 Thanks very much for coming to this presentation and thank you to the organizers for putting together such an excellent panel on civilian agency in conflict zones. It's a pleasure to contribute to this discussion. My title today is Seize Fires and Civilian Protection Monitoring, Evidence from Myanmar. And in this presentation, I focus on civilian agency and the form of civilian protection monitoring. Civilian Protection Monitoring is a form of protective civilian agency and in the context of Myanmar at least, it emerged in the context of Seize Fire Monitoring and Myanmar's complex conflict landscape after the democratic opening back in 2011. You may remember that in the early years after Myanmar's opening in 2011 and Myanmar's transition back then, there was high optimism and high hope that it would be possible to bring peace to the many decades-old insurgencies in the borderlands that it would be possible to negotiate an overall comprehensive peace accord and to consolidate a democratic regime. So many international organizations and donors rushed into Myanmar to support that nascent peace process. And I think you'd impart to the complexity of Myanmar's conflict landscape, the country became somewhat of a laboratory for local peace building approaches. You may or you may not remember that Myanmar in 2015 had a complex conflict landscape. You don't fully have to understand the map on the left side to you, but the main message here is that in 2015 there was a so-coordination of Seize Fire Agreement, however it was only signed by some of the very many rebel groups in Myanmar. And it is important to know that the strongest rebel groups in Myanmar never signed that 2015 Seize Fire Agreement. However, internationally that Seize Fire Agreement was very much lauded. There was high hope again for this being the start towards a comprehensive peace process. But of course the conflict landscape in Myanmar was extremely fragmented in terms of rebel groups. So back in 2011 during the transition of Myanmar, the European Union and other donors started funding so-called Seize Fire Monitoring Networks. It was in support of bilateral Seize Fire Agreements. Some of these Seize Fires culminated in the 2015 NCA, Nationwide Peace Accord. And with that money from donors, international NGOs and local civil society organizations trained civilians in Myanmar's borderlands in the conflict regions to monitor Seize Fire Agreements. And the idea was that early civilian involvement would improve protection of civilians. So these conflict zones, these borderlands are generally areas or were areas where international actors had very limited access. So international presence to support and protect civilians was hardly possible. Because of that background, NGOs and CSOs trained these civilians and it was hoped that early civilian involvement would overall support the local peace process that it would bring women into local peace building early on again. And that overall, all this local agency and local civilian protection would be support for a long time sustainable peace process. Now unfortunately, as we know, Myanmar's peace process failed. It ended abruptly last year with the military coup in February. And we know with hindsight, of course, that international support for local civilian protection and peace building did not lead to peace. And as many analysts have published by now, under the circumstances in Myanmar also could not have been expected to lead to peace. However, I think that the case of Myanmar does offer some important lessons about the potential and about the limitations of civilian monitoring to improve the protection of civilians and remote and difficult to access conflict zones where international actors could not directly intervene to protect civilians. This presentation is based on a recently published or forthcoming work. I will not discuss in depth the literature behind the findings or the research design. In the interest of time, I will only give you the main arguments and some of the main findings. I think the sources for the findings are available online. I'd like to point out a very exciting new book forthcoming next year on a civilian protective agency co-edited with among others Juan Mazzudo who is also sitting here in the audience. And some of the work is also forthcoming in that book. So civilian protection monitoring. What is it? It basically means that civilians and CSOs come together basically are trained to monitor ceasefires in the absence of international monitoring that could have taken place. But because Myanmar's ceasefires either failed very quickly or were dysfunctional from the start, civilian monitors were trained by CSOs, but they were never really in a position to monitor ceasefires. So what these civilians did who had the networks to monitor and the knowledge to monitor is instead use the networks and the knowledge to monitor the protection of civilians and to overall contribute to a better protection of civilians on the ground. So civilian monitors monitored conflict dynamics, civilian harm and human rights violations. They reported them to state actors but also very importantly to humanitarian and peace building actors. And with that they provided humanitarian actors who did not themselves have much access in the conflict zones with crucial information to better serve civilian populations. Civilian monitors trained civilian and self protection strategies and overall also supported civilians in safer displacement practices. Safer displacement simply means more coordinated displacement and information to humanitarian actors to better reach quickly displaced populations. And overall in some instances at least they were able through their monitoring and reporting to seek redress for civilian abuse. I present three arguments based on this work. The first one is civilian capacity and conflict conditions, both shape and constrain civilian protection monitoring. So the analysis here focuses on how can civilian protection monitoring work in different conflict zones, what are the potentials, in what ways is it innovative, but also very much what are the limitations of local agency. And with civilian capacity I mean the knowledge of civilians, the networks that they have, the institutions and the experience of how to act in a conflict zone overall. There's excellent work on all of these points, some of them I cite here on the slide. And with conflict conditions I mean the overall context. So factors such as armed group sensitivity to civilian preferences, restrained among armed actors, but also institutions to punish abuses of the civilian population. And we know for a fact that in the context of the Myanmar Army is not one that has institutionalized restraint in terms of violence against civilians on the contrary. It has been a highly abusive military and Myanmar's counterinsurgency in the border zones has been extremely deadly for civilians. My second argument is that civilian protection monitoring can effectively contribute to the immediate protection of civilians in context of open and active conflict. I will give you more details on that in a moment. But importantly it is less impactful in so-called no war grey zone situations. And I think that's an important point when we discuss local agency and local peace building because much of the local peace building is expected to precisely take place in these grey zones and transitions from conflict to peace building and there are high expectations on civilian agency contributing to civilian protection and peace building. And I will explain in a moment some of the factors that make that very difficult. Lastly, civilian protective agency is a form of political agency. And that should be very clear from the start. Political agency means it is rooted in certain worldviews, values and norms but also group interests of course and group mobilization. And as political agency it is contested and it can generate resistance not just among armed actors and political actors but also importantly among some population groups. So for example in Myanmar also among some of the populations that were supposed to be served and protected by these civilian monitors and their protection monitoring. Very briefly on the research process I did field work with a local team back mainly in 2018. I've been involved in researching in Myanmar since 2016. Field work primarily took place in the north in Kachin state on the border to China. Kachin state has one of the longest standing insurgencies with a very strong rebel group the Kachin Independence Army. And I compare the case of Kachin state to Karan state in the southeast on the border to Thailand which equally has a very long running insurgency and a very strong and cohesive rebel group. And both rebel groups are very strongly rooted in the local populations. The main difference here is that Kachin state did have a very long ceasefire about 17 years until 2011 with the Myanmar government and the Myanmar army. And so had been relatively peaceful until Myanmar's transition but that ceasefire broke down in 2011. And in 2012 Karan state and the Karan independence army negotiated a ceasefire. So basically they flipped one state had a ceasefire while the other state had active conflict which is not surprising because it's been a long standing strategy by the Myanmar government to play out rebel groups against each other in ceasefire negotiations. And it's one of the main reasons why the civilians could hardly monitor ceasefires and could hardly contribute to the protection of civilians. Very briefly some of the empirics on this comparison. Kachin state as I just said had a failed ceasefire in 2011. It did have another ceasefire back in 2013 but it failed completely very quickly basically. And so as I said earlier in 2011 the EU as a donor put funding into building these civilian ceasefire monitoring networks. To some extent copying some successful models from Mindanao in the Philippines. So NGOs and CSOs came in, trained civilians in 2015 brought some of them also to the Philippines to learn from that example. But in 2015 the Kachin ceasefire had already broken down completely. So they essentially started civilian ceasefire monitoring at a time when there was no ceasefire to monitor. But civilians did learn from these trainings and they appreciated these networks. So what they did was adopt the ceasefire monitoring knowledge and network, the infrastructure that they were given to some extent was very little funding. This is all volunteer based work. So they adopted that knowledge and they used it for protection monitoring. They had protection monitoring in terms of as I said earlier disseminating information to civilian populations how to protect themselves better. And collecting information for humanitarian actors how to serve the civilian population better. So overall in Kachin state which had a very strong monitoring network the monitors were able to use international expertise for the betterment of local conflict conditions. Now by contrast current state had a ceasefire from 2012 onwards and the current independence army actually also signed the NCA in 2015. So it didn't have open conflict during the ceasefire monitoring period but it was a highly militarized environment with ongoing high abuse against the civilian population. That means that the Mio and Maami remained stationed in many contested areas of Kachin state equally the rebel group. It did not give up territory control. You had a different governance system, the rebel groups governing their own territory and the Mio Ma government governing other territories. And within the context of that militarized complex environment and the different objectives of armed groups and many militia groups that were also present civilian monitors were very much restricted and the work that they could do to protect civilians. And that was first and foremost because no armed group really had an interest in making that ceasefire work. There was high skepticism among both the current independence army and also the current population in the peace process. And that's why there was no functioning ceasefire architecture. And so without, I'm almost concluding, without a functioning ceasefire monitoring architecture, civilian monitors could also not use that architecture to report on civilian abuse and to protect the civilian population. So overall, despite the more peaceful conditions on the ground, civilian monitors were unable to protect civilians from abuse, primarily non-leaser abuse such as land grabbing by armed actors and displacement for displacement in the context of a stored peace process. Conclusions very quickly. First of all, civilian protection monitoring can make an important contribution to the protection of civilians, but only under specific conflict conditions. Second, international peace building actors can strengthen civilian capacity and I would say many NGOs are internationally very good at it. And they're not doing it only in Myanmar. They've also run successful programs in other countries such as Colombia. But they are often much less effective in changing armed actor rational, changing preferences and over conflict conditions to make civilian agency work better. And lastly, my third point, civilian adaptation of external peace building knowledge to local circumstances was one of the key factors that mitigated the risks for civilian involvement and the potential risks of moral hazard and I'm happy to say more in the Q&A about that. And finally, adopting a focus on local peace building is important, but it does not guarantee that international actors can somehow scale up local civilian protection and conflict mitigation practices. Thank you.