 We cannot build sustainable peace and effective states in post-conflict countries without understanding the dynamics of the conflict itself. Unfortunately, we don't lack for causes of conflict. There's a lot of poverty, there's inequality, there's disputes of all kinds. Given how much potential there is for conflict, what's surprising is eventually how little violent conflict there is. In spite of the tremendous suffering and disruption that war causes, eventually most countries solve the problems that were created by conflict and even sometimes they actually use the conflict in order to make tremendous progress afterwards. The worse your defeat, the better position it is to make a new start. And the best example, of course, here is Germany and Japan whose defeat was so total that they really had an opportunity to completely rethink their own identity, who they were, what they believed in, and as a result have had a very good post-war in spite of a very traumatic, very decisive, very total defeat. There have been a number of studies, for example, that found that cities that were bombed did much better than cities that didn't, because they had to completely renew their stock of housing, of industry. They did a new start. They conducted research in Greece in the past where I was able to visit villages in which people lived together with the people who had victimized them and sometimes people who had victimized each other repeatedly on both sides and you would think that it would be impossible to stitch together a community that has gone through so much damage. And yet what I found was that in fact people do adapt, they learn how to live together because they understood how complex the relationships were.