh to be easy if we understood as the time that is a spring and it's easy that's our mistake uh and it's only 10 years so i think it's still very early uh to uh to judge and say it's a failure it's a transformational a continuous movement of struggle and is not finished and i mean shiraz would would maybe say the same but if you look to see there are some protests still ongoing in syria under some worst condition in iraq and lebanon in algeria they are every week out in algeria despite the pandemic it's it's still very early to say it's it's the end and whether summer or winter we will survive i think yeah good point and and thoughts on the american influence i think i would leave it to us okay i think it's you know fatima's point is right the question is so broad as to it's it's very difficult because this part so dynamics that it's uh it's it's it's more or less impossible for us to to give a better answer and fatima is absolutely right in fact if you look even areas in syria now that are nominally reconciled with the regime there have still been ongoing protests against bashar al-assad so that tells us something just at the very micro level but even when we look at the u.s involvement then again you know calibration of american involvement american policies well we're looking at 10-year period here we've had three different presidents in the united states during that time one of whom i think you know we can describe as a highly unusual uh uh uh president um but it has to be usual in one sense but in the other sense was very very close to the gulf powerhouses saudi arabia uae and restoring the sense of confidence and reassurance that they had wanted after the obama years so in that sense actually it was a return to a kind of status quo feeling for some of those uh uh governments and in fact maybe a status quo plus because in fact they were getting more uh of what they wanted particularly after having felt a degree of exposure uh um previously and again now with president biden and his administration i think you can again expect to see a slight recalibration in a way that leaves countries like saudi arabia and the uae and is feeling slightly more uh exposed again slightly more jittery i think this is term again as they will seek to engage the iranians there and that might lead to more trade-offs in other places i.e in syria or elsewhere i tend to think of this as if you think you know us interests what's the russian interest the iranian it's like the air in a balloon at different points different administrations will grip the balloon in one part and what happens the air is displaced to others the balloon itself hasn't pop it's not going anywhere and and therefore the the particles and molecules are moving and different areas are becoming emphasized different parts of this structure are becoming you're coming under greater stress because of the way that you are clamping this balloon but uh again a number of those actors in the region whether the monarchies the iranians others you know are there and they see out multiple administrations and so there's again that lopsidedness of time and event horizon in the way that some of these actors are thinking and operating thank you um sure has um do you have any thoughts on those wider questions um yeah just to kind of go back to fatima's point that this it's too soon to tell i mean these are long transformations that can take decades to kind of come through but also i would say that there's there's learning i mean there's learning on both sides i mean you've got authoritarian regimes learning from each other how to be more authoritarian which would not help the region to get to more kind of transformative politics but it's also learning on side of the protesters if you look at the the the lebanese protest for example they've learned from from what happened in egypt in a sense that they're much more focused on on how to build posts uh post protests structures you know that that can engage in politics that they're they're um thinking about um how to come how to transform society how to create alternative uh services et cetera so i think i'm i'm mildly optimistic in in the long run in in the sense that that for a lot of people in the region once you've had these these mass protests this is something that that you don't think this is possible i mean before 2010 this wasn't deemed a possibility within the middle east and now you have had a decade of mass protest so i think this is not something that will go away um but it will be a very long uh slow process of building things on the ground and as viking i said not just on social media although social media have their role to play but materially sort of on the ground thanks very much andreas yeah i i agree with everything that's been said i think there is it's difficult like shiraz said to come up with a macro picture of saying this is the arab spring and this is where it's successful and this is why it's not successful i think uh there are a lot of there's a lot of evidence locally that it has been successful and continues to be successful i think there are a lot of achievements that you know the arab world can cherish um even though at the moment like i said we are it's somewhat some somewhat the at an arab winter where the where the um the regime seems to win where authoritarianism wins seems to win and to come back to jerome's gerund's point about um authoritarianism i think authoritarianism 2.0 is is winning at the moment in those countries that are authoritarian obviously tunisia i think has is is a great success country where authoritarianism has lost um i think in libya we're on the on the brink of seeing a bit more pluralism away from authoritarianism but if we look at syria i think the regime in some areas again some area seems to be winning um the um not very in a not very sophisticated way but you know when we look at egypt for example i think egypt for me is kind of the embodiment of the new authoritarian regime very similar to the uae uh where authoritarianism is learning how to do repression in in in in a 21st century way and here i think despite the fact that civil society has been empowered and that mobilization has been empowered the tools of demobilization and repression have also been modernized to such an extent that at this point in time regimes are winning and there was a question about china and china's influence in in the region and i think one very powerful relationship that's been forged at the moment that nobody's looking at is uae and china the uae have become one of the most important the most important client state for the chinese in the region in terms of procuring information technology procuring means of subversion that are being used not just domestically in the uae because in the uae civil society no longer exists at all but they're exporting it to other countries they've tried to export it to libya they've definitely exported it to egypt they're exporting it potentially now to syria with new relationships being forged there um so there is a authoritarianism 2.0 it becomes increasingly powerful and despite the fact that obviously we always talk about the media but the arab spring was mobilized through social media social media was immensely important in this um and obviously continues to be important but it feels like that the regime has completely conquered that domain for the time being and i think that's something that makes me a bit more worrisome about the united states i i do think that the arab spring fell into a bracket when arab when the when the obama administration wanted to withdraw anyway and it's it fell into a bracket of withdrawal u.s withdrawal from the region the region is no longer we look at three administrations and we see that the middle east is no longer as important as it used to be so i think in this kind of context america has withdrawn and when it reengages in some uh in some areas it does so in an entirely different manner than it has throughout its history and i think that is a very important uh thing to consider because it has created a vacuum that now and to one extent the gulf countries are filling because the americas taught the americans have told the gcc that they have to now bear the burden of conflict in the region more more directly and so they're doing it in a very divided manner and it has allowed others to come in iran russia turkey and to an extent uh china as well so uh you know in in this respect i think um i'm slightly optimistic in some areas but also very pessimistic in others yeah for my own uh part i would uh agree that it's a bit too early to say because the power structures within individual countries and the power structures within the region are very much in in flux uh at the moment um but if i could just end with a more geopolitical wider point um it strikes me that what's interesting about the region one thing that's interesting about the region is that at a moment when external involvement is probably greater than it's been for some time from countries like um israel turkey iran but also russia china the us now coming back this is happening at a time when arguably in geopolitical terms the middle east region has never been less important in the sense that it's always had a very small population it's got a minute uh economic contribution to the world economy but also as the world moves away from dependency on fossil fuels and relatively few of the countries have diversified their economies and everyone's focus is on the u.s china relationship it's going to be interesting to see what that means for uh the dynamic in the middle east north africa region going forward because what is absolutely certain is that the geopolitical future the prosperity and security uh across the world is going to depend over the next 30 years on the u.s china relationship and that relationship will have a direct impact on every region in the world including middle east and north africa i think we'll we'll end it there because we've reached 7 30 but i want to thank uh all of the five panelists for their fantastic contributions and i want to thank all of the audience for joining us this eve for this look up look back at the 10 years of the arab spring so thank