 Good morning. Welcome to our first panel of the day. My name is David Yang. I'm the Vice President for Applied Conflict Transformation here at the United States Institute of Peace. As part of my job, I have the privilege of overseeing our work on preventing violent extremism led by Leanne, and I'm so grateful to Leanne and her whole Resolve team for putting on today, but a whole week of Resolve activities. And I'd like to thank all of our partners, both governmental and non-governmental, in the audience for working closely with Leanne's team and the rest of us at USIP on these very important issues. I'd like to remind everybody that we do like questions. I was getting sage advice from our real think tanker, Katie Zimmerman from AEI, and she knows from decades of experience that people like their questions attributed to them, so I pledge to follow that incentive system and read your name along with your question. So please, we are eager to hear your questions. Before I introduce the panel, first, my last thing, I wanted to send regards and greetings from our President, Nancy Lindborg. Nancy had looked forward to being here today, but she took a trip instead to Columbia. She is there demonstrating USIP support for the continuing peace process in Columbia, but she sends her warm greetings and again thanks for the partnerships with so many of your organizations. This panel is all about resetting priorities and taking stock if priorities are being reset. The title of the panel is Non-State Governance and Going Local. I should explain a little bit. When I was asked to moderate it and given this title and panel, I was both excited and felt like an undergraduate who had just been handed a blue book exam that had to figure out and unpack the meaning. So this is unscripted by Lance team, but I want to try my hand on the four-part blue book answer to the question. So what is non-state governance and going local mean to me in the context of preventing violent extremism? It could mean one or all of four things. The non-state governance part could mean actually the equivalence of a no-state or no-state-led governance, meaning there's an absence or even worse, a predatory state at the local level. So that's my first thesis sentence. My second would be in that gap of state-led local governance is filled informal state structures, could be tribal governance, could be other forms of traditional governance and justice to fill that gap. My third response would be apropos today's topic, that violent extremist organizations instead fill that gap and in many cases fill that gap very successfully. And finally, and my summary conclusion for the professor would be, it could be all those groups contesting the sphere of local governance. That is an absent, fumbling, inefficient or predatory state, traditional judicial or governance mechanisms and finally violent extremist organizations would be happy to govern those territories, those localities, those communities. Now the going local part is because we're trying to unpack a lot of the questions this morning by testing them at the local level, particularly the shift from so-called counter-terrorism strategies to more granular PVE strategies. And we're trying to see at the local level in the eyes of experts who have studied real communities in the developing world, whether in the developing and developed world whether that shift is actually occurring. So let me introduce our panel. To my immediate left is Dr. Linda Bushai. She's currently a professorial lecturer at GW's Elliott School of International Affairs. Previously and most recently she was Director of Research Evaluation and Learning at the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative. And before that she was a long-time colleague here at USIP where she focused on preventing electoral violence, countering violent extremism and security sector reform. To her left is Dr. Huda Abadi. Huda is the founder and Executive Director of Transformative Peace, which is a consulting firm that works on inclusive peace processes as well as human rights-based approaches to violent extremism. For many decades now Huda has designed and implemented peace-building programs mostly throughout the Middle East and North Africa. And then finally to Huda's left is Catherine Erkady Zimmerman, who's a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is AEI's Senior Analyst on Terrorist Groups and she also is a Research Manager for AEI's Critical Threats Project. Thanks to all of you for joining us today. So we're going to have a conversation to start off with, but then I really invite your questions. I don't, unlike Oprah, have a earpiece and a producer feeding me questions. So I'm relying on all of you to bring our conversation home. So I was very much influenced by the speakers this morning. The Fireless Fireside Chatters, the Ted Talkers, and others including Assistant Secretary Natali in her keynote. And I think one of the through lines, the subtext, or really the headlines, was this least hoped for transition in our policy between sole focus on counter-terrorism to a more nuanced, comprehensive, complex strategy on preventing violent extremism. So we're going to test how far we are as a community in transiting those polls. And so my first question is to Huda. Huda, you've been a big proponent of what we're calling, Lance's team's calling, the going local approach. And particularly you've studied how ISIS has a deep understanding of local grievances. And as a communications expert and having a PhD in communications, you've argued that they're very adept in their propaganda at exploiting these local grievances. And in fact, you argue that in general we're focused too much still on addressing extremist ideology. And by doing so, we miss a point about why actually people join violent extremist groups. You've published a paper this summer on Morocco and challenging the elevation of Morocco as a best practice. So please tell us a little bit about your version of going local and what you found in Morocco and beyond. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Hello, everyone. So absolutely, Daesh has shown that they're very hyper-local in even the way that they recruit. And in our analysis while I was at the Carter Center, we found out that we analyzed more than 800 videos of Daesh. And we found that out of the 800 videos, the religious narrative was less than 10%. So it's very important for us to keep this in mind. And when the sole focus is on ideology, then we are not looking at the political and social grievances. We are focusing specifically on we're removing the responsibility away from the governments and putting it specifically only on ideology. And so we have more focus on counter narratives. And we've seen governments have spent millions of dollars on counter narratives. But what is really needed are counter offers or what are we providing to the local communities. Some of the things that came out from the study, not only in terms of research, but also working with community and faith-based leaders, is that counter narratives are important, but they're not the main thing. And a lot of times, governments have spent so much money. And I always say that the messenger at times is even more important than the message. So in places where the government does not have as much legitimacy and are not as well respected, when they are the ones who are providing these counter narratives, it's really just putting the money on the drain. Whereas it's really providing social services, educational services, et cetera. But also the work with community leaders have shown that when you invest and empower community leaders and faith-based community actors, they understand the context in a very nuanced and hyper-local level that us in institutions or global forums don't understand as much. So for example, even a strategy that would prevent violent extremism saying northern part of Morocco might be completely different from the southern part of Morocco because the context is very different. And there's not one way of self-radicalization. And so as Dr. Horgan this morning was saying, it's complex. And so we need to find various ways and strategies in preventing violent extremism. And in doing this work, we found that trust is the main currency. And so when actors working in this field don't have trust, it's not really sustainable or as much effective. Youth play a very important role. And a lot of time we use the buzzword that we need to engage women and we need to engage youth. But really how are we engaging with them and what types of investments and also what types of risks are they taking? And when we specifically discuss youth, we have to see them not only leaders of tomorrow but also of today because they think outside of the box the conditions that they live in affect them deeply. And there is a sense of hopelessness that the Aussie dash is really able to use. So we really need to work on these issues. Thank you, Huda. Katie, let me turn to you. So, Katie kindly shared a draft last night with me of AEI paper she's coming out with called which will be titled Beyond Counter-terrorism. And it speaks to the need for a grand strategy as Bill and others spoke of. And so Katie, in your draft that you shared with me, you argue that violent extremist organizations feel a huge gap in governance at the local level. And that, like Huda is arguing, we need to understand the appeal in their filling that gap so that we can render these groups less appealing. So could you give us a kind of summary of your version of going local? And not yet your grand strategy. We can get to that later in the hour, but really in terms of where we're missing the mark on analysis. Certainly. And I just want to say that I'm thrilled to be here and thank Leanne for all of her efforts pulling us together and the Resolve Network as well. I think the challenge that I've seen to which Huda's research shows and certainly others have looked at is that we have missed the connection between the transnational organizations, such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and the fundamentally local conditions in which they're operating. And this goes a little bit to the default cookie cutter approaches that are simple in US policy, but also because it becomes very challenging for us to understand the local dynamics without having somebody on the ground pushing them forward. And what we want is to look at the extremist organization itself and interdict its radicalization process. So the idea of countering the violent extremism, stopping the radicalization as it begins, preventing the imam who is pulling in recruits from doing so by changing the imam or identifying the various grievances that the groups are citing and preventing them. But when you actually look at how extremist organizations are gaining strength in communities, it is not simply because they have a radical message, but because the communities have been weakened. And this is where the conversations that have been hosted here at USIP about fragility and some of the links to extremes and come forward. So the local issues come out when Al-Qaeda in Yemen, for example, identifies that the local communities don't have access to diesel fuel or water because of the humanitarian crisis. And that's something that it can offer, not as easily now, but it used to be able to offer to the communities. And it would do so in exchange for the ability to operate in that village. We've seen it again and again in actually across the board, I would say, in Africa, Yemen, Syria, in Iraq as well, and other places where you see some of these organizations where they offer dispute resolution mechanisms because the local mechanisms have broken down or the one that's offered by the state is deemed to be corrupt or will not actually give a fair judgment to the local person. And though many communities understand that they're putting their disputes up for resolution by a very extremist interpretation, it is just that the judge is very, very unbiased to the point where there's anecdotes from Mali where a landholder had been ruled against in the Malian court system. And he brought it to the local group on Sarideen and put it in front of the Imam there. And the Imam tried the case and found against the landowner again, not because he was supporting what the state had found, but because the evidence was against him. And so that's an example where the man thought that because it was an extremist organization, it would automatically rule counter to what the state had ruled and they took the evidence and decided that no, it was actually correct. And so when we're looking at how to work in these spaces, it's going to be really bespoke, tailored interventions at that local level, which challenges the US government certainly, but also the understandings and the practitioners can speak much more in depth than I can about the challenges about working in these communities and working outside of just a radicalization paradigm and within this idea of building the resiliency within the community to reject these extremist organizations again. Thank you very much. I'm gonna turn to Linda now for opening thoughts. Linda's been around, as all of you know, Washington for a long time, even though she's worked mostly in civil society now at GW, before that USIP and ABA Rowley, she's worked with policy makers, donor agencies, she understands them very well. I was almost gonna say us because I inhabited government positions for many years myself. And she's often reflected that in terms of preventing violent extremism or countering violent extremism, that government officials perhaps in their rush to do good, still too much default to a position where government is seen as a faithful, effective partner in PVE policy. What I mean when I was talking earlier about local governance providing public goods at the local level, first and foremost, justice security, the conditions for having a livelihood, that in Linda's views, you know, we're starting with the wrong assumptions that in our CVE work, our PVE work, we have to many times assume and look squarely in the eye of predatory states both at the national and local level. And obviously these predatory states create fertile grounds for violent extremism. So I'm gonna start with a provocation to Linda. And as we heard Assistant Secretary Natali say, and as I've read in the excellent US government stabilization assistance reviewer, USIP's own task force report on preventing extremism and fragile states. It seems like everybody's gone local already and at least rhetorically on paper in these reports. So do you think we as a community have truly gone local or by protesting perhaps too much, we aren't there yet? And what, if we aren't there yet, what do you think causes our continuing myopia? So just give us a waterfront on what you've seen and how we're stuck, if at all, please. Thanks, David. I'll be provocative in turn then. I actually think that we know an awful lot about going local and we know an awful lot about what works and what we should be doing, but there are just as there are structural conditions that might make local communities more likely to be recruited to violent groups, there are also structural conditions about the way the US government and our other partners in this space function that make it hard for us to do what we know is a better approach. I would point to, for example, the stabilization assistance review framework, which is incredibly positive as an effort by the US government multi-agency community to look at itself and examine what it's doing and identify what it should do better, coordinate, focus on governance, look at local partners, do rule of law, and step back from the kinetic approach. And that's exactly right and we know that, but what are we actually doing? We're funding in very short streams, 12 to 18 months, we're rotating personnel in and out constantly and that alone, I mean the single biggest thing we might do to change the impact on the ground is probably to stop rotating personnel and to really start to prioritize personal relationships and people who have been in a country or worked with an organization for more than one or two years and say, we need you and your relationships on a project. We want you involved because we know that you know the people and that you're trusted by the people. Look for evidence of trust, look for evidence of relationships built and developed and that is a shift of emphasis as well rather than focusing so much on the groups and what the extremist groups and what they're doing. We need to focus more on the health of the communities and that's basically what the SAR helps us start to prioritize, but I think we need to actually get from what that big vision is to what the little local structural problems to that kind of engagement are from the US government and our friends in the space and then as practitioners, I'm fully aware of how hard it is to be the change mechanism for the donor. The practitioners are always having to measure, measure, measure, ask everybody whether you send out surveys, do baseline assessments and I think another part in addition to stopping the rotation of personnel is paying close attention to the fact that there's a Heisenberg principle in effect when it comes to international intervention. It's not a unilateral, I'm the mover and my arrow goes out and has an impact in the space that I want it to. I myself by doing an intervention, by getting involved, by attempting to prevent or counter violent extremism have an effect that changes the situation that I started seeing. My own presence there, not just the actual effect that I'm intending to create but my very existence and the fact that it's me who I am representing the US government and we need to pay more attention to that effect, the fact that our actions aren't single arrow dimensional, that they have a rotational kind of iterative approach and there's something kind of, there's a counter intuitive incentive that's put in place by the measurement impulse by that effort to always do, especially for those who are practitioners because there's definitely a role for evidence gathering and for academic research and for knowing what works, that's quite critical but when you're actually an implementer on the ground, the intense focus on measurement and what works actually blocks the ability to be iterative because in order to produce good metrics for your donor, you are actually stopped from changing yourself midway. Really smart donors who have really good close relationships with their implementers understand that and they allow more flexibility and they understand that measurement actually changes the facts on the ground but it's quite important that we really look at our mechanisms, not just what we know but how we are constrained in what we deliver and the programs that we are designing because that does have an effect on whether or not we can make a change. Thank you. Huda, I'm gonna ask you a follow up question. So we were talking yesterday that Morocco in your view really wasn't the international best practice that a lot of policymakers sought as and so I'm curious as you engage policymakers and fora like this one, whether when you present your evidence about your analysis of ISIS propaganda and you say, look, it's really 90% not focused on religious ideology. What do people say in return? How effective have you been as a researcher that's trying to change policy but could you start with how you see Morocco as a success story differently than perhaps most policymakers would? Okay, thanks for the question. In terms of, I had the privilege to work with community and faith-based leaders from Morocco, Tunisia, France, Belgium and the United States in developing, in building their capacity and empowering them so that they can develop and initiate local projects. So on the one hand, I was able to conduct interviews with community leaders, families whose sons and daughters have joined Daesh within northern parts of Morocco or communities that had the youth go and then compare it to the work on the ground. One of the issues is when we focus so much on ideology, we turn a blind eye to the everyday struggles that communities face and so in terms of Morocco, Morocco spent a lot of its, it's like the diplomatic card of Morocco is the religious discourse, it's faith, but unfortunately the political space for CSOs is very tight. There's not a lot of space so they can operate on PVE issues and so when there's a monopoly of religious discourse and when some of these young people, for example, I asked youth who know of their, who have had friends join Daesh, like where do you hear your, where do you go to to hear the Friday sermon or to learn about religion? It's not official institutions, it's not the official religious institutions. In a lot of times it's through the internet, it's like sheikh Google. So when a lot of the resources are specifically, are specific to just official institutions without empowering local community leaders who have the connection and the sense of identification with communities that are struggling, but also who talk the language of the youth, then it's kind of, it's ineffective. So that's one major thing. And a lot of times the CSOs had to reframe their interventions because of the security approach. And we spoke very briefly in the morning on the security approach with community approach and the gap between these two. And when countries focus specifically on an aggressive security approach without giving the space and the voice for CSOs, then we are not looking at a long-term vision to preventing violent extremism. And actually we might further hurt and harm marginalized communities. And so we've had instances where community leaders had to completely shift their interventions and reframe it. No, we're not talking about religious discourse, we're not talking about PVE, we're just talking about civic engagement. So that they are able to operate. And so it removes that also national debate of being able to discuss these issues. And in a lot of my work, not only in Morocco, but in other North African countries, when you asked religious and CSOs leaders, are you familiar with Daesh's propaganda? Do you know how they recruit? 95% of them told me we've never watched a Daesh propaganda. And the reason is there were the security approaches who will be knocking on their doors. And they're like, well, you're radicalized, you need to come with me for questioning. And so what happens, it's a vicious circle because they fall on this, you know, they basically depend on the media for their interventions and they fall prey to thinking that it is just ideology. And so their interventions are specifically focusing only on ideology and missing the social political fabric of it as well. Thank you. So I'm gonna ask Katie first. We're gonna pivot a little bit to prescription as opposed to diagnosis. And I'm gonna ask all three of you. So Linda and Huda, please be thinking of this. So Katie, you and Bill Braniff are like peas in a pot. You're both calling for grand strategies. You both make references to the long twilight struggle of the Cold War, perhaps the analogy of containment policy, et cetera, et cetera. So do you see, the big question is, do you see going local as a key part of a PVE grand strategy? And the second part is a little bit about sequencing. It's a big deal to provide good local governance at the local level for states threatened by violent extremism. If that in itself is a long twilight struggle. So where do you begin in a more comprehensive way to create a localized grand strategy but without falling into despair because it's such a hard, long process to do? Please. That's an easy question. I think the answer to the first one is yes, but I can get a little bit more into what that looks like. So fundamentally we've missed the local context when dealing with this challenge and we want to prescribe an ideological approach which is agnostic toward the local dynamics because the ideology, it gets talked about differently in local narratives, but it is a global ideology. And then we've also missed the fact that a lot of times it's local conflicts that have nothing to do with what the extremists are pushing that enable the extremists to come into various communities. And again, you can look at the spread of extremism in Mali that moved from north to south where the extremists intentionally stoked communal strife in order to get in. So it's actually a strategy that you can look at what the Islamic State has done inside of Iraq and Syria to expand and reconstitute. And the divorce in US policy between that transnational threat and the threat that we have here at home which has very little to do with those local conflicts. And the local conflicts themselves which are and the conditions that have driven communities to basically make a deal with the devil. Very few communities want someone coming in from the outside that starts to change how you live your life, how governments is run, how women are dressing and whether or not you can watch soccer on the television which is something that comes through. But they are making that exchange because they find the groups offer them something that they need. And when we're looking at how these groups have expanded most successfully, it's not because of the ideology, right? The Islamic State weaponized the internet in a way that I don't think many actually imagined. Al-Qaeda tried and failed pretty miserably in 2010 and 2011 to do it on the internet through Al-Liki. But what we've seen is, right, it's defense of the community that they can come in so when there's local strife and this is where the questions of the state come into play, so a piece of research that came from the Critical Threats Project this summer looked at a small group in Burkina Faso which, right, middle of Africa doesn't seem like we should care about and they found that the organization was able to exploit the security force response to gain recruits. So it intentionally set off attacks in order to draw security forces in because it knew that the response would then generate another cycle. So the default American setting which is there is a security issue in northern Burkina Faso that strengthens the security forces so that they can deal with it as our counter-terrorism partners would actually feed the problem there. So, you know, reframing that approach and actually looking at the issues on the ground. When you're looking at how to do that, right, because all of a sudden you've got a lot of local villages that all of their own problems all have their own local leaders. There are, you know, incredibly bespoke ways of tailoring the strategy and approaches that, right, I don't have to write grants and figure out how to measure the success and get the money to pay for it. It becomes overwhelming, except it's not global. It's actually, my work has shown that this is not something that we need to fix every single governance gap in the world. Right, we could aim for that, but when you're looking at it strategically, it is in certain areas and it's very predictable about where it comes. You can identify the communities that are at risk and we could be doing a lot more to head off. So this is the preventative effort that we keep hearing talked about now because once extremist groups get their fingers and penetrate these communities, it's much harder to pull them out. It's identifiable. It is, you know, has to fit into something that's comprehensive and this is where we struggle as a government for a variety of reasons. But it means making sure that it's not just a whole-of-government approach, but that it is strategically aligned, that it, you know, and all the buzzwords come up, that the funding is long-term, that it's flexible, that it's an iterative planning process and that starts to hit on all of these actual strategic problems we have within our government about an aversion to risk, the fact that once we have a strategy and a plan, that's the plan. So even when we're seeing it in a program, right? So just simply implementing a program, that's the plan. That goes all the way up to the strategic level. So there are challenges and impediments here at home that we need to be starting to address within how we function and how we treat this problem before we can get to the actual implementation and have it nest all the way down to the local level. Great, thank you. Okay, I'm getting lonely up here. Well, it's running dry quickly. But I'll finish the round and then get to your questions. Thanks very much. So Linda, I'm gonna ask you a variation of the same grand strategy question. So don't listen, but after the hour is over, I pick up the phone and say, Denise Natali, Linda Bashai is not a true believer. She doesn't really think that we've made the transit very far from securitization to community-based approach. She said, darn, Linda again. So she calls her up at GW and says, okay, smarty pants, write me a memo by Monday morning, outlining a community-based grand strategy. What would you say? What would be the outlines of it? Yeah, thanks for the easy question, Dave. I would say, Denise, thanks for calling. It's really nice to talk to you. You know, I actually think we know more than we think we know. And maybe another quick kind of cheat strategy would be to stop calling it countering violent extremism, stop referring to violent extremism, and start talking about local empowerment initiatives. And we are strategic, and it's countering violent extremism to us because we're targeting the communities that we know are at risk or that we know are vulnerable or are already radicalized. But we go there with an open ear to listen to all the problems and not just the ones that affect us because it's noticed. The local communities know when the Americans show up, all they wanna do is train and equip and they're gonna talk to the government anyway, and the government's probably just gonna call us all terrorists and lock us up, or some variation of that theme. But so I think it's really important that we become very sensitive and aware of the unintended consequences of the way we get involved, of the language that we use, some reference to that was already made this morning, very important, really good, to say stop talking about it like it's a war. And that discussion about it, the narrative of our violent extremism, counter-terrorism efforts as in war language, the enemy, destroy, attack, those kinds of words, and that is exactly why they keep flourishing because we are elevating their narrative to be one of taking on the world's greatest army ever. Who wouldn't sign up for that, right? What a great glorious Marvel Avengers world that you can live in when you're taking on the US military and it's full glorious might. So stop all that and get really quiet and really local. Not stop all that, obviously. It's important for military and kinetic efforts to be present when there are very serious kinetic efforts on the other side. But what I mean about the going local approach, I think we already know how to do that. We know how to talk to women. We know how to talk to youth. We know that schools are important. We know who the key stakeholders are, religious leaders, educators, mothers, families, all of the things that we have been doing for other development purposes all along. Those are still part of the toolkit and critically important for helping us know what we know. So the hard part of that is the coordination part. And I used to be super frustrated both at USAP and at ABA Roley at all the talk about coordination both here in Washington and in the field because nothing is harder than coordinating. Nothing is harder than getting all these people with different programs and money than funds that they have to implement according to all the different requirements that their own specific little grant has and all the different governments with their own different goals and incentive structures. And so coordination is really difficult. There are institutional blocks to that. I think humility and awareness of the unintended consequences and humility and awareness about how we ourselves are a model for the people we're engaging with, how we communicate to ourselves and with them has to demonstrate and model how we want them to communicate with each other and with us. And we have to be respectful. We have to pay attention to their dignity and their identity. And that's all very much a part of the kinds of message that we're sending and communicating as we operate. The short answer is, David, there's no quick answer. There's no code to crack. It doesn't just unlock because you start doing it right. You have to just, all the balls are in the air, you got to keep them there. All of the tools we have, we have to use, and all of the information and knowledge we have, we have to synthesize. But that together with respect and acknowledging that we have an effect on the people we're working with and paying attention to their local knowledge and situation is a critical part of getting better. Great, thank you. So there's so many good questions that actually I'm gonna ask you to couch your answer in one of these provocative questions in a very useful way. So Peter Bauman, raise your hand. Thanks very much for your question. Peter asked that, let's get, I'm paraphrasing, let's get real, let's actually talk about the real politics of violent extremism and PV and CVE. And he says that is, are any analysts really looking at who benefits from instability and the presence of violent extremist groups and what are these benefits versus the threats to those that benefit? And so that's originally what we were getting at in terms of violent extremist organizations filling very constructively in some societies a gap of the provision of the core goods that the state should be providing. So are we really looking at that and is it possible in our sometimes polite discourse to really talk about the kinds of things that particularly you and Katie get at, like let's get real, these VEOs are actually providing a lot of valuable services to these communities. This is a great question actually. A lot of times when we talk about PVE we just put band-aids and we're like, let's talk about counter-narratives, let's do this empowering program, but the project that I developed when I was at the Carter Center came from my work on Syria. And we had Syrians across political and ideological divides come and say this was in early 2014, what would the Syrian political solution look like? And this where the elephant of the room came within foreign fighters and the Syrians said, we have to discuss the issue of foreign fighters, this is not a Syrian problem, but this is an international problem. Why am I saying this? I'm saying this because a lot of times we don't even talk about the instability that we have created within a lot of the regions with we've ravaged wars, we've broken the social fabric. And so we can't, if we're really trying to look at PVE or CVE we really have to look at our own foreign policy, our own interventions, we've, some areas we've bombed to the stone ages. And so to expect that we're not creating more grievances is to me mind-boggling. And so that's one. The second one is our support for autocratic regimes that we know use the language of violent extremism to crack down on dissent, where there is a lack of human rights, yet we still fund and we still fund programs that are PVE, CVE, through those particular countries as well. So on the one hand, a lot of times we're like, okay, we have to see the cup half full and what can we do? I mean, what can I do as a researcher and a practitioner? I cannot solve the problem in Syria or in Libya and the list is so long. So you say, okay, CSOs, we should empower them, we should listen to them. A lot of the community leaders told me that a lot of times international organizations come and they talk, we're like rat labs, and this is, I'm quoting, I'm paraphrasing it. They said it in Arabic, like we feel that we're rat labs and we're talked not with, but talked down to. And so we come and we say, okay, this is a great project and this is a great project that would work for country X and let's try to implement it without listening. So we have to be super critical, but also be able to be self-reflexive and think on the broader international community and what's the role of the international community in terms of exacerbating or helping, but at the same time looking at the local level and saying, okay, given the situation that we're in, what can we do to be able to solve these issues? At least at the local level to be able to give stability, hopefulness, dignity to these people. Thank you. The next question is from a former colleague of mine, Kyle from Equal Access. And he asked, I think it's a good question for Katie. He asks, it goes to the default, all governments are good partners assumption. So Kyle asks, how do we compel governments to examine and publicly acknowledge their own contributions to the political and social issues that drive violent extremism? That is a great question. And it's one that I actually do address in the forthcoming report to a degree. And it's a challenge for us because this is such a massive problem that we do need partners. And we need partners at the government level. We need the state to be a partner in many cases even to gain access. And we need to have partners at the sub-state level. And they also, there's some sub-state actor issues in terms of how we partner as well. But when we're looking at the incentives to actually bring governments into the right mindset here, and this goes to the points we've heard about some of our partners using the language of terrorism to suppress political dissent, which is something that the United States needs to take a stronger position against very publicly and on the international stage. There are tough conversations that our diplomats must have with their hosts. And this is something that we need one clear vision and I'm going to use military language here. But we need a clear vision of who the enemy is. And to the point about that J.M. Berger made this morning about what is extremism and who are extremists. We have a definition that we don't have a clear definition that all analysts at the USG accepts of who is al-Qaeda. You can look at the arguments about al-Qaeda in Syria as the most prominent example today. Why don't we hear about the threat from Northwest Syria because there's an intra-analyst debate over which groups, which individuals are part of al-Qaeda, which are not and whether or not they present a threat and what that interdiction looks like. And to draw back even farther, I argue that our enemy is greater than just al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, but it's this ideological movement to Bill's point that you have this ideological movement that's coherent the enemy. Now that's different when you talk to some partners in the Gulf where they draw the line much closer to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in terms of who the subscribers are but then jump to the Muslim Brotherhood which has avowed to only use political action. It's a little different in certain cases, but it's not taking military action and espousing terrorist acts to achieve its objective. So first we need to actually have a conversation globally about what the definition of this threat looks like and to make sure that our partners are bought and sold on that. Two, we need to shift out of this counterterrorism paradigm. It's not just shifting away from counterterrorism to a preventing or countering violent extremism paradigm. So it's not just moving to the PVE or CVE, but even beyond that and going to the community-based approach and recognizing that it's the conditions on the ground. And that means that we need to recognize that when our partners say, yes, I understand that there are grievances that are legitimate within these marginalized factions and that's why the extremists are gaining ground, that we don't simply just build up the security force that the government then will use to put down the problem because we've fed into that cycle of violence and we've replicated our counterterrorism approach actually among our partners. And the last bit is that the US has a lot of leverage. We can bring our European partners aboard on this one as well. And once we have a United Front, we have leverage that we should be using to get partners to act properly. Yes, we require them, but at the end of the day, if they're making the problem worse, that's not a good partner. So that's an honest conversation that we need to be having and we need to show that we're willing to hold our partners accountable, condemn acts that are outside of what we would say it and also support actions that are difficult for the regime. Thank you. So I have a lot of great questions. Thank you, everybody. So I asked the panelists, I'll address them to one or the other of you and please be brief so we can get it through as many as possible. This is an anonymous question and it says, so you've talked a lot about the drivers of violent extremism, but what about the resiliency? I go back to one of the comments this morning. One of the Ted Talkers was talking about multi-finality and a single factor might create a multiplicity of outcomes. So this is about that. So what if there's community X, community Y, and community Z and they're all exposed to the germ of VE? Why are some, even with this gap in state-led local governance, why are some more resilient than others? And is Robert Putnam's theory of social capital important to that understanding of the sources of resilience in the face of absent government and the face of violent extremism? You wanna take a crack, Linda? Yeah, sure. We've actually done some really good research on that very question and again, there are multiple explanations, but one of the key answers to why some communities are more resilient or have resistance to recruitment or radicalization is social trust. Is the extent to which neighbors rely on neighbors for their own security or for collaborative responses to community problems, the extent to which they feel that there are ways to resolve conflicts with each other, even if it's just an independent local decision maker or religious leader. So those communities that feel that kind of trust with each other feel more secure even in the face of natural disasters or poverty or other challenges to those communities. I would just add, I know I need to give you a short answer but I would point to one more example in which sometimes communities could be so vulnerable on every measure of the scale and I'm thinking particularly of Sudan here which isn't typically showing up on the radar screen of those working in violent extremism except that there are violent extremists in Sudan and they are promoted and have been up until the recent change in government had been actually sponsored by the government in quiet ways. And so sometimes the resilience is simply a joint effort against the government. That is, the government is the one that's associated with the danger and therefore the community is actually band together and do some really impressive local governance things in response. But again, it's complicated. Thank you. Katie, first who to, given your previous work route I'm gonna ask you two questions that were issued separately. One is, given your work in North America you were saying and Western Europe the question asks, what does localization look like in the US and Western Europe where white nationalism is on the rise? The other question is, I'm assuming the question means reintegrating women and children from extremist fighters communities. So can you talk about some of the local successes in reintegrating women and children back into their communities of origin? So please. Yeah, thanks. Thank you for the questions and thank you to the person who asked about Europe and the US and the rise of white nationalism because a lot of times whenever we talk about violent extremism we tend to just focus specifically on al-Qaeda, Daesh and so one of the things that I always, that I recommend that I wrote in my article is we cannot be selecting which extremism that makes us feel better. That's the one, which violent extremism that makes us feel better, that's the one we're gonna be talking about. So what I mean is when we're talking specifically and working on, you know, with communities from North America and from Europe in the program that I led we were trying to respond to the rising tide of Islamophobia and saying that this is a threat, this is not a Muslim issue, this is a human rights issue and if we are gonna be countering violent extremism in the United States we need to be able to address this and to be able to see it as a real threat as well and looking really at the data and what the data shows that, you know, the threat of white supremacy in the United States and in Europe are more of a threat than Daesh-y groups and so the interventions that the community leaders that we worked with did not only focus on Daesh but they focused on building resilience, preventing Islamophobia, countering Islamophobia and working with other partners that specifically work on white supremacy and bringing the two, we had panels where we would bring a former white supremacist and a former, you know, like Daesh Al Qaeda really, former Al Qaeda and both doing presentations to show that violent extremism does not belong to one group and you know, and so we need to look at that. So that's for the first one. In terms of the second one is women and... And children. And children. Yeah, so I didn't work specifically on reintegrating former, so I can't talk much to that, reintegrating them, but I did work with women community leaders and they play a very, very important role in building resilience within the communities and also in preventing violent extremism because they have very tight knit networks within the local communities. They understand their communities very well and sometimes can see signs before others can and to be able to empower them and give them a seat and their also vision of security in general is very different and to have that gendered component when we're thinking of PVE is absolutely important because going back to Daesh, Daesh has also a gendered approach to recruitment and so we also need to think of what would be effective gendered approaches when we're talking about PVE. Thank you. So thanks to Jackie Dusharmé, sorry if I mispronounce your last name. This is a question for Katie. Speaking to what Katie said about the need to understand local cultures in formulating counter-terrorism and CVE efforts in areas such as Afghanistan where the Taliban's number one goal is to get rid of foreign occupation. How can we gain a better understanding of the local needs and or grievances and provide assistance without encouraging further negative impacts? And how do we tailor our US policy on such narrow local level needs? Thank you and I will be very brief. I think when you look at Afghanistan in particular, we actually have a depth of expertise about how to build local governance up in a way that will keep the Taliban outside and this was developed during the village stabilization operations, VSO, and the Afghan local police initiative, which for those that aren't aware, effectively, VSOs were tasked with identifying and helping support local governance to enable the community to kind of re-strengthen. So the idea was that over decades, literally of war in Afghanistan, the social fabric that had kept the communities together had been degraded and then also recognizing the failure of the US approach in the early 2000s when we went into Afghanistan, which was to try and create a central government that would push out from the center, which we know that state-based approach has failed in almost every case because we can't model ourselves abroad. They're different cultures. And then the ALP effort was to take what was a naturally occurring phenomenon where most communities have some sort of self-defense communal militia and to try and formalize it. So this was taking something that already existed and to try and link it up to the national structure that we had built in Afghanistan. It was not successful everywhere. That needs to be recognized. But there were cases of success and it was not, you're seen as an occupier when you act against the interests of the local community. And you're seen as a facilitator or an enabler when you're working with the communities. And so this is something, right, if we are only working with the Afghan government, which a community rejects Al-Fan because it is the persistent marginalization or codifying a power structure that will disenfranchise the community, we're going to be seen as occupiers. If we are willing to break a fully state-based framework and work with sub-state actors and work to re-empower the communities and not insist that a host nation government have full authority from capital to border, which is the model that we tend to support but actually doesn't work, then I think that we can start shifting the narrative away because the Taliban themselves can be seen as occupiers and what they're pushing. And so it's just changing the approach in order to really shift the narrative and the perspective on the US. So that's also shifting us from the military-based approach that we now have inside of Afghanistan, CT and looking back at how to fix the issue. Great, thank you. So we have two more minutes. I'm gonna ask one last question from an anonymous because it's a great summary question. It's a good Denise Natali midnight phone called All of You. So you say going local, grand strategy, et cetera, et cetera, but how do we address, we talked about bad partners, but how do we proceed if our state partner is not a good partner? How do we even proceed to go local in that case? Very briefly down this line. Linda? Very briefly, I'll remind everyone in the audience because you probably have thought about this but not in a while of the case of the Lord's Resistance Army. We forgot about that particular extremist group, but that was a classic case where the state was a terrible partner, but we didn't see it for a long time and we enriched them to the point where it was very convenient for them to just never stop the Lord's Resistance Army. So that's a classic case of how not to do it. How to do it is to partner with, I've not suggesting in any of the remarks I've made earlier to ignore our state partners, diplomacy, international law rules, actually kind of dictate that we need to engage with the state government. So I'm not suggesting we shouldn't, but we need to get smarter about how we engage them and what we tell them we're doing. And I think that there are lots of ways to work with local communities in ways that will very much prevent or build resilience and prevent vulnerability to extremist groups and start to build, I think we need to play the long game. I think we need to build independent judicial and security structures. And those are the things we can say we want to do without always making it about violent extremism and kinetic structure. Thank you. So we got to go to lunch. So very quickly, Huda and Katie. Yeah, very quickly. I would say mapping the local context who are the political stakeholders and being very clear when we're working on a particular context to know that, other than just the state, but other political stakeholders, second to evaluate and evaluate and evaluate. And the third, when you're evaluating, going back and listening to the communities and seeing whether they benefited from the programs that we have funded. Thank you, Katie. My short answer is really support what we just heard, but also we shouldn't partner with bad partners. I mean, that's the short of it. And this goes to the question of, there are actually acceptable partners that you can think of that might border the state. So having a containment policy in terms of our partnerships might be the way to go when a state is the wrong partner to have. And then we revert to what I think is the band data approach, which is counterterrorism as, from an American interest perspective, that is the last step of defense. Great. So audience members, thank you for your help. I'm gonna hire all of you as producers when I start the David Young show. And thanks, join me in thanking our panelists.