 I know people are going to continue to join, but I don't want to take away from the valuable time we have to engage with an absolute hero of mine. Sarah Petron has joined in us today. We're so grateful for not only her engaging, but in a busy time as she's transitioning from Pennsylvania back to Washington DC. I'm not sure how you're doing it all, but there's a few a few a few keywords to describe her humanitarian professor. You can throw a teacher in there as well. Author and we'll talk in a minute about her new book that just came out this week. And then I also say leader because she is a leader in thought and action, both in the humanitarian ecosystem and certainly within the Department of Defense. And I think our friends from NATO would probably also agree that she's a leader and with many other militaries around the world. So I'm going to just provide a quick snapshot of her bio, hang with me because there's a lot to cover because I do really want to highlight the diversity of her expertise. And let me also start by saying for those of you who don't know me, I'm Dave Pilati with the Naval War Colleges Humanitarian Response Program. I'm really honored to get to host and moderate this discussion with Sarah today. She's just finishing up an assignment as a peace operations analyst at the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, PKSO and I, the acronym that many of you are very familiar with and she's got a lot going on. As I said, her new book was just released. It's called Bring Rain, Helping Humanity in Crisis. And although I've only been able to sneak a peek at the first 20 pages, it's a really heartfelt look at how she got to this point in her life and how all of us as human beings can help others around the world who find themselves in harm's way. So I think she will, she'll talk a little bit about the journey with writing the book today. She's also had this just really rich and deep career in other parts of government and intergovernmental organizations. So she monitored UN peacekeeping operations in cooperation with the joint staff for the U.S. military and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She's been serving as a subject matter expert on a range of topics for years, some of them which we're going to explore today, including human security, protection of civilians, atrocity prevention, women peace and security, sexual exploitation and abuse, human rights and many, many more. She also formerly served as the founder and managing director of Protect the People where she facilitated these really awesome training events for the U.S. military and our partner nations on vulnerable populations, including refugees, migrants and victims of human trafficking. And she is a prolific writer, has been involved with the publications for the U.S. women peace and security agenda in the UN peacekeeping for the U.S. civil society working group on women, peace and security and papers on Syria and other contexts where there's been significant conflict and vulnerable people put in again in a harm's way. She continues to advise the Center for Strategic and International Studies Task Force on Women's and Family Health, providing policy recommendations on health implications of the global refugee and migrant crisis, and she spent significant time with NATO. And just so we do get a chance to get to her, I will close out with, she completed her undergraduate studies at Gordon College and has a really impressive master's degree from our friends at Oxford University and the Refugee Studies Center. A few notes, we are recording this, it is recording. So just if you ask a question, keep that in mind. And since we are recording, Sarah might opt to not answer the question, although I'm sure she will at least give you some semblance of her thoughts, but we want to be respectful of all the various positions that she holds and who she informs with, how she may or may not decide to answer. She's going to give three mini lectures, which I will let her explain, that are going to run 10 to 15 minutes each and she wants questions throughout. And then she is also kind enough to have time at the end for questions. So we really do want to let you engage in dialogue with her. So please don't be shy with that, Sarah. Thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, thank you so much, Dave. And thank you to the colleagues that I see your names on the line and to those of you at the Navy War College that I'm meeting for the first time. I really appreciate you having me today. And maybe this is a bit ambitious, but when Dave and I talked about all the things that should be covered in this guest lecture, I thought, well, let's break this up into three different parts. One part on civil-military relations. I'm just going to share how I got into working with the military. I am a civilian. I am a humanitarian. I'm a white female. And so working with the military means a certain thing from someone coming from my background. And I also want to talk about protection of civilians, which is my favorite topic. And I'm going to share comparative frameworks on the protection of civilians. And then we're going to close with 10 minutes on human security, which is really an evolving concept for military actors. And I'm going to speak specifically about human security from a military perspective and where that might be going within the U.S. government, although all of my remarks are my personal reflections and they don't reflect any of the positions that I've previously held before. So as Dave said, we're happy to record, but please keep in mind I'm sharing my own personal point of view with you today. You can go ahead. Civil-military relations. We'll start here. And as Dave said, my book Bring Rain came out yesterday, which is really exciting. And this has been about five years in making the writing of this book. And the book is not an academic textbook. It's not for experts, but it tries to make accessible to the average person what the work of protection is in conflict and disaster zones. And there you see a picture of me in the middle of my team on the Afghan-Pakistan border with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 2002 and 2003. Prior to doing my graduate degree at Oxford at the Refugee Study Center, I had primarily worked in on the continent of Africa. I was born in Kenya in East Africa, which is where the title of my book Bring Rain comes from, because I was born in a year of drought. And the book tells the story of the drought in the village where I was born. And I had wanted after finishing graduate school to diversify the geographic locations where I was working. And so my first position after graduate school was on the Afghan-Pakistan border. And this was right after on September 11th. At the time, there were only special forces along the Afghan-Pakistan border. And I was coordinating the movement of vulnerable populations away from the border zone, which was a very complicated mission. Every day, we would get up myself and my team of 50 people, 46 men and four women. And we would try to identify people who were priority cases for relocation away from military operations in order to prevent civilian casualties. And this was a very complex operation. And there were things about it that were successful and things about it that didn't go right, which you can read about in the book. But the foundation of this work as a civilian and a humanitarian review and agency was the focus was really on protection through international law, through refugee law, human rights law, and international humanitarian law. So all of the things that we were trying to do to help the civilian population were at its foundation about their human rights and their right for protection, according to legal standards on the laws of armed conflict. And this is only one example of many other cross-border operations that I've advised. Over the last 20 years, I've also worked on the Kenya Somalia border, on the Ethiopia Somalia border, on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, and in many other cross-border operations, both by being there and also by supporting these complex operations remotely in other capacities. And in each of these types of operations, it was very important to coordinate with police and military actors on the ground in order to coordinate the movement of people, the transportation of people, and in order to also provide for people's safety who were affected by armed groups in the area. Next slide, Dave. So this may be oversimplified, but I sometimes think that when we when we talk about international law, it's really important to get to the heart of things and to stick with the basics. And so the thing I want to emphasize in this mini lecture today is what is the civilian perspective. For civilian humanitarians, the individual human being is at the center of everything. The individual has rights, the individual has protections, and the law is the foundation of all of those rights and protections. And humanitarians coordinate with governments to ensure the rights of these human beings and coordinate with the security sector sometimes. As we know, there are different levels of civil military coordination. And at this level, you all are probably very familiar with the differences in the agencies that some of them will coordinate or cooperate with the military, and others will not share information or locations or have any type of coordination with the military. So we don't have time to go into that. And I assume you know about that. But it's just so important to understand that the civilian perspective honors the human being and their physical integrity based on law. Next slide. And here is one of several models of humanitarian protection, but this I borrowed from all that Humanitarian Protection Guide. And this is called the egg model, and it's used by many agencies, although there are some other models for humanitarian protection. And here you see the center of the egg is focused on patterns of abuse, or what we would call the risks and vulnerabilities of the civilian population. And then it looks at what types of responsive action are possible within the operational environment to keep that human being safe. And then what types of remedial action are available, and what can be done to form an environment that is more protective for the human being who is at the center of all the interventions in the humanitarian sector. Next slide. I put this in here that really the challenge with all the models is that we have to mind the gap. And this is what humanitarian agencies do in operations every day, particularly someone working on protection, is always addressing the gap between what protection mechanisms are available to them and what the reality is on the ground. And mind the gap comes from the subway system in the London Underground in the Tube. As you know, there's a gap between where the train arrives and the platform where people stand. And in every mission, in every operation, there is a gap between what we think should be in place and the reality on the ground. And the US has frameworks for this. We have stabilization frameworks. We have fragility frameworks. We have laws and organizations that have all kinds of guidance. I'm just going to generalize by talking about some of the realities on the ground that I see as being the most common in all the different types of conflicts that I have been analyzing over time, which is a lot. And really, when it comes to the rule of law, we see not only weak courts and insufficient national laws, we also see the use of traditional justice mechanisms that sometimes really don't do justice to individuals and their human rights. We see institutions within the government that are either malfunctioning or non-existent. And we often talk about this as being governments that are incapable of providing services to their population. We see a security sector in the form of police or border patrol or militaries that should be providing public safety, but are either corrupt or perpetrating violence against the civilian population. We see infrastructure such as water sanitation systems, telecommunications systems, and also shelter and other forms of infrastructure that are either damaged or collapsed. And then oftentimes our frameworks don't consider the financial mechanisms and means that people have for their survival, but we know that in many conflict zones, there's limited access to capital, different forms of a cash economy, and different ways of having barter in exchange that lead to the proliferation of a black market that is controlled by gangs and other types of criminal actors. And then we also see a breakdown in social cohesion and fractured divisions between groups of people and also violence within communities. So civilians committing violence against other civilians. So there are all these gaps regardless of all the good frameworks we have in place. This is the reality we have to work in, whether you're civilian, humanitarian or uniformed police or military. Next slide, Dave. So that really leads us to what I kind of call the dilemma of physical protection, which is what I have spent most of my career focus on, is how can we physically protect people from being compromised, from having a violation against their physical integrity as a human whether that results in death or casualty or rape or sexual violence or injury or maiming or some other form of physical violence. This is really a major gap that honestly we should see national police, we should see national militaries, border patrol, government officials and national laws that can provide this physical protection for people who are vulnerable to harm being committed against them. But what we often see, and I'm generalizing from many different countries here, is that local leaders and militia groups hold a lot of power, maybe perhaps more power in certain conflict zones than any of those formal government institutions. And that those groups are loosely affiliated with formal government structures. And some people call these groups non-state actors, but I think what we're seeing as a trend is not only non-state armed groups in the form of terrorist groups and criminal gangs, but even more loosely affiliated types of people who have weapons and are a harm to others. We see the fracturing of the economic, political and social structures in conflict zones. And we see that in my view, in my personal view, that none of the stabilization or fragility models are sufficient to produce the result that we desire, particularly within U.S. government frameworks. And I just want to say briefly why I think those models are insufficient. I believe that they're insufficient because we do not consider the role of other actors that influence the outcome. We have regional powers not only for great power competition, but neighboring states and other influences on the outcome of any given conflict that no matter what we do for our operational reality, for our humanitarian assistance, we have to look at the other influences that shape the outcome of conflict in a given state. And sometimes we're so focused on our specific role and our specific action that we're really not considering how these other actors are influencing the outcome and working toward a shared vision for conflict termination. And so I'm going to leave it at that and this ends our first mini topic on civil relations. So we'll just open this up to questions for a few minutes before we jump to the next one. So we are happy to have you, you can unmute your video, you can throw your little blue zoom hand up, or you can throw a question in the chat. And I will start to give people time to think about if they would like to ask something. I was really excited actually, Sarah, to see you bring up the law enforcement police border patrol one. Because we've noticed a trend at the war college, I'd say probably in the past year. Some would say maybe related to COVID and border issues and others would just say it's a conversation that's been taking some time to happen. But an increasing number of NGOs have wanted to talk with us and our other academic partners that work on the civil military engagement coordination stuff. They wanted to talk about police coordination and law enforcement coordination. So I wondered if you would just give some additional thoughts about that and maybe there's clearly a lack of guidance doctrine processes if compared to civil military coordination. So any overarching thoughts and in the meantime, if anyone else has a question related to civil military engagement, please jump in. Thanks, Sarah. Yeah, thanks so much, Dave. The policing role for public safety is super important and it's not always fully understood by other protection actors, but particularly because I have worked with refugees and migrants and people affected by human trafficking and done a lot of cross-border operations. You know that when you work with the security sector that the military is only one of many different types of uniformed personnel in any given environment. And so coordinating with border patrols for interior police and other forms of authorities is really important. And thankfully at my former, in my former role within the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, we do have a really renowned policing expert, Dr. Karen Finkenbinder, who I've worked with on stability policing frameworks for NATO. And it's really important to realize that not all nations have the same model of policing that the U.S. does. In fact, our model is very unique and there are some nations that are more equipped to provide stability policing that kind of mine that gap between police and military roles. And Italy in particular is very good at playing this role in conflict zones. Thank you. So we do, I've got a chat that our friend Johnny Robinson, our colleague has a question for you. Hey, Johnny. Hi, Sarah. Thanks very much for the presentation so far. I'm probably going to ask a question that you get asked all the time. But you know, I was wondering if you had any thoughts about, you know, some of the technological solutions that are coming out in this space in terms of protection of civilians, protection of humanitarian workers, such as, you know, humanitarian notification systems or kind of block chain solutions and things like that. And I wondered if you could speak a bit about that from your experience. That would be great. Thank you. Yeah, well, it's funny. I would ask you a question too before I answer. I mean, are there particular technologies that you think are are effective and are working well? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, you know, I've worked with Dave on the humanitarian response program and we're currently looking at the humanitarian notification system. And I certainly know in Syria where where my a lot of my background is on the humanitarian side of things. It hasn't worked so well, or it is perceived to have not worked so well, whereas in other contexts around the world, it perhaps has worked better. So it seems like there isn't a one fit solution at all. But yeah, just thought, yeah, see what your thoughts are. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Syria is a unique case unto itself. But I would just say that at the time when I was managing operational programs and cross border zones and things like this, and it has been a few years since I've been more focused on educational work. But when I was directly in operations every day, it predated when when drones and unmanned aerial vehicles were available to the humanitarian community. Of course, those have been available to the military for some time now. But for example, when I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan at night, I used to dream that I was a bird and that I could fly above all the towns and that I could just count all the households and count all the people in the refugee camps because it just took so long to reach everyone in such a vast terrain. Now organizations like the International Organization for Migration and the UN have access to these types of systems that can collect huge amounts of data. And also human rights actors are using different surveillance systems to track civilian casualties. And those are just producing like amazing awareness of situations that we would not have had those kind of big picture views of. And they're also creating different versions of the same story, right? Like we know with groups like Air Wars that their data doesn't match U.S. government data on certain conflicts. So I think that this is a very good thing that we can have a more big picture discussion because of those technologies. But certainly when I think of Syria, I think of all the different early warning systems that people have tried to put into Syria that warn people of aerial bombardments in advance of their occurrence and all the efforts that have been made. There have been so many groups who have worked on this and I think they all feel like you that the results have been mixed and that sometimes they've been able to save lives and sometimes terrible things have happened and they were not able to prevent it. So I think it's a mixed bag, but I think anytime we can see the bigger picture and have a more honest civil military dialogue, it's a good thing in my personal view. I have a chatted question, but they basically said perhaps it's better after you cover protection of civilians. I would love more thoughts on you about engagement with non-state armed groups and I probably agree with them and then not a private chat to me. John Hirsch just put one up in chat. John, if you'd like to jump on camera and just ask, that's totally great if you're willing. Otherwise, you have to hear me play John Hirsch. I think I saw it pop up, but maybe you could voice the full question. Much better to see the John Hirsch. Go ahead. I didn't know I'd make an in-camera appearance today. So I was just wondering, I'm glad you brought up the legal authority part and I wondered from your experience when you have different competing interpretations of what body of law were applying. Is it international human rights or is it international humanitarian law? And I just was wondering if you had a good example of what that looked like in an operational or a stabilization actual on the ground kind of context where you're kind of working with NATO things one way, but you guys think it's another way, what that kind of looks like. Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe it leads me to think about something that's a little bit different and where I see the greatest incongruence between interpretations of the law of armed conflict is on the question of military necessity. So Dave didn't mention when he introduced me that I previously served as a senior advisor to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Washington delegation during a time when we were every day trying to negotiate ceasefires and intervene in particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. And also if we look at Syria and we look at counter ISIS operations in the last campaign, we see this question of military necessity being the heart of a lot of debate between humanitarian actors and government and military agencies. So very often I have seen for the US a claim that something that happened was of military necessity whereas non-military groups or humanitarian agencies will say this was a violation of international law and this question of military necessity is what I would say is at the heart of some of the biggest debates that I've seen in the last decade and I'll just leave it there. Can I just follow up real quick and ask are they claiming it's a violation of international humanitarian law or a different body of international law? We might get to that closer to the end. Yeah when we talk about trends in military thinking around these topics from my perspective. Thanks John and Sarah if you're good we'll move to protection of civilians and if you can just remember there's would love to hear more about non-state armed groups was the other question. Yeah all right we'll move on to POC but keep coming back to me on that other one. So some of you may have seen me give this presentation on protection of civilians in the past this is probably one of my favorite presentations to give because I find that a lot of people they don't know about the different frameworks for protection of civilians and how they compare to each other. So I'm going to share the UN framework for protection of civilians that is in their protection of civilians policy and this is just an abbreviated version these all have long documents and guiding some things you can look at later but we're trying to go for the mini lecture concept. So the UN really perceives protection as protection through dialogue and engagement and this is a very important and unique thing within the UN that protection of civilians occurs within peacekeeping missions and in order for there to be a peacekeeping mission there needs to be an agreement between the parties to the conflict about an end to that conflict and that may seem just so basic to all of us but it's a big deal because they receive the ongoing political dialogue with the armed groups to end the conflict as a major aspect of their protection activity and then also the provision of physical protection and going back to police the UN police uncoll also have protection of civilians frameworks and guidance for their police which could be informative for other other police actors and then lastly the establishment of protective environment which is also about conflict termination. Next slide. This is the US Army doctrine and framework for the protection of civilians that was also adopted by joint doctrine on peace operations and it really has three pillars the very top three pillars of the framework are understanding civilian risks, protecting civilians during operations and then shaping a protective environment. These other boxes that you see below it are 45 tasks that were determined to be the actual protection actions that the US military um should be prepared to do in a given environment and the blue tasks are ones that have a significant military role and the grayed out tasks are the tasks that are performed in cooperation with other actors such as in cooperation with national governments or in cooperation with humanitarian agencies but like the UN the US doctrine has three main parts. Next slide. This is the NATO military concept on the protection of civilians which I was part of developing with the Alec command transformation and it is really a different model than the UN and the US and it has a lot of different parts to it but again there's three main elements such as protection from harm, contributing to a safe and secure environment and facilitating access to basic needs and actually instead of protection from harm it's mitigate harm since this was I think an earlier model before it got formalized by the military committee so it should say mitigate harm and when NATO talks about mitigating harm it talks about mitigating harm from its own actions so preventing civilian casualties and mitigating harm from other actors and so you see at the top of this a focus on perpetrators of violence whether they're uh state actors of violence or non-state actors of violence and contributing to a safe and secure environment really focuses on governments and institutions which is where we would see like the US stabilization frameworks for example and then facilitating access to basic needs coordinating with civilians and aid workers and then there's this yellow ring all the way around it that talks about understanding the human environment and that is really an important part of making sure that this lens of protection is uh fully understood next slide so I always like to point out what is similar about these different comparative models all three the UN the US and NATO focus on physical protection from harm as the key part of the military role which is I think is what really led someone like me as a civilian sanitarian to want to work with the military because I consistently saw people losing their lives and being physically violated and I wanted to prevent that type of thing from happening and you also see an emphasis in the military models on shaping the environment which means working with other actors which means civil military relations which in the military world is predominantly done through the J9 function the shaping of the environment next but what is different about all those models is again the UN emphasis on political negotiation and dialogue and it might seem so obvious but I always have to explain that really for the US to protect civilians we do not have this requirement of needing a political negotiation and a dialogue or an agreement we know the US military and other actors are involved in different types of operations all over the world where sometimes there really isn't a negotiated settlement and we kind of are missing that piece in our framework the US focuses on assessing the risk to the civilian population and here it's so important to point out that in order to assess the risk the J2 intel function is completely a necessary function that has to identify the risk of violence to the civilian population and in every protection of civilians gaming tabletop exercise major operation we often see that protecting civilians doesn't make it into an operational task because it doesn't come from the J2 that this is part of the analysis of the operation itself and NATO's pillar on facilitating access to basic needs is different than the US which has one of the 45 tasks as supporting humanitarian actors but recognizes that US agency for international development and other parts of the government are the focus of providing humanitarian assistance and even in the development of the concept many humanitarian agencies encourage NATO to take out the humanitarian component but NATO insisted and part of part of this was because of its experience as being a provider of last resort when there were no humanitarian actors in a more remote location however when everyone comes together when you see the UN and US and NATO come together they all basically agree that they are working toward the same goals when it comes to protecting civilians they just go about it a little bit differently and I think this is the end of this mini lecture on protection of civilians so we'll stop there yes it is and I will open the open the floor for questions you're you have this new presentation down pat the floor is open and in the meantime just to keep the dialogue going as you and I spoke a little bit earlier today we've seen significant issues in dozens and dozens of contexts around the world with protection of civilians both from conventional militaries and and non-state armed groups but the one that I think concerns the war college the most and a number of our partners including civic and stanford and the army war college is looking at potential great power conflict in the future so large-scale combat operations between peer or near peer adversaries and if you scale up the conflict the protection of civilians issues become much much more complex than we've seen even in context like Syria and Yemen which had been pretty horrific so my the first question as we see who else wants to jump in is really what concerns you the most about this this future great power conflict this this potential fight between peer adversaries yeah thanks dave well I think it probably is the same concern that all of us would have when we think about great power competition I mean I if someone has information on this that I'm not aware of I would I would love to hear more about the protection of civilians frameworks for Russia and China but we don't really know that there are a any frameworks in place that that even bring them close to these types of considerations for operations and certainly the role of Russia and Syria and other places like Ukraine too is particularly disturbing and so what do we do when we're in this system where we have all these resources and attention going to these these country relationships but protection of civilians isn't part of our dialogue so I would say maybe part of the solution is including protection of civilians in the dialogue that we have with Russia and China and trying to come to some greater agreement about what the basics are and this is a very complicated issue to address thank you and we have a question from Marla thanks for joining us today yeah thank you so much for having me Sarah this is fascinating as usual I just wanted to bring up a question that kind of follows on in your you know great power and let's go sort of issue is that you know tjag pd just wrote this what I consider fairly disturbing article about how if we do find ourselves in a near peer or peer-to-peer conflict that is large-scale combat operations where he used the example of you know columns of tanks and and fighting out in the field that basically all of the lessons that we've learned about poc over the last two decades will become moot and it will just be ihl only and so I'm wondering what you think about that um and what you think some arguments against that might be from from your standpoint yeah thank you um my last slide is going to address some of the trends that we see and maybe I'll give it away a little bit but one of the trends that we see is this idea that our national laws are the only things that matters and the law of armed conflict is addressed in us law and um this perception that international humanitarian law never ends that there's never an end state is always changing and it's maybe more expansive than what our laws of our conflict recognize and again I just go back to my comment about military necessity if we have leaders who believe that it's of military necessity to have large-scale loss of life then that argument might well be made and I think you've said many times also know that you can drive a truck through um international humanitarian law and that's where some scholars say well no we need more adoption of human rights laws and we need more frameworks and new frameworks but I think really um this is an ongoing dialogue um both within the US and with external actors about how we interpret our legal obligations in situations where it is perceived that the loss of civilian life is a necessity and there are situations such as that and there is great debate about that thank you so much next up is one of our star war college students from the ukraine alex hello my friend hello i am captain alex mister of ukrainian navy and first of all thank you very much for your presentation and very interesting but i have again practical question for you about ukraine and our russian ukrainian war on our east it's understandable for me about all the processes and international rules or other things but do you have any thoughts or any ideas how to deal especially with russia because recently we we see a lot of examples that it's not possible to negotiate with russia it's not only in ukrainian russian problems but with european union and especially last time after last news with the us as well so do you have any ideas if not if international rules doesn't work what would be the best way how to push russia finally to negotiate and to find any beneficial ends or any ideas please thank you well like one of our other questions i'm gonna ask you a question back i mean what do you think is the greatest likelihood for putting an end to the conflict in ukraine what is your greatest hope for that of course for ukraine it's obviously that we are really wishing and we are trying to do the best at least from ukrainian side to finish first of all the conflict our war actually i call it in our east and after that to go to next step which is Crimea and get it back as well because it's not acceptable for us and probably all entire world would agree but again it's very difficult for us to do it by ourselves and to fight with russia and of course thanks a lot for the international support but again it's very interesting how to how to find the way and push the russia back and finally follow the international agreements and standards thank you thank you so i don't have the answer to what will influence russia i think a lot of people are trying to influence the u.s relationship with russia and i can't speak to that but in terms of the ukraine i do know that the ukraine has received a lot of assistance from nato and from other groups Dave mentioned the center for civilians in conflict and i was fortunate also to have worked with the armed services of ukraine and civic on advancing their dialogue on protection of civilians and i think when it comes to the eastern territories there's a lot that the ukrainian military can do to also better protect civilians in the territories and i always like to give the example of some of the very basic things such as ways of keeping schools safe because schools in the eastern territories have been confiscated by military actors and also we know that russian youth groups have been formed to recruit ukrainian youth into more predominant russian ways of thinking so i think the situation in ukraine requires a long game response that includes thinking about the entire civilian population especially protecting children and young people from joining armed groups so i'll just leave it at that for now thank you i do have to point out the way sarah approached that question shows what true humanitarians do before she answered she actually asked alex what does your country want like this is such a great skill for you to be teaching military officers from around the world i had to say thanks for that because it's just i'm i'm slowly learning this because what when most people do when asked that question they would start giving a u.s. centric view on it so i think that was really great and then this wonderful comment in chat from this wonderful comment in the chat from uh kernel holland about just elevating the dialogue with not only the military discussion on psc but the political and the diplomatic and the economic and the informational i think is is tremendous so thanks for that kernel holland and with that should we move to the last one yeah with the time let's move on here we go to the third topic okay human security um i know some of you that have joined us today have been focused on human security in um in your work in numerous ways and when i talk about human security for the next few minutes i mean to say what does human security mean to the military there are lots of human security frameworks um in academia in uh civilian discourse but my few comments on this are focused on the military role go ahead Dave um so human security the original concept of it comes from a un human development report in 1994 that has these seven uh concepts of security of what again human beings being at the center of the model as a civilian model um what people need to keep them safe and it had these seven things so personal safety for interpersonal violence uh between people community safety food security environmental security political stability um health which makes us all probably think wow that's important with the pandemic and covid and everything and economic security which i mentioned earlier is often left out of different types of poc and conflict frameworks um but financial institutions are also important when we think about the total picture of human protection so this was the original uh un consideration of what human security meant and they meant it as a framework to help guide governments toward uh greater human development when they created this it was not meant to be uh for the security sector in particular uh next slide so how did human security become something that the military um is thinking about and getting involved in and it's really because the un security council has over time established numerous resolutions on what we within um at least within uh some of the do d conversations call cross cutting topics and these cross cutting topics um are unique disciplines unto themselves um one is the protection of civilians which we talked about in the un uh resolutions are really focused on peacekeeping missions but there are also resolutions on children and armed conflict women peace and security which is about empowering women to participate in the political process and also protecting women and girls who are vulnerable to certain types of violence such as conflict related sexual violence and sexual exploitation and abuse but there were un resolutions on many other topics including cultural property protection and human rights and and many other things that are considered cross cutting topics that are almost unique disciplines and in some cases the un has created uh special offices of the secretary general to address things like children and armed conflict or conflict related sexual violence and now we see nato also trying to address some of the same cross cutting topics and themes within its overall uh protection of civilians and human security framework next slide where is this going so here is the north atlantic council for nato and um nato created a human security unit at its headquarters and that unit is co-located with the women peace and security unit um of nato and this office addresses all of those umbrella topics that have un security council resolutions but nato does not think like the un nato is a very different institution and alliance than the un nato is predominantly a military entity with some diplomatic capabilities as well and so there is a little bit of a struggle about whether or not human security is just an umbrella topic that addresses the cross cutting themes or whether human security is a new concept that the military should define and use as a planning tool and if so what purpose or use would this new human security concept actually serve a military alliance next slide so when it comes to thinking about nato it's really important to know who is leading the way and why because one of the primary differences between nato and the un is that nato is an alliance of predominantly military actors we know that the us has the political mission to nato that has state and it has the military mission that um is the do d role aligned with you come in all of this but nato is predominantly a military alliance it is not necessarily a civilian in nature in the same way that u.f. institutions are civilian in nature but within the united kingdom the ministry of defense has established a doctrine for human security and that doctrine combines their guidance on protection of civilians targeting and women peace and security and the uk ministry of defense also has human security units who are operational and deployed in the field in conflict zones who predominantly are looking at issues related to gender canada also is one of the leading uh militaries that has embraced their responsibility to protect and atrocity prevention as a role for the military and this is something that the ministry of foreign affairs is often the lead on with negotiating and supporting countries in conflict and trying to reduce atrocities but there's a role for the military in in canada and in also preventing atrocities and canada also has a center of excellence on children in armed conflict the delare institute which is founded by romeo delare who also served in the un peacekeeping mission in rwanda and then the nordic states are huge on women peace and security and have a separate military training center on gender in military operations and i was somewhat tempted to add the us here but i think for the us we're still not sure exactly how human security will be conceived of within the government and within the military and as dave and some others know i um have done a lot of work on this in my previous role at the peacekeeping center and uh we'll see how it turns out um and we can take some questions on that later next slide so what is human security to the military i think that human security is predominantly a good planning tool and can help the military understand the operational environment and have a sharper picture identifying risks and threats and knowing what to expect in any given environment but the really unique thing about human security is that it provides the military with an opportunity to look at different types of threats right now international law is focused on armed groups international humanitarian law very focused on armed groups perpetrators of violence who are you know maybe formal militaries maybe not state armed groups maybe loosely formed militia groups but what a lot of people are looking at in the future operational environment is threats that don't come from human beings or armed groups at all threats that come from new technologies like artificial intelligence threats that come from infrastructure accidents threats that come from the environment and large-scale disasters um and the impact of climate change and other types of asymmetric hybrid i should say cyber and transnational threats that are not easily um pinned on any particular armed group at all but could come from a myriad of other sources that are not easily identifiable as human beings i think human security offers us a framework for looking at these non-traditional threats the challenge i think when we talk about human security is that some people like to use it as a bucket for everything and they like to use it as a bucket to think about all threats and all aspects of conflict and everything that happens with human beings and i think that that is too much we have to somehow narrow the scope of what human security is and what it's not and so this the verdict is still out on how this will play out from a u.s perspective next slide before we close i just want to give you a few trends to consider that might help shape our concept of human security moving forward i think it's very alarming when we look at the death toll from conflict over the last 10 years and a great study came out this summer um from a number of groups in europe that tracked um the impact of war on civilians that indicated that 2.5 million people have died as a result of armed conflict in the last 10 years and we can predominantly trace that back to armed groups but that's a huge number of people and it far exceeds the amount of people that are accounted for in civilian casualty reports but in the u.s we do have a hyper focus on civilian casualty mitigation and a lot of new congressional requirements on mitigating and preventing civilian casualties and maybe these requirements uh some academics have started to say have uh shifted our focus from thinking focus from thinking about the big picture of um reducing violent conflict and improving the overall outcome for the civilian population and then as others have said the grand uh strategy and uh it's really about great power competition and there's a hyper focus on uh great power competition right now and yet are we really influencing russia and china on these specific topics um i would gather to say that uh no one has figured out how to sufficiently influence them in this particular area and then there's also a debate about whether international law really matters or whether domestic laws rules regulations and guidance are sufficient for addressing civilian harm and what is really required of the military um i'm sure some of you know that across the spectrum of civilian considerations um that there are some people who only want to do what is required and let uh the civilian humanitarians save lives and help others and let's just stick to this business of uh focusing on the enemy and doing the job that the military was meant to do and um so there's a wide spectrum of perspectives but my particular question that i think the military does need to answer is whether or not human beings are really a strategic consideration and why or why not and some people would say that they are and some people would say that they aren't but as a civilian humanitarian myself i do think they are a strategic consideration and that it would behoove us um to continue to focus on their well-being in the future so i'll uh end there and open the floor back up we'll put this up for a few minutes and then we can just go to camera let me let me also ask sarah would you like to stop the recording and open it up for a little more informal discussions or we can keep it running no it's up to you yeah okay before we stop i will go ahead and just say huge thank you so that the uh recording finishes on a high note this was a wonderfully rich deeply educational discussion i know for everyone on the call and with that we will close it and then we'll do a proper thank you at the end as well