 Okay, thank you. It's an honor to open the discussion and I hope I will be very brief in my comments so that there will be, I guess, many questions from the audience as well. I will just set one question for each and then one more general question for everyone. And the general question is that how would you generalize your findings, so can you apply them to other conflicts or regions? I noticed that the focus is now very much on Africa and for Andrew's case on the North American media. So if you kind of look at the question in a more general sense, is there anything you could say about that. And then for Frank, thank you for underlying the identity perspective because identities do have a lot of power, sometimes divisive. And sometimes integrative. But how would you concretely re-engineer the identity among children and youth? And what is the role of school system and education here? And what sort of ethical questions are involved in such re-engineering of youth identities? And then for Andrew, very interesting projects and comparisons of different data sets. And of course we know that news media-based data sets have many problems, but is this surprising after all. And when I was reading your paper, I was wondering what is the relationship between the media-based data sets you use and the interviews conducted. With mainly North American journalists. So you're not very precise about this in the paper. And the paper of course raises many questions and includes various aspects. And maybe if I were you or leading the project, I would suggest that you leave something out and sharpen the focus of the paper. Then for Cyril, of course we know several explanations for the drivers of the conflicts in Sahel region. And many of the conflicts are difficult to categorize. And use the chest normatively that the African elites and people should take the lead in negotiating a new social contract. And this reminds me of Rawls of course. So the question is how would you create a good original position and assure equal participation of different groups informing this sort of social contract. So a more philosophical question. And then for Jessica it was very convincing paper and using a lot of data. And I especially enjoyed the way you defined legitimacy as a capability to provide services. So this is the procedural aspect of legitimacy. But then in the empirical part you also raise the relevance of trust the formal and informal institutions. And of course I understand that the problem is when you use data which is already collected. You are not able to operationalize the theoretical concepts maybe in an optimal manner. But what is the relationship between these two aspects of legitimacy. Thank you. Thanks very much Hanna. Excellent questions. Everybody got a general question. Everybody got a specific question as well. Well let me look at the audience here in the room very quickly if someone wants to piggyback. Okay let's please please take this this round as well. So if you can if you get a specific question let's answer these. And then we'll take another round I see about four hands. Let's let's go from right to left. Maybe we start with. Okay go ahead and then we'll go to the right. Thank you very much all of you for those stimulating presentations. I am Eve Navalia from McKelley University in Uganda. I would like to speak to you series presentation. Now listening to you, I got an impression that international players and parasitators have not done much in promoting peace in this area region. And therefore I would like to ask what in your opinion could these bodies do differently. If they are going to contribute to peace in that region. Thank you. Good thank you very much. Hi. Grazie bacilio from CGIR. Thanks a lot for the very very interesting presentation. My question relates really to the topic of these sessions in terms of what are the policy innovations that we can think of in the near future for peacekeeping. And specifically related to this. What is the role of the climate crisis and impacting in the way that we implement peacekeeping operation. We know that climate can influence and impact these operations but also operations such as the one I used for instance in the case of Mali can also cause environmental problems and create grievances leading to conflict. So I would like to pick your brain on that one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. My name is Daryl Sequera. I suppose my question relates to Mr. Frank O'Chere. Which is in connection with inequality of opportunities. Which is recognized to be the case in many many countries including European ones. Now the question here is how do you bring about equality. Is it a system whereby you would encourage a homogeneous society. So the different ethnic groups shall be encouraged to forget to somehow subordinate their identities and culture language etc. And become homogeneous with a majority. That's one way to bring perhaps equality. And on the other hand would you prefer unity and diversity which is the declared policy of India. For example although they don't practice it all the time whereby they encourage independent ethnic groups communities nations whatever within the vast subcontinent. But to remain one nation and they are trying to go towards that goal. So where does the balance lie perhaps for Africa. That's a good question. Frank really asked for that when he talked about Indonesia reengineering. I think that provoked a lot of questions. Did we have anything over here or shall we go. Oh that's another round. Okay. So let's start. Let's start there. You've heard a couple of questions. You have the questions from Anna as well. Let's do the same order. Frank over to you. Thank you very thought provoking questions. So I will start with the question about generalizability to other contests because this experiences in Africa. And I think it's largely generalizable this idea of reengineering and breaking the identity barriers in such a way that it's more of multicultural integration than assimilation of one dominant group for over the others. So in the case of Northern Ireland for example where the idea of the Catholics and Protestants played a dominant role. We had the same experience where when the youth began to feel more Irish and more united as Christians than being protestant on or Catholics that led to a reduction in the tensions and eventually in the incidence of conflict. So in that sense I think it can be generalized. If you also look at the US for example in places where you have more mixed identities in schools it tends to lead to more integration and less diverse opinions on race. So again keeping people apart making them more affiliated to their groups is less productive than trying to integrate them in a way. That would be my thought on that. Also there was a presentation yesterday about the case of the kids in Turkey and how the dominant language is the language of instruction in schools and so on. But and that's where the kids don't feel very integrated into the society. So again finding a way that the dominant group is not trying to assimilate everybody to get along but trying to integrate them over a period of time over a generation or two would be a more sustainable way forward. I think to the question in the room my thought will be that eventually there will be congregations and there will be more group mixture going into the future. So at the moment we can accept the diversity but eventually there will be more mixture through intermarriages through internal mobility through interculture interactions that in 50 years in 100 years from now if you are actively promoting diversity and inclusion it will be so mixed that these current divisions and affinity to groups that we have would eventually be dissipate over time but not coerzen it to assimilate. So I like the approach that India has taken to promote unity in diversity but eventually I have the sense that if you go back 20 years how the situation was and how you would find it in terms of intermarriages interculture exchanges in terms of even schooling. There will be more increasingly integration than people keeping to the strict borders that we have at the moment. That would be my initial thought but happy to discuss. Thanks very much. I'm reminded by the unity in diversity question. I think a lot of people feel that managing diversity is great but at what point do you turn from managing diversity to pluralism which is a bit more of a positive engagement that actually applies more inclusion, appreciation, respect, promoting social cohesion etc. Thanks very much. Andrew shall we go to you next? Yeah certainly. Am I still coming through okay? Yep. Wonderful. Yes Hannah thank you so much for your feedback and comments really grateful for them. Yeah so I think you asked a couple questions here. Are the results surprising? Why the focus on North American media and why the North American journalists interviews. I think the short answers to your questions are no the results are not surprising or perhaps are not surprising. But I think they're important right? We know that literally thousands of academic references are made to these data sets so clearly these data are being used. So I think they're just typically being used sort of in spite of their potential biases which raises a fundamental question about like actually know what we've learned or what we think we've learned from these data and for government funders right? Like should they you know should they encourage potentially like some of these efforts to go in different directions which then leads I think to your question about the North American journalists and media. Why focus on North American media because these data sets focus on North American media for the most part right? So some of these data sets are I think wholly or very closely near wholly reliant on the major wire services right? So the Associated Press, AFP, Reuters so on and so forth. Some of them are I think making more and more efforts to incorporate local media. But even where those efforts are made my understanding is they only do so. You know not speak for those but just from what I've seen incorporating local media in English language or starting to incorporate local media in different languages. So I think your point is well taken. Some of the work moving forward might be to really try to engage much more kind of rigorously and seriously with local media. However, our research has also pointed to potential biases that come along with local media as well right? So I won't get into this and I don't want to take too much time here. But an example where this really comes out is the case of Syria right? So under the Bashar al-Assad regime there really was no significant press besides the state you know sort of media apparatus. And so much of the reporting that was done from you know journalists who were traveling in another country described basically it being done often by activists. Who then potentially have their own agenda right? These are not individuals who necessarily local media people who potentially had incentives to misreport or incentives to only partially report. Or in some cases right local journalists and this is something that comes up in our interviews. Local journalists face more dangers in some cases than international foreign correspondence. And so in those cases that are potentially more susceptible to certain biases in terms of knowing that if they report on certain topics that are more vulnerable to retaliation to. So then that might lead to its own cycle of like a selective reporting that might lead us to the same sort of outcomes that we see. So anyways, thank you for those comments. I'm very grateful and again my sincere apologies for getting the paper to you so late. So I'm especially grateful that you made the time to read it on such short notice. Thanks. Thanks very much Andrew. No I clear and I think maybe we'll have another round for a couple more questions. Well thank you very much. I would respond to the first question about generalizability. I would say that it's problematic in the sense that the countries of the Sahel have particular histories and socio-economic context that are unique on a case by case basis. But there are also commonalities across the region. But if I were to pick something, I would say that one of the commonalities is a crisis of democracy. And globally, even though it's difficult to accept this, democracy is in crisis. If not, why would far-right groups attack Capitol Hill in the world's largest democracy? Why the shift towards the right with extremist right-wing ideologies that actually are advocating for things that strike at the very heart of the democratic ethos, which is equality and freedom? So that is a crisis in the region that the people of the West African Sahel desire freedom. They desire equality. And this is something that is generalizable to the other parts of the world, where there is an ongoing struggle for the heart and soul of democracy. And I would argue that what we are looking for is democratic renewal, that is recharging the batteries of the democratic spirit. Because democracy is not really the destination. It's a means to the destination. And that destination is freedom, equality, and a life of dignity for all. And if we extrapolate this to other societies where you think of minorities, be it ethnic minorities, racial minorities, minorities of sexual orientation, these are principles that need to be defended at every turn. But fundamentally, inequality is an issue that threatens democracy. And when we see how it is threatening not just democracy and stability and the nation state in the Sahel, it's something that other parts of the world we need to draw lessons from. So that's my response to that question. Second issue has to do with African elites and a new social contract. How will you ensure equal participation? I think the first step is to recognize there are certain foundational and structural issues that we need to be addressed. But let us look at the context. Most of those countries are in a space that is highly securitized and militarized. In other words, military and security solutions are prioritized over democratic solutions. And therefore the first thing that has to be done is to demilitarize and de-securitize politics. Because there is too much premium on politics as power. And once those in power get into power, they will do everything to defend power. But that is not the use of power in a democratic ethos. So my philosophical answer is that we should go back to see how we can build equal citizenship. And have a national conversation that will create the spaces for different groups of people, ethnic, social, cultural and generational, to be able to deal with that conversation in a egalitarian, socially just and participatory manner. It will require a national dialogue in the various countries. But the environment would need to be demilitarized and desecuritized. The last question I caught was about international players having not done much. That is looted. Because there are various international players in the Sahel and they come to the table with different things. I think the international players have done a lot. So the issue is not about they are not doing much. They have done a lot, whether you are looking at it in terms of economic relations, whether you are thinking of it in terms of strategic relations, whether you are looking at it in terms of military cooperation, military training, provision of arms and all what not. The international players are doing a lot. What my argument is is that they are doing so much. But rather than pour water on the fire, they are pouring petrol on the fire. Because today, I mean UN peacekeepers are attacked, French peacekeepers are attacked. They cannot defeat the various forces because the space is too wide. They cannot cope and billions of dollars are being spent year in, year out. And the situation is becoming more complicated. So if you keep trying something and it doesn't work and it's not effective, you will need to try something else. And my argument is that international players would have to undertake a paradigm shift of peace and security. And begin to embrace what it means to allow people to define their own democracy, to define their own peace and to begin to allow principles of social justice. What international community should do, and I argue in my paper, is to first understand the centrality of a homegrown new social impetus for political change and sustainable peace. The youth and other organizations and community-based groups actually have an alternate vision. What international community wants to do is to look at it from their perspective and see how they can invest in such, with new terms of engagement, to build new capable and participatory institutions and initiatives that add lives to the values of people. I know that sometimes the logic of extractivism, extracting resources is very huge. But the conflict is so much and the geopolitical situation is changing. That is not just the west that is interested in Sahel. Russia is interested, Saudi Arabia is interested, Turkey is interested, China is interested. And there has to be cohesion even if the international engagements are to continue. And the only way is to come back and talk to the people. And that cohesion with the people and with the international people coming in. Because everybody is coming in as individuals and what you have is an unruly marketplace and that is where conflict thrives. Thank you. Thank you very much. Jessica, your turn and then we'll take the left side of the audience and see if there's anything online that we need to attend to. And I think we're still okay for time over to you. I'll be very brief. Thanks so much, Hannah, for the comments. Regarding the generalizability of the case I'm looking at, which is one million in Libya, I think what's interesting is that in a way that mission does represent a turn that has affected other missions subsequently, which is the focus on peace-building. So currently all peacekeeping operations have peace-building mandates to different extents in the sense that not all of them try to do that many things that have allied in one of the slides. So in some way, UNMIL is not special as a mission, but of course there are some specificities to the context where the mission was deployed. The fact that it was a complex settings. And more generally, I think UNMIL in and of itself is an interesting case because the UN has been, in a way, advertising it as a success story. And so they think they've been doing something good there. So I think in and of itself is a case that is worth examining. And thanks for raising the point regarding traditional leaders, which again I put that as to just just oppose this trust towards formal and informal institutions. I think that to figure out what is going on with the traditional leaders trust. Well, first the Afrobarometer asks about traditional leaders, but they don't provide information on what are these exactly in the context of Liberia, who respondents be thinking about the same kind of actors, who are these traditional leaders really. And I think interpreting the results on that requires better, I think, diving more into the history of the conflict. So what was the role, for example, of traditional leaders during the conflict, but also to what extent they were part of the peace-building process, were they empowered by the UN? Was the UN trying to liaise with them to build peace locally? So I think a lot of what UN has been doing on the ground with those leaders specifically would help, I think, shed more light on the finding of traditional leaders, which I think should be a completely different project. And finally, if I can talk of the policy innovation question that was asked from the audience, I think this is very interesting. And in the context of the paper I've been discussing, the policy innovation really is, I think, the peace-building term that has happened. And what I'm trying to suggest is that we should probably be focusing a little bit more on that. We know that there are things that UN missions can do reasonably successfully. They can reduce violence, for example. They can lengthen the peace, but can they do more than that? So what is possibly, I could say, a negative side effect of what they're trying to achieve on the ground? As much to everyone for their insights. Great. Thank you very much. I think we have time for another round. Let's take this side of the audience. We'll start here up front. Enri Koninkalatti, research assistant at UNU Water, MPGD candidate in the University of Helsinki. My question is for all, but especially for Dr. Rocheri regarding the impact of COVID-19 in this peace-building dynamics. Your last slide, you mentioned that it is really important the interaction between members of different ethnic groups. I would like to know what do you think about the impact of COVID-19 because most of our countries imposed curfews, so it was not possible for people to interact and to be, just to stay in public spaces. So it was not possible to go to schools. So there was an possibility to learn and interact with other individuals. So like if these moved children and youth to their ethnic groups to feel more closed or they felt more national or also regarding the impact of social media on this. Yeah, this is my question. Thank you. My name is Eva Lissami-Lemaki. I'm a local participant. I would like to go back to Serial's presentation. I'm not very well aware of the political developments in West Africa, but you were talking about the paradigm shift and lack of democratization or flashback of democratization. I think it was very interesting what you were mentioning about the return of military governments. And that reminds me that we used to study militarization and military governments in Africa and Latin America, especially in the 70s. And I think in the case of Africa, an explanation was that it was the post-colonial setting and weak political institutions. In the case of Latin America, the explanations were different, of course. But maybe you were giving some general explanations for this paradigm shift, so I would like to hear a little bit more specifically what you think would be the determining factor in the political systems so that the military has come back. Thank you. Thank you very much. A really good question. I think if you consider that as paradigm shift there's quite a bit of turbulence, people sticking to the old paradigm, I would add to that what would be an indicator that a paradigm is actually shifting in the overall response in the Sahel, beyond human security, beyond stabilization, et cetera. We have one more. Yeah, thanks. Ville Savaranta from CMC Finland. I have a question to Jessica. Firstly, it's super interesting to see a paper using the GOPKO dataset. Finally, great work on that. You made the observation that citizens close to UN deployment areas are more likely to trust governments and police. I just want to dig a little into that spatial argument that you make there. If you can tell more about that, did you, for example, control your interviews using population density dataset or something along these lines since it would be really interesting to dig into the micro level on this. How does that proximity of the UN operation and the population work? Does it work only on higher density areas? How about lower density areas, et cetera? Thanks. Thanks very much. I think Jessica's presentation touched the nerve for a lot of us, certainly for me, because in the next three years we are the proud new hosts of the secretariat for an international dialogue on peace building and state building. I think we need to have a chat as well about what that actually means in the current context. I think that's it. Anything from the audience online? No. Okay. So we have about four minutes, one minute each, but also give Hannah perspective an opportunity as well to maybe wrap it up for us if she would like to. Frank? Thank you very much for the question. I think the COVID lockdowns was brought about this loneliness isolation that prevented opportunities for integration and socialisation. And as we have seen, some people got radicalised, people had issues of their mental health that kind of reinforced some of these identities. So it's really an opportunity that countries are beginning to open up to go back and try to address some of these challenges that these lockdowns have brought, but definitely I agree that it wasn't a good period for integration and opportunities to promote this kind of unity and cohesion in society. So we should really go back and promote this now that we have the opportunity. On social media, I think it offers ministries of national security the opportunity to actively monitor social media, look at sentiments and pick up a least signals of any resentment. So we know how radios have been used in the past to mobilise groups. And yesterday we had somebody made a prediction that the next mobilisation will be through social media of some sort. So ministries of security should actively monitor social media, pick up sentiments and also actively send out neutralising information so that any attempts of radicalisation can be neutralised and early warning systems can be set up in a way that you can prevent some of these conflicts from escalating into actual conflict. I hope that kind of responds to the question. Thanks. I don't know if anyone asked Andrew a question. Can I ask you a question, Andrew, as we move ahead? So I think part of what you're saying is if we're looking at people, policymakers particularly in the west, international organisations using evidence-based or turning to evidence-based decision-making on policy issues and everyone here in the room and online perhaps and all of us are concerned with building national capacity in particularly difficult contexts, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, et cetera, how do we actually then in a particular transition period or peace-building period help national counterparts to be able to actually maybe look at the same data, expand the data and for them to also be able to undertake what we might consider evidence-based decision-making that is actually in the interest of promoting and sustaining peace and prevention in their particular country. Go ahead. Yeah, that's a wonderful point. I think that's right. We talked about the potential effort to include more local reporting, but in cases where it's possible, if there were ways to actually train, equip post governments to potentially carry out more of their own precise record keeping of where, when, what type of violence is occurring, then I think that would be a really, really incredible way to offset sort of some of these existing data collection efforts. Good. Thanks very much. Zero. Well, thank you very much for this very interesting questions. I will respond to the recent coup d'etat by looking at the actors involved. Now, when you look at the military officers that led the coups in Mali, Bukina, Faso, as well as Chad, you will see that they were all trained in the West, United States, Germany, and France. And how did they get that training? They got that training because they were specialized soldiers who were trained to fight terrorists and insurgents. It was part of the securitization response to the crisis in the region. But guess what? They came back home, had these very interesting positions, grew very close to the political leadership, saw the problems in the state, and took power. Unintended consequence of what was supposed to be an international support to a problem in the country. This is a bit different from the coups of the 1960s and 1970s. And so that's why I said in my opening remarks that you have global responses being localized. The global response to a crisis in that region has created the situation of the rise of new militocrats. Going back to the question you raised about paradigm shift. I'm talking about is not a shift from the civilians to the military. What I'm saying is that the whole industry and framework of stabilization, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, that paradigm that treats the result or the symptom but does not go to the bottom of the problem, which is the collapse of the social contract and the very dire socioeconomic conditions that have eliminated most of the people and reduced them to penury and hopelessness. And they are searched for any alternative to that political configuration that has been imposed on them. That is the fundamental problem. And that is what has to be rethought. And that's why I'm advocating for a paradigm shift away from top-down, imposed, securitized solutions to ground up people-centered perspectives. The argument is that we've tried something for so long. It's creating new contradictions. Let us go back to the roots, do the research and start a new paradigm that shifts away from the one that is either counterproductive, or limited in impact, or creating new problems. Thanks very much, Siril. Jessica, over to you. Yes, I will mostly address the last question in just a time because I think we're already a bit over time. So thanks so much for the reflections on the proximity story here. I have to say that with peacekeeping, proximity is tricky because what I'm assuming here is that peacekeeping just stay where they are in the counties where they are deployed because I don't have information on, for example, to what extent they go patrolling. And we know that they move. So they don't just necessarily stay where they are. However, the kind of... The role that proximity has, I think, in my theoretical thinking here is that proximity just implies that the signal that citizens receive regarding the city capacity is just stronger if units, if peacekeepers are deployed, they're visible because these military deployment are visible. And so in a way, I think this is where the attribution problem can become more relevant. But it's a bit tricky. I think the GOPPO does a great job in enabling access research and looking at this more micro-level dynamics. So it's a great public good that more people will be using and a lot have already been using it. So I think it allows us to say more about this spatial dynamics. But again, of course, there are limitations because we don't know exactly how much contact is there with civilian populations and local populations. Thanks so much for the question. Thanks very much. Hannah? Okay, we are already over time. But yeah, to conclude, I was a bit concerned about the title of this panel, Policy Innovations in Peacebuilding, and I didn't really know what to expect, some kind of technological innovations and so on. So I was very happy to see that we are in the middle of the traditional political science questions on identities and democracy and role of media and so on. So this was very nice session and very good learning experience for all of us. So thank you for the audience and for the panelists for the interesting discussion and papers. Thank you very much. Thanks to everyone online. Thanks to everyone who joined here. Have a good lunch. Very much enjoyed it too.