 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the executive vice president here at the United States Institute of Peace and we are very pleased to welcome you here on on Monday morning for this discussion of three reports and you'll hear more about each of those in a moment. Institute of Peace was founded 1984 by Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, that it's practical, and that's essential for national security and international security. We provide people and organizations and individuals abroad with the tools to seek peace, seek ways to avoid violent conflict. And indeed we're talking about violent conflict here this morning. Discussing violent extremism a global threat dating back millennia. Jihadi groups are only among the latest movements to fuel conflicts and use terror tactics. Despite the lessons of 9-11, we failed to predict the emergence of al-Qaeda in new forms across the Middle East and North Africa. We were blindsided by ISIS sweep across Syria and Iraq, which at least temporarily changed the map of the Middle East. Both movements have continued to evolve and surprise while producing dozens of franchises across the globe, and we'll hear more about these franchises here today. In 2015, ISIS-affiliated groups engaged in attacks across 28 countries, more than double the number in 2014. Last year, deaths from terrorism rose by 650% in the 35 countries that belong to the OECD. This rise in extremism coincides with growing political instability, as other three reports released today illustrate these two trends feed off each other. U.S.-backed allies in Iraq and Syria have recently made progress in confronting the Islamic State, Daesh. By all accounts, ISIS has now lost more than 40% of its caliphate, but just yesterday, Daesh apparently retook Palmyra over the weekend, and so it would be a mistake to assume this progress opens the door to disengagement in the region. Extremism grows from social and political grievances, and the tools provided by military force or good police work cannot alone dry up the emotional and social wellsprings of radicalization. Limited resources, competing political interests, poor coordination, further muddy the waters and present a daunting task for the next administration. The U.S. Institute of Peace is committed to helping fresh approaches to these challenges. We work on supporting communities to reduce the appeal of violent extremism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and North Africa by providing training and expertise, as I mentioned. USIP is also providing policy-shaping research through the Resolve Network, an international consortium of research organizations committed to understanding the local drivers of violent extremism. Our forum today is an extension of this work. Today's panelists will explore future trends in extremism, innovative policy responses, and reflect the analysis from three new reports. The first report, titled The Jihadi Threat, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Beyond, was produced by USIP and the Wilson Center. The report is the product of a four-month study, led by Robin Wright, whom you will hear momentarily. USIP convened 20 experts from think tanks and universities across the United States to explore the world's deadliest movements, their evolving strategies, future scenarios, and policy considerations. It's the latest collaboration between USIP and the Wilson Center, which also produced the groundbreaking book and website projects such as The Islamists and the Iran Primer. The second report, we'll examine today, is Turning Point, by the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Countering Violent Extremism. Commission was co-chaired by Leon Panetta and Tony Blair. Stephen Hadley, chairman of the USIP Board, and USIP President Nancy Lindborg were also commissioners for the project, which calls for a new paradigm, using both soft and hard power, to forge partnerships from government, civil society, and the private sector to confront extremist ideologies. USIP and CSIS have worked together for several years on foreign policy issues critical to US interests, including partnership on the Iraq study group at a critical turning point in the US intervention in Iraq. The third report, by the Prevention Project, is Communities First, a blueprint for organizing and sustaining a global movement against violent extremism. It identifies the challenges of coordinating a global response to extremism. It offers practical guidance on durable solutions. Robin Wright will moderate the first panel. Robin is a joint fellow at USIP and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and is also an award-winning author, contributing writer for the New Yorker. She brings decades of experience and unique insights to USIP after reporting from 140 countries for the Washington Post and other major news outlets. Please welcome Robin Wright and the first panel. Good morning, everybody. I'm delighted to have you join us. This is the report that we authored. This is a group of, as Bill said, 20 experts from across the United States who are really into the nitty-gritty of the extremist movements, particularly ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the franchises. I'm particularly delighted to, I'm honored, in fact, to be among four of the most distinguished scholars in the country on this issue. To my right, Will McCance, who's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of The ISIS Apocalypse, The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State. David Gartenstein Ross is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is also a fellow at the International Center for Counterterrorism at The Hague. Fred Wary is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a widely published author. I am in awe of Fred because he has been to Libby twice this year, right in the heart of the conflict. Hassan Hassan is a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. Hassan I've been following for ages, a former correspondent himself, and he's a co-author of The New York Times bestseller ISIS inside the Army of Terror. So as we've painfully witnessed, extremism has evolved traumatically and dramatically since 9-11. Movements, leaders, tactics, strategies, and theaters of operation have all proliferated in ways that were unimagined in 2001. The world has mobilized unprecedented force. The United States alone has spent trillions of dollars in homeland security, diplomacy, the military to try to counter jihadi extremism. And there has been progress between 2001 and 2016. There have only been, well, less than 100 deaths inside the United States from jihadi extremists. And yet, as we all know, the threat endures. And one of the things I thought I'd start with this morning is to give you a brief little look at the different waves of extremism on jihadis, the things we discovered that we thought were actually quite interesting in following the patterns that have evolved in the three major waves of jihadism. The first trend, and there are five of them, is that in sheer numbers, the mobilization of foreign fighters has been larger with each wave than its predecessor. The growth is today exponential. With surviving jihadis and fighters of previous generations becoming very important catalysts for the next, for the new generation. The pattern suggests that the next jihadi conflict will have ever greater numbers than the last. And that recruitment is likely to surge in large part because the best recruiters of the new jihadis are the ones who participated in the last one. The second trend is that each mobilization of fighters has been faster than the last. The time required for jihadis to act or swarm in the language of jihadism in each theater of conflict is roughly half of what it took the previous wave. The ease of global travel and social media are obviously key components. They've solved the problems of coordination and expedited the travel and mobilization. The third trend is that the foreign fighter pool has diversified with each wave. The first generation of jihadis galvanized during the Afghan war was predominantly from the Arabian Peninsula, often known as the Afghan Arabs. Gulf fighters have consistently contributed the largest contingency among foreign fighters, but the proportion, because each group has been larger, the proportion of fighters from the Gulf has decreased with each wave. During the second wave in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, North Africans showed a dramatic increase against the U.S.-led coalition. North Africans constituted about one quarter of all foreign fighters during that second wave. During the third wave between 2012 and 2015, Central Asians and particularly Europeans mobilized in unprecedented numbers to join the ranks of the Islamic State, a troubling development particularly for Western countries. The fourth trend is that each generation has become more extreme. The trend is not specific to just jihadi groups. We saw the same pattern emerge in Algeria as well as among Palestinian groups between 1970s and 1990s when groups splintered and younger fighters grew ever more impatient with the older generation and sought to execute more brazen attacks than their forefathers. ISIS and al-Qaeda have followed similar patterns, with younger fighters becoming ever more aggressive. The fifth trend is that in the future jihadis are likely to spread out to more locations and similar causes and for reasons that might not be as obvious. First and foremost, jihadism has become a profession, not just a set of beliefs or a belief system. And once mobilized, it's often very difficult to demobilize foreign fighters, that whole wave. And foreign fighters who do demobilize are likely to remain on an important part of the overall fabric of jihadism or modern jihads becoming facilitators and becoming supporters, pushing the agenda even if they don't join the latest jihad themselves. So we're going to run our panel as Q&A. I'm going to do a couple of rounds and then open it up to all of you. And I'm going to start with Will McCants. So we've seen ISIS take incredible losses, 57% of the territory in Iraq, almost 30% of the territory now in Syria, 40% total in the caliphate. So my first question is, were there ISIS? How does this play out? What does the conflict look like? And looking as much forward as you can. Thank you. And first of all, Robin, congratulations to you and your team for pulling this together. We spent days arguing with each other, and the fact that she was able to distill it down to this is remarkable. It's also remarkable to see how far the star of ISIS has fallen from its high point of just two years ago. Remember when it declared its caliphate, so-called, in the summer of 2014, it controlled the lives of some 5 million people, a territory estimated to be the size of the United Kingdom, a war chest, some estimated at $2 billion to go from that high to this low of having lost nearly half its territory. It's the two poles in the tent of the ISIS caliphate, Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, are both under extreme duress. And the organization itself is crumbling. It has taken a beating. The US intelligence estimate that circulated in the news last week was something on the level of 50,000 ISIS fighters have died to put that in context. US casualties, fatalities in the Vietnam War were about 58,000. So it's approaching that level. Think of the shock that sent through the American political system, you have to anticipate something similar is happening in ISIS. The more its territory shrinks, the smaller its tax base, the less money it can pay fighters. So all of the death and the dwindling salaries mean that there is going to be a lot of infighting in the organization. And it's telling that Baghdadi himself had to issue a rare statement calling on his fighters to stand and fight in Mosul because the worry was that some of them were going to bleed away. And they have stood firm. Nobody thinks they will hold the territory in the long term, but they're fighting for it now. So signs look good in terms of the organizations crumbling in Syria and Iraq as a state led, as a government. I don't think anybody certainly not in our group anticipates that the organization will just fade away if it loses its main cities. It will remain a fierce insurgency. The politics, the underlying politics in Syria and Iraq cut against an easy settlement of this conflict. And ISIS will be there to explore it. And the history of the organization tells us something about what it is going to do in the near term in Syria and Iraq. When it was beaten as an insurgency in 2008, it still remained one of the world's most formidable terror organization and killed, according to one estimate, something like 2,000 people in the intervening three years before it appeared in the open again. 2,000 people who had participated in the Anbar awakenings, and this was ISIS preparing the ground again for a comeback. This is also the period when you had a number of prison breaks to free personnel and high-profile terror attacks to stay in the forefront of the minds of the global jihadist community so it could continue to recruit. So one anticipates that the organization will attempt something similar in the coming years if it loses its government in the Sunni hinterland between Syria and Iraq. We'll come back to that in a minute then. One of the most interesting trends we talked about was the evolution of al-Qaeda, once the vanguard of Sunni jihadism, and how it's jockeying once again for primacy, and how its long game may end up proving more durable than the ISIS plan. And so I want to ask David, let's take a look at al-Qaeda. What happens to it? How does this play out? Particularly given that ISIS appears to be losing territory and the kind of momentum it's dominated the jihadist scene for the last couple of years, but that's fading. What happens and what's al-Qaeda doing? And looking forward particularly. First of all, Robin, just as Will did, I'd like to congratulate you on a remarkable report. I've been a part of a number of working groups and based on past experience tend to avoid them like the plague. In this case, I wanted to take part because of my belief in you and I'm not disappointed. I think it's a tremendous final product. You mentioned a trend towards increasing extremism over time. I'd certainly divide extremism between strategic extremism and extremism in use of tactics. I think that ISIS and al-Qaeda are basically equally extreme in terms of their long-term vision, but ISIS has by far the more brutal tactics. Now, Will said and I agree entirely that ISIS's star has fallen dramatically. I would contend that the fall of ISIS's star was eminently predictable. And we know this because this is what I've been saying for the past couple of years and I know that al-Qaeda certainly saw the same thing. ISIS's strategy, just put bluntly, was terrible. Their strategy was to make enemies, then make more enemies, then continue to make enemies. They immediately betrayed the various groups who were part of their coalition, groups like Jay Shrijaal, Tara Khattanakshbandiya, or JRTN, who they started to round up almost immediately after their offensive that took ground in Iraq. They attacked groups who weren't at war with them, such as the Kurdish regional government, which opened up new fronts. They tried to commit genocide against groups that were militarily irrelevant, like the Yazidis, and that drew in increasing resources to the fight against ISIS. So I'll kind of saw it coming. And part of what they did was played off of two different factors that were gripping the region. One was the rise of ISIS. They would play up ISIS's strength, ironically, just as ISIS was playing up their own strength. There's a really interesting interview that I encourage everyone to look at, which was given to the Guardian last summer. In this interview, Abu Qatada, Abu Muhammad al-Makdisi, who were both out of prison, talked about how al-Qaeda had been destroyed by ISIS. Basically, that Zawahiri had already lost control of al-Qaeda, and then ISIS came along, and al-Qaeda was splintered apart. Now, one could see at the time that al-Qaeda was in a very strong position. They controlled territory in multiple countries. Their comeback was very clear, but Abu Qatada and Makdisi were talking about how their organization had been splintered. It was in line with a lot of the narratives coming out of analytic communities in the West, but just a brilliant psi-up on their part. They also played off of the Iran-GCC competition, and continue to do so to this day. The Syria conflict, a large part of that story, is the conflict between Iran and the GCC, with, of course, Assad being aligned with Iran, and GCC states helping to support the opposition, including the opposition that's dominated by al-Qaeda. Yes, al-Qaeda is making a comeback, and we can see that across multiple theaters. We can see that in the Syria, where one of the consensus views in this group with very divergent opinions on some issues was that Jabhat Fatah Asham, or the successor of Nusrah, didn't have any sort of real split from al-Qaeda. Now, what their nominal split will do to the organization can be debated, but ultimately, the group agreed that there are still links between them. They're one of the strongest militant factions in Syria today. There's Yemen, where al-Qaeda continues to control territory along the coastline hundreds of miles. There's Libya, where, within the group, people didn't agree on the extent of connection between groups like the Derna Mujahideen Shira Council, or the Benghazi Revolutionary Brigade, and al-Qaeda Central, but they certainly do proclaim connections to them. Then there's Mali and Somalia, in both of which you have an increasing insurgency, where al-Qaeda is at the center of it. In Somalia, it's their affiliate Shabaab. But the biggest factor to me, in addition to the fact that we can see this comeback on the ground, is the fact that al-Qaeda can just operate far more openly now than it ever has before. The receiving state support in Syria, this isn't even obscured, and in other places like Yemen, Libya, they're able to control territory without anybody really being particularly bothered by it. A lot of the charity organizations, the networks that the U.S. and others worked so hard to shut down just after 9-11 that we're helping al-Qaeda, are essentially back in business, and that there are organizations now, which are giving aid to this jihadist group, and it's happening in the open. This is something that the new administration is going to have to deal with, and I think we're not that far from this being something that media catches up to and starts to say, oh my God, al-Qaeda is operating openly again. Can I ask you just for one minute to talk about how al-Qaeda has deployed a lot of the officials who were in Afghanistan and Pakistan and embedded them with local groups, and that's one of the most important things in understanding why Nusrah's strategy, how it's been effective, and why it hasn't really separated from al-Qaeda. Because this is really a tremendously important strategy that hasn't been widely recognized, I think, in the outside world. Absolutely. The most prominent example of this in Syria is the Chorus on Group, which is a group of al-Qaeda senior leaders who are called the Chorus on Group because they moved in from South Asia, the region which al-Qaeda refers to as the Chorus on Region. They were embedded with a few different organizations, including Nusrah, Ahwar-e-Sham, and continue to operate Syria to this day. One thing that I think is an important trend about al-Qaeda leadership is often when we talk about al-Qaeda corps, al-Qaeda senior leadership, we think of them as being confined to South Asia, but increasingly it's geographically diffuse in places like Syria, places like Yemen. You've seen very prominent examples, including in Yemen, the late Nasr al-Wahashi was serving as the deputy commander of al-Qaeda at the same time that he was also an official within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That's a trend and one that potentially provides much greater ability for al-Qaeda corps to provide guidance to multiple affiliates at the same time. Well, that's a logical segue to Fred. It's very interesting. ISIS has 37 provinces, as they like to call them, in eight different countries. Al-Qaeda, and of course most of them are very, most of them, not all of them, are fairly young. Al-Qaeda has five transnational branches. And so I'd be very interested in having you take a look at how important are these franchises in it for the future of jihadism. We saw recently in Libya, a country you spent a lot of time in, that ISIS first colony has actually kind of disappeared. So the question is, how do they regroup when none of us are going to write them off? And how central is the central leadership in determining what the strategy is? Because my sense is that this was a movement that, until two years ago, ISIS and al-Qaeda were the same thing. And now they're effectively rivals for influence. They're scrambling to try to get more and more of their own affiliates to build up their profiles. So talk a little bit about the franchises and their role in their future. Well, I think the affiliates are increasingly important. And the center of gravity, as the report concludes, is shifting to the affiliates. But I think this distinction between affiliates in the center, as David mentioned, is becoming blurred because of the dispersal of leadership, of power. The affiliates are the reach. They're the global reach. They lend expertise, fighters, funds to what would otherwise be very, very localized insurgencies. So in that respect, they're incredibly important. From a U.S. policy perspective, they're only as important as we deem the certain countries where they are important, and certain fronts. So again, if an affiliate emerges in a fairly remote location is contained, obviously there's questions about plotting and this sort of thing. But within the sort of hierarchy of interest, we have to make that determination. I think we have to distinguish between aspirational versus the actual, in the sense that we've seen multiple instances where the brand is exported to a certain locale, to a certain front. But it's tempered by local realities. In Al Qaeda, there's numerous lessons learned about this, from the Horn of Africa to elsewhere. They run into certain local realities in the insurgency, whether tribes, whether sociological symptoms, various political realities that shape their strategy and their targeting. So again, this embedding can only get them so far. Again, in terms of a place like Libya, again, it responded to a Libyan context. Why did it emerge where it did insert? Because it was a seam area. This is what I like to call a seam area, where there's a locale that falls between two certain political blocks, whether Mosul, whether Sinai, northern Nigeria. These are the real areas of growth for the affiliates. Again, I think in terms of their determination of strategy, we've seen multiple cases where it's bounded by these local factors. Let me ask you to kind of take a look at Al Qaeda versus ISIS. Which group has more effective franchises? Maybe talk about some of the ones you think are the most dangerous looking into the future? Which have the most potential? We've seen, for example, the Sinai province shot down the metro jet, the Russian metro jet. I'm trying to think of the other one that's higher profile. But talk about the ones, kind of compare them and their potential. Well, I think our report concludes that Al Qaeda has the more durable, sustainable franchise strategy. I mean this reconfiguration of their brand, I mean post-Arkawi, Maktisi, with Ansara Sharia, we saw it in Libya that rested on using political flexibility as a virtue where they would form these alliances with different militias, focus on Dawah first. This attempt at moderation, I think, does lend them some sustainability. But it's also a liability, I think, in terms of, and the report addresses this. If you dilute your Jihadist project so much and you become so localized, that impacts your ability to form a sovereign state, to conduct operations. You have to make sort of compromises with local groups. It creates dissent within the leadership. So, again, Al Qaeda, I think, is a long-term threat to regional order. It's going to be with us for a long time as is Jihadism as a project. But from a policy perspective, we have to determine. Again, this country-first approach versus transnational. And where does Al Qaeda fit into that? Look, the report says so many of the leadership from these different groups have come from Egyptians. I'm very worried about the Egyptian affiliate. I'm very worried about Sinai. Again, what did it start as? A localized Bedouin insurgency, the product of peripheral marginalization. It was very quickly hijacked, embedded by this transnational group that now is shooting down airliners. The CC regime approach is, I think, very counterproductive. We can talk about that later. AQAP is going to be with us as well. I mean, the carving out of territory that David mentioned. Al Qaeda, the Arabian Peninsula. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes. I think that's very worrisome given what we know about their leadership that some of their leadership has actually subsumed the Al Qaeda-essential leadership. One of the things that David mentioned, I should have pointed out, is that Al Qaeda, because of the brutality of ISIS, comes away looking as more, I hate to use the word moderate, but more willing to work within systems and not simply kill everybody around them. Now, it doesn't mean they have different goals down the road, but the fact is that suddenly Al Qaeda attracts people who are interested in Jihad but don't necessarily want to kill everybody. Let me turn to Hassan. As I mentioned earlier, ISIS and Al Qaeda were one movement until 2014, and they pose complementary threats now to global security. So my fourth question is, whether Jihadism generally, how does this trend evolve? We've been surprised over and over again for all the energy and time and resources we pour into this, into understanding it. If you're looking down the road, five years, 10 years, how do you see Jihadism evolve and what are the issues that trigger it? Absolutely. I agree with Fred. He just mentioned that Jihadism is here to stay, and I completely agree with that. I think the wave is in favor of Jihadism. Even if Jihadists lose the war, as ISIS might be losing the war now, but I think Jihadism will win in the same way that Islam is over the past few decades, won the war in the sense that their narrative, their appeal, their relevance is still there, and it's still entrenched. Even if Muslim Brotherhood organization didn't make it to power or they lost power or they were challenged by, or their power was limited. I follow the intellectual debate or the side of Jihadism as well as how the groups operate and what these groups do on the ground. The word he just mentioned about moderation, how Abkhai, for example, present themselves as a moderate group. I remember about two years ago there was a full report of kind of a very long, just pasted, I think, Jihadist article saying actually going back to 2012 and narrating, talking about how Jihadism became irrelevant in 2012 and 2011 with the Arab revolts. And they say it was, you know, Jihadists across the world. This is like an insider talking. They felt under threat, they felt that they're no longer as relevant as they wanted to be. And then he continues, he said with the rise of ISIS and kind of also Islamists, our spring, we started to see another trend which is one extreme like ISIS conducting their kind of, or kind of trying to reach power through savagery and through brutal tactics. And you have Islamists who also sold the cause, you know, people who were trying to get to power. They are politically engaged but they're not getting anywhere. And he said, Abkhai saw an opening there again. And they said they start to present themselves as wassity, as moderate, as intermediate, as a kind of a middle way movement. And they say we started to kind of push towards that, to present ourselves as a way, a middle way between ISIS and Islamists. And that was actually, that worked for a while. And that's why you started to see that kind of cyclical or cycle of analysis where also academics were saying, sorry, Al-Qaeda was dead in 2012. People wrote books about that, saying Al-Qaeda was done. And then later you started to see another trend of saying Al-Qaeda is rising again or Al-Qaeda is stronger than ever before. And then with the rise of ISIS, people started to say the rise of ISIS is actually an opportunity for us because that means Al-Qaeda is going to be weakened and is going to be uprooted by this new trend, which is easier to deal with because it's so brutal so people can actually rally against it. But I think, to go back to your question, I think there is a danger in there, which is not to see these two groups in as two threats, different threats that benefit from different spaces and they're going to continue to thrive despite the different constraints and despite also their rivalry. ISIS, for example, their strategy is Nicaea and they have proven Nicaea, which is a word that they use, which means a war of attrition. I think it's similar to a war of attrition. And Al-Qaeda also uses a word that is similar, but it means kind of a gradual popularization of the idea of jihad. So they're really working on two fronts and these two fronts, unless you deal with the two fronts at the same time, you're not going to deal with these two threats down the road. And Nicaea, for example, the ISIS strategy worked in Iraq. Back like just a decade ago, you had numerous jihadists or Islamists or even nationalist insurgent groups that represent Sunnis. If you're a Sunni, you have diverse options. If you're a Sunni and believe in violence, you have a diverse choices, a diverse kind of diversity of choices. Today, you don't have except ISIS. If you're a Sunni in Iraq who doesn't believe in the political system, who is opposed to the Iranian kind of hegemony in Iraq, who doesn't believe that you need to work with the Kurds and so on and so forth, you only have ISIS, right? And this is reality. This is what Iraqis talk about. And this is why ISIS is more comfortable today to pursue violence in the same way as much as they want, because they know that even if they lose ground, they're going to go back and there's a vacuum they can fill anytime they want. Al-Qaeda, at the same time, is pursuing this kind of quiet front where they can embed with other organizations. They can come, flash, they can look different. They don't have to be looking like Al-Qaeda. That's what Al-Qaeda in Syria is doing. That's what Al-Qaeda in Yemen is doing. And I worry that every time you find a place where Al-Qaeda is quiet, know that it's more dangerous than noisy Al-Qaeda. And that's why I think people exaggerate when they say Al-Qaeda in Syria is the most successful organization. I think the most successful organization or maybe dangerous or something I don't know about, it might be even more dangerous or less dangerous than I think, is the one in Yemen, maybe also in Libya. So I think to just conclude, we kind of, we have to look at the two threats or the two organizations as two fronts and you have to deal with them differently. Yeah. I mean, one of the things we point out in the report is that they both ultimately want the same thing and that's creation of a caliphate. They just go about it in terms of different strategies. Al-Qaeda is for building up and educating a Muslim population so that they eventually willfully or willingly embrace the idea of a caliphate, whereas ISIS goes in and is going to impose a caliphate and kill anybody who disagrees. And so ultimately they represent the same kind of threat. Back to Will, one of the things that was very striking about our report was how we found how diverse jihadism has become and that it's not just Al-Qaeda and ISIS. It's not just the dangerous duo. It's also the kind of diversity, for example, there are those who invoke the globalist jihadi rhetoric and there are others who invoke just the local, the country first as we call them. And so there's a diversity in terms of where your priority is, what your focus is, what your resource base is. And there's also something, it's a really important term to understand in the future of jihadism and that's the term marble or marbling. And this is the intersection of global jihadi groups with local jihadi groups and the relationships ebb and flow, they cut in and out like marbling as is strategically or financially expedient. So maybe you can kind of explain both trends and how that's changing the face of jihadism. Right, I want to pick up a thread that Hassan mentioned and that is what the world looked like before 2011 if you were a jihadist. It didn't look good. It did not look like things were going your way and this is when Obama's administration made the very confident assessment that they have beat Al-Qaeda strategically. It looks laughable now, but at the time that organization and others had not been able to make many inroads because the Middle East and North Africa was largely stable. Fast forward to three years later when the wheels come off the bus. All of this state failure in the region has really been the fuel and the engine that is driving the jihadist resurgence and in many ways has provided the grotesque laboratory for the Darwinian experiment that leads to the hybridization or the marbling as Robin says, where you see different groups in a theater of conflict who are experimenting and they're positioning themselves against one another, against a regime, against competitors. The longer those conflicts go on, the more diversity you have of course and some of these experiments succeed wildly for a time and others fail and then you will have a complete reversal and what's happened because of these conflicts over the last five years in so many different theaters at the same time is that you've had a tremendous amount of diversity in the jihadist community that has resulted. So you have the global jihadists who are serious about their taking on the far enemy as it were. For example, Al Qaeda Central still carries that flag but itself has also really pushed the local stuff whereas under Ben Laden it was de-emphasized. So now they have a hybrid that they've worked with. ISIS speaks the global jihadist language but for a long time just focus on the local stuff but it has now been pushed to expand globally partly because it is trying to cope with this onset and alleviate pressure on itself. Then you have groups like Ahar Al-Sham in Syria which uses a lot of the same rhetoric as the global jihadists but they have disavowed the global jihad. They say we're only fighting for nationalist goals, we're focused only in Syria, we don't have broader ambitions, you have a variety of Ansar groups in different countries that also speak the language of global jihad but are focused locally. So you have this broad spectrum now of groups that use a variety of tactics and strategy in response to the turmoil that they are confronting and the problem that presents to policymakers and especially to the incoming administration is who do you deal with? Do you go and fight everyone? Is it a war on all fronts? Do you have the resources to do that and what does a real fight look like? Is it just using special forces and air power or is it a more sustained commitment on the ground and which enemies do you want to make? I mean what's being contemplated right now among some in the Trump orbit is even going after the Muslim Brotherhood which parts of the organization have dabbled with violence, many parts of the organization have not. These are difficult questions that are going to confront the incoming administration because it is it is one hard to determine what the real priorities of many of these jihadist groups are because their rhetoric is confusing and even if you can determine it through careful analysis or intelligence do you want to pick that fight preemptively or do you want to wait for them to come to you and there are dozens hundreds of these groups now and each one will require its own careful assessment and by the time the bureaucracy is able to render a verdict those groups will have splintered there will be a new cast of characters that the situation Robin is moving so quickly and the diversity in this marbling that you're talking about is happening so fast it's difficult for a large government like the United States to respond nimbly and with the right set of priorities. One of the best examples of marbling is actually the newsrefront in Syria this is a group that emerged when seven Syrians were dispatched by Baghdadi Baghdadi to Syria to form a kind of logistic cell and it became its own little branch and it ultimately broke away from ISIS because it wanted to focus locally and it believed that the first task was ousting Assad not carrying out ISIS agenda so it pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda and along the way that became so volatile in terms of achieving the kind of cooperation they needed with local Syrian groups that in I think it was July, June or July this year it rebranded itself and took a new name and said it's not involved in any with any external groups well it was all a sham because at the end of the day al-Qaeda had embedded a two dozen at least two dozen of their own leaders in with Nusrah the United States killed two of them this fall in airstrikes and so this is this ebb and flow the ability of these groups to morph and evolve and adapt in ways that we often can't keep up with and we saw it happen yet again this weekend with our al-asham so Davide let me let me ask you Sunni extremist extremist movements have proliferated at a time that governments across the the region are weaker or are frail and the traditional forms of authority the traditional forms of identity are being redefined or challenges and so as as a result the region both politically and physically is vulnerable so looking ahead how does this intersection between frail states and jihadism play out how does it shape the future well first of all let me congratulate the panel on its restraint for talking about nationalism versus globalism in the jihadist context without referencing domestic politics so the question is that wasn't our agenda will the weakening states make ices great again and the answer is maybe you know look the trend towards weakening states in the regions we're talking about north africa and the middle east in particular as well as sub-saharan africa is not going to reverse you have clear ecological problems and if you just look at satellite images of africa you can see within a few years the degree to which desertification has massively increased in the continent lay on top of that political systems that aren't working particularly well corruption is endemic and even when you have new governments come into power who want to clear out that corruption it's very difficult to do due to path dependency nigeria is a very good example of that where it's hard to disentangle past mistakes past corruption you have financial crises which are gripping the regions but also obviously gripping western states which makes it much more difficult to step in with aid one thing i focus on and something we talk about in the report is internet penetration obviously the rise of ices the mass mobilization that came so quickly which robin referred to in her opening remarks is tied to their facility with the internet but in these critical regions internet penetration remains very low it's in africa right now 29 percent it's 53 percent in the middle east and about 27 percent i believe in south asia more and more people are going to get online one thing that's really interesting is going back to social science in the 1990s which talked about the impact of computer mediated communication you know back then in the 1990s and you had about 14 percent internet penetration in the us in 1995 back then people were studying chat groups where people could go online and talk about the fact that they were gay or that they were anorexic or that they were white nationalists and in all of those cases all three of those though they're very different have one thing in common which is that all of them are what you could call marginalized and concealable identities marginalized and that they're frowned upon by society and concealable and that you can't tell looking at somebody that they're a white nationalist or that they're anorexic or that they're gay you can tell if someone's a member of a racial minority group but not those other identities and so if you look at the identities that have been brought out you know both in the jihadist sphere and beyond you know recent attention being focused on white nationalism and you know globally you can see very similar phenomena where mobilization to these various causes becomes easier now i think that when we when we look at at violent extremism today and use of the internet we tend to look at it through the frame of isis mobilizing you're also going to see other movements mobilizing in africa and the middle east which aren't people in those countries aren't accustomed to i think lgbt identity is going to be one because that's the logic of computer mediated communication people will be more outspoken about minority sexual identities in a number of countries that aren't used to that atheism in my view is going to be another you're going to see traditional identities increasingly threatened furthermore social media makes it far easier to to destabilize the government to make it harder to govern you know i was in southern africa and in namibia late last year when you had south africa city shut down by protests against a rise in university phase and i had the privilege of talking to some old anti-apartheid activists who said you know there was no comparison at all like the speed of mobilization to protest apartheid was so much less than the speed of mobilization to protest an increase in university fees and that's because of different media right on the one hand against apartheid you'd mobilize house to house it was very slow against university fees you could just throw up a hashtag and people will come out and they can shut down entire cities so the the whole process the whole mechanism of combating violent extremism and how violent extremist mobilized is going to look so much more complex in a short period of time because you're not just going to have violent extremist mobilization but debates are going to be racking countries in these regions at the same time that governance becomes more difficult that governments become weaker and isis al-qaeda jihadism in my view looking forward about 10 years has to be understood against that increasingly complex backdrop interesting we're going to open up to questions in just a minute but i i want to ask both one last one for both hasan and fred and i'm going to skip to hasan because we're going to pick up on on the what we call the drivers or the the conditions that enable jihadism and we talked about a lot of them in the report there's six major ones whether it's ideology or in some cases the absence of alternative ideologies demographics uh technology that david's already covered the issue of foreign intervention and the we found a direct correlation between the level of foreign intervention and the response and the growth of jihadism can you talk a little bit about what you what factors you think are particularly important in looking down the road the drivers that will enable or spur or inspire jihadism down the road thank you i i i'll blame david for bringing the domestic analogy but i think isis kind of especially if we're focused on isis the kind of the mantra that isis has is similar to sunnis over the past century have been have not been winning they're they're they're losing on our own fronts and they say even though they're the the vast majority 90 percent of the exactly yeah that's the air world that's a key uh key thing there and they say if you join us you would be you would be winning so much you'll you know you'll be tired of winning and i think that's that's really kind of the what defines isis narrative over the past uh you know a few years and if you go back for example to the to the post 2008 when they were defeated in iraq and i think this period is very important uh and everyone has done you know uh work on that uh because it it will tell us what's going to happen next and one of the things we mentioned in the report this uh this strategy of isis called in hyaz or retreat into the desert and they say uh they have been talking about it for seven seven months now right since may they've been talking about that we this is what what this is our fallback strategy we can lose a cert we can lose muslim we can lose rakka but we're going to go back to the desert and when in palmyra just a few in the yesterday is an example of that that's what isis can and cannot do but to go back to that kind of 2008 isis launched a campaign similar or isis kind of virgin of degrade and ultimately destroy the iraqi uh state and they they launched that campaign through a campaign of terror they say when we retreated into the desert we went to the unbarred desert we left behind what they call in arabic mafares amni or security agents uh sleeper cells uh kind of thing and they said we went back we went after everyone who had fought us uh with the with the americans with the iraqi government uh these are sunni uh insurgents uh that were the the awakening councils members and they said we started that campaign of degrading and really going after all the people who who who posed a threat to us and will pose a threat to us and then they said when we in 2014 when we came back and took musul uh we had uh like a major space major vacuum to operate in and there were no uh there were not enough sunni uh rivals to really push us back and that's why the americans and the iraqi government had to bring people from the south from elsewhere to really fight in feluja and to creed and in musul uh now rather than from musul feluja and to creed and i and i think this is this is the this is uh one of the driver this is one of the drives which is that isis presents itself as an alternative as an option for sunnis al qaeda does does the same but does it more smartly uh through uh the kind of engagement with the with the populace uh and so on and so forth but the just to name the six drivers we uh the kind of the six factors the isis uh uh you know enabled isis rise which is the kind of that campaign of degradation the prison breaks prison breaks were also an important thing isis uses prisons the same also a way that jihadists use prisons for indoctrination of kind of uh creating the the ideological monsters that we see in the middle east also another factor was the policies that noor and maliki the the previous uh prime minister of iraq followed in iraq which is kind of a sectarian uh type of uh of policies uh he went after the sunni politicians uh who would otherwise kind of create an alternative for sunnis to be part of the iraqi government and then he had also the withdrawal of the american troops that was a major factor because the americans withdrew at a time when the iraqi government already was degrading was eroding and and the sunni uh sunni fighters who fought isis also started to go away and then the last factor was the syrian uprising um and you all know the kind of the rest of the story enabled isis to go back from iraq to syria and from syria back into iraq thanks uh i just wanted to point out the one thing that struck me having been through the region this fall is how uh the sunnis who've dominated whether it's through monarchies or autocratic rule the Arab world for 14 centuries now feel like the new shiites they feel marginalized and it struck me everywhere i went uh talking to whether it was shakes or um the young that they said there's there's no leadership uh we don't there's not a country that we look at an ideology as an alternative an individual there's this vacuum and that's i think one of the most important drivers uh and this prison phenomena can't be underrated it really is huge in in taking kids who may have been you know on the margins may have been picked up for some minor crime and they uh uh they get exposed to people who they think will protect them um i do want to leave some time for questions so just uh uh fred if you could deal our last question and that is in six weeks we have a new administration taking office and it will inherit an incredibly complex array of challenges in this world of jihadism can you give us some of the considerations that it is going to have to factor in when it takes office right i mean one of the virtues of the report is that it identifies um you know terrorism is ultimately and fundamentally a political you know strategy so counterterrorism has to be connected to to politics um and in that sense our strategy in the region the strategy of the incoming administration has to be connected to um to regional realities and and i think the first consideration is an appreciation to the for the fundamental um tumult that's going on in this region it's unprecedented um perhaps we haven't seen it since 67 perhaps earlier the post ottoman era this is a region that's that's collapsing on itself for uh civil wars collapsed states um a shrinking space for for civil society the the states that are still standing in the region are under tremendous pressure we're entering i think what we can call the post rontier era an era of low oil prices so their resources to deal with the tremendous societal demands that are bubbling up from below are are limited they haven't realized the game yet they haven't figured out what to do next the biggest population displacement since world war two we're we're creating a huge crisis of dislocation and we don't know what the full effects of that will be generationally so these are tremendous realities the rising sectarianism that you mentioned the cold war between um iran and and Saudi Arabia now with that in mind i would just you know put forward another principle and that's that context matters um our report talks about the very localized you know drivers the localized constraints aren't rng hot ism so sweeping pronouncements about certain groups sweeping prescriptions i think will be fundamentally counterproductive and that goes to the point that that will raise about the brotherhood i mean the brotherhood is ultimately an expression of certain realities from which it emerged so it's different in Egypt it's different in Syria it's different in Tunisia it's a product of very political culture that's behavior and so that that granularity i think is is absolutely essential the third consideration again it it may seem tried it may seem basic but i'm going to put it out there it's not about Islam again a lot of ink spilled on this from my perspective this focus on ideology this focus on promoting the correct form of Islam is a boon to certain authoritarian actors in the region that can suddenly advance certain programs whether surveillance of mosques whether putting forward certain clerical figures who really don't have much credibility in the first place while ignoring the hard tasks of reform and restructuring their societies restructuring their rule addressing the fundamental drivers of discontent so again be wary of this this focus on our moderate Islam the fourth one is this buzzword of local ownership it's not simply about local ownership it has to be about local ownership with this long term focus on our governance many states would be more than happy to own the terrorism problem because they're often using it instrumentally to secure their own rule they're going after legitimate political dissent and then there's the question of partnership that will raise who do we actually partner with in these states that are collapsing do we partner with the Kurds do we partner with the Masrottin militias who attack CERC and what are the follow-on challenges that that present to state cohesion and and and state unity i think the report also very nicely emphasizes policy realism and and if i was to urge the administration to read a book well there's many books i would i would urge them to read wills and others and of course yours but there's one it's an older book it's not on terrorism it's by laurence freedman called a choice of enemies and it's about the u.s experience in the middle east and listen to that title a choice of enemies we've been confronted through that for this you know for for centuries and so policy realism are we going to go after all the al-qaeda affiliates all the brown are we going to defeat jihadism as a lifestyle as a counterculture as a profession no we're not we're not going to defeat um illiberalism we're not going to defeat defeat radicalism so again prioritization the last one and again there's another great sentence in the in the report i would like to claim credit for it but i i don't think it was mine the jihadist agenda will be defined by western intervention or western action again the conflicts that have opened up in the region that have attracted jihadism were often of the consequence of of of western intervention and there's another piece that i would i would raise going back to this this sort of fundamental this classic article of terrorism 1975 david fromkin's article in foreign affairs the strategy of terrorism when this was first arising he again terrorism is a strategy designed to provoke an adversary into doing something that is against their interests so i think that's absolutely fundamental to to remember we only have five minutes for questions so why don't we take two and we'll um uh and we'll get the group to respond the their microphones on the side so i think marina's got her hand up right let's take one from marina and one down here okay thank you for a very interesting discussion i'd like the panel to address the issue of the medium term strategies or likely strategies of this organization because it's easier to understand the short run and you have talked a lot about this in this post post ISIS caliphate period the long term as you said is the creation of a real caliphate that they can last and so on but how do you go from this present phase of reorganization of withdrawing to the desert of recruiting of finding ways for this organization to work or not work together in different ways to the goal of getting to a caliphate in other words what is the next step okay and let's take he has a question let's take them both thank you very much um my question is kind of going back on talking about social media and kind of what uh mr garden steen ross and others were talking about about self isolating or like communities that find them find other like kind of hidden members through social media um kind of comparing that with what we've seen in the recent american elections where we have like uh so-called like a red feed and a blue feed when it comes to political parties and how those are kind of mutually like almost radicalizing uh what do you think what is your question do you think that that kind of phenomenon will happen in uh as different jihadist groups are competing for uh competing for legitimacy are we going to see extremism we've only got three minutes to answer so um will you want to take the first one yep uh so it's interesting i think in the mid term it it seems that in some ways al-qaeda and isis have switched positions in in terms of focus of of attack for isis i think the priority once they lose their government will be attacks abroad to try and stay in the jihadist public eye to continue momentum to continue to recruit conversely as david's talked about i think for al-qaeda particularly among the affiliates it's a strategy of trying to blend in not getting the notice of the united states as a strategy for trying to advance their political objectives in the region great debbie do you want to take the second part on sure in terms of uh different jihadist or extremist feeds absolutely we can see that happening for a variety of reasons but i'd say the the biggest reason is the expulsion of militant groups especially isis from twitter on twitter it was very easy for isis to talk to non jihadist but also for jihadist to talk to each other now with the migration to telegram you'll have channels that are dedicated to a group as opposed to the cross pollination that's at least um a short to medium term trend it's possible that you'll have other platforms emerge that are more open for jihadists to communicate with each other uh i want to thank my panelists co-panelists for just an extraordinary conversation and a really enlightening report there are copies for all of you on the front table anyone who'd like to see it please join me in thanking will david tre and hasan good morning everyone we're we're a little bit ahead of schedule actually our next panel is supposed to start at 10 30 but please stay i see a lot of people getting up to leave right now um so my name is georgia holmer i'm the director of cv here at usip and in our next panel we're going to be focusing explicitly on efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism so our previous panel made very clear how interconnected and fluid and complex and indeed marbled the relationships are between many of these extremist groups in the middle east and north africa and really the scope of their reach and impact and the complexity of the dynamics that enable them and they spoke a little bit about the fragility and the weakening states that really enable these groups to thrive so how do we stay ahead of the curve then how do we support a comprehensive and sustainable strategy given the complexity and the politicized nature of both the threat and our capacity to respond to it we're very fortunate this morning to have a have several distinguished experts with us on our panel and i just need your patience while they join us they're getting their microphones on right now so we've just wait two minutes and they should be coming shortly unfortunately did not plan a song and dance interlude for you for this unexpected break in our program so please bear with us just a moment um my title is director of countering violent extremism and usip has is very focused on violent extremism as being a significant driver of conflict as being a component of a lot of the conflict we deal with and we've spent a lot of resources and energy on understanding how a lot of these violent extremist groups actually intersect with some of the more traditional sectarian conflicts that we deal with and a lot of our work is very much focused on determining what peacebuilding methodologies and by that a lot of the the traditional tools that we have in our peacebuilding book box like dialogue and reform and police especially police reform conflict resolution skills are tailored and applied for cve purposes and cve objectives and this is something we've been exploring and trying to do is in an innovative and creative way as possible over the past couple of years and we have some very interesting learning coming out from these interventions which we'll share with you at another time for your patience so we had a little bit of a delay there and grateful for the musical interlude that we had all right well we're very fortunate this morning to have a very distinguished panel of experts with us to discuss what's worked and what where we need to continue to improve in our effort to develop effective and smart and sustainable approaches to this ever-evolving threat of violent extremism. I'd like to start by introducing Amy Pope who is the deputy assistant to the president and the department of homeland security advisor on the national security council staff of the white house. We are still expecting undersecretary Sarah Sewell that she hasn't yet arrived but hopefully she'll join us and I'll introduce her when she does come. Shannon Green is the director and senior fellow of the human rights initiative at the center for strategic and international studies and last but not least we have Eric Rizand who's the director of the prevention project and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings institution. So let's start the second half of the discussion. You know we're all very aware of expansion of U.S. institutions and policy and legislation and strategies that emerged in response to 9-11 but we really have witnessed the second wave of effort focused on prevention in the past two years. One that really represents a paradigm shift in our approach to addressing violent extremism which has an emphasis on addressing root causes that looks to reduce the appeal of recruitment and vulnerability to radicalization. The White House summit on CVE in February 2015 and the United Nations plan of action on preventing violent extremism which was issued in 2016 really represent pivotal events in advancing and consolidating this more comprehensive and prevention focused approach to this issue. Spoke let's start with you. Can you help us understand how our approach to the challenge of violent extremism has evolved in this past administration? What are some of the central features of it? First of all thank you for having me here. It's a real pleasure to be here and to discuss this important conversation at such a pivotal moment in our history and I want to thank all of you who are here to listen in. It's important that we have a well-informed community of people talking through these issues. I'd say there are a number of ways in which the president's strategy on countering violent extremism has evolved over the past eight years. First is the recognition that countering violent extremism is an important part of our response to terrorism. That our response to terrorism can't just be focused on what we're doing in theater outside of the United States. It can't just be focused on bombs and intelligence collection that we really need to address the root causes of what's happening with terrorism and that's really the idea behind what we're doing here. It's to identify what causes people to radicalize to violence, what's behind it and what can responsible governments and communities do about it. So over the course of the past eight years we've seen the first ever development of a strategy on violent extremism and that really focused on communities as being at the heart of the solution. That governments acting alone are not trusted actors all of the time. They certainly do not have all of the information they need to respond to the problem and that our best response is one that's comprehensive. Secondly what we've seen happen is recognition that as we take on the issues of terrorism more broadly even globally that we have to incorporate this concept into the work we're doing. That's why I'm particularly proud of what we did with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2178. That Security Council Resolution was really focused on fighting on dealing with the issue of foreign fighters but what we did was we explicitly recognize that it's not just about exchanging intelligence it's not just about exchanging information between governments about our borders. It really needs to be about sharing best practices identifying ways to counter the root causes of extremism in the first place and so this was something the United States put forward it's something that we've advocated continually but it's a recognition that this needs to be a global solution to a major problem. Welcome Under Secretary Sewell thank you for joining us that's okay we we're talking about CVE no surprise good I'm in the right place you're in the right on the right panel and you've really been very instrumental in advancing this agenda around CVE in your tenure here at the Department of State. I think well we'd like to ask you is since the White House summit in 2015 what do you see as the biggest gains that we've made and where do you see we need room for improvement in advancing this this particular approach to the problem of violent extremism? Well thanks for the question. I think I'll talk about a couple of different elements in which I think we've made enormous progress but I want to really emphasize how tentative this is given the scope of the problem and the generational nature of the threat and so I'm very proud of the steps that this administration has made and I think there's a lot more that can be done to institutionalize this going forward most specifically since the White House summit I think we've seen a real focusing on both the policy and the programmatic aspects of international support for CVE partners and those partners are different than the partners we've typically worked with on the CT side so in addition to working with states whose actions have to be carefully monitored and encouraged so that they don't exacerbate the problem of violent extremism we work with civil society and we work to do capacity building at the community level. My favorite example so far of what we've been able to do and I hope that it's a real pilot and an inspiration for moving forward is the work that we did at state with AID to approach the problem in a different way than we had before we took the al-Shabaab as a problem set we looked at where it had been moving and threatening in terms of its impact and its recruiting we identified the places and the communities most vulnerable to that recruitment and radicalization and then working with post working with civil society organizations and working in a really integrated way across the U.S. government we prioritized a couple of key areas in which we did holistic investments that combined the policy interaction with the government actors and the support for communities themselves to build resilience against radical messages if you think about CVE is essentially taking the the broad tools of our foreign policy and using them not just for humanitarian purposes but also to secure a security dividend then you can see that we have enormous scope to expand this approach globally and that's I think really hopeful and exciting and it's a positive message it's an affirmative message it's an empowering message at a time when I think that's what we really need to galvanize the international community and you know the the UN has now embraced preventing violent extremism which is it's lexicon for countering violent extremism but it's embraced that at the level of the UN counterterrorism strategy and so that brings a whole lot of new actors to the game and it brings a whole lot of capabilities to the game that we didn't used to think of as being highly germane for example UNESCO has developed a terrific curriculum on on tolerance and on critical thinking and you know we don't typically think of UNESCO as being a partner in the counter-terror fight but it's very much a partner in preventing violent extremism and so I think we have laid very important groundwork for a different approach both analytically programmatically and pairing programming and policy interventions in the national sense and then I think we've built a much more coherent and integrated international approach to to countering violent extremism I want to just make one more point if I could and I know I know that we don't have a lot of time but but the the final points that I wanted to make are the the moving forward we need to think about how we can tell the story across communities both the security community and the rights community because CVE is one of these areas that really requires both to be working together and I think there's a big opportunity for the the next administrations to both build on the monitoring and evaluation to show the impact of these programs but also to embed within a unified strand of American foreign policy the sense that doing good is is making us more secure and that we can pursue the kinds of values that we stand for as a country while making ourselves and our partners safer in the long haul and so I think that's a huge opportunity before us I also think it will be interesting to see how the incoming administration given that it is being given direction from congress to really collapse the national security council structures and decrease the number of staff to see what opportunities that might create for greater integration of what have traditionally been seen as our counterterrorism efforts and our foreign policy efforts and those could in turn reinforce a lot of the really interesting work that Amy and others have been pioneering which is getting our local law enforcement and our local CVE lessons learned into international practice but also bringing those bigger foreign policy muscle movements whether it's the UN whether it's the World Bank international financial institutions the private sector etc to be part of an effort to reinforce community resilience so that the problem doesn't spread while we continue to pursue the hard security measures that we need against the current terror threat okay thank you essentially we're we are here to talk about two reports that have recently come out as well and one of them is the CSIS commission report on countering violent extremism and one thing I really appreciated about this particular report was how it really underscored the importance of a measured security response and Shannon I know this is something that's been an important issue for you in terms of the promotion of human rights as a component of a CVE strategy so how do how do we operationalize that idea how do you ensure that security responses are not exacerbating the grievances that actually fuel violent extremism and what are your recommendations to put forth a more just and sustainable role for security actors while also maintaining a progress in the CVE agenda thanks Georgia so taking a step back the CVE commission was comprised of 23 people from a variety of backgrounds and sectors and walks of life so I think the recommendations and the report truly represent a bipartisan consensus on what the next administration needs to do to advance CVE in a way that builds on all the progress and the work that's been done really over the last 15 years and particularly over the last couple of years thanks to the folks to my right so we tried to look at the problem of violent extremism as a system with multiple layers and drivers and actors involved and if you look at it as a system you see all the different ways that these factors interact and it becomes very clear as Sarah said that you can't just do CVE programs you have to look at the policies and the practices that help create sort of this nefarious cycle of violence both in the United States and internationally so for example in the domestic context we interviewed countless people who pointed out that there really is this sort of negative cycle between anti-Muslim anti-immigrant sentiment and violent extremism in the sense that terrorist recruiters are able to play upon those sentiments and tell their targets that you're not wanted in the society you'll never belong so basically what we're saying is in the domestic space the US government needs to avoid policies and actions and rhetoric that plays into that cycle and that would really mean operationally redoubling efforts to address the real legitimate concerns of Muslim communities within the US whether that be about surveillance and stigmatization or the hate crimes that are becoming so rampant and really continues the engagement that we've seen under the current administration and we argue that this isn't a matter of political correctness this is just smart effective strategy abroad we tried to look at the way that our traditional partners are potentially feeding into the spread of extremist ideologies so for example we traced the evolution of extremism back really 50 60 years and concluded that for a generation or more some private donors in the Gulf have been contributing to the spread of extremist ideologies by funding mosques and schools and various types of media that reject local religious cultural and social and political customs that contradict their own understandings and values so what we say is rather than ignoring this reality we really need to call on these partner countries to take additional concrete steps to deter disrupt dismantle funding to groups and individuals that are part of this process of exporting extremist ideologies and essentially the commission report says primarily it's on those countries to take those steps but the international community has an obligation if they aren't going to take steps to stem the spread of extremist ideologies and should consider punitive measures such as freezing of assets visa and travel bans and criminal actions for those who support or provide material support to extremist activity in that regard we also call for a global educational partnership building on what Sarah mentioned which is UNESCO's really good work and trying to inculcate tolerance in school systems and essentially what this global educational partnership would do is commit countries to ensure that extremist ideologies and hatred and intolerance are not being embedded in the education system and educational materials so essentially they would be committing to expunge that kind of hatred and intolerance from the education systems we essentially say for this to be effective robust monitoring and evaluation measures need to be put in place and the US government along with other international actors should consider different measures that could be taken if countries didn't live up to these commitments and then finally Georgia as you mentioned we look at we looked at some really interesting or merging data that suggests that violent extremism often thrives in environments characterized by oppressive abusive or predatory governments and you know we found that where governments do exhibit these behaviors people are often motivated by a desire for justice and dignity so we thought that it was important and a CVE strategy that the next administration would adopt to again make sure that our own partnerships particularly our security and counterterrorism partnerships weren't fueling these grievances that feed into these cycles of violence so what we call for again is that the next administration conduct thorough review of all weapons transfers trained and equip programs and other security assistance provided to countries that Freedom House considers not free or partially free and really considers very thoughtfully whether or not that assistance is doing more to counter extremism and terrorism or is actually feeding into those cycles of extremism and violence so finally in terms of operationally operationalizing those ideas we thought that it was really important to have somebody that could look across the domestic and international space across CTE and CVE to make sure that our policies were consistent and were advancing the goal of countering violent extremism so in the commission report we call for the appointment of an assistant to the president that would be situated between the national security advisor responsible for Homeland Security and the national security advisor who's primarily responsible for foreign policy and regional issues and that person would be the person who's ultimately accountable for making sure that there are results on the CVE front and would be accountable for the present to the president for making sure that progress was made on CVE. Thanks Shannon. Eric, your report really gets into the weeds of CVE practice and policy and you also have some very specific recommendations on organizational and resource changes and challenges that might help advance this agenda. Can you outline some of those for us? Sure and thanks to USIP for hosting another dynamic conversation on CVE and let's hope that these kinds of conversations can carry forward into the next administration. I think the first comment I would make is that the part of the challenge we're facing here is that when governments talk about CVE they talk about counterterrorism often and when communities think of CVE they think of everything but counterterrorism and they don't want to be told by external actors that the reason why communities need to become more resilient, the reason why communities need to build more better relationships with law enforcement, the reason why communities need to create alternatives to young people who are at the risk of being recruited into violence is because of an external agenda. There are many more pressing concerns often in those communities that's worrying the parents, that's worrying the families, that's worrying the professionals than terrorism even though terrorism may be an issue. So the challenge in sort of operationalizing and sustaining all this positive momentum is to find a way to meld these two often different approaches to the problem set or different perspectives in the problem set. And I think collectively the sort of the CVE community has been very good at laying out this broad framework in terms of needing to go beyond security actors. It's been very good about pushing this notion that we have to go down to the community level, communities are on the front lines of the effort. They're the closest to the problem set and best able to identify early kinds of radicalization and intervene against it. But what's going to motivate these communities, what's going to incentivize these communities to do this? And I think this gets into some of the organizational issues that my report tries to highlight whether it's at the international level or you have an international architecture that's driven by member states of the UN or regional organizations that's often driven by diplomats who aren't necessarily reflecting the concerns of communities in their country when they're talking about CVE or counterterrorism. It's a very state-sanctuary system. So how are the voices from these communities going to be heard in international conversations around counterterrorism and CVE so that some of the rhetoric around CVE at that global level can be challenged because for the failure to sort of translate into action. In the national level how can we get more and more governments to develop national action plans on countering violent extremism that are again reflective of community concerns that are reflective of subnational actors involvement and that actually empower local communities not to necessarily implement counterterrorism or countering violent extremism strategies but to develop locally owned, locally generated strategies that are going to prevent a variety of forms of violence in the community including violent extremism. And I don't think we're there yet. I think we're still sort of trying to figure out is CVE a counterterrorism issue? Is CVE more of a development issue? Is it a community resilience issue? And it's just a very challenging to sort of meld these two separate communities. And I think at the community level in particular we have to figure out a way that non-law enforcement actors in these communities whether it's social workers, whether it's teachers, whether it's public health officials at the community level, whether it's parents and peers and religious leaders they can sort of join together not because of a security imperative but because of that that's again imposed externally but because of a locally generated set of concerns with external funding to support programs in that area that aren't sort of imposed from outside and I think that's for me is the fundamental challenge is that we all talk about communities even in this country. Communities are seen as the sort of the core of the solutions here but how do you actually generate locally owned solutions that can be implemented in a sustainable way that don't require national government funding, that don't require national level direction or monitoring, that it's actually the community themselves organizing around the problem set and I think we're unfortunately not there yet and I'm very concerned that the approach that the next administration is signaling in the transition phase is anathema to that sort of ethos and I think it's more important than ever that those of us who have invested some time and energy in in developing sort of and pushing out of the CV agenda that we can't expect that national governments will continue to be a benign champion of this agenda and that it's really incumbent upon those outside of government those in civil society those at the community level those in international organizations to champion this agenda not necessarily from a security perspective but from a perspective of protecting communities, local communities and adding this extra layer of defense in these communities to a variety of forms of violence but it's a pretty steep hill we have to climb right now. So Eric, two very challenging issues you bring up here. One is how do you actually implement something that needs to be locally generated and locally grown and owned? How do you ensure sort of the organic nature of community level CV programming and the other one you alluded to is this really true challenge we have in coordination just within the U.S. government on advancing this agenda. One thing I really appreciate about the CSIS report Shannon is how frankly you unpacked some of these issues conceptual issues around CVE that have been sort of the source of conflict and a barrier to coordination and I think it's always important to sort of have a frank conversation about why there are these differences and why there isn't a full agreement on what CVE is and what is the best way forward. Do you think you can outline for us some of these issues? Sure. So as Georgia mentioned and as many of you are likely aware there has been a lot of controversy around CVE. I think it's important to go back to what the original purpose is and was which is to move away from a purely securitized approach to violent extremism sort of recognizes Amy mentions that we're not going to be able to address this challenge by solely resorting to intelligence collection or bombs or locking people up so people were recognizing look we have to move further upstream and prevent people from being radicalized. I think a number of things have created the controversy including by and large the fact that law enforcement agencies because of their reach into local communities have been oftentimes on the forefront or the leading edge of engaging with communities so it automatically puts it into that realm of a counter-terrorism issue and as Eric mentioned there's been a lot of resentment among some communities about that approach so questions like why are you coming to my community solely concerned about terrorism we have all of these other problems we've got hate crimes we've got poverty we've got poor education terrorism ranks you know 10th maybe on a list of priorities and so a sense of resentment that when these communities are engaged as oftentimes as a security issue so that's one of the problems there have been concerns amongst human rights groups and civil liberties groups about the implications of CVE so concerns about you know when does the speech that one might use that expresses support for an extremist organization or when does even becoming radicalized and embracing certain ideas and values become a crime and concern about communities being surveyed and that their speech might be constrained because of this desire to stamp out violent extremism I think amongst people who are operating in the international space there's also been a concern that overtime CVE which is always poorly defined has just sort of grown and grown and grown and a question about where are the parameters so there are some people who say if you can't define it then how do we know what the ultimate objective is and then how do we measure whether or not it's working so there's been a concern I think a bit about mission creep and while some you know people are embracing this even further move upstream under the rubric of preventing violent extremism there are others that are pushing back against that because they say well when is it CVE versus development and so there are some people who want to sort of bring those boundaries back in again and have a tighter definition of CVE for me I think one thing that's been effective is some of the work that people who are looking at CVE from a public health perspective have done and there's this idea of a pyramid or this idea of primary secondary and tertiary interventions for me it's helpful to think about the kinds of stuff that Eric was talking about as the bottom layer of the pyramid so the stuff that's really embedded in communities where you're talking about community resilience you're talking about addressing some of those underlying drivers and causes that to me is something that should primarily be led by communities and there's little to no role for law enforcement in my opinion at that that basic level of the pyramid in the pyramid the secondary level are those who might be indicating an interest in extremist ideologies but have not yet been radicalized again I think primarily communities and civic groups should lead those interventions and they should do so on the basis of their expertise so this is not something that I think people should just dabble in I mean I think you do need to be trained and again very little role for law enforcement agencies at that layer of the pyramid but then as you reach the top layer of the pyramid and people have been radicalized even if they haven't committed a criminal act yet and community groups again might be in the lead in terms of trying to de-radicalize those individuals clearly because there is a threat present I think that's where law enforcement agencies do have a stronger role so for me part of it is just being more deliberate about what space we're operating in and who are the primary actors in each of those spaces and where possible trying to de-secure ties the work and getting law enforcement out unless it's in the tippy top of the pyramid where there is an actual threat so I'm going to ask both of our seated officials since they've been met meeting this challenge of coordination in this very complex space what would be their best advice to the incoming administration on continuing to advance this agenda and how would you go about doing that could we start under secretary sure thanks Georgia I think I think there are two different questions that are really paramount in the next iteration of this endeavor and one is coordination I mean without prejudice to the specifics I think there is a real need to bring together the the voices and the analysis of those who think about the immediate threat from an intelligence and military perspective with the voices that think about how do you stabilize areas in general how do you give communities hope about the future in general and how do you think about how our policy and programmatic interventions can can help prevent bad things from happening and reinforce good things where they are happening right now those happen in two separate silos there is not an integration of use and I think that's absolutely critical going forward in part because we risk not thinking about the second order consequences of the first pillar of our activities whether it's our counterterrorism partnerships whether it's the way we use military force against active terror threats whether it's the capacities that we build overseas and and that is not to say we don't need all of those things that is to say we have to be cognizant of where the the where we might better readjust all those activities to not accrue the negative second order benefits second order effects or work with our partners to help them better understand their own self interest in doing things differently so I think that's one huge piece of the puzzle I think the second piece of the puzzle is resources there's just no getting around the fact that if you look at again you know my world I see two cones I see our CT cone and our CVE cone and I don't see them integrated when I look for CVE budgets you know where are they right you know the the reality is for very good reasons we built up a massive infrastructure post 9-11 and we put you know billions hundreds of billions of dollars into a huge set of capabilities that are really important for our security and we have not dropped perceptible you know impact into the balancing of those hard side efforts with the softer side efforts that I think ultimately are what we need for success on the hard side and so you know when you think about whatever analogy you want to use a preventive a disease control analogy whether you want to think about this is building buildings and you need to have a recapitalization of your building you need to have a relationship between your preventive efforts and your response efforts and right now those resources are so fundamentally mismatched and where they do exist and trust me this has been my life for the last three years they are they are in pockets that are individually controlled and there is no synergy among them no prioritization of them and they're not integrated appropriately and so I think we have a huge amount to do both on the the rebalancing of our resources and the rebalancing of our policy making and the integration of the same can I just say something very quickly on resources so we did some analysis to try to get our heads around how much we're actually spending on cve versus ct and it's difficult because again both of those things are ill defined and some things are classified but essentially based on the best data we could find we found that we're spending less than one tenth of one percent on cve as opposed to ct so there's actually a chart in the report that shows that it's a little dot that cve versus ct so again the commission did call for that rebalancing that sarah was talking about including by starting with a billion dollar annual investment from the u.s government and cve so advice for the next administration one I would say it's not it's not actually I'm going to disagree a little bit with sarah because I work on the national security council and my day-to-day job is bringing together the different departments and agencies to confront an issue so we do have departments and agencies from the intelligence community representing the defense department we have officials representing homeland security state department justice department etc all sitting around the table trying to figure out what is our right approach here so it's not that they're the issue of ct and cve have not been coordinated they're not it's not that there's no integration it's just that this balancing that both sarah and shannon have remarked has remarked upon has not been achieved so my advice to the next administration is that we need to go big on our cve efforts we're amassing more and more evidence that the work we're doing within communities is paying off that it's absolutely critical that we make these kinds of investments that we address the grievances that are causing people to radicalize to violence that we take head on the ideology that encourages people to act in violent ways rather than engaging within their communities that we invest in things like human dignity in democracy in building up civil society that that is the way that we're ultimately going to be successful and we need to make sure the next administration needs to make sure that conversation is happening at the same time as what we're doing on counter terrorism that they need to be much much better integrated so we see that starting now that has been an important tenant of president obama's policy on cve but for this to be successful it really needs to grow significantly we have sort of the initial efforts have started we have initial evidence coming in but unless we really make a key make this a key investment i don't think that we'll see the kind of success that we all anticipate we would see the second thing and and this is in terms of advice the next administration is that we have a lot of evidence about what doesn't work since 9 11 we have watched experiment after experiment basically be tried and fail and i would look particularly to the question of creating this us versus them mentality when we put law enforcement in our intelligence community in a situation where they were looking at particularly community particular communities as a whole and communities indiscriminately regardless of individual actors we actually created more conflict between government and between communities and that conflict actually fuels violent extremism and it fuels distrust which makes it far less likely that government officials will know what's happening and will be able to respond appropriately so i think you know especially we're coming off a campaign where there's been a lot of rhetoric about who's who and who believes what and i'd urge the next administration let's take a step back from the us versus them let's look at these especially here at home although it's true around the world let's look at these as american communities let's continue to build the relationships to break down the barriers between law enforcement between community actors let's find the evidence about what really works and let's find what really works and let's look to you know eric mentioned looking at communities but but communities we believe do have the answers we believe they are the ones who best know what factors are fueling grievances what factors are fueling alienation who within a community is becoming more and more disaffected what is the best way to to deal with that disaffection and so the the the onus on the next administration is to take this to the next level to figure out how we better grow these nascent efforts rather than creating a barrier between government and the us the rest of the the us thank you and what i'd like to do now is open this up to the audience so that we have an opportunity to have a broader discussion about these issues and there are a lot of people in the room who've been working on these issues for some time and this is an opportunity for us to share some of our our own ideas and experiences of what will continue to help advance this agenda and where its strengths and weaknesses might be so are there any questions from the audience Dave out away from the wilson center i found this discussion very interesting but very abstract and i wonder if you could give us some concrete example particularly working with some country or some government abroad where you've tried to apply this approach and what reaction you've gotten because at least in the arab world civil society is now a very dirty word governments are very suspicious of them they don't want to work with civil society because they feel that's what that's the group that started the arab uprising in the first place so can you give us some examples of working with countries governments where this approach you're talking about has been tried do you want to say a few or do you want to um why don't we start with that one because that's an important one so i might start with a micro example and then ask sara to provide the more macro examples but i i just want to um sort of give a shout out to a particular community that i met with when i was in the haig and in the haig as you probably know within the netherlands the number of foreign fighters who are folks who have left a go fight is is disproportionately high and so there has been a very concerted effort by the mayor and the law enforcement community in in that particular city to engage with their community there and what i saw was a group of moms actually begin to identify for each other what are how do we how do we observe what's happening within our communities and with our children how do we build the links with our law enforcement they actually had a um a round table where they had police officers mental health professionals teachers um and other school officials um and just a range of um sort of government actors and social service providers sitting with the moms around the table and they'd the number of moms they'd been able to train within this community was quite significant but more importantly is that they were able to identify and intervene very quickly when they saw um some of the children um begin to exhibit behaviors that were of concern so this was you know this is just one tiny little micro example but kind of what the the kind of example that we want to see around the world where we have real breakdown between the we're breaking down the barriers between the community actors um and the people who live within the community so David if i understood your question correctly you were really asking about the relationship between uh policy that's predicated on the empowerment of civil society and our reality on the ground in many areas that are at risk of violent extremism spreading in which the space for civil society is diminished and so so the first thing i want to say is you're right that is a real problem that we are working with and i think one of the most important things for those who believe that civil society is a critical ingredient for a future world we want to see more generally is that cve is perhaps one of the most compelling ways in which we can help elevate the role in the importance of civil society to governments that feel that it may not be in their short term best self-interest to provide that space in other words if the point that we can make is that in the long run these communities are essential partners in securing the country from violent extremism that's a potential game changer in terms of how those relationships work that's easier in theory than in practice and we could talk about specific cases and how hard that is but i think in general one cannot underestimate the importance of the whole cve prevention enterprise for preserving the role the essential role of civil society in whether it is you know public goods or security i think to this more specific manifestation of your question which is how can we see that it works one of the interesting things that i observed as we were canvassing cve efforts which have been going on for a long time but in a very sort of piecemeal point holistic way that weren't integrated and weren't prioritized is that it's very difficult to see the impact that you want to see when that's the extent of your programming uncoordinated somewhat random and isolated interventions and that's why what we've tried to do with the east africa pilot is a completely different approach that i described earlier that's new we're just starting to actually let the grants for that now that's the problem with the time that it sometimes takes the federal government to work but i think the best example i can provide you in the short term is some of the work that we've done in pakistan that aidid had done in pakistan years prior where they were able to focus on specific communities engage over a period of years in an integrated way and then we're able to measure things like attitudes towards the government attitudes towards violent extremists movement of youth outside of those communities those are some of the very basic m&e indicators that can be very useful in making the case the interventions that we might think of as you know frothy foreign assistance programs can actually have a tangible impact on security at the local level and then because of the globalization of this threat and the movement of people and ideas ultimately impact on the global level yeah i think it's a very very pertinent question i think one of the um sort of stories so far in terms of the cve effort um that the u.s and other western governments have really pushed is that it hasn't really penetrated uh to the most critical part of the world in terms of today's immediate threats and um the reality is that cve conversations with those governments in the middle east of north africa tend to focus on counter messaging they're easy conversations to have with authoritarian governments because it's not about their behavior they can help push out messages about certain interpretations of islam they can use that as a vehicle to prop up certain government favored religious leaders and that's basically become cve in the in the arab world and i think all the stuff that about civil society all the stuff about how governments treat their citizens is too often seen through a human rights lens and not through a security lens in our discussions and i think i mean i'll say this with a straight face but i it's hard to say it with a straight face that my hope is that the next administration um learns this lesson from the previous administration and actually integrates all these foreign policy tools so that we're actually engaging uh governments in that region um on civil society on how they treat their citizens in the context of a security discussion but i'm not i'm not holding my breath and i think the other the other um just think to point out is all this focus on civil society and communities um if you actually look and for my project we've gathered a bunch of data we're still in the process of data collection but eight hundred and fifty um civil society organizations around the world implementing about a thousand projects against not exhaustive at all in sort of this cve or cve relevant space uh hundred countries uh are touched here and the vast majority of these are in the prevention area um they're not in the intervention so they're not in the space where um individuals have sort of are about to cross the threshold uh oh and they're certainly not in the rehabilitation reintegration space which is the most pressing set of issues now in terms of all the returning foreign fighters and in terms of all the defections from Boko Haram or Al Shabab so any progress you've made so far has been in the really easy safe areas where uh few would really object to communities having a role to play because it's sort of building on existing violence prevention programs they may already have in their community the challenge is how do we create legal and policy frameworks to allow civil society and communities to enter this the space closer to the immediate threat and related challenges um the program that Amy described in The Hague is a wonderful one but it's not really replicable to a non-western context because you don't have a non-western context you don't have a national government that is empowering local authorities to do that in non-western context you generally don't have local communities that have enough trust in their local police that they can sit down at the table and engage in all these issues in a sort of safe space so it's these are huge issues to deal with if you want to see the CV agenda be more than sort of a western uh um very important but still very much western kind of uh agenda hi uh Juliet Schmidt with IFIS I just had a question somebody mentioned that it being difficult to distill sort of the the core difference between development and cve work and I just wondered in your in your opinions what do you think that difference is there was one more question here in the front thank you for your presentation on my craft a counterterrorism writer and a couple years ago in working on a book on US government counterterrorism programs I found that there was not too much coordination at times between the homeland security people and FBI and reaching out to local communities I wonder if this coordination has improved and another sort of nitty gritty question having worked in congress and dealt with congress uh some of the committees and members look towards how do you measure success now if a person decides not to become a lone wolf because of some reach out he doesn't exactly call up the FBI or somebody who says hey I'm about to commit something and I pulled back because of uh because of your efforts so how do you deal with this issue of trying to you know measure success and quantify it in order to get more resources from congress let's take a third question and then we can have each panel Michelle Brignan thank you I just had a question you had talked about punitive measures for foreign countries or just individual actors who fund encourage whatever violent extremism um like funding mosques and whatnot in the US and my question is would you or could you carry those same punitive measures over to US actors who encourage and frequently fund we don't call it violent extremism but there's like you know there's a lot of hate crimes and whatnot that are frequently encouraged I mean this election cycle has just been horrible for that and so you know freedom of speech issues you know present themselves but would you carry those punitive measures over to US actors as well or would you only apply them to international actors okay some good questions here who would like to take a first stab I will all start with um the development one since that's the community I came from so I think a lot of the environments in which violent extremism thrives are also development challenges so you're talking about fragile environments oftentimes that have a legacy of poverty and inequality and marginalization and justice deficits all problems that in and of themselves are worthy of trying to tackle but also can be drivers of violent extremism so again at that bottom layer of the pyramid where you're trying to address some of those underlying grievances and causes I think the difference between a purely development program and a CVE program is one of intent and design so I think you have to be very clear about what you're trying to address through that program so for example we did an event with Mercy Corps I think it was just last week and they were featuring a report that they just produced on a USAID funded program in Somalia and essentially the program was improving access to secondary education and then some cool some locations it was just the secondary education and then other locations it was coupled with civic engagement opportunities and they did a very rigorous study and what they found was in cases where they had combined the education access with the civic engagement opportunities they saw a drop in both support and participation and violent extremism whereas in the locations where they just did the access to secondary education they saw a drop in participation but not in support so that what that says to me essentially is that if you want to do a CVE program using developmental approaches or developmental tools you can't just do it willy-nilly you have to do it very thoughtfully based on an assessment of what are the particular drivers in that location and then design a program with the intent of reducing support and engagement and violence and then you need to monitor it very carefully because a lot of our assumptions about what is causing people to join extremist movements are incorrect and sometimes you have consequences that are unintended so you need to apply these kind of rigorous and many techniques that Mercy Corps did to make sure that you're having the intended impact on the punitive measures I mean again there are laws around this so it's not just if somebody expresses support for an extremist ideology it's when they're providing material support to a terrorist organization or to an individual who is espousing violence so there has to be that connection to a threat Amy could probably talk more about what we do in the domestic arena but certainly anything that would apply to other countries we would apply the same standards to ourselves but again it's just very care it's important to be very careful that it is connected to a threat of violence versus just cracking down on all organizations that might espouse views that you find very deplorable but are protected as free speech yeah I can say a couple respond to a couple of the comments it's I'm a prosecutor by background and I can tell you that the tools that we have here in the United States are actually probably far more effective and targeted than what we can use overseas so we can individually if we believe that an individual is inciting people to violence or providing support to a terrorist group there are very specific laws that allow us to identify that individual whereas a lot of times when we're looking at sanctions it tends to be a much broader brush the second piece of it is that we're we can be far more effective in carrying out the the the criminal prosecution here in the United States than we could abroad but but the I think this sort of points to a bigger issue which is something that Eric alluded to earlier that the approach to CVE is not a one-size-fits-all there's not what we see working the Hague is not going to work in Jordan what we see working you know somewhere in Minnesota is not necessarily what's going to work in France I mean it's just these are different communities and I think that the key lesson that we've taken away from the past eight years of work on this is that you cannot apply a broad brush and expect to get stellar results you really have to know the communities that you're working with you really need to understand the particular cultural back and forth and understand the particular governments and so it's why we've we've stressed again the need for to engage at a very grassroots level with respect to the question about the Department of Homeland Security and FBI not coordinating well that is something we too recognized several years into our tenure here that drove first the creation of our strategy but then more recently we stood up the interagency task force to counter violent extremism which is here in Washington and it's co-led by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice but most importantly is it has represent representatives from our core domestic agencies that work on CVE so FBI is an important part of that task force and these folks are all working in the same building they're putting together common materials they are coordinating on who's speaking where and what they're saying they're just trying to ensure that we as the federal government have our house in order because we recognize there were you know some folks would say one thing and some folks would say another and it was confusing at best and and not not helpful in many cases so we've we've learned that lesson and we're trying to do better from a bureaucratic point of view but at the same time this is one of the places where we think the next administration would do well to grow that task force to invest in that task force and really to give it some license to improve the coordination and improve the efficacy of our work here at home I will just addressing a couple of those questions just on the on the DHS DOJ coordination I think I would fully agree with what Amy said in terms of the improvements I think one of the key areas where much more improvement is needed is to bring in non-law enforcement federal actors as co-leads to the task force so it's true it's not a law enforcement not a a perceived to be an overly securitized task force even though we all know both the DHS and DOJ do much more than simply enforce the law and provide security but the perception in communities is that it still is overly securitized and to actually bring in state and local representation to bring in community representation into the task force maybe not as full members but to give them sort of a voice some voice in at the federal level and I think that's a good practice that should be pushed out to other countries as they're looking to develop sort of CVE coordination coordination mechanisms and I think on the on the development you know where does development end and where does CVE start I think one of the and again I agree with how how Shannon outlined it I think one of the challenges that almost every country has a different and every CVE practitioner or policymaker has a slightly different take on where that the line is between the two and in an environment where their resources are limited you don't see additional resources being being fueled into CVE despite the fact that it's such a high policy issue development actors are increasingly I wouldn't say simply relabeling traditional development programs as CVE but in some cases that's what they're doing and the result is that you get what's already a kind of mushy area in between the two is becoming even mushier the UN was doing a cataloging of which of its agencies or have developed CVE or PVE in their parlance or PVE relevant programs and I kid you not that about a third of the programs that I saw were simply they changed either a development concept to PVE so it was a program that had been education now had a PVE acronym slapped on it or a program that had been counterterrorism had a PVE acronym slapped on to it so it's it was not doing what Shannon was advocating for which is actually retailing existing programs to actually give them a PVE or CVE objective it's simply relabeling and I think that's a real risk we're facing particularly in the UN context where there's still you know they want to be part of the game but they don't really want to compromise their existing programs but they they think by slightly relabeling it they can get more money so it's a real it's a real challenge I think for the next phase of CVE work is how to really without trying to define it because I think a definition searching for a definition among 193 countries will be a fool's errand but I think how can you sort of delineate the the playing fields so that people know when they're on a PVE playing field and when they're not and I think we're not there yet I do think that it's it's important to know that we do have a model of how it can be done the East Africa pilot is a really good example of how there was careful analysis there was pooled funding there was collective decision making that involved consultations that were local and you can do it what it requires is a a better sense of what resources are available and then a forced collective prioritization of where they need to go and then a tailored application to the specifics of the problem set because as everybody has said they differ by place but I do think we have a template for how to do it the question is do we have the political will to set up our systems so that we can execute that template I think it's true that a lot of policy and strategy conversations especially on CVE can be quite abstract but it's rare that they're this frank so I'd like to I'd like to thank our speakers really for speaking from a very authentic place about these challenges so thank you very much for taking the time this morning thank you to all of you who came out this morning please join me in a round of applause