 We're only running about 20 minutes behind the schedule. So this is our last session before lunch and it's my pleasure to introduce two speakers. Professor William Maley, Bill Maley is very well known, not only to academics at ANU, but also in Australia more generally. For his scholarship on Afghanistan itself and also on his advocacy on a wide range of issues, strategic issues, but also issues of migration and the like, Bill has been a very articulate public intellectual in that regard and very much respected. So before he became the Professor of Diplomacy here, Asia Pacific Diplomacy at ANU, he was at the Canberra campus of the University of New South Wales and published extensively on Afghanistan issues. So Bill, it's my pleasure to invite you to speak. Thanks, Greg. It's a great pleasure to be able to speak at the conference today and also to congratulate Heroro Ingram and the Department of International Relations for their sterling efforts in putting together such a remarkable panel of topics. The session this morning is called The Search for Solutions, but my remarks are more concerned with challenges to the search for solutions. And I wanted to begin with a story which I think illustrates one dimension of these challenges. In 1940, when the Battle of Britain was approaching, a man called Frank Pick, who had been the Chief Executive of London Passenger Transport Board, was appointed Director-General of the Ministry of Information. And he was invited to lunch by Winston Churchill who wanted to size him up. And during the course of the lunch, Mr. Pick stated that he would never countenance any form of propaganda which was not in accordance with the strict truth and his own conscience. Churchill's reply was, I am indeed flattered and proud to find myself at lunch and with so exceptional a man. And what I think that highlighted was that in the circumstances of existential danger which Britain faced at that particular moment, when France hadn't fallen a couple of months earlier, there were greater issues on the Prime Minister's mind than the conscience of the former head of the London Passenger Transport Board and his commitment to strict truth. Nonetheless, there was an element of significance in what Pick had to say, and I'll come back to that later in my remarks. One of the difficulties that states have faced in dealing with terrorist threats is that there are complex range of problems that those threats create. And one is that terrorism, as far as Western states are concerned, is not an existential threat of the kind that Germany posed in 1940 to Britain. And therefore, some of the techniques that might be justified by reference to an existential threat to the very survival of countries such as domestic censorship typically will not be available as at least a public policy when one is talking about trying to deal with threats that terrorist groups might pose, for example, the ones nationals who are travelling abroad. As long as we value the idea of a liberal democracy, there will be some limits to how far one can go in choosing techniques to respond to terrorism. And there I think there's a lot to be said for the famous observation that Benjamin Franklin once made that those who seek to sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. It's also the case that if one engages in propagandistic activity to excess, there can be consequences that are very adverse to one's own interests, that excessive propagandistic activity can boomerang. It can undermine one's authority. It can undermine one's credibility. And it can undermine one's instrumental effectiveness in trying to deal with the threat that terrorist groups throw up. So finding appropriate responses to the kind of propaganda challenges that terrorist groups themselves present is not something which is an easy and straightforward activity. And I now want to elaborate some of the reasons why that might be the case from a communications point of view. States, of course, communicate with audiences in a whole range of different respects. At a very formal level, one finds diplomatic messaging between states using things like the Not Fair Barl, which are a form of signalling, which can, of course, come in the form of deeds as well as words. When during the December 1971, Bangla Desh crisis, President Nixon sent the USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal, this was a signal just as much as a printed statement from the White House would have been and often deeds speak more loudly than words in international relations. States can also communicate, however, in a rather more subtle way, if what they seek to do is reframe the way in which issues are viewed by particular audiences. There's now a lot of literature on the issue of framing and counter-framing, that if one can actually dispose people to see an issue in one way rather than another, it may greatly facilitate the process of trying to deal with the threats that particular groups might pose. And to give you a very crude and simple example of framing, when the Tampa sailed interview in 2001 when Captain Rinan had picked up refugees from the waters of the Indian Ocean, this was framed by the then Prime Minister in Australia as a security challenge and a challenge to ideas of national sovereignty. It could just as easily have been framed by a different government as an opportunity to be a good international system, that citizen, that being the kind of underpinning vocabulary that the now ANU Chancellor, Gareth Evans, had put forward when he was Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1996. Politicians all the time are making choices about how they frame particular issues as far as a wider public is concerned. And framing can be undertaken effectively or with considerably less effect than one might wish. And in a sense, this is part of the wider superactivity that's now come to be called public diplomacy because once an initial message is articulated by a political leadership, the task of spreading it then tends to cascade down through diplomatic missions that one has in various countries of the world and through bureaucratic agencies as well. States also engage in propaganda, which almost by definition is simultaneously manipulative and misleading. And states can engage in what is now seen as the propagation of fake news. This incidentally is a quite familiar idea but not necessarily with that particular designation. During the life of the Soviet Union, people used to talk about Diaz informacia or disinformation, which was news completely faked and disseminated with a view to discrediting Western countries. And there's an entire book by Shultz and Godson that looks at the kind of activities in which the USSR engaged before Gorbachev's advent, which documents in pretty searing detail some of the fake claims that were disseminated to people who were seen as likely to swallow them whole. And the defining feature of Diaz informacia is its complete falsity. At another level as well, states often find the need to develop strategic narratives as part of a strategic communication strategy. And this is particularly the case if states go to war and they see a need to mobilize their own populations in support of an activity which since it's likely to cost lives amongst one's own military personnel may need a fairly strong reinforcement in order to justify it to a domestic audience. When it comes to developing effective strategic narratives and effective strategic communications, however, there are a number of problems of message formulation that arise as well as challenges relating to the nature of the audience to which one might be speaking. One of the problems that many states have encountered is that of coordinating amongst multiple bureaucratic hierarchies with their own objectives. And it's naive to think that this kind of process will either be attempted at all or that it will be carried out with much skill or dexterity. And there's a rather spectacular example, even looking back 15 years, that surfaced in January 2001 when the Australian Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs went on a trip to the Middle East which was designed to dissuade people who might be tempted to do so from using the services of a people smuggler and getting on a boat to come to Australia. And a really remarkable kit was prepared to be distributed by the minister during his trip. One document issued in the minister's name said, and I quote, your children will abandon your traditional way of life in favor of modern Western ways. You will lose control of your children who will rebel and question your authority and your religious beliefs. Now, for people who are fleeing Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, it's a risable suggestion that that kind of thing would have deterred them from coming. But the greater problem was that this material was then translated into Arabic and Persian and printed in a very high quality brochure with a glossy cover. The only problem was that no one in the minister's department seemed to realize that the Persian and Arabic scripts move in the opposite direction from the English, and so the entire booklet was printed backwards. When one of my PhD students presented this to me, I felt that the minister needed to be saved from himself, so I leaked it to the Australian, and it had to be pulped. But the interesting thing from the point of view of coordination was that the following week I was at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and they were incandescent about this particular exercise. They had not been in the loop, they had not been consulted, they'd never seen the documentary material, and they realized that it was radically at odds with the image of Australia that they were seeking through their own public diplomacy to promote, which was not a country where people would lose control of their children or things like that. More recently, in another brochure from the same department, a cartoon, about a 20-page cartoon was put out to try to dissuade people of the Hazara ethnic group from leaving Afghanistan to head for Australia, and the last page showed a distressed Hazara sitting on the island of Nauru in fairly miserable circumstances with a thought bubble above his head showing a group of Afghan dancers whose performance he was tragically missing by being in Nauru rather than being in Afghanistan. The only problem was that the dancers in the image were quite plainly members of the Pashtun-Mungal tribe, whom a large number of Hazaras would regard as the enemy, rather like suggesting the Jews would get UEI'd because they couldn't take part in the Nuremberg rallies anymore. And through that particular image, which was probably pulled off the internet by a public relations firm, the entire thrust of the brochure was destroyed. And it's not a brilliant idea to do things in an uncoordinated fashion. What's the lesson there? There can also be major problems of message coordination if one is operating in an alliance structure. And this was something which haunted NATO for years within the ISAF deployment in Afghanistan. Now, one problem is obviously what you might call the Trump Twitter phenomenon. And if you have a US president who takes to Twitter overnight because he has nothing better to do, then this is inimical to the idea of a coherent messaging strategy in respective complex situations on the ground. But there's also a multinational alliance situation. The problem of ensuring that messages from one government are not at odds with those that another government is putting out and also at odds with the message that NATO might be trying to project into the field. And of course, if you look at the countries that make up NATO, they all have their domestic politics as well. And I'll come back to that in just a moment because this does tend to shape the way in which messaging takes place. Very few political leaders send messages to a foreign audience without at the same time contemplating how such messages might play out domestically. It's also the case that you can't convey a clear message if you don't have a clear message to convey. It sounds elementary, but it took NATO until the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest to get anything close to a coherent message about its objectives in Afghanistan that could underpin strategic narratives on the part of the alliance, which meant that you had a range of different states which were articulating their own messages, largely for domestic consumption as to why they were in that particular country. And if you looked at Australian strategic messaging, it was concerned with alliance maintenance with the United States and preventing terrorist threats coming to Australia. There's nothing about the people of Afghanistan in Australian messaging, which meant that it's probably just as well that not much of it found its way into Afghanistan in any case. But in some situation, there may be literally no coherent message to put forward. And one of the great strengths of Churchill as British Prime Minister from a messaging point of view was that before the end of May 1940, within a month of assuming the Prime Minister ship, he'd actually seen off through the famous Five Days in May, the Cabinet meeting when Lord Halifax's disposition possibly to negotiate with the Germans was wiped from the scene, which meant that from that point onwards, right up to the end of the Third Reich in April 1945, there was a very clear and unambiguous strategic message which the British were presenting of, no surrender, we will fight them on the beach and all that kind of thing. There can also be problems related to the receipt of messages. Different languages have different cultural scripts. And it may well be the case that a message may be crafted in figurative language without any real understanding of the difficulty that that may create and then translating it for use in any other kind of environment. The most famous example of this was Mahmood Ahmadinejot's October 2005 statement about Middle East policy, which was translated into English as a threat to wipe Israel off the map, although in fact the words he used in Persian were neither literally that message nor figuratively focused on that as well. And one can play into real difficulties through figurative language. Messages may also be drafted with spectacular cultural insensitivity. There's just been a kerfuffle in Afghanistan because on the 5th of September, the United States distributed a cartoon which showed a lion, which was supposed to be operation resolute support, chasing a dog, which was supposed to be the Taliban. And the only problem was that the author of this particular cartoon put the Islamic profession of faith, the Shahada, on the side of the dog, which is regarded as an unclean animal, and this led to a lot of trouble. Put it gently. It's also the case that rumors can fly very easily in countries where an oral tradition is strong and that that may interfere with the receipt of a message that's been even well-crafted. Messages may be contaminated by the official status of the messenger. Some people disbelieve, automatically, anything that a foreign affairs official says, and that's not a bad idea in some circumstances, but it can come into play. And some audiences will simply not be swayable or amenable to anything that's said to them. The most dramatic example of this was actually during the Watergate scandal when representative Earl Landgriebe, Republican of Indiana, went on television after the publication of the smoking gun tape from the 23rd of June, 1972, which showed Nixon had been involved in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal from day one, and he said, don't confuse me with the facts. And if you essentially have a don't confuse me with the facts mindset, it's going to be very difficult to use strategic communications to turn someone around. One may also have multiple audiences that need to be addressed, domestic as well as foreign, and foreign audiences may be far from homogeneous and a number of the presentations this morning have made reference to the complexity of the environment in which one's operating. But to conclude, just two quick points. One is that even a strategic communication that does not engage in a point-by-point refutation but of terrorist propaganda, but seeks to convey a broader message may nonetheless be effective by triggering a cascade. Cascades come about when people are positioning themselves in the light of how they think other people are likely to position themselves. This, in a way, goes back to a very famous comment that Thomas Hobbes made in Leviathan and when he said, reputation of power is power. A very profound insight and one that means that if you can create the impression that you are going to come out on the top, then you may well come out on the top because enough people may calculate that it is in their interest to align with a likely winner than a likely loser. But it is at this point if one's trying to trigger a cascade that credibility becomes important. And Frank Pick probably asked for too much when he demanded strict truth, but it's the case that one doesn't necessarily need to go that far in order to be effective. In 1971, Isaiah Bolin gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service in Oxford to an Oxford academic who had been notoriously difficult for most of his life. And someone came up to Berlin afterwards and said, how could you talk about Morris in such a generous fashion? And Berlin said, the secret is to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. And I think that's good advice for people engaged in strategic communications as well. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bill. There is an error on the program or no mission on the program. And as you can see, we actually have three speakers in this session, not two. And the third speaker is Luke West, who I'll introduce shortly. But our next speaker is Dr. Alastair Reed. He's the acting director of the International Counterterrorism Center and also a researcher at Layton University. And prior to that, he was at Utrecht University. So it's a great pleasure having heard very much about you, Alastair. It's a great pleasure to be here with you. Good morning again, everyone. Thank you very much for introduction, Greg. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I'd just like to extend my thanks again to the Department of International Relations for being pivotal and bringing me out here. I realize that it's just me and Levi standing between you and lunch. So I will try and not go on too long. What I'm gonna talk about today is the research project which ICCT has been doing for the last two years counterterrorism strategic communication project. And this all came about when me and Harara Ingram, who spoke earlier, were asked to write a policy brief for policymakers to explain to them everything they needed to know to write, to have a successful counter-narratives campaign to counter ISIS propaganda and essentially defeat terrorism and create world peace and all of it in eight pages. And it didn't take as long before we sat down, we realized we couldn't write this because there's far too much to put down but more importantly, the whole idea of counter-narratives is based on so many untested assumptions. And what we decided to do was to go away and start a research project to examine these untested assumptions but also to go and look at propaganda, tear it apart and understand what it's trying to do and to look at not just ISIS propaganda but propaganda from the far right and other groups and try to properly understand it to be able to develop successful counter-measures. Now, I'm just going to stick to giving you three key points that have come out of our research. The first is that disruption is not enough. The likes of the Internet Referral Unit and Europol have done amazing work in identifying ISIS propaganda and getting it taken down. However, disruption is a very difficult process because you're often spending a time essentially doing whack-a-mole. Take it down one place and it comes up on another place. And then if you're successful on one platform such as Twitter and Facebook, it migrates to other platforms such as JustPace, a Telegram and you have to start again and then move on to other platforms. But more fundamentally, even if you are successful at disruption, the best you can hope to achieve is a vacuum and vacuums are ultimately filled. So if you create a vacuum, you need to make sure you fill it with your messages before it is filled again by the opposition. So whereas disruption has a key role to play, it is not sufficient by itself. Second point I wanted to make was just don't reinvent the wheel. There is a tendency in terrorism experts and the policymakers to see the propaganda coming from ISIS as something entirely new. There's an entirely new phenomenon which you've never seen before because they use Facebook, because they use YouTube and maybe slick videos. But this is to miss the point. Whereas the medium of communication may be new, the basis of propaganda is still there and it's still an awful lot we can learn from the past. And if we don't learn from the past, at best we'll waste our time reinventing the wheel but at worst we'll repeat the mistakes of the past. In the introductory remarks by Professor Michael Wesley, he pointed, referred to the positive reformation and the important role in which the creation of the printing press had in spreading the message. Whereas it's worth reflecting on the process of that. It's often misunderstood that it was a creation of the printing press which by itself single-handedly drove the positive reformation. Now at the time, the vast majority of the population were illiterate. So there's no way that people were converted from confidant to the president by reading. But the printing press played a crucial role and that role was in the spread of ideas. It allowed these ideas to be spread far and wide across Europe. But it was then how those ideas were then broadcasted to the population through oration and preaching by people preaching in the marketplaces and churches which then convinced the population of the value of those ideas. And we can draw parallels with current ISIS propaganda. If we just think about it on being online and forget about the offline world, we forget about important parts of the radicalization process. What we've seen across Europe with people being radicalized to travel the fight in Syria and Iraq is that we haven't had individuals, hasn't been even spread of individuals, one here, one there, which you would expect if people were individually radicalized online. What we've seen is people traveling in groups which has highlighted the importance of the offline process in that the messages may have reached them through the online world, but it's how it interacts with discussion in the offline and group dynamics in the video contact which has driven the radicalization process. So we need to not just focus on the online. And we can also look back at history and see have we repeatedly even made this mistake. Bill referred to World War II, but I can go back to World War I and at the beginning of World War I, the Allies were not very good at propaganda. And it wasn't until the middle of the war towards the end of it that they were able to match the German propaganda and then to become better at it and play a decisive role in winning that war. But as soon as the war was over, we dismantled all of our information capabilities. When World War II came along, we had to rebuild them and it wasn't towards the end of the war that became good at it. Then we dismantled it. When the Cold War happened, we had to rebuild our information apparatus, learn the mistakes again. Then when the Cold War was ended, we dismantled it. And now in a situation in the war in terror where we need to rebuild our information systems again and relearn the mistakes of the past. Now the final point I want to make is about the need for more sophisticated communication campaigns. Now in recent years within policy circles, the idea of counter-narratives has become seen as something of a panacea that counter-narratives will be able to solve the problem of ISIS propaganda and stop radicalization. The silver bullet that is shot will solve all our problems. But there are a few fundamental issues with the idea of counter-narratives. They have their place, but only as part of an overarching communication campaign. One of the lessons from the past is that a successful communication campaign has a balance between offensive and defensive messaging. And campaigns tend to be successful when the balance changes from defensive to offensive messaging. One of the issues of counter-narratives is that they are essentially defensive messaging. And if we focus solely on them, we're always on the defensive. This means that we're essentially just talking about what the opposition wants us to talk about. We are allowing ISIS to set the ground on which the communication battle will be debated. But also, there's a fundamental misunderstanding about what a narrative is. When often we're talking about counter-narratives, what we're really talking about is counter-messaging. And we should learn from the opposition. ISIS propaganda is made from dozens of different types of messages where there's a density choice, a rational choice, offensive, defensive, say-do-get, but they all build together to create a rich tapestry that's reinforcing itself with a central narrative. If we pick out individual messages and then try to rebut them, we fail to understand the strength of ISIS's overall narrative. And also for ourselves, we can't just have a counter-messaging campaign, we actually need to have a counter-narrative. And a narrative is not just a message, it's how messages build together to create a story. But also, we need to make sure that in our rushed-accounter ISIS propaganda, we don't fall into traps. ISIS are experts at laying traps to bait journalists. And sure, we all remember the video, the gruesome video of burning the Jordanian pilot alive. We all remember the final bit of it where the pilot was burned alive, but there was another 15 minutes before that. And in that 15 minutes, they set out their argument. This was a pilot who'd bombed Syria and he was responsible for burning alive many innocent women and children. And it was only fair, only reciprocity for him to suffer the same fate and to be burned alive. Now, they knew that soon as that video was shown, the Western media would focus on the final bit and decry how barbaric it was that ISIS was burning alive with one pilot, which it was. But ISIS was ready with its counter-messaging, saying the Western media is collectively losing their minds about us burning alive with one pilot, but saying nothing about all those innocent women and children which are burned alive. And then they're ready with their secondary messaging, releasing a picture allegedly of a Buddhist monk throwing a Hindu baby into a fire pit. And saying, look, the West said nothing when this happened. Look at their double standards. So journalists need to play important part of this and part of it is being aware of the traps that ISIS may set. But to link this to the current situation with Rohingya, for me, the issue is not so much immediately about whether Rohingya refugees may be radicalized and brought into groups like ISIS, but the propaganda power which ISIS will have from exploiting the context. Another point which we need to take on board is targeting the fundamentals of communications. Often when we've had one counter-narrative, we think that will solve everything. But the message which goes to an individual who's just become curious in ISIS compared to an individual who's about to get on a plane to travel in Syria Iraq is very different. We need to be clear who we're trying to target and what type of behavior we are trying to influence and then design our campaigns backwards from that. But also we can't see our communication strategies, our CV messaging campaigns as something that is on the side of government. That's something that helps us sell what we do, makes our operations more poundable. We need to make sure our strategic communications are synchronized with the rest of government because ISIS will ruthlessly exploit any contradictions between what we say and do and will exploit our say-do-gant all the way through their propaganda. But also communications shouldn't just focus on counseling and preventing radicalization, but also after an incident. We need to be there with post-incident messaging. Terrorism is all about communication. The difference between an act of terrorism and an act of violence is that the intended audience of an act in terrorism is not necessarily those people who are killed and injured but some audience over there who you're trying to affect and the audience which you're trying to terrorize. So as Hararo mentioned earlier in his talk about the Westminster Bridge attacker, how the media jumped on it straight away and a number of politicians came out and essentially made this individual from an individual doing a cowardly attack to an agent of his global terror organization. We need to be kept. The communication war continues after an incident and we have a strong role to play in making sure that terrorists, even once they've carried out attack, are not successful in terrorizing the population. Now, the final point I want to make is the missing link in strategic communications is the same missing link that we have in all CT and CVE policy and that is monitoring and evaluation. Unfortunately, we're now in a situation of a clear and present danger and we haven't got the luxury of going away for 10 years to try and research what works and coming back and then implementing it. We need to try strategies now but those strategies need to be based on solid empirical evidence but also they need to go hand in hand with strong monitoring and evaluation so we can learn the lessons as we go along, understand what doesn't work and understand what does work so we're able to have more effective strategic communications and I will end there. Thank you very much Alastair and our final speaker for this pre-lunch session is Luke West, who is a lecturer at Charleston University and also I think still a PhD student here at A&U although I'm sure you're just about finished who's been working on issues of radicalism and terrorism and Luke, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you to the college and to the department for having me even if it was a reasonably late notice and at least after the printing run was sorted out. I think the only way this timing could be worse is if it was Friday and I was standing between you and a beer rather than lunch so I'll try and keep it reasonably brief. What I'd like to talk about this afternoon is part of what I'm trying to understand and what I'm researching in my PhD and that's trying to understand how it is the terrorist organizations exert power in the international system. Conventionally terrorism is understood across the vast majority of the literature. Terrorists, insurgents, all of these types of asymmetric actors, they are weak and a brief glimpse at the last 16 years fairly clearly demonstrates that in particular al-Qaeda I've actually exerted an enormous amount of power in the international system and so my research is trying to grasp what it is and how it is that they undertake this because they lack most of the basic elements that we use to understand what constitutes power in the international system. And the conceptual framework that I've developed is ultimately about communication so this is where I tie in the information wars. And we've only got to cast our minds back to some of the headline incidents of the last 16 years, the decision to go to Iraq, the passage of the liberal policies domestically such as warrantless wiretapping and these types of things are the vast majority of counter-terrorism legislation. Things like Guantanamo, the Black Site Prison Networks, Abu Ghraib, enhanced interrogation techniques, the willingness of the Australian, British and American governments to remove from the battlefield and where Alalaki, Junaid Hussain and Neil Prakash all citizens of those countries are not critiquing necessarily the merits or otherwise those decisions, any of them. But they are decisions that we would not have made but for the events of 9-11 and the effectiveness and the influence and coercion that al-Qaeda and the broader jihadist current have managed to exert on us. I'm trying to understand what that is. For this to work requires a sustained campaign by a terrorist organization. A single incident is not sufficient but the capacity to continue a campaign and what I'll explain in a second is the conceptual framework that comes to explain this. Pick up a couple of things that Alastair mentioned about terrorism as a communicative act. This is the COVID that we need to understand. Regrettably, this is something that we've known for a long time. In 1982, Alec Schmidt, Alastair's precursor at ICCT, wrote a famous terrorism studies book called Violence as Communication in which he states, terrorism cannot be understood only in terms of violence. It has to be understood primarily in terms of propaganda. Violence and propaganda, however, have much in common. Violence aims at behavior modification by coercion. Propaganda aims at the same by persuasion and terrorism can be seen as a combination of these two things, of propaganda and violence. And if we go back even further to the anarchists in the late 1800s and the early 1900s who invented the idea of propaganda by deed, they implicitly understood this and the propaganda by deed is the blueprint for most of the terrorism that's taken place in the 20th and 21st century. So in trying to understand all of this and trying to explain it, I have developed a conceptual model that conceives of an idea called convergent power which argues that the way that a terrorist organization exerts power in the intentional system is that it requires the convergence or synchronization of three key factors. And that's the innovative application of violence, the incorporation of communicative dynamics into that violence and the exploitation of emergent technologies. And that when you get these three things working synchronously or converged, that's when you're able to exert substantial amounts of power in the intentional system. And that the absence of one of those factors will mean that you lack the capacity to exert much power at all. And that what this conceptual framework is built off of is understanding that anarchists and the discovery of dynamite and the proliferation of handguns and the invention of the rotary press, printing press in the late 1800s underpins their capacity to achieve anything at all. And that's the convergence of those three things and the effective deployment of them together that means that the anarchist terrorists of the late 1800s and early 1900s exerted an enormous amount of power influencing the international system at the time. We can think of the same thing in regards to the Palestinian liberation organization, the hijacking of planes and the exploitation of television. And that we can think of exactly the same thing in regards to James Foley in an orange jumpsuit being beheaded and having his video distributed on social media. And that is how you force and coerce your adversary to react and ideally you provoke them into overreaction. This is the entire purpose and idea. And what you ultimately seek to do is to produce newsworthy content, content that demands news coverage that's embedded with your ideological messaging. So if we keep in mind that the terrorism act is communicative, I'm not seeking to kill all of my adversaries. I'm seeking to influence and change the way that they think and behave and the demands that a democratic public places on a government. So they all in turn institute policies that then create additional division, et cetera, et cetera with the society. In understanding this, there's some excellent work by Kidd and Walters who wrote on the strategic logics of terrorism. They had five, one of which the key one for our purposes is provocation. It's one of the purposes of which a terrorist organization deploys violence is to provoke their adversary. And that you can't provoke your adversary unless you get the three of those factors working together. Mere violence alone is insufficient. In giving you a empirical demonstration and I do this because I spend more of my time talking to practitioners than I do to academics. If we think of Coloured Shroof, who you should all be familiar with and normally I'd have a litany of images up here but it's almost lunchtime and you don't need to see that. We all remember Coloured Shroof with his son holding the decapitated head of a Syrian soldier, yeah? Yeah, that was a tweet that Coloured Shroof sent out from Syria. There was no journalist in Syria at that point. And from there it makes its way on the front page of the Australian newspaper the following day. And not just that story but the whole entire front page of the Australian with all national security stories. It makes the front page of a range of newspapers internationally in the UK and the United States. On top of that the following morning on breakfast television at 6.19, the screenshot I've got from sunrise is a picture of him, yeah? And then another one, the photo that was also on the front page of the Australian with him and his fatigues with his kids in their fatigues looking like a soldier with a quote of him explaining how his actions were justified. And that's when you start to exert influence and coercion. Because as a result of that it forces the Australian public and the Australian political discourse to discuss Syria, Jihad, Islamic State, Al Qaeda, terrorism, et cetera, et cetera. It forces us to do this. We'd rather not discuss these issues. And in fact, up until that point Australian politics and public policy had at least somewhat of a dip in its terrorism focus. So from the period when the former Prime Minister Gillard announced the national security strategy of the National Security College up here and pronounced that the age of terrorism had diminished. We had just started to shift our focus away to other things. Until we were forced to put it straight back on the front page and focus overwhelmingly on that. And we can think of the same thing in regards to James Foley and his beheading video. And that is a particularly sophisticated and refined example. So down to details like orange jumpsuits to clearly communicate and signal not just to us as an external audience but to sympathisers who take particular umbrage with Guantanamo Bay which is what that orange jumpsuit is all about. The use of things like choosing to have someone with a thick British accent as the person undertaking the beheading again adds power and weight to the image within 48 hours of that video being released on Diaspora precursor to telegrams on an encrypted platform. The U.S. President held a press conference where his tone and his language shift from referring to ISIS as the JV team, right? So it'll basically have B-grade al-Qaeda and suddenly he's talking about genocide and the Yazidis and securitising and militarising the hell out of what's going on in Syria. And with by the end of the year this is in January 2014 by the end of the year NATO has joined the coalition against ISIL and military operations in Syria and Iraq are underway. So the capacity to shape and effectively influence and coerce the decision-making processes of the highest levels of government in the West is achieved by the release of a highly polished and effective piece of propaganda. And again that's not to suggest that we ought not to have gone to Syria but understanding that we didn't make that decision entirely freely. And there's substantial questions about given the strategic priority so someone mentioned earlier today about whether or not, I think it was Greg, about the utility of us contributing which is an excellent point about the utility of us contributing to what's going on in the southern Philippines of which I agree given our strategic priorities in the region I'm fairly confident that the guys in Marawi against North Korea and that other large country around North and this is what it does. It forces by the assessment that the political apparatus makes of the public's demands in regards to what happens in the face of terrorist acts and terrorist propaganda assumes that we insist that they do something about this and there's an awfully large assumption in that. I have colleagues at work who are former military guys who regularly raise the question of what would happen if we didn't do anything? If we didn't do anything, what would happen? A bunch of handful of terrorists in the southern Philippines which is terrible and tragic but strategically it's a very, very different question. But we don't really have a choice in this context, right? So using that James Foley video as an example we can think about that in reverse. If I film James Foley or if I behead James Foley in the desert and that's all I do then it is literally a tree falling in the forest. Nobody knows I'm standing in the middle of the desert in Syria, I beheaded someone and it's achieved absolutely nothing. Even if I film it and have him in an orange jumpsuit and do all of the little bits and pieces that make it something I've still got nothing. I need the right technology platform to distribute it on. I need to get it out to people and that's why it goes on to social media. And it's only when those three elements all come together that you've achieved the sort of power and coercion and influence that you're seeking to achieve. The other half of this equation is the operationally orientated propaganda that ISIS has mastered. It's an idea that the Islamic State really sort of made happen in the current context. It's not an original idea. There was a magazine in the United States in the early 1900s called Freedom or Free Height in German and it was published by a guy by the name of Johann Most who was a German immigrant to the United States who was also an anarchist. He also wrote a thing called the, trying to remember the name of it, the Science of Revolutionary Warfare which is a small pamphlet that teaches you how to make explosives. Pretty much the same way that Inspire magazine teaches you how to make pressure cooker bombs. And the idea was that it came with a bit of enough ideological continuity that people would view it as something affiliated with anarchism and that you go off and do stuff. And they suffered this litany of individual attacks all over the United States for a decade plus just like we are now, it's not an original idea. But the jihadist content that's produced in De Beek, Remire and Inspire magazines which are the ones that everyone knows plus the huge body of supporting content that is released. So they print posters for you now so backgrounds for your phone. Comes with tactical guidance. So there's a number of attacks. You would be all be familiar with them by virtue of the litany with which, the frequency with which they take place. So stabbings and vehicular rammings are two of the big ticket items that are promoted as pre-approved tactics here to use. Trust that as ISIS, we hereby designate these as approved tactics. On top of that, those magazines and the vast body of literature that they produce also comes with rolling religious permissibility. So don't go looking for a shake or an imam to sign off on this. Trust that whatever you do, as long as you do it in the name of ISIS, it will be religiously okay and you will get the rewards that you seek. And some guidance on how to make sure that you submit the buyout video so that you get recognised as a soldier of the Islamic State and that you carried out your operation in response to the call to target coalition states which is the last line of the Amar-Qiyj press release that comes out. Mostly, almost except for two instances when it is actually an operation undertaken by Islamic State or someone who sympathises with or is inspired by Islamic State. There's only two where it's been claimed where, and I'd go with slightly different languages than I think Stephen used earlier, which is that no one proved that they didn't have an affiliation with the Islamic State. If there's a negative proof exercise in that, that's different. Just because we didn't find it doesn't mean that the guy in the Philippines and the guy in Las Vegas didn't have a cognitive affiliation with them. Yeah, cool. So what we know about the effectiveness of that operational propaganda is that since 2014, when former strategist and spokesperson of Islamic State, Adnani, released his infamous Indigil Lord is ever watchful, there has been some 50-odd individual or dyad attacks in the United States of individual and small cell operations. Usually relatively low-tec or with a half turn, so niece as opposed to a vehicular attack that kills one person, but it's the same basic idea. Individuals rather than large groups and small-scale rather than seeking mass casualty, large explosive attacks. So I touched earlier on the idea that this is not a new and novel idea, but it is different in the 21st century, particularly because of the nature of the technology platforms that are used, and it's different in a couple of key ways. The speed, the scope, and the scale. The speed with which I can be responsive and reactive to current events, the number of Marawi videos that have been released since that's become something salient allows me a flexibility that I didn't have if I was handing out, printed on a, you know, on a rotary printing press. It lets me be responsive, right, quickly. It gives me scope, which means that instead of me having to find the right person in this room who I was gonna guesstimate was the person to hand my hard copy propaganda out to, I upload it to a thousand different URLs and whoever wants to access it whenever they want to access it can access it, either safely or with a cavalier attitude. Either way, it's not my problem, right? You can access it however you want. It makes it accessible and the volume of content that I can both produce and that I can put up online dramatically changes the environment. That makes it all accessible because I can be sitting on the train, reading Inspire, listening to a nashid, and no one will really know, well, not no one, but mostly. It's a platform that provides interactivity as well. So it's not just me accessing static content necessarily, it's me going into my social network, receiving it from people and then discussing the content which lifts its salience and it's the way that it resonates. And those of you not familiar with archive.org who research anywhere in this space really should be. Because you can do takedowns all you like, but it's always preserved. And that ignores all the guys who download it to the USB and hand around hard copies to their mates. That coupled with the presence of rich media content, a video compared to a static black and white printed typewriter written document, dramatic difference. The fact that I can be filming dead kids in Syria or the latest thing that happened in Marawi or whatever it might be and the visceral nature of that content in the aftermath of airstrikes changes things dramatically. But at its core, they are using fundamental principles that were laid out by anarchist terrorists in the late 1800s and the philosophers and strategists who wrote those ideas down. This is in and of itself, it is not a novel idea. Bringing it back to some of the CVE measures that we've been talking about today and counter narratives, there's some reasons why it's exceptionally difficult to counter licenses propaganda and their narratives. It's in part because it's a highly refined narrative that for our purposes at least for 16 years now has been embedded into our daily lives. 16 years ago on September the 10th, if we'd gone and done a box-pop in Canberra and asked people what al-Aqbar meant, none of them would have known, the vast majority. Whereas now this is a phrase that people are familiar with and familiar in a terrible way in that they don't understand it. They don't understand it for 1.7 billion people on the planet. It's a relatively benign phrase, benign-ish. But they know that they're scared of it. And that's when your narrative is hitting a point that makes it for us to try and penetrate that. After 16 years, if we cast our minds back to the Sydney siege and the holding up of the not-an-ISIS flag and the way in which the media and the broader public and a number of enthusiastic politicians used that to determine that this was a terrorist attack. That kind of narrative environment makes the idea of us trying to craft a message that we can punch through and divert and push people in another direction, exceedingly difficult. Coupled with the ongoing decisions that we've made over the last 16 years and our engagement in the Middle East, which doesn't assist that narrative, coupled with the ongoing structural problems that you have in the governance arrangements of the Middle East, means that some of the arguments that underpin the Jihadist narrative, but particularly about governance in the Middle East, it's not wrong, right? It's what a first-year politics class should sound like. The critique of Middle East and Western foreign policy engagement in the Middle East is not incorrect. And so the big challenge is how you take someone who finds this narrative appealing and sit them down and talk with them or message at them, trying to explain that, oh, no, no, no, no, actually your take on Western foreign policy in the Middle East over the last however long we want to go back is actually all incorrect when there's merit to his argument. So there's some structural challenges that we confront that coupled with the fact that if any of you read the amazing interview with French President Macron in this big over the weekend, where he waxed lyrical about Hegel and postmodernism and a whole range of fascinating ideas, he gave a reasonably devastating critique of postmodernism and the need for the Western world to rediscover grand narratives. And that one of our biggest challenges in trying to provide a counter-narrative is that counter-narrative needs to be as singular as the narrative that we're countering. And ours is not. Ours is a splintered postmodern idea where we don't actually know what it is. You know, the thing that we're trying to sell you as opposed to ISIS, it's mine. It's not ours. And that presents an enormous challenge for the Western world. That couple of structural problems around bureaucratic, so creative processes, which is what you need to develop a message, doesn't come out of bureaucracies. So anyway, that's my, I'm out of time, so lunch. Yeah, thank you.