 Good morning, everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started. This is rather unusual. So many people are here on time. It's Washington, D.C. and it's raining. And since I just got off a conference call with somebody who's stuck in traffic up on K Street, I commend all of you for your ability to manage. What is it now the 15th straight day of rain we've had here? So it's a pleasure to welcome everyone here. I'm Jeff Helsing, the Associate Vice President for Education and Training at the United States Institute of Peace. And we are happy to... You cannot hear me. I may not even have the mic on. No, it's on. I will just speak louder. Thank you. The Institute is one of the many partners of the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum. And we've been happy to host a number of the sessions here. And we will do so again in September, where, unlike this one, which had to come together a little bit, I won't say last minute, but we'll say with a few fits and starts, the one in September will be focused on youth. And we're already pulling that program together. So I hope all of you can join us then. Today, we are going to focus on a topic that's very much on the minds of many practitioners and policymakers, not only in Washington, but also around the world. It's becoming an increasing area of focus in terms of research. One of the areas that we're addressing here at the U.S. Institute of Peace is the topic of resilience, trying to understand what are the key factors that help communities and societies become better able to resist the pull of lure of, if you will, groups that are engaging in violent extremism. And some interesting sort of work is emerging around this area. And we hope over the next six months to a year to really be able to come out with some really evidence-based research where we can start creating some real ideas of what the links are, what the factors are between how a society or how a community is organized, the nature of its leadership, the nature of its relationships, can help really create means to resist violent extremism. So what we're going to focus on today is really two particularly interesting aspects of this question. The first is the role of or the increasing role of social media and the links that it creates and the challenges that it presents. Social media is one of those areas where there's sort of two sides of the same coin, one negative and one positive, but certainly the reach of communications and the ability of individuals and organizations to reach into communities regardless of isolation, at least geographically, is significantly increased. And what does that mean? What are the challenges in that regard? And then we also want to add sort of another layer to this and that is the increasing role of women in organized violent extremism. What does that mean? What are we seeing? And what does some of the research begin to tell us? And so with that we have three very distinguished panelists who are really focused both in terms of developing programs and doing research in these areas. And I will just introduce them one by one and then we will go in order to hear their presentations and then we will end with a question and answer session. So first to my immediate left and to your right is Rabia Choudhury who is a Jennings Randolph senior fellow here at USIP where she is doing research on the intersection of religion and violent extremism. She comes to USIP from the New America Foundation where she's been an international security fellow where she developed and led a CVE community project in partnership interestingly enough with Google, Facebook and Twitter. She's also the founder of the Safe Nation Collaborative which is a CVE training firm. So she's really been addressing this issue from a number of different perspectives and she has very good ties into the corporate world and those who are really engaged in communications or enhanced communication and social media technology. Then we have Michael Shippler who is the regional director of Asia programs at the Search for Common Ground, one of the key partners for the forum. And Michael oversees program offices in Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Timor-Lest. And Michael has been engaged in peace building for well into two decades and he's been engaged in programs focused on youth, media, civil military affairs and governance. And he's going to talk about sort of the increasing role of social media as he's witnessed it in his program support and work for search particularly in the Asian context. See he, like Robby, have a particular interest in and have experience with Pakistan. And then finally to my far left is Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen Turner who is a public affairs officer in the United States Army. She has over 20 years of service and is currently the U.S. Army War College Fellow here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior coming to USIP she was the public affairs advisor to the 38th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, now retired General Ray Odierno and she managed and developed his communications particularly both internally and with external media for over three years. But she's had a long and distinguished career in public affairs in the Army including communications planning and advising senior officers on public affairs strategy. So she's taken this past year to really delve into communications strategy related to CVE with a particular focus on the increasing role of women. So with that I, like I'm sure you are looking forward to hearing our panelists. So, Robby, thank you. Good morning everybody. Can everybody hear me? Is this Michael? Okay. Let me pull this up and first of all thank you so much for the introduction and thank you all for being here. It was a toss up whether I was going to make it through the rain and traffic as well and I want to apologize for how I sound. I'm a little bit under the weather and I'm also a little bit medicated right now. But I'm awake. So I want to first give a little bit of background about my work in CVE and so you can understand like the perspective that I have come at this work with. I'm not a researcher. I'm not an academic. I have been for the last five years to the extent that you can be a CVE practitioner and for the last 15 years an advocate really deep in the grassroots of the American Muslim community. So you know I come at this work from a community advocate lens but also most importantly I come at it as being part of the community that is really mostly impacted not just in the U.S. by CVE policy but also obviously overseas by the actions of violent extremists and so it is a major concern for me because of the direct connection that I have to many of these issues, how they impact my community, my families, my places of worship, my family overseas, my family happens to be from Pakistan and I was born on a street that a few years ago for the first time in a history of his country was attacked by terrorists. So that's how deep they've gotten into some of the places that were previously very peaceful in Pakistan. I want to talk a little bit about about the work that I did at the New America Foundation before coming here. I've only been here a couple of months so I'm new at USIP and I'm as interested as everybody else in seeing like what my research here will finally yield but I'll be back in a year hopefully to talk about that but at New America Foundation for about two and a half years I ran a program that basically provided social media advocacy training to Muslim activists and communities across the country and this was of course in direct response to the increasing use of social media by violent extremist groups not just to disseminate their messaging but also you know most troublesome was the recruitment of Western Muslims to come join them or to perpetrate acts here in the United States or in other Western countries. So the question was then that what can what can some of these private sector companies do some of the tech companies and what is their response to this and that was the question the government posed and overwhelmingly these companies said listen you know we're not in the business of censorship but we are in the business of helping to promote better better content and so what we can do is we can provide media training social media trainings to the communities that are being directly impacted so we over the course of two and a half years conducted trainings in about nine different cities we trained about 500 activists organizations representative of about 150 of the major and minor Muslim organizations across the country I would say I would say at least a good 70 to 80 percent of all of the well-known Muslim organizations somehow had training this training given to them over these nine trainings so here's what was interesting about the experience some of the learning that I was able to glean from it number one even Muslims who are very very engaged on community issues have very little idea what's happening on social media and I want to tie this back to you know the recruitment of women in particular at some point but just bear with me what's happening with social media people have no idea first of all because if you are an American Muslim and you decide well I want to see what's happening on social media let me go see what Boko Haram is up to or what Shabaab is tweeting today you might end up on a list you don't want to be on so people are very careful about how they're using internet and social media they don't want to end up under the lens of law enforcement and so they're very much avoided parents and communities have no idea religious leaders and moms they've no idea that you know young people can get on their smartphones and with 15 minutes they can be tweeting with somebody who is a nicest recruiter or supporter or posing to be one so there's very low information there's very little information on on this subject period the second thing that's the second issue that really stands in the way of getting this giving this priority in communities is the fact that after 9 11 American Muslims have taken a very defensive stance in terms of civil liberties and they find cbe to be an encroachment on their civil liberties and there are lots of different reasons for that so the primary focus of muslims in the west has been civil rights fighting islamophobia fighting fighting anti-muslim bigotry and that has been the primary focus violent extremism radicalization cbe these are very low priority on their list most people will say these are not relevant to our lives these issues are not relevant to our lives and if you say they are that means that you are you know you're making presumptions about us that are really incorrect and troublesome um one thing that i also learned and um jeff had mentioned that i uh also am the founder of an organization called the safe nation collaborative and the safe nation was founded about five years ago and what we do with safe nation is we provide cbe trainings law enforcement and to communities all on a local level so if you have a local sheriff's department and you have five mosques in the jurisdiction what we try to do is provide similar trainings to all of them so they actually just have the awareness of what's happening online and many times even local law enforcement doesn't know that as i was doing these this work i did a lot of work with the youth groups that were part of the mosques and the communities and this is not there's i don't have empirical empirical research on this or data on this but i can tell you anecdotally in at least four or five different situations i conducted a kind of an exercise with youth groups and muslim youth groups ages 16 to 19 maybe 15 to 19 uh where we did the identity exercises and it's very simple you just draw a tree with branches and use and every branch you name a part a part of your identity so if i was drawing my tree i might say mother sister pakistani muslim american whatever and so i did this repeatedly and i can tell you in about 90 percent of the cases and these are kids who are born and raised in united states um would not have the word american on their identity tree i saw this in one community not a single one of the 20 students had the word american and i thought this was fascinating and i didn't understand why and that got me very interested on the issue of muslim identity in the west and i realized that you know this is kind of the crux of the issue i think when it comes to things like recruitment marginalization and the push and pull factors that we talk about when we're like how do people become radicalized whatever that means how do people decide that you know what how do young people decide that you know what i'm going to get up and i'm going to leave my my community my family everything i've ever known and go to a country that i have no ties with to fight i will fight a war that i know nothing about how does this happen so um i wanted to uh talk a little bit about this and this is um from a security debrief their website and some of the research shows this line right here the second most commonly mentioned risk factor and that's for radicalization is a youth identity crisis the desire for structure identity coupled with a weak parent child relationship which is also very interesting because that's similar um in other contexts too with right right-wing extremism and other kinds of um similar phenomena can make young people susceptible to a recruiter's message okay so let's talk a little bit about identity now this is also um this is from a cnn article why is isis so successful at recruiting and i actually uh want to push back in terms of the framing there because i think in the us context at least isis has not been so successful i think it's been fairly low recruitment but nonetheless richard barrett of sufam group said that for many it boils down to a lack of a sense of identity or belonging okay so what shapes our identity what shapes the identity of of um any community of of youth right uh particularly in this context muslims in the west well i wanted to see what kind of messages vial extremism isis in particular isil daesh whatever you want to call them who are really really adept at social media on a level that i haven't seen any other organization um be proficient with what kind of messages are they giving specifically to young people um that might actually be directed at this issue of an identity crisis and why are they resonating and so what i'm the images i want to show you right now they weren't prepared for this um this panel they are part of an exercise i do in communities just to show people how is how does isis talk to your kids and why does it work so you have these are some of these most of these pictures are taken directly from isis instagram accounts and and other um uh distributions they've done so this is a really interesting image and i think this image evokes power right romance something right it's a it's a beautiful image right it's almost artistic it's not brutal it's not bloody there is something very uh you know romantically just you know adventurous about it you've got this image why why would they do that right and there's others where they have nutella right kittens the internet loves kittens terrorists love kittens right look look how much they love kittens um right here look they've got restaurants there you know they've got tablecloths they eat together um one thing i want you to notice in in these images which are like again are coming directly from their instagram accounts i don't see any religious messaging right they're not giving scripture they're not giving religious you know any kind of saying oh the Quran says this or the prophet says this they're just saying you know look at what the what does this mean to you this is speaking specifically to a demographic right young people on social media we respond in jannah um so i think some of these things are these images are really interesting the ones of them in kind of combat mode right this now there's a distinct distinct difference between these kinds of images and the images that we got for years from let's say al qaeda and the Taliban right can anybody name a difference here what makes this very distinct or any of well let's go back here one second these two images from what we've seen before i know i can't be the only one who laughed when i saw um al qaeda fighters swinging from monkey bars and doing training exercises that just didn't seem legitimate that they had no uniform right they look organized they look professional this is a military these are not just insurgents or terrorists these are people who are part of something like real they're part of a state states have militaries right so these are even as horrifying as this images because we know exactly what happened afterwards um to young people this looks like these people know what they're doing right they've got it together they're creating something real okay they're not just haphazard and then you have women now this is also interesting okay these women are in full niqab so how is this attractive to a young muslim woman in the west who's grown up let's say in very open circumstances she does she's not forced to dress like this but why would this resonate with her i don't explain to you why i think why and these are the kinds of messages that they're given by other girls and women who've gone over there being co-wives of best friends so you know we're all like friends here um and we're going to get into the why so these are the kinds of images that they're getting from recruitment now let's look at their context right and i have a teenager i also have a seven- year-old um and i'm raising my kids in post-911 america on the other hand these are the images are getting from western media okay um these guys to me i mean this is called the rage muslim this is actually a meme in the muslim community the rage muslim so they so they you know again there's more rage muslims a lot of muslims are very angry but guess what they're actually impotent they can't do anything they just they can just be angry more rage muslims these are all from western media sources look at this um these are very powerful images to a young muslim right because this is how they are seeing themselves reflected in the media here this is the only time they're seeing their images somebody they can maybe relate to even though they shouldn't right so this person is completely impotent disempowered um and what about women how are muslim women depicted in the media well you know those isis women might have been fully covered but they were organized and they had guns they're empowered these women are not empowered right look at us right this is what our young people are seeing um in in the countries are growing up in and so there is absolutely a very definite connection between the identity crisis that young muslims are experiencing and i would even say those of us who are not so young are experiencing who's grown up in western countries who don't understand exactly where they belong um and anti muslim victory arise an anti muslim sentiment you know right now and the numbers are polling about 75 70 of gop voters say that muslims should be banned or muslim shouldn't be allowed this country this is having a direct impact on the psyche of young muslims because they don't know where they belong they don't feel american they don't feel anti american but they don't feel american and that creates really fertile ground for recruitment and i i think we're lucky that we haven't seen higher numbers because when it comes down to this when you have leading presidential candidates making statements like this you are gonna you know yesterday i was taking my daughter to school she's seven years old and she said i don't know we were just driving like we had the radio on and all of a sudden she said mama trump is coming and i was like what do you mean she's like well trump is coming we gotta go we have to get out of here i mean to this level that she's in second grade and there are these fears right of not belonging so there you know i really believe strongly that what you're seeing and then when it comes to young girls in particular wanting to go overseas and get married to these men they don't know and to you know there is a big dearth of um of muslim male heroes the muslim man in the western psyche in the in in western media is the rage guy he's impotent he is um he treats women badly he has no power he can't protect anybody here um and so what they're seeing is and and we and i have talked to us too many times i said you know what we need we need more images of muslims in service of muslims in the military of muslims in law enforcement that exist let's see them on the media let's see them on billboards let's let our young people see these images uh it would all it would not just help uh their sense of identity and belonging to this country but also i think would push back on anti muslim bigotry and i think anybody who studied any of these messages can tell you that um the kinds of messages that anti muslim bigots give and violent extremists give they are like an echo chamber so isis will say muslims cannot live in the west muslims in the west are at odds and anti muslim bigots will say the same thing they say islam and democrat are incompatible they're getting exact same messages from both of these groups and they're feeling very much alienated so i'll stop there um and um i guess we can take the rest of the question i think that's the end of it for me so all right okay thank you uh thank you uh good morning everybody um it's really great to to have a chance to be here thank you for the invitation and the introduction um i want to speak a little bit about where a peace building organization like search for coming around is fitting into this broader uh dynamic around messaging counter messaging narratives counter narratives within cbe right now i want to start out though by asking how many people here are the familiar with the term uh propaganda of the deed so raise your hand if you know that term very few propaganda the deed is the concept that drives terrorism and in fact not just terrorism but other acts of violence uh by non-state actors and insurances and in fact to a certain extent by state actors as well it's the idea that by by that an act of terrorism is an act of communication right terrorism is by nature aimed at creating visual imagery typically uh that sows a particular message in society that goes rapidly across a population or across a bunch of populations to cause a shift in political social uh cultural dynamics right so terrorism is by its nature no matter who it's committed by a prop piece of propaganda propaganda of the deed it's not a new thing it's something that has existed as long as insurgencies have existed and one of the things that's really critical to understand and something that i think those of us in the peace building space have been just sort of starting to grapple with over the last number of years is really understanding that insurgencies are inherently built around the notion of a strategic narrative so if you read the if you look at kind of insurgency manuals and counterinsurgency manuals you'll see that the starting point critically is the storyline the storyline that insurgency group whatever it may be whether you're talking about a Maoist insurgency in rural Nepal or you're talking about a global insurgency like what we're seeing with Daesh starts with a critical story aimed at communicating a certain image of both a historical glory and some kind of possible utopian future which taps into and sort of frames the core grievances of of a population and the traditional um traditional insurgencies so if you look at the Maoist traditional model of insurgency was also built on the core concept of building a popular support so building essentially a community of people group of people rate who would support that insurgency and create basically a public uh public demand based on their core grievances and so the essence of media propaganda and and the tools of communication were really at the center and have been at the center of insurgencies for for decades for as long as insurgencies have operated the essence of this is not just to create recruitment for soldiers but also to create space in communities for insurgencies to hide for them to operate freely to then spread particular political religious or whatever ideology and insurgency is operating on and essentially to create a foundation for for essentially launching their military campaign media communications tools have been really at the absolute center of insurgencies for as long as insurgency does have existed and you'll see really a wide range of the kinds of media tools traditionally so in Nepal for instance the Maoist insurgency there formulated these very effective insert cultural artistic drama groups that traveled the country wrote music wrote songs did theater participatory theater quite frankly used a lot of the kinds of tools that an organization like our search for common ground uses right and and some of our colleagues there would tell us you know they would attend these events thousands of people would come watch these events and say you know even people who are quite firmly anti-maus quite ideologically opposed by the time they would get through watching often would feel roused up that these guys were tapping on to hitting on the core grievances of those groups and really seeking you know a way of trying to provide support and this a sense of popular support what's really important always for us to understand those of us who are engaged in this now is that it has always aimed at targeting both men and women it's never been about targeting men and trying to engage men in insurgencies but rather to create a whole circle a whole community of people around essentially an armed cause so social media has catalyzed or has enabled the catalyst a catalyzation anyway has been a catalyst for for a real shift a really transformation in the way in which insurgencies are actually functioning really insurgencies are innovating and innovating at a doctrinal level okay what does this really look like al-qaeda was the first really to conceptualize of what some people are called a global insurgency now this term has generated a little bit of controversy and you see this controversy manifest because it has been used at times to talk about and sort of sort of reinforce the the the anti-muslim propaganda and anti-muslim bigotry that we've seen around the world but is if you sort of take away that dimension of it and just recognize it as a a concept of mobilizing an insurgency at a global scale right whatever the ideological cause could be it is something that really occurred now the main shift that happened optimally is the notion of popular support and this is where social media is so critical so whereas in a traditional Maoist style insurgency where community support and public support was built from the ground up and it was really defining communities based on geographic locations so we're going to get this village and that village and we'll be able to create you know a physical space al-qaeda began to conceptualize of that popular community as a virtual community a community that existed actually based on shared identities or shared grievances that existed across dividing lines we're seeing to a certain extent or the vastly less effectively organized the the neo-nazi movement an extreme right white supremacist movements starting to try to replicate this model as well and social media was the critical fundamental enabler that enabled initially al-qaeda to cut draw out those connections de-isolate people from their space to link them into a community of people where they could actually then launch an extremist movement what isis has done is taken that insurgency innovation and they've added the innovations of marketing right and really i've met a guy who's a social media marketer designs campaigns for pepsi and things like that and he was telling me that everybody is looking in their space at isle with with envy right because what they have done is they've actually taken the real shift that we've seen in the marketing space which is away from you know we all know sort of how marketing works in in in has worked in our lives where the kind of core concept is touch people's lives seven times touch their consciousness seven times and eventually they'll have awareness of your product and eventually buy it but marketers are suddenly faced with the prospect of that model simply not working and what people are starting to do is create what we call what they call user journeys right what they want to do is create entry for somebody into their product and drive them on a pathway that ultimately leads them to buying that product so if you think about how many people here might have nike app on their phones you have a nike app you take your run right and then you end up posting your nike app run time if you run well i don't tend to post mine but you put your nike app run time on your facebook right everybody sees okay nike i'm associating that with health i'm associating that with this person who i admire who ran you know 10 miles in an hour right and then you know when it comes time first of all you're wearing out your shoes inherently it comes time to buy shoes well nike is in your consciousness and you're going to buy it right and this is a user journey almost all major products are now sort of saying how do we actually engage people in a process that step by step incremental that ultimately leads them to buying our product and this is what isle has done right and isle has essentially creating entry points for people to be able to engage on a journey that leads them ultimately to either recruitment or whatever destinations isis is trying to have them change so what's powerful about this is that what they market it i mean it's fascinating to see sort of the imagery that you've put up one of the ways that that i mean one of the things that i've observed is that the marketing that's done from place to place is rather different actually the messaging the way in which it operates the whole kind of structure of the message is a little bit different and tuned effectively to the core grievances the core challenges and the motivational factors that are driving youth behaviors in those communities right um they combine also this core notion of a hero's journey with a user journey so one of the things that i've seen in in several different publications in dabik this whole notion of actually you can create an incremental process in your life to achieve heroism right so the image that you showed of the horseback actually i mean it really struck me it reminded me of the images of the american special forces in afghanistan on horseback right it was a hero image right and what that is ultimately doing is tapping into something that we actually at search for coming around consider to be one of the most critical and fundamental resources for peacebuilding which is that power of youth sense of injustice the the power of a sense that actually society is not as we think it should be the power of the desire to cause change right which is something that many many groups that use extremism not just uh that's isis but buddhist extremist groups and uh whites premises groups are all tapping into that kind of sense of of of disquiet that young people often have as they become aware of the political dynamics around them and they create the journey to do it there's a guy i know in in norway who does a prevention of uh of recruitment he's an extraordinary guy and he told me you know when they were really trying to understand what was going on he said they got on facebook to see how how hard it was to then actually go to syria and he told me they were able in in just a matter of hours to have a plane ticket to uh to turkey just a matter of hours through an engagement with a recruiter on facebook and so what they've also done is something that those who work in the behavior change communications feel know very well they have linked that user journey to access to the product and it has to be rapid because people make decisions and the the line between making a decision to take an action or make a do a behavior and acting on it the timeline is very short and probably shorter in the modern world than ever before right and so essentially they make available that resource there is now this whole world that of of counter messaging counter narratives that governments and states are sponsoring um even the cool idea of counter narrative by itself demonstrates the powerlessness and the limitations that states are facing and trying to grapple with and confront the narratives that isle and any other insurgencies uh are putting forward and in fact over the course of over the course of armed conflict of small awards it is very very rare that you will find any state actually putting forward saying our counter narrative messaging uh approach was at the center of our victory in cases that they went why is this one is that states often put forward propaganda that uh promotes them okay or promotes a very narrow line uh that they're seeking to uh seeking to push into their citizenry and in the modern world people are a lot less susceptible to kind of typical propaganda most people even people who live in societies where which are not very free and open can smell propaganda a mile away we all can we all know it when we see it here uh even though uh we will watch particular news channels that guide us into a particular attitude set state propaganda somehow smacks me and the other thing is that state actions and state propaganda typically don't align with each other so in other words state propaganda of the deed or state deeds which cause resonance in their society and their messaging don't tend to align we saw this in the united states uh in the way in which uh the u.s. saw to fight the insurgency in iraq the narrative was around uh democracy around freedom around self-determination of iraqi people around strong institutions but the visual imagery that amosed the most emerged the most striking visual imagery that emerged from iraq was Abu Ghraib which gave an absolutely contradictory message right to what the strategic narrative of the counterinsurgency was where do peace builders fit into all of this right because if you can imagine an organization like ours that gets funding from state governments most of whom have taken a clear side in terms of the conflict between isil and and and their broader world uh and we're getting funding from the u.s. state department from the british from others how do we actually put into social media space into the public broadcast media space messaging that is not actually taking a propaganda line that won't be effective but it's also not uh promoting obviously recruitment into arm groups where do we really fit and we're full of a host of dilemmas and challenges around that for us there are three things um i would by no means claim that we have figured this all out and in fact i think that that organization like ours and anybody who works in the media space and has been working with youth for a long time like like as we have are facing actually really substantial challenges around the market in the way in which people absorb information the the the kind of space we can occupy in a media market challenges to that are really quite significant threats to how we actually cause behavioral change in a new way and all of us are really trying to grapple with this and if you can sort of think about this that that kid in karate you know 10 years ago if we put a television drama series up on tv about kids in karate or even a radio show you know that's going to be one of a handful of things that he or she would actually have access to the influence on his or her life would be pretty substantial who resonate strongly today if you put that same show on the air it's going to be one of a thousand inputs into his or her life on a daily basis right and social media enables rapid fast quick engagements that affect people in such broad ways that we're not actually yet aware or even understand how actually people are absorbing messages and this is a critical challenge that we're facing in addition to the challenge of remain remaining fully impartial and messaging in a way that really truly resonates with populations so there's two main things that i think we've been seeking to do and i'm going to show you just very quickly a couple of quick examples the first is we basically are seeking not to create counter narratives but rather what we call citizens narratives or the voices of people put people's voices ideas use their own perspectives into the professional media space or and on to social media equip enable people who want to have influence over their society those same young people who are typical automatic targets by isil or others create opportunities platforms for them to get into that public space to talk about their challenges of identity their sense of what a right proper just world looks like what kind of uh viewpoints they and their peers may have um what that and the other kinds of professional media outputs that we try to put out seek to achieve is really to promote pluralism the notion that societies can be diverse and that diversity doesn't necessarily threaten your identity your practices that promotes tolerance and most important in my opinion promotes critical thinking and the critical thinking piece is really quite fundamental um we did a study in in nipal i'm in fact uh our colleague who was on uh on that project of this is here uh oh maybe 10 years ago uh just uh at the at the end of uh nipal's armed conflict and we really wanted to understand what is it that enabled those young people who lived in communities where the malice uh insurgents were recruiting youth with what was it that enabled those to who resisted to resist and we emerged from that study with two really critical factors okay one was i some one young man put it to me he said well i asked questions his critical thinking is about saying hey i'm not going to just accept all the things that people are telling me i'm going to ask questions about it and understand how my behavior aligns to my interests and the second thing was around belonging to groups connections volleyball teams youth clubs youth networks different kinds of structured groups in that context those two factors then basically fueled a media initiative that we did that we put into place for years aiming to address those two critical factors um from there i wanted to show you two quick videos there's a couple minutes uh one is actually from a commercial uh from a commercial because actually advertisers have huge influence and maybe much more power and influence than a peace building group like ours would have right and it's just an example of this promotion of tolerance uh and and how that kind of message can be injected into society uh it's from uh it's an indian commercial all right good morning everyone thank you jeff for that kind introduction and i just want to publicly thank uh usip for having me be part of the team here for the last eight to nine months as an army fellow being uh one of a handful of military folks here in the building um it's been an honor to be here so thank you um i am a public affairs practitioner um that's what i do in the army full time um but i chose to study something a little bit different to be outside of my comfort zone and that was women who engage in terrorist activity or who willingly join violent extremist organizations and so i found that topic uh very fascinating very interesting and it was because of all the media coverage of women's involvement in terrorist groups that a lot of media whether it be social media traditional media has been the narrative has been um those poor women uh women are victims uh women were coerced the man made or do it it's never been women as a combatant women as the perpetrator that's always been kind of the second third uh consequence of story coverage the leading story has always been or the leading tagline has been uh women was coerced or she's a victim or um how could she leave her family a man must have made her do it instead of thinking about women actively engaging having a direct role in terrorist activity so that's what i chose to study over these last eight to nine months and i'm going to talk a little bit about my research and um talk a little bit um it's tied to both with what michael and rabia have talked about in some way shape or form so um you know so the main question i looked at what draws women to violent extremist groups and i'll talk a little bit about my methodology i'll talk about three case studies i chose to um research um but i'll give you a little bit of the overall context first um as instability in the world is increasing non-nation states are becoming more powerful we need to recognize the role women are actively playing in terrorist organizations so we can better prepare ourselves from a department of defense perspective from a national security perspective internationally from just us to to europe with nato to all the different countries i think that are being effective globally with terrorist organizations the actions that terrorist organizations are conducting right now throughout history women have conducted violent acts and have participated in violent extremist groups insurgencies and revolutionary organizations i can only imagine uh the impact of some of the groups i studied would have if social media was active or created back in the 60s 70s and even the 80s with some of these groups the impact would have just been incredible it would have been amazing um i looked at some of the groups when you look at the history of women's organizations or women that have participated organizations you have the bottom mine off brigade out of germany that was created by women uh they were very active in the 60s and 70s uh they were responsible for several bombings that killed citizens military and u.s soldiers in germany you look at the pkk the ira the eln the sandinistas in the 1960s they had 25 to 30 women in their organizations shining path had 40 percent uh the people's liberation front for palestine one of their most famous um terrorist was a woman by the name of leila khalid who hijacked twa flight 840 in 1969 she became like the poster the poster woman for recruitment for that organization and the role women played in that organization you also have the weather underground which was a u.s organization it was a revolutionary youth movement in the 1960s in the 1970s you know why have we not recognized the impact of women the deadly effectiveness of women and on security and on society why do we not consider women a threat um why do we have these preconceived notions that when we think of a terrorist our first thought goes it's a male late teens early 20s we don't think that it could be a woman and when we hear it's a woman um we just kind of dismiss it and it's almost like that shock like oh my god you know so i i've just noticed that immediate coverage especially over this last last year uh when you think about over the last year what's happened in our world we had the paris attacks um initial follow-up coverage with the paris attacks was widespread coverage from paris when we thought a 26-year-old woman detonated a suicide vest everybody kept reporting this is the first female suicide bomber and i'm sitting there going no it's not no it's not um and then it came out that no she didn't have a suicide vest we were wrong but everybody was leading with that fact they were just shocked that a woman could be a suicide bomber with the San Bernardino attacks uh media reports were just you know couldn't understand what would drive a woman to be radicalized and have this couple leave their baby with their grandparents but i picked up on i don't know if anybody else noticed for the first 48 72 hours pitchers had um her husband up there and they had a blacked out silhouette of her they didn't show her picture for days and i was just sitting there going why aren't we showing her picture why are we so shocked that a woman could leave her child and lead her husband to do this act of violence so just those two incidents alone just helped kind of validate my research and got me just more energized to finish my project while i've been here uh when we analyze women's motivations to join these groups whether it's a terrorist political or radical movement many analysts tend to believe women are coerced they're victims of men rather than the possibility of an alternate explanation there's a more sophisticated nuance complex set of factors to explain why women join these groups so when i looked at my research i found uh dr mea bloom's four r plus one framework i use that as my methodology and i just love reading anything that dr bloom did listening to her speak and in view she did and i really focused on her four r plus one framework and that's revenge could be the loss of a loved one uh redemption that's the forgiveness of passings and we find that many suicide bombers use redemption as a reason for joining a group relationship tends to be the most common that goes for men and women it could be you know a family member a boyfriend girlfriend a spouse that's part of this organization that would cause someone to join respect uh with women i found in my case studies respect was a lot of reasoning why women join these groups and it was because they want to be respected they want to show they are just as dedicated to the cause as men as the young men in their tribe or village or in their city and rape is the is the other r and so when you look at rape as a cause or reasoning or factor to join it's because in a lot of cultures once a woman is raped they are unable to go back to their family to go back to their village so what are they going to do a lot of women have no choice but you know i'm going to be part of this group they're going to welcome me into my family i can't go home to my family or on the flip side um organizations use this as a recruiting tool so they know the woman can't go home so they say come with us but they're also cause for raping women to get them to join their organization which is like i said it's the other side of the coin when you look at the rape as a factor um also with the case studies i studied women were assaulted by the by the by the enemy of the organization could be by the government could be by the military and that caused them the needed protection so that's why they also joined the group so um all of those four plus one those could be all those could be a reason for a woman to join a group there could be a combination of factors but i did find at least two to three of the r's in the case studies that i studied in research were the reason why women join these groups uh the case studies i looked at um i hope you're familiar with some of them um the ltt e the liberation tigers of tamal uh elon out of Sri lanka the chetchum black widows and the fark three very different organizations but they do have many similarities when i um looked at them these groups pioneered the tactics used that transcended their culture and used women as combatants to produce unexpected and often overwhelming results uh the ltt e had 30 to 40 women uh they were started as a revolutionary movement in Sri lanka it was with you know the the tamal people and the single east people and the ltt e was was created to um go against that caste discrimination that was in Sri lanka at the time they they perfected the suicide vest and they pioneered the use of women's suicide bombers they you know they were it in the 80s and 90s they were um an internationally known terrorist organization that were they were highly regarded that just they knew their craft and they perfected that tactic of a suicide bomber they were the only organization to kill two world leaders uh in 1991 the former prime minister former prime minister ghandi was killed by a 19 year old female suicide bomber and she was able to get so close to him because again of that bias when we look at men and women that the prime minister looked at her and was just like it's okay because his security who was a female was very concerned about her getting so close to the prime minister he said it's okay it's just a girl and as soon as he touched her touched her hand she detonated her vest killing 16 people including herself and the former prime minister so that again goes to that preconceived notion and that's why a lot of terrorist organizations use women because of the ability to get through security checkpoints because of how they're perceived the ability to hide the vest or the hide the bombing in the clothing um at just getting after you know how society views women um the other case study i looked at was the church in black widows uh 40 percent female uh they were women were responsible for 40 percent of the attacks from the the church and separatists they had their first attempt using women in 2000 with a vehicle born ied they focused on military targets and they progressed to civilian targets including children this group struck fear across russia russia tried to say that women were zombies they were drugged they didn't willingly join the separatist group and they would not do these things against russia well for again when you look at that four r plus one methodology i used a key point to that was revenge church in women were avenging the death of their brothers their fathers their families they hated the russian government and what the russians did to the church and people so that was a lot of reasoning why they joined the church in black widows they're international internationally known for the um hostage the theater taking back in 2002 19 of those terrorists were women um so it's a very very powerful group they they are still i'm not going to say they're disbanded um when russia sponsored the olympics back in 2014 they were concerned about the threat from the church in black widows so there's they're still out there they're just not as active but um you know very powerful group uh the fark was the last group that i studied 30 to 40 percent women some uh data that i found said that women were as high as 50 percent in that organization which is very telling um they come from a communist background uh equality it's you know really the haves and the have nots they talked about a columbia for all columbians uh i think the fark is a um case study that we need to watch especially with you know what's going on with the peace process right now i think there's a lot that we can learn about women's role in a revolutionary terrorist organization whatever you want to call it but the importance and the effectiveness that women have uh in the peace process in the radicalization process and what we need to pay attention when we think about women and women as combatants i think the fark is a great case study uh the fark fully embraced having women in their ranks they trained right alongside the men whatever they said a man was going to do a woman was going to do there was no difference um the only thing was is they just they didn't they weren't in a lot of leadership roles so that was one thing i found with all three groups that women were not they were in some leadership roles but they they weren't very high but with the fark in particular um they actually preferred having women versus men commandos because they felt the women were more vicious they were more ruthless because the women felt they had something to prove so they were commandos prefer to have women than men um do their fighting actually which and i kind of like that but anyway not not but anyway i thought that was kind of interesting um so with uh the peace negotiations ongoing it's estimated there are 17 500 fark that are expected to demobilize um how that reintegration goes how that demobilization goes is it going to be successful are the combatants going to go back to the jungles and fight and pick up their arms again to fight the columbian government are they going to be welcome back into society um and and how do you welcome women back into villages when they left their children left their families how do you make sure they get the proper education and the proper responsibility that they've been having with the fark so i i just think there's so many issues um from a peacekeeping perspective from a conflict prevention with the fark case in particular um that we really have to pay attention to um what the outcome conclusions of my paper i felt the department of defense um because i am biased when looking from a department of defense perspective uh the u.s. government should view women within the context of conflict the threat women can pose and we need to consider inclusive strategies that may be more effective during conflict prevention and post-conflict operations um when we consider the current threats of boko haram and isis or isil or dash um what what threats do they pose right now from a military perspective from a plan or perspective i would want to know how are the organizations using women why are they using women what strategic purpose do women have for that group why are women joining these groups how do we prevent women from engaging with these groups we need to consider both the male and females um females as threats on the battlefield and we need to do more to counter and prevent women versus just the male population and that's uh i'll be ready for questions great thank you all very much um we'll go ahead and take questions um we have microphones down here and we will uh we will circulate them so yes sir can can you identify yourself just we have people watching this so we want to hear your question we want them to hear your question thank you has your studies of any of you allowed you to look at uh post conflict regions and in particular uh as an example what comes to my mind is Algeria where you did have women that participated in uh and detonating themselves in crowds and so forth and post-conflict what has that taught us both pro and con to the role of women um so i wish i studied more on the Algeria case study because that's a fascinating case study i think with both the case in Sri Lanka with the the Tamils and still more to come with Columbia um from what i could see it's almost where we reverted back to the role of women that they played before joining those organizations so when you think about advancing gender advancing gender equality and the role women roles women play in society with the particular groups i studied it it was like they went back to how things were beforehand so they didn't really further uh gender equality that's why i'm hoping with Columbia and the FARC we see more progress than i think is what has happened in Sri Lanka and uh some of the other countries that had high percentages of women in their organizations i don't know Michael if you sure no it's a great question i mean the the ddr the disarmament demobilization reintegration processes uh that have been implemented around the world have really struggled to be inclusive enough to include women and this includes both the those that that do ddr for adults and for children so for girls and women um i think there are a couple of really critical learnings one is to understand how an armed group is organized in its totality because while there are many women who play combat roles many women also play what are traditional support roles cooking playing role as you know porters things like that that may not put them in combatant roles which may mean that they don't have access to weapons and so lesson a that that has been learned and learned a really hard way is that access to a full ddr programs should not be based on trading weapons uh and and traditionally that was sort of how it was done you know disarm hand the weapon and come in second of all in terms of community responses men and women and and girls and boys face pretty different sorts of challenges uh particularly around the perception that there may be of them as they're returning home and and in particular one of the things that we've seen is that there's a lot more stereotypes and stigmatization of girls and women uh around around sexual behavior in particular so in nipal at the end of the war where nipal's malice had approximately 30 percent women and girls as well and about 25 to 30 percent of the 11 000 children who served in the war there uh were girls uh when they came home uh the suspicion uh that was attached to them and the stigma that was attached to them uh because of an imagined sexual behaviors during their time in service uh was so poignant that uh it led families to feel a lot more shame than they did of their boys coming home uh and in fact pushed a lot of families not all but many families to uh to really put a lot of emphasis on getting their girls married or their young women married very quickly and that was where there was a ton of push of course that wasn't the uniform experience they're really a diverse set of experiences so yes uh hello my name is lea but i'm a fellow at the national endowment for democracy i actually work on cv e issues and conflict resolution in lebanon on the border with syria and i work specifically with fighters from um both hezbollah and recruits from isis or nostra that went and came back sorry and uh my question to you is so i found very interesting that a lot of things are in common when it comes to the reasons why people resort to violent extremism such as the need for a sense of identity or belonging um now in in lebanon there are also other main structural problems that exist like poverty or marginalization or injustice that also affect and also push these people so my first question is whether this is also a factor here and my second question is more related to the role of women when it comes to actually resolving those so so countering violent extremism because in my case and in lebanon i see this as an advantage because in these areas we are perceived as less threatening because the role of women in those conservative areas is somewhat perceived differently and therefore trust is given in much more easily for women who work in these areas so i was also wondering about the role of women when working in these very violent or prone to violent areas thank you i mean i think um at least in the in the in the us context which has been like primary my focus you're not going to find some of the structural issues you're talking about and even those are debatable i mean we know right now that you know research shows us depending on the context that sometimes economic factors do play a role and sometimes they don't i mean for example in pakistan you're seeing a lot of the support coming from upper middle class and fairly well educated people for violent extremism and for ideologically extreme groups in the u.s i would say the only real structural issue that that young muslims might think uh is pushing them towards this is really kind of law enforcement and us policy on these issues cve itself is a very toxic term in in in united states i mean like for muslim community not just in the us but across the atlantic too so that's really the biggest challenge that we have is how to engage on these issues without further disenfranchising or marginalizing the communities and so structurally but you know american muslims by and large are you know fairly upwardly mobile um they're not experiencing the kinds of things that muslims for example in europe might be facing or in lebanon poxson on financial issues i think getting at your other the reasons behind not just the four hours that i mentioned i did find private poverty in the case studies that i looked at was a big issue specifically with the tamel tigers and with the farks so you had poverty lack of education lack of opportunity with education the whole equality nationalism the cause was a big issue that made women join men and women join these groups if someone's in your village and they're willing to teach you how to to read and write and you know that you're only opportunity like the fark did then you're going to join the fark so i did see those were other reasons behind joining but i with your statement as far as the influence of women when it comes to prevention i think absolutely women have a huge influence within societies within certain cultures and i think we need to use that more and be more inclusive when it comes to women in that prevention process i would just follow on i think that the most effective violence prevention strategies uh that we've been executing and that have been executed globally have a very explicit overt approach to engaging women in leadership roles in in that prevention work and that's true whether you're dealing with gang violence in you know in washington d street c or you're dealing with the recruitment of youth into isis and dice from from you know in southern kyrgyzstan and the the key here is that it's about understanding the whole environment in which young people are growing up and all the pressures upon them that that are in place and that a fractured adult society is often a major sort of enabling factor among many others that enables recruiters to engage youth and and pushes young people to to see some power in that armed group or that extremist group and so the the strategy that we often employs around engaging those citizens groups with state organizations to and with youth leaders in particular to actually create basically cohesive approaches at community level for prevention so one of the one one example very briefly was that in southern kyrgyzstan we've been in fact with with support from usip by chance we've been working with um with uh is on the frugana valley we've been working with a whole range of stakeholders to exactly what i described as work with the police and working with youth led organizations which are led by young men and women both and uh one of the groups that we found really critical was what i call the atincha who are sort of female religious spiritual clerics leaders who play a big role in in uh in religious affairs in the community and who were perceived very much by the police in particular as being threatening and who had a huge fear of the police uh as as potential oppressors and by actually creating space for them to engage and come together they could actually put forward all sorts of joint issue doing social media and public media community media uh events that that promoted tolerance that um that also then evolved into kind of collaborative strategies for prevention of recruitment of violence yes ma'am thank you my name is musu clements i recently left uh the peace through development project in in borkina niger in chat as the chief of party i'm now with uh msi one of the key components of the pdf project was looking at young people as community actors and agents of change encountering violent extremism and one of the things we struggled with with was getting young women into the the pool of young people we trained as youth leaders so i think for me it it it i always struggle with how just how strong a whole culture has and i don't use culture to explain or excuse but i think very often we don't really understand what that means when we say what what the culture what the what is the impact of cultural dynamics that we face i remember for example in niger one day bringing together the network of female female leaders for peace and they come in and they sit down you know these are movers and shakers in society and yet when you bring coffee into the room or tea they start serving the men i mean i was always struck by that but yet they're talking about how they're going to use their their their influence and their positions to create a difference in society but yet they serve the men so i think one of the things that we as implementers or researchers have to really take a step back to try and better understand how do you work within the cultural context it's not easy i don't have an answer after almost three years with pdf i still don't have an answer i was struck by the film's images that you showed with the the ices people and the and the kittens and then you're talking about how state propaganda doesn't work because it doesn't align okay i see the image of ices fighters with kittens and then i see them beheading people on the beach yet young people are drawn to that i i don't have the answers to that is something that i struggle with so i think we have a lot of work to do the answers are not easy but i i i i feel comforted that the work that we are doing with young people that's a start but we need to really be more inclusive with women and fight hard to figure that out it's not easy you know i and i completely understand um what you mean in terms of the the cultural context and even in even in diaspora communities you have to respect that cultural context and i think that's really the best we can do um i think it's never a good idea to go into any community region country whatever and say that well according to you know the cultural standards i come from this is this is is not appropriate this is how leadership works leadership is going to look different in different settings um what's interesting especially in a muslim context is that the historic role of women leaders in the muslim tradition and history and scripture and all that looked very different than it does today so culture in many ways has trumped kind of religious history and tradition um and that you know and you bring that back how like maybe through education and things like that but uh there are just too many interests that um prevent that from happening that would then then dismantle some some of the patriarchy and in some of these areas so um you know it's i i feel like you know you have to um as disturbing as it can be to see people revert into roles that seem to us very submissive and that the best we can do is to try to elevate them in their leadership roles and you have to respect the cultural boundaries where they are but i do think because of social media and over the next few generations and the world getting smaller and i and kind of flattening out in a bit i think we're going to see these shifts all over the globe anyways i wasn't i wasn't disturbed by the action of serving the tea i was more struck by it and i thought okay they have validated their own dynamics and so now we move on to where we need to talk about and so you know let's say that i think that the power of the social media uh and and traditional broadcast media uh also of engaging uh women and girls is is is really critical to mention here given the link here um you know in environments where maybe young women and girls don't wouldn't have permission say from their parents or you know or their guardians to be able to join your youth leaders network uh what other ways and what other forums are there for them to actually participate engage in a program well so radio radio is a in some places a communal family experience although that's shifting with the proliferation of mobile phones people listen to radio more individually now than ever before so radio is a way that you can reach people who have who are in deep isolation and increasingly social media is a way for people to contribute back even from from a place of decent deep isolation to connect with others etc and that that's why this approach is is so critical for us to be grappling with and figuring out how to how to be effectively the man behind the camera there thank you very much i'm after how soon i work for voice of america border region service that's one of the conflict region um along the upon border um i've been a journalist in that part of the world for a while and for ten years here the questions comes at a very right time when you are talking about the radio role and the people the youth media consumption habits shifting from now on um we be talking to women in that part of the world i mean on daily basis since the radio started and uh they are more the agent of peace um is a journalist i have my observation um my question is in particular context of the isle recruiting people from not from the muslim communities it's it's a different phenomena they're reaching out across the globe to very villa of communities in europe even in the united states um what makes those young people especially young girls young women to to be connected on on the social media what is the connection between the social media use and the isle reach out to those young men have one of you either of you can answer this question um um thought about it and did you find any answer on that thank you very much i mean i i think you know what i pointed to earlier is is a big part of it i mean again you know we do have to take a step back and remember that this is not a like you know huge epidemic happening right we're talking about a few cases a year maybe when it comes to young women at least um and i think you know like i have a teenage daughter and i feel like our young girls are looking for their heroes they're looking for me the zane malik's great but you know um it doesn't work for everybody we don't have there's an absolute dearth of male masculine positive heroes not just in the united states but across the world right if you look at muslim male leaders across the world many times i mean we're talking about figures that are you know um brutal or controversial or corrupt or something so um and i do think they're young uh women who and i this is a really interesting methodology the four r plus one and i think that probably applies to a lot of it too one thing i've i've noticed um with young people and i and i think it comes back to identities because they don't feel they have to feel part of something so what are they where is their pain connecting to their pain is connecting to the umma right like the global muslim community so they might not be experiencing grief like you know direct grievances here but they're feeling the pain of people dying in syria they're feeling the pain of of people dying in yemen from saudi attacks and so they're connecting to this larger community instead of a connecting to their within the country within their local communities and um and i think that's again just goes to identity um but you know this is uh the video that that you've shown is really interesting there is a project that i understand is being developed in bakasan called um i think it's called mera bakasan meaning my bakasan which is supposed to be a trans media project that will show bakasanis from all different um you know places in society and different faith backgrounds and bring them together under national identity and i think that's something that we need to think about too with young american muslims i'll take one last question thank you animal ring with the christian science monitor and i just like to ask uh rabia too when you were speaking with the community kids you know what was their response when you pointed out oh wow you guys i i know or if you did i don't know but but just that idea of you didn't identify yourselves as american you know what were they thinking did they kind of respond oh wow you know i didn't realize that or oh that's interesting or do they have some reason oh absolutely and then and then just uh a quick follow up for kathleen too i uh you mentioned that you wanted to have the the military look more closely at this idea of of women and extremism and i'm just curious how would you like them to respond do you have any recommendations and what is their response to your research yeah i i was so struck by it because i i just couldn't understand and i said are you not all born here who are you not all what is your citizenship they said well just because we're american citizens technically legally doesn't mean that i comfortably identify as an american um one young woman and who actually happens to be a very prominent youth activist and i expected something a little bit different from her said that i feel like if i identify as an american i'm a sellout um and i i thought that was really interesting and you know it's it's a real generational shift when i was growing up um for us are because our families came to united states to put down roots so the message to us was we're now americans and you're gonna join government and law enforcement you're gonna be part of the communities uh whereas in the last i said 15 20 years um young people despite the kinds of messages that elders might be giving them are are getting much stronger messages from outside and they're being told you are not you don't belong here and so um if for them to claim that they do they say that we are we are being co-opted we are sellouts um others identify very strongly with other kinds of social justice movements like uh for undocumented people so one young person said that you know if i identify as american that's like me throwing people under the bus who are undocumented not american i said well and i and i was an attorney who practiced immigration law for years and i said listen those undocumented people want to be americans i mean like that's the whole point you know i was so but but a lot of it is coming from this real anxiety and just a place of just really even anger but again not anti-americanist but just not feeling like they belong good to see you anna um i think when i say um as far as my recommendations for the military so being a war college student i've shared you know i'll wait for the war college to publish your paper next month but i've turned in my research and i've kind of shared it with different people whether they be co-workers or peers that i've known for a few years um to get some feedback on my paper so i'm hoping to get some feedback over the next few weeks um but i think from the military perspective we just need to ensure that when we do a conflict analysis um that we kind of make sure we don't have that gender bias when we're looking at the threat and so when we think about the threat we need to look at all aspects of the threat as it applies to where we are and where we're operating in and being here at usip i've been working a lot with the gender team and the gender advisor um taken some classes here and just to actually apply a gender lens um and it's not just women when you think of gender it's men and women so you have to do that gender analysis also when you're thinking about a conflict and so that's one of the key things i learned being here that i would have no no clue about applying a gender lens to analysis as a military planner but i think especially in some conflict zones you have to do that to ensure you have the right context before going into that theater of operation so michael any final thought sure you know uh just reflecting on both this question and and this this four r plus um uh framework you know we've come to this work around youth violence prevention from a bit of a different angle really for me at the center of the most effective programming is uh is really understanding youth agency and youth decision making within their own lives um and really looking at how do we actually understand those factors those motivational factors is how we frame it what are those things in a person's life that motivates him or her to take the decisions that he or she takes uh and then to really create channels and openings for them to fulfill those motivational factors rather than sort of saying okay you're a victim of your circumstance but rather to say you have power and agency and how are you going to enact or act upon that power and agency to affect your society in a positive way and so we see those motivational factors as assets as genuine central assets that can be harnessed in a really constructive and positive way and this view i think well well well it's taken some time for it to take hold globally we now see it reflected in the the newest uh the un security council resolution 2250 which which was passed in december which really speaks about the power of participation of youth in decision making in their own personal lives in communities and at a national and international level and the importance to cultivate that and throw resources behind it great well thank you all very much um it's a nice segue to our future discussion of youth which will be in september there will be another forum uh in the intervening months all of you please look out for those announcements and please join me in thanking our panelists for what was a very rich discussion so thank you all