 All right, wonderful. Well, thanks everyone for being with us, and thanks Stefano for the introduction, and a particular thanks to the four presenters for giving us four really rich and interesting presentations. I've got the daunting task of in 10 minutes trying to sort of bring this all together into a single coherent discussion. So I'll do my best, but there was just so much in all four of these presentations that we obviously have a lot to get through. So I think, I mean, in some ways, all four of these projects are addressing a kind of timeless question, which is why do protests occur? Why does mobilization occur? But they're doing so in really interesting ways because they're asking this question in the sort of current contemporary historical moment, and putting that question into a global context. So we're living in this moment where protest appears to be on the rise over the last decade. Zakaria sort of alluded to this in the present others as well. Now we need to be a little bit careful about sort of making big conclusions about global trends. Some of the data that suggests protests is on the wife has some biases and problems, some frequency biases, but we're seeing this now across enough data sets and in enough different, it's operationalized in enough different ways that we can probably say conclusively that we're living in a global moment where protest is really at quite a high level. Well, it's not say unprecedented, but it is a sort of a moment in which protest seems to be dominating and across the world in a variety of different contexts and regions. And so these papers are sort of interrogating this question of why protest emerges in light of the various things that are going on around the world. So COVID-19, obviously a major factor, particularly in the first paper, economic changes, neoliberalism, and the changing nature of the global economy, democratic backsliding and populism. So how are these forces, which we're all very attuned to, how are they shaping dynamics of protest and changing the way in which mobilization occurs? So questions of why protest occurs, but also what form is it taking and how is that different than in earlier eras? And then what kinds of impacts is it having? Are the kinds of questions that these papers are dealing with and I think are really exciting. So I've got some suggestions and thoughts for the four authors. I'm gonna deal actually with the first paper by Mortorano and All and then the third paper on Iraq together because they both take a grievance approach to looking at protest. And I've got some thoughts about that. And then I'm gonna look at Zakaria and Alcindus papers because they're both dealing with the question of protest in Africa. So on the first two papers, because protest is a timeless question and it's been studied for so long, sometimes it's sort of difficult to deal with all of the existing arguments and literature that are out there. And I think both papers cited the original Ted Gur relative deprivation thesis as motivation and are really building on that thesis. I think it's important for both of these papers to think about some of the literature that's come between Gur's thesis and what we're dealing with today because for a long time grievance-based arguments really went out of fashion in social movement studies. And the reason that they went out of fashion is because people kind of made the argument that the correlation between where you see either absolute levels of grievances or relative levels of grievances, which was Gur's original point, the correlations with protest actually weren't very high. And so people came in, social movement scholars came in and they said, well, grievances are important, but they're not the only thing. You actually need a lot of other things to make protest happen. You need resources, you need organizations, you need networks, right? We have the classic menk or also in collective action problem that needs to be solved. So grievances are necessary, it was pointed out, but they're not sufficient for protest to occur. And I think both of these papers could do a little bit more to think about those kinds of critiques of the original grievances argument. Now I think actually recently we've been seeing a resurgence of grievance-based explanations for protest. So in that sense, both of the papers, I think maybe are part of a new wave or a new trend. But I do think for both of them that they need to think a little bit about what these other aspects of mobilization that a whole generation of scholars have pointed out are really important. So for the Francesco and co-authors paper on the United States and COVID-19, I think it's particularly important to think about the collective action problem and these sort of organizational dynamics of protest because we're talking about protest in the context of a pandemic. When organization presumably should be very difficult to accomplish. So I think the idea that grievances around inequalities and lockdowns could be behind these protests is compelling, but there's more work to be done and explaining to us how these protests came about and what the organizational basis for creating this mobilization really was in these counties that you're looking at. Another small question for that paper is to think a little bit about, well, and I wonder if the data actually exists for this. I think it might, because I think you're using a version of the ACLA data set to look at this, but are the protests actually about inequality and about COVID, right? Because if thinking about, you know, having lived through COVID in the United States and seen a lot of protests in the places I was living and others as well, a lot of the protests that took place actually weren't about COVID. So we had the Black Lives Matter movement taking place in the summer of 2020. And so I wonder if you can sort of get used maybe demands variables in the protest data that you have to get under a little bit. What are these protests really about? Because even if they're taking place in unequal neighborhoods and unequal counties, it's not necessarily the case that they would be about COVID specifically. So I'd like to maybe hear more about that if you have the data to answer that question. With Dan's presentation, I'm super interested in this paper. I'm doing research on Iraq and the T-Strength data myself. So this was very exciting. Couple of small questions in addition to the one I already mentioned about mobilization and organization. Is there a question on protest participation? I would love to see the same analysis on who participated in protest, not just who supports protest, potentially sort of a higher threshold, right? And maybe something interesting, you know, security I would imagine would play into that dynamic as well. I also think, again, getting back to this idea of sort of needing to engage with prior scholarship. I mean, one of the longest standing findings in the social movements literature is that the most agree to do not actually protest. And I think you're contributing to that and your findings align with that. But interestingly, most of those studies are about material deprivation. And so your paper comes in and brings security into the picture in a really interesting way. And so I would bring that out more, right? And I think in that way, you're actually adding something new to what is kind of a pretty well-established finding in the field. Okay, let me turn to the two papers that deal with the question of protest in Africa. And actually, there were some interesting ways in which these two presentations overlapped, which I thought was kind of exciting. Both of them are grappling with this recent protest wave that we've been seeing in Africa over the last decade. Both of them are grappling with the question of how the nature of protest during this wave is different, right? And I think there's some synergies between some of the conclusions you both are finding. These protests have been more horizontal. They have embraced deliberately in some cases a decentralized model of organization. They have eschewed formal politics, right? Alcindor talked a lot about how there's a sort of disdain for formal politics in these protest movements. And in some ways, both of these presentations reminded me a bit of the work of Asif Bayat and the concept of revolution, which he puts forward as an alternative to the sort of classic model of revolution. And I see both of these pieces of work as sort of in some ways building on those concepts and ideas. Alcindor's presentation brings up a really important problem with this type of mobilization. And this is a problem that we saw, of course, during the Arab Spring, which are a set of cases that I know quite well, which is what happens when these horizontally organized social movements actually achieve success and take power, right? What do they do with that power? Because there's an internal contradiction built into these movements, which is that by sort of treating the political realm as corrupt and as something that should be disdained, they end up with a major problem when they actually achieve their success and come to power and have to do the hard work of governing and engaging in politics and how to do that while maintaining the same set of principles. I think the jury is still out on how this works and I think Alcindor raised some really provocative ideas from some of the cases she talked about about how this might work successfully. I have some concerns with Tunisia as a case of success or a case that bears this model out as sort of showing that it can work. I think that the recent turn of events in Tunisia demonstrates really that there's some ways in which this type of politics can be co-opted for autocratic ends and shows really the limitations of this type of horizontal organizing when it comes to actually engaging in formal politics. So I would kind of chalk that case up as more sort of an example of this type of mobilization sort of failing. I think that the autocratic turn, or Kaïs Said is a really problematic turn of events and I think that, so we're still waiting, I think to see some good success stories of how this form of mobilization can bring about really substantial and transformative politics. I'm really excited by Zakari's presentation and it sounds like maybe a book. It seems like it has that level of scope. It is an impressive, the level of the kind of questions you're dealing with are very impressive. I guess one suggestion I have is, in classic comparative politics mode, thinking more about variation, even that economist map that you put up, there are some white countries there where we don't see a lot of protest. So why are we seeing protest at such a high level in some countries of Africa and not in other countries? And maybe looking at that cross-national variation, sounds like maybe you're already thinking about sub-national variation, which I think is great, but thinking a little bit about the cross-national variation there can get us towards some answers to these big questions you're posing. And then a question for both papers is to think a little more about regime type. And Zakari, I talked a little bit about this in your explanation, the failures of democracy in Africa since the 1990s, but the cases you're bringing up are cases of autocracy and democracy. And we seem to be seeing protest across both sets of cases. My sense is the dynamics of protest differ a lot between autocracies in Africa and democracies in Africa. And so I wonder if, can we get a single explanation account for both of those? Are there some differences in the nature of mobilization depending on regime type? I think that would be an interesting question to wrestle with. Certainly your argument about the failure of political parties works well for explaining protest in the democracies of the continent, but not so well for the autocracies, right? So I would push you on that a little bit. Same thing for Alcindor, how does the arguments that you're working through differ according to the regime type? And I think I'll leave it at that as we have 15 minutes left for Q&A. Thanks so much. Thank you, Gillian. Thank you for your comments and thank you for your perfect timing. Is it possible to have Alcindor on the big screen so that we don't forget about her or at least if she wants to join us and participate? So yes, do you want to move there so that you can actually face the audience? I'll stay here and direct the traffic. Yes, I already see a couple of hands. One there, two in the back. Yeah, we can start here. Yeah, yeah, okay. Hello. Thanks for these interesting presentations. My question is for Francisco and I'm Philip Verbin from the University of Libre de Brucell. Francisco, I didn't understand how inequality was measured. I assume it's measured at the county level and probably you have an income measure or a consumption measure. And so I was wondering if communities or counties are very, very poor, but they're not unequal. Let's say everybody is poor. Do they then turn up in your analysis because it may be that they're just very poor but not unequal. And then I would expect nevertheless a high level of protest because at a national level, they may be at the bottom end of inequality, but you don't see it within county because the majority of everybody is poor. So can you comment on that? Thank you. Yes, and there were two hands in the back. Okay. Tom Dierkes, I'm with the University of Basel and Swiss Peas. I have a question for Zach Manpilli on, because you talked about social movements and protest and the global order, obviously. Now I was wondering if you think about your other work on rebel groups. There I think there's quite a lot of literature that looks at the links between rebel groups and foreign powers. So during the Cold War, in the post-Cold War period where rebel groups would use certain language or be it Marxist, be it liberal to get support. And so you could say that maybe there was quite a clear relationship between what these groups were doing and this global order. Now, how would that work with the protest movements you describe? Like who can they go to? Or is this more a sort of abstract thing where we see economic conditions change and there is some sort of response to that but maybe not such a clear link as with the rebel groups that you looked at. Yeah. Yeah, I'm Darrell Sequerel. I have a question as regards how the authorities should react against a protest which is unjustified. For example, those who protest against vaccination against corona, thereby endangering innocent individuals who want to protect themselves against getting infected. Another example would be a protest where a group of people want to convert land into human use and destroy a rainforest for example that would lead to a long-term decline in their development but a short-term advantage. So here we have the need for specialized technical analysis of these issues and decisions based on those scientific technical analysis. Now, how does one deal with sort of shall we say, uninformed protesters who are short-term in their approach maybe have vested interest or are instigated by other parties to protest and are really unjustified in their protest? Thank you very much for your very interesting and motivating presentations as well. My name is Irmeli Mustolahti. I work with the University of Eastern Finland and especially I was very happy that you were raising up this issue relation to elite of civil society. And we are in our own research, we talk about suitcase and briefcase NGOs and also these type of advocacy organizations. And for example, this case which you were having a pictures from Tuara, from Tanzania, you don't really see these type of elite civil society or these so-called briefcase or suitcase NGOs there in the streets but there is the young men, young ladies who are so-called responsible sized to actually in those protest and movements. So how you see this type of NGOs which often are actually financed by donor aid who are rather the responsibleizing the youth to actually in this protest. Yeah, do you want to reply to the first round of questions or do you want to collect more? Please. We have some specific questions, other questions we are directed to all of you. Well, thank you for the questions actually before moving to Philip's question. I just wanted to mention something about what Kilian raised before and you are actually very right in discussing about which type of protest we are analyzing and we had this question too. And that's why I tried to mention but I didn't specify in the presentation that we actually look at COVID related protests. So protests that have COVID as their main topic and to compare with other types of protests we checked for 2020 year in which Black Lives Matter protests were very relevant actually the majority of protests in the US and there were also protests related to the elections to check if these stringency, this interaction between stringency of the measures and inequality affects also those protests and we interestingly find that it doesn't. So it does not have an impact on protests related to Black Lives Matter or to the elections, presidential elections, but it does only relate to COVID related protests. So just to, and with regards to inequality the question from Philip, yes indeed that it is income inequality and it's a genico-efficient from 2019 for each county and but you are very right in very poor counties this might be a problem because they might protest as well so that's why we also tried with the measure of poverty and interestingly found that there is no really a big impact of poverty on protest participation. Now the reason for this, it might be complicated actually what might be again from a net total evidence there is some scientific evidence on the fact that for example inequality increased after the 1980 Spanish influenza because the lower bracket lost most of their income so also an increase in poverty. So in that case inequality and poverty went hand in hand. Well in this case maybe the increase in inequality is due to richer households getting richer thanks to or as a consequence of the pandemic maybe this could be a justification. However, I agree with you that we could explore a bit more this element of the analysis. Thank you, I can leave the floor. Yeah, thank you, great questions. Let me take these, well let me start with the question about unruly protests and protests that are articulating agendas that we may not be comfortable with. And I think the question I would ask is how much do you believe in democracy? And if you believe in democracy then you have to accept that there are people who have views that are anathema to us. I don't want to romanticize protest. I don't want to romanticize activism. The groups that I'm interested in can as easily espouse agendas associated with the left of which I'm a part of as they can with the right, right? And that's just a reality but I tend to support protests because I tend to believe in democracy and I think that the nature of electoralism that has been implemented in African countries and across the world I would say has really reduced our capacity for choice, right? I'm an American citizen. I feel like I have no choice in the political process. And so I participate in protests because at least I can find a way to express myself democratically. Even if there are views that the political parties are not going to champion ever, right? And so I think it's important that to me as somebody who believes in democracy that we accept that protests may articulate things that we don't like but they should be allowed to move forward, right? And that may differ if you don't think democracy is desirable and I certainly respect that position as well. To the more specific questions, you know, I think the question of internationalism is hugely important here, right? And I think my work on violent groups deeply informs my work on social movements, right? Because I think increasingly I'm not convinced there's a divide between the two. I think the divide between violent and nonviolent activism is largely an artifact of government preferences, right? What I have seen is that with the groups that I study people move between these two forms of activism not based on any sort of moral agenda which is how we often frame it, right? But rather on tactical or strategic ones. So I know personally people who have participated in violent groups who then become nonviolent activists and back and forth, right? And their decision to participate in one or the other is not, as it's often framed, the result of their personal moral rectitude but rather the context in which they're operating at a particular moment and their calculation both individual and whether or not violent or nonviolent activism is warranted in that given moment, right? And so I'm more interested in the synthesis that tries to bring together these two analyses. In the social sciences at least in the West we have a field of conflict studies and then we have a field of nonviolent social movement studies. And I think that division is increasingly nonsensical, right? So to the question of internationalism I think if we look at it historically, right? Part of what I'm trying to do here is to think back to earlier periods of global disruption. So the last time we had these major waves of global uprisings, 1940s, right? In the context of the anti-colonial struggles. The 1980s and 90s in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, right? Are we living through a similar period today? Now of course I think to come to the Killian's points that makes it difficult, it's hard to assess in the moment whether we're living through a similar period of global disruption but I have a sense that maybe we are, right? And that necessitates a global response. It necessitates coordination across borders and we have not seen to the extent that existed in the 1940s and in the 1980s and 90s the same level of coordination across borders. I think in the African context it's starting to emerge. There's a very interesting network called the Afriki Network which has tried to bring together many of the leading social movements in Africa. You know, I have worked with them. I've tried to get funding for them. I have failed to do that because foundations don't want to support social movements, right? They prefer to support NGOs which brings me to the question of what role are NGOs playing in this process? And I think that what I wasn't able to discuss in my presentation, again, I think there's good reason to push back against the tendency to individualize activism, right? To create these heroes who are centered in our stories of these social movements. This is why I'm leaning towards a more structural account, right? Because if we take a structural account of what's unfolding, we can situate the NGO within these larger structural processes, right? And at a core level, the NGO is not capable of bringing about transformative change. And that is a structural condition, right? NGOs have to operate according to the laws of the country in which they are based. And that means that if you're a foreign foundation, right, who's trying to give money to activists and you end up giving money to an NGO instead, you've already sort of shaped the field, right? You've already determined that you're gonna favor one type of political action over the other. And that one type of political action will happen to be the one that fits within the domestic legal order and in essence reinforces unjust political systems. And that's a structural reality. It's not a moral failing. I don't blame people who work for NGOs. Those are my friends, right? I'm from a middle class educated background. They're my family members, like, I don't fault them for working for NGOs, but I do not conflate what they do with the kinds of uprisings that I'm interested in. They have a different politics, right? And that operates both at the domestic level, but is often determined by these global forces. So part of our NGO industry in the West is to take activists and transform them into NGOs. And that necessarily involves transforming their politics to participate in systems that I think we all would agree are fundamentally messed up politically and economically. So we need to be able to talk about this, right? We need to be able to discuss how we've arrived at a situation where we are reinforcing systems that we recognize as being problematic, rather than actually providing support to, again, the people who I think are the most impacted by global capitalism and the ones who are most likely to go out into the streets to protest things like a bread price increase, right? Attempts to take away their land. In Tanzania, these employer protests are not alone. It's happening now with the Maasai in the Northern part of the country as well as the government tries to take away their land in the name of tourism. You know, these, and I think everyone in here can think of these cases, right? Because their activism does not fit our preordained models for how they should be operating, we tend to dismiss them, or even worse, I think this is the logic of philanthropy capitalism, to discipline them in the context of the NGO. And I think that's really, really problematic. So I'm much more interested in a different type of internationalism, right? The type that we saw during the anti-colonial struggles where it was really a movement to movement type of transnationalism or internationalism rather than a foundation or government to movement internationalism, right? I know that's abstract, but I'm happy to talk about this more. No. Okay. No, I'm good. Everything you said resonates. I took copious notes. It's very early stage research. So, and we'll talk about, you know, data and other issues pertinent to Iraq. Okay. So we're running out of time, but I would like to hear if Alcindor wants to comment or respond to some of the questions. Well, maybe just a comment, given that we don't have much time. I just wanted to say that I really think that the central question, it's really about this global situation, you know, just to echo Zach Mampili on this, because also what I wanted to do with this presentation, which I didn't have much time, was to look at beyond the street protests, but also beyond the local. And what I've been observing with my research is that these movements are uniting beyond the borders of their own countries. For example, the Afriki Mwinda that Zach mentioned, it's a Pan-African organization. And it brings up a number of movements because people are realizing that the problem is not a leader. And in a paper that I wrote about this, I talk about these movements going beyond the leader. For example, when Ben Ali or Omar Bashir went, it wasn't enough for them to go because there is a whole system that is behind them that perpetuates itself. But it's also beyond the local because that is an international system that creates constraints to these movements. And they are realizing that it's beyond, it's a much bigger issue than a particular government, a particular leader, but it's a political system that they're dealing with. And my interlocutors in the field, they were very clear about rejecting a particular system, this idea of party politics, this idea of party elites, this idea of a civil society that is an elite. Why not go through to grassroots? Why not start from scratch? So these are some of the ideas that I see emerging. And thank you for mentioning Tunisia on this. But my view is that Tunisia is a really interesting case and we should look at it more closely because precisely what Kayisayed was doing was to try to break the very system, which is global, which is this idea of political parties, this idea of political parties around the elites, the oligarchies that are created. And they are also moving into civil society, which is serving that. And so how to break that, how to make municipalities and grassroots as the center of politics, just think about it. If a parliamentarian doesn't have to be from a political party and comes from the municipalities, somebody who's elected at the local level and has to respond to the local level, it completely changes the dynamic. It's true that he might now have been kind of taking a more autocratic turn, but it's interesting also to see what the Tunisian public opinion says about it. It's, most people, especially my interlocutors, are really keen for Sayed to move on. They say, you know, you are challenging the system and they will not let you operate. He was in government for a couple of years, everything he was proposed would not pass in parliament. It was blocked exactly because he was going against the people who are in parliament. So, you know, it's true that he's becoming an autocrat, it's true that, but I think there is a lot to be unpacked there and there is interesting things going on. And I think we should just be open and see what it takes us. And as I ended in my presentation, you know, only time will tell, but something is brewing. That is, you know, we're living in a very interesting moment, I think. Thank you.