 All right, thank you all for not used to moving chairs much less of this hour of the day, but thank you all for coming out here. It's wonderful to see so many people. My name is Adam Braver. I'm the library program director also on faculty and the creative writing program and some of you from your first year experience as well. So we've got quite a mix in here. We welcome to our first talking the library program of 2023-24. The series is endowed by alumna Mary Tiff White with her vision was to bring outside voices onto the campus in order to inspire students through learning about different people's experiences and cultures. And today we welcome Dr. Alfred Babbo. There are some people you want to know as soon as you meet them. Such was the case with Alfred, who I met through our mutual connection with scholars at risk of which Alfred was a scholar at risk. Immediately it became clear to me that I was in the company of someone with amazing intellect, warmth, presence and with a fire in his eyes. Our interactions carried on through curious encounters running into each other during a 2 a.m. layover in Dublin, which led to a two hour conversation. Another occasion found both of our flights being canceled at the end of a conference in New Orleans, leading to an afternoon and evening together wandering the city and later again finding each other at yet a different layover in Charlotte, North Carolina. And less surprising but nevertheless meaningful in a room with student advocates at Alfred's home campus at Fairfield University. All this to say that each time I'm with Alfred, I walk away feeling as though I am a better person and a more informed person. And true, he is more than his story as an exile from Cote d'Ivoire, forced to escape after receiving multiple death threats for having the courage to speak on the effects of the vicious civil war on the higher education community. And though that period is something I imagine Alfred will talk about, it is his experiences as a scholar, one who had to endure life altering threats and risks and danger for his ideas that also allow him to speak with expertise on today's topic about misinformation and how it threatens democracies around the world. So please welcome Alfred. Thank you, Adam. And I would like to take the chance to thank everyone. Is that okay? You hear me now? Thank you. So I was saying thank you to everyone who made this possible for me to be here. This is my second time coming here. And I'm always happy to be on this campus, beautiful campus. I would like to take the opportunity to share, of course, to go beyond my own personal experience and also share some reflection on the topic that have been suggested to me. And of course, I'll be happy at the end of this talk to answer your questions, have a conversation with you. That's what I expect. So maybe to go straight to the topic, I would be discussing, I would say, disinformation, misinformation and propaganda and all the things how it's related to democracy, how is it impacting democracy. So I can start with my own brief story. I'm an anthropologist. I'm from Ivory Coast, Ivory Coast, or Côte d'Ivoire, which is in West Africa. So we are, which is a Francophone country, so that means I speak French and I did all my, you know, scholarship, my, you know, young career as a researcher in my country, as a student in my country. I never dreamed being, you know, in the United States. I came in the United States at a scholar with a scholarship in 2006. My country was already in trouble, but I decided to go back home and I would go every time in Europe, in Switzerland, where I did my postdoc research. And actually, I never thought that I would be out of my country. And I was hoping that everything would be okay. But unfortunately, we used one powerful instrument of democracy, which is elections. We thought that election will be the gateway, will be the solution to address the long political and military crisis in my country, which started in 2002, when I was a graduate student preparing my PhD, ready to go for my defense. And I woke up in the middle of the night with gunshots. You know, everyone were running away. And I didn't know what to do. The only thing I tried to grab was my dissertation. At that time, maybe you're too young, you don't, you don't, maybe you did not have the experience of having the, the diskettes. We had some small diskettes, they're flat like this. So I had five of them because of pictures in my dissertation. So you cannot put it on one disk. So I had all of them and flip flops and tried to find a way out. And at that time, I was in a town called Boaque, which is around 300 kilometers from Abidjan, the capital city. So my goal was to reach the capital city where this place was safer. So I was what we call internal IDPS, probably you have heard that, internal displaced person. So I moved after I won't be long on that, but it was difficult for me to leave this town and reach Abidjan in one night of October 22, 2002. So I stayed there. I did, I got myself, put myself together after the trauma and I continued and did my dissertation, my discussion and then got my doctorate degree. And after that, as I said, I came to the US, I went, I travel a lot and I was, as a scholar, I was hoping that things would be, you know, fixed through election. So how come something which was supposed to be the one of the interesting principle of democracy will instead, you know, create more trouble in the country? So in 2010, 2011, in 2010, we're supposed to hold the presidential election that will end the crisis, the political crisis in my country. Unfortunately, because of misinformation, disinformation propaganda, then this election turned into civil war. So at that point, I was not internal displaced anymore. I was then a refugee. I left. I had to leave my country with my kids, my wife and cross the border and find my way towards Ghana, the east of Ivory Coast and then later in a Francophone country, which is Togo, the capital city. So the idea for me was to avoid English because I'm a Francophone, right? And I was like, I'm not staying in Ghana because Ghana, they speak English. I don't want to stay here. And here I am, right? That's life. You never know. You know, I was fleeing. I was trying to avoid English country. And I'm now in the United States. That's our life. So now I'm an anthropologist and after resistance for a couple of years, I have now to assume my role as a director of the International Studies Program at Fairfield University. So that has been a long way. And I would like to take the chance to share this path with you. So when you are a refugee, of course, you, refugee and scholars, you have two sides of your, you know, your life that you have to resume with. Of course, you have to catch up. You have to start over your social life and take care of your home, yourself, take care of your family. But at the same time, you have to resume what's your career? How do you get a job? How do you teach? And for a couple of years, I've been thinking about, you know, how I connect what happened to my, to me, how things like democracy have been so misrepresented in Africa that we instead of being involved and take advantage of what democracy is, we are fighting, right? We're killing each other because of elections because of, you know, and I will, I want to open up a little bit on how this is happening in the world. So we can understand that lying and, you know, playing with truth in politics is not something which is only in one part of the world, but even in democratic nations, how they're playing with, you know, lies, how they, you know, they're playing with truth, that's the call alternative, you know, fact and ultimately how this is undermining democracy and beyond that, how we're creating refugees or people like me because of a lie, right? We never think that's having a refugee somewhere here in our town, right? It could be based on the fact that's one prominent politician lied on something. It never occurred to us, right? So I want to make this connection for us to understand and hopefully they will help us have a conversation. So briefly I will go over some definitions and of course I had some questions and hypotheses and I will go over some of the key argument that I have. I hope I will go quickly so we can have time to have a conversation. So I'll go with those definitions. So I see this information as you can see as the fact that we can transform the fact, right, the factualization of the of the word that stemmed from corrupt political institutions. So the person who is already playing, you know, to this with the fact is corrupt, right? The other thing that we can pay attention to is how now the trend, the new trend of social media has, of course, developed this possibility of disinformation. So the way you type on your laptop or on your phone, one thing you say could be playing with a friend, right? Saying something like that, you want to prank someone, you say, you know, you write an information, something happening on campus today, maybe it was a question for you because you forget the question mark, right? Then it would become something which is not a question anymore and it would go and it's for you the time to realize it's already as a actual information. Okay. So social media played a lot on that. And for that, you have how social media used for many people to spread lies and conceal truth. And we know a lot of countries which have created and institutionalized this way of, you know, doing politics. Okay. Of course, then you have the political disinformation, which is how disinformation is something which is becoming central to political activities, right? What does it mean? So we can go further and see, you know, how it plays with some concrete examples. So here, for example, I'm putting here how in one of the articles that I shared with you that the place where disinformation has spread widest and deepest is the US highest level of junk news circulation. Conspiracy theories have also become viral. So one of the conspiracy theories that we know, for example, in Europe is related to race or the greatest replacement. I don't know if you have heard about that, but with this thing that, oh, these Arabs are coming to replace us or these Mexicans are coming to replace us or these Africans are coming to replace us, right? So change the demographic of our population. Not only the demographic, but the existence of our country, the existence of our identity. So that is how it plays. And we can see in the United States here, the election of 2016 and 2020 were very interesting to see how disinformation work. So once we use this disinformation, it's become, it will integrate what we call propaganda based on where, how it spreads, how quickly it spreads and what kind of technology we use and with what intents. That is how propaganda will play here. So of course, we know that it's biased, but it doesn't prevent us from spreading the information. Sometimes we know that this is not accurate, but you're still sharing the information. You're sharing that information with your friend and it's circulating. So a couple of definitions here. The historian defined propaganda as narrowly selfish, right? It's something selfish and it's in the interest of a particular person or particular group. So why are you spreading or circulating information that you certainly know that is wrong or is not true or you don't have any evidence to support that? So in the interest of a particular person, propaganda is also the management of collective attitude with the idea to manipulate significant symbols. So manipulation is also something that happens here. We can also see how it's an effort to create or shape things. So sometimes you know the truth, but you will add some details that will change maybe the meaning or the form, but you recreate the information or you re-fabric the information with a specific intent. So it's deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions. So with the development of technology, we can say now it's also integrating the way we use to for persuasion to make sure that what we think, what we say is make it true by using technology. Then we can go back, we can finish with democracy and try to see how it's something which is of course that has been praised in our society today. And as I said, if it's something which is so good now, then we have to wonder why democracy which is supposed to be providing wealth, well-being which is supposed to provide peace is creating in some nations more war. How do we even bring kind of democracy with weapons? So think about what happened with Afghanistan, right? The US thought that they will spread democracy in this country by sending militaries there, you know, we force democracy in this nation, but 20 years later nothing happened that, you know, that they're playing. And in many African countries, as I said, we have been fighting for democracy for the last 30 years, and we still have more civil wars than democratic regimes, okay? So someone like Joseph Schumpeter says, democracy is a system in which people have the opportunity of accepting or rejecting their leaders. So we have the chance to say, you know, to say something as citizens, right? To participate and to be part of the process. And liberal democracy, so that, you know, that's another thing. Democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, so check and balance in different institutions in this system, okay? Specially multi-party system and protection of freedom. Those are really important freedom of speech and freedom of expression. That's what we see, how it's related to disinformation and misinformation, okay? Am I free to say whatever I want? Even if I know that it's wrong, it's not true, or it has no evidence, right? Because of freedom of expression or freedom of speech, can I say that? Even if I'm aware that it could be very harmful down the road. So that's also how we should question democracy as we think. One thing we have, I took from Anna Arendt's paper and work, is that lies have become part of the fabric of daily life. So if this is true, then we have, you know, we should be concerned. But it's not only for politicians, probably, for all of us, right? Is it something which is part of our life? So why have lies always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools for politicians? Okay? Why is the search for truth? Now people are looking for truth because lies have so been around us. So now we're thinking that we need to double check things, okay? And what are the consequences of disinformation and propaganda on democracy and society? Some hypotheses lies have always been inherent to politics, whether it's domestic or international, okay? But have recently triggered the rise of disinformation, which is acute in old and traditional democratic nations. So as long as it was, you know, lies were happening in and about other nations for foreign relations. People were not really concerned, you know, especially, but when we see how lies have been part of political activities, political rhetoric, political discourses in all traditional democratic nations, then people think that we should be, you know, concerned about what's going on because at that point we're going, we're touching the foundations of, you know, what we believe to be democratic. So that's how it's important. Second hypothesis is playing on the edge of the truth in politics weakens democracy. And if we believe that democracy is the best system, then we should be aware of different factors that are undermining democracy, okay? So truth and politics have never stood on common ground. So I would like to maybe present a brief video here, which is a short video. And maybe some of you have heard, have already seen that video. Okay. I don't know if some of you have seen this, but we can, we noticed that this is happening first in terms of institution is happening at the UN, right? And UN Security Council. So that's the top level. Second, the person we're speaking is a top administration of the American government was, okay, Colin Powell. And of course it's really, it's talking about how Iraqi government is lying on something that will trigger later the invasion of Iraq by the US Army. Okay. So here is the one talking about Iraqi government lying. Then what happened years later? Anyone has a thought? What do you think happened from this? No one? Want to try? Yes, please. Invasion of Iraq? Yes. Invasion of Iraq. Then you're basically, that lies about all the WFD, the mass destruction. They did what? Sorry? Basically, what the mass destruction applies. Okay. So there, it happened that there were no massive, there were no weapon of massive destruction there. Okay. But that happens after we had many Iraqis killed. Of course, American soldiers killed and many and millions of Iraqi refugees in the world. That is, later we realized that this was a fake and it wasn't. There were no evidence about that. So you can understand to, you know, to what extent lies can go, you know, to the top of the top. Okay. By those who have the power and those who have, you know, will control the biggest institutions in the world. And as I said, this is happening at the UN. And of course, we can say, so why other countries did not react? Why the other nations in, you know, because that's the UN, right? Why the other nations did not react? So that is how you see the leverage. Okay. So we can go from there to see how the best way to discuss lies is to think to confront lies and truth and politics. So here, Arendt, for example, mentioned how in terms of truth, we have a variety of truth. Of course, you have historical truth. Those that you will find in the history of every nation, every country, every community. You have some fact. And we were having a lunch, having lunch a few hours ago, when we were discussing about the history, for example, of Bristol and other towns in the United States, where some stories, actual facts, kind of coming up, people are learning what's happening in this, what happened in the society. So she listed a lot of truth, and she wanted to really make the the the the emphasis on the factual truth. How do we connect truth to facts? Okay. Of course, when you connect truth to politics, you have also the political rhetoric that distorts and refugiate truth. So rhetoric will be used for by many politicians to play around with, of course, the truth, whether we can distort some of the aspect, whether you can present a different aspect of it. Okay. And the truth is in political. Factual truth is in great danger of disappearance, because more and more we can play with it. And of course, as long as it's in politics, people think to think that it's pretty okay as long as it's politics. Why? Because we have one specific goal. Okay. And philosophy and truth here, we understand why people would lie and why people will be playing with truth. What is the moral aspect of it? What is the rational aspect of it? Okay. When we we put together empiricism and rationalism, do we do we deal with truth based on our personal experience or based on, you know, how we think truth should be? As we move forward with propaganda, we see that propaganda is connected to the lie, to the fact that lies lies has always been instrumental to gaining political advantage. So people don't do things for nothing. Okay. To gain something, favor. So here I'm taking, for example, the the case of COVID-19. Okay. That was an interesting case where the former administration thought that, you know, we can say it is just a flu. It's nothing dangerous, it's fine. But the danger of that was the fact that it was risky for public health for all of us. And the consequence of that, it was the fact that we had to slow down people's reaction and all measures that we took later in this country to kind of, you know, slow down the spread were delayed because for a long time we didn't want to acknowledge that this disease was serious. Okay. Of course, during the Cold War and during wartime, World War I, even the current war between Israel and Hamas, Ukraine and Russia during wars, that's the best time for people to, you know, to use any information, any tools for propaganda. Okay. For their own gain, of course. Okay. The way that we tell the story will be different. And of course, intelligence services will be playing, will be used, you know, to reinvent, rewrite the story about something that happened. Okay. It could be bombing. I think yesterday it was about, yesterday or two days ago, it was about bombing the hospital in Gaza. And right now, everyone is saying, we don't know who did that or, you know, so we're trying to find where it comes from. Okay. So of course, intelligence services are playing that. And of course, we also know that propaganda is also something powerful nation used for political and geo-strategic hegemony. Okay. And that can also play for the global governance, especially for someone who come from a country that are being colonized for a long time. And again, we're talking about colonization, how when the story is written by the colonizers, it's different from the colonized, right? Okay. Those who colonize will present a beautiful part of, you know, what they did. Okay. Form of propaganda use mainly three ways. They bend wagon, okay, convince the audience to do or believe something because everyone else is doing it. So, as I said, because you spread something, you believe that, you know, it's true. And you have the deterring generality, positive meaning. Okay. We give a bit positive meaning. We try to give a positive meaning to something even if we believe that we see that it's wrong. And of course, repetition is one form that people use for propaganda. We repeat, we repeat. And because we repeat, we think we've, we, we ultimately start believing it, but and we are convinced that other people will also, you know, believe it. Okay. So repetition can go from different, something wrong like, so when I think about Russia or China, the way the terms that will be used in American media or European media, talking about someone like Putin, they will be talking about the dictator. Okay. So the term, the term that's used to talk about the president of Russia or the president of China, this term means something. It's not, they're not just using it because they don't have any other words, right? So it means something. They want to describe it and they want to repeat it. They repeat it. So you, young people, you can understand and you can connect, you know, dictatorship with this guy, right? When someone asks you any idea of dictatorship, of course, you'll be thinking about Putin because you have heard that too much, right? In the media, the mainstream media, that's how they play. Okay. Now, maybe they're right. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I'm saying, I'm explaining how it plays, right? Okay. So this information in democracy is playing with alternative facts. Okay. So now more and more people are talking about alternative facts. So how fact would be, how can we have alternative to fact? Fact is a fact. I don't know. But of course, you remember the debate or controversy around President Trump's inauguration, okay? They were talking about the number of people who attended this inauguration. They're comparing with President Obama's inauguration and they were kind of controversy about the numbers who was kind of more popular. And some people would say, this is alternative fact, right? So it's good for you to question that how fact could be, you know, can have alternative. So lies consistent with lying and consistent lying, lots of facts. So the reason is that because we're looking always for alternative facts, of course, at the end of the day, we're kind of wondering where is the fact? Where is the truth in this thing? And this information is also not by ordinary people, but even by leaders, institutions, you know, mainstream media, okay? And it goes with manipulation, censorship, abuses, okay? And I can give more example when I go to the timeline that I have next. And of course, as I say, development of technology and the big data is also in social media, of course, making the manipulation of information on as something that's contribute to the disinformation. So just some basic examples. Historical events. So the war in Iraq and Watergate scandal, for example, that was in 1972. So I can give more detail. And you have in 90, you have Iraq war, of course, and the prison campaign, hilarious, Clinton emails. Okay, so all those, you know, events are happening. And the last election in 2020 here, the baseless claim about fraud, all the things. And of course, we can think we can also put the January 2021 attack on Congress as a result of the fact that people believed in what they heard, because they were convinced by this repetition that it's, you know, even if they didn't, they don't have evidence, they were still believing, okay? And the danger is the fact that at the end, people cannot think by themselves to try to distinguish, you know, what is the truth, you know, that. So just an example of what happened in 1972. President Nixon announced that his own investigation had determined that no one in this administration presently employed was involved in this very bizarre incident. So first he denied, right, as the president. Then he would come later, right, to say, Oh, I'm sorry about what happened. Okay. And at the end, you will, of course, ask for the resignation of his top collaborators and later himself will, of course, step down. Okay. With 2016-2020, so far back in the history, but most recently, 2016 election and 2020 presidential elections denounced. So we can see, for example, here how the former president Trump said he won the popular vote, even if all data was kind of saying no. Okay. What is interesting here is that for the last election, the 2021, all his team, you know, they tried some of the who see on the court and nothing, no, no, one was, you know, presented as true. Okay. That they sent more than 50 lawsuits were dismissed. So they did not bring the evidence that everyone was looking for. So that's how you deal with truth and how you deal with truth. So to go now to the connection between misinformation, they play with the truth and democracy, propaganda and democracy. We can say here what I was saying present a few minutes ago is that lies and propaganda can affect many countries, including, okay, how people deal with human rights, how they deal, of course, with democracy. So the danger is that not only to impair free speech, but what is really important is the fact that people cannot think clearly anymore because we're so surrounded by lies, then that is what is really dangerous. We cannot make the distinction between fact and fiction. Okay. And that is really dangerous. And as we undermine democracy, we are building more autocratic, autocratic countries, autocratic political systems, right, in which we use election, but we still are able to undermine freedom, some democratic principles, okay, by we spread false information. And it seems that more and more is kind of common and is kind of commonly accepted that people can spread wrong information and nothing happens. Okay. So you have some news which are well known for spreading conspiracy theories without any evidence and those are public and nothing happened to them, right. Recently, I think only some of them have been sued, right, based on someone who said that the killing mass killing of children in Connecticut near my university was a hoax, right, and it has been for a long time. It's a couple of years ago, but now I think only last year it was tried and fine to pay a lot of money. Okay. So as long as we don't react to those lies and they are publicly operating, of course, we put in danger our own democracy. Okay. So I'm going to hand up here and I can show you briefly what could be seen here as how democracy is in peril using the VDEM. I don't know if you guys know this organization, but VDEM is a variety for democracy. And I can show you briefly using some of the indicators there. So when you take the indicators like party dissemination of false information abroad, you have also party dissemination of false information domestic. You can see when you combine or load those things, you can see the trend that what's happening in 2020. Okay. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2020 is down. So we can see that things are going down instead of improving. Electoral and closed autocracies are home to the majority of population, 68 percent of world population are living in autocracies. Okay. And liberal democracy diminished from 41 countries to in 2010 to 32. So we obviously going down. Okay. Instead of increasing the number of countries embracing democracy, we're seeing that is going down. Okay. So this is just an example of using some of the some of the indicators that I showed you here. And I took one part of the world where people come from. Okay. Here you have Middle East and North Africa. So when I use the freedom of expression and how freedom of expression is evolving, you can see the blue line that is some here in 2010. Here is higher here, but it's going down here in terms of using the index and the government action against media in terms of censorship. You can also see the red one. And those are below the minimum. So you can see here in 1980 and here too is coming here how the governments are, you know, pushing and for censorship of media. Okay. So I can just briefly do something with you together. If we want to take here is a variety of democracy. Okay. And let's say we take and this is pretty open. You can you can use it. Let's say we take let's say let's use Americas. Is that is that okay for everyone? Okay. And for the indicator, let's see how it happens with party dissemination of information domestic. So you will also see that when we're talking about lies, it's also about, you know, when the US government told us that they are not checking our phones, they are not listening to us. I don't know if you remember at that some time, we had a scandal with Snowden. Edward Snowden would disclose that actually the US government is listening US citizens. And that was not right. But for a long time. And because of that, these guys, these guys are out of the country. So what I'm saying is that first information is not only for a broad government can also use, you know, first information for domestic, you know, things. What other things we can use is, let's use corrupt media. Okay. So what I'm trying to show you is that this is very interactive. And you can see things that you want to, you're really interested in, right? Some indicators that you're interested in and you can pick the country or the region, the world that you're interested in and see, you know, how, what is the state of party dissemination of first information in Americas, right? You can see here. And the study here for the dissemination only in 19, around 2000. Okay. So that's what you see. This always takes the minimum as, you know, the reference to study what's interesting here. When we say, we see the media bias, you see, as of here, how the media develop development of media development technology also increase, of course, the bias of media. Okay. And how this is really affecting. If we want to add democracy, for example, democracy index, we can add to see how they're interacting. Okay. So that's something I wanted to show you. We can add whatever you want. It could be freedom expression or the things to learn from this connection. So after the, after the impact of lies and propaganda on democracy, I want to finish with how is also impacting us as, you know, human being by addressing the fact that once we start wars, right, you have people who are forcibly displaced. So that is how you have refugees in the world, but also refugees in your streets, refugees in your communities. Right. If you see someone here, it's not necessarily because this person wanted to leave his or her country, but someone who might have played on propaganda or on lies and carry out wars in his or her country for this person to look for, you know, a safe place, right, whether it's in Europe, in Australia, in, in, but I can tell you that the US is not the most, is not the biggest host of refugees in the world. Maybe some of you know already the, the nation was hosting more refugees in the world. Anyone? Yes. Is Germany? Germany has a lot, but it's not Germany. Thank you, but it's in the Middle East. Okay. So here you have the refugees, but you have also the internal displaced person. You remember, I told you I was myself, internal displaced for 80 years, and then you have the asylum seekers. If you want to know later, I can give you the chance to talk about that. Okay. So I want you all to be aware of what's happening, uh, where we went to try to bring democracy to, you know, all things that we constructed propaganda about human rights here and why we need to send people there and how Syria, Syrian refugees are in the works today. Every, everything went from something like that war that were related to the massive, the weapons of massive destruction. Okay. And even if people are talking about ISIS today, of course, it's related to this invasion of the US army, the invasion of Iraq by the US army and European armies. Okay. So I want to stop here and give everyone the chance to ask questions. I wanted to make the connection again between misinformation, construction of information, how we purposely play with the truth, with the fact and how this is connected to the fact that we are undermining, you know, contributing to the decline of democracy, but also how we are through that's playing with some, you know, some people's human beings life, sending them in the street as refugees. Thank you. Any questions? I'm happy to answer questions. Of course, I sent some of the reading. So if you have the chance to read, if you have questions, I'll be happy to answer. If you want to know more about my personal experience, I'm happy to. Yes. How did your story, how did your story specifically install at that risk? Like with your size up? Were you already so aware of this? And then like, how did much more aware of these problems come after your journey with them? New things that you notice? After I fled from my country, how did what I learned? Yeah, I'm just specifically from that experience. From that experience, I was, as a scholar, I was working on issues related to the development because I'm from Africa, which is a continent where we still have, you know, our main issue should be development, right? So I was working on development issues, doing research on how we can develop our nations, our countries, you know, and based on my experience, I shifted my research and now I'm doing research more on refugees, humanitarian actions, and I'm reflecting on why we have refugees in the world and, you know, how can we change the narrative around refugees? That again, some people are seeing refugees still seeing, I have one class that I, which is refugees and culture in my anthropology class. And I ask, I start the class by asking students, when you hear the term refugees, what comes in mind? What are the first things that comes in mind? And it's really interesting to see how for many people, refugees means, you know, insecure people, refugees mean, you know, poverty, refugees means some people will even think refugees as terrorists, you know, because of the, again, the rhetoric, the propaganda and the purposely connection between 9-11, for example, and, you know, Arabs and people coming from Middle East and terrorism, right, or Muslim and terrorism. So you have this negative connotation between when we talk about refugees and they never realize that a lot of refugees are not people who would say, hey, I want to leave my country, right? That's why they first displaced people. So I, that's, if I say, if I can say that I learned something or what I'm doing as a research is to try to, you know, write around this narrative, how to change things and believe that I created with a group of colleagues, we created something that we've called share the platform, share the platform. We think that many refugees have skills, they have talents, they have knowledge, you know, of course, as I told you, myself, I'm even sometimes surprised that I can say a correct sentence in English, because I did everything in French. I learned, and I did not come here when I was 20. I came here, you know, at very, you know, adults. And it's not easy to learn a new language as an adult. For my kids, it was like this. But for me, I did all my life. I was already publishing in my country. I was almost professor, full professor in my country when I came here. But I had to start over as an assistant professor. Then I'm right now associate professor. And that's, you know, so I learned from that. And that things I want to, I want this narrative to change. And in this share the platform initiative that I had with my colleagues, we're trying to say, if organizations or institutions like your school, right, want to share the platform with some refugees like us, we have some talent that we can share with everyone. If they want to give us the podium, if they want to give us a space, if they want to give us a room, right, on the podium, they can hear some maybe some interesting things from us, right. And that's, that's what I'm, that's what I learned from my experience. And that's what I'm connecting to my work today. Thank you for your question. Anyone else? Yes, please. So I come from a neighborhood family. My family, they decided to come to America their choice. I was just curious as to what caused you and your family to be pushed out of the country. So it was basically because of the war, as I said, in 2002, I was displaced from my town to the capital city. So for eight years, we're in the middle of the crisis, but not a war yet. In 2010, when we held the presidential election that was supposed to end the crisis, then it turned into a civil war. And I can tell you civil war is also one of the dirtiest, dirtiest war on health, because civil wars means people are looking at your identity, right. They're looking at, and for me, it was even crazy because they were looking at my, they were looking at my ethnicity, they were looking at my origin from the west of the country. So when they look at the west of the country, they know that people in that part of the country will call them Betty. So they were looking for specific people of this to kill, right. Because they were finding a president who is a Betty. So I don't know this guy, right. I have nothing to do with him, but because I'm from his ethnic group, so I'm a target. Unfortunately for me, again, this guy was a professor at the university. And I'm, you know, students like, you know, I'm a professor, that was in 2002, I was student, but in 2010, now I was professor, right. So again, for them, someone who is a Betty, who is from the west, who is a professor at the university, I'm kind of checking all point for those rebels, I'm a good target to kill. Because this guy is a professor, that means the same, you know, kind of thing turned with the president. Again, I'm not from his, I wasn't from his political party. I don't know him. I don't have any connection with this guy. But that was enough. And worse, this guy in my country, his name is Babo. Babo is G-B-A-G-B-O. My name is Babo. As you can imagine, in terms of sound, for the rebels, they don't care. The difference for them, Babo, Babo is the same. So people will be tracking me down, you know, go to my house, try to, you know, get to catch me. Okay. So that's what happened to me. That's how I had to flee with my family. Yes. Thank you. That's a great question. So first, I would like the course that I'm teaching at Fairfield University is what we call a community service course. Now we call it community learning course. So we want students to learn while taking class, learn better by being part of the process. Right. And by talking to refugees, because many people talk about refugees, but they have never met a refugee. In my class, when at the end of the class, I ask them, do you have, you know, can you learn, have you, have you heard about a very prominent refugee in this country, in the United States, or someone that, you know, was a refugee, you know, but we became, you know, very prominent political person of, you know, public figure. Of course, there will be many, anyone, you know, in the, on campus here with a refugee, they never thought about myself being standing before them because for them, they cannot imagine, right? You know, for, again, as I say, for them, refugees, someone who's, you know, uneducated or so I thought that making the young people meet the actual refugees will probably contribute to change their way of seeing, you know, and, you know, separate them, their thoughts from what they hear every time from the media, right? So that's, for me, don't be afraid of making a connection with refugee communities. If we can go there, go there and learn from them, learn where they come from, learn their culture, you know, try to, to learn better about what's seeing them out. And that will probably change your way of seeing what refugee means and also, who are the refugees. And at that point, you will see that all of us are, you know, potential refugees because it happens sometimes overnight and you have to grab just a couple of things to live. For me, as I said at the beginning, when I heard that I had to live, you look at your house and you, you have maybe 30 minutes or someone say you have 20 minutes to leave the place. What do you take? And things are racing in your brain, you know, you don't have, you don't have the time. What do I take first? What do I live here? What, you know, how do I grab all those things? Right? So sometimes, sometimes people take pictures, photos, something that you will never replace, you'll never find because you're going there, you don't never know when you come back. Maybe you would never come back. When I was younger, it was easy for me. As I said, I just collected my dissertation, right? That was and I left, but it's so, it's so hard when you, and when you leave, don't, don't, don't look at behind you. Otherwise it would be, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to leave your house to leave everything you have built there and to go, right? And sometimes you go without knowing where you are going. You, you just go, you don't know where you're going and you don't even know what fate is waiting for you there, the other side. The point is just to save your life and then later, as long as you're alive, you can start over as a point. I hope I answered your question. Thank you. Yes, please. Do you need the mic? How you try to tell the truth if people don't want to hear it? I would say we need to be persistent because otherwise if we drop, right, if we, we, we don't push the truth, we win and the lies we win. And sometimes people tell, as I said, for example, for the video about what Colin Powell said at the UN, people were already dead. Many people were refugees and it was years later that they acknowledge that it wasn't true. But we cannot afford to continue to do that, right? You cannot kill people and 20 years later say, oh, we're sorry. No, that was a lie. So we need to anticipate. We need as young people to try to find the facts and the way liars are spreading the lies. We also need to use the same avenue, the same technology, maybe to spread and maybe over spread the truth. That's probably the way to do that. Otherwise, if we say, because no one wants to hear, then we're not doing anything, then we stop. I'm sorry, but right? Yeah. So we need to be, you know, we need to find ways. We need to be creative. We need to find things. But that's a great question. And I would like to let that to you, young generation, right? You need to find ways to really spread the truth. And as I said, be critical. There is no alternative facts. Facts are facts. Yeah. We cannot say, oh, no, this dimension, this aspect is not here. No. So that's, I hope I answered your question. But thank you. Anyone else? Alfred, thank you for the talk. So thanks for thinking about Alfred. It'll be around for a few minutes. So if you do have questions that you want to ask him, then we'll be happy to do that. Otherwise, thank you all. Thank you again. Thank you so much. Thank you.