 My name is Ozan Tarapur. I am the South Asia Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. I'm here at the US Institute of Peace talking about the Quad, which is a grouping, an informal grouping, comprising four countries, the United States, Australia, India and Japan. So the Quad is an informal grouping that's intended to coordinate on regional policies in the Indo-Pacific. Originally it was founded as a response to a humanitarian disaster, the tsunami of 2004, but since then it was resuscitated in 2017 as a way essentially for the four countries to share their strategic assessments of what's happening in the region and then it really pivoted a little bit in 2021 with the advent of leader-level summits and continuing foreign minister meetings where they started to not only discuss what was happening in the region but to actually put forward a positive agenda of policy work, things that they wanted to deliver to the region that the four countries would coordinate on, what they often call international public goods. So everything initially from delivering COVID vaccines to people across the region to coordinating now on regulations for telecommunications technology and climate change etc. There are a couple of key actors or groups of actors that I think the most important in how the Quad does its business. The first is the states of the region across the Indo-Pacific and here I'm thinking mostly of countries in Southeast Asia, members of ASEAN who have greeted the Quad cautiously but so far without any significant resistance. You might expect a little bit of resistance because ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is a long-standing institution in the region that has really been the hub of regional institution building, regional political organization. When the Quad came along there was a sense that maybe it would seek to supplant ASEAN and so there's a degree of caution among ASEAN members about what the Quad is trying to do and where it will go, its trajectory but I think so far because the Quad has gone to great lengths to include ASEAN members in its deliberations and its discussions, those cautions have those sensitivities have been elade which leads me to the second main big non-Quad audience which is China. Now China has responded to the advent of the Quad initially by sort of dismissing it as a non-event as something that doesn't matter but also putting out a narrative that the Quad is there to provoke this security competition to introduce Cold War style thinking to the region, unhelpfully divide the region and that I think suggests to me that Beijing is actually concerned about what the Quad represents and what the Quad is doing. What it represents is a grouping of countries that are coordinating to put forward a vision of the region that is distinct from that is an alternative to China's vision of the region and I think that concerns Beijing. Part of the Quad's agenda does address security issues that are commonly regarded as non-traditional security issues so they for example will discuss maritime security in the form of illegal fishing for example or they will try and build maritime domain awareness so that countries across the region know what is happening in their exclusive economic zones etc. The Quad does do things that are I think security activities it's just important to understand that these are non-traditional security activities and things that are not traditional military activities that might suggest that there is an adversary. The Quad has been very careful to say that what it does as part of its agenda both at the leader level and the foreign minister level is about providing things security goods like maritime domain awareness that the whole region can use indivisibly.