 So, my presentation here is called, is protest a luxury, evidence from post-ISIS of rockets with two co-authors who are not here, so I'll be representing the team, of course. And you know, the papers sort of are, empirically we're focusing on this really massive and powerful protest movement in Iraq that erupted in 2019 called the Tishrin protest movement. Some folks may be pretty familiar with it, others it may have caught their attention and then, and sort of slipped by in the very tumultuous last couple of years, but it really was sort of the largest protest movement in modern Iraqi history and it was notably a pan-sectarian protest for good governance and for a civic state, which really represented a powerful vision. So we're asking why people support these kinds of protests, especially in societies like Iraq where insecurity is so salient, this was only two years after of course the defeat of ISIL in the country and so we want to understand how that insecurity may influence the ability of these protests to succeed in these societies and we think it's such an important and salient question because as I was alluding to this, these kinds of protests represent I think one of the most promising pathways out of conflict traps for countries like Iraq that have been caught in cycles of sectarian violence for the many years towards a different kind of politics that doesn't make that so likely just beneath the surface and a similar movement meanwhile has happened in Lebanon as well in recent years. So we think there's something really interesting going on and we want to look at the attitudinal dynamics behind it. So a little bit just to give you the landscape, the land of the protest support in the country so you can see that it's very popular overall so over 70% as I alluded to I wasn't you know I have the numbers to back that up it's a very broadly appealing protest movement and then also you see reinforcing the other point that I made earlier that level of supermajority appeal among both Sunnis and Shia in the country which makes it somewhat which is more pronounced than among the previous protest movements that the country has seen. That said it's still you know not unexpectedly that support is you know sort of maximized most among the Shia, the movement sort of started among the sort of Shia underclassed in Iraqi society and has been most salient there and you know some of the dynamics we highlight about how fears of insecurity and war sort of hamper this movement have some sectarian overtones as well. So I won't linger on the literature too much we have a pretty standard literature review in our protest oriented paper we'll talk about two of the biggest strands of research on protest and rebellion those on grievances and opportunity structures I think most of us have heard some of that language before so I think we view you know this there's tremendous amount of useful literature we are trying to intervene in a couple of ways one of them is we think there's room for a framework that integrates some of these ideas and creates room for some other ones from psychology and that's coming from classic work on motivational psychology which drawing on you know the sort of seminal writings of people like Maslow really focuses on human motivations and the hierarchy of human needs and how we tend to be really distressed and upset if we're unable to fulfill our needs especially the most sort of fundamental needs that we have and so we focus on three needs that we think are especially influential as a way to sort of synthesize this needs for security sustenance and significance significance just really briefly on these significance is sort of the most existential need in a way it's a need about you know being respected having a voice in society having control over your own affairs and so on whereas the others are a little lower on that needs hierarchy so sustenance is about being materially comfortable of course that's tapped into by having your basic service needs and employment needs met and all that and then security and I think it's those lower rungs on the ladder that we think have at times been neglected and this sort of motivational theory can help us remind us that those can obviously disrupt your you know drive to fulfill those higher needs which a protest movement like this might appeal to so that's what we're sort of getting at and I think again that security you can see the last couple bullet points need we argue operates differently when you really have a fundamentally insecure community or a segment of your society they're gonna have a hard time getting behind these more aspirational protest movements we argue that are seeking broader social significance for individuals as well as fulfillment of you know more achieving a reasonable level of a standard of living for folks and so we argue that when survival is at stake protest can become become a luxury so we have a few drilling down on these and these ideas we operationalize them in a few different ways that I think I'll mention briefly because they get at the core the core sort of appealing aspects of the protest to Iraqis so on the significance dimension corruption obviously these were heavily inspired by the you know resentment about the deep corruption Iraqi government society foreign interference so to the extent to which Iraqis are really upset about the foreign domination by multiple coming coming from multiple sources of their country they're also going to be more find these appealing and drawn to these protests and I think again hearkening back to that earliest that first one first point I made that they also represented this pan sectarian vision of politics and so to the extent Iraqis are fed up with a corrupt sectarian system they're really going to be attracted to these and the idea is that all these cohere around ways in which individuals feel that they're disrespected right and not given a proper voice in society so these are sort of some of the core we would call these grievances political grievances in the traditional literature but here we're in this framework terming them significance motivations so then you also have core sort of sustenance drivers that we would think are have been capitalized on in this movement that it will appeal more to people who are unemployed which is a huge problem in Iraqi society and that don't believe they're just they feel that they're the have nots you know that sort of h2a here they're not materially comfortable they haven't come out on top in the society and they want obviously you know there's a pretty natural way in which a anti-system protest movement you know taps into that so sustenance motivations and then the security ones which again we think is this framework is a way to help inject these into the literature most here what's you know we think this is our most novel contribution because you know war is just beneath the surface here of Iraqi society and so we operationalize this in a few ways you know one more traditional Iraqis just kind of perceiving their situation security situation more negatively you'd find that on surveys all over the world but we also look at you know we wanted to really try and capture more acute forms of insecurity so we look at conflict induced displacement and exposure in proximity to ISIL terror attacks we've also looked at proximity to coalition airstrikes as sort of observational variation and we think this is really important because it represents the ways in which some of these communities remember how movements for political change have resulted in have actually kind of led to war in the past so we think this is really the pathway that we're trying to get at and we know it's early stage research so we hope to kind of substantiate those mechanisms more in the future I won't bore you with the or have time I don't I can't bore you with the methodological details of this survey it's a broadly nationally representative survey of Iraq to the extent that such surveys exist at all nor will I go over the descriptive statistics with the interest of time I'll show you some of the core results here essentially we find support for most of the hypotheses right you know we're not saying that insecurity is is dominating this whole decision-making process about protest support you're finding you know that the support is really powerfully related to these these significance motivations resentment about corruption angst about foreign meddling and belief that the Iraqi community student she encouraged and sort of solve big problems together these these show up but at the same and we don't a little footnote is we don't find much for sustenance type motivation what we term sustenance motivations but we do find that these security perceptions and experiences do drive that support down and that taps into some of my broader research on how exposure and being in security really insecure situations fundamentally changes political psychology and especially this ISIS violence proximity variable we find is probably the strongest so as a little bit of a way of starting to look beyond Iraq we also threw together some graphs using air barometer survey data cross-nationally just to look at whoops how I'll go through this really fast how support for very very cautious slow reforms correlates with the percentage of people who say that security is sort of the top issue that they face and you actually do see some interesting sort of I'd say very suggestive evidence that in some of these places like Libya that now security is a foremost on large you know on many people's minds that they tend to not be as aggressively hitting the gas in terms of support for drastic social changes we I would I would argue that some of these dynamics maybe at work here and a similar and similarly negative relationship correlation with the extent to which people are protesting versus again that domination of that fundamental core security mindset so that's where we're at implications there there's a lot that's confirmatory literature here but I think this this we want to think about more of the lower rung needs that shape protest support and behavior especially how publics in these regions that have really suffered from protests destabilizing their societies their thinking can be transformed and we think that it's important for scholars as well as for the international community to grapple with as we we look at these protests that we'd like to see succeed all right thank you