A sniper fired at a group of fleeing civilians in west Mosul, Iraq. Credit Ivor Prickett/Panos Pictures

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"The Arab Uprisings and the Syrian Case: Unfinished Business"

Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and teaches in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (2012).

"Authoritarian Apprehensions"

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999) and, most recently, "Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria" in Critical Inquiry 39.4 (2013).

"Understanding the New Syria: The View from the Diaspora"

Lindsay Gifford is an assistant professor in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where she also is currently serving as the Interim Director of Middle Eastern Studies. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University, for which she conducted ethnographic field research in Damascus, and was a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with refugees in Jordan.

"Reconfiguring Authority: State and Informal Actors in Iraq"

Harith Hasan al-Qarawee is a Senior Fellow at the Central European University and senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, where he leads the Iraq Initiative. His research focuses on religion-state relations, sectarianism and identity politics, and informal actors in Iraq and the Middle East.

Respondent: James L. Gelvin is a professor of History at UCLA. His most recent book is The New Middle East: What Everyone Needs to Know (2017).

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