 Good morning. My name is Lisa Grande and I'm the head of the United States Institute of Peace, which was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 as a national public institution committed to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict abroad. We would like to extend a very warm welcome to our panelists and to everyone who is able to join us today. What we hope to do in today's discussion is to explore an aspect of decarbonization in the transition to green economies that is looked at, but we would argue is not looked at enough. And that is the potential for conflict that is tied to that transition. As I think all of us know, the invasion of Russia, the Russia's invasion of Ukraine has raised many questions about the impact on energy markets because of actions that are taken by aggressor countries. We also know that in a number of countries that are oil producers, there are complex political arrangements and compacts that are in place that are certainly going to be impacted by the transition either into new forms of green economy or because of decarbonization itself. What we hope to do in today's meeting is to explore the many aspects of that crucial question. I'm very pleased to introduce Dr. Taken Blaine, who is the head of the Institute's Environment Conflict and Climate Program. Thank you so much, Lise, for opening our event today. And allow me to echo your welcome to everyone joining today's expert panel. We look forward to exploring together the topic of today's seminar, how decarbonization will affect peace processes and political settlements and fragile oil-producing states, but also why the learnings from this work are relevant both to the peace-building field and the climate change community working on a just transition to a global green economy. I do want to say a couple of words first about where this program comes from. The US Institute of Peace's grants program supports the research we will discuss today. Since its establishment in 1986, USIP's grant making has sought to seed and develop the international conflict resolution in peace-building field. Over the years, USIP has awarded some 2,300 grants to organizations and institutions in 46 states, the District of Columbia, and 90 countries. USIP grants have increased the breadth, depth, and reach of the Institute's work, and they have over the years leveraged millions of dollars in funding from other donors. This program has been a longtime supporter of projects focusing on the nexus of climate and conflict, having funded peace builders to work on research, dialogue, and capacity-building initiatives related to the environment since the early 1990s. Recognizing the growing importance that the environment plays in conflict zones where we work, USIP ran its first competition solely dedicated to environment conflict and peace-building in 2020, funding research that touches on nearly two dozen countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The projects include studying the effects of climate-induced displacement in Nigeria, supporting grassroots environmental peace-building movements in Northern Kenya, developing tools to more effectively monitor, evaluate, and learn from environmental peace-building efforts, just to name a few. The panelists here today from Tufts University and the World Peace Foundation were able to conduct this research as USIP grantees. I'd also like to extend a special word of recognition to my colleague Jeremy Moore for leading this grants program and overseeing many of these projects. This seminar also fits into USIP's program on climate, environment, and conflict, which was launched in 2021. The program focuses on three main thematic areas, migration and displacement related to climate and environmental change, transboundary waters in a changing climate, and a just transition to a global green economy. While the research being discussed today has important conclusions around peace processes and political settlements in fragile oil-producing countries, it also raises questions about how we support a peaceful transition away from fossil fuels in countries that have been highly dependent on their revenue. This is a topic I hope we can delve into more during the question and answer period and really get a good conversation going with many of you as participants. Now, with that background complete, I'd like to introduce our two speakers. Alex DeWall is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, where he is also a research professor. His academic work has probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV and AIDS, and governance in Africa and conflict in peace building. His latest book is Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine, and he is also the author of The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa. He's worked in very practical ways on peace building. He was seconded to the African Union Mediation Team for Darfur from 2005 to 2006 and also served as a senior advisor to the African Union's high-level implementation panel for Sudan from 2009 to 2011, where he took on several roles in the negotiations leading to the independence of South Sudan. Our second speaker, Aditya Sarkar, is a PhD researcher affiliated with the Fletcher School at Tufts, where his dissertation work focuses on the changing politics of claim-making by newly urbanizing populations in small towns in India with a broad interest in issues of informal work, migration and urbanization. He is also part of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, which is a seven-year research consortium led by the University of Edinburgh's Law School. Besides being a trained lawyer himself, Aditya has worked as an independent researcher with organizations such as the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, and the Open Society Foundations. Lastly, I'd like to recognize the contributions of a third main researcher on this project, although he couldn't be here today, Benjamin Spatz. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business, but he is currently on leave to serve in the U.S. government as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow, so we have him just down the road from us, even if he isn't able to participate in today's seminar. So that's a little bit about our speakers. Now, I'd like to begin the discussion today by asking both of our speakers a quick question to get us started. Alex, first off, what is the origin of this work and what led to your interest in decarbonization and political settlements? Well, first of all, it's really a pleasure to be with you and the World Peace Foundation has a quite well-established partnership with USIP. Our history goes back even further. We go back to 1910 when we were founded and we're really a part of the common shared interests and collaborations that we've managed to accomplish over the years. Getting to your question, the specific thing that stimulated our interest of this was in my previous job before I joined the World Peace Foundation when I was working with the African Union as a practitioner in the mediation, leading up to the independence of South Sudan in 2011, which is a topic, a country very close to the heart of your presidents and CEO of East Grande. Two things were very remarkable at that time. One was that with the separation of South Sudan, Sudan, the broader Sudan, the northern Sudan, lost 75% of its oil and almost all its foreign exchange earnings because of the secession of the oil rich south. And I was part of the team that engaged with the Sudanese technocrats, the minister of finance, the central bank about how they would manage this transition. And they had a number of ideas, but their political leadership just didn't have a clue. And then within a year of the independence of South Sudan, the South Sudanese shut off that oil production completely, which was a contributor to the civil war that broke out a year later. And so it struck me that this was going to be a much, much bigger issue across oil producing fragile states in Africa and elsewhere with the impending transition to a carbon free economy. And we coined this phrase, traumatic decarbonization. Thank you so much, Alex, for a little bit of that background. Aditya, I think Alex has primed you perfectly to explain what traumatic decarbonization means. Help us understand that term. Absolutely. And thanks again. I want to echo Alex and saying that it's an absolute pleasure to be here today. Thank you for having us and for letting us share some of the findings from our research. Now, what is traumatic decarbonization? Of course, to explain that we should look at the expression decarbonization, which usually refers to the replacement of fossil fuels with cleaner or non hydrocarbon based forms of energy, and such as renewable energy. This is obviously critically important for mitigating the worst impacts of climate change and for transitioning to a low carbon economy. Now, as the world decarbonizes, we would expect the demand for fossil fuels to decline over the medium term, not withstanding periodic spikes in oil prices, such as the one caused by the war in Ukraine. Now, decarbonization will also mean declining oil revenues for oil producing states. And this is important and at least referred to this in her opening remarks. This is important because in many countries, oil and gas revenues play a key role in politics. So some of these oil producing countries are relatively well prepared for the energy transition, others are not. And some of the countries which are especially ill prepared for the transition are those that we commonly call fragile countries which have weak institutions and are often wild. So in places such as South Sudan, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, political leaders, or almost all men, rely on oil revenues to control government and state, to buy elections to assemble political coalitions, control armies and militias, and to extend patronage to their allies. So in these countries, leaders and political elites are really focused on short term survival and not retaining power, and oil revenues are a critical component of these survival strategies. So the focus of our research, therefore, was traumatic decarbonization, which we used to refer to the sudden unplanned reduction of oil revenues in states, which are dependent on these oil revenues for their current political system. And they really began with the hypothesis that this type of decarbonization would have implications for stability, for violence, for peacemaking efforts, corruption, development outcomes, etc. And we tried to test it through six case studies and a couple of thematic papers. And the case studies really covered Sudan, South Sudan, Iraq, Nigeria, Ecuador, and Venezuela. And we had two thematic papers, one on sort of the energy transition more generally, and a second one on the effects of oil prices on peacemaking. And I should just end by acknowledging the work of fantastic researchers who did work on these papers. Shahla Alpli, Katrina Burgess, Javier Corales, Joshua Treys, Karun Gopala Krishnan, Jared Miller, Dubey Teed, and Yang Hospice. And of course, Ben Spatz, Alex, and I were also involved. Let me stop there. Thanks so much, Aditya. I really appreciate you bringing up the authors of all of the case studies that this work relies on. I also noticed you slip in something about the gender of many of the individuals controlling oil, which probably won't be a major topic of this particular seminar, but raised a question in my own mind. But anyway, I'll leave that for later. I have a chance to delve into the research a little bit. And again, Alex, I'll start with you first, if that's okay, and then move to Aditya. Alex, you've worked on politics in the marketplace for a long time, and I'm wondering whether you can help us understand how oil rents and decarbonization fit into this space. Let me explain where this framework of the political marketplace came from. And again, I'll put it in the context of my own experience as a practitioner, and then move on to pick up on the issues that Aditya has raised. So the political marketplace framework began as an ethnographic observation, really, as somebody who is a member of mediation teams, first of all, in Darfur, then North and South Sudan. And in the Darfur talks back in 2005, 2006, the Sudanese chief negotiator, the representative of the National Congress Party in Khartoum, he didn't see his job really as getting a beautiful piece of paper with signatures on the bottom. And fully committed to the sort of the all the array of measures in that would be called for for addressing the root causes of the conflict in Darfur. Now, he saw himself very explicitly as a trader in a marketplace. He was using what he called his political budget, which were the money that he was given by his boss, President Omar al-Bashir, which he didn't have to account for piece by piece. He had to buy up individuals from the rebel camp and also keep in line his own allies, his own militia in Darfur at the going rate. And the going rate went up and down, depending on a number of factors, supply and demand for the services of rebels, whether the Chadians and the Libyans and indeed the Americans were in this market as well. At that time Darfur, he said, was deregulated gangsterism. He wanted it to be a monopoly in which he was the monopoly buyer purchaser of these political services. So the theory really is one in which mercenarized transactional politics, that is bribery and coercion, is how real politics works. Briber isn't so much for personal enrichment, though that's an element. It's to allow the individual who is being bought himself and they are almost all men to bribe his own underlings to keep himself as a viable political business, a political concern. And this is how provincial governments in Sudan and a number of other countries has operated for decades. And when South Sudan got its independence, it liberated itself from northern Sudan, but it continued basically the same practice of real politics. Now the link to the carbon economy is very important, because Sudan became an oil exporter some 20, 22 years ago, and the oil revenues were channeled into political budgets from the state at the top, either directly through discretionary funds, or they were recycled through construction contracts and so on, which were massively over invoiced and the money then went into the party or the security budget. And it was oil revenues that made possible the comprehensive peace agreement of 2005 that ended that civil war. It brought the Rebels, the former Rebels, the SPLA, SPLM, into government. The SPLA traded its insurgency for a share of the money. And according to the comparative studies that we did, this seems to be a common feature. We can come back perhaps to the patterns of oil revenues and the types of conflicts and the types of peace that we see. But what we saw in the aftermath of the decarbonisation in the north because it lost its oil revenues in the south and the south because it shut down its oil revenues was very interesting. In the north, economic planners wanted to restructure the economy and shift to agriculture, but that wasn't actually what happened. What happened was that the politicians replaced oil revenues with revenue from gold. Gold is very different because gold is mined artisanally in small mines in the peripheries and therefore the control over that revenue belonged to the militia that controlled the places and controlled the mines and also controlled the smugglin. And the leaders of that, of those militia, who were former Janja Weed, the notorious staff for militia, were transformed into a group called the Rapid Support Forces headed by a commander called Muhammad Hemetti, became extremely powerful and indeed as powerful as the regular armed forces. And as the government in the center lost its revenues and lost its capability of keeping that political coalition at the center in power and was forced into inflationary financing in order to carry on paying for its political spending and also to buy the gold. The citizens of Khartoum and the central areas rose up in revolt and there were two revolutions going on at the same time. The ordinary people demanding an end to this autocratic keptocracy and these militia forces empowered by the shift from oil to gold demanding power too. So we saw a major change in northern Sudan and perhaps we could see similar scenarios elsewhere. This was one of our hypotheses which Aditya will address. Now South Sudan was even more dependent on oil revenue than the North, something like 95, 96% of its government revenue came from oil. And when it cut its oil production to zero in 2012, it expected this to be brief. It was not a long term. It was not planning for this to be a long term decarbonization, but it pretty much turned out that way. It has not managed to restore its production since. But and in the short term, it ran out of money, not just for making the government function, but also for these political payments, for the payments to the army in particular, which was a sort of coalition of different munition. So our first hypothesis was that this financial crunch caused the outbreak of South Sudan civil war in December 2013. And our researcher, Josh craze, investigated this and he found that there was an element of truth in this, but the reality actually was more complicated and more interesting in that the, the, the, the, the government of president Salva can actually then went back to long standing patterns of extraction and coercion and predation, abandoning his what he had hitherto had, which was a big tent policy of using all revenues to buy all these different rivalrous political factions into a government. So we saw a general disintegration of the, the, the cohesion of the government and that strategy and its replacement with a different and sadly rather more authoritarian, autocratic pattern of governments. And again, we this this pose is a pattern and a set of hypotheses about the links between decarbonization and conflict, which we begin to see in for in different forms elsewhere. Thank you so much. I don't think in spite of the fact that I've read your work that I had really fully understand some of, or fully understood some of these trends and how gold is so different than oil in terms of where it confers power and what that meant for kind of an ongoing set of events. Dita, tell us a little bit about what decarbonization changes about this story and what doesn't change. Can you give us a bit more detail there? Yeah, absolutely. And, and thanks Alex for sort of, again, being up my points quite nicely. And so I'm going to try and make four brief points, which is further in Q&A. But the first point is about the patterns of peacemaking and how they're associated with high and low oil prices. So our researcher, Jan Pospisil, worked on using peace agreements data and oil price data to try and understand whether there were correlations between oil prices and patterns of peacemaking since the 1990s. And he found about 54 peace processes since the 1990s, which were associated with conflicts in oil producing countries. Now that number is obviously too low for a credible statistical assessment, but he did have one key descriptive finding, which is useful in the flag term. Which is that periods of declining oil revenue are surprisingly associated with more peace agreements and periods of increasing oil revenue are actually associated with fewer peace agreements. Now that seems to fly in the face of our hypothesis, but that, that this quantity seems to be resolved if you look at the difference between the types of peace agreements which are signed at this time. Now, when there's higher oil prices, greater availability of oil money, what you see are fewer peace agreements, but those peace agreements tend to be comprehensive that they deal with a wide gamut of political issues. On the other hand, when you have lower oil prices, lower oil revenue, you see more ceasefires and many more ceasefires. So you have short term limited agreements instead of these larger oil encompassing peace agreements. Now this suggests that increased oil revenues allow for what Alex just called big dent patronage politics where almost all elites and contending groups can share in the revenue to some extent. On the other hand, lower oil revenues seem to be associated with greater bargaining and negotiation between elites, often violently and create a conflict and shorter term peace making efforts in the form of ceasefires. Now the second point which I want to make is that the rules of politics tend to stay the same after decarbonization, even though the relative balance of power between different elites and different elite groups might actually change. Now I'm going to divide this point into three sub points. The first is that when decarbonization causes rapid shortfalls in revenue, politicians look for alternate sources of revenue. They also make calculations about who needs to be paid off immediately, whose claims can actually be postponed for some time and which claims can either be denied completely or can be violently suppressed. Now some of the common tactics that they use to look for alternate sources of revenue or to increase availability of existing revenue is cutting spending on public goods and services, mortgaging future oil production for cash in hand, often at a large discount, turning to other forms of resource extraction. Alex just spoke about gold, but timber is another obvious example. They also indulge in rent seeking through activities such as trafficking of narcotics, smuggling, extortion and protection records. You also see simply a simple preying on populations through loot and plunder and land seizures, sometimes directly and sometimes by licensing of subordinate political plans. Now, I'll give you an example. Take the case of Nigeria where oil rents provide about 65 to 85% of overall government revenue and oil rents are a key element of Nigerian politics. So after prices for Nigerian crude dropped by about 75% in 2020, the government secured international loans to fund about 20% of the gap in the federal budget. Then, and despite calls for austerity measures, what was cut were actually health and welfare programs and this during a global pandemic, while budgets for zonal projects and state-owned enterprises actually increased. And these budgets for zonal projects and state-owned enterprises have historically been the way in which it needs access and distribute patronage rents. Now, the second sub point within this broader point is that there are key differences between temporary and permanent decarbonisation. In cases where revenue shortfalls are caused by fluctuations in global oil prices, politicians may seek short-term sources of finance, such as loans, as in the case of Nigeria. Also something we saw in the Iraq case. In other cases where the decline in oil revenue seems to be a longer term trend, there tends to be a more fundamental reorientation of the political economy. And the Venezuelan case is an excellent, excellent one for this. When there, the decline of oil rents was actually caused by mismanagement and underinvestment and predated the global drop in oil prices. Nonetheless, when oil prices fell in 2014-16, it compounded an existing macroeconomic crisis. And the Venezuelan president responded by resorting force to repression, but also by expanding the role of the military in economic activity, especially mining. So the Orinoco Mining Arc, which is a mining zone rich in gold, copper and iron, among other minerals, was opened up for strategic development and the military was given special powers to manage the zone. Illegal mining sites mushroomed, drug trafficking flourished and revenues from both were channeled to ruling elites. So in effect, the regime turned to this complex web of extraction, transportation and bribery involving artisanal miners, gangs and guerrillas, members of the military, as high-ranking government officials to generate revenue. The third sub-point within this point is that as a result of these strategies, alliances tend to shift and there are clear winners and losers, but the rules of politics don't change. Rarely do you see a move away from transactional politics to more institutionalized political systems. Now, to go back to the main points I was making, the third point I wanted to make is that decarbonization in almost all our cases was associated with the immiseration of the population. Now, what I mean by this is that decarbonization is usually the catalyst. It is not the sole cause of economic distress, but in all our cases, the decline in oil rents caused budgetary shortfalls and precipitated macroeconomic crisis. In these countries, which we were looking at, and even at their most benign, elites had little incentive to provide public goods or undertake welfare enhancing economic reforms. And again, it off our cases may be Ecuador and perhaps to an extent Venezuela somewhat different, but with the general rule holds true. So in general, and even before decarbonization, the overarching political economy in many of these countries was already heavily skewed against most of the population. After decarbonization, and in every case other than Ecuador, governments either ignored the crisis or exacerbated it through their efforts to find alternate sources of revenue and rent and through the often violent methods that they used to extract that rent. Maybe in the interest of time and then skip over this, skip over giving an example, and I'll come back to this in the Q&A if that's if that's of interest. I'll come to my final point, which is about off ramps. I mean, do the cases that we studied, they tell us anything about how decarbonization can be associated with moving away from transactional politics. And I think the evidence for that is somewhat mixed. In most of our cases, there was some form of large scale nonviolent protests during or after decarbonization. And the protests followed a fairly well established pattern. They were sparked by material issues, usually price of bread, unemployment, lack of electricity, especially in Iraq during the summer months. And then they expanded to demand broader systemic change, but they didn't always result in substantive change. So Iraq is an excellent example. Iraq's historic levels of protests in October 2019 against production, economic decline and endless cycles of conflict actually ended in repression and elite retrenchment. The elite actually strengthened their grip on power. In some cases, security forces opened fire on protesters, killing and wounding people. But political parties in militia also carried out targeted assassinations, detention, torture and intimidation of civil society and activists. And this was carried out with impunity. And as a result, the sort of protests were curtailed pretty rapidly. Sudan is a similar case and Alex touched on this because there the military has been able to strengthen its grip on power over the few couple of years after the revolution. And this despite widespread and continued courageous civilian protests. The only counter example that we actually found was in Ecuador, where mass political agitation, especially by indigenous groups, labor organizations and anti-tax demonstrators did play a significant role in fueling a split within the ruling party and subsequently in ensuring that President Rafael Correa did not seek re-election in 2017. But the Ecuadorian political system is also something which is a little bit more institutionalized than many of the other cases that we saw. And the military plays a more limited role in politics. So the extent to which we can sort of extend these findings from Ecuador to other cases is an open question. That said, what we do know is that mass widespread nonviolent protests seem to be the only way in which the needle can shift at all. So let me stop there and again, as I said, happy to come back to any of these in the Q&A. Many, many really important points there, Aditya. And I do hope that we will get into some of these issues a little bit more in depth in the discussion. For everybody who's online, please feel free to begin submitting questions through the question box on the screen in front of you. I will be passing those on to the speakers and so start writing down anything that you'd like to discuss. I'm at least going to throw out one question to get us started, which is near and dear to my heart, and that's about climate change. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change actively encourages decarbonization. And as we move towards a global green economy that will help limit climate change, we're probably going to be under increased pressure to see decarbonization around the world. Depending on how rapidly this transition takes place, it is probably going to result in significant changes in oil and gas prices and sales. And yet I don't think that the climate change community has really wrestled yet with what these changes actually mean for politics and stability in fragile and oil producing countries, as well as the implications for their neighbors. And Aditya, in particular, you're talking about some of the social and economic ramifications for some of the people who are least able to cope with these kinds of changes, too. But I guess my question really is, what do you think that the climate change community should really take away from your work to guide international action around the transition to a global green economy? Perhaps Alex, I'll start with you, but Aditya, if you want to add to it as well, I'd appreciate both of your thoughts. Thank you. That's a big and challenging question. And let me start with a general response. And then a couple of specific points. The general one is we all want to see this global energy transition. All of us in this community want to see it. But this green energy climate crisis response community has been fighting an epochal battle in the global policy sphere to get the world's most senior policymakers to acknowledge the evidence, accept the analysis, and put in place global institutions. And international economic incentives to make it possible to decarbonize. And that is, that has been a monumental struggle. What I'm afraid are rather depressing message from this is you can succeed in that struggle, but there's another battle. There's another arena in which the struggle needs to be continued and one in which we are rather ill prepared to fight. And this is the arena of transactional or quotes real politics. So for the transactional politician, the player in the house of cards, if you like, none of these policies and institutions really matter or to be more precise. They matter only insofar as they provide assets, opportunities or obstacles to them to continue playing their game. They're not really interested in those public goods and they may actually ironically have entered politics with an interest in public goods. But the rules of the political market in these countries mean that if you cannot compete with others who are more ruthless, more cynical players, who are interested only in power, you are simply not going to survive. So we need to understand how this arena of real politics operates. It's incentives, it's mechanisms. And I think the political marketplace framework is actually a pretty good framework for getting to grips with what is happening. So I think the general point is we need to sit together. Those of us who work in this studying this rather disagreeable set of political realities and practices, people who study corruption and violence and so on with the climate change folks and see how we build those alliances and common approaches. And let me highlight two issues, specific issues that come up. One that actually Aditya alluded to, which is that under the pressure of loss of carbon revenues, a ruling elite in a government may turn to an alternative resource such as timber. So we might see actually something even worse, which is, for example, massive deforestation for timber or for turning tropical forests, wetlands into intensive agriculture, which just in order to fulfill those short term political budgetary needs. And I think we need to pay attention to that and how to align the incentives. The other is looking at the peacemaking community because what we, building on the points that Aditya was making about the way in which what we see is when oil prices are high, we see more comprehensive agreements. When oil prices are low, we see sort of scattered ceasefire and small bargains being made. What does it mean to try and make peace in countries where that central authority that has a major source of revenue that it is using for this Big Ten politics, when you can't do this Big Ten politics, when we get a shift, if you like, to a more Hobbesian state of a war of all against all. And we're terribly bad at actually designing and implementing peace processes in this kind of environment. It's something that we urgently need to bring our focus, our energy, our analysis to. Those are really a couple of really good points, Alex. Number one, about where countries will move to in terms of recovering the lost oil revenues and the risks from a climate perspective. But also this question about what this means about how we work on peace processes and the really significant risks there as we see political systems move in different directions. Aditya, would you like to add anything to the question about what the climate change community should learn from your work? I suppose it's a fairly common place and fairly self-evident observation, which is to extend Alex's point that climate change, the community that is working actively on climate change needs to look beyond sort of the specific contours of the transition itself to assess the implications of decarbonisation. And I think that is quite a key point. And the second point, which is around time horizons, because I think one of the things that climate change community is working with is a sort of short to medium term, in the sense that these changes are urgent, they need to happen immediately. But obviously, they will take a medium term sort of period of time to play out, whereas many of the political leaders that we are talking about are only focused on the day-to-day survival that this creates a sort of disjunct, if you will, between the time scales that the different groups are working with. And I think that, and I'm not sure that there is an obvious way of responding to that, but being aware of it is important enough, et cetera. I think that's two of my points. Yeah, very much so. You know, there was another question that had come in, just as we were beginning this conversation, specifically about the role that, or how we think about the next conference of parties president for the UN negotiations on climate change being Sultan al-Jabbar, and I'm not sure that I'm pronouncing his name correctly, so apologies. And, you know, what that actually means for how we address these kinds of issues in the short term. And then also how this fits into strategic competition around this transition to green technologies. Is this a question that either of you feel able to take on in terms of the current politics around the climate change negotiations and kind of how we address these issues at COP when we're also dealing with controversies around COP leadership? Let me make some points that are a little, perhaps a little bit oblique to the central question about the venue of the forthcoming COP in the Gulf, which are to do with the role of the Gulf states' foreign policies, particularly in the more adjacent areas of developing countries, which the area I'm familiar with is the Horn, but also more widely. And there are two elements to this that I think need to be, that are very relevant to this discussion. The first is that the Gulf monarchies obviously are highly reliant on carbon rents, but they are in a position where they can go through planned non-traumatic decarbonisation. They have the money to look ahead. Part of their strategy for doing that is diversification and particularly diversification of investments on issues to do with food security, because they are obviously food importers and they want to secure the food supply chains. And this involves major investments in land and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. And there are major issues that arise about the social equity, sustainable development, but also the carbon development. So they may be going through a process of planned decarbonisation that is certainly meeting their needs and meeting the broader needs of the shift out of a carbon economy, but they may be shifting the burden, some of the burdens to countries that are less able to cope. And the other element to this is if we take the model of the political market and monetise transactional politics, the foreign and security policies of the Gulf monarchies are the apogee of this. This is how they conduct their business across the greater Middle East and across Africa. They give massive cash handouts for the political alignment and loyalties of elites across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. They are, let me be candid, profoundly corrupt and corrupting. And if we want to see the decarbonisation of fragile oil producers resulting in a lessening of corruption, a lessening of transactional politics, we need these rulers to change their business model quite radically. The point that you make about how the oil revenues have been a resource for diplomatic actions is a really interesting one. Thank you so much, Alex. Yeah, I was going to sort of jump in and just say something about, again, a point that's complete. It's not directly addressing the question about strategic competition around green technologies. But I think it's useful to step back and think about the role that oil plays in very different political systems. And I think we can sort of broadly think of three categories. Obviously, there's overlap and strategies between categories. But we can think of oil producing states as being those which are stable with diversified economy. So you have, for example, United States, Canada, Norway, United Kingdom, et cetera, that's falling into that category. I mean, that is probably where Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil might also fit, even if that fit is not quite as perfect. You can think of places where there's a political settlement which is based entirely on carbon. Sometimes authoritarian and the state society compact is based on channeling oil revenues to the population in the form of economic benefits. So I mean, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and in the past perhaps Iraq, Libya and Venezuela might have also fallen into this category. And the final is one for the lack of a better expression, which we are calling carbon-related political unsettlements. I mean, where hydrocarbon reserves are being exploited in an institutionally fragmented political system. So it's not that it is the exploitation which is triggering conflict, but it does shape the landscape of conflict. And I think in thinking about these questions, for example, strategic competition, et cetera, green technologies, it's worthwhile thinking about which level of country that question falls into. And again, obviously, as I said, there are overlaps and it's not a perfect classification by any means, but yeah, just to say that. Now your final point about which level of country we're talking about and how fragile those countries are or how stable those countries are and their resilience within those various political systems to absorb changes is really critical. We have a question that might turn us in a slightly different direction. And this is about some of the toxic legacies of the oil of oil production in many countries. International oil companies divestments are accelerating in Nigeria without steps to address some of these toxic legacies such as pollution, division, et cetera. Do you have any suggestions of international policy interventions to learn from? And if not, what should this divestment look like? That's a fascinating question and really not one that we have really reflected upon. Am I wrong? Perhaps you have something to add, but I think that there's an interesting agenda here, which is of course decarbonisation means that oil companies are not going to be making money. So who, of course, they have accrued enormous gigantic profits over the years, but who should be liable for this cleaning up the mess? And is this something that comes within the loss, under the loss and damage heading that has been raised as an agenda item at the last, well, previous cops, but at least some progress was made recently? I don't have an answer to that, but I think it's an agenda item to be pursued. Aditya, any thoughts? I know this is part one given where your research has focused. Yeah, no, I think Alex has summed it up quite nicely. I think it's also worth thinking about, I mean, just to sort of tack on to it without answering the question, really, because I don't have a pure answer. It is to say that the divestment of Western oil companies doesn't necessarily mean that oil production is going down. It doesn't also mean that newer companies which are stepping in to replace those are producing oil in a cleaner or environmentally sustainable way. We just suggest that we just say that the legacies of environmental damage are likely to continue as long as oil remains central to the political system of these countries. And in fact, Nigeria has plans to expand its oil production and gas production in particular, I believe. So I think that this question is extraordinarily important, but I don't have an answer for it. It is really important, and I understand not having any answer to it. But just from the climate perspective, I'm not sure that it really fits in in the loss and damage area, but it's something that we need to think about. It's really hard, especially from an equity issue and from the ability to help support local populations, especially in countries where social and economic investment has not been a priority. It's certainly something that I think the global community should be considering more as these companies walk away from investments that are leaving permanent damages behind. You know, for the next question and perhaps this is the last or the second to last, I wanted to turn for a moment to fragile countries and how we think about support for weak states. How do we account for the impact of a green transition in how we think about addressing fragility and thinking about supporting fragile countries in developing stronger political systems and more stability. A couple of points here. One is that we have been pursuing, particularly over the last 25 years, a whole array of sort of state building measures in countries from South Sudan to Afghanistan, etc. But many of them have been not very successful. And probably the number one reason for for for their failure is that the places where most effort has been put. It's been in the shadow of the war on terror and counterinsurgency. So the militarization of the state building agenda has undermined its intrinsic values and its and its promise. But the also it is this agenda has often been pursued without attention to the ways in which the national elites are very much focused upon on day to day survival, particularly countries that have been through major crises and meltdowns in which state authority has hung on only very tenuous so that those who are in power. There's been a process of selection of those who are successful politicians for those who are skilled at remaining in power other than those who are delivering public goods. And I think the the the element of success, if we look in in sub Saharan Africa that we've had has been one in which the the norms and principles enshrined by the African Union in its formative period of about 20 years ago when the Africans made a common commitment to democracy and human rights and peace building that delivered something. Unfortunately, we're in retreat from that at the moment because of the the breakdown in the multilateral order. The Trump administration and the current global rival rates. So there is a huge agenda sort of new agenda for peace that I think needs to be reanimated and I know there are people including the the UN Secretary General who are thinking along these lines. And I add something to that and I think just to say that support for green transitions in fragile countries and again, sort of the slightly off the cuff, but support for green transitions in fragile countries may not actually involve direct support to the green transition itself. It may involve support to to groups which are dealing with the most immediate impacts of that kind of transition or the toxic legacies of that off of carbonization and decarbonization. It may involve, for example, supporting civil society to successfully challenge the kinds of politics, the kinds of transactional politics which have already been put in place and and that might in fact be the most successful way if oblique of supporting green transition. That's a very difficult thing to do. And it's extraordinarily difficult, especially because in these political systems, there's always the possibility of unintended negative consequences, but but yeah, there there, therein lies the challenge. Thank you so much. And I apologize, but we're going to have to wrap up just as I'm beginning to see a couple more questions coming in. However, I hope that many of you have enjoyed today's discussion and perhaps would be able to follow up individually with the others if you follow up questions. Just last point, one question came in asking about where they can see more of this work being published. And I just wanted to say that a short article was published several months ago on usip.org. You can search for decarbonization and you'll find that short piece, but we are also hoping to publish a paper with Alex and Aditya and other authors in the next few months at usip. Alex or Aditya, can you say anything more about where some of this work and is particularly perhaps the case studies are being published. We could be putting up this a lot of this material on our own World Peace Foundation website and we're hoping to to have an academic publication which of course will take some months longer. It speaks to how new this work is and how much it's very much a field that is in development rather than being very established but it's one of the reasons that I really appreciate the opportunity to speak about your work today. Many thanks to both of you as speakers, in spite of the fact that I've had the opportunity to read some of your work and so on, I still learned from hearing it discussed here, and I appreciate your willingness to take on a couple of questions slightly out of the original topic area. For all the listeners out there, I hope that you greatly appreciated the discussion with Alex and Aditya today, apologies, I'm stumbling over words. We are hoping to continue having a series of conversations about the transition to the global green economy, and this is just one kind of early piece in what we hope will become a series. So thank you very much to both our speakers and all the participants today, and we wish you a great rest of your day. Thank you very much.