Talk entitled ‘What Future for the Palestinian Authority?’. Yezid Sayigh is Academic Director of the Cambridge Programme for Security in International Society and a Teaching Fellow in the Politics and History of the Modern Middle East, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He is also a consulting Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London). Previously he was an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the bilateral peace talks with Israel in Washington DC in 1991-93, and a senior negotiator in the peace talks leading to the Gaza Strip and Jericho Area Implementation Agreement signed in Cairo on 4 May 1994. In 1999 Sayigh co-authored (with Khalil Shikaki) the ‘Report of the Independent Task Force on Strengthening Palestinian Public Institutions’ for the Council on Foreign Relations (New York). His academic research focused on the relationship between religion and nationalism (especially Islam and Arab nationalism) in the context of globalisation.