 All right everyone, I think we're gonna get started if people can take their seats. So welcome, I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter. I'm the president and CEO of New America. And welcome to After Aleppo, prospects for preventing mass atrocities in the Trump administration. And it's hard to say, I'm delighted to have this panel. Atrocities prevention and delight don't go in the same sentence. But this is a tremendously important subject. And I should start by saying we're particularly pleased very much in the New America spirit to be welcoming the Center for New American Security and we have Rich Fontaine. And also the Friends Committee on National Legislation which sponsored a lot of this work. And Human Rights Watch. We will, who of course needs no introduction but part of what I think is important is bringing together very different groups on this subject. I wanna just say a couple of things. Having served in the Obama administration when Samantha Power and others were working on atrocities prevention and just in my own work focusing on this issue. The first is just how hard it is, right? We generally hear about it when a lot of the work we should have been doing or we hear about it in the sense it's on the front pages when it's after, it's not too late but it's later in the process than one would want. And then of course, depending on how much it's in the papers, it gets often blown up into an issue where again, where what tends to happen is that the responses seem military or sometimes economic but more likely military. And because we only have those tools that then puts us in a situation where in my view the choices are the wrong ones. It's sending in our own troops versus stopping the killing of others. So my second point is it's vitally important to have more tools because we have so few. We actually I think are prevented from doing work we otherwise could do. Final point I wanna make and I don't think any of us can make it enough. This is not just humanitarian. One of the biggest problems in this area is oh yes, this is the humanitarian stuff. This is the nice stuff. This is the good stuff. It's not the national security stuff. Until we change that, we are not gonna get the responses we need. It is not the humanitarian stuff. When governments do what they do in Aleppo, in Darfur, in Sudan, in Bosnia. When governments do that, those governments are dangerous governments. Those governments need to be stopped then because if they are not stopped then the problem will just get bigger and it becomes then an international security issue. That's where the human rights movement was born. In 1933 had you stopped those atrocities, the world could have been a very different place. So I will just end my remarks with the point that this kind of work is to me as much national security work as if we were doing nuclear arms control. And with that I'm going to turn it to our own Heather Herbert. Heather is here at New America as the director of the New Models of Politics program. Those of you who know Heather, her portfolio extends across national security to all sorts of parts of domestic politics to work on women and lots of other things and we are just delighted that she's one of us. Thank you. Thanks Ann Marie and thank you so much for her coming out and highlighting for us this particular issue which might have seen an odd one to be choosing at this particular time but as you say in some ways is very central to the issues that are on the headlines today. We at New Models of Policy Change really wanted to take on this issue because it's one where the old rules about Democrats versus Republicans, interventionists versus isolationists, governmental versus non-governmental really don't apply anymore and we think this is an issue area where particularly under the circumstances we're now facing. If we're going to go forward and come out with better policy outcomes we're going to need different coalitions in different ways of thinking about the problem. And so in that sense I was delighted to be asked to serve last year on the task force that wound up producing unnecessary good U.S. leadership on preventing mass atrocities and I want to recognize as Ann Marie did the Friends Committee and also the Prevention and Protection Working Group which is a group of Washington based and global NGOs that do advocacy on prevention of violent conflict and protection of civilians. And also Charlie Brown, the report's lead author who's with us this afternoon and I see the audience is full of ringers by the way who have decades of experience in this field and you can all expect to be called on during the Q and A. So just a fair warning in advance there's going to be a very participatory event. All of you watching you're in for an extra treat when you find out some of the people in the audience are but first of all we're also very fortunate to have on stage two people who really represent the breadth and depth of the spectrum of people and forces that work on these issues. To my immediate left which is something I don't get to say very often is thank you to our wonderful events people for arranging it that way is Richard Fontaine who's the president of the Center on a New American Security and he's been there since 2009 and really been a key moving force in shaping it into what it is now which is a premier national security think tank that also thinks very hard about humanitarian and foreign policy issues and sees security in a broader sense rather than a narrower one. Rich has also worked at the State Department the National Security Council on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee including a stint as advisor to Senator and presidential candidate John McCain. So he has seen this from both the policy maker side and the domestic politics side which will I think very much influence some of the things he has to say to us today and he also served on the experts committee drafting the report. And then further to my left is Akshay Akumar who is the Deputy United Nations Director at Human Rights Watch which means that she sits in New York and conducts advocacy with members of the General Assembly the Security Council and other UN agencies. Her past also includes a stint in direct atrocity prevention advocacy at the enough project here in Washington DC where she also helped to launch the Sentry which is a project directly looking at the financing of deadly conflicts and the enabling of atrocities through financial means which will give her an extra special perspective. I wanted to start before they jump into the current situation just by giving a little air time to the experts committee report that we drafted together last year because frankly on the, I mean so I will just frankly admit that I don't think there was anyone among the dozen or more experts who imagined the election outcome that we are now living under so there's that. On the other hand the report is really prescient in a couple of important ways in that it insisted that there wasn't a robust high level commitment to preventing and ending atrocities in the United States government, in Congress or in the international community and one of the very first things that the report says is this is a commitment that needs to be reexamined and renewed. The report also insisted, again something that has not been maybe the most popular tenant of atrocity prevention that longer term prevention is an easier, cheaper and more effective route to atrocity prevention and deserves more attention when we talk about atrocity prevention as Ann-Marie said we tend to think about troops but point of fact if that's what you're thinking about you've already failed in some important measure and the report really goes through in some detail what it would look like to do more of that to shift up how we focus on atrocity prevention. The other point that I think you can trace through some of the policy debates we've had in the last week in Washington actually is how poorly understood the relationship between mass atrocities and the actions of non-state actors are and that may seem like kind of a brainless thing to say but in point of fact we have 20, 25 years in some respect 75 years of thinking about mass atrocities over in one corner marvelously developed school of thinking, recommendations, policies and then over here we have the set of thinking that we've developed in just the past two decades really about the role of non-state actors in security and insecurity and what we saw happening in the later Obama years was a real failure of those two strands of intellectual inquiry to enrich and inform each other and in ways that frankly impoverish both disciplines so something that we were hoping to see in government and that we're still hoping to see out of government is more attention to thinking about how we talk about how we understand and how we combat mass atrocities in the non-state actor space. The report's recommendations take up sort of three categories one being this idea which we noticed even as perhaps we didn't understand where that would lead us in American politics that there isn't a strong commitment to the idea that Ann Marie voiced that atrocity prevention is a core national security interest because atrocities inevitably have security consequences. So we noticed that there was a need to recommit to that at high levels of the US government but also in Congress and frankly among the NGO community and we were commenting backstage beforehand as has been said over and over where was the huge public save Aleppo movement or frankly where was the huge public save Syria movement two or three years ago and do we understand well enough in our society and in other societies why that didn't happen and what it would look like in future. So there was a need that we identified which perhaps is even more pressing now to reconsider these questions in the NGO and congressional space even apart from whatever does or doesn't happen in the executive branch space. On the prevention side that entail you know it's easy to say oh we need better prevention policy but that we also need more empowerment of local government, civil society, local conflict resolution mechanisms which frankly is where effective prevention takes place and less in sort of really fun programs that are run out of Washington or New York or whatever else you might like and paradoxically and this is what happens when you put a bunch of former government people on a panel we need better evaluation, better planning, better understanding of what has and hasn't worked which frankly again I think is something you've seen in the last week where we're suddenly having a debate about the value of US engagement with very little hard data that anyone on either side can draw on and finally and just something that I will recommend the report to you and to the government geeks in the room when you get to the level in Washington that you have director after your name you get invited to serve on a fair number of task forces over the years and it's really delightfully rare to serve on one where people actually sit down and say how could we make government work better? This is how we could make government work better we should do this, no we should do that the money should go here, no I worked there and that's not the right place it should go through there so this report actually is a really wonderful blueprint for how you think about making government work and whether it's at the state and local level whether it's on some of the other issues that we work on here at New America and elsewhere whether there comes a future point where we are truly interested in reinventing these mechanisms at the national level I actually really and with unreserved pride because it's not part of the report that I personally contributed to which makes it easy for me to brag about it in front of an audience of people really recommend it as a format for thinking about how to govern well which we're old fashioned enough here at New America to still believe in and with that overview of the report which we have hard copies of outside you can also find online I'm gonna turn to Rich who generously offered to take up the cudgels from the moment that the report was finished and talk a little bit about from where he sits at the intersection of politics and national security where are we in Washington on atrocity prevention right now? All right, well thank you what I wanted to talk to is a little bit of this sense that was I think implicit in Heather's remarks but I'll make a little more explicit which is atrocity prevention is all fine and dandy if Hillary Clinton is elected and there's at a minimum a divided Congress but now you have a Republican Congress and Donald Trump is president so wasn't this all sort of interesting intellectual exercises but it's not actually gonna be implemented or that atrocity prevention is sort of irreversibly won't be taken seriously for some amount of time and I can't predict to you I'm out of the predictions game permanently I can't predict the outcome of either the politics or the foreign policy of the current administration but I would submit to you that there are at least some reasons to think that atrocity prevention can and should continue to be on the agenda both of the executive branch, the Congress and civil society writ large it is obviously true that the current administration has a narrower view a narrower definition of national interest than did the Obama administration or did the Bush administration focus less on values at least thus far and on issues like human rights and democracy promotion and more on issues like economics and physical security I think you also see this thread run through where a lot of folks in Congress are and frankly where a lot of the American people are after Iraq and Afghanistan seeing Libya fall apart, seeing Yemen fall apart and I think there's a bit in Afghanistan I think there's a bit of this kind of sense that while it may be a good idea in the abstract to try to do something about these things in practice there's not a whole lot we can do these kinds of episodes whether it's mass atrocities or simply the promotion of human rights in places where they are lax is sort of too much for us it's not what we do terribly well I think that for reasons that Anne Marie said we have to articulate both the values case and I don't think we should forget the values case but also the national interest case some folks will see merit in some others in the other and some in both I think if you look at the administration even the few data points that we have thus far it doesn't paint completely one picture in one direction so General Mattis who was doing work before he went in with US Global Leadership Coalition Mattis said something on the order of if you don't want to fully fund the State Department and USAID budgets then I've got to buy more bullets that is not indicative of someone who fails to get the kinds of reasons why we would want to engage in preventative actions to prevent mass atrocities similarly now there's talk of planning for no fly zones in Syria and the president over the weekend had conversations with a couple of Middle Eastern leaders to discuss just that this is something that was sort of this distant objective in the Obama administration there are always reasons one through 100 why they said this couldn't be done at least now it seems like it's being taken at seriously at the presidential level that's not to say it wasn't before but there may be movement where there wasn't before and that could be a step in the right direction I think Syria possibly the state Yavuz here is sort of the paradigmatic case study of why if you let these things go on what seems like a humanitarian crisis at the beginning turns into a manifest national security crisis over time had we been able to exert some sort of influence some sort of early prevention to stave off the civil war in Syria or to end it before it got completely out of hand then we could have if you think about the problems that animate our leaders today we could have really dealt with some of the biggest ones of all the four million refugees that are outside Syrians borders the destabilization of the European Union the kind of conflict that has been going on and as you see these far right parties in Europe rise on the back of Muslim immigrants coming in and then the opposition to this the effect on the neighbors on Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey of course, the rise of ISIS the biggest terrorist sanctuary that has ever in history been created and then we had to go and continue to stay at war to stop it the expansion of Iranian influence so now they run along with Russia as the primary driver external driver in Syria and elsewhere and then the reinsertion of Russia into the Middle East in a way that is more significant than anytime at least since the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and probably since Nasser kicked out the Soviet military advisors before that all of that has at its root the Syrian civil war and so if we had been able to stave off some of this we would have done ourselves not just Syrians but ourselves a huge service that brings up the question well can we actually do that because the other argument is well yeah that's great but there's nothing that can be done President Obama and others often said just about this it's a hornet's nest there's nothing we could do other than make the situation worse or get drawn inextricably into an Iraq style permanent occupation kind of thing and I would submit to you a few examples of places where either the United States, the United Nations or others have gotten involved in a preventive way and arguably prevented significant atrocities possibly mass atrocities it's always hard to prove this right because it's the dog that didn't bark so show me the mass atrocity that didn't happen well if you drop it on your toe it doesn't hurt it's hard to demonstrate this however, look at the Central African Republic look at the UN diffusing a crisis in Guinea also the UN ending inter-ethnic killing in Kyrgyzstan the example of Liberia and the modest US military intervention during the Bush administration that very likely staved off a much larger scale instability in that country the political pressure the Obama administration put on the politicians in Kenya to close their differences and reduce the tensions there the French troop intervention in Cote d'Ivoire we do the reality is we do have successes to point to and then of course we do have these others that we can't determine precisely because nothing bad happened and that is a success but I would submit that it's not simply the case that we have to kind of shake our fists at the injustice of the world and say we're sort of stuck with these problems indefinitely there's nothing we can do about them because in fact I think there are things we can do and hence the kind of work we did in this report just turning to again the politics of all this the natural impulse is to look to the US government and to the executive branch of the US government and say what are they gonna do about this and that is totally justified and we need to continue to do this but I think the other actors particularly in our current political atmosphere are gonna be also very important so Congress has always been at the vanguard of so-called values issues in foreign policy establishing the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, the Travelling in Persons Office the International Religious Liberty on and on and on and so Congress's role here particularly given the administration and how divided the Senate is and so forth I think that Congress has a particularly important role in the report that we did there's some recommendations aimed specifically at Congress but I would and I don't say this just because I spent seven long years of my life in that body of government but I think it shouldn't just be an afterthought after figuring out whether the executive branch would do something then there's a civil society angle of all of this and there's a civil society angle both in exhorting the US government to do things but then there's a civil society sort of over there in these societies that are starting to break down and that are ripe for mass atrocities and in many ways it's a civil society that is the glue that can hold them together and so there are things that can be done civil society organization to civil society organization and then in terms of advocacy and as Heather said you know there's there was sort of no save Syria movement in a way there was a save Darfur movement and I think this is a product of our political leadership saying nothing can be done that the weariness of Americans after Iraq and Afghanistan wars in which they looked at it and couldn't really tell what the benefit was the United States for our huge investment and then looked at the other fires burning particularly around the Middle East but elsewhere and said you know, Namas and so I think it's the voices in the public that need to remain loud in order to articulate that A, there are things out there that we can do to prevent mass atrocities B, if we do these things then it will accrue not only to our interests but be consonant with our values and C, we can do these at acceptable cost to the United States. I'll just close with two points one is before I turn it over one is on the value side I think it is as I have done here it's important to make the national security case for atrocity prevention and that case is real but we can't go overboard and forget the values case one of the reasons we wanna do this is because we are Americans because this is our values and because we stand for something that we believe is unique in the world and have a unique set of responsibilities and a unique foreign policy orientation and that has resonance if you look at the debate over the last 72 hours over the executive order that comes out that has been mostly a values based debate about what it means to be American what it means to be America in the world how open we should be, how close we should be and the policy is changing here and there already based on a values argument so the national security argument is key but so is the values argument there are things that we do and that we should do because we're Americans and that's what we stand for last thing I'll close with is if you sort of buy my argument that we can do these kinds of things that we should do these kinds of things and then there's some flickers of hope that we will do these kinds of things where would we do these and so beyond Syria I think there's a few flash points and I know that you may expand upon a few of these things or maybe subject for future or for discussion here in South Sudan the conflict there is approaching really a potentially catastrophic level of ethnic violence between the Dink and the New Earth and this is the kind of thing where it has all of the hallmarks that you would look at for a potential genocide all of the sort of early warning alarm bells have been ringing in Burundi there's tensions between the Hutu and the Tutsis and violets there in Burma as everybody knows the Rohingya are a persecuted minority they've started fighting back and so the way that the government in Burma responds is gonna determine whether in fact they're gonna be even greater atrocities in the Balkans people are starting to sound little alarm bells here and there about Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo the Burundi violence has been spreading over into Equatorial Guinea the Dink is versus the Equatories there and then finally of course Libyan Yemen have these civil wars which continue to raise some of these require I think large scale kinds of thinking peacekeeping forces and so forth other of them is a diplomatic effort or economic sort of sanctions effort or a civil society effort but there's certainly plenty to do and so with that let me turn it over to you Thank you Heather and Rich I wanna take up two of the charges from Rich's remarks one is let's look at the situations which really do demand action and then the second is to consider the role of civil society in galvanizing that action but before I do I think important from the UN and perhaps the broader international perspective the need to reflect for a moment on the impact that the fact that atrocity prevention is in many ways seen as an American or a Western project will have on any of these efforts being successful and I think particularly at this moment with the administration that we have in Washington there is a reason to take pause and consider the extent to which international organizations or multilateral entities are willing to take moral or values based leadership from an administration that has not shown that it's willing to put those issues at the top of the agenda and that's not new I think whether it's Guantanamo or the Bush era and complicity and responsibility for torture or even the ongoing support that the US government has given to Saudi Arabia and Yemen there have always been parts of the international community who have said well why should we follow the American lead but I think now more than ever especially in light of the executive orders that we've seen there are many who are questioning the extent to which they even want to cooperate with the US government on basic things like borders and allowing for screening for example in the Netherlands or Canada to continue if they're going to be done on the basis of US customs and border protections rules or to cooperate on counter-terrorism and I flag that because the extent to which this entire atrocity prevention project is viewed as an American project is then implicated and put at risk if American values are seen to be deeply compromised themselves and with that mind I think that it's important then to consider the three paths that we could go down there's one path which is that some of the recommendations in this report and some of the structures that were put in place under the Obama administration including the atrocities prevention board will continue to exist and they may work at a certain bureaucratic level especially in identifying and flagging places where early warning signs are triggered and as a human rights lawyer one of the things that we are always saying is that human rights abuses and violations are one of the best early warning signs that we have that a nation or a country is particularly at risk for further deterioration and if these structures are kept in place then there's the possibility I think as Rich says that we can continue to see some American engagement on this issue but I think what's more likely and what I would put in the more likely category is that the prioritization that we saw under the Obama administration of atrocity prevention is going to shift under this new administration and in light of that I would argue to you as members of civil society, academia or part of the Washington community who care about atrocity prevention that we are in desperate need of new champions and new champions may require looking outside of Washington to other capitals and so I wanted to bring to your attention a few examples of cases where we've had small or less powerful states be successful in gaining some traction on issues that have seemed to be intractable. One good example I think is the situation in Syria and efforts to promote accountability and justice there. Many of you may know that at the UN Security Council there were attempts to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court which are repeatedly blocked by the Russian government who vetoed those attempts and this became sort of the conventional wisdom that we weren't going to get any kind of mechanism that could promote accountability and justice in Syria especially as the Russian government got more and more involved in the active campaign in Aleppo at the end of last year. But we actually saw the opposite happen which is when the international community was really confronted with the reality of this indiscriminate bombardment of Aleppo there was suddenly momentum for other states to step up and say well we stand with the people of Aleppo and we're willing to try to take some efforts and measures to alleviate their suffering and also to push for accountability and justice. And this last issue was seen as almost impossible in U.S. policy making circles and yet at the very end of last year two countries, tiny countries as far as global influence were able to move the entire UN system to create a mechanism that will collect evidence with an eye to building cases for prosecution in Syria and the two countries are Lichtenstein and Qatar. Now these aren't countries that typically work together and they're not typically countries that have the ability to galvanize over a hundred states of the General Assembly to vote in favor. And civil society played a big role in bringing together and building this unusual consensus but what we found with the case of Lichtenstein and Qatar is that they were able to build on the outrage that came out of the inaction to Aleppo and also to harness that outrage into some type of political will and so a resolution was passed at the very end of December to establish a mechanism which the UN is now working on setting up which would take the work of things like the commission of inquiry or civil society groups or the Syrian justice and accountability center and really package those into cases that could be operationalized and brought to courts whether they be under the principle of universal jurisdiction or at some tribunal in the future. In our assessment, atrocity prevention of course has an important component that has to do with deterrence and accountability and justice and the real specter that the long arm of the law can come for you is so important and so this unusual alliance between Qatar and Lichtenstein I think shows that when you do have an absence of an American leadership and this was under the Obama administration with Samantha Power at the helm who wrote a problem from hell and yet we didn't have that leadership for this mechanism coming from the US we had it from these two unusual actors I think that's the kind of model that civil society are going to be needing to look at going forward and when we talk about civil society and galvanizing and the absence of a save Syria movement I think that a lot of that comes from the recognition that although there was a save Darfur movement and I'm someone who's worked in that movement and for the enough project working on the Sudan's for many years although we had that movement unfortunately the reality not just in South Sudan but in Sudan itself and in Darfur is that atrocities continue to this day so even though there was that public galvanization at the end of the day those policy outcomes weren't realized and so I think some of the skepticism for mobilization and activism comes from the real fact that there's a belief that at the end of the day we don't have the right channels to influence these actors but thinking about Sudan for a moment there are other channels for influencing these actors and they may come from the global south they may come from India where I was born or China or Malaysia these are countries that have significant oil interests in the Sudan and in fact sort of filled in the gap when the Americans and the Canadians left and spaces where now our growing middle class is coming into their own realization about values mobilization about socially responsible investing and about what kinds of values they want their country to be projecting abroad I think one of the best examples of that is the fact that the Global Citizen Festival which is this big concert kind of like Live Aid that happens in Central Park every summer around the time of the UN General Assembly was for the first time also duplicated in Mumbai and you had Coldplay as the lead but then you had other Bollywood stars and they were there to talk about human rights and development and drew a huge crowd and that's the kind of mobilization that we really need to think about if you accept that maybe the actors who are influential in the Sudanese calculation are from the Global South then we need to think about ways to build that cross-stable society engagement to mobilize those actors on the issues that we care about collectively and finally to wrap up I think that we also need to acknowledge the ways in which this movement has worked but also the ways in which it hasn't worked and it's been sometimes viewed or perceived as co-opted to just advance American interests instead of advancing values or human rights and the Libyan example is one that comes up often in the UN Security Council or in broader international discussions of the responsibility to protect or atrocity prevention people point to Libya as saying, look, we mobilized we went into Libya under strongly Western leadership saying that we needed to take action to prevent atrocities and the outcome was not the outcome that we expected and there were more atrocities as a result of this and so there is a credibility issue that's built into that and that's connected I think also to the case of Yemen where you have war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by a Western ally who continues to receive the backing of the United Kingdom who will even refuse to say that there are war crimes happening there because they have an arms trade treaty obligation to stop selling weapons if they recognize that there are war crimes or the US government who continue to aerially refuel the planes that are dropping these bombs and that is also connected to the global war on terror where the US is conducting military operations in Yemen as well and that element I want to underscore for this community because I think that it is something that is threaded throughout the global evaluation of what the atrocity prevention movement from Washington can do and can bring to spaces and international fora that are seeking to prevent conflict and mass atrocities as well. So Akshaya, you've just made an amazing case for why atrocity prevention is a terrible thing that Americans shouldn't try to do and I think it's very interesting that you can pull that thread of left criticism and then you can pull the thread of right criticism that Rich talked about earlier and pull them together into something very strong and yet at the same time as you also talked about there's this global consciousness and a rights based consciousness that you see very strongly among Americans like among their peers all over the world and in the sense that the folks who were engaged on Save Darfur 10 years ago their sort of generational successors are now mobilizing globally on climate change or mobilizing globally on the sustainable development goals. So I guess the question I have for each of you from the unique lenses you bring to it is where does the next movement on atrocities come from? And Rich, I wanna ask you that very pointedly as it refers to the Republican Party because the champions of this work within the Republican Party show we say this gently are not young. Well, some are young, I'm just kidding. Other than your, oh, I really walked into that. Kidding, you meant elected leaders in the US Senate some of which are over the age of 25. Yeah, I get it, I get it. So where does, where do those leaders come from on your side of the aisle? And actually, where do you see that leadership coming from globally? Well, I mean, I think if you look at some of the younger senators, I mean, folks like Marco Rubio, I haven't heard what he said about atrocity prevention in particular, but he's a great believer, both in the values and in arguments and in America's role in promoting human rights and preventing bad things from happening in areas where we don't have a specific physical protection interest that you can discern immediately. So I think there are senators like him and there are other folks like Senator Dan Sullivan who's now on the Armed Services Committee and others. I think one of the kind of, we're gonna just have to see how a bit of this plays out because if you look at the Obama administration, I became convinced that the way you could determine whether someone in the Obama administration wanted to intervene in Syria or not was based on whether their formative experience was the Balkans or Iraq. Those who saw in the Balkans the discreet expression of American military power in order for a relatively happy ending were much more likely to favor intervention in Syria and those who saw the catastrophe that unfolded in Iraq were much less likely. I think there's gonna be something in terms of who's sort of discerning which lessons on the Republican side as well and Libya is a part of this because some people have looked at Libya and said the lesson is don't get involved at all. Others have looked at Libya and said the lesson is if you're gonna topple the government own it and then still a third group has said the lesson is make your intervention as discreet as possible back off the troops from Benghazi but don't go when topple the government because you have to take a responsibility. And so I think time is going to have to tell which on the Republican side who's discerning which lessons and I think people are likely to point in different directions on this but I do think that there's some younger people beyond John McCain. Yeah I will jump in the interest of fairness and say that I could have, you could ask me the same question and it's been I think very interesting to watch Democrats in the last week and notice that some of the voices that have been strongest on the refugee front are also those that were most strongly opposed to military intervention in Syria. So this field I think and this is actually a way of bringing it back to you does have the challenge that it so very often gets caricatured as a military field that atrocity prevention is all about use of force and at this point you know you got no tools on the military side and at least in the US you have a dwindling constituency for military first intervention. I think exactly you can point to Democratic office holders and say if you came of age in the 90s then you believe that there are things that military intervention can do. If you came of age politically in the 2000s you don't and sometimes it seems like it's not a lot more complicated than that but I'm gonna swing back to you on what kinds of pressures should US civil society be expecting to see from its global partners in the years ahead on this. I think that you know I wanna answer two of the points that you made. One is about tools because I think and Anne-Marie said this as well that we really have an empty toolbox almost beyond military intervention and in the light of the lessons that people have taken from that we need to look at crafting more tools and ways to go after the enablers of these pernicious conflicts and the enablers of atrocities and from my assessment that means looking at arms sales but it also means looking at the financial flows, the kleptocracy, the money laundering that allows abusers to continue to entrench themselves in all of these places and I think that that points to just broader spectrum need to look further upstream on atrocity or conflict prevention and to also broaden the umbrella beyond thinking do we go in and take military action to what can we do earlier to change the dynamics of the conflict and affect the incentives of the abusers themselves and when you put the question like that I think there is quite a good case for both global mobilization and for mobilization in the United States on issues whether it's the sustainable development goals or more narrow issues like transparency for natural resources and issues that people can feel are connected to both their bottom line and the potential for preventing atrocities abroad and that would be the space that I think could be worth exploring which is the financial nexus, the role that enablers play and the role that civil society can play in shining a light on those enablers and trying to build systems that allow for greater transparency to hold not just the people with the guns in their hands accountable but also the ones who are enabling them to continue pursuing a military or abusive solution to a problem. So speaking of the toolbox let's talk a little bit about a couple of the specific situations that you both raised that are likely to present themselves in the weeks and months ahead and maybe South Sudan because we have a colleague here at New America Justin Lynch who has been writing quite a bit and who I believe was expelled recently and one of the points he makes is just how few tools we the international community seem to have despite having been so integrally involved in the creation of that state in the first place. So I wonder, actually can I push you a little bit on what tools are there to deal with Southern Sudan and then Rich maybe we'll talk a little bit about what that might look like politically here. Well at Human Rights Watch two of the tools that we've really been emphasizing are to respond to both the arms and the financial side of things and so we've been seeking an arms embargo imposed by the UN Security Council. This was a policy prescription that we pitched repeatedly to the Obama administration and to both Ambassador Power but also Ambassador Rice at the National Security Council and we got a very late in the day agreement from them to move forward with it and unfortunately there wasn't consensus from the rest of the UN Security Council at that point. So I think going to Justin's point you see that even when you do have a tool in the toolbox deploying it at the right time is really important because there was a moment in this conflict maybe a year and a half ago where there had been actually international consensus around the need for both of those tools to prevent further abuse and carnage and it wasn't deployed and then the moment that things got in line politically for the United States everybody else was on a different page but I think that that doesn't the absence of multilateral consensus doesn't vitiate the ability to do things on a bilateral level whether that's considering the ways in which the oil agreements between these companies from the global south are negotiated with the South Sudanese whether that's some kind of bailout package that the IMF or the World Bank might at some point be considering giving to the South Sudanese government because of the crazy inflation and the real economic turmoil that the country is facing or whether it's bilateral law enforcement actions that the US or other Western governments could take under the guise of pursuing corruption or money laundering or imposing sanctions against key leaders I think these are the kinds of tools that we haven't usually put in the atrocity prevention box that maybe we should start to So Rich you're sitting back in your old Senate office and Akshaya comes in to see you and gives you that pitch, what do you say? I would say I think yes to all those things but there needs to be more still done I'm far from a South Sudan expert so that's my caveat here but in addition to an arms embargo and targeted financial measures against those who've committed crimes and so forth just a basic look at this situation it appears to me that you're not gonna get a cessation of fighting while the government remains in place with the same individuals you're gonna have to have some shift to a technocratic government Now African countries are able to get together and just see a change in the president in Gambia so these things can be done given enough coordination I don't know specifically all of the mechanisms by which you would achieve that outcome but what I would say is I think South Sudan has a special pride of place for the United States because we help midwife the independence of that country this is not just one more place around the world where there's one more set of problems we thought we the United States thought that this was a good idea to have an independent South Sudan we the United States celebrated the independence of South Sudan and if this falls in on itself and shows that this is a failed state then I think we have at least a small dog in the fight that we wouldn't necessarily have otherwise Who do you imagine being able to recruit to that cause now you're sitting in your old seat in the Senate but you gotta go around and find some other offices of as I mean already the folks who were around and were the key players when the US as you say helped midwife the birth of South Sudan there are fewer of them than there used to be so where does the new constituency for South Sudan come from? Well I haven't done a whip count in the Senate now since 2009 I apologize if I'm triggering PTSD Yeah exactly if I start shaking just someone give me a puffer or something but you know certainly Senator Coons has been very active on African issues Senator Inhofe has been active on African issues you have Senator Graham and Senator McCain were active on every issue you know they're Senator Durbin I mean there are individuals I think it's not just the question of who's the constituency for South Sudan it's who's the constituency who would support some American role together with other international actors in order to forestall which could be a genocide in a country that we midwife Well I have to say anything that you imagine Senator Coons and Senator Inhofe in the same sentence gets my ears to twitch up but before we open it to questions and start picking on some of the distinguished people in the audience I wanna give you each a chance to push back on anything that the other has said or to you know exercise panelist prerogative and pick any fights you'd like to Well I'll push back on this idea that you know America's bad behavior taints the willingness of others to work with us now that may be true as a matter of fact but I think it's something that Americans themselves and certainly our friends and allies around the world should push back on it I mean why should a country around the world want to cooperate with the United States that has Guantanamo based al-Opin and a close relationship with Saudi Arabia why would they ever want to cooperate with a country like that in order to prevent mass atrocities Well to prevent mass atrocities show me the other actor you're willing to work with Lichtenstein is great and I've been there, I love bad news but they don't have an army and you know if you look around the world at the countries that have the will and the capacity to act in these kinds of situations you could sort of say that you know China or Russia or someone else is pure but I think that's a stretch and so while as a matter of fact it may be true that disaffection with particular American policies makes either foreign governments or international actors less inclined to work with the United States I think you're left with the irreducible reality that yes it is true the United States is going to act in its interest but we're all going to have to live with that I mean that's a normal course of state behavior and to say that you won't work with the United States I think is just sort of shited Well to pick up on that I think that you know we live in a world of realities and we have to accept that no nation state comes to the table with clean hands so my pitch wasn't that you wouldn't work with the United States but that we need to consider the ways in which atrocity prevention in particular has the stamp both of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and now perhaps more relevant for those in the White House the former administration and the ways in which the actual movement to prevent atrocities could be undermined by that legacy versus thinking about ways to rebrand it to continue to press its relevance because of course atrocity prevention has a national security impact and it also promotes and protects human rights So I have two yes no questions for you to close out this segment Can atrocity prevention work without military force? Yeah Can atrocity prevention work without the U.S.? Yes but it's going to be difficult There you have it, okay my colleague Cheyenne has a microphone please put up your hand to ask a question and then tell the microphone who you are so that all the good people watching at home will know and we can start with Charlie right here Hi, I'm Charlie Brown, Strategy for Humanity I want to try to pick up on two strands and then tie them together in a bow if possible both strands are in the report but they're also in the things that you've been talking about one is popular mobilization and the other is spending money on prevention We like to say that the saved are for failed that there isn't a basis for popular mobilization in this country but in the last six years we've actually seen multiple popular movements You have the Tea Party, you had the Trump movement you have the current movement about immigration several spontaneous, several semi organized several well organized but all those have been around negative things they've organized to be against something not for something so setting that aside for a moment then you have this issue of funding we have a large number of people in this town and nationwide who are against the idea of spending money on a lot of things and one of them is foreign assistance we've all heard rumors about what the Trump administration may do on that front we've seen a draft executive order that proposes a 40% cut in funding for the United Nations and yet we have things like the report that we all worked on that says that we should be spending literally billions of dollars on prevention so that we don't spend tens of billions of dollars on response and we don't have to do things like military action so the way I would tie this all together is how do you use the energy in this country that is clearly there for a popular movement that actually pushes for positive change including convincing fiscal hawks that it is smarter to spend money on prevention than to waste money on response I think part of it is highlighting the success stories in the past and the specific ways in which what you described can be achieved I sense that a lot of the the breakdown here is when people sort of think things just can't be done I mean if you look at the polling for example there's some drop off over the past few years among a number of Americans who say that promoting human rights is an important aspect of foreign policy for example but in the abstract who really is against human rights it's more this idea that nothing can be done or nothing can be done at acceptable cost in the United States I think as I said before things can be done and they can be done at acceptable cost but because I think sort of conventional wisdom is that they can't or at least in many places you have to refute that with some of the specifics when have we been able to spend a few dollars in order to save millions when have we been able to intervene on the ground in a modest way so as to forestall a much bigger intervention militarily when have we been able to impose targeted financial measures in order to stop bad behavior so that we could forestall much bigger crimes happening down the line it's hard I mean we should acknowledge it's hard to make those cases because you're pointing to the things that didn't happen which are never gonna be as emotionally resonant as the things that do happen that you get really upset about and that you un-mobilize against I mean that's always gonna be hard but I think you gotta get into the specific cases of this stuff The theme that I'll pick up on which is the idea that by taking action on prevention early you can save money in the long run is something that I think the new UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who was previously the Refugees Commissioner and so has some experience with the pain that people feel in the long run on this issue has really taken to heart and made his signature message in his first couple weeks on the job and so since he will have the unenviable task of defending multilateralism and globalism and perhaps the UN budget against those who don't see that value I think emphasizing that connection between conflict prevention and investment in the kinds of programs and funding that could act early to prevent things from getting worth later might be the lens through which to push and defend that broader space that's going to be under attack Yeah and I would surely mention a couple of movements that you didn't mention the climate movement, Black Lives Matter the immigration rights movements in this country which I think are worth mentioning because they're the ones that are most closely connected to the international movements that you're talking about and when young middle class people in India are thinking about what is the kind of India that we want to have those are the global connections that are being made and that is a challenging and interesting problem for mainstream atrocity prevention folks in the US who may find connections with some of those other movements a little bit out of their depth if not outright uncomfortable the other thing that I think the atrocity prevention community has got to take on is that we this idea in many ways comes out of fairly high levels in back in the Clinton administration and comes out of an idea of human rights that was very quickly taken up by US administrations of both parties during the Cold War and the fight about human rights that we're seeing in both political parties dates back to before the Cold War and was smothered in both parties because human rights were connected to a perceived geostrategic goal and a security interest and in some ways our community was very dependent on having administrations that would make that case for us and we had the Bush administration which made it in a way that failed fairly spectacularly and discredited it for a lot of people we had the Obama administration which didn't choose to make it very much which also I agree Richard sort of led to a lack of public enthusiasm about it now we have an administration that makes no bones about saying we don't believe that so in some ways it's a moment of rebirth for the community what do you do when you no longer are a government interest so that's an interesting problem. Thank you. Thank you all for really great panels and a great explanation. Oh Diane Randall, friends committee on national legislation. So some people came of age in the Balkans and some came of age. What was the other example you had that? Yeah, thank you. Some of us actually started paying attention during the Vietnam era. Yesterday I actually just returned from Austin, Texas and I had the opportunity to visit the LBJ Library and I was completely struck by this man who is considered a brilliant politician but his pretty bald statement that he had no vision for how to end the Vietnam War. And so I am pulling together the threads that Heather referred to with regard to this being this report, a necessary good, being actually a tactical kind of how to go about fixing a problem that is very pragmatic but also this is a very big vision really to try to prevent mass atrocities and thinking about that big vision and the pragmatic aspect of it in the Trump administration and with the Congress that is really pretty much reacting right now, how do you pull those two things together? The idea of a vision that could actually end mass atrocities or at least address them in a meaningful way and a Congress that is going to have a hard time reacting and then to tie into that the last part is I'm struck that this is a hard thing to make a grassroots effort. This is a hard thing to sell to people around the country. I mean they may not wanna have war but understanding the end of mass atrocities is kind of a complex messaging. So if you could speak to all those questions. I think that there is potential and scope if situations can be made human and made very real and relatable. One of the things that we do at Human Rights Watch is go to the field and collect stories and then try to bring them to members of Congress and policy makers to expose the realities. I think taking the broad concept of atrocity prevention and making it very real by talking about the woman who fled with her three children across the border because people were coming after her because of her ethnicity. I think that's the kind of thing that can help mobilize constituencies and take the issue out of the realm of political to the realm of something that you can relate to just the way that the immigration ban or the refugees ban has really mobilized people on a people to people basis. And the other thing I think is that we need to really consider entry points that are the low hanging fruit for this administration. And these are places that we haven't talked about but I would say that North Korea which is a space that's very high on the national security agenda for this administration is also a space where people face really serious systemic human rights abuses and a huge accountability gap. And so talking more about North Korea as an example and a space to push on atrocity prevention might be a way to give some who are wary of the theory and operational issue that they can engage on. Similarly, the Yazidi community in Iraq who have a huge accountability quest and who continue to face challenges and hurdles might be another community that could be appealing as a way to explain this concept and a way to also make it more of an issue that could be worked on in a bipartisan fashion even in this Washington today. This idea of the vision and I guess to say at least one thing here, I think it's you got to think about what precisely the vision is. I mean I'm struck when you're talking about the Vietnam War because I think for LBJ ultimately and for the Pentagon and the State Department ultimately the objective of the Vietnam Wars and not let South Vietnam fall to the communists in the popular mind it was to win the war against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Those are two different visions. And so I don't think that ending mass atrocities is gonna be a vision that is going to animate people on the hill because of this. I keep getting back to the sort of what's doable? What can we actually do? What is pragmatic? We've had sort of throw the football all the way down the field, foreign policy for quite a while now and now we're sort of stepping back. But describing a vision in which the United States at what I think most people would say is a reasonable cost of blood and treasure can do in order to enhance our own national security and do things in accordance with our own values. Painting that picture, it's a more modest picture but I think it's one that would resonate more than if we made it sound like some sort of moonshot kind of we're gonna end mass atrocities and who's with me kind of thing. On the messaging more popularly I think I agree that the case studies and things like that are important. For me some of it boils down to the same kind of thing that what is the messaging on something like PEPFAR or something like that? The reality is there are many people who are alive today, men, women and children because of what the United States has done because of the actions that we took that were not always in our narrowly construed self-interest and people should know about that and feel good about what the United States has done and be inclined to do more of that when it's prudent to do so. And that is I think what the messaging kind of has to boil down to. Hi, thank you for very stimulating thoughts. My name is Mindy Reiser. I'm Vice President of an NGO called Global Peace Services USA. I'd like you folks to ponder and tell me why you think that the religious communities across the world haven't been able to mobilize people from those communities. We've had certainly Pope Francis make some initiatives on the Palestinian-Israeli issue and without too much success. We've had the elders, you may remember them. Some of them are no longer alive. Of course, we've had Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter as part of that and Mary Robinson. And then we have the Nobel Peace Laureates who convene from time to time. We've had movements like Bread for the World which deals with hunger but that mobilizes many committed Christians. But somehow this hasn't moved in the ways we've been talking about to a mass mobilization of the religious to atrocity prevention. Why do you think that's so? I would say that I do think, especially on the Darfur case, we did see a lot of religious mobilization. And with the various Holocaust museums, including the US Holocaust Museum, we've seen the Jewish community really stand in solidarity with victims of atrocities in other places around the world, too. So there is some evidence, I think, that people as motivated by their religious beliefs can act consistently and coherently on situations that are far away from them that aren't directly related to their day-to-day lives and that do come from a religious space. The issue, I think, is follow-through and translating that commitment of religious communities into policy action, and Rich, you can talk about how you see religious communities being able to do that going forward. I guess I don't really have a specific answer on religious communities and atrocity prevention per se, although you see the effects of them in terms of advocacy and our foreign policy on all sorts of different issues. The one thing that I would say, which is, you know, sort of the dark flip side of your question, which is, and I think it's yet another reason why we have to take mass atrocities with a threat there, I'm seriously, if you look at a place like Burma where the Rohingya are fleeing into Bangladesh, Bangladeshis are basically letting them stay now, but in the past, they haven't let them do this. It's becoming, you know, Rohingya armed with knives and little weapons attacking border posts and police stations and things like this, you're gonna get a Burmese armed forces overreaction and all these other things. Already ISIS has sort of highlighted this as one more area where the Muslim people are being oppressed and things like this. If that becomes a cause celeb for ISIS, we've got a huge problem in Southeast Asia. Now I know when you said religious, you know, this is not what you were thinking of, but I do think that that side of it is worth thinking about as well. It is not only the Quakers who are motivated by mass atrocities to do something or to try to sort of bend history here, it's other more malevolent forces as well and so we have to take that seriously. And growing out of some of our work here at New America, surprisingly on a range of issues, including domestic policy ones, you can kind of sort religious community interventions into two categories and what I think is the big dividing factor is how hard do you work to actually get down to the congregational level and that there's been a large amount of advocacy across a very wide range of issues that's kind of add some national level religious leaders and stir and Hillstaff can tell. You can tell the difference between the DC Office of Religion X coming to see you and getting calls from constituents. And I think therefore I also think of the initiative to really change the way the US responded to AIDS in the early 2000s and actually Bosnia back in the day for those of us and Vietnam back in the day that you were where you had activism at the congregational level. And frankly what we haven't seen and this is called out in the report and Rich you mentioned it, we did not see congregational level activism around mass atrocity conflicts very much in the last eight years. And that is painfully obvious to policymakers. We had another question over here. Hi, Meredith Tricker with the Peace and Security Funders Group and forgive me if I missed this but another community I think we didn't mention is the business community. And I wonder if, so in this sense talking about the private sector, with this particular administration, so barring arms sales, so people who supply the arms and private security companies, conflict is bad for business. Do we think this is an argument that will resonate more with this administration for obvious reasons and is that a lever that you think we should push? I do, I definitely do. I'm imparted to find out where you're talking about of course, but yeah I think that that is an argument that is certainly available to those who are making the arguments on behalf of doing something about potential mass atrocities and I think it is likely to have more resonance in a validly business friendly administration than one that was less so, so yes. Maybe to operationalize that, we've talked about Burma and we've talked about South Sudan, those are both places where there are significant natural resources including oil and minerals, mining, in the case of Burma, a lot of the sanctions have been lifted and US businesses are considering ways to enter that space and so I think that all of those issues are on the table both from the corporate social responsibility side, but then also from the perspective that continued instability and the destabilizing impact of the Rohingya issue will affect the ability to invest in other sectors of Burma's economy, similarly securing South Sudan's oil won't happen if conflict continues to occur there. So it's unusual to advertise other think tanks works at your own think tank events, but just cause that's the kind of place we are here at New America, back last fall the Stanley Foundation actually held a multiple day conference and had a working group that I know because I was chairing a different working group so I have no idea what this working group talked about but they did have a working group specifically trying to tease out ways and methods for to get private sector involvement in atrocity prevention so you can check that out on their website. It's always possible there's someone in the room who participated in that working group. Nope, doesn't look like it, but do check their website because I know there's been some specific thinking about sort of what are avenues that actually work for corporate involvement and I saw we had a question over here on the aisle. West wrist, American society of international law. You mentioned the beginning rich that Congress has also been involved on some issues similar to this and has made changes. The obviously there's the genocide and atrocity prevention act that's currently sitting and will be reintroduced now in the new Congress. Does something like that have legs? Is it going to be a useful tool? Even if it is simply for motivational purposes to get activists engaged behind it, to get the public behind it, but it also obviously creates a more strong and stable engagement in the executive branch with support for the atrocity prevention board and things like that. Do you see that in the new administration and the new Congress as still a viable option for pursuing some kind of engagement across the multiple different areas of US participation? There's two questions in your question. One, is there a good idea to what had passed Congress? Those are not the same thing. So yeah, these pieces of legislation, whether or not they pass, often have at least, they set an agenda around which people can mobilize support and they pull responses out of the executive branch, you think that this may have legs. Whether that does, these days no one would ever lose a bet by betting against the Congress passing something. So I guess that's where I would put my money. But who knows? I don't know. So I see one more question on the aisle back there. Thank you. Will Ferraro, consultant to PSEC Lab and member of the PPWG. I guess I'm hearing, and maybe you kind of said this, but I'm seeing this as much more of a reframing and maybe the way I would characterize the Obama administration focus on mass atrocity prevention is really about architecture, both within the administration but also globally and in supporting regional efforts as well. So maybe actually if we're thinking about it, a new administration that's set out to say we're gonna cut foreign assistance and we're more about national interest rather than global norms, maybe we just reframe this to say that other countries pursue the architecture and we work on a case by case basis as they come up and mobilize national interest focus in response to particular incidents as they come forward. It's not to neglect, it's just to kind of reframe as you're saying kind of in a national interest argument mindful that there's not an inclination to spend resources, blood and treasure and just kind of think about it that way. It's more about in that way, we end up potentially building our case on a case by case basis. So it's just kind of like your reaction to that. Well that certainly accords with a lot of my view. I think, I know that there was a lot of frustration among Hill Republicans for example when the Obama administration would tout the atrocities prevention board and all the sort of architectural bureaucratic steps that it had taken in order to prevent mass atrocities while Syria was a manifest mass atrocity that the administration looked as if it was doing very little about and could not generate the political will to do much about and to the extent to which that stuff seemed like a substitute for doing things in certain cases then it was quite frustrating I think for those who said, well if you're not gonna do something don't do something but don't say that you've done something and the thing you've done is have an interagency process by which you can sort of flesh out good ideas and have early warning and all these other things. Those things are certainly not mutually exclusive. You should be able to do both but where the rubber meets the road in my mind and particularly I think given the current political consolation is let's just focus on preventing mass atrocities as those potential mass atrocities arise. We can do the architectural kinds of things the extent to which those can be done to that end of course but I think the arguments that are likely to be salient are less on the process and architectural and normative side and more on the hard edge national interests suffused by the fundamental American value. Actually how far can a US atrocity prevention policy that's framed in this kind of it's all about US national interests way how far can that get us in the international context and what's the point at which other actors put up their hands and say well if it's really that much about your national interests we're not sure it's in our interest. I think the way we would argue it is that atrocity prevention is in every country's national interest and it's also in the interest of protecting the rights of individuals and going back to this issue of little bit of money on conflict prevention early saves a lot of money in the long run that's an argument that you can make regardless of the government because every government has budgetary constraints so it would be about repurposing it to say this is not just in American interests but also in your interests and in the interests of the global community to be engaged on these issues. One thing that I wanna draw out is the fact that to the extent that we make the values case that has greater resonance because the values that we would be drawing on especially if you connect them to rights and obligations are then universal and so when you talk about genocide or war crimes or crimes against humanity and add a legal dimension to that then this triggers obligations that every single country has and that international institutions can weigh in on a consistent basis across the board. So I also wanna follow up Will on what you said and Rich the way that you kind of diminished the Obama administration's extreme attention to the institutions and structures and processes of atrocity prevention and we haven't really critiqued this or talked about it explicitly but one can I think look at the record of the Obama administration and favorably say that the lesson that many people took from the record of the 90s and certainly the lesson that many people took from reading a problem from hell was the we didn't know we didn't have the information the government didn't have the information and that one can I think look at the creation of the atrocity prevention board and all of the very careful attention that went into building and developing how it worked as an effort to remedy that problem. So do we now conclude that that was the wrong problem? Were those structures ultimately not useful? Would we want to keep them if we could keep them? What's the role? What's the balance of information versus political will? Yeah, I think they have value and good on the Obama administration for looking at this and building these structures but it's not a substitute for political will certainly not a substitute for action, right? So if you point to the structures at the same time Syria is going on it's sort of like saying Mrs. Lincoln really enjoyed the play. The play was nice but you had to snag and so I think that it's worth, I mean all the kinds of stuff that are in bed in the APB in terms of early warning the information also that's all those are valuable things but at the end of the day that has to convert into something it's not a good sort of in and of itself it's a means to an end to the end is to prevent atrocities. On that I would say that maybe right now the situation that we're in is actually the best case for the utility of building all of this architecture and institutions because at minimum we're guaranteed that the information is being collected and it's analyzed and if this structure is preserved it's being escalated and presented to the right decision makers. We have a completely separate question of how to influence those decision makers to generate the political will to act on the information but without those structures I think we would be in a very different place because we don't even know what would have been prioritized or brought to the attention of an administration that has said that these aren't the types of things we really want to spend our time looking at. So then what happens if the structures go away and the information isn't being collected isn't being brought to the attention of decision makers anymore. Bad things. It's a technical foreign policy term. All right well I can't let you end on that note we've got we're gonna take one more question or so we're gonna take one, two and then Charlie you've had a two finger so we'll take three questions and that'll give you both a minute to think about what your final statement is. So we talked, you guys talked a lot about the crisis in international justice, atrocity prevention happening globally from kind of the US perspective but in terms of from the local buy-in of the affected communities. I'm from the Syria Justice and Accountability Center and from the Syria perspective there's been a lot of frustration among Syrians with the international community kind of a dismissal now after years of empty promises like you said making statements and promises with no follow through. How do we remedy the local buy-in of the communities affected by atrocities to give heart that the international community will step up especially when we are looking at the current administration and kind of a complete flip of rhetoric internationally. Angie Garvey at Peace Direct, I kinda wanna echo that other question. You guys mentioned that kind of the toolbox for atrocity prevention is relatively empty and I was curious to see your perspective on supporting those local civil society organizations in the communities and countries that are at risk for atrocities and how in the current political environment it would be possible to tap into engaging with and supporting local civil society. Just the best when the audience has better closing questions than the moderator does. No. My two fingers very quick and it's a gentle pushback to Rich which is while I acknowledge as a former APB member while I acknowledge that Syria is going to shadow not just the APB but the Obama administration. The APB was more than technical fixes. There was a lot that it did. Early attention to the Rohingya preventing the Murley from being killed in South Sudan, car and number of other places that didn't get as much media attention but it still was able to affect change. So for your final sum up, what can we do to either reassure or shine more of a light on or assist local civil society communities? More broadly, what's the one thing that you wanna see happening during the next six months to four years? Well, let's say, okay. Let me just tackle real quickly the Syrian local buy-in issue. I think this is a huge question for the new administration that they're gonna have to answer in the next couple of weeks which is what is our disposition with respect to those whom we have quietly or not so quietly supported now for several years and who have put their lives on the line for an effort which the United States supported namely going after the Assad regime. If the administration ends up sort of flipping and saying, well, actually, we're fine with Assad remaining in power indefinitely and removes all of its support from those forces that we have supported that is probably a death sentence for many of these folks and something short of that, which is not good. So in addition to sort of the objective, look at, okay, here's Syria and is Assad gonna go? Is Assad gonna stay? What do we sort of do? We're not starting with a blank sheet of paper here and we've made commitments to people who have in turn made commitments to us and to each other and I think that the presumption should be that we will stick with those commitments unless there's a very, very good reason to sort of do this. And I think more abstractly, outside of Syria, I mean, I think when you go into these kinds of things, if you want local buy-in, you've gotta be credible. That's how you get buy-in and you're credible if you keep your commitments and so I think that has to be foremost in our minds when we start out on these kinds of efforts. On local civil societies, all I would say is in addition to the dollars that we can pass out to interested organizations, or technological things, some of which the New America Foundation is actively involved in, like encryption software so that these organizations can encrypt their databases and so forth so that bad regimes or bad actors can't have access to their information that could be used against them. Circumvention software so they can access sources of information otherwise would be blocked. You know, phones with kill switches and things like that that I think is beyond the technical capacity of some of these local civil society groups that just don't do this kind of stuff but those things should be made available and I think that's something about the US government and companies like Google and places like New America and foundations and so forth can get involved in. On Charlie's point on the APB, I totally agree with you that there are non-Syrian things that the APB did well and it was overall, it was a contribution there. I guess what I was sort of fetching about is when the charge is put to the Obama administration that because of Syria it seemingly didn't take on the big mass atrocity and it points to the structures rather than the acts and the successes that you point to which I think has been kind of a dominant theme of my whole thing here is be specific about the successes and the actual, you know, talk about the Rohingya. Don't talk about how there's a nice inter-agency coordinating mechanism and all these other things because other than the folks in this room there's not very many people for whom that has much resonance. And then the final thing if I don't know if this actually answers your question but I just would put emphasis one on the sort of specifics on this but also on the doable aspects of this because I think that the biggest sort of uphill climb is gonna be among those who say it's all very nice but we can't afford it. It's all very nice but we just can't be successful. It's all very nice but look at the past 15 years of American foreign policy. It's all very nice but these people have been fighting each other for thousands of years or whatever the reasons are. And to demonstrate that it's doable and acceptable cost of the United States I think is the key to getting by in for those. Okay. Well I wanna pick up on the theme of civil society because I think that reflecting and amplifying civil society voices is probably the one investment that can be made by the US government and development partners in preventing conflict and atrocities before they even start. And so when we really talk about upstream solutions and I think that that was one of the findings of the report is we need to act earlier before things go bad than grassroots reconciliation efforts and community building and an investment in those kinds of initiatives are really important. But the other thing is attention to human rights issues and situations in places like the Philippines where you have the government conducting what it calls a drug war but killing people perhaps on an indiscriminate basis with no justice and accountability and raising those issues further up the chain as well. To answer Heather's question about what I would be looking for in the first six months I think it would be to really track the ways in which American engagement on this issue doesn't diminish and also isn't compromised by actions that might be taken abroad in the war against ISIS or in the ongoing engagement in Yemen or counter-terrorism where American credibility on this issue could really be much further compromised. I think that that is a real risk and one that we need to be aware of because for American values to have resonance they can't if there is a real risk of complicity in crimes and atrocities elsewhere. And for the four years I think looking at doable situations looking at North Korea or accountability for the Yazidis or some issues that might have resonance with niche communities that are influential in Washington right now would be the space to be able to get some traction so the broader agenda doesn't fall off the map. Well you are a very devoted audience to sit here past the time on a Tuesday afternoon. On behalf of New America I'm really happy to invite you all to stay and head on out where we have a little bit of a reception so that people can talk to each other, meet some of the report authors who are here. Thank you all for being such a terrific and engaged audience and please join me in thanking our wonderful panelists.