 join us, and we'll get started straight after that. Just to restate, welcome to the final panel of today's conference. We're just going to pause for a minute to allow people to join us, and then we will get started with our presentations. Great, well, we will get underway. Welcome back. This is the third and final panel of today's conference. The title of our panel is Lasting Conflicts and Regional Threats, Opportunities and Challenges in a Collaborative Approach to Security. And I think it's fair to say, whereas the first two panels perhaps focus a little bit more on human security issues, this one touches on more traditional security concerns. As like the previous two, this panel will last for around 90 minutes from three o'clock to hot as four, and each presenter will be invited to speak for up to 15 minutes, for around 12 to 15 minutes each. And once we have heard from everyone, then we'll very happily take some questions from you, the audience, and hopefully give you some some compelling answers in return. If you do have a question or a comment for one or other of our speakers, please don't hesitate to pose it in the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. If it's all possible, please can use the Q&A box rather than the chat box, as it's easier to manage and to read. The panel will proceed in the order as set out in the conference brochure. So leading us off will be Professor Clive Jones. Professor Jones is at Durham University, he's a professor of regional security, and he's also a visiting research professor in the Department of Historical and Classical Studies at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. His more recent publications include Fraternal Enemies, Israel and the Gulf Monarchies, which he published with Joel Gazanski, and it was published by Oxford University Press last year. The clandestine lives of Colonel David Smiley, codenamed Grinn, which was published by Edinburgh in 2009, and that's published with Noel Breonee. And finally, Britain's departure from Aden in South Arabia without glory, but without disaster that was published last year as well. After Professor Jones, we will have Dr Christian Coates Alrickson, who is a fellow of the Middle East at Rice University's Baker Institute of Public Policy in Houston, Texas, and also an associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. His research focuses on the political economy and international relations of Arab Gulf States, and he is the author of numerous books, including most recently Qatar and the Gulf Crisis, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. After Christian, we will have Dr Courtney Freer, who is an assistant professorial research fellow of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her work focuses on the domestic politics of the Arab Gulf States with a particular concentration on Islamism. She received a defil in politics from the University of Oxford in 2015, and her thesis was published a couple of years later by Oxford University Press as rent it Islamism, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf monarchies. And finally, for our panel and for the conference, very fittingly, we have one of our PhD students, Ena Rudolph, who is based in the Department of War Studies, and is also a research fellow at the ICYSR. She completed her master's degree in political science and Islamic Studies in 2012 at the University of Heidelberg, specialising in conflict resolution, peacebuilding and political Islam. During her studies, she headed the regional group on conflicts in the Middle East and Margreb, and has lived throughout the region, including Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and Palestine. I think you will agree, therefore, that we have a very well qualified and knowledgeable panel who will be able to cast a great deal of light on subject today. And I look forward to hearing what they have to say and your questions in return. With that, I would like to hand over to our first speaker, Professor Clive Jones. Thank you, John. Thank you to your staff for arranging today's event and for inviting me to speak to your illustrious audience. Paper I want to briefly give today is looking at Israel and the Gulf monarchies, and I've titled tentatively this paper, A New Regional Security Complex or Just Complex Regional Security. I'm not sure I actually have an answer to that question, because it's something that I'm still working on. But I think we do need to ask the question of how we actually conceive of the so-called Abraham Court, and they're signing a bit much fanfare in Washington in September 2020. We're seeing by some as a vindication of a new regional order underpinned by the Trump administration that actually had been evolving through a hidden diplomatic process since at least 2006, and that's why I wrote about this as the emergence of a tacit security regime. It also appeared to vindicate Benjamin Netanyahu's so-called outside in approach to the issue of Palestine, an issue to be managed rather than solved. And again, I refer people back to the work and the words of Jared Kushner, who said that he was not interested in the two-state solution, but the 22-state solution, a position in which Washington and Israel seem to be in lockstep in marginalizing the Palestinians. The violence in Gaza last May in 2021, however, and indeed within Israel itself, clearly has challenged this narrative. The resolution of the conflict, the symbolism of Hamas fighting rockets towards Jerusalem El Quds in defense of the Holy Sanctuary, underscored the view for many critics of the Abraham Accords that peace has to be achieved with rather than from the Palestinians, and secondly, that the United Arab Emirates in particular, but also the other Gulf monarchies, exercise a little influence over the scope and scale of the fighting, suggesting that as a mechanism for recasting security relationships in the region, the Abraham Accords were in fact ephemeral. I think, however, it's worth bearing in mind the following points, that the Abraham Accords were never presented by the Gulf monarchies, and certainly not by the Emirates as a panacea to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These accords are not peace treaties, they are normalization accords. Secondly, the accords are a strategic choice for the Emirates that saw them as strengthening security and economic ties to Israel, that's very self-evident. They were never, however, conditioned or determined by the Israel-Palestinian conflict, although Benjamin Netanyahu's unilateral threat of annexation of parts of the West Bank, the occupied territories, certainly allowed the Emirates to come out of the closet as the kind of fifth cavalry coming to the rescue almost of the two-state solution. More importantly, perhaps, there's been this longer-term shift away from, certainly from the Emirati perspective, the rentier state model as the main means of social contract in an autocratic state and helping to accelerate Abu Dhabi towards, in particular, a knowledge-based economy. Diversifying the economy will be a precondition for survival, the Emirates see it, and the technological partnership to be developed with Israel is therefore very attractive. Again, I point people to the recent one billion investments by the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund into Israel's Tamar gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean. I think it's also important to note there are two other factors often overlooked that also have conditioned this relationship between the Emiratis and the Israelis. The first is the psychological. It's the political acceptance among Gulf Arab elites, not just of Israel's right to exist within secure boundaries, but also acknowledging the historical legitimacy of Jewish claims to the land, claims that firstly challenged the narrative of Zionism as a colonial project, and secondly, an acceptance that this places such rights on a par with the Palestinians, which has implications for issues related to the right of return. And this seems to be implicit within the Abraham Accords, but clearly rubs up against the 2002 led Arab peace initiative led by the Saudis. Nonetheless, it's a huge boom for the Israelis and should not be underestimated. Second is, of course, the position of the United States. US diplomatic muscle was used to broker the agreements with the Arab Gulf States, but equally Israel and the Gulf monarchies are now well aware of what they perceive to be United States retrenchment. What should not be forgotten, of course, is that from Obama through to Biden and including Trump, all US presidents have seemed to look to reduce US commitments in the region. And Martin Indic, the former US special envoy to the Israel-Palestine negotiations, wrote recently in The Washington Post that ultimately the United States wants to have its local partners come to understand their role in an American supported rather than an American led regional order. And indeed, it's this position of the United States in its role that will likely now determine the intensity of ties between Israel and the Gulf monarchies. And conceptually, I think this is best seen through the shifts in how we now understand the very construct and concept of regional security complexes. Now here, we're clearly borrowing on much of the foundational work laid by Barry Buzan and Oli Weaver, in particular in their book Regions and Powers. But they define a regional security complex as groups of states with a degree of security interdependence broadly defined within a given region. And clearly the Middle East and North Africa would come under this rubric as a region. And they place importance here on what they term adjacency and proximity, which are the key elements in deciding what constitutes a regional security complex. And within a regional security complex, they argue you can have sub-regional security complexes. And at the time that they wrote their book, they actually, which is still overshadowed by the Gulf War, they identified three sub-regional security complexes within the Middle region. One was the Maghreb. The other was the Levant, which would include Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. And then of course the Gulf, which would also include Iran. Now with the demise, clearly the Cold War, there's been some rethinking of what security complexes now look like across the region. And these three interpretation includes the role of non-state actors. So we have one interpretation here, mainly by Israeli academics, that actually see the region made up of four differing security complexes. There's what are called the Sunni Islamists, which include Turkey, Qatar, and Muslim Brotherhood type organizations. There's the Iran led access, which would include sheer militants and militias in Iraq, Syria and of course Hezbollah. There's the sort of so-called Sunni moderates, which is the Emirates, the Saudis, the Bahrainis, perhaps the outliers being Oman and Kuwait, with Israel being classified as a sort of cusp state. And fourthly, you have the various jihadi organizations, notably of course remnants of Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Now, while this perhaps captures more accurately the alignment of regional power, I think this definition too has its limits. First of all, how monolithic really are these blocks? Is there a unity of purpose implicit within such definitions? What does it tell us, for example, about differences between Islamic Iran on the one hand, secular Syria on the other, and Sunni Hamas, which are lumped together as one block? They're clearly defined by what they are against, that is mainly the US and Israel, rather than what they are for. So we're having a problem of epistemology here. And secondly, it ignores the fact that some actors in the system are members of other systems on the periphery, on the boundaries. Turkey has interest clearly in the Caucasus, North African states clearly have relations with other countries in West Africa. So the very concept may be maybe too fungible for some. And increasingly, such models often emphasize religious ideological caricature over hard power considerations. That could be regime stability, national identity, that are in fact better explained, I would argue, by hard power politics or realism. So thus, adjacency and proximity may no longer be the sole drivers of a regional security complex. And indeed, the Abraham Accord suggests that regional security complex is based on geographical proximity alone, may need to be reimagined. And indeed, if a security complex is defined by the level of securitisation that results from the scope and intensity of these interactions between these actors, I would argue, actually, that the Abraham Accords highlights the process of at least partial de-securitisation. So the normalisation agreement between the Emirates and Israel has an effect created what I would prefer to call a security hub, some are called as a community, which is now defined by amity, rather than enmity, and where the sub-regional construct first outlined by Weaver and Busan is increasingly redundant, but around which relations with other states have come to be mediated or centred. This security arrangement is new in the sense that it is not bounded by a continued dominance of one overall great external actor as regional security complexes were deemed to be in the past. And I think this is where the significance of the Abraham Accords actually is. The relationship between Israel and the Emirates ultimately focuses upon them as the centred core elements of that particular community or hub around which other actors are now beginning to evolve. And this, to my mind, best describes the regional security hub today, where interests can be aligned, modes and means of influence signalled an exchange, and which over time might be institutionalised within a broader agreed framework. The Gaza War did not derail the Abraham Accords. Clearly, it did highlight that domestic and regional obstacles still have to be dealt with by signatories if ultimately its potential in the coming years is to be realised. And this will include, of course, clear differences that do exist between Israel and many of the Gulf monarchies over the role increasingly being played by China in the region, one perhaps of the great uncertainties. But in a region where realpolitik has long dominated diplomatic discourse, the very basis on which the Abraham Accords was signed, ultimately fear and concern over Iran and from the Emirates perspective as well, their concerns over Turkey, still set to determine as well as the limit of the wider appeal of this new regional security complex. And I'll leave it there. Thank you. Super. Thank you very much, Clive. That was very, very interesting. Just to remind you, if you've got any questions or comments for Clive or for any of our speakers, please feel free to put them in the Q&A box at the bottom. I'd like to hand over now to Dr Christian Coates Ulrichsen. The floor is yours, sir. Thank you very much for inviting me to this panel. I was going to talk about Gulf security in terms of the Biden administration. And back in the spring, I entitled or subtitled it, restoring deterrence question mark. And I think actually in the last five months, we've seen an increase in concern in all Gulf capitals as to the longer term intentions and objectives of US policymakers, which as Clive noted, is now a third consecutive US administration from Obama to Trump and now Biden, that to some extent is keeping its partners in the Gulf guessing whether intentionally or not as to the longer term reliability and commitment of the US to a regional security order that's arguably its underpinned since at least in the early 1990s. Many of these trends began to accelerate, I would argue, in 2019, although they go back further. We saw initially Gulf partners begin to question the Obama administration for the way in their view, the way they were perceived to have abandoned Osnabarak in Egypt in 2011 and then again perceived to have negotiated with Iranian officials in secret in 2012-13 and then Gulf countries out of the negotiations for the JCPOA in between 2013 and 2015. That was one reason why Saudi and Emirati leaders especially were so enthusiastic about Donald Trump's election in 2016 on the British premise that he wasn't Obama, relationships had really deteriorated by that point. And we then saw the initial embrace of the Trump administration in its first six months. We saw Donald Trump go to Riyadh for his first overseas visit, be received with extreme pomp and circumstance, and then two weeks later the blockade of Qatar with initial support on Twitter from the President himself. That blockade and the way that Trump initially seemed to side with Saudi UAE was an absolute shock to the system for the Qataris. And I would argue for Kuwait, no mind in other Gulf countries as well if they were looking at it in terms of the bedrock of their external security partnerships suddenly being called into question by the actions of one man in this case, so at least one man plus the people around him. Ultimately the US administration didn't change sides over the blockade. The Saudis and Emiratis I think felt a sense of frustration at that, but I would argue then the Saudis and Emirati's own sense of abandonment, if you can call it that, came in 2019 with the pattern of attacks between May and September 2019 on maritime and energy targets in and around the Arabian peninsula, culminating of course in the Missile and Drone attack of 14th September 2019 on Abqaiq and on the Al-Qaeda oilfield in eastern Saudi Arabia. And the issue there that again was analogous to 2017 for the Qataris were which sort of made policy makers think again about some of the assumptions I think they had always made about the relationships they had with the US was that Donald Trump seemed to distinguish very clearly between attacks on US interests and attacks on partner interests. In fact two days after the Abqaiq attacks Donald Trump said this was an attack on Saudi Arabia, it wasn't an attack on the US and he then didn't do anything in response at least overtly. Whereas in June 2019 when the US drone was shot down over the Gulf and in December 2019 when the US contractor was killed in Baghdad, we saw US response burst in the form of an attack on Iran's electronic warfare capabilities in June and then in right to the end of 2019 in the sort of tit for tat escalation that included the killing of the Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad a couple of days after a couple of days into 2020. So from a Gulf states point of view the US was now drawing distinctions and I think especially between 2015 and 2016 and 2018 early 2019 if you look at the rhetoric from Muhammad Salman, from Muhammad Zayed and Abu Dhabi the rhetoric from Saudi and Emirati officials was very much predicated on the assumption that when it came to their interests and US interests vis-à-vis anything to do with Iran or Iran's kind of network of groups around the region I think the assumption was that they were those interests were one of the same and 2019 showed very clearly that they were not necessarily entitled to make that case. So we began to see very quickly a not necessarily a de-escalation but at least the terms of quiet outreach and some of these negotiations but meetings between officials that have accelerated over the last year between Iranian officials and delegations from Saudi and the UAE which are a very striking very immediate change in rhetoric too where it's in 2018 for example Muhammad Salman had said that to ensure that any fight with Iran takes place in Iran rather than Saudi Arabia I knew that one point threatened to take action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon by 2020 in January after the spike in US Iran tensions after the killing of Soleimani in the Iranian retaliation we saw Khalid bin Salman, Muhammad bin Salman's brother approved Deputy Defense Minister fly to Washington to make the case of de-escalation and say this is not time for another conflict in the Gulf. So quite a striking and an immediate change in rhetoric there since then of course we've had Joe Biden enter office and I think the Biden administration made it very clear both in the campaign and in their opening months in office that they didn't see the Gulf States as anything like the priority that at least Saudi and UAE had on the Trump and that obviously the Biden administration came to office at a time of unprecedented strain with the pandemic and the need to chart a way out of the pandemic both in public health and economic terms and to the extent that they were focused on the Gulf or the Middle East it was trying to engineer return to the JCPOA and to find a way to end the Yemen conflict and those two initiatives took up a lot of the administration's limited bandwidth for the Middle East over its first six months but they both seem to have stalled over the summer in fact they don't seem to be going anywhere at this point in time. The Yemen conflict has not been in fact it's escalating of anything and the JCPOA remains stuck in its limbo and I think on both cases the US officials are realizing that perhaps it's much easier to say something in opposition and then that's harder to put something into position in the commutation when you're back in government and from the JCPOA point of view I think Iranian officials would be entitled to ask why they would believe a US assurance of returning when in two or four years could be very different and the JCPOA does not have the status of a protected treaty by the Senate because that would require two thirds of senators to agree in which politically right now I think everybody accepts that's impossible. Then of course the withdrawal from Afghanistan even though it was telegraphed 18 months in advance even though it was facilitated by the Doha agreement that are given or made possible by the Doha agreement facilitated by the companies the manner in which it was conducted in a sort of almost a callous nature of Biden's statements I think over that process has just further increased that perception of abandonment and again perceptions I think were important especially in the context of policymaking in the Gulf that they now see a third consecutive US administration where they have severe concerns about their longer term objectives about the longer term reliability but I think we are in this moment to transition in Gulf security more generally or in regional security more generally where we do have the sort of one complex which I think has been in place since at least 1990s in a state of flux we don't quite yet know what will replace it and of course the Abraham Accords as Clyde Jones did point out very well where I think in a beginning of a way to think about what a post-american kind of Gulf might look like a note for example that the UAE Accord with Israel included mention of a strategic agenda for the Middle East which wasn't necessarily in the other Accords now that may or may not come to full fruition but I think it's at least two of the more kind of assertive regional actors beginning to think about what might happen if they work together as they already have done and to begin to step up in terms of trying to secure at least their own interests and where does that leave the other Gulf countries the countries that don't normalize where does that leave the positions vis-à-vis Iran or other security issues we've also had Russian and Chinese beginnings of Russian and Chinese plans or approaches to try and define what a regional security order in the Gulf might look like again nothing's come to fruition we had the Iranian hope endeavor these are all at least beginning to think about what in the longer term in maybe next 10 15 years something might begin to the sort of contours might begin to look like nothing has yet come to fruition but ideas are being put out there which may or may not kind of evolve longer term if there is a US disengagement and I don't think the US would ever fully withdraw from the Gulf because there's a level of disengagement both politically and also in terms of actual physical facilities that also could change dynamics in the sense that any other external or extra regional partner that is involved in Gulf security at least in terms of securing their own interests will not take it's very unlikely to take anything like the same approach that the US has taken vis-à-vis Iran for example the same level of siding consistently with one party against another that we've seen over the last 30 or even 40 years now so there could be hopefully more balanced Gulf longer term I think the question is how do we get there in the meantime and then just finally I think from a Gulf point of view everybody is now beginning to think about well watching what happens next in Washington we're only a year away from the congressional midterms and whether the republicans take control of either one of both houses of Congress I think will be an indicator for Gulf leaders as to the direction of travel potentially in 2024 and at least for the moment I think they still do look at Washington very heavily for the cues now we've obviously seen that the Biden administration has not followed through with its with Biden's claim in the campaign to turn Saudi raping to a prior state that was clearly a piece of rhetoric made in the heat of a debate that said by sort of delegating management of the Saudi management of the relationship with Mohammed Salman to people like the defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Biden has made it very clear that Saudis at least are now will have nothing like that privileged relationship that they had with with Donald Trump but I think we're in a state of flux we don't quite know what's going to happen next I think all the pieces are in play I think the Chinese angle is very interesting to watch because China has been increasingly approaching into what US officials warn is the strategic space that their Gulf partners are sort of allowing Chinese investment in the US has warned the UAE and Saudi especially but also Qatar and Russia not to allow this that those warnings have largely gone unheard the Gulf countries are insistent in adamant that they are not going to be put into a position where they have to choose between the US and China and if the US-China relationships do continue to worsen I think this does leave the Gulf states in quite a delicate position but one in which I think they will try to maximize their positioning by perhaps by threatening one party or the other for example I think just yesterday US UAE officials suggested that they would float to the idea of security back to the US and sort of use the China angle as the bait for that to happen so this leaves I think all parties in the state of flux as being sure to see what happens next and eventually I think a more balanced Gulf could become possible in maybe a two three four years now so with that I'll pass it back to you John thanks great thank you very much Christian that was super again just to just to remind everyone if you've got any questions or comments for any of our speakers please feel free to post them anytime in the Q&A box at the bottom it's my very great pleasure now to invite Corky Freer to give her thoughts over to you Cornel great thank you so much and thanks for having me I'm going to change gears a little bit looking at the the role of religion and politics in the Gulf and this has been an issue that came up particularly during the blockade essentially that the role of Islamists was something that was not threatening to the culturally regime whereas the role played by Islamists especially after the Arab spring is something that the blockading states have brought up since that time really and since 2013 even so I want to talk about what happens to the interplay between religion and politics in the Gulf in the oil wealthy Gulf states when you were in a period of sustained low oil prices and and to what extent does the rentier nature of these countries affect religious life and affect the way that religion interacts with politics so and and also how that interacts with regional security more broadly so in the past I've I've written a bit about whether state access to funds actually enables GCC governments to have over religious life previous work especially the strand of literature on rentier state theory has posited that access to oil rents essentially enables governments to buy off political challenges and therefore resist any reform towards democracy rather simplistically summarizing political life as no taxation no representation so this literature has documented ways in which rentier governments managed to co-opt economically and politically powerful segments of society yet I think that little attention has been paid to their ability to do so in the social sphere and in particular when it comes to religious actors so is the co-optation of religion possible even in states that can afford to fund specific religion strands religious strands and if a state becomes less able to afford to buy off potential religious opposition or to fund a particular vision of state Islam is it likely or that Islam will become more politically relevant and how does all of this play out in terms of regional security relationships so before focusing on the gulf specifically I do think it's worth noting that as has been documented by other scholars in great detail Islam has mobilized a variety of political actors throughout the Middle East meaning that religion is undoubtedly part of political discourse as it is of course in other places in the world as well debates about the state's appropriate role in religious life about the enforcement of religious social policies and about the place of religion and educational judicial political and political life as well as in foreign policy continue throughout the Middle East indeed through the throughout the region we have ministries about cough and Islamic affairs managing the religious sphere and state concern about the role of Islamist political groups in particular since the Arab spring has highlighted the purported need for states to police independent religious networks both at home and abroad because the state is so entangled with the religious sphere throughout the Middle East and because religion is so highly politicized in much of the region it's sometimes difficult to tease apart government control over the religious sphere from the control it exerts over political life more broadly indeed in the gulf as elsewhere in the Middle East religion has increasingly become bureaucratized but where the gulf differs from the rest of the Middle East is not then in the fact that the religious sphere is managed by the state at least to some extent but rather the extent to which it can be and is funded indeed Saudi Arabia where the religious establishment is most explicitly integrated into state bureaucracy has famously funded Salafi Wahhabi schools around the world as documented in a number of work especially Michael Farquhar's book Kaltar has housed the international union of Muslim scholars and provides an international platform through Islam web and Islam online the UAE has hosted groups like the Muslim Council of Elders and has also built the the lavage Sheikh Zayed mosque named after the former Abu Dhabi leader and first president of the independent UAE so there's an explicit connection between state leadership and religion and it's often tied by money in the gulf so as Steph and her talks and work has pointed out gulf governments although financially independent and in many ways autonomous from other actors in the state put in place restrictions on their own authority through the creation of clients the process that generates distributive obligations yet also shores up political support so while such obligations in the past have tend to be described primarily as affecting political and economic life I'd argue that the rentier states of the Arabian Peninsula have also festered similar distributional relationships with the religious sphere which allow for general co-optation or repression of the sphere but also bind political leaders in the Gulf to feeling the need to appear to adhere to basic tenants of Islam as articulated by the state and this these distributive obligations also have regional consequences as we've seen since the Arab spring in particular and so we expect on the basis of what we know about rentier states that the religious fear will be co-opted and a state vision of Islam will be propagated but we also expect that the state vision will not entirely prevent the formation of independent Islamist groups and indeed state attempts to co-opt the religious sphere in a belated and defensive manner to counter rather than preempts the growth of independent Islamists can actually spur their growth so despite their ability at least in theory to buy off opposition in the cultural and religious spheres the Gulf states appear no more effective than non-rentier governments in controlling religious discourse indeed a variety of independent Islamist movements continue to exist within these states because independent Islamist groups like the muslim brotherhood are not required to provide tangible needs tangible goods for their followers in the way they do in other parts of the Middle East although they do supplement wealth or packages provided by rentier states they tend to gather followers through their provision of ideological inspiration and so we're much more difficult for states to regulate they have a less tangible effect and the presence of state funded religious authorities is not sufficient to stem the tide of independent religious discourse or mobilization and the fact that these groups have transnational links also fuels a lot of concern among these Gulf governments about their ability to mobilize groups across borders and also concerns about the extent to which they are loyal to state governments and so while rentier state theory has presumed that political opposition is unlikely to arise in states that provide handsome welfare packages it does allow for the presence of cultural or religious movements and indeed because scholars of rentier state theory have opined that economic levers for opposition tend not to exist in rentier states the cultural or religious sphere is therefore a likely source of inspiration for opposition movements so as a result the extent to which rentier governments across the Arabian Peninsula control their religious sectors often through funding appears to reflect their political openness more broadly meaning the independent religious actors behave differently depending on the shape of political institutions surrounding them so Kuwait for instance houses a vocal and active parliament and so Islamist agendas there have tended particularly in recent years to prioritize responding to the concerns of constituents and expanding their voter base rather than expanding some kind of transnational movement more broadly in Qatar and the Emirates where there are no political parties independent religious actors tend to focus on issues related to social policy in particular issues linked to the sale of alcohol concerns about dress code the importation of western materials in Bahrain where the Shia majority is ruled by a Sunni monarchy independent Sunni movements like the Muslim Brotherhood are not considered politically threatening and thus are allowed to contest parliamentary elections while in other states lacking the same sectarian dynamics the Brotherhood has been outlawed as a terrorist organization namely in Saudi Arabia and the UAE so ideology does seem to matter regardless of political structure and regardless of rentier wealth and so ideology is notoriously difficult to buy off even for states that have the financial wherewithal to do so and so the persistence of independent religious movements despite the ability of Gulf governments to buy them off demonstrates the durability of these movements even when we don't really expect them to survive in addition when it comes to looking at the rentier states of the Gulf the same ideological trends that hold appeal in the broader Middle East also attract followers there so there's not the same Gulf exceptionalism as we expect to see in other instances and although Gulf frontiers in theory have the ability to co-op certain segments of the religious sector through financing it doesn't mean that this will wipe out religious complaint or basically make religious practice only exist in one way so even if state if Islam is complained and that a diversity of the religious sphere in the Gulf are taken as constants state responses to them are not and indeed both repression and inclusion of independent religious actors into distributive relationships are quite costly and so these costs can be quite high in periods of low oil prices especially for governments to undertake so these options become quite costly when they're lower oil prices in Saudi Arabia for instance after the fall of oil prices from 1986 the practices of repressing both Sunni Islamists and attempting to include them into broader rentier benefits became quite costly leading to a brief detente arguably also after 2014 there was a brief detente for a similar reason since the more recent oil shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic we've not seen the same levels of repression we saw for instance in the wake of the Arab spring with mass arrests of people supporting political Islam whether Sunni or Shia so in situations of low oil prices discontent can come not only from the religious sphere but notably and unusually for rentier states due to economic grievances further repression a costly act becomes less viable as a reaction so the religious sphere is somewhat constant in terms of state involvement especially rentier state involvement within it but the these economies are changing and their their priorities are changing in terms of how how threatening religious activism and independent religious strands are for them so we do have some some definite changes in terms of economics for the first time we have a GCC state Oman that has announced its intention to introduce an income tax tax on high net worth individuals VAT has also been introduced in all the Gulf States except for Kuwait and Qatar Kuwait has been downgraded by Moody's for the first time due to concerns about its liquidity so these economies are now facing very real challenges that are likely to be articulated by actors beyond the religious sphere and I believe that in that situation we're likely to see less focus on on the the perceived threat perceived or real threat of Islamist groups in these countries so where this had been the primary articulated threat in the Gulf in post Arab spring I think now things are changing a little bit I think this also means that funding for co-optation and for repression of the religious sphere and for state linked religious actors is less readily available and I think as the economic pie shrinks and as these countries try to diversify their economies increasingly competition for what remains will become more prevalent whether for members of tribes members of specific religious orders members of political blocks or of merchant elites and so as the pie shrinks what spending these governments maintain will indicate how nervous they are about their hold on for instance the religious sphere and the extent to which it could foment political or social discord so which distributed obligations they maintain in the coming months and years I think will be critically important I do think though when it comes to political Islam and the ways in which it has shaped regional disorder and regional disconnects and in recent period I think that it has changed at least for the present period so I'll stop there thank you thanks very much Courtney that was that was very interesting moving on now to our final presenter I'm very pleased to introduce Ina Rudolph who is a PhD student with us here at Kings Ina over to you thank you very much John and as we've heard throughout the day I think the parameters for boosting a regional security cooperation are very different than the geopolitical climate that we had imminently after the territorial defeat over ISIS and in my presentation I would like to focus on one particular actor that has claimed ownership of this territorial victory over over terrorism in Iraq and those are the popular mobilization forces known in Arabic as the hashtag shabi and so for those of you who haven't been following that fervently the Iraqi political landscape I'd like to provide a bit of background and clarify this very hybrid organizational character of the hashtag shabi and also their embeddedness within the political system and I very much think that their entrenchment within both formal and informal government structures is critical to assess and evaluate to which extent they still present a threat or a spoiler to boost the regional security cooperation so as many of you may be familiar with the historical context after the after the invasion of most of after the collapse of the Iraqi armed forces there was a very important fatwa a religious addict issued by Iraq's supreme religious reference by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and he called upon all able-bodied Iraqi citizens to take up arms and defend the homeland the problem was that in the context of a security and leadership vacuum when the thousands of volunteers started to to march and to line up there was no coercive or formal security agency that had the capacity to take the lead of organizing equipping and administering this flow of volunteers so this created a very problematic context it was used as a pretext by an actor or a group of actors who have been thriving in the Iraqi undergrounds the so-called Fasail al-Mukawama al-Islamia or the Islamic resistance factions in Iraq and being highly supported by the Islamic Republic and also by having pre-existing links to a lot of Iraq's ruling elites they easily took the lead and also took ownership of the newly established paramilitary structure and also took control over a lot of the strategic institutional domains that form a sort of like this popular mobilization commission as an institution and the problem here is that for a lot of Iraq's neighbors these actors present a threat to their security they raise a lot of legitimate security concerns in terms of their ideological proximity to Iran but also in terms of their rhetoric and their commitment to preserving resistance operations outside of the formal chain of command a lot of them have accumulated also battlefield experience some of them in the course of resisting what they frame as the US occupation forces and some of them such as the border brigades even like while fighting against the former regime of Saddam Hussein so what we witness is actually Afatua paving the path for the creation of a semi-autonomous paramilitary structure that also became quite critical as a political actor because even though they were framed and even sanctioned by the state as a member and component of the Iraqi security forces the circumstance by no means prevented their affiliates or what I call embedded advocates to contest the political system so they built this whole grand narrative based on their battlefield legitimacy on their military success on the battlefield against ISIS and contested the Iraqi elections and also were able to attend seats within the Iraqi parliament under the Fatah alliance led by a brother veteran Haji Amir so here we see that they already obtained institutional leverage and within the political system which also like gave them the right and opportunity to compete over what should Iraq's role be in the region and what should be Iraq's foreign policy and now in my research I define them as a state sanctioned paramilitary umbrella they comprise some 160 000 some say 150 000 active fighters grouped in around 40 primarily shared but not exclusively shared different brigades and formations the majority of the analytical and also academic work on the Hashib stands to differentiate between three main ideological components or ideological currents those being the Iran-aligned currents the so-called Sadri's current and the Atabat Hashid referring to those formations linked with Iraq's clerical establishment nevertheless my few were there and also first-hand interviews with a lot of those paramilitary leaders reveals a dissonance and a lot of contradictions regarding even like what should the Hashid's role be what should the Hashid's semi-autonomous foreign policy line be and and how should they sort of accommodate on the one hand their commitment to a transnational resistance alliance and also like their commitment and their obligations as a member of the Iraqi security landscape so just to illustrate a lot of those contradictions emanate from the competing perceptions of the Hashid's as a holy warrior as an actor that has or possesses the mandate to exercise religiously sanctioned violence and I want to illustrate here for example both the Atabat and the Sadri's Hashid formations tends to generally comply with the national focus of the Fatwa and with their official mandate as a security agency as a coercive agency but the resistance aligned formations tend to derive from this role as a holy warrior a different kind of mandate so for example a lot of them have used like this narrative of the sacred warrior to legitimize and to rationalize their involvement in the Syrian conflict for example in the defense of the Sayyid Zainab shrine and on the other hand to support or to express their solidarity with the cause of Lebanese Hezbollah and more importantly for for today's conference with the Houthi rebels there have been several reports by Gulf sponsored outlets I have to point out that the Hashid has boosted its support for the Houthi rebels in 2016 there was a meeting reported between a Houthi delegation and some prominent representatives from the so-called resistance currents such as the leader of Faka Taib Sayyid al-Shahada, Abu Alaa al-Wa'lai and Akram Qabi another very curious incident was a recorded videotape statement of the former chief of staff of the PMU of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis where he was joking about a marching towards Riyadh in support of the Houthi rebels next to it like come some controversial statements also from members of the Imam Ali Brigade again like threatening to take very concrete steps to support the Houthi rebels cause this has raised legitimate concerns on behalf of Iraq's neighbors because every time this solidarity for the Houthis is being expressed it goes hand in hand with a very severe condemnation of the policies of Saudi Arabia and what's also more worrying is that this narrative is not just limited to the mukawama currents due to the resistance factions but sometimes it's also been reflected in the official narrative in official statements of the PMU. Just to illustrate the website of the Hashat Shabi had published some information about clashes with ISIS members also claiming that among them were members of the Saudi Arabia National Guard so with that goes hand in hand like this narrative or this criticism of the kingdom that it has been reportedly unable to prevent its citizens from fighting on the side of ISIS and also like from destabilizing Iraq. But there has been a slight change in this rhetoric. In 2019 there was a historic interview with Abu Mahdi al Mohandis where he for the first time rejected accusations that missiles manufactured by the Hashat Shabi forces were intended to pose any threats to the security of Saudi Arabia. In the interview he made a very clear statement that those missiles were being manufactured to sort of like compensate the hashat slag of an air force. Furthermore in view of the foreign policy line that was already propagated by former prime minister Adil Abdul Mahdi there were a series of meetings between the PMU chairman Falha Al Fayyad and Tamar Sabhan, his Saudi counterpart, to alleviate some of the concerns. But of course as I have also witnessed in my own interviews with Saudi Arabian officials for example in an interview that I had with Prince Dokil Faisal he expressed serious doubts whether parties such as Hashat Shabi would ever be willing and able to engage in a constructive exchange with Saudi Arabian counterparts and whether they would be really willing to take the backseat and allow an Iraqi administration to sort of like push for for further repression. We have to also take into account that the hashat today is not what the hashat was following the territorial defeat of ISIS. The movement has suffered from reputational damage and here I want to point out it's not just a matter of the hashat but also a matter of a lot of the members of the Iraqi security forces following the violent repression of Iraqi protesters and also the intimidation of Iraqi activists and the lack of accountability for all of those politically motivated killings. So that's on the one hand and also as Professor Ulrich mentioned the killing of Qasem Soleimani and also of Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis was a major blow to the Hashat Shabi but not in terms that maybe the Trump administration envisioned that. If I may speculate a bit I think the main drivers for this assassination was also the ambition to weaken the Hashat Shabi but what has been in fact weakened was the path of the Hashat towards greater state institutionalization. At the end after Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis was eliminated the actor which is already highly heterogeneous in its structure became even more ambivalent and there was a higher lack of predictability regarding the behavior and the actions of a lot of the members of the so-called resistance current. So this in my perspective presents one of the biggest spoilers to boosting regional security. On the other hand there is a cause for cautious optimism and we find these calls for cautious optimism in the pragmatism and ideological flexibility witnessed and observed in the actions by prominent actors such as Hadi al-Amri such as also Bader al-Qasim al-Aragil but also Muqtada al-Assadah all of whom have been very vocal about sort of formulating or pursuing an Iraq first foreign policy a foreign policy that is at least supposed to serve Iraqi national interests and the foreign policy that is meant also to boost regional security cooperation with Iraq's members. And so looking closely at these actors I think it's safe to conclude that the Hashat is indeed an actor that on the one hand a domestic actor an actor still embedded in a transnational ideological alliance but also an actor with the leverage to formulate and pursue its own foreign policy line. And in that sense I think the Hashat is also still involved in an ongoing competition of what statehood and whom statehood comprises whom Iraqi statehood comprises. So I think when we try to evaluate their approach to security alignments this approach to security alignments is also likely to both reflect and replicate the transactional character of Iraqi elites multi-vector foreign policy approach. And here not just vis-à-vis Iran and Saudi Arabia but also vis-à-vis players such as Russia and China. And just like to end on a more recent note there has been an upsurge in the pro-China rhetoric of a lot of the members of the Moqawama of the resistance camp. And it has been a development that a lot of us have not been really really keeping an eye on but since 2017 whenever there was a Chinese delegation visiting Iraq there were they also made an extra effort to visit the house of Qais al-Hazali and to have like talks with him in his perspective in his mandate as the leader also of the Saudi unblock. So I just hope like that I have been able to dispel some of the myths of the Hashat just as a proxy actor as an Iranian trojan horse because we're dealing here with much more than a proxy actor. We're dealing here with an actor that has the will but also the capacity to pursue a very agile foreign policy line. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Ina that was absolutely fascinating and thank you again to all of our presenters in this panel. We're going to move now to questions and comments and answers and I'd like to start off if I may given that Ina is still on the screen by asking you I guess it's a clarification question for myself. In the course of your presentation you mentioned the importance of both battlefield legitimacy of kind of warrior status and then laterally the importance of essentially the pragmatism of of key actors. In my mind those two tendencies would seem to be if not incompatible but then quite different. How do you see them as as bedding down together? Thank you very much for this question. So I argue that the Hashat tries to build its legitimacy upon three pillars. The first one is a legal legitimacy based on the law issued by the Iraqi parliament and actually legalizing them as member of the security forces. The second one is their religious legitimacy derived from the Fatwa of Sistani and here like we have this narrative of a holy warrior and the third one is their grassroots legitimacy the shabi part. The populist part as a security component like made by the people but also serving the people and here we have like a lot of examples like for a dissonance. As I mentioned like most of those emanate like from competing perceptions of what does it mean to be a holy warrior. As a holy warrior are you just responsible like to protect the Shi'at communities and Shi'at sanctuaries in Iraq or like can you expand like this mandate for example to rationalize your presence on the battleground in Syria? So as you mentioned already like this is one contradiction that we see within this actor. So far how they have been like playing this is to use it as as a plausible deniability as a smoke screen and in my research I even argue that there is sort of an oligopoly on resistance or an oligopoly of what does it entail like to have a right and a duty to resist. So for example if the official hash channels like distance itself like from one of the formations that are making like this inflammatory claims that are sort of like marching into Lebanon or opposing with leaders of the Houthi movement like they adopt the sort of like the statist narrative and they say like no we are a state sanctioned umbrella etc we abide by the commands of the commander-in-chief of a prime minister in Iraq's case while like giving a free hand like for the others like to pursue like their own narrative and the way like they solve it like they claim okay like they're allowed to contribute volunteers to the hash tashabi because it's a volunteer based like structure but like what to what they do in their free time or like how they tend to self cater how they tend like to sort of like engage in rent seeking schemes we are not accountable for that. The question is after the October after the upcoming elections depending like on which party or on how the new administration is going to look like there's a big question whether like this smoke screen or like the strategy of plausible deniability will still fly and I seriously doubt that I am currently like more optimistic that they would have to go through more straight to legitimize their presence and to safeguard like the state sanctioned benefits such as salaries but also just legal legal protection. Great thank you very much. I've got a combined question for Christian and for Courtney. If as Courtney set out the economic and financial situation in the Gulf is getting increasingly difficult to the point that these governments are having to take unprecedented measures could the possibility of growing incapacity to control religious elements within their countries could that be enough to get the US to come off the fence a little bit more and perhaps show these countries a little bit more love and support than it has been doing over the last few years. Do you want to kick off with that Courtney? Yeah I can start sure no it's a good question I mean I think I think that's so far we haven't seen kind of a qualitative shift in terms of how much and how kind of overt opposition is some of these measures in the Gulf so I'm not sure how much of a shift we will see moving forward that said it could be just because of restrictions in place so people don't have as much freedom to state their opposition to especially to the economic aspects that the economic like austerity measures and things that have been proposed and in some places put into into place I mean I think in terms of the US role I think the US definitely has a very much a vested interest in maintaining the maintenance of political stability in the Arabian Peninsula and I think for that reason the US has not really pushed political reform for one thing I mean I think there's this false dichotomy that's often presented between stability and basically stability and political freedoms and this idea that essentially you know authoritarianism at least maintains maintains the status quo and so I think that for instance with President Biden during the campaign talking about isolating Saudi Arabia as a pariah state I think you know obviously that the there were some documents that have been released you know for instance related to Jamal Khashoggi there was talk about releasing a bunch of documents related to 9-11 but I think you know US policy will not fundamentally shift I mean that said I think that if there were an actual viable threat domestic political threat on any of the kind of American allies in the Arabian Peninsula I'm not sure how much the US would want to get involved I mean I think they would get involved rhetorically but I don't really see much more than that and I'd be curious to hear what Christian's thoughts are. Yeah thanks I mean I agree with I mean all of what you just said I think we saw in 2011 when there was a political threat to one of the monarchies it wasn't the US intervened it was the Saudis and the UAE and so in effect it was the ritual perhaps more well-equipped monarchies intervening to show up one of the weaker monarchies or one of the monarchies but less availability to sort of function in the same way we saw also the extension of financial support packages to Oman and to Bahrain at the same time funded by UAE Saudi and Qatar so I think that's probably the most likely to happen again in the sense that the six monarchies take the view that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link and therefore it's necessary to I guess prevent any break in that link I think the US would be as you say Courtney just to sort of a bystander in many ways it wouldn't have to actively support any oppositional group but it would probably be reliant on its partners in the Gulf to take the lead in trying to support any regime in difficulty difficulty for the US might be where that to escalate to the point where there was a significant human rights of the humanitarian risk and in the sense to kind of US support for the regime doing a huge amount of sort of internal suppression might become a political cost but I mean that's just a hypothetical that we probably won't know until we see but I think we can take the example of Bahrain in 2011 as to what that support might look like and then that very muted US pressure on Bahrain vis-à-vis US pressure on other countries at the same time you know there was so much no US pressure on Bahrain and me Hilary Clinton at that time I suspect you said actually said there were times when our interests no values don't align this is one of them you know having spent the previous weeks kind of extolling the virtues of kind of uprising some sort of political demands in other parts of the Middle East suddenly in Bahrain it was a very different story. Super thank you very much and we've got an excellent question from Bob Hoffman which I'm I'm very selfishly going to expand and I'd like to pose this question to to Clive and to and to you again Christian over the last few weeks we've seen French relations with the Margrethe states take a quite a severe turn for the worse and previously we've seen the Gulf states considering military cooperation with Morocco and also with Jordan do you foresee an opportunity perhaps for the Gulf to increase its military presence and influence in North Africa at the expense of France and the European Union sort of a reformulation of the of the security blocks that you mentioned Clive. It's a very good it's a very good question I think it's worth pointing out of course that France is actually in alliance with the with the range of of actors in particularly Eastern Mediterranean but primarily over the concerns that the French seem to have over Turkish influence so it might be that the French are actually looking for for closer alliances with the whole range and host of Eastern Mediterranean actors and some people have talked increasing about a so-called Hellenic alliance which brings together Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Jordan being mentioned as well which could act as a a kind of informal alliance which could protect shared interests in in in the Eastern Mediterranean region so I don't necessarily think we would actually see France actually pushed to one side and indeed I think the French amid the Ferrari over their collapsing submarine deal with the Australians have just I think delivered or or about to deliver three frigates to the Greek Navy so actually I think the French will actually be a very important actor in the region because they themselves have huge investments in some of the the gas fines in that particular region particularly I think with Egypt if I'm not mistaken yeah I just add also I mean as I've said France and the UAE for example are cooperating very closely on a number of issues including in Libya also including in Eastern Mediterranean again with the issue of Turkey although perhaps Turkey-UAE relations are beginning to to to some extent but there has also been heavy UAE Saudi kind of interesting kind of strengthening security and economic ties with Greece and again this also brings in to some extent the normalization with Israel too I think we saw in the Libya case in North Africa how actually the North Africa context can become a sort of theater for competing in rival agendas supported by different Gulf and other Middle Eastern countries obviously Turkey cut out to some extent and versus France, Egypt, UAE and Russia in the Libyan context. Morocco Gulf relations have always been strong to the extent that they've been personal relations but again they've also varied in terms of different kind of countries there's never been a kind of unified I think for Morocco policy and again if there is greater Gulf interest in North Africa I think it although we have seen a kind of lessening of differences in the Gulf over the last couple of years and there's always a danger that they wouldn't always be on the same page in any kind of given context foreign of Africa as well and actually we could see divisions rather than a unified approach also kind of two sides about same coin. Great thank you very much I've got a broad question from Mohammed which I'm going to paraphrase and pose to all of you perhaps starting with you Hina. Mohammed essentially asks or essentially says that the only thing worse than being an enemy of the United States is being one of its allies. Do you think that's likely to be the case given other geo-strategic developments both in the region and more broadly globally certainly the Biden administration's increased seemingly increased interest in the age of Pacific. Do you think that the friendship with the US will become easier or harder over the shorter to medium term as I say Hina if you've any thoughts on that? I think it's a very politicized issue and we've seen how like let's say the limits of US engagements with domestic actors has been used by different components of the Iraqi political landscape to sort of like make the case that the US is not a reliable ally. Just like to illustrate for example there is a strong component of tribal of Sunni tribal forces within the Hashdashabi and for a lot of them the experience or let's say disappointments associated with the Safwa phenomenon has like let them or urged them to see protection but also like to see some form of a working relationship with the Hashdashabi forces and even in my personal interviews with a lot of them they have like maintained that brigades that naturally like have a stronger connection like to Iran naturally like have been enjoying like more privileges and more decision-making powers. So like this is just one illustration of the domestic politicization of this let's say sometimes ambivalent US approach to co-opting but also like to flirting with domestic actors. I think one of the weaknesses of this approach is like this prism of looking at domestic actors as potential proxies. So there is a bit of this bizarre mentality how do I find myself like the best or like the most constructive like proxy actor and it's not like how things function in in in Iraq. I once again like mentioned this transactional character of the Iraqi political system so even if if the US or like even if another foreign actor like seems to have some sort of a working relationship with one particular segment of the security sector it doesn't mean like that their relationship would not be subjected like to external shocks but also like to more agile preferences of certain paramilitary leaders. So this would be a bit of a recommendation for anyone like looking to to engage with Iraqi domestic political but also security actors and on a more positive note I think what we have what we have witnessed like recently with the Biden administration is that both Iraqi but also Saudi and Iranian actors like started overthinking their reliance or like their view on on the preponderance of having certain foreign alliances with the US. So currently like they're seeking more direct engagement and we've seen this like also in the last round of talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia facilitated by Iraq and also like in the framework of the New Mashra initiative by current Prime Minister Mustafa al-Qadami also attended by by President Macron which once again illustrates the stronger French role or at least like the appetite for a stronger role in the region. Do you want to take a swing at it Courtney? No I think I think that was quite a comprehensive answer so I think I'm okay. Anything to add Clive or Christian? I think there is sort of wider dynamic here with the United States we shouldn't forget I mean we there is this perception and I think in some ways very well grounded that there is this American retrenchment but I put it no more strongly than that. The Americans will remain it's in their own interest the Americans will remain a dominant power within within the region and I think it's worth noting for example that just last week when the Israeli foreign minister yeah Lapid was in Bahrain there was a very visible meeting between Lapid at the foreign minister Zayami and I cannot forget remember the name of the American Admiral but in front of the base of in front of the USS I think it was the Pearl Harbor the American the headquarters of the American Fifth Fleet in in Bahrain and it was a very visible demonstration of of if you like resolved that the Americans are still there to guarantee at least visibly a reassurance to the Bahrainism indeed to the other Gulf monarchies but I think behind the scenes there there is clear concern and I think one of the things that we need to take into consideration is the role of China Christian may say more than this but I think China offers something that the US and other Western powers cannot and that's ultimately an autocratic state-led development model that for many because of the lack of democracy and accountability may actually be very attractive to the gold stynastic rulers and I think we shouldn't forget that it's just building on that I mean my Gulf leaders point of view a lot of that economic and energy trade already goes east not west in terms of the economic relationships now that the Gulf states have they're kind of focused on Asia and Asia is the the markets of the 21st century so we are seeing to some extent a divergence between longer standing political and security and defense relationships which are still focused on Western partners and economic and energy interests which focus east as a whether or not that divergence can be sustained in the event major increase in China US tension would be I think something to watch I just think about the US relationship as well I mean one of the issues with the US is there are so many points of entry for that relationship to flourish I mean the US is not a monolithic entity that's the White House there's Congress there are 50 different states and one of the things the Saudis for example would be very good at is spreading arms agreements over multiple states so that you have a whole host of senators members of our congress who are rather vested interest in keeping open factories and other component supply chain parts I think one thing of Saudi is perhaps in the UAE to some extent maybe didn't factor in too much in 2017 with Trump was the relationship they have in the US is not necessarily underpinned by values anything like the same extent to other countries like Israel in the UK European countries have a relationship and that so that makes that relationship a bit more fragile because once you strip away the economic commercial strategic components there's not as much to underpin it although I would say that from a UAE point of view the UAE's signing of the normalization agreements last summer was a there's a master stroke in actually resetting the way the UAE is spoken about in Washington at least in official terms but to recasting the UAE however probably as a peacemaker at least in rhetoric from both political parties so that did illustrate the uh against the ways in which I mean the UAE was able to draw a distance between itself and Saudi Arabia whereas until 2019 Mohammed Salman Mohammed Zayed who often talked about his two peas in a pod and also distanced itself from from kind of back ash over Yemen which has largely been directly against the Saudis not the United States so in that respect it was a master stroke and very interesting to watch how that develops going forward thank you very much just to change focus slightly and this is a question we've got for for Courtney in terms of the the Muslim Brotherhood um there's obviously the the the CC regime has been very active in its campaign against the group but more recently events in Tunisia um the move against the Nader and the um overwhelming popularity of this amongst Tunisians um do would it be fair to say that the Muslim Brotherhood and its sort of fellow travelers that this is a downward curve in their influence popularity across the region at the moment or is it too small a sample size and too soon to say it's a good question I mean I think I think it has been kind of a downward slope for the Brotherhood since the fall of the Morsi government really in terms of having power and having a ton of visibility um that said the Brotherhood this isn't the first time that the Brotherhood has been in this kind of situation where it's been forced underground in a number of countries so I don't see it as as kind of the end of the Brotherhood or end of Islamism or anything of that nature um I do think that there we're seeing we're seeing more and more polarization about Sunni political Islam um you know not just in Tunisia um but also in places like Turkey um where there's you know kind of this this sense that you know where the where as a brother where the Brotherhood is certainly not underground there there is this polarization and and this sense that a lot of political agendas that are anti Brotherhood are are you know basing their agendas kind of solely on that in some senses um and so I think I think that when it comes to the Gulf in particular because Brotherhood movements there are not really needed to provide tangible support in the way they were needed in places like Egypt or Jordan traditionally um I think that it's easier for them to survive underground um and yeah I mean I don't expect them to disappear completely but I do think that this is a period when um they're seen as less threatening I think that post Arab Spring there was immediately right after the Arab Spring there there was a lot of fear about Islamist takeover in a lot of these countries um that hasn't happened um but there still is this very real fear of of the Brotherhood despite the fact that there aren't any Brotherhood-led you know governments in the region um so it's still I mean just but even when the Brotherhood is pushed underground it still affects political rhetoric uh and political agendas of other of secular movements and I think we'll continue to do so thank you very much um that was going to lead me to uh the final question we've got open but I think Ina has has very kindly addressed that with the chat so we can we can move move on or move on from that um I've got a question uh therefore in the chat box um which asks whether uh the extent to which um the Gulf States are cooperating in response to certain security concerns such as international terrorism civil war and refugee crises um there's been a lot of play made in the news recently about some of the divisions and tensions that exist between some of the states are they still as deep as as they have been or our relations between the GCC members and the proofing um and I I put that to Christian first of all but I'd welcome everybody's thoughts well thanks um the relationships are improving to the extent that the blockade of Qatar was lifted in January there was a reconciliation agreement signed Al Ghulah in Saudi Arabia and at least three of the four countries that had been part of the blockade Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia in Egypt have taken steps to actually work with the Qataris and working parties to address issues of difference Bahrain and Qatar have been less uh sort of move forward less perhaps I think the fact that this agreement has had specific tracks for each of the parties to address issues of bilateral concern separately from each other is a good sign I think the agreement of 2014 which ended the previous kind of rift in the Gulf one of the issues there was that there was was a sort of kind of take it and leave it I mean they'll they agreed and then just move on there was no sort of mechanism for coordination or follow-up whereas this time it does look as if there are working parties actually working to work through some of those issues um well I guess what we have seen on the other hand is in terms of Afghanistan we have seen obviously the Qataris taking the lead in terms of facilitating uh uh some refugee inflows from from Afghanistan then some processing for onward transfer to the US knows where we haven't necessarily seen any cooperation there we saw with the Ashraf Ghani moving to to the UAE we've seen the studies take a very low profile so we haven't yet seen any sort of cooperation in practice even though the tension has perhaps lessened at least for now anybody else like to offer any thoughts or we culminate it well I think with that we will call time that's a perfect time in fact on our panel um thank you very much thank you very much to each of our four speakers to Clyde, Christian Corny and Ina for your presentations at some point one of these social platform one of these conference platforms is going to provide canned applause and they probably already do if I had any I would play it um because I'm sure that's what everybody's doing back in their offices at home so thank you very much for your your papers and thoughts I'm going to hand over now to Sophia thank you John um and again I just like to offer my thanks to our final panelists for another really really interesting series of presentations I really learned a great deal and I'm sure the rest of our attendees did as well um I just wanted to offer some broader closing remarks to conclude this session and to draw the conference to a close um I'll keep them short and concise I'm sure everybody's quite tired after a long day looking at the screen so um essentially I've had an amazing day with 11 fantastic presentations which have been expertly chaired across three panels um just wanted to reflect briefly on the breadth and depth of our panels um and our speakers today we've discussed some very topical and timely challenges facing the region such as the climate emergency and the impact of digital repression women's rights and human rights as well as tracing the possible effects of the changing nature of Gulf Gulf security and transnational transitional geopolitical alliances um although each panel explored quite different types of questions pertinent to this region true to the title of this year's program conflict climate and civil society tracing instability challenges and change from Iran to the Gulf I think that a great deal of commonality actually flowed through into each panel um which is testament I think to the cross-cutting intersecting nature of the challenges that have been identified and the opportunities that remain this is very encouraging um as something that Mrs. Tawakal Kaman remarked on at the start of her keynote address this morning was that um our struggles are not isolated and that fighting human rights women's rights equality and democracy does not preclude fighting to protect the environment to protecting our freedoms and creating security and these comments have really stuck with me all day and have made me reflect on how we can harness each other's skill sets and subject matter expertise to focus on achieving some common goals as John mentioned at the beginning of this panel um panels one and two focus more on human security dynamics whereas panel three focus more on the traditional security tensions and regional orders nevertheless these complex security relationships are very much interlinked and connected to each other finding points of commonality is so important if we're able to better understand where existing tensions lie and where new threats would arise how to nurture and navigate fragile relationships and political tensions and to factor in the important impact of new actors and technologies in changing regional dynamics in doing so we are more likely to be able to join the dots between seemingly disparate issues across the region and to better understand how we can move forward to generate longer lasting peaceful and prosperous approaches to the various complex regional struggles that we've learned about today so now I want to turn to a series of thank yous again to our brilliant panelists and chairs across the day for three fantastic fascinating compelling and very successful sessions we were honored to have so many esteemed scholars practitioners and activists accept our invitation today to discuss their work with us and we've thoroughly enjoyed the presentations and the really lively discussions that have followed I know many of our panelists have dotted all around the world in the Middle East the US Central Europe and at various locations in the UK so a special thanks to those who had to get up extra early to do their presentations we really appreciate your time your commitment to this conference and I must also thank the participants for their great questions as well for keeping the conversation going and a special thank you and shout out to the Kings brilliant communications team for making this event happen who are absolute tech wizards their contribution has been key and core so a huge thank you to Lizzie and Daniel and their team for making that happen thank you to Kings and to War Studies for hosting this event hopefully this will be the sort of tail end of the zoom conferences and next year we can do something in person and it would be really lovely to meet some of you in in the flesh so hopefully with yeah the 2022 conference we might be somewhere on campus here together and thank you to the attendees for joining today one great thing if there is one great thing about the zoom conferences is that we can reach so many more people and we can connect to so many connecting more people within our community which is something that's very special and we have enjoyed doing over the last 18 months so that's been fantastic hosting all of you today as well and lastly just a very brief housekeeping note that if you have any further questions about the conference or if you want to get involved with the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in any way do email myself or Ahu or John our contact details are on the program or you can just google it and I'm sure all the information will be there for you and with that that's that's a wrap so thank you very much and all the best and hopefully see you sometime in the future