 Hi, my name is Steve Hopgood. I'm a professor of international relations at SOAS in the University of London and my work is fundamentally about human rights activists and humanitarian workers in the contemporary international system. The reason I'm interested in human rights and humanitarianism is because I spent a lot of time with human rights workers and humanitarian workers. These are some of the people that I like most, engage with and identify with most, but I've always been fascinated as an academic by the kinds of moral and political dilemmas that you face when you work in these sorts of professions. Particularly in relation to humanitarianism, one of the toughest things for humanitarians is the extent to which they need to work with the cooperation of governments and we know the governments are frequently responsible for the kinds of abuses and atrocities and other catastrophes at the international level that humanitarian workers are required to deal with. Think of many examples of this. In the article I've just published called When the Music Stops, what I try to look at is what will happen to humanitarian workers in particular in a world which is, if you like, less hospitable to the kind of global rules that we're all familiar with from the last 70-80 years of the international system. And these are rules like the Geneva Conventions or International Humanitarian Norma Widely or various other kind of norms or codes of conduct about how humanitarian should operate. Now this system, we can argue about its origins, but this system, the rules in the system were broadly written by a familiar set of Western powers, Western Europe, the United States, North America. But the new powers coming into the international system see themselves as not responsible for writing those rules and they're beginning to challenge some of these norms. You can see a really obvious example in Syria where Russia, a Security Council P5 member, has cooperated as is Iran with the government of Bashar al-Assad to bomb hospitals, for example. Something that even 20 years ago I think we would have thought was impossible in the international system. So I'm asking what will happen to humanitarian in a world which is less hospitable to those global norms? And the sort of conclusion I come to is humanitarian needs will need to work much more closely with governments who have potentially human rights and humanitarian records which we would find deeply objectionable. But really there is absolutely no choice but to do this because those governments can close access to humanitarian workers. They can refuse to support or sustain global rules of norms about humanitarian activism. They can just make life extremely difficult, even more difficult for humanitarians. They can stop funding humanitarian endeavors. So in the end I suspect in a less hospitable world where sovereignty is seen as the primary principle about organizing the international system, humanitarians will need to cut deals in order to be able to get access to the people who are suffering most. And that will mean they may have to de-emphasize some of their human rights and other concerns about the causes of the suffering of some of the people they deal with. There is a positive side to this and I'll conclude here. On the positive side humanitarianism does fulfill a function in the international system. It may not be necessarily one we particularly like, but sovereign states going about dealing with their political issues, often using violence or ethnic cleansing, do nevertheless create problems, interstate problems that they find it very difficult to deal with. And humanitarians provide some of those services. Sometimes it can look like an alibi, but for the people on the ground, this is nevertheless an extremely welcome intervention by humanitarians. By contrast, for me in the world to come, human rights will have a much less secure footing because almost all the governments who object to the global human rights regime see it as just about curtailing sovereignty and not really about providing any benefits for the international system as a whole. So major rising powers, China obviously, Russia and others, will see that there being really minimal utility in a global human rights regime. That's still something to be said for a sort of global humanitarian set of actors and processes and structures, which do at least provide some help and comfort for those who suffer when sovereign states do the things that they historically have always done. Thank you very much.