On this week's episode of the podcast, Cinzia Bianco of the University of Exeter joins Marc Lynch to discuss her new book, The Gulf Monarchies After the Arab Spring: Threats and Security. This book applies an original theoretical framework to unpack the threat perceptions and strategic calculus driving the behavior of new impactful regional players in the Middle East and North Africa. Bianco looks at how the small monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) spent the decade between 2011 and 2022 trying to re-shape regional equilibria as protagonists to provide reading keys to the past, present, and future of policy-making in the Gulf monarchies, middle powers destined to play an oversized role in the new multipolar world. (Starts at 0:10).