 title, Tracing Instability, Challenges and Change, from Iran to the Gulf. Our panel is going to be 90 minutes from 1 to 2.30 p.m. We have four very exciting presentations lined up, and we have Gholnaz Esfandiyari, journalist at RFERL, chairing the panel. I would just like to reiterate that we really encourage participants to ask questions using the Q&A box, rather than the chat function, as that works really well, and it's easy for the chair to follow through the questions. So with that, it's over to you Gholnaz Esfandiyari. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ahu. As Ahu said, my name is Gholnaz Esfandiyari. I'm a correspondent with Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, and I will be the host of today's discussion on civil society and human rights 10 years after the Arab Spring, during which we saw the rise of social media, which activists used to call for more rights and to bring down dictators in the region. 10 years later, repressive governments and groups and operatives are also using social media platforms to control their own people, influence the outcome of elections, and block dissenting voices and smear critics. We will discuss these issues and also how human rights practices are being changed, and how rights are both exercised and violated on social media. I'm joined for today's discussion with four by four outstanding experts. First, Susanne Tahmosebi, the executive director of Femena, an organization that supports woman's rights defenders and their organizations. Susanne has been working to support civil society and women's rights in Iran and in the region for over 20 years. She's a founding member of the one million signatures campaign that worked to end gender bias laws in Iran. Next is Mahsa Ali Mardani, an internet researcher working on internal controls and social movements in the MENA region with a focus on Iran. Mahsa has been working on human rights-oriented questions of access to the internet with civil society for almost 10 years and is currently working on her PhD studying political communications online in Iran at the University of Oxford. We are also joined by Dr. Mark Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar and the author of Political Repression in Bahrain published by Cambridge University Press. Jones' work focuses on the nexus of repression and technology. And last but not least, K. Etersmetta, a PhD candidate in Harvard University's joint program of social anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. Tersmetta's doctoral research focuses on citizenship in Oman and the formation and evolution of borders on the Arabian peninsula. Susanne, Mahsa, K. Etersmetta and Mark, thanks so much for joining us for today's important and very timely discussion. We will have time for questions from the audience after your presentations. So please, everyone, use the Q&A feature to send your questions to our distinguished panelists. I'd like to start with Mark, from whom I have personally learned a lot about inauthentic Twitter accounts and disinformation campaigns, targeting journalists, activists, and others. As a matter of fact, I was once attacked online just for retweeting some of Mark's observation about trolling an attempt at online manipulation on Iranian cyberspace. It can be very widespread, and many women have been targeted. And I know Mark, you will address the issue of digital misogyny in your presentation. So please, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Gondaz. It's great to be here. Yeah. Welcome, everybody, to this presentation. Yeah, so I'm going to talk a little bit about digital misogyny, and that will come a bit later on. But I just want to give an overview of the landscape of digital repression that we've seen evolve, particularly the sort of more Arabic speaking side of the Middle East. But I'll touch on Iran to an extent. So I think, you know, since we're doing this kind of review of the past 10 years, it is important to talk about this argument of the notion that there was this very kind of positive perception of technology in 2010 and 2011, particularly with regards to the social media and mobile technology. You know, the notion of liberation technology and the emancipatory potential of technology was very much talked about in academic circles. I do think the academic argument is lagged behind somewhat. I think there's a tendency to overstate the case or underestimate the speed at which authoritarian regimes have managed to co-opt those technologies. And I think there's, you know, the more you look at case studies across the Middle East, the more you realize how quickly technology was co-opted as a tool of control and repression, and one that actually facilitated state dominance over civil society and activism. So I want to talk about the kind of development of some of these tactics. I think, you know, the speed at which we saw tools of surveillance or the role of technology and social media work as a tool of surveillance were very evident early on in the Arab uprisings. And I would certainly say even countries as small as Bahrain, which often get overlooked, you know, often are an interesting bellwether for the kind of tactics that we see used across the region. Just to give an example, I think I'm speaking from my own experience when I started my PhD in 2011, you know, there was a lot of pressure to almost focus on social media as a positive force. But very soon I began to see that it was being used as a tool of surveillance. And in very interesting ways, and the context is so important in the kind of instrumentalization of social media. So, you know, we saw the emergence of initially the use of social media for as a form of vigilantism. So you'd have accounts, you know, you'd have activist accounts being what seemed like trivial things. You know, someone would mention an activist account and tag the Ministry of the Interior's Twitter account. And in some cases, if people are interviewed, that was enough to stop them tweeting. And this was because obviously in an authoritarian context, people are very aware of the power of the state. And at the time, people were being arrested and tortured. And, you know, one of the consequences of that were people were very, were made very aware of the consequences of engaging in dissent. And it would be enough just to sort of mention the Ministry of the Interior in a tweet without resorting to anything particularly sophisticated in terms of spyware and that kind of thing. And another interesting aspect that I think often gets overlooked in the social media, people often focus on the participatory nature of the, you know, the ability to network with other people to build strong networks that can be used then to mobilize as resistance. What people often don't look at really is the actual chilling effect that even sort of slightly more nonparticipatory functionalities social media can do. So one of the interesting things about YouTube or videos, you know, what was very common is videos of state brutality, police violence and tortured bodies that were circulated a lot. And, you know, I remember interviewing people who'd see these videos. And whilst it, in some case, it might have galvanized some people, provoking anger and encouraging actually people to go out on the street for many others. It actually simply evoked fear and unwillingness to engage in in protest with fear of those brutal consequences that were made very visible through the kind of selective distribution of these horrendously violent videos. And I think that's something that doesn't get researched enough, actually, I think the focus tends to be on the more participatory channels of social media. And I think that was kind of a curious one. But what emerged, again, very quickly in 2011 and 2012 was the growing awareness from activists, from civilians of the capacity of the states to use these technologies. So, you know, one of the big things that he saw in Bahrain, that was partly a function of it is a very small country in a very small society. And this is why it's important to the case studies, was the fact that, you know, you'd have people with this optimism. And I think academia is partly responsible for this. And certainly it would take tech companies partly responsible for, you know, blowing their own trumpet about the potential of social media to encourage debate and discussion. And even if, you know, you look at the recent news about the leaks, the whistleblowing in Facebook, I think Mark Zuckerberg is still talking about the ability to encourage free speech, is that this attitude actually encouraged people to be very, you know, maybe encouraged people to be naive about how they shared information on social media. So, lots of people would use Facebook or Twitter to take photos of themselves, for example, at the Pearl Roundabout, the Pearl Square, if you find media reporting on it. And not necessarily because they felt that they were particularly political, but because, you know, it was an event. And then these photos were then used because people, lots of people weren't particularly aware of security settings or privacy settings, which I think are becoming more embedded in people's digital literacy now. And then you'd have other accounts distributing these photos asking for information about these people, then those photos would then be circulated with people's numbers, people's place of work on them, you know, you'd have people who are mentioned by these accounts packing a bag of things and putting them by the door because they fear that the police would come around at 3am. And so you had a lot of this what looked like peer-to-peer surveillance, vigilanteism online. And then, you know, the government would use include IP spying techniques. So, people's desire to remain anonymous, it became quite clear quite soon on that anonymity wasn't any guarantee of protecting one's privacy. You know, people could click on links and that would expose the IP address and reveal that identity. And that happened quite a lot in Bahrain. The use of European spyware was found very early on, I think about 2012. This preceded Pegasus. There was Gamma International's Fin Fisher, which had the same functionalities. It was once installed on one's phone, it would reveal your could record your video access to your phone's camera, your laptop's camera. So, the tactics that we've seen or that became common sort of emblems of state repression using media were kind of present very early on in the Arab uprisings. And, you know, it's in my opinion, and I become increasingly cynical, is that this has only got worse. I think the as the knowledge of these kind of technology and the abuse of these technologies increases, one of the functions of that is that it erodes people's trust in other people. So, one of the strengths of one of the important things about social movement aspects is the ability to trust others and to form cohesive networks that are strong, resistant to state repression. But the problem is that people are increasingly cautious about how they communicate and with whom they communicate and the tools with which they use to communicate, which is obviously an important protection mechanism. But at the same time, that leads to atomization of the individuals and it runs the risk of people being or those without sufficient digital literacy being separated in terms of their connection to other peoples. And I think we're seeing a lot of this and, you know, we're seeing the online space become a space where there is less authentic and organic engagement. And certainly in Arabic social media, since 2015, the rise of disinformation, propaganda, co-opted accounts, less so bots these days, we're seeing a co-opted civil society and a co-opted space. What that means is that the Arabic social media space, I would argue, certainly on Twitter, is becoming a space in which dissident voices are increasingly, you know, absent. And so the vacuum is filled with pro-government voices that support the status quo. And what you're getting then is a civil society that is essentially co-opted and reflective of the narratives put forward by specific authoritarian regimes. And I think to be specific in the Arabic-speaking context, you have interesting power dynamics, where you have, you know, you have a digital space, you have country with high technological penetration rates, specifically Saudi Arabia, who are able to, you know, and also a populist country who are able to dominate the Arabic-speaking narrative simply by virtue of the fact that they have so many citizens who use social media, but also so many what seem to be suspicious accounts engaging in propaganda and spreading to particular foreign policies. So there is, in terms of the public sphere, the digital public sphere, it's increasingly problematic. And this is abetted, as well as said by attacks on those who don't share those views. So even people who don't live in the region are attacked. And, you know, I've done some recent studies, particularly on how women journalists are attacked. And what you're seeing now is an interaction between multiple aspects of digital control that intersect and inform what you could call a strategy. So one of the cases I worked on was the the attack on Radar Ores, who's an Al Jazeera journalist, just for context, I think many here have heard the the fact that up to 50,000 people could have been targeted by this Israeli made spyware Pegasus. But we knew at the end of 2020 that about 40 or 36, I think Al Jazeera journalists had been targeted using this invasive surveillance software. At that time, that was actually after what happened last year, where suddenly, you know, you have these situations where online to what looked like online Twitter mobs can turn very quickly and attack one one person or a group of people. I know this is quite common in the Iranian to the space, which I'm sure must have talked about. And this was a very interesting case because now there's a court case in which Radar has said that private information from her phone of her in swimwear was was basically taken from a phone using Pegasus and then distributed online on Twitter. This information was then promoted by influencers and it created a Twitter storm and then resulted in, you know, very virulent misogynistic abuse being directed to the extent that with thousands and thousands of accounts all tweeting at her, there was caricatures, there was poems, there was there was even stories that broke out into CNN Arabic, basically, you know, using, you know, calling her prostitute and saying that she basically, you know, got promoted at Al Jazeera simply because she slept with the chairman. And all this was disinformation, disinformation based off malinformation that was malinformation being, you know, in this case, a photo that was extracted illegally from a phone. I say illegally that the whole nexus of law in the digital space is actually really ambiguous. And it's one of the things that I think that facilitates this abuse. So I'm just going to sort of leave it there. But I mean, my argument generally is that obviously things have gone digital authoritarianism is on the rise in the region. And it shouldn't be seen as a parochial issue. A lot of the actors who are involved in the supply chains of disinformation surveillance harassment online start in Silicon Valley and end in the Middle East. So we shouldn't forget that. And I think it's the authoritarian turn for one of the better words started much earlier than many people anticipated. Or many people seem to think it started very early on. And I know that's a cynical note. I don't know if anyone here is going to provide something more positive. But yeah, those are the kind of that's the kind of lay of the land argument they want to put forward. And so thank you very much, Gomez. And I look forward to any questions that might come later. Thank you for this fascinating presentation. I'd like to turn to Massa, who will speak about the Iranian perception information operations in the Arab world. Massa John, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Volnaz. Let me just try to share my screen really quickly. One second. All right. Well, it's great to be part of this panel. There are so many distinguished scholars and activists on this panel. So I'm very honored to be here part of it. I realize the overarching theme is how gendered notions or misogyny present themselves online. Unfortunately, I haven't done a very specific study that touches on this. But, you know, as Mark alluded to, there is a lot of misogyny on Persian Twitter, which I myself study, and sometimes I'm part of. And I think the other panelists who focus on Iran have a lot of focus. But the things that I'm going to talk about, they broadly, I guess, the end victims often are women. So while I won't be touching on it, these are all part and parcel of the same trends. So today I'm going to be talking about a paper which I actually just realized is up online with the Journal of Open Information Science that I did with Mona El-Sawa. And we were trying to understand the impact of Iranian influence operations when we use the term influence operations kind of borrowed from the social media companies that use this term. And there's a lot to go into, I guess, in terms of the terminology we use for these things. But the paper is unpacking the Iranian perception information operations in the Arab world. And when trying to look at the issues of disinformation where Iran is centered in as the topic, there's a lot to kind of know to contextualize it. So there's many geopolitical factors that color the discourse of disinformation when we're looking at Iran, especially the fact that there is the problem of animosity between Iran and the United States. And this colors a lot of the dynamics that exist within the region, especially amongst the allies of the United States in the region and how this plays out. And one of a really great study that actually Mark did in 2018 was looking at how MEK, which is a kind of militant opposition group that wants to take down the Iranian system and how they have actually co-opted and pursued disinformation campaigns to kind of co-opt protests and protest discourses in Iran, especially during 2017 and 2018. So there's a lot of complexity in many sides to understanding disinformation. And so this geopolitical factor has to be kind of understood alongside the fact that Iran is a bad actor in the region. And they do have, they do conduct malicious activities, but kind of together how we understand these two dynamics is that Iranian disinformation campaigns, at least the ones that stem from Iran, really formulate into something we call a propaganda camera, which I'll discuss later, which is more of the perception that they pose. So and in actual fact, Iran has made a name for itself as being an actor behind influence operations. I mean, most notably during the last U.S. elections, they acquired openly accessible U.S. voter data and they started targeting those U.S. voters, posing as the alt-right group, the proud boys, threatening the voters to vote for Trump. And this has over the years, these kinds of activities led to social media companies targeting influence operations and taking a number of them down. But what we have found is researchers and policymakers have heavily emphasized Iran's role as a significant factor behind foreign influence campaigns. And so this has led to a number of reactions, especially from the U.S. government and U.S. social media platforms. Most notably, we've seen the U.S. government seizing more than 100 internet domains associated with Iranian influence operations. And so we kind of, with this research we were doing, we wanted to ask to what extents or influence operations actually present regionally and within the Arabic online sphere. And so as you can see, we were trying to answer this with some of this graph here. And so the questions we were asking are what are the main tactics that Iran is employing and using to manipulate Arab users on Twitter and how are these campaigns engaging with the users in the Arab world? So in this study, we analyzed six hash data sets that Twitter itself provided. And Twitter is the only social media company sharing data like this. Facebook doesn't share its data sets when they do takedowns. And so these were influence operations Twitter had identified between 2008 and 2020. And so we tried to measure tactics, targets, and engagements. And so if you look at this graph, you see that Arabic is the most tweeted content by these influence operations. And so we found that despite the fact that there's a massive media focus in terms of the threat that Iran opposes as a disinformation actor targeting the American or English language online sphere, it seems that Iran's iOS focuses have been mostly on the Arab world and they've been primarily targeting countries like Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia. And so a list of countries that have Iran's rivals, proxies, unlike other countries in the region, which are not of strategic importance or already firmly under their influence. And in this study, we argue that although the Iranian influence operations we examined aspire to pollute the Arabic online sphere, their attempts were really failing to engage Arab users over the years. And so as I said, we named these efforts perception information operations, meaning that the power of the Iranian operations actually stems from the fact that they're perceived as powerful and impactful than actually being. So about 30% of the Arabic tweets included URLs to third party websites. And so this has been a tactic that has been very popular. There's been a few other papers written about this, namely Citizen Lab had a paper in 2019 called Endless Mayfly about some of these fake websites that the Iranians were creating. And the most popular Arabic one was NileNet online, which was imitating Egypt's state broadcaster and the discourses they were peddling was to show that Egypt's government was inefficient and weak. When we expanded the shortened URLs, however, we found thousands of links to other platforms like Instagram, SoundCloud, Change.org, Vimeo, WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels. And this kind of spoke to the fact that the Iranian campaigns were thriving on other platforms. And unfortunately, the scope of our study couldn't access data from those platforms. But unlike previous analysis that had really focused on the fake websites, we found through studying this new data that Iranian influence operations were using new strategies. And so a number of the top active accounts, they were impersonating Twitter users from Bahrain, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. And, you know, we had found in an earlier analysis, actually that Mona had done in 2019, that Iranian influence operations were mostly using modern standard Arabic, which is not what ordinary Arabic users would use. But when we analyzed these larger data sets over, you know, longer periods of time, we saw that, you know, we were still seeing those instances of modern standard Arabic, but we were seeing more examples of dialectical Arabic used by, you know, common Arabic users online. And so this pivot towards citizen voices, as opposed to, you know, the kind of new sources and the very formalized contents was a new strategy. And so we can say by analyzing more data through this Twitter dump from 2020, that there were more, there were a wide variety of efforts by the Iranian influence operations. And there was no one standard strategy. And so this made us question whether or not these were, you know, efforts that were not necessarily centralized, that they come from different institutions within the Iranian states. But more importantly, what were the factors that Twitter was using to attribute these to Iran. And so this is, I think, one of the biggest points in our study. Develling a bit more into the data, we had 2.1 million Arabic tweets. But we found that they were only produced by 2,700 accounts. And so there were 10 accounts that produced more than 50% of the Arabic tweets. And there's very little engagement over the years that we were studying. And so when we calculated the engagement points and these included retweets, likes, replies and quote tweets across our data, we found that the most engaging Arabic tweet received 2,272 engagement points. So that's very low. So more than 86% of the Arabic tweets received zero engagement. And what is the most notable in terms of, I guess, this failed engagement is that despite the increase of tweets during certain moments. And so we were looking at, you know, the Qatar diplomatic crisis that happened in June 2017. And you can see from the graph, there's like a, there's an increase of content during that time. And so despite the increase in effort and resources that these Iranian operations were putting, there was still very little engagement or appetite to, with users in the Arab world to care about this content. And so, so what we kind of wanted to conclude was, you know, there was previous studies that had indicated website-based influence operations had been a favorite tactic. And so you have Mona's study from 2019, you have Citizen Lab, Citizen Lab and List Mayfly study from 2019. And this has been one of these were the main studies looking at these Iranian disinformation efforts. But in this particular study, we indicated about 30% of the Arabic tweets were still relying on the tactics described in those previous papers, which was those imitation websites. But we noticed that the most popular websites, you know, using this tactic, we're still sharing, you know, the imitations of the Arab websites, just like the Egyptian Nile Net online. And so this is still kind of a long standing hallmark of these disinformation efforts. But, you know, we saw these new tactics of more, you know, user base and citizen voices. But when we were kind of zeroing in on the content by the citizen voices, we sometimes were questioning, you know, are these actually influence operations? So we do find, you know, a user in Lebanon who would claim to have Iranian heritage in his bio, and he was clearly promoting content that was in line with Iranian foreign policy or, you know, could seem like Iranian propaganda, but we couldn't really tell how you can differentiate between someone who is, you know, authentically of Iranian heritage living in Lebanon and posting content like that, or actually being part of operations, which brought us to the main question, which was how are, you know, these platforms attributing this? And there is very little transparency in terms of attribution. And a lot of these campaigns, when we've, you know, kind of dug into how, you know, Twitter or Facebook have come to identify them, have, you know, identified them in collaboration with for profit, for profit driven cybersecurity firms like FireEye. And, you know, we often find that these for profit driven companies actually have interests and selling services to, you know, Gulf Arab countries. And so characterizing Iran as a bad actor is, you know, good for business in some ways. And so this transparency leaves us a little bit skeptical in terms of attribution, the lack of transparency. And so what we really the major takeaway we had, and this was, you know, sharing the fact that there have been a few studies prior to this that look to empirically assess the impact of these campaigns and very little impact was able to be deciphered. But, you know, the number of non empirical research studies, you know, commissioned between a series of DC think tanks and US media firms that really concentrate on Iran is part of a wider issue. I mean, we've, there's scholars like Nargis Bajovli who defines it as, you know, the predominant framework of US national security that perpetuates this very narrow view on the complex terrain that is Iran and the region. And so we argue that these perspectives that dominate Western and Arab media and research discourses that exist might actually give the power and weight to these campaigns to actually be more effective. We have two more presentations. Sorry. Yes. Yes. That's basically the end of my presentation. Thank you so much. That was fascinating. Next is Suzanne. Suzanne, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to be part of this really important and timely, and I think very interesting event. I've already learned so much from the other speakers. So I'm going to be speaking more about not so much from the same perspective as other speakers, but more about how the Iranian women's movement has used social media to organize and, you know, in times of repression. And I think that the Iranian women's movement holds some lessons learned for other countries in the region that are moving towards or already are in a state of serious repression that they'll probably see similar trends within their own context. I'm going to start a little bit earlier than the 2011, just to give you a background of how women's movement has used social media to organize. I'm going to talk about the different periods, and then I'm going to talk about the current tensions that exist within the social, you know, within the women's movement inside and outside the country and the use of social media. And lastly, I'll give a few recommendations. So I want to start from the early, I mean, the first, when the Iranian women's movement began to use social media was in the early 2000s, when the NGOs were rather new, they were just more recently established and social media became, I mean, on internet became widely available. So a lot of young women took to the internet to set up web blogs, and they started talking about their experiences as women. Many of them were not activists. Some of them were journalists. They found a more open space to talk about their issues and express themselves on social media and on web blogs. And at the same time, the NGOs began to set up websites and communicate with their audience at the same time. So there's not much tension at this point. I think everybody is really experiencing internet and use of internet for a promotion of social issues at the same time. And it was actually a very positive time and a very positive development for the women's movement is to get the message of being a woman and some of the challenges that women face and the discrimination that they face in a country like Iran where laws discriminate against women, both law and culture discriminate against women. It was a very positive development. Then we move into another phase maybe in the sort of more mid 2000s where campaigns are set up. This is a time of repression for Iranians. They have to move away from their organizations or individual NGOs because NGOs are being shut down and they begin organizing broader campaigns. So these campaigns use online spaces very actively websites, web logs, etc. And the web logs of these women that were established a few years earlier really came to the aid of these campaigns to spread their message. So it was a very cooperative period. We see the emergence of the one million signatures campaign, which relied very heavily on the use of websites and also web logs, women webloggers really supported the one million signatures campaign and its growth and expansion, but also the Stop Stoning Forever campaign and the access to the stadiums campaign. The women's access stadium campaigns also were very much aided by the web logs and the women female webloggers in this space. I should also mention one other event that was, you know, where we see a serious collaboration between the women's movement and those on online spaces is the opposition to a bill that was put forth by during Ahmadinejad's presidency called the Family Protection Bill that was to ease restrictions on polygamy. And really it was a moment where women's movement activists, their collective action and web logs and everybody on social media really came to the aid of one another. And at that time, we saw the emergence, we were the very beginning stages of use of Facebook. So all of these elements worked together to help organize a good resistance to this bill that was tabled. It was a big success. So in the post 2009 elections, which were widely contested, we see this cooperation sort of in the way that it was end and take on a new form. So around 2010, many of the activists, women's movement activists have left the country because of repression that followed the contested presidential elections. And the women's movement inside the country feels very disheartened because of the protests, the protests really led to crackdowns that didn't need to real serious change. And you see a hiatus in terms of in country activism. So those activists who had left the country take to medium such as Facebook and websites, etc. to carry on the work they had been doing inside the country. This is around 2010, 2011, 2012. And we see a lot of organizing also on Facebook and other social media platforms during this time, with a relatively quiet in country women's movement. The next, and I think this is the start towards the end of this period, we really see the start of the emergence of certain activists, particular activists who become very well known because of their activism on social media, on behalf of women, on women's issues. In the past, we had celebrity activists, but they weren't getting their credibility from working only on social media, that they were getting their credibility from working on the ground within the women's movement somehow connected to the women's movement inside the country. So this is a divergence in that sense is that we're seeing people emerge claiming to be working on women's issues who've never really had a history of working within the women's movement inside the country. And lastly, in more recent years, maybe from 2014 to 2000 to the current time, we see use of both women influencers, social media influencers to promote women's issues and then also the women's movement inside the country using social media to promote women's issues or to promote their work and their message. And here we see greater move towards individual online personas, they're becoming much more central to the women's movement or the message on women's issues, they're getting a lot more attention. And we see a range of groups that are emerging, a range of individuals that are emerging on platforms such as Instagram, who are targeting ordinary citizens with their messages and with their work. And they have huge following, some of them have huge millions of followings, not all of them necessarily have a background, many of them actually don't really have a background on women's issues. Many of them have been outside the country, have worked outside the country, they've never worked inside the country. And I should mention that also the presence of Iranians on Instagram and following Instagram celebrities, it has a voyeuristic quality to it. It's almost like I think in the US, the reality shows in the US. So it comes with an element of these people are maybe talking about women's issues or social issues, but they're also sharing a lot about their lives and their personal lives, their personal journeys, their husbands living in the West, going to university, etc. So there is this interest in the lives of individuals more so than a collective message. So some of the tensions that have emerged, especially in recent years between the activists on the ground and those celebrities or influencers outside and who are using social media. And I'm going to talk about this. I should say, I come from a background of having worked inside the country. So I want to put that out there, that that is maybe my bias, but this information comes from discussions with activists inside the country. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about the tension. So historically, there has been a tension from the start, from the mid 2000s when the campaigns emerged, a tension between creating balance in terms of organizing online and organizing on the ground. So, you know, how that there needs to be a balance that we can't just do organizing online, even if it's easier because of repressive policies. So this has been a continuous tension, at least for activists inside the country who are working on the ground who feel that they need to connect with individuals on a face-to-face basis. Now it seems more recently that there are tensions more that while these tensions of creating balance of online and in-person activism exist that there are tensions more between activists on the ground and online activists who are largely based outside. There's the issue of repression. This creates a lot of tensions because, as I think other panelists talked about, there's a lot of surveillance security charges against activists or what they say, similar to the rest of the region's crackdowns that, you know, really push back the use of social media by activists on the ground. And especially whenever there's a lot of there's a social media, there's activists inside the country or even an influencer inside the country who gets a lot of attention and gets a lot of followers, there's there's crackdown against them. So collective groups that are, you know, working on women's issues are very mindful of this because they want to continue their work and they're doing work in real time, not just on the ground, not just online. So they're mindful of this and they don't they don't and they can't get huge followings online. So there is this imbalance in terms of those outside get huge followings and so therefore they get a lot of credibility and they have become the face of the women's movement, both for many people inside the country and many people outside the country, but those activists who are working in collectives have to remain rather anonymous for security purposes. Then there's a tension between collective versus individual focus. So a lot of the activists that I talk to are actually very mindful they want to promote collective action as opposed to individual celebrity status, you know, for individuals or, you know, they shy away from becoming influencers and they prefer to work on collective through collective action. So this is a tension that exists. Another tension that exists are the do no harm principles. Many of those who are outside the country who are, you know, even inside the country who have celebrity status, they don't have experience working on the ground. So they don't understand the harm that they can cause with some of the work that they do. And perhaps it's not a priority for them. Maybe their main priority is that they want to share news and get more followers. So sometimes with their actions they cause harm in the communities that they're working with or some of the people that they're working with on the ground end up going to prison because of carelessness of the influencers. So another tension is the competition between groups inside and outside the country that undermines civil society and collective action inside the country. Yeah, so what's happening is that, you know, those inside the country take up soft issues that's not as sensitive. And so I think some of those outside the country who are actually getting funding also try to take up soft issues so that they're not shut down, they're not blocked, etc. But this creates a lot of sensitivity to the work that's going on inside the country. And so those inside the country end up getting targeted when those outside the country using social media with massive followers start addressing the same issues in the same way that those inside the country are doing. So it really undermines the ability of activists inside the country to work and to build their civil society because it, you know, to through no fault of their own, there becomes a lot of sensitivity to the issues that they've taken up. So I'm going to just give a couple recommendations and I'll stop there. So I think there needs to be better coordination. I mean, certainly if influencers had better coordination with activists inside the country and help the ones moving inside the country, the message could be amplified and it could be better keeping in mind the security concerns of those activists inside the countries they need to keep in mind and take very seriously the issues of do no more harm. I think funders that support activists based outside and working largely online need to put prioritize the do no harm policy and they need to also prioritize and make it part of their condition is that those working outside using largely social media need to complement the work that's going on inside not be in competition with it and ultimately those working online and from the outside, particularly from the outside and even active even celebrities like actors, et cetera, who take social media and take on women's issues really need to understand that they're not a replacement civil society for those working inside the country and that we need that civil society to thrive. So we have to be mindful of not competent not create not being competitive in a way that undermines civil society strengthening and puts activists on the ground at risk. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Suzanne. This was a very important presentation. Our last speaker is Keter Smede who will speak about anti nationalism in Oman since the Arab Spring. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having me on this panel. It's really an honor to come out to these distinguished speakers. My talk takes about 15 minutes. So I hope I'll wrap up at five past the hour. So in this talk, I analyze a recurring topic in my conversations with Omani friends and interlocutors, the ambition of young Omani men to acquire Emirati citizenship. I argue that this ambition complicates our understandings of what practices constitute citizenship in this region and beyond. Renouncing Omani citizenship is a powerful if evanescent political tool for those young Omanis who feel alienated from their political community and powerless to change it. I've taken the empirical material for this talk from multiple rounds of field work for my PhD on citizenship in the borderlands of Oman and the UAE, with the most recent round cut short, unfortunately, in March 2020. So like all good anthropologists, I begin my talk with a vignette. In November of 2018, my friend Yusuf drove me around Badha province. Badha is an exclave. That means a small piece of Omani territory separated from mainland Oman by the United Arab Emirates. Yusuf is Madhani born and raised in the exclave but currently employed at a palatine plant in mainland Oman. He was one of a number of kind Omanis who had previously humored this random dude asking him about the exclave over Twitter, surely one of the most sophisticated anthropological methods over the 21st century. But in summer 2017, Yusuf had shown me a road the Omani government was building. The road was cut through the mountains to still unspoiled land, ready for the construction of new houses. In 2018, he showed me the finished product. A beautiful road that reached far into previously inaccessible western parts of the territory, but there were no new houses to speak of. Acknowledging my puzzled face, he turned the conversation to what the road had cost. The government had spent 60 million riyals, roughly 30 million pounds, on the project. An amount that could have been a lot smaller, he assured me, if the government had had the foresight to build the road 20 years sooner. It didn't strike me as coincidence when several minutes later in one of the villages Yusuf stopped near a large cluster of homes. He told me that no one lived there anymore and that the houses were either empty or occupied by Indian immigrants. The original Madhani owners had moved to the Emirates and several of them had taken on Emirati nationality. The Emirati government had given them land for new homes in Khorkhakan, a nearby coastal town, and they only came back to Madhav for family events and holidays. The matter of fact tone in which Yusuf discussed the relinquishment and acquisition of citizenship no longer bold me over at this point. Ever since my first nine months of fieldwork in 2011, young Omani men have privately expressed to me their wishes to move to the UAE and live there. These conversations with Omanis compel me to reflect on the meaning of citizenship in the Omani context, and specifically in the Borderlands and beyond. So, since the late 1990s, citizenship has become an increasingly hot topic for scholars of the Middle East. And among numerous scholarly works, I believe two key populations have emerged as prime subjects. Palestinians who are denied the full rights that legal citizenship in Israel nominally guarantees, and labor immigrants predominantly South Asian, who are excluded from all legal citizenship rights in the Gulf. As a result, we sometimes know more about what citizenship is not or what it fails to be, unless about what it means to those who at least seemingly enjoy full rights and privileges. It's an ongoing debate for some scholars even whether we can talk of citizenship on the Arabian Peninsula since those governed by absolute monarchs are rarely involved in their own governance. The editor of the volume on citizenship in the Middle East explains that citizenship in this region is simply a contractual agreement, a way of organizing modern nation states and the populations within their territories by separating members from non-members. And political anthropologists in turn have argued against this understanding of citizenship as mere legal status. Instead, citizenship is analyzed as a complex bundle of practices constituting political membership. These practices can and do take place outside the conventional political arena and what the amount to differs from context to context, from minorities maintaining the right to be culturally different while still participating in nationwide democratic processes, to disaster victims making claims on state resources on basis of injury and disease, to migrant groups fighting for recognition of their membership in immensely heterogeneous urban settings. Through such practices and claims making, these groups and individuals cast themselves as citizens by articulating their belonging to a political community. So what do we make of practices that signal an absence of belonging? Now older Omanis consistently dismissed the younger generation's ambitions as motivated by simple materialism, but I find that explanation incomplete and even unconvincing. My main concern in this talk is with the renunciation of citizenship, but I'll quickly touch on the elections for the Majlis Shura, Oman's consultative council. Over the past 10 years, I've learned that it is not out of sheer apathy that young Omani men avoid voting in these elections. Many of my interlocutors say that they are concerned that candidates run for personal gain, that they feel guilty if they elected someone who turned out to be unfit for the job. And perhaps most importantly, that the elected council lacks the power to solve any actual issues. But abstention and intentional inaction do not register as neatly on a spectrum of claims making as other practices do, nor does the act or the desire to give up one citizenship. So how can we conceptualize a kind of citizenship, the very dissolution of which is an end to be pursued? Let me return to Madhav province. Why should the complex relation between political belonging and citizenship become an issue here? I think it's a no small part due to the uniqueness of this geopolitical oddity, sometimes humorously described as a doughnut. And I think we can sort of see why. The present day map leaves little room for doubt. Within the two pseudo circular lines lies Oman and outside them the UAE. Historically, of course, this was not always the case before the unification of Muscat and Oman in 1970 and UAE's declaration of independence in 1971. The interior regions of both countries today were home to tribes whose allegiance fascinated between various rulers, Muscati sultans, sheikhs of the Trucial Coast, Imams in the interior region, etc. British political correspondence from as early as 1902 shows that the sheikhs of Sharjah, Fujairah and Abu Dhabi have all challenged Muscat's claim of sovereignty over the three villages that are located in present day Madhav province. However, one episode in particular shows that the inhabitants of these villages were not standing idly by while the distant powers that be argued over their fate. In 1954, word reaches the British political agent in Muscat that Sharjah forces hoisted their flag in Madhav, signaling their occupation of the village to which the sultan of Muscat had laid nominal claim. The agent and the sultan brood over a proper response and finally right the sheikh of Sharjah to express their disapproval. But to their surprise, they learned one week later that there had never been an occupation by outside forces and instead it was Madhanis themselves who had mounted an insurrection against the sultan. They had also refused entry to the sultan's local representative who collected zakat on his behalf. To make matters worse, the sheikh of Sharjah, with the village's change of heart now brought to his attention by the sultan's letter, writes that he is ready to come to the aid of the Madhanis, jeopardizing the sultan's claim over the village. The important takeaway here is that it was the Madhanis themselves who fashioned their own political belonging, expressing allegiance by raising a new flag and limiting access to the village to those deemed on their side. It's not entirely clear to me yet how Madhav province ended up back on Oman's side. Madhanis tell me that once the issue of drawing borderlines arose in the 1960s, which is a big, big issue, they simply chose to be part of Oman and that was that. Of course, the modern nation-state system typically does not allow for territory to change hands nor citizens to switch political allegiance with ease. A lasting effect of borders drawn and agreed on by states and international powers is the rigidity of national territory and political identity, a modern development of which some of these young men in the exglade now seem to suffer the consequences. The production and reproduction of nation-states is not an easy feat. Naturally, much more than drawing borderlines goes into rendering Madhav province and its inhabitants Omani. Mark Valerie, inspired by the seminal works of Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, discusses how the Omani nation as a whole is a result of state policies. The state he demonstrates engages in identity engineering through the manipulation of history, heritage, and symbolic references. It promotes a national generic form of Islam that muddles the difference between Ibad-e-Sony and Shia Islam, and it fosters a nationwide Omani identity that attempts to supersede tribal affiliation through extravagant celebrations of the nation. Of course, Oman is not unique, but the creation and sustainment of such an identity also happens on a much smaller scale in much subtler ways. Madhanis perceive the Omaniness of the province and themselves not only through state investment in infrastructure, health, and educational services, but also through slides that welcomes them to Oman, a mosque for Friday prayers named after Oman's late ruler, and countless Omani flags and images of the Omani late and current monarch throughout the province. Michael Billig has coined the term banal nationalism to capture the quotidian ways in which the nation is indicated in the everyday lives of its citizens. This reminding, he says, is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion. It is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building. National identity embraces all these forgotten reminders. I believe this theory could be elaborated by attending to what we might call banal anti-nationalism. That is to say, the ways in which forgotten reminders actually repel citizens and make them feel disconnected from their political community. So even now, the UAE is also very much present in the exclaim. Emirati Dearhams, not Omani Rial, seem the preferred currency of Madhanis to the point where some government officials say that they have their salaries paid in Dearhams. We're not at work in the public sector where Omani official dress is mandatory. Many young men wear Emirati-style kenduras, claiming that they are more comfortable than the Omani counterpart. And finally, in order to get anywhere else, young Madhani men must drive, often in their Emirati cars, through Emirati territory. On these trips, they often remark on the enormous development that the Emirates has witnessed and the international reputation it enjoys. Importantly, they often contrast this with the state Oman is in, before uttering such sentences as, if Sheikh Zayed may God have mercy upon him had been the ruler of Oman, if only for one year. The comparison between the global success of the UAE and the seeming lack thereof for Oman proved a consistent source for vexation, a reason for young Madhanis to distance themselves from their political community. Apart from the 30 million pound road to nowhere, one other site in Madhan was seen as a local fiasco. Hewed out of a small mountain, a man made waterfall towers over the barren landscape of Madhan province, visible before you even reach the villages. When I first saw the structure appear from the passenger seat of my friend's car, I turned to him in bewilderment. Ahmed, an employee at the local government, shook his head and poured out his thoughts. It's a grave mistake, he said. It's the biggest artificial waterfall in the Gulf with huge pumps that cost millions using clean water that vaporizes and gets wasted. It doesn't benefit the people at all. Had it been a swimming pool or a musical fountain, but who's going to spend hours looking at this? For Ahmed, the costly monolith attests to the Omani state's squandering of monetary and natural resources. Such irresponsible projects fuel his and others' frustration with the state, which is exacerbated by the recent economic downturn and consequent price and oil prices. Implicit in his mention of a musical fountain is no doubt again a comparison between Oman and the Emirates juxtaposing the lame waterfall with the famous Dubai fountains at the foot of Burj Khalifa. While it's arguably intended as a source of national pride, a display of the state's ability to make water flow from arid mountains, the monumental waterfall seems instead perceived as a flop that made some people very rich, while leaving others perplex and alienated. Overt celebrations of the nation can backfire, leading one cynical interlocutor to say, El Watan is for the rich, El Wataniya is for a Shah. The nation is for the rich, and nationalism is for the people. Renouncing citizenship is an ephemeral moment in which young Omani show that if they can't get anything out of the nation, they're getting out of the nation. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for this very fascinating presentation. We now have, we'll go to the questions, answer the questions we have received. The first one is actually about the pandemic. Will COVID-19 pandemic mark the end game for Iraq's and Syria's, Lebanon's and Algeria's mass popular uprising? I think either Mark or Kea could take this question. Mark, would you like to answer the question? I can try. I'm not entirely sure. I don't think the COVID-19 is going to end uprisings. I mean, I think to say uprisings end is very misleading. You know, a lot of the reasons for underpinning those uprisings haven't changed. I mean, what we've seen in Lebanon, for example, has happened during and throughout COVID. So, you know, in Syria, I mean, Syria isn't an ongoing war. I think COVID pays no heed to civil war or economic crisis. Sure, it reproaches national attention on certain issues, but there's no reason why it should actually change those uprisings. If anything, the many of the problems I think that have been produced by COVID as just economic hardships in certain sectors, especially things like tourism, are just going to contribute to the driver's of unrest. So, if anything, it's probably going to be an input factor into encouraging protests than anything else. But it's a very big question to ask, but I really don't think it's going to end it. Thank you. Yeah, it hasn't also ended in Iran, for example. We've seen protests and elsewhere in the world. The second question I think is for Mahsa, how in your research have you seen as their use and interpretation of the social media become a productive tool in promoting sustainable democracy and reduce the prevalence of insurgency and foster economic development in Iran and the Gulf region and improve its relationship with the West, considering the regional power status and influence of Iran in the Middle East in post-COVID-19 era? Mahsa, would you like to take this one? Yeah, that seems like a many-faceted question. But obviously, in almost every context, the internet and the use of social media has been very formative. And many different aspects of society, I mean in terms of economics, there's a massive commerce industry because of social media and mainly foreign social media. And I mean, it is one of the factors stopping Iran and Iranians from being fully isolated due to the many different factors stemming from state controls to sanctions. It is a tool that definitely helps Iran stay as a globalized nation. And it is also one of the factors why the state is actively trying new means and methods to control and curb social media and promote kind of internet nationalization and promote those alternatives and not before in social media platforms. So it is very impactful. It obviously there are many different ways the state is trying to manipulate even those foreign social media platforms. But you can really see the impact in the ways and the methods that Iran is pursuing. I mean, there's a bill forthcoming to be ratified in parliament that is going to curb the use of foreign social media drastically. We're not sure how it's going to implement it and exactly when. It's expected maybe in the next few months. But if this does come into play, we will see a very drastic change. And I think it will highlight even more the impact and the role of that social media has been having in Iran. Thank you. And please keep sending your questions. Now, we have a question for Kaya. I think this is for you. The question of citizenship and identity politics in the Gulf. Gulf is a serious subject that heads of states and government and or presidents must come to grapple with national security, economic development and regional security. However, have you considered the we versus them in exploring the narrative of belonging and wealth acquisition in a Persian Gulf? Kaya, I think this is for you. Thank you. That is a brilliant question. And I wish I could say that I have considered it at length. What I can say is that very interestingly, a lot of the narrative when it comes specifically to Oman and the United Arab Emirates, which is what I'll keep the focus on here, is that a lot of the narrative pushed by both the Emirates and Oman is that they are actually one people or very close siblings. They don't necessarily see the borderline even as they are negotiating agreements to finalize border lands between them. The tribes that live in the borderlands straddle the border. People have family on both sides of the border. So in that sense, there is no real we versus them that you see in that narrative. And I hear that among my interlocutors as well. They'd be the first to say that the people on the other side, we just see them as Omanis as well. Or they will remind me that all of this used to be part of Oman historically. And that is, of course, somewhat of a it's not a contested claim, but it ruffles some feathers in certain quarters. So in that sense, there's no real we versus them. They see more of a we, but there's there is a clear sense that in certain parts of the country and in specific in the UAE, there's at least a perception that you would be able to make a better living or at least enjoy a better standard of life than they think they can do in Oman. Thank you. Thank you. Please keep sending your questions. I have a question for our panelists. We discuss Twitter mainly as a tool for activists that has been co-opted by repressive regimes. I wanted you to comment on Clubhouse, which is a relatively new social media platform that is being used by government, but also activists. For example, in Iran, they've been using it very effectively. Who would like to comment on Clubhouse and how it's being used in our region? Susan, would you like to comment on how women's rights activists have been using Clubhouse? Hi, sure. I think that, you know, certainly in Iran, social activists have used Clubhouse quite a bit, and it's actually been successful in breaking some of those tensions that exist between those inside and outside the country. It's a space where people have come together. Despite the security risks of connecting with those outside the country, it's been very positive. So it's certainly been positive for those outside the country because they get to hear from people inside the country, which maybe normally they don't have as much access to. I think, I don't know, I think the other panels can probably also reflect on how well used Clubhouse is for other countries in the region. I think the women's movements in some of the countries, I see a lot of my colleagues from Libya, for example, on Clubhouse discussing, you know, the situation in Libya. I see Egyptians on Clubhouse, not so much the Egyptian women's movement, but a lot of Egyptians on Clubhouse, maybe a lot of them are expats. I'm not sure how well used Clubhouse is in the other countries. I think it's pretty well used by Iranians and it's, you know, it's really been, I mean, it kind of revolutionized the relationships that provide an opportunity for discussion and discourse that were Iranians both inside the country and those outside the country were missing, and especially around the elections. I just want to say one quick thing about Twitter. I think you talked about how toxic it is. It's extremely, extremely toxic for Iranians. And when you see civil society activists from inside the country are often not just people outside the country and people outside the country get attacked. Yes, it's a defamation issue. It makes you feel really bad, but people inside the country, when they get attacked, they don't always get attacked by state. They sometimes get attacked by opposition groups that want to paint a picture that there is no civil society within the country. So any form of civil action that's discussed by those inside the country is attacked, even organizing to launch a complaint against the judiciary for how it operates prisons and how it uses solitary confinement, those people behind that, which is pretty radical act in a context like Iran, the people behind this initiative were attacked. So it really is a very serious, you know, so Twitter is used as a way to undermine civil society pretty seriously. And I think one way those outside, in terms of Iran at least, and learning from the experience of Clubhouse, that we really need to break the isolation of the Iranian civil society and the Iranian women's movement so that they hear their perspectives and their voices outside the country a little bit more. Thank you. Mark, would you like to comment about Clubhouse? It seems that it's harder for this, you know, anonymous accounts or, you know, technical accounts to sort of co-opt it or try to influence it. I mean, you can just shut them down or it's not like as easy as Twitter, right? Could you comment? Yeah, I would say it's probably not as easy as Twitter, but the interesting thing about technology is that it's authoritarianism adapts to the various functionalities. So I wrote a couple of pieces on Clubhouse. Obviously, when it came out, come on a few minutes earlier this year, when it sort of took the world by storm and the region, there was again a lot of what I call this honeymoon period of technology. And we saw this in 2011, where everyone's celebrating this new technological platform, everyone's getting on it and saying a lot of stuff, which is great. There was lots of interesting discussions. But I also noticed very quickly that there was also very kind of sinister attempts to stop those discussions using various techniques. So I mean, I myself saw it a number, there was a number of groups discussing politics in Saudi and one person entered that room. They took a screen recording from the phone, recording those who were speaking, and then posted that video on Twitter saying that these people were traitors and they were speaking out against their country. So they were, again, publicly attempting to shame and drive traffic for people attacking those accounts. So I see rooms discussing politics. There was again one talking about politics in UAE in Saudi. And at one point, everyone changed their profile picture, everyone on the panel changed their profile picture to Mohammed bin Salman. So I imagine those in the audience didn't necessarily feel, I've got like a screenshot of like 60 identical pictures of Mohammed bin Salman. So those in the audience would definitely not feel comfortable about being critical. And at the same time, I've been in rooms talking about politics in the region where you have people in the, and this is actually a bit like being in an actual face-to-face seminar. Certainly I remember back in 2011, you'd have people in the audience who almost looked like they were planted. They would stand up and try and monopolize the Q&A and then give a very kind of pro-government agenda. And in this clubhouse room that I was in, the person systematically started attacking each of the panelists, saying various things about them that they were either traitors or that, you know, that they were criminals in their country. So they were attacking people. So they were finding ways to actually do that. And what I've, you know, speaking to colleagues in the region as well, they noticed that certain people show up over time and time and again in rooms discussing politics. So they do appear to have the classics of the Muhabbarat issue where they have people who go into rooms to listen to conversation and this can have a chilling effect. And even seen in more banal issues, civil society related issues, ones that might not be construed as overtly political, you know, I was in a room where people were just discussing, I can't remember what it was, it was in Al-Qaeda and it was related to something seemingly trivial. But then someone cited the public gathering law and, you know, not one of the laws that regulates how you can talk about other people online as a response to someone they disagree with. And in the situations where the legal context can be very arbitrary and enforced and these things, you know, it does have a chilling effect. Just as I said at the beginning of my conversation, it was enough for some people to stop talking just to have them tweet the Ministry of the Interior's Twitter handle at them and the same with Clubhouse, we're seeing new forms of control. It doesn't mean people aren't using their spaces or having kind of closed spaces. But the issue is as a space becomes more public, it's more likely to be or attract the attention of the authorities and therefore have an intervention. The closed spaces, it's less likely to happen and people can talk about this, but the whole issue with closed spaces, we can have a conversation privately on signal. The whole point of social media was that it would allow people to network in this kind of large-scale sense in a very powerful sense and I don't think Clubhouse is going to generate that. Right. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have another question. How do you assess civil society in relation to climate change in the Arab region? Is it a priority? Who wants to take that? Kaye or Mark? Kaye, would you like to...? I was wondering if the question poser could elaborate a little bit what they mean by assessing here. Is the government prioritizing civil society or should one in trying to address climate change be focused on cultivating civil society? I'm not quite sure if I understand the question. If someone else has a better understanding, please feel free to go. Oh, I think Mohammed is trying to clarify it, Kaye. Here's the, in terms of public engagement, the person who asked the question says... That doesn't necessarily... Again, the government engaging with civil society here or how we should all as... I mean, I guess all citizens should be focused on improving their own actions and help tagging time change. Citizens. Citizens. Well, let me say this. I'm sure that the government very much focuses on trying to tackle climate change. But in Oman, at the very least, where the dollar price of barrels of oil is really the main topic of the news every day and every night, it seems very unlikely that they will actually be able to wean themselves off oil at this point, even though they've been promoting diversification campaigns for decades. Some of this was touched on in the previous panel as well. Citizens themselves have come together in... volunteer teams, charities, where they try and contribute. But I think from what I know from my interlocutors, they're all skeptical as to what their effect can be on the larger scale when it comes to climate change because of how much they need energy, particularly energy that is created by the use of oil, the burning of oil, fossil fuels, to even in the summers have air conditioning and to get around anywhere, right? So I believe they expect more from their government to diversify the economy, but they can perhaps wait for quite some time for that to happen. Thank you. I have a question either for Massa maybe or Suzan. We spoke about digital activism. Can you give us some examples of what works and what doesn't? And why? I guess I could go and let Suzan take over. In terms of what works for digital activism, I mean that's a very I guess loaded question when it comes to my focus area, which is Iran, because I guess activism has been an ongoing process for the past over 40 years of the Islamic Republic prior to that. But I mean, in the context of Iran, there's tons of different factors that come into play where you want to avoid the surveillance monitoring and controls of the state. I mean, just as we were talking about clubhouse, there was various ways that you have to adopt to the threat model in Iran. I remember speaking to LGBTQ activists inside of Iran and just the very features of the platform that meant that if you signed up with your telephone number, everyone who had your telephone number registered in their contact list would be notified that you had this account and they could see you go into a room where you could possibly out yourself as a member of the LGBTQ community. And so these are the different kind of dynamics at play as a digital activist, as I'm sure in the rest of the region, there's a lot of these different considerations of security and protection. There is an increasing trend I find within Iran where the situation, and I think Susanne can probably better speak to this, where there is a kind of new generational shift that we're seeing with a lot of activists inside of Iran who don't have the kind of same fear often. They will, even knowing the risks and that the possibility of arrest and torture, they're still, you know, defiantly speaking with their real names and coming out and there has been this kind of new trend of it might correlate with the fact that the economic situation and the political situation are deteriorating more and more. I see John has his hands up. Do you have a question? John, do you have a question? Okay. If not, Susanne, please, sorry. Yeah, so I just wanted to go back again to some of those tensions that I talked about. I think that one, you know, there has, there have been, at least in the Iranian case, and I think more recently, I think we've seen a lot of groups have organized on social media with respect to Afghanistan. Other, you know, other, we've had experiences in other countries as well, where we, you know, where social media is, you know, people have organized on social media and it's been effective. But I think, you know, going back to the tensions is that, you know, social media doesn't have long term attention span. So people come together for hashtags and they may be successful in gaining the attention of some policymakers who, who, you know, who may do something positive, or who may just give a sort of a promise and not actually carry it out later on, that we really need those activists on the ground who are advocating for some of these issues. So we had one very positive experience, you know, in terms of in Iran, stopping the execution of three young men who were arrested as, you know, for participating in protests. This was, you know, it was, it was huge and really we had very broad involvement of ordinary citizens joining this hashtag. It was huge, but other hashtags might get some sort of response from policymakers, but unless there are groups on the ground really following it up for long term periods, it's not successful. And that's why there really needs to be some sort of balance between online and, you know, on the ground activism. If we're working for human rights, we have to understand that that civil society that does work on the ground is absolutely critical, even if space is closed and it's very securitized, we have to make sure that we maintain their presence and their activism somehow. Okay, Jonathan, sorry, do you have a question? Okay. If not, any more questions? Anyone has a question? Then I'll hand it to Ahu. And thank you so much to Susanne, Kaye, Mahsa and Mark for their very interesting presentations. I learned a lot and thank you to the audience. Thank you for the, for the excellent questions. Ahu. Thank you very much. And everyone in the panel for your super interesting presentations. I equally learned so much. And thank you to all our participants for your great questions and for your engagement. We really enjoyed it and look forward to seeing you in half an hour time, just a little bit over for our third and final panel. So, enjoy your coffee break and we'll see you soon. Thank you very