 Hello, I'm Jonathan Pinkney, Senior Researcher for the Program on Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event series on people power, peace, and democracy. In these events, we'll bring together academics and activists, peace builders, and policymakers to discuss practical lessons learned from groundbreaking research at the intersection of nonviolent action, peace building, and political change. We'll talk about how mediation can transform nonviolent action movements, show the strategies grassroots movements has used to pressure warring parties to come to the negotiation table, and how action on the streets can carry those negotiations to a peaceful resolution. And we'll take a long-term look at how nonviolent action and inclusive dialogue and negotiation processes can help forge a long-term sustainable democracy that includes the voices of the most marginalized. We hope these conversations will inform and inspire you as together we seek to better understand and bring about a world where conflict and injustice can be resolved without violence. Thank you. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the transitions to multi-party democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa, many well-known campaigns of nonviolent action have led to significant democratic reforms. And research shows that these cases are reflective of a deeper trend. Political transitions initiated through nonviolent action are almost three times as likely to end in democracy as any other form of transition. But how meaningful are these changes for groups that have been politically excluded and repressed? We know all too well that democratic institutions don't necessarily translate into meaningful political inclusion for those marginalized by reason of their race, ethnicity, gender, or other identity characteristics. How does nonviolent action affect these deeper dynamics? This is the question we're going to dig into in our conversations today. For our first conversation, I'm joined by three researchers who have been working together on a groundbreaking USIP research project examining changes in the inclusion of politically marginalized ethnic groups after successful nonviolent action campaigns. Subindra Bogati is the founder and chief executive of the Nepal Peace Building Initiative with more than 15 years of experience working with national and international organizations on peace building, governance, and development issues. Welcome Subindra. Titik Virawati is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. Welcome, Titik. And finally, we have Dr. Ches Thurber. Ches is a political scientist who studies global conflict, security, and contentious politics. And he is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. Welcome Ches. Thank you so much to all of you for being here and let's dive right into it. So I'd like to start with Ches. Can you introduce us to your broad statistical research on inclusion after nonviolent action campaigns? What kind of nonviolent action were you looking at and what were you trying to understand? Yeah, thank you, Jonathan. So the motivation for this research actually came from my own field research in Nepal talking to members of the Maoist group there who had initiated and sustained for about 10 years a violent civil war. I was trying to understand because this came just five years after a successful nonviolent movement that had led to democratization in the fall. What had pushed them towards this further step of taking up arms? And when I asked them questions about why they thought that using nonviolent techniques would not work for them, they would say things such as, well, you know, that's a strategy that works for the bourgeoisie, but that doesn't work for people like us. And when you kind of unstripped some of the Maoist language from that, I think what they were talking about was that this was a tactic that produced gains for people from privileged groups, people who are already included in politics that they saw civil resistance as kind of an insider's game amongst elites, but not something that produces what they would describe as real social change. And so this project was kind of an attempt to put that to the test. And it's not just Maoists in Nepal who make these type of arguments. This is a pretty standard critique from the left, the radical left in terms of how they view civil resistance and nonviolent tactics. And I think legitimately does point to a gap that exists in academic scholarship on nonviolent resistance, which, as you pointed out, has highlighted the success of civil resistance campaigns when you define it in the short term in terms of ability to depose a dictator. Or even as your own research has shown in terms of producing democratic reforms as measured in terms of things like competitive elections, freedom of speech, those types of what we might think of liberal negative freedoms. And so this leaves the question kind of the next step for us is thinking about, well, what is the track record bin in terms of making broader progress towards social inclusion, the types of things that the Maoists that I was talking Maoists that I were talking to were interested in achieving. And so what we've tried to do is to take a kind of cross national analysis and to look at cases of transitions to democracy where movements have been successful in terms of bringing about some type of liberal democratic reforms and trying to see how often does that result in greater steps towards inclusion. And what we've kind of really found so far is sure enough democratization that leads to inclusion is far more rare. It's a much smaller subset of the cases in which democratic reforms occur. So could you I'm curious about sort of the point that you just raised there at the end, could you tell us a little bit more about, you know, why this is such a rare occurrence and perhaps what are some of the characteristics of transitions where where this does happen? Yeah, so I think when we think about the ways in which democratization transitions to democracy happened, it shed some light as to what might be going on. I think the first is that we often think of transitions to democracy happening in one of two ways. One is from the top down, what some scholars call kind of negotiated packs amongst elites and so kind of by the very nature and description of this, we can see how why that might not lead to more inclusive reforms when it's just elites sitting around the table forging packs, forging deals, even if that provides for open political competition. We're not talking about major steps for inclusion. The other kind of school of thought about democratization thinks about democratic transitions that come from the bottom up. And I think this is where we see more promise for for advances towards inclusion. And I think democratic transitions that are sparked by civil resistance campaigns by mass protests that bring people out into the street have a greater chance of resulting in the end in advances towards ethnic and social inclusion. But even then, it's not that frequent. It's still a small subset of those cases. One of the things that I found in prior research is that marginalized groups are less likely on the whole to initiate campaigns of nonviolent resistance, that a lot of the ways in which we understand civil resistance and Gandhi and nonviolent tactics to work don't seem as as amenable, as viable for marginalized communities. This idea of bringing huge numbers of people out into the street. That's a more difficult thing to do for more socially isolated groups. Many of which happen to be smaller. This idea of kind of persuading and winning over regime elites, getting key members of a government to defect and switch sides. That seems less possible when we're talking about mobilization by minority groups. So what we found is that the chances of success are higher in terms of achieving social inclusion when it is minority groups who are actually participating in the campaign. And then also what we think what I think is happening is that this is coming about by some process of coalition coalition that often it is, in fact, more privileged elite groups who are leading these campaigns of civil resistance for democratization. But in their efforts to build a broad coalition to get as many people out in the streets as possible, they make deals with organizations that are representing marginalized communities. And when those deals that they foster lead to some kind of promise that in the future, government will have a more inclusive more inclusive society and provide kind of specific issues on the political platforms that these marginalized communities are advocating for, I think that's when we might see the most successful for civil resistance campaigns leading to eventually a state of greater political inclusion. Thanks, Ches, that's really that's really fascinating. I think so to get a little bit more detail on this, I'd like to turn to Subindra now. Subindra Ches mentioned his work in Nepal. And of course, you've been doing research on sort of political contention in Nepal for a very long time now. I'm curious to hear could you give us just a little bit of an overview on how have marginalized groups in Nepal participated in nonviolent action movements? Thank you, Jonathan. I think they, they, you know, they have been participating in movement since 1990 or before that in all organizations, but they were brought together by the mass movement by 1996. So their voices have been there since 1986. And in 2006, when the 19, 19 days long movement came upon, then I only make other people, it is not only the mass to our people who have come to this street, is their voices too. So when they were voting, they were having this violent movement in question with my list. They have been to those sort of inclusion sort of stuff. But once they chose nonviolent movement, like people like us, me, come up, upper caste group. We are all taking part in the movement. It started long ago, even before 1990, not that much, but after, after the 2006 movement, I think that made everyone heard about it. Thank you so much, Samindra. I'm sorry, I think your audio was a little bit, a little bit going in and out. So I'm not sure I quite caught all of that, but I think I've got the, I've got the main points. So you mentioned in particular a lot of participation by marginalized groups in the movement in 2006. How did that then? Was there then greater inclusion of those groups after the 2006 movement? Or what did those sort of political deals look like after the movement was over? No, it was not only in only the inclusion of the different groups or marginalized groups in 2006 movement. It was a movement by all the groups. You know, at the time the common enemy was the king. So political party leaders, then citizens, other people, whoever were in Nepal, they all participated in that movement. But the movement was for inclusive democratic and progressive sort of constitution, or the constitution that should be written by the constitution assembly. And it was mainly to be, you know, inclusion for the sake of marginalized people. So what I was saying earlier is that when the, there was a more, there was a movement, violent movement going on from 1996 to 2006, not many people participated, but when the movement became nonviolent, then people from all walks of life went over there despite knowing the fact that the movement was for the inclusion. It was, you know, the country was, if you've, the country so far in the state and the, in the society, it is a brown shape dominant. The one particular group is dominant, despite knowing the fact that they will be losing the, all the individual walks of life participated and in that movement was to be for the inclusive question assembly. And will you say that those goals of inclusion have been met in Nepal after 2006? That is interesting. You know, that's what we were, I mean, my research find says that, I think we're back to square one. Like it started with the kind of, you know, we started thinking about Nepal where, you know, if you look at it from 2006 until 2015, you know, all this movements or whatever debates that we have in Kathmandu, that tried to save, that was all about what the country should look like, what should be its structure, you know, what is the nationalism sort of thing. So there was so many dialogue was happening. It was, it was being written, it was being discussed from different perspectives. And there were so many policies that came affirmative actions came into force. There were so many other movements and we had this elections in 2008. There was really, really inclusive in terms of political representation. So many Mao Zedan groups became members of the country in assembly. And then when it came in 2013, you know, the number of the representation came down. And by the time we are in 2015, then it was back to, I think, square one. You know, like we tried to, whatever we tried to accept after coming in 2015, the deep social division that we had or the inclusion issue that we had, we couldn't complete it. So in terms of policies on papers or, you know, whatever the political leaders, I mean, made the speeches or arguments, it was all good. But the only part, the difficult part for Nepal is the implementation. We failed to implement whatever we promised we would do. So, but, I mean, saying that, I mean, despite saying that, what I would say is that we have good track because, you know, we have within 10, 15 days, we have seen so many affirmative action that the government has taken to make the people, to make the country, to make this national institution inclusive. We haven't done enough to make it more inclusive. Thank you so much, Subindra. I'd like to turn to Titik now. You've also been examining some similar questions in the context of Indonesia. Can you tell us a little bit about the transition in Indonesia that you're researching and what the relationship was between nonviolent action and inclusion there? Thank you, Jonathan. Street demonstrations in Jakarta increase in the mid-1990s because the public fell disappointed President Suharto's handling of corruption, collusion, nepotism, and public protest. After he was re-elected for the seventh time in May 1997 and the financial crisis hit Indonesia in July 1997, student activists in Jakarta began street demonstrations on May 3rd, 1998 and continued until President Suharto stepped down on May 21st, 1998. The student mobilization took place after political and military groups supporting President Suharto and opposition groups disagreed on the leadership transition process, observing that student mobilization was on the rise. Various social organizations led by urban middle class intellectuals joined the students. While the students acted as a mobilizing force to pressure President Suharto to step down, the middle class non-student intellectuals took the initiatives in proposing six demands for reform. First, Tixuarto and his cronies to court. Second, amend the 1945 constitution. Third, eliminate the dual function of the National Army. Fourth, eliminate corruption, collusion, and nepotism. Fifth, over the widest possible regional autonomy and six enforce the rule of law. To your second question, the 1980 civil resistance movement and peace building initiative carried out by social organization have the potential to increase the social inclusion of marginalized groups in Indonesia, even though outcomes vary across marginalized groups. Two additional points should be stressed here. First, by marginalized groups, I mean social groups that are based on categories of gender, social class, ethnicity, and religion. This kind of grouping has been made based on two types of major problems facing Indonesia at that time. The first problem is about nation building, ethnicity, and religion fall under this category. And the second one is about problems other than nation building, gender, and class fall under this category. And second, the differences in the outcomes of social inclusions depend on, I will just mention three factors here. The degree of state repression, the level of organizational capacity, and whether or not post-authoritarian government leadership existed. The social inclusion of women in Indonesia is greater than farmers and workers for two reasons. First, under the authoritarian regime, gender-based organizations in Indonesia were less repressed than class-based organizations because some elements of the state were open to women's non-traditional roles in promoting economic growth. That was the key policy agenda of the state at the time. Second, gender-based organizations were more able than class-based organizations to seize opportunity when it came using non-material sources of power, especially in the form of creativity and initiative. For example, women's organizations seized the opportunity afforded by the fall of Suwato and the riots that led to sexual violence targeting at least Chinese in May 1998 by urging the new government to establish the national commission on violence against women. In addition, the social inclusion of ethnic minority groups in Indonesia is greater than religious minority groups because although the social organizations representing ethnic minority groups in Indonesia were heavily repressed by the authoritarian regime and like organizational leadership, the post-authoritarian government leadership played a crucial role in improving the living conditions of those marginalized ethnic groups. In this case, the people of East Timor or Timolese state and ethnic Chinese people pose authoritarian government leadership. Here means the qualities of a mother leader who is willing to accommodate complaints from the people and find solutions in both external and internal environments such as family education and workplace that value-crossed cultural communication seem to greatly influence how presidents Suwato's successors in this case, President Habibi and President Abdurrahman Wahid made the decision at that time. So living and working in Germany have shaped the mindset of President Habibi who openly accepted a peaceful solution rather than a military one in dealing with the issue of East Timor. For example, to demonstrate seriousness, President Habibi took a critical step by offering wide-ranging special autonomy or independence if autonomy were rejected. The people of Timolese they finally opted for independence through a UN sponsor referendum held in August 1999. And similar to the people of Timolese state ethnic Chinese people enjoyed better living conditions. It was mainly thanks to President Abdurrahman Wahid popularly known as Usdur who played a critical role in advocating for the social rights of ethnic Chinese Indonesia. For example, he took a major step by revoking the 1967 Act which banned ethnic Chinese Indonesia from ethnic Chinese Indonesia from practicing their faith and preserving their cultural traditions. And this achievement has been made possible due to the influence of Usdur's egalitarian family background. He comes from a traditional Muslim family that highly values cultural diversity and he's a son of Nahlatululama leader. Great, thank you for that overview Titik. Now, one thing that Ches mentioned in his overview of the kind of the broad statistical research was that participation in the sort of nonviolent action campaign that initiated the transition by marginalized groups then seemed to lead to more inclusion across the board. So you mentioned sort of marginalized groups in Indonesia across several dimensions, gender, class, ethnicity, religion. Was there a lot of participation by these marginalized groups in that movement that you were describing against Suharto in 1997, 1998? Yes, yes, that's right. Urban, especially poor urban people joined the protests at the time in 1998. And their protests were led by by the urban middle class intellectuals. The urban middle class intellectuals demanding change including among others students, journalists, lawyers, academics, and social activists. Interesting. So a question I'd like to maybe go back to Ches on but I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of all three of you. So I think you've raised, you've all raised that creating institutions of electoral democracy may be somewhat easier than forging these deeper kinds of inclusion for the most marginalized groups. Are there ways that say international actors or other outside observers who want to help facilitate this sort of deeper and more comprehensive inclusion? How can this be promoted or supported from perhaps outside the country as well as by activists within countries going through these kinds of transitions? Ches, I think I'll turn to you first and then hear thoughts of you from Subindra and Titic as well. Sure, am I allowed to say I don't know? I think this is a really tricky question. And because I think we see kind of a two-sided nature to this type of external support. On the one hand, external actors can provide a real boost of support for a movement, both in terms of providing resources and knowledge and material things that are really helpful for a movement that is challenging a government, as well as imposing certain types of costs, whether they be sanctions, restrictions, diplomatic pressure on the regime that can put greater coercive pressure on them to get to the bargaining table and to make these types of concessions, especially if external actors make these types of steps towards inclusion an important part of what they want to see that the regime do as part of an external, as part of a negotiated settlement. At the same time, our empirical evidence about the role of external actors and the support they provide has been pretty mixed in terms of not showing kind of a clear relationship in terms of helping movements succeed overall. And we find that it can be particularly perilous in these cases in which questions of identity and social inclusion are at the center of the campaign. Mr. Bender and Tateek may be able to talk about specifically the way that this played out in those two countries. But it can be a real opportunity, actually for the regime to rally nationalism against marginalized communities by pointing to the relationships that the marginalized communities forge with international actors and say, look, these international actors are coming and they're trying to tear apart our society. This is not the direction that we should be headed. Salim Bia. Yeah, please, Subindra, go ahead. I think in the... Okay. I think in the power that it was bringing initially since the peace process, international community made their post-peace building isn't as inclusion, which was taken, I mean, positively. But I think they were doing pretty good. Like they were helping to helping support marginalized community to build their capacity for forming caucuses and helping them to acknowledge and also be politically active, everything and really going well. But what we also saw at that time was there's a kind of competition among the international actors to support. So there's a kind of, you know, so many international actors were supporting so many groups and then they were in the news all the time and that made the government kind of not happy about it. So if you look at 2008 in Nepal's, you know, CA election, it was really going well. And after 2013, the government started blaming international community, saying that they were trying to, you know, destroy the Nepali peace process by helping the marginalized communities. So it started backfiring. And in 2014, the government came out with the policies saying that you cannot support, you can support the development activities, not the social issues. So as far, what I think is the way they supported international community is supported from the very beginning, very good in terms of making the, you know, more help without chasing knowledge with tactics and everything. But as there are any competitors, you know, international, I enjoy competing as well. It also backfired a bit. So I think a slow and coordinated would help a lot. Great, thank you, Subin. Titik, you have thoughts on this question? Yeah, sure. One of the main takeaways to be learned from the Indonesian case was that the involvement of international actors is critically important to improve inclusion of the nonviolent action campaigns. In the short term, I would say that international actors should help increase the capacity of social organizations to create greater inclusion by giving those organizations financial support for any social activities that are oriented toward social empowerment and by conducting training in nonviolent and peace-building skills or nonviolent activists and peace-builders who are both at the national and local levels. And in the long term, I would say that international actors should help create conducive environments that can promote the growth of the new middle classes through the provision of quality education. For example, international actors either working alone or working together with national governments or for scholarship to people from developing countries. Great, thank you so much, Titik. I think with that, we will conclude our first conversation. Thank you so much to all of you for sharing some of the findings from this groundbreaking research with us. It's really exciting to hear and we look forward to the final publication of your research. So having heard about this from Ches Subindra and Titik, we'll turn now to some reactions from a panel of academic and practitioner experts. I'm joined now by three outstanding panelists to discuss this question of nonviolent action and long-term inclusion in more depth. Rosa Emilia Salamanca is director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research in Action, an organization working for peace, human rights and democracy from a feminist perspective in Colombia. Mona Ansari is a lawyer, human rights advocate and former commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Nepal. And finally, Deepak Tapa is director of Social Science Baja, a research organization based in Kathmandu and he's written extensively on Nepal's contemporary political developments. Welcome to all of you and thank you so much for joining us today. I'd like to turn to Deepak first. Deepak, I'm curious to hear your reactions to what was just presented by Ches Subindra and Titik. What are your thoughts on this relationship between nonviolent action and inclusion, both in the case of Nepal, which was discussed and perhaps more broadly as well? Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. I will speak only for Nepal because that's where I work and I will not be able to comment much on what is happening elsewhere, although I do keep up with the developments there. In the case of Nepal, what was presented earlier more or less sums up the situation in Nepal. Although as Subindra put it, I would not be as let's say pessimistic as he was, as he sounded. There have been developments over the past 15 years. Yes, there have been setbacks particularly since 2013 and after the promulgation of the 2015 constitution, but there have been advances that will be very difficult to roll back anytime soon. Attempts are certainly being made by people in power at present. The government of Nepal is presenting led by someone who does not believe any way in the idea of inclusion has been always against that and the irony is that he was given the responsibility of implementing a constitution that is supposed to usher in a very different idea of Nepal. But there is despite all his efforts, I think people are realizing to a large extent that the gains made in the past 10, 15 years are here to stay. There will be undercutting and undermining done at various levels. And yes, there have been a rollbacks, but yes, they're here to stay and hopefully we can build on them further rather than roll them back further. I'll stop there for now, thank you. Great, thank you so much. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts as well on the issue that Ches and Subindra brought up about the participation of marginalized groups in sort of nonviolent action. In this case, the 2006 nonviolent movement against the monarchy and how that may have impacted the kinds of inclusion that have come about that you were just describing. Do you see a connection there or not so much? Yes, certainly, but like the 2006 movement that ultimately led to the ouster of the king was a combination of a number of factors. One was obviously the people tired of the insurgency that had been going on and looking for ways in which they could end the insurgency which would definitely mean the movement against the king. So that was one. And then along with the ouster of the king was the implicit promise that the future Nepal would be a much more inclusive society because the five years or so previous to the movement there had been a greater realization that one of the reasons why we have so much discord and dispute and conflict in the country is because of the lack of inclusion of the majority of the population. So there was the idea that the movement against the king would result not only in peace but also the creation or the crafting of a different kind of Nepal. We call it the new Nepal and the time. And definitely there was this feeling. Now over time, what a new Nepal meant differed for different groups of people because there are so many interest groups involved. All had this vision of a new Nepal but the visions certainly differed from interest group to interest group. Hence the long time it took almost nine years for the constitution to be drafted. Wonderful, thank you Deepak. I'd like to turn to Mona now. Mona, you've been of course at the forefront of fighting for greater inclusion in Nepal as part of the National Human Rights Commission. And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on what have been some of the challenges of that fight and how has the fact that Nepal's transition happened through this mass people's movement affected that fight for greater inclusion from your perspective? Thank you so much. And good morning and good evening to you all for bringing me here in this interesting discussion. Whenever this question come to in my mind and for the why inclusion? Why inclusion and why nonviolent movement on the inclusion? The quickly answer in my mind actually peace and stability for me actually what I have been seen since my childhood actually. I saw so many marginalization exclusion in the country. When I was in a class six, this is a story very much connected with me. My father was a carpenter and I was in a class six in government school starting. At that time I noticed there is a scholarship for Dalit was very initially started. And you know, in my class there is like two or three Dalit student who is not coming regularly to school. And my principal told me, are you interested for that scholarship? He's asking to me. So the question is here. Is it that is scholarship for Muslim? No. Because we are not known as the citizen actually. We hold the citizenship but we are not. We always treat it as an outsider. This is the one what I have been faced in my class six. This is my real example, real experience. And I was surprised and I returned to home and I told my father, I'm a Dalit. And my father explained to me that our law said that you are untouchable but not that much untouchable. How the Dalit is untouchable? I suppose to be like, you know, the gold water. If some Dalit is a thirst to uppercase like Subindra, like Deepakzi. So they have to be like, before entering their house they have to purify with the gold water. Not me. So this kind of behave we have been faced in since very early age. But of course in a, you know, the conflict took a place in Nepal. It was very highly desired that when CPA, Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed, at that time, there was a very few benchmarks that, one is Constituent Assembly election. Second is ensure inclusion in all state institution. And then third is reform the government. Reform like governance and government mechanics. All the state institution. And of course the other one is the most important is transitional justice. But later when I monitor and I watch very closely all those ongoing process, since my practice and my work from the Women's Commission throughout the Human Rights Commission, I have not exactly feel whether this the inclusion is fully applied, fully practiced. No, because after CPA signed till today there is a people on the street, still indigenous, Tharoos, Dalit, Muslim, Madesi, women, they still are demanding for equality, inclusion, treatment for the equal. So this is like all these are nonviolent movement, accepted few, because when you know before the problem of the 2015 constitution, I was just reading this afternoon when I supposed to be part of this, I was reading like a constitution article 42, article 42, you know, it said a state that all organs of the state will be inclusive, but the provision relating to different government and constitutional body do not ensure inclusion the fact that the constitution was drafted by people with it. This was my articles line, intentionally in reflected in many articles of the constitution, everybody knows that Khasari group, you know, this is the upper class, this term have to be noted like in my, in the constitution Khasari group has remained the most advantage group ever since the unification of Nepal 2,240 years ago. And this is the group that control the state affairs, every state affairs in the last 240 years. All the drafters of the constitution of the, whether they were politician or bureaucrats, where from this Khasari groups and hence they put this group quality for inclusion that effect right of the minority, minority community. The constitution does not define any other groups, but it define Khasari group who's ruling decade and decade of Nepal, Brahmins and other like Thakuri, Sanyasi the Khasari group cannot be defined marginalized group on any basis, whether it is, this is my opinion, SDI or any other government index. So the question is as Deepak Ji mentioned, I don't know there's a missing part of your research or maybe I missed out. So sometime I, this is the real realization for Nepal inclusion or exclusion, whether is rightly going on, but I have not seen as like our political party or a state actors have realized that inclusion is the need for peace and stability. And this is the process of nation-building actually. Thank you for those observations. And I think that very important emphasis on kind of the ways that new institutions are created and the people who create those institutions then really shapes what the impact of them is going to be. One sort of very quick follow-up for you. I'd be curious to hear you talk a little bit about the kinds of movements that have tried to push against that. You mentioned this a couple of times, the kind of continued push by marginalized groups sort of from the outside through protests or other kinds of actions. What have made some of those, have some of those been effective? If so, are there ones that have been more effective than others and what has helped them to work or not to work? Actually, some of the movements have been still going on. For example, Dalit movement. Dalit were treated in Nepal as an untouchable group still. We have a law, very strict law in the constitution. Untouchability is strictly punishable. But the question is that this group is still facing everyday challenges. And I think that's a good question. This group is still facing everyday challenges. Their life has been threatened. They have been masculine. If you go to Google, there is a news link. The last year, same month, the group of Dalit were killed. This is just a name of like a love affair with the upper caste girls. So, Tharus. Yeah, people said like if you are going to talk with the various Nepali people, they said, in the constitution, there is a Tharu commission. There is a Dalit commission. There is so many marginalized groups. Groups or thematic commission is based on is a form constituted in the constitution. But the question is like, this is the real realization or just the political game? Maybe Deepak Papa also can add some of the things. But this is my observation of being a practitioner and what I have been observing with many, many of like many painful stories actually. And if any marginalized community is supposed to be raised for such issues in the major debate or majoritarian debate, they either face allegation or defamation. I mean, there is so many incidents. I have been also facing the same way, so many incidents. So, this is the continuation of something like a ruling class influence on the state mechanism. Great. Thank you so much. I'd like to turn to Rosa Emilia now. You're coming at this from a somewhat different situation in Colombia. But I'm curious to hear sort of your reactions to the research and the conversation that we've been having thus far. How does this resonate or not with how violent action has affected inclusion in Colombia? Well, thank you so much for this invitation. And it's very nice to see my colleagues here and also to hear all what they have said already. And I think it resonates a lot, not because we are in the other side of the world and because we are a Latin American country, we don't resonate with all these things because we really know exclusion also. I think for the Global South, exclusion is a very important issue. And when we talk about resolving or trying to put other kind of ways of resolving our conflicts and so on, so from a nonviolent vision and as practitioners to have other ideas about inclusion, these are very, very important discussions. I think that the East and West, sometimes we are especially in the Global South so near in our reflections and in the way we understand the situation. So first I want to say that this thing of nonviolent and inclusion is very complicated. Because when people are highly excluded and they have been in conflict environments, in conflict contexts, it's very difficult because there is something that is happening in the minds of everyone and some kind, the speeches and the values and many things, practices of conflict and confrontation will come inside like the way culture behaves. So there is a lot of change. You have to change. You know that we work a lot saying we have to transform transforming ourselves. So there is a lot of things that we have to change in our mind, in the ways we act because as we naturalize violence against women we naturalize violence against people in general. So I think there is a huge work we have to do still within us and with us and with people trying to understand and trying to change concepts, ways and behaviors that have been so deeply in long conflicts absorbed by cultures that you have to change that in a very high way. So I think that even our social movements we have to change and sometimes we are being stacked in what we call the modern ways of behavior. So we always are trying to find ourselves in confrontation all the time because there are many power relations that we have to change and you not always find a way to change these power relations in a very nonviolent way because people and power are always or many times having a lot of violent attitudes against nonviolent people or against people that want to change things in another way. So I think there is still a long conversation between what means nonviolent and how nonviolent can be effective to change power relations because power relations are so deeply rooted in our societies. So this is one of the things I will write because we really have to find another way to change our own behaviors. So I'm trying to start this conversation from us to others and then this idea of inclusion I think that it's like if we had a model and then how we include people in that model and I think that this is not an issue of how we include and how we make people going the same like we were doing a pizza so we are going to put many things and we don't know what is going to be tasted it will be always pizza. So what I think is that we when we talk about inclusion it's not about minorities it's about ideas it's about ideas of life it's about ideas of what are women thinking but what are the diversity of women thinking what are the different indigenous and native groups thinking about what is life and what life looks like for them and what are our descendant people in Colombia thinking about their own way of behavior and the way they think they approach to life so this is not a thing of how we can include this minority sometimes I feel very I feel so strange because sometimes they speak how we can include a minority from women and we are more than have all the humans of the world so why are we treated like minorities so I think I want really and I suppose that yes I really like very much the intervention of Titiq and how this all the research can can really problemize this kind of concepts minorities, inclusion how we can in a contemporary way what does it mean now for us so when we are talking about discussion about ideas we are talking about the designing of another way of a state we are not talking about the same kind of state we are talking about a state that will have answers and will respond to different ideas of the world not only to one not only to one way of being democrat not to one way of achieving spiritual security as we say because we are so diverse in our approaches even to God so we need a state that will really recognize all this human diversity of ideas and approaches to life so I think we are not longer asking for important institutions because when we talk about new institutions what are we talking about we are talking about new institutions that are coming from a preform way of behavior and thinking about democracy or we are really thinking what kind of democracy we want for our countries in a way that inclusiveness will have different kind of dynamics in discussion and practice in that democracy that will be designed from our own way and will be like ownership by us because when we have new institutions that are imported they are not us they are not our own process they are not our own answers so I think there is a lot of discussion that I think is very interesting about this and finally I think that in power relations that you find in gender issues in identity and ethnic relations and power relations are very tricky and I admire how the elites of different ways because we don't have only one elite we have the patriarchal elite that is divided in many ways but we also have the economical elite and we have the political elite so we are really dealing with a lot of elites that are very different and sometimes they are joined but sometimes they are divided just to play different roles so I think that we are talking about exclusion, equality and economics also and I think for this moment of our lives economical issues are substantial to peace these are substantial so we what are we talking about economical issues only inclusion of how everyone has a job or also we are talking about how we are thinking about how we would like to ownership land or how we want to ownership other things that are really in the moment and in the part in the highest way of the way where we have to think about the planet and we have to think about other things so I think now we have to redefine what we are thinking because I think seriously that we are in a civil like an opportunity to having a new speech about what do we mean about inclusion and non-violence for a country that is so important because we are now reaching a new way of violence and we have to leave that again. Thank you so much Rosemilia for that really important focus on complexity on making sure that we are not looking at these things in a simplistic way and ensuring that we are not just thinking about inclusion as who are the minorities of the table but also transforming our ways of thinking and the power relations that are shaping our conversations. I think that is so crucial as you said I think this is only the very beginning of a longer conversation that needs to happen on all these issues and so I hope that unfortunately this is where we will have to end our conversation here today but I hope that all of you who have joined us today will continue to join USIP as we continue to have these conversations about what does it mean, how can it be effective in changing these power relations, how can we be having these broader more complex conversations about creating better institutions for all of us. So I just want to say thank you once again Rosemilia, Mona and Deepak for being here with us this morning, for sharing your insights with us and for all that you do to work for peace. Thanks again to all of you for joining us. This event is the last event in our particular People Power Peace and Democracy series where we've examined the intersections of non-violent action, peace building and democratization. You can find the recordings of all these events at usip.org slash events stay tuned as publications on these topics continue to be released in the coming months and as we continue to hold new events on these topics. So thank you once again and I hope that you all have a wonderful day.