Hello, everybody. I'd like to welcome you back to the second panel of this event on sectarianism in the Middle East. My name is Mark Lynch. I'm a professor at George Washington University and a non-resident associate here at the Carnegie Middle East Center. And I'm delighted to be able to moderate this second panel. We'll be going in the order starting as far away for me as possible. We'll be starting with Justin Gangler, who is, make sure I get this right, Research Program Manager at Qatar University, then Alexander Siegel from New York University, Alex Henley from Oxford University, and Joe Behoot from the world. So Justin, the floor is yours. Well, you can still see it. OK. Well, thank you very much, Mark, and thanks, Fred. We're over there now for this invitation. I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew my background, which is in survey research and collecting public opinion data with the risk of potentially drawing this towards a more academic rather than policy discussion. But this is going to inform the work in my chapter, but also the way that I'm coming at this question of sectarianism. I'm looking in particular at the political economy of sectarianism, which you might think is sort of a strange combination, economics and sectarianism, and what does that really mean? And another way of thinking about it is sort of rationalist explanations for sectarian behavior, both on the part of citizens and on the part of states. And so if you think about the way that sectarianism is often described and talked about, not always maybe by more serious scholars, but sort of the average description of sectarianism, it's something very bad that happens. You might have different impressions about why it happens, but the conclusion is sort of, it's this bad thing that happens as a result of some processes that we may or may not understand, and how do we avoid it? And so my chapter in the book sort of takes a different angle and tries to understand what are some of the reasons why people might engage in sectarian behavior? What are the sort of behavioral underpinnings of sectarianism, both from a perspective of a state, whose job it is or whose aim is to remain in power, and from the standpoint of citizens who are just sort of trying to interact with their fellow citizens, trying to engage politically, trying to live their lives, sort of in an ordinary sense. So how do we understand the motivators of sectarian politics in particular? The chapter looks at the GCC states. I'm coming from Qatar University, and my background is in Bahrain and Qatar to a lesser extent. And so I'm looking in particular at the way that Gulf states or sectarianism is manifest in the Arab Gulf states, which arguably is sort of the main epicenter of this question since sort of maybe moved from Iraq to the Gulf since the Arab uprisings. So this builds on some new work, not all by myself, by people like Stephen Brooke, who look at sectarianism in context where there are no Shia, for example, the case of Egypt, or in countries where sectarianism shouldn't exist. So the question is, well, if you have anti Shia sentiment that leads to deaths of individuals in a place like Egypt where she are not actually a political constituency that threatens the status quo and in the Maghreb as well, then how do we think about it and what's really driving it? So one side of this is on the standpoint of states. And so looking at sectarianism as a tool of regime security, we talked about this maybe in the first panel in the context of more non-essentialist explanations of sectarianism. I don't think I go that far exactly, but looking at this sort of truism, which is often said, that essentially states can scare people into accepting unpopular policies. And how does sectarianism fit into that sort of a dynamic? This is a picture of sort of infographic advertising the Saudi National Transformation Plan. And you'll notice that this plan involves a few things that ordinary people wouldn't necessarily be welcoming, including a VAT tax, for example, a new tax on goods and services, including public sector salaries will be cut 40% of total spending and things like this. And so it's looking at the way that sectarian politics can interact with other policies and other dynamics, including economic dynamics in the country to help explain what's driving these things. And so the starting point of this in the Gulf Contest in particular is thinking about, and don't worry about the slide, I'll talk about this, is thinking about how does politics operate in this region? The prevailing understanding of the wrong TA states or the sort of oil producing states in the region, not just in the Gulf, is that states get money. When oil prices are high, they have a lot of money, so they give people a lot of money, people are relatively happy. When oil prices are low, they have less money, they give people less, and so that's when problems sort of start to occur. In reality, it's not really how things work, it's more along the lines of what we were talking about in Syria where some people always sort of do better and some people always do less well. And traditionally, those sorts of differences tend to go along group-based lines, sort of ascriptive dissent-based lines for different reasons, we can talk about that. This is just an example of this in the case of Bahrain. This uses survey data to explain the things that determine whether or not a citizen in Bahrain is employed in the public sector as a function of their concentration in the neighborhood where they live. And so you'll see, if you're a Sunni living in 100% Sunni neighborhood, you have a 75% chance of living in the public sector, whereas if you're a Shia living in an entirely Shia neighborhood, you have a 30% chance of living in the public sector. So clearly, these sorts of economic outcomes are not just random chance, right? There are important distributional implications to sectarian identity. This looks at another factor. On the side of citizens, we have, again, to sort of understand this puzzle of why do people engage in what is in many cases a costly behavior, I mean, expressing publicly sentiments against another group. I mean, it's not necessarily a socially acceptable thing to say that you dislike other people on the basis of some ethnic characteristic, right? If you just think about social relations. And so one way that people are thinking about this is looking at sectarianism as a form of peer pressure. There's a sort of social conformity element where either because of the prevailing narrative or religious or political narrative, people feel pressured into these sort of sectarian attitudes and behaviors, and this is where work on Egypt, for example, has gone. They're using the case of this country where they literally have maybe 1% of the population or less, which is Shia, but all of a sudden three or four years ago had these outbreaks of sectarian violence in and around Cairo that led to the deaths of many people in a sort of gruesome fashion. And this is a sort of picture of the funeral procession from those events. Another thing that you might think about in the context of why individuals might engage in sectarianism in a country like, let's say Bahrain, is in a case where the state itself has very overtly come out in favor of one sectarian position versus another, then is expressing sectarian attitudes as an ordinary citizen? Is that a signal of disliking the other group, or is that a signal of just supporting the state in the state's own position? I mean, is it a signal of political support? You're saying, yeah, I support you on that thing, just like you might support the state on its retirement policy, or is it actually reflective of an underlying hatred of Shi'a, let's say, or something like this? And so I think there are important behavioral elements on the side of citizens as well as states that are not exactly understood. My contribution for the book to sort of briefly outline it focuses on this question from the standpoint of the state behavior. So how does states gain from sectarianism? Both specifically as a specific sort of strategy, but also more broadly sort of from the outcomes that sectarianism generates, which is basically feelings of insecurity, feelings of conflict, feelings of instability. And so what it takes to its starting point is this post-2011 concern among citizens in the Gulf region in particular for stability. I mean, which is not hard to explain given that all you have to do is turn on the TV or the radio, Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, all these places with graphic images from places like Yemen, from Syria and other things that seem to drive home the point that when you go down the path of revolution or the path of change, bad things tend to happen, especially if there are malicious regional actors that are looking to take advantage. And so what we've seen, accordingly, this is based on some survey data that my students who collected from Qatar is that the priority that ordinary citizens give stability versus other types of national goals when you ask them to choose between different goals that a nation might prioritize or they might prioritize for their country, stability has really jumped up from something like 30% of citizens in 2011. I think it was even lower maybe to 10 or 20% in 2010 before the Arab Spring to 75% of people in 2014. The newer data I think we've just received recently, it's up to 80%. 80% of people now prioritize stability over these other competing national goals. And so what does that do politically? Does that make people more deferential to decisions that they don't necessarily agree with simply because they now prioritize stability? And how does sectarianism sort of raising this threat of this either internal, in the case of Shia populations or Muslim Brotherhood populations or Salafist populations or external Iran, other actors, how does that both drive this concern for stability and then via that concern for stability, how does that impact how people think about politics and how they react to things that might be unpopular such as, for example, the National Transformation Plan and other reform agendas going on in the GCC. And so essentially what the chapter does is uses some survey data collected in 2016, 2017 from five to six GCC states, all the GCC states except for the UAE, which declined to participate in the survey. And divided people, this is a simplistic explanation, but essentially divided people into three groups or even two groups, let's say. People who are concerned about stability, so the people who are sort of in that first category over here on the left-hand side and everybody else. And then it asked the question, okay, so how does the political behavior of the first group differ from the second group and what does it mean substantively in terms of regime security in the Gulf? And what you find is this common pattern among three of the four, sorry, four of the five surveyed states, the exception is Oman, and I guess we could talk about that if people are really interested in Oman, is that concern over stability essentially breaks the link between economic satisfaction on the one hand and political satisfaction on the other hand, which operates sort of in the Gulf and other wronged states. So it means that if you're concerned about security and stability above other national goals, your deference to unpopular political decisions as measured through some survey questions is entirely unrelated to your own economic satisfaction because of course you don't care as much about your economic satisfaction relative to this other goal that you have of security. So this is a summary of that result, which is that if you have one person in a country, let's say in Bahrain or Kuwait or Qatar or whatever, who is economically dissatisfied, objectively economically satisfied, so maybe on a scale from zero to 10, he's in the lowest 25th percentile, but he's not concerned over stability. He named some other goal as his top national goal, let's say democracy or perfecting the environment or economic development, and then another person from the same country who's also economically dissatisfied at the exact same position on the sort of economic satisfaction ladder, but this person names his their national goal, security and stability, maintaining the system, these sorts of concepts. The second person is 50 or 80%, so almost twice as likely in some cases depends on the country, to defer to government decision making. So the exact survey question, which has been used in a lot of surveys in the region is that citizens should always agree with government decisions, support government decisions, sorry, even if they disagree with those decisions. And so people in this high prioritization of security category are 50 or 80% more likely to strongly agree with that sort of a statement, which underlines the importance then and the sort of economic interest that states have in what? In increasing the proportion of citizens who are in that category, because now you don't have to provide for them economically, it's essentially an economic subsidy. These people are no longer connected to you via your increasing their material circumstances, but because of this other link which doesn't cost you anything, I mean might cost you things, but it costs you less money. And so if you can only scare people more, either by let's say having wars in Yemen or by raising the threat of domestic and international actors, then your economic burden as a state really decreases dramatically. And that's the point of the chapter. And I'll end there. Thank you. Now we'll hear from Alexander Siegel. Nice switch with you so I can see. Sure. I'm sorry. Hard to see the slides from that angle. Okay, great. Thank you so much to Fred for organizing this and it's really exciting to finally see the book in print after almost a couple of years. So my chapter of the book kind of comes out of a broader research agenda that I have as part of my dissertation which is this idea that during the Arab Spring there was all this optimism of the role that social media could play in democratization and empowering new voices across the region. But then five years on, the question that I think is really important to ask is what role is social media playing in the crises and conflicts that have been left in the wake of the Arab Spring around the region? So this work kind of fits into that broader research agenda. And in terms of this paper, some of the general research objectives are to ask how does social media affect the dynamics of local, national, transnational sectarianism in the Arab world but also perhaps more importantly what can social media data teach researchers and policymakers about the day-to-day micro-dynamics of sectarian conflict in the region? So I think in order to motivate this it's important to kind of take a step back and people start talking about social media as this sort of new phenomenon and particularly in the context of sectarian conflicts that as the Syrian civil war escalated, suddenly there was sort of this narrative about an outpouring of online hate speech and this idea that this is a totally new phenomenon but I think it's more useful to contextualize it into the role of media in conflict more broadly. So if we take a step back kind of across the region media has long played an important role in empowering various political and religious elites to spread all sorts of narratives and sort of a common example that comes up is thinking about Nasser using radio to spread Arab nationalism but perhaps more closely related to the discussion of sectarianism if you look at Sadat's use of radio in the late 70s the kind of anti-Shia messages he was putting out when talking about Hafez al-Assad in Syria really speak a lot to the sorts of narrative we hear today and are a similar example of thinking about elites taking advantage of new tools to spread different kinds of political and ideological messages in the region and so there's been a lot of discussion also about the growth of satellite television for example and particularly sectarian media outlets that after the Iraq war got underway and sectarian tensions escalated these media channels took on these sort of decidedly sectarian narratives but I think no matter which form of media we're talking about whether new media or more traditional media it's useful to think about the fact that this is a long standing phenomenon where different actors take advantage of the media tools available to them to try to spread these narratives for different political aims. At the same time there might be something qualitatively different about social media so what might be different about this new media form and I think in my research my feeling is that what's primarily different is the existence of these platforms where elite everyday citizens, media outlets, armed groups, extremist groups are all operating on the same platform putting out information interacting with each other and so you see these evolving narratives that are coming from the top down from the bottom up at the same time and in some ways that is fundamentally different than these other media sources which everyday citizens and actors with less sort of clout and economic capabilities couldn't access in the same way so nowadays we have on social media this user generated content which is much harder to control and you get all sorts of actors both those with more power and those who previously wouldn't have had a real voice in the debate kind of entering conversation here so there's a lot of discussion of this many analysts of social media data have talked about the proliferation of echo chambers and this idea of thinking about sectarian conflict for example that maybe you have only Sunnis online talking to each other only Shia online talking to each other and that that's creating these kind of hostile environments where more extremist messages get circulated what I actually find which I'll discuss in more detail as we move forward is that there's a lot of cross-sectarian discussion online some of it cooperative some of it quite hostile but we don't sort of across the region but especially in the Gulf Sea these kinds of echo chamber environments where only members of one sector talking to each other online there's actually quite a bit of interesting back and forth and so when we look at this data we suddenly have a new opportunity to look in real time at how all these different actors are responding to events on the ground what kinds of narratives gained traction who's spreading them and where are they coming from so one place where we've seen the spread of hostile sectarian rhetoric in the online sphere is coming from particularly Salafi clerics in Saudi Arabia and their use of anti-Shia discourse is pretty striking because they're using these hostile sectarian slurs that were once more the purview of extremist groups but have entered their vocabulary and so you have these actors Muhammad al-Areefi for example as of this morning has over 20 million followers on Twitter so when he tweets out one of these nasty anti-Shia tweets such as the Raafid assemble Shia women whose aim is to provide temporary marriage for Shia fighters or these sorts of things Jews and Christians did not used to collude with the Raafidah as they do today in this country in every country these tweets aren't just going out in the ether to a few people they're potentially being viewed by some subset of these 20 million followers and perhaps lending legitimacy to some of this more extreme rhetoric and so what we see when we look at the proliferation of anti-Shia rhetoric over time on Twitter and for this paper I was looking at a six month period in 2015 because that's when the Carnegie paper that later became this book chapter came out we see this really large spike in anti-Shia rhetoric that's occurring around the Saudi intervention in Yemen and particularly it starts when the Houthis have this major advance in Hadi, President Hadi flees the country and so the question is what's driving this spike? Is it everyday citizens reacting to the news? Is it members of the royal family? Is it sectarian media outlets? And what you see when you dig into the data is it's primarily these clerics and sectarian media outlets that begin tweeting this anti-Shia content earlier on and then their tweets are retweeted at high levels by others and after that sort of gains traction then everyday citizens and other actors join the discussion but what social media data enables us to do which we can't do so easily with more traditional data sources is see who exactly is beginning this conversation, whose messages are gaining traction and where do they spread and I think that provides really important insights to us to gain a better understanding of the micro-dynamics of conflict in the region. We can also look at anti-Sunni language on Twitter which I find in my data is much smaller in volume than anti-Shia rhetoric and a lot of it is produced by sort of armed groups and accounts that are armed group supporters but you see this really sort of dehumanizing rhetoric like get out, own the loss of, there's no place for you in Ali and Hussein's Iraq for example where you're talking about rhetoric that's really saying Iraq is for one sect only and these kinds of messages don't spread as widely as the anti-Shia messages partly because they're not produced by actors that have large followings but they're still there and interestingly like this message for example the get out, own the loss of message is a reply to a Sunni person who's tweeting something about the advance of the popular mobilization front in Iraq so these people are interacting with each other and having these kind of hostile real time conversations that we can monitor. When we look at anti-Sunni rhetoric it tends to spike around different in this period anyway around different clashes like to create offensive and recapture clashes in Ramadi but also in the aftermath of ISIS related attacks like the attack on a Shia mosque in Saudi Arabia or the release of like a viral ISIS video for example. Then we can think also about counter sectarian messages that appear and here are a couple of examples from Lebanon in this picture you have the guy who is being split in half by the word sectarianism and it says national unity across his body and the tweet above says don't you know that in Lebanon we are all Shia if the Shia are threatened we are all Sunni if the Sunni are threatened we are all Christian if the Christians are threatened we are all Lebanon and these kinds of messages also are fairly popular online but they don't tend to gain the same kind of traction as the anti-Shia rhetoric and we saw a lot of them in the Gulf emerging as I'll show you here in the aftermath of the two attacks in Saudi Arabia on Shia mosques and also particularly the attack on a Kuwaiti Shia mosque in this period in 2015 where the message would instead be we're all Kuwaiti or we're all Saudi et cetera but what's interesting about this language is it's often met by a strong backlash online particularly in the Gulf from people who say this is all Shia propaganda what are you talking about we're all Kuwaiti clearly Iran is behind ISIS and this attack and there's all kind of conspiratorial rhetoric that often sort of comes out as a backlash to the counter-sectarian messages so just to recap kind of the primary findings that are in the book chapter we have these diverse violent events which are driving fluctuation both in sectarian rhetoric but also in the volume of counter-sectarian rhetoric we see clerics and sectarian media outlets and also influential Gulf elites playing an important role in spreading this rhetoric online and I think what's particularly problematic about this is it lends credence to a lot of extremist messages so ISIS accounts are also tweeting anti-Shia rhetoric but they're not getting retweeted at high rates then at the same time you have these well-known actors with large followings putting out quite similar statements which I think touches a bit on what Cole was talking about this morning with the sort of overlapping narratives between extremist groups and more mainstream actors that kind of blur the lines of whose message is whose. Another important point that I mentioned is I think it's useful to note that we have these ideologically diverse actors that are engaging with one another and arguing with one another sometimes productively sometimes probably counter productively on Twitter but we don't see just these pure echo chamber environments that are often discussed and then finally this idea that most counter-sectarian narratives really lack elite support and so they're not spreading very quickly or to large audiences and often fail to gain traction and as I said before often viewed with suspicion so I have a current project that's in the works right now where I'm doing an experiment to see what kinds of counter-sectarian narratives people might find more compelling and I have, it's partly a survey experiment but I also have these bots that I've created that are tweeting various counter-sectarian messages that people tweeting anti-shea content online so we'll see when those results come out if there's anything more promising with kind of certain kinds of messages that might be able to gain a bit more traction but that's an open-ended question at this point so thank you so much. Very thank you. Now we'll turn to our stomach. Thank you. Good morning. So I'm gonna keep the conversation about clerics going for a bit. We've heard a lot about Saudi clerics from Alex in a little in the last panel. I'm gonna focus on clerics in Lebanon and really seeing quite a different thing going on when looking at religious authority and sectarianism in Lebanon. I've looked at clerics, the kinds of clerics that I've looked at have been the kind of officially recognized heads of various religious communities in Lebanon and I think they're a great example of how clerical politics can work in relation to sectarianism in multi-confessional countries so perhaps like Iraq, like Syria, maybe Egypt and I think you see quite a different thing going on from what you might see amongst these Saudi clerics and I think there are lessons to be learned from Lebanon's history of governmental engagement with these clerics, with these religious authorities. The Lebanese state has been engaging with heads of communities, religious heads of communities for over, well, almost 100 years ever since it was created and a very much part of the confessional system that we're gonna hear a bit more about from Joe in a moment and I think increasingly nowadays we have politicians and diplomats seeing conflict in the Middle East as driven by polarized religious identities, they're looking to engage with religious leaders as representatives of these identity groups and it seems like a common sense solution. Who better to speak to when dealing with sectarianism than the leaders of these sects? So what I tried to do in my contribution to this book was look a bit at who these religious leaders really are, who do they represent, what do they represent and should we see them as part of the problem of sectarianism, should we see them as potentially part of the solution, how should policymakers deal with these figures? And the first point to note is that these heads of religious communities as we see them in Lebanon are not the ones inciting sectarian hatred and I think we end up very easily with kind of a caricature of clerics as pretty much walking embodiments of sectarian difference as preaching incompatible world views that lead their followers then into conflict with each other and in a sense I think these kinds of caricatures give religious leaders almost too much credit. In reality what we find when we look at these senior religious figures is that they're officials, they're essentially bureaucrats most of the time. They've risen out of hierarchical, bureaucratic, religious institutions and they're not charismatic rabble-rousers, they haven't kind of a risen out of the masses as natural leaders and they might have influence but it's not a very clearly, there's not a clear link between religious leaders and some kind of ready-made religious followership. You also find that these institutions are heavily invested in the modern nation state, in the state order. They benefit from their control of family law courts, from running publicly-owned mosques, from salaries from state budgets, funding state funding for religious schools and colleges, all this kind of thing. These religious institutions are very much invested in the status quo in a state system that's based on confessional coexistence in a place like Lebanon and you'd see that in Iraq as well, for instance. And so you have these religious leaders rising out of institutions that are very much kind of part of the ideology of the state, part of the structure of the state and they become religious leaders by succeeding within that hierarchy. They start off like any elite, they go to the right schools, their families place them in the right jobs in the central religious administration. They play the game and largely, those who end up in charge of these religious institutions are also those who've never really upset anyone. They've never really drawn enough attention to have had themselves blacklisted by the various political interests involved in appointments to the top offices even in religious institutions. So often these guys, they're the uncontroversial ones who kind of risen to the top. It's a very, very far cry I think from the image we sometimes have a little naively of what religious leaders are all about. Having kind of taken them down a notch, they do have a great potential that we see throughout Lebanese history for actively defusing sectarian tensions and they can do that by making kind of symbolic stands. We've seen over the last five years say since the war started in Syria and the role of Hezbollah in Lebanon has become particularly politicized and a particular kind of bone of contention between different communities. An interesting thing that's happened is that each of the leaders of the main religious communities has deliberately taken a symbolic stand with the opposing community as it's been seen. So the religious leader of the Shi'a community has been very critical of Hezbollah during these years and the Sunni Mufti and the Maronite Patriarch have both reached out to Hezbollah and tried to build bridges. Very clearly kind of trying to cross the divide and you end up seeing this, you see this throughout Lebanese history, you see it all the way back to the Civil War of 1958. Maronite Patriarch of that time very famously stood with the Muslim opposition to a Maronite president. So you have these kind of symbolic acts through which these leaders can use their status, the status they achieve through these institutions to address what they see as a kind of rising sectarian problem. So that's kind of the good side potentially, something we can engage with them over. On the other hand, you could say that their very existence in public life in a country like Lebanon works to inhibit social integration. It helps divide the population through this symbolic role they play unless they're using it in this very strategic way. But we often have, you often see images of the various religious leaders of Lebanese communities used as a way of representing sectarian division in society. It becomes symbolic of these divisions. And they also enforce them practically. The religious institutions have a huge amount of power over people's daily lives. Family law courts effectively prevent intermarriage between sects or make it very difficult. And these religious institutions, of course, administer schools and all kinds of key life events. They channel people into kind of different communal tracks, you could say, by administering their births, marriages, divorces, deaths, inheritance, the whole kind of cycle of family life. And so you have these kind of two sides. Actively, these religious leaders might play quite a positive role at times, at key times. Perhaps more passively or at least in more kind of institutional terms, they can be seen as part of the root of the problem. So what do we do with them? Should policymakers, should diplomats and politicians be dealing with these figures? I think there's a huge problem that we find in that because these aren't kind of naturally occurring phenomena, these leaders aren't just there as organic representatives of sects, they change. And we end up changing them by engaging with them. And that's what you see in Lebanese history, that by recognizing particular figures as the representatives as the leaders, administrators of different religious communities, you end up empowering them and disempowering others who would like to have a role in those activities. And I think in Lebanon, I see it as leading along with various other problems in the confessional system of government. I think it leads to a crisis of representation. You have a system of recognizing religious leaders that is intended very positively to kind of expand the scope of democratic representation to kind of provide other means of engaging with sectarian diversity. But actually what you end up doing is empowering particular institutions as representatives. And you end up excluding all kinds of people from secularists to Islamists at different extremes. And I think it kind of feeds into some of the problems that we see today that we're gonna hear more about from Joe, I think, or even there. All right, thank you. And now Shobahut, the Carnegie Endowment. Thank you so much, Mark. First of all, a word of thanks to Fred Wary for this fantastic work that he has led. And I really feel lucky to have arrived at Carnegie at the time that this book was the project was launched and that I was asked to join very kindly by Fred. Thank you so much, Fred. And thank you, Carnegie. In fact, I'm speaking at the end of this day of this event. And I think it's not a coincidence because probably my chapter about Lebanon, the Taif Agreement, the confessional system, or what we call more scientifically the consensational democracy system is part of particular in all this complex that we are discussing. Because Lebanon is probably the first and only case so far where confessionalism or sectarianism has been institutionalized. And this is the headline, maybe, of my presentation. So it's a very specific case, but at the same time, and this is what I will try to end on in a way to close the day, it also gives lessons to the other cases. We can drive some lessons for good and for bad from Lebanon that would speak to the other cases that we have heard about or that are addressed in the book. What are the specificities first of the sectarian system in Lebanon that make it really particular and to that day, uncomparable with our other cases? First of all, it has a very deep historicity. It's a system contrary to what people could think is well entrenched in history. First of all, Lebanese sectarianism, Taifiya siya siya, as we call it, is rooted in something that started in the Ottoman era. It's the millet system, the way that the millet system of the Ottoman Empire starting from the end of the 17th, 18th century, early 18th century has organized the communities in the Levant by granting them the right to organize their legal system, their sociological organizations and et cetera. Then the French mandate came and also contrary to a cliche that is well entrenched, it only in fact took it over, it prolonged it. Just remember that at the end of the ancestry of civil wars in Lebanon, 1860, the famous massacres of the mountain, under the Ottoman Empire, the Reglement Organique, Reglement Organique that Metternich put in place to end this war, the civil war, created a confessional system in Lebanon in the Mutas Arifiyah, where you already had a governing council form out Lebanon of six members, three Christians and three Muslims with a Greek Catholic, a Greek Orthodox, a Maronite, a Druze, a Sunni, and a Shia. So it's not a new system. This is the first particularity, the second particularity. Fred this morning said it's beyond Sunni and Shia, it's not only Sunni and Shia. I would say Lebanon is beneath or before Sunni and Shia because it's an organization between Christians and Muslims, which is very particular also. And if you miss that point, you don't understand kind of the genetics of the sectarian system in Lebanon, which narrative, which philosophical narrative is built on the Christian, Muslim encounter, dialogue, et cetera, the East-West dialogue, and all this story. So this is the second particularity, although, although, and I don't forget that, with time, especially after the 90s, the sectarian system in Lebanon becomes, but implicitly, much more about Sunni and Shia organization. But it's rooted until today, despite all the tension between Sunnis and Shia in Lebanon, that is, in fact, the main story, even of this morning. In fact, the legalization of the sectarian system in Lebanon is mainly about Christians and Muslims, which is the second particularity. Now, this is the first point I wanted to make. The second one is to try to tie the Lebanese sectarian system to a more, a wider family of political systems in the political science paradigm. Lebanon is not a very particular case in the world. Lebanon, at least in the 40s, 50s, when the sectarian system was legalized under the form of the national part, was part of a family of other sectarian democracies, consensational democracies in the world, ironically not in the Arab world, mainly in Europe and sometimes in Africa, Nigeria and et cetera, Belgium in Europe, maybe other cases elsewhere, that political science, and famously, one political scientist, Aaron Clippard, studied under the name of consensational democracy, saying that in societies that are heterogeneous, but now, of course, this is the entirety of the problem, how do you define, or how do you decide that a society is heterogeneous, who defines the groups and et cetera, but in a society that is perceived or perceived itself as heterogeneous, democracy has to accommodate the rights of individuals, meaning like a Western, Western democracy, a one-man-one vote, but also to give rights and guarantees to the groups as they define themselves. So the demos, in demos, Krasya, in democracy, is both the individual and the group. So this is the architecture of the sectarian system as Lebanon took it, meaning that in fact, every mechanism of decision and power sharing has to take into account the rights of individuals and the rights of groupings, with sometimes giving the rights of groups or groupings to the detriment of that of the individuals, which is a philosophical question in Lebanon about what does individualism mean in the sectarian system, but this is another debate. However, and this is now the path towards this part of the unraveling of the type system and why was it in fact a very bumpy road. What the sectarian democracies or the consensational democracies theorists, like Aaron Lippert said, is that for this system to work properly, it needs or it takes some structural conditions. And he singled out several conditions. I would retain three of them. The first one has to do with the nature or the quality or the political culture of the elite, of the political elites themselves, that has to be, that have to be these elites, naturally inclined towards compromise in a constant manner. I mean, they are negotiatory, they are transactional, they are, and they are not in a zero sum game, let's say mindset or political culture. The second one is that the economy, the political economy of such a system has to ensure a minimally acceptable level of redistribution of wealth, meaning that you can't have concentration of wealth within one community to the detriment of others or within one space or one territory within the system to the detriment of others. And the third condition, the third prerequisite was that the system has to evolve in a more or less peaceful regional environment so that the external tensions does not, do not strain, in fact, the system internally. If you take these three conditions, you can easily say, at least for the two last, the economic redistribution and the regional environment that Lebanese constitutional democracy that was in fact born really on paper in 1943 was doomed to fail because in fact, it was in a very tense regional environment, the Arab-Israeli conflict that started three or four years after the birth of the system and then the Arab-Arab wars and then the Cold War internationally, et cetera, et cetera. The economic system that in fact concentrated everything on Beirut and within the sectarian system, concentrated it in the hands of two or three specific sects or communities to the detriment of other or at least within these communities in the hands of a cluster of people to the detriment of others. I won't get into the story or the history or the narration of this unraveling. This is part of the chapter that I had the chance to have in this book but I would say that the agreement that ended up the civil war of 1975, which we call the Taif agreement, in fact was built on two pillars and this is probably the novelty compared to the classical and traditional sectarian system, sectarian political system in Lebanon. It was built on two pillars. The first pillar was that in fact, as I was saying, it transferred the quote unquote political hegemony in the political system in Lebanon from the hands of the Maronite community or the Christian communities that were in fact omnipotent before the Taif agreement or before the war. It transferred this hegemony to someone else. The problem is that this someone else was a kind of very fluid couple of Sunni and Shi'a political forces. So in fact, the hegemony that was in the hands of the Maronite community was transferred and vested upon a duopole of Sunni and Shi'a political forces. The second pillar of the Taif agreement, which is organically intertwined with this first pillar is that by a kind of international acceptance and due to the conditions of the war and the end of the war, the Taif agreement gave the management and the implementation of this system to the Syrian tutelage over Lebanon. Meaning there was a kind of Syrian mandate over Lebanon after 1990 that was put in charge, that was vested in managing this system of transferring the hegemony between Sunni and Shi'a. And the Syrian tutelage in fact, always played on this pillar or on this first pillar of transfer of hegemony and the competition between Sunni and Shi'a, which in fact led Lebanon to in a way join the family of the other cases in the Arab world where today you have this tension between Sunnism and Shi'a. So in fact, in a way, Lebanon is a precursor in the tension of Sunni and Shi'a, but at the time the Sunni and Shi'a tension flares up after 2010, in fact Lebanon completely joins this family and its internal tension becomes almost unmanageable and almost problematic. Now I will end up very quickly with the last point, which is in fact what are the lessons that Lebanon can tell the other cases in terms of sectarianism or when we talk about sectarianism. I would say that the positive lessons, if we can say so, are the following. First of all, the necessity, and this is something that the current events of today are telling us in a very crude and violent manner, the necessity of political system to recognize sociology, not to hide it, not to conceal it, not to deny it, to accept that societies are heterogeneous, but having said that, not forcibly to fixate heterogeneity, i.e. to inscribe it in fixed boxes, in closed boxes, meaning that this takes a very inventive, political and institutional and constitutional engineering. And this is probably the huge challenge that countries like Syria, Iraq, probably tomorrow, Yemen, Libya and et cetera, will have to face in the coming decades. This political engineering to find. The second lesson that Lebanon gives us is this famous importance of the elite nature and quality. And for that, of course, you can say this is genetic, you can't create the elite you want and et cetera, but here also political engineering has a role. And this is called democracy, elections, circulation of elites, fluidity of systems, intra-sectarian democracy, because this is sometimes also we forget, we tend to think about sectarian democracy as a dialogue between heads of sects, as you said, but sometimes we forget that this also has to do with the competition within the sects, not only among the sects. And then you have other examples that Lebanon in fact gives us to tell or to lead us to the idea that it will be kind of difficult to completely replicate the Lebanese system if, for example, tomorrow a solution for Syria or for Iraq has to take the shape of a tough agreement. As some people say, we need a Syrian Taif or we need an Iraqi Taif. What would be the impediments to that? The first impediment is historicity. These countries do not have the political culture of sectarianism. There is a political culture of sectarianism. Any Lebanese knows how to deal with sectarianism in a more or less light manner, which is not the case in countries like Syria and Iraq today. The second has to do with that, it has to do with a kind of political philosophy that built the Lebanese system on this famous slogan of no vanquished and no vanquished. So in fact, even after a war where very clearly someone has won the war, you have this idea or this narrative that is overbuilt that in fact we all lost and we all in fact won. So we can build the system again on a kind of very soft and very diluted hegemony. This has to do with demography. So for example, in Syria where today and Haiko is saying that in the first panel where you have more or less an 80% Sunni society fighting against a 10% Alawi regime, more or less if the figures are correct, it will be very difficult in fact to build such a narrative after the war in Syria of no vanquished and no vanquished because there will be clearly a vanquished and a vanquished or at least there is today clearly a dominated and a dominant. And the last point about that is exactly what Lebanon lived under the Syrian tutelage. For such a system to work, you need a regional architecture of regulation. So the question would be for example, for Syria and Iraq, who will be the Syria for Syria tomorrow, i.e. who will be the guarantor of civil peace tomorrow in Syria? Who will be the Iraq of Iraq? And this is I think the open question for a region that is today in turmoil and that is probably called to stay in turmoil for years and if not for decades to come, I'll stop at that point. Thank you very much. Great, thank you, Joe. And the historical perspective is actually, I think a very good place to begin a discussion. Before going to the audience, I just wanted to ask each of you if you might just say something about connecting back to the first panel. So the subtitle of the book that we're discussing that you produced is the roots of sectarianism in a changing Middle East. And so we all know that there are changes in the Middle East. I'm curious if you see sectarianism also changing. In other words, is there anything new about the way sectarianism is practiced, experienced or having political effects in the countries that you study or more broadly that you might be able to share? Alex? Yeah, so I think in regards to my research, this connects back to the idea that social media provides this platform where you have everyday citizens, elite armed groups, extremists, all interacting on the same platform. And so that then changes sectarian discourse in the sense that all these groups can sort of learn from, co-opt and adapt the messages in each time. So I think in that sense, the language of sectarianism is changing and the ability for everyday citizens to participate in the proliferation of sectarian messages, I think is a new phenomenon. So I think that's how I would tie it back. Justin? I think in the case of political economy, clearly the change is the retreat of oil prices since 2014 and especially in the Gulf context but not just in the Gulf context. The desire of states that have had this sort of social welfare system that's unsustainable to move to something else and the potential to leverage sectarianism in order to ease the transition to something else that still preserves regime security under changing economic circumstances. Alex? I mean, I think everything is always changing and it's very easy to look at other parts of the world and think that they change slower than our own. You know, if you look at American society, recent events seem to have exposed whole new ways of understanding its makeup. And I think this is a point on which I would disagree with Joe, that I don't think you can build, it's very difficult to build kind of governmental solutions to sectarianism out of the kind of readings of a society's makeup because the society's makeup changes all the time. Even the things that we think that we assume must be kind of the stable core around identities that are built, you know, these kind of the religious beliefs or the religious institutions, those things are changing and interacting with each other in different ways all the time. No, in fact, I would completely prolong what has been said. For me, the change and probably what trenders sectarian is much more dangerous and much more difficult to deal with today is that it has gradually evolved from a pure political power sharing struggle between, I mean, political forces that use sectarianism or sectarian language to something which is much more identity-rooted, much more religiously-rooted, and much more, let's say, around symbolic, more than politics, and you can share power but you can't share symbols. For example, when you talk about fighting to protect the Shia shrines in Syria or fighting for the return of the Mahdi or fighting for the murder of Ali or Hussein in the seventh century and the eighth century, it's much more difficult to solve this crisis than to solve the question of who will become the speaker of parliament in Lebanon and how many ministers the Greek Orthodox will have and the Greek Catholics and et cetera. So this is to say that I think that the slippery slope on which sectarianism is on towards identity politics only and no more power sharing politics partly is something very difficult and it will render much more difficult to mediate transaction and negotiate solutions in the future if this trend goes on, which is, by the way, something you can find in the Arab-Israeli conflict also which is more and more going towards a struggle over symbolism and identity much more than over territory, rights, interests, and et cetera. But what's interesting is that if that also applies in the Gulf, where you see perhaps, I mean, Justin, I'm curious if you see a disentangling of these identity narratives from the kinds of political economy bargains which you see as at the center of how sectarianism operates. Sure, I mean, to the extent that you find, as in the case of Egypt, which I mentioned explicitly, but sort of anti-Shia sentiment in a place like the UAE, for example, where you have very small portion of Shia or something that seems to be very disconnected from the political potential of that group, it's much more about, and part of it I think is this question that we talked more about in the first panel of outside support, right? So what's different is that if the potential political problems that can emanate from a domestic group is augmented sort of artificially by this outside power which may or may not exist, which is Iran, I mean, the outside ability to manipulate that group, then it doesn't matter if you have only 25 Shia in your country, you have also Iran and they could somehow use this group to invade or something. I mean, so I think having this always present intranational competition increases the latent potential or the perceived latent potential of groups that otherwise from a strictly domestic angle don't have the potential to cause as much chaos as they're being given credit for. Okay, great, why don't we go to the audience and see if people have questions? Yep, go wait for the microphone. I'm Dr. Caroline Poplin, this is way outside my wheelhouse, but Yemen, how do these kinds of things play out in Yemen? It's hard to believe it could get worse, but is it going to get worse? Is there going to be more outside intervention? Is there any way we can use the different groups to stop the violence and the humanitarian crisis? But anyone like to speak to Yemen? I mean, I've lived in Yemen for a couple of years. I'm definitely not a Yemen expert. I would say when I spent time in Yemen in 2006 until 2008, and I mentioned to people in passing that I was also working in Bahrain and working on things there and they asked, well, what are you working on? I said sectarian conflict, and they would say, oh, well, okay, that's interesting, but it doesn't really have any relation here. I'm like, what are you talking about? You have also Sunni and Shi'a here. They're like, no, we don't, who's, where are the Shi'a? They only consider the Houthis as the Shi'a in the country and that Zaidis who are now being labeled as the Shi'a majority or the Shi'a vehicle for Iran, they consider them Zaidis, which is something different than Shi'a. So when I was in Yemen, it shows sort of how quickly this change and how people understand their own social categories can happen. Beyond that, in terms of solutions, I think one complicating issue is, and maybe this is very procural because it relates to my presentation and sort of my research interest in this case, but not to be too conspiratorial, but I think there is a real way in which not just Yemen, but the persistence of instability in the region and particularly since it's sort of on the Arabian Peninsula gives states leverage to do things that in a time of less security concern would be very difficult to do, especially on the economic front. And so I'm not sort of suggesting that states are artificially prolonging the conflict, but I think if Iran, let's say, were to go away as a concern tomorrow for all the Gulf countries, I don't think that would be welcomed by any of the Gulf countries, except for maybe Oman. I would just say that I recently had a conversation with the head of the UN humanitarian coordinator, and the three things that I took away from that were, he said that things in Yemen at the humanitarian level are far worse than people think they are, and we all think that they're bad. He said they're worse. He said that number two, we all kind of count on Yemen having this kind of reservoir of resilience base. It's never had a very strong state, strong communities. He said those reservoirs were almost entirely used up that they've been decimated by the blockade, and especially with central banks stopping paying salaries to, what is the public sector employment is quite high anyway. And then the third is that as he put it, there's no hope on the horizon, which was a pretty dismal way for him to end, but so yes, I think things can get worse. Wait for the microphone. I wanted to ask Joseph about how, or if you can see a possibility, how to harness potential for non-sectarian politics. Or trans-sectarian, non-sectarian, and you speak about intra-sectarian democracy, which is important, but then you also have this at times quite sizable movement, perhaps, outside the formal political realm. We can get some momentum and then they dissipate again and sometimes they're then harnessed for the wrong cause, they're hijacked by the sectarian elites, but I mean, in any place in the region, and think of people establishing non-sectarian platforms, I think that it's an ebony. You have the level of education necessary, it's sufficient in sufficient numbers, like reaching sufficient parts of society, but you have frankly a political system that militates against it, that electoral system that does not allow any kind of non-sectarian representation to be established in a sustainable manner, so what to do about it? I mean, Leibhardt is very negative about it, as you know. It's a lot. Those, the rebel Rousers have to be contained, the wise men have to lead, and it's more about keeping people apart, and keeping people from massacring each other that way, than bringing them together. Yeah, I could, you know, this is partly the untold story in Lebanon, I mean, the untold history, because in fact, and this is something really unjust for these movements, we tend to forget that this is not new, it's not post-civil war that you have this civil society movements and et cetera, we tend to forget that, for example, and this is very, very interesting for political scientists, at the eve of the civil war, 1975, meaning mainly during the period 1970, 1973, 74, if you take back the statistics and the works, the sociological studies that were made at that time, the student, the non-sectarian or trans-sectarian student movement was at its height. It was extremely powerful. The labor union movement was extremely powerful. The political parties, non-sectarian, were very strong. You had a very strong communist party in Lebanon, which is, that is today, anecdotal, for example. You had trans-sectarian or cross-sectarian housing movements and intermarriages. It reached really the peak in 73, 74. One year later, you have one of the bloodiest sectarian civil wars in the history of humanity, in fact, which is a very interesting case to study. It means that, in fact, these indicators are not enough. Something else has to do with political economy. A lot of people tell you, no, Lebanon is not in crisis. Lebanon is not heading towards catastrophe. Look at, for example, construction and look at 73, 74 Beirut was over-constructed also. The banks were blowing under deposits and a year after you had also a civil war. So I would beware about these movements per se as indicators that the society is, in fact, not too minimal. Now, the second part of the answer is, first of all, as you said, the instrumentalization of these movements by the sectarian elite, but not only by the sectarian elite, by, let's say, some forces, like, for example, in Lebanon by the Muhabarat or et cetera, that use them, in fact, to weaken sometimes the sectarian elite. So, in fact, you are escaping the sectarian political game, but you are entering in a very bleak and very shady other kind of game that is not very much nicer or very much, let's say, better than the sectarian game. Now, the third part of the answer, and this is my policy answer, although I hate to make that in an academic setting, is to say that probably instead of trying to decapitate the sectarian system at the top, it's to try to open small avenues and breaches in the sectarian system from the bottom, from below. For example, like maybe struggling for a civil law of marriage, for example, at least optional for people, to encourage housing policies that are trans-sectarian or cross-sectarian or et cetera by mixing people geographically, probably things like the Lebanese university and et cetera. But trying today to confront the political system from the top by saying, we want to change the system, tomorrow we will pass to a Western steering democracy and et cetera is something doomed to fail from the onset. What we have Heiko here, I'm actually quite curious, Justin, you make the point about how the Zaides become Shiites and somehow the Alawites became Shiites, but the Kurds in Iraq never became Sunnis, and I'm curious if Lebanon, you look at Lebanon's experience of institutionalized confessionalism versus what we're seeing everywhere else in the region, I mean, what do you make of that? Of the ability of some groups to be turned into the Sunni-Shia narrative and other groups seem to be immune from that kind of imposition of identity. I can give you an anecdote that- Benara's back there. That maybe gives an angle here. So in 2013, perhaps, when I was with the German think tank, we had a meeting with some Iranian think tankers. One of them was an intelligence person, officer, former. Apparently he was instrumental in suppressing the Kurdish insurrection in Iran after the revolution. He said something very interesting about the Alawites. We had this kind of semi-theological discussion, are the Alawites Shiite or not? Compare practice and social, I mean, social practice in particular in Syria, even today, but certainly before the war with Iran. I mean, it's really a very remote, that there could be any resemblance between them, between Syrian Alawites and 12 Shiites, at least as practice in Iran, Iran. He said, well, the Alawites are orphaned shia. But I mean, that's very interesting. It means you have, these are orphans, these are people who have a family that is perhaps unknown and they need another family and they have to gather it in to our orbit. But it's really like, I mean, it is something that happens on the state level in this case. And you bring in, you ingather a group and you claim them for yourself for strategic purposes. I think that's a very clear case. And perhaps in the process that they really, Alawites themselves become convinced they're Shiite. I don't know. I don't know, just for the second question, I mean, why did Kurds never become Sunnis?  And for the Kurds, there is a competing narrative. There is an ethnic national narrative that cuts across those denominational differences. Look at the Balkans, look at Albania, for instance. So across the Balkans, it's the former Yugoslav space, let's say. Denomination and nationalism is really almost interchangeable. All Kurds are Catholic and all Serbs are Orthodox and all Muslims are Muslims. But then look to Albania is free denominations. And actually most people, I mean, very few people know that it's free. For most people think Albania is entirely Muslim. They're the national idea is simply dominant. I think that's, again, it's historical question of the historical formation of certain communal identities. And that's the case of the Kurds not being seen as Sunni. That's fascinating. Let me take a couple of questions over on this side. Ma'am. Thank you. I'm a fellow of the Young Professionals of Foreign Policy here in DC. My question is, when we think about trying to de-escalate sectarianism, which factor has a bigger impact? Is it sort of de-escalating regional tensions and that would allow domestic dynamics to sort of go in a different direction? Or is it about sort of coming in domestically first? So, you know, things like in the Gulf, so having a different institutional setting when it comes to employment or in Lebanon, sort of changing the way that democracy operates. So is it, which one I guess matters more? Is it coming in from de-escalating regional dynamics or is it fixing the domestic institutional settings? Something like two. When you think about that, we'll take another question and then we'll answer them all. My name's Connie Zulam. I'm a Kurdish activist here in town with the American Kurdish Information Network. I was wondering if some of you could put your historian hats on. I mean, Europeans had sectarian wars. How did they address it? Did Asians, I don't know if they had sectarian wars. Did they, how did they, if they had it, how did they address it? Can the people of Middle East learn from the other experiences in the world? I have a question for Joe, actually. First, congratulations for the new votes. Joe actually mentioned that, mentioned about the institution re-engineering for the democracy and the social justice improvement. But there's one other kind of institutions that I'm more interested. That is the economic growth. And Justin actually also linked the public opinions and the political preference with the economic growth. So I don't know whether anyone can talk about it a little bit more. Maybe quickly, in fact, I'll try to tie the questions to your question.  I mean, as long as you have a feverish, let's say, environment, it's very difficult to treat the body. I mean, first of all, you have to quell this, to isolate the system from regional interferences, very fierce competition between actors, regional actors that use a sectarian language as a tool. This is a prerequisite. And then you have the domestic, et cetera, within which I would put not economic growth. I don't think I ever said economic redistribution, which is, okay, growth is good for everyone, but if you have growth without distribution, you haven't made anything. You have growth in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, and I don't think that there's no sectarian problems in Saudi Arabia. So in fact, growth and redistribution, and I said it, not me, Aaron Klippert said it, that this is one of the three prerequisites of the functioning of a constitutional democracy. So yes, this is a cynic one-on condition, as you say. Now, if you allow me just a few seconds and another anecdote on what you asked, very interestingly, after the Taif agreement, and mainly after 2005 and the crisis in Lebanon, when the divide between political shiaism and political Sunnism became really acute, and you had these Christians that were torn between the two, you had people in Lebanon saying these are the shia Christians and these are the Sunni Christians. So in fact, it's an identity is also sometimes like that. So you have onists were the shia Christians and people from Jaja were the Sunni Christians. So you have this joke in Lebanon, which is not only a joke, I think, which is politically something relevant or something interesting to use to explain something. A great article, right there. Justin? I think in this question of domestic versus international prerequisites, maybe Mark has a different reading, but I think in political science at least, there's been some work, including recent work in the Middle East that seems to suggest that in times when you have less space for domestic political activity, so sort of more closed environment, maybe crackdowns and that sort of thing, that people naturally magnifies the importance of international sort of transnational identities because of course local political identities then sort of a moot point because there's no space for political actives. And Lawrence Lua wrote a good book on this in the Gulf context on transnational shiaism. And so I think it's not necessarily the case that at least in my experience in the Gulf that cooling international tensions is a sort of prerequisite for domestic reconciliation. On the other hand, I think another important question is whether or not states feel, so ruling elites feel it's in their interest to have this sort of domestic reconciliation. If you think about the uprising in Bahrain, for example, in 2011, the first political party to be dissolved after that shia-led uprising was the secular political society. Why? Because the only real threat to a regime like Bahrain or other minority rule regimes is if basically people start to organize on the basis of just regular class or political grievances. Like I don't like corruption or I don't like the fact that the state is just naturalizing random people to serve in the military and the police. But so that's dangerous from the state if that starts happening. But if people start protesting because I'm a shia and I don't like the state, then that's easy to combat because then all you have to do is say, hey, some of these look at all these shia protesting, maybe you should do something about that, right? That's a very easy situation to handle from the standpoint of the state. So it's not a coincidence that the secular political societies and sectarian mobilization hasn't emerged. And people in Bahrain came up with stickers, for example, that they would put on their coats that said, not Sunni, not Shi, just Bahraini. And people would rip them off at security checkpoints. They would use that as a sign of opposition because they're daring to challenge the sectarian and narrative of the state, which ties back into what the question I raised in the presentation, which is how can you, if the state is proactively promoting a sectarian narrative, then if you agree with that narrative, then are you just a sort of supporter of the state and that's all you are, is it a political act or is it fundamentally a sectarian act? And I think it's not always clear when the boundary between those things. Alex or Alex? Yeah, I mean, I think not to harp too much on the media environment, but that really ties into this discussion of transnational versus more domestic sectarian issues because now you have a space where everyday citizens in countries across the region are exposed not just to what's going on in their own political system and domestic political elites interpretations of conflicts abroad that you can, they can also view content that's being produced by people on the ground in other places in real time. And so distinguishing between domestic and transnational becomes more complicated because it's not just about the elite narratives anymore, it's also these sort of mass narratives that transcend transnational boundaries in a new way. Alex or Jack, last word? I can as well, yeah. I mean, it's such an interesting question from somewhere. I mean, I think it doesn't, this doesn't always have to come down to conflict and where conflict is happening or originating, but the kinds of identities and the way that people are drawing boundaries are shifting even in peace time and in ways that I think always kind of belie national borders, but also communal borders. I mean, going back to my clerics in Lebanon, the appointment of Sunni Muftis in Lebanon has always been done partly by Lebanese Sunnis, but also partly by Lebanese Christians and Syrians and Egyptians and they've all been involved in that process. And I think, as Alex is saying as well, you can't really, these things are never happening completely separately. All right, well, I think we're just about out of time. I'd like to thank you all for coming. I'd like to thank Carnegie Endowment for hosting this fabulous event. Thanks, Fred, for inviting me to moderate.  Thank you. Thank you.


all right corona what is going on people hope you're doing well as we all know with the corona virus spreading it's best to stay at home if you don't know what to do well this is a great time to do some epic product shots if you see my previous videos you might know that I shoot most of the product b-rolls by myself at home for this video I teamed up with the one and only Tony Leverick Larsen who is a Norwegian photographer and videographer living in Espanya on his channel he does a variety of awesome b-roll product shots and might have some very useful tips for you so with no further ado Tony show us what you got first off let me just say these tips are my own preferences they won't apply to every creator and every setup out there but I personally have found them to help me quite a bit when producing both personal and commercial work tip number one is use a soft light by soft I mean light that doesn't create super hard shadows my preferred way is using the ambient light from the window I make sure to have my setup placed so that the window casks a light from the top side and down one way to see if your light is diffused enough is to place the tip of your finger down on the same surface where you're placing your products and see how clearly you can see the shadow that your finger is casting tip number two is to create a setup that works both for video and photos I see a lot of cool setups that works great for product photography but sadly won't work for video depending on a project try to create a setup that works for both it'll save you a lot of time and money in the long run tip number three is when in doubt less is more it's hard to get specific on this tip because it's really just a leap of faith but let's compare it to making food when cooking a dish it's more important to have a few high quality ingredients and preparing them well then it is to just throw in a ton of different ingredients and spices that basically just drowns the essential taste of the dish me personally I would rather spend more energy on getting light color and composition correct then buying a lot of props don't be afraid to experiment because it is a creative field just make sure you have the basics correct maybe shoot the basics first and then experiment and see how it goes all right that was awesome Tony thanks for the great tips so we all have different styles of creating a product video here's an example of a product video I shot at home ready for that so here are my tips on what I find important when shooting a product video tip number one is to try to make the product look interesting for the product shot I added a black acrylic floor that makes the watch reflect off the ground it gives it a luxury feeling to it and just makes the overall scene look more interesting and to me it's little details like this that make a big difference it's important to clean the surface using a microfiber sheet to remove the unwanted fingerprints I built out the rest of the set by adding some coffee beans which I thought would match great with the golden color of the watch and adds more depth to the scene there are really no rules to this you have to try and test out to see what works for the product just remember that the scenery will reflect the product's message tip number two is to use proper lighting it's important to have a soft light by adding a diffuser and getting it as close as possible to the product so that the light is nice and spread out to isolate the product more I added a honeycomb over the diffuser for my second light I included an aperture M9 to light for the reflections and to make it a little bit brighter it was kind of hard to light this product because sometimes the light would reflect on the glass of the watch so I had to work around it to find a good reflection I added a third light to brighten the other side to make it look evenly lit try experimenting around and shape your light in a way that makes the product stand out more for my last tip tip number three is to add movement to the product under the platform I added a motorized turntable that allows the product to rotate smoothly you can also buy a cheap turntable in Ikea if you are on a budget for the smooth push in and slide shot I use the eye footage shark slider it's important to try to get as many different shots as possible to have more option in post everything was shot on the Sony a7 III in 4k 25 frames per second and 1080p 50 frames per second using the Sony 24 to 105 f4 if you shoot in 4k you have the option to do some digital push in or moves and speed wraps I believe that it's easier to shoot videos of people than of products because a product doesn't move it doesn't show any emotion in fact it doesn't do anything and your job as a filmmaker is to make the product come to life so these were our simple tips on how to shoot a product video at home challenge yourself use anything you have a fork a shoe whatever and start practicing would love to see what you have come up with I want to thank Tony for joining me in this video if you haven't checked out his channel he does not only create product videos but also real estate music videos and more so go check him out and give him some love if you like this video then give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel I would really appreciate that thank you so much for watching stay at home and see you in the next video