Hello, welcome everyone. Good evening. This is the second of March and welcome to the event on the Arab winter. And the democracy and discontent by Dr Stephen King, hosted by the SOAS Institute and co-chair by myself. The chair of the Center for Palestine Studies and Marcus Persat, who is the chair of the Center for Iranian Studies. My name is Dina Matar. I am in the Center for Global Media and Communication at SOAS, the chair of the CPS. Dr Stephen King is going to talk about a very interesting topic, particularly now that we are in the 10th anniversary of the Arab crisis. And so, without further ado, I'm just going to give you a brief bio. He is associate professor of government at Georgetown University in the US. He is the author of several books. The first is liberalization of the game democracy, and then the new authoritarianism in the MENA, the Middle East and North Africa region. And he is the co-editor of the view of authoritarianism. And he is also the author of the book that he is going to talk about, which is the Arab winter, which was published in 2020. I just don't know how we have time to to write all these books, but we're looking forward to hear from you. Dr King is going to speak, and I will connect questions in the question and answer button that you see at the bottom of the museum zoom page. And for those people who are joining us by Facebook, welcome. And you will also post your questions in the chat box on the side. So, Dr King, the floor is yours, as we say, or the platform or Thank you. So, like many scholars of the Arab world, I was working on authoritarian resilience just prior to the Arab spring. If you look at that scholarship. Certainly, nearly everyone saw the authoritarian Arab republics that were the main participants in the Arab spring as dystopian. We acknowledged many issues that Arabs felt that needed improvement and we did not whatever angle, one hand about explaining this authoritarian resilience. What the literature did do is, is demonstrate the difficulties and challenges and frustrations in their world just prior to their spring. That said, I was surprised as anyone, when as Ferris Mubarak, the director, when asked Ferris Mubarak, the director of Arab Policy Institute said, aptly the Arab world has decided to reinvent itself. This decision did not come from the top. It was claimed by each and every one of us from the most famous to the anonymous and we, we, everyone here probably recalls the excitement of the early Arab spring, how you had the mass uprisings, you, the shocking removal from power of Ben Ali and Tunisia Mubarak in, in Egypt and eventually Salah in Yemen and Qadhafi being killed in Libya. And we hadn't seen anything like that it was out of the blue to an extent. And you had after the after authoritarian breakdown in those countries, you had serious elections that led to transitions in power. Who would have thought that Nahidah and the Muslim Brotherhood would win competitive elections and actually take power. Getting rid of Salah with the help of the Gulf Corporation Council and the election of he ran unimposed, unopposed, I guess, had he in the election of had he in power. They had an exciting national dialogue conference in Yemen that that sought to do what I tried to do here in this book. They had committees trying to deal with nation building and state building they had committees dealing with efforts to strike a democratic political bargain trans all of the issues that I'll talk about in this study they organized a national meeting in Yemen to deal with them. That was exciting as well. Libya. We have to recall that just after Qadhafi was killed there was serious election in which it was a July I think of that year, in which a coalition of largely secularist one in those elections. That's another transfer in power. Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Mubarak have talked about that and of course Tunisia getting rid of Ben Ali. Okay, so the the breakdown happened. And there were democratic transitions in those places I define democratic transitions in terms of competitive elections and when in which the opposition actually wins and takes power. So these were serious elections and and obviously there are uprisings in Syria that that ended up in in the nightmare that we have Bahrain nearly fell. The rulers there. Without the help of Saudi Arabia and they might not have succeeded. Egypt looked promising at the beginning, and they certainly had competitive elections. Surprisingly the military allowed more see the take power. Obviously, at the end, the, the democratic consolidation was not achieved and obviously more see has reimposed the military authoritarian regimes but often think that if Libya, I mean I'm sorry if Egypt. Had consolidated this democracy. Then the, the, there would have been a different tenor to the whole Arab spring because of the number of Egyptians in terms of the population in the region. So I took caught up in the excitement and hope for the region. There was a rebel rebellion from below that saw democracy respect for human rights, socioeconomic justice in the end to corruption, all would have improved the lines of people in the region so much. So it's exciting to see the possibilities but also as an analyst I had to think about what would, what will be the outcome or what was the outcome. When I was developing the framework for this. I, I ended up focusing on democratic consolidation. And I use the comparative research. I use the comparative research to define democratic consolidation and to try to figure out how it would operate in progress. In a couple of, in the literature there were a couple of broad approaches to democratic consolidation. One talked about emphasize the elections and changing values and attitudes. A second approach. I was it wasn't an aggregate approach, which looked at disaggregating the areas that pose the biggest challenge to democratic consolidation. And so I landed on the democratic transitions literature, which is a disaggregate approach. And this transition literature was one of the leading anyway approaches to democratic transitions and I'm talking here. About smitter and no Donald. And one part of, let me talk about the part of that framework that didn't fit at all. If we recall in the literature at the time, literature on democratic transitions, including the approach by O'Donnelly and smitter really emphasize conflicts within authoritarian regimes. That would lead to an opening in which the people would rise up. But the start came from within the regime. That didn't fit their spring at all. It was an uprising from below a mass uprising. Ben Ali's regime wasn't splitting or seemingly in danger prior to their spring. So that said something about the general literature and what authoritarian breakdown looked like in their world. We saw in their world mass uprisings were important. We saw that social media turned out to be important. We saw that the role of a martyr. Turn out to be important with Mohammed Woods easy and the copycat martyrs during their spring around the region that a martyr seem to create solidarity with with the masses and help to overcome collective action issues and how people were out in the street on mass and certainly the martyrdom was easy contributed to that and and how people felt solidarity to his experience as we recall. He was the young poor man Mohammed boys easy and Tunisia who relatively poor who ran the vegetable and fruit stand and had to pay bribes and was treated with disrespect and was slapped and apparently spit on. He had enough. He went to the gas station after he had gone to the municipalities in the local municipal government officials and they backed up the abuser. He had enough and he lit himself on fire. That wasn't there. Social media's role wasn't included in the literature in a serious way. And also the regional angle in their world doesn't figure very much and they compare doesn't figure in the as far as I know in the comparative politics literature that this regional role that was important in the Middle East. Now, I agreed more with the transitions literature's approach to democratic consolidation in terms of packs. And O'Donnell and Smitter defined packs as negotiated compromises or efforts at national consensus to address conflicts that could derail a democratic transition. They talked about military pack extricating the military from politics how there needs to be national discussions and cooperation and consensus building to extricate the military from politics they talked about a political bargain. Political parties. That cover all of the major conflicts in the society. Coming to a political bargain. The socioeconomic pack was an issue that they raised. And it was largely to make socioeconomic changes because the rebellions were partly about the economy to make socioeconomic changes in an inclusive way to begin to answer the demands of the people who rose up. While at the same time, not just distributing state resources that in the end damaged the economy. But some kind of consultation of the main social forces during this transition period. And O'Donnell and Smitter their Latin America's they write all about Southern Europe so they probably had in mind the Spanish transition in which there was a socioeconomic pack to help the democratic transition including announcing that as a country, this that labor business capital the government are together to help consolidate this democratic transition. So they talked about those three packs. But that wasn't sufficient to capture democratic consolidation challenges in the Arab world during the Arab Spring. These packs are important that that O'Donnell and Smitter did not cover a nation state pack. Our countries had national unity issues. The authoritarian regimes broke down those national unity issues became very serious in a threat to a democratic transition. The state level. In contrast, I'd imagine to the Latin American states that O'Donnell and Smitter researched. There are still state issues in the Arab world and I suspect that Latin America, what became independent in the 1820s. So the countries that emerged from that have had quite a while at nation building and state building our countries haven't had that experience. I end up arguing one of the strongest propositions from what from this work is that it's very difficult to to consolidate a democracy. If you do not have a modern state and a modern state on barbarian lines is defined as a military security force capable of monopolizing balance within the territory. The rational legal bureaucracy and tax resources to pay for the military and the bureaucracy. Attempting to have competitive elections without monopolizing balance has led to balance and unfortunately civil war in a few of our, our cases. A second pack that was not a part of O'Donnell and Smitter framework that I think is important for the Arab world would be a rule of law pack that entails human rights, respect for human rights, which would mean reform of security sectors and the judiciary from the way they function on their autocratic rule.  So as we've seen Syria in Iraq and I should add Iraq obviously came from US intervention not a part of the Iraq's transition, not a part of the spring. But transitional justice and national reconciliation national reconciliation traditions are very important when post civil war, how can you just move into consolidating competitive politics without dealing with that issue. So, associate associate economic pack. I'm not sure if I talked about that one. The emphasis from old Donald and Smitter was about inclusive policy making in order to to help legitimate emerging democratic transition. They expanded on on their focus in a few ways one for our reaching economic socially and economically was very important to get rid of rent seeking elites and economy dominated by rent sinking elites. Getting the calculus of the region to turn away from from rent extraction and towards production and in competition. You know they are spring revealed that there was a poor relationship with the World Bank and IMF with with these Arab countries that would go on to have democratic transitions. The World Bank and IMF ended up supporting cronyism and rent sinking in their efforts to support transitions to a market economy. So in fact the the regime leaders would in their negotiations with the World Bank and IMF they did not share accurate statistics. And you ended up basically with the World Bank and IMF supporting what had been crony capitalist authoritarian regimes that were reviled by the population. And there are come contribution to it. I am up in the World Bank look like it was the contribution of of go ahead and privatize the economic resources of the state so state on enterprises and land and turn out to be upward land reform during the switch from Arab socialism to this crony capitalist type of authoritarian rule that the World Bank and IMF help to to succeed. Another thing about the socioeconomic pack I had to think through what kind of economic development strategy might help consolidate a democratic transition. And the at the end of the day I ended up accepting what all five countries or six countries supported as their goal during these transitions. It was about maintaining a market oriented economy. Because it's important for these countries to develop economically that they take advantage of the opportunities within the global capitalist system. And also take advantage of a vigorous private sector that's not committed committed to rent sinking or corruption. That's the goal across the cases in that in in practice, none of our cases ended up, even after the democratic transitions ended up with an economic reform strategy that that took advantage of the private sector in global capitalism. And transitional justice human rights I talked about those issues. So if you look at those kinds of issues, and you're trying to figure out a way to explain the differences and outcomes of the Arab Spring transitions. I ended up just to preview it, arguing that Tunisia's unique success based on comparative strength and national unity is based on comparative strength and national unity state capacities, it had an advantage in terms of an apolitical military. It had advantages in terms of limited Islamist secularist secularist polarization which helped consolidate a political bargain. And, but it's been it's was weak in terms of delivering on socioeconomic improvement. But even with those things getting the military out of politics the political bargaining but bargain between Islamist and secularist and a political military. Those things meant that Tunisia has to the considerable extent consolidated is democracy. The military let me just say one other thing about the expectation of the military from politics. If they are involved in politics in Tunisia, they weren't in Egypt, for example, they were in the task for Egyptians, one of the major tasks was trying to extricate that powerful military and powerful in the political sense military sense in the political sense to extricate them from politics and convince them to accept democratic consolidation, which of course did not end up occurring into Egypt wasted really their relative strength and national unity and state capacities the military was not extricated from politics. There was greater Islamist secularist polarization in Egypt, and that played into an opening for the military to move back into power. In the Yemeni Yemeni case as opposed as well both suggests that a modern state is essential for democratic consolidation, and moreover, attempting to implement competitive elections without a modern state without without even the monopoly of balance within the country with various types of militias that that emerged during the battle against Gaddafi, trying to move ahead with competitive elections failed miserably in and there's been a lot of bloodshed obviously similar with Yemen. I also talk about broken states Iraq which we broke along with the British is there are major ally and George W. Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. And so those with Iraq and Syria and ISIS. I talk about what kind of nation states they were, and how attempts at democratic transitions with these characteristics of the state ended up with ended up fostering balance and immense human suffering, obviously. So, in these cases, after my main cases obviously are Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. And what time did I started at 1230 I have 40 minutes is that the goal. Yes, that would be good. Yeah, you'll find. Um, so my main cases are the cases that were the most involved in the Arab Spring and the transitions away from authoritarian rule Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, in addition to the broken states. I just mentioned, and the way I handle the case studies was to begin with challenges to the regimes prior to the spring. And in all of our cases, these are authoritarian republics that I've had characterized both in earlier work as crony calculus versions of authoritarian role. Which I define in as, as having four characteristics policies that combined with narrow elite ruling coalition led to really the corrupt distribution of state on assets and land to a crony small elite, including members of the, of the regimes of Mubarak's family, been Elise family and so forth. This transition gradual transition away from Arab socialism that these countries undertook also had a change in political institutions of facade and multi party politics develop legitimacy became more tied to capitalism and multi party politics, but the legitimacy was weak. Obviously, because of the best evidence from the amount of repression necessary to maintain those regimes. So, in all of those cases I talked about the challenges to the regime so in Tunisia's case, there were Islamists, there were, there were various stripes, there were labor unions that challenged the regime. So, eventually, the, the, obviously, there was an uprising in Tunisia sparked by been by Bozizi in late 2010. The transition occurred. And it was left to Tunisian leaders to attempt to consolidate this transition to lead the consolidation of this transition to democracy. With my framework, you have to deal with extracrating the military from politics, luckily, Tunisia's military has been apolitical the whole time. A political pack. And in this case, the big conflict was between Islamists and secularists. And again, the Tunisia, Tunisia was blessed in the sense that Islamists and secularists have been working together to plan a post biennale future for a decade or so before the Arab Spring started. So, you realize, or the, the, remember this name, the step and I guess was it. I think it was step on after step on who use, who developed the concept of the twin tolerations and the twin tolerations means that secularist conflict means that Islamists will accept temporary rule if secularists win power, as long as they play according to democratic rules and the same for secularists that they would tolerate Islamists taking power if they abide by rules of democracy. So that conflict settled very well for for Tunisians there they they ended up with a very interesting conclusion working together with the secularists and Islamists in Tunisia they ended up making a strong case that in the Arab world, you really need to understand the secularist coalition governments in those early elections that determine the constitution and so forth. It can't just be by part ruled by partisan victories and temporary elections. So, a political pact. In the twin tolerations developed in Tunisia, they gave them great advantages now, I ended up arguing that Tunisia's democratic consolidation is in trouble. And that's because the economy hasn't changed under Ben Ali steel corrupt is still crony capitalist, there's a push that after an initial movement away from the private sector cronies in in Tunisia. A few years in an argument was made by the government and power that we need to stop doing that we need to stop pursuing transitional justice with these capitalists, we should use their capital we need it now so stop this attack on them. What essentially what it ends up ended up being was no change in the economy, really. And that's, I feel is very dangerous for the Tunisian transition. Also, the, the rule of law on human rights practice improved slowly. The trend. Judicial sector reforms and security sector reforms have been slow. Egypt. As many of you know the, the mubarak longstanding mubarak regime had not been legitimate in a while it faced the challenges that face challenges prior to their spring from from labor unions from when it's the kafia the enough movement. Islamists, obviously. But again, we're all most were shocked by the uprising in the toppling of mubarak but once it happened. Egypt had a serious challenge with extricating the military from politics. And, you know, that in this framework I'm using. The way this has to occur is you need to get civilian elected authorities to gain control of several areas to extricate the military from leadership selection and and and policymaking. I mean, those are the most important and a few other points as well. Now, the military in Egypt did back away from their position in the political economy that has a huge role in the economy with military enterprises that are a big chunk chunk of the economy. The military didn't shoot when mubarak pushed for it, and they played the role of supporters of the, of the revolution. Now we know in comparison to to Tunisia, the, the military. First it wasn't a political and second it was very reluctant to give up its prerogatives. So, during the transition the military and each of the skies they their leadership made itself of he the the institution to God this democratic transition in Tunisia the military got up the way quickly, completely. And that was a bad sign. The sign was that the military back off and out of the political system for a time. But they were really measured in trying to figure out how to protect their interest in perhaps reimpose military rule. And at the end of the day they did that. One of the ways I talk about Egypt is to talk about how the military was ambivalent about democracy despite posing as supporters of the transition and revolution. The Islamists were ambivalent about it and we see that in how the Muslim Brotherhood was reluctant to share power with secularists. The Islamists did so well in those transitional elections. But they, unlike the Anahadan Tunisia, they did not sincerely reach out for secular allies and there are a number of ways that becomes clear a big one was that as they started winning these elections they had promised that they would not attempt to control parliament and the executive branch and the constituent assembly and they would not even have a candidate for the presidency and they reneged on that. They reneged on, there are these odd choices for governors. When Morsi was in power including making a known terrorist with blood on his hands the governor of the region where his organization executed. The secularists as well seem more ambivalent about democracy than they did in Tunisia. And probably that was probably because the Islamists weren't as open to an alliance to deal with polarization. There are a few extraordinary incidents like for example the parliament, the first, the lower house, the first elected parliament. The secularists in Egypt ended up siding with the Supreme Court and the military in terms of dissolving that elected body. There was an ambivalence on both sides. The socioeconomic issue similar to Tunisia there was some progress in dealing with the corruption on the Mubarak and then obviously as things turned away from the revolutionary forces that ended as well. And then I highlighted, well first of all, challenges to Salah's chronic capitalist authoritarian regime included the Houthis, obviously the Zaidi Shia. A revivalist movement that turned into opposition to the regime and the regime's alliance with the Saudis and even socioeconomic issues start to play in it. And we know that there were some say that the Arab Spring conflict was just one more of the Houthi wars. The southern movement, obviously Yemen was, was two countries prior to what it was in 1990s, the South Yemen and North Yemen. So that challenge was important, the Jihadi Salafis, that challenge was important. And Salah's rule at the end of his time was contested by other elites gradually in his rule. He had changed from a sharing of power and economic resources with other elites to doing it less so. Yemen itself, obviously the transition broke down. And we are having a war. The Civil War, I talked about that, the nation state packed issues, obviously they are in a war. So we know, or some, in some phase of an attempt to emerge from the chaos and war. But, you know, a nation state pack will be different from for Yemen in that attributes of the modern state are very weak in Yemen. In its long history, the state in Yemen has not monopolized the use of violence, the state is relying on tribal militias, the tribal militias are armed. And so the attempt to democratize without monopoly of violence in Yemen was very difficult and contributed to the Civil War that we have now. And also should be mentioned that that in both Libya and Yemen, the political parties have associated militias. There's still the tribal militias there's still the militias that wrote that that emerged during the conflict. The violence and the lack of modern state attributes are a tremendous challenge to any full transition and consolidation of democracy in Yemen and also in Libya. And I talk about near the end because it became apparent to me that issues of state and nation were pivotal in understanding the results of the Arab Spring. So, in the states that have broken apart Iraq, Syria and ISIS, I talk about their background as nation states. Obviously Iraq was created by the British for to make up for his for their betrayal with the Sykes-Pickel agreement. Syria had national unity and modern state issues going into their spring. Obviously, and I talk about ISIS, in the sense of how they built up their version of a state and what has cost it in its end. Obviously the biggest cause has been armed groups in the region and outside the region have worked to to get rid of ISIS as a territorial entity. So how do I conclude this study. As a summary, I conclude that the Arab Spring demonstrated that the vast majority of Arabs yearn for democracy, respect for human rights, and socioeconomic justice across the region, millions were killed injured or displaced while striving for these goals. This gave me a firm belief that the, that the exceptionalism argument, the argument that there are worlds if it is exceptional in its resistance to democracy and respect for human rights. The Arab Spring demonstrated that that is not the case. Conclusions. And I, I returned in the end to my own framework and what it might have in the analysis I did, and what it might mean for studies of comparative studies of democratic transitions and consolidation. Conclusion with nation state and Barbarian state rights state packs. It's clear that the need for modern state especially the monopoly for the use of violence within the territory is is pivotal. The other part of it is, it's, I don't see a lot of evidence that is even possible to consolidate a democracy without a state that monopolizes violence that has a rational legal bureaucracy, and then that can pay for state fields. The unity is also pivotal, attempting to democratize without it. The national unit, the national disunity in Libya in Yemen, and in Iraq contributed to those transitions turning into civil wars. The nation state packs I conclude that obvious this is radical Islamist gain power in failed states and attempting to transition to democracy without a modern state ends up fostering failed states in these cases. The military pack literature talks about extricating the military from politics but it doesn't talk about a military that dominates the economy, as it does in Egypt. And on the salad and in Libya, that these militaries are going to fight harder to to maintain their power in the Egyptian military cordons off up to 40% of the economy from state policy. The second point is the need for sustained mobilization to continue the momentum to extricate the military from politics that that momentum stopped in Egypt when Islamist and secularists ended up in conflict, and the military in Egypt took ready advantage of it. So, sustained mobilization as elected leaders attempt to extricate the military from politics seems to be important. There's a political packs. One conclusion is that yes, coalitions and between Islamist and secularists and the twin tolerations can help consolidate a democracy, but in the Tunisian case. They've moved to the next step in that secularists and Islamists posts Arab Spring have had coalition governments, but that has limited policy choices for the people, both the Nakhda and the various secularist coalitions in in Tunisia. The have ended up pushing for the same policies, greater security. And following the World Bank and IMF on their market reform model. And as I said the economy isn't changing hasn't changed in these 20 years and both the Islamist and secularists are provide or presenting that platform to the two Tunisians. And at this point, it would help their consolidation if these political parties went back to their corners and develop their own policies, including a possible alternative to the modified market reform strategy that is recreating chronic capitalism. In terms of socioeconomic, socioeconomic packs. It's, it's unfortunate that their spring did not provide did not end up with did not end up changing the economies in any crucial way. There was an opportunity during our third hearing breakdown to change the trajectory, and it did not happen in the World Bank and IMF are very explicit about that even in the Tunisian case. How that that that was a missed opportunity. And now we're returning to crony capitalism not social net social economic justice. Now the rule of law transitional justice and national reconciliation those issues. Obviously, judicial and security sector reforms would be necessary because those judiciary in the security sector had function as ways to protect narrow. networks of the of the elite of the small elite. So reforming the judiciary and security sector to protect all citizens is seriously important and it's been difficult in Tunisia and obviously Egypt backtrack. Secondly, in this, in terms of those issues. Transitional justice and national reconciliation are very important. In Libya and transitional justice was combated by a political isolation law, which ended up being a way to discredit elected officials that were secularists and the Islamist parties in their associated malicious use that political isolation law to get rid of electoral competitors and to take over an assembly that that should have been largely led by secularist or acts debathification also set up a terrible dilemma in terms of transitional justice and national reconciliation debathification was too broad. It got rid of the people, the military, the military, the military members that were largely Sunni. And it didn't replace it with the national military. So instead you ended up with the state attempting to consolidate a democracy, but without the monopoly of violence in the country. Okay, that's my opening. And I'm happy to answer any questions and to learn from you all as well. Thank you very much Stephen that was very interesting and focus. I have a couple of questions which I'll ask at the end because I want to get the floor to, to our, you know, kind of attendees. There are a couple of questions that in terms of regarding Syria. One of them is whether you think that the regional and international the lack of the regional and international intervention had precipitated an Arab winter in Syria, or the other whether, whether the fact that they did not intervene, caused the end of spring so have you included the international kind of involvement. I have, it's not the major focus at some point I mean it became as the transitions slowed and continued over time outside actors really got involved in trying to influence these transitions you know, obviously it's just gotten involved in Libya, Qatar, it's gotten involved everywhere, the Iranians and and and and Yemen the Saudis in Yemen you ate all of that obviously it's important. I didn't make it a central focus frankly because I figured that division of labor, someone else would step in, and I think they have with these international influences and foreign policy, and I've always preferred the domestic angle to the foreign foreign policy but in the Syrian case. You know, the, the, when the free Syrian army that the free Syrian, I think that was the organization's name. They rose up in and and the the ethno sectarian conflict was not there at the beginning, they rose up for the entire population, and they needed support internationally. I think I think Obama probably regrets not establishing a no fly zone in some part of Syria that would have allowed the free Syrian army, a chance to maintain a coalition and combat the Assad regime. I think it was a failure in that sense. Thank you. And there's another question regarding what sorts of new mechanisms the regimes employed to sustain authoritarian stabilities in the post uprising era. Did you, you know, kind of other new mechanisms that they are deploying to try and sustain authoritarianism. Well, they, they all emphasize, look at a, if you want to try to get democracy in up in hell, as in Libya, in, in Yemen, in Syria. So authoritarian stability has been one of the arguments in those cases, and I was even interested, interesting in the, in the Libyan case that was another comment I meant to mention, or Libya. So, so fear of chaos and violence, I think it's been the biggest argument that's intuitive, and they've used it successfully. As I said, I, in the opening of this book, I write it for the next Arab Spring. And so once it's consumed, what happened, I think there were, and obviously movements are starting again Algeria and Sudan are starting to rise up. I don't think that is forever. I think there was a cost to these authoritarian regimes for for the Arab Spring. And they aren't as stable as they might have been, even if they reproduced the pre Arab Spring authoritarian regimes. What else have they used? Well, those are the main points, I guess. Okay, thank you. There's a question, which is, yeah, it's a kind of perhaps a comment. Can we speak about Arab Spring or a Christian winter, which wasn't sure of what it meant, but I don't know it's a matter of naming. Is that, is that about the US and Trump? I don't know, I presume. So that's funny. I certainly feel like the US is in an Arab winter. It's appalling. And it's so racially based. You know, this is, this is about even just this week, these last few weeks, where they've been trying to repress political participate the Republican and Trump repressed the political participation of African Americans, which really hits a nerve. And this is exactly been our experience, even post slavery, that, you know, reconstruction and then the KKK emerges in.   So for me, sure.  There have been moments and I know where this is a sideline subject. There have been times when I think that I'll just move to Ghana, I mean go somewhere it's been a very frustrating experience that it almost feels like white Americans will never forego white supremacy. In general, obviously they are like, we know the percentage that 43% of white Americans disagree with Trump, 57%, according to the election agree with it, which is a disturbing and disappointing outcome. It is, it is. There's a question from by and but I think we have answered your question about international support. And there's another question in post conflict settings international communities always ignore transitional justice, ignoring justice at the cost of securitization, and we always fail both transition and security. So, when you talked about the monopoly of violence by the state. What, when I said what does monopoly of violence by state. Yeah, is that possible. If you have the monopoly of violence by the state without transitional justice, is it possible to have it. Kind of secure situation towards democracy. I end up on the fence a little bit on transitional justice rule of law and national reconciliation. I do think our region demonstrates that that those issues can derail democracy, especially because of the balance in the history of repression, an autocrat brutal autocratic rule. And then I mean, what good with the elections be in Libya and Syria. Yemen, after all of this, if you don't deal with, with, you know, with transitional justice and human rights and what happened in the past and what you're going to do about it. It's, you know, almost feels like it's trivial to to talk about competitive elections if you don't address that at all. Exactly. We have, we have a question here which is about how important was the Algerian president of 91 92 and paving the way for the establishment of a secular Islamist paradigm, leading to the restoration of authoritarian rule during the Arab winter and the failure of democratic consolidation and to wait, I'm sorry, can you repeat that one only caught half of it. Okay, so how important was the Algerian president of 91 92 in paving the way for the establishment of a secular Islamist paradigm, which has led to the restoration of authoritarian rule during the Arab winter and the failure of democratic consolidation. What does he he or she mean by a secular Islamist paradigm in Algeria. Can you ask the question again, please. But the second part of the question is democratic consolidation in Tunisia seems to have been successful, but the economic transition is to lagging behind. I think external shocks like the cobit 19 pandemic and the increasing polarization between secular and Islamist or post Islamist forces. Is that a risk of return to the authoritarian rule, I think you did. Yeah, I mean, I think the economy is a great risk for the Tunisian transition. The same economy is the Ben Ali economy dominated by corrupt crony calculus and the same, the returning to the same economic policies that were crony calculus without making a change. It really must feel to most Tunisians that is the same Ben Ali economy. And that's just not acceptable. They are sustainable, or at least it's it's a challenge to their consolidation. So in Tunisia, what I end up saying is that they could they've made considerable consolidation of their democracy, they've made very important steps with dealing with the secularist polarization. The political bargain. They've had three change of hours in power from Islamist to secularism back. That's a very strong sign of democratic consolidation. There's a question about the main reason for the entrenchment of authoritarianism in Egypt. You know, I think of the failure of educating the military from politics and as I said that the way to do that you have to maintain mobilization against regime. When the opposition was unified Islamist cyclist everybody wants to get away from a barric in their out in the streets and in millions, the military wasn't willing to shoot people. It was willing to allow this transition though they tried to control it from the top. They are more see one and took power they didn't stop him before he took power. So the military was pulling back. But you need sustained mass mobilization to continue that. And, and, and once that stopped as well as the split between Islamist and secularists with secularists starting to sign with the military and the Supreme Court. The military was in, in a position to move in, betrayed the secularists that they said they would, you know, that they were intervening to end Morsy's tyranny. And they really just CC reestablished the military authoritarian regimes in some ways even stronger, more a bigger grip on the economy. Anyway, there are free areas where for CC has has become even more authoritarian than Mubarak was. And there's a question from Rami with the recertions of appraisings last year from Iraq to Lebanon to Algeria and so on. How can the Arab world break free from the endless up and down side. Well, I think it's good news that they're coming again. And in a way that I really thought I'm Algeria which didn't rise up during the Arab Spring. It's had a serious popular uprising that the Algerian military that's still trying to to to control and they don't have control over that. So, yes, that's exciting. Also in Algeria when I think about Algeria and they popular masses have risen up fight for democracy. They're going to have the challenge that the Egyptians had a military that dominates politics in the economy. So they're going to fight harder to stay in control. That's one of the sad lessons of the Arab Spring is the consolidation challenges are so difficult that even if you get the uprising even if you get authoritarian breakdown. Consolidating that democracy is tough and it varies, as I said, Tunisia didn't have to get rid of a powerful military, but Algerians will. And I end up what I end up trying to do in the book is to talk about ways to deal with that. And as I said, popular mobilization that that last supporting elites that get elected that are trying to extricate the military from politics maybe they want to change a constitution that limits the military's role. The public has to get behind these leaders to during the transition to try to push the military out of politics. There's a question here which is can to speak. So, can't see how speaker can say Bahrain. While I agree with much said can see how speaker can say Bahrain. There was never any attempt to call for regime to be replaced only John Chia and silly call for reforms in Bahrain, whether regime might have granted marginal reforms was surely never relevant to Saudi Arabia. Would not Egypt have had a better chance had elections not been rushed. Egypt are in in back in which country are you talking about in Egypt. Well, I think the question is is a question about Bahrain. There was never an attempt to go for them to be replaced only on Chia and so Nicole for reforms. And whether regime might have granted marginal reforms was surely never relevant as Saudi Arabia would never have counter countenance reforms in a state next door. And then the next question in this question by this by this attendee is would not Egypt have been had a better chance had elections not been rushed but been delayed to allow none brotherhood parties time to organize. Yeah, I agree with that second point strongly. It was after they got rid of Mubarak, and the transition was starting the first step the military that I said took over the transition process instead of what happened in Tunisia that they stayed out of the way. One of the first steps was that the military decided was to amend the Mubarak constitution and have elections quickly, which the Muslim brotherhood agree with as well. And secularists had good reason to want to slow it down. They needed time to develop organizationally to to to compete when the Muslim brotherhood could just take off from when it's been doing prior to their spring, and they had a tremendous advantage. So, you know, I agree with the secularists of of Egypt, who push to delay these elections and give themselves a chance to to grow as an opposition. And finally, they got organized is the national salvation front. I mean, a year or two after a year or so after when there's only in power for a year but sometime in Mubarak's time. They started to organize so yes I agree with that. I suppose the Muslim brotherhood took advantage of the situation and, and I guess I would think of it in terms of the twin tolerations to prevent the split between Islamist and secularists. The Muslim brotherhood probably should have tried to accommodate secularists on the issue of time during the transition. So thank you. To what extent did religion have an influence on the Arab Spring example in Syria do you. And how has authoritarianism impacted the Syrian situation of crisis. So, two related questions in terms of religion in Syria and also authoritarianism role in in the continuing crisis in Syria. I mean, no, I mean the uprising wasn't led by Islamists. And that's across the region by the way, that's another interesting thing about their spring that all of these rebellions the they were basically young secularists who rose up. And Islamists once after a bit of time stepped in and joined them. So certainly, in general, the, the, having the, the Islamist join these modern these secularists was promising. And then I look at it in terms of religion in terms of the twin tolerations that, you know, are secularists willing to accept Islamists running and getting power based on elections as long as they accept democratic rules in the Constitution. And do secularists accept Islamists getting to run, or do Islamists get second, get tolerated and accept secularists getting to run as long as they play about democratic roles. The other piece of on religion is that within this polarization of Islamists and secularists. The Islamists played a role in trying to moderate more radical is the moderate Islamists played a role in trying to especially in the Tunisian case if you look through it. They played a role in trying to moderate more radical Salafis to accept this democratic transition. So that ends up being an important role and it's the same and on the secular side, I suppose. Another thing about religion in general in the Arab Spring, as we recall, you know, the, at the early in the Arab Spring, the radical Islamists were on their heels. And in the Arab Spring, the secularists in Tunisia and Egypt, in this new era of democracy, this emerging democracy, they could get power by running in elections, both social and political power and economic power by running in elections. So radical Islamists were on their heels and, but unfortunately, the difficulty in consolidating democracy. The health states that emerged because the states with limited state capacities didn't survive the transition and electoral politics. So, I suppose that's, that's, that's unfortunate they were, you know, radical Islamists like ISIS and al-Qaeda were on their heels, and then the transition experience allowed them to reassert themselves, including obviously ISIS. Okay, so I have, I have a question which is in relation to, in relation to your kind of framework that or the opening thing around democracy and explaining democratic elections as being a one factor in trying, in trying to say, this is a democracy. So whether you have, you know, so the idea to focus on elections as, but that, that reinforces as far as I'm concerned the exceptionalist argument about the Middle East because it's, and, and again, it kind of frames the discussion in a western frame of what democracy is. So, and a related question is, in terms of your approach, and you said that we need to have modern states, how do we define modern states? What are the characteristics of a modern state? And how do we move towards that? I, I, I'm sorry, I missed the first question, but I got the second, let me answer that. I define modern states on barbarian lines. One is the military monopolizes the use of violence within the territory. So the state controls the territory. There aren't militias out there with guns or anything like that. Those militias were in Libya and Yemen and the military did not monopolize the use of violence. So I think that's the most important piece of a modern state that the military monopolizes the use of violence. Modern states are also defined by a rational legal bureaucracy, according to Weber. So I use that instead of a patrimonial bureaucracy and so forth, the administration is able to function and the government is able to operate in a way that people who vote can feel like their policy choices can be implemented. Let me read on that point. That was something I meant to read at the beginning by Ali Zaydan, who was the first elected Prime Minister in Libya's transition. Ali Zaydan. This is what he said after he fled Libya. Libya has lived through 42 years of systematic destruction. The government has no army or security forces to control the Libyan street. The Islamic groups are spreading radical new ideas and the country's administration is weak and small. Those are all conditions that aren't modern states. That's the opposite of it and trying to have competitive elections and consolidate those. It's extremely difficult under those conditions. And those are the Libyan conditions. They weren't the Tunisian conditions. One was much more close to a modern state, going into it. So if we go back and think about the kind of plan, and if you think about the barbarian argument in terms of legal authority and charisma and so on, how would you bring in the idea of leadership and charismatic leadership as being central to a modern state as well? Actually, I haven't thought about that issue. I mean, Weber, charismatic leadership, but he talks about, as I recall, there's an evolution of that in Weber that's separate from the way he characterizes a modern state. And by the way, that definition of the modern state I gave, it's the most common definition of a modern state in the comparative literature. Okay. So there's a related question to this from our food saying that in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, states has absolute monopoly over the violence can be modern states. Say that again. They have absolute monopoly over violence. But does that mean it's a modern state? I mean, that's one attribute of it. Gaddafi had monopoly of the violence in this state before it was the revolution. So just having the monopoly of violence does not make a modern state. In this transition, though, what one has to be careful about in transitions is that once the autocratic regime has broken down and Gaddafi's monopoly of violence is over, it has to be reestablished. It has to be reestablished in the West. I am arguing or thinking that once Gaddafi was killed, the Libyans had invited the West, the UN to help protect their transition. Once Gaddafi was gone, I think the these international forces needed to stay there long enough to take the guns out of everybody's hands. We probably should be under UN auspices, but that because Libyans were open to it, they reached out. That was the moment when the international actors, I think, should have been, could have stopped a whole lot of misery in Libya, taking the guns out of the hands of these various militias. Thank you. And I think the last question, is there a chance of democracy in Sudan? Sudan was the other example. Sorry, at the end of the book, I talked about looking ahead and that Sudan and Algeria are both having massive bronzings for democracy. In the Algerian case, they will have to deal with that powerful military. There will be challenges in the Sudanese case on national unity, I suspect, and some other issues. So the same kinds of challenges that my framework discusses in the beginning will be challenges for those uprisings for democracy as well. I have a question for me, which is, we've got like two minutes. You talked around social media, do these models and paradigms and concepts, do they take account of social media? Do they take account, you know, I break down democratic transitions into authority during breakdown, if we break down these autocratic regimes. Transitions to democracy, meaning elections that are free and fair and opposition wins and takes power. And then all of these challenges of democratic consolidation that I spoke about today. I can actually say, for some reason, say that question again. Sorry, I lost my thought. Is that, you know, do you take into account in these kind of very much? Right, right, right. Sorry, social media. And social media was crucial in the Tunisian in the Egyptian case. It was in the Tunisian case was interesting in that, you know, by Ben Ali didn't realize how dangerous social media was and he encouraged it during his time in power. But social media allow Tunisians to get around Ben Ali's police state. Ben Ali had the strategy under Ben Ali was that if there are conflicts, you shut down information. And the conflicts generally occurred in the southern part of Tunisia in the interior where the poor people were and resources are in the capital. So conflicts would arise, it shut down the media in these conflicts in the south and he went on. Now, social media and Tunisia got around that once conflicts in the south started to occur social media. So spread information to help organize people help people get into the streets. And that was great. Now, certainly regimes have become more savvy these days about social media. So I think they were caught off guard during their spring the potency and immobilizational ability of social spring of social media, they were caught off guards and and and now they're more aware of it. So it's not going to be as positive for democracy and human rights as before as these regimes get better and autocratic regimes get better at using social media to maintain their control. Okay, thank you very much. We're coming to the end. Not guess do you want to come in. Okay, thank you. Really, no, I just I was trying to think, you know, fitting, sort of going further east, fitting Iran or whatever in the argument, but I suppose they're, you know, different category but no, only to say thank you very much and many of the people who have also expressed their thanks for a wonderful thought, very, you know, thought provoking and rethinking the idea of modern. Thank you guys for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to rethink about these arguments. Thank you so much and we're looking forward to reading your book and have a have a good day. Okay. Have a good evening. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much.


Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Tuesday, October 9th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Microsoft's first Windows Phone 8 devices will be available for pre-order in the U.S. on October 21st. CNET has learned that a Google Nexus 10-inch class tablet is in the works, and Google is offering a plea to developers to create better tablet apps. Join us now with breaking analysis on some of today's big headlines is SiliconANGLE contributing editor, John Casaretto. Welcome to the show, John. Good morning, Kristen. So Microsoft announcing that some of the first Windows 8 devices are going to be available for pre-order in the U.S. October 21st. Can you tell us about some of the new devices that will offer the Windows 8? Well, Microsoft has been rolling out a number of devices for this launch. I think there's a good amount of anticipation to see how this is going to play out. We've seen tablets, and now we're seeing some of the phones come out. There was also an announcement that some of these mid-market tablets are also on the way. So it's going to be pretty interesting. Now, from the phone perspective, I think that they're really going to need to shoot for the high-end. Customers expect high-end phones, high-end features, high-end camera, high-end displays, and things like that. So we're going to see some real, real good offerings, I think, in this particular announcement is the first event of a number that we'll see. Any idea on the number of devices that will offer Windows 8? No, I think under 910 at this point, as far as the phones go, I think that a good lineup across all the carriers, you're going to have two or three devices per carrier, and some of those will be in common. So you don't really know what their end lineup is going to be in terms of across the spectrum, but you can expect that. I know you just heard the droid here. When I was looking for my phone, I was looking for a Windows 8 phone or hoping that a Windows 8 phone was on the horizon, and those are a little bit darker times there where we had no idea. But now that these announcements have come out, I think that you'll see a lot of consumers are going to be curious about it, and when they turn that corner and see that these devices are pretty neat and pretty intuitive, I think that you're going to see a big uptake on these. Now, do you anticipate there are going to be a high volume of pre-orders on these new devices? You know, that's a great question. I think that Microsoft has done a great job at marketing and rebranding themselves. I think that they'll try to exploit some alignment with some of their marquee products potentially here. We'll see some promotion along with Xbox, you know, just an all-out barrage and try to make something of it. And I think that, you know, that's pretty much where they need to be with this. We've heard a lot of mixed reviews and even some negative feedback prior to the Windows 8 unveiling. What do you expect consumer reaction to be to these new phones? I think that when people get their hands on the phone, that'll really be the big thing. The question is getting it actually in people's hands. I think that they've done a lot with the functionality aspect of it. Again, slick hardware is really going to be the key differentiator here. So I think that, you know, that there will be a big interest in it. And I think that that's really going to be the things that distinguish the phone from the rest and how successful this launch is. We know the pre-order date is going to be October 21st. Any idea when the phones will be available in store? There's reports that it'll be available in early November. So and that's just in time for obviously the holiday season. You'll probably see some really cool phones coming out with cool color schemes and things like that. So, you know, they're shooting for a hit market, not just a black phone or a corporate phone, if you will. I think that that's part of their strategy as well is going after that. So I think November, holiday season, all these things, they line up and make sense. CNET has learned that a Google Nexus 10 inch class tablet is in the works. The 10.1 inch tablet will have a higher pixel density than Apple's third generation iPad. So how much better will this display be? You know, all these things are like a neck and neck race. You know, Apple comes out a little bit more, competitors come out a little bit more, much like the phone market. I think that, well, what they're reporting is that this new Nexus will have greater performance than the Retina iPad. So you'll have a high density, the PPI, which is the pixels per inch. So you can expect them to kind of extend that line a little bit more.  But what we do know is that this is a high end device and we're looking at some high end features on it. Absolutely. With the upgraded Retina display, is that something the consumer eye will actually be able to tell the difference on? That's a good question. I think that what you're going to see is the technophile bunch, really, you know, looking at those things, the bottom line feature per feature. You know, it may not be distinguishable to the average person, but the technophiles will be the ones that really, you know, take this to that next level, right? Of, you know, hey, this device has got this feature and it's better than this feature. And it's, you know, if it's so moderately detectable, it will remains to be seen what that means in terms of adoption all term. Now you mentioned the tablet is projected to be a high end device. Can you explain what high end device means in terms of price for consumers? Yeah, you know, Apple really sets the market there. So that's that's what everybody shoots for there. They're the dominant tablet. So, you know, whatever, you know, whether it's 16 gig or 32 gig or, you know, whatever the scale of the highest end tablets are, and in this case, being Apple at the moment, that's what's really going to set the market. So, you know, the price will fall in line with that. My Apple will probably adjust at some point as, you know, there'll be a price war just like anything else. Google will be partnering with Samsung on this device and it'll be a co-branded device with Samsung. So what's the significance there of the partnership? Well, it's quite significant considering Samsung's background of litigation with with Andrew with Apple. And, you know, I think that Google aligning with Samsung, you know, they do it already on the Galaxy Nexus. So it's it's a strengthening of that relationship with Samsung. And I think that we're going to, you know, products along those lines and we're going to see, you know, and it's coming to the tablet market. Android tablets began appearing about a year and a half ago, but the company's still having trouble getting third parties to design applications optimized for their larger screens. Can you tell us why that is? Yeah, well, a lot of developers have not been very quick to adopt to a larger tablet space. So the big complaint that you see a lot of developers have not really created applications that are suited well for the tablet. So so a lot of the things are like just blown up versions of phone apps. And I think that might be the biggest thing that the issue that that's going on right now. And now Google is attempting to resolve the issue by putting out a tablet app quality checklist. And that's going to be designed to assist developers in creating better tablet apps. Can you tell us what kinds of guidelines the checklist mentions? Yeah, absolutely. It's a it basically starts out as a checklist. It addresses the layout, the quality of the core apps, whether the application uses a full screen asset utilization. There's a whole list of things like that, the fonts that was particularly interesting. So, you know, all those different elements that make for a great tablet app are part of the checklist. And reportedly, they're also continuing to to offer assistance and best practices. So there's going to be additional guidance apparently throughout the week for developers to optimize their apps for the tablet. So with the previously discussed rumors about Google pushing their own hardware further, do you think this is a move to set the bar higher for other hardware? I think so. I think that there is definitely a push to address the quality of the entire ecosystem, including the app store, clean that up to give a better experience. They definitely want to, you know, make a bigger push into the higher quality tablet space. So I think that it's a great effort. It's a great effort. And we'll see how effective that is in the long run. Well, John, thanks so much for your input this morning and we'll see you again soon. Thank you very much and have a good day for all the latest in-depth coverage and breaking analysis on tech innovation. Keep up to date with Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV.


Let's talk more about the infield and the depth they have. And again, to the hot stove rumor mill, right? I read something that said, oh, the Yankees are in on Trey Turner. And I'm thinking to myself, why? They kept Parraza. They kept Volpe. They could have traded those guys. As we look at this, and it could be LeMay, Hue at first or second, if Rizzo comes back, you've got Glaber right now. You've got Cabrera, who can play all over the field. You've got Kainer, Falefa, and Parraza. You've got Volpe on the come. So it makes sense that we pretty much see this configuration in some way, shape, or form in 2023. Again, first base is open. If they bring back Rizzo, that solves that issue. But they do have LeMay who, if they wanted to go that route. Brian Cashman said at the GM meetings, there's going to be a battle for shortstop in spring training. And you're right. If they didn't believe in Parraza and they didn't believe in Volpe, then they would have traded them for something that might have needed for the stretch run. So they really believe in these players. I think Volpe might be looked at as a guy that, unless he just bulls people over in spring training, could join them later on in the year. Parraza has a chance to beat out Kainer, Falefa. So does Oswaldo Cabrera. He could play shortstop as well. And Cashman said that Josh Donaldson is his third baseman. But the one variable in all of this, and it also involves LeMayu, if in fact they resigned Rizzo, there have been rumors. Do you trade Glaber tours now before he starts earning big money? And he did come off a pretty good year, and he seems more comfortable at second base. That's a possibility as well. Would it make sense to move some guys around and try and trade Donaldson in the final year of his deal?  That's the big problem. He was so good defensively, too. He's great defensively. He should have been in the top three in the gold glove voting. But I will tell you this, $25 million a year. I don't know if the Yankees want to digest that much money, because they kind of think, but Aaron Boone said he thinks there's more offense in there. We know the defense is there. I mean, he played a gold glove caliber third base, but hitting-wise, it was not what they expected. They expected more from him. He did not have a good postseason at all. But I could see them starting the season with him at third base. Now, if they get somebody to say, we'll take him and we'll give you our bad contract, that's a deal that could move as well. But again, it all hinges on whether they bring back Rizzo. If they bring back Rizzo, then LaMayu could automatically move to third base, and they solve that problem. But right now, there's so many moving ports, and as we said right at the start of this, it all hinges, it's contingent upon judge and Rizzo the other moves that you make. All right.


When one of the parameters governing the dynamics of a long-range interacting system of particles in thermal equilibrium is abruptly changed, quenched, to a different value, the system shows a fast relaxation to a non-equilibrium quasi-stationary state, QSS, where the lifetime of such an off-equilibrium state diverges with the system size, and the temperature is non-uniform across the system. The density profile in the QSS obtained after the quenches anti-correlated with the temperature profile in space, exhibiting the phenomenon of temperature inversion. This article was authored by Shamit Gupta and Leipo Cassetti.


Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I'm pleasure to have here Medora Meskasky, co-founder and VP of product at platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud native at scale conversation. Thank you for having me. So cloud native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud native develop basically DevOps in the CICD pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code. It's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native at scales up? Yeah. You know, I think what's interesting and I think the reason why super cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this. And I think I know my CEO was chatting with you as well and he was mentioning this as well. But I think there needs to be a different term than just multi cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributants of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is an appropriate term for that. So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere and that's just the beginning. We didn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IoT, OT and IT kind of coming together. But you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, these new challenges there. Can you share, because you can have edge, so hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state, but across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area yet. It hasn't been done yet, spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water. It's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's some business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think in the context of this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axes. I think on one end, you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have to deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis, you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site, or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site, right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axes, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when your scale is not at the level. Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there. The technology is also getting better. We're seeing Cloud Native become successful. There's a lot to configure, a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because what about at scale challenges here? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I like to call it the problem that the scale creates. There's various problems, but I think one problem, one way to think about it is, it works on my cluster problem, right? I come from an engineering background and there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is, I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, it's not working. Only the exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that developers test their applications, et cetera, within the sanctity of their sandbox environments, but once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower, at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending these applications and having them run at my customer site, where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster right, but maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity and there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just one example of an issue that happens. I think another whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you're deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. Okay, so I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved. When you see the success of Cloud Native, you see some experimentation, they set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes and then you say, okay, we got this, we configure it, and then they do it again and again, they call it day two, some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hot spot is and when companies transition from, I got this to, oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? Yeah, so I think it's interesting, there's multiple problems that occur when the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment, but the moment it runs production, it comes back with P0s and P1s from support teams, et cetera, and those issues can be really difficult to try out, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds, it escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting.  And so the things don't work, and when things don't work, triaging them becomes like initially hard, but it's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is as you have these distributed clusters at scale, you got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. So this is a huge problem, I love that comment. That's not happening in my system. It's the classic, you know, debocking mentality. But at scale, it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is, this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or in the cloud or at edge environments. And what Arlon is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sides of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components and at scale. So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in terms of the chaos you guys are raining in? What's the bumper sticker? What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line in a traditional, let's say, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot and it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line which is taking each component, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way then handing to the next stage where again it gets processed in a standardized way and that's what Arlon really does. That's like the elevator pitch. If you have problems of scale, of managing your infrastructure that is distributed, Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those problems. So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, CICD, pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. Yeah, not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers are responsible for one picture of that layer which is my apps and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with. But then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability is integrated and so it solves problems for both those teams. Yeah, it's dev ops. So the dev ops is the cloud-nated developer. The ops teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? Absolutely, yeah. And Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because Kubernetes clusters or your specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlaan addresses that problem at the heart of it and it does that using existing open-source, well-known solutions. Adore, I want to get into the benefits what's in it for me as the customer developer but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open-source. Why open-source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there, platform nine. Is it open-source and you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open-source dynamic and first of all, why open-source? And what is the consumption? Open-source is great. People want open-source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe you want to buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through. Can you share open-source and commercial relationship? Yeah, I think starting with why open-source, I think it's, we as a company, we have one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open-source technologies components and then we make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits in a massive way by this open-source economy, it's only right I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty and contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so we have always held that strongly as one of our principles and we have created and built independent products starting all the way with Fission, which was a serverless product that we had built to various other examples that I can give, but that's one of the main reasons why open-source. And also open-source because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall. Behind a block box. Well, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with SuperCloud is the new model of consumption is I want to look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great, that's open-source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I want to move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that it's going. But that's the benefit of open-source. This is why standards in open-source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Agent Cockroff uses the dating metaphor.  And that's what open-source is. This is how people are selling. This is not just open-source. This is how companies are selling. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.  I think one is just, you know, this cloud-native space is so vast that if you're building a closed-flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprise's use cases. And so having it open-source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SaaS-hosted version of it as well for those customers who choose to go that route. You know, once they have used the open-source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with who can, you know, support them for that production environment. I have to ask you, now let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know, because if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why should I be enthused about Arlo if I'm a customer? Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises where we talk to many of them, you know, our customers where this is a very kind of typical story that you will hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution and could be on-premise. It could be public cloud's native Kubernetes. And then we have our CI CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone.  And as these things, these things start by being done hand-grown and then as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home-grown DIY solutions for this. I mean, a number of folks that I talked to that have built Terraform automation and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course, technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Opspeak will be delighted, the folks that we've spoken with have been absolutely excited and have shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on EKS, Amazon, and we want to scale them to a few thousands. But we don't think we're ready to do that and this will give us the ability to do that. Yeah, I think people are scared, not scared. I won't say scared, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And I think this is going to come up at KubeCon this year where enterprises are going to say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I want to see track record. I want to see other companies that have used it. How would you answer that question to or challenge? You know, hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise. I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. Yeah, absolutely. So two parts to that, right? One is Arwan leverages existing open source components products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arwan uses Argo CD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right?  That's one. Second is Arwan also makes use of cluster API, CAPI, which is a Kubernetes subcomponent, right? For life cycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or open source projects that will find Arwan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo CD, now Arwan just extends the scope of what Argo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to your point of the comfort and that's where, you know, Platform 9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arwan at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DevTest environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform 9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to, Platform 9 customers that are familiar with Argo and then Arlo, what's been some of the feedback? Yeah, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a chord right away, but then we start talking about Arlo and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD and they start opening up, they say, we have standardized on Argo and we have built these components homegrown. We would be very interested. Can we code develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlo before we even wrote a single line, of course, saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, if you had it today, I would have purchased it. So it's been really great validation. All right, so the next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, look, I have, I'm so busy. My team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project. It's so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform 9 help me? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the core tenets of Platform 9 has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting this and a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers. So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands and giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlon will integrate with what they have, so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will even, in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and give you an inventory. And that's cool. So customers have clusters that are growing. That's a sign. Correct. Call you guys. Absolutely, they have massive, large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today. Or they've done that already on say public cloud or otherwise and now they have management challenges. So it's basically operationalizing the clusters, whether they wanna kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure and or scale out. That's right, exactly. And you provide that layer of policy. Absolutely, yes. That's the key value here. That's right. So policy-based configuration for cluster scale-up. Profile and policy-based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. If I asked you how this enables SuperCloud, what would you say to that? I think this is one of the key ingredients to SuperCloud, right? If you think about a SuperCloud environment, there's at least a few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical, like they are life-saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way. So that are not solves. Then you need to complement that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are going to happen and you're going to have to figure out how to solve them fast. And Arlon, by the way, also helps in that direction. But you also need observability tools. And then, especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make SuperCloud successful. And Arlon fills in one. Okay, so now the next level is, okay, that makes sense. It's under the covers kind of speak, under the hood. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems, the apps are going to be impacted. Are they going to be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact? If you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to. Because the right checks and balances have gone through and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them. Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility. I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my apps counterpart to do their part right. And so this really gives them the right tooling for that. This is actually a great kind of relevant point. As cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role, but this is a key point. And I have to ask you, because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are going to be do what they're designed to do, the question is, what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer that they should be calling you guys up and implementing Arlo, Argo, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it failed apps? Is it latency? What are some of the things that would be indications of things that effed up a little bit? Yeah, more frequent down times, down times that take longer to triage. And so your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners and they're extremely interested in this. Because the rate of failures they're encountering for the field when they're running these apps on site because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own scripts. So these are the kinds of challenges. So those are the pain points, which is if you're looking to reduce your mean time to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one.  So those are the signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confidence of physical and digital coming together and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the media terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology is running the business, is the business, the company is the application. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now and boards are saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Do you see the same thing? Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the technology that's, you know, that's going to drive your top line is going to drive that in a consistent reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. Final question. What does cloud native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want them to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee, production is running absolutely smooth and he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. And the CIO doesn't exist, there's no CISO there at the beach. Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on theCUBE, thank you for your time. Fantastic, thanks for having me. Okay, I'm John Furrier here for a special program, presentation, special programming, cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud, modern applications with platform nine. Thanks for watching.


Yes, baby, let's go dude huge ring huge one silver lanes family seal, dude the one ring I Don't know if I can take this off. I can't I can't take it off chat. I can't it's too powerful. I just It's too good. I just I need it. I need it. I need it. I need I need the one reach and I need it The ring doesn't control me Low 25, let's go nice level 25 easy Paladin good evening. I heard you're having some trouble taking off the ring I've done some searching and I think I found a solution. Oh Whatever could that be? It may be a little painful. I don't know I Feel like I shouldn't take it off. I have another ring, but they did speak of this I think it's pertinent. You do I don't want to it's not far. Where are you taking me? I know you don't trust me yet. Just believe in the light You must jump in it's hot. I Can infuse you the power of the ancients. It's crazy. I could never but you must die first What by God, man? Do you want to have free will or not? I do have free will and I do want to keep the ring on This procedure should assist you in being able to wear more powerful rings for your adventures There is no more powerful ring. I don't need this This ring is wonderful It's precious. They didn't anticipating corrupting you so fully so quickly. I thought your connection to the light more powerful There is none other the greater connection to the To the light than I What is this blaspheme? Prove it then do not need it's me again precious good job that night elf chick is crazy You and me together buddy forever and always the one true ring for the one true can Exactly, I do not need to do this and take it off if I want to you can be rebirthed with a will to resist I just don't want to perhaps. I had chosen poorly. I am the only option. I'm the best option Very well, take this might it grant you a modicum of the strength the ritual would otherwise The seed What does it represent? Rebirth or so the tradition say You can do it, you know jump in I know you still have the power within you. What if I lose it? That's not the point I'll do it. I don't even know if you're in range Okay, Vivian. I trust you. I was finally He will to take it off. I don't know where he had gotten into me. This must be destroyed. I will Take this to the to the black fathom depths As soon as I can to cast it away Forever It is a ring of great power, but also great corruption Now continue your journey as man do what was promised so long as you hold that acorn the ancestors will protect you my maple seed I Shall take this seed and carry it With me so long as I have the ring For now, let's go I'm growing weary of the toll This ring has had upon my body the dormant heat is a lot to bear as well indubitably light Guide your path night elf All right very good very good very good very good. Oh man chat. We got a hey listen the RP is real Okay from this server.  It has to be done Greetings paladin word of your various activities has reached si7. You've grown so powerful that even master Matthias Shaw Has become aware of your presence. Do not let said power corrupt you. I have no corruption This is your only warning. We will be watching you Bah humbug Dude, I don't know why I think I just think that the stealth walk away is Every time a rogue is talking to you and then stealths and walks away It's just so funny to me Guys listen, we spent a little bit of time this week Role-playing we spent a little bit of time this week having fun Unacceptable behavior for world of Warcraft. Okay. We can't be having fun. All right So I think it's about time we we kick the crusade back into gear. Okay. I think it's about time we go we start Rallying the troops. Okay. I think it's about time. We start bringing the crusade back So game time begins this week and you know what I've made some mistakes. All right. I was having fun I was doing some YouTube content. All right I was taking my time leveling to 25 and you know what we're at a little bit of a disadvantage You know, we've had our backs up against the wall and ashen veil and honestly I'm a little bit disappointed I thought the alliance was better than that But you know what the alliance needs a leader and we don't have one right now, okay? Our leaders are taking their sweet-ass time making YouTube guides like it's 2017 or something Okay, our leaders are taking their sweet-ass time Leveling our leaders are taking their sweet-ass time doing org owner things. Okay tomorrow is when the real show starts We're gonna react to YouTube videos for six hours tomorrow, and then I'll play Wow for 30 minutes in in-stream. Thank you