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LSE: Public lectures and events
Reclaiming Democracy in the Square? Interpreting the Anti-Austerity and Pro-Democracy Movements
01:20:07
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- [00:00]
A
Okay, well, good evening and welcome everybody. My name's David Lewis. I'm the head of department in Social Policy here at the lsc. And this evening we have three eminent speakers who are going to discuss the issue of reclaiming democracy in the square, interpreting the anti austerity and pro democracy. On my left we have Professor Malis Glacias from the University of Amsterdam, and on my immediate right, Professor Heber Ralph Ezat, who is a professor at Cairo University who's come over all the way from Egypt just to talk to us tonight. And then on my extreme right, not politically, but geographically, we have Amine Ishkanian, who works here at the Department of Social Policy at the lse. So the format this evening is that we're going to take the presentations in that order and our speakers are going to talk for about 12 to 14 minutes. And I'd like to ask Marlis to begin the proceedings.
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B
I'd like to begin by taking the opportunity to thank our collaborators Jeffrey Players and Irum Ali, to thank our numerous research assistants, some of them students here at the lse, students at the University of Amsterdam, but also people have helped us in Cairo, Athens, Moscow. Some of them paid, but many of them unpaid. So thanks very much for making this report possible. And I'd also of course, like to thank the Robert Bosch foundation for making this report possible. I'm going to be talking a little bit about why we did this research, how we did this research, and then I'll say a few things about our findings. And as the last speaker, Armina will pick up where I left off with those findings. So let me begin with the why. For Me Personally, around 2010, 2011, I'd been doing research on civil society, NGOs, social movements for about a decade and I was very sick of it. I was going to reorient my research agenda to looking at some more top down institutions. I was working on the International Criminal Court and developing an interest in authoritarian regimes. But lo and behold, what happened in 2010, you began to have the Spanish and Greek anti austerity protests, but then even more important for me, the Tunisian and especially the Egyptian uprisings. And I immediately had a feeling that there was something more than meets the eye to these things happening simultaneously, that there might be some deeper commonalities. I'm not suggesting that I thought there was a single network behind all this, but I did think there was. As I said, this was not just coincidence and I wanted to know more about that. I was also rather suspicious of the media attention which was generally quite, I think, welcoming and positive, but did portray both the anti austerity protesters and also the protesters involved in the Arab Spring as not knowing very well what they wanted. I suspected that instead there might be something going along, more along the lines of very diverse concrete concerns and demands, but also perhaps an attempt to develop a new political vocabulary that might not be so easily recognized by journalists. I also distrusted the notion emerging from the media that all this was coming out of nowhere and had no connections with more formal civil society. Now, I started speaking to Armina about this, and I thought Armina would kind of discount all these suspicions, particularly the one about deeper commonalities, because much of Armina's work has been about the dissonance between what international NGOs believe to be universal values and what local priorities actually are. But it turned out that Armina very much shared my intuitions and also my questions. And her particular, I think that that came out of, was going to Yerevan in Armenia in the spring of 2012 and finding an Occupy camp there, Occupy Mashtoz. And I think it was very clear to her that this was not a pure copycat of Occupy Wall street or the Western manifestations, but it yet had decided to pick up that name. And that was not coincidental. So that's how we started really, with a common agenda of some questions that we were both deeply interested in. And I was very comfortable doing it with Armina precisely because I knew she would curb my inclination to always see common patterns and common discourses everywhere, because she's rooted in anthropology and she'd have a much better eye, kind of, for local peculiarities. We both come out of a research tradition of doing qualitative research, but we felt there were certain things that we couldn't establish with qualitative research alone. The first was the question whether These movements of 2011 were a flash in the pan or whether actually there was something more lasting to them. And I'll show you some of our findings there also whether this was just a confluence of Western and Arab movements and nowhere else in the world, or whether there were broader patterns. And we also felt that there was some leverage to be had from all the self reporting that these protests nowadays do, so that we wouldn't have to rely on the media alone. But at the same time, of course, we felt that the survey would not be enough, and we also wanted to do some deeper field research. Now, qualitative research has very often do their field work alone, but this time we decided that the first site we'd Go to, We'd go to together. So we did research together in Athens so that we would kind of jointly experience what was happening there, jointly, elaborate and adapt our research questions for the other sites and evaluate things together so that we have a more intersubjective interpretation. And I think that's been a very valuable experience. And with that, I then went on to do research in Cairo, where I've been coming for many years, mainly thanks to Eberzat and Amina, did research in London. And we had other collaborators, including Jeffrey Players, who is here today doing research in Moscow and Yerevan, all raising the same questions. This is what we found in our global survey. And I think maybe I need to say a little bit more about our method there. What we counted and then subsequently coded, both from media reports and from self reporting, was any events that had involved at least 50 people, but more importantly, that had some sustainability to them so that we could actually call them movements and not just protest events. And we decided this would be the case if there were at least 10 days of either encampment or street mobilization within a period of three months. And what you can clearly see in this graph is that while the biggest confluence of mobilization is indeed in the summer of 2011, you can see it go up again at the end of 2012 and then go up again just as we stopped doing the research around the first of July. And this includes, of course, the Brazilian protest, the Bulgarian protest, the protest in Istanbul. So we can definitely say it was not a flash in the pan. There's something more sustained. And Amin will speak to that more in detail from the qualitative research. Initially, we weren't going to ask questions about social media because we thought the social media question had been done to death. And we ourselves were rather bored with it. Just like this respondent who also said, I don't think social media is the cause of the student movement. If that is the next question. It's not the next question. Good, because that is the most boring question. So that was our initial response, but we actually found that there was more to say about the role of social media. This is from one of our respondents in Cairo who was speaking about this. We are all Khaled said website that invited solidarity with a young man who had been beaten to death in a police station. And this respondent said, one of the things about this Facebook page was recognizing that we are so many. We are so many who are frustrated. This always gives you courage and increases your abilities to know your strength. Because all the time organizations weren't able to show how strong they are. They always depended on working on the ground. So one of the things that social media can do is kind of both measure and also perhaps augment the kind of civil courage underneath these kinds of protests. And another thing that it can do.
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Is.
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B
Speak much more to transnational communities. But we did find that there is much more of a language barrier there than at least I initially expected. So we found that our Greek respondents especially speak to Greeks and a lot of Arab respondents kind of move in the Arab world, whereas others are bilingual. And hence it's not surprising that the Armenians found social media particularly important because of course they have a very dispersed diaspora and they could speak to it in this way. So that about social media, despite our initial thinking, oh, let's not hype up the social media, we found that actually research that has been done so far doesn't specify that much. What it can do, what it cannot do. I think we've got something more there. But the main thing that I really wanted to talk about, and Armine will talk about it in some more depth, is we wanted to do more research on the aspirations and the demands of these movements because both the anti austerity protests and also the pro democracy protests in the Arab revolutions have been accused of only knowing what they're against, but not what they're for. And while, as I said, I think all the movements we researched were characterized by great diversity and hence also had very different concrete demands, they were developing a common understanding, understanding of what democracy is that I think is very different from the kind of formal Western understanding of parliamentary democracy or even liberal democracy. The greatest universality in the responses we got in the interviews we did was in a rejection of electoral democracy as not something we don't need, but as something that is well below our aspirations of what a democracy can be. We found quite a few respondents affirming the need for civil liberties, the rule of law and equality before the law in order to have a more substantive democracy, whilst others made a link with social justice that Armine is going to address in more detail. But isn't there something else that we found that I've tried to capture in these two very important quotes, that democracy is not something you demand from the state. Democracy is something that needs to happen in society. It's a way of doing things. Both of these interviews, interestingly, we actually did through translators, so there's not some sort of common effect of very cosmopolitan youth speaking here. Ahmed is a 22 year old student in Cairo who said democracy is a culture and obligation at a popular level. We use democracy for formulating our revolution in the family, in the streets. People have not been educated to practice dialogue in democracy. And this is very interesting. I'm hoping Heba will address too, whether she thinks there's something in this. I think that the absence of democracy at the former level is a result of the absence of democracy at the popular level. And similarly, Nafsica and Athens had told us one month earlier, democracy comes from all of us, from the government and municipality. But if we want to give democracy real meaning, it has to start at a grassroots and society must fight for it. It's not a gift, but something you have to fight for. You have to fight for democracy. So they have this perception of democracy as both something deliberative, participatory, that happens in small groups, but also something to do with struggle, with having to fight. And I think it's for that reason that the experience of being in a square for a longer time is so important and transforming as an experience to the people in these movements. In Moscow, we found that although Occupy Aby, the movement that was there in a square for eight days, was both small in numbers and actually not very sustained, it was broken up by the police. That mark a qualitative change in the way oppositional policies was being done. People were not anymore just in the street going put and go away. No, they were talking to each other and trying to develop products inside society. We had other respondents saying all this talking, it's not leading anywhere, and being more frustrated with the square experience. But nonetheless it has had further results that Armine will speak about in more detail. But I actually found that the person who best captured what kind of the square does was someone from Cairo, an acquaintance, as it happens, of Hebera Ulfhezad and who had later then also been involved in Occupy Wall Street. He called this time in the square a kind of utopia. And he said we must recognize it for what it is as a utopia. And I'll just end with a quote from him. He described the 18 days in Tahrir Square in January 2011 as God shows certain people utopia to tell them it exists and that you have to achieve it yourself, and then it's gone. That's why I don't see the revolution as a failure, because it was just hope and a glimpse of what we can achieve.
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C
Thank you.
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A
Thank you very much. Thanks for keeping to the time so well. So next we're going to hear from Professor Hebera Fizat. Are you Going to speak from the lectern or.
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C
Yeah. Thank you everybody for coming and thank you Marliz and Armini for inviting me. And I have to go back with my number to 2003. And also thank Mary Kaldor, who introduced me to the group working at LSE on the Global Civil Society Yearbook and where I got to know Marlee and other colleagues. And I think that the work that has been done on the global civil society and the anti globalization movement and on is very much relevant to that. And I wish that if you are going to turn the reported to a book that you should actually link it with the anti globalization movement, though it seems that it is a democratization movement, but it's also a continuation of what started with the anti globalization movement and anti war. And I think that you can find a lot of things that are in common between both. And also it's all about the generations that basically refuse to admit or refuse to give in to the standard. So it's the aspiration of change on the global level, it's aspiration of change on the local and domestic level that is inspiring those youngsters and many people who are actually inspired by them, as well as citizens, even senior citizens participated. But there is that sort of vibe that started the momentum. And I think that the youth deserve to be recognized for that. But unfortunately, the generation that usually usually pushes for the change is not the one that gains the outcome and the fruits of change. What is so interesting about the report, and I will keep referring to it because my comments are basically sort of a commentary on it and adding some more points from my background and my experience in Cairo, is that it gives us sort of this approach that it's not only about the Arab Spring, it's not only peculiar to the situation of Egypt and Tunisia and other countries in the Arab world that basically inspired the world with the revolutions, uprisings, whatever you call them. But it is a wave and here we can sort of reclaim again this sort of historic analysis of global affairs. And not global affairs in the sense of official and for international relations, but rather the affairs of what we used to study in our work on global civil society. So there is a spirit that is coming up in the world from below and it is democracy bottom up as we formulated it in the book that came out to show sort of respect and gratitude to Mary Kaldur during the course of time a couple of years ago. So I think that basically the issue at stake is the relation between structures and flows of power. We have the structures, whether global or Domestic that are very much well designed, that are serving specific interests. And we have the flows of power that were very sort of very well put and very well studied by people like Manuel Custon's and others. We have the work of Antonio Negri talking about multitude. We have the work that is describing rhizomes. So we have the horizontal and we have the vertical. We have the structures and we have the flows. And I think that the whole dialectical relation, or sometimes confrontational relation, is between the two rationales on the ground, whether on the global or on the national level. Here we have the attempt or the sort of the goal of examining agency on the very individual level. That's why the narratives are very important, very inspiring, why people made that picture possible. You can recognize individuals, but they build that scene. But you can also see behind it something that they did not recognize when they were living in the bubble of that utopia of the 18 days in Cairo, in the case of the Egyptian revolution, is that the structure of the fierce state, as Nazi Ayubi called it when he was studying in his excellent book Overstating the Arab State that I keep rereading and I keep reteaching to my students and asking them to read it. There is that overstated state behind that scene that was not very happy about the flows of power going out of the structure of power. And this is what made the democratic transition that took place. And I think that you also should refer to the democratic transition that took place, or the responses of the system to try to accommodate, but basically to absorb what happened and to turn the flow again into a structured relation of power, or to sort of hide it, or to sweep it under the carpet, or to pretend that now we have a process of democratization, we have elections, etc. But eventually the fierce state came back with its ugly face. Whether we call what happened in Egypt a coup, or whether we call it a soft coup, a hard couple, it doesn't really matter. But I think that using the word coup obstacles or does not allow us to understand the very complicated dynamics of the relation between the street, the return of the masses and the rule. Not of social media, but of mass communication. The role of the TVs followed by everybody, not of Twitter and Facebook and the impact they have on millions of illiterate people in our country, for example. So here you have again the return of the overstated state. And it's not only about the army, it's about the reaction of the state towards something that it keeps calling an interval, or even calling those who eventually were elected by the people, whether you like them or not, whether performance was good or not, they eventually were chosen by people on the square. There were not millions of people, but the millions actually came out to the streets during the elections. And these are the elections that brought a specific group to the seats of power or to office, because power and office are not always the same. But at the same time, the failure ended up in protest again by some people on the streets that were seized and taken as an opportunity by the armed forces to take over power and then set the roadmap for the future. And I think that here the two factors of geography and demography are very important too, reflected on in the report on the youth and how they feel very much disenchanted. But many of them, like the young man Rami, for example, that you quoted at the end, actually thinks that, okay, now they took it over again, but what are we going to do on the grassroots level and where do we go from here? Many of those who actually demonstrate on the streets of Cairo or were part of the Rabba sort of sit in and the scene of Rabba were not only Muslim brothers, but they were youth who felt that they had dignity and they want to protect it. And they maybe felt that same sense of utopia in Rabbah. And if you talk, maybe you can come back to Cairo and talk to those who are going through a very traumatic experience because of the fierce and very brutal ending of the Rabbah sit in and Occupy scene. It was really a very harsh comeback of the state. How the different actors on the state level are managing the situation in order to introduce another democratic scene without the Islamists is actually one of the concerns. And I just published about 10 days ago an article about examining the notion of post Islamism that was introduced quite many years ago by Asif Payat and Olivier Wah, also in some of his writings. Because there is that component when it comes to the Arab world and when it comes to Egypt and Tunisia, the Islamist dimension and the return of secularism, if we can say so, and how it would affect the culture. I think that we are witnessing some sort of a conflict here that some of the articles that have been published lately are referring to a very Hobbesian concept of the state. Now it's time for the state to come back. Enough of chaos, you know, we have to pull the country together, etc. And this is the discourse that is now dominant in the mass media. While there is a division between the different revolutionary forces and the youth in different generations on different sides. So we don't have a very unified rhizomatic or multitude type resistance on the ground. So it's a moment of a bit of confusion and I think that it will take some time. The most disturbing thing is the rising culture of exclusion and naming the others as insects, invaders, fascists, while the discourse itself is very fascist as well, in its own terms. But the sort of the corrosion of civility, as I call it. And maybe Marliz also remembers that 2007 we had that workshop in Cairo on violence and civility after the bombings in London. And we were very much concerned about what is civility when we talk about global civil society. When we talk about civil society, what do we mean by civility and how can we define it in its relation to the use of force and violence? And something of that has been written in some of the chapters in the Global Civil Society yearbook, I think 2007 and maybe eight as well. Let's go back to the notion of Ibn Khaldun, one of our prominent social historians in the Arab world, for those who know the name. He said that the development or the unfolding of history is basically the history or the story of societies pending or shifting all the time between humanity and brutality, or humanity and anti humanism. So I think that the scene in the Arab world after you have finished your report needs another look because we are witnessing a sort of a return of a culture of exclusion and brutality and corrosion and distortion of the civil discourse in the public sphere. Law is also a very important point that needs to be looked at. The fight over the last two and a half years was basically over the legal and juristic dimension of the Parliament that has been dissolved by the court. And then the second champion was dissolved in June 2013. There was a big fight about the Constitution and we have a big fight about the Constitution today in the committee and the constitutional assembly of 50 that has been sort of set after the outset of President Morsi. And I think that law is an issue of fighting and struggling in the political sphere. But it's a fight that is on the facade because law itself is not rooted in the culture and what we can see is the sort of violation of laws in day to day life. It's a very interesting issue that I think you should look into. You mentioned the different actors, international actors, you mentioned civil society, you mentioned trade unions, but nobody mentioned the army and the armed forces and the police. And I think that maybe because of that utopian scene, you expected that it's over now with the interference of them, but they have been there all the time. Maybe the police did not show on the surface, but the army was there with the presence of the SCAFF and how it basically ran the transitional period in Egypt till and after the elections of the parliament and of the outset, President Morsi. So I think that the element of civil military relations actually should come on the scene as well. The relation between friendship, utopia and citizenship, the rising polarization is also a corrosion of a notion of citizenship where people can be denied their basic rights as citizens and law can be set aside. Human rights made a joke of and turned into a joke. You know, human rights discourse sort of trivialized and marginalized. And this is something that again raises the issue of the basic civility of a society that had an aspiration one day to go to on the road of democracy. Maybe we are witnessing also a post ideological, non ideological scene. But I think that ideology plays a role and it will remain on the scene. But maybe we need a new spirit and reformation or reform of the different ideologies. There is a shrinking liberal view on the political scene. Many of the liberals and socialists basically sided with the armed forces when they interfere in the scene, based on the demonstrations that took place on the 30th of June. And I think that the ideological scene is very confused and ideology should come in as well. Not only utopia and religion. And it's. It's very hard time for an Egyptian to watch so much blood on the street. But it's also very stimulating for a political theorist who is looking for the remainders of civility. I don't believe in Hobbes. I believe in Rousseau. Thank you.
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D
Thank you, everyone. As Marlise said, we were looking at shared commonalities, but also differences. And one of the three commonalities that we found was and demands was democracy, as Marlise talked about, understood in three ways as rule of law, social justice and participation. Also, social justice was a very key demand and it was understood in three ways. First, that there should be less inequality. Second, that the state should not collude inequality, but to protect the underprivileged. And third, that when formulated more concretely, that the state should provide basic access to social services. Dignity was a concept that we found in some of our research, but not everywhere. And it was differently constructed and understood. So what I'm going to do in my talk is focus mostly on social justice and touching upon a little bit of democracy. So one of the questions we asked our interviewees is who do you demand democracy or social justice from Thinking they would say the state. But most people answered, I demand it from myself, the understanding that you have to change yourself in order to change society. And so this led us into a very interesting set of questions and analysis. Because on one level, what we were hearing and what people were telling us was the importance of individual responsibility, of citizens, of individuals taking responsibility and joining in projects through solidarity with others in their community, their neighborhood, their city and their country. So it wasn't that they were demanding things from the state, but they were also recognizing that they had a role to play. But to be clear, this was not the understanding of individual responsibility, or as some theorists within the governmentality literature have called it, individual responsibilization, which should be understood as a concept, which means that up until now, some individuals have been too reliant on the state or have been too dependent on others, and that they need to become more responsible for themselves, so responsible for their own library, creating their own health clinic schools and so forth. It's very strongly associated with neoliberal politics. And it's in that context where it has been used that people are shirts responsibility. And in order for them to become more responsible, we need to encourage them to become more enterprising, entrepreneurial and responsible. And I think, of course, this has been criticized by many theorists who have argued that that doesn't work. Not everyone starts with the same set of resources, or the same set of connections, or the same amount of time, knowledge, so forth. David Harvey has argued this. So it wasn't this type of responsibility, and it wasn't about excusing the state from its responsibility. In many places where we talked to people, they said, for instance in Yerevan, they said, people are demanding things from the state and they want the state to function as a state. That is the ultimate thing. That is why there is so much focus on rule of law. In Athens, one respondent said, I believe the state responsibilities have now been taken over by the people because the state does Nothing. There are 1.5 million unemployed who don't have access to basic health care. The state is nowhere to be found. Everything that we gained in the last 150 years, we have lost in the three years. In the last three years, we had gained these rights through very hard and painful fights. And now they have been lost. So although he wasn't talking about the welfare state very much, this was about a discussion of what the state should do and the responsibilities and rights of both states and individuals. And in London, one respondent said, in the context of the big society, the government has used the language of community action and responsibility for its own ends. They are using it to justify cuts to public services, but they are also using it as a Trojan horse to privatize public service services. So there was this sense of we want to be responsible, but that's not about excusing the state from what it should also do. And so they had the respondents that we met, and from our research we found that there were different notions and understandings of responsibility, whether these were solidarity projects or about building links with your own community or locally. So I'll start with the coffee drinking lazy Greeks. That's not my term, that's what it says on the poster up there. And this was created by the Omicron project and it was in reaction to people who said, the Greeks don't do anything, they're lazy, and so forth. And this lists 150 solidarity projects that have emerged in Greece in the past three, four years. We're talking about volunteer movements providing free medical services, drugs and vaccines for people without access to medical health facilities. These are movements organizing micro economies without money to increase solidarity and strengthen social bonds. These are groups providing free lessons and knowledge exchange, as well as book swapping initiatives and collectives organizing free cultural events. And there's a whole list of things which you can read about at this website and. But what this demonstrates is when things begin to fall apart, people step in in different ways. One of the communities that we visited there was a group called the Robins of Day. Day is like EDF or British Gas. And basically when the electricity was being disconnected, they would go at night and reconnect people's electricity. And the idea was, why should people be living in this way when it wasn't their fault in terms of the crisis happening? So this was part of that discourse in Athens locally. What we've seen, for instance, building links. The Fry and Barnett library, which was closed by the Barnet Council, was reopened through a symbiotic relationship between the community and Barnet and Occupy squatters, Occupy activists. And I think this was a very important coming together in order to open. And more recently, there's been news that Occupy has helped reopen a pub, a much loved pub in Barnett that was closed again. And at the bottom, there's a free car initiative that was started in Armenia when the government decided to raise transport fees and people didn't want to go along with that. So people began to pick up individuals who were waiting at bus stops and taking them to their destination, saying, don't pay, let's starve the Businesses, let's starve the bus routes so they will stop raising the fees. And indeed, they were successful. So these were several things that we saw in terms of people taking responsibility and understanding their role within society. But of course, there are other actors, and we've mentioned some of them, and I'm going to focus a little bit more more on some of them, because it's important to think about how formal civil society organizations and actors, including NGOs, trade unions, political parties, relate to these new activist movements. Because after all, the parties, the unions, the NGOs are intermediary institutions and organizations. They claim to represent, to give voice, to advocate, to campaign. So what we heard from many people was, where were they? And the fact that people were going into the squares, in the streets was already a sign that there had been a failure of representation, a failure to give voice to the concerns. But of course, there's also the question of, well, if you don't engage with political parties or unions or NGOs, how then do you scale up? How then do you have greater impact on policy, politics, economic developments and so forth? And I think this is something that we've struggled with and we've tried to think about in countries, particularly in the former Soviet Union, where donors spend millions, if not billions, building civil society and democracy. What has been the result? NGOs on paper, oftentimes without actually representing others. But this is not only in Eastern Europe, in it is a phenomenon we discovered that exists in many, many places. And I'll give you some quotes in a minute, but before I do that, I also want to recognize that the reason that NGOs are not speaking out or the reason that some organizations aren't speaking out isn't necessarily because they don't want to, but because in recent years, we've also recognized what is explicit and implicit or direct and indirect means of silencing these organizations. What some have called the chilling effect. This can be very direct. For instance, the introduction of the foreign agents law in Russia, which squeezes out freedom of expression. Or it could be something less severe than that. For instance, the transparency of lobbying bill that's now being debated in the parliament in this country, and where may many charities and unions have spoken out against calling it the gagging law, that it would silence it would have a chilling effect because organizations would be prohibited from speaking out on policy issues for a year before elections. And it's very important to recognize this, because one of the things we have found is that NGOs are facing a crisis. And oftentimes There is a loss in terms of independence of voice, mission and action that comes about not because only of government pressure, but because their own reliance on funding and other partnerships. So for that reason, what we discovered was a very much love hate relationship between these activist groups in the squares and the streets and in the communities and the formal NGOs. On the love side, some organizations said, yes. Some individuals said, yes, it's great to work in an ngo. I mean, it's just a great job that gives you more time. It's better to work at an NGO than a cafe or something. In Yerevan, an activist said, if you look at the activism, those people who have been employed in the NGO sector work more professionally than people who are out and join protests afterwards. Maybe those people are enthusiastic and concerned about issues, but they do not have the skills to think things forward. So this was very important. And we heard many times in all of the cities that we worked in that NGOs and people who work for NGOs were cooperating behind the scenes, oftentimes providing meeting space, providing, for instance, reports that hadn't been made public, printing things, doing different kinds of support activities, but not making that public for various reasons, including that they were receiving statutory funding and they didn't want that to be made public. On the hate side of the spectrum, well, maybe hate is not the best word to use here, but on the more critical side of the spectrum, what people said is, for instance, in Cairo after the uprising, there have been millions or billions sent to civil society, but no supervision of it. Everyone would take a lot of money and spend it on whatever. So there was this sense that they were benefiting, that they were profiteering from the situation and that this was having a negative impact on how people saw civil society and particularly NGOs in London, one respondent said, we are the disaffected, the pissed off, the subversives. Within the conventional world of voluntary action, the voluntary sector has become privatized, corporations democratized and deadheaded. So increasingly now align with and see our future with direct action and radical movements. And indeed, we've seen this in London in other instances, for instance, on the policy of workfare. Boycott Workfare, which is one of the organizations, activist groups, has been pitted against NGOs, formal charities. And the reason is because some of those charities, like businesses, are using workfare. And so it's an interesting dynamic between the informal and the formal. So I think these are issues that need to be unpacked and further investigated and to conclude. So it's always about impact Isn't it? Impact assessment and so forth. So has there been policy level and wider policy, political impact? I think at some level we can say that, yes, there has, in the sense that public debates and discussions have changed. We talk about inequality now. When you say we are the 99% or talk about critique, the 1%, people will know what you are talking about. There's been more discussion about social justice, about democracy, tax justice, debt and so forth. So that has opened up. There has been greater awareness of issues among the wider public. And I think this has been very important. I've put a picture here from UK Uncut where they say the big society, revenue and customs, if they won't chase them, we will. And through protest against Starbucks, they managed to get more Starbucks to pay more money than they had in the last decade in the UK in tax. So there has been some movements and of course there has been solidarity and support networks beyond the squares. People who met in the squares have now gone on and worked together on other projects. And so we can see the emergence of social capital, new forms of social capital. How long they will be sustained, what impact they will have, we don't necessarily know at this time. But of course this is something that's ongoing and transforming as we speak. And finally, we've seen the resonance of the methods and discourses in new sites of protest in 2013. Istanbul, Rio, Sophia and I didn't put up there Dhaka in Bangladesh. So there has been that mode of protest that continues. But I think the fact that things haven't been addressed fully, we are going to continue to see these issues coming up. And just to conclude, recently there was a protest in this country, in London, around the work capability assessment. And what I found was very interesting and perhaps it's a model to think about. The relationship between the formal and informal about impact was that it was a campaign organized by disabled people against cuts. Occupy London, together with faith leaders from the Muslim and Christian communities as well as MPs, they had a very specific target. It was the work capability assessment and how it was leading to suffering and deaths of disabled people who were undergoing this assessment. And it was very interesting because it brought together the activists, informal groups with those that are much more formal. And of course, the impact is still elusive. We haven't seen it yet in terms of policy, but perhaps that's the new model of thinking and moving forward, of making both horizontal and vertical links. Thank you.
- [46:05]
A
Okay, well, thanks very much to all of our speakers. And we have about half an hour left now for some questions. And discussion. So let me open up the floor to our three speakers and what I'd like to do is to take maybe questions in threes from three different people, and then I'll invite our panel to comment or to answer. So if I could ask you to first just identify yourself and then to tell us if this is a question for a specific panel member or a general point, and if you could confine yourself, at least in the first instance, to just one question or comment, and then you can maybe come back into it later on, depending on how much, how many questions there are. So let me open the floor now. Why don't you start?
- [46:58]
C
Pennywaterhouse, National Coalition for Independent Action I'm very struck by the notion of the insider outsider working together, because most of.
- [47:08]
D
The people we work with are what.
- [47:11]
A
We call call subversives.
- [47:12]
D
And my question to the panel is.
- [47:16]
C
We struggle with how to support, organize and nourish subversives.
- [47:26]
D
Because by definition most of them are.
- [47:28]
C
Isolated, keep their heads down. They may have a different hat outside of the organisations they're working in the.
- [47:36]
A
Same, sort of the formal side of the world.
- [47:40]
C
But actually the real struggle for us is how you bring together the force.
- [47:44]
A
Of subversives if they're not already connected.
- [47:48]
C
In and organized and quite isolated often.
- [47:52]
A
Thank you, That's a great question. Let me move now to the lady there in the turquoise.
- [47:58]
E
Thanks.
- [48:03]
C
My name is Marilena Simiti and I'm a visiting fellow here at lsc. I have participated in the anti austerity protest in Greece and I wanted to ask whether we can actually perceive collective mobilizations in the squares as a unitary political subject, because I don't think this.
- [48:25]
D
Was the case in Cairo, neither was it in Greece. And in Greece, not only you had.
- [48:30]
C
Diverse political forces, but you had conflicting political forces with different interpretations of democracy. The lower square has genuine democracy with grassroots mobilizations, and in the upper square.
- [48:46]
D
With strong nationalistic frames and populist frames.
- [48:50]
C
So you cannot actually take out democracy, the war, democracy out of its context.
- [48:57]
D
And a second question regards the issue of national sovereignty.
- [49:02]
C
And I think it's impossible to see.
- [49:05]
D
Anti austerity protests in Southern Europe without.
- [49:08]
C
Taking into account this issue.
- [49:12]
A
Thank you. Let me take one more question from this side of the room, the lady at the back. And then for the next round we'll move over to the other side. Side.
- [49:23]
D
Jane Chillaya.
- [49:24]
C
This is a general question. Women's and children's rights hasn't been mentioned. I just wonder how it's been subsumed.
- [49:35]
A
Okay. Shortened to the point. Okay. Let's ask our panel now to respond to some of those questions. Would you like to.
- [49:44]
B
To start?
- [49:44]
A
Armini? Sorry, My list. Why didn't you start?
- [49:49]
B
Okay. I have little to say to the question, how do you organize subversives? Other than, I think, from our experience of interviewing the people who were deeply involved in protests in Athens and Cairo in particular, I would say when the big mobilizations came, they didn't know they would doing it. They didn't know that this was going to be the big push, the big moment. Somehow something resonated and people showed up. So I'm not sure to what extent you can orchestrate and organize that. I absolutely agree with you. I think in all the squares, we found it in Moscow as well, that there were both nationalist forces and various versions of left wing forces in the square. But I think that is part of the point of democracy, is not that you all agree with each other, but that you differ possibly quite fiercely. And I think what people experienced as special about the square, and that has been very difficult, I think, to maintain afterwards, would be that you would be at least willing to bracket those differences to the point that you would be prepared to speak to each other. And even, it seems, in the squares in Athens there was some dialogue between those. But I think in Cairo, what many people have said to me was that during those 18 days there was this slogan of the people demand the downfall of the regime. And they never defined what regime meant. And it turned out that regime meant very different things to different people. And so it is a moment, I think, at which there is not only to some extent a common enemy, of course, that fantastic, very temporary unifying factor, but also this preparedness to have a conversation as opposed to a violent exchange about differences about women and children. I think I want to bring up the final interview that Armina and I had in Africa, Athens, which was with a feminist who opened our eyes to.
- [51:59]
C
The.
- [52:01]
B
Differential impact that the crisis is having in Greece on men and women and came up with very much information that I at least had not been previously aware of. And I think it is also fair to say that in Athens, maybe it wasn't as much in the public debate or it wasn't as much in the square as it ought to have been. I think Cairo is a very different gender story.
- [52:27]
C
Again, where.
- [52:28]
B
With Heber at the table. I'm not even going to try and address that.
- [52:33]
A
Heber, let's move over to you and choose any of those or all of those messages.
- [52:41]
C
I think I. I've been really thinking A lot about that notion of the collective in the square is not necessarily unitary. And we witnessed that in Tahrir Square over the two and a half years. People have been. I mean, the utopia that was there actually was fragmented into different utopias along the ideological lines. And that's why there was some sort of a fight over Tahrir Square at a specific point. The Islamists took over very famous Kandahar, you know, demonstrations when the black flags. And that actually raised an eyebrow from everybody. Like the square is now taken over by the most sort of militant or the most radical. It was taken by secular forces at specific point when they called for demonstrations in Tahrir and they managed to fill the square. So they kept shaunting and saying, the square is full without the Muslim brothers. You know, there was a fragmentation of the dream, a fragmentation of what actually was the utopia of the 18 days into different utopias in different spaces, fight over the space, and then later on fight over different spaces and different stages. And I think that the feeling that the. The ruling party or the ruling group is actually siding with one side against the other, something that actually was reversed later and siding of the army on one side against the other, etc. I think this is the whole point that there is no unitary square anymore, and there is no unitary square in the geometrical sense. I will. And people are not in the same square anymore. So I think this is the dilemma. And the key word for that is spontaneity. What happened on 25th January 2011 was spontaneous. And even those who participated did not expect it to turn into what it turned to be the utmost. They were just thinking of is to build on the Kulina Khalid Said movement and the other movement that took years, like IFEI and others, and maybe the Minister of Interior would resign. I mean, nobody thought that it would develop in that. And of course, the use of force basically, and violence on behalf of the police on the 25th led to the 28th and led basically to the people taking over and occupying the square. So it's also the dynamics between the use of violence and pacifism and the degree now of the use of violence of different civil groups as well, that actually took place over time from different sites. So I think that this is one of the issues that challenge the notion of the simple and very interesting and very important notion of rhizomes and multitude by Negri and by others who wrote about that, because the multitude itself is not coherent. The multitude itself starts spontaneous, but does not continue like that. So in the course of time there are different multitudes on different levels and sometimes they actually go against each other. The conflictual dimension of multiple and rhizomatic action and networks on the informality of the political action apart from the structures sometimes is not as romantic as we, as we assume and hence comes in the tanks and comes in the force. So whether under democratic slogans or whether with the support of some people who were disenchanted by the experience in the course of time. I mean, this is. How can you. Can you bring it back? Or is it like an irreversible process? You start with a utopian and then you end up in ideological conflicts, etc. Regarding women's and child rights, I think that this is one of the main concerns that I've been worried about. By the way, I'm the coordinator of Diploma on Child Rights and Public Policy at Cairo University that has been set three years ago in cooperation with different universities including Berlin Bristol University in UK and the ISS in in the Hague. And we have been working on the issue of child rights and youth rights. And of course we have very disturbing information coming out of the street and the NGOs that have been monitoring basically the situation of child rights and the commitment to child rights law, the child law are very disappointing. It was just swept away and especially with the disposition discourse and the debates that took place in the parliament regarding child rights, women's rights, etc, that were very sort of disenchanting and on the ground the issues of women and the rising harassment, etc. And street children participating in clashes. I mean, it's a very complicated issue with many topics at hand and I share the concern with you and we are about to sort of publish a report on the situation of children since 25th January till today in different situations and in different circles and how they were violated not only in the clashes, but also sometimes by ideological abuse by different groups bringing the children to the points of demonstration which are sometimes not very safe for them, or the sit ins or occupy, etc. So there is a concern and we hope that bringing it to the surface all the time and insisting on not putting it aside because. Because there are more important issues at stake, as usual in any society where women's and children's issues are put aside when we have a political conflict will not continue. We hope to do that.
- [58:05]
A
Thanks very much. Do you want to pick up any remaining issues and then we'll move to some more questions?
- [58:11]
D
Yes, I'll just make a point about heterogeneous actors Because I think as you stated and as our respondents told us, there was that upper square and lower square, but I think it's broader than that. In all of the contexts, there was heterogeneity in terms of age, in terms of ideology, in terms of social class. But what they were often united by was the anger towards either the regime, the government in power, or in the case of Greece, of course, the troika and the international kind of the structures there. But perhaps that's what makes the struggles more difficult, is because they lack a cohesiveness and a coherence in the sense of, you know, how is this different from former struggles? It's different because in former struggles, perhaps not necessarily always, you had more coherence in terms of the group of activists. Here you have ordinary citizens who have never before participated in protests coming and joining in the squares. So it becomes a new learning ground. And I think it becomes quite different in terms of how things will move forward and how things will happen. And in terms of austerity. Yes, I think, you know, definitely it has had a gendered impact. And the Refuge Against Cuts protest which I mentioned was specifically about the cuts that have been made to women's services in the UK. It was organized by UK Uncut in December of 2012.
- [59:31]
A
Okay, thanks. So there's time for small questions. I know there was a gentleman down the front here that. Why don't we start with you and then we'll move over to this, this half of the square. The square.
- [59:46]
E
Ari, from the People's Republic of Southwark. One of the things that got me was that there's a difference between the formal and the informal. And one of the main things about that is the informal doesn't have the voice with the powers that be as the formal formal does. But the informal has the power when it comes out to protesting. And the other one is that with the US government's report on usb, hsbc, sorry, and what they've been up to, there is starting to be an underground movement that for a grassroots movement. Now there is not the government that should be attacked because they're only the tools of the banks and the bank can't be got rid of, so the bank has to be got rid of, if that makes sense.
- [60:35]
A
Thank you. Okay, yeah, the lady at the back there and then a gentleman in the.
- [60:42]
C
Thank you so much. Non resident fellow at Chatham House. Congratulations on completing the study. I can only imagine the whole bubbling and then the process, which is not, not easy to formalize and make some conclusions of movements across the world that you looked at. And my question one is related to a trigger. Did you look more closely into what were the triggers for the protest? We understand that more broadly it's about democracy and participation, but were there any specific links to quality of services, you know, dissatisfaction with local government that would trigger, you know, the grassroots movement? And another one is related to, again, the links between formal and non formal, because I think that's very important. I mean, civil society. Did you see any spillover effects of people, you know, participating first at the grassroots or these kind of activist movements and then going to a formal NGO saying, okay, maybe this is, this is an option for me to be involved through an organization? And did you interview some of the NGOs to see how they see this movement? Do they feel threatened? Do they want to be part of it? Do we say, we don't want to have anything to do because this is going to die tomorrow? We are here forever.
- [62:00]
D
Thank you.
- [62:01]
A
Thank you.
- [62:07]
E
Hi. Hello. My name is Andy Amad, members Occupy Economics Working Group in London. My experience of Occupy is that it uniquely is concerned with a total transformation of capitalist society. And that's certainly why I've got involved. And that's the reason why when I go to conferences of sociologists or political theorists or economists, when Occupy is ever mentioned, it sort of has a talismatic status within conversation when people suddenly chirp up and say, oh, what would be an Occupy perspective on this? And I think what they mean by that is what happens when you turn the conversation towards a desire to completely transform capitalism and a recognition that capitalism itself is a vampiric, predatory system of ex appropriation. And we're entering into a neo colonial. Well, we're already in a neo colonial state of capitalism with the attempted takeover of the entire fabric of life, the biosphere, the climate, our subjectivities, our cognitive apparatus, our ways of perception, our capacity to love, our basic human relations. So we're moving towards an era of total capitalism, or if you like, in Deleuzian terms, where capitalism is imminent to everyday life. I'm sure you're aware of these sort of concerns and I'm wondering if you can speak to total capitalism and the desire to have a total transformation of everyday life.
- [64:06]
A
Thank you. Let me take it in the other order this time. Armine, why don't you go first?
- [64:11]
D
Okay. It's a very difficult question. Maybe I'll start with the relationship between the informal and formal and kind of work my way towards that because, you know, there is this difference. And we did speak to NGOs, trades unions, political parties, and ask them about their views about informal activist groups. And it's very interesting because of the views of each other. And one of the trades unions activists that we talked to, they said specifically about London, Occupy London. Yes, we share their anti bank sympathies, we share their anti capitalist sympathies, but they work completely different than we do. So we go there one week, we talk to one person, we go there the next week that person is gone. So we don't know how to relate to you. And they don't have a blueprint that we can follow, they don't have a structure. So it becomes this completely different set of thinking and operating. So it's about how do you bring these different worlds together? And it was very interesting because another respondent said, well, if there's a clear agenda, we can follow and support that. And that's why I said, you know, in terms of the. When there is an agenda, when there is a policy that's being attacked, it's easier to bring the formal side onto it because they find it very difficult. And the media also criticizes NGOs for. I mean, the critique of the media has been, well, Occupy doesn't know what it wants, right? I mean, that's been something without recognizing that. Actually, no, there are very clear demands. It's about how do you meet those targets? Which remains the mystery, the question. But I think the demands are there. I think the importance of being concerned with the transition, transformation of society and the fact that we are facing a situation of complete takeover of capitalism, I think it is in people's minds, but it's about how then do you translate that into action becomes slightly problematic. And particularly when you're working in the model of an NGO that has, you know, project cycles, program cycles and so forth, it becomes completely illogical. I mean, they can't think that way, they can't operate in that way. And so I think, you know, we are talking about different universes within civil society.
- [66:33]
A
Emma, would you like to.
- [66:38]
C
Regarding the formal and informal, I think that we need to a bit redefine the semantic field of formality and informality because we borrowed it from economy. So we're talking about the formal meaning the official or the structures and the informal meaning what people regarding survival structures in the economy, etc. But in politics, what we mean by the formula and informal is usually the form and the formless. So formless techniques can also sometimes be used by the structures, you know, and can give many examples of how the state Sometimes use formless techniques and mechanisms in order to go out of its way, or apply specific factors of formlessness to cover for its power and hegemony. And sometimes the spontaneous, like the Occupy movement, starts in the course of time to formalize some of its own spaces as well. Dividing roles, setting boundaries, assigning people specific missions. Once you stay, you become like a small society and therefore giving it a form in order to run the space, you know, is not as spontaneous as it started. And this is the whole dilemma about agency and structure in the social sense, not in the political sense only. Coming to your comment, I think that this is not a response, this is rather a reflection. I think that one of our problems is that our Islamism never managed to look more into anti Catholic capitalism. And on a specific level of analysis, I think that the experience of Islamists in the Arab world has not realized that it has to put its struggle on the platform of struggle against capitalism and also to hold to its ethical and ethical religious component, transcendental dimension, and not resorting to pragmatism, because pragmatism would lead them to falling into the traps of capitalism on the philosophical and also on the political level. And this is where I actually have my heart. You know, it's like when can Islamism actually open its understanding to the dynamics of capitalism and become part of the struggle against capitalism and its hegemony over the human soul? This has never been been the case or has has not been the case. And I hope that in the future the Islamists would learn from the lessons, the hard lessons that they have been going through, that the discourse has to transform and that actually this is part of their struggle for the human being.
- [69:16]
A
Thank you.
- [69:19]
B
I will say a little bit about the trigger question and then about the total transformation and society. We have not looked at the triggers. Lots of other people are looking at the triggers. And I think the most you can say about it, it's different in each situation. But in each situation what triggers a big mobilization is some sort of perfect constellation of the stars, as it were. So for Egypt, I would say it was a decade of fermentation already, then a few years in which privatization measures really begin to bite. Police brutality being an older issue, but that was really beginning to be shared, I think, as an experience. And then finally, of course, the Tunisian revolution. So triggers are being done by others, and I think in a way they're less interesting than trying to capture the aspirations. And I think it is the case indeed that not everyone we've spoken to, but a subset of Activists in every single situation is after the total transformation of society. And I think it has been our aspiration to kind of capture and structure what that means and then translate it into the language that you can kind of put into this kind of report. But total transformation of society, I think, is precisely why a few years afterwards, the yields may seem disappointing. That's precisely because the aspirations were so enormous.
- [70:49]
A
I think we've got time for a couple more questions. So, Jess, a gentleman at the back in leather jacket.
- [70:59]
E
Sorry, my name is Carl. A general question to the panel. What moral philosophy do you think run things in the modern democracies? And has he got anything that could address the increasing inequality that we've seen throughout the world since the 70s or increase the quality of life of the masses and increase social justice? And a sub question to HEBA is, can there be any other kind of moral philosophy than a religious base one in the Arab world?
- [71:32]
A
Thank you. Yeah, the gentleman in the middle and then over there. Sorry, could you just wait for the microphone a second so that we can, we can all hear your questions.
- [71:48]
E
A political thinker, sociologist. I was wondering whether you were a friend of contemporary or Ibn Khaldun, who was a great Islamic sociologist, philosopher, history.
- [71:57]
D
Who had something to say about the.
- [71:58]
E
Rise of and polar civilizations. Thanks. Clyde Menzies, also Occupy Economics working group. The thing that intrigued me about Occupy is that you had people coming along looking for answers. There was the outrage and the anger that they were looking for answers, and there were other people who thought they had answers. And so one of the manifestations of Occupy was a great deal of learning and sharing information and understanding. And that has continued even though the physical space is no longer occupied. Was that replicated across the Arab Spring?
- [72:41]
A
Thanks. Okay, Heber, I'm going to ask you to go first on these.
- [72:53]
C
I think the question on moral philosophy is very important because one of the problems that were actually very crucial for the development of the Islamic discourse regarding dignity and freedom and human rights, et cetera, was the embodiment of the notion of the ethical and moral in the body. You know, people were trapped in creating their own understanding of morality related to the individual, especially to his actions or appearance. And I think that this embodiment, or turning the moral and ethical into the choices of day to day life, not the structural relations of justice, is one of the problems. The ethical became very puritanist, if you can compare with the evangelists, and, you know, sticking to the very day to day individual dimension of morality and being ethical in a very, in a very Limited religious sense. Not that the ethical is that the system might be unethical, if it's not just, you know, and you have to fight against that unethical dimension of social structures. And I think that this is one of the dilemmas. I had a student, master students who was working on the notion of the body and the embodiment of the notion of the body and the imperial embodiment of notions, the concepts. It's a very highly philosophical issue. And I think that there is a lot of investigation in that, at least in the academic circles that I'm part of. But of course, if you come out and say something like that to people on the street, they do not understand what you say. Ibn Khaldun is very important because he actually was talking about the elementary basic dimension of civility. And I don't like to use the word barbaric because it's related historically to Berber and the Athenian imagination of the other. But it's brutality. Can we say brutality or savagery or. I don't. What is what the opposite of civility. So he thought that this is actually the whole thing, that the rise and fall of civilization is not only related to the political bond, establishment of kingdoms, relations of power, the different generations that take over the networks of use of force and the networks of establishing cities and civil domains and having a structure in terms of political systems, but basically about how the degree of civility and humanity in a society. And this is a line that goes in the writings of Ibn Khaldun, apart from what he was famous of establishing tribal power into kingdoms, what he thought was part and parcel of his understanding of Arab society. The questions that Occupy poses, do they continue when people are not occupying the space because the spaces of the mind have been liberated? This is the question. In a way, I think they do. And there are so many things that the political conflict in Egypt has been obscuring. There is a fall of many myths in the domain of thinking, especially in the Islamic domain that I'm more familiar with, and also in the political domain of different ideological conceptual maps, there is a new thinking that is starting, but the political contestation and the political conflict usually sort of hides it. But if you. If you follow some of the Facebook pages of some Salafis, for example, who have been completely disenchanted by the performance of organized Salafi groups, more sort of right wing groups, etc. And they are bringing to the space a new voice of reflection, comparison with Western philosophies, rereading of their own heritage, going out of the hierarchies. These are not true. They are voices. But voices have always been important in making that sort of breakthrough. They are not famous. Once they go into the intellectual debates and questioning, they are not very much, because media, as you have mentioned, is always interested in people who shout loud. It's not interested in people who are thinking in a very slow pace about how to transform their understanding of the world. Not necessarily shifting ideologies, but translation, transforming from within. The voices are very low, and the voices are still emerging. But I think that part of what happened during the Arab Spring is actually that many ideas have been subject to investigation, and the whole noise of politics did not allow us to hear new voices that are emerging on all levels. And the younger generation is trying to ask questions. And because I teach at the university, when I come across students who are 20 years old who ask me questions that professors of six years who are 60 years old never ask themselves. So I have a lot of hope in the youth, a lot of hope.
- [77:42]
A
Thank you.
- [77:44]
B
Yeah. I would just follow on from that. On the question of moral philosophy, I've always thought that it's not the role of the academic to tell you, the general public, what the books say about political theory or moral philosophy, but rather to listen in. So I take my moral philosophy from the streets and try to listen into those voices and then to make sense of them and analyze them. And I think we've made a start with that, with this report, but it's very condensed, so I think it's incumbent on Amina and me to do more of the work. And in fact, we are hoping to make this into a book. And I think HEBA has already raised all the critical questions that need to go in there. So I think listening in precisely to those primarily, but not always young people in the streets is where we get our new moral philosophy, maybe get out of the crisis of democracy.
- [78:38]
A
Amelia, I'm going to give you the last word.
- [78:41]
D
I think civil society, you know, to come back to this, is that space for negotiation. And I think, you know, the fact that you did have people looking for answers, and people who thought they had the answers that became that meeting ground. Unfortunately, that narrative gets lost sometimes when you look at the media reports who only report on the evictions or the violence. But one of the things that people constantly said, this was a time when you could actually speak and listen and think and formulate your ideas. And I think we are in a crisis of new ideas and new ideologies. There is that sense that we sometimes repeat certain things. We have the same debates. But I think there is also hope that, as Heba said, in many places where the youth are thinking in different terms and sharing ideas. So hopefully there will be more to think about.
- [79:33]
A
Well, thank you very much. It's been an incredibly wide ranging discussion, and I'm sure that we've probably raised more interesting questions than we've been able to answer. But I'd like to thank you all very much for coming along tonight and for some excellent questions. And I'd like to thank our three panelists for three very stimulating presentations and wish you all very well with the subsequent stages of this work and its dissemination and publication and further debate. So thank you very much, everybody.
- [80:04]
C
Thank you.