The key point is whether or not there is a state collapse in the country; whether the institutions, including the bureaucracies, the ministries, and armed forces especially, are still functioning or are fragmented and essentially nonexistent.

In Egypt, what happened was a series of protests that pressured the military, which has always been in control of Egypt anyway, for about 60 years, to get rid of the president and the small elite that surrounded him. But while it was a regime change, it wasn't the collapse of the state, the armed forces didn't fragment, and, in fact, the state is still very much intact and in control of security. They have had some problems with the police, which has been somewhat weak and demoralized. But the general security situation is fine, really. There are sporadic incidents of violent unrest -- some of which are political, some of which are just opportunistic, or theft-related and economic.

In Libya, really this state is Moammar Gadhafi. Therefore, when his political survival is in peril, the entire government apparatus falls apart. The security forces fragment and, indeed, they are fighting each other right now. So you're looking at really problems that are of the opposite sides of the extreme in Egypt and Libya. Most countries we are hearing about are somewhere in between.

I think that among certain sectors there tends to be a much higher threshold for risk. We find that corporate security managers, for example, whose job it is to actually know the security situation, often have a higher appetite for risk. Situations others may perceive as too risky they may be willing to see it is a price worth paying, a risk worth taking -in the hydrocarbons industry particularly. Usually hydrocarbons industries are well entrenched in the country, they have a high entry costs, they're already operating there. Short of an all-out destruction of assets and the entire sector, they are not going to leave. Hydrocarbon companies in Iraq and Yemen, for example, are under no illusion about the environment they are operating in. It would take a serious deterioration of the security situation for them to leave -- if they will at all.