He argues that unlike other regional powerhouses qatar has been able to achieve its global standing for aljazeera it supported democracy movements in the least of the hosting of major world events like the world cup. This is about one hour and 15 minutes. Thank you all very much. Let me start at thinking osama and his Wonderful Team for tonights event. Most grateful and honored to be here. Thank you all. I was motivated to study qatar. Ive been in qatar since 2007 at the georgetown campus in doha and one of the first things that struck me about the country was its Amazing Development and its relative success. So what motivated me to write this book was the simple question of whether or not qatar is for real. I dont know how many of you are familiar with qatar but in many ways this is a country that consistently punches above its weight to use an overused metaphor and its a small state, which tries to be extremely consequential not only within the Arabian Peninsula and within the Persian Gulf Region but in the large reason and the hunt ended exercises a certain amount of power than in many ways is in commensurate with its size, its demography in the region where relatively regions like syria and iraq and saudi arabia have long influenced Regional Affairs and have long called the shots if you will. Qatar has been extremely consequential over the last decade and a half and has not only been extremely consequential but it has also in many ways shaped the direction of Current Events and in fact history as it unfolds. So when i went there, there were several questions that i had. One was what i posed to you earlier, is qatar for real . This is a country that is exercising a sort of power that is fleeting and impermanent or is it a country that is in many ways consequential . And then if you look at doha, its an amazing and its a very odd city in terms of its development. It is engaged in what you might call high modernism in a city that is growing into the sea and into the sky with artificial islands and highrises but it is also a city where you have relatively little urban tradition and the urban tradition that is their is statedirected. Its an urban tradition where the government deliberately tries to create a sort of heritage. And so the questions i had for myself were to what extent does all of this mean anything and how lasting is this . Is it something thats fleeting in the larger history of the middle east where we have the worlds oldest civilizations and where we have countries that have long shaped the history of the region. The more i studied this, the more i realized a couple of things. First of all i realized that qatar is indeed a Success Story. Its not an unqualified success that it is in many ways a Success Story and that story needs to be told. I also realize that there is a series of developments and fat ears that have converged at the same time to result in what might be called qatars moment in history. Qatar currently is riding high. Its not only punching above its weight that its in many ways having a number of successes that are shaping consequentially recent history. So qatar is in many ways a Success Story that needs to be told that again it does have some glitches. And then i realized for myself as well as others, its a place that needs to be described and its a place that needs to be studied and analyzed because it isnt just fleeting. When i went to qatar i had an extremely hard time describing the place for others. I remembered one of my First Official meetings was with a highranking diplomat and i asked him, how do you describe this place to others . Its is extremely to describe qatar. He gave me two images that stuck in my mind. One he said, well you know this is like those scenes in james bond movies where you have these National Celebrations where people have their National Dress and they are all together in beautiful colors of their own National Dresses and in many ways qatar resembles that. The second image that he told me about was more lasting. He said imagine at that time the size of the population was just over a million. He said you have 800,000 people waiting on 200,000 people in that image really stuck with me. So i decided when i wrote this book, i thought one of the first things i needed to do was to describe this difficult this place thats difficult to describe, this odd place. So bear with me as i attempt to read you a passage from the book to try to describe a place. For those of you have been in qatar you know there are lots of opulent buildings and very luxurious hotels. What im about to tell you is inspired by the description in the lobby of the Ritzcarlton Hotel in doha. There are a number of other hotels that are newer and more opulent but this particular passage i have been there for six years now close to seven years and every time i go to the lobby of the ritzcarlton im in many ways of overwhelmed by the opulence that i see. So i decided to start out with a description of qatar and then i will tell you a little bit about the kinds of power and influence that i think qatar is exerting and what are some of the ingredients for its success that osama mentioned. Doha may lack of session with lang but it is still filled with a glance that numbs the senses and distorts perceptions of reality. Many parts of the city resemble the surreal and inc. On grand mixture of hong kong on the one hand in tucson, arizona on the other. Its not surprising that todays doha is one massive construction site. No sooner are city maps painted then they become up so we. As new roads and multilane highways replace old snaking streets. Roundabouts, marbles a Traffic Engineering from a bygone era ,com,com ma a few cars and manageable street flows are being steadily replaced with four corner junctions end times traffic lights. Cranes and other heavy Construction Equipment are you the clovis features of the urban landscape. Doha it seems is that did to tearing up its asphalt at streets as soon as they are ready for use. Entire neighborhoods made up of older shops and larger singlefamily homes are raised with unsettling frequency and replaced by tall glass cover laming buildings. Remembering directions to points of interest is often an exercise in futility. Taxi passengers frequently find themselves giving directions to their drivers, many of whom are recent varieties from bangladesh or ethiopia. Dohas roads and streets are seldomly mangled cars strewn on the side of products the worlds highest and deadliest traffic accident. The municipalities installation of. Cameras all across the city have done little to encourage a culture of driving safely. Unsurprisingly most qataris prefer larger presumably safer cars. The ubiquitous Toyota Land Cruiser overwhelmingly in white is the dash of delhi roads, the referred car of qataris. In recent years more daring colors of lacking grade are also seen david darting around town. All the while the cities armies of construction workers and their tens of thousands remain as inconspicuous and hidden from public you. The state employees the discourse revolving around the protection of the family to bachelors from shopping malls and socalled family days and from living in Family Residential areas. In this sense, it is a code word for Migrant Workers from south asia and family designates everyone else, married or not. The biggest interaction in unskilled Migrant Workers and the rest of the countrys residents say for household mates are on dohas congested streets where stuck in traffic tired eyes peer through half open windows of all American School buses or grungy ones made as workers are driven from future highrises to the distant labor camps. So what i tried to do was to convey a sense of this odd mixture between hong kong and tucson arizona, this city that has landmarks in bellagio that had nothing to do with the culture of the gulf but nevertheless are an important part of the countrys tradition and its sense of identity, a but then i realized that in fact doha as i mentioned is a Success Story. It does have some challenges. It does face some serious fundamental challenges but nonetheless it is in many ways a success rate. What are some of the ingredients of that Success Story . What are some of the main factors that have made doha and qatar into what it is today . I discovered this can be divided very broadly and in summary fashion into four categories. First and foremost at least compared to the rest of the middle east and compared to its other neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, qatar has a comparative advantage that others dont. In many ways qatar has remarkable social cohesion. 10 to 20 of qataris are said to be shia and about 10 of qataris claim to have come from iran. Nevertheless the qatari shia tend to be remarkably supportive of the so unlike our rain for example where there are fundamental very major sectarian tensions in qatar there is remarkable social cohesion. Also unlike the United Arab Emirate which is the confederation and one of those emirates has a wayward ruler that needs to be bailed out ever so often by the ruler of abu dhabi, qatar doesnt have that problem of having a confederation. Qatar also in addition to its social equation is extremely small demography. The number of qataris ranges at most around 200,000 so its a very governable easily manageable country. It also has inordinate resources. It has inordinate wealth. So on the one hand qatar has the comparative advantages compared to all the other regional states its got cohesion. Its got a very manageable population and small demography and it has inordinate resources at its disposal. A second characteristic that sets qatar apart from the rest of the pac within the Arabian Peninsula and the larger middle east is centralized decisionmaking. In many ways the way to conceptualize the country is to think of it as qatar a corporation. Qatar inc. Is an easy way of thinking about it. In many ways the major decisions in the country are made literally by a handful of people and there is tremendous centralized decisionmaking. You can imagine that for all the minister of energy brings in revenues. The Prime Minister who also happen to be in charge of Qatar Investment authority is the guy who invests the funds that are brought in. Shake how most of the former a meres wife is in charge of culture activities. Its her foundation that has invited universities like georgetown, cornell texas a m virginia commonwealth two, and she also oversees about with a couple of her daughters, overseas cultural activities. Then you have the former arab who for now the last couple of months is the apparent. He is the chief deputy in many ways, the amir in waiting, the title of the former was deputy also and then you have the ceo overlooking the old operation. In many ways if you think about it, decisionmaking from investments to bringing the dollars to cultural activities to overseeing the whole operation, those decisions remain by five people and although the precise number may change by one or two and some of the personalities might change, the fundamentals of decisionmaking remain concentrated and remain centralized. That gives the qatari political system tremendous agility. He gives the qatari qatari system inability to capitalize on opportunities that for example the political system doesnt have or the bahraini system and of course the bahrainis have major publics doesnt have. Although kuwait or the uae might have the amounts of wealth are even more wealth, they dont have the centralized decisionmaking and leadership. It also the other characteristic is that it has an old wealthy vision. There is a vision that characterizes the qatari leadership at cavities and agendas that in many ways is lacking in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula and across the persian gulf. Its a vision that initially was motivated by survival status. That is hyperactive diplomacy which i will mention in a moment it was initially motivated by a survival strategy when sheikh Hamad Khalifa came to power in 1995. There was an almost irrational fear that qatar would be gobbled up. It would be trampled on over wealth by saudi arabia or by developments. Qatar engaged in an incredibly hyperactive diplomacy to ensure its survival and then they realize that it wasnt survival that they needed to worry about, it was getting a place secure on the global map and then building on that position within the global map to enhance qatars local position within the global community. There is a welldefined vision that is being pursued with unmatched passion in qatar. But also, important within the qatari political calculus is what might be called high modernism, this incredibly at give and robust pursuit of modernity however defined, defined by the government. The way that the government of the qatari state defines modernity is through construction. We see that passage that i read whereby actively dohas geography is drawing urban landscape is being reconfigured through the building of futuristic cities. Georgetown university along with other universities is housed in whats called education city. There is Qatar Technology park in the pearl artificial island. There are all sorts of mechanisms to pursue modernity as defined by the government. In all of this is pursued by construction projects. The importance of this isnt just in changing qatars urban infrastructure but in tying the state to business at chairs, bringing within the orbit of this and within the employee of the state qatar ebusiness interests and qatari entrepreneurs. Each of these cities that are being built, lucille city for example being built slightly north of doha or within doha there is doha land, not too different from disneyland but theres there is something called doha land. All of these are Construction Development projects through which the Business Community is drawn in come into the orbit of the state and therefore political stability is insured and in many ways purchased. Political stood stability is insured. There is remarkable political stability which ties the Business Community, potential opponents of the state for example in kuwait to the states vision and its pursuit of development and modernistic projects. Last but i know means least the fourth element of qatars success is its influence and power. One of the things that struck me about qatar was how a small state established only in 1977, how can a small state it comes so consequential . There was an Arab League Meeting in which the qatari representatives in the arab league this is before the arab spring, the representative from qatar was very passionately advocating qatars speech and he was very easily dismissed by the representative from egypt at the time who said please sit down. All the people in the country do not add up to the people in bus stop in cairo. And when mubarak went to the aljazeera studios he turned to his information minister and he said, how can a matchbox like this cause so much trouble across the arab world and you he told his information minister, you employ 20,000 in cairo broadcasting in the skies with their handful of people in aljazeera studios create more problems. So is qatar and influence for real . What i discovered is qatar through a number of very carefully calculated foreignpolicy mechanisms and through it very carefully careful use of its foreignpolicy toolbox, several tools in its toolbox has been able to create conditions whereby they can pursue its interests. What are some of those tools . First and foremost qatar pursues a Foreign Policy that might be best described as hedging. This of course comes from gambling. Its a term that comes from gambling whereby you place one lets say you bet on the United States to guarantee your security and you place a number of smaller bets. Lets say for example you maintain fraternal ties with hamas or with iran or with other actors that may not necessarily see eyetoeye. What qatar has been able to do it carefully calculated policy is to position itself as an important conduit between various actors that otherwise do not speak to one another. A couple of months ago qatar was extremely successful although immortal in many ways, successful and positioning itself as a conduit between United States and the taliban and that really was an interesting development. Qatar has been able to maintain ties very close fraternal ties with iran at the same time it is anchored under the American Security umbrella and american cultural institutions and universities and of course American Economy and diplomacy or economic patterns that diplomacy. This is what might be called subtle influence. What qatar has been able to do through its subtle power, through its exercise of subtle power is to create a set of conditions, a set of structures whereby they cant exert its influence in quite subtle ways through its International Investments, through its careful pursuit of hedging as a foreignpolicy initiative. Through its very deliberate, very aggressive branding effort as aljazeera tv station represents. Its extremely active in branding itself and of course do a very aggressive advertising campaign. If you fly anywhere in the world you will see advertisements for either the National Carrier or the qatar foundation. There are a whole variety of other qatari into decent interest that will help together cr