 Hello everyone. The mics are working. Thank you so much for coming for our today's seminar, which is money markets and monarchies, the political economy of the contemporary Middle East, and our speaker today is Dr. Adam Haniek. Adam is a reader in development studies at SOAS and an advisory committee member of the Center of Palestinian Studies. His research focuses on the political economy of class and state formation with a geographical emphasis on the Middle East. He's the author of three books, most commonly Money Market and Monarchy's, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Political Economy of Contemporary Middle East, which is also the title of our seminar today. And when he wrote his bio, he was shortlisted for the 2019 International Political Economy Group Book Prize of the British International Studies Association, but we found out yesterday that he won the prize. Congratulations. And our discussant today is Dr. Jeffrey R. Weber. Dr. Weber is a political economist with research interests in Latin America, Marxism, social theory, the history of the left, international development, capitalism and nature, imperialism, class, politics and social movements. He's the co-author and author of five books and currently he's a senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations in Goldsmiths. So, welcome Jeffrey and Adam. We, the format of the seminar would be Adam speaking for about 45 minutes. We'll pass you a slip of paper at 40, and then at 45. And after the 45 minutes, we will have Dr. Weber as the discussant, summing up, giving up some points and feedback for about five to seven minutes, and then you can choose to reply to that at that point of time. And beyond that, we'll open it up for questions. So, thank you. Okay, I'd like to begin by thanking everyone for coming tonight in the Department of Development Studies, FASY and the team for organizing this seminar series. I want to present some of the work, some of the ideas from the book to you tonight, which looks at the role of the Gulf States in the political economy of the wider Middle East. I wanted to begin by just offering some of the motivations and themes of the book and then turn to some of the findings and arguments that I present. Basically, the book starts from a long-felt opinion that the Gulf Cooperation Council states, the six states in the Middle East, which I'll speak in a bit more detail about in a second, are quite poorly understood in mainstream coverage of the Middle East and in political debate about the region today. Often, the Gulf is reduced simply to their oil and gas supplies and the role of these oil and gas supplies in the global economy. The Gulf's role in various wars and conflicts, notably today, of course, in Yemen and in Syria and the kind of following of the ruling family intrigues, different factions of the ruling families in these states. In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010, I think it's become patently clear that these six states are quite central to the Middle East's future trajectories. But a lot of the discussion around these Gulf states focuses on their most overt manifestations of power projection in the region. What I was hoping to do in this book is to demonstrate the importance of a political economy perspective to these discussions with a focus on the ways that the Gulf's position as a critical site of capitalism in the Middle East is shifting patterns of accumulation throughout the wider region and that this role in how we understand capitalism in the Middle East at the regional scale can provide insights into the politics beyond the kind of superficial analysis that often comes with the gossip about the ruling family or religion, Islam, etc. So, theoretically, the book is situated in debates over how to understand the relationship between global processes and the ways that class and state formation play out across the national, regional and other spatial scales. Many scholars have critiqued the tendency in much of the political economy literature to take for granted the national or nation state as the natural geographical unit and vantage point of analysis. What I try to do in the book is to move beyond this kind of methodological nationalism to see how different spatial scales, in particular the regional scale, are produced through cross-border processes. So, it's trying to understand how the Gulf's position as a major node of capitalist accumulation in the Middle East is changing the way that the region itself is operating over the last few decades. This doesn't mean and shouldn't be taken to imply that the nation state is no longer important, but rather it points to how sub and supranational processes play an increasingly fundamental role in both the ways that globalization works and in shaping what goes on at the national level, helping us move beyond the kind of state centrism that typifies, I think, much work on the Middle East. So, there's two angles that I explore this question from. First, I look at what we can learn about the global from the vantage point of the Gulf. The Gulf, if you think about the ways that people often talk about the Gulf's, or sorry, the global political economy today, we here talk about, I mean, a focus largely on the United States, potential or relative decline perhaps of US power. We talk a lot about Europe and increasingly emerging markets and the bricks, of course, is symbolic of these kinds of emerging markets. But within this, the Gulf has been typically largely absent, and I think this is a real mistake. We think about the Middle East is kind of left out of these discussions of how the global political economy functions. The term bricks obviously excludes the Gulf. All the region is simply reduced to its oil exports. So, what I try to do in part of the book is to show how flows of Gulf financial surpluses are an essential component to understanding the contemporary world market, to understand these kinds of patterns of persistent levels of overaccumulation, the predominance of US and Europe continuing predominance as core zones of power, but the emergence of new centers of accumulation and political rivalries. And I think having finished this book, it's actually, I think, becoming even more of a topic. We can see, I think, in the last six months or so, the shifting relationships between Asia, East Asia, China, and the Gulf, Middle East as a whole, but particularly the Gulf region, which I think is quite interesting. It's actually moved a lot faster than I thought initially in the book. This is not just a matter of adding another case study to how we understand global processes. It's about seeing the global in and through its relationship to the Gulf. By understanding this relationship between the global and the Gulf and the Gulf's place in the making of the global, I think we can gain some insights into the nature of global capitalism itself. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about this. Perhaps Jeff might want to pick up with these topics or we could talk about it more, but I want to turn more to the second kind of relationship that the book explores, which is to try to understand how the Gulf location within the global has been articulated through shifting patterns of accumulation in the wider Middle East. And before I do that, I just want to make a few comments about the Gulf itself for people who are perhaps unfamiliar with this part of the world. I'm talking here, I mentioned the Gulf Cooperation Council. The six states here highlighted in green, dominated by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the largest of the Gulf states. These states are marked by a number of features that set them apart from the rest of the Arab world. They are all monarchies whose rich and relatively cheap hydrocarbons, that's oil and gas, have made the Gulf for many decades a critical focus of Western strategy in the Middle East throughout the 20th century. With the emergence of the United States as a dominant power in the wake of the Second World War, the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, developed as a major pillar of American foreign policy in the region. And this is part, I think, of perhaps how we need to look at the emerging relations with the East over the last few years, what this might mean for US power in the region. In 1981, these six states joined together in the kind of security umbrella that had both economic and political aspects to it as well called the Gulf Cooperation Council. The US led invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were largely carried out through a military presence in the GCC states. And today a wide array of US troops and military installations are located in these areas, including naval bases in Bahrain and the forward command of US Central Command in Qatar as well as other bases in the area. At the same time, the Gulf monarchies differ quite significantly from other states in the Middle East. And I think one of the most significant aspects of this is the Gulf's reliance on a very large number of temporary migrant workers, mostly drawn from South Asia and to a lesser degree the Arab world. These migrant workers make up now more than 50% of the Gulf's total population of 56 million people. When considered as part of the labor force in the Gulf, these figures are even more stark. We find that migrant workers range from over 59% to 86% of the employed population in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait to around 92 to 95% of the populations in Qatar and the UAE. Quite a remarkable figure when you think about it, less than 10% of the population in these states actually holding citizenship. Now these workers are denied labor, political and civil rights and they've been fundamental I think to part of the story that I try to tell in the book which is the patterns of urban growth and capital accumulation in the Gulf states. There's a lot again that can be said about this but again I'll perhaps I'll leave this further to discussion. Now these Gulf states should not be, despite the fact they're in this kind of regional integration project of the GCC, they should not be taken to be all precisely the same. There's a lot of differences and internal rivalries between them, most importantly between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on one side is a major poll of power in the GCC and Qatar on the other that's emerged in the last few years. But I think key to the story that I'm trying to tell here is what's happened essentially since the early 2000s where we've seen an increasing demand for the Gulf's hydrocarbon exports and a near continuous 15-year increase in the price of oil up to about mid 2014 which led to a massive expansion in the quantities of surplus capital held by both private and state-owned firms in the Gulf. So I try to map this surplus capital and the capital accumulation conservatively we're talking about well over $6 trillion accumulating in the region by governments and sovereign wealth funds and private firms and individuals in 2016, $6 trillion, this is a level that has massively increased since the early 2000s. And what this has been central to is a process of capitalist class formation where we see large conglomerates that are closely connected to the state benefit from contracts provided by the state that dominate most of business processes in the region. We're talking about activities such as construction and real estate, industrial processes, steel, aluminium and concrete, retail processes, shopping centres and malls and of course banking and finance. So I try to present a map of actually these different sectors who are the dominant conglomerates and how they've emerged through the last two decades. Now this surplus capital accumulating in the Gulf has mostly historically and continues to date mostly to be invested in North America and Europe where we can see Gulf firms taking stakes in a lot of household names, Twitter, Barclays Bank of course is being part of an inquiry that's happening now in the UK around investment from Qatar. We can see it in the largest provider of nursing homes in the UK for example is actually owned is a Gulf owned firm. We can see it in real estate and many different sectors football clubs is obviously another one. But so what I'm trying what I'm going to say in the next part of this presentation should not be taken to imply that North America and Europe aren't continuing to be the major areas where these Gulf capital flows have focused. But what we have seen through the 2000s and continuing today is increasing amounts of investments that have flowed into neighbouring Arab countries over this period. Now these capital flows were predicated upon the adoption of structural adjustment packages in places like Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and elsewhere through the 1990s and 2000s the liberalization and opening up of these Arab economies. And as a result of these kinds of reforms Gulf capital took a major stake and was a primary beneficiary of the neoliberal turn that occurred through the last two decades. And this I think tells us something about neoliberalism in the Arab world that is not immediately apparent when we think of neoliberalism as bound or enclosed within these kind of state centric frameworks. In other words it is certainly true if we look at a place like Egypt that neoliberal reforms which were a major part in the uprisings that overthrew Mubarak in 2011 and the demonstrations that continue today in Egypt. It is certainly true that these neoliberal forms played a big part in enriching the Mubarak regime, crony capitalists if you want to use that term connected to the regime, obviously the Egyptian military. But the other side to the story that often gets missed is that it was Gulf investments including by both private and state firms entering into Egypt that became if you like interiorized in the class structure of the Egyptian state. So when we think about Egyptian capital we can't just talk about Egyptian as a nationality, we need to think about the ways that the regional hierarchies were also formed and the Gulf became a major beneficiary of this kind of opening up. Now this is not just simply true in terms of the ownership of capital. It is also, it means that when we think about development processes in places like Egypt, we think about the ways that citizens or the populations in these countries relate to the state, relate to the political economy. We can look at how the Gulf has become a major intermediary between Arab populations and the market itself. And this has important ramifications for social and economic development and not to mention political alliances. Okay so I want to just give some examples here to illustrate what I'm saying. So I'm going to run through a few sectors which I look at in a lot more detail in the book. Beginning with agricultural production and agribusiness. Now this is I think a really interesting sector because when we think about the Gulf we don't normally think of the Gulf as being an agricultural producer. We think of it as being an oil exporter, obviously it is an oil exporter. But there are major internationally known firms, agribusiness firms that are Gulf owned and are headquartered in various Gulf states, in particular Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. These firms over the last two decades have been very involved in the purchase of land throughout the Middle East and also other parts of the world, Africa and even North America. But even beyond the land grabs that have been attracted quite a lot of attention, these kind of Gulf land grabs, it's interesting to look at the way that supply chains, agricultural supply chains dominated by Gulf owned firms in the Middle East as well as all the way up to the actual sale of products, retailing of agricultural products in the region. So if we look at Egypt for example, close to half of the food and agricultural companies that are listed on the country's stock exchange are either controlled or have significant ownership stakes held by Gulf based capital firms. Now Egypt has been the primary focus of this kind of internationalization of Gulf capital but other countries are also being drawn into Gulf agribusiness circuits. So in Jordan the leading companies involved in dairy farming, fruit and vegetable production, processed meats, edible oils and minerals, mineral water are all Gulf owned. Similin Lebanon, Gulf based firms hold controlling or major stakes in the largest dairy producer, one of the top ice cream and juice companies, grain mill and silo compound with the highest storage capacity of any mill in the country. The biggest nut retailer in the Middle East which might sound strange but this is quite a, I like this example because this company appears to, I mean everyone thinks of it as being a Lebanese owned company. When you go to the airport in Beirut you see this company emblazoned around the place stalls telling that this is a Lebanese product. It's actually Kuwaiti owned this firm and leading supermarket chains and so forth. Now all of these firms they produce four domestic Arab markets, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and so forth as well as for export to the Gulf and what this means, and this is relatively new, we're talking about a two decade process, it means that policies that promote food security in the Gulf which the idea of food security has been the major plank of Gulf agricultural planning since about 2007, 2008 with the spike in food prices, global food prices that happen at that moment. So all Gulf states have put forward food security as their major food policy but what this policy has meant is that the Gulf food security actually is a discourse that has justified this expansion of Gulf investments around the rest of the region. So we see agricultural production, the circulation and consumption of food shifting through the changes to the Gulf agricultural policies. Now I don't mean to imply here that this is true across every single country in the region. If we look at places like Morocco and Tunisia these are much more tightly linked to European markets but it is shifting regional patterns of trade, agricultural trade, the types of agro commodities produced and the structures of ownership and control within the sector. Now a second very important sector is urban development, real estate development construction and here again we can see that the nature of the Arab city, the nature of urban development in the Arab world is largely interlaced with the dynamics of accumulation that come from the Gulf states. So if we look here, okay so this is a table that looks at real estate projects in six major Arab countries between 2008 to 2017. It lists the number of projects that are worth more than a hundred million dollars. So these are major mega projects if you like. I'm not talking about a small apartment, I'm talking about large tourism resorts, shopping malls, large buildings. You can see the government-owned projects and you can see in the third column GCC related projects. So these are projects that are owned, developed or built by GCC firms. You can see the value of the projects and the last column I think is most important which shows you the total value of GCC related projects or GCC related projects as a percentage of total value. We can see that in all of these states that a significant proportion, a very significant proportion of large real estate projects are owned in this way through Gulf-based companies. I'll come back in a second to why I think this is important. So these are the big projects that are you know tended and publicly available information. Perhaps even more interesting I think this kind of brings me back to the point I made a little bit earlier when we think about capital development at the national level. Here are five states and I'm looking here at the listed real estate firms on the stock markets of each of these countries. So these are firms if you went to Egypt or Jordan or Palestine or so forth you would think of them as being Jordanian firms or Egyptian firms, their household names as being the big locally owned firms in these countries. The second column shows you their connection to GCC capital. So this is like a minimum 20% ownership of GCC investments. In most cases more than that 20%. And you can see that again around about one fifth of these firms are in some way connected to the GCC. This is a trend that has shifted or has increased over the last 10 or so years. That these the ownership of these firms has become more and more interlaced with Gulf investors. Now why is this important? It means that the key tenets of urban planning in many Arab cities and the policies that are very familiar across the world, privatization of land and public housing, the lifting of rent caps, the growth of mortgage markets, private provision of infrastructure services, all of these kinds of things are actually mediated through Gulf investments. And it's I think something that we can see evident across many Arab states. Moving along, this is actually one of my favorite examples, which is telecommunications. So this is looking across these two pages, I think 10 Arab states. And it's looking at the ownership of telecommunications firms. The ones in yellow are Gulf owned. The first line, sorry, the second column is fixed line operators. So kind of the old previously largely state-owned telecoms, some of which have been privatized recently. But more importantly, the second column, the mobile license operators. And you can see here that in brackets, that's the market share that these telecoms actually have. And you can see that Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, GCC owned telecoms, controlled the largest share of the entire mobile market. And there is no country apart from Syria and Libya, in which case that the GCC Gulf telecoms do not own or operate at least one mobile license. Now, why do I find this interesting? It's not just because when you make a phone call that there's a Gulf-based telecom ultimately at the end of where the profits from that telecommunications occur. I think again, it has policy, it's related to how urban spaces are planned. These telecoms, and this is true very much in the Gulf, have been major, have taken up again as part of the global move around smart cities, surveillance infrastructures. And you can see that if we see those policies kind of unfold, and they certainly are unfolding in parts of the, in many of these countries, that it's actually Gulf-based telecoms who will be leading the development and implementation of these kinds of infrastructures, urban infrastructures, particularly around surveillance. So I think this is quite revealing. The final sector I wanted to quickly talk about is finance and banking. Maybe I'll leave this thing, but I'll move to this slide here, which is the Arab banking system, this is from 2017, looks at the total number of banks in each of these countries, the number that are GCC related in the fourth column there. And you can see again that there's a very high proportion of banks in Jordan, for example, 86% of the country's banks in Jordan are actually owned by GCC financial firms. Again, a very significant figure. This is important because again, the policies that we've seen that promote growth of the financial sector, that promote mortgage markets, that promote financialization are again intermediated by GCC financial institutions. So when we think about financialization, it's not something that's just occurring within these individual countries. These banks, if we look at their names, they appear as a Jordanian bank, a Lebanese bank, an Egyptian bank, but ultimately it is the Gulf-based financial firms that are involved in this kind of accumulation. Now all that I've said should not be taken to imply that this is some kind of predatory takeover by the Gulf of the rest of the Arab world. That's not the argument I'm trying to make. In many cases, Arab capitalist groups in these countries have benefited significantly from their connection to the Gulf and have actually headquartered themselves in the GCC. Non-GCC Arab firms now view the Gulf as an important area of economic activity, particularly in areas like construction, logistics, and retail. But taken as a whole, these trends reveal how neoliberal reforms in many Arab countries have been both reinforced by and predicated upon the internationalization of Gulf capital. The rollout of structural adjustment project packages in the 1990s and 2000s didn't just transform social, political, and economic power within the borders of individual Arab countries. It's marked by new hierarchies at the regional scale. So to give you some examples of why I think this is important. When we look, for example, at Jordan, where there has been a major push to get Jordanian citizens into financial markets, to borrow money on mortgage lending, and to use that to purchase houses, this has been a major push of financial institutions in the last decade or so. That appears to be something at the surface that is a Jordanian process. The largest mortgage provider in Jordan is a well-known housing bank of trade and finance, a well-known Jordanian bank. But if we look a dig a bit deeper, that bank is actually owned by majority, fully owned by a Qatari and Kuwaiti partnership. So it is a Qatari and Kuwaiti firms that are mediating the relationship between Jordanian citizens and financial markets through the housing sector. When residents of Beirut or Egypt protest around the lifting of rent controls in their capital cities or around the attempts to clear out slum dwellers in the state's informal housing communities, they are not just confronting national urban policy, they are also confronting the ways that the priorities of urban development have been increasingly subordinated to the accommodation of golf-based firms. And when Moroccans and Tunisians access the internet, they do so through five subsea cables that are connected to the global internet backbone, and this critical infrastructure is again predominantly controlled by golf firms. So this is, I think, the key argument that I'm trying to make is that golf capital plays a major part in the making of how social relations in the region unfolds. Now, I don't have time, and again this is something we can perhaps look at more in discussion, but I think all of this can tell us something very interesting about the politics of the region today. It tells us, for example, I think a lot about where post-conflict reconstruction might go, because if we look at a place like Yemen, for example, the firms that I've talked about here, the banks, the construction firms, the infrastructure, telecommunications firms, all of these kinds of large companies will play undoubtedly a major role in the rebuilding of Yemen, post-conflict reconstruction in Yemen. We can see this already in the case of Egypt, we can see it in the case of Tunisia and in the case of Jordan. So I think when we talk about conflict, we talk about who are the ones who will benefit from this kind of reconstruction. The Gulf is both a primary antagonist in the conflict, very clearly in the case of Yemen, but also will likely structure the ways that reconstruction and development take place in the end of cessation of formal violence. So I'm trying to understand, I think, how this development of the regional scale will, I think, further project the various Gulf states as key actors within the region into the future. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Adam. You were 10 minutes before time. We will now hand over to Jeff for about 10 minutes, shall we say? Sure. Okay, thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I'm delighted to speak and celebrate Adam's new book. I was thinking about it on the train over and I recalled a conversation about a decade ago. It was a dark, rainy, cold midwinter in London in some depressed pub in which I was getting drunk with a small group of melancholic Marxist intellectuals, as one does. The question was raised amongst us, could we think of anyone under the age of 60 who was engaged in a sustained research agenda that was going to produce real, lasting, meaningful work under the age of 60? And our list was really dismally small, which made the evening even brighter. I think a decade later, that list has gotten somewhat bigger. I don't want to exaggerate it, but there's been a renewal of interest in Marxism. And I think you can see this in perhaps most innovatively in Marxist feminism and in work on ecology. But I think this latest book of Adam's, if it's understood as part of the trilogy of books on Middle East capitalism, which are all about more than Middle East capitalism, I think this constitutes another figure on still a small list. Not only that, but I think this book, as good as the other two were, raises the bar to a new level of sophistication theoretically and philosophically, methodologically, not just in terms of political economy. And I should say that I'm not an expert on the Middle East, so maybe they're not that good, but I'm not an expert on the Middle East, but it's not just because of incompetence that I'm going to focus my comments on method and theory. It's also because Adam stresses in the book a hostility, I think, which is well founded to methodological nationalism and to the kind of stress on theories that want to emphasize the exceptionalism of the Middle East, how everything in the Middle East deserves a particular explanation. And so ideas like capitalism in class are often understated relative to other various culturalist or institutionalist explanations of different types that emphasize the particularity of these things. So I want to stress in focusing on method and slightly more abstract themes that usefully Adam downplayed in his talk today, the sort of universal importance and impact of this book beyond area studies. So what the book is about, I'm not going to go through this because Adam just summarized the core basic arguments, but the theoretical axes as I see it that it hinges around and that I want to focus on are scale, internal relations, and totality. So it departs first from Lefebvre on the notion of scale that stresses that capital accumulation is always territorialized in particular ways and that space is produced in and through processes of capital circulation and accumulation. And he moves this therefore much beyond the discussion of merely the so-called super recession or decline of the relevance of the nation state in neoliberal globalization or those who take the opposite position that the state has retains its significance and so on. Of course, Adam doesn't ignore the nation state, but it's the transformation of the national form in relationship to these other scales that becomes much more important, much more important. And the co-constitutive relations across these different scales and their internal relations with one another and the processes of class formation and state formation inside of these multiple scales that is the driving theoretical emphasis. And I think what's interesting here is that unlike Adam, I have found most of the critical geographical literature, apologies to critical geographers in the room and so on, but pretty deadly in recent years. I mean, the notion of space and scale has been, for me, largely empty vessels doing little theoretical work. And I think Adam underplays the way that he gives life, he gives a renewed life to these ideas by connecting them to internal relations and totality. So that they actually are doing work that, in my view, was absent from, obviously not true of Lefebvre, but he goes a long way back. I'm talking about the contemporary debates in critical geography. So by internal relations, he moves to Bertil Olman and this philosophy of internal relations in which you you remove the idea that objects and concepts are self-contained and that they then collide with one another as external relations, but rather that the relations between objects are themselves fundamental to the nature of those objects. So you focus on the relations between them as being constitutive to the makeup of objects. So if you focus on relations between objects and the changing relationship between objects over time, you'll see that the changes in relationship between them changes the objects themselves. Now it's one thing, as Bertil Olman does very effectively, to defend this idea of philosophy of internal relations on its own. It's quite an audacious thing to then try to empiricize this. Empirically it's much more difficult to do than to say that this is true in philosophical terms. But the way that this is done in Adam's work is to think about the global through the concept of totality in particular. And so I just want to read one section here which comes in the introduction on what he means by totality. Here my approach emphasizes the notion of the totality, the whole, which arises through the interaction of its parts. This whole, however, should not be seen as a simple aggregate of individual bits in which the sum of all the small scale parts produces the large scale total. Rather the totality emerges as something more than its parts, a structural evolving self-forming whole. And here he's quoting the Czech philosopher Carol Kosic. And it's typical of Adam in this book and the sort of innovative character of it and the far-reaching reading behind it, that he comes at the question of Gulf capital through an engagement with Hegelian Marxism via the Czech philosopher Carol Kosic, who he engaged through Dale Tomek in a study of colonial slavery and the sugar circuit of capitalism in 16th century emergence of the world market. That's how we enter this discussion. And what that notion of totality does is not just say that the totality is something more than the sum of its parts, but he is very careful to stress that that totality or the global should not be reified and held as a scale above that externally relates and determines those scales below it, but rather the coming into being of that global. And in that process then, Adam is focusing on another of the, even if he does this implicitly, I mean there's no, I see it strongly, but he never says this explicitly. He's engaging with one of the most newly revived currents of Marxist theory today, which I think is this focus on temporality. The coming into being of the global means that it is never this reified thing that then affects things. It is constantly being produced and reproduced through the constitutive internal relations between these scales. So I'm just going to leave it there. I just wanted to signal those three levels of analysis and how that, and then encourage Adam to maybe reflect more in the Q&A if he has time. I'm sure there are many other questions to relate it to this discussion of state and capital in a more explicit way maybe then in the introduction. Thanks. Thank you so much, Jeff. Adam, would you like to respond or shall we open the floor up for questions? Okay. So we shall open the floor up for questions. We have two volunteers running around with the mic on either side of the room. So if you raise your hands and I can direct them towards you and we'll start by taking three questions at a time and then Adam can respond. So just up there and there. He's taking up the concepts which are in the book but lacked the time to explain until we got to Jeff. I want to ask how these processes reconstitute national capital not simply as a rival as you hinted. It's not simply a rival rate with the Gulf investment. It's some kind of new relationship and perhaps dependency and then what does it mean for the nation state? Even those states which seem to be relatively independent before this process such as Egypt where the military was the major owner of industrial commercial assets, what does it mean for now to speak about the state in these countries? My question is about the, if you took a look at the tech and tech investment sector as a relatively perhaps smaller sector than some of the ones that you had mentioned but on two levels. One on Gulf capital fueling the global tech race, I mean probably most recently the investment by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund into the vision fund and you could argue perhaps that it even led to the situation with WeWork that we have today with the abundance of capital and everything that had resulted but at the same time there's the Gulf capital that also fuels the technology sector within the Middle East and within the non-Gulf MENA region which has a different type of impact and is actually the number one source of growth capital for these types of nascent firms in the region. So I wonder if you took a look at that from the two different aspects. Thank you and Alessandra right in the front. I have a mic. Thank you. Thanks Aram that was really great presentation skills to actually give us a sense of what the book is about and I think I have two questions and one perhaps draws on some of Jeff's comments and I really appreciated a lot the presentation. One is if you can give us a sense of how easy it is for non-GCC Arab capital to move to GCCS headquarters because in a sense that qualifies the argument of the role of GCC capital in the region versus the GCC as a spatial note of capitalist accumulation in the world economy and the second question perhaps related to some of the issues that Jeff raised is instead what you think is the contribution of your work to reason debates on the role of circulation in capital accumulation because it's a huge historical work on the Arab Peninsula as the reason Indian Ocean trade that actually point at how commercial capitalism is the vantage point through which we should understand some processes that constitute global capital formations today. So I'm thinking of the work of Gyrus Banerjee but also more historical work like the margins of the market etc. Thank you. Thank you would you like to respond? Yes thank you that very good questions and yeah some of them actually my responses are going to overlap a little bit to some of these. I think the way Alessandra phrased it is actually a very good way of saying that the GCC is an important spatial zone of capitalism if we think about capitalism in the Middle East. So what we can notice and I didn't get a real chance to expand on this but also it relates to the first question we can see that many Arab large Arab firms particularly post 2011 and the uprisings that took place since that time have moved themselves from their local countries their domestic countries and have either established themselves in the in different GCC states listed themselves on GCC stock markets in particular Dubai is a big one here or have their major accumulation is actually taking place in the Gulf even though there's an example here you know Egyptian Orescom one of the largest construction firm in Egypt well-known Egyptian firm that is now jointly listed I believe and perhaps headquartered in in Dubai and most of its projects take place in the Gulf. So we see that Arab capital has certainly become more and more dependent upon or linked to its relationship with accumulation in in the Gulf states. So I don't want to imply as I said I don't imply this is like a hostile takeover and it's not a kind of a dependency argument in that in that kind of sense it's a way of looking at how does the nature of capital accumulation change when we think about accumulation within the region at that regional scale. So that's one example these kinds of firms that are large Arab conglomerates that now are centrally headquartered in the Gulf. The other very important example it relates to the final comments I was making about post-conflict reconstruction the diaspora bourgeoisies that have been displaced through war and conflict. So we can think here about Palestinian capitalist class is a very very clear example of this Lebanon Iraq Syria Yemen okay. We can see large they often have both a Palestinian citizenship as well as a Gulf citizenship okay which is if you look at the policies of citizenship in the Gulf is almost impossible to achieve okay. So what has happened is that the ruling families in the Gulf have said okay this person is an important ally politically and economically and have granted that person citizenship. Hariri in Lebanon is the classic example whole Saudi citizenship. Abumazan the Palestinian Prime Minister president is has Qatari citizenship. You look at the key political leaders in Palestinian politics they're all very close to different ruling families in the region particularly in Abu Dhabi. There's a number of examples we can trace out here. So this kind of diaspora bourgeoisie that may have citizenship in both places but is located in the Gulf region. Connected to this and this comes back to the first question as well about how is national capital getting reconstituted. I think if you look at somewhere like Egypt is a very good example. You look at in the last since about 2015 2016 the coming to power of Sisi backed very strongly by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. We can see Saudi Arabia making a very determined effort to build its links with Egyptian capital and Egyptian military which is long-standing but also especially it's really interesting the Red Sea project I think is a really interesting example where Saudi Arabia basically now sees the Red Sea canal and the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea and the Saudi coast of the Red Sea as being a single zone under Saudi control. So there are plans to build bridges across both sides both coasts joint development projects agribusiness projects. All of these things that have been pushed through the Egyptian parliament despite the fact that the Egyptian population is largely hostile to them but it's really a really a redrawing of the map of how Egypt national capital in Egypt is constituted. The other I think important part of all of this is of course illicit flows that go through the Gulf. So this is again Dubai is where this really stands out where we can see not just in the Middle East but in parts of Central Asia parts of Africa where the Dubai is kind of a rerouting of these kind of illicit financial flows and from Dubai it goes into either the real estate sector in Dubai or elsewhere or gets cleaned and then goes somewhere else. So a very good example of this is the Gupta family in South Africa who was very part of this ongoing investigation in South Africa to state capture and basically they fled to the UAE in the last year or so but we can see it in Pakistan we can see in Afghanistan we can see in Thailand we can I mean all of these people who flee their countries or are still there and still making illicit gains are rooting this through rooting this through the Gulf. The the question the tech sector is really interesting and I think I begin the book actually with the soft bank example because the vision the soft bank is a huge firm that invests primarily in like tech startups it was a Japanese firm but vision the vision fund which is a fund owned by soft bank it's major investors are Saudi Arabia and I think also the UAE recently have come into this as well UAE sovereign wealth fund so they are the biggest investors in we work but as well as a number of other startups or major major I think I forget the the quote now but it's something like the biggest private equity fund in history soft bank so it's really an indication and the Saudi Arab is not a passive investor in this you know they are part of determining what is happening to a company like we work today so yeah it's it's very interesting there are other kind of again often private equity firms that are headquartered in the Gulf that have played a more regional role in kind of in kind of tech startups as well I think this relates to this question of telecom ownership too because a lot of these a lot of the obviously web based development internet based applications are connected to telecom telecommunications firms so the the role there the circulation circular circulatory kind of capital is it's it's very very important and that's why when I talked about for example agribusiness it's not simply the ownership of land which is where the Gulf often gets reduced to you know land grabs in Africa actually if you look at the land grabs or purchases of land by the Gulf there are certainly investments in Sudan and and other African states but a major part of this is actually European states it's Canada you know the Canadian wheat board is now Saudi owned when it was privatized it was bought by a Saudi firm alfalfa production which is used to feed dairy product dairy cows in Abu Dhabi it is alfalfa is produced in California I think it's California or a U.S. state the largest grain mill in or the oldest grain mill in Greece is UAE owned you know so these are these are the the investments in land are not as we typically often think just in poorer countries they're often in European or American or Australian or Canadian states but it's all along the the supply chain so it's it's land but it's also logistics owning logistics firms to move these agricultural products and again Dubai is a big role of this so you can look at the shipping of agricultural products through Dubai but also air air I mean the airport Dubai airport is now the busiest airport in the world I mean it overtook Heathrow a few years ago as the busiest airport in the in the world so yeah this whole kind of linking between east and west that the Gulf kind of has pushed itself or portrayed itself to be is is the Gulf is really kind of projecting itself as that kind of as that kind of intermediary node in the circulation in this kind of global circulation and honestly I think the the the war in Yemen is largely about this it's I mean obviously Saudi Arabia is worried about the Houthis and and the the the war there itself but I actually think the biggest kind of strategic goal of the Saudi UAE intervention in Yemen is controlling the coast of East Africa trade with India and China as part of the one belt one road initiative if you look at where Saudi Arabia and UAE what have they've done during the last few years of the war it's to take over the major ports in Yemen it's and connect these ports with ports and military bases in east Africa and this is again where this one this Red Sea project with Egypt fits into this and this is about circulation it's about in 10 years time who are who is going to or what's the Gulf's position going to be in these kind of major circulatory routes thank you so much Adam we dig the next three questions so one right there next to you Adam we heard in the last decade or so since the global economic meltdown a lot about Islamic finance as an alleged alternative to the western capitalism and we had about certain instruments such as Sukuk etc so I'm wondering what do you think about it being as an alternative as opposed to as another just just another form of capitalism do we have any more questions right there as well thank you okay thank you Adam for the presentation of course you had limited time so you you chose to focus on probably what people know less about and that's very clearly what you did but I think it's important for the audience also to to give take some time and and explain how the role of these countries in enforcing the the global capitalist agenda in the region in enforcing for instance the IMF conditionalities and all that the role of their capital in doing so and also the these connections I mean when you identify the the share of Gulf countries or Gulf related capital in the various projects how about the the western or whatever companies that are also involved and therefore what kind of nexus there is there I mean this dimension of the story was not in your presentation for the reason I said I mean you wanted to focus on what is less known but I think it's important to to give an idea of that thank you thank you one right there thank you thank you Adam I've bought and read your book and it was brilliant learned a great deal from it I wanted to ask whether or not you could speak about some of the neoliberal legal development some of the decisions that ultimately opened up the region to capital investment but also enabled much of the accumulation that you talk about thank you shouldn't we take a couple of more questions and then sure okay anyone yes hi I just wanted to ask you talked a little bit about sort of the Red Sea project and local opposition in Egypt and you mentioned it also in your actual presentation but could you talk more about how this sort of the spread of Gulf capital has made it harder for local resistance movements to actually push back just in more detail I don't know if you have case studies or stuff I've not read the book yet but it'd be really useful to get more context on how that plays out in any of the countries you've studied there's a gentleman in the last rule there yeah I just I wanted to ask about so the contradictory relationship between UAE and Iran and what we've been hearing about recently how UAE's been security agents have been visiting Iran I wanted to ask about how that relationship is different and why is it different from Iran to Saudi Arabia for example and why the same cooperation hasn't been happening also if I wanted to I wanted to ask about so the middle class in Egypt has benefited historically from the oil the oil prices going up in the Gulf countries that's been happening since the 70s and but I wanted to ask about the change in attitudes for that middle class in in Egypt towards the Gulf countries because I think there's there's been a change in attitudes where at first it was it was supporting the Gulf countries and they're based on their enrichment but recently there has been a change in the middle class perception in especially in Egypt towards those Gulf countries which I wanted to ask about how would that affect Egypt in the future thank you very much okay okay thank you yes the yeah I'm glad you asked about Islamic finance actually because I think this is a really really interesting field actually because it is very often in the literature on Islamic finance particularly by industry practitioners and obviously the people most people who study even on an academic level it's really portrayed as being some kind of you know community pro-poor alternative to to mainstream conventional finance something that is you know has a bit more social concern a bit more concerned about social welfare but you're still allowed to make money that's kind of the way Islamic finance is generally it's also presented as being less crisis prone so in 2008 there was this a lot of discussion about how Islamic finance was more resilient to the global crisis because it was wasn't investing in risky assets I honestly think that's all it's nonsense that if you look at the the Islamic financial instruments like Sukuk which is like a bond the kind of Islamic equivalent of a bond that they are essentially they play the same role as conventional finance they're just kind of differently named and there's different legal structures but they play essentially the same the same kind of same kind of role and what I think is most interesting about Islamic finance is that if you look globally there are a few core zones of Islamic finance Malaysia obviously historically and continues today to be a big zone of Islamic finance but if you look at the ownership of Islamic banks and where Islamic finance deals get done the Gulf really now is at the at the top of this globally and again Dubai is the center of this in terms of Sukuk offering Indonesia's for example Indonesia offered a or offered a Sukuk in a couple of years ago it was the largest kind of green in green in Sukuk first green Sukuk in the world it was listed on the Dubai stock market so foreign governments who are Muslim majority countries that are opening up this kind of Sukuk they're listing in places such as Dubai so what this means is that I think Islamic finance is a vehicle through which the Gulf can actually enter areas that and sectors that it may not necessarily have been that present before so Indonesia is a very good example of this but you look at for example Kazakhstan Sudan Pakistan Turkey these countries that have growing Islamic finance sectors at very different rates Gulf owned Islamic banks often what appear to be local banks they're actually Gulf Gulf owned Islamic financial institutions this is not in any way uh counterposed or or contradictory with conventional finance I think you can think of it as as it's kind of a comparative religious advantage you know being the center of Islam of Islam having the experience and historical background you can promote these kinds of areas that go alongside your conventional financial power so Dubai has set itself you know I think it was 2014 or something like that set itself a policy of becoming the world center of Islamic finance and you can see that that's I think what they've been trying to add it's very interesting that mainstream financial institutions like the IMF the World Bank different UN institutions are promoting Islamic finance as an alternative financing structure Sukuk in particular so so again and they're very clear this is not you know they want bond structures that can be both Islamic have Islamic tranches and uh uh conventional uh structures um yeah on Gilbert's question absolutely the uh the the the Gulf has played and particularly I mean this is true historically but it's even more true post 2011 um has played a major role in ensuring these kind of conditionalities IMF structural adjustment conditionalities um uh uh are put in place very often the Gulf is the first port of call okay so the IMF won't invest in Egypt until uh uh Saudi Arabia the UAE and Kuwait have uh basically extracted an agreement from from the Egyptian government to implement certain certain measures um it's interesting that uh the the up until I'm not sure if this is still true but certainly when I was writing the book it was true uh that the largest debt Egypt owes is actually to Saudi Arabia uh UAE and uh Kuwait uh not to the IMF not to the World Bank and the reason for this is what these countries have been doing is placing their dollar currency reserves in the central banks of different Arab countries um and so and this is a debt okay so they place their currency reserves in the Egyptian central bank they've done it in Yemen they've done it in Tunisia they've done it I believe in Jordan and perhaps also in Lebanon and this means that you have an enormous kind of power over what countries can do because at any moment you just can pull this money back home and the the prices pressure on the currencies uh etc so uh yeah it's very often these kind of conditionalities happen I should say it's not just IMF and World Bank the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is kind of a new actor in the region a major European financial institution that came in post 2011 and has often partnered with um with Gulf firms the other side to Western capital and it's absolutely true that in many sectors Western capital particularly in parts of North Africa Morocco and Tunisia are important very important here um are you you'll find European and American firms predominant in many sectors um but also I think the other side is uh the way that the GCC is an important uh zone for those Western firms too I'm not trying to say it's more important than you know European or or uh North American investments but it's clear for example in certain sectors like engineering or high-end kind of design that um uh the the Gulf is seen as an important market um uh and a kind of resilient market in a kind of in an environment of global um slump if you like um okay uh neoliberal uh the kind of legal uh uh changes that have taken place yeah there's a whole range of examples you can see uh and what I what I've tried to do in the book is kind of connect how these neoliberal policies were were related to the opening up and then and then the investment flows that coming from the Gulf so if you look at uh agribusiness okay well agricultural uh policies uh a major thing has been uh privatization of agricultural land uh uh export oriented agriculture um policies um driving peasants or farmers off their land um getting rid of kind of fixed tenancy uh uh and low rents um uh for agricultural so all of these things happen Egypt is the perfect example because it's such an important agricultural producer um and they started in the 80s or even a bit earlier accelerated through the 90s and 2000s um so that's where these kinds of these kinds of policies uh were very much connected at the same time to in flows of Gulf capital coming into into Egypt if you look at uh urban development sector you're talking here about uh lifting of uh rent caps in in the kind of old capital cities uh like um man Cairo Beirut which have happened more recently or or uh and that's about and privatization of kind of state housing firms in these countries uh you you're talking about private privatization of infrastructure um uh PPPs around infrastructure can connected to um uh IMF agreements off or World Bank agreements um yeah uh the yeah mobilization against uh yeah that the yes asked about the mobilization of or popular mobilization I think it was really interesting in 2011 where you saw uh a lot of the protests were targeting various corrupt deals that took place um for example around uh land sales uh that were sold off very cheaply um to different uh people close to the uh you know close to in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere uh uh and it was interesting that there were a lot of popular protests about you know we need to bring this to account who are the guilty parties that that did this land these land deals then when you dig a little bit deeper it was actually very often it was uh Gulf these firms that I've talked about here who were the ones that were buying up this cheap land um in in in Cairo and and and elsewhere um but it was obscured so I think there is this kind of there was a kind of uh understanding by uh some of the popular movements that our problem is with the Mubarak regime um which is obviously true but there's another layer that was behind the Mubarak regime and closely benefiting from it I think in the last few years it's become much clearer uh partly because of the open support of various Gulf states towards uh CC and and other political forces um in in the region that it's it's much clearer we saw that in Egypt with the sale of the islands in the Red Sea or the transfer of the islands to Saudi um Saudi control um but I think it's very important politically if I was to say one thing that I you know I hope the book to do uh is to say that uh if we're going to change if we're going to see real change in the region then we have to also challenge the position of the Gulf the Gulf states like that's an integral part of how capitalism works it's not enough to just you know look at it at the national at the national level um Iran and the and the UAE the uh uh yeah you're absolutely right uh but I would be a bit more even when we're talking about the UAE there's differences here too like Dubai has historically and continues today to have a much closer relationship um uh with Iran uh a lot of this is hard to know the exact details because it's partly you know because of the sanctions uh on Iran uh but if you look at Abu Dhabi uh it's much more closely aligned to the Saudi uh position um on on Iran so um I think it's partly a proximity thing it's partly a historical thing there are a lot of Iranian uh business people operating in the free zones uh in Dubai when you go down the you know the Central Creek in Dubai used to be able to see Dubai Iranian banks there on the side etc of the creek um uh so there are those historical regions but in general I think this is part of the you know there there is a competition taking place for regional hegemony which Iran is obviously a major part of and it's uh the the Saudi UAE access is about trying to um sideline sideline Iran within this um uh and then the question about uh the the changes around uh remittances and etc since the 1970s I think it's very interesting to look at uh the moment you know the last big oil boom the 1970s uh a lot of Egyptian workers Lebanese Palestinian Jordanian workers going to the Gulf um working in sectors such as construction uh bringing money back home had a very lot of important effects on uh Arab city development etc religious effects as well ideological effects but the the at that moment the Gulf's role was sold as being a part of Arab solidarity you know we are we are recirculating petrodollars back to the region this is our brotherly you know support for other Arab countries um now I don't think that's really the way it's seen um and certainly not the way it's it's it's portrayed I I think among many people who I mean it's people the kinds of class fractions that are working in the Gulf are different from what it was Arab class fractions working in the Gulf are different from what it was in the 70s it's more kind of uh you know engineers or professional level uh and the low wage construction work is much more South Asia flows um so there has been a shift from Arab to uh South Asian predominant Filipino labor uh over the and now more and more Chinese and other uh Asian workers I didn't thank you so much Adam um we are almost towards the end so we're going to take the last round of questions now uh so we have a lady up there in the last room hi hi thank you for your presentation I think towards the end of your presentation you said that the capitalist class who are the firms who are already existing would actually you know like move towards a post-conflict reconstruction but as far as I know the capitalist class mostly makes profit out of conflict and that's what the capitalist class from Saudi was actually doing in Yemen they were actually they're still making profit out of this conflict so why would if you it would be great if you could put light on why would they you know uh work towards this post-conflict reconstruction of Yemen thank you uh this lady right here thank you um my question is around the whether or not this has anything to do with labor market opportunity and labor relations of the gcc nationals um whether this has opened up any work opportunities especially in these countries uh earlier this year I was in Sudan for the field work and in one of the very sort of rural area I found one foreign company which was Saudi I haven't met any of these people but I'm wondering whether these newly you know the Saudi or gcc companies who are investing in these countries are actually providing opportunities for gcc nationals themselves or are they just sending people from south asia or philippine to take care of these companies if so uh who is actually going from gc are they the ones from the conglomerates families or you know more like less you know less like a low low class I mean low class or middle class people from these countries thank you and right there and fuzzy of that thanks thanks Adam I wanted to rejoice and celebrate but there cannot not be a question about migration when it comes to the Gulf and uh and in fact when I read your book and I mean I was captivated I actually thought that you managed in 38 minutes to do food justice to the richness and depth so I mean that was incredible presentation but in a sense I thought you preempted the questions about migration by uh foregrounded it at the beginning saying that this is all about migration is constitutive of all the patterns that I describe urbanization uh changes in the way in which the region can be conceived and so on so forth but I I don't I didn't get that much by reading your book so I'm sure I misunderstood some of the points that you made in the book but let me frame the question in this way I mean the way in which you presented migration this cause migration in this presentation it seemed to be exceptional to the region contrary to the uh desire to move away from the exceptionalism of the region I mean it's a region that uniquely has 90 percent of the population in some countries over 50 percent migrants etc etc so I wanted to use this as a way of introducing the topic of migration in this discussion and hear your comments about that thank you and Fez you wanted a question thanks Adam for the excellent presentation um I just had a question about um fossil fuel based firms and your kind of perhaps get you to sort of speculate a little bit on because you think about how uh those firms and and particularly how you showed the kind of entrenchment you know their investments in in the wider region and beyond how to begin to dismantle um those firms um given given what we're we're operating in a context of climate crisis um and you don't associate the GCC in particular with climate change protests or anything like that in contrast to the wider Middle East region but I just wondered if you could say something more about that because it seems to me that those the fossil industry in in the region is is very is very strong so how how does one begin to go about challenging that do we have any more questions this is the last opportunity to ask there is a lady up there thank you hi thanks very much for this um I'll ask it because I think you can probably make a nice segue from the question about um post-conflict reconstruction in Yemen um I was going to ask if you think that um that there may be some sort of stabilizing effect that that the GCC intervention sort of economically reinvesting in construction should there be any sort of semblance of peace in in Yemen in the coming years um so if there would be any sort of stabilizing effect or hope for that and then if yes or even if there's some sort of degree to that um what would the implications be on East Africa specifically in the horn um if you look at like control of Hedda and how that would affect sort of the the Red Sea project and how that relates to sort of another um uh migration flow if you look between Somali and Yemen what the implications would be for that really thank you so much okay thanks uh yeah so maybe I'll start with the Yemen uh I mean you're absolutely right that they're they they are you know they are profiting from conflict um and not just in Yemen but but more more broadly um and there's various ways in which this this takes place uh I mean obviously it's not just these private conglomerates it's also uh the weapons sales that take place large amount from the UK obviously to um to the Saudis and and others in the region um but at some point uh there is going to be uh an end to the like the the war uh whether this is I mean I don't want to speculate when this might be um and I think it's important to see that what happens after the war after the kind of violence physical violence ends in continuity with the actual aims of the war itself um that we see kind of the the uh the actors who are engaging in this war now trying to jostle for an outcome uh that will be beneficial to their regional interests post when the shooting actually stops um now that's what I mean by uh if you like profiting from the from the conflict um now the other side to it is and this is Yemen is a very good example because it's Saudi and UAE are the ones who are bombing the country uh it's right on their borders um you can see that they've taken over key infrastructure points uh in the last uh few years already uh but if you think about where is the post conflict restructure post conflict funding going to come from uh yes it will come from the World Bank and other other places but it's also going to come from large regionally owned uh uh banks like the Islamic Development Bank um like the Kuwaiti Development Fund like the Abu Dhabi Development Fund you know these kinds of large sovereignly owned funds um as a financing mechanism uh who is going to be doing the uh the rebuilding uh for roads for net uh infrastructure networks for for hospitals for schools uh it's not only going to be Gulf firms uh but I think especially if the Gulf ends up being politically having a major say in what happens post conflict uh I think it's very likely that they're going to be if not for the fact that they are the major firms operating in these sectors already um and they're already I mean these there's already this kind of aid that is flowing to Yemen through the Gulf um that's already happening uh uh uh and yeah so I I think Yemen is is an example um I'll come back to your question in a second but it's it's a bit more complicated in the case of Syria uh because in Syria you obviously have you know the Russian and Iranian support of the of the regime uh and if the regime manages uh to to remain in place uh it's it's quite likely that Russian and Iranian firms particularly I think Russian uh uh firms will will be play a major role in the reconstruction but it's interesting to note over the last year to six months that there has been this kind of reconciliation between many of the Gulf states and and the regime like you know I think it's Bahrain has opened up a diplomatic office now in Damascus um there've been attending uh regime operated uh uh development or investment fares that have happened um in the last year or so Gulf thing so I think there's an attempt by uh both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to kind of have a say in what happens um there um yes uh the question about um the workers citizens uh as part of this I it's it's not these these investments they they're not bringing GCC citizens as kind of cheap labor or low paid labor into these kinds of projects um however at the level of kind of the uh executive level yes you can find certainly uh citizens um uh as part of these uh these companies one of the people I interviewed in my book um uh talked about this uh the C-suite you know the the you know the CEOs the CFOs kind of uh high level management uh of of large conglomerates and that he was saying that many of the development many of the firms um uh in the Gulf now make a requirement for you if you want to get promoted to one of these C-suite positions you have to have done a stint somewhere else in the Middle East first uh uh and once you've done that a few places then you'll get your promotion uh in a telecom company or whatever it might be um so yeah but uh it's either local labor most likely local labor uh uh yeah who are who are the ones actually you know building these projects etc um yeah migration yes it's I mean there is a certain I I wouldn't say it's exceptional um uh it is pronounced very much more pronounced I mean just saying that 10 percent of your population has citizenship and everyone else has no viable route to ever getting citizenship is fairly exceptional statement um but many of the patterns that you see in other places migration pattern migration um uh kind of bureaucracy or control systems that you see elsewhere in the world I think have been seen in the Gulf first so you know this whole idea of uh you know in this country uh citizens taking responsibility or being uh brought in to monitor migrants um uh and control you know who if you're a landlord you have to check someone's uh citizens or residency status in order to be able to rent a house for example these kinds of things um that has a long pedigree in the Gulf um that kind of system where the citizens are part of the way that migration is governed uh has a very long pedigree in the Gulf and I think it's starting to be generalized generalized elsewhere what's its uh significance uh for these kinds of things um I think one of the things is that you can see at moments of crisis that uh what the Gulf has a response to economic downturn uh that is not available in the same way to other states so 2008 with the global crisis uh in Dubai a lot of workers were just simply sent home um you know they were blocked planes were blocked booked uh and they were just put on the planes and sent home often without getting salary and that kind of stuff so this is not available in the same kind of way to uh you know Spain or uh or UK or whatever where you where you faced with large levels of of unemployed construction workers um so it's a kind in this sense the crisis gets felt uh uh you know it gets displaced out of the Gulf I'm not saying it's a way of completely overcoming crisis but it is a way of dealing with crisis to some degree and in Saudi Arabia that's what's happening today uh you see like millions literally millions of people getting deported from Saudi Arabia over the last few years uh migrant workers um okay uh fossil fuels uh yes this is a very important question uh and you know all what I've said shouldn't be in any way meant to imply that uh uh the fossil fuels are not still key linchpin of of these these states um and you're absolutely right that there's a lot of uh a lot of Aramco for Saudi Aramco you know is a classic example uh it's one of the major polluters globally responsible for there was a report that came out last week about um who is responsible for climate carbon production globally private and state owned firm Saudi Aramco uh was on top of the list um you know more than Exxon or more than you know these large western oil oil firms um so they are but they're much less part of the discussion about in in climate change politics I think you're you're right to identify that um and uh I think what's also interesting though is the last uh last few years has seen a lot of these uh firms again particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE uh making inroads into renewable energy um and uh you know uh wind water desalination these kinds of projects solar energy in a big way um so that you know there's a company called Aqua which is a Saudi company which is a big uh you know in renewable energy uh company very active um across the region um so they're they're trying to also uh you know take a take a stake into this kind these emerging um renewable energy markets um uh mostly Saudi and the UAE in that respect uh and finally uh stabilization um I wouldn't call it stabilization effect um I think that uh unless like I said unless the position of these countries are challenged and their role in the region is challenged then uh it may mean a formal end to you know day-to-day violence and conflict but it's not long-term um it's not a good scenario in somewhere like uh Yemen uh like I was saying I think a lot of Yemen is about the Horn of Africa uh East Africa Red Sea um and the routes um that uh the trade routes uh that are that are part of um the One Belt One Road so you see this kind of interesting both rivalry as well as collaboration um between Gulf States and China uh in uh in that area uh so you see for example in Djibouti where China set up its first overseas military base um ever uh you see UAE companies trying to operate ports there in rivalries with uh Chinese firms um in other uh African Horn of Africa uh states you see this kind of competition around um who is going to control port infrastructure and military infrastructure um but at the same time you see the Gulf making a very uh open and explicit uh uh uh engagement with um with with China with China both at the state level and also um at the at the commercial level much more than it was say two years ago so it yeah this I think is very important to kind of think about as we move forward really thank you so much Adam can we have a big round of applause for Adam and for Jeff