 Good morning, everybody. Great to see everyone. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at US Institute of Peace. And it is my great pleasure to welcome everybody. And for those who are watching online, you can follow us on social media at USIP and participate in today's conversation with the hashtag inclusive peace. And I'm looking at who's in the room. And I think probably almost everybody here has something to contribute to the conversation. So I'm just delighted to welcome everyone. Probably everybody knows, but I'll remind us that USIP was founded in 1984 by US Congress as an independent, nonpartisan federal institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is very possible. It can happen, despite what the headlines tell us. That's essential for our national and global security. And most of all, it's very practical. And so the conversation that we're having here today is about how to take a lot of evidence, a lot of good policy ideas, how to move that ever more firmly into practice and to understand that. We are all keenly aware that there's a growing international consensus in the international policy community that inclusion is critical to the success of peace processes. There's growing evidence. Probably many of you are familiar with some of those most compelling pieces of evidence, including the Ipsila study that looked at 83 peace agreements and found that when civil society is included, the risk of peace breaking down after agreement is reduced by 64%. That's a very powerful statistic. And so the challenge and the charge today is how to better translate these findings into better practice and better policy to produce better results. And one of the challenges I think is, how do you not only bring diverse actors to the table, but how do you also enable them to have a more effective way of participating? How do you make that a better process and conversation? And I know you'll hear more specifically on that topic today from our USIP Jennings Randolph fellow, Ezra Chawadar, who's been looking at what are the entry points to broaden and deepen participation in peace processes. And I want to note I was just upstairs with a really remarkable group of senior African women leaders from about eight different countries. And the one thing in a free-flowing dialogue that we had, the one thing that they really wanted to talk about was how can women be more effectively involved in peace processes? And I tried to invite them down, but they're having a, there's a whole program, but you know they got quite passionate and they said we don't need anymore UN resolutions. We're done with resolutions. We want it to actually happen. We want to no longer be knocking on the outside, but to effectively be able to bring peace to our countries because we have something to offer. So I commend you to the conversation that you're having today. This has been an effort that USIP has been engaged in for over 10 years, including our efforts to support inclusion in the peace processes in Colombia. And I know you'll hear more about that today. We in Colombia looked specifically at what are the more innovative mechanisms that were used in the FARC negotiation to include more diverse sectors and how do you develop a gender sub-commission that can be effective? And we are currently commissioning new research on what are the forms of resistance to inclusion and how do we overcome that resistance and what's the role of different coalitions in having more effective peace processes, trade associations, different grassroots movements. These are the kind of research findings and others that we'll hear about today from conciliation resources. We're just delighted to be partnering with conciliation resources. Thank you for the good work that you all are doing. And we're looking at how these best practices can be incorporated into support that USIP colleagues who are working to support various peace processes right now including in Burma, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Colombia and other places and how to help bring these forward into US policy and to a broad community of practitioners. So I know this will be a very rich conversation. We're still going to see if we can get our African women leaders connected up somehow but have a wonderful dialogue conversation. Thank you everybody in this room for your interest and engagement in this topic. And I hand it over to my wonderful colleague, Rho Tucci, who's Director of Inclusive Societies here at USIP, Rho. Thank you, Nancy. So before we kick off, I just want to mention that this is just the beginning of demonstrating USIP's commitment in the space of inclusion and peace processes. So we'll have two new members join the team in the coming weeks and we've got a range of activities that we'll keep you updated on from little things like including the term Inclusive Peace Processes in our new peace terms book that's available on our website to partnering, expanding our partnership with organizations like Consoliation Resources who have been working in this space for decades. So more to come. We'll keep you updated for sure. So let's get started. Let me give you a quick overview of the program. We're first going to turn to Consoliation Resources. So my colleague, Sophia Close and Zabia, who are senior advisors at Consoliation Resources and authors of the new reports. They'll give us an overview of their four-year project focusing on navigating inclusion and peace processes and how their research draws from local perspectives and local partners in Columbia and Nepal and a number of other countries around the world. We're excited to hear how they saw inclusion negotiated as we move from war to peace. What were the common barriers and trade-offs between inclusion and stability? What are the types of external and internal support that have been most effective? And what are the strategies that organizations have used on the ground to influence these processes? And then we'll turn it over to my colleagues, Deepak and Rosa Emilia, to hear more about the details of how these experiences played out in Nepal and Columbia. So let me turn it over to you, Sophia and Zabia. Please. Thank you so much, Nancy and Ro for your warm welcome and for your support for Consoliation Resources to be here with the United States Institute for Peace and for your partnership in peacebuilding. Just a little introduction. Consoliation Resources is an independent international organization working with people in conflict around the world for almost 25 years to prevent violence, resolve conflicts and promote peaceful and inclusive societies. We take what we learn to government and other decision makers working to end conflict to improve their policies and their peacebuilding practice worldwide. I'm going to pass to my colleague, Zabia, to start our presentation. Good morning. So the work that we're sharing with you today is research that we've been conducting over the last four years. It's part of a bigger research consortium called the Political Settlements Research Project. We've been conducting it with some of our partners who are here today. It's a UK-age funded project as well, being led by the University of Edinburgh in the UK. And the main question or issues that it's interested in is this looking at high inclusion gets negotiated and navigated in water peace transitions. So our starting point for it was really a recognition that inclusion and conversations around inclusion are becoming increasingly important and discussed. We see increasing commitments to inclusion in global policy documents, the recent UN and World Bank report on pathways to peace, the sustaining peace agenda, and as well as these normative commitments to inclusion, we also see greater evidence on why inclusion is how it contributes to sustainable peace. And also evidence of why some of the exclusionary peace deals that we've seen, some of the emphasis on stabilisation and stability haven't necessarily allowed for peace deals that have endured. So our starting point was to look at what are alternative ways to stabilisation? How do we look at the way inclusion has been operationalised? Particularly so looking more at the high. How does inclusion get negotiated into peace deals into transition processes? And also because we work very closely with partners in the context where we work, looking at the strategies that have been used by civil society, by different marginalised groups to get different agendas and different interests into peace deals. So we were looking particularly in this project at five different contexts. Columbia, Nigeria, the Ogden, which is the Somali region of Ethiopia, Nepal and Boganville in Papua New Guinea. So we have two of our partners from the research, Deepak and Rosemilia from Columbia and Nepal to share some of the more in-depth research findings. And Sophia and I will talk a bit more about this kind of key overarching findings, broad trends on inclusion, and then Sophia will talk a bit about the kind of more gendered aspects of the findings. So just to look at our kind of key overall findings. Oh sorry, and I should say, one of the frameworks that we've been using under this broader political settlements project is the idea of formalised political unsettlement. So this is the idea being championed by Christine Bell at Edinburgh University who leads the project that transition processes, the institutions that emerge from peace agreements and peace deals tend to formalise some of the dynamics from conflict into those institutions, but they also allow, what emerges is also renegotiation, contentions, more bargaining. So it's not necessarily settlement, it's unsettlement. And the argument is that this actually allows increased opportunities for thinking about inclusion and trying to push inclusion into the agenda. So just to run through some of the main findings. Thank you. Firstly, really importantly what we saw was that inclusive change is slow and incremental. And this requires both sustained commitment but also realistic and then long-term goals. So the tensions between stabilisation and inclusion often lead to agendas that prioritise stabilisation to the detriment of inclusion. And because of this you have quite unpredictable, quite non-linear transition processes where there's also opportunities for change can be quite unexpected. So for example in Nepal the 2015 earthquake actually provided quite an unexpected opportunity to push through a second constitution. So because of this kind of tension between stability and inclusion, what we saw is that it's really important to think about inclusion from the start. Trying to delay it to later into the process actually closes down space for opening up a conversation on inclusion. What you see tends to happen is elite capture of institutions and political arrangements that actually limit the ability to introduce inclusion at a later stage. So it's very important to think about inclusion from the get-go. Particularly being more upfront about inclusion at the start allows you to think through what some of the tensions are between stability and inclusion, what some of the trade-offs are and where there are opportunities for thinking about how to get different groups agendas into transition processes at different stages as well. So this really requires a long-term view to really see through the kind of, to allow for more predictable trajectory really. The second finding that we had was that the way that inclusion tends to be negotiated in transition processes tends to be predicated on the accommodation of specific identity groups. So if you look at, for example, par-sharing out arrangements, they often operate by trying to provide specific groups to enter into a coalition. And this can have unintended consequences. Firstly, that these types of frameworks may preclude some groups from accessing political arrangements. So for example, in Nepal, we saw that the main mode of political inclusion that was discussed in the first constituent assembly was federalism based on ethnic self-governance. And this would have benefited identity groups that were territorially concentrated. Whereas some groups such as the Dalit communities, a very marginalized group within Nepali society that are more geographically scattered, it was quite important to look for other ways to ensure their political representation and inclusion. Second implication of this is that mechanisms such as par-sharing or reserve seats for particular groups tend to reinforce the societal identity markers. And that's often an hindrance to pluralism over the longer term. And the mechanisms rarely enable people to move between specific political and identity markers. And this can have an impact on how inclusion gets. Some of the outcomes for inclusion in the future. So it's very important to be aware of the unintended consequences of particular mechanisms and seek ways to mitigate its adverse effects. Secondly, or thirdly, I'm not sure where I am. Thirdly, we saw, and this I think speaks very much to some of Ezra's research that she's doing here at USIP, is that there is, tends to be, elite resistance to inclusion agendas. So what we saw is that the emergence of progressive and inclusive politics can often be short-lived. And a key feature of transition processes was the return of the old guard to the political scene. But what we also saw is that the re-emergence of some of these more conservative forces doesn't necessarily signal the demise of inclusion agendas. And it's quite important to think about ways in which to both engage and incentivize those whose interests are threatened. And some of the ways that we saw that that, the ability to keep inclusion on the agenda was through what we called hooks being built into agreements or implementation processes. For example, mandatory consultations, participatory and transparent monitoring processes that give excluded groups leverage vis-a-vis formal actors in transition processes. And also as commitments become more incorporated into legal documents and instruments, and often they become too ingrained in the political discourse to be substantially reversed. Fourthly, and my last point, is around the subnational level. And this often being overlooked as an arena where change is possible, inclusion is possible, but also where different forms of exclusion happen. So the typical focus on the kind of national and the formal often misspecific ways in which exclusion actually happens at the national level. So you see that when we talk about inclusion as a national agenda and thinking about groups that can access political arrangements, often inclusion gets precluded at the subnational level. And there's much less visible barriers to inclusion within subnational, informal, customary structures and authorities. And often for many communities, the local and informal may be more relevant for them in determining their ability to affect change or avoid sub-perspectives. On the other hand, we saw that actually this kind of looking at the kind of unsettlement at this subnational level actually allows for different avenues or channels for thinking about inclusion at the subnational and informal level. So these have quite important implications for how we think about inclusion, particularly where we see an increased interest in mechanisms such as decentralization, local governance, peace committees, local civil society activism. And what we saw is that it's very important to think about the ways in which inclusion at a formal level and the commitments made at a formal level are translated down into this local level. And I think my colleagues will talk a bit more about some of the mechanisms for doing that. And I'll hand over this here. Thanks, Zabia. My show and tell, these are out the front and we hope that you'll take a copy. This is the larger paper and we have a smaller paper that gives policy guidance for both mine and Zabia's presentations. So these reports that I'm talking about discuss findings from our practice-based research in Columbia, Nepal, in Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea. We explored particularly how effective peace processes have been in securing inclusive outcomes and how women and other excluded groups have challenged and expanded the peace process through this different forms of organized activism. And we reviewed how the violence within the conflict or the threat of violence affects their ability to engage and what extent these groups used international standards like UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and others to further their inclusion aims. So this research builds on research that our colleagues are doing within the political settlements research project, particularly Catherine O'Rourke's work on gender and political settlements that conclude that the root causes of violence, including gender inequalities are rarely fully addressed in a peace process. And our research found that the conflict, whilst it did shift gendered roles and behaviors, dominant masculine hierarchies remain through the transition processes. So despite the greater participation of women and other excluded groups, these hard-to-change gendered norms are not being transformed. Indeed, often these systems continue to perpetuate forms of gendered exclusion. And in all the contexts we researched, men, particularly older, elite men, continue to dominate much of the national and local level decision-making. Our findings also highlight that political settlements are shaped by both the formal and informal systems of power, which remain deeply contextualized and take long periods to shift. So for example, the final constitutional negotiations in Nepal ended up being decided by higher status elite men. Despite 30% of the constituent assembly being women. And in Bougainville, where seats are reserved for women, many people view the non-quota seats as being reserved for men, suggesting that there are fundamental attitudes to gender roles that remain unchanged. So as Zabia mentioned, this indicates the need for much longer timeframes and complementary initiatives at all levels of the peace process to overcome resistance to change in regards to gender. So conciliation resources suggest that donors who are operating in peace transition contexts can do more to put gender at the heart of their programming and in particular, our key points. So women and other excluded groups need sustained and adaptive support to leverage their participation. So they are able to engage in the outcomes of influencing the outcomes of peace processes in which they take part. This means building in deliberate mechanisms to include these diverse groups into peace negotiations, into the agreements themselves, and into the implementing institutions and mechanisms that come after a peace agreement to seize these opportunities for inclusion. And we particularly note that that needs to happen early and during and immediately after the peace processes. And this may include hooks such as reserved seats at formal, national, but also very importantly at the sub-national, the local level as being a path for women and other excluded groups to engage and also quotas in constitutional legislative reform consultations. Another major finding of the research is the importance of using an intersectional approach to peace building to identify these patterns of multi-dimensional and persistent gender discrimination to help understand which groups are losing out and why. An intersectional approach recognises that exclusion and inclusion are determined by many factors in regards to a person's identity, including their gender. For example, their ethnicity, their age, their faith, their ability and their sexual orientation. And this should be a basis in which we can create a far more targeted and systematic response to reducing the exclusion of these specific groups. So unless these are multi-dimensional forms of discrimination are addressed, they continue to be embedded within the political settlement. And we also noted that international organisations rarely undertake gender-sensitive analysis. And we used our conciliation resources, gender and conflict analysis toolkit to do our research and we find it very helpful to take this approach. We also noted that during and after a conflict, non-state and civil society organisations are crucial spaces for activism and peace resistance. Women and other excluded groups working in civil society organisations have continued to create and sustain spaces for inclusive change. This work is difficult to sustain, is risky to undertake which I think Rosa Emilia will underline as well and requires ongoing support. International solidarity and support has been crucial to achieving these local forms of inclusion and all the case studies that we looked at. However, the assistance has also been problematic and has exacerbated community and national level tensions. So participants in a number of the places that we were researching explained that the term gender itself is often understood to mean women which can exclude the vital role of men and boys in transforming gender roles and behaviours. And our research reinforced the importance of engaging with influential men and key institutions, for example religious and cultural institution on the ground to build support for transformative change within society. My final point. International frameworks and standards such as 1325 seed or the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have been very useful in each of the contexts to leverage for inclusion. However, they need to be complemented by having homegrown and bottom up perspectives, approaches and priorities and international actors can do more to support local activists to adopt these local frameworks to their contexts as has been done in Columbia, Nepal and Bogenville and I think my colleagues will discuss that particular point. So I'm going to pass to Deepak Tapa now to explain the context that he has been involved in in Nepal. Thank you, Sophia. The Nepal case for those of you who are not familiar with the situation in Nepal. Nepal has in the past 12 years undergone political transition and emerged out of it more or less intact and is considered by many to be one of the most successful examples of a transition that was able to manage all the different grievances. There are obviously differences of opinion regarding what it was able to achieve and there are shortcomings in the whole process and in the political structure that we have right now. But on the whole we managed to escape a reversal to conflict and that itself is a no small thing considering the tensions around the peace process that we saw between 2006 and more or less still very recently. Having said that the one aspect of the peace process that has not been taken up with any level of seriousness is the issue of transitional justice and that's a separate issue. So having recognized that I will deal with more the political process which sometimes tends to give a pretty skewed picture if you forget the other part. As shown in the slide the comprehensive peace agreement of 2006 ended the People's War launched by the Maoist Party in 1996. It also ended the supremacy of the monarchy around the same time. So the promise of the People's Movement of 2006 which was launched prior to the agreement being signed was towards greater inclusion of Nepal's different social groups of which as you can see on the slide there are so many 125 different social groups speaking more or less 100 plus languages following 10 different religions. Of course they're not divided equally. The largest group that we have in Nepal is only 16%. So you can see understand the diversity that we face in Nepal. But the other thing was that it would lead to inclusion but also the end of the conflict and to some extent there was a great desire for the end of the monarchy because the monarchy has continuously or had continuously stepped in to stymie the progress towards democracy historically. Hence the success of the movement was due partly to this great enthusiasm and participation by large sections of the population who envisaged the advent of what we then called New Nepal quote unquote which would see great inclusion of all kinds of people. It was also possible because the demands made by the Maoists when they started the People's War had a great degree of inclusion. They demanded the inclusion of various groups which following their ideology perhaps was only to be expected but it was also a tactical strategy because you have in Nepal almost 70% of the population is recognized by the constitution as being marginalized. Hence there was the possibility of gaining a great degree of popular support for their own movement. So by the time the 2006 movement came around the most of the political forces had recognized that exclusion was key to the success of the People's War and that was one of the problems that we had faced. So they began to calibrate their own positions on the issue of inclusion and began to at least declare that they were all for more or less what the Maoists had demanded of course with certain caveats. And this came about only not only from the political parties but also from the state including a government rule controlled by a very conservative force represented by the monarchy. So when the comprehensive peace accord was signed and around that time we saw a number of steps taken to ensure great inclusion of the different social groups of Nepal. Among the main ones that I'd like to mention is that Nepal has declared a secular state one of the long-standing demands because there's a large contingent of people influential people in Nepal who believe that it's a western agenda forgetting the long history of organizing against the imposition of a particular religion on Nepal. Very important was the adoption at the same time in 2006 of something that we call the Gender Equality Act which required that all the acts had to be amended to bring a gender parity in Nepali laws. The third thing that we did was we introduced quotas in government service and education as well as in the electoral process to ensure greater representation, not in proportion but then to a fairly large degree of the population. And we also recognized, so we also ratified the ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous Peoples and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that was in 2007 to recognize the rights of a large population of the Indigenous people around 37% of the population. And among the things that we did and that led to the problems that came later was to introduce the idea of federalism in Nepal which also had a long history and then like when the Maoist insurgency going on there was greater recognition that one of the problems with the way the Nepali state functions was that it is a very unitary centralized structure and all the development happening around the periphery of the capital. So we need to take government closer to the people and one of the ways to do that is to break up Nepal into different federal units with a federal state at the center which immediately led to the question of what is the nature of the federal states going to be. And there was this great debate about whether it should be based on economic viability or whether it should be based on ethnicity. The problem with both approaches was that because when you say economic viability only you don't recognize the historicity of certain groups having lived in certain parts of the country and the gradual dispossession that they faced over centuries of their rights and their property as well. But on the other hand because of the huge migration that has taken place internal migration that has taken place over the past centuries there is no one place where a group is in a majority except in small pockets. So despite the fact that there are recognized territories that were historically homelands of particular groups, they don't form a majority. No one forms a majority anywhere. Again like we have 125 different groups. So it is very difficult to find areas where any group forms a majority. So that led to what we are increasingly calling the backlash, the elite resistance mainly because this whole dialogue or this whole discourse around federalism was suddenly conflated with the idea of inclusion. So if you provide great inclusion that will lead to ethnic federal states and hence the breakup of the state. Of course that was one extreme argument. And there were extreme arguments on both sides also because there was this group of very influential activists, academics who were advocating ethnic states and also to the extent that they would not exactly ethnic cleanse other populations from there but then ensure that life becomes difficult through taxations and so on. So you had two sides of the debate which really helped in watering down the inclusion agenda and right now inclusion is still seen as a dirty word in certain circles in Nepal among the elite. Mainly because although inclusion is something that has been demanded by the local population over many years, the support for activities revolving around inclusion has come mainly from western donors and hence the idea that inclusion is a western agenda is very strongly felt in very influential circles of Nepal. So that is a problem. But the reality is that there are certain groups of people that are excluded and the constitution in 2015 recognized that groups are excluded. Certain measures have to be taken to provide for greater inclusion. Hence the electoral quotas, slightly watered down were retained. The quotas in jobs and education has been retained. There are attempts being seen to somehow ensure that inclusion is a much more milder version of the inclusive policies will be put in place in the future. Recently in a couple of days ago there was this announcement by the government that the quota system would apply to someone only once. So if you enter the government service through the quota system in terms of promotion you are no longer eligible. So there are various ways in which the elite have ways of getting back because the commissions are headed by the elite and they submit the reports to the elite and these are the people who make the decisions at the moment. So that is where we are. But what has also happened is that we held three rounds of elections last year the federal level, the provincial level and the local level. And that has led to, because like we have these electoral quotas and then we had not had local government elections for 20 years that has led to great inclusion particularly at the local level mainly because the local governments reflect the population of those areas. The more immediate impact has been in the electoral quotas introduced for women. So the lowest administrative unit is the ward in which out of five members two have to be women and one of those women has to be a Dalit woman. That's even more fantastic. So we find at the moment that at the local level at least 40% of all representatives are women. So which is a sea change from the situation that existed earlier. That also has led to other changes in the provincial and the federal level also. In the federal level and the provincial level at least 33% of the legislative members have to be women and then there are other quotas related to various other social groups as well. When it comes to the apex decision making bodies such as the cabinet of course representation of women is still below par. Representation of Dalits at the most oppressed group in South Asia is even lower than women but it is different. Nowadays you cannot have a cabinet without representation of at least one Dalit. Of course it's tokenism and all that but that's something we didn't used to have 10 years ago. And I think that we're moving towards a much more progressive state. So that's the optimistic view. Of course there are a lot of problems but hopefully we won't revert back to. Now that inclusion has somehow been institutionalized through our constitution and through our laws we will find ways in which to manage the many problems we still face. I'd stop here. Thank you. Good morning everyone. In the Colombian, I really like to hear Deepak because I imagine how we can be in some years and then I don't know if I feel happy or not. But it's very good. It's a good lesson to hear. And in the Colombian case I just want to say like five main points that I want to highlight in this moment. The first one as you see in most of you know the Colombian case. Most of you know that we come from a very long conflict environment and that we have a very complicated conflict. It's not only an internal armed conflict but it has a lot of many things that are around. So what I want to say is that we are actually, yes, a very polarized society, a very divided society, a very broken society with many agendas that has been not applied of many people, from indigenous people, from Afro-Dizandan people, from everywhere. We have so many problems. But I think that one of the main problems that we have is that we are a fearful society. We are fear. We feel fear. And that is extremely important when you are talking about inclusion. That is important because everyone is a fear of any kind of change. Everything is a risk. If too much inclusion, that is a risk. But too less inclusion, that is a risk. But women, they are a risk. But indigenous, they are a risk. But elite, they don't want to talk about risks. So fear is something that we have to take into account when we are talking about inclusion, about changes, about how we are moving our society. So this means a lot of tensions because everyone, and in this idea of multiple identities that we also have in another way, but we also have so many arising identities that were unknown for so many time, there are people that we see each other. There are people that it is really a crucial moment of recognition, but also a very risky moment for changes. So the second point means that with all this, we are in a peace process. But at the same time, we are in a negotiation. So it's a real weird moment because we are having all the same time. We have to talk about everything at the same time. And then we have to prepare for the next peace process. But we have been just in a negotiation that tried to be highly inclusive with gender perspective. And in that sense, we did a good job as women's movement. But women in the negotiating table were also doing a good work. And I think that this kind of joint work gave very important issues and outcomes. But then we have a transition, very complicated moment with all these ingredients. And I think we have many studies, and that is something that I always think about. Many studies say after a peace process, a violent moment will arise. And they say it several times. And they say gender issues are going to be very complicated if gender issues have been thrown to the moment. So sometimes I question myself, so if we know all this, why don't we prevent all these issues? If we know it, so many researchers, so many comparative studies saying these moments are crucial because that's a lot of fear and a lot of changes. Why don't we take it in account? And then we have this idea of sustainable peace. But sustainable peace means negotiating in the whole society. Well, you have this negotiated table, but then you make it wider because the whole society is now negotiating. It's negotiating inclusion. It's negotiating changes. We have to speak. We have to dialogue. We have to have negotiations in between society, in between women, in between indigenous, different organizations, in between peasants and indigenous, in between minorities and the indigenous and women and the LGTB and all the rights and identities that have been exerted and all with a status quo, with the elite resistance. So we have to manage because then our incredible challenges are transforming the ways of participating, transforming our ideas about inclusion, transforming our notion about citizenship and transforming the way we talk with the elite in a peaceful way. So that is challenging because it's so many things that you have to transform transforming. You have, it's not only the idea of inclusion, it's the idea of transforming the ideas of inclusion and transforming the power relations about inclusion. So it's really challenging. And we find this kind of elite resistance to any change because there are a lot of interests and there is, and I'm not talking about only the politician elite, I'm talking of so many different economical elites that we have in Colombia. We don't have only as rich people. We have, for example, all the narcotrafic things and they don't want things to change so easily because they have great business on there. So we have to manage to have another kind of conversations. We need to be so creative and that is challenging for women because we don't want to be included just because we are women. We want to be included because we have other ideas about security, about relationships. It's not, and I understand when we talk about borders, but it's not only about borders. It's about other new ideas coming to the democratic debate. So we are trying to build another idea of democracy. And I think that idea of democracy is not really yet invented. And I think that what is extremely incredible of these new ideas and tensions and dynamics about inclusion and participation is because we are creating new notions of democracy. And finally, with this I want to finish. The last point I want to arise is we are changing the fabric of relations in society. That was brought in a meeting we had previously in New York and I found it so deep and nice. We are changing the fabric of our relations and that is challenging. That means that we have to change and that we have really to have different kinds of support. We need to have support not only to go to a meeting. We need support to know and how to go, meet and be influential, be important in that meeting, have voice in that meeting, go back to my country and say that meeting was useful or it was useless, more of the same because we have to be accountable in our countries. And then we have to have notions of how we are going to get better. And finally, the support for Colombia now is so important. We have the echoes of peace but we have the echoes of violence. We have the echoes of peace and we have to have the international support for the echoes of peace, people that are willing to keep working on peace because the echoes of violence, they always have the ways to behave the way they want. And that is why we have so many human right defenders, women and men killed in Colombia, but that also is why the echoes of violence and status quo are also taking away the life of many women in the feminine side that are arising so much in Colombia because even in these cultural things, people don't want to change. They want to preserve their privileges. So thank you so much. Thank you, Rosa Emilia and Deepak for that richness on the opportunities and challenges of advancing inclusion. I'm going to turn it over to my State Department colleagues and our USIP JR fellow to offer some reflections. So my first question, Jennifer, to you is how do you see this guidance useful in your effort to support peace processes in the U.S. government? Well, first of all, I just want to thank all of the speakers for this research and for the work that you've been doing. You know, as Nancy said at the beginning, we know that this works. We know inclusion matters, and we're still not very good at it. And so I think that this is a really welcome. I'm excited about this research and the very practical things that are pointed out in the guides about how we can do this better because I'm the first to admit that, you know, I think we genuinely want to do this better from the international donor side and we don't necessarily get it right. I think to Rosa Emilia, one of your points about how women, it's not just about creating more seats at the table. It's about which table, which speaks to... One of the things that I look at is process design. We looked at all conflicts from an actor analysis, who has the power, who are the players that need to be included, and then also from process design. What is the negotiating table, but what are the other avenues for inclusion and on what topics? And time and time again we see women get relegated to the social topics or to the, you know, we'll get to those later topics, not to the main security issues. And as you pointed out, if you're trying to change the security paradigm or if you're trying to change what democracy means and transformative change, then you have to have more voices at the table. And so I just want to highlight, you know, we do recognize that the underrepresentation of women in these efforts in those conversations particularly really creates blind spots that we can't ignore. And I want to highlight two different efforts that are underway right now that I think intersect nicely with this research. One is on the forthcoming strategy on women, peace and security. So back in the fall, Congress passed legislation on women, peace and security that made the U.S. actually the first government to enact comprehensive legislation on this issue. And a cornerstone of that is to develop women, peace and security strategy. That is being developed right now and is going to focus, include focus on how to foster women's meaningful participation in peace processes and security issues. So that's going to look at things like how do you make peacekeeping more effective by enhancing gender-sensitive training and bringing more women in? How do you support women's accommodations and gender integration into the peacekeeping and peace process capacity building? And then we're also growing our investments in efforts to engage women in issues ranging from CVE, atrocity prevention, the security issues again where their voices are most often excluded. So that strategy is in development right now. And I think the research that Consolation Resources has done will be very helpful in sort of fleshing out the where do we take that. Another avenue is the stabilization assistance review which has been a study undertaken by State, the Department of Defense and USAID jointly looking at our decades of stabilization assistance work that the US government has done and saying, well, what works? What do we know about that? And one of the findings is the importance of understanding the political landscape, really trying to get that right. And that could use a broader focus on the whole range of society. In the guidance note, you point out the importance of frameworks that better disaggregate marginalized actors. And so thinking about what that looks like when you're looking at stabilization contexts, I think could be really powerful. The review does recognize that elite bargains and buy-in are part of the stabilization picture, but they're necessary but not sufficient. And I want to read just quickly one of the definitions that it says in the report of stabilization being political. And that means we need to focus on the local, national and regional societal and governing dynamics agents and systems that lead populations to inclusive nonviolent settlement and agreement. So there's a lot in there, but I think it does open the door to exactly the type of analysis and a greater understanding of the political landscape that you pointed out. And so where we are in that, the report is written, and it's how do we implement those recommendations? And I think would welcome greater conversation about the types of frameworks and analysis that can help us get that political understanding right. Because coming from CSO, our Bureau of Conflict Stabilization Operations, we look at the subnational a lot. So very much welcome that finding of that being a place where in peace processes we can look for broader avenues of inclusion. But we're also really keenly aware of how hard it is as outsiders to get the understanding right. And so welcome more conversation about who has that information. How do you get, how can we make our frameworks more effective in actually getting to the type of understanding that you're pointing out so rightly is needed? So I'll leave that there. Great, Jennifer. Thank you. Those are two concrete examples of how we leave this guidance and these experiences into U.S. government policy and practice. Ezra, let me turn it over to you. I know that you have a particular interest in recommendation number two and a particular comment that is in there that has also engaged those threatened by change to mitigate the pushback. I know that is an area that you're focused on. So tell us how you see this research. What's next? Where can we go from here with that finding and that information? Yeah. Thank you, Ro. And I also would like to thank our friends from Consoliation Resources. There's so much to reflect on in these reports and they're so valuable in giving us rich evidence about, you know, especially what I'm interested in and the obstacles to inclusion, especially the resistance part. But I would like to pick up on two issues from the reports and elaborate a little bit more on those. What is next? So that question. So just to begin with, I think that without addressing how to tackle resistance, either elite resistance or other types of resistance to inclusion or what you call as backlash in your report, we're not going to make much progress at least, you know, towards our desired point on the inclusion agenda. So we have to do something about that. In my own research, in the research project that I was part of from the Inclusive Peace and Transition Initiative in Geneva, we looked into 40 case studies, that 40 negotiation, 40 peace and transition negotiations that were inclusive somehow. And we found about like in 29 out of 40, there was some type of backlash resistance to inclusion. So that is another reason why we really need to be thinking more about this and the evidence provided in these reports is very valuable in that sense. So what can we do about that? Well, one of the things that I'm working on and I think what we need to do next is to unpack first of all resistance to inclusion. And what do I mean by that? So we need to really come up with a typology perhaps because in my research I'm observing that there are different types of resistance. It's different in terms of strength. It takes place at different stages of a peace process. Sometimes there's resistance in the beginning, but it dies out later. Sometimes actually there's not much resistance in the beginning, but it builds up in time. So the target, the locus of resistance, et cetera. So there is a number of issues here. And we need to use evidence like produced by the Consoliation Resources to do some more comparative work to perhaps find out some patterns around these. Just to give a small example, so I observe in the cases that I work on that the strategy or the tactics used by those who resist inclusions range from minor to medium to strong. And it can range all the way from, you know, biased sort of like unconscious bias, biased attitudes in a negotiation process all the way to the use of violence against people who are being included, et cetera. So there is a whole range of tactics and maybe some of these are easier to address than others. Some of these are, you know, but we need to build our awareness around these and see if there are any patterns. And also we need to be understanding that the strength in terms of timeline of a peace process, as I said. So just to give an example, in Kenya, for example, there was some mild resistance in the beginning of the negotiations, the post-election violence negotiations in Kenya. There was some mild resistance to inclusion of civil society actors in the beginning from the government, but it sort of died down later on in the process. Whereas, you know, one of the, for example, very common rationales of the resistors is that, oh, we don't want any civil society inclusion because it's just an extension of the armed group or it's just an extension of the opposition. So I see this a lot across cases. For example, I saw this in the Tajikistan case. I saw this in the Ache case. I saw this in the Mexico case with the Chiapas negotiations. So this is a very common discourse, for example. How do we address that, right? In some cases, it was addressed successfully. In some others, not really, but what are the strategies that we can use to overcome that? Another point that I would like to take up on, I think which is very important in the reports that our colleagues raise is how do we manage expectations that emerge around inclusion better? And what do I mean by this? So I think Zabia mentioned that inclusive change is slow and incremental and we all know this. But on the other hand, like in the Nepal case, when the negotiation process creates an inclusive space for these groups that have been marginalized for a very long period of time, it immediately raises expectations of these groups. But then, knowing that this is a slow and incremental process, the achievements or the attainments do not come immediately. In fact, actually, we know from a lot of examples that it takes long years of continuous struggle to get these achievements. But what happens is what this leads to is what we know in social psychology is the relative deprivation feeling or the sense of relative deprivation. And as we all know that this kind of deprivation feeling, frustration, you know, can actually lead to the mobilization of anger around us. So we see some example of this in the Nepal case, for example, with the Madesi uprisings. They were very upset about the elite sort of redoing of the Constitution after, you know, after long years of failure in Constitution making, and then this is pushed, you know, after the earthquakes, et cetera, and there was a lot of disappointment because a lot of the things that were in that Constitution they were not happy about. And it was sort of a disappointment given what was promised in the comprehensive peace accord and later on. So the question is like how do we manage these expectations around inclusion as mediators, donors, and the parties, actually, or as, you know, the locals? I think that's also another important aspect to think about. This, I mean, this was not the case only in Nepal, by the way, but again, as I observed this in many other cases that I look at from, like, Togo to Egypt, et cetera. So, all right, so I will, I'll end it here. I think we're about to end. But I would be happy to open up in the question and answer about the, you know, how we can go about the classifying different types of resistance, what is mild to medium to strong, et cetera, and how we can think about those. Great, thank you. I'm going to actually just follow up on one question with Jennifer before we turn it over to the audience. So Jennifer, just quickly, on that last point of managing expectations, do you have any immediate advice that comes to mind how you would advise your state colleagues or other donors engaging in the peace process to assist in managing expectations? And in the meantime, we'll also start to think about your own questions while you're listening to Jennifer, of course, because we'll turn it over to you in just a minute. I think it's a great point and a great question that we're all going to have to continue to wrestle with. One thing that comes immediately to mind is the recommendation about how do you domesticate international frameworks, and how can donors use the conversation about, you know, without making it a Western agenda, as you rightly pointed out, also a concern, but how do you take the international norms and push towards inclusion and use that as an entry point to talk about expectation management and how long situate it in part of that larger struggle globally and use examples of how long change takes, and maybe by looking at it through that lens, that's one way to start the conversation about managing expectations. I think that there's also an element of just engaging for longer. You know, once an agreement is signed, that's actually when the hard work starts, and that's also when the international community is most apt to say, great, work's done, moving on. And so I think it's the focusing on implementation and making sure that there is sustained engagement, particularly on the inclusion agenda. Thank you. Okay, well, there's a lot of rich discussion here, a lot of points we can, a lot of different places we can go with the guidance and the report findings. Let me turn it over to you all. Where do we have some questions? Okay, we'll go Jackie, and then over Tyler. Hi. Is it on? Yeah. First of all, thank you. Can we take two at a time, actually? So we'll go to Jackie and then Tyler over there. Okay, actually I have two questions. Sorry. The first is about the issue of the frameworks that Jennifer mentioned, and I saw on some of the products a conflict analysis through gender lens. And my question is about other frameworks that are being used, because from a conflict analysis perspective to an extent you're looking at power dynamics and I think you mentioned power. And I wonder whether there are other stakeholder mapping tools that get at more of social networks and what I call constituencies of experience. So people who have been displaced, people who have been victims of gender-based violence. So reframing the gender conversation through the analytical tools that we're looking to define inclusion. And then the second question is, I think Deepak had mentioned working at different levels and Rosa as well at different levels in society. And I'm thinking about peace processes and starting at the top with the mediators. And I wonder if there is research about differences in inclusion when there are female mediators at the top. Is this one on? Yeah, okay. Hi, I'm Tyler Thompson from USAID. My question is about internationally condemned actors like international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda that are ISIS or cartels in other contexts or whatever. And actually more importantly the communities that either benefit from their security umbrella or associated with them. In some contexts, I'm thinking of Mali specifically, but these actors are by design excluded from conversations about peace and resolution to conflict. But in some cases they're an extremely important factor in that process and sort of how, what ideas are there to maybe reconcile with those communities. Thanks. Zabi, do you want to try to stay closer to the question or yeah? And then we'll move over to the mediators and Tyler. I don't know. Anybody wants to take a step with that? We'll go for it. Hi. Hi. So, Consiliation Resources developed a gender and conflict analysis toolkit two years ago. And then we've been working with our colleagues in Safer World to roll out a participatory systems and our gender conflict analysis tool. We've now tested it with a focus on with colleagues in the EU and civil society participants from Pakistan, Somalia and South Sudan. And what we do in that is take a number of exercises which draw out the intersexual analysis. And we've sort of developed a number of activities that allow us to do that with the partners in the room. And we see that it is getting down to a more finely grained analysis of who, the way that different gendered groups experience both the gendered causes and effects of multiple forms of violence. So, seeing violence is a very big spectrum. And then understanding as we do that, where might be the points of leverage for peace building practice when we do that? So, I'm happy to discuss this in more detail. And what we hope to do is sort of provide tools around that for other people to take up that work because we think it's helping us get to a better peace practice. Our peace process was hardly mediated and the signing of the peace accord. The transition phase was when we saw a lot of mediation efforts. I would not be able to answer that particular question you mentioned. The one problem we had was we had just too many mediators in Nepal. Mostly the smaller European countries, the northern European countries and some other INJUs. Just too many actors. And that led to hotspots. And that achievement was nearly zero. Of course, there are various achievements that have been claimed. One of the reasons why that did not happen was because every time the people were taken away to Switzerland or wherever, the people coming into the representatives of the political parties coming to these meetings kept on changing. So this whole idea of building trust and all that, that really did not take effect. So in fact, that had a very negative impact in the transitional period because anything that came out of anyone's mouth was seen as, okay, this is Switzerland speaking or this is Denmark speaking or something. That really had a very, very negative impact actually. To answer differently. Well, in the case of Colombia, we didn't have mediators. We, Colombia, I think the name mediators in Colombia is complicated. We don't, I don't know how to explain it, but we don't like the idea of mediators because we think that we have to talk between us. And this is, I don't know how to explain it, but we like more the idea of facilitators. So in the peace processes in both, in the last few we have had, we have always facilitators. We don't have mediators. And there were women and men in the governments that were helping in the process. So that is another place because we try to have an image. Sometimes when we talk about mediation is like this and facilitation is like this. So we like like this. We don't like like this. I don't know. Sometimes I don't use very well English. Yeah, it's very visual. And in the second question that I, I think it's very important from your side what is happening with the people that are involved in many things. And I just want to take something that Ezra was saying. In this inclusion matter, there's always a suspicion that you are talking in behalf of what side. Maybe you are part of, or you are part of the FARC or you were previously in the population of the FARC or you are near to the left wing or whatever. So that is very hard to overcome because you cannot talk about justice. You are talking about justice from a perspective and that is very suspicious. So that is very complicated for inclusion and draws many times to new killings. And for people that are, especially the people that have been involved and our, I don't know if under the umbrella of, I don't think that we have to stigmatize, again people saying that they are under the umbrella of narcotraffics. They have been excluded so highly that the way that they were, they make up a living was through the growing of this kind of illegal crops. So that is a starting point. They were very excluded in the beginning. And after when we have the agreement to have them included in the agreement was very easy. But then in the policy, in the real policy, they have been pushed so highly not to have a process, not to change in a quiet and important way the growing of different crops, having support, having economical support. No, they have been really, sometimes they have been killed. We have in the South 18 peasants that were killed because they were not doing a very fast changing of growing of crops. So I think that is a huge problem because then you have to have the ideas and a really good policy to make people change the idea that not only fast money is important, but sustainable other things. So that has to be very... And for women, it's also an important, important, important issue because many women that have been caught as moulas. I don't know the word for moulas in English, but that they have been transporting mules. They were expecting that they were going to be... The jail sentences were going to be changed because they were really very poor women with their whole family to be taken care of. But that hasn't happened. Thank you. Anyone else? You want to comment quickly on the last one? Yeah, I was just going to speak to the last question by armed actors. So one area of work that the Consolidation Resource has been doing for nearly as long as we began 20 years ago is looking at engagement of non-state armed groups and particularly looking at what some of the barriers are. So prescription regimes, counter-terrorism frameworks, but also kind of the opportunities and strategies used by a variety of actors to think about engagement. So we produced a publication back in 2000 that was called Engagement of Non-state Armed Groups and that tried to look at different typologies of armed actors to think about when are specific points in which they may be engaged. And also thinking about disaggregating a bit what engagement means and looks like. So it often is associated with negotiation which is often associated with kind of sanctioning a particular agenda of an armed group. So we looked at the ways in which engagement does not necessarily mean negotiation. Dialogue can take many different forms and as often if we look at experience from multiple contexts engagement dialogue happens with armed actors at very early stages by a variety of actors including as you were talking about some of the communities that may benefit from security. They're also in negotiation, not just about security but also preventing violence from state actors as well. So we also brought out a publication on community level engagement with non-state armed groups. But I also think there's around this issue a lot of the discussion around armed actors is dominated by the security discourse. And what we've been trying to do is bring a more of a peace-building lens to this. So when we talk about engagement often what we see as engagement by military attaches as well. And there's very little space for other actors to bring in a peace-building agenda to think about talking to armed actors. So there's a lot of work being done on this to try and break down some of these A silos and some of the kind of dominant discourses on engagement. So I could point you to lots of it but we've been doing work on that. Great, let's take a couple questions in the back over there and then we'll get one more round in. So we'll come back up here. Thank you. From the Washington College of Law where I teach mediation. Not for peace processes but for large foreign investment projects. And Jennifer I think was alluding to a couple of issues for the research. After you agree that you need to convene more people the challenge comes into who speaks for a group of people. And once you identify who speaks for a group of people how to avoid or how to make sure that even though that person or group may have an authority they're in line with the objective that you ultimately want to reach which is peace. They might have a different agenda which is actually undermined something that was also alluded to earlier. So my question is are there lessons or have you looked or are there lessons to be learned from perhaps large foreign investment or just investment public work in which local legislation requires consultations with indigenous local groups. I know Peru has a rich history. I know Columbia has a rich history. And I wonder whether some of those lessons or experiences are transferable or the fact that in some instances violence might not be involved that make them entirely different experiences. Hi, Juan from USIP here. I'm kind of new here. And I'll follow up on what you're saying. I'm a consultant or was a consultant for international donors and organizations and diplomatic missions. And part of the problem that we have is that our own international structures are not very inclusive in our own structures and that has an impact on the way we promote inclusivity. And one of the examples that I have is that whenever I get hired by an international donor I'm given a set of actors that are considered interlocutors that are acceptable to that donor. And I have to stay within that realm and they don't seem to be democratic either in their own structures. So I throw it back to you and ask you what kind of strategies do we have to not only to ensure that the international community is as well inclusive but also that when we have these interlocutors that they're also democratic in their own understanding of who can participate as legitimate actors for them. Sure, we can start there and then see who else wants to chime in here. On the lessons learned from investment, I think that's really interesting and it is something that within CSU we have not looked at a lot in terms of how those would compare. I think that there probably are lessons that can be drawn. One thing that immediately comes to mind is you give an example of mandating consultations with the legislator. Well, in a conflict environment you may or may not have a functioning legislature but that doesn't mean that the system you would use for consultations couldn't apply necessarily. So I think it's a really interesting question and not one that we have personally looked at. On our own structures being not inclusive and having the list of preferred interlocutors that absolutely does happen but that's why I think that an increased focus on really understanding the political landscape and trying to broaden that list is important and that we're coming at it not from a, you know, who are our best contacts in the field but from a really trying to understand what is going to make a dialogue inclusive and sustainable and work. And so we come at it a lot from the analysis and of just really trying to understand who those actors are and hopefully that helps to broaden the conversation. Then how do you make sure that those interlocutors themselves are democratic? Well, some of them are not going to be and some of them are not going to have an inclusive lens and they have to be dealt with and probably engaged as well but I think you're right that making sure not to limit the focus to them. Fair points. Yes, I'll just add something to that in relation to the consultations basically. You particularly asked about consultations with indigenous groups and there are actually many examples of this in the cases that I looked at. I think there and in consultations is one of the most frequently used method of inclusion especially with broader constituencies like indigenous people, etc. The question is more like what kind of consultations or how those consultations are designed, how they're conducted. You have a whole range of ways from town hall meetings to other types of sort of consultative processes but one example that immediately comes to my mind about including indigenous people in the consultations is Guatemala, the peace negotiations there, the civil society assembly which was sort of an officially mandated, I mean both negotiating parties agreed to have or to establish a consultative forum like that which included indigenous people there. But again, one of the main problems with that was that even though it included all sectors of society except one the economic, mostly the economic elite who resisted or boycotted and did not want to be there and then later on actually they continued their resistance. So there are many examples of that and most of the examples that form the procedures is through public consultations, some way of public consultations. Great, thank you. Okay, let's take another round. We'll go up here. Got a lot of questions. I mean if we want to keep going we could extend a little but I don't see anyone walking out the door. So how's your timeline? Yeah, please go ahead, both of you. Thank you. I want to pick up on the idea of resistance and to ask about whether or not you're finding gendered approaches to resistance either the different ways that men and women are resisting or that it's targeted at women and I'm prompted in part by reading a lot lately about the different ways that women in political life are targeted as women. So they're targeted like their sexualities attack, they're targeted with imagery versus words et cetera and so I'm wondering if that surfaced and perhaps Rosemilia you were mentioning that there's increase in femicide et cetera in Colombia is that a form of resistance to the peace process that you're seeing. Thanks. Good morning. My name is Kim Weichel. I'm a gender and peace building advisor. So one of the key components I think in enhancing inclusion and peace process is the role of a vibrant civil society which of course can partner and try and keep the government accountable. At the same time obviously we're seeing a crackdown of civil society voices in many countries. It's one thing of course to have the government pass the national action plan or a gender equality act, it's quite another for them to implement it and it can in fact enhance tensions if there's an expectation talking about expectation management that it's going to have some change and then it doesn't actually occur. So I'm wondering if in Nepal and Colombia we talk about, you know, has civil society really organized together in a coalition form, not just gender, but a variety of groups come together to both partner and push the government or perhaps in Colombia the elites in terms of enhancing inclusion. Thank you so much. I just want to ask a quick question about the point commented by Rosa in terms of how can we change the way that we speak with elite, especially there is an important problem for countries in conflict resolutions because there are powers, there are actors that are resistant to change and most of the time is because they have rules of power that trespasses the local capacities of countries in particular. So my question I will say is how the international community can build capacity for countries to foster the effective dialogue mechanisms with the elite while building an integrated approach with top-down and bottom-up strategies to promote the inclusive processes in peace. Thank you. Okay, great. So we're going to go over to Rosa Emilia and Deepak and Ezra, I think you have a piece in there too on the gendered lens to resist. Well, first I think international policies of many countries, sometimes we see it like with different speeches at the same time. We are talking at the same time about peace, but at the same time international community are pushing highly for results. So with this idea of planning and what are the outcomes tomorrow and what are the outcomes tomorrow. So it's like a very complicated idea of what peace-building means because then we have to finish all the, for example, all the growing of illegal crops but at the same time we have to build peace, inclusive peace with all these other things. So this kind of makes very tense the environment in the countries because then you have also these international pushing all around us and also with all these economical issues and these mining issues because we are trying to get back to the land but at the same time land is going to be sold to new people for mining or different kinds of extractivism. So the tensions are not only the ones that were left by the conflict but the daily conflicts that we are perceiving that they are new or getting worse. That's one of the things that I want to say. The other one is that in the resistance in the case of indigenous people and many people I don't know even Nepal but in our countries we have gone through the consultation, the signing of agreements, the going on and then the institutions and the country don't have the capacity or maybe the will to accomplish all these consultations and they are just sometimes, I really think that we don't believe any more in consultations because I was saying in these days that we have so many consultations that we have fatigue of participation. We have participation fatigue because nothing is really changing and the last thing I want to say is that feminist science, yes and this is important. We are not only changing economical issues like this between poverty and so on we are changing relations and privileges between men and women and men don't want to, many men, sorry for the man that I hear. Many men don't want to lose their privileges. So in society these echoes you cannot understand them very well but then it's like a justice coming from men saying what is happening? We are changing too much. You have to go back to the way you were before. So unfortunately in our case many women are dying because we are conducted again, re-conducted to the way that we should behave and not to have too much freedom. Civil society played a very major role in the run-up to the 2006 popular movement and further into the peace agreement. That was mainly because the political parties had been so thoroughly discredited that they had gone on making commitment after commitment declaration, after declaration that they made a mistake, now they're going to reform. Of course that did not happen ultimately but that was the promise that they had made to the people. And it was civil society which rehabilitated them in the eyes of the people and brought them together as the ones who are going to lead the popular movement. Once the popular movement was successful obviously the parties started sidelining the civil society and civil society at that time in Nepal civil society is also very partisan so that was a bipartisan effort in the non-partisan effort in bringing the parties together. And once the parties came back to power and they began sidelining civil society in general most of the civil society actors began following their own parties. So they had competing visions of what the new Nepal is going to be like and hence they were not able to play as active a role. But there were certain elements again that you have civil society that represent the marginalized groups and of course women as well. And these were groups that were supported because that is what the mandate of the peace agreement was and of the interior constitution we had. They were supported by various western donors and as a result of which the whole donor agenda of inclusion as I said was seen as an attempt to divide up the country and now there is a backlash and we are between India and China both of which are not very helpful towards civil society at large and we learn from both of them. There are examples and the current prime minister we have has shades of learning from both both the north and south and hence there is this greater emphasis and the discourse at the government level is more about now that we have all been taught about our rights now we need to be taught about our responsibilities whatever that means it sounds very nice but they talk about that. Hence there is a greater attempt by the state not to allow funding for rights based work in Nepal and that is seen clearly from the the allegation of all authority over NGO activities by the prime minister's office. Ezra did you want to make a quick comment? Last reflection do you want to lead with our policy-made various practitioners? I would like to take on the question gendered lens on reasons I don't know really actually maybe there is but we don't know and I think this is a great question to explore further but we were discussing this among ourselves earlier today that one thing that I know is that sometimes resistance to women inclusion comes from places that you don't expect that it will come from it comes from more liberal minded western educated etc. men rather than the usual suspects that you expected from I was just talking with a woman working on Syrian negotiations and like this has been the case for example so it's really I think it's worth really looking into and explore further if there is any gendered lens or difference in resistance to women inclusion. Great well thank you for those who stayed I'm going to do a quick quick summary see how much I can capture from the report in particular and then again pass it over to Rosemey and Deepak so we've got smart inclusion and incremental approaches we've got inclusion from the start so we can navigate and address the tensions with this stability agenda we've got being mindful of the consequence of power sharing and reserve seats we're considering and anticipating where we might see recapture and resistance and building in hooks to overcome it we've got not overlooking efforts at the sub-national level we understand that gender norms are perpetuated long into the transition so how do we recognize and work towards much longer frames how do we use the intersectionality lens along with continued gender analysis how do we help the international community the assistance they provide recognize their limitations and their influence and assist local organizations in domesticating international frameworks to their context we talked about overcoming resistance managing expectations and relative deprivation and ultimately how does this these findings and these rich experiences our next step is to think about tools and strategies for policy makers to help turn these findings into practice and into reality so I hope that I hope I did some sort of justice but please Rosa Emilia and Deepak leave this group with some final thoughts I really don't have much to say except to pick up on a point that was made earlier about interlocutors as you can imagine I'm also I also happen to be one of them there's an email from someone in the USA that has been sitting has not been answered but I think like what as donors what is required is to go out of your comfort zone of talking to the same people and it's very difficult because you're dependent on your own local advisors who are also comfortable with a certain group of people but there has to be a way of doing that and then of course like you never know who you're talking to for instance the last time the last time there was a group from DFID that had come in and we'd been called to what what I might call a focus group dinner with two other people so the first thing I asked them was why am I here can you tell me because I have different identities and they said because I'm a young progressive intellectual very nice to hear that especially the young part but I know that I'm invited to different other groups for my own social identity for my background as for my academic work all of these and it's not very helpful talking to the same people because I'm not called by the Swiss for instance I'm there USA calls me DFID calls me and one or two other NGOs call me for these when the teams come in but I'm telling the same thing over and over again what's the point so just to make that so thank you well I want to finish saying that the 27th of May we are going to have elections and that my country is quite vibrant in this moment because we have different candidates and we are in campaigns and so but one of the things that we always say is that we want peace not to cost our lives and that's why I think Cybel Society in Columbia is very also vibrant and is an incredible dynamic and I think a lot of people are working for really achieving peace and as Deepak have just said we want the international community to go out of the comfort zone and they have to see us like societies that are building something new and the investment that all international community have done on these countries is an important investment is a middle and long term investment but is an investment you cannot lose so the support for a transitional and really an opportunity to establish other dynamics in our countries is substantial for sustainable peace and thank you all for coming and thank you again to Yusuf and to Jennifer for joining us on this panel just a final plug for some of our publications that are outside on the table please help lighten our loads travelling back to the UK but also you'll find there the reports that we've been sharing today but also some of the more context specific case studies that we've been talking about and just a final plug in a couple of weeks under the same project we're bringing out an in depth report on Afghanistan and the political transition there it looks at some of the issues we've discussed here particularly around we have some really interesting interviews with members of the Taliban some of the Taliban leadership licking up political options and some of their resistance and interest in pursuing political transition also issues around sub-national inclusion and also gender dimensions as well so look out for that great, thank you well thank you for sticking around for another 15 minutes have a good day hi thank you thank you