 Welcome everybody. I'm delighted to welcome you here to the US Institute of Peace. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president and CEO here and I'm delighted to welcome you to a really important conversation. Warm welcome to those joining us online and you can follow us on Twitter at USIP with today's hashtag people power for peace and of course that's the numeral for people power for peace. I'm very happy to welcome the authors of the report we have to discuss here today. Hardy Merriman who's the president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict or ICNC for short and Peter Ackerman the founding chair of ICNC. And I want to give a special shout out to Peter because not only did he provide a lot of the early intellectual capital that created this body of research in the field it's also the co-chair of the USIP International Advisory Council so we're very fortunate to benefit from his considerable insights in all dimensions. As many of you no doubt know USIP was founded in 1984 by members of Congress as a nonpartisan national but independent institution dedicated to preventing mitigating and resolving violent conflict and we do this by connecting research with policy with training with support for those on the front lines of trying to prevent involve and resolve violent conflict. We have a long tradition of supporting research and practical approaches to preventing mass atrocities and genocide. In 2008 some of you may remember we co-convened the Genocide Prevention Task Force co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and Secretary William Cohen so today's event is extra special not because just the topic is so important and so germane to our mission but also because this is the inaugural event that we are co-hosting with USIP and ICNC since we established an official partnership between our two organizations last April. We're very pleased to have that opportunity to take what has been a long partnership on working together on research and program activities and this partnership really enables us to do so within a more formal framework and to expand our respective efforts into a important field of work that is very very important to our mission with some great partners so hang on so I can't think of a better way to christen the new partnership maybe if we had a few bottles of champagne but we'll get there so I know many many people in this room probably everybody who's in the room with us here today has watched you know with hope with great interest with awe at what has gone on around the world New York Times has dubbed this the year of the protest from Kazakhstan to Algeria to Sudan to Nicaragua to Hong Kong it's been truly amazing and it's heartening to see that even as a you know we're so concerned about the rise of authoritarianism but so too is the number of people who are taking to the streets to raise their voice and demand greater accountability less corruption more responsiveness from their governments and we know that as inspiring as these movements are these very courageous citizens need support they need space to resolve the conflicts and to accomplish their goals our nonviolent action program supports activists in peace building in some of these very tough environments from Nicaragua to Venezuela Afghanistan by providing trainings on strategic planning and integrating dialogue and direct action and this is seen especially through our guide on synergizing nonviolent action and peace building happily known as the snap guide SNAP you can find the snap guide online and I highly encourage you to check it out and share it with your networks and the Maria may be able to say more about that the name alone is worth the look snap so the report that we're going to discuss preventing mass atrocities does two very very important things it reaffirms existing research on the efficacy of nonviolent resistance and usip's director Maria Stefan co-authored a study that examined three hundred and twenty three major violent and non violent campaigns from nineteen hundred to two thousand and six and found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as successful at achieving their goals as armed insurgencies twice as successful secondly this report offers practical guidance for how the international community can best support movements without undermining their legitimacy their safety or their agency so I know this will be an amazing conversation we have an extraordinary panel to talk about these issues with us today and to kick us off I'm delighted to turn things over to the co-author of this report the president of ICNC somebody who brings more than fifteen years of experience in the field of civil resistance to this conversation and a wonderful friend and partner Hardy Merriman thank you so much thank you so much Nancy the feeling is mutual it's great to be able to collaborate and partner with usip not just today but in the future thank you thanks to the panelists thank you to all of you for coming out on this rainy day and so as Nancy said since 2002 I focused on nonviolent civil resistance movements around the world that are fighting for rights freedom and justice I take a social science approach to these movements trying to figure out in the most basic terms why do some movements succeed and why do others fail and in particular I emphasize and my organization the International Center on nonviolent conflict emphasizes the role of strategy and skills what kind of strategies are effective in what kinds of skills are needed for ordinary people who are facing oppression to unify themselves to organize and to wage civil resistance and win against unaccountable political systems so today I want to talk about external support to these kinds of movements to civil resistance movements and discuss this new international doctrine that Peter Ackerman and I are proposing called a right to assist or the short version is R2A so the right to assist is a framework that would guide collaboration and international support to civil resistance movements that meet certain criteria around the world it's not just any movement we'll get into that Peter and I designed R2A in a way that is designed to engage a wide array of international actors so it's not just a state-centric model it's a model that would engage NGOs yes states multilaterals diaspora groups and a whole range of external actors to be supportive of nonviolent human rights movements the goal is to incentivize the choice of nonviolent civil resistance when groups decide to rise up and demand their rights and support that choice and we argue that if we can incentivize and support that choice we can reduce the probability of violent conflict and therefore reduce the probability of atrocities so my presentation today has four parts let's see great the clicker works so the first is to find my terms real briefly what is civil resistance what do I mean when I say that then talk a bit about why civil resistance matters there has been a huge growth of research about the dynamics and impacts and outcomes of civil resistance movements around the world in no small part with Maria Stefan who's sitting right there as one of the prime researchers and particularly the the quantitative research has been very important over the last 10 years we can make all kinds of claims now that we used to feel strongly about and now have data to support so the right to assist argument that I'm going to make to you today draws on a lot of literature and research that really is just new and exciting and I think we're still grappling with what the implications are and this is one attempt to get to that so then I want to talk about external assistance itself and give a five-part typology of different forms of external support ranging from very sort of low threshold indirect not very interventionist support to progressively more targeted interventionist and challenging support and then Peter and I felt strongly that if we're talking about external assistance we really need to scrutinize our own ideas about this our own assumptions and so actually if you take a look at this special report about a third of it is us responding to possible points that people might raise of saying but what about this because we have to be really careful as external actors we all know that there even good intentions can lead to negative outcomes so we are sort of offering this out as something for those take for people to consider we really welcome your comments critiques ideas feedback and we're hoping that people will run with this and want to take this add their research to it add their ideas to it and slowly start to develop a normative framework or actually a full international doctrine around support to these movements so what is civil resistance so I'm going to bet that the first image that comes to your mind when I say that is a starts with P protest right masses of people it's one of it is the most common image this is an image from Algeria earlier in the year where they through nonviolent means forced to political transition against a president who run the country for 20 years so this is very common there are different variations of the protest image there's a large group of people there's the close up there's focusing on a point of contention but they all give the idea of mass people at least say no to something and possibly demanding something no but that by itself is not civil resistance that's the generally what the media portrays mostly but here's another image of civil resistance where do you think this was taken this was taken in cartoon in June of this year and here this is an incredibly powerful act of civil resistance so the general strike repression was so severe people said we're not going to mass we're actually going to stay home so if we want to get to a definition of civil resistance we need a definition that can bridge the protest the strike and a lot of things in between so here's just a basic definition civil resistance is a way for people often ordinary people who don't have any special power status or privilege to wield power without using violence and it consists of three kinds of acts the first is acts of commission where people do things that they're not supposed to do not expected to do or forbidden from doing protest when you're not supposed to protest sing a song when you're not supposed to sing a song wear a certain color use certain symbols create new social or economic or political behaviors that are not expected or that are forbidden right there are lots and lots of ways we can do things we're not supposed to do right we can just think about all the rules in our lives written and unwritten and then each of those represents a possible point of disobedience civil resistance includes the opposite acts of omission where people don't do things that they're supposed to do or required to do so refusing to pay taxes not open not showing up for work working slow school boycotts not paying utility bills boycotts choosing to change buying patterns lots and lots of ways we can omit our conventional obedience patterns and then a combination of both so this would be for example creating alternative governance systems alternative educational systems alternative economic systems which some movements have done that's both an act of omission and commission so it's a simple definition and just one other point and then I'll move on is violence here is construed in a narrow sense of actually doing physical harm or threatening to do physical harm so if it's if an action is threatening to do physical harm or doing physical harm it would not be civil resistance okay so with that people generally tend to do civil resistance when the conventional means of making change are not working right if they could change things using elections they would alone they might do that it's a lot easier if they could change it just by petitioning the legal system and they had the capacity and access to do that they would probably do that but civil resistance is a response generally to truly unaccountable actions taken by power holders where the institutional means of changing that are failing and so around the world it's not surprising that is authoritarianism rises we're seeing a lot more movements to challenge that authoritarianism whether it's on grounds of corruption people want democracy people want rights or a whole range of other issues so why does civil resistance matter I'll give you four reasons all backed by data the first is that it's powerful right so for those of you who are familiar with this book of which Maria Stefan is a co-author Nancy mentioned that Maria examined with Erica Chen with over 300 nonviolent and violent movements over the last century and the core finding was that the nonviolent movements that were trying to get a political transition were twice as effective 53% success rate versus the violent ones which had a 26% success rate so a two-to-one differential in terms of success of nonviolent movements versus violent movements and this is obviously a surprising finding right because the conventional assumption is that violence is the means of last resort violence is the strongest thing violence is what people should do when everything else is failing and yet over hundreds of cases over the last century we see a huge difference in the success rate of popular nonviolent and violent movements even against powerful authoritarian governments in addition the average nonviolent campaign was found to last only three years the average violent campaign was found to last nine years so some might argue that violence is more power it may not be as effective but it's faster and the data completely rebuts that claim nonviolent movements take on average three years which is a long time if you expect to be successful in three to six months right three years is still a long time but it's a lot shorter than the alternative so another reason why civil resistance matters is that it's a driver of democratic development and this is one of the most replicated findings in the literature now it's been replicated seven or eight times where consistently people look with different methodologies at the relationship between nonviolent movements and democratic development and they consistently find a very strong relationship so just as one graph this is drawing from Chenoweth and Stefan's work they looked five years after you have a nonviolent movement that succeeds it gets a political transition what happens and they found a 57 percent success rate so 57 percent of the time nonviolent movement yielded a democratic outcome it's not a hundred percent right 43 percent of the time it didn't I'm sure we can all think of cases where it didn't but it's pretty remarkable when you compare it to the prospects of violence for example which produced a democratic outcome six percent of the time another study done by Freedom House and also with Peter Ackerman looked at also top-down transitions that did not have a nonviolent resistance component just negotiated round table transitions they resulted in a quote free society 14 percent of the time between the 70s and 2005 so as a comparative matter civil resistance has proven consistently to be one of the most effective ways to get out of authoritarianism interestingly enough even when nonviolent campaigns have failed they sometimes lead to a democratic outcome five years after a campaign failed that's the figure on the to your right there was still 35 percent of the time a democratic outcome so there's something in nonviolent resistance nonviolent civil resistance that has a democratizing impact even if the movements immediate goals aren't achieved a third reason and this starts to get to the atrocity prevention and violence prevention piece civil resistance movements are significantly less likely to lead to mass killings in civil war than violent insurrection so I'm gonna talk about right to assist at a minute but my colleague Peter Ackerman and I who co-authored this report have been talking about right to assist for a long time and last year there was a remarkable finding about nonviolent movements and their probability that a mass killing will happen that propelled us to say okay now is the time to write this we have the data that we need so Erica Chenoweth looked looked at basically what's the general probability that you will have a mass killing when there's a national uprising it's just a generic probability okay doesn't whether the uprisings violent or nonviolent forget about that for a second and so what she found with Evan Prakowski her co-researcher was that an uprising generically had a 43 percent chance of yielding a mass killing event and a mass killing is basically the 1000 civilians killed in a single continuous event it's basically an intentional targeting of a large number of civilians at one time right 43% of the time that happens and it makes sense because the literature on mass killings tell us that instability plus a threat to a government makes a government more likely to respond in this way but then the researchers looked well let's see if the driver of instability is nonviolent or violent let's see if that changes and it changed it amazingly they found that when a nonviolent campaign was challenging a government there was only a 23 percent chance of a mass killing when a violent campaign was challenging a government the probability of a mass killing was three times as high and this is really interesting because actually the nonviolent campaign is more threatening to the government has a greater chance of creating a transition than the violent one and still governments are much less likely to use this kind of to do these kinds of killings and atrocities against nonviolent movements similarly the probability of civil war if you look 10 years after a nonviolent campaign there was a 28 probability of civil war this is based on over 300 cases over the last century a 28 percent chance of civil war which we have which was the results of which we're seeing now for example there's a the civil war in Syria or in Yemen is a really high percent it's an uncomfortably high percentage right I mean we shouldn't feel good oh that country it only has a 28 percent chance of resulting in civil war is scary however when we compare it to a violent campaign the chance of civil war 10 within 10 years of a violent campaign violent campaign are uprising is 43 percent so if people are going to rise up anyway and we'll get I'll get to this in a second because in general sooner or later under authoritarian regimes people do try to rise up shouldn't they be incentivized to choose a method that has a greater probability of a constructive outcome and a lower probability of devolving into civil war kit mass killings and so forth and I would add as well there may be things external actors can do to drive that 28 percent down okay last part of our literature review and then I'll get into right to assist so the data also tells us that civil resistance has proven remarkably effective even in highly challenging circumstances so one common refrain we might hear is that well nonviolent civil resistance can only work when there's a government that's not as brutal or in a society that is not fractured ethnically or when there's a certain level of economic development or when the movement is supported by outsiders or you know powerful countries like the united states or when the regime itself is very powerful and big so these have actually been tested in a growing body of research that says okay so let's control for that condition let's control for regime type and regime brutality and see if it see if it relates to movement emergence and outcomes and what we're finding remarkably is that it doesn't it doesn't of the six factors i listed there the one that is found to be significant is use of violent repression and use of violent repression against a nonviolent movement is found to reduce its chance of success by 35 percent 35 seems like a big number it is a big number but the conventional view is that if violence is used against a nonviolent movement it's 100 effective right but that's not the case it's 35 percent so when we look for example at the movement in sudan that over months and months has so far transformed one of the most brutal governments of the last 30 years and a government that used a great deal of repression the repression was not enough to stop that movement and so this this is grounds to grounds for hope so if these conditions don't determine a movement's outcome by themselves then it must what we see is that skills strategic choices of movements matter yes repression might be used but the question is what's the movement's counter strategy to it in sudan one thing was a stay-at-home strike and it worked pretty well so there's an interaction between the conditions a movement faces and the strategies and skills that it meets those and how it overcomes or transforms them okay so the premise of the right to assist just to sort of summarize is that dictators are often challenged by their populations at some point right so instability is inherent in the authority in authoritarian regimes an authoritarian may look stable at the outside but how do they generally fall generally they're challenged by their own populations not always but often so we can see sudan earlier in this year looks stable 30 years of the same government but wasn't we can look at algeria earlier this year we can look at russia where this picture was taken in august so we're 60 000 people showed up in moscow just to contest local elections when they were being thrown by the government we can see burkina faso in 2015 transition there we can see tunisia egypt syria again there's no guarantee that rising up nonviolently is going to yield the best outcome egypt has obviously struggled enormously in syria there was six months of nonviolent depending on how you count primarily nonviolent resistance that then succumb to arm struggle thus we have this risk of civil war but all of these governments one could claim seemed stable at the outset and yet people rose up and so when we look at the map of the world now my question is where else will people rise up and when they do ease the international community whether we put on our NGO hat our policy and you know government hat multilateral hand or others prepared for this can we incentivize it are there things we can do to support it to avert outcomes like what we saw in syria so if people are going to rise up against governments eventually we know how they do that has major repercussions for mass killings for civil war one one brief stab i didn't mention to you is that two-thirds of atrocities occur during civil wars and so peter and i developed this document around the right to assist and so it is as i said sort of a proposed international doctrine but right now it is simply a document that you have and you can think about this in a few different ways for it to be useful the first is that what's in here you can see it as just a set of common principles that you could read about and apply to your work if you are in an organization or you know department right now it's designed to be useful even if you don't have a whole bunch of allies about guiding movement-centered work whether you're a philanthropy or whether you're in policy or otherwise we could start to develop it as a normative framework maybe something short of a full international doctrine but something where if we get a number of people around the table who work with this and develop it we don't think we found the answer we think we've started to work on an answer that could be developed further that could be grounds for collective action greater coordination and solidarity between external actors or over time if it proves its worth it could develop into some sort of international doctrine with structures that could be developed to go with it now i mentioned that when peter and i worked on this we wanted to get this to have this be not necessarily state-centric right so for those who follow atrocity prevention the prevailing international doctrine of the responsibility to protect which was used in libyan 2011 looks like it will never be successfully invoked in the u.n. Security Council again at least its most coercive measures it will not be able to get past a veto we've seen atrocities since 2011 in sudan in Myanmar in a variety of other places in central african republic that have where responsibility protect has been blocked in the security council so if we're gonna do something around a right to assist we want to get out of the idea that one state can veto and then the whole thing stops so this requires the designing of different sort of structures to think about how this could be invoked so let's talk about external support for a second so what kind of support makes a difference what can external actors do to answer this question we first have to ask well what's actually helpful right what's going to make a movement more effective so to come back to my earlier point about skills and strategy the data is telling us that those matter and so in our five-part sort of typology that we offer for supporting movements the first two directly relate to skills and strategy so the first is simply public education make knowledge about civil resistance available accessible and attractive to people we know that if people don't feel like they have a choice or if people want to rise up violence can very quickly monopolize the conversation about what needs to happen if there's a demand for change and violence is the only product on the shelf people will eventually choose that so let's let's make conscious the fact that there is another alternative that it's more effective that it's more attractive to most people a lot of people the the barriers of joining a violent uprising are huge basically have to give up your life as you knew it whereas in civil resistance thousands or millions of people can participate and still go home at the end of the day often so there's much lower barrier entry there are a lot of things that are attractive about it so how can this be communicated through a variety of institutions schools associations unions religious communities youth clubs it can different means television films music art literature cultural practices advertisements there are lots of ways to just make people aware of this and messages can be adapted to different languages history and cultural context so I'm not talking about importing something from the outside into various countries nonviolent civil resistance is something that is inherent in virtually every culture right so I don't know I have two kids they understand the power of nonviolent dissent all children do right it's something deeper in our human psychology here it's not something that Gandhi created or that I am talking about is something I put my trademark on no every society has had some version of a strike or a boycott there is history and cultural practices around disobedience of unjust of unjust rule in every single society but are those elevated in ways that legitimize and in hint that you know what just what happened historically is not just a strike or a protest it's actually part of a much broader method of struggle that we can practice public education can also take the form of supporting research about movement effectiveness which obviously I think it's incredibly important because I'm drawing on it for this work supporting the development of new educational resources films translations videos website and so forth curricula supporting workshops supporting online classes fostering peer-to-peer interaction this all falls in the category of indirect support this is not going into another country trying to pick a particular movement trying to subversively get stuff into them this is above the board available to all comers just information the second is capacity building this is more targeted this is in our work at ICNC we respond to requests from activists around the world we don't initiate contact but if they contact us and want something we try to help them so if they want it what can we you know what can external actors provide workshops for specific human rights groups and activists on a variety of skills right we're going way beyond just the protest here for movements that want to accomplish legislative gains or major political reforms they need insider knowledge access to institutional knowledge they need you know organizing knowledge about how to mobilize the society and a whole range of other things change is a team support it requires a lot of different skills so providing workshops meeting people where they're at seeing what they need and trying to get that to them it's very simple offering convening space so that people can get together in dialogue it might sound so simple but the amount of good ideas that don't get acted on for lack of convening space or because they're missing a few hundred dollars it's huge and people who have suffered under oppression have often been deliberately divided and ruled so are there spaces that can be brought together intentionally that external actors can can provide where groups can rebuild trust rebuild social fabric so that they can work together there is room for small funding and in-kind support and small targeted grants and programs and this is this is something i'm more cautious about it's something that icnc has done it's something that i think when done well can be incredibly effective i think providing funds to movements can also be quite risky if not done responsibly and so maybe we can get into that in the q&a it's very useful when done well there are ways in which it can contaminate a movement or cause all kinds of internal rivalries and squabbling so it's proceed with caution but there's a rule for it the third is just supporting populations directly in conflict things like offering strike funds which the united states and european unions did to polls in the 1980 when they were striking against soviet rule um legal aid for persecuted activists ensuring adequate medical care for victims of repression emergency assistance these are things that are done and what i'm trying to do is bring them all under a common umbrella of movement support so that rather than saying each one is legitimately justifiable or exists on its own or has its own community of practice discreet from other communities of practice we can see that they're synergistic and start acting accordingly and just to find them internationally accordingly rather than saying well this particular form of supports is legitimate but this one may not be and we're not focused on that just this we need each other whatever your skill set is the fourth has to do with increasing the cost of repression so here naming and shaming perpetrators it would be great if there was a new level to this where if a movement of a certain size was met with violence by its government and it was exercising its rights to engage in nonviolent resistance if the if the repression met a certain threshold say you know x number of people who were killed or certain abuses happened what if that triggered automatic international investigations so it wasn't a question of who's going to pick up the ball will that happen it was known by perpetrators ahead of time if we do this violence there will be investigations and targeted sanctions attending trials and public actions diplomats and others do this unarmed civilian protection is another thing that can be done i think remarkably effective where civilians both foreign and from the host country are trained as neutral mediators and deescalators of conflict i think we need more research to show just how effective that's been but all the preliminary what i've seen is that it is incredibly effective back channel communications admiral denis blair wrote a book several years ago in which he said that the u.s military has so many touch points with other militaries many of them informal through exercises joint exercises or contacts through war colleges why aren't we leveraging those when a movement rises up in another country if we know the officers in the other country who already have rapport with officers in this country can we connect them and get them talking targeted sanctions i'm almost done lobbying allies just to stop supporting oppressive governments we know this matters of course we ourselves may have to look at our own government's practices as well elevating human rights and foreign policy trade and security policy possibly cutting off arm shipments i think generally there is a real need for rebalancing priorities internationally where trade and security policy don't necessarily always supersede human rights and democracy concerns and derecognition which is a separate matter that i won't get into now but it has to do with a government becoming so egregious that it passes a threshold where it actually gets internationally recognized for its sovereignty and the fifth and then i'll stop has to do with fostering political transitions just to be really clear about this this is really an if then thing this isn't about external actors saying hey we'll give you transition support this is about ordinary people rising up engaging in civil resistance meeting violent repression and such that over time they conclude that they actually must change their government and if and when that happens the question is are they left with ad hoc very little sort of support for that when the government is doing major abuse or what can the international community do so providing pledges of assistance particularly after transition which can induce people in the government to think about whether the conditions might be better afterwards space providing space for oppositions to plan again so simple but so critical right providing space in the in the earlier example was about activist strategizing when there's going to be a a political transition it's more about building structures that can be organized and manage that transition election monitoring protecting whistleblowers and induce helping to induce whistleblowers from governments that are doing abuse and then also critically playing a watchdog role post transition because that's when gains can be lost so again many of these things are done we see them as related we see them as something that could fall under right to assist these are just examples in one last point i'll make and then i i'd love to to hear from the panel is we actually soon will have research and data to show the effectiveness of a number of these different forms of external support Maria Stefan and Erica Chenoweth we expect over the next six months to nine months we'll have data that shows publicly the impact that some of these forms of support have had on movements and that can be a whole additional piece that enriches this conversation so concerns considerations and opportunities here's here's our own self-doubts that we that we air publicly and questions that might lead into dialogue what campaign should receive assistance peter and i outline three different criteria but there could be more is support for civil resistance synonymous with supporting regime change we answer that but we know that that's a question people might have what if external support has a harmful impact on a campaign what if external support contributes to societal instability what forms of external support are permissible under international law and how should r2a be invoked and who should exercise oversight again we've tried to get into some of that here but we'd love to hear your thoughts thank you great hardy thank you so much for that excellent presentation and warm congratulations to you and to peter ackerman for producing a really timely provocative well-argumented report and i can't think of a a more important topic to address at a time when as we've heard authoritarianism is rising globally civic space is closing so thinking about what forms of external assistance to activists and movements can be helpful i think is a really really important topic so my name is maria steffen i direct the program on nonviolent action here at the institute and i have the distinct honor of moderating our panel this afternoon and we will be hearing from two activists and a practitioner who will be essentially reacting to the report into hardy's presentation and speaking about how in their experiences they have kind of the pros and cons of various forms of external assistance and their thoughts on whether there's a right to assist if you will so i'm going to briefly introduce the panelists and then we'll have a conversation and then we'll have plenty of time for a question and answer with you all afterwards so first kuskandi abdel shafi is a sudanese activist peace and human rights advocate and an independent research consultant he was active in the student movement and against genocide and ethnic cleansing in darfur and kuskandi has worked for various organizations to promote human rights and support civil society and sudan including the african center for justice and peace studies in the sudan democracy first group next alahandra espinoza is the co-founder of voices of nicaragua an initiative focused on youth and women that promotes a culture of non-violence human rights and social and economic development when the crisis in nicaragua first broke out last year alahandra managed a victims assistance fund which guaranteed hospitalization for the injured and funeral expenses for fatalities then ariella blater is a program officer at wellspring philanthropic fund in the atrocities prevention and response program ariella has worked for over 20 years in policy strategy and management in the ingo multilateral and private sector as a human rights and humanitarian lawyer so i think we have an eminently qualified panel to spark the conversation this afternoon and we're going to start with kuskandi who as we heard sudan has experienced a significant political transition following a popular uprising that removed an accused war criminal from power earlier this year you were an activist in that movement and so i wanted to just start by asking you kuskandi what has been your personal experience with external assistance and if you had a list one or two things that have been helpful and may be less helpful or even harmful what would you say thank you maria for kind introduction and congratulations hardy and for this great work i really appreciate and this is also my second panel with icnc for the first report on probability of the atrocity in nonviolent movement and i am really happy to be here and thank you for the audience it is a privilege to come here today just a brief introduction i'm really happy to read this because all of you know sudan by nature this was most detailed and autocrat government in the age of this state called sudan for the last 60 years and this because it has combined it ethnic elites autocracy and also religious ideology where it always justifies in one of three categories of any activist to be accused of crimes against the state or extrajudicial killing or torture or all kinds of mechanisms that made very hard for any activism to work inside the country and so the the because of the war in 2005 the therefore case was the first case to be submitted to the international criminal court in march 2005 and many of sudanese were hopeful that icc could at least like put the little hope for the international community to act to at least provide justice after they failed to prevent the atrocity at the first place but this has never happened until today that is why i'm very happy to read on this approach because i personally coming from the country which is fragile a state where people are continuously leaving a fear because the state is hostile to them and and i am very happy to read this because it is very hard to see people are killing in the village and you are waiting for that big room which is the UN Security Council to take a decision to help rescue people it's not going to happen and it fails several times it fails in Darfur it fails in south sudanese fails central africa it fails in Myanmar and it's going to fail fail fail fail and i think this mechanism provide another alternative uh on the the world not to stop like not with folded hand that there are things to be done to get back uh before that is like all of you know uh sudanese a living example when you want to see that nonviolent movement works we had city our country had 63 years old in this 63 52 years were ruled by the military dictators we have a violent movement start since 1955 which is is more than 40 years of the rebel movements that are fighting government but we have this is the third time that the nonviolent movement was able to to to topple the dictator government and this time amazingly what happens by young people aged 10 to 25 but not that this time was happened by women and that is why it's a special moment for us to stand and acknowledge that this really practically worked but it also gives more hope and it's also participatory there are something else that i would like to say is that with my personal to come back to the question of my personal assistance that we receive i wouldn't have been here if there is no international assistance there was a time that i have to leave my country i was in Ethiopia i had to leave Ethiopia again and i was supported by an organization called eastern horn african human rights defenders project with defending the human rights defender and they were able to relocate me to Uganda where i have been safe and where i was managed to come back come here and be with you all here today so in personal experience i have spent in the last six to seven years working on youth movement using my early experience when it was in university and also working with an organization that trying to promote democracy and i think one thing that one support that we received we received a lot of fund where we provide a youth scum and when i see these five frameworks of assistance i see that we went through all of this assistance and i think it was working because one last things that i remember was part of was a youth scum where we young people from different part of Sudan came to plan actual nonviolent resistant action and go back in this was in new kenya because it was a safe place for them to even build trust because the government security divides them and actually that was in april in november 27 that was the first time in history of Sudan that successful strike all over the country from east west north and center was secured in one day and this was an effective work because of that kind of meticulous planning from different group and they were able to take a collective action and that was really pivot away for these groups to organize themselves and a strike new movement that culminated into a regime change so i am really i see this practically this worked in sudan but also and it will work on other places but talking on sudan context we would also see that something that have delayed the the the nonviolent movement was also from 2005 2006 2009 people were more dependent on international intervention people are thinking oh un security council will use article seven come back and catch all the criminals and we will have a country free of them and i think that somehow delays the process also um sometimes something that we also felt we had a movement uh in 2009 2010 and i think in that movement where uh some of the young people have been received uh selectively to get out of the country go somewhere get trainings and get some incentives have created some sort of disagreements among the youth groups that's why contextual understanding is truly really important for these frameworks to to to work so that's all i could say thank you thank you very much kuzkandi and i think he mentioned a number of support options the human rights defenders fund the small grants the youth training um you know and the whole idea of waiting for international event intervention um you know not being the case and so drawing on other resources so thank you kuzkandi um alahandra the protests that began in nicaragua last april um were met with very harsh repression from both government and paramilitary forces and the opposition movement is currently um demanding free and fair elections and so i wanted to ask from your perspective as a nicaraguan activist what what are the most important things that external actors have done and could do to support a nonviolent peaceful transition in nicaragua yes thank you very much for having me in these places i want to share with all of you and um first uh i want to explain how everything started in nicaragua last april april of last year basically uh we were two different reasons why the the protesters took the streets especially like the university study students and the older the older adults the main reason the first reason was the fire in indium maize it's a natural reserve and we were concerned about that fire and the second one was the government unilaterally reformed the social security law and which decreased that basically decreased the benefits for seniors and increased the contributions requirements and so the citizens the citizens and their right to a legitimate right to protest a peaceful protest they took the streets and the government respond with violating the basic human rights in in nicaragua and that respond resulting in spontaneous massive peaceful demonstrations in rural areas rural areas and and in the cities and around the country and to be clear uh i want to just mention that before the april and 18 of 2018 we were we don't have any formal organization and and of like a no violent resistant movement or whatever it was uh right it was like a respond or when a show to support and assist and so and with a solidarity with victims of the repression and and and when a strong commitment and conviction that the the violent violence will never be justified in nicaragua that's i think that's the most important thing now we have 300 people killed 100 people in in jail as a political prisoners thousands people injured and uh like a political and socioeconomic crisis that's that we are living right now i think the international community react pretty quickly condemning the repression like the human rights violations in like in a miracle time i can say that for example in just 90 days we have the oas condemning the the repression and they create in in real time during the repression they create a special a special group a working group at the oas to follow out what's going on in nicaragua and they travel to nicaragua in those days and the international community react like each government react condemning the the human rights violations and the other the other thing is uh as a citizen with some privilege to be honest we mobilize each other to support victims of the repression no matter what like what if they were uh on the street of what they were doing it was just a human itarian support when the government starts to deny the attention in public hospitals so that was something that really moved us like to support all these people and to be honest we cannot wait until the international community react to support peaceful protesters and people with privilege we have to support them we have even when we are not involved in their demands if someone is dying if someone is denying the someone is denying the attention to peaceful protesters or everyone we have to support them and one incredible thing that happened was the when the government starts to crime and criminalize the the protesters and the repression increased uh many people fled the country and they start to walk to costa rica and one important like uh justice of human itarian uh support the costa rica they opened the go the the borders and they um they support or they increased like the the whole like immigration migration process of they improve their own migration process to uh asylum seekers asylum seekers that's really important thing and one thing like it really happened was like just in five months we have this the at the UN the Social Security Council and uh now it's in in the OAS hands that we have to try to solve all this this crisis unfortunately many countries like a most like the majority of the countries are like really concerned about what's going on in Nicaragua and and what how everything are being like happening right now and the other thing is the one important thing that happened is before the crisis we don't have enough support from the international community or we don't have support in in in civic engagement or participation in or democracy values or all this stuff but the the small organizations who has been working underground uh when the crisis start they they just like it starts to support the NGOs or the activists or leaders that they met before the crisis and I think it's really important to like in those kind of situation and have like keep the connections with people underground and whenever something happened you you you can connect with them immediately or you can be a and they can they they will tell you or what what's really need in that moment you don't we don't need to invite what we what the countries needs as a movement we we know what what can we do and for example signs April 18 of 2018 we have many strikes, marches, vigils and many things that were happening not just in Nicaragua around the world and condemning this the repression but we need a lot of tools and new tools in the international and the international community to support people in real time I think save lives is the most important thing in no matter what if they were in one side or another side we need to save lives. Thank you very much Alejandra those are really important messages and you also got interestingly how outside actors can help prevent and mitigate repression through condemning violence and other means so thank you very much and finally Ariela so from your perspective as both an international legal expert and a philanthropist how does the right to assist resonate with you based on what you've heard from the panelists and from the report that you read okay I got the first the first hurdle is I got the microphone on thank you I just want to thank again Maria for your underlying research and for moderating today hardy peter for the report and the interesting merging of sort of this social science political science approach with what I feel is sort of the field that I work in the mass atrocity mass atrocity prevention field and so my reflections kind of round out things with that lens as to how this progresses the sort of mass atrocity frame does it cause harm does it hinder progress there and I in that vein I was very interested and thank my my colleagues here on the panel it's interesting Maria that you called me a practitioner because I would say that's the last thing in comparison that I am really these are the practical examples that in my recent two years ago switched to philanthropy the intention is to support these so my first just general reflection here was that it's interesting that this report has used the responsibility to protect frame something really akin to the norm setting in the mass atrocity space but the question that arises for me is is this really a right or a responsibility and almost in the report right off the bat I would say peter and hardy did a great job of restating the case that this is absolutely a right there's absolutely no prohibition that I can think of on it and and similarly we do have a responsibility to support these nonviolent means of achieving these democratic gains and that we shouldn't really necessarily think about the responsibility to protect frame because it almost brings us back to that let's seek sovereignty let's get this back into the inactivity among states and let's get back into that you know sovereignty and non-intervention principle so I would say that this is a strong principle and that I see it as a responsibility and it is absolutely right so that being said I think the key question that I'm reflecting on is as an external actor how can an external actor like the private foundations space that I occupy be helpful as opposed to a hindrance and I first think that I want to commend the authors for also recognizing there's so much more research to be done about this we're all flying by the seat of our pants we in many ways have no idea what we're doing particularly in the private philanthropy space and I am again speaking from my personal philanthropic funder lens as opposed to my foundation in particular so in terms of that I think there's two sides of this do we help or hinder in this sort of external support we do we help or harm the movements itself and do we as external actors help or harm in reducing mass atrocities and those are not necessarily the same thing on the movement space I would say that a foundation like my own and many others understand that locally grown movements and locally led engagements are important and lead to durable peace that being said we don't necessarily understand when why or how and I think that's really important and we certainly do not know how to fund those authentically in a way that does not change the purpose or shield from safeguard against repression and in general it's no mystery that foundations have their own strategy goals and outcomes and here hardy you've you've made the very good point that it is important for these movements to authentically rise up to achieve their aims that's by nature at odds with the timetable and the outcomes and the process of which a foundation goes through so those are sort of limiting factors so that means that that the the needs that are identified have to be authentic from the ground and they have to be met immediately in as Alejandro put at the moment in response and that has to meet together and I think that rarely takes place and so I think yeah another area that that the report could continue to develop is these experiences of how there are small funds emergency opportunities small targeted pots of money that can actually make a difference I'm happy to say that my particular foundation has a rapid response emergency fund that puts small funds into the hands of people we strive to get to the point in time where we can do something as small as gas money because the other thing is the model the foundation model is very specific of a certain amount of money to a certain legal framework of charitable status of certain reporting requirements and that is at odds with the mutual purpose so before you invite these external actors and take their resources understand that your different desires and process are early at odds and you need to line that up the second thing excuse me here is that do external actors help in the mass atrocity space does their entry assist with and support those endeavors which are intended to put an end to the the ongoing or the threat of mass atrocities here we know a lot more about the extreme form of mass atrocities of genocides and interestingly enough in most cases the outside support does not help and unfortunately in most cases the genocide is either completed the act is done to completion or internal force is used and where it is unclear if if anything that it is prolonged or not by external actors so then when it comes to the general mass atrocities there's so much we don't know it's so context specific and in general I think here again it invites that question for more research if we're saying that we want to support movements and in that process we want to stop or mitigate atrocities we need to understand the invitation of those external actors comes with risk and not necessarily a positive return the other thing I wanted to say is uh excuse me referencing off of my other you know colleagues here I think and the report I think Hardy and Maria's underlying research and Peter make a really strong case for how nonviolent means are effective can prolong can protect engage in a sec create a secure space mitigate violence and I think that it's really important to also recognize that women in leadership roles and nonviolent movements are doubly as effective I don't know what that number of value would be but in the mass atrocity space I've seen a lot of great research about elevating women's leadership in all forms of the spectrum of peace building whether it be in the response or the prevention side and by extrapolation and we see some research outside on the table so I wonder if there can be another dimension to this about how effective nonviolent movements are when women are in leadership and it's indigenous locally thank you so much Ariella that was super helpful and um you know thank you for the words of caution as well and kind of the starting point of do no harm and recognizing kind of the the risks associated with outside support which are incredibly important for those on the outside to consider when it comes to external support so we've got about 15 minutes that remain so I think we should go directly to um to discussion with the audience and maybe what I'll do is take two or three at a time and we'll see how many rounds we can get through so all the way in the back please and let's uh you'll probably need a mic so there we go thank you thank you um and I I particularly appreciated this oh maybe just uh uh just say your name and affiliation and brief question thank you yeah my name is Simon Billiness and I'm with the international campaign for the Rohingya and uh also a campaign director of no business with genocide and we really operate in the space I mean let's pull back a little bit I mean this unified field theory of assisting nonviolent movements I mean this was fascinating it's I think it's groundbreaking work and what interests me particularly is you know where we fit into this which is you know increasing the cost of oppression because you know we've been focusing on uh you know sanctioning bad actors through citizen sanctions uh in the case of Burma and Rohingya and um we've been but we put pressure on Chevron to adopt a policy of not doing business with governments engaged in genocide or crimes against humanity and in response to that they have publicly said that they are raising human rights issues with the government of Myanmar and we've been doing this also with other oil companies like Total even the Chinese national overseas oil corporation which is also publicly traded so um I'm particularly interested in um because this is how this is how um you know nonviolent movements here in the U.S. just like during the campaign against apartheid kind of linked hands with nonviolent campaigns in South Africa and sort of turned around U.S. policy from support for the apartheid regime and and corporate investment in South Africa to divestment and U.S. sanctions so you know I'd be very interested in you know talking further and further discussion on how you know through tools like this by focusing on um the fact that these these governments committing the suppression want and need foreign investment and if we put pressure on companies to not invest or not trade if that government crosses certain lines certain red lines um you know we put another extra tool that's part of this unified field theory of tools in terms of external support. Thank you very much up here please. My name is Effie Tamban with OSS Network um from Cameroon I'm going to be speaking from that back drop because of an ongoing ongoing horrific atrocities um in Cameroon. I very much appreciate the presentation it's very rich a lot of things that I've learned today from these and I appreciate the fact that we're looking at overcoming the present challenges especially with the responsibility to protect because we've come face to face it looks like a very concrete wall trying to find solutions with what's going on. The question I have is what practical ways do we have in terms of not just the you talked about naming and shaming but we have actors in the western world that put economic priorities above human rights um the Ohio lobbies big muscles uh to block the media from covering what's going on political leaders will be cozy with dictators how do you go about those challenges that are real challenges. Great question so why don't we go to the back here. Thanks so much uh my name is Noah Rosen I'm a PhD student at American University. My question is about how does this r2a framework that you've created travel to civil war context given the uh statistic that Hardy shared with us that two-thirds of atrocities happen in civil wars and I'm especially thinking of the kind of nonviolent strategies that people like Ali Kaplan and Arjona and others have talked about in terms of active neutrality other nonviolent strategies for violence prevention uh what is the effectiveness of nonviolent strategies in civil war context uh do the same kind of external support mechanisms that you discussed apply to those kind of more localized movements against non-state actors often and what are some of the links that you see between these kind of local actions for violence prevention with nonviolent movements for more general social change thank you those are great questions and since we're short for time why don't we take one more question um from right up here hi Ursula with friends committee on national legislation and I just had a quick question about the international support we're talking so far about benevolent international support but for example in Sudan right after the coup we saw Saudi and other golf partners flood money in to protect uh the military leadership that had taken over rather than push for democratic transition so what's the international community's role in sort of countering those not so benevolent international actors okay those were media questions so we have the foreign investment corporations question um how to address things like lobbyist pressure and like preventing media and journalists from entering these conflict areas um how well does this framework travel to civil wars and nefarious outside support and how that can be countered so go i got four pages of notes just maybe take um take one that's pressing we'll make sure we get um everyone has a voice sure um first of all i i'll respond to you simon um thank you for sharing that example and your valuable work um you know this is a great example of things we missed and hard to just be sure oh sure thank you for your comment and for your valuable work it's a great example of things we missed and could have put in the report and and you know should be included next time as an example of international support i would point out that one split that we often see in governments that are doing abuse is a split between actors who primarily think of their interests at the bottom line is economic interests versus political interests and what the civil resistance movement can do whether domestic or external civil resistance or both is split those interests where one says ultimately my highest value is getting back to business as usual and profitability and the other says ultimately our highest value is maintaining control no matter what and when the economic and political start to split it can lead to cascading effects so i would see i see what you're doing is very valuable and in that in that frame which i think should be built out um i'll stop there and reserve my right maybe see something later any other responses i had one response um thank you Ursula for for your point and i think it's i have no great answer except that this is opening the pandora's box and so if you were to maintain this as a doctrine then it is not restrictive to benevolent support and so and it would similarly have no restriction if we had such restriction then we would find ourselves in a position to not have that right to assist so i think it's a really important point for peter and hardy to consider as they continue to ally this to a doctrine um with the benevolent support already why don't you respond to that respond to that as well so it's funny you know i always bring more slides in a presentation than i have time to make and so two of my slides relate directly to what you're talking about because we know after the sudanese um interim i forget the exact acronym for it met with ua in saudi they came launched a lot of repression and also when the when the airport was shut down due to strikes egypt said you know it will give you workers to reactivate your critical infrastructure so what is this this is authoritarians that have really for the last 15 years or more become much more deliberate and coordinated in challenging and becoming more effective at suppressing nonviolent movements it's very deliberate it's been building for a long time um it i would say it correlates quite well with the decline in democracy overall in the world which is documented over 13 years so in other words when a movement rises up now in a place like sudan it is facing the local government and numerous other governments that want to work directly to mitigate the economic political or social impacts that movement has oh did a strike shut down your infrastructure will help you are they imposing costs in your economy will help so we've seen this and i guess you know this is a really critical point to elevate on the other side who has movements backs is their coordination at what level this is what has been lacking so part of how we can see right to assist i we made the case here that it could that it's it has a significant role to play in preventing atrocities and violent conflict it can also be construed to have a role to play in creating more global stability around you know stemming the decline of democracy and stemming the expansion of authoritarianism because external actors that support human rights and democracy have not been as organized i would say in the last 15 years as those that are seeking to stamp it out and particularly target movements so i see what you're saying consistent with that i also would say yes you open up right to assist and you say external support is legitimate and then various governments say well how about this support how about that support and want to use it for their own purposes we know that will happen criteria are very important um that's something we hit on a lot in this report about what are the criteria for evaluating a movement's impact and this is all stuff that has to be developed and then mechanisms need to be enforced when countries abuse it thanks hardy i'm brought back to fletcher school like international law classes and then it's like who decides in these cases but anyhow 100 yes i would like to answer the question about the love reasons in in in the media in our case unfortunately we are like a small country and after months nobody cares about what's going on in kanawa and we are just six million people making our ones and sometimes it's not just someone who is trying to quit the the topic on in media it's just we as a citizens are we are forgetting what's going on in some countries especially when the governments or big enterprises don't doesn't have any like economic interest in in those kind of countries for for that reason as citizens for for us it's really important keep that in the agenda in different countries and in in our country as well because sometimes like the people just want to like continue their lives because it was it's really hard if you think like the the whole atrocities the the way commitment is it's really hard to to keep it and the the the most important thing to keep it in the agenda in the international community for me is the transition for the transitional justice in mass in like in in wars or human rights violations we can use that tool and in our case we should explore what how can we use the transition justice because it's not just like we cannot get in those kind of like a situation we cannot just work on electoral system or democratic system or rule of law we have to work on justice we we are we are like having all this pain in the society we have a traumatized society and and no matter what what side you were you were during the during the repression or and the other thing is the type of repression change and sometimes it doesn't mean that we are not like seeing people on the street dying on the street it doesn't mean that the repression is is not like continue and we have to find or recognize the way that the how the repression continues and one thing is not just for me it's not just the right to to to assist or to protect is that we have as a country is we have the obligation to support peaceful transitions is is like for me it's something that is nobody it's not something that it's happening in that country it's something that's happening around the war and impact in the whole like in the whole region in this case in Central America and one thing for me really important is use the technology that we have now to key in the expertise the international expertise and to we need to recover the confidence in in governments in rule of law and like easy things that we need to like recover that confidence right thanks Alejandro so Cuscandi you have the final word we've got about a minute left okay thank you for a very good questions i i will just only react with ourselves question only spoilers which we call so there is not only locally spoilers there's always international spoilers and they come in different ways either autocratic relations or economic relations and i think that is what's something that the framework could have some kind of a way to deal with that with regard to to dealing with those spoilers and which happens in in Sudan case Saudi Arabia UAE and Egypt but also something else that i would also want to say about the the nonviolent movement in war context i think after the spark of nonviolent movement all over the Sudan and even before that in Darfur there was always being a nonviolent movement in the IDP camps so there's a larger IDP camp which are almost a liberated area there's nobody from the government could ever enter because of the resistance of the people and i think there is always whatever the situation there is the way that nonviolent movement was work also for an instance when the nonviolent movement started for instance we have a lot of large China investments in Sudan so the youth went to Chinese embassy for three days they speak Chinese these are like students who are professional Chinese language speakers they wrote banners they spend there for two days shouting and yelling at them and i think that has somehow an effect um just to to finally wrap up also i would like say there is also other type of support for instance in Sudan case there is a very well organized professional Sudanese diaspora that played a very crucial role in the chain that happens and i don't know within this framework where this fallout but it is a very important and crucial something else also to to to think about there is a kind of a when the movement started in Sudan there is other protests in different countries for instance in Ethiopia several supporting people in Sudan in Nairobi Kenya those has a very strong meaning also to the movement inside where we'll see and this also happens when the when the when the Kenyan protest the the second election you will find the Ugandan opposition supporting they're giving a protest supporting Baba in which is in Kenya and i think there is always this this kind of a particular country which has a popular connection social connections i think those kind of support also have a lot of a lot of meaning in encouraging people to continue but also it can put a lot of pressure diplomatic pressure from their government to act in favor and that's why there is a lot of other frameworks that are very useful for instance something that helps Sudan was the deregognition of the African Union to the Transitional Military Council is strong statement and condemnation from the US government European Union and UN Security Council later this was like the the the good things that i could ever remember from the UN Security Council and African Union so so i think the the those are like kind of things that happen but one general thing just for final to say is that the framework always i feel like it is start when already there is a movement and then the support comes in and i think we can think about how all the development fund and peace building programs have really anchored it from the beginning on building self-sustaining society this could angering with this could help in having this organic locally built movements and that's like for instance thinking about exist strategy if i have five million dollar project in a country or in a community for three years i should from the beginning start when i am getting out what i'm gonna leave one of the things i could have organized community and that's where you will spend some of the funding for doing that and i think that would help to have i think and and there is the UN Resolutional Peace Building architecture which provide a lot of good things on what really international framework could support on this process so that's all i can say but i am optimistic and thank you thank you fiscondi so just i wanted to formally thank again hardy merriman for co-authoring an awesome report in peter ackerman and thank you to our panelists for really you know supporting an enlightening conversation this afternoon i sense this is the beginning of a much longer conversation that certainly will continue to support at the institute so thank you all for coming out and i hope you all can escape the rain getting back home thank you