 Good morning. My name is George Moose and I have the great pleasure and the great privilege of serving as the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace. And I also have the pleasure of welcoming all of you here, as well as all of those who are following us online, to this the fourth annual Resolve Network Global Forum. And you can follow us on social media with at USIP and with today's hashtag Resolve Forum. For those of you who may be new to USIP, the Institute was founded by Congress in 1984 as an independent nonpartisan and national institute dedicated to reducing violent international conflicts and the threats that they posed to U.S. national security. We do this by working in conflict zones around the world, providing people, organizations and governments with the tools, the knowledge and the training to manage conflicts so that they don't become violent and to resolve them when they do. One of the most pervasive drivers of conflict in the world today is the rise, spread and evolution of violent extremism, especially as it interacts with existing conflicts, creates new ones or further damages already fragile contexts. Despite progress that has been made in countering terrorism across the world, the threat of extremism continues to grow and grow more complex and in many ways more lethal as new actors arise. Here in Washington and in other capitals around the world, governments are converging on a recognition that we need a new strategy to curb the spread of violent extremism. And that is why the Congress directed the US Institute of Peace to host a task force on the subject of extremism in fragile states. That task force, which was led by the co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission, Governor Tom Keane and Congressman Lee Hamilton, assembled some of the most knowledgeable American foreign policy experts to pick up, essentially, where the 9-11 Commission report left off, to devise a strategy to address extremism at its origins. The task force released its report in the spring, which I hope many of you have had a chance to read. It's available online. The report found that the threat of violent extremism is evolving and that it requires an approach that is at once both simple but daunting. And that is to put prevention at the core of our policy. Among the key findings, the report argues that we must prioritize prevention within the US government and in our partnerships with other governments to mitigate the underlying conditions that allow terrorism to emerge and spread, especially in fragile states. We know, however, that significant knowledge gaps continue to pose obstacles to our understanding of what works in preventing violent extremism. It is precisely these knowledge gaps that the resolved network was established to address. The resolved network is a global consortium of researchers and research organizations, policy makers and practitioners committed to empirically driven, locally defined research on the drivers of violent extremism and the sources of community resilience. Importantly, Resolve provides products and services to policy makers, to practitioners and researchers who require nuanced, multidisciplinary, data-driven approaches to addressing the problem of violent extremism. And to that end, Resolve is committed to including the expertise of international, regional and local stakeholders in the design of research and to elevating the capacity of these local researchers to contribute to that global research. In short, Resolve's ambition and purpose is to facilitate knowledge exchanges that enable the communication of findings and key analysis among researchers, policy makers, practitioners and impacted communities. And indeed, that is why we are here today. And I want to thank especially those of you who are members of the Resolve network who have traveled here to Washington for this event. We hope, we think today's format, the TED-style talks and presentations and the salon-style discussions will provide some thought-provoking input to your reflections. We also hope that they will provide a unique opportunity to learn from some of the premier preeminent experts in the field. And we also hope that they will prompt reflection on the progress that we've made to date in addressing the problems of violent extremism and to the priorities that should inform us going forward in terms of our research, our policy and our practice. I think it's appropriate that this Resolve forum is taking place during the week that leads up to International Peace Day, the International Day of Peace, which is on September the 21st. Here at USIP, we believe that peace is indeed possible. But we also know that peace takes action and that it takes all of us. As you listen to the speakers today, I hope you will take the opportunity to reflect on your own contributions to peace and that you will be inspired to join us in USIP's peace day challenge. Participation is simple and easy. Between now and Saturday, September the 21st, you can take action for peace by sharing a photo on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook using the hashtag peace day challenge. All of the photos will then be used to create a mosaic that will display the inspiring things that we all are doing together to create a more peaceful world. USIP is proud to serve as the host for the Resolve network and the Resolve Secretariat, which is made possible through our partnerships with the US Department of State's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and with the US Agency for International Development. We would like to recognize and thank both for their support for the Resolve network and for their commitment to growing the evidence-based for policies and programs to counter the spread of violent extremism. And with that, it is now my pleasure to invite to the podium Assistant Secretary of State, Denise Natali, who directs the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the US Department of State. Please join me in welcoming her. Good morning. Thank you, Ambassador Moose, for the warm welcome. I would like to thank USIP and the Resolve network for hosting this very important event today. I'm very proud of CSO's role in supporting the Resolve network and establishing the Resolve network in 2015, and I look forward to continuing to support the important work that you do to expand your resources and capabilities. As we address the critical issue of countering violent extremism, it's reassuring to know that this administration is showing its priority, to spare no effort to preserve the safety and security of the United States. When President Trump released the National Strategy for Counterterrorism in October 2018, he affirmed his commitment to do whatever is necessary to protect the nation, especially when it comes to terrorism. The National Strategy for Counterterrorism, which is informed by our National Security Strategy and this administration's priorities, is guided by US national interests. It recognizes that the nature of terrorist threats have changed. They are more complex, fluid, and diversified across the globe. These changes weren't a more expansive approach to address the full spectrum of terrorist threats, and a broad range of non-military means to counter terrorism and violent extremism. There are three key efforts that I'd like to focus on today. The first is prevention, secondly, partnerships, and third, targeted programs. First, the National Counterterrorism Strategy recognizes that while we have built a robust counterterrorism capabilities, we still need prevention architecture to thwart terrorist radicalization and recruitment. This effort begins with developing and implementing national and local action plans to increase civil society's role in prevention. It also includes a renewed emphasis on combating ideology that ferments terrorism. To this end, the United States is empowering government officials, community leaders, and religious figures to develop locally resonant counter narratives to dissuade would-be recruits from turning to violent extremism. Our second focus is on building partnerships. We not only seek to address the specific dynamics of radicalization and recruitment, but also to enable partnerships with the United States over the long term. This effort requires building local capacities and mitigating the grievances that terrorists seek to exploit through local conditions. Resolve is an important partner in these efforts. My Bureau of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations is currently working with Resolve to train local researchers to produce empirical analysis from municipal leaders in the western Balkans associated with the Strong Cities Network. This network is a global network of mayors and practitioners that are united in building social cohesion and community resilience against violent extremism. We also have supported Resolve to train local researchers in Bangladesh who conducted analysis and communicated it to policy makers. This effort resulted in the Bangladesh police commissioning a specific study to improve community policing. Third, we are committed to better targeting our CDE programs. This effort reflects this administration's priority to focus judiciously on using taxpayer dollars in all of our foreign assistance programs to ensure greater accountability and to realize more effective outcomes. We are making sure that our efforts and our programs are tied to clear policy objectives and that we need to measure success and impact. As management guru Peter Drucker once said, famously said, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. For instance, in the past CDE focused on poverty and counter-messaging, despite the fact that there is no clear evidence that poor economic conditions or terrorist propaganda alone are sufficient drivers of violent extremism. It is critical that we approach CDE with sound data-driven analysis. This means generating more empirical data and research that is grounded in local realities. CSO has a forefront of this effort at the Department of State, working closely with the Bureau of Counterterrorism and our other partners, by conducting planning strategies, designing programs and monitoring and evaluation. Our staff has also deployed across the globe to conduct analysis and coordinate CDE activities with other U.S. government agencies, regional partners and local stakeholders. For instance, our CDE baseline research that we are conducting right now, program in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Malaysia, Niger and the Philippines, establishes baseline indicators for violent extremism and community resiliency. This allows us to design more effective programs, monitor the changing landscape and measure the impact of our CDE engagements. I'd like to share an example from Kenya of how we are operationalizing these three key strategic priorities of prevention, partnerships and targeted programs. In 2013, Kenyan Security Forces responded to the Westgate mall attack in Nairobi with the arbitrary detention of Somali men in the East Slay neighborhood and elsewhere, which increased communal tensions. Five and a half years later, in late 2018, when Al Shabab attacked the Ducit D2 hotel, law enforcement and community members worked together to channel communal tensions through dialogue and nonviolent action. This effort prevented the terrorists from achieving their objective to polarize the community and gain new recruits while giving voice to valid frustrations of the community. This example also has policy implications. The Kenyan government realized that community engagement and non-securitized approaches can help defeat terrorism and prevent radicalization to violence and improved its approach to CDE. Since then, the government of Kenya developed national and country-led action plans on CDE, which are focused on dialogues between the government and local community members. This CDE effort is also built on a longstanding partnership between the United States and Kenya. This partnership has further enabled more targeted programming based on understanding the specifics of localities and building the capacity of local communities to effectively engage with security forces. Additionally, building trust and dialogue between police and the communities they serve in East Slay has enabled a constructive feedback loop. For example, community members voice concerns over group profiling to police leadership while their visits to the police barracks widened their understandings that the police face. In one case, instead of ignoring a tip from an unfamiliar community member, a police responded to a local contacts report that someone unknown to the community was handing out cash and religious materials to local youth. A possible warning side for recruitment. All of these positive engagements are built on sound research and evidence-based analysis, and they reinforce three key points and findings. First, deeper and more effective engagement between police forces and local communities is critical to breaking the life cycle of radicalization. Second, a rise in security force abuses and state-sponsored violence against civilians correlates with a rise in violent activity, including the emergence of new violent extremist organizations. Three, these programs send the message to governments that CV is an essential component of an effective counter-terrorism strategy. While CT, counter-terrorism can stop imminent threats, CVE can build societal resiliency to prevent, counter, and recover from these threats. I'd like to conclude by highlighting three questions that I would like to consider for you to consider during your discussions today that can help us translate your cutting-edge ideas into action to counter radicalization and recruitment by violent extremists. First, how can we effectively measure success and impact when we're addressing countering violent and preventing violent extremism? Secondly, how can we better understand local relationships to enhance societal resiliencies to violent extremism? And third, how can we bridge the gap between securitized approaches and community-led approaches to prevent radicalization to violent extremism? I hope today's event brings fresh insights into the challenges and opportunities that we face. I applaud Resolve's efforts to make research more relevant and accessible to policymakers. And I thank you again for the critical work that you're all doing to support our efforts to counter violent extremism and terrorism. I will now turn it over to Leanne to facilitate the rest of the discussion, but again, thank you very much for sponsoring this important event. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Leanne Erdberg, and I am your emcee for today. I will be the one who's introducing speakers. I will provide logistical information like where you're going to find coffee, where the bathrooms are, when we're going to lunch, and later this afternoon where the reception will be. I will also be a little bit of a cruise director and ask people to move to the center of the room because we still have people who are going to be staggering in. So if you see seats more in the center of the room, feel free to get up, move to the center of the room. You will be doing a service to your colleagues. But more importantly, I get the honor of being today's emcee because I'm the interim executive director of the Resolve Network, and I direct our program on violent extremism here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For today's fourth annual forum, I thought I would quickly explain to everyone a bit more of why we've structured today's event the way that we have. So I decided to go to history to give me a little bit more grounding about why we're doing the things that we're doing. And I found one of the most cited scholarly papers from the field of medicine is by an author, her name is Phyllis Alan Richmond, and she explored American attitudes toward the germ theory disease during the time period of 1860 to 1880. And she found despite the progress of germ theory improving medicine across Europe that American physicians were slow to adopt germ theory. She found that they were hostile to new views. They discussed the theory in highly unscientific ways. They employed imprecise terminology. They manifested deep allegiances to old fashioned theories, and perhaps her biggest finding, there was a lack of any attempt by American physicians to prove or disprove the germ theory. She wrote this article in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War, where U.S. policymakers were looking to finally promote what they were calling democratic science, large scale investments in education and research and development, most probably to compete with the Russian investments, but also providing a huge opportunity for universities and educators and research and development to take off in the United States. I bring up this story because I'm deeply hopeful that the social sciences, especially those that are specific to conflict and terrorism, are finally ripe to have a germ theory tipping point. And perhaps also a new generation of democratic social science investments with a new focus on the humanity and dignity inherent in all people, to uncover how people move in and out of violent beliefs, violent behaviors, violent attitudes as a human challenge, not just as an enemy to be defeated. I think we can be bold about our opportunities here in tackling the challenge of violent extremism, but also a humble about what is possible if we don't tackle what isn't working, what we have learned, and embrace new ways to address violent extremism. So throughout today, we have designed discussions to enable our collective reflection, the incredible scholars, practitioners, and policymakers that you will hear from today represent exactly the opposite of those American physicians in the year 1860. You're going to hear precision, you're going to hear facts, you're going to hear testing of theories, results from experiments, firsthand knowledge, new ways of understanding violent extremism. You're going to hear some provocative pushback, but it will be informed by deep experience, well researched critiques, and you will hear recommendations that can help inform our future practice, our research, and our policies. We are certain that to do more than just prevent violent extremism, we have to also think about what is sure to be the dynamic iterations of violent extremist groups and terrorist networks. And to do that, our collective understanding is ripe for constructive disruption, but future recommendations. So our event today is going to start with a high-level fireside chat, followed by TED style talks, and talk show style panels in both the morning and afternoon sessions. Our goal is to keep everybody engaged and curious, walking away having learned something new, and interested in a future partnership with Resolve and USIP. During today's event, I feel it's fair to tell everybody that we're not going to do a live question and answer session, but instead volunteers are going to be up and down the hallways to collect question cards during the first half of both our panel discussions as well as our fireside chat, so please use the cards and write down your questions so we can feed them to the moderator. As a reminder, the event is live streamed and is recorded. And as Ambassador Moose said, don't forget to join us on Twitter at USIP and our hashtag Resolve Forum. We also have a social media guide available for your reference if you would like. Lastly, during the breaks and before you go for the day, please grab publications on the table outside of the auditorium with our recent publications from Resolve as well as many of Resolve's partner network organizations and our network members. To start off our first discussion for the day, it is my pleasure to welcome J. M. Berger and Michael Singh to the stage. J. M. Berger is a researcher, analyst, and consultant whose work explores extremism and terrorism, propaganda, and social media and analytical techniques. He's well known for his publications, including his book ISIS, The State of Terror, co-authored with Jessica Stern and Extremism, published in 2018. We are delighted to have Mr. Berger join us for a conversation with Mr. Michael Singh, the Lane Swig Senior Fellow and Managing Director at the Washington Institute. Mr. Singh has vast experience in the US National Security Policy, including his tenure at the White House, as well as his appointments as Special Assistant to the Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. In 2018, Mr. Singh served on the Congressional Mandated Commission that Ambassador Moose referred to, the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States. And as mentioned, the report is available outside for those of you who have not read it yet. Mr. Singh is also the co-chair of the Congressional Mandated Syria Study Group, which is charged with providing Congress and the Executive Branch an assessment of the situation in Syria and recommendations for US Policy. It is my delight to invite them to the stage and thank you everybody for being here for the Result Forum. Thanks a lot, Leanne. It's a real pleasure to be here with all of you. It's an honor to follow Ambassador Moose and Dr. Natali. And I also had the honor, as Leanne mentioned, of serving on the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, which met here at the US Institute of Peace. And on behalf of that Task Force, I really want to thank all the members of the Resolve Network and all of you who are engaged in research on extremism because the Task Force really benefited from the work of this issue. I think many of us had worked on this issue before. Anyone who's worked on this issue is frustrated by this issue. And we really sort of put it to the researchers that were supporting us to show us what works, show us what we have learned. And people were able to do that, and that really, I think, benefited the Task Force in the report. So here we are to do a fireside chat. There's no fire. I understand the other talks are short, but I understand they're short and to the point. And so that's what we're going to aim for here is to be to the point. It's a real pleasure to be here with JM as well, who's one of the most respected scholars on this particular issue as everyone knows. And we're just going to try to sort of skim the top of the waves a bit as a way of teeing up the rest of the discussions today. And this is an issue where I feel as though we always have to start with first and deal with the definitional issues are quite important. So I thought we would start there, JM. And I thought we would start with a very basic, the basic question of how should we define extremism? What is extremism? And how important is it that we have a common definition for that? Yeah. So the definitional issue has been my big cause for the last couple of years. I think that we have struggled with this and it's a very consequential issue because if we don't understand extremism as a field and as a unified kind of phenomenon, we can't really study it in a systematic way and we can't create policies that are fair and objective. So we need to understand the things that make jihadism like white nationalism, like anarchism, terrorism. There needs to be some way we understand these things in a coherent kind of framework that lets us talk about all those things as being related to each other. You know, beyond our just instinctive understanding that they're related. So what I've been arguing for is a definition that is sort of grounded in social identity theory that comes out of work that I've done and also the work of Hororo Ingram who's written some material on this and proposed a sort of extremist system of meaning that can guide a definition which is that extremism is the belief that your group, the in-group cannot be secure or survive without taking hostile action against an out-group and that hostile action is always necessary because of the inherent nature of the out-group. So it's a commitment to always always being engaged in hostile action against some group that is not your own. And hostile, I think, is an important word in this because a lot of our conversations about extremism have naturally revolved around violence. That's obviously a high priority terrorism, you know, for a long time a lot of the field was very concerned with terrorism and didn't use the word extremism that much at first, in the immediate years after 9-11. And slowly we've come to understand that extremism is more than just terrorism. So it can be a state-like apparatus, like ISIS. It can be political. It can be harassment, such as the all-right online. There are a lot of different dimensions. It's the hostility. It's the fact that you're taking action against that out-group that makes you an extremist. So I think there's sort of distinction between extremism and violent extremism. As we think about this from the perspective both of the researcher and the policymaker should we only be concerned with violent extremism? Or do we need to sort of start with extremism and why? Why would you sort of give the answer you do? I think we need to be concerned beyond violent extremism. Violent extremism is a natural priority for policy makers. It's a government role to ensure the safety of its citizens. So that is a natural focus and an appropriate focus for government efforts. But as an academic community, as the people out here who are working to study this, as people who are working as activists, and to an extent as people who are shaping policy, we need to understand it more broadly because movements can go back and forth between violent and nonviolent modes. Pre-violent activity can lead to violent activity sometimes. Sometimes it will lead to people sort of scaling back what they're doing. It's important for us to understand that either way. We need to know if a movement is tipping toward violence or if it's going to step away from violence, we need to know why, what are the factors that cause a movement to step back from violence. Something in that respect that I think we don't talk about much because it's a difficult thing for policy makers is what kinds of intermediate steps do we accept below the level of complete theoreticalization. So if you're dealing, you know, this comes up in Syria, obviously, with Tahrir al-Sham I think is kind of the preeminent example of this. If a group steps back from the most extreme interpretation, but it's still pretty extreme, how do we deal with that? Do we want to incentivize groups to do that? Do we want to praise a group that does that? Even though it's still very extreme, we've just taken a step back and disassociated itself from global al-Qaeda particular kinds of attacks. So I think there's a lot of really complicated stuff in this space that we've only just begun to discuss and explore. I also want to ask you another distinction which is this question of, we're talking about extremism, well what about the extremists themselves? Can we study sort of all groups or all those who practice extremism sort of on the same footing? So if you have extremism that is espoused by a state, either for ideological or political purposes, can you study it in the same way that you'd study extremism as espoused by say a non-state actor or a movement? Is there a distinction to be drawn there? There's a distinction in terms of the kinds of practices, but they're definitely of a kind and we need to be able to integrate that. So my litmus test for definition of extremism is that it has to include the Nazis at all stages in their development. If you have a definition of extremism that excludes the Nazis at any point in the Nazi regime then it's missing something really important. So I think that It sounds like a fair litmus test. Yeah, well, and I think that, you know, we've been very focused on non-state actors which is appropriate to some extent, certainly. You know, September 11th has shaped a lot of our response to this and so that was carried out from a non-state actor. But if we look at ISIS ISIS is pushing that borderline, or was, pushing that borderline between being a state and being a non-state actor. It's a proto-state. So do we stop considering them extremism if they become a state? I don't think we do. So all of these factors I think that what we're lacking there's a lot of people who are working on comparative studies of extremism and a lot of people in this room and what we're lacking is a systematic way to do that to sort of view the field as a coherent whole and what goes into this study and what stays out. We spent a lot of time initially on this question and the task force on extremism, the scoping question in a sense of what actually is the problem that we're as a group trying to tackle and there was both the kind of theoretical question but also the practical question of when we're recommending solutions who are we recommended they be directed towards. Another sort of category question maybe or maybe a question of priority is do we focus should we focus more on extremisms that have broad appeal sort of global ideologies or ideologies of global appeal or that feature of global networks more than we focus on say extremism that might be particular to a place or to a smaller group that doesn't have that kind of global appeal can we learn from those as much as we can learn from the global ideologies? I think we can learn as much from each of them who deals with it and at what scope are valid questions depending on you know how popular movement is and how widespread it is we also run into a lot of problems the most popular kinds of extremism become related to power structures political power structures social power structures and it becomes much more difficult to deal with them as extremism. So just you know the sort of easy low hanging fruit on this is that there are millions of white nationalists, people with white nationalist beliefs in the United States compared to at most a couple thousand people who are ISIS supporters but look at our resource distribution on that. Right I want to talk about something else you've written about and for those of you who haven't seen it you should see it. JM had a chapter that he wrote I think back in June is that right a research report for the Resolve Network where he goes through a lot of these issues it's a fascinating paper and I would definitely recommend it to everyone here but one of the things you write about in this research report is the shift that has taken place which again the task force that I served on sort of focused on quite a bit from just talking about countering terrorism or fighting terrorism to talking about the preventing and countering violent extremism framework now that that shift has sort of been at least a few years now sort of in place I'm wondering what you think about what have the implications of it been what are the successes of the shift what are the failures of making that shift I think that the big problem in the space has been the same problem that was associated with counter terrorism which is that having become a national priority we put massive amounts of money into it without really demanding accountability so anybody who had a great idea got some money to work on it and didn't necessarily have to report measurable results didn't have to come back with metrics that show how you were violent and extremism you could come back with metrics people would come back when we were talking Leanne mentioned some of us and Assistant Secretary Natali mentioned some of this we come back with metrics that say we created jobs but we can't come back with metrics that say that creating jobs reduced violent extremism so I think at this point I think this is a widely the next generation of programs that we put onto this will have more accountability will have more measurable outputs that are related to violent extremism and not to our assumptions about what's causing it what about successes do you think there have been any real sort of gains that you can point to of shifting this from the counter terrorism to the C sorry the P-CVE network I think that no I mean I don't I think that there are certainly some programs that are good there are people who are doing good work moonshot CVE I think is one that's particularly strong doing kind of individual intervention work a number of groups have popped up on the far right side over the last couple of years doing this and that's all private sector basically some of it is government supported or funded and some of these programs are good but in the surrounding these successes are just a gigantic industry of people churning out social media metrics and monitoring lists and a lot of kind of aimless programming so it's a kitchen sink but you don't find anywhere else in government no never it's not a common problem at all so it's kind of the kitchen sink approach in that some things you know you throw everything at the wall and a few things do stick but I think that we're probably due for a reckoning on this this whole industry well and since we're one of the things I think we're looking at here today which I think is great about the resolve network is this kind of nexus between research and policy do you think that policymakers and researchers are sort of in the same place on this shift made on the value of it and so forth or are there differences I think people are coming around I think there's sort of a broad recognition at this point that we need to do more the research there's been a lot of great research done on this topic and related topics over the last several years you know there's been a lot of noise but there's been a lot of really kind of good insightful focus stuff and the trick is sifting through this very large body of literature I mean just since September 11th the body of literature on terrorism and extremism has exploded so there's just so much of it so sifting through it finding what you can do in a sort of actionable way and then doing it I mean it sounds simple it's actually very complicated to do each step in that process and and I don't want to be I mean my kind of response a few minutes ago was probably more negative than I intended it to be I think that we have a lot of, it's sort of like an ocean of people working on this and there's a lot of people making individual progress or small group progresses and the problem is I don't think that's kind of cohered into an industry by systematic approach to the problem and to what extent is that sort of blocked by or affected by sort of the political ups and downs in Washington I mean maybe it's a delicate question but because this is a research area that depends so much on government engagement and government funding you know how much is it subject to the vagaries of kind of political climate here in Washington well the good news is that because of an abundance of funding you know starting from 2001 and running up until fairly recently the field is pretty established so there's a lot of people working on this they're committed to this, they have departments they have programs so it's more self-sustaining than it was before but the presence of government funding has shaped the kind of research that we did so we have disproportionate research on jihadism versus white nationalism other and then other kinds of extremism or distant third if even that and so the funding, whatever funding levels exist I think they sort of shaped us and I think the abundance of funding also contributed to a lot of vaporware type projects a lot of you know pie in the sky kind of research that it's actually worth conducting but it's a lot of money that goes to things that didn't work out so I think the environment is somewhat tighter now from the government side I think that the social media companies are now stepping up and they bring their own perverse incentives to the research program you know I think overall our funding sources and I mean I'm not exempting myself from this in any way I take money from all these people that I just mentioned and they're all watching so be careful everybody knows that I'm a bit of a loose cannon on this so it's what you put up with when you deal with me I think you know it shapes the research so sometimes it can shape it in innocuous ways which is here's a bunch of money to research something that's kind of interesting but maybe isn't a top priority but you know it's interesting so hey I'm going to do it but other times it creates incentives to do research that is just because there's this big pot of money and the university for instance might want want a big piece of that pot of money and then finally it's really driven by the incentives that each of those sponsors have so I think ultimately you know making extremism studies into more of a regular academic pursuit will be better for the research that's produced I want to shift a bit into this question of how we're doing when it comes to countering violent extremism we're preventing it and as I said you know for all the members of the task force there was a great deal of frustration and we were surprised nevertheless actually to see the numbers on just how much extremism has spread around the world since 9-11 and how little success frankly all these efforts of countering it or rolling it back have had and again we were surprised to find that there was even at this stage you know 17-18 years after 9-11 a pretty poor understanding on the part of policy makers about what drives extremism how do you account for that I mean do you think that there's a disconnect between policy makers and researchers on this question of drivers of extremism and what can we do to get people to better understand what the drivers are yeah so I think you know that's a pretty fair assessment I mean it's kind of difficult to know I mean we put all this effort into these programs one reason we can't say that they're super successful is because we haven't figured out what our metrics are and we don't have a way to control you know what would extremism look like if we hadn't been doing all these things you know with all the other factors extremism is growing in part because of new technologies like social media and so it may we may be doing things that are successful but extremism will continue to increase because the structural factors are encouraging it more and then there's also a question of drivers so a lot of the bad assumptions about drivers that I've heard certainly have originated in policy community you know go to a meeting in government and you know people who just have very intuitive ideas about what causes extremism and it's very difficult to move them off of that so poverty being one of the most persistent ones one of the areas that I'm interested in in my research is actually looking at the question of the role of uncertainty so there's something called uncertainty identity theory which is by a social psychologist named Michael Haag which has found pretty good empirical evidence to suggest that when people are experiencing uncertainty they look for things to reduce that uncertainty and that extremist ideas are a way to reduce uncertainty and it's kind of offers a way to square the circle on some of these driver questions like poverty doesn't correlate to extremism sudden poverty sudden economic up for the loss of an industry that had supported people or even sudden wealth in some cases anything that really like upsets the status quo upsets people's understanding of where they fit in the world may be related to that and that may be a way to redeem some of these driver questions you know that some places certain places a jobs program might be a good thing education might be a good thing but not as a universal policy I think a point you're making there is the importance of sort of tailored understanding and tailored approaches to these problems in different places around the world which again is something that came out pretty clearly I think for us as we spoke to researchers I want to talk about one driver in particular and it's something that Dr. Natali actually mentioned in her comments and that's ideology because this is a driver that policy makers do tend to focus on a lot they like to devise policies to try to combat ideology and so I want to ask you how do you think we have over or under emphasized or rightly emphasized the importance of ideology and have we been successful have we figured out how to combat it successfully sitting here in Washington DC so the latter question is a pretty easy no the former question is I think that it is appropriate to recognize the importance of ideology if you don't have an ideology attached to violence then it's just random violence or it's criminal violence is profit, violence for profit the thing that defines extremist violence is that it's driven by an ideology that is not profit that is not random and so you can't you don't have extremism if you don't have ideology on there understanding it as a driver is a more complicated question to adopt to become part of ISIS you have to get the ideology somewhere you have to it has to be transmitted to you somehow the question is whether the ideology shapes somebody who already has an inclination to violence structures their violence we know that that happens right ideology structures violence we don't know if it causes violence or if that violence would come out in other ways if the ideology wasn't there and there's a question from the audience which I think is an interesting question which is somewhat related because you've talked about the sort of role of ideology in sustaining violence someone's asking about the role of violence in sort of sustaining the success of the extremism so it's almost kind of the opposite would you say that for an extremist group do they at some point need to advocate or adopt violence to survive do we have lots of examples of extremist groups that have been peaceful and have nevertheless thrived as movements or as groups so peaceful and nonviolent are not necessarily the same thing which is why I went with the word hostile in my definition of extremism so you can understand the hostile behavior as violence you can understand harassment as psychic violence you can understand discrimination as structural violence so you don't have extremism without that peace that form of attack that comes in maybe physical violence as we understand it maybe something else I think that physical violence is and this is I'm looking at this more in depth in my dissertation research which I'm currently ongoing so I'm not complete answers to this yet I know never to ask anybody about their dissertation I love talking about it but my point being I don't think I personally don't feel like I'm at a place where I can fully answer that but I think that there is there are structural incentives for extremist groups to continue to radicalize to escalate the kinds of hostile action they want to take and some groups I don't think that you I think what's probably most unlikely and somebody here may be very able to correct me so I'll say this with some humility attached to it I think what's most unlikely is for a group to sort of stay in that middle zone where they're engaged in systematic kind of hostile behavior but don't escalate the violence but that doesn't mean they're always going to escalate the violence some groups will get up to that point and then ease back and that's a process that we really need to understand better one thing we haven't done is study extremist movements that fizzle and it's very difficult to do that because when they fizzle we don't find out about them you know extremist movement gets to a certain point and then goes back draws back why does that happen and can we encourage that to happen so you know there aren't I don't I'm sure people in this audience probably can suggest some case studies on that and I would love to see some off the top of my head I think of something like the John Birch Society which sort of went up to a certain point had a certain amount of success and then tapered off and never went away it's still here it's still out there actually but it never achieved critical mass and it's not a significant player in that scene as we understand it today how much of a problem is this you write about this a little bit in the paper I referenced how much of a problem is it in the research community to sort of agree on sort of who you're studying in a sense to agree that well that's an extremist group a new extremist group especially with others saying oh no it's not it's not quite up to that line yeah so I mean I can't get people to agree that Nazis are extremists so I mean you know I'll tweet about this and I invariably get some very smart people who I respect will come back and say well the Nazis were popular they represented mainstream German society so they're not extremists so if I can't get people to agree on that then you can imagine that getting people to agree on up and coming groups is even more difficult I think the definition we come back to the definitional problem because we need to define the field in some useful way so that most of us are studying you'll never get perfect agreement everybody will always have their own definition at the beginning of a paper or a book or a dissertation and they will include the groups they want to include but what we need is really a coherent understanding of the kinds of groups we're going to study so that we can do comparative and longitudinal study of groups we need to be able to compare how white nationalists and and jihadists function we need to be able to compare how Nazis function in al-Qaeda why one has a certain kind of success and one has a different kind of success and we need to be able to look at them longitudinally the other element of the definition that I'm using particularly it's focused on nonviolent behavior is that in a practical terms this isn't going to stop somebody from studying it but if you're studying X group and it has a history of a movement that engages in nonviolent activity then it tips over into violence then it tips back away from violence it's still the same kind of group throughout that history similarly a lot of the definitions of extremism that are currently out there are based on extremism, defining extremism the people who don't want Nazis included defined extremism as being outside the mainstream it's a fringe movement so the Nazis can't be extremist because they're not a fringe movement but the Nazis didn't start off being the mainstream they started off as a fringe movement they became the mainstream and then they reverted to being an extremist to a fringe movement they didn't stop being Nazis during that period so I just think where we need to go I think is that we need more systematic systematic and kind of high level comparative and longitudinal study of these groups I think a good definition empowers that so we have only a couple minutes left for our fireless fireside chat and so I want to come back to this question since we do have policymakers who will be watching of metrics and what success looks like you know as a director of a research institute a very uncomfortable relationship with metrics but I know it's important for policymakers and so I think the question which arises is what does success look like against extremism and what are the sort of key things that you would recommend to make it more successful we talked a little bit about some of the diffuse nature of the researcher of the funding and so forth we talked about some of the lack of success that you feel as though it's had what does success look like and what do we need to get there is it more resources, is it a different focus is it a definition management of the problem it's not defeating extremism we've had extremism always throughout human history recorded human history you can find movements that fit my definition of extremism and that will fit other peoples there is some argument that it is inherent to the nature of society and psychology of individuals and groups it's a problem to be managed you can't wipe it out, you can't eliminate it we're not going to have that perfect society someday where nobody has any kind of bigotry or hatred or violence but it's like crying we manage it so when you see crime increasing in an area you put more resources on that area part of the definitional issue here is knowing where to put more resources you know by most kind of metrics you would look at white nationalism as the most serious problem than jihadism in this country there are reasons why we focus on jihadism some good and some bad but ultimately what we see is that there's a very strong and resurgent white nationalist movement in this country and so that is somewhere where we should put attention the fact that we're always running around putting out fires is not necessarily bad it's part of, it's inherent to the problem you're always going to have fires so you're always going to have a fire department that has to go rush and put out that fire so what you want to look for is if there's a team of arsonists working in your neighborhood how do you disrupt that functionally from a policy standpoint I think you do that you can use more kinetic kinds of approaches to that by arresting or exposing people who are recruiters exposing networks, cutting off money cutting off resources an ideology can't spread unless it's disseminated so the deep platforming that we're seeing now is a useful tool for managing the problem it doesn't get rid of them but it's a management tool deciding where you're going to draw the lines on deep platforming is a whole different fireside chat I think mostly I think that the more we have a toolkit of understanding of which groups we're including in here how those groups evolve over time why do they tip toward violence why do they tip away from violence why do they tip toward being more extreme whether having more hostile views of the out group or embracing more hostile actions so if we can identify those factors at the group level that's a useful way to approach this problem that sounds like a nice way to tee up a lot of the conversations that we're going to have later on today at this forum I think one thing that came out very clearly and all the people we talked to on the task force was that this is a problem and certainly not all of the problems that we look at are this way where researchers, policy makers and the public all agree that it's important, that it's urgent that we need to tackle it and so thank you very much J.M. for the work you've done on it thank you to everybody else here who's engaged in research on it and thank you to USIP thank you so much J.M. and Mike for really fantastic discussion it is my pleasure to move us to your TED Talk style presentations I'm going to go ahead and introduce all three speakers and then they will speak in succession so bear with me as I reiterate their incredible bios which you can also find in the materials that we have provided so our first speaker is going to be Bill Braniff Bill Braniff is the director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and a professor of practice at the University of Maryland also a member of Resolve's Research Advisory Council Bill's research focuses on domestic and international terrorism counter-terrorism, countering violent extremism and today he's going to talk to all of us about exploring countering violent extremism and the benefits of a grand strategic response to terrorism our second speaker is Laura Dugan a professor and associate chair in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland she's also the Senate's chair-elect at the University and the vice president-elect of the American Society of Criminology she's also a member of Resolve's Research Advisory Council her research examines the predictors of extremist and hateful violence and the efficacy of violence prevention and intervention policies in practice as well as the unintended consequences of government actions today Laura will discuss methodologies and the media in countering violent extremism and research our third speaker is John Horgan we're delighted to welcome him back to the stage as he first joined USIP and Resolve Global Forum in 2017 he's a distinguished university professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University where he directs the violent extremism research group and is a member of Resolve's Research Advisory Council during his presentation John will provide insight into the psychology of terrorism so those are going to be our three speakers please join me in welcoming our first speaker Bill Braniff to the stage to begin our session okay this is the the big green button well good morning and my thanks to our hosts and to the Resolve network for all the work that you do um we can't killer capture our way out of this fight we all nod our heads reassuringly when a senior leader gets up and makes this remark and then collectively in the same breath we say we will defeat destroy eradicate or annihilate terrorist organizations we keep saying we will win look most terrorist groups die within a year so I guess if you're fighting terrorist organizations it is possible to win but perhaps organization isn't the right unit of analysis most terrorist most terrorist movements instead last day very very long time but don't worry Daesh has been defeated the governments of Iraq the governments of the United States in fact the 81 members of the global coalition to defeat Daesh have declared that we have defeated Daesh so after hearing that Daesh has been defeated will our societies be more resilient when the next bomb goes off in the next country perpetrated by the next organization or individual associated with Daesh or with Al Qaeda for that matter which is striding into its fourth decade in each of these countries there's a new leader experimenting with new terrorist tactics and weapons exploiting new grievances exploiting new conflict zones so when the next bomb goes off because it will well we have bred fragility into our societies instead of resilience why do our leaders insist on saying that we will win when we know we can't kill or capture our way out of this fight why are we held hostage that sets the threshold for our success so impossibly high and then through funding relegates us to relying on our intelligence our intelligence-led military and law enforcement capabilities alone well at the same time sets the threshold for success for our adversaries so low that even after they have lost the very claim to their legitimacy they still can't help but succeed to remain and expand why do we keep playing into their hands I'd argue that it's because we don't have a grand strategy an organizing principle that we all agree on that understands the essential nature of terrorism therefore our citizens don't know what we're trying to accomplish nor what's realistic to accomplish an absent that collective understanding they simply demand safety and our political leaders merely respond by talking tough on terrorism now terrorism is complicated and menacing how could we articulate a grand strategy that would be understood and even if we could wouldn't that grand strategy just by necessity have to be bellicose given how scary the threat is at the risk of donning rose-colored glasses I can think of a time when such a menacing threat was met with a fairly sober and rational response that could be easily distilled into one intelligible word containment that was an overly bellicose and it was built on a line of argumentation that politicians could confidently articulate administration after administration without sounding weak the understanding that merely our way of life was more empowering, was more legitimate offered a better future than that of our adversaries and what they had to offer instead was bankrupt and that if we empowered civil society and built alliances our adversary would be small from within now I'm not arguing that containment was perfect it was without its critics nor that it's the right strategy itself for the current threat I'm also aware that it's easy to think that this cold war paradigm the idea of a grand strategy it doesn't relate to terrorism because the Soviet Union was a rational political actor and terrorism after all is just about the wanton violence the attack therefore counter-terrorism must simply well we've gotten really good at stopping the next attack and terrorism is generally up by an order of magnitude since 9-11 because terrorism is not about the act of violence the next attack is just a means to an end the end being the psychological impact on an audience beyond the physical target of the attack intended to induce political change maybe that political change is revolutionary overthrowing governments and the international system or maybe it's about preventing change protecting the status quo in either case it's about highlighting a sense of collective victimhood and then selling violent empowerment as the way to vanquish that victimhood in order to shape society over time according to a vision of the future that the extremist believes is more legitimate than the alternatives and if terrorism is inherently about the political and psychological payoff from the threat of empowering violence counter-terrorism has to be primarily about blunting the psychological and political effects and undermining the legitimacy of violent empowerment if violence fails to generate the desired psychological and political payoff the incentive for violence decreases over time and when I say over time I mean across generations of violence and sexes here's your cub of the caliphate in this picture we understand why the KKK is a 150 year movement when we understand the essential nature of terrorism in this context as a fight to garner social and political legitimacy over time we understand that traditional counter-terrorism is necessary in a very limited way when violence is already mobilized but it's entirely reactive and it's not as patient as grand strategy and we realize that the only way to marginalize the effects and attractiveness of violent extremism is to foster alternative forms of community centric empowerment CVE is not a sideshow it's the main event so before crafting a strategy articulating a policy passing a law conducting an operation launching a narrative campaign to attack on cable news we should ask ourselves the following question will this effort empower the majority community in question for whom the terrorist claims to speak to further marginalize the attractiveness and political and psychological impact of violent extremism in that community and if the answer is no it might feel really good but it's probably lousy counter-terrorism as my students here to peer countering violent extremism program taught me making victims and villains is the problem not the solution we need to help communities make heroes thank you that was awesome hi I'm Laura Dugan I'm a professor of criminology and criminal justice from the university of Maryland and I'm here to talk to you about methodologies and media encountering violent extremist research so before you zone out it is TED so it's only 10 minutes and I think it will be compelling for you to think about what are the things that go into the research that we do and what makes good research I've been studying violence and public policy and terrorism for more than two decades now and one of the key things that's important and really understanding this dynamic and what works and what doesn't work in reducing violence and possibly even stopping it is we need to have data that measures violence systematically and comprehensively as possible we also need data that measures what we do in order to stop violence and so how do we find these sorts of data now coming from criminology or being a crime researcher criminologists get their data on crime from three major sources official data from police departments also from self-reported data from perpetrators and also surveys from victims now none of these are going to provide us a comprehensive source of violent extremism incidents they just aren't particularly from a global scale because the scale is just too big and it crosses national boundaries and we don't have a central agency to collect official reports despite the problem being severe the events are still rather rare making it difficult to collect information from either perpetrators or from victims and so this is when we turn to media here's the thing terrorists like attention criminals don't like attention terrorists like attention they want to be part of the public narrative and they want to shape public opinion the other thing is that media likes to report on bad things and so what we have is a synergistic relationship between violent extremists and the media and this presents an opportunity that scholars have taken advantage of in order to chronicle events of violent extremism and so I'm going to talk a little bit about the global terrorism database which is the most comprehensive database that's available on terrorist incidents across the globe and that particular database I'm one of the principal investigators that collected those data and it began a long time ago with the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services had ex-military personnel scanning newspapers looking for incidents of terrorism and when they found them they wrote them down on index cards in fact these are two of the index cards that they used these index cards were basically how they were recording terrorist incidents from the 1970s the 1980s and the 1990s the boxes that are in the upper right hand corner are what the Pinkerton gave to Gary Lafri and I back in 2002-2003 and they capture all of the global incidents that occurred from 1970 to 1997 except for 1993 which was somehow not in the boxes we don't know where those were but the key here is that this was a really important opportunity because at that time there was no source of global terrorism that included both domestic and international attacks now what you may not have picked up on is that Gary Lafri and I got these data in 2002-2003 the last incident that occurred in those boxes was in 1997 and so we were already lagging behind in for five or six years and so if we had the incentive which we did to continue the collection up through the present we were already behind which has implications and so throughout the years the global terrorism database what those boxes became relied on whatever technology was available at the time in order to pull the information together now this is what's done today and I'll get back to what we did before this is what's done today and basically we rely on news aggregators to pull in information the technology used in machine learning tools that is based on input from analysts that either accepted or rejected a news story or accepted a news or accepted a news so that more and more stories come together that are actually terrorist attacks now this is the front page of the global terrorism database that's housed at the start center where Bill directs and according to the definition of terrorism that is used by the global terrorism database and that meets the criteria you've heard reference to from the speakers up to today now I'll come back to this graph but I also want to talk about what governments do because part of the policy equation is what is it that can be done in order to reduce terrorism and you know as the speakers have made hint to just focusing on countering terrorism and reacting to terrorism isn't enough and so in order to collect information on how to what governments have done to to address terrorism we need to look at a broader perspective and so this chart shows you how a colleague of mine Erica Chenoweth and I have looked at government actions in a counter-terrorism environment or in a terrorism environment and we are interested in looking at government actions that span from fully repressive to fully conciliatory we're interested in looking at whether these actions affect only the perpetrators are they discriminant or do they involve by standards or the constituencies for whom the terrorists fight we are interested in looking at material actions like raiding a town or releasing prisoners and we're also interested in looking at non-material actions like praising a leader or you know making bold statements and things that are more rhetorical or threatening or even empowering and so how do we get data like this once again once again there are no public sources of information on this we can't look at those who are doing the actions we can't take surveys on those who are targeted by the actions and so therefore we turn to media and this slide is not for you to look at the details of but it does give you an idea of how we've gone about collecting data from news sources by downloading information using machine technology to identify events and then rely pretty heavily on human coding to get a sense of what is happening here to give you an example of some of the information that's captured and what we call gait which is government actions and terror environments we are able to capture the Israeli government giving allowing utilities to be installed in Palestinian refugee camps which may not look like counter-terrorism but it's relevant to the terrorist threat we're able to capture things like leaders threatening government leaders threatening somebody who's a leader within a constituency movement that also has a terrorist component to it we're able to capture things that are going through the policy process that's going to affect constituencies in different ways and so it's a move in the right direction however this particular we're now working to update it but it's a little slower it's not quite as technically advanced as the efforts to collect the global terrorism database although we're working with computational linguistic scholars to find ways to more efficiently collect these data and to preserve the accuracy of the data here's what the two data sets GTD and GATE look like when they are combined the red bars these are just crude measurements but they show repressive actions by the governments that are listed there the blue bars show conciliatory actions and these are directed toward constituencies of terrorist organizations or their organizations themselves and the line represents terrorist attacks just a number of attacks in those countries according to the global terrorism database and what's important by this slide is to recognize that that they track pretty well now what's beneath these data so I have a minute left and this is what I'm here to talk about but I can say it all pretty quickly because they rely on media sources we suffer from the same biases that all media gives us if it bleeds it leads we are able to capture the most compelling stories but the less compelling stories may not be able to be captured in these data as I mentioned before the GTD was pretty much tied to the technology that was available at the time and so we have a mixture of prospective and retrospective collecting we have a mixture of human coding versus machine coding and that all has implications to analysis do we really think that North Korea had only one terrorist attack in 48 years so media collection is tied to freedom of press my last slide is this because it shows the combination of these two we have problems with using just media but does that mean that we don't do it? No it doesn't but it does mean that we need to understand the biases that are inherent in media and when you're analyzing these data you need to take into account those things and I'm not going to get into modeling strategies but what I urge you to do is read the documentation on how things are collected in order to properly analyze it and not just take the data as truth in order to be able to assess what works and what doesn't work so thank you good morning how's it going my name is John Horgan thank you so much USIP and Resolve Network for bringing me back we spoke a few months ago and if I recall correctly you asked me to talk about everything I think people ought to know about terrorist psychology and reset the priorities in seven minutes no problem here we go I really thought carefully about this idea of resetting priorities and what it means because it's always a danger of saying well why don't we just cast it all aside and try to tell a different story I think there's a great danger in that so it is critical to take a very careful look at where we've come from and to get a sense of what we have achieved there are three major themes that I think have really cropped up time and time and time again in the last 50 years of research on terrorist psychology 48 years to be precise what do terrorists have in common broadly what distinguishes them from people who don't engage in terrorism and far more recently so what does all of that mean is there enough for us to pull from what we know about those questions so far for us to use that knowledge in any way that is realistic and actionable and it's that final question that I really want to focus on for most of what I want to present today this of course has been our bugbear, our obsession for the past 15 years lots of definitions out there but by and large this word refers to the process whereby people change to such an extent that they are willing to become involved in violent extremism perhaps one of the most concise if not elegant summations of what we know from that research came from our colleagues just around the corner from here at George Washington University's program on extremism and this quote really is significant to me for a few reasons it's not just because it happens to support my own thesis but they say the profiles differ widely in race, age, social class education and family background and here comes the understatement their motivations are equally diverse and defy easy analysis the significance of that quote for me is that it doesn't this is not about terrorists with large it's not about making the statement to apply to the variety of different kinds of groups out there this assertion Seamus and his colleagues were pointing to is evident even in extremist who wanted to join ISIS from North America this diversity and complexity it is what we have found I've spoken to policy makers some policy makers who feel that this kind of statement if it is an accurate reflection is a stunning indictment of us in the academic world having not really made a lot of progress if that's the outcome wow the other view is that well that's a very naive statement because the other view is, no this is the outcome of some of the best research we have out there this is the reality and we just can't shy away from it it is diverse, it is complex that is the nature of terrorism and perhaps the true challenge then is to figure out how we channel that complexity easy peasy, right? radicalization remains a hard problem for two reasons I'm not the first person to point this out Heidi Ellis, Noemi Buhana and a whole bunch of radicalization scholars have been here before multi-finality and equifinality aren't just two wonderful words to casually throw into dinner conversation every now and again but if you want to quickly explain why radicalization is a hard problem use these two concepts the first multi-finality is where one factor can lead to several outcomes all of you who study radicalization will know what I'm talking about here we're all worried about exposure to violent extremist content and what it might mean yes, it might be a factor in leading someone down the road to terrorism unquestionably it also might lead to protests it also might lead to mobilizing someone into taking action against this kind of content it might lead to self-harm it might lead to multiple different outcomes the second issue it might seem similar but there's a key difference here and that's when the same outcome can come from multiple predictors and let's not even talk about terrorism for a second let's talk about having radical views or having extremist views on the kinds of things that might factor into that and fuel that it is everything from following a certain twitter account to religious indoctrination to foreign occupation to you name it I firmly believe that we are in the golden age of terrorism research I think we have come so far in the last 20 years that we are no longer searching for the drivers of violent extremism or the pieces of the puzzle in front of us we just don't know how they all fit together one of the greatest challenges for us in the research world is to figure out the nature of that sequence the sequence of radicalization and how those bits work also faced with the dilemma that the sequence is not going to work the same way for every single person even within the same group it's far easier to answer the question of what terrorists have in common the problem here and to go back to Michael and JM's presentation at the beginning is that we get so caught up in the ideology the content of the ideology that we miss the bigger picture here I don't care if you are a violent incel, a member of a white nationalist extremist group ISIS al-Qaeda, even some of the old the red army faction, the IRA this is what you have in common there is genuine legitimate moral outrage at some injustice perceived or otherwise it doesn't really make any difference in the eye of the believer this should not be this should not be new to you terrorists have to work hard to convince themselves and others that what they are doing is just it's necessary and it's urgent this is one of the powerful features of ideology as a mobilizing power and I mean all kinds of ideologies to provide an urgency to action talk of imminent invasion is very powerful in terms of convincing someone that if we don't act now it will be too late and your way of life will be fundamentally at risk and the one thing that all terrorists have in common they all believe that their actions will help bring around or bring about a better future again this is across the spectrum of groups for all of the time I've been studying terrorism I have been loath to think about an overarching grand theory of terrorism but I think if we strip away the ideologies the content of the ideology we're onto something far more meaningful now, resetting priorities well look the reality is different forms of terrorism are going to come and go they go up, they go down whatever metaphor, whatever analogy waves or something else we want to use that's not going to change I'm not so naïve to think that especially in the policy world that there aren't going to be discussions around well what do we call our how do we characterize our responses let's call it CVE well let's not call it CVE let's call it something else now we'll call it perhaps PVE perhaps we'll call it something else now again terrorism to an academic it doesn't really matter we're still going to have to address these issues we're still going to have to come up with actionable solutions where I think we really ought to be going is this and this is a this is an uncomfortable ground for an academic because we're not used to I'm no shame in saying this we're not used to speaking to policy makers we are especially uncomfortable at offering imperfect information and imperfect knowledge if we think it's going to be used in some way and I think that's the thing that we struggle with and I think that that is one of the things we're going to have to somehow address through uncomfortable but necessary and overdue conversations this issue of the radicalization process and its sequencing I mean I don't know how long it's going to take us to crack that if at all but we can't wait until we do so the question is what do we do in the meantime I think it is well within our grasp to identify intervention stages based on what current knowledge and tools we have at our disposal a few years ago with some funding from the National Institute of Justice my colleague Mike Mick Williams and I found that those best position to spot the signs of growing radicalization weren't religious scholars, they weren't parents they weren't teachers, they were the peers of people themselves so we spent two years talking to those peers to try to figure out well if your best position why aren't you doing anything about it and we found that well they're actually very very people are peers are very very reluctant to report concerns about radicalization I unfairly thought it was because well maybe they just maybe they just hate cops maybe they just hate law enforcement it wasn't that at all the overarching reality was that this was the reason for this bystander effect had to do with fear now that to me seems to be a non-ideological bipartisan grounds for thinking about CVE that addresses the problem in a far more practical way than perhaps we have been alluding to in recent times and just a simple example that I just put out there to say that sometimes we do lose focus on what we actually can do so thinking about anonymous convenient solutions to reporting to reporting concerns but here's what I want to really leave you with today I'm all for resetting priorities don't get me wrong but before I simply you know give you a shopping list of look here's all the things I would really love to see funded in terrorism research for the next 5-10 years I can do that trust me these are some of the bigger issues that I think are going to pose us pose much much bigger problems for us in the immediate future and I mean short to medium term future I'm going to disagree with my learning colleagues from this morning I see very little evidence that we're taking prevention effort seriously at all certainly domestically I think we're so far behind we don't even know it we are in the midst of not just a national epidemic of extreme right-wing violence we're seeing a global resurgence in with this and I don't think we have any clue of just how insidious this really is present company excluded of course but this is not something that's going to go away this is something that is serious on levels that I don't think we have really grappled with yet there is decreasing public faith in both government solutions to this and in scientific answers I don't want to hear that it's complex I can't give you any other story other than it's complex because this is what I do might mean that I need to go off and find a different line of work but I can't simplify the radicalization process in any other way it is complex and that's the reality of it we're seeing increased polarization and nonviolent radicalization I mean this is not again this is surely not news to you and more worryingly we are seeing a return to simplistic ways of thinking about terrorism so the question is what are we going to do about it I know I'm out of time I'm going to finish with what I started with I think terrorism research has never been in better shape there's a debate a number of years ago in academic circles it sort of seeped out a little bit about whether we've gone stagnant or not I completely disagree with that theory I think it is better than ever before the evidence the evidence base is better the quality of data is far far better than we've ever seen the question is now how do we move that research imperfect as it might be into actionable knowledge I think that is the challenge before us thank you so much thank you so much to all of our speakers I feel like not only did we learn a lot but we have a lot to talk about during our first coffee break which will be happening now we are running a little bit behind schedule so we're going to cut our coffee break just about five minutes short so please get in line for the coffee quickly but you can exit at the top of the auditorium and we will reconvene at 11 o'clock for our first panel so thank you so much good morning everybody can you hear me could everybody take a seat and we'll get started okay the mic's on so I don't need to shout anymore good morning welcome to our first panel of the day my name is David Yong I'm the vice president for applied conflict transformation here at the United States Institute of Peace as part of my job I have the privilege of overseeing our work on preventing violent extremism led by Leanne and I'm so grateful to Leanne and her whole resolve team for putting on today but a whole week of resolve activities and I'd like to thank all of our partners both governmental and non-governmental in the audience for working closely with Leanne's team and the rest of us at USIP on these very important issues I'd like to remind everybody that we do like questions I was getting sage advice from our real think tanker Katie Zimmerman from AEI and she knows from decades of experience that people like to be their questions attributed to them so I pledge to follow that incentive system and read your name along with their question so please we are eager to hear your questions before I introduce the panel I'm first my last thing I wanted to send regards and greetings from our president Nancy Lindborg Nancy had looked forward to being here today but she took a trip instead to Columbia she is there demonstrating USIP support for the continuing peace process in Columbia but she sends her warm greetings and again thanks for the partnerships with so many of your organizations this panel is all about resetting priorities and taking stock if priorities are being reset the title of the panel is non-state governance and going local I should explain a little bit when I was asked to moderate it and given this title and panel I was both excited and felt like an undergraduate who had just been handed a blue book exam that had to figure out and unpack the meaning so this is unscripted by Lance team but I want to try my hand at a four part blue book answer to the question so what is non-state governance and going local mean to me in the context of preventing violent extremism it could mean one or all of four things the non-state governance part could mean actually the equivalence of a no state or no state led governance meaning there's an absence or even worse a predatory state at the local level so that's my first thesis sentence my second would be in that gap of state led local governance is filled informal state structures could be tribal governance could be other forms of traditional governance and justice to fill that gap my third response would be apropos today's topic that violent extremist organizations instead fill that gap and in many cases fill that gap very successfully and finally and my summary conclusion for the professor would be it could be all those groups contesting the sphere of local governance that is an absent fumbling inefficient or predatory state traditional judicial or governance mechanisms and finally violent extremist organizations would be happy to govern those territories those localities those communities now the going local part is because we're trying to unpack a lot of the questions this morning by testing them at the local level particularly the shift from so-called counter-terrorism strategies to more granular strategies and we're trying to see at the local level in the eyes of experts who have studied real communities in the developing world whether in the developing and developed world whether that shift is actually occurring so let me introduce our panel to my immediate left is Dr. Linda Beshai she's currently a professorial professorial lecturer at GW Elliott School of International Affairs previously and most recently she was director of research evaluation and learning at the American Bar Association's rule of law initiative and before that she was a long time colleague here at USIP where she focused on preventing electoral violence countering violent extremism and security sector reform to her left is Dr. Huda Abadi Huda is the founder and executive director of Transformative Peace which is a consulting firm that works on inclusive peace processes as well as human rights based approaches to violent extremism for many decades now Huda has designed and implemented peace building programs mostly throughout the Middle East and North Africa and then finally to Huda's left is Catherine Erkady Zimmerman who is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she is AEI's senior analyst on terrorist groups and she also is the research manager for AEI's critical threats project thanks to all of you for joining us today so we're going to have a conversation to start off with but then I really invite your questions I don't, unlike Oprah have a earpiece and a producer feeding me questions so I'm relying on all of you to bring our conversation home so I was very much influenced by the speakers this morning the fireless fireside chatters the Ted Talkers and others including assistant secretary Natali in her keynote and I think one of the through lines, the subtext really the headlines was this least hoped for transition and our policy between sole focus on counter-terrorism to a more nuanced comprehensive complex strategy on preventing violent extremism so we're going to test how far we are as a community in transiting those polls and so my first question is to Huda Huda you've been a big proponent of what we're calling local approach and particularly you've studied how ISIS has a deep understanding of local grievances and as a communications expert and having a PhD in communications you've argued that they're very adept in their propaganda at exploiting these local grievances and in fact you argue that in general we're focused too much still on addressing extremist ideology by doing so we miss a point about why actually people joined violent extremist groups you've published a paper this summer on Morocco and challenging the elevation of Morocco as a best practice so please tell us a little bit about your version of going local what you found in Morocco and beyond, welcome thank you, thank you and I'm happy to be here, hello everyone so absolutely Daesh has shown that they're very hyper-local in even the way that they recruit and in our analysis while I was at the Carter Center we found out that we analyzed more than 800 videos of Daesh and we found that out of the 800 videos the religious narrative was less than 10% so it's very important for us to keep this in mind and when the sole focus is on ideology then we are not looking at the political and social differences we are focusing specifically on we're removing the responsibility away from the governments and putting it specifically only on ideology and so we have more focus on counter narratives and we've seen governments have spent millions of dollars on counter narratives but what is really needed are counter offers or what are we providing to the local communities some of the things that came out from the study not only in terms of research but also working with community and faith-based leaders is that counter narratives are important but they're not the main thing and a lot of times government have spent so much money and I always say that the messenger at times is even more important than the message so in places where the government does not have as much legitimacy and are not supported when they are the ones who are providing these counter narratives it's really just putting the money on the drain whereas it's really providing social services, educational services etc. but also the work with community leaders have shown that when you invest and empower community leaders and faith-based community actors they understand the context in a very nuanced and hyper local level that us in institutions or global forms don't understand as much so for example even a strategy that would prevent violent extremism saying northern part of Morocco might be completely different from the southern part of Morocco because the context is very different and there's not one way of self-radicalization and so as Dr. Horgan this morning was saying it's complex and so we need to find various ways and strategies in preventing violent extremism and in doing this work we found that trust is the main currency and so when actors working in this field don't have trust it's not really sustainable or as much effective. Youth play a very important role and a lot of time we use the buzzword of we need to engage women and we need to engage youth but really how are we engaging with them and what types of investments and also what types of risks are they taking and when we specifically discuss youth we have to see them not only leaders of tomorrow but also of today because they think outside of the box the conditions that they live in affect them deeply and there is a sense of hopelessness that Dash is really able to use so we really need to work on these issues. Thank you Huda. Katie let me turn to you so Katie kindly shared a draft last night with me of AEI paper she's coming out with a call which will be titled Beyond Counterterrorism and it speaks to the need for a grand strategy as Bill and others spoke of and so Katie in your draft you shared with me you argue that a violent extremist organizations feel a huge gap in governance at the local level and that like Huda is arguing we need to understand the appeal in their filling that gap so that we can render these groups less appealing so could you give us a kind of summary of your version of going local and not yet your grand strategy to get to that later in the hour but really in terms of where we're missing the mark on analysis Certainly and I just want to say that I'm thrilled to be here and thank Leanne for all of her efforts pulling us together and the resolve network as well I think the challenge that I've seen to which Huda's research shows and certainly others have looked at is that we have missed the connection between the transnational organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and the fundamental local conditions in which they're operating and this goes a little bit to the default cookie cutter approaches that are simple in US policy but also because it becomes very challenging for us to understand the local dynamics without having somebody on the ground pushing them forward and what we want is to look at the extremist organization itself and interdict its radicalization process so the idea of countering the violent extremism stopping the radicalization that begins preventing the imam who's pulling in recruits from doing so by changing the imam or identifying the various grievances that the groups are citing and preventing them but when you actually look at how extremist organizations are gaining strength in communities it is not simply because the communities have been weakened and this is where the conversations that have been hosted here at USIP about fragility and some of the links to extremism come forward so the local issues come out when Al Qaeda in Yemen for example identifies that the local communities don't have access to diesel fuel or water because of the humanitarian crisis and that's something that it can offer not as easily now but it used to be able to offer to the communities and it would do so in exchange for the ability to operate in that village we've seen it again and again in actually across the board I would say in Africa, Yemen, Syria in Iraq as well and other places where you see some of these organizations where they offer dispute resolution mechanisms because the local mechanisms have broken down or the one that's offered by the state is deemed to be corrupt or will not actually give a fair judgment to the local person and though many communities understand that they're putting their disputes up for resolution by a very extremist interpretation it is just the judge is very, very unbiased to the point where there's anecdotes from Mali where a landholder had been ruled against in the Malian court system and he brought it to the local group on Sarideen and put it in front of the Imam there and the Imam tried the case and found against the landowner again not because he was supporting what the state had found but because the evidence was against him and so that's an example where the man thought that because it was an extremist organization it would automatically rule counter to what the state had ruled and they took the evidence and decided that no it was actually correct and so when we're looking at how to work in these spaces it's going to be really bespoke, tailored interventions at that local level which challenges the US government certainly but also the understandings and the practitioners can speak much more in depth than I can and I think that's one of the challenges about working in these communities and working outside of just a radicalization paradigm and within this idea of building the resiliency within the community to reject these extremist organizations again Thank you very much I'm going to turn to Linda now for opening thoughts Linda's been around as all of you know Washington for a long time even though she's worked mostly and ABA role she's worked with policy makers, donor agencies she understands them very well, I was almost going to say us because I inhabited government positions for many years myself and she's often reflected that in terms of preventing violent extremism or countering violent extremism that government officials perhaps in their rush to do good still too much default to a position where government is seen as a faithful, effective partner in PVE policy. What I mean when I was talking earlier about local governments providing public goods at the local level first and foremost justice security, the conditions for having a livelihood that in Linda's views we're starting with the wrong assumptions that in our CVE work, our PVE work we have to many times assume and look squarely in the eye of predatory states both at the national and local level and obviously these predatory states create fertile grounds for violent extremism. So I'm going to start with a provocation to Linda and as we heard Assistant Secretary Natali say and as I've read in the excellent US government stabilization reviewer USIP's own task force report on preventing extremism in fragile states, it seems like everybody's gone local already and at least rhetorically on paper in these reports. So do you think we as a community have truly gone local or by protesting perhaps too much we aren't there yet and what if we aren't there yet what do you think causes our continuing myopia? So just give us a waterfront on what you've seen and how we're stepped if at all please. Thanks David I'll be provocative in turn then I actually think that we know an awful lot about going local and we know an awful lot about what works and what we should be doing there are just as there are structural conditions that might make local communities more likely to be recruited to violent groups, there are also structural conditions about the way the US government and our other partners in this space function that make it hard for us to do what we know is a better approach I would point to for example the stabilization assistance review framework which is incredibly positive as an effort by the US government multi-agency community to look at itself and examine what it's doing and identify what it should do better, coordinate focus on governance, look at local partners, do rule of law and step back from the kinetic approach and that's exactly right and we know that but what are we actually doing we're funding in very short streams 12 to 18 months we're rotating personnel in and out constantly and that alone, I mean the single biggest thing we might do to change the impact on the ground is probably to stop rotating personnel and to really start to prioritize personal relationships and people who have been in a country or worked with an organization for more than one or two years and say we need you and your relationships on a project, we want you involved because we know that you know the people and that you're trusted by the people look for evidence of trust look for evidence of relationships built and developed and that is a shift of emphasis as well rather than focusing so much on the groups and what the extremist groups and what they're doing, we need to focus more on the health of the communities and that's basically what the SAR helps us start to prioritize but I think we need to actually get from what that big vision is to what the little local structural problems to that kind of engagement are from US government and our friends in the space and then as practitioners I'm fully aware of how hard it is to be the change mechanism for the donor right the practitioners are always having to measure, measure, measure ask everybody whether you send out surveys, do baseline assessments and I think another part in addition to stop rotating person stopping the rotation of personnel is paying close attention to the fact that there's a Heisenberg principle in effect when it comes to international intervention. It's not a unilateral I'm the mover and my arrow goes out and has an impact in the space that I want it to I myself by doing an intervention by getting involved by attempting to prevent or counter violent extremism have an effect that changes the situation that I started seeing my own presence there not just the actual effect that I'm attending intending to create but my very existence and the fact that it's me who I am representing the US government we need to pay more attention to that effect the fact that our actions aren't single arrow dimensional that they have a rotational kind of iterative approach and there's something kind of there's a counter intuitive incentive that's put in place by the measurement impulse by that effort to always do especially for those who are practitioners because there's definitely a role for evidence gathering and for academic research and for knowing what works that's quite critical but when you're actually an implementer on the ground the intense focus on measurement and what works actually blocks the ability to be iterative because in order to produce good metrics for your donor you are actually stopped from changing yourself midway really smart donors who have really good close relationships with their implementers understand that and they allow more flexibility and they understand that measurement actually changes the facts on the ground but it's quite important that we really look at our mechanisms not just what we know but how we are constrained in what we deliver and the programs that we are designing because that does have an effect on whether or not we can make a change Thank you I'm going to ask you a follow up question we were talking yesterday that Morocco in your view really wasn't the international best practice that a lot of policy makers saw it as and so I'm curious as you engage policy makers in fora like this one whether when you present your evidence about your analysis of ISIS propaganda and you say look it's really 90% not focused on religious ideology what do people say in return and so how effective have you been as a researcher that's trying to change policy but could you start with see Morocco as a success story differently than perhaps most policy makers would okay thanks for the question in terms of I had the privilege to work with community and faith based leaders from Morocco, Tunisia, France Belgium and the United States in developing in building their capacity and empowering them so that they can develop and initiate local projects so on the one hand I was able to conduct interviews with community leaders families whose sons and daughters have joined Daesh within northern parts of Morocco or communities that have had the youth go and then compare it to the work on the ground one of the issues is when we focus so much on ideology we turn a blind eye to the everyday struggles that communities face and so in terms of Morocco Morocco spent a lot of it's like la carte diplomatique of Morocco is the religious discourse it's faith but unfortunately the political space for CSOs is very tight there's not a lot of space so they can operate on PVE issues and so when there's a monopoly of religious discourse and when some of these young people for example I asked youth who know of their who have had friends joined Daesh like where do you hear your you know like where do you go to to hear the Friday sermon or to learn about religion it's not official institutions it's not the official religious institutions in a lot of times it's through the internet it's like sheikh google you know so you know so when a lot of the when a lot of the resources are specific to just official institutions without empowering local community leaders who have the connection and the sense of identification with communities that are struggling but also who talk the language of the youth then it's kind of it's ineffective so that's one major thing and a lot of times the CSOs had to reframe their interventions because of the security approach and we spoke very briefly in the morning on the security approach with community approach and you know the gap between these two and when countries focus specifically on more on an aggressive security approach without giving the space and the voice for security then we are we are not looking at a long-term vision to preventing violent extremism and actually we might further hurt and harm marginalized communities and so we've had instances where community leaders had to completely shift their interventions and reframe it no we're not talking about religious discourse we're not talking about PVE we're talking about the national debate and so it removes that also national debate of being able to discuss these issues and in a lot of my work not only in Morocco but in other North African countries when you ask religious and CSOs leaders are you filming with dash propaganda do you know how they recruit? 95% of them told me we've never watched a dash propaganda and the people are like we'll be knocking on their doors and they're like well you're radicalized you need to come with me for questioning and so what happens it's a vicious circle because they fall on this they basically depend on the media for their interventions and they fall prey to thinking that it is just ideology and so their interventions are specifically focusing only on ideology and missing the social political fabric of it as well so I'm going to ask Katie first we're going to pivot a little bit to prescription as opposed to diagnosis and I'm going to ask all three of you so Linda and Huto please be thinking of this so Katie you and Bill Branifer like peas in a pot you're both calling for grand strategies you both make references to the long twilight struggle of the Cold War perhaps the analogy of policy etc etc so do you see the big question is do you see going local as a key part of a PVE grand strategy and the second part is a little bit about sequencing it's a big deal to provide good local governance at the local level for states threatened by violent extremism that in itself is a long twilight struggle so where do you begin in a more comprehensive way to create a localized grand strategy but without falling into despair because it's such a hard long process to do please that's an easy question I think the answer to the first one is yes but I can get a little bit more into what that looks like so fundamentally we've missed the local context when dealing with this challenge and we want to prescribe an ideological approach which is agnostic toward the local dynamics because the ideology it gets talked about differently in local narratives but it is a global ideology and then we've also missed the fact that a lot of times it's local conflicts that have nothing to do with what the extremists are pushing that enable the extremists to come into various communities and you can look at the spread of extremism in Mali that moved from north to south where the extremists intentionally stoked communal strife in order to get in it's actually a strategy that you can look at what the Islamic State has done inside of Iraq and Syria to expand and reconstitute and the divorce in US policy between that transnational threat that we have here at home which has very little to do with those local conflicts and the local conflicts themselves which are and the conditions that have driven communities to basically make a deal with the devil very few communities want someone coming in from the outside that starts to change how you live your life how governments is run how women are dressing and whether or not you can watch soccer or something that comes through but they are making that exchange because they find the groups offer them something that they need and when we're looking at how these groups have expanded most successfully it's not because of the ideology the Islamic State weaponized the internet in a way that I don't think many actually imagined al-Qaeda tried and failed pretty miserably in 2010 and 2011 to do it on the internet through al-Liki but what we've seen is it's defense of the community that they can come in so when there's local strife and this is where the questions of the state come into play so a piece of research that came from the critical threats project this summer looked at a small group in Burkina Faso which right, middle of Africa doesn't seem like we should care about and they found that the organization was able to exploit the security force response to gain recruits so it intentionally set off attacks in order to draw security forces in because it knew that the response would then generate another cycle and so the default American setting which is there is a security issue in northern Burkina Faso that strengthens the security forces so that they can deal with it as our counter-terrorism partners would actually feed the problem there so reframing that approach and actually looking at the issues on the ground when you're looking at how to do that because all of a sudden you've got a lot of local villages that all of their own problems all have their own local leaders there are incredibly bespoke ways of tailoring the strategy and approaches that I don't have to write grants or how to measure the success and get the money to pay for it it becomes overwhelming except it's not global it's actually my work has shown that this is not something that we need to fix every single governance gap in the world we could aim for that but when you're looking at it strategically it is in certain areas and it's very predictable about where it comes you can identify the communities and we could be doing a lot more to head off so this is the preventative effort that we keep hearing talked about now because once extremist groups get their fingers and penetrate these communities it's much harder to pull them out it's identifiable it is has to fit into something that's comprehensive and this is where we struggle as a government for a variety of reasons it means making sure that it's not just a whole of government approach but that it is strategically aligned and all the buzzwords come up that the funding is long term, that it's flexible that it's an iterative planning process and that starts to hit on all of these actual strategic problems we have within our government about an aversion to risk the fact that once we have a strategy and a plan that's the plan even when we're seeing it in a program so just simply implementing a program that's the plan that goes all the way up to the strategic level so there are challenges and impediments here at home that we need to be starting to address within how we function and how we treat this problem before we can get to the actual implementation and have it nest all the way down to the local level great, thank you I'm not lonely up here but while it's running dry quickly but I'll finish the round and then get to your questions thanks very much so Linda I'm going to ask you a variation of the same grand tragic question so don't listen but after the hours over I pick up the phone and say Denise Natale, Linda Bashai is not a true believer she doesn't really think that we've made the transit very far from securitization to community based approach darn, Linda again so she calls her up at GW and says okay smarty pants write me a memo by Monday morning outlining a community based grand strategy what would you say what would be the outlines of it thanks for the easy question I would say Denise, thanks for calling it's really nice to talk to you you know I actually think we know more than we think we know and maybe another quick kind of cheat strategy would be to stop calling it countering violent extremism stop referring to violent extremism and start talking about local empowerment initiatives and we are strategic and it's countering violent extremism to us because we're targeting the communities that we know are at risk and that we know are vulnerable or are already radicalized but we go there with an open ear to listen to all the problems and not just the ones that affect us because it's noticed the local communities know when the Americans show up all they want to do is train and equip and they're going to talk to the government anyway and the government's probably just going to call us all terrorists and lock us up but so I think it's really important that we become very sensitive and aware of the unintended consequences of the way we get involved of the language that we use some reference to that was already made this morning very important really good to say stop talking about it like it's a war and that discussion about the narrative of our violent extremism counter terrorism efforts as in war language the enemy destroy attack those kinds of words that is exactly why they keep flourishing because we are elevating their narrative to be one of taking on the world's greatest army ever who wouldn't sign up for that what a great glorious Marvel Avengers world that you can live in when you're taking on the US military and it's full glorious might so stop all that and get really quiet and really local not stop all that obviously but you know it's important for military and kinetic efforts to be present when there are very serious kinetic efforts on the other side but what I mean about the going local approach I think we already know how to do that we know how to talk to women we know how to talk to youth we know that schools are important religious leaders, educators mothers families all of the things that we have been doing for other development purposes all along those are still part of the toolkit and critically important for helping us know what we know so the hard part of that is the coordination part and I used to be super frustrated both at USAP and at ABA Roley at all the talk about coordination here in Washington and in the field because nothing is harder than coordinating nothing is harder than getting all these people with different different programs and money than funds that they have to implement according to all the different requirements that their own specific little grant has and all the different governments with their own different goals and incentive structures so coordination is really difficult there are institutional blocks to that I think humility and awareness of the unintended consequences and humility and awareness about how we ourselves are a model for the people we're engaging with how we communicate to ourselves and with them has to demonstrate and model how we want them to communicate with each other and with us and we have to be respectful we have to pay attention to their dignity and their identity and that's all very much the message that we're sending and communicating as we operate the short answer is David there's no quick answer there's no code to crack it doesn't just unlock because you start doing it right you have to just all the balls are in the air you've got to keep them there all of the tools we have we have to use and all of the information and knowledge we have we have to synthesize but that together with respect and acknowledging that we have an effect on the people we work with and paying attention to their local knowledge and situation is a critical part of getting better great thank you so there's so many good questions that actually I'm going to ask you to couch your answer in one of these provocative questions in a very useful way so Peter Baumann raise your hand thanks very much for your question Peter asks that let's get I'm paraphrasing let's get real let's actually talk about the real politics of violent extremism and PvE and CVE and he says that is are any analysts really looking at who benefits from instability and the presence of violent extremist groups and what are these benefits versus the threats to those that benefit and so that's originally in terms of violent extremist organizations filling very constructively in some societies a gap of the provision of the core goods that the state should be providing so so are we really looking at that and is it possible in our sometimes polite discourse to really talk about the kinds of things that particularly you and Katie get at like the real these VEOs are actually providing a lot of valuable services to these communities this is a great question actually a lot of times when we talk about PvE we just put band-aids and we're like you know we let's talk about counter-narratives let's do this empowering program but the project that I developed when I was at the Carter Center came from my work on Syria and we had Syrians across and ideological divides come and say this was in early 2014 what would a Syrian political solution look like and this where the elephant of the room came within foreign fighters and the Syrians said you know we have to discuss the issue of foreign fighters this is not a Syrian problem but this is an international problem why am I saying this I'm saying this because a lot of times we don't even talk about the instability that we have created within a lot of the regions with we ravaged wars we've you know broken the social fabric and so we can't we're really trying to look at PvE or CVE we really have to look at our own foreign policy our own interventions we've some areas we've bombed to the stone ages and so to expect that we're not creating more grievances is to me mind boggling and so that's one the second one is our support for autocratic regimes that we know use the language of violent extremism to crack down on dissent where there's a lack of human rights yet we still fund and we still fund programs that are PvE CVE through those particular countries as well so on the one hand a lot of time we're like okay we have to see the cup full and what can we do what can I do as a researcher and a practitioner I cannot solve the problem in Syria or in Libya and the list is so long so you say okay CSOs we should empower them we should listen to them a lot of the community leaders told me that a lot of times international organizations come and they talk we're like rat labs and this is I'm quoting I'm paraphrasing it they said it in Arabic like we feel that we're rat labs and we're not with but talk down to and so we come and we say okay this is a great project and this is a great project that would work for Country X and let's try to implement it without listening so we have to be super critical but also be able to be self reflexive and think on the broader international community and what's the role of the international community in terms of exacerbating or helping but at the same time looking at the local level and saying okay given the situation that we're in what can we do to be able to solve these issues at least at the local level to be able to give stability, hopefulness dignity to these people thank you the next question is from a former colleague of mine Kyle from Equal Access and he asked I think it's a good question for Katie he asks it goes to the default all governments are good partners assumption so Kyle asks how do we compel governments to examine and publicly acknowledge their own contributions to the political and social issues that drive violent extremism that's a great question and it's one that I actually do address in the forthcoming report to a degree and you know it's a challenge for us because this is such a massive problem that we do need partners and we need partners at the government level we need the state to be a partner in many cases even to gain access and we need to have partners at the sub-state level and they also there's some sub-state actor issues in terms of how we partner as well but when we're looking at the incentives to actually bring governments into the right mindset here and this goes to the points we've heard about some of our partners using the language of terrorism to suppress political dissent which is something that the United States needs to take a stronger position against very publicly and on the international stage there are tough conversations that our diplomats must have with their hosts and this is something that we need one clear vision and I'm going to use military language here but we need a clear vision of who the enemy is and you know to the point about that J.M. Berger made this morning about what is extremism and who are extremists we have a definition that we don't have a clear definition that all analysts of the USG accepts of who is al-Qaeda and you can look at the arguments about al-Qaeda in Syria as the most prominent example today why don't we hear about the threat from northwest Syria because there's an intra analyst debate over which groups which individuals are part of al-Qaeda which are not and whether or not they present a threat and what that interdiction looks like and you know to draw back even farther I argue that our enemy is greater than just al-Qaeda or the Islamic state but it's this ideological movement to Bill's point that you have this ideological movement that's coherent the enemy now that's different when you talk to some partners in the Gulf where they draw the line much closer to al-Qaeda in the Islamic state in terms of who the subscribers are but then jump to the Muslim Brotherhood which has avowed to only use political action it's a little different in certain cases but right it's not taking military action and espousing terrorist acts to achieve its objective so you know first we need to actually have a conversation globally about what the definition of this threat looks like and to make sure that our partners are bought and sold on that too we need to shift out of this counterterrorism paradigm it's not just shifting away from counterterrorism to a preventing or countering violent extremism paradigm so it's not just moving to the PVE or CVE but even beyond that and going to the community based approach and recognizing that it's the conditions on the ground and that means that we need to recognize that when our partners say yes I understand that there are grievances that are legitimate within these marginalized factions and that's why the extremists are gaining ground that we don't simply just build up the security force that the government then will use to put down the problem because we've fed into that cycle of violence and we've replicated our counterterrorism approach actually among our partners and you know the last bit is that the U.S. has a lot of leverage we can bring our European partners aboard on this one as well and once we have a united front we have leverage that we should be using to get partners to act properly yes we require them but at the end of the day if they're making the problem worse that's not a good partner so that's an honest conversation that we need to be having and we need to show that we're willing to hold our partners accountable condemn acts that are outside of what we would say it and also support actions that are difficult for the regime thank you so I have a lot of great questions thank you everybody so I ask the panelists I'll address them to one or the other of you and please be brief so we can get through as many as possible this is an anonymous question and it says so you've talked a lot about the drivers of violent extremism but what about the resiliency I go back to one of the comments this morning one of the Ted Talkers was talking about multi-finality in a single factor might create a multiplicity of outcomes so this is about that so what if there's community X, community Y and community Z and they're all exposed to the germ of VE why are some even with this gap in state led local governance why are some more resilient than others and is Robert Putnam's theory of social capital important to that understanding of the sources of resilience in the face of absent government and the face of violent extremism you want to take a crack Linda? we've actually done some really good research on that very question and again there are multiple explanations but one of the key answers to why some communities are more resilient or have resistance to recruitment or radicalization is social trust is the extent to which neighbors rely on neighbors for their own security or for collaborative responses to community problems the extent to which they feel that there are ways to resolve conflicts with each other even if it's just an independent local decision maker or religious leader so those communities that feel that kind of trust with each other feel more secure even in the face of natural disasters or poverty or other challenges to those communities I would just add I know I need to give you a short answer but I would point to one more example in which sometimes communities could be so vulnerable on every measure of the scale and I'm thinking particularly of Sudan here which isn't typically showing up on the radar screen of those violent extremism except that there are violent extremists in Sudan and they are promoted and have been up until the recent change in government had been actually sponsored by the government in quiet ways and so sometimes the resilience is simply a joint effort against the government that is the government is the one that's associated with the danger and therefore the communities actually band together and do some really impressive local governance things in response but again it's complicated. Thank you. Now the first who to given your previous work who I'm going to ask you two questions that were issued separately one is given your work in North America you were saying and Western Europe the question asks what does localization look like in the US and Western Europe where white nationalism is on the rise is I'm assuming the question means reintegrating women and children from extremist fighters communities so can you talk about some of the local successes in reintegrating women and children back into their communities of origin so please. Thanks, thank you for the questions and thank you to the person who asked about Europe and the US and the rise of white nationalism and I think a lot of times whenever we talk about violent extremism we tend to just focus specifically on the Daesh so one of the things that I always recommend that I now wrote in my article is we cannot be selecting which extremism that makes us feel better that's the one that which violent extremism that makes us feel better that's the one we're going to be talking about so what I mean is when we're talking with communities from North America and from Europe in the program that I led we were trying to respond to the rising tide of Islamophobia and saying that this is a threat this is not a Muslim issue this is a human rights issue and if we are going to be countering violent extremism in the United States we need to be able to address this and to be able to see it as a real threat as well and looking really at the data and what the data shows that the threat of white supremacy in the United States and in Europe are more of a threat than Daeshy groups and so the interventions that the community leaders that we worked with did not only focus on Daesh but they focused on building resilience, preventing Islamophobia, countering Islamophobia and working with other partners that specifically work on white supremacy and bringing the two we had panels where we would bring a former white supremacist and a former Al-Qaeda really former Al-Qaeda and both doing presentations to show that violent extremism does not belong to one group and so we need to look at that so that's for the first one in terms of the second one is women and children and children I didn't work specifically on reintegrating former I can't talk much to that reintegrating them but I did work with women community leaders and they play a very very important role in building resilience within the communities and also in preventing violent extremism because they have very tight knit networks within the local communities they understand their communities very well and sometimes can see signs before others can and to be able to empower them and give them a seat and their also vision of security in general is very different and to have that gendered component when we're thinking of PVE is absolutely important because going back to Dash Dash has also a gendered approach to recruitment and so we also need to think of what would be effective gendered approaches when we're talking about PVE Thank you So thanks to Jackie sorry to mispronounce your last name this is a question for Katie speaking to what Katie said about the need to understand local cultures in formulating counter terrorism and CVE efforts in areas such as Afghanistan where the Taliban's number one goal is to get rid of foreign occupation how can we gain a better understanding of the local needs and grievances and provide assistance without encouraging further negative impacts and how do we tailor our US policy on such narrow local level needs Thank you and I will be very brief I think when you look at Afghanistan in particular we actually have a depth of expertise about how to build local governance up in a way that will keep the Taliban outside and this was developed during the village stabilization operations and the Afghan local police initiative which for those that aren't aware effectively VSOs were tasked with identifying and helping support local governance to enable the community to kind of re-strengthen so the idea was that over decades literally of war in Afghanistan the social fabric that had kept the communities together had been degraded and then also recognizing the failure of the US approach in the early 2000s when we went into Afghanistan to create a central government that would push out from the center which we know that state based approach has failed in almost every case because we can't model ourselves abroad, they're different cultures and then the ALP effort was to take what was a naturally occurring phenomenon where most communities have some sort of self defense communal militia and to try and formalize it so this was taking something that already existed to try and link it up to the national structure that we had built in Afghanistan it was not successful everywhere that needs to be recognized but there were cases of success and it was not you know you're seen as an occupier when you act against the interests of the local community and you're seen as a facilitator or an enabler when you're working with the communities and so this is something right if we are only working with the Afghan government which a community rejects often because it is the you know persistent marginalization or codifying a power structure that will disenfranchise the community we're going to be seen as occupiers if we are willing to break a fully state based framework and work with sub-state actors and work to re-empower the communities and not insist that a host nation government has a full authority from capital to border which is the model that we tend to support but actually doesn't work then I think that we can start shifting the narrative away because the Taliban themselves can be seen as occupiers and what they're pushing and so it's just changing the approach in order to really shift the narrative and the perspective on the US of shifting us from the military based approach that we now have inside of Afghanistan CT and looking back at how to fix the issue great thank you so we have two more minutes I'm going to ask one last question from an anonymous because it's a great summary question it's a good Denise Natali midnight phone call to all of you so you say going local grand strategy etc etc how do we address we talked about bad partners but how do we proceed if our state partner is not a good partner how do we even proceed to go local in that case very briefly down this line Linda very briefly I'll point I'll remind everyone in the audience because you probably have thought about this but not in a while of the case of the Lord's resistance army we forgot about that particular extremist group but that was a classic case where the state was a terrible partner but we didn't see it for a long time and we enriched them to the point where it was very convenient for them to just never stop the Lord's resistance army so that's a classic case of how not to do it how to do it is to partner with I've not suggesting in any of the remarks I've made earlier to ignore our state partners and our policy international law rules actually kind of dictate that we need to engage with state governments so I'm not suggesting we shouldn't but we need to get smarter about how we engage them and what we tell them we're doing and I think that there are lots of ways to work with local communities in ways that will very much prevent or build resilience and prevent vulnerability to extremist groups and start to build I think we need to play the long game I think we need to build independent judicial and security structures and those are the things we can say we want to do without always making it about violent extremism and kinetic structure thank you so we got to go to lunch so very quickly Kuda and Katie very quickly I would say mapping the local context who are the political stakeholders and being very clear when we're working on a particular context to know that other than just the state but the political stakeholders second to evaluate and evaluate and evaluate and the third when you're evaluating going back and listening to the communities and seeing whether they benefited from the programs that we have funded thank you Katie my short answer is really support we just heard but also we shouldn't partner with bad partners I mean that's the short of it and you know this goes to the question of there are actually acceptable partners that you can think of that might so having you know a containment policy in terms of our partnerships might be the way to go when a state is the wrong partner to have and then we revert to what I think is the band-aid approach which is counter-terrorism as you know from an American interest perspective that is the last step of defense great so audience members thank you for your help I'm going to hire all of you as producers when I start the David Young show and thanks join me in thanking our panelists great thank you so much to the panel as they exit the stage I figured I'd just give a couple of instructions for people for lunch so lunch will be served in the great hall you can actually exit through either one of the various doors and we look forward to welcoming everybody back here for our afternoon session thanks welcome back everybody I think we're still going to be trickling in but figured we'll try and get started welcome back for the afternoon hope everyone enjoyed lunch I hope everyone got their chip choice of choice and we are really excited to continue what I think has been a really interesting conversation from multiple different angles and we hope to replicate and continue that throughout the afternoon so we're going to open it up with three more Ted style talks as with before I'm going to introduce all three of our speakers up front and then they're going to speak in succession so we're going to start with Nafis Hamid who is a research fellow at artist international an associate fellow at the international center for counterterrorism in the Hague a bone art trust PhD candidate in the security and crime science department at the University of college London and a member of the Resolved Network Advisory Council today Nafis will present on the role of neuroscience encountering violent extremism a subject matter focus of his recent research after Nafis we will have Teyuta Abdi Matai who is a consultant on research and security policy and served as a policy advisor to the fourth president of Kosovo her research explores trends in radicalization and violent extremism in the western Balkans as well as extremist propaganda reintegration programs for returning foreign terrorist fighters and monitoring and evaluation for the P and CVE field her work in the Balkans illustrated the need for more exploration on the role of trauma and violent extremism research and that's what she'll discuss with us today and then our third Ted style talk is actually a trio Ilana Lancaster, Munir Hamisi and Felix Bivins Dr. Ilana Lancaster Dr. Felix Bivins and Munir Hamisi will each present on participatory action research Ilana is a senior program officer here at the U.S. Institute of Peace and leads our work on conflict management training for peacekeepers capacity development for educational institutions and of course on participatory action research Felix is the co-founder and co-director of the Regenerative School and Education and Research Institute rooted in international development regenerative systems participatory action research and peace building Munir is a peace and security expert and currently heads the de-radicalization CVE unit in the office of his Excellency Governor Hassan Ali Joho in the Mombasa County Government in Kenya this two year collaborative project work involved marginalized youth in Kenya and participatory action research so we'll have all three speakers start and I'm pleased to introduce Nafis to begin Thank you everyone so when we think about violent extremist movements one of the things we we worry about with them is their ability to mass persuade their ability to create these slick videos and these great online messaging campaigns that then spread out on people's cell phones into their social media that they watch on YouTube and various devices that change the hearts and minds of people but that might be a very convenient narrative that may be leading us astray in a lot of our strategic communications tactics so a colleague of mine Hugo Mercier a social psychologist has been studying the role of mass persuasion across a variety of context and what he basically finds is it hardly ever works regardless of the sector religious socialization doesn't seem to work very well when it's televangelist or people on the radio when it's negative ads on political campaigns or robocalls or online commercials doesn't seem to have a big effect on voter attitudes this is the one that surprised me even commercial advertising doesn't seem to actually be very effective it works on occasions here and there when people don't have a lot of experience with the product but otherwise it's quite idiosyncratic and there's no real systemic element when it's working when it's not working and even when we think of the Nazis this powerful machine with their great propaganda that changed the Germans minds well it turns out their propaganda was even not as effective as we generally think it was it had some effect but really what the research shows is actually their propaganda increased anti-semitism in areas of Germany that historically had high anti-semitism it actually backfired in areas where there was historically low levels of anti-semitism and a lot of their propaganda just failed it just didn't work for example they tried and failed to make the German people pro-Euthanasia they tried and failed to get German industrial workers to be anti-communist they even tried and failed at getting the German people to like the Nazis they liked Hitler as a leader but they didn't actually like the Nazi political party and their propaganda wasn't able to have much of an effect so what does matter it's not that mass persuasion or commercials or advertising has no effect but you need to see the effect you need to see it within the ecology of communication it has its biggest impact when it becomes part of the day-to-day conversations of people person-to-person communication social interaction actually causes people to change their religion to buy a product they wouldn't otherwise buy to change their their stances on various political issues and even to get pulled into extremist movements our own research that we've been doing on our database of foreign fighters who joined Al Qaeda we find that 75% were recruited by a friend 20% by a family member and 5% by someone that they didn't have a pre-established relationship with but it was still person-to-person and yes they were able to talk to people and had online communication and sometimes shared videos but the videos by themselves didn't have an effect until they became part of the actual conversation with people who had strong trustworthy and authoritative relationships and what we find is that when people fall into these conversations and they start engaging with each other and they get into these echo chambers something starts happening with their values for some of them, for some of their values their values start to turn into sacred values now despite the label sacred it actually doesn't have to be religious at all actually a lot of these values can be liberal democratic values for some people freedom of speech is a sacred value civil liberty is a sacred value is any value that you would consider inviolable and non-negotiable and our team has been studying the role of sacred values and conflicts around the world from nation states like Israel and Palestine to non-state groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and even the PKK and generally what we find is that the more sacred values enter into a conflict the more intractable that conflict becomes and the higher the propensity towards violence but in order for us to really be able to say something about CVE to counter or prevent these things we knew that we had to get deeper than just looking at the role of sacred values in a conflict but looking at the role of sacred values within a person so I spent about three years in Barcelona doing about 800 surveys with a team of research assistants and a variety of interviews and was able to find some radicalized populations one of those populations about 30 guys who were avowed supporters of La Shkari Taiba and Al-Qaeda associate these people were supporters of armed jihad they were supporters of armed jihad against the west they even said that they would be willing to join a jihadist group or carry out an active jihad right in the west themselves and so once I got them and I knew what their sacred and non-sacred values where I did the next best thing that we could possibly think of doing to understand what role sacred values play internally we put them in a brain scanner and we scanned their brains on the first ever neuroimaging studies the first ever brain scan the first ever neuroscience studies actually done on radicalization and what we found was that when they were processing their sacred values a part of the brain called a DLPFC you can see it highlighted there in green this is a part of the brain that is associated with deliberative reasoning it's when you self-reflect it's when you engage in deliberative rational thought and reasoning this part of the brain deactivates when they're thinking about their sacred values it essentially goes offline now when they're thinking about their non-sacred values you have that part of the brain active and you have another part of the brain active the ventromedial prefrontal cortex the VMPFC there in red now for most of us in all of our decisions these two parts of the brain work in tandem the subjective value part and the deliberative reasoning part so most of you out there when you were having lunch you probably had a moment of thinking do I really want to crack open this bag of chips do I really want to eat this brownie I want to but that's going to be a lot of calories that might be unhealthy I just worked out this morning maybe I worked out last week and it'll undo all the benefits of that well that was your DLPFC and your VMPFC working together most of our decisions involved both of those areas and sure enough with our radicalized population when they had low willingness to fight and die for their values both of those areas were working in tandem however when they had high willingness to fight and die for their values which were mostly their sacred values and that's where we came from the DLPFC deactivates and there's no longer a connection between these two areas of the brain basically decision making is no longer being mediated by deliberative reasoning regions of the brain so our question became how do we reconnect these areas and reactivate deliberative reasoning regions all of our research on sacred value showed that it's incredibly hard to change a sacred value to desacralize a value it happens people do deraticalize values but it's idiosyncratic we have tried a variety of experiments tried to systematically do this and we have not been able to do it so we knew that we can't go after the values that usually leads to a backfire effect people become reticent, they become stubborn they sometimes increase their propensity towards violence when they feel like someone is challenging their values so we knew we had to come at it from a different tactic so we used something called manipulation of social consensus basically we made them think that one of them was just other Pakistanis living in Barcelona that their peer group disagreed with them about their willingness to fight and die for these values for half their values and half the values we used as a control where they agreed with them and so when the participants were looking at this disagreement they were willing to martyr themselves their in-group was not willing to martyr themselves they were upset, they were outraged they even got out of the scanner and we did a post-experiment survey with them they said that they were bothered by that and they said yes, they conformed they lowered their willingness to fight and die to actually conform to their peer groups and when they were conforming when they were actually moving towards the general consensus their perception of what the social norm is about violence the DLPFC, the part of the brain that was deactive came right back online and their willingness to fight and die as it lowered those two parts of the brain, the VMPFC and the DLPFC started working in tandem again they reconnected, deliberative reasoning came back online and it reconnected with subjective value now this has a few strategic communications implications on the one hand, again going back to mass persuasion if you don't know people's sacred values and you're just targeting messages out there and one size fits all if you're hitting their sacred values you're basically targeting your message towards a part of the brain that isn't even online at that moment you're not going to have an impact it's going to be deactivated and it certainly doesn't have any access to the subjective value part of the brain so you need to know what people's sacred values are but another problem is that people's sacred values vary from person to person even within just our 30 participants we had in this neuroimaging study they had different sets of sacred values between them so again, how is a one size fits all mass persuasion attempt actually going to have an impact when you don't really know which values your messaging might be able to have an impact on it goes back to that importance of person to person interaction and leveraging the social norms you don't have to change the beliefs you just change their perception of the norms you change their perception of what they think their peer group thinks is acceptable levels of violence, if anything, at all and this fits in quite well with a lot of post-conflict reconciliation research that's been done Elizabeth Pollock, another social psychologist did work on post-conflict reconciliation in Rwanda and what she found was she dropped radios into different parts of Rwanda different villages and for half the villages they had a reconciliation theme soap opera they were listening to and for the other half it was a health program when she came back a year later she found basically the same thing that we've been finding in all of our research people's beliefs didn't change the actual strategic communications didn't actually work at changing anyone's beliefs or values but what it did do is it changed their perception of the social norms they now believed that other in-group members believed that reconciliation was important even though they personally did not and that belief that change in perception of social norms led to a change in actual behavior including a 100% increase in cooperative behavior in the trial populations so again you don't actually need to change people's beliefs you just need to change what they think their peers think about violence or certain actions and what action pathways can be taken in order to change behavior so what does that mean? it means that we should be trying to amplify the voices that believe that are anti-violence basically that don't actually believe in these violent actions many people who join these groups come from communities where there are prevailing the prevailing norms are basically non-violent they don't support many of these groups but those voices aren't being heard those voices aren't being deafening those voices are not being amplified or if they are if the messaging is coming out it's coming out through some government organization or some unknown entity that's throwing out this mass persuasion as opposed to local voices having their voices amplified so again as the speakers before me were talking about you got to go local you got to go down into the friendship circles you got to go down to the community level if you want to change people's perception of social norms it's who they think is their in-groups norms that they ultimately care about and if you can change the norms you can change behavior you can increase cooperation you can increase reconciliation you can decrease propensity to violence you can literally change the circuitry of people's brains thank you maybe get some assistance okay good afternoon everyone my name is Teuta Avdemetay and I'm a researcher and policy advisor based in Kosovo I've been researching violent extremism in the Wester Balkans for over four years alongside with extremist propaganda as well as reintegration programs before I go on with my presentation I would like to take a minute to just for us to think you know when you think about drivers of violent extremism what are some of the main three factors that come to mind so usually whenever I ask this question to an audience usually the main response that I get include poor economic conditions so a search for a sense of belonging or a desire to belong to a greater cause as well as marginalization and more often than not what is missing may be trauma so as my presentation gives it away today I'm going to talk about trauma and violent extremism and I'm going to share some of my insights drawing on my experience interviewing family members of foreign fighters as well as women returnees in Kosovo from the foreign conflict zones in Syria and Iraq we've seen that in the recent years the field of violent extremism studies has been growing however we also notice that non-ideological factors such as trauma have received relatively less attention when we try to explain these kinds of phenomena so at the outset I think we should ask the question what is trauma how well do we understand it and how well are we able to identify it so in general terms trauma is defined as an emotionally scarring experience leaving someone with a deep sense of helplessness but more specifically as the American Psychiatric Association defines it trauma refers to as an exposure to actual or threatened death serious injury or sexual violence whether directly experiencing it witnessing it in person as it occurs to someone else hearing that it has happened to a close family member that you know or a friend or just hearing about it like all those details repeatedly as is the case of first responders and when we look at these elements that constitute trauma we also know that one of the context in which we find trauma to be quite prevalent and present at a great scale is during conflicts and during wars and this brings me to Kosovo so the country where I'm from 20 years ago experienced a terrible conflict so the conflict left around 13,000 people killed an estimated number of 20,000 women and men who were raped half the country's population or about 1 million people fleeing as refugees and around 1600 people still missing according to the World Health Organization so witnessing violence and cruelty is often associated with a range of psychological and behavioral problems including anxiety, depression, suicidal behavior as well as PTSD and recently there have been studies in Kosovo that show that even several years after the war ended rates of PTSD are still quite high among the civilian population who was exposed to trauma among the former refugees as well as the war veterans and this brings us to the next question so why is this issue and why should we consider this when we talk about PVE and CVE research we know now that violent extremism is a very complex process it's non-linear it's hard to predict and it's manifested through a broad spectrum however in order for us to understand the various factors that influence it it's important to broaden the range of these factors and again drawing in my experience conducted these interviews with these groups of individuals I believe that in the case of Kosovo especially trauma may be one of those understood factors that could help us understand the radicalization process of foreign fighters so just to put things into perspective from Kosovo there are around 255 foreign fighters who travel from Kosovo to Syria and most of them went through Turkey they took a very lengthy road and through various means of transport although the map is not supposed to illustrate the exact routes it's meant to illustrate the distance between these two countries and so again going back to why should we consider trauma when we think of PVE and CVE research I did not think of trauma as one of those more relevant factors going into this research however the more the interviews kept going on I noticed that trauma was becoming a recurring theme so vivid recollections of the war memories of the war started to become a pattern for instance in one case of a foreign fighter a quite prominent one I learned that while he was just a child he was exposed to extreme violence he witnessed as his sibling was heavily beaten as well as his mother was being tortured in another case in the case of one of the first ever foreign fighters from Kosovo just looking at one of the videos that he published in 2010 he talks about Islam under threat the narrative that we see being propagated many times later on but what's interesting to see is that during his video during his remarks he talks about he makes many references to the war he makes constant comparisons between the war in Kosovo and the conflict in Syria and he talks about brothers being tortured and brothers being raped and if you look at the background of this specific foreign fighter you'll notice that the place that he comes from has been one of those regions that was most affected by conflict and rape as a tool of war was quite widespread so in spite of these cases in spite of us understanding these bits and pieces from different cases there has been no serious effort until now to fully explore this link so this leaves us with a knowledge gap and there is no study that makes this evaluation whether there is a link between trauma and radicalization in Kosovo I say Kosovo but this can be also applicable in other similar contexts as well as beyond and this again leaves us with many questions so first of all does trauma play a role in the radicalization process if so to what extent and I think this is the overarching question just to help us think through this issue then how do foreign fighters differ from the general population in the way they internalize or externalize trauma so again if the general population or have the conscious population was in one way or another what makes this individual so different some studies on PTSD on those who try to determine PTSD rate seem to suggest that having strong social support system may be one of those factors but again this was not done in relation to foreign fighters this was done just in general the next question is how does previous were related trauma influence their susceptibility to extremist propaganda so how do these individual react when they hear these narratives of the liberator and their pressure how does this resonate with them does it resonate with them differently how is the foreign fighter with war related trauma different from a foreign fighter who has not experienced conflict previously so what is the difference between a foreign fighter from the UK and a foreign fighter from Kosovo in this case and even just as important how do we account for war related trauma in relation to other traumatic events so if we take war related trauma as a proxy in a way because we know that if you experience conflict you are likely to be exposed to trauma but we cannot exclude other traumatic events that may influence another throughout their lifetime so this is also something that we need to consider but in order for us to think through this question I do believe that it is important to have more research to look more in depth into these questions to explore the link between trauma and radicalization and especially in post conflict countries as well so if we determine or if trauma is indeed one of those factors that is relevant then it is going to have important implications especially for disengagement and reintegration programs so as countries are becoming more proactive in bringing back their citizens from the foreign conflict zones in Syria and Iraq I think it is important for us to explore this more in depth so not only previous war related trauma but even with these new population for example children who are growing up in Syria and Iraq so how does trauma factor into this and I think we should along with this other range of factors we should be paying greater attention to this we should focus on this and take this seriously and I believe that if we as researchers or as policy makers don't focus on this so the question become are we going to be able to break the cycle thank you good afternoon I am Alana Lancaster and I am a senior program officer in the center for applied conflict transformation and here at USIP and I would like to begin by showing you a video in just one moment thank you Kenya has a youth bulge the community kind of see youth as a challenge they find themselves marginalized we used opening learning circles we also used world cafes where they would write what they would feel is their response and we also used theaters of oppressed this process has helped the youth researchers to actually learn about the importance of democracy and active citizenship collectively the process of participatory action research is in itself building peace having young people participate in research work this is what I always wanted to see thank you what happens when your research project comes to an end you've collected your data spent countless hours analyzing four hours writing up your research you've targeted the appropriate journals or perhaps you've had some of those testy conversations with your publications team you submit your manuscript and with relief you turn your attention to everything that you have put on hold and you wait patiently or maybe not so patiently for a response from the editor no news is good news right the editorial team liked it and good enough to go out for peer review accepted with revisions revise and resubmit revisions are minor so you revise and resubmit congratulations published your colleagues think it's really good research strong research and this work will greatly contribute to the field of knowledge but what happens next not for you but for the communities where you conducted your research what are the impacts on the lives of the people with whom you worked we stand here today with an offering and the offering is par participatory action research the three of us Munira skip Felix and I believe that par has a lot to offer you researchers practitioners policymakers and at the same time we argue that par has even more to offer the communities who are most directly affected by extremism and who safety and well-being are why we do the work I'm a relative new kid on the block I came to this work to this VE PVE space in July 2015 when I joined the institute one of my first tasks was to design and deliver the third of three workshops on P CVE VE to a group of education stakeholders from Africa and in Middle East and I was quite confident in my ability to design deliver and engaging one week workshop for educators as I come from an education background but I was less than confident in my ability to design a solid training engagement on CVE but like any good academic refugee transitioning back into the practitioner space I turned to the literature and what I found was this I think you know this all very well violent extremism is highly locally contextualized small-scale initiatives are better than national and large-scale programs like violence and there's limited research on the relationship between education and CVE what I couldn't find at all was community-led research in this space research in which the communities themselves identify the area of inquiry determine the research design and analyze the data collected by the end of 2015 Skip and I had joined forces and in January 2016 successfully facilitated the training in which education stakeholders from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Jordan came together and explored the ways in which participatory approaches can be used with vulnerable youths youth in communities that's my Kenyan English youths and communities in addressing the root causes of radicalization it was successful and by late 2016 we had secured a small amount of funding to pilot a participatory action research project with USIP generation change fellows the project kicked off in 2017 with the aim of elevating and amplifying the work of youth peace builders youth need to be seen as active producers of knowledge rather than passive recipients of knowledge generated by others knowledge generated by communities must be recognized and understood as legitimate that was the aim of this pilot project and it was actually at 7 August 7 Memorial Park in Nairobi where I met Munira Hi everyone I was born bred and educated in Mombasa I have worked as a community volunteer a social worker and a peace builder I'm the co-founder of Lonamak an acronym that stands for 3 Counties found in Kenya that is Loitoktok, Nanyuki and Machakos Lonamak is a community based organization in the heart of Mombasa founded by a group of volunteers in 2015 which core operations are the achievement of UN resolution in 2020 creation of self spaces for women affected through VE and the empowerment of local communities my journey as a peace builder was at its peak during the 2014 Masjid Mosa attacks in Mombasa County the mosque was being used as an indoctrination cell unfortunately by the lead Imam Abudwogo the clashes between the young people and the police raiding the masjid led to tensions across the county and the country respectively after that we saw an influx from civil society organizations international organizations and which had a lot of focus around research on the root causes of violent extremism the research was basically unfortunately extractive it had the traditional methodology of specifically targeting people like myself who had the courage to speak about radicalization in Mombasa when no one had the courage later learned wanted to be associated with terror related aspects the environment was tense when disappearances and killings of prominent sheikhs and imams took place and Mombasa was a hotbed of terrorism and cooperation amongst community leaders for peacekeeping and radicalization was minimal however in 2015 we formed a community based organization called LONAMAC which created peace and cohesion in a non-coercive manner as a part of USIP's participatory action research pilot program LONAMAC conducted research in 3 sub counties within Mombasa so these 3 sub counties are actually the hotpots for not only radicalization but for also organized crime and when I say organized crime I'm talking about the gang kind of culture PAR is a very participatory research approach that centrally places the community as the drivers of change communities have been in the past been used as data providers you know enumerators and validators in traditional research approaches however PAR provides the community with knowledge and power to shape and change their communities in all their different local ways all this was evident during the workshop in which every member of the community was represented so this workshop basically had members from the county government civil society faith based organization, youth led organizations, NGOs the workshop's main objective was to create a statistical platform for community members to share out their challenges and problems as well the output of the second workshop which is I think this is where the magic happened which is the research design workshop was creatively and smartly forming the research question so basically in your traditional ways of research you usually have a research question at the back of your head right but with PAR what comes out of such kind of an interactive conversation is what actually forms the research question so the research question is a contribution of everyone in the room and necessarily what you think as the researcher I know this is very radical since the musted moosa attacks youth in mombasa have had a disconnect to the police however the PAR process has helped to bridge this gap during the data collection phase researchers who are local youth who have had a range of basic primary secondary and some who have gone to college engaged senior government leaders as active citizens PAR has transformed our community-based organizations in the sense that bigger NGOs now recognize the work we do at the grassroots level as youth-led organizations like Clonomac and my fellow PAR facilitator who could not make it his name is Sungora who runs the manyata youth entertainment organization and right now we see it as members of the CV engagement forum which is a macro entity body responsible for coordinating PV programming at the county level I'd like to welcome Skip there you go Thank you Manera I'm Felix or better known around here at the institute as Skip but I did show up today so so why is this important what does this kind of process mean for research and what does it mean specifically for all of you as researchers into CBE well let's start from a purely utilitarian perspective PAR helps us as outside researchers have a better set of more grounded data our partners in the community have deeper relationships and more clear understandings of the dynamics in the community they can steer us in new directions that we may be blind to cognitively as researchers or often like the man who's dropped his keys at night under a lamp post did you drop your keys under the lamp post sir no no I didn't drop them there but that's where the light is we often build these these cognitive lamp posts out of our own preconceived ideas we're only looking for answers where we already expect they're going to find them working with community researchers pushes us you as the researcher have to give up some of your power and let the local researchers go in directions that are clear to them this change in power relations is at the heart and core of PAR work PAR is very different it doesn't sit within a positivist paradigm of knowledge creation PAR is a constructivist approach to building knowledge in CBE we aren't going to find one universal answer to this issue what works is going to be contextual and impacted by local factors and local actors those nuances can be more readily brought to light through dynamic engagement with the community where the local co-researchers find solutions that make sense within their specific milieu because power is core to PAR the process of conducting participatory research helps the co-researchers become more aware of how power works in their lives both positively and negatively they find language to talk about the structural power issues that they know surround them but they may have difficulty articulating through PAR they also understand how better to enhance their own power to act collectively and to harness the power research as a practical tool for change just don't take it on the airplane because we as professional researchers often limit the role of local partners only to data collection the fullness of the research process remains unclear to these partners design as Manera has discussed analysis, writing reports and using the findings to influence change these seem like skills that only research superheroes with advanced degrees can accomplish through PAR however the process and use of research are demystified the co-researchers in the community understand better how research happens from start to finish and how it can be leveraged to create change and meaningful impact where they are in this way PAR opens up possibility for change happening at multiple levels simultaneously we as the outside researchers use our traditional inputs out traditional outputs to leverage for policy change or building theory within our professional spaces the co-researchers on the ground use their findings to work for change simultaneously at the grassroots moreover they now have the tools to carry out their own work, their own research they embed these skills within local organizations and governmental bodies they train up others to use these same tools we have seen this with our team in Kenya the organization that Manera founded and discussed, Lanamak has embedded this tool in their community work the same has happened for her partner and co-facilitator in this work Nicolas Sangora, who Manera mentioned his organization now uses participatory research methods as the central mechanism for how the organization engages with community and conducts learning moreover the youth researchers who are part of this overall process are weaving these tools into their own work outside of these organizations whether that be as community mediators as people who are working directly in the area as a CVE or even as coaches building more collaborative sports teams this is the great thing about PAR everyone can utilize these tools in the spaces and communities where they are in this way PAR is valuable because it creates the opportunity for ongoing impact and change through capacity that is built in the local group to support ongoing work and research independent of the original process that builds the capacity of co-researchers in the community and provides practical tools for them to continue using research as a force for change long after the outright outside research has wrapped up so to emphasize this point in particular keep in mind that our project with USIP in Mumbasa ended about 18 months ago the reports have been written everything has been published our pilot project has ended and the story of PAR in Mumbasa County isn't yet finished as illustrated by Dr. Ilana in SCIP PAR is what we find useful as PVE practitioners at the grassroot level and I now stand in front of you as the county director for CVE at the governor's office in Mumbasa County and to be honest we have incorporated PAR into our policy in how we program and the way we conduct research through PAR we conduct research on how as a county government we are able to reintegrate returnees back to their communities and how do we formulate a reintegration framework so if you look at the county government mandates one of our mandates is the social services so right now we are conducting a research on how do we link our social workers into learning how to reintegrate returnees back to the community but also not forgetting that reintegration in our county currently is the work of the state government so we are looking at how do we connect the nexus between what the national government is doing what the county government is doing in able to reintegrate returnees back to the community as a community based organization LONAMAC is integrating PAR as a research methodology into finding out the roles and impacts of women as returnees and foreign fighters in the country with the recent dosage Nairobi attack security analysis distinguish that women are no longer VE victims but perpetrators as well participatory action research is a bottom-up approach that helps the government learn from the community it is what VPV practitioners and researchers have been looking for before I joined the county government I co-founded LONAMAC and it is because of PAR that now we are able to connect or rather get a feeling of you know you've worked for the community before and now you're in government so for me my work is much easier because of the PAR process and we have created one of the best strategies in the world that's the Mombasa County action plan for PVE that's a multi-agency approach in the fight against extremism our governor who is also the chairperson of the steering committee working group under the Strong Cities Network recently commissioned research that uses PAR outside the CV spaces in a different sector altogether which is economics so I think we stand here offering you PAR as a useful approach widening the field of research and extremism PAR generates actionable knowledge PAR deepens engagement with community provides community with powerful tools to address extremism at grassroots level provides locally informed solutions and expands our network of allies long after our time on the ground comes to an end if you're interested in learning more about our work in Kenya with PAR we have publications outside so thank you very much for your time and attention thank you so much to everyone who spoke in this last session we are going to break quickly for our last coffee break following the coffee break we are going to have two back to back panels so we hope that everybody can enjoy a little bit more free time coffee over the next 30 minutes and then we will see you back here in this room for our rest of our afternoon it's coming up probably till the end of the year early next year so it's like taking notes probably on that how to deliver and keep people okay so the presentation of parts of the brain with it I've not seen that before how do you fix the ribs in there by in London okay we need to I've never met him before well you know I was talking about that I've done this I'm sure it really impacts how far you can get I've done it I think it shows you wife there how many of you have their own role here and their own actress how many people say what you're right there's all kinds of yeah I imagine yeah right yeah I've been fighting that since the police last night I'm not bouncing back actually my last trip to the US when I got back to London it just took so much longer to adjust yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah good afternoon everyone I think we're about to start the final stretch of today's events my name is Georgia Homer I advise on counter-terrorism and CVE policy at the organization for security and cooperation in Europe I'm based at the secretariat in Vienna but I'm also formerly the director at USIP so I am Leanne Erberg's predecessor and I have to say how wonderful it is to be back here back in this building, back in this community this is a place that you never really leave and it's a place that never really leaves you so it's very special for me to be back here in Washington and very special to be back here at the Institute of Peace we have a very wonderful panel lined up this afternoon on the issue of disengagement from violent groups and I can tell you from my perch at the OSCE that this is a topic that has singularly seized the international community mostly in the context of dealing with returning foreign fighters and their families I think we're going to talk about it a little bit more broadly we have some brilliant researchers here with us today in the context of the conflict in Iraq and Syria but we'd like to talk more broadly about some of their trends and research that have to do with disengagement from violence in violent groups as many of you know some of the issues that are being faced with dealing with the returnees have to do with the very specific needs and concerns surrounding children it has to do with very specific experience of having been exposed to trauma in a conflict zone it has to do with the issues surrounding the capacity of the criminal justice sector to respond to the needs and issues that these returning groups face and it also has to do with the details around what happens in the non-custodial or post-prison environment when individuals need to be reintegrated back into the communities some of these are the communities in which they radicalized in the first place so there's a whole host of issues we hope to touch on in the next hour and we're going to start with some opening remarks from our three panelists but let me start by introducing them to you and tell you a little bit about their backgrounds so to my immediate left there with me here we have Dr. David Mallett Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University he previously served as the Director of Security Policy Studies at George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs and he is the author of Foreign Fighters Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts which was published in 2013 if I'm not correct next to him we have Dr. Shiraz Mayer who is the Director of the International Center on the Study of Radicalization at King's College London he also leads the Center's research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and is also an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and last but not least we have Dr. Lisa Search who is a research fellow for the Toda Peace Institute where she directs the Institute's Social Media and Peace Building Program Lisa many of you know her as a peace builder she is also on the International Review panel of G-SURF and in 2018 she published a book on the ecology of violent extremism which very much integrates a peace building lens into the topic of addressing that form of violence so we're going to start with David here and I'm going to open up the question of asking what are the current trends and research that we're seeing around disengagement from violent groups and how would you characterize what's happening in that space well thank you Georgia I guess this is going to be the panel of slides so we'll navigate those I think a picture is worth a thousand words so I can cut down a lot of words by just showing you a couple of quick graphics green button, other green button okay that's there we go when we look at I'll put this back for one second when we look at the question of FTFs and returnees, often times it's presented as sort of a binary question of are returnees a threat and perhaps can the threat be mitigated by not permitting their return one question that I was interested in with Rachel Hayes and I published a study actually that came out last year that looked at the question of returning FTFs and the question of how long are they a threat and what do we know about what they do and what do we learn and just really quickly looking at a couple of hundred cases we found that the average returnee who does become involved in domestic extremism attack or attempted attack does so within approximately six months of returning less than that there are a few outliers beyond that but when we're going to focus on this is just the grass scatterplot looking at the time can see clusters down at the bottom and they're really between 1980 and 19 at the other end there hasn't been any variation the different conflicts Afghanistan and Syria haven't really mattered in that impact so there's nothing changing in that regard the lag time between returning and some sort of extremist action is for most of them less well under a year so what this basically means is that when we are concerned about security or we're concerned about directing reintegration resources there's this critical window within the first few months that we've gone on rather than perhaps a long-term question of reintegration beyond that and one thing I should note that's relevant to current debates is that prison hasn't been a factor because if somebody is going to engage in a terrorist plot they do so within such a short amount of time that they've not gone to prison so we haven't seen people coming out we haven't seen attacks plots or attacks delayed by prison sentences at this point so I'm going to go back to the first question looking at the question of what happens to those who don't return and we were able to find 54 what we're calling career foreign fighters and it turns out that they are on the average of two and a half conflicts about a third of them a quarter of them were active previously and about a third of them are active when they return we broke them down, we're looking at career progression we sort of broke them down between the executive mid-level and then operational foot soldiers and you know there's a slight those who are in leadership positions have been in slightly more conflicts something like 2.8 versus 2.2 but what we're finding is that in terms of their prior experience it's actually the mid-level operatives who were active in domestic extremism first we tend to focus on the impact of being a foreign fighter on what you do as a domestic extremist afterwards but it looks like there may actually be some experience gained at home it's actually important for what they do in the field whether they're a leader or not doesn't seem to matter much in terms of how active they are when they return if you look at the conflicts this has been the case, a lot of people went to Afghanistan first Bosnia, I mean obviously those were longer ago so that makes sense we're seeing Syria not so much yet as a first time destination there's a place that people have gone afterwards as repeat foreign fighters and then finally just looking at career progression with three being the foot soldiers and the leaders, I think the most important finding for us is that most of the people who come in as foot soldiers don't stay at that level they tend to progress into leadership so by having individuals who don't return home you're actually looking at the possibility of them impacting other conflicts gaining more experience becoming leadership positions later on so within that context I'll just wind it back within that within that context within that context when we look at trends we're finding that people who have been extremists abroad are basically participating at the same rate that they have been in the past, this could change because we have new policies in relation to Syria but recidivism happens at a lower level than it does for domestic terrorists or common criminals and part of the reason for that more work needs to be done on this is that many of them report being very disillusioned we're seeing high incidences of PTSD which were not reported in the past and so these need to be taken into consideration when we're crafting policies to address reintegration I'll just follow up very quickly on that and build on that with a few remarks which is I think if we're looking at the field and where academics who look at this issue from all sides of the perspective are agreed upon really a lot of the mistakes that we've made in the past we have this very high number of detainees right now former ISIS fighters who are held by the Syrian Democratic Forces principally in northeastern Syria and there isn't any kind of really well conceived plan at the moment by a number of countries about what should be done lots of people have posed different ideas and I think what's particularly interesting is that there's a huge disconnect right now between politicians across the world who are quite happy to say we've defeated ISIS we heard that earlier today as well and that was of course the headline statement which does speak to the loss of the territorial dimension of this group but doesn't speak to its other aspects of its identity which is that it remains an insurgency that is active in parts of Syria and Iraq and of course it remains a potent terrorist organization which again retains a capacity and capability to act both regionally but also internationally as well and what's particularly striking now is we are essentially repeating many of the errors that were made in Iraq after 2003 where we gathered lots of really serious guys from al-Qaeda put them together in Kambuka and then did nothing about it and we had individuals who returned more or less immediately to their activities and went on to create ISIS and so there's some really interesting research which shows and has built upon interviews of people who were held in Kambuka who at some point said it was really difficult for us all to get together on the outside but once we were in prison the Americans brought us together essentially we created the spaces in which these individuals were able to socialize building on David's point here is really important there is no off-ramp you are creating avenues for people to say I'm 24, I'm 20 who were in leadership positions precisely because they had fought in other theaters before and a lot of the work we did at ICSR back in London was actually looking at this idea of what's your sort of progression if you are a foreign fighter arriving into theater in 2013-14 for example firstly you are most likely to stick within your linguistic cluster if you are an English speaker from the UK you are hung out with English speakers if you were a French speaker you hung out with French speakers and so on given that a lot of these individuals were arriving with no combat experience they occupied lower level foot soldier front line kind of positions but the ones who broke free of those strictures were individuals who had precisely that kind of prior combat experience they came in knowing what to do they generally had learned the language as well because they were able to speak Arabic and therefore were able to progress and get on through the movement so we're seeing a very clear repeat of this and whilst there's a lot of divergence within the academic community in terms of how we might best tackle this I think everyone's agreed on the fact that what's being done right now is a repetition of the failures of the past and so we're kind of heading I think in this rather slow motion disaster to what we've seen I'm not happy no I'll pass over to my colleague so if you don't mind if you could take us maybe outside of the ISIS context and especially since we're talking about repeating mistakes and talk about maybe where we could learn from other other contexts okay I'll do that but I'm going to start actually in Iraq pre-ISIS and that was in 2006 I want to tell two stories one in Iraq one Afghanistan in 2006 I worked with Iraqi peace building organizations who had a methodology that I think prevented their own young people from joining ISIS later and their methodology was this they would go into a community and it was very much participatory action research where the community would determine its development priorities whether it wanted education water healthcare etc and then the community would really do the hard work of building cross boundary relationships between Sunni Shia between Kurdish and Arab and as the community stitched that together they were taking conflict resolution courses and really starting to manage and lead their own community in a governing way that was inclusive of all the different stakeholders in that community and what they later found is these communities with this governance structure did not have young people joining ISIS so that's the first story the second story is from Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012 I was working in Kabul with a variety of different Afghan peace building organizations and these people had had two decades of work mediating land conflicts water conflicts within tribal regions so they brought a lot of experience to the table and they were very critical of the DDR model that was being used by ISAF at that point which involved some small payments to entice people to leave the Taliban and reintegrate into their communities and what Afghan peace builders were saying and the model that they were working on was and I was part of the training team for teaching all of these leaders how to do mediation about local grievances so as people were leaving the Taliban they were actually being part of a community gathering where there was a trained mediator representatives from the government different tribal groups and they were trying to deal with the local drivers and grievances that were fueling why people were entering the Taliban in the first place because the same Afghan peace building organizations had done extensive research on why fence sitters were joining the Taliban sort of if they were sitting in between government and Taliban why were they joining the Taliban and the main theories of change by the international donors at that point was extremist religion and unemployment so you saw most of the money being channeled to counter narratives religious education and employment generation but what they found is those were not the main drivers of people joining the Taliban the main drivers were very local grievances having to do with corruption and governance often having a tribal ethnic dimension because many of us know about the government Taliban conflict but underneath that there is a whole history of ethnic tensions that hasn't really been dealt with through any of the peace processes so those are driving people to join but then the second was of course what we now know because it's been replicated by the Global Terrorism Index and many other research centers that the sense of humiliation and the sense that the foreign forces were humiliating the dignity and the identity of the country and the region and the people and the religion that sense of humiliation of foreign forces was the other key driver so much of the programming wasn't going into addressing those drivers and that's why many would say the DDR programs weren't working it was sort of buying people off was more like short term rental and they went back into the system so I think those two stories and many other of my experiences working in East Africa, working in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and many other places that are facing the challenge of violent extremism and terrorism helped me develop this model in the book that we mentioned earlier the ecology of violent extremism where the peace building approach is trying to sort of back up to that context to those local grievances so requiring an in-depth stakeholder consultation to outline what the drivers are and really that peace building isn't so much competing with PCVE or counter-terrorism because they each are working within a different time frame so the very short-term immediate threat would be a counter-terrorism response, you know, the midterm targeted trying to reduce and the vulnerability or support the resilience of vulnerable communities is PCVE and peace building is looking at the kinds of factors that actually create civil war suicide violent extremism, you know there are a lot of things emerging from societies where there's not social cohesion and there's a weak state-society relationship so this model and then this next diagram just shows from a conflict resolution or a peace building approach sees this necessity that we've talked about a lot today of a multidisciplinary approach that deals with the individual, the identity issues, the community grievance issues, the national ideological and the global network exchange so really a multi-tiered multi-perspective approach which we call peace building is necessary to address these many different drivers Thanks, Lucia, I want to pick up one idea you said about understanding the reasons people join as being part of the calculus and figuring out why they disengage and actually asked the panel that question if understanding the dynamics around radicalization of joining or being recruited translates into what you need to understand around disengagement and rehabilitation and if they have any reflections on that because what we want to get to here is a conversation about how and why people are leaving these movements so could I open that up to the audience? All right, well, I'll grasp the nettle first. I think based on what we've heard earlier today as well and I think everyone in the room would agree there are multiple pathways into radicalization, people's motivations are extremely varied and the primary thing that's keeping them involved will also vary but also it's likely to evolve over time again if I use the conflict I know most about in Syria and Iraq radicalization changes in the sort of self-narrative that these individuals telling themselves about why they were there, what they were hoping to achieve so you could see earlier on a lot of humanitarian narrative and that sort of notion that we've come here to help, we've come to respond to what we've seen as a humanitarian crisis and then that evolution into we're not here to serve people, we're here to serve God and so even that story the individual were telling themselves was evolving very, very quickly but also dramatically and I think a lot of that is reflected in what we see in terms of some of the more prominent I wouldn't say successful but certainly prominent in the ones that you're able to access de-radicalization or disengagement programs that operate in the Middle East so if I take the example of the Saudi rehabilitation center which I've been to now three times I think there are some people in this room who have been because I've seen you there you know you can see different I should say as visitors not as sort of inmates you see very different things so there is a clear financial imperative for people to leave and it's a very open path of the program you are financially incentivized to leave but not just you but your community as well so your tribal connections sort of pulled upon and it's really brought into a broader sort of social investment of everyone around you has an interest in you not going back to what it was you were up to but coupled alongside that are also very dense and weighty theological discussions and we've seen again the Egyptians or the Libyan Islamic fighting group as well have these large recantation initiatives which are focused much more on the theological aspect and the other sort of reasons of why you want to not do something so on so I think we're at the same point of divergence with deradicalization and or disengagement as we are with radicalization in that it will most likely be a case by case basis and I'll stop with this and I think that's a point we've seen in the UK at least in the way that its flagship program prevent has evolved over the best part of a decade going from everything that we heard about earlier we don't have large national programs that are fairly generic versus now which is in essence the sort of front of channel taking the personal individual and trying to work out what it is about them that has led them to start to embrace or embrace extremist ideas and then to tailor a specific intervention around them which has input from a number of agencies in the UK in order to have a sort of specific program for that individual and it does operate in the shadows quite a bit we've asked for a lot more access to data but it does seem to have a relative degree of success and it doesn't just operate with jihadis but with the far right as well let me just add on to that because I wanted to talk about trauma and the Saudi center for reintegration actually really does focus on trauma recovery trauma healing whatever you want to call it through art therapy through counseling music therapy very creative ways actually and what's interesting about this is the trauma narrative of understanding how early childhood trauma or even more recent trauma is affecting young white nationalist young men who shoot down people with guns in this country often there is a trauma analysis which is interesting and kind of conserving because some of the other analysis of where that's coming from is often missing but that trauma analysis has rarely been used in the international center and certainly I think the Saudis have really been clear that addressing trauma is part of the reintegration process so I think a lot of well we've heard today that we still don't know how to identify who is going to radicalize we can look at pathways it's I think it's a similar concern about deradicalization and disengagement there's no one way out there's been focus on narratives on ideological justifications I think there's a focus as well on individual efficacy that matters and Lisa was just talking about this in terms of not just in trauma but some of the things we were mentioning earlier about programs community level grievances I think one thing that we should look at is that there are a lot of narratives in the world but we don't think that they all necessarily apply to us we all see stories about people in need people hurting and we don't say it's my responsibility to do something about this and what extremist groups of different stripes do and especially using J.M. Berger's definition of extremism with focus on group identity is that they make the focus on this is your level identity that matters this is the one that requires action reducing the pull of those types of identities and whether you want to use different social science terms like cross cutting cleavages or intersectionality the fact is everyone has different levels of identity everyone has different responsibilities different roles to different facets of their identities different groups and so by giving people a sense of efficacy perhaps or giving the sense of responsibility whether it's at the family level or the community level that they can have an impact I think would go a long way towards addressing some of these issues let's go back to this topic of trauma because we heard about this earlier today too and how exposure to war trauma is something that contributes to vulnerability to radicalization and it's something that is featuring in this particular demographic that we're talking about coming out of Iraq and Syria so thank you for putting that on the table Lisa could I ask the other speakers to reflect a little bit more about how this issue of a PTSD or experience of trauma is informing some of the responses towards rehabilitation or disengagement or perhaps some of the choices around disengagement and motivations towards it if they are I think there's a long way to go in this regard I was actually at a great resolve event on Monday here listening to some of the work that's being done on the Balkans about previous work on childhood traumas from war experience and the impact of that so I think we need more studies showing that in the case of Western countries people going off and becoming FTFs which has been the counter-terrorism pre-eminent concern in the last few years it's less trackable it's less obvious without getting a sense of individual profiles after somebody has already gone and traveled I think there are certain risk factors we've talked about developing types of individuals, at least categories for examining pathways into radicalization the work, as I understand it is still pretty rudimentary at this point it's not something I've worked with people directly in the field about Lisa maybe I think it's important to realize that there may be some kind of correlation between trauma and vulnerability to violent extremism I also think it's not everybody so there's many different pathways and when we were working in East Africa several years ago and then I participated with Department of Defense conflict analysis of what was driving young people in East Africa to join El Shabaab the thing that came out that correlated within that context is that there were so few pathways for advancement for these young men it was the most ambitious the most entrepreneurial actually in some sense the least traumatized with the ones with the most capacity were the ones who were becoming enticed with the idea of leading an El Shabaab segment so I think it's important to look at trauma and also to realize in some context it's really quite different and I think for reintegration then you're also thinking about some communities lost their most talented young people they're young people with the greatest leadership skills who left the community and went to join and lead violent extremist groups and carry out terrorism so there's actually a huge potential in thinking about channeling that kind of leadership in a different direction so there's like sensitivity to trauma is necessary and also kind of seeing the real capacity that exists with some of these groups I'll just make two very very quick points I'm glad you actually I should have mentioned the point in Saudi about the therapy and the rehabilitation if you're unfamiliar with this I would just go online and look at it there's an art therapy element to it and it's surreal I mean it is really surreal because you have these hardened individuals who are fought in foreign conflicts who are now it's just worth watching there's videos of it floating around the internet so I encourage you to take some time I'll talk again just about one other aspect of this which we haven't really touched upon but it is a latent problem it is a huge problem again bringing it back to Syria and Iraq which is the sheer number of children who are now again not just in those communities but who have actively been raised by fighters by competence who are again being held in such a secure conditions and so adding to the trauma is this further sense of humiliation and is a further sense of insecurity and it's basic human insecurity but winter is coming these are not comfortable tents to live in at the best of times the conditions are very very trying and challenging as it is and on top of that you have associated impacts of whether it's PTSD or other mental health issues that are related to this encouraging a new generation to walk this path is of course very very high and again there is not particularly significant political will to challenge this issue head on but it does require a pretty swift intervention we actually have a huge stack of questions and I think enough time to get through some of them so I'm going to turn to the audience questions now thank you for the opening reflections the first one actually is specifically for you Shiraz it's regarding the camp and the role that it played in bringing together militants and extremists and allowing them to organize and mobilize after their release and the question is given the conditions in Iraq and Syria today versus that of 2004 to 2011 given the different population of today's camps such as the women and children in residence as well how might the threat trajectory differ today is the question let me see if there is an anonymous question that's a great question I think the threat is a lot more acute in many senses today all of the underlying structural issues that we would have spoken about in relation to Iraq post-2003 in Syria pre-2011 have been exacerbated so that broader aspect I was talking about just basic human security if I were a Sunni taxi driver living in Mosul or in Raqqa life today is a lot worse than it was even under Islamic State just a few years ago the exposure to vulnerability the exposure to a political class either in Damascus or Baghdad is making me uncertain about my future but as you say it's a huge number now of women who have been very active and conscious and playing their own roles within these organizations now in a more pronounced way that they haven't done in the past and then children which are a new dynamic here again in quite significant numbers they've either been exposed to indoctrination by these groups if you follow Islamic State propaganda you will have seen lots of videos in which children were used as executioners or any children who are just growing up now and coming into their consciousness in these camps who are being fed this narrative what is very interesting and we haven't been to the camps inside Syria yet but you can see it in Raqqa to a lesser extent as well is that the women at least are much more open in terms of their ongoing support and commitment to Islamic State and again there's a lot of a reportage which talks about this and the sort of brazenness of that campaign we will come and get us out, Baghdadi will return we will revive the caliphate once again and so on and so forth there's a lot more open dogmatism there and I'm not sure why that is the case if you've seen again the interviews with male detainees particularly of western there's a lot of denial of what was really happening you would think ISIS was a dining club based on what most of them are claiming to have done just being chefs and cooks and whatnot so there's a lot of denial going on because I think they're worried much more about being turned over to local custody and of course no one wants to end up in Syrian State custody in particular so I think there's a lot of denial going on there but all of those underlying issues to my mind are worse today and so this is something that I've been really going on about a lot in various audiences such as to say the political world to start to look at how we collectively deal with this and it's worth saying there's huge division even between very close allies Britain and the United States are in wild disagreement about what should happen about these detainees the United States has repeatedly and rightly in my opinion criticised the British Government for its approach which has been to completely wash its hands of those who are in detention in a lot of cases to strip those individuals of their British citizenship to precisely force them down the road that David was talking about becoming career terrorists and so we are displacing this problem but essentially elongating it because these are individuals who now if they get the opportunity to leave their current detention have no prospect but to go back to the fight and to come back even stronger and harder than they did before so I'm afraid that outlook isn't particularly optimistic This next question is asking is a follow on David I think to your description of career foreign fighters and the related recidivism rates and the question is how does the experience of FTF differ from that of more traditional mercenaries and I think the question is specifically in terms of repeat experiences and recidivism Well labels are always a tricky thing whether it's terrorism or whether it's whether it's foreign fighters or mercenaries I would just say that we have historically if you look beyond just jihadis just beyond the formally designated FTFs we have hundreds of thousands of people who have been foreign fighters for what you would think of as extremist causes whether they're ideological groups ethnic groups probably the biggest one would have been the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s after that was over the League of Nations to send people back home and gave them pocket money to help ease their way back I guess if you're going to look at people in similar movements what has happened with ISIS is not necessarily unprecedented you had revolutionary Russia and China encouraged people to come from the west to be doctors to be teachers offered women special status in shopping districts recruited some from the Canadian parliament and from the Manhattan project to come teach and be farmers and things like that and it's not just about the children and most of the men most of the men not all end up returning to western countries and not making a big splash afterwards I don't say that everybody takes an off ramp when they're given it but most people probably do and I think that's been our experience with FTFs throughout time So here's a question that really asks about the nature of de-radicalization programming and its relevance to conflict resolution Lisa say if you mind I might throw this one your direction it says in addition to conflict resolution classes what other methods could be recommended for addressing the grievances that are found that might be relevant to de-radicalization and does this apply as a de-radicalization program So I also wanted to get out of the Middle East context and talk about white nationalism which I'm grateful that many people today have already mentioned this So as I look at my community in rural Virginia there is a lot of white nationalism we have one of the largest white nationalist radio TV programs that shows around the world and you know this thought of how are we going to address this and reintegrate I mean it's when the scale is these are not fringe group this is the mainstream of society it becomes a bit of a challenge then so what does reintegration actually mean within the American society but I think the issue that we haven't spent very much time today talking about is social cohesion which is really the focus of a lot of peace building work so what is driving young people to join white nationalist groups in rural Virginia is similar to they certainly look a lot like the Taliban they drive trucks and they have flags out the back so my street in Rockingham County looks very similar to the street I lived on in Kabul in terms of threats and there's a lot of guns everywhere but I think it's less of a question about their relationship with the state and more about the fragmentation of American society and of course social media has exacerbated that but is not completely responsible for that we have a long history of polarization and racial injustice and racial tension that needs to be addressed that issue of social cohesion though I think is a main lens to look at reintegration in every place where it exists in Myanmar with the buddhas Muslim in Israel Palestine with the radical Jewish groups and their approach to Palestinians sort of everywhere you look if you look through a social cohesion lens you can see work that needs to be done to stitch how people view each other how they perceive their own identity and whether there's a potential of work to be done that gets to some of the conversation earlier today where the perception is that an identity can exist without a death threat from another group or this sort of other group so how fear is dealt with in the society and what kind of programs are stitching people together and what kind of social cohesion is that and what kind of social cohesion is it? So Kyle from Equal Access is asking us to give some specific examples of lessons from programs that create off-ramps for those associated with violent extremist groups and he has an interesting question here about whether it's possible to replicate or scale or build a social cohesion would anyone like to talk about specific programs and some of the learning that's come out of them? Hi Kyle So when I first started looking at we're not talking only about FTLs but in terms of building alternative identities so the particular holds of groups with extremist calls would be mitigated by saying you have other obligations you have other interests I've been thinking about this in terms of national identity that there are national service institutions whether it's military or something else that would give people a sense of tie to their country. The political reality these days in a lot of countries is it's harder to build sort of a pluralistic civic nationalism so I think perhaps an emphasis can be on civil society groups on giving people alternatives I know that the UK in particular has some sport based there in some ways very similar to crime prevention programs in this country with midnight basketball leagues in the 1990s there's very limited research on how effective those were but what studies there have been show that the cities that have them everybody's crime rates fell in the 90s but those cities fell most fastest so I can easily imagine if somebody wants to feel like they are making a difference in the world if somebody wants to save people whether it's just sort of paramedic work or just programs there's opportunities like that that could be invested in. I think the most important factor for this in the first instance is the sort of ability to get people off that ramp without criminalizing them so prevent does this quite a lot in the UK as mentioned through channel as an intervention aimed at the individual and a lot of that is also saying it's not just challenging them but it's saying if you continue down this path it is likely you will fall foul of legislation which talks about X or Y this could lead to custodial sentencing and so on it's kind of fronting you up to show you where your life could be headed packaged in and around some of that broader engagement work that we're talking about and actually the slide that's still up contextual factors again shows the sort of plethora of different ways then in which you will attempt to pull on that individual but that D-Ride also takes place or disengagement stuff still takes place with those in the criminal justice system as well so those who are serving custodial sentences so it is a broader aspect to that. I think the scalability of it or like creating these things outside of their regions wouldn't work because I've spent a lot of time as I've mentioned already looking at the ones in the Middle East the Saudi one is the most well developed but there are similar ones in the UAE and so on but what's interesting about it is you could never replicate those outside the region you just simply couldn't the idea of giving financial inducements to individuals to get them to move away from it clearly not fly in any western state but what's also really interesting is that it plays upon the reality of the relationship between the individual and the state in those countries so we have the social contract and a particularly sort of different kind of relationship with our governments in the west versus the kind of relationship that you have in the Middle East so in Saudi Arabia it's very much spoken about and talked about to this notion that the ruling classes are the sort of parents and you're all the children and so in the DRAT centre they say we are being forgiven in the way that you might tell your child off if they do something wrong but you don't necessarily ground them for a week so just stop it and that's your right essentially to decide how you're going to engage with your child so others are also saying look that's okay you know our brother here fell on hard times and the government has chosen to support him and to do various things so it works very much within the particular confines and I think it does enjoy relative success within the confines of the environment in which it works but are there broader lessons for us in the West? No, not really One thing that we haven't talked about yet is that much of the research correlates reintegration or leaving de-radicalization with a former fighter being the one to invite somebody to leave so whether that's an Indonesian prisons with foreign fighters doing the work to help de-radicalize within the prison setting to here again in North America if we look at groups like Life Beyond Hate which is completely made up of former white nationalists and their work is to engage directly with white nationalist groups and young people and to invite them out in a without shaming and without the heaviness that so many groups talk about so I think that that realization that former whatever former ISIS, former white nationalists are really key to the strategy for de-radicalization and inviting people to leave and supporting their voices more We have a number of overlapping questions so I'm going to bundle them a little bit there are a couple of people who would like to hear you talk about religion and disengagement and de-radicalization you mentioned religious discourse being a component of some of the programs you've studied I'm also aware that that's a very controversial aspect of some of the programs as well for a number of reasons not least of which is sort of the human rights piece of it around freedom of belief and whether that actually is an effective way to de-radicalize so I'm wondering if you have some reflections on the issue of religion and disengagement and de-radicalization to share with the audience okay again it's a very contested space in terms of what a particular individual is going to believe as his interpretation of a particular concept or idea to drive forward their desire to be a member of ISIS or Al Qaeda or anything else again that debate happens more freely and with greater confidence by the state understandably in the Gulf the Saudi state believes it has the right to intervene in that debate and to say your understanding of the religion is wrong ours is right here's what we think they have a unit within the Ministry of Interior called the Ideological Security Unit and it's I know the whole purpose is to go to these individuals not just within the prison system but elsewhere as well and say you think this is a correct understanding for how you should have a relationship with the government that's wrong this is what it should be you think this is a correct interpretation of Jihad just to use as a broad term well you're wrong here's what our understanding of it is here's what we think the terms of engagement should be and so on even at various times early on for example the Syrian conflict in 2012 when lots of individual sort of celebrity scholars in Saudi Arabia began to fundraise for example for Syrian refugees and for Syrians who had been displaced so the government worrying about what might happen stepped in and took control of those and said it's a really good idea that you're taking raising funds to send up but we'll take control of this so it feels it has the right to do that and no western state could really intervene in quite that same way into some of those debates but the other point I'll make in relation to this and I think it's slightly I wrote a book on the belief system and sort of intellectual trajectory of the Jihadist movement but I'll contradict myself a bit by saying the average person who goes into the group doesn't know those ideas particularly well we tend to have this notion of individuals who join highly ideological movements that they are themselves highly ideological and that they've read all the books and understood the key concepts and therefore they decide to become a member of group A instead of group B or C or D in actual fact what tends to happen is people join highly ideological movements all the time without ever really understanding what's going on and what happens is that there's a leadership at the top which understands those ideas which has really imbibed them and which then gives direction to your actions and then your actions are invested with that broader political significance which might distinguish you from an ordinary criminal so the criminal might shoot somebody to steal from them someone else might shoot them in the name of a broader cause right this is revenge for X and therefore the same act takes on a different meaning so in that context there's a really good way this is not my example about you when Jay was talking earlier about the Nazis I'd read this somewhere before and it really is a great way to think of it if you think of the prison guards at Auschwitz they hadn't read necessarily in minecraft not every single one of them had but their actions were given purpose and direction by leadership that had a plan and a vision so you have an ideological with every individual necessarily understanding the Islamic state as well with its revival of slavery for example and things like that the final point I'll make on this is that having now been repeatedly as I said to the Saudi program over 10 years anecdotally what's very evident is the ones who are most susceptible to breaking down easily of course so the ones who are not of that leadership ideological level the ones who are there tend not to make it to that rehab center because they are doing funny the second time I went we met an individual and a colleague and I on the flight home were talking about him and we said he really didn't seem very repentant he seemed clearly ideological and sort of on that path three years later four years later I was talking to a British foreign fighter we were communicating over Skype and he said to me you'll never believe it I met this great brother earlier today from Saudi and it was the guy who said he was going to return to the course there are a couple other questions too that are overlapping a number of people would like to hear you talk more about this vivid parallel you drew between rural Virginia and Afghanistan and so I'm wondering if the speakers would like to talk a little bit more about some of the commonalities that exist in extreme right wing groups and these other militant groups were talking about when it comes to processes of de-raclization and disengagement if there are any reflections on that I think the audience would like to hear them I think the work of defining what is a violent extremist belief system is really important work and we did a little bit of it this morning but one of the things that was touched on maybe not clearly is the purity narrative that all of the groups have are either ethnically or religiously pure so in Myanmar the Buddhist state is looking for that pure Buddhist state the white nationalists are looking for a pure white state in ISIS you know we can go on to all the different groups around the world but that purity narrative I think really requires a different type of intervention than intervening with other armed movements so there would be many violent movements around the world that don't have this purity narrative they have a difficult state-society relationship they have ideological grievances and frameworks but people who have built their world view on fear of another and the sense of I'm going to die unless I fight and kill them that is a really dangerous part of the world view that makes people particularly vulnerable to extreme gruesome violence because the other groups have been so dehumanized and they can't even imagine this multi-cultural democratic society which you see most clearly actually within ISIS and white nationalism the real anti-democratic anti-multicultural framework and of course that came out in Norway with the attack and the ideological statement also then borrowed for the New Zealand massacre of Muslims in the mosque this idea that it's almost Franz Fanon-ish right so the purification of violence it's only through violence there can be no political process that achieves the perfect outcome it's only through gruesome violence do we establish this pure state so I think we need to do more wrestling with that it has to do with identity it has to do with the sort of psychology and trauma and fear it's a package that needs more work I guess I would just add that one thing that there's white nationalists and ISIS but really I think a lot of these groups there's this zero some sense of competition with others but of losing out in particular to others the sense that you have to take aggressive action now because your group whoever they might be will be in far worse position if you don't it justifies the costs you have a duty to people in your group there's a lot of gendering except for incel there's a lot of gendering used about why it's necessary to fight to defend innocent women and children and things like that so again it's changing I think somehow the calculus about who are we that makes people think I have to fight for us so since resolve is all about bridging research with policy and practice I think we'll wrap up a final round of reflections perhaps on how some of these ideas can inform policy and practice so why don't we go in the same order we started in and see what recommendations you might have on that level brilliant new ideas well I do think we've covered a lot of the ground today on the panel indeed at the whole conference so you see individuals who join extremist groups who are willing to engage in violence because they feel marginalized in some broader context because they feel a sense of insecurity because some group is offering them if not direct security at least a sense of purpose we see messaging that your own life is debased that you can come be a warrior for a cause or a hero that you can perhaps engage in antisocial violence you really want to do anyway but this time you'll be celebrated for it so what I think it's really about is connecting individuals to a broader sense of society where they perhaps don't feel under siege but also don't feel the same incentives to fight for a particular marginalized group because they see that as just one strand of their identity so building broader whether it's ties through other civil society groups or whether it's ties to the broader civic polity recreating the sense of linkages that people seem to lose I think that builds on this notion of what we've been discussing all day and on this panel there's a broader pattern of disorder taking place here which is feeding into whether it's jihadist violence, extreme white-wing violence or indeed as some of the other conferences heard about in Myanmar, up in Kashmir in China as well and this is all feeding off a broader sense of a breakdown in trust in political institutions in experts and expertise and so on and so forth and so actually reviving some of that confidence in what have been the traditional anchors of the state will go some way towards addressing this broader pattern of global disorder which is really quite remarkable in the pace that it's taking but it is fundamentally asserting itself as a process of othering as a process of trying to return nostalgically to some imagined glory which in reality doesn't exist and of course the most recent manifestation of someone trying to do that was Islamic State to say we will return glory to Muslims by addressing perceived injustices or slights and so on and so forth that slogan isn't too different from the ones employed by the political leaders I want to go back to this diagram and also really focus on the work of US Institute of Peace in making this research policy practice building those bridges because this is the space where I think it's happening most clearly anywhere that I know of in the world and that is because USIP put out a new report last spring which is being passed out on violent extremism and the day that I was watching that live webinar of Senator Lindsey Graham talking about what a fantastic report this is and did you know there's groups of people that study conflict analysis and that they do peace building and for Lindsey Graham to be saying this I felt like was a tremendous victory of thinking really all of the research we've done is making its way into the hands of the policymakers who are now looking at some of the data that we've put together on evidence-based approaches to addressing violent extremism and I want to thank USIP Georgia you laid the groundwork for this just incredible work because I think it's really significant that we have spaces where people from the three communities counter-terrorism CVE and peace building can all come together and mention that violent extremism needs to become a field I agree but I think the field of peace building which has existed now for 40 years and has focused on conflict analysis and social cohesion and polarization issues we have so much to give the field of violent extremism in terms of how do we get to the root causes and how do we deal with governance and polarization and many of the issues that are driving violent extremism please join me in thanking our panelists this afternoon thanks everybody for sticking around for everyone who's been here throughout the entire day and for those who are new and joining us for our last panel of the day we are going to be adding one additional chair so that is going to be taking place at this moment so if we just want to hold tight for just about 30 more seconds we should be continuing on our way to adding the chair thank you so much and I will invite our moderator and our panelists to come up on stage our last panel of the day is entitled Global Policy Trends and the Impact of Research I'm going to allow our moderator to actually introduce each of our panelists but I'd be happy to welcome you to the stage at this moment in time with over 100 years of government experience panelists our our next and final session speakers and moderators are well positioned to reflect on PCVE efforts to date focusing on a lot of the challenges that we've heard about all day today Leanne audience thank you very much I'm Dan Benjamin currently resident in northern New England and happy to be back and really thankful to Resolve for bringing together so many former colleagues and friends of mine and I hadn't expected to have so many reunions but it's wonderful to be here and I really applaud the work that Resolve is doing let me begin by introducing our panelists to my near left is General Mike Nagata an old friend for many years in the government to his left he was Lieutenant General and I guess most recently Director of Strategic Planning at NCTC did they drop the O at some point? No it's still there. Director of Strategic Operational Planning which I always felt was one of the hardest jobs in the government actually to his left is Robert Foshe who is the principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations he's a career Foreign Service Officer and served in many bureaus and in many embassies to his left is Mr. Runyon, Christopher Runyon who is Senior Official at USAID working on Africa now and has also had a long and impressive career in the government working in the field and to my far left physically if not politically is my old friend Daniel Kimmich who had the pleasure of working with for many years in government and is the man who if there's something to know about strategic communications he's the person you want to ask and he is currently the Deputy Coordinator is that the correct title? Principal Deputy Coordinator for the Global Engagement Center so by way of a brief introduction myself I was a coordinator for counter terrorism and set up the first CVE unit in the State Department and I thought that I would kick this off by venturing a few observations on what has happened in the field in the policy world since I was born in in May of 2009 and I would actually I do have to make one apology before that I just remembered so in the Academy today I'm at Dartmouth we all have to sign statements that say we will never be on man-ells all-male panels and so I want to apologize on behalf of USIP for this one and simply point out in fact that several of these men work for women who declined or could not be president so I think it's an important point I feel like we should now play the Dance of the Dinosaurs too but okay so moving right along I wanted to just venture a few observations and then throw it open to our panelists to see if they agree number one is that the first 7 or 8 years at least maybe 10 years after 9-11 the discussion about C and now PCVE was largely characterized by endless definitional fights those definitional fights I am hoping have receded somewhat and if they haven't then I will just start now number two when I came into office my view was that there was a real paucity of good social science on which to base CVE programs that seems to have changed dramatically in part because of organizations like Resolve and the many members of the Resolve Network so there's a lot more social science out there than the question that remains is is that social science being read and utilized by policy makers so there are a number of sort of sub questions there is the social science being presented in a way that policy makers with very limited time can understand is it being crowded out by what I think many who have served in government understand is the tyranny of the classified in other words if it's classified you read it if it doesn't matter and then I guess the concomitant question is when the problems with getting CVE going was that there were all these different audiences that you had to talk to senior officials who would all in as we heard earlier this morning we're not going to shoot our way out of this problem and then would immediately say no of course I'm not going to allocate $15 million for your cockamamie idea because they knew that they could never get the metrics or the support on Capitol Hill and because they fundamentally thought that social science was kind of squishy and would never deliver the kind of dramatic results that a good drone strike would so I am interested to know whether to what extent that has changed and I'm throwing too much out there I'll stop with this one our partners in this world we tried hard in the Obama administration put CVE on the international agenda through things like the creation of the GCTF and G-SERF and it seems to me that our partners have really embraced that and are perhaps less nervous about countering violent extremism or preventing violent extremism maybe even less squeamish about the notion of the therapeutic is having a role in countering terrorism and violence extremism and that we're still a little bit going in circles and that is why we don't have the funding that we might like but I put a lot on the table and I'm happy to entertain all your thoughts on that and then give you 10 more principles or observations so Mike you're retired now right as of a month and a half ago well Mazeltov and so that means you can speak more freely than our other panelists at some peril but you know please have that well these days the only person I'm worried about getting in trouble with is my wife but first of all thank you to USIP the sponsor of this forum for allowing me to be here today I'm going to react to three of the things you just said I regret to report our definitional debates have not abated they may not be as numerous or as vociferous as they once were but there is too much time still being wasted on quite literally dancing on the head of these rhetorical pins and we really need to stop it because there's more productive things we could be doing with that time and energy but unfortunately a lot of our definitional debates are driven by a sustained and pernicious degree of ignorance about what it is we are talking about or what it is we are trying to achieve which gets to the next thing I'll react to you talked about social science research I would certainly stipulate that whether it's social science or other forms of scientific pursuit that the body of research that has grown I'll just use the arbitrary date of 9-11 it's not arbitrary for Americans but it is utterly arbitrary for everybody else in the world it is inarguably larger than it once was but I think my personal opinion is that's the wrong measurement to take satisfaction that the volume of research is larger than it once was because the scale of terrorism today is much larger than it once was so I would argue that the gap between the research we need for an ever growing and diversifying problem versus the scale of what we have that delta continues to grow we are not keeping up with the need for research we are falling behind the need for research because the scale of the problem keeps growing now why is that so well you've already in many ways described it it's an absence of policy seriousness for some of those of you in the room who know my background I'm a special forces officer by background I have literally spent 20 years of my life utilizing physical violence to deal with terrorists and after 20 years of not seeing my family for more than half that time I regret to report there are more terrorists now than when I started so I've lived the dream or the nightmare of realizing that while I would certainly argue that when lives were on the line or a hostage need to be rescued that the use of violence was necessary but it is strategically and clearly inadequate to solving the problem we have because we've got more terrorists now despite all our strength the strength we've developed the use of physical force the third thing I'll just react to is really just the reverse side of the coin I've just described what would it take it would take I do not believe it would take the kind of resourcing or manpower that whether it is military forces or intelligence agencies have been lavished with particularly inside the United States since 9-11 I don't think the absorptive capacity exists in the terrorism prevention and CVE world but most importantly because of this absence of research or sufficient research I should say I want to give credit where credit is due there are incredibly courageous researchers all over the world trying their best to do this what we're looking from is inconsistent or non-existent policy support it is very popular and to a degree necessary that politicians everywhere speak strongly consistently and then match their rhetoric with legislative or policy action to support the use of kinetic forms of counter-terrorism if you try to do that what the volume is of similar kinds of political rhetoric to support things like counter-messaging or terrorism prevention or CVE or what have you it is a tiny fraction what you see in the other realm of counter-terrorism thanks I'm going to try to pick myself off the floor now and Robert what would you like to comment among that smorgasbord of different observations well again thank you and thank USIP for organizing this conference and I do apologize I know my assistant secretary wishes she were here I know you regret that I'm not the assistant secretary but please know I regret I'm not the assistant secretary too so um I have to say I would agree with those comments for the most part but I think in CSO we are working hard to provide the best way to help us in this field and to develop what I believe are some of the most important ideas of how we apply the research that is out there there is a lot of research and our team is looking at it bringing it together and trying to figure out what's the best way to apply this to the local situations that we're confronting now we're a small small organization and there's not a lot we can do other things we can do by establishing our baseline studies on the situation they're looking for indicators and then devising or helping to devise locally some kinds of strategies to address violent extremism and I think that is really the future of this field in terms of the work we're going to be doing it is not there is no kinetic solution as you said it cannot be it has to be a political solution and it has to be locally driven and locally supported it will fail and that is what we are focused on at CSO trying to find those opportunities trying to try different approaches and different places and learning from those lessons and doing this through a whole of government approach it is not just the State Department it's the State Department working with our colleagues at DOD at USAID in the field on these problems and partnering with local authorities to see if we can come up with solutions that they think will approach or will address the threat that they're facing from violent extremism so I think that is for us the way forward it doesn't take a lot of money but it does take support on the hill and other places to understand that this is a long slow process it is not a quick solution but it's one that you have to sustain and move forward on in order to be able to claim any kind of success we're now at 18 years since 9-11 18 years from now I think we could be in a much better place if we continue with this process and expand it and broaden it to other parts of the world so that's encouraging thank you can I just press you a little and you can make this sign if you don't like it but can I press you a little on the since CSO is at the center of this world now of the nexus with social science and the policy world I'm sorry you're the nexus of social science with the policy world do you feel that the US government is getting the social science it needs able to digest it and to turn it into effective policy I would say to an extent yes that we are getting the research we need we always need for more and as a consumer we will always want more are we able to turn it into effective policies the real question and that is what we're doing with our various projects but not on a large enough scale is what I would argue we need more resources especially personnel to be able to do that and we are working at the same time on how do we evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and those kind of indicators of effectiveness can they have more of a universal application than just in specific locales and that sort of thing and again I think as we do more of this work and develop these concepts more broadly and deeply we'll find the lessons that we'll have greater and more universal application Christopher Thanks I will try to address five of them and the last I will not for personal employment reasons but I would I just wanted to say in this room we've got a lot of research heroes who have done some amazing and pioneering work that I know that USAID and the rest of the US government has taken advantage of we also have some policy heroes so I did just want to give a shout out to both Dan and to Mike I really admired Dan's amazing work at CT during a tough time and then with General Nagata I witnessed you in the situation room in the White House do some pretty brave things to stand up for smart strategy in good policy so just a shout out to those guys You'll notice we're both out of government now On definitional fights, yeah I think that that's better I really do and perhaps an example of that is the fact that we're in our second perhaps third iteration of policy even within USAID which meant we had to settle on taxonomy and we had to look and talk with a lot of people to make sure we were using that stuff and I would just say on policy in 2011 we put a policy out the development response to extremism and insurgency which was a pretty important document for us that shaped a lot of our thinking and it really came out of a lot of the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences that's now being adjusted to be more direct in that it is more geographically sort of you know oriented to places that we know are of specific CVE vulnerability or direct threat it's more focused and more CVE specific as opposed to the concerns that we all had about attribution and sort of saying well a program's got this connection but there wasn't the data behind it there wasn't the research behind it and the third component of that is the measurability and making sure that there is data that backs it up our taxpayers deserve it Congress is asking for it our leadership is the new administration presently is asking for that and so we're using a more tailored definition of our to extremism and how we know that our programming is working and then the last is one that I think is really about self-reliance and about local capacity we're trying to make that more a centerpiece of our strategy and our approach and measuring that to make sure that it's not just that the problem went away well maybe the problem went away temporarily but is the local capacity there to keep that in a sustainable situation going forward and just one plug is that that strategy is available for public comment on the USAID website in a week or so so especially for all the folks in the room who are either practitioners or researchers we'd love to get your feedback on that when it does come out are we using the research? Absolutely not only are we funding it including I'm proud to say my bureau in Africa helping to support resolve but we're using those publications whether that's the governance nexus pub out of resolve which has been very helpful the secondary source research and a lot of our programming has also conducted research as either a prequel to actual on the ground activities or have tried to embed research components in the activities while we go along that said boy do I wish that we had a deployable battalion of PHD candidates who could embed with a lot of our implementing partners to be able to real time pick up data while at the same time we're trying out and experimenting with activities so I think that's probably about it classification still a challenge you know when you have to walk down hallways to get into safes to pick out hard drives to boot up computers you're just not going to have people connected the way the interagency probably does need to be connected on this let alone with research especially when that's funded perhaps by you know intelligence community organizations or others where it's even further siloed and then on resources we're still struggling with resources we've tried this 1207 we've seen CTPF we've seen there are all these others out there we know we've got some support but somehow we have not been able to crack that nut thanks Daniel so the virtue of going last is I've now forgotten all the questions but we seem to be starting with a bit of a baseline exercise in telling positives and negatives so I'll start with what I think are some positive developments and move on to some that are a little less positive I would definitely flag as a positive that on the definitional side I recall 10 to 15 years ago a huge amount of energy expended on largely fruitless polemics over monocausal explanations it's ideology it's poverty it's grievances and those seem to have subsided there are some outliers out there still advocating these but largely thanks to the efforts of the research community we have come to an acceptance that there are much more complicated factors in human behavior this leads to a bit of a negative because it would have been much simpler had there been a monocausal explanation we would design programming around it we would be well on our way to solving the problem but since we're dealing with people in the infinite number of motivations they have we've come to this very complex place so that leads me to the second development which is the genuine profusion of research and I think that here other panelists have discussed this we confront at the global engagement center what I think is a good problem to have but still a problem and that it is challenging to simply follow all of the research we have someone in our office who follows this full time she's constantly sending around summaries of the research but we struggle to make sure that this is integrated into our programs that said this is a much better place to be in than we were in ten years ago on the issue of research I sense and I'd actually be curious to hear from some of the folks here that we still face the problem that Mark was talking about the engagement outlined in a very famous paper where he said government has reams and reams of information that it keeps to itself but tends to exploit only to uncover new plots and look for threats and he characterized this as government knows everything but understands nothing the research community he said has all of the intellectual firepower and the time to really make sure that the research community understands everything but knows nothing and we I think have really not made as much progress as we should in bringing this together and making more information available I'm hoping as time goes by and there are now decades separating us from the inception that more of this will come out and become part of the public realm of the development that we're having this conversation in a vastly different policy context than we did when counterterrorism was unquestionably at the top of the agenda. Now if you just look at the headlines there are issues of geopolitical competition that have really superseded counterterrorism. Counterterrorism hasn't gone away but it is one of several competing priorities and it's unclear what are the current levels of activity. My hope obviously is that we don't lose momentum that we have built up particularly on the research side and the interaction of that research with some of the programatics so that's my preliminary balance sheet. Well very good so that's all very helpful. One issue I want to revert to which General Nagata brought up underscores kind of a big box in the situation which is that we don't have a global census of violent extremists but we know that there are a lot more of them and there were not too long ago and yet that has not really dramatically moved the needle on government interest US government interest in the social science in CVE-PVE approaches to violent extremism and it would seem like the obvious answer is because the kinetic approach did a good enough job in dealing with the imminent so we'll let the urgent just languish. Do any of your current former masters and I won't ask you to name them have a consciousness of this growth in numbers and how the environment seems to be changing? Some do but I would argue it is an insufficient number of senior policymakers not just in our own government but around the world recognize or have been able to grasp the reality that the use of physical force against terrorism necessary though it may be as I indicated earlier when lives are on the line it is strategically insufficient for the simple reason that you've already cited I mentioned when I made my remarks there were inarguably more terrorists now than there were 18 years ago not just more but the diversification of terrorism is extraordinary but why? Why is this sufficient policy maker attention so we can make what I would argue are the necessary investments and frankly the necessary priority shifts towards methods of combating terrorism that don't involve force. I think a lot of the explanation is well known to this audience I think you and I have even talked about this on one or two occasions when we were still in government we had the political event horizon particular policy maker is measured in a few short years well the use of violence can deliver satisfaction for a few short years until of course the phenomenon were struggling at morphs in a direction that we didn't expect and rebounds one need not look no farther than the fact that we thought we won against Al Qaeda in Iraq only to have it morph into a much more virulent form of terrorism that we now call the Islamic State but for the policy makers at the time they drew enormous satisfaction from the notion that we have strategically defeated AQI you know roll out the brass band have the victory parade it's all over but we didn't realize it wasn't over there were some people telling us it wasn't over but we didn't listen so that's one reason the only other reason I think worth mentioning is at the risk of sounding like I'm venturing into arenas I have no expertise I've read over the years several different versions of old psychological truth people hate uncertainty they love certainty matter of fact I've even heard one psychologist say people will choose a unpleasant certainty before they choose complete uncertainty now why am I mentioning that because there is nothing more uncertain today than how to prevent large numbers of people from becoming terrorists the journey from reasonably normal citizen to someday becoming a violent extremism the solutions for that are very uncertain right now dropping a 500 pound bomb delivers nothing but certainty you either you know you killed that person or you didn't which is why just as a matter of human nature people tend to gravitate towards what they can tangibly measure see and feel vice the uncertainty of how do you prevent someone from becoming an extremist anyone else want to comment on it I'll venture something you know this paradox here I think even as we have deepened our understanding of what I would describe as the very local dynamics of terrorism down to the kind of personal dynamics of groups there has been a phenomenon in the broader context that is in the exact opposite direction which is terrorist organizations small clandestine terrorist organizations latching on sort of lamprey like to insurgencies which are large and public and the tools that we use to counter recruitment and radicalization at the local level informed by research those are entirely different from the tools that you use to counter an insurgency which takes root in a political context that requires a completely different set of policy solutions different parts of government deal with that it is often intractably difficult it's embedded in regional and geostrategic contexts that are extremely tough to get at so I think this has been one of the conundrums we've grappled with over the last decade is that even as we've deepened our understanding of what I describe as the micro level of terrorism at the macro level it is now intertwined with insurgencies in a number of theaters that require a much different and more complex toolbox to deal with I think it's a really important point I would contend that it's always been intertwined with insurgencies whether in the caucuses or cashmere or where have you what is different is that there are just so many more now and so many states teetering on failure or failed and so on and so forth Christopher I know you are holding your mic so you want to say something so that I want to ask you to answer this question but also another question which I think is good for Robert as well and that is we have heard a lot today of really interesting and impressive work that points to the need for hugely specific localized knowledge and the understanding that every context is radically different the US government is one of the world's largest organizations and by definition has a hard time with that and I am curious to hear if you think that we are nonetheless evolving new ways of dealing with those kind of radical specificities and are you optimistic about continued progress in that direction thank you so for the earlier questions yeah we are stretched out a number of context that we are working in we weren't having these conversations about Mozambique we weren't talking about Tanzania the way we are talking about Tanzania and I really like Dan's point I just wanted to build off of that I just today was reading a little bit more about 30 ISIS guys come back from the Middle East go to the Philippines whip up in alignment what was your analogy there leech on to the local insurgency yeah lamprey and next thing you know we have a thousand people if that's ISIS 3.0 we have a whole different set of cross disciplinary things that need to fuse quite quickly and I think the resource needs are going to be very different for that type of a fight on complexity I think that's another really really important point we are leaning into complexity our new strategy will embrace that and on hyperlocalization that is absolutely critical as you can imagine the transaction costs for hyperlocalization are a lot higher when you're doing a large portfolio of activities than if you just walk in the room and say there's the problem go fix that one driver or go fix that one problem so we are wrestling with that but the good news is at least for me the development organization I mean it's malpractice in our business if you aren't using extremely local information and you get out there and you find out what's going on in that village not that village, not that village that village and the differences between those are so terribly important on terrain and understanding that terrain and turning that into good project designs and good interventions that try to have a CVE impact one other thing I did want to say was you know we started to allude to like the terrorist criminal nexus that haunts my dreams a bit because of these shifting loyalties and allegiances and the commercial aspect of things we'd love more and more research on that and right now I'm finally getting to the Kilcullen book which talks about the out of the mountains book which talks about competitive control and I think there's a whole thing there that I think would be very useful for researchers to read just as a construct for how we try to respond to the challenges of governance and the absence or the presence of state and how that becomes a rational choice for local people we talked about that during counter insurgency work somehow we need to go back and read that chapter again now in a terrorism or extremism mindset and then one other thing I would just plug would be I think there are some mega trends here and if we're going to skate to where the puck is going to be a little bit more you know what is what is a continued rapid urbanization going to bring us what our climate change is going to do with regards to people's state society relationships what are some of the water scarcity problems going to do what is 5G terrorism going to look like and I think for a development organization trying desperately to take the long view and a sort of gradual but deliberate and sustained response those are the things that I think are particularly important for us both for researchers and then certainly on the practitioner side well I was going to say I'm an optimist but after hearing that I know it was a close killer you know that what I would say though I would agree with those comments especially the idea that we have to have kind of the local connection I was familiar with the resolve curriculum and how you're trying to do capacity building of researchers at the local level this is hugely important this will pay the kind of dividends and provide the kind of research that we really need and that we can try to get access to this is for me one of the most important sort of kind of projects that we're pursuing right now but at the same time I would say within the government approach and what we're looking at for the United States government and why I do have somewhat of a cause for optimism I see policy development here that's responding to this in a way that's not kinetic that is saying there are aspects to the violent extremism problem that we have to address in different manners and in different ways so for example we have the stabilization and assistance review looking at how we can do stabilization better as a whole but at the local level and try different things we have 11 countries right now that we're focused on we're going to see what's going to happen there and learn the lessons from that and apply it in other places we have the Eli V. Sell Genocide and Prevention Act and essentially under that we are going to be identifying countries that are at risk or even sub regions at risk for atrocity and try to come up with strategies to address the threats that are there those strategies just as they are in the SAR will have CVE elements they have to have that and address CVE aspects we have the Women's Peace and Security Act and the strategy that we're implementing now that completely integrates women and women's issues and peace and security issues into CVE to make sure that we have real progress again at all levels and recognizing that without CVE being addressed as part of WPS there will be no real progress and lastly let me just mention Fragility which seems to be one of the big themes of the day right now we are working with USIP on a Fragility project in Burkina Faso just a pilot project to see how we can identify the indicators and come up with strategies to address fragility that might give grounds to violent extremism this is a small project but it's a pilot project to try to figure out lessons again that will have greater application this is important because we fully anticipate the Global Fragility Act will be passed and we need to know how we're going to respond to that that is a 1.15 billion dollars over the next five years on fragility and that is really about addressing the CVE indicators as an aspect of our fragility approaches and all of this put together shows that we have a lot of different approaches to the CVE problem filtering through or integrated into woven into various policy approaches and program approaches by state, by USAID and DOD okay now I'm going to ask a question that may make those who are still in office squirm a bit and so I'll focus it more on Mike anyone else who wants to can chime in so being fully candid it was my understanding back when I was in government that localization was hugely important but there was also a really important dimension at the highest level government to government interaction and there was a discussion earlier today about dealing with bad partners we have countries that we have serious relationships with that either do really bad things in the name of counter-terrorism what or he used to always feign that kind of thing in the situation room too it took us forever or that simply can't be bothered for example to deal with the very legitimate grievances having to do with lack of the provision of justice and those sorts of things which are a major driver I think we all agree and I guess the question is from those of us who just read the newspaper it would seem like there isn't a lot going on at that level of government at the moment in bilateral relations or multilateral fora but there is a huge government below that and I'm curious if you think the torch is still lit there are still extraordinary people in all the agencies of the government that I used to work with that are striving mightily and in some cases courageously because they're potentially putting their own careers at risk to make the case to make the argument that we have to shift our policy formulations and our strategic thinking towards those things that are more likely to lead to long-term strategic success as opposed to short-term I feel better because this guy is now dead or in jail and I have complete confidence that that mass of people from junior officials all the way to pretty senior officials will continue to strive in that direction but at the top layer of the policy and I won't restrict this to the United States government I see this in many governments at the top levels of many of the governments that I've interacted with over the years there is a reluctance to follow that course there are exceptions to this there are some very senior policy makers I know both in the United States and around the world who are also striving in this direction but there's an insufficient mass of them they are outnumbered by those who are either oblivious of the need to make this change or are very reluctant highly resistant in some cases to make this change now having said that it should beg the question why so I'll try to be brief about this one reason is because of what I've already mentioned it's the ways in which we can successfully employ these other instruments these other instrumentalities fill these decision makers with uncertainty whereas they know they can watch the IRSR feed of a kinetic strike that's nothing but certainty but there are other reasons as well one of them is that we've got some very unfortunate habits it was my colleague just mentioned the billion and a half dollars I think it will be invested over several years I'm glad that's going to happen I'm delighted that's going to happen but as soon as I heard that I thought about the fact that my office for my last three years I was charged with doing an empirical analysis of how the United States Government spends counterterrorism money annually that's actually a perennial requirement of the National Counterterrorism Center I can't quote any specific numbers here because the report is classified but I doubt it will shock any of you to know that we spend tens multiple tens of billions of dollars each year on kinetic counterterrorism now I'm not saying we should throw that kind of money at CVE or counter messaging I don't think they have the absorptive capacity and money isn't necessarily the solution to all their problems but when I examined the enormous disparity between how we resource kinetic CT we can replace everything else that can't possibly be the right answer but that's not part of our policy budgetary formulation habit our habit it's almost on autopilot is to throw the lion share of the checkbook at people like I used to be who go on raids who use physical force or who arrest people we have got to see everyone here knows nothing is harder than changing your habits but if you never start you never finish I would just say two things to that there are many people in our political leadership who believe that every time they face these problems there is the kinetic solution or there's a solution of just throwing money and they you know flash back and forth between these two all the time I think what we're trying to do now is just develop a smarter approach and it means yes there is times when you have to have a violent solution and there are times when doing something much softer is much better for a longer term solution and trying to be smart about that and helping our political leadership understand why this is a better approach in this circumstance at this time is really the challenge for all of us and that's what we're trying to do can I riff off of that I have even lower expectations it's a race to the bottom here I dream of just not continuing to do stupid things if you look at some of the research you know I think for us there were some ripples that went through the policy world at least in my circles when the UNDP report The Road to Extremism came out which you know cited how approximately 71% of those who made the tipping point from anger to taking acts of physical violence in Africa did so because of negative interactions with security forces of their host country government so I think we've got to start there in a lot of ways you know some of these grievances are very legitimate and fuel the problem and I think sometimes in our rush to quote-unquote partner we get ourselves into mortgages that are quite difficult to get out of and I think it creates risk association problems for the United States later down the road and I say that because often it is later when we are asked to help fix the situation and it is one of structural violence that has impacted the community I did a good chunk of my graduate research in Uzbekistan I was just thinking about this I don't know why but Uzbekistan came to my mind because here's another situation where you had a legacy of a repressive terrible governance then it flipped and we're still dealing with that aftershock and we will be for quite a while the trauma issue that had come up earlier in the earlier sessions I think that wrestling with that we should have known better that to be in relationships with governments that were structurally repressive which would impact foreign fighting and other kinds of problems like that and then the last just because it's not classified we attribute approximately 85 sometimes north of 100, 120 million or so dollars per year over the last three or four years to what we would call CVE so that's about the level of investment when you compare that with some of the other agency thanks for that question specifically for you when when I was in government I was always troubled by the extent to which some of my superiors in various buildings were convinced that if we just got the messaging right we would crack this nut open and it wasn't really persuaded but somehow I got involved in doing an awful lot of work on messaging and I think that the message if you will that we got throughout a lot of today was that messages on the airwaves from distant unknown sources of dubious provenance are not going to solve this for us but I'm pretty sure you think that are we going to still continue to always have that decision maker who thinks if I just hired the right people to get that message right is that going to be our fate forever? Well I don't want to fall into a paroxysm of pessimism here so I'm going to say no I don't think so is this the abracadabra solution or the war game solution where the bad tweets are rising on this side of the screen the good tweets will rise to meet them and somehow the problem will be solved in a couple of pixelated bursts in the middle that's pretty obviously nonsense I'm preaching to the converted here I think we all understand this I would actually attribute some of this to an early spate of obsessive focus on the messaging genius of al-Qaeda we've all forgotten about this because the most recent obsessive focus was on the messaging genius of ISIS as compared to Zohar Hiri Stajji sitting in a cave still but if you read some of the analyses from 2004 I think those resonated with senior policy makers more than many of us realized at the time and there was this sense that these guys have really cracked the code on a magic way I once was giving a presentation and joked about the al-Qaeda website with the button to donate the person that was briefing said wow, we've got to stop that there were some very simplified understandings of how this worked what I would say in closing on this we have really moved away from looking at this through a messaging prism we've moved away from looking at the solution through messaging we very rarely use the term I'm using it here because that's how you framed the question but this is not about messaging it is about influence it is about behavior and messaging is one component it is often the most visible component it is often the one that attracts the most attention because it's something that is relatively you can talk about you can see it it often intertwines with technology we're a technology obsessed society we love talking about the latest platforms but those of us who have done very in-depth research on this realize it is simply one component I would say broadly we at the Global Engagement Center recognize that it's simply one component and we've moved very considerably away from the idea in the core and we constantly push back at the idea that we are a messaging shop or that you're going to have this problem and let's bring in the messaging guys at the end that's just not how it works see I knew we'd find something reassuring so I want to throw it open now and just ask if there are any trends any developments from our partners we cooperate closely with quite a lot of countries on PCVE on influence on a lot of different things if there are any noteworthy trends that you would want to call out right now for those of us in the veil of ignorance that is the private sector it would be enlightening I'll mention one there's a personal opinion I suppose some people in the audience may think I'm full of crap here but I think a global trend is a very rapidly to one degree changing to another degree deteriorating relationship between populations everywhere and their governments some of this change is necessary and beneficial a lot of it though is a loss of confidence everywhere I've been for the last particularly the last 20 years but really over my whole entire career I've seen this I didn't always recognize it I've only come to recognize it perhaps in the last decade but rather obviously I'm going to focus before I finish on the deterioration aspect of this not all of it is deterioration but a big chunk of it is everywhere this relationship is deteriorating and I do believe it is a global trend so it's consistent with your question this is this creates everywhere I look this translates into a rich growth medium for violent extremism which is why I think this is a very large part of the explanation why as I stipulate at the outset there are more terrorists now than there have ever been anyone else maybe just this is a bit parochial to my world but I think that amongst the development people who have been asked to rise to this challenge there's a fairly high degree of consensus across countries so the donor coordination angle of this is easier and it's led to a lot of blended funding co-designed projects shared data and other things like that that I think are very valuable so that I think it's just something I wanted to point out let me just reinforce that here at USIP earlier this year we had a meeting of the communications working group in the counter ISIS coalition and one of the few silver linings to the dark cloud that was ISIS is the degree of international cooperation around the issue and that continues and that's I think much it's in a much better place than it was 10 years ago I know that we interact with many more countries and we benefit from their kind of shared experience in this area if I could add just one thing I would agree there is concern about the deterioration of this you know this disconnection of people from the government it really is troubling at the same time I think back to one of our projects in Kenya I don't know if Dr. Nathalia talked about this earlier but we took an approach after the Westlake mall terrorism attack where we saw that seemed to drive people towards more violent extremist kind of opinion and attitude of working in a different area in Kenya with the local government to improve the relationship between the local population and the security forces that were there and this came about after about five and a half years there was another attack I want to say the what was it DUSI 2 attack and what we saw after that was actual what I thought was progress in the sense that while people were appalled by the attack you didn't have the same kind of reaction of people moving towards a more kind of extreme kind of approach looking towards violence as the way to resolve this the security forces didn't kind of engender that and I think it's an important model for us all to look at and what I found especially interesting on this case was our international partners were looking at it in the same way and looking saying this is something we can draw from and learn from and we seem to be having much more conversation and dialogue along those lines sticking with the issue of our partners Daniel made an important point that we are shifting paradigms and focusing more on great power and near pure competition and so you know there may we may see a dialing back of resources both on the kinetic side but also on the on the softer side and so I guess the question is is that detectable among our partners especially those in Europe who have really put out quite a lot of money for the P and CVE work I don't know that it's immediately detectable I can't speak to the budget figures we're definitely having a more complex conversation that we're having this is particularly apparent at the global engagement center because congress specifically broadened our mission starting in 2017 to deal with propaganda and disinformation by state and non-state actors so what had been a focus on non-state actors like Ida and ISIS very quickly became a focus on Russia China, Iran I would flag one potential benefit to the CVE effort from the renewed focus on nation states and great power competition if you look at the history of our cold war standoff you know there was an enormous you know component of it that consisted of the information space and that was the cost of direct military confrontation was so astronomically high that we were forced to operate much more in the realm of propaganda counter propaganda and we made very considerable investments in those areas our hands were much less tied in the counter-terrorism sphere it often unfolded in areas where we could do things that you cannot do against a nation state now that we are looking once again at competition between nation states you know nuclear powers a lot of this is once again going to unfold in the information space and I think that that could lead to I think you know if you just look at some of the recent congressional legislation in you know countering Russian malign influence the amounts are pretty significant you know compared to some of the things we were talking about in the CVE space so I think that you know we are going to be working at a larger scale and certainly we are dealing with actors that are working at a large scale paradoxically I think that could end up benefiting the CVE community down the line I would at some point like to have a discussion about how do we transfer some of the lessons we learned from CVE in the last 10-15 years to these more recent areas of kind of great power competition but I think there is more interplay between this and we are just starting to explore it I'll take a shot at it I brought so much sunshine to this panel with my optimism but if you looked at a if you look at you know gray warfare and perhaps some of these new rules of the game as part of great power competition it's hard for me not to believe that great powers will use proxies and great powers will arm those proxies and those proxies will use violence and some of those proxies will look different than the types of groups that were typical in engaging and I think the violent extremist organizations are absolutely within the food groups that they will look at to take advantage of or to distract or to consume any nation's resources that they're going up against so for me and based on what Dania just said I mean not only the knowledge management from all of that prior work but to be honest break out the microfiche from the cold war and take a look at some of that because I think we will be dealing with some of those types of issues going forward but they will be nastier and perhaps more lethal I would just say not just the microfiche I would recommend to everyone the miniseries Carlos which is a great depiction of the Soviet Union's involvement with some of the terrorist groups in the cold war era I want to express my dubiousness at the idea we're going to pivot away from counter terrorism and I'm not just saying that because I spent my career doing it I've seen us try to quote pivot away from terrorism on multiple occasions we're still pivoting towards the far east we've been doing that for about five years actually when I was on the joint staff the joke was our pivot to Asia was a 360 degree pivot we ended right back where we started but I think there are important reasons why well policymakers can't take their eye off this ball one is because of the political harm terrorism does and there's nothing more finely tuned than a politician's ability to sense unfavorable changes in his political fortunes as you know very well terrorism is the use of violence to cause political change but more importantly I think a better characterization is we clearly are going to have to increase our effectiveness against peer competitors and the like but partially for the reasons it was just described groups non-state actors that somebody's going to call a terrorist group are going to be increasingly attractive proxies for everybody including the United States so that's one reason why terrorism is going to go away but I think the most important reason is because when an act of violence occurs that is political reverberations which again is the goal of any terrorist it is it becomes politically untenable for any government that is suffering the consequences of it not to throw resources at it I mean I remember before Benghazi we were in the special operations where we were pulling people out of North Africa until Benghazi happened and then everybody had to turn around and go right back there's still air in large measure so it's not really not a pivot it's never going to be a pivot to increase our efforts against these other problems but we're never going to pivot away from terrorism Chris can I just follow up maybe I don't know if you're up to speed on this stuff but are your colleagues your opposite numbers in the world's leading development agencies sticking with the CVE mission or as defense budgets are going up around the world are they moving are governments moving resources in that direction do you have a sense of which way the wind is blowing yeah I think again this has been a hard fought consensus and I think for a lot of other political reasons over the last 15-20 years it's been hard for some countries to get on board with where this was going we talked about before some quibble over terminology more than others we can sign up for PVE but we don't want a thing to do with CVE what are the difference between those again but I think at the end of the day when we start talking about what effects we're trying to have on the ground and what we're trying to prevent from happening there's a fairly good consensus there I also believe that the tent has gotten bigger in some sense on other countries contributions certainly from the donor kind of food group because I think again it's more palatable for them to make contributions to that and we're a little bit further away from some of the stigmas of Iraq and other things like that and ISIS I think has shocked the system a little bit and created a new motivation to get behind that and now if anything I feel like we're seeing more leadership and I think for this audience there will be nodding but more research that are coming from whether it's European or other centers that are producing things that are quite helpful and informative for our approaches so I do think that that has gotten bigger there is a bit more of a coalition and in some cases there are more resources available to work on it so to follow up on that resource I'm sorry research issue not resources going back to research a question from the audience that'll modify a little what any any tips for scholars on what to do to get in front of a policy maker get your ideas in front of a policy maker and how to make those ideas user friendly I'll start just two very simple things put the bottom line up front and don't be afraid to be critical and to be directly critical when I first arrived in government I said you'll be amazed at how quickly offices take notice when someone mentions them directly and that is definitely true so you might not see the ripples but people in government do read and take notes I would just take those two things put the bottom line really up front because particularly senior people in organizations don't have time to read academic papers they will not read to the end they don't build to a conclusion they want to know in a summary paragraph if you have a comment and you frame it specifically you will definitely get the attention if you ever put in that comment if I can just add to that I liked the par presentation earlier to sort of remind folks you don't have to have spent the first three years of your graduate life figuring out your research question and then go out and solve the answer to just that problem come work with us and others on a level of effort and then I think a more iterative approach is a smarter approach for us I think the fallacy of us knowing what the solutions were going to be or what the problem was that we needed to research immediately way ahead of time is just not there I saved this quote I wanted to read this but we received a very good piece of research recently it was 161 pages long but it was good and the response from one of our senior leaders on the email chain was excellent to have this kind of analysis now how to incorporate this into our programming and I think that that last little step from research conclusions to action ability I beg that researchers especially those like you who are steeped in field work just stagger a couple of guesses about where you would take this make some suggestions about action ability not just here's what the regression tells us but what would you actually think about doing as a result of this or what would you try to avoid that type of stuff I think is very interesting it helps us to kickstart the policy conversation internally as to how we would start developing interventions around it I would just agree with all that I would add one other thing for where I've been working and at the State Department watching it over the years nothing gets attention more than if a congressman says I read this report can you please you know why aren't you acting on this having that kind of political reach and just even a question will get such an immediate response it's incredible I had one other thing I was going to say which was I would encourage our academic partners especially to follow policy read the documents that are coming out that are provocative towards policy so you know USIP in partnership with this congressional task force, congressional mandated task force put out the extremism in fragile environments publication it's pretty provocative piece it's got an annex with proposed legislation I mean it's out there these are the types of debates that we're having internally in the policy world and I think the more you understand those it will help you craft the sort of last few pages of some of your research to really be responsive to some of those challenges. What if you can quantify what percentage of the research that does get a response it does get people's attention comes in the form of not the monograph but the four pager that has been boiled down by a place like USIP or the many resolve partners I mean is that a word to the wise should you hook up with a policy institute to get it into the right format or do you think that the center certainly does I'm going to give you a yes but answer for reasons that have just been described shorter is better than longer if you want to get a policymaker or even the staff of a policymaker to read it because their staffs are often even busier than the senior person is but there is peril here as well because it's not an unmitigated good brevity is not an unmitigated good brevity can you can lose the context of the research you can lose important details that's one form of peril another one I'm going to say with some trepidation because I know there are research in the audience here it is not my intent to offend you if I do offend I apologize up front but there is a problem some of the shorter pieces that I see come across that support themselves to be research if you ask for the original documents and examine them sometimes they do not exist and even more dangerous cases when you actually get to some of the source materials there's no footnotes there's no empiricism to the analysis nobody's ever tried to repeat the experiment and gotten the same results to the conclusion that some of the stuff that gets tossed at policy makers whether they be congressional members or people in government or people in the executive branch frankly it's just personal opinion or anecdote tarted up as research and when it comes across as a really short piece it's very hard to detect that unless you dive unless you challenge where is the source material for this on the bureaucratics of the interface between the research community and the government I got to the state department and I had a lot of people reading classified intelligence I didn't have anyone reading research so I went out and I hired Will McCants and that took care of it for a while and then he said you don't like government that much Daniel you said this is just reading the research what are the other organizations doing? I can't speak for other organizations there are people who are well plugged into the research community I laughed when you mentioned Will because he was one of the people who brought me into government and then promptly left about a month later liable friend we've benefited very much in organization and you can't just have a person who sits and reads research that's not how I want to characterize our approach to this you have to push it to the people doing the work you have to make sure they read it she does the great work of going and interacting with the research community and following things but that then goes to members of our teams and this also is a very important function of leadership leadership needs to hold people accountable make it clear that we care not just that you're following classified analysis but that we expect that you will be looking at academic research you will be interacting with researchers we expect when you present your programs one of the pillars of justification will be citations of research so that's something that has to come from management so I would say it's much more I think it's actually dangerous in some ways to assign some person and think you've checked a box you need to integrate it and that has to come from the top down also I would love to see going ahead a little bit more interaction between the practitioner community and researchers just so that we can talk to each other it's not always apparent from the outside what is and is not possible in government it is sometimes rather idiosyncratic internally what is and is not possible in government and you can't assume that there has to be dialogue about it so I'd love to see you know you could create some review board of practitioners who could look at papers and say what's actionable or not but you know more ways that we can interact with each other at CSO I have to say it's an impressive bureau it's an impressive group of people and I think per capita wise we have more PhD's on our staff than any other bureau at the department and that's a deliberate kind of approach we are recruiting from the people out there who are doing the research bringing them in and asking them now apply it so it forces a dialogue it forces a conversation that is constantly being renewed by the intake of the workers that we're bringing in and what happens in the big five-sided building on these issues in terms of the intake of research well I doubt it will surprise you to know that the most eager consumption in the military whether it's the Pentagon or elsewhere of research materials are those about weapons platforms mobility platforms the next generation radar or what have you I'm not suggesting that there aren't parts of the military whose mission their mission is central to either information operations or influence activities or messaging or even things like CVE but they suffer from the same problems that I would argue everybody else suffers from if this is not a priority for the most senior people in the Joint Staff or OSD or the service chiefs it's hard to get attention so there's often a ceiling effect that very energetic very talented people just can't get beyond perhaps more importantly though the you know there is an attitude to some degree it's a reasonable attitude to some degree it's a bad attitude that the research that is most relevant to dealing with the topics that we've come here to discuss there's a bad attitude in the military not our job we don't care which is ridiculous given how many senior military commanders I've heard in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever I've been saying well damn it we went in there and now they've come back who's preventing the next crew from arising and coming back where are the fill-in-the-blank civilians without recognizing will you fail to pay attention to this up until now now it's goring your ox so now you care reminds me of that really famous Rumsfeld snowflake are they regenerating faster than we can kill them the answer is yes one of the secrets little unknown secrets at least from a few years ago in the government was that DOD was often a surreptitious sort of funder of a lot of CVE that was going on at state and DOD was a great partner and a lot of three stars and four stars got it and wanted to help out the state department it will be interesting to see if that persists as there's some reorientation of priorities I would argue it's in the long-term strategic interest of the U.S. military to become a stronger advocate of the civilian practitioners both government and non-governmental that do the kind of work we're talking about here today but at the end of the day no amount of enthusiasm or even advocacy from the United States military is going to get this community to where it needs to be the kinds of resourcing and policy support that I would argue everybody on this panel that are still in the only one not in government now of your panelists what they need to truly strategically succeed cannot be funneled through the Department of Defense the Department of Defense is never going to care enough about this to make that successful without the policy makers of all stripes becoming greater enthusiasts for this kind of work which in many ways is more difficult and more complex than anything I've had to do we're never going to get there okay well I think blood sugar levels are plunging people are thinking about what else they'd like to be doing this evening so I just wanted to ask if our panelists had any final comments on this eternally challenging set of problems that we've discussed it's again it's one of those problems of democracy how do you get people to focus on the long term how do you get to them to fund things that are uncertain how do you convince them that we can develop greater knowledge we have done it in the past in other circumstances if anyone has any closing thoughts on their own and you can anonymize your discussions on your own interactions with the hill on this I would be eager to hear them because ultimately that institution is going to play that part of our branch of our government is going to play a really big role in all this may I yeah I think because this is being recorded there will be little anonymization but no I mean I think at least for me I sort of feel like a counter terrorist in a candy store to have an audience like this and people working on so many different issues that directly impact the way that we use in many cases your money and I think that the one thing I was going to say earlier that was I think a positive point here is that the fundamentals of the CVE PVE space that we're working in have they've had durability through changes of administration and that's good that's good for all of us if it had been even more of a policy 180 we would have a lot of real problems and I think we'd be that many more years behind so because those fundamentals are there I think we are making some progress and I think we're doing it in a much more sophisticated way than we had previously cadre wise we still need to grow you know it was a pretty lonely conference room in the early days and it is bigger but you know that handful of people unfortunately several of whom are in the room here I don't all want riding on the same public transportation at the same time just for fear of lobotomization of our capacity but but I do think that there's also just extraordinary growth that still needs to happen and how we much more rapidly communicate because if the threat is going to be changing this dynamically going forward we need actionable research much quicker and I think that that's true in the development space I think it's probably true in the diplomacy space and I know that it's true on the security side as well let me just pick up from there because I would agree with that and I would say in the interactions we've been having on the hill especially there's a recognition that this is a field that is here to stay and it has a future and it has a value and a worth that people are projecting to the future so I believe you know we'll there will be you know waxing and waning of support through the years but overall this is now an area that people say this is something we have to pay attention to and support politically and that's the message we're getting from the hill and in general as I mentioned before we're seeing the policy space in this area expand and broaden in ways that going into different fields and taking different approaches to the CVE problems but with generally bipartisan support and support both from the hill and from the administration in ways that I still find sometimes challenging in the current climate let me just offer my heartfelt thanks to the people in this room I think that and all the other researchers out there I think that much of the positive progress that has been made in this field much more of it than is generally recognized is really directly attributable to your insights your field work it's something that I think we see just in the fact that this form is taking place that resolve exists that we're having this kind of an interchange you know I think it's a good model to build on and I hope we build on it more well I wasn't quite sure how I would end this on a positive note but somehow it happened and given all the other elements of the discussion I'm quite pleased with myself so on that note let me thank you all for your continued attention let me in particular thank our panelists for an enlivening and informative discussion and with that I'll turn it back to Leanne. So thanks everybody especially those who have been here all day today we really appreciate your time and your attention thank you so much to everyone who has been a speaker, a panelist and I'd like to give a special thanks to my incredible team here at USIP Megan Loney, Bethany McGinn, Katiera, Arianezad Bozgoski and Fouad Pervez. Team Resolve has done incredible work to make today happen and I hope that everybody gets a chance to spend a little bit more time at the reception getting to know everybody on our team. I'd also like to thank everyone here at USIP that made this possible our public affairs team our AV team our operations team we have been here all day multiple stage setups multiple different things and to make it look this easy and this seamless is a feat in and of itself so thank you to everyone here at USIP to make this possible I think we have learned a lot today I won't try and sum up although we may try and do some written sum ups afterwards so we'll have to send out to everybody what those blog posts look like. I think we learned a couple things though that I do think are worth highlighting that that the peace building challenges for our future are not going to be solved in one day or in one conference but we have a lot more work that we have been progressing on and can continue to progress on together so I really hope that we can find more opportunities to work together as part of the resolve network with USIP as home to the resolve network secretariat and maybe continue this what I'm calling constructive disruption we see resets as a good thing I think that the change that was alluded to in the last panel is difficult and uncertainty is difficult but we are stronger when we are able to face those uncertainties and those changes together so thank you everyone and I'm going to direct everybody now to our reception which is going to be let's see it's in our international women's common which is going to be up the stairs and over to pass the turnstiles I get that right thank you everybody for being here today