 Good morning and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace, which was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 as a national, nonpartisan, public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict abroad. We're delighted to co-host this year's opening day of PeaceCon with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, one of our country's most important peacebuilding organizations. USIP's partnership with AFP, AFP members, and the community of peace builders who gather every year for the conference makes this one of the most important events that we do here at USIP. Over the next several years, days will be discussing changes in the way we build peace. When the UN turned 75 two years ago, the countries of the world came together to discuss a new global compact known as the common agenda. A key part of this compact is the new agenda for peace. Across the world, as you probably know, a global consultation is currently underway with countries and non-governmental organizations and think tanks, civic groups, and community networks all offering their ideas and their vision for this brand new agenda on how we're going to promote global stability and peace. This year's PeaceCon is an opportunity for us to do the same by looking at our current architecture for peacebuilding and offering our own recommendations on how peace builders can and should change the way we try and build peace globally. I'd like to extend a very special thank you to our co-host, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, with the executive director Liz Hume. Liz has more than 25 years of senior leadership positions in bilateral, multilateral institutions and NGOs. She's great in policy and advocacy and has overseen important operations in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Liz, may I turn the podium over to you? Good morning, everyone. Last year at PeaceCon, sitting at this podium, standing at this podium looking out over an auditorium and the seats were completely empty. This year, we're together. And I've hugged so many times. I don't think I've hugged this much since in the last three years. So I'm so grateful you're all here. I'm so grateful that we can also engage so robustly virtually with colleagues all over the world. So thank you so much for showing up. I know opening remarks are meant to be inspirational and motivating, but to be completely honest, I'm really struggling this year. And I know many of you are, too, because you tell me. The recent outbreak of violent conflict and the threat of atrocities in Sudan, human rights abuses in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, and backsliding of democracy in the global north. These are tough times. But I'm not going to rattle off statistics to you, because you know them. If you're sitting in this room, you know them. If you don't, you might be in the wrong conference. And we can't dwell on crisis messaging because we know what happens. We do know. We have a lot of brain science, behavioral brain science knowledge. We know that when we start crisis messaging, we talk about the problems. Our brain shuts down. Our frontal cortex shuts down. That's our problem solving. That's our empathy. And we need that here today, and we need that more than ever. And we also know these are human-made problems. If they are human-made problems, we can fix them. But we have to use our collective agency. We have more than we think we do. We have more power than we think we do. And we have to use our collective agency and demand that conflict prevention and peace building are prioritized and can't be a second-order issue. Name your crisis is over. So it's up to us to finally integrate conflict prevention and peace building in the health sector, in the humanitarian sector. And we have some really good wins. The Global Fragility Act, of course. We'll talk about that. I couldn't be up here and not talk about it. We built some amazing data over the last two decades. This data from the Institute for Economics for Peace, from the Fund for Peace, the OECD, this data has helped us make this case. And Principles for Peace. We'll hear about this more today. How do we build our standards and tell our story better so that it resonates with policymakers and donors and the public? So this past year, AFP, the Alliance for Peace Building, released its new agenda, sorry, its new strategy. Its 10-year strategy to advance and build the field. That's all of you. You own the Alliance for Peace Building. It's your organization. We work for you. So that's what we're going to be rolling out along this conference and throughout the 10 years. And we want you to hold us accountable. I want to thank the US Institute for Peace. They're incredible staff. It's been a journey to get here. We're shaking off the cobwebs from COVID. And I also want to thank this amazing, small but mighty team at the Alliance for Peace Building. They're phenomenal. If you see these, tell them thank you. They've worked so hard. And I really want to thank Jessica Baumgardner-Zuzek. She works with me. She's my right hand, my left hand. She's in front of me. She's behind me. She's amazing, and I can't thank her enough. We also have an incredible board at the Alliance for Peace Building. I am so fortunate and privileged to introduce you to Charlie Bolden. He's our vice chair. He, besides being an amazing human being, he's a brilliant astronaut. And you went to space four times. He doesn't think he's a peace builder, but I tell him all the time he is. And I know you all want to ask him this question. Here's the answer. No, Liz. I wasn't scared when I was waiting for the rocket to go off. No, Liz. Not even a little bit. So, Charlie. Good morning, and thanks very much. It's a pleasure for me to be here. As I look around, I see some people who brought me to this community. Melanie Greenberg is here. Bob Berg is back there with my wife, Jackie. And so for some of the younger of you, you may not recognize those names, but they brought me into the peace building community. And I will disagree with one thing that Liz said. I do believe I'm a peace builder. Now, it has taken me some time. So I'm General Charlie Bolden, as Liz said, and I'm the current vice chair of the board of directors of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. And it's my great honor to welcome all of you on behalf of our AIP board to this year's peace con. As a Marine, and yes, I am still a Marine. I am retired technically, but I'm still a Marine. I'll go to my grave that way. A former NASA astronaut and the 12th administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the Obama Administration, I felt right at home within this wonderful, global community of peace builders since joining AIP's board a number of years ago. One of the things I admire about all of you, about this community is the diversity of experiences, perspectives, and approaches that AIP's members and partners represent. Yet united under a common goal of advancing peace and peace building throughout the world, with my background in the military, I know firsthand the importance of preventing violent conflict and for the need to prioritize diplomacy and channels for dialogue at every level. As someone who collaborated closely with the Russians from my days as an active astronaut, through my tenure as NASA administrator overseeing U.S. participation on the International Space Station, for example, which has now been in orbit for 23 plus years. There has not been one second during that 23 years when we've not had human beings living and working off this planet together, peacefully, cooperatively, and we've gone down to two crew members every once in a while and during those periods of time, those two crew members have represented the United States and Russia, so go figure. You know, I have firsthand experience developing a close working relationship and friendship with those I previously assumed were my enemies. Let me quick story about how I happened to fly my last space shuttle mission, which is the one that I cherish the most. There are none that I think are my favorite or my best or any of that, but the one I cherish the most was my last flight STS-60 way back in 1994. And I was here in Washington, D.C. at NASA headquarters and my boss came in and said, hey, we want you to go back to Houston. I said, when? To just to get out of D.C. He said, well, soon because we want you to command another shuttle mission. I said, great. We had not flown the first servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and having been the pilot for the Hubble Space Telescope Deploy Mission and left it in not great condition, I was really anxious to be able to go back and command the crew that would go repair it. They said, no, not gonna do that. We already have a crew. I said, okay, what do you have in mind? They said, well, we are going to fly the first Russian cosmonaut on the space shuttle. I said, forget it, stop. I'm a Marine. I've trained all my life to kill those guys and they've trained all their lives to kill me. I don't want to fly with any damn Russian. And he said, okay, calm down. There are two cosmonauts who happen to be here in D.C. And they would like to have dinner tonight and we'd like for you all to get together and just talk and then come back in in the morning and tell me what you think. And so I reluctantly went out to Reston and to a home of a friend of mine and met Sergei Krikolov, Sergei Konstantinovich Krikolov, who today is the number he actually runs human space flight for Roscosmos, for the Russian space agency. And Vladimir Titov, who was, in fact, a Russian Air Force fighter pilot who had trained most of his life to kill me. But we spent the evening talking, we started off talking about family and our kids because all of our kids were very young at the time and the kind of world that we wanted to leave them. And that's all we talked about the whole evening and talked about the mission that we were gonna fly, the opportunity we had to try to form some kind of bond that other people would understand. That was quite some time ago and today there are still two of my dearest friends. So don't give up. As we kick off this peace con 2023 to discuss new peace building architectures for today and the future, I find inspiration in the creativity and energy you all bring to our work and connections and new thinking that will arise during this conference. We're gonna be discussing a lot of interconnected challenges we face as the human race, as well as the solutions you all bring forward. I know that this work is not easy, not easy at all. And that it's happening at many levels, at every grassroots community level and at the highest levels of international policymaking. But working in community, we stitched together this complex constellation of peace building efforts to be more impactful than any one of us can achieve alone. It's exactly what Liz was talking about during her comments. Alone we're kinda, it's easy to feel hopeless but together we can do anything. As I said, I'm one of the lucky few that has had the good fortune to see our planet Earth from space. A life-changing moment for me and my comrades to experience each other as humans first and foremost. And this is a sentiment that I want to pass on to all of you as you go into the next three days. A sense of hope, a feeling of connectedness, a willingness to be open to new ideas and perspectives and a commitment to continuing to work together in new ways for our common goal of peace, peace across this globe. Thank you all for what you do for the world. The AFP board continues to be at your service and looks forward to getting to know each of you more over the coming days. A special thanks to the U.S. Institute for Peace and for co-hosting with us on this first day and a huge note of gratitude for the tireless efforts of Liz and Jessica and the entire Alliance for Peacebuilding staff. For the hard work that has gone into putting on one of the premier peacebuilding gatherings in the world. As they say, I say to my friends over in Israel when I talk to them every day, Shalom. To the rest of you, God's peace. Have a great conference. Charlie, thank you. Absolutely fabulous speech. We're delighted to welcome the members of the first panel to the stage. May we have you join us? Where do you want to sit? I'll take that first one. All right. We're very pleased to welcome the colleagues who are just joining us. Ambassador, thank you so much for being with us from Berlin. We're very pleased to have you here. This first plenary focuses on the challenges and the importance of adapting peacebuilding strategies in response to new global power dynamics and the unprecedented strains that are being experienced by the multilateral system. We're very fortunate to have an esteemed distinguished panel for this conversation. Ambassador Dickey Potzel joins us virtually and is the director general of crisis prevention stabilization, peacebuilding and humanitarian assistance at the German foreign office. Ambassador, we're delighted you're here. Rob Jenkins is the assistant to the administrator for the Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization at USAID. Rob, welcome. We're pleased to welcome Caroline Bronson, the senior manager in the fragility, conflict and violence unit of the World Bank which provides additional resources to the international development association countries that are facing different kinds of risks. And we're also delighted to welcome Awadabo who is the deputy head of the UN peacebuilding support office. Before that office, Awadabo held a number of senior positions within the United Nations most recently as the chief of country oversight and support for UNDP's regional bureau in Africa. Awad, with your permission, we'd like to start the discussion with you. What we'll be doing is we'll ask each of our panelists a specific question and then we'll have a round of questions that we hope everyone will answer and we look forward to taking questions from the floor as well. Awad, your first question. As we know the UN is one of the largest most important entities responsible for maintaining peace and security across the globe. What concrete changes do you think as a senior leader within the United Nations including the department that you helped lead will make the UN better adapted to address today's threats? Thank you so much. Yes. Thank you so much, Liz. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's really great to be here. This is actually my first peace con. So I'm really excited to hear from all of you. Before I joined the UN 23 years ago, I was actually working for civil society as well based in London, but focused in Africa on human rights. So this is really wonderful. So let me try and answer the question, but I wanted to turn the questions the other way around if you don't mind. Also because in fact, I'm in another panel where I will talk a little bit more on the new agenda for peace, but I'll certainly make mention of it here today. But let me start by just talking about some of the global challenges. I think we all collectively face, and I believe Liz also mentioned them earlier, which is to say that these challenges are not only about what UN faces as far as the work we do, but it is challenges that we all as peace practitioners face and have to contend with in a world that's really changing fast and that's really increasingly complex. I would like to say that the first challenge that we all face is to be fit for purpose, to be fit for purpose to respond to the escalating number of fast-changing conflicts, the fast-changing nature of conflicts. I mean, today, right now, the world is facing the highest number of violent conflicts since 1945. Ukraine and Sudan, I've just added to a growing number of different types of conflicts, of active conflicts, of protracted conflicts, of conflicts that are affecting millions of lives and livelihoods the world over. To add to this complexity is another challenge, which is the nature of conflicts are changing. Peace actors are now faced with conflicts that take many forms from the more insidious use of technology to sow conflicts and to escalate them, to the rapid growth of criminality and gangsterism, to community level conflicts, to localize cross-border conflicts. These fast-changing multifaceted conflicts require a new way of thinking. They require us as peace actors to reevaluate our strategies and our actions. They require new tools and modalities and ones that can take into account these fast-evolving realities. This is a challenge for the UN, but it is for all of us as peace partitions to be fit for purpose and to be able to respond adequately, effectively, and sustainably. A second challenge is what has been coined as the poly crisis that the world is facing. These are, in other words, the major stresses that serve to aggravate existing conflicts, that sow seeds of new conflicts, and that unravel hard-earned peace and development gains. The last few years have seen their fair share of these stresses, and we are all suffering the brunt of them, and sadly, as is often the case, it is the most vulnerable and the conflict-affected countries that continue to suffer the most. These stresses we know include, of course, the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the skyrocketing food and energy costs that causing alarming food insecurity worldwide. I mean, it is sobering that recent WFP statistics estimates that 345.2 million people are projected to be food insecure in this year. That is double the number of 2020. That is sobering and that is scary. Not to mention the climate crisis, the threat of terrorism, the global pushback against human rights, which all of us, I'm sure, have known or witnessed, as well as pushback on gender equality, and the unregulated development of dangerous technologies. Another challenge that we will, as in the UN will certainly face, and you will face, is the deficit in international solidarity that we are witnessing today. According to the OECD, socioeconomic grievances continue to be the core of the most violent conflicts, with 24% of the world's population living in fragile contexts. And yet, ODA, dedicated to peace in these countries, has declined by 19% in the past decade. We are seeing in our work at the UN the trust between the global north and the global south is continually undermined by perceptions of unmet commitments and double standards. And yet, in all cases, prevention and peace-building requires strong coherence across instruments of diplomacy, mediation, economic policies, and sustainable development. So given this fragile outlook and the rising needs, there is indeed an increasing demand for peace-building resources, which is also another challenge. The demand we have is not met from the funding we are getting from our donor partners, nor is it sustained. Competing priorities at time of fiscal constraints threatens the provisions of necessary funding for building and sustaining peace. And this was recognized by the General Assembly in 2022, September, with the GA resolution on finance peace-building, a call to strengthen commitment for peace-building, both financial and political. We are waiting to hear what the GA's response will be to our call, or the SG's call, for assessed contribution for peace-building. So across the background of these daunting challenges, we must continue to push and emphasize the centrality and the foundational nature of peace-building and opportunities it offers as a catalyst for the broader 2030 agenda and the SDGs. Peace-building is an immense opportunity. It is a fundamental pillar that cuts across humanitarian development and peace nexus to address systemic fragilities at the root of conflict. It requires people-centered, gender-responsive, and inclusive approaches. It is mutually reinforcing with sustainable development. So to get back to your point, Liz, on how are we working to ensure we are having responses that are practical and that are effective? Firstly, let me speak for the Department for Peace-building and Political Affairs, which is where I work, PBSO, Peace-building Support Office. And to say first, we have the new agenda for peace. The new agenda for peace will underline preventative action as a priority at all levels and will make an appeal for greater international solidarity to tackle inequalities as key drivers of conflict, both within states and between states. By underpinning the call to leave no one behind, the new agenda for peace will be a marker on the road to the summit of the future and the broader 2030 agenda. The new agenda for peace will allow us to keep our eye on the ball on the SDGs, especially where progress is lagging in many fragile and conflict-affected countries. Sustainable development in particular is the route to prevention and peace. We know the development deficits drive grievances, they undermine institutions and allow polarization and violence to flourish. Secondly, we are hopeful that the new agenda for peace also offers opportunities for an enhanced peace-building commission able to meet the increased expectations put on it. Strengthen the peace-building commission can allow it to exert significant leverage to support the UN's efforts in prevention and peace-building by bringing together and proactively consulting a wide range of actors within the UN but beyond including civil society, private sector, regional organizations, et cetera. With this, the PBC can help address some of the root causes and drivers of conflict and instability and confuster coherence and effectiveness of UN action. And we are witnessing a growing appetite for the work of the PBC and a recent engagement of the PBC with countries like Timor-Lest, Colombia, Mozambique and Central Asia region has shown this. In addition, it's also important to note that the peace-building commission supports the Security Council by accompanying countries currently on the council's agenda as they prepare the long road for sustaining peace. And in this regard, South-South Triangular Corporation has also proven to be a great way to learn from each other's experiences. And just last week, the peace-building commission provided Colombia, my country, the Gambia and Timor-Lest, a platform to share their unique experiences in transitional justice with members of the commission and other conflict affected countries that are considered by the PBC. Thirdly, we continue to advocate for sustained and adequate funding for peace-building. This is also including increased funding to the SG's peace-building fund. We have seen that the PBF can be a powerful vehicle to advance our collective efforts to address global challenges. Such investments are key to not only addressing otherwise critical but unfunded actions, which are often root causes of conflict. They are catalytic to achieving the SG's in fragile contexts. For example, since 2015, virtually all the PBF investments have contributed to the implementation of the SG's to 2030 agenda. They offer the foundation for UN, for civil society, IFIs and other actors to be able to build on and in support of the national priorities. These investments are catalytic. They're key to sustained support in peace-building interventions and in the long term. Fourthly, at DPPAPBSO, we work on our partnerships for effective prevention and peace-building. We know we must do this. We must continue working and improving our partnership to IFIs. We also know the critical role civil society organisations have in peace-building, particularly at local and community levels. At DPPAPBSO, we look forward to scaling up our partnership with civil society, including through an annual dialogue, the first of which is planned for October this year. We understand the importance of working with regional banks, with regional economic commissions, noting the increasing cross-border and regional character of conflicts and the important role these entities play. How much more time do I have? Am I running out of time? So, yeah, I do tend to talk too much. Maybe just two more points. I wanted to certainly make reference to, of course, the work that we do on the HDP nexus because very important and particularly so in light of the scarcity of resources and the scale of needs that we have. And also the importance that we place on inclusivity, our leadership role in the youth peace and security agenda and WPS as really all important catalysts for the new agenda for peace and ensuring that we can take this work forward. And lastly, let me make reference to an important point which is on the issue, on the point on data and results for peace-building. We understand that demonstrable results and impact is important not only for our donor partners but importantly for the constituents that we are servicing or serving. And one good example of our planned work at DPPA is that we are developing a peace-building impact hub to deepen the understanding of how we assess, use and share the impact of our peace-building interventions. So these are just a few examples of how we continue to strive to adapt. Reform and adaptation are by no means a once-off event. In the UN, it has been and continues to be a continual process. The next few months with the publication of the new agenda for peace leading to the summit of the future will be key in securing commitments from member states and all stakeholders on these priorities. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Carolyn, the World Bank has been a leader in calling attention to the conditions that lead to instability and that lead to fragility and in developing strategies for addressing these. The bank is also in the forefront right now of developing tools to help conflict-affected countries that have been hardest hit by a whole range of global shocks. We're hoping this morning that you can share how the bank is addressing these and what you hope for in the future to connect those to building peace. Thank you very much and thank you for inviting me to this important event. Thanks to all of you for showing up this great morning and thanks to my distinguished co-panelists representing institutions with which we have very strong and deep partnership with. Let me, as mentioned, the multitude of crisis, the multitude of challenges that we're facing in the world today has a huge impact on development, on development trajectories and for the ability to people to find their own social economic opportunities and a better livelihood for themselves. So as some of you may know, we used to be thought of as the first ones to leave and the last ones to get back in in times of crisis and conflict. But I hope you'd also agree with me that we have come as a World Bank a long way since that time. Let me just point to a couple of things that have changed the way that we have approached the topic within the World Bank. I would like to really highlight the Pathways for Peace, which we did in collaboration with the UN. This for us was really a pivotal report that allowed us, for those of us like myself, within the Bank who are very passionate about peace and stability, to really make a development case for conflict prevention, both in terms of preventing that it starts, preventing that it escalates, as well as preventing reemergence after the end of conflict. So it really allows us to make that strong business case for why, as a development institution, this is such an important and pivotal topic for us to invest in. It was absolutely critical that we did it with the UN, as you all know, a lot of the core aspects related to peace and stability are within areas that we don't normally consider ourselves as the World Bank to be having the comparative advantage, i.e. on politics, on security, dealing with security actors, et cetera. So it's very important for us to do it with organizations that have that expertise and have that ability to engage on some of these aspects. So what happened after that? So one of the other key things was that we actually, for the first time, developed a World Bank strategy on fragility, conflict, and violence, which made the case for us continuing to engage in an upping and strengthening our engagement on four different pillars. The first one was actually prevention of conflict and violence, so both in terms of armed conflict, but also vis-a-vis interpersonal violence. The second one was on how do we remain engaged, again, going back to this thing of being sort of the first one, silly, right? What is the role of a development actor who thinks long-term in these sort of more humanitarian-type contexts, what could we do? Thirdly, looking at how to transition out of fragility, conflict, and violence. What's the role of development in that case? And then finally, also looking at the spillover effects, not least forced displacement, where we saw a critical role for us to play in looking at some of the protracted crisis and the longer-term impacts as well as what we could do. So this has led to a number of things. We have, first of all, really tried to deepen our analytical understanding of what lies behind some of these conflicts, understanding the key drivers, as well as what are some of the sources of resilience that we can also, as a community, as development partners, help to build upon. And finally, really trying to get very granular, very specific in terms of recommendations for our fellow colleagues in the World Bank regarding both those who have the engagement, at least the policy dialogue with governments, but also on the specific programming, how we do our operations. And not just in terms of what we do, but also how do we do it, with whom do we do it, where do we do it, et cetera, to think through how we can actually, through these quite significant amounts of development assistance, we could actually help support some of these trajectories and try to be supportive there. I want to highlight also that we have been looking quite a bit at our financing instruments. With IDA 19, we established what we called the Fajili Conflict and Violence Envelope, which actually consists of three allocations that corresponds to those pillars. So both trying to provide more funding for prevention is unfortunately, and I'll get back to that point, prevention of escalation of conflict. So it's actually for those countries that are already seeing a certain element of insecurity. It's also how do we help provide, ensure that we have a minimum of engagement in those that are still in conflict, in high-intensity conflict? How can we look at the World Bank's ability to support institutional capacity as well as support human capital and try to prevent that from deteriorating? And finally, how do we support those countries where we see a window of opportunity, where we see an inflection point towards further stability and consolidation of peace gains? So this is actually quite a few billion dollars that we are over our different IDA cycle, three-year cycles are further investing in this. And to the World Bank, going against our performance-based allocation, which is sort of a chord into our DNA. So actually quite a change in the way that we operate. So let me just highlight that we are is something we're incredibly humble about. This is a huge endeavor for the World Bank. It's also unlike the UN and many of the rest of you. This is sort of a new territory for us. And we are, of course, facing a number of challenges, not least due to the country-based model that we have. We work with governments, right? And governments are often a key player in the stability and the conflict that ensue, right? So thinking through how do we work with them? How can we support champions within governments to help us advance on some of these agendas? We're also having a lot, as mentioned, sort of the polar, both the cross-border crisis, which challenges our country-based model, right? But also the polar crisis. In a world with so many competing priorities, how do we retain that focus on conflict prevention on peace-building when we have COVID and climate change and debt sustainability and all the other things that are thrown at us? And I think it's something we're trying to very hard from our unit also to ensure that in the current review of the bank's model, which is trying to increase the focus on cross-border challenges, how does fragility, conflict, and violence play in here so that we can ensure that this big challenge is taken into account here? Let me just highlight a couple of things that we also took away from the Pathways for Peace Report, and which I really wanna highlight how it sort of guides the way that we think about this, right? First one is that as much as we would like to think as an international community, we can come in and change everything. At the end of the day is the countries themselves that have to drive these processes. Government, civil society, the impetus and the driving force has to come from them. So just to say that we're trying to, we can't set the sales, but we can try to blow into the sales, which is what we're trying to do with our increased engagement. Secondly also just highlighting that it's also not development assistance alone. I think Afghanistan is probably one of those examples where it's really obvious it's not just a matter of pouring money into a country and we will have peace, right? It is really a matter of collaborating across diplomatic, humanitarian, development, security institutions to be able to advance this again following the impetus of the national actors in this. So I think I'll stop here, but just say that we are trying and I hope also appreciate all the input from everybody here in terms of thinking more upstream. As mentioned, we are trying to do prevention where it's already started, but we all know that the further, I guess from the health analogy, right? That the earlier you start on prevention, the bigger the impact, right? So how do we think through getting, not being coming in too little and too late, but really think upstream what is the role of our various advantages, our various competencies and expertise where we can try to try to address these drivers of conflict much earlier on. Thank you. Carolyn, thank you. And Batsudar Putsul from Berlin. With the world facing so many multiple crises, ambassador and many more on the horizon, it's more important now than ever before to have fragility and stabilization champions, countries that are prepared to use their resources and their leadership to implement lessons that we've learned from around the world. Germany is one of those champions. You're already a leader in stabilization and in fragility and we're hoping that from the perspective of Berlin, you'll share with all of us today the lessons that you've learned and the things that Germany hopes will change as we rebuild our peace building architecture. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit, elaborate a little bit about the stabilization efforts here in GF, of course. And thank you also for the warm words extended to us. And let me start with an example, a concrete example, a company foreign minister Annalena Baerbuck to Nigeria in December last year. It took us to the village of Ngaranam in Borno State. This village was destroyed completely by Boko Haram forces in 2015. The entire population had to flee to live in refugee camps. Now stabilization efforts within the so-called Lake Chad stabilization facility under the leadership of UNDP brought together the Nigerian government, the local government, and also security forces and the affected communities to rebuild the village from scratch. They steered the process together. And now in October last year, the village reopened with houses designed to the needs of the people by a Nigerian artist, a school, a market, water tanks, a police station, people working as farmers once again. Local population is now returning and we're talking of 3000 people at the moment are returning to the village. The mother of six children told us that the family now finally feels safe again. Her children can go to school, they have a house, food and cattle. And they see the state authorities can deliver for the people. They can be trusted. And these are the successes that we want to achieve with our stabilization engagement. Now over the last few years, crisis prevention and stabilization and peace building have therefore become key components of our foreign and security policy. Stabilization facilities, as the one I just mentioned, are indeed one of our favorite instruments. One early example of our effort has been the stabilization facility in Iraq and Yulis have championed this endeavor in Iraq on the UN site. The task back then was support the government of Iraq to deliver security, basic services and a sense of normalcy to the areas liberated from the Islamic State so that people would return to their homes, to Ramadi, to Mosul and other places. To do this in a flexible and well coordinated manner, integrated into a still ongoing military campaign against ISIS was not an easy feature. But UNDP stabilization facility contributed immensely through this effort. The facility will close this year at the end of this year. After 10 years in cooperation and over 100 million euros in German contribution since 2015. The facility completed over 3,000 projects ranging from infrastructure rehabilitation over livelihood support to promoting social cohesion. It has helped more than 5 million displaced Iraqis to return to their homes. We look forward to the lessons learned of course. The model has then been replicated to other contexts, quite successfully we feel. Most recently they just mentioned Lake Chat region and Liptak-Ugurma in Central Sahel. Now what is very important and Caroline just alluded to it and spoke to it, stabilization facilities put our partners sovereignty and political needs front and center. They support the return of positive state presence. From security to basic services. And most importantly it is the government that's doing it and it is seen doing it and not us, not the donors and not UNDP, which is running the facility. So now last year in December we published our first concept on stabilization with the headline an integrated action for peace. And why is it integrated? Because it's integrated A first and foremost in our diplomacy and our diplomatic efforts. It's integrated into multilateral and international coalitions. Because as it was said before, we can't do this alone. And three, where relevant it is also integrated into military engagement. And that means that what we are trying to do is really to work hand in hand with the other two D's development and defense. So challenges of course are ample. And I want just to name a few. And thank you for seeing us and leading role here. But we really need to sit together and think about like how to tackle those challenges also together because still more needs to be done. Collisions need to be formed on different levels not only internationally, but really also locally. We need to have all actors on board, i.e. the civil element, but also the military element to be successful. And we also need to enhance the cooperation between the humanitarian, the development and peace actors, the famous nexus, which was also already mentioned. If we get the nexus right and we are really convinced this only increases the impact we can have with our different engagements. Arguably, on the other hand, the biggest challenge arises in situations where we do not have a political partner in power who shares our values or as a minimum a reasonable degree of overlap of interests. Adaptability to developments on the ground and flexibility is really key in our stabilization efforts. That's why we look very closely at what is currently happening on the ground and where we cannot cooperate with government partners support to civil society actors and local self-governance are possible mechanisms. The second or different challenge again is resource mobilization. Germany is already one of the largest donors in the peace building and the stabilization space. My department alone spends about 500 million euros per year. The needs seem to be endless but our pockets are not filled with money. So two reflections on brief reflections on that. First, we have to become better at opening up and encouraging more peace positive private investment in fragile states. Investing in extremely fragile context comes with high risks. We all know that for investors which makes investing less attractive, obviously. Plus, we need to make sure that new investments have positive impacts on ongoing peace processes. On this, we are already working very closely together with PBSO and we are exploring innovative financing methods. We are curious how peace financing will be reflected in the new agenda for peace. And secondly, and I think that goes without saying we need to become more effective in what we are doing. So there is still a lot of room for improvement and to become better at knowing what works in which context should really be a priority for all of us. So happy to share more information if anybody's interested and if you're interested in the concept that we published just go to our website or reach out to me and I'll send it to you. Thank you so much. Ambassador, thank you so much. Rob, the Biden administration recently took another step in the year-years-long adoption and implementation of the Global Fragility Act by sending to Congress the required 10-year horizon plans for the priority rollout countries, Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Libya, Mozambique, and then the region of coastal West Africa. This was a huge step forward. How is USAID going to change the way it works to better respond to the new risks of instability in these areas? And I know last year when you were with us, Rob, you shared very interesting reflections on what you hoped USAID would have done by the next peace con. So in the spirit of transparency and accountability, we would be very interested in your own reflection on, did USAID get there? Well, thank you, Lees. I have no memory of what I talked about last year. There was no one out here. First, I want to thank you. I want to thank Liz. It's a great honor to be on this esteemed panel. I'm having a bit of imposter syndrome. You start with the guy who's been to space for four times. These three wonderful dynamic women, a lot has been said. I hope to add something to the conversation. You're expecting me. Everyone's expecting me to spend a lot of time talking about the Global Fragility Act, like about the US strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability. This afternoon, there is a 3D diplomacy defense development fireside chat just on the Global Fragility Act. So I'll touch a little bit on it, but I'm not going to go into it too much right now. I'd like to just, first, no one's ever been fired quoting their boss. So last month, the administrator of USAID, Samantha Power, delivered her annual testimony on the budget when you have to do it in front of all four committees. And she went through the litany that we've all heard, and we all have gone through the poly crisis. Looking at it just a little bit differently, whether we knew it or not, the world was on a positive trend there for a while. Things were getting better. Poverty was going down. Nutrition was going down. GDP was going up. Wow, things changed quickly. With all these different shocks, you name the one that's the biggest, partumes the latest. Think about it, eight countries, border, Sudan, all of them have had conflict recently. That's a big part of Africa, which is a big part of the world. So we're losing on investments over 30 years. Democratic backsliding, misinformation. So the question is, can we do anything about it? I think Liz Hume is hiding over there. I don't know where she is. But she did say we should focus on a sense of hope. I don't know if any of these problems are solvable. I'm not sure if any problem involving humans is ever solvable. It evolves. So how do we mitigate? How do we manage? I'm not sure what the answer is. I know it's not going to be unidimensional. Lately, I've been over-focused on the fact that I think our industry, that being development, foreign affairs, foreign assistance industry, has become over-specialized. We've gone so technical that everyone's a specialist. No one's a general practitioner standing back and looking holistically at what this society we're looking at, what this country, what this region needs. No, I'm looking at food security. I'm looking at child malnutrition. I'm looking at you name the X. Is it stabilization? Is it peace building? Is it prevention? Is it countering violent extremism? Why do we make all those little differences? Because in the field, you're going to be working locally, listening to local partners, and hopefully fixing whatever local problem is there and roll it back up. Underneath it all is governance, the thing we do least up, because you can't measure it. Those of you who know and have the honor of working with Andrew Natsios knows that his big thing was, sometime in the 80s, in response to Congress, at least at USAID, we started to double down on those things that we could measure and prove we had an effect. Education, health, humanitarian assistance. I know if these children are starving and we give them what they need and they live, we can say we saved some lives. That doesn't work in the stabilization realm. That doesn't work in the governance realm. So we got out of that. So we're fixing the symptoms, and we're getting really good sometimes at fixing the symptoms. We're not fixing the cause, and that's hard. No amount of foreign assistance is going to do it. I can guarantee you not one donor is going to do it. No matter what we're going to do, it's going to take time. We're going to have to actually not just pay lip service to partnership, but real partnership. The ambassador talked about the different things that Germany is doing, and yes, Germany is a leader in this space right now. We are really proud, as part of the Global Fragility Act implementation, but really proud to be partnering with Ambassador Poltzel's team, my colleague, Clemens, who works for her. We recently did a trip out to coastal West Africa together. And with IOM, I see Brian Kelly, a good friend and colleague here. We, our government, USAID, and the German government, have co-designed, will co-implement, co-manage a program in Togo, Benin, and Ghana, staff in the field working together every day, hoping to pull more donors in in a few weeks at Stockholm at the Stabilization Leadership Forum, working in the same mechanism in the same place, co-managed together, co-funded, with the government's local and national of those three countries. Is it going to work? I don't know. But it's practical. It's not just lip service to partnership. If we're going to be solving any of these things or getting to anything that looks like solving, we're going to have to work together. That's hard for us in the US government. We like to roll in with an idea. We like to throw some money at it. We like to throw some people at it. And when we were a little bit shocked when it didn't work, we are trying to change our culture, which is one of the hardest things to change, is it involves changing minds and changing behaviors. I see Rick Barton is here. I learned from him that behavioral change after age 40 is a very rare thing, he used to say. A lot of the people were trying to change their mind and their behavior over age 40. We can get there. It's going to take a long time. I think one of the ways we got into where we are today, you mentioned Afghanistan, unrealistic expectations, hubris, a lack of humility, thinking if we just try a little harder this year, we can solve this thing. We've got to step back. Look at the broader picture. How do we collectively pull together? Because we don't have enough money. We have a new policy framework at USAID driving progress beyond programs, acknowledging it's not just the assistance and the programs. It's pulling people together. It's using that to leverage other people's assets, other ideas. That's where we're going to get anything that looks like success working together. So I don't know if we are where I wanted us to be this year after last year. I will say we've done a lot of work in the US government trying to act differently, implementing the Global Fragility Act. There have been some milestones. There's a lot to show for it. So far, that's all the bureaucratic oariness. Now, tune in later this afternoon, and we'll talk about the challenges, what it really means to implement things differently in a new way. Thanks, Lisa. Rob, thank you so much. We have a few minutes left for this session, and we welcome questions and comments from the floor. I didn't know we'd get questions from the floor. I wasn't prepared for that. Yes, ma'am, please. Thank you so much to a wonderful panel. I would like to touch on Mr. Jenkins and a couple other panelists talked about coordination and collaboration and what you're doing in each of your organizations towards that goal. I was wondering if maybe some of the panelists could speak to an entity within your organization that's more defense of the 3Ds, a security entity that you would like to work closer with in the coming year. Sure. In the bureau that I have the honor of leading, our Bureau for Conflict Prevention Stabilization, we have our Office of Civil Military Coordination and Cooperation, CMC. It's an entity dedicated to strengthening, fostering, building, leveraging the relationship between USAID in all manners of the Department of Defense across the spectrum of assistance, humanitarian assistance, transition assistance, development assistance. As part of implementing the Global Fragility Act, we, USAID, along with State Department and DOD, have created a secretariat, full-time, dedicated people. I see some of them are here today, who spend all day, every day, coordinating among the 3Ds. That doesn't sound very exciting. Thank you, Jody. He's the Deputy Coordinator of the Secretariat. But for a bureaucrat, that's really exciting. It really is cool. I have spent my entire career trying to coordinate better with the Department of Defense and State Department. I have never, honestly, never seen it work as well as it's working right now. But remember, the Pentagon and all those combatant commands, that is a large beast. So we can coordinate all day long pieces of it. The hard part is how do we use that coordination to leverage, I was gonna say the battleship, but that's a little bit trite when you talk about DOD. That huge, massive enterprise that is DOD and how do we leverage it the best? We'll never, ever get to the point where we go, we're done with coordination, we don't need any more of it. Everyone believes in coordination, no one wants to be coordinated. We are dedicating ourselves to real partnership among the 3Ds. And again, tune in this afternoon and you'll see just how exciting it is. They're like, I want to take a question. So I wasn't quite sure, I quite got the question, but certainly just in a nutshell, well, first to say that no, we do not coordinate with defense entities per se, but the question actually raised some thoughts from in my mind speaking specifically on this issue of peace and security and what it actually means for the work we do on peace building. The perception of the work that DPP does in peace and security and peace building, and especially as we speak on the ADP nexus and the need to work in a much more collaborative fashion, I think it's just to say that it's a continuous challenge as far as coordination and collaboration, ensuring that in trying to push the centrality of peace building, how to ensure that we are speaking the kind of language that our humanitarian colleagues in the age understand. I mean, I think we've got it as far as development actors and peace building actors, but how do we speak with our humanitarian actors on peace building in a way that does not scare them when they hear the S? So certainly not when they hear the D, I'm sure you'll be running a mile, but certainly when they hear the S because it is about humanitarian space, it's about this fear that we don't want to muddy the waters of what peace building is vis-a-vis the soft P. And this is one of the challenges as far as HDP nexus and the work we do on peace building. On collaboration and coordination, just to say that PBSO, the raison d'etre of peace building support office, it's about collaboration. It's a recognition that we don't do it alone. So in fact, everything we do, whether it's a peace building fund, the peace building commission, the work on strategy, it's about how do we work better with the UN system and other actors, civil society, IFIs, et cetera. Maybe just real quick. So as some of you may know, we had a world development report back in 2011 that highlighted security, justice, and jobs as being the key elements towards peace. And sitting in an institution full of economists, that's a very difficult one to get across, to be honest. I think we have come also here quite a long way, not least through not necessarily like bilateral defense, but we have worked and seen increased collaboration with UN peacekeeping forces, for example, in those countries, so where those exist to try to have that conversation where how does development and security interact? So in that sense, really trying to move beyond thinking of it as being, you know, security being a non-productive sector. Therefore, any expenditures on that is unproductive and should be canceled, right? And saying, in the Gulf of Guinea right now, how can you not talk about security expenditures? And trying to think through how we, as a development institution, still work collaboratively and constructively on those issues. Ambassador? Ambassador Mute? No, am I mute? No, can you hear me now? Yeah, excellent. So maybe just two quick examples. First of all, we have what we call the Enable and Enhance Initiative. And that actually means that a very close cooperation with our friends of the Defense Ministry, we have a joint budget. And we have to decide on where to put the money together. So I mean, it's not the overall budget, but the budget for Enhance and Enable projects. So the defense guys, they look more on obviously the military side, on the equipment part, and so on and so forth. Whereas we look at training and other civil aspects of it. And obviously because of Ukraine, this budget has really grown a lot. But we are very happy that we have this close cooperation with the Defense, friends in the Defense Ministry. Secondly, the Interior Ministry has been gracious enough to second one of their very experienced police officers to this Director General. So he's working in one of the units here. And he is like the focal point for all the projects that we do in the security sector with regards to security sector reform, police training, and so on and so forth. So two, I think very good examples of how we cooperate like on a daily basis with the different actors. Thank you. And Ambassador, thank you. We're at the end of the session. We're gonna ask our panelists one final question. The theme of this year's peace con is new architecture for peace building in the world. If you were asked under duress to name the one thing that should be done to change the way we build peace globally, what would it be? Rob, we start with you. I question the premise that we have a peace building architecture. That's the problem. Humanitarians do. Humanitarians have the cluster system. No joke about clusters necessary, but they have a system. They have sphere standards. They've agreed how they're supposed to do things. They know when something happens how to come together. We don't have anything like that. I think it's time that we put that together. Ambassador. I find that a very tough call, honestly speaking. Well, if I pick one thing, but Caroline already alluded to it, I think really we need to get better in terms of ownership. We have to have leaders in the process that are actually from the particular region, from the particular area. I personally really also think that that was also one of the major failures in with regards to Afghanistan that we didn't manage to really have ownership from the government side there. So if you press, then this is what I would say. Caroline. So under duress, I may also again question a little bit. Do we actually know what works? It's difficult to design architecture if we don't know what that architecture is supposed to be doing. It is something that we are struggling with, not at least when it comes to prevention where you're dealing with a counterfactual. Do we actually know what works? And I would doubt that. And I do think that we have a lot of work ahead of us to get much better, much more granular to figure out whether it's across the D's or across nexus and whatever. Not least then how we put all that together into an architecture. And the final colleague of who is the deputy of the UN's peace building office? How would you answer the question? Well, yes. So I want to tell you that we do at the UN indeed have a peace building architecture. It may not be perfect, but we do have a peace building architecture. Yes, I do think that there is certainly room for improvement and we recognize that and we do hope we can improve what we have. The peace building architecture as it stands constitutes the peace building commission, the peace building fund, and the peace building support office. And we oversee all of that, including the work we do on strategy and partnerships with the bank. As far as what I could change, I think a powerful tool that we have, and I don't think we use, but we could use better, speaks to the issue on national ownership. It speaks to the issue of political will because I completely agree. I say the same thing about Afghanistan when I speak to my continent, Africa. If it was money that was going to solve Africa's problems as far as conflict, we would have no problem. It is much more than that. It is about, of course, everything we're talking about here, working together, collaboration. But central to this is about will, political will. It's about ownership and will. And for me, the peace building commission is a powerful, powerful political body that we need to support. We need to build. We need to enhance. We need to make sure we are all part of it that can help us to push together and pull some of these strategies and objectives and goals that we collectively want to see in these countries. Thanks. I hope everyone joins me in thanking Ambassador Potzel, Rob Jenkins, Carolyn Bronson, and Awadabbo. Thank you. Incredible colleagues up. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. So as they're getting settled, I want to introduce Melanie Greenberg. Melanie Greenberg is the managing director at Humanity United, former CEO at the Alliance for Peace Building, our touchstone, and about 5,000 other things. We are so grateful that she's in our community. So Melanie, I'm gonna turn it over to you. Everyone, I'd recommend while we're changing our panels here, just everyone to get up for a second and just take a stretch. And while you're stretching, I would like to thank Lee's grand, Liz Hume, Charlie Bolden, the amazing staff at the Alliance for Peace Building, and all of you. It is a truly profoundly moving moment to be here in person after three years of trying to do peace building virtually. And as all of you know, peace building is an innately in-person set of processes and relationships. And to do that to the metaphorical and actual empty room is dispiriting. So it is with great joy today that I introduce this panel and just look forward to talking with all of you over the three days at PeaceCon. So I never had an Earth from Space moment, but the closest that I came was at the end of the Cold War as I was entering the peace building field. I began to see that citizens could make peace. Nuclear scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union who came together to talk about ways to de-escalate nuclear risk. Citizens from Israel and Palestine who started to think about what architectures of peace could look like well before Oslo. Louise Diamond, who some of you might know who coined the multi-track diplomacy, gave a talk about a Passover Seder that she held in the neutral zone between Greek and Turkish Cyprus where refugees from both sides of that conflict came together to talk about the theme of Exodus. And something went off in my mind. I thought there is more to peace than governments that as Rob Jenkins said, there are no general practitioners. I would argue strongly against that. The general practitioners and indeed the experts are the citizens and societies who live with conflict every day and who every day exercise tremendous moral imagination in the words of John Paul Edirach to create formal and informal processes for bridging, for healing, for shifting divided politics, creating government structures, engaging with governments, holding governments accountable and truly creating what so far is often seen as a hidden architecture for peace. And I'm hoping that in the changes we've talked about in the last panel and that we'll talk about today become the primary architecture for peace. So that I welcome you to the panel called Bright Spots and a Bleak Landscape, New Constellations for Peace. We as peace builders are inherently optimistic and always look for those bright spots. But during a time of rising politics, geopolitics and dire humanitarian need, civil societies coming together in powerful forms that stretch our conceptions of what it means to build peace. The people who are creating and inhabiting these spaces view their engagement together as radical acts of politics and imagination that have the seeds within them for deep transformation at a local and global scale. These formal and informal collaborations are not always easy or natural, but they point towards a future where peace building undergirds, a vast landscape of social change and indeed new architectures for peace. This panel of brilliant women will explore several areas of creative collaboration to shine light on these new architectures. What are we learning from new forms of transitional justice in Colombia? What are we learning from national dialogue in Colombia and Syria, which bring a wide spectrum of civil society together to forge a political path through a highly polarized landscape? And what do we know about the principles for peace and the narratives for peace that help convince a skeptical public that transitional justice and dialogue are there to serve them? How do societies create the political landscapes, create the trust that's needed to create sustainable peace? So it's a great honor to introduce our panelists today. I'll give a very brief bio because in your app you should have bios for everyone. But Maria Victoria Llorente, here from Bogota is the Executive Director of Fundación Ideas para la Paz, Ideas for Peace. Maria Victoria has been a researcher, a consultant to many arms of government and the Inter-American Development Bank and is one of the world's leading experts on the relationships exactly to the last questions that was asked in the panel before between peace builders and security sector reform. Maria Palaprada, who was the advisor to the presidency of the Colombian Truth Commission has been engaged in dialogue, peace building and transitional justice for over 17 years. And Maria was the permanent advisor to Father Francisco de Rue, the president of the Colombian Truth Reconciliation and Non-Repetition Commission. And she'll soon be starting a fellowship at the Crock Institute at Notre Dame University and is leading a remarkable platform of all of the trans media documents and videos from the Truth Commission are now online for anyone to access. And I really encourage you to talk to Maria Pella about that. Julia Royg is the founder of the Horizons Project with more than 30 years of experience working for democratic change and conflict transformation around the world. And she served for almost 14 years as the president and CEO of Partners Global. And we also know Julia as the board chair for the Alliance for Peace Building. So thank you, Julia. Raja Altali is the co-founder for the Center for Civil Society and Democracy. And she is a member of the Syrian Women's Advisory Board for the UN Special Envoy for Syria. And when the Syrian revolution started, she started documenting human rights violations and worked the Syrians inside Syria and with Syrian refugees, especially in the Middle East. And finally, Hedekasas, the executive director of Principles for Peace. She's had 17 years of experience in various leadership and expert roles at the UN and was the former chief of the Crisis Prevention and Response Office in Geneva. So please welcome these wonderful panelists today. And I just have to tell you, one of my least favorite jobs is being a human stopwatch for panels. If I didn't have that role, you would be here very happily through lunch. So if you see me flashing these very annoying orange cards, it's for full transparency to make sure that we have plenty of time for our speakers to speak, but that we also engage with the audience. Now, further ado, I turn the floor to Maria. Hello. No, it's working. Thank you, Melanie. Thank you there for the Alliance for Peace Building and the UCIP for hosting this event today. Hello to everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a honor to be here speaking on the name of the Colombian Experience on Peace Building and Transitional Justice. And it's furthermore an honor to be sitting in this panel full of peace builders, women peace builders. And I do believe one of my first ideas I would like to share in this scenario is that bright spots in Colombia are being women all over the world and all over the country, sorry. And being the strongest bond for non-repetition in our country after 60 years or still where we are facing an armed conflict in Colombia and over 60 years of an armed confrontation, we are working very hard in order to be able to overcome the violence and to move forward to non-repetition. So as we all know, there is no blueprint for peace building and transitional justice. We have just heard about peace building structures. I would say it depends on each context which peace building structure will function or not. And so in a country as Colombian, having 60 years of armed confrontation which has been changing from years and from the regions in time is not the same armed conflict from the beginning till now but it's still a lot of violence and are still a lot of lives and victims going on daily. We had the possibility to sign a peace agreement in 2016 with the biggest armed group in Colombia, the FARC, and we are right now implementing this peace agreement and the Truth Commission where I had the honor to work for the last four years was part of this peace agreement. So regarding the question what to do different, what to keep on doing in order to enhance peace building and try to avoid the new conflicts or to maintain the violence which is actually in Colombia, I would like to share four elements from our experience. The first one would be the purpose of the Truth Commission and our raison d'être. I guess once we were all very clear from the commissioners to the whole staff of the Truth Commission that our raison d'être was human dignity, lives, and human rights. We were able to navigate in a society and in a country which was daily posing us in dilemmas regarding public leaders, regarding their legitimacy, regarding political parties and winning the elections, regarding enterprises and maintaining their stability, regarding institutions and the fulfillment of their mandates. We had to every day focus again and said our purpose is not on all of that. Our purpose are not institutions, are not politicians, are not political parties. Our purpose right now are lives and human rights. And we have to focus on our mandate in order not to lose our path of these three years of our mandate, engaging in political debates which would bring us out of our initial mission. So it was very important for us to focus and to be able to do that. There was an element that was very important to be able to do that and it was that we were an independent state institution, independent of all powers. So we really could navigate through our mandate going aside of all these really interesting debates but who were not like in the middle of our mission and that was very important to keep focused. Having that clear, we knew our mandate was to fulfill, contribute to fulfill the right of victims to truth. In Colombia, we have almost 19% of our population has been defined as a victim. That means almost 10 million of Colombians are victims of this conflict. And 80% of these 10 million of Colombians are civilians. So you can imagine it is a war between armed actors and 80% of the victims are not armed actors. 80% of the victims were women who were raped or sexual abused as part of conflict strategies or children who were, I forgot the word, brought firstly into the armed groups recruited or entrepreneurs who were just victims of kidnapping or leaders who needed to leave the country because they were in danger because of what they were doing. So 80% of the victims are civilians and we were really clear that fulfilling or trying to contribute to the fulfillment of the right to truth was not only the need to explain and to understand, but most of all, we felt that there was a need to listen to the victims, to hear to the victims, to try to understand their suffering, their sorrow, their pain, their hopes and their resistance and peaceful resistance as well. So part of our methodology was listening and what we settled as a meaningful listening, we tried that our listening sessions were preparatory in itself because we know the country is not gonna be able to repair in a monetary way and no one will be able to repair someone who left or a violence you have suffered in your body, but therefore we thought a very important part of our mission and our process will be to listen and to have a meaningful listening or as Jean-Paul Leatherer says, thank you Melanie, listening with a heart. So that meant that was a political decision inside the institution which meant methodological and financial consequences. We developed methodological tools and we had teams prepared to speak and to listen to women exclusively, teams and methods in order to talk to LGBTQI population in order to speak with indigenous, with Afro-Colombians, with children, with youth and with exiled population. That was a main task. So making it relevant and significant, but also at the end coming back to them to let them know what we found out, not only to come to them to listen and to ask, but also to come back and to bring the information. And I guess I have one and a half minutes. So two additional issues I would like to share. So one, first of all, having our purpose clear and our raison d'être. Second of all, making our listening part of our method un-significative. Third of all, once we have understood in the Truth Commission that the mandate we had was bigger than the whole institution itself. It was impossible to be able to complete this mandate as a state institution within three years facing the pandemic and having at that time a government who was completely against our mandate because they were against the peace agreement. So they found the Truth Commission was not a legitimate institution. And the official narrative was fast every day against our work. So we had a lot of wins against the mandate. We realized we were not able, we were not going to be able to fulfill it on our own. So we began a systematic process of alliances and partnerships with civil society, with private sector, with universities, with public institutions in Colombia and abroad. That's how we were able to work with victims, Colombian victims who lived in 24 countries around the world and have to thank once again UCIP and Humanity United and USAID for allowing us to work with Colombians living in Colombia in the States, sorry. And once again, what Melanie has mentioned, the possibility to have nowadays the results of the Truth Commission in a digital platform available for all Colombians and for all the world in a permanent way is thanks to an alliance with the University of Notre Dame and Humanity United as well. And just to finish, I would say from our experience in Colombia and in these three years of the Truth Commission, we need bottom-up, top-down, middle-out approaches. All of them are needed in the regions. They are legitimate, they depend on who is doing them, who is capable of doing that, but we need in order to reconstruct a society that has been 60 years in a perpetrated violence context, we need all of them. But from what we have lived in the last years, I would say the bright spots are on this inside-out approach. I guess that's what we have faced is that where individuals allow themselves to connect with the suffering of others and when individuals decide to be touched also by injustice, they go then ahead and make decisions which are relevant for local level, for institutions, for policies, for the country internationally. And these decisions will then help us to build again systems of value that put in the center humanity and the protection of nature. So I believe we have to focus again on the persons, on the individuals and how we collectively recreate new systems of values for our society. Thanks. Thank you, Maria. Maria Victoria. Well, thank you very much, Melanie. First of all, I wanna thank USIP for having us here and the Alliance for Peacebuilding and of course, Melanie Humanity United. Thank you, thank you. I feel very privileged to be here in this panel and look into all these people here finally in a packed auditorium. I think it's amazing. So thank you, thank you very much. So okay, I'm going to bring into the discussion these exercises we had in Colombia related to a social dialogue. We call it social dialogue. It's very different from the social dialogue that we internationally know about. It's not about labor, labor that it's a social dialogue in the sense that it brings together different people. Diversity is really key in these and to exchange positions and to get to know people that don't really know each other normally or wouldn't be together talking and with a purpose to address issues, critical issues and hopefully to produce something different and to bring out something from that dialogue bring out something that might be related to changing relationships, building trust, mainly building trust, which is so scarce in our days and build common agendas and also shape or influence public policy. So in recent years in Colombia, we have been using dialogue in many different ways. So we have been using dialogue to build important peace accords, not only the one we signed in 2016 but previous to that. So we have had like a tradition in using dialogue which is a paradox, being such a conflictive and such a violent country in some periods of our history, recent history. So recently, this idea of, so this tradition of dialogue open became wider and civil society and particularly during the recent social outbreak we had just after the pandemic in 2021, though we already had some different outbursts of social outbreaks prior to that but really the one in 2021 was huge in Colombia like it was in other countries in Latin America. Remember Chile, a country that we would never thought in our context that was going to go into that in such social unrest. So during this process, a number of initiatives of social dialogue flourished. We counted at least 62 experiences in a period of, I don't know, it was like three months. That really critical moment were like two months and expanded to three but during that period really, really society mobilized and there were all sorts of initiatives of trying to bring together people from different places, civil society, businesses, academia. So there were really, really a lot of stakeholders that got involved. Businesses which are usually very, very difficult to bring to these sort of conversations they were really engaged but also public officials, national government, local governments also promoted different instances of dialogue. So it was really, really important and it was really important in the sense that it helped us sort of, it didn't de-escalate really what was happening because this was a multifaceted civil unrest. There were overlapping agendas. So it was very, very difficult to understand and to really bring out which was the common agenda. So at the end we ended up having these different experiences as I already said, 60 of them or 60 plus. Some of them were more sort of negotiating, so more like trying to get into negotiating not necessarily people that were in the streets, not necessarily that but trying to negotiate agendas and we were part of one of these initiatives at my organization, Ideas for Peace. We are a think and do tank, so we get involved into many of these instances. So one of those was for instance, young people, one of the key people that came out to the streets were young people in Columbia. There was a huge, two minutes? Oh my God, I love to talk. Okay, I love to talk. So I'm not going to go into the specifics of that, but there were different instances. So some were more negotiating, others were like forum types, other were like more structured dialogues. We took part also in another one, more structured, which we call the, we have to talk Columbia. And well, if you wanna have any specifics about that we can talk afterwards. But anyway, what I can say about that and the bright part of this is that there were quite a number of achievements, I believe, and I would talk. First of all, there was really, we nurtured and waved a thick dialogue fabric. And we continue, it is amazing how after almost two years exactly of this, we still are engaged in this, not all of them, but we are still working together and trying to find different ways to collaborate and to build better ways of having these dialogues because we learned there were a lot of methodological advancements. We innovated on how to do these dialogues, how to try to make them more representative, which is a key aspect of that, how to refine methodology. And also on the other side, I would say challenges, finish, okay. So finish with the challenges. No, I don't know Melanie, I'm just, you know. No, so finish with the challenges because though there was a lot of energy coming together and really sitting with different people that I would never imagine we could talk within the pandemic. So we were sitting by Zoom with many of those people. So it was really, really, but the challenge is, and that is the challenge we are facing right now is how to make these dialogues incidental, influence. Because at the end of the day, we come together because we want to change things, not only change our interpersonal relations and build trust, which is key, but after that what can we do together? So I think that right now we're sitting in that problem and what we have learned is that we can address that issue in a better way if we focus in more specific issues, not national dialogue, more local things, and it is feasible and the difference between national and our local, and I believe we can talk afterwards about that. So I think that if we concentrate in more specific issues and right now we are, and I'm really right now trying to see how can we overcome this idea of that is very present in our country and right now with the government, with the present government, that is that we need to have a national accord. So how do we get to the national accord and how do we bring together and how can we make it really representative? So I think that these experiences building to that, but I'm not very positive about the possibility of a national accord. We already have our constitution and everybody is pretty much happy with our constitution in Colombia right now. For more on the challenges, Friday afternoon, Maria Victoria will be speaking with Alex Shubridge and John Pauletterok virtually about the challenges of dialogue. So we'll have a chance to delve more. And that's a perfect segue. Thank you to Raja. Thank you very much. And I want to continue with you and with a great panelist with the power of facilitated dialogue, but in another context in a very more dark context in Syria. We have been trying for 12 years to organize facilitated dialogue in order to resolve issues that it's very difficult to resolve. Our hope and our mission actually is to cultivate hope to achieve sustainable peace and the transitional justice in Syria. But I don't want actually to tell you so much about the suffering that Syrian people have been encounter not only in the last 12 years from the indiscriminate shelling on houses, schools, hospitals, you have seen the pictures, the use of chemical weapons, and you saw the pictures of thousands of people who were tortured and killed in detention centers and security forces of the Syrian regime. Much more than that, it has been a difficult 12 years, but also 50 years of oppressions and dictatorship of the same family, of the same security forces. With that, how can we cultivate hope? How can civil society and Syrian women take us in a way in order to find some solution to difficult situation? So I want to take you with me to a room in March 2019 in Istanbul where we came together 30 women. At that time, we were worried that the constitutional process was going forward in order to establish the constitutional committee, but we were worried that what about the detainees and the thousands of family, how we will make sure that they are not forgotten before the establishment of the constitutional committee at that time. So there are like in the room at that day in the morning and the people who knows me, they know that I'm not a morning person. But I was there with 30 women who were looking at each other in the beginning. How can we dive into the issue of thousands of people who are missing? Some of them are killed, some of them are still in security forces detention or in prisons. It wasn't only us actually, every one of us brought with them their beloved ones. I brought with me my father who was arrested for nine years in the 90s when I was 12 years old. Not presence in the room physically, but he was with me in spirit. Some of us actually, one of us was survivor and she was survived from detention through the hostage exchange. And we decided to talk about how to deal with hostage exchange in Syria. Some of us has led facilitated dialogue and has talked about their beloved one even though they know that they might be at risk. We'd led conversation and dialogue before and after which led to release of detained people and also kidnapped people. Among of them were women, but not only survivors were there or women leaders who facilitated release or negotiated release or the demands for change the fate of thousands of detainees and kidnapped people in Syria. Some of us were families who are still working towards knowing where are their beloved one. So in the morning, it was very hard. Everyone was looking at each other. We were like in this big room, five tables, six of us were sitting with each other looking and trying to find way how to dive into the conversation. And it was, the opening session was very essential because together we decide what are the different priority that we want to go through. But of course, the two days, we had only two days together. Of course, like each day, it's six hours organized conversation. But more than that, what happened in behind the scenes are as important as what happened in the room. In the coffee table during lunch, during our evening in different rooms in order to negotiate, facilitate, setting priority, identify some of the important messages that we won't like to agree on together. Like how can we deal with exchanging hostages while we know that it could be taken as an excuse to arrest more people? At the same time, how can we not call for the release of the kidneys, all the kidneys, even though among us, one of the women saw her husband killed in that Caesar pictures. And she is still waiting for her mother to be released. It's this power of facilitated dialogue. Together, we were able to say and bush for truth finding and ways in order to explore more and finding more about like that issue of the kidneys. It's still not resolved. And I think in the previous panel, we talked about like long-term solution. And we know all of us that it will take time in order to reach to solution or justice for all the people in Syria who have been survivors of detention or other human right violations, which some of them actually amounted to war crimes and crimes against the humanities. How can we reach to that without all the preparation that went through? So I won't like to go into some what happened before and also after the facilitated dialogue in order to be able to see the power of facilitated dialogue and how it could be a way of cultivating hope for the future. So when we are discussing which topics we wanted to go to, even like to decide on the detention, a lot of consultation needs to happen before identifying the actors, identifying like analyzing the context. And all of this it's essential not only about the issue or the detention issue only, but also as a way of investing in critical thinking and investing in way of active participation. And this is, I'm not talking about like country that has been practicing democracy for a long time. I'm talking about how can you tell your opinion after 50 years of dictatorship? So we are working towards making sure that bushing for a mechanism of truth, commission and accountability in Syria is essential. And that with bushing and with your support calling for establishing that mechanism for missing people in Syria that the general secretary of the UN announced in January and it was endorsed in March of this year. So with that, I would like to finalize and support and hope that we support the power of facilitated dialogue. Thank you. Thank you so much, Raja. Thank you and good afternoon or morning. I lost count in another time zone. It's very hard to speak after Raja because I think you've really put in your storytelling way, put us into a very difficult context. And I think it's a real pleasure and a way to be here at PeaceCon and talk about peace, especially in these dark moments that we're living and to constantly put the focus that peace is an essential international public good that actually determines the fate of our livelihoods, of our climate and negotiations and cooperation but also our future as humanity. So in these dark times, I think it's very important that we're talking about peace. And for that reason, I'm really grateful to be here on behalf of the Principles for Peace and just to say a few words about that because we are a newer actor in this space. We are a collective effort of 120 organizations and a coalition of actors across the political, security, humanitarian development and mediation space that came together to support an international commission on inclusive peace and imminent commission which concluded its mandate earlier this year with the support of Germany, Denmark, Robert Bosch and many other governments with a very concrete and simple idea which was talked about in the previous panel. One, do we know what works and what doesn't work in peacemaking and our peace efforts? Can we orient ourself around our collective learning, what we've learned from mistakes but also what actually works and where peace holds? And can we have a common lexicon, common standards, common principles that guide us as we move forward? And that's why we came together as a collective effort. And there's no doubt that there's such a wealth of experience, a lot of investment. I mean, earlier on, there was a talk about how professional this field has become and it's true, it's become very, very professional. But in general, peacemakers and actors within the peace space do not necessarily orient themselves around common lexicon, common standards, common frame of reference, analogs to how the humanitarians do around the humanitarian principles and the sphere standards. And the result is often very different ideas around visions and objectives and time frames and results and makes also tracking and measuring quite difficult. So our coalition came together out of this sense of urgency and concern for the changes in the conflict and lead and peace landscape. And I think the previous panel analyzed it beautifully starting from Awa to the rest. So I'm not going to go there but also out of a sense of fed-up-ness. And I say fed-up-ness, it's shared between practitioners, policymakers, but also populations who see that over the years we see again and again that we have such a bad track record. In some places it's good, you know? We have some great successes where peace continues to hold, you know, we can talk about Bank Somoro in the Philippines, we can talk about Acha Indonesia, Timor Leste, we can talk about how things are unfolding in Colombia. But we can talk about also failures in Afghanistan, we can talk about Syria, we can talk about Yemen, we can talk about Libya, I can go on the Sahel Mali. But fed-up-ness on part of the populations and as someone myself who grew up in a conflict country, you see firsthand the horrors of war and conflict and you see that war is not just about the battlefield, it's about all these insidious impacts that continue to unfold when the guns go silent. So that's what really brought us together with this effort to really go deep into what works and what doesn't work, what do we need to recalibrate and how do we actually articulate that in a set of principles that can guide us. So we really try to understand, okay, how can this not be dismissed so easily? Because, you know, if you do an academic exercise, people say, oh, that's too academic. If you are doing it civil society perspective, they're like, oh, that's really nice, but real politics says something different. So we were very keen from the very beginning to actually think through very well an approach that anchors all our evidence-gathering and articulation in three key anchors. One evidence, so we have the academic rigor and in our 120 organizations, coalitions, we have some of the leading academics from east to west, north to south, who have been distilling over 700 pieces of research to see what's actually worse and what's not. The second anchor is the operational dilemmas and challenges, so we brought together those who are sitting in the hot seat and have been sitting in the hot seats, whether as ministers, force commanders, SRSGs, to actually unpack what are the operational dilemmas, the trade-offs that they face. And then third, we brought in the lived experience and perspectives and as someone who worked in many crisis countries, you know, I've seen a lot of times how much, a lot of the assumptions around what drives violence, how do you build peace are not necessarily matching if you actually speak with people who are living in these contexts. So global consultations, 154 consultations, 61 countries, 100,000 insights, and that's only because we've done this collectively. Often people talk about how competitive this field is in the peace-building field, that was not our experience and I think many organizations in the room today have contributed to this process and to this global consultations. I wish I had time to tell you what were all the findings I want because otherwise you'll stay here for a long, long time. But maybe just to share a few things with you, one, it's always easy to blame geopolitical complexities and context when we're talking about why things are not working in one country or another. But what we found out very clearly through this evidence generation process is that there are also gaps at the heart of the current approach to peace and stabilization. And often, peace breaks down because of three key deficits, if I'm to simplify. One is a legitimacy deficit surrounding peace processes or the efforts of peace actors who are involved and that's because of who's involved and who's excluded but also what peace delivers. We focus so much more on political peace and that populations focus a lot more on dignity, on tangible benefits, on justice, on accountable security. I put two marks under accountable, not only security but accountable security and economic opportunities in jobs, et cetera. And we have a blind spot in our toolbox on this side because of the siloed approach. On the inclusion deficit, yes, women and youth are not included but also, in many cases, some of other elite actors are also excluded which become spoilers. And on the transformation deficit that we are addressing symptoms and it was talked about earlier today not necessarily addressing the root causes. And I think we've seen that in many cases in Sahel and Afghanistan are short time frames. Some can say we've been in Afghanistan for 20 years and others can say we've been in Afghanistan 40 times for six months because of the approach. So four shifts to highlight that we try to encapsulate in the principles for peace and the peacemaking covenant, how we think about peace more than political peace is needed. And I can say more but I see Melanie giving me the vibes from there so I will refrain but ask me, I'll tell you more if you would like, how we approach and realize peacemaking effort. And here it's elite packs are important but more than elite packs are needed and accountable security is key. And just to substantiate what I'm saying, think what's happening right now in Sudan. No need to say more. Three, we really need to recalibrate the relationship between externals and internals, internationals and nationals. There's need to be a lot more humility in the relationship. More of midwives and less of peace architects are needed in this era and more respect and reciprocity. And the fourth one is really to go beyond inclusion as representation to inclusive outcomes and pluralism especially in this era with a strong backlash on democracy. So I won't have time to tell you what the eight principles are unless Melanie says I do. Looking at our clock we have to have just about 10 minutes so I think, is there a website we can go to? And you can go to the website but as one would, I will abuse the microphone and just say eight principles. Go to the website and check them. I will not abuse the microphone so much. But just to say we did not launch this as a set of principles that would gather dust in a report but actually we've accompanied them with a dedicated capability with the Principles for Peace Foundation to be a catalyst and a synergist of partnership and we look forward to partnering with you all as we take this really to move from principles to influencing policy practices and financing and we have a lot of exciting plans with our partners around that so join us and don't give up on the idea that peace is possible because we have to making peace possible. Just not sure if it works. Does it work? Oh my gosh, no that's okay I have to go last after like and between all of you in the break but gosh thank you so much to all of my co-panelists. I'm gonna go super fast so that we can at least get a couple of remarks in from all of you just to say I was asked to speak about narratives. I always am because I love that topic and the storytelling that we've heard appear and just even the name of the panel, right? I mean we're talking about new constellations of peace and obviously an important part of narrative is these concepts of metaphors and so just the fact that you're like experiencing the constellation of these women because a constellation is a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern and so I'm just inspired by the patterns that we're seeing and we're hearing and we're challenged with and so I'm also gonna talk about some bright spots when it comes to narratives that I see about how what do I mean by narrative? It's not just storytelling, it's sense making, right? We're understanding the world through narratives and we're trying to bring forward these narratives of peace and peace building at a time of all of these challenging kind of complex crises and difficulties and violence and complexity is the answer and that is the answer, that is the narrative answer and what I would wanna say when I, we have to complexify our narratives and peace builders are very good at this. We actually see nuance in everything. We wanna talk about all sides, we wanna bring all sides in and yet we still struggle as a field not to insist on our narrative about what peace building is, what it looks like, the activism that we're working for because in its purest sense, complexifying narratives is a practice of both and. In its simplest sense, we can be working at the national level and prioritizing local dialogue and local voices. We can't, we've gotta stay away from the black and white messaging that we have. We do know this, who's good and who's bad in this story? What is the right answer? It's short-term urgency, it's long-term work. All of this has to be communicated and how we're bringing people into a peace building agenda and we have to go for the hardest cases and I was trying to think, okay, what are the hardest cases of both and when it comes to complexifying a narrative of peace and peace building and I thought about the Doha negotiations that are happening right now where 70 civil society organizations are saying, please recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's government. Is there a both and there? Is there an and? We stand with the women of Afghanistan and we need to have someone, a group to negotiate with. These are difficult topics. Difficult, when you say real politics and yet we have to engage with these polarities, with these you were talking about, all of the challenges of being able to bring people into this work because what's the other one I was thinking of? One of the hardest ones was we were all so thrilled when the world stood up in solidarity with Ukraine and there was another narrative which was there was a racialized aspect to why the world was standing up with Ukraine and both of those things could be true and so what I really am just encouraging us with regards to bright spots, with regards to calling people into our work is that we actively engage with these complexities and the nuance because I was actually asked to talk about how to convince a skeptical public and we heard from Rob Janksons this morning if you're over 40 you're not gonna be convinced of anything, we don't change our behaviors, we actually don't but we can bring forward new sense making and what does that look like then as a narrative practice? It looks like engaging in a movement mindset and so a lot of you talked about mobilizing, you talked about creating political will, we talked about needing solidarity with the oppressed and that is a movement mindset as peace builders not as technocrats, not for all the wonky kind of evidence that we have even though I agree that this is important if we're gonna engage in narratives we're thinking about meeting people where they are because there is a reason that there's a rise in populism, there is a reason why autocratic regimes have resonance with people we're fearful, we're traumatized, we're worried about migration, we're worried about changing norms, we're genders, we have to engage in these narratives, we can't necessarily combat them, we can't convince anyone to think differently, we know this, you're all engaging this but we need to interrogate our own narratives about how we are communicating, about our goals about peace and peace building and where those narratives and partnerships lay so I had so much more to say to you this morning, we're gonna be able to continue talking about narratives but I'm gonna stop there so hopefully we can get a couple of questions. Thank you Julia, I think we'll have time maybe for one question. Eh, hello, so it's not an easy question, maybe or maybe it's a stupid question but anyway, like conflict is something that is very human, I'm also Colombian, I also, and I like to feel that we're like a bright spot but being there you don't feel so bright, so I think there is, like I understand the whole complexity of everything that we're doing but there are things which are pretty simple and one of them is if conflict is human it's very different to use weapons in human conflict, no, we don't have to agree on everything but one thing is when you have a kid that has like a massive gun or a guy, it doesn't have to be a kid who has a massive gun who intimidates or killed somebody with it, so I don't know if the question that we should be asking is what if we decided as humans just to disarm the world or what could be the quickest way to do that together or now can we undo the weapons industry? That may be just a start, that would be my question. Thank you and although our focus is international and we're here at the USIP as we understand conflicts that are awash in guns, so thank you. I wonder using that as a jumping off point, could I ask the panelists if we were to gather here in a year to another full audience and we're thinking about conflict reducing the guns but a way of being a couple of steps further towards transformation of conflict, what would you like to see in a year? Maybe starting with Juliet and moving to Maria. So in a year at PeaceCon, that's what I'm gonna say. A year from now at PeaceCon, I'll be very excited when we have a diverse group of folks attending who will see themselves as peace builders. General Bolden this morning said, no, no, I see myself as a peace builder. I would love those who aren't currently in the profession to be in the room with us with regards to that bigger movement for peace. Liz in her opening remarks said something very important around advancing the field. And I think in this era of complexity with all the challenges that we're facing, we really need to be very adaptable and moving forward. So what I would hope in a year's time that we see some practical shift in our approach around areas where we know things don't work, that we embrace a lot more common approach and common standards in how we operate and be able to track these together so we can actually move towards more effective approach to peacemaking, more legitimate, more accountable security, more focus on dignity and humility and subsidiarity that we nuance our proposition and move a bit away from toolbox approaches to nuanced contextual solutions that actually gets rooted in society. Thank you. So one year from now, I see that we are working together to create the space for collaboration for Syrian civil society and Syrian women in facilitated dialogue to resolve, first to discuss and resolve some of the very difficult local problems and local conflicts and responding to that huge humanitarian disaster after COVID and after the earthquake with that addition of the long-term dictatorship and also all the detention and the human rights violations. So I see that we are working together. I hope you'll feel great partnership from this room. Next year, I think that from the previous panel, I believe that the biggest takeaway for me is the difficulty of coordination and bringing together people from different fields and its diversity, but not everywhere. We don't need everybody in the room, but we really need to bring in other people. We need to bring in security sector, we need to bring in security sector, we need to bring in businesses, we need to bring in other conversations related to development. Fortunately enough, people that are working in that development field are more and more understanding sort of other things that are very, very specific of the peace builders, like for instance, trust. They are looking into trust as something really, really key for development. So I really think that that will be great. And just to my compatriota, may I have a minute for that? For that, that's a very difficult question, but I'm not going to answer it exactly, but it brought into my mind something that was said also earlier in the first panel, and is that I'm not quite sure, and this is exactly the point in which we are in Colombia right now, if we are talking about criminality or conflict. So that is a huge, so the question for me is we are still talking in Colombia that we need to take weapons out of politics, and yes, we still need to do that in some parts of Colombia, but what we really need to do is not to put on more politics into weapons. So not to understand criminals, like ordinary criminality as politics, even though they are connected. So I would like to say just that. Thank you, well heard. Maria. Thank you, thank you again. Thank you also for posing the question because making it conscious will allow us to think and maybe to advance towards it. So thank you again. I would say from one year from now I would like to have no more daily victims in Colombia. We are still having victims day-to-day and we are Colombians fighting Colombians, so I would like to stop having victims. And I would like to have a more open discussion on human security and the war on drugs. That's a key issue for Colombia, for peace-building. So once again, geopolitics, it's very important for our future of non-repetition. Thanks. Thank you, thank you all. And please join me in thanking this amazing group. We couldn't do justice to everything, but we are grateful. Please enjoy a well-deserved break. And the next sessions will be in the different breakout rooms. There's a QR code that says what rooms the sessions are in, so have a break. Thank you.