Saturday, July 25, 2:00 PM EDT

The Syrian regime has consolidated its power in the past few years with the assistance of its allies, Russia and Iran.

However, the conditions that led to the uprisings are all still present, especially dictatorship and social justice. These conditions have actually only gotten worse.

The recent anti-regime demonstrations provoked by the socio-economic crisis in the Sweida and Daraa provinces under regime control indicate how intolerable the situation has become.

The Assad regime and other regimes in the region believe that they can maintain their despotic rules by the continuous use of massive violence against their populations.

This is doomed to fail, and new explosions of popular protest will inevitably happen, just like those of 2019 in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon, which have been described as a “Second Arab Spring”.

The panel participants will analyze the current situation in Syria and Sudan, and the overall context of the uprisings as well as the regional prospects.

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Sara Abbas is a Sudanese Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Freie Unversität Berlin. Her doctoral research focuses on the discourses and practices of women members of the Islamist Movement and al- Bashir's formerly ruling party in Sudan. Most recently, she has been researching Sudan's resistance committees which emerged out of the 2018 revolution. She is a member of SudanUprising Germany and the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists.

Gilbert Achcar is a Lebanese academic, writer, and socialist. He is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He has written extensively on politics and development economics, as well as social change and social theory. His publications include The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, published in 15 languages; Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2008), with Noam Chomsky; the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli-War of Narratives ; The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising; and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprisings .

Joseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, academic, and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever. He is part of the Wartime and Post-Conflict in Syria project, at the European University Institute, Florence (Italy) and works at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of Hezbollah: Political Economy of the Party of God and Syria after the Uprisings, the Political Economy of State Resilience (Pluto Press and Haymarket). He is also a member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists.