 So, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, so good morning. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the Executive Vice President here at the United States Institute of Peace, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to Peace Con 2018. This is something that we've been looking forward to all year since last Peace Con, and this is an especially exciting one for us. The Institute of Peace is very pleased, honored to be able to host the first day of Peace Con in partnership with the Alliance for Peace Building. So it is, and it's a great day here that we'll have. The Institute of Peace is convinced that peace is possible. We're convinced that peace is practical, and it's important for U.S. national security and security of our allies. And I say possible, several of us got back from Afghanistan last week. And many in this room, many in the city, many around the world think Afghanistan's not possible, peace is not possible. Well, it is. We came away with some sense that there may be an opportunity here. The stars might be aligning for some discussion between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban with the Americans playing a role. And none of those pieces were in place before, and now they are in place. We also visited Islamabad and the Pakistanis have said, you finally understood what we've been saying all along. That is, you have to have these conversations. So peace is possible. It's possible in hard places. It's possible in other places around the world. So this is what the theme here of the Institute of Peace has. Again, great opportunity for us to have you all in the building. We're glad to have General Zinni and Tom Stahl, Rob Berg, the rest of you who have come from some far places and near to be a part of this year today. It is my great pleasure to introduce Liz Hume. We need no introduction to this group. Liz is the CEO. We talked about the title here. The CEO running the Alliance for Peace Building. And Rob will guide us on all of this. But it is a great pleasure for me and a privilege to introduce Liz. So please kick us off, Liz. Thank you. Acting CEO. So good morning and thank you, Bill. On behalf of the Alliance for Peace Building and our generous sponsors, I want to thank everybody to PeaceCon 2018. If you want to expand the conversation on social media, please use the hashtag PeaceCon 2018. We are incredibly thankful for our wonderful partnership with USIP, the seventh year that we've been partnering on this conference. So many people at USIP have been working hard to put this together today. I especially want to thank Tina Hegedorn, who has been working very a lot with us and she's on speed dial with us. So thank you, Tina. I also want to thank the AFP staff. It's a team effort. They have been working tirelessly. This is a phenomenal program. If you see them, thank them. I really want to thank Adam Wolf. I know he's probably still outside. I can't thank him enough for his work. And the whole AFP team. And I'm sure they're out there. But please thank them when you see them. It's a sobering time in the world. I don't need to tell anybody that's sitting in this room about the statistics. We are at a 25-year peak in terms of global conflict. It's a sobering time for the field, for the world. This is a challenge to our field. The world needs bold and courageous peace builders now more than ever. But there are challenges that we have to overcome in order to advance the field. There are a couple of bright spots. We'll hear about them today. The US government, a lot of new frameworks at our high-level panel with the UN. And those are all great. But it will really be focusing on implementation. But they could really change the fundamental way that violent conflict and prevention is addressed. One really important piece of legislation that I would like to point out that AFP and Mercy Corps has been leading a coalition on is the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act. We encourage you to get involved. And please talk to Laura Strawmeyer from AFP who is working on it. Two key challenges I see. We have not made the case for the field and we have not proven impact. And until we do those two things, we will not advance the field. We struggle to show evidence. So this lack of evidence, I believe, is one of the greatest challenges. If we believe that what we do is important and our work is effective, then we have to show impact. We had a solutions forum here yesterday led by our amazing director of learning and evaluation, Jessica, who is standing right there. She worked very closely with Joe Hewitt's team here at USIP. It was a phenomenal success. And we encourage people to get involved. Also, it was sponsored by One Earth Future Foundation as well. But we also have to move forward collectively. As a field, we have not done a great job at making the case for peace building. We need to work collectively to inspire more people to act. AFP, with some of its partners, Search for Common Ground, International Alert, GPAC, Consoliation Resources, is working together to form a peace building coalition to inject peace building in the mainstream media into policy. You will hear more about it as the conference goes on. We encourage you to join us as well. I would like to say one thing that we did do is we had the initial success of introducing the word peace building into the dictionary. So hopefully, very soon, when you type peace building, you won't see that little squiggly line underneath. So I want to challenge everybody here to work on these issues to advance the field. And I want to thank everybody that's here for your time, your commitment, your passion, without it, this conference also couldn't happen as well. I hope you'll find these next couple of days inspiring. I have a couple of housekeeping things that I have to go over with you, the conference app. We have come into the 21st century. Please go to EventMobi if you haven't already downloaded it. And it will be your essential tool throughout the few days. So go to EventMobi. The password is peacecon2018. It's in the program. If I can do it, you can all do it. Trust me. I'm very technologically challenged. So we will also be doing a data collection project this year. Again, moving into the 21st century, you can give instant feedback on sessions. You can download and decide where you want to go. You can see somebody's bio. We're saving trees. It's all fantastic. So we'll be sending you notifications on your conference app, and please complete a short survey by 2 PM today. Once you do that, you'll be registered for some prizes. We'll announce at the end of the day. So with that, I want to thank, finally, AFP's board members and our incredible board chair, Bob Burke, who will be introducing General Zinni. Thank you all. Good morning, Excellencies and colleagues. Thank you so much for participating in this wonderful event. And we are particularly pleased to greet Ambassador Nimaga Mali, a country we have focused on for years in one of our 24 affinity groups, a group marvelously led by our esteemed President Emeritus Chick Dumbuck, and whose participation included frequent participation by the now current Foreign Minister of Mali. And she's doing a fine job. We also want to give a special welcome to Ambassador Tecla Berrahan of Ethiopia. His country has been seeking peace in very wonderful ways, and they have just established a new cabinet, Gender Equal, a Minister of Defense who's a woman, and a woman who is now going to head their brand-new Ministry of Peace. That's terrific. And I want to add a word about yesterday's meeting. I have very yellowed credentials in evaluation as founding chair of the OECD DAC evaluation group. And I was thrilled to see people from around the world, young people with really vibrant, fabulous ideas and programs and accomplishments in learning and evaluation. And I want to thank Jessica for organizing yesterday's terrific solution. Jessica Baumgarder-Zuzik. She did this despite a very recent tragic family loss. And Jessica, you're my hero. Thanks so much. The Board of the Alliance for Peace Building includes a number of stars, key CEOs of member organizations and several others, including retired Marine Major General Charlie Bolton. Charlie is beloved by his colleagues in the military, respected by the four space crews that he captained, and highly regarded by the 25,000 employees at NASA and organization that he directed for the eight years of the Obama administration. I ask him one time how he became such a respected and effective leader, and particularly how he became a respected military leader who searched for peace. His answer, two-word answer, was Tony Zinni. General Zinni rose to head central command, in my view, the most difficult assignment in the US military. And he has important things to say about peace and peace keeping his topic today. My mantra is that peace and security require each other. So our understanding of each other and finding common ground with each other is not just nice, it is essential. If we want peace to endure, we have to have protective security. And if protective security has a framework, it must be peace. I'm particularly pleased to ask you to join me in warmly welcoming four star general, Anthony Zinni. Thank you. I know when you hear general, you think I'm going to talk about the military aspects, and my focus is on the security dimension, and maybe just that. But I've had a very unusual career in the military, and I've spent a lot of time in the other dimensions involved in what we're here to discuss today at the conference. Somehow along the way in my military career, I ended up involved in peace mediation work. And I spent a long time while still on active duty doing that. I owed it all, I think, to Ambassador Bob Oakley, those of you that may know of him or know him. He passed away, unfortunately, not that long ago. But he taught me a lot about how to open a dialogue, how to conduct mediation and facilitation, and to look at the long-term ways we try to stabilize environments that are destabilized, and that need some sort of long-range assistance on the political and diplomatic and other dimensions that really don't involve security and humanitarian work. For some reason, that stuck. And I've done things like I headed up the US mission in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I've been involved in the Philippines, actually through USIP, through the Henri Denon Center, and a number of other NGOs. I've worked mediation processes in Indonesia, in Africa, and elsewhere. I'm currently doing work for the State Department right now and trying to resolve the rift between Qatar and the Arab Quartet. So I've seen that dimension of it, where we try to stabilize things politically, and in some ways, when we use that effort to try to prevent things from degrading into a violent confrontation or a humanitarian disaster. I've also worked on the humanitarian side, too, and I've worked with a lot of NGOs doing humanitarian work, most of it in how the military can contribute to that, and trying to do it within the framework of the way our NGOs operate so we understand that we don't have this clash of cultures and we don't get involved in where the military goes its own way, and it tries to dip into humanitarian missions and doesn't get it right because they don't understand what the requirements are, the methodology, what's sustainable, and all that. When Charlie Bolden worked for me when I was the commander of First Marine Expeditionary Force, we found ourselves involved in a great deal or a great number of humanitarian, peacekeeping, peace enforcement kinds of missions. At the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed like these kinds of missions just grew, and we found the military now trying to understand how better to deal with them, and we got into naming these things as low-intensity conflict, military operations other than war, and we came up with a plethora of names that we tried to work with. It became clear to us that we're thrown into these kinds of missions that we needed to find a way to bring all the elements together, especially when we're involved in hybrid or complex missions where there's a security dimension, there's a humanitarian dimension, and there's some sort of political diplomatic dimension, and then eventually some sort of stabilization effort. We started in the Marine Corps, we called it an exercise. It was called Emerald Express. Some of you may have participated in it. We ran it in California. It was not really a military exercise. It was trying to bring together all those that were involved in these kinds of missions, including our allies. Obviously our interagency components here in the US government, NGOs and others, to try to work through how can we work better together? How can we find a way that we cooperate in these environments and do better? Now, I'm gonna make a prediction. At the end of this conference, you'll probably come to some conclusions or recommendations. You're probably from your own experience going to talk about some things we haven't gotten right. We've been at this thing for decades in trying to understand it. I can predict when the next sort of peace enforcement, peace keeping, major humanitarian mission, complex, hybrid, whatever, we will relearn the same lessons. We will come together and tell us we should find a way to coordinate better. We should find a way to cooperate better. We should find a way to communicate better. That when we get together, we don't understand each other. When Lance Corporal, with all his combat gear, meets that young NGO out there trying to do humanitarian work, I can tell you there's a cultural difference. There's a basic misunderstanding of each other's missions. Even though both intend and want to make this thing work and are committed to it, they're gonna come at it from a different direction. And they shouldn't be meeting on a battlefield to use a military term. I would tell you the same thing as if we tried in a military operation to suddenly meet each other, different military functions on a battlefield without having planned or having exercised or having had him work together or having had a structure that we worked under, it would be a disaster. Yet we're gonna keep repeating those same lessons. We're gonna find out that we need to plan together. There's some way we need to be able to understand when we get in this environment, what are our roles? How do we compliment each other? What do we do best? How do we support or reinforce each other? We shouldn't be asking those questions when we arrive at the scene of the crime. We should have been asking those questions ahead of time. If you know the military at all and had any experience with the military, we are planning fools. We plan everything. We got a planning process that will water your eyes. I mean, it's unbelievable. We do not like doing things where people that are working with us do not have that same kind of process. They can't get into that level of details. Of course, we have gigantic planning staffs. We have a gigantic support systems that allow us to gather that information, the process, we have gigantic decision-making structures and processes. And so when others come to join us that don't have all that, how do you meld that? How do you make it work? How do we begin ahead of time? A lot of the talk here will be about prevention. How do you prevent without planning? And we're gonna relearn that lesson also. We're gonna learn about our missions and how our missions will differ. And worst of all, how our missions are gonna change. And one of the, we have a term in the military about mission creep. You go on to it, you get involved in a situation committed to it. We get very detailed missions and task statements. Once you're on the battlefield, once you're in this environment, those missions may not be relevant. We have a sort of a tradition, especially in the U.S. military, in that we kind of let the missions be what they're gonna be. And sometimes this frustrates our senior leadership in that our missions creep. And we end up doing things that we weren't sent there to do because we see a need or a requirement and we get deeper involved. One of the problems the military runs into the whole situation becomes dependent upon the military. I was in Somalia, I did three tours of duty in Somalia. The first one when I went in, we were told that we were just going there for about two weeks just to provide security on the ground because obviously the NGOs and others trying to provide humanitarian assistance now could not move because the warlords, the militias, the gangs were robbing them, stopping them. And we were very limited, short period of time, go in, freeze the situation, provide security, ensure the flow of these resources, and then somebody would take over from us. When we landed, we did, in less than three weeks, had covered the entire area in Somalia we were responsible for. These resources were flowing and we asked the question, and then what? We learned that there wasn't this magic organization or force coming in after us. And I realized this about three days into the operation when I got told there were a number of Somali, quote, intellectuals that wanted to see me. And I met with them, they were former academics and businessmen and others, and they were putting their finger in my face and saying, when are you gonna start the jobs program here? And I said, jobs program? You know, I look at my mission and tasks, I didn't see jobs program as one of those military tasks, but it made me realize we had now, to use Secretary Colin Powell's description, the pottery barn example, you break it, you own it. I would say, to paraphrase that, you touch it, you own it. And so we owned it, and we ended up getting more and more deeply involved. We ended up running the police force, trying to reestablish the government, working with Ambassador Oakley to try to get the warlords to cooperate and come to the table. But our mission went far beyond the simple mission of security. And so missions could creep, and when missions creep, we could end up getting into somebody else's business too. And in a way, with the military, where we don't fully understand that business, even though it may be well-intentioned and we wanna help. What do we do about funding? Who pays for all this stuff? When we get committed in the military, you know, it comes out of our military budget. Nobody at Congress is saying here's a pot of money to do humanitarian and peacekeeping work. And so those funds come out of our operating funds. And so when we are committed to these missions, those people in the military that are doing these things are not doing the training and education and other functions with their primary responsibilities are. Not to tell you that the military doesn't like these operations, I will tell you from my experience as a commander, when our troops are on the ground doing these things, I think their morale is higher than at any other time, especially if they can see right in front of them the benefit of what they do. And I have tons of video that show this and it brings us home that this is an important part, I think, of the missions the military has. Because I think it balances out the other more horrible missions that we have to perform at times. And so this is not anything the military rejects, it's just something that it costs in terms of funding, it costs in terms of training time and other things. So we have to appreciate that kind of commitment and that kind of trade-off that we get. The military often gets stuck with that kind of mission. I did an assessment in Iraq and Afghanistan after I retired for the generals out there. And when I went around looking at how, from soup to nuts, how everything was working down onto the ground at the district level, patrolling with the soldiers and Marines, I realized how much that the military had taken on that were non-military tasks. You know, where people in uniform were doing things because obviously we're the 800-pound guerrilla in a room. We have the people, we have the structure, we have the logistics, but the things they were doing were non-military. So I walk in and I meet with the anti-corruption task force and the entire task force with one exception were military people that I knew. What the hell do you know about anti-corruption at the government level? No, this is OJT for them. We know where is Treasury? You know, where is State Department? Not that they aren't committed out there, but again, do they have the numbers? Do they have the ability to meet the requirements? Do they have the capacity? And so we end up then with this mismatch that comes across and we end up, especially from the military side, with people committed to doing things that they don't necessarily have the expertise in. In many ways. We overcame some of that in Somalia where we provided the military support, but people like Ambassador Bob Oakley provided the oversight. So we understood what we were doing. We were at least under somebody's direction who understood how we interacted with the warlords and others in the dialogue that was created. When we deal with the media, we have different approaches to that. You know, we come with a big public affairs section. There's a media interaction. Those other members that are out there in the same environment may not have that capacity. How are we telling people how the mission is going? How we're determining where we are? How we tell each other's stories? Or we tell a collective story in some way? And how do we organize for this? You know, the military organizes and structures for a mission. We task organize. But there are these other elements that are in the same place that are carrying on a function. How do these organizations connect? Now, we have jury-rigged a lot of things. I know when we first went into Northern Iraq to protect the Kurds and to get them down out of the hills and Turkey and back home, our initial reaction was, how do we interact with these NGOs? How do we connect to them? How do we communicate? How do we coordinate? We took our civil affairs organization. We created the first CMOC, Civil Military Operations Center, designed to do this. You know, civil affairs was created like in the aftermath of war to deal with the civilian casualties and civilians that are displaced or whatever. But now it had a much different role. At that time, we were creating one. Now it's become commonplace, but it was to interact with NGOs, private volunteer organizations, international organizations, United Nations. And as we learned that, we tried to employ it in the future. But it was never structured to be that way. This is something that was created on the scene. And the other part that I've learned, especially from the mediation part of this, is how do we understand what we're involved in? One of the things I learned in peace mediation, I finally did nine of these things and I went off and got a master's degree in mediation and dispute resolution and negotiations, because I felt there were people out there that knew tactics and techniques and procedures and processes and theories on this that I was trying to learn on the ground, working with NGOs and working with the UN and others. But how do we find a way to make sure that we bring these together, that we are all on the same sheet of music, that we understand how we each operate? Now, it's easy for me to end here and say, these are all the problems. These are all the lessons learned and you'll mull it over in each of these groups. And at the end of this conference, we'll list all these same ones. The next time we go out and engage, we will come back and we'll list these again. So I'm going to give you a proposed solution and it's going to be radical and a lot of people will object to it, but it's to get your brain fired up, get your pissed off so maybe you think outside the box. I'm going to say we need to create an interagency command. And I hate to use that word command because I don't mean it to be military. We in the military should contribute our civil affairs organization, our peacekeeping institute, the investments we make in exercises like Emerald Express. And we should create this much like we do our military commands, our regional combatant commands that have components, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and our regionally focused central command, Pacific command, European command. This organization would be interagency. It would have a State Department component. It would have a USAID component. It would be able to interact with NGOs. It might even have a representation from NGO organizations in it. It is not meant to be directive in nature. By that I mean it isn't taking the place of State Department or the military. It is just a means of organization, training, coordination, planning. It is a deployable entity. So if you go into an Iraq or in Afghanistan, you're not trying to scratch your head and saying, we need something beyond the military because guess what? Once the Republican guards defeated, the pottery barn comes into play. I have a grandson that's banned from the pottery barn so I understand the concept. You break this, you own it. And suddenly we're scratching our head and bagged out in Kabul and saying, now why? This organization would have the now why to answer. It's not gonna be a pickup team like CPA or OR-HA or whatever we throw together at the last minute with people unfamiliar with the situation that understand as I learned through the mediation process the need for research. The excellent NGOs we have out there that provide some of that research, matter of fact, US Institute of Peace is one of them. I know when we did the mediation work in the Philippines, the background information, the research that we came here to get to bone us up on what we needed to know was exceptional. But we need to really come away with some hard recommendations. You can't come away with relearning the same lessons. You have to say we need a structure for this. We need a funded, we need a train, we need a plan for these things. We need to focus these things on parts of the world where we most likely employ them. And so from somebody that has seen this from every angle in the high bread complex, whatever you wanna call it organization, I'm telling you we've never glued it together. We have the parts and the parts are represented in this room. And don't walk away from the conference without an idea as to how to move to those decision points. How do we structure this thing? How are we gonna fund it? Who should? How do we interact with others from a US perspective? How do we train, organize, plan? I mean, that's the key. It's not to repeat lessons learned. Thank you. Thank you, General Zinni. So now I have the pleasure of introducing Tom Stahl. His bio is in the app. I'm sure many of you know him. He's the counselor at USAID. He has served the majority of his 30 years in this field working overseas in conflict affected and fragile states, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon. I had the pleasure of meeting him in Ethiopia and about 2009 I was running a conflict governance program in Ethiopia. My husband had the pleasure of working directly for him at USAID. And I asked him, what would you say about Tom Stahl since you work directly for him? He said, tell everybody, he's an expert in so many sectors in this field and he is phenomenal to work for. So I just wanna warmly welcome Tom Stahl and say thank you so much. Thanks very much, Liz. And it's great to be here. Thank you all for coming and for inviting me. It's a tough act to follow to come in behind General Zinni. But I'm really glad to be here and be able to talk to you. I'll talk about a couple of things. I know I've been asked to speak a little bit about the transformation that's going on at USAID that's gonna affect our support for the work of peace building and conflict prevention. And you have more speakers I see on your schedule later today and tomorrow to get into the details. But let me talk a little bit about what we're doing. It's early in the process, of course, for me to be able to go into a lot of detail. For one thing, we haven't figured out all the details yet. And of course, there's a lot of work to be done, including getting congressional approval. Our proposal is up in front of Congress right now. And then we gotta get all the lawyers and the unions and everything on board. But as we work our way through this very large undertaking, I do wanna emphasize that the transformation has always been intended to be a genuinely collaborative process between the agency, the staff, and our many partners like you all. And so it can truly be said that the impact on your work will consist to a great degree on what you want it to be. And I hope you'll take that to heart and reach out and engage with our staff, make your ideas and concerns known, whatever other faults we may have, we don't presume to have all the answers. Now, you might ask why we're going to all this trouble in the first place to take on this huge reorganization of USAID, that's a fair question. Well, the easy simple answer is that OMB told us to. But of course, it's more than that. The world has changed a lot over the last couple of decades in the time that I've been working for USAID. The majority of countries where we work today are considered fragile or vulnerable to conflict. And that means both staff and development gains are more or less perpetually at risk to some degree. And our current structure aimed at addressing conflict and instability was essentially designed in a sort of an ad hoc manner over the last number of years. So that structure does not enable staff to effectively coordinate peacebuilding efforts even within USAID to say nothing in the interagency as General Zinni was talking about, or to fully implement the stabilization assistance review that came out recently in June. So in very concrete terms, our current structure was never intended to cope with a world that has 70 million displaced persons the most since World War II, or a world where disasters that we face were overwhelmingly man-made. So what I can tell you about the transformation is first that since I was asked to address this specifically, the key element of what we call effective partnering and procurement reform is the key element of it is known as the New Partners Initiative. And it's something that you should look into. It'll be kicked off with an early demonstration project spearheaded by what is now the Dacha Bureau that you all know and love, Bureau for Democracy Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. It's aimed at mobilizing new and underutilized partners and resources and identifying effective program models for a proposed Bureau for Conflict Prevention and stabilization. Like just about everything we do at USAID, it's designed to help our partner countries progress along the road to self-reliance. And it will incorporate our new country-specific roadmaps, which many of you have probably heard about by now. And by the way, you can view all the roadmaps now on our website. There's 130 some countries on there. And these nifty roadmap tools are designed to provide a clear understanding of where individual countries fall on the development spectrum using independent data, not USAID data, independent data to broadly evaluate their levels of commitment to self-reliance and capacity for getting there, commitment and capacity. Now, we've always believed that every nation's circumstances are unique. The roadmaps help us to do a better job of actually treating them that way. I strongly encourage you to check them out and make good use of them. But back to the matter of hand, here's what else I can tell you about the transformation. Especially with that aspect of it, focusing on conflict and violent extremism. So the proposed new Bureau for Conflict Prevention Stabilization, or CPS, we've got to have an acronym like the military, we have our own acronyms. It would create a standalone but interconnected team to focus on the non-humanitarian aspects of a crisis and provide the agency with a holistic crisis response capability. This new Bureau will give us the capability to support vulnerable countries before, during and after a crisis. Now, that's not something we really have right now. The idea is to improve our conflict early warning analysis and make our peace building programming more flexible, more nimble, more of a priority, more field focused. So this new CPS Bureau would incorporate the current offices that many of you know, the Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management, CMM, transition initiatives, OTI, civil mail cooperation, and the countering violent extremism coordinator, along with some parts of our, what we call program policy and management office of Dacia. And then CPS would serve as the US government's technical lead on conflict and violent prevention and the implementation of political transition and stabilization programs in countries that are important to US national security as laid out in the stabilization assistance review. And we believe this will result in improved civilian military coordination and communication and collaboration. And CPS would also manage the, another one that you will probably all know well, the complex crises fund. And then while the Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Center is being elevated and moved to a new technical assistance bureau, technical support bureau in USAID under this proposed reorganization, the Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, CPS bureau, would retain a core of DRG staff who focus on human rights and governance issues in fragile states that are prone to violence. And they were also proposing, as you well know, a new humanitarian assistance bureau bringing together the Office of Food for Peace and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance to build upon the world's best, most effective humanitarian assistance force and make it even better and more integrated. And then this HA bureau would then be linked with the CPS bureau under a new Associate Administrator to make sure that we maintain that linkage between the human, you know, the pure humanitarian aspects and then the conflict prevention and response aspects of the crises. Now I could stand here and run through a list of all various other bureaucratic changes, but frankly, you know, you're probably not all that interested. You'll get into it in more detail throughout the day and tomorrow, and they're available on our website. Suffice to say that a lot of very smart people and mostly career staff have put a great deal of thought into making USAID more functionally aligned, more field oriented. But I hope that gives you a sense of the shape of things to come. But now if you'll indulge me, I'd also like to take this opportunity to make a bigger pitch about what I have long felt would be among the greatest challenges to the art of peace building and conflict mitigation. I'm sure I don't have to convince an audience like this that there's more to helping a country stand on its own two feet than just economic development in the traditional sense, or transparency in government or even democracy. I'm talking about something foundational, something, one of the real basic building blocks of civilization itself. The kind of primordial human force that when neglected can wreak havoc among everything from nation states to high schools and all the way to our living rooms. And I'm sure you've already figured out, I'm talking about, of course, teenage boys. Okay, sorry to get a little melodramatic on you there, but in all seriousness, there is a direct and well documented link between a society's ability to provide purpose and direction for its young men and that society's level of peace, stability and standard of living. Popular culture is full of lamentation over the state of young men in America. Not just teenagers, of course, but well into adulthood. Living on couches in their parents' basements, playing video games all day, so on. You've heard the story. It's a real problem, it's hardly limited to the United States. Nor is it by any means a new problem. In fact, way back in 1935, the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead having studied social interaction among students at Columbia University and all the way out to Papua New Guinea declared famously that the recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough so that the male may, in the course of his life, reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement. In other words, every society must grapple with the issue of what do we do with our young men. For centuries, tribal societies have wrestled with this challenge all the way back to the ancient Spartans and beyond. And that's under the best of circumstances. When you add in an environment of political oppression, injustice, police brutality, with a serious lack of economic opportunity or even healthy activities to be involved in, you've got a recipe for disaster. The kind of slow-rolling disaster that we see playing out today in places like the Northern Triangle of Central America where an epidemic of gang violence is driving massive outmigration. And Sahab Saharan Africa in the Middle East where extremist groups find fertile soil for recruiting among large populations of young men with few prospects for better life. I know that a great deal of your and our development programming relates to empowering women and girls, and rightly so. There remain massive historic injustices across the globe that hold back societies by holding back the female half of the population in those societies from exercising in some cases even the most basic human rights. This is a vast and tragic waste of human potential to say nothing of injustice. The single most effective and important key to achieving lasting development is to empower women and girls, no question about it. But as important a focus on girls is for development, when you're talking about the challenges of conflict and peacemaking in any given time context, it's no secret that you're more likely to be talking about the boys than the girls. Research increasingly shows young men around the world today feeling aimless and adrift, bewildered by a rapid cultural change and what they mean for their roles in society, even deeply traditional societies. They lack a sense of purpose and belonging. The result is a distressing pattern I've noted time and again in a wide range of US foreign policy discussions that I've been involved in. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I've found myself the lonely advocate of addressing root causes in a room full of consensus that the best solution to the problem boils down to simply killing more bad guys and of course they're all guys. And there is our situations where that may unfortunately be the case but as no less an authority than the US military consistently testifies even before Congress, wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we put more of our emphasis on building peace than on buying more bullets? Self-reliant countries are not only more prosperous and free and resilient, they are countries that place a priority on engaging young people and addressing their unique needs and in the process reducing the lure of crime and drugs and violent extremism. Traditional mores for helping with this issue are breaking down and if we don't address them, I'm afraid that many of our efforts will amount to houses built upon sand. Simply put, if we don't give our boys something healthy to do, a purpose, a sense of belonging, there are others who will and that's not likely to be healthy for anyone. So our enhanced focus on conflict prevention in USAID will work to get young men involved in their local community, including directly in peacemaking, along with the women who are obviously critical as part of it. We'll work to address corruption and human rights abuses, other forms of injustice which young people, young men and women often see as preventing them from achieving their goals and we'll work to establish sports clubs, IT centers, et cetera, supporting civil society organizations to provide avenues for young men to get that necessary sense of belonging. I don't have all the answers, but it would be a mess if I didn't take advantage of this opportunity to challenge you, my captive audience of peacemakers to make this a priority in your daily efforts and over the next couple of days to make the world a better and safer place. Thank you very much. So I just wanna say thank you so much. That was very powerful and I just can't thank you enough for coming and speaking to General Zinni and Tom Stahl. Tom, you raised a lot of points about new transformation at USAID and a lot of new frameworks. And those are important, but they're not the only ones. And so for the next high level panel that we are going to have here, I'd like to invite our next panelists to come up that are sitting in this row here. The panel is titled Global Policy Frameworks on Sustaining Peace, A Call for Collaboration and Collective Action. Again, you'll be hearing that collaborative and collective language a lot in the next couple of days. So please feel free to come on up. I wanna thank a few people who really worked hard to put this panel together that are not here today. Corinne Graf from USAIP, from you, sorry, USAIP. Malika Joseph from GPAC and Richard Ponziow from the Stimson Center. One of the key pieces about whether it's the transformation process at the US government or a lot of the different frameworks that we're gonna be talking about or the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act or the SAR is really focusing on how do they all interrelate and implementation. So I think that's gonna be a big theme of this panel. And I just would like to introduce now Gary Milante from SIPRI, who will moderate this panel. Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Ah, there we go. Thank you very much. Thanks very much to the United States Institute for Peace and the Alliance for Peace Building for having us today, for having this conversation. This discussion, the confluence of, I think it was four or five organizations that said we need to have this conversation at the AFP. And so we put in proposals. AFP said all of you are thinking about this so we need to be able to put this together into a conversation. And eventually it became this panel. So we all think it's important. I'm going to briefly introduce the speakers. Then I'm gonna tell you the ground rules for this conversation because I wanna keep us on time. Then we have a timekeeper who is Sam. Sam, Sam is right there. So I'm gonna say the rules. Sam is gonna keep track of the time. When you see him start waving at you, you're out of time. When you see him stand up and start throwing things at you, you're gonna stop talking. And in a moment I'll get into the substance why we're here and why we're talking about this. But I wanna reflect also on the fact that we're talking about, we've already talked about US policy, US frameworks. I think those were great interventions to start us off here today. Now we're talking about global policies and kind of global frameworks. Some of them coming from New York and the UN, some of which are things we're engaging with globally that transcend any kind of agency or institution or ownership. But I think what we have to also acknowledge and realize when we're sitting here talking, I know many of the people up here will speak to it, is that this is still a very Western, Northern conversation that's happening about these frameworks and how they actually reach the ground where peace needs to be built. And so I very much encourage you to reflect on that in your conversations and I'll explain in a minute what our format's gonna be. But also you to have a dialogue here, to challenge us a little bit and say, okay well how do we make these frameworks real in the world where peace has to be built on the ground and where people need to own the peace that is being built, the counterparts there. I noticed earlier we mentioned that the ambassadors are here from Mali and Ethiopia. I will give you the first opportunity to respond if you have particular interventions or responses when we get to question and answer. So I encourage you to think about those and then we will come back to that. First, let me introduce everybody. We have Katie Thompson here, the team leader at the United Nations Development Programming program. I will not go into your entire title. All of these people are very Google-able and you can find out all of their interesting bios and profiles, but Larry Atree here is the head of policy at State for World. Ro Tucci is the director of inclusive societies at the United States Institute of Peace here. Darno Rodriguez is the executive director at G-PAC, the Global Partnership for Prevention of Armed Conflict. And David Steven is the associated director at Center on International Cooperation, CIC in New York University. I've asked them to sit in this order because in a moment I will go to them and they will have two minutes each to say their first round of these are the frameworks that they are working with, that they're engaging with and they are using for peace building. And they're also gonna place those in the kind of global context of peace building. This is where we are in these conversations for these frameworks. That's gonna be the first round. We're gonna go through to David and then I'm gonna come back again to Katie and we're gonna have a second round. They'll get three minutes each, so luxurious three minutes each, to talk about where they are implementing these frameworks on the ground, where they're doing this and what the specific cases, where are the examples where we see this happening? This goes back to the question about evidence. Where do we see this actually happening? How are these frameworks being used for peace building in these environments and these contexts? That'll be the second three minute intervention. If we do that all right and we're all on time, Sam keeps us honest, then we have time to come out to you for questions and I ask you to please ask short specific questions because there will be a lot and that way we have time to be able to respond to them here and we'll target the questions. Not everybody will be responding to all questions. Briefly, about frameworks. Frameworks are extraordinarily useful. I think General Zinni has already set us up with this. He said the army plans everything and you have this fantastic quote from Eisenhower that said the plan is nothing but planning is everything and that's where I wanna connect frameworks into this conversation. We have a number of these frameworks. I'm gonna go through them in a minute just so that they don't have to in their limited two minutes. The number of these frameworks where we are thinking conceptually about how to organize many different actors, many stakeholders, many different agencies and institutions and all of the kind of global architecture that we have arrayed to be able to help us to build peace in these environments. All of those frameworks are intended to give us a kind of common language. That's one of the principles, one of the effects of it but they also give us common principles so that we know when somebody else is invoking one of those frameworks, we think they mean the same thing. We think they are trying to achieve the same thing. So those embody the principles and in many of these cases, they are the roadmaps for us to be able to achieve things. I'll get into that in a moment. But a roadmap again is a plan. It is how we are intending to try to achieve outcomes. So the frameworks are the planning that is everything. We know when we encounter the real world with all of our frameworks and all of the intentions that we have that they don't end up being exactly what we intended. But the idea with the frameworks, remember, is that we are agreeing on some language, we are agreeing on some principles, we're agreeing on how we will do some things, how we will interact and engage with each other so that when we get to the ground we don't have to have that conversation in the battlefield or in the humanitarian field or in the development field where we are all busy doing all the things we need to do. Hopefully these frameworks are tools for us to be able to get common understanding in advance. So that's what this conversation is about. How can we use them for collaboration? I'm gonna go through quickly, very quickly. A few of the frameworks that will be mentioned here just so that they're on the table already and you don't have to spend your time defining them and introducing them and we skip the education part of it. If you wanna Google any of these, I guarantee that these terms are very Googleable and they will educate you about them. There was a report last year, the year before, that was the Pathways for Peace Report that was done by the UN and the World Bank. I would attach that underneath the rubric of the prevention agenda. The prevention agenda is a framework. The way of thinking about how prevention is done in the UN World Bank, Pathways for Peace Report, is a framework, there's two. Sustaining Peace Agenda had two dual resolutions at the United Nations. Together, that's called the Sustaining Peace Agenda. It is linked to the prevention agenda. Not exactly the same, there's some differences in language, mostly because it's a member state's activity versus a research activity by the UN World Bank report. Then, that's another framework. Then, there's the Sustainable Development Goals, another framework, a roadmap for how we achieve the kind of sustainable development we would like to achieve by 2030. Within the Sustainable Development Goals, there are 17 of them, 169 targets, 232 indicators. Within that, there is SDG-16, Peace, Justice, and Inclusive Institutions, Inclusive Governments. Though that SDG is a framework, that's a way for understanding a roadmap for how we achieve development, collectively, together. Then, there's SDG-16+, which is something that has been conceived upon to say that peace, justice, and inclusive governance are bigger than just what is listed in SDG-16. It spills over into other SDGs as well. David will get a little bit into that, but I wanted to put it out on the table. That's a different framework, and there are documents and lots of information out there available for that. Then, something else you should know, is that in the course of the Sustainable Development Goal process, every year, there's a high-level political forum on a few of the different SDGs. There will be one in 2019, in July, in the General Assembly meeting that follows that, and in this one, this year, SDG-16 is being reviewed. Remember, states come and voluntarily report on their progress on this, but it makes this a particularly important, interesting, pivotal year for setting the baseline on how we're doing on peace and knowing whether we're gonna make progress to 2030. And then, there is an entire initiative called the Pathfinders Initiative that David will speak a little bit about as well. That's 40 different pilot countries that are themselves volunteering to say they will volunteer on peace, justice, and inclusive governance. But there are other frameworks. We could just as easily talk about the stabilization agenda, including the incarnation of it here in the United States. We could talk, and a framework itself is the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act. There is another framework that has led us to here, which is the Busan framework, the New Deal, the International Dialogue. That was a framework that got us to here based on Paris principles. And then these roadmaps that we've just been talking about from USAID, they themselves are frameworks like post-conflict needs assessments, all these other things. Those are all frameworks. They are ways for us to get to common understanding of what it is we're doing. I just want to put them all out there, so now we're all on the same page. You don't have to spend time talking about them. And we can talk about what ones are the ones that are important to us. Where do we see them fitting into the global architecture right now? And that's what our first question is about. So now I'm gonna hand over to Katie, and you'll have two minutes and you can reflect on that. Thank you, thank you. Can I spend two minutes arguing with you about your hierarchy of frameworks? No, okay. So hi everybody, it's really nice to be here. I work at UN Development Program. I think I'm the representative of the UN system here, but I will speak, obviously what I will talk about is more an orientation around how development practitioners engage in peace building or conflict prevention. And to highlight that, I mean, clearly for us, the key framework is the Agenda 2030, which is the Sustainable Development Goal Agenda. The reason why, and this is the point about hierarchies is this is an intergovernmental document. It's owned by all member states. It's universal and it can be calibrated and made context specific. Some of the ways in which we are advocating around the goal 16 and 16 plus that you're going to hear about are key for those of us who are focused on peace building to make the SDG Agenda live in terms of conflict prevention. But it's very crucial and very critical that it's understood that this is our basic framework because it's nationally owned and it's universal. One that wasn't mentioned is the sustaining peace resolutions, which, I'm sorry, that was mentioned, but perhaps it can be understood if you like as the UN's linkage of the development community with the peace building community. It's important in the sense that it's brought peace builders in terms of member states to the idea that peace building is long-term and that it's very much rooted in Agenda 2030 and it sort of reframed those conversations in that dimension. And that's been very useful for development practitioners. The third one that I want to highlight, which is the one that wasn't mentioned, is the Secretary General's Prevention Plan, which is for the UN actors and entities, obviously very important because it's really the command piece. It's about directing our resources and our focus on prevention, beyond conflict prevention, but addressing all forms of risk. Okay. Is that working? Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for bringing us together to talk about this important topic today. From my side, I think, I mean, we have to welcome and support and get behind the efforts on sustaining peace that are pushed to bring peace back into the center of what the UN is all about and the reforms that are taking place there. I think the pathways for peace effort that was mentioned is also a really good process that's brought home some really important messages about priorities and partnerships to the banks, to the UN. But I really do think that the Sustainable Development Goals and particularly the commitments around Goal 16 and related targets are the biggest factor in our favor as a community and the tool that we have a big opportunity to work with. And I say that because I think, you know, Goal 16 and the other targets were constructed out of a real reflection on what are the biggest drivers of conflict worldwide. It's a vision of positive peace. It was genuinely consultative in the way it was put together but then signed off by all world leaders. And it's also this really important bridge between the peace community and the rights development actors the governance actors and between governments around the world on a common vision that they can own and understand each other on. I think, you know, thinking of the theory of change that you have to work with with the Sustainable Development Goals, you know, whether it's that it's a chance for countries to shine in comparison with each other. It's an entry point for fresh dialogue on the issues that matter on the ground, whether it's a prompt to measure the things that matter and see prevention challenges in new ways, whether it's a prompt for governments to hear feedback from their citizens. There are all these different ways in which the SDGs is a tool for pushing for change, which I think we can really use. I do, while I've got the floor also though, want to sort of strike a note of challenge coming back to what Liz said about the world we're in right now. We have commitments to things like the Armstray Treaty, but we see defense expenditure at a high in the post-Cold War era. We see autocratization taking its grip, not just in places like Russia or Turkey, but in Brazil, in India, even here at home in the US. There are big, big challenges in the way governments are behaving right now and the way they're shredding the commitments to global conflict prevention norms which we've painstakingly constructed. So we have to be dynamic in responding to that. We can't fiddle while Rome burns as a peace-building community where the framework is a tool, we have to use it, but we also have to think outside the box where the framework isn't touching the people who are changing the world for the worse right now. Thank you. Great, thank you. At USIP, we're utilizing and developing a number of the concepts within these frameworks and whether that's being adaptive and people-centered, addressing the short-term while investing in the long-term, supporting integrated strategy planning and programming, and of course, advancing inclusion and building cohesion at every stage of resolving conflict. And I wanna take a minute on that last one since that's the field that I work most closely in. So the example, when I think of these frameworks, I think they're most helpful in guiding our efforts to pursue what I work on, which is inclusive peace processes. And we know that these peace processes are critical moments in time where we can really redefine relationships and address the root causes of conflict. And so when I talk about inclusive peace processes or broadening participation in the peace processes, we're certainly talking about women, youth, civil society, religious actors, but we're also talking about how to widen citizen engagement and armed group actors in these processes. And that's at all levels of a peace process, of a multi-track peace process. And I raise this because I think the frameworks, what they help us do is make the case for creating this ecosystem, right? This ecosystem where there's multiple players brought into the process and are contributing to the solutions. Our process, they ultimately will have a shared responsibility in supporting and most likely implementing. So this is really the concept of a people-centered that you see in a lot of these frameworks. So what does that mean for what USIP is doing? We're focusing more attention and resources towards developing research and practices on track 1.5, track two, track three, looking at grassroots organizing and collective action and the role that that plays in peace processes. The last point that I wanna make is that USIP, along with many of the partners in this room, we're well positioned to seed and test many of these concepts on the ground and to help operationalize and refine these frameworks. So for inclusion, what we're doing is we're fleshing out some critical questions such as who may resist broadening participation? Why and how, how do we manage and navigate around that resistance? What are the new pockets of inclusion we are creating, right? I mean, the new pockets of exclusion that we are creating with inclusion and how can we mitigate those consequences? And finally, how could we advance social inclusion towards social cohesion? So that means helping to create safe spaces to voice differences and build bridges across divides so that we can address tensions long into the future. Well, thanks. Well, first of all, I wanted to link sort of like the broad theme of this conference, the power of collective action to our conversations because when we're talking about the frameworks, we're talking about how can these frameworks help us mobilize collective action in order to build this global architecture? So I think we should start with a question and this question is, is the peace building community actually worldwide being mobilized by these frameworks? Or are these frameworks contributing to the mobilization of the peace building community in order to move towards implementation of this agenda? I think the answer is twofold on one hand, yes. And I remember when we were discussing on where the whole agenda as these were being discussed that we had a huge mobilization of the peace building community and we're all behind that and we say we have to get this peace goal and we strategize and we got it. And I think there was a huge sense of accomplishment from our communities, like we got this peace goal. But the question is like, we have this goal, now what? We have goal 16, now what do we do with this? And we had this question actually in our community in G-PAC and we said, okay, what do you want to do with this at the regional level where our network members are working? It's like, what does this mean to you at the regional level? Help us think, what do you want to do with this SDG framework? And for us, the answer was a bit not what we expected because we saw that these frameworks actually were not getting the traction that we thought or the energy that we were having here in these discussions at the country level. So these frameworks, they didn't really help that mobilization or that we expected that they would have. So I think we should answer, we should ask ourselves, why? Why are these frameworks maybe not bringing that effect that we thought it would bring at the field level with peace building organizations, with organizations that are working at the grassroots level? And I think in general, we can talk about two things. First, lack of understanding of what these frameworks are. I was listening to Gary and I was getting confused with all these different frameworks and I work on this almost every day. So there's this lack of understanding. It's like, okay, yeah, but what does this mean for me? And the second part of it is this lack of understanding causing or generating kind of like framework fatigue for our people in the ground working on trying to implement these frameworks. And I think we have to think about, or I'll come back in my three minutes because I already see my warning to me, not even to the second warning, but my time is done. But hopefully think about and reflect how we're trying to overcome this and show the relevance of these frameworks and how we can actually work on this and how this can act as a blueprint that can help us participate in this global peace building architecture. Thank you. So I too work on the sustainable development goals. I help run the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Justice and Inclusive societies. And it was set up precisely to answer this question, a question put to us by a finance minister from a conflict affected state who'd fought very hard for these goals in a bitter and difficult negotiation and said, now we've got them, we've got no idea what to do with them. So the Pathfinders is really about trying to make some sense out of these targets. We do work with the SDG 16 plus targets, so 36 targets from across the agenda that directly talk about peace, justice and inclusion and go deep into the other goals. And one of the things that the Pathfinders did as a group of member states and other partners is put together a roadmap for what implementation looked like and I have a copy here, I have a few other copies and it's an attempt to explain how we start to turn this into action. Now, as Gary said, we're in a critical year this year and in the summer in July, ministers gather to review SDG 16, also SDG 10 on inequality. The September heads of state and heads of government leaders, prime ministers, presidents come together and they've been asked to look at all 17 SDGs and to mobilize further actions to accelerate implementation. So this is the year really for us to focus on those actions, on those solutions, the kind of solutions that were being discussed yesterday and that I hear being discussed in about a thousand different conversations like this one. It's a time for acceleration to show that we really are turning it into action and we really have to have a bigger mobilization around these issues. I don't think we're asking the grassroots to work on targets, we're asking them to work on issues and challenges but we're trying to use the targets as a common strategic language, a common strategic framework that combine these efforts together and make them the whole, the greater than the sum of the parts. For this audience I've pointed one particular headline target, SDG 16.1. That's a target that says we must significantly reduce all forms of violence everywhere and that is a target that I think we need to start taking seriously. We need to use it to bind together five different prevention communities, the folks working on conflict, the folks working on urban and youth violence really responding to the problems. So to the question of young men that was raised earlier, the folks working on interpersonal violence including women and children, the prevention of human rights abuses and mass atrocities and the prevention of violence extremism, we need to bring all of those together around SDG 16.1 and really mobilize in the next year to show that societies can work towards quantified reductions in violence and quantified increases in peace. Thanks. So very quick introductions. Thank you very much for keeping on time. To sum it up, we have all of these frameworks. We don't see necessarily the traction on the ground where the rubber hits the road in the countries, in the societies, in the people that own the peace, whether it's our counterparts from our own agencies, whether it's the national counterparts, whether it's the NGOs and civil society there, whether it's the spoilers, all of the stakeholders. We're gonna go back to them in a moment. They're gonna say these are what we see happening on the ground. This is where these frameworks actually touch peace that is being built in these particular contexts and we're gonna use those as examples for the discussion. How do we know that we see these frameworks being useful? But I think these are good challenges. From Darinel, he reminded us that we have framework fatigue. There's a lot of frameworks. Sometimes people on the ground say, is it just cut and paste? Should I just find and replace all the terms that said prevention and call it now sustaining peace? We have all of these parts, General Zinni said before, we have all of these parts that we're trying to put together. And then the question is, can we come up with solutions that work for all contexts? Do we need to tailor them for specific contexts? And then of course, Larry reminded us of the global context that we're working in. How do we actually fit what we're trying to do in all of the action and energy that we have into having effect on the ground? So now, Katie, we come back to you. You have three minutes. Luxurious three minutes. So I think I have four because I was the only one who obeyed the rules, but anyway. So I'm kind of provoked also by what some of the colleagues have said. So I'm going to go a bit off what I plan to say, which is obviously coming at this, I was originally somebody who might have classified themselves as a post-conflict practitioner who moved into development approaches because I sincerely believed and still do that working strongly to promote national ownership, which includes not just governments, but all parts of society is the only way to achieve change and that bringing executive powers to situations has a very limited impact. So I do really want to flag why the SDGs is important and why the word development is important in all of that. And it's not simply because I work for the UN Development Program. It's because it symbolizes something about the approach, which is very different from the approach which perhaps many of you use or work within your daily work. I went quickly through the agenda here and saw barely anyone having the title with the word development existing in any of the organizations are here, which I find very interesting. So forgive me if I'm saying something that's obvious to all of you, but the development discipline is largely populated globally by economists still. And so converting economists and planners and finance experts to the ideas of good governance and the ideas that are embedded in 16 plus is not an overnight transition. It's work, it's hard work. And I'm not cynical about the fact that this doesn't get off the ground overnight. I'm very positive actually about what is happening across the globe with the caveat of the points made by my colleague from Safer World. In terms of our work, what we're seeing increasingly accepted at national level in countries where it may not normally be expected, that combining work on peace and development is increasingly seen as the norm as opposed to the exception. It's not restricted to post-conflict context. It's regarded as a preventive measure. And the UN has a lot more traction in achieving that these days than it did in 2004. I think that's largely due to the SDGs. I think it's really been helped by the World Bank study and providing some substantive underpinnings for that. And I think that's incredibly positive. So for example, in 2004, we were managed to deploy under very difficult circumstances, five peace and development advisors in the field working for the UN resident coordinators with a head of the UN country level. And these days we have 49, covering 70 plus countries without much political challenge to those deployments or their work with governments. I think that's incredibly positive. It reaches the point where it's difficult to find people with the right skill set to do that work and they work with small teams of national officers. They work with volunteers, both national and international, I think is an incredibly positive change. In addition to that, I'm going to take my extra minute. In addition to that, what those people are doing, and I didn't mean to dwell on them, but I am dwelling on them to show that you can achieve change. Obviously what they're doing is working with the national authorities in order to ensure that within SDG planning frameworks, these elements of 16 plus are taken into account. And that's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Development plans are four to five years long, sometimes 10 years long. It's going to take time to work cross ministries to bring about these changes. Part of the work that we've been doing, David referenced it, is to really put governments who want to show some leadership at the center of these conversations. So they can show quite concretely how a Ministry of Justice can work with the National Human Rights Institution, can work with the Ministry of Finance to ensure that access to justice is promoted in rural communities and also ensuring that NGOs are at the table and civil society groups are there to impact on the quality and the extent of that service provision. There are governments doing that work. Final thing, because I'm abusing my time now, is so that's all of the positive side. And I think this is part of what we're trying to do at country level in the UN system. But goal 16 isn't a given at any moment in any large intergovernmental settings such as the General Assembly, what's been progressed can also be undone. And it's particularly important to work with these national partners, especially national governments in the global south, to speak to this agenda. And I'm sorry that I speak here rather than one of my national counterparts because it's those voices who will carry this agenda. It isn't going to be the countries of the global north who have traditionally supported this agenda. So that's, I think, where our focus of our work should be in the next year. And I'm sure that David will pick that up as we go forward. Thank you, Katie, so much for the rules-based international order time limits. Anyway, I'll try and do my duty. So, yeah, I mean, I struck a challenge in my first sort of opening there. But I mean, I think, and I think, you know, we have to be mindful, the civic has told us we're in a world where 109 countries have completely shut or repressed or obstructed civil society space. This is the majority of member states. This is the world we're in. But I think it's tremendously important to be tapping into also the civic activism that is rising up and pushing for change in dynamic ways in countries all over the world, whether we're looking at South Korea or the Gambia or Romania or Ethiopia, and to nourish that. Within the safer world, we've developed a model for trying to use and localize and operationalize SDG-16 plus commitments where we find that they can be a tool for doing things. And I think it's really leading to some exciting results. So, in Somaliland the last couple of years, we've been engaging with civil society organizations who've come together, formed a platform for acting on goal 16, and they've been engaging with the authorities. We've seen legislation passed on female genital mutilation, on women's political participation, the chief justice and a lot of judges across Somaliland coming together, thinking how can they work towards a vision for access to justice that really identifies many of the challenges in that context and does something about them. I think another example, and it's more nascent, but it's really important is in Sudan, we found it's possible to get together civil society and government officials to talk face to face about goal 16 issues around justice, security, governance for the first time. And I think people there are very appreciative of the opportunity to actually sit and discuss frankly with government officials there for the first time on some of these things in what's been a very close space. So these are some of the ways in which we can use this to push for the kind of conversations and changes we need to see. What we've developed as a sort of model for using the framework to build that broad ownership that you were talking about is really an effort to contextualize things. So start by understanding the context. Find a way to create space for dialogue, to identify with civil society, with national authorities, what are the relevant problems in a particular context. And set out national priorities and develop the partnerships not just with government but civil society, universities, business people to take action in locally relevant ways. Try and identify champions on the ground and mobilize them. Also find ways to build on existing foundations. What are people already doing? How can their efforts be sort of highlighted, nourished, sustained rather than creating something new? Help people also to use the framework to strengthen accountability through monitoring and the indicators to get civil society and involved in holding their governments to account. And then connect these national level efforts with the global so that people are aware, they're giving praise where it's due to change on the ground. And the other thing I think to sustain these efforts, we need to formalize them into processes of working together that guarantee inclusion that have some rules around it without bureaucratizing and creating this kind of problem of isomorphic mimicry which we see so much sort of in the development sector as a kind of creating a kind of malaise. So that's the model that we've sort of working at with Safer World and yeah, I think it's something we're quite excited about and I think it reflects a lot of the other work that's being done by the likes of G-PAC and the Pathfinders and UNDP to try and take action with this framework. So KDI, I have the reverse story. I came from USAID in the development space for a number of years and now working in the peace building space and we had our own challenges in the development space of getting other development sectors to understand the importance of good governance, education and health. So it's a common challenge all around. You know, the example, the two examples that I was gonna give one project, one program, the project is actually quite similar to Larry so I won't dwell too much on it but it is this concept of integrating justice and the justice and security fields and so this is our justice and security dialogue program that's been operating in Nepal, Nigeria, Iraq and the Sahel and similar concepts as to what you described, opportunity to create forums for dialogue, to bring non-state actors into the problem-solving efforts and to address immediate issues while also building relationships to address conflict in the long term. So this seems to be a common model that has been very effective in a number of places and these are the recommendations that are in fact embedded. These elements that are embedded in this project are the recommendations from pathways to peace and in the next iteration of this project we'll also be helping the participants to apply a system-sinking approach to solving the challenges in their local area so we're taking the next step in enhancing that project. At a larger programmatic effort, one thing that USIP is putting a more concerted effort towards and many of you might already know this is towards non-violent action which we believe can really be a transformative approach within the peace-building space and I mentioned this approach because it's a real opportunity to materialize divisions that are set out in these frameworks, but specifically SDG-16 and all of the frameworks do emphasize the need to engage local actors, grassroots actors in one form or fashion but the non-violent action space really crystallizes it and we know that using an alternative to violence, non-violent action is very effective in challenging injustices and addressing long-standing grievances. So what we're doing and I dare say it with Lisa right here because she's been one of the co-creators in this effort and there'll be many sessions on this throughout the conference so I don't need to go into detail but taking the tactics of peace-building and the tactics of non-violent action and seeing how they can be synergized, what is the interplay between those and really giving the local actors a diverse range of options that they can work with to forge political and social change and so we've developed training around this, around this concept of synergizing peace-building and non-violent action and it aims to help expand participation and build coalition, sequence and diversify the use of tactics and of course remain disciplined and committed to the non-violent action and message. The last thing I would say as I see my time's up we're also rethinking conflict analysis, how we can use this analytical tool to accommodate the shifts in focus that we're seeing so to better account for multi-dimensional risk and the changing nature of conflict. We've just started that so more to come there. Let me leave it at that. Thank you. So for us at G-PAC we've been thinking and going back to the question, okay so what, so what? So we have this frame or so what? So what do we do with them? What do they mean for the work of our members especially in the global south? And so we pose again this question and again the answer was well now we don't really work on goal 16, we don't really work on the SDGs and we were like what do you mean you don't work on goal 16? Then we go back, isn't your work focused on reducing violence? It's in 16.1 about reducing all forms of violence. It's like you work on that, maybe you're not aware that you're working on that but you are working on it and that's a mission of your organization. So what we try to tell people is like you're already working on this and rather than seeing this as now something that's coming from New York and is being imposed here it's like think about it, how can I use this for my work? The work that I'm already using, how is this useful for me? And to create some spaces for what I am already doing in the Philippines, in Liberia, et cetera. So that's how we're framing our approach to addressing this issue. And then we have of course, as NGO limited capacity to do that. So from the global perspective we're thinking not okay what can we do to create this but what are we doing already to create this awareness? How can we hook up our membership into what is already happening? So we, for example, the World Federation of United Nations Association we're already doing some outreach about goal 16, the 16 plus forum, et cetera. So rather than replicating and doing the same thing we said well, can we use your forum what you're already doing? And then we sponsored some of our member organizations that they know and they participate in this dynamics and then they can take it at their country level. So we're trying to connect the different initiatives that are happening about creating awareness and bring civil society organizations from our network there. Similar with the work, sustaining peace, the prevention agenda in general which is our core business in GPAC. So we're trying to again connect. Now what does this mean in the ground? So right now we are conducting a research from the civil society perspective. What does sustaining peace mean in Liberia for civil society organizations? How do you articulate that? And we're trying to work together and we're lucky enough to have this prevention platform that has been developed with United Nations Department of Political Affairs and coordinated together by GPAC and CUNO, the Quaker United Nations Office but that brings a number of civil society organizations working on decision. We just created some space for discussion with the UN. How can we work together? And final, my final point before my time set up is the need to create these spaces for discussion. Discussion about the so what? So what do we do? The pathways for peace report, for example, it brings a number of findings about trends, of what conflict is, how conflict is developing right now, how most conflicts right now are not or are among non-state actors versus other non-state actors. What does this mean for the practice of prevention? So what we try to do is to create those spaces and say, okay, we have this very nice findings. It's like, what does this mean for your work, for our work? A civil society organization but also convening other actors. So what we're trying to do is, and specifically with the pathways for peace report, is at the regional level convene these meetings with the authors of the report, with the regional organizations there, with civil society organizations there. Okay, look at these trends that the report is pointing out. Look at some of the recommendations there. What does this mean for the practice of the African Union? And how can you work together with civil society on this? What does this mean for the practice of ASEAN? And how can you create linkages for that? So we just had my colleague Malika here, just came from a meeting that we had in Bangkok around that conversation. And we're having this tomorrow, actually, another conversation with the OAS. What does pathway for peace mean in the Americas? How can we work together? So essentially that creation of spaces and have that conversation and post this, so what question and what's coming up from here is what we're trying to do. It's running around. I've actually, like Katie Scrap, what I was gonna say, I just wanna try and pull some themes together and test my timekeepers' patience by making six points about what I think successful communities working on these SDG-16 plus targets are doing. I think first, like Katie said, they're really taking advantage of the national ownership that's inherent in this platform. Katie and I were just both in Sierra Leone and there was a very big gathering around SDG-16 plus, many countries from the regions. Ministers really coming and thinking quite hard about how to take this forward. And so we're seeing new types of conversation coming together. Secondly, they're bringing together a mix of national champions. The MDGs had a very much North-South dynamic, but we're seeing quite different types of conversation arising on this issue. So Argentina is doing a lot of work on justice, for instance, at the moment, based on its network of access to justice centers in the poorest communities. And we saw some really interesting conversations between the minister, the deputy minister from Argentina on justice with her counterparts in the West Africa region last week. Third, they have a grip on their evidence and they're talking about solutions and not about problems. I was in a country that was described in the launch of the Pathways for Peace report in this room as a test case for prevention. And I saw through a two-day workshop the planning commission being bored to death by the SDG-16 plus targets until the last, the second day, when we actually started to talk to Turkey about justice, about why young men were deeply disaffected and what to do about it. We weren't any more talking about indicators and structures. We were really talking about what action looked like. Fourth, I think communities are beginning to articulate, to bring together those solutions and articulate them in a language that practical policy makers and people who have a martial money can understand. I would give an example of that, the people working on violence against children. There's roughly 25 countries now in the global partnership to end violence against children and they're brought together around the Inspire package. Seven strategies for ending violence against children agreed by WHO, the World Bank, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a real attempt to create a framework for implementation. Fifth, they have a long-term vision. They understand that it's gonna take time to get this going, but they're determined to begin to start showing measurable change in the early 2020s. Not everywhere, somewhere, but to demonstrate that change is possible to combat the fatalism that really is one of our most serious problems. And sixth, they're part of this, I mean, they're doing what Larry is saying, but almost in the opposite direction. They're part of the fight-back narrative. They recognize that the politics are very difficult for many of these issues at the moment, that we have an opportunity through the SDGs and some of the other frameworks that we're talking about to build a new narrative, to make it practical, to turn it into action, to get national leadership, to get a diversity of countries working on that, and to begin to show that a different vision, a different strategy, a different future is possible. Under my three minutes. That was incredible. And he covered what I was gonna do to wrap up, so we actually saved time. I would encourage people to start lining up at the microphones, I'll come to you in just a moment. You're gonna pass the microphones. If the ambassadors are here and they wanna raise their hands, they could have the first crack at a question. I would second that, David. I think what's happening is people are seeing the 2030 agenda, they're seeing the value of it if they're active and agile on the ground, and they realize this is a way to be able to mobilize action. It is a common framework that people are using to be able to talk about it. They see the value of 2019 as a time to talk about baselines, how we're doing, and talk about what impact would look like. I think Ro brought up a really interesting point we should, I wanna reiterate it, that this is what SDGs, the overall framework of SDGs, and then SDG 16 and 16 plus give us, is a way, a simple way to integrate systems thinking into very, very complex development work. It is when you say systems thinking to people on the ground or anywhere, any kind of planning, people say, oh, that's just too complicated, I can't get into everything, all the complexity of the world. If you say, here are a number of things that have been identified as the core parts of development when they're in the 2030 agenda, that's actionable. People can engage with that, because these are real things that are happening. And I see the examples that you brought up where this is really happening on the ground. It's not just about whether you make a target or whether you actually make the progress that you said you were gonna make. Some real signs of progress right now are just actors, ministers of planning, civil society leaders, stakeholders, saying that's a good way to measure this. I understand now that if I use this indicator, and I report regularly on this indicator, that it helps me to understand better how the system is working, what it's producing, and how I can make that case to my constituents that we're actually making progress. So just engaging with it and using the language is itself evidence of success on peace building. These are people engaging with a peace building framework that's built into the SDGs. We're ready to go with the question. Perfect, thank you very much. Please just introduce yourself quickly, and then the question. Thank you very much. My name is Olumide, a student at George Washington University. My question is to the UCIP, United States Studies of Peace. I have released a report recently talking about the 2019 elections in Nigeria. Some areas that are projected to be very, very violent, like Lagos, we were in Kano, and with respect to grassroots strategies, I know you work a lot with civil society organizations. What are you doing with the politicians and the young people to avert this imminent violence? And I think that is the core of the issues that we have in Nigeria right now. So I'd like to know what you think we can do as young people to avert the imminent violence in these areas that you have projected, thank you. Sir, another question that's queued up, yes please. Dane Smith, this is perhaps not a question that's terribly on point with the panel, but I wanna get it out there. We heard from General Zinni about the possibility of an interagency command. We heard from my esteemed friend, Tom Stahl, about a new Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization in USAID. What we didn't hear about was the State Department. Perhaps that is not a surprise during the Trump administration. But in any case, there has been a, what I would call a 10-year experiment with what eventually became the Conflict Stabilization Operation Bureau at the State Department, which was designed to deal with conflict. And I wonder how that fits in with this overall look at how we deal with conflict stabilization and peace building. We have another question right here. I'm Milt Lauenstein and I fund various things for peace building. I'd like to ask Ms. Tucci. She said that the USIP offered all presented alternatives to local people as to what they could do for peace. And I wonder if she really believes that USIP knows what their alternatives are better than they know themselves. Okay, identify yourself right now with hands. I'm gonna go with these questions right now. We'll get started and then we'll come back to the next round of questions. But make eye contact with the people that have the microphones. I'll stay here so that the microphone can hear me. We had three questions. One was, we have an example. We know there's elections coming up. It's going to be difficult in Nigeria. I guess one of the first questions I would have is, practically speaking, or any of you working in Nigeria, but more broadly, can we generalize out of that? What do peace and development advisors, for example, do when they know that an election is coming up in the future? So Katie will come to you. Maybe Larry, you're making eye contact with me. So maybe you have something you wanna reflect on on that. We had a question, and I'm gonna broaden it a little bit. I think we could have lots of lunchtime conversations about the organization of the United States response to these issues. But I think it goes back to the question that General Zinni brought up to us before. And I think this is, I think it was a great challenge that he brought to us. You know, when military folks and defense folks encounter the peace building community, and I've taught many courses with the NATO on the comprehensive approach, they have this moment where they sit back and they step away from the table and they go, wait, there's nobody in charge? How do you do this? How do you do peace building when there's nobody in charge? There's no structure to this. And we, generally, if you're a peace builder, and I am an economist, by the way, Katie, but an economist peace builder, but we generally, we're used to that. We know that what we need to do is go around and meet and build the coalition that is the people that are gonna be working with us to be able to identify joint objectives and be able to deliver together. And we know that that has to be adaptive and it has to be very, very different in very different contexts. And that, and that it's not always the same person that's in the hierarchy or in the structure. So I think the challenge is not, you know, what are the specific parts? How is it being organized in the US government? How is it being, those are all conversations that we can have. And you can also ask our UN colleagues and people in New York about what's happening with the UN architecture. That's, you could have long conversations about that. But I think more generally, for you to reflect on, Darno, I know you've thought about this, David, you've thought about this. And Katie, I'm sure you've reflected on it. Not getting into the specifics of who reports to whom and how is this organized? What does the architecture look like? More generally, how do we solve the problem of knowing that we have multiple actors coming into these kinds of spaces? How do you solve this problem? You've all worked in the field and you've all done this. How do you solve the problem of knowing there are multiple actors coming in these types of spaces? You have some people that have expectations of an extremely hierarchical system or this type of reporting. And there are other people that don't have that expectation or don't work that way. And they need to be able to work very, very loosely. And they need to be adaptive and work with a variety of actors to find the constituency of peace. So I'll more broadly open that up that way, if I may. And then the question, and I think it's a good challenge and it's one that we had identified in setting out this panel, which was, are we, I guess I'm solving the question and I'm answering the question and responding to it. Are we facilitators or are we people that are bringing solutions? In my view, we're facilitators. We are people that help people to have a conversation. And that's what I think the panelists meant when they talked about opening up the space for these discussions. That's why the SDG framework is a useful thing. We can create a space for people that will talk about common objectives that they would like. We're facilitators helping people. Robert Sigliano, I know is here, is called a complexity coach. That's a fantastic job, right? We're helping people think through what their possible solutions would be, not coming with solutions to them. But maybe you all want to expand upon that a little bit more. So we'll just come straight back down the line because there were questions for all three of you there. All five of you. Thanks, Gary. I definitely need a complexity coach. That's a good one. So thank you for the question about Nigeria and youth. I want to preface the answer by saying, I don't think that certainly, I don't think that I'm getting the question right vis-a-vis how UDP engages youth in peace-building conversations. And I don't want to speak, I can't speak for all of our offices because I think some of the offices are doing really good work on youth mobilization and working with youth groups. But I think in terms of our theorizing and our ability to catalyze change of the nature that's been so well spelled out in the report that Graham was done, I don't know if he's here. I think that we're not quite getting it right. So thank you for provoking the question. It's really an important one. What I would hope to see happening in Nigeria is that the advisory capacity that sits in the UN office is working closely with coalitions and different coalitions, including youth coalitions and youth groups, to listen carefully to what is happening on the ground, both in the North and around the electoral process in general, in order to inform the decisions of political affairs, of human rights, of resident coordinator, and bring those messages back to government in a safe way. And I hope that that is happening. And that is the very purpose of having those people deployed, is to enable those types of conversations and to empower locally mediated solutions between those individuals and groups on the ground, local stakeholders who have a stake in the solution, a peaceful solution to the problem. We call this insight of mediation and UNDP, not everybody does, but I think this type of approach is what we should be doing to foster change. I also hope that the work that is happening there is also looking at the electoral process in general to ensure it's not just meeting minimal standards of freedom and fairness, but it's a genuinely inclusive process. And I'm very happy to talk to you offline about, in more detail about that, should it be helpful. So that's what I would hope to be seeing in a context like Nigeria, clearly in a context like Nigeria, the UN is not the only actor that's going to influence the decisions of the government and I would hope also and I would really, if I was present on the ground, be working with all forms of coalitions for peace to find other actors and champions for peaceful messaging, including bilaterals, including regional actors. I mean, the regional actors that Darinel has focused on are incredibly important and including governance that is not central, but local level governance actors who want to see peace in their communities and are working strongly to bring about change at that level, who can be incredibly influential. So those are the types of actions I would hope to see and I would hope that the UN could foster those and we can speak offline in detail about that. In terms of stabilization, I don't think I could satisfy your answer about the US and stabilization so I can speak briefly about stabilization in general. So stabilization is a favorite term of a number of Western governments who want to bring a more securitized approach to the way that they're engaging in conflict affected or post-conflict settings. It's frequently more palatable to parliaments who are in general drifting rightwards and in general moving away from ideas of development spending, but more convinced by ideas of stabilization and spending. It comes often with a heavy dose of a security component and sometimes a hard security component. So it's not uncontroversial, especially with those governments who are on the receiving end of assistance that's labeled stabilization monies. At the same time, there are some very positive things happening under the rubric of stabilization, including underwriting and supporting the types of efforts we've been discussing. So the patterns of donor engagement through stabilization approaches is varying depending on this particular national government, but many who are finding it challenging sometimes to spend quite vast budgets that put under the label of stabilization tend to orient themselves latterly towards the types of programs that have traditionally been understood as development in the rule of law sector, the justice sector, security sector, local peace building approaches, demobilization efforts and so on. So it's a complicated field. The reason why it gets extremely complicated is that generally stabilization monies are run by ministries of foreign affairs as opposed to development actors and so it makes the conversations with the national counterparts more complicated. So stabilization can be used positively, but I think it's very important to think about how that looks on the receiving end of stabilization approaches. I'll stop there. So I won't try and comprehensively answer all the things that came up, but I mean just a couple of thoughts. I mean I think on this question of how do you kind of hold back the tide of when you can see an outbreak of immediate violence coming, electoral violence, youth dissatisfaction. I think one of the really important things it can be sort of trying to build support amongst people with the power to change patterns of hard security responses which often fuel the problem. So one of the examples from our research in the last couple of years is around the Garrissa University attack by Al Shabab, how that led to a moment where Kenyan political leaders and leaders in the Northeast decided to try a different approach to security provision even when things were really sort of very violent with a group that most organizations and countries have designated as a terrorist organization, trying a different model of security provision, clamping down on arbitrary arrests and torture and abuse of youth corruption in the police service, getting communities again talking to the police and restoring trust really in that context took counties like Garrissa back from the brink. Then I think that's where also US and other governments need to leverage on governments like Nigeria and others to try a different approach and not reach for those kind of tools. But then I think on the question of do peace pool, does have the answer to local problems and need to come along and give them, I think obviously most of our experience I think would reflect a role that's more about facilitation and pointing out that there are ways of working on things. There are things you can do as communities, you can play a role. In many of our contexts we've been told women can't play a role in conversations around security but we found it in country after country that women are the backbone of local security in protecting people during conflict, finding solutions to security challenges on the ground and that we've been able to open up conversations where they do come and play a role and show their value in finding solutions to security problems. So I think as peace builders it is about opening up, facilitating things to happen but making sure that it is local actors who are working to identify the solutions and deliver them. On the question of the US peace conflict architecture, can I just shamelessly plug an event we have this evening at Tonic restaurant from 5.30 to talk about rewriting the Washington playbook and the place of peace in US foreign policy. Feel free to join us for that. Thank you. Okay, so I'll start with that last one first then. And I don't wanna respond again for the US government but I have heard that there are conflict prevention reviews under way that jointly would stay in aid. So I think there are a number of good things coming out through the stabilization effort done in coordination between state and aid. So again, leave it to the USG officials to elaborate on that. Just to pick up on your point, I don't wanna answer now that I've got Lisa, one of the co-creators of the SNAP guide and Maria, the other one up there. So I don't wanna answer for them. They have a session later on today on nonviolent action and peace building but I would even say maybe we even use a software where they facilitate. We're completely in a supportive role and we're often engaging with local actors who are already using these nonviolent action tactics or peace building tactics. So our goal is really just to expand on the diversity of options available. It is always up to the local actors. I mean, that's what we're supporting in the inclusion portfolio. It's always up to the local actors on what they choose and Maria will go into research on donor support or external actor support to grassroots movements as well in a later session. So if you're interested in that, please attend that as well. And the last point just quickly because we are running out of time. You raised an interesting point about preventing election violence. That's also another framework that we could potentially draw some lessons learned from into our prevention landscape. Yeah, quickly. So Gary poses a question. How do we bring actors together? What experiences do we have bringing actors together? I want to make reference to three examples. First one that refers to yet another global framework that I think we need to put in value also which is international dialogue on peace building and state building and the whole new deal because that framework, if there is something unique is that actually created space for civil society and official space in the table for civil society to participate. So I think that's very important. And the fact that there is a platform that facilitates the participation of civil society to play a meaningful role in that space. I think that's significant and that's something that can be maybe replicated for other global frameworks. How can you articulate meaningful civil society participation? And these platforms, I think they have a key role. Another example of that is the civil society dialogue network of the European Union, for example, where they have this consultation process on specific areas with experts. But, and if you ask, say, this, we could not do this without a platform that identifies who should be in particular conversations at particular moments. So these platforms help identify who the key interlocutors should be. Second example I wanted to give was, and again, briefly. We have limited time. I'm sorry. So very, very quickly. Very briefly. The civil military dialogues and the manual on human security that Lisa participated on how understand, basically it's a question of translation, understanding what the military culture is for civil society organizations, what they can do, what they cannot do, and what civil society organizations can do as well. So, a brief comment about mobilizing action for crisis response. We have actually, right now, having an example, and we're having this discussion with some colleagues from the Swedish International Development Agency yesterday, about a crisis in Cameroon. Our members in Cameroon are saying, it's like we have this crisis, there is a bridge. We are on the verge of really outbreak of violence here. Can you help us? We're able, as G-PAC, to mobilize very quickly in four days a response action there. And the lesson here, or what we were discussing with our colleagues, is like we need these partnerships, by which we, Acida, Acida, we are mandated to do that, but we cannot mobilize so fast. But maybe we do it through you and you help us have this crisis fund or something. You are able to facilitate that mobilization. So maybe that's something else that we can think in those moments of a quick reaction, where quick reactions are needed. Thank you. Great, thank you. I'd like to take on the facilitation points. I mean, I don't think that we are neutral facilitators. There is a huge amount of evidence out there about what works, and I don't think we should be ashamed of using it. We know, for instance, that one of the fastest ways to reduce violence against women is better regulation of alcohol in communities. There's really very strong evidence of that. I would say in the United States, one of the easiest things that the 40% of states who do this practice could do to improve their relationships with young men is to stop charging young men, children for being on probation. We have 40% of states that charge young men for being on probation and then chase them and their parents to repay those debts when the probation period is over. It's insanity. We have good evidence that that is... It's actually costing more than it raises. We have experiences of countries like Georgia that have done amazing work to improve a police service that was one of the least trusted institutions in the country, to one that has at least some respect from citizens. One of the things they did was to stop police stations having more than one story so that people in police stations couldn't jump out of windows during interrogations. We have good evidence that things like that work. And I think we really need to marshal that evidence and use that evidence and put it at the disposal of people who have the power to make change in different contexts. And then I'd like to come... I mean, I don't know much about the State Department, but I do work with a lot of governments around the world and almost every country that I work with, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is in some kind of crisis. And until we invest in ministries of a foreign affairs, until we have a different kind of diplomat that is able to respond to complexity, that is able to bring together international regional and national actors on a platform, that is able to construct that platform for change, then I think we're gonna find it very difficult too to cope with the problems that this complex global world is throwing up for us. Thank you. There's all this expertise in the room. We've summed it up in a piece I wrote that says, context matters, but knowledge transfers. Of course, in these spaces, we need to know what's going on. And of course, it's a local solution, but we have to be able to bring in what we've learned from other experiences. And that's why all of this expertise is so useful and it's so useful to be able to come together and share here. We're gonna go all go to lunch. You'll see all of these people for the next couple of days. Let's continue the conversation on all of these topics. And I thank you very much. So enjoy your break. You have about a half an hour. And please know that you are already getting alerts on your app. So take a look at those. Might be helpful down here as well. So welcome and thanks for coming today. My name is Charles North. I'm a senior advisor here at the United States Institute of Peace. Our subject today is peace building in hybrid war. I'm joined on this panel by a great panel. First, we have Dr. Marche Barkowski who is a civil resistance expert and adjunct professor at the Krieger School of Arts and Science at Johns Hopkins University where he teaches strategic nonviolent resistance. Among his publications is a 2015 white paper on nonviolent civilian defense to counter Russian hybrid warfare. And a 2018 report, the case for civil resistance to Russia's populace centric warfare, how democratic societies can fight and win against authoritarian hybrid onslaught. Next, we have Dmitry Potenkin who is a Ukrainian policy analyst and activist. He has drawn on his experiences in Ukraine's revolutions in managing a get out the vote campaign and as the IT director of Ukraine's first public radio station to train human rights organizations around the world in mass mobilization. He is the founder and CEO of Fakes Radar, a Ukrainian NGO dedicated to identifying and debunking disinformation through coalition building, gamification and crowdsourcing. And then finally we have Ambassador Sarah Mendelson who is a distinguished service professor of public policy and head of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy in Washington DC. She was previously the US representative to the Economic and Social Council at the United Nations. She has worked in government, academia and civil society promoting development and human rights and she has extensive experience in research policy and programming in Russia. There is no one definition that I've found for hybrid war and there seem to be many other terms that are used to describe the same concept. So, but today we are using the term hybrid war to represent the broad range of tools and tactics short of armed invasion that countries like Russia are using against other nations to influence, divide, polarize other societies. To subvert democratic institutions and processes and to catalyze conflict. This is not a short term fad and nor is it a tactic specific to Russia. The National Intelligence Council's 2017 Global Trends Report says that in the future of conflict, quote, more actors will employ a wider range of military and non-military tools blurring the line between war and peace and undermining old norms of escalation and deterrence. Non-combatants will be increasingly targeted sometimes to pit ethnic, religious and political groups against one another to disrupt societal cooperation and coexistence within states. So what are the implications for peace building? When the distinction between war and peace is becoming more blurred and societies are increasingly the target. How can we apply the tools and approaches of peace building to reduce, prevent and mitigate the harm to societies and prevent the outbreak of violent conflict? So let me begin with you, Maciej. Can you help us better understand what hybrid war is? You have written about populist-centric hybrid war. What is that? Thank you, Charles. And thank you for assembling this panel on this, I think, important issue. And thank you for USIP for this terrific facilities and bringing us all here. So yes, indeed, I published recently a study that was released by Free Russia Foundation on what I call Russia-populist-centric war to describe Kremlin attacks on democracies. And, but to understand where that terms comes from and to understand the hybrid war itself, one needs to go back to color revolutions in Serbia, 2000 in Georgia, 2003, Ukraine 2004 and Kyrgyzstan 2005 and reactions of the Kremlin elites to those revolutions that basically were interpreted as not authentic, as not grassroots, as being exported from abroad, as being manufactured by Western powers. Then the second wave of protests, the Arab Spring and then subsequent protests in Russia in 2012 against rigged elections, parliamentary and upcoming that time presidential elections made Kremlin even more jitter about the Western influence that time the Kremlin blamed explicitly Hillary Clinton from instigating those protests. And then revolution of dignity in Ukraine happened in 2014 that kind of proved for Kremlin the point of Western interference and Western instigation of the protests by the population. So the Kremlin, so-called Kremlin social technologist began thinking about if the Western countries are using this as an instrument of warfare, how we can utilize that. But I think the most significant and interesting development was focused centered on the Russian military itself. And it was Russian military that basically incorporated and integrated the concept that they called protest potential of the population. They used that term, protest potential of the population into the military strategies. And it was Valery Grasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian army that in his talks and publications between 2013-2014 was writing about populist kind of centric warfare as the new type of conflict. And then eventually that also this type of thinking was brought into Russian military doctrine that was issued in December 2014 that basically explicitly says about new modern conflicts that Russian military should be aware of. And they explicitly say, and I quote here, that those type of conflicts rely on non-military measures with the extensive use of protest potential of the population, including social movements and political forces. So they quickly had a chance to kind of make those strategies work. That was the case of Ukraine where basically if we saw how the hybrid war was waged by Russia and Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, it was with the use of the local civilians, pro-Russian local civilians that were on the streets and squares protesting. And Russia was using this as a pretext to intervene. And in fact, right now we have access to secretly recording tapes by Sergei Glasiyev who is the close aide to Putin on Euro-Asian integration where he was directing his associates in 2014 in Eastern Ukraine, basically to bring out people on the streets to capture squares in towns and cities in Eastern Ukraine and to capture city councils and make demands of autonomy towards the new key of government. And then at the same time call for Russian intervention to protect the rights of the supposedly oppressed rights of minorities. So the concept of populist-centric warfare directly derives from the protest potential of the population that Russia, political elites and military elites are using right now. And underlying motivation for Kremlin to attack democracies using this type of tool is understanding that basically democracies are not reconcilable with Kremlin's authoritarian rule and basically Kremlin is involved in existential conflict with democracies. And Kremlin thinks that it's kind of invented or reinvented a new type of weapon that is with low costs, that is not costly, that doesn't involve necessarily sending tanks and missiles into democracies. And that exploits vulnerabilities of democratic societies. However, I would argue that those vulnerabilities, even if they're exploited by Kremlin or China or Iran for that matter, they are at the same time the strengths. The independent societies of democracies are also the strengths that could be tapped on in order to push against Kremlin populist-centric warfare. So that leaves my next question is, this is an aggression against our countries. Why aren't we looking to, why don't we rely on our governments, our military, or even IT corporations to take care of this aggression? What's the role of civil resistance? Right, I see civil resistance as a potent tool, not only against dictatorships, and we have research that shows how effective nonviolent civil resistance is against brutal regimes, particularly in comparison with armed resistance, but also against hybrid threats emanating from abroad. And when I look at civil resistance, I define civil resistance as basically political power exercised by ordinary people in the form of disruptive actions, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, non-cooperation, civil disobedience, but also in the form of constructive type of actions that would be about building alternative media, alternative educational system, building kind of movement infrastructure to effective and managed repression against those who are mobilizing non-violently, and infrastructure that allows also movements to reach out to the opponent's allies in order to solicit effective defections from the opponent. And basically in my study, I look into defensive and offensive civil resistance strategies. And just to kind of give an illustration of one or two of them in terms of defensive civil resistance strategies, I talked about building tightly neat solidarity communities on the local level, as solidarity communities that are mobilized, that are organized and vigilant. And we have in fact examples of at least two communities in two towns, one in Ukraine, one in here in the United States that effectively I think resisted Russian hybrid warfare, and one in the United States is actually Baltimore. In 2016, it was the fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter set up that time no one knew by Russian trolls under the name of black activists. They called on Baltimore population to go and protest, and that was the first anniversary of the killing of Freddie Gray. And basically they called on people to go out and protest against police brutality and police violence. And the response on the part of the local activists when they were receiving those messages was who you are. We don't know you, you have never worked in our community. We have never kind of interacted with you. You are not legitimate voice of our community while you are coming here to us. So they pushed back, but they pushed back because they were organized. They were also organized to resist agent provocateurs, be domestic, but then they could apply that quite quickly into kind of external threats that were coming from whoever we didn't know that time. And another community, it's actually in Kharkiv in 2014 where the expectation was that after Donets and Lugansk, another major city in Ukraine that would fall would be Kharkiv and Odessa. And one reason I think why Kharkiv didn't fall into separatist hands was precisely because the pro-Ukrainian community was mobilized. They went on the streets. They were calling for basically voicing this support for the unity of Ukraine, predominantly in non-violent manner, demonstrating and pushing against pro-Russian groups that then forced the authorities to basically align with the dominant pro-Ukrainian mood in the city and then negotiate also agreement with Kiev in order to put down the kind of pro-Russian insurgency that was starting there in Kiev. So the mobilization of communities is crucial. And in terms of that's kind of more defense. In terms of offensive strategies, one of that is actually is given to us by Gandhi, which is the outreach to the population of the attacking state. Gandhi went over the head of the British government and British monarchy and reached out directly to the population, to the British public, effectively to basically win sympathy of the British public with the causes that he had. And in the context of Russia hybrid war, this is the same thing. We should make an effort to reach out to the Russian population over Kremlin. And that could be on individual kind of level and it could be on a more kind of organized collective level of different professional groups, different interest groups interacting with the counterparts in Russia. And one example to illustrate that is on the kind of individual level. I've got just a minute or two, but I don't know how many of you heard about Grigory Rochenko. This is the former head of the anti-Russian doping, anti-doping Russian agency, who basically revealed the whole kind of scheme of doping in Russia. And it was Brian Fogel, American filmmaker that reached out to Rochenko. At that time, it was just about Brian being interested in amateur cycling crisis. And he wanted basically to prove that you can dope without being discovered. And he was looking for people who could tell him how to dope effectively. And he thought, well, Russians may know about that. So he contacted Rochenko. And that was well before any news about the doping scandal in Russia. But through the interactions, they developed affinity, trust, and basically they knew about each other's families and so on. And then when the scandal, when media started writing about the doping, possible doping without evidence, suddenly Brian Fogel could reach out to Rochenko and said, so what exactly happened? So then Rochenko, fearing also for his life, went to the United States on the trip organized by Fogel privately, testified to the Department of Justice, gave major interview to the New York Times that published a masterpiece on the doping scandal that involved Putin, FSB, and the whole kind of Russian government, embarrassing Putin at the same time. So these kind of social interactions that may start without any intention of undermining the regime, they could pay off eventually, like in that case. Great, thank you. So one of the areas of hybrid war that we hear about the most is disinformation. And Dmitry, one of you, you're on the front lines of dealing with disinformation in Ukraine. Can you give us a sense of what does that look like from where you are? Well, actually, there's a whole bunch of very cool fog checkers and journalists working in Ukraine and in other countries in the European Union against disinformation. So my experience is that they need help, that they produce very good fog checking reports. And unfortunately, lots of fakes are still much more popular than the fog checkers report. And the reason I think obvious that to produce a fake, you just need good hearing and imagination, et cetera. Well, to check data, you need time, expertise. And in the end, you know, fog checkers, they are not trained to write fancy headers. Fog checkers are trained to check the facts. So as a result, they have very good content, is unfortunately much less popular. And lots of media, even Ukrainian media, they're still dominated by several myths. And these myths are limiting us in lots of things. Like we, well, the least of such fakes, it's huge basically, I don't know what to start from. You have an example that sticks out for you? Oh, well, well, there are, look, you know that there are whole troll farms in Russia producing fakes. And they take information as a means of war. And this is what complements what Masha just said about their perception of non-violence as just another way of their military operations. I mean, for us, for non-violent activists and experts and trainers, when non-violent resistance is a valuable thing just because it can work itself and help people and help protect their rights. But for Russians, well, first of all, they did not invent that theory. I mean, they stolen lots of Western theories and then they mis-stolen them. They took it as if both military and non-military parts are just two sides of the same job. And in their case, that job is mostly wrong job. It's a bad job. So for them, creating conflicts and creating online clashes, this is just a step in setting up violence. And then either saying, look, I mean, guys, you are criticizing us, but you have your own clashes and violence. If this is on the other side of the pond, but if in Ukraine, for instance, or in Georgia, then they are then coming with their military attempts to help and to protect the local Russian speaking population. So for them, the first step is creating clashes, polarizing people online, then bringing it offline, and then misusing that to basically annex, like in the case of the Crimea, was and set violence and then cover it and excuse it with lots of more lies. Good news is that, first of all, this, I mean, it's kind of products, but they're running out of fakes. I mean, several months ago I noticed that they started repeating, so. And there are several reports showing narratives of the same, basically seven or another version is 12 narratives of faking the reality in the region. And, you know, they're running out of them, so which means that it is making their propaganda less efficient, and well, basically Russia is now, and well, Putin's regime, let's be clear, and his oligarchs selling such services to him for unequal market access, et cetera, and other preferences, they basically are able to even support their economy just due to fakes. For instance, you know that Russia is exporting energy resources and I don't know, how long would they survive? I mean, the Putin's regime without the ability to sell the energy resources to the members of the European Union, for instance. And they think that, I mean, by the way, lots of people on our side and the Ukrainian side and the European side, they think that they, for some reason, must buy Russian oil and gas, and this is a huge myth. Lots of even experts in Ukraine, they believe that, you know, while Ukraine is transporting Russian gas, Russia will not start the major war, the fact is that there is a war, and this is very important, by the way, when we talk about hybrid wars. In Ukraine, this is not just hybrid, this is not just online. More than 10,000 people killed, so this is the war. This is, I mean, on the occupied territories, we have concentration camps. So what's the role of a fake radar? How are you mobilizing citizens and organizations to push back and counter the disinformation? Well, we realized in 2004, during the Orange Revolution, that we need to help people. I mean, we can't do anything without the people, and we need just to help them mobilize and protect their rights non-violently. So we need to provide that capacity to learn and then to organize themselves. And now it's online, we are trying to use those successful experiences, and we are, again, we are combining quality data from the fact-checkers, so we are not, my project is not checking facts. We take content from the professional fact-checkers, and then we just help deliver that content to where it is needed. And we involve the users. I mean, it's great that finally all the social networks started fighting against the fakes, but I don't think they can do that alone. This must be concerted the fort of the social networks, fact-checkers and other journalists, and the people themselves. We need them to- Where are the fact-checkers that you've been, you're working with? Where are they, are they, are they Ukrainians or are they others, or? Well, we partner with the best Ukrainian fact-checkers, and we also, we're looking forward to working with other fact-checkers. I'm very optimistic about the International Fact-Checking Network at the Pointer Institute. And we are basically serving two markets, both the users and the fact-checkers. And we want to test our tool now with the Ukrainian fact-checkers, and then we will reach out to others too. And the objective of your tool is to what? How does that work? Well, it's kind of anti-virus, but against disinformation. Now we started with fakes related to Ukraine, produced mainly in Russia, but then it's about quality of data. We want to not only deliver quality reports on the fakes, we want to also help people learn because lots of fakes are not related to the violent conflicts, you know, all those fakes about flat earth, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you need to let people educate themselves and their friends informally. And our service, it allows to check your news feed, which is made by your friends. And we trust our friends for whatever they share, be it fakes or good quality data. So the way is to let people protect themselves and help their contacts and friends learn, well, the banking reports, and learn good quality data, just general educational content. Right. Sarah, the hybrid war is designed to exploit fissures in society and catalyze conflict. So what is the role of public policy in building resilience in society and resilience to hybrid war and in spurring citizen action to respond? Charles, let me just first thank you for organizing this panel. I think you can see that the work that these guys are doing is both incredibly interesting, totally relevant, but also brave. And thank you, USIP, for putting this together. And the fact that you all are here, I think is a testimony to your understanding the importance of this topic. In terms of policy, I think first, we have to recognize what we're talking about. People need to understand what is going on. We're in a very different situation in 2018 than we were in 2016. If you were exactly, well, maybe two and a half, three years ago, saying the kinds of things that you read about almost every day, including in indictments, you'd say that's crazy, that's not happening. So the fact that we have much greater, not total, but greater public awareness, I think is important. If I were writing policy today, I would make this absolutely critical to be taught in school, that people understand what is going on, that young people, that college students, graduate students, high school students, understand and be able to attain a sort of digital literacy so that they're able to one day go work for you, being able to fact check. So raising awareness is a critical piece. I also think that there's a positive narrative for democratic societies that is getting lost. People want to be like us. They want open societies. They want to be able to worship, however they want to worship. They want to be able to send their kids to schools where they're learning good skills. They want to live in a place where rule of law means something. They're not interested in corruption. I mean, I think that it's vital to understand this is on some level an existential struggle. This is a struggle about open societies versus closed societies. And I think every time you get open versus closed, open will win. It may be not immediate, but it'll be in the long term. I want to say one other thing, which is we did something amazing three years ago, the international community, which is often lost. We agreed to an agenda, 193 member states agreed to an agenda called the Sustainable Development Goals and I'll tell you why it's relevant. Over 100 countries by this point have reported out their progress on these goals. Next year in July and in September, heads of state will meet in New York to discuss this and for the first time, these goals apply to all of us. They're universal. This is not about the global north or the global west talking to the global south or the global east. Fundamental to these goals is a platform around creating peaceful, just, inclusive societies. If you consider yourself a human rights activist, we just got a big boost. We got rights woven into a development agenda that applies to all of us. And the issues of recognizing that rights and governance and conflict in the flip side piece are all absolutely fundamental drivers of development. We got that. We've already, we negotiated millions of people around the world, engaged young people in particular who were extremely interested. Countries that were emerging from conflict, their ambassadors said we're not signing on to this agenda unless this aspect is involved. And so this is the cluster around what we call goal 16. But what's really interesting is corruption is also in there. Active efforts to reduce corruption. And this is where I think the greatest vulnerability for certain closed societies, including Russia, exist. Citizens care about corruption. People don't like hearing about the massive amounts of money that have been siphoned off and are stashed in all sorts of places. So on the policy front, there's all sorts of issues around beneficial ownership and uncovering who actually owns something. How do you have a $14 million or $20 million apartment when you make $70,000 a year? That was the power of Yoram Maidan when those people were walking calmly on the estate of Yanukovych and discovering the golden toilets and the exotic birds. And I think that that really shook Mr. Putin. So another tool in peace building is dialogue. And there is a so-called attract to dialogue where you bring together people from both sides of a conflict to look for reconciliation and understanding and reconciliation and end to the conflict. With that work in hybrid war, can you envision a case where we have attract to dialogue that is akin to an arms control negotiation to bring an end to hybrid war? So generally, attract to can sometimes be beneficial when there is no attract one. I would say that that's some of the circumstances under which attract to can help. And we think of attract to as oftentimes gentlemen sitting in a room, closed doors. If you looked at the New York Times today, you'll see a picture of Ambassador Bolton meeting President Putin and Fiona Hill looking on. So track one is actually happening. So what if we had a different model of attract to that tapped into public opinion? I think that the thing that we saw, I looked very closely at the lessons from Serbia in 2000. There was a real sensitivity among the leaders of that movement of understanding what public opinion was in Serbia. It's not a coincidence that the Russian government has gone after the best public opinion company, Lovada, and labeled them a foreign agent. So what if we had a track to that was actually sort of citizen to citizen, but based on public opinion data? What if we sort of open this up using our digital, the era that we live in now and kind of flipped the tools that they're using to try to undermine democracy? What if we used it to try and engage? I mean, I feel at this time, I've been going to Russia since I was a high school kid since 1979. I feel more cut off from Russia right now than at any period in my lifetime. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And more and more people are moving either into exile or offshore. I'm not saying by any means that the digital space in Russia is safe. I think we have reason to believe that it's not entirely safe, but I do think there are ways of engaging and we need to be thinking creatively. So I'm not sure that a track to, in the traditional sense, would work here, but maybe there's some unconventional ways to do this. Great, thank you. Now I'd like to open it up to the audience for questions you may have for the panel. We do have volunteers who can help bring mics. So one question over here. Working on the wrong side. And we have on the other side, yep. No, up here. Hello, great. Thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It's a wonderful conference so far. I was very encouraged to hear people discussing digital literacy and I really wanted to sort of hone in a bit on that more, especially from Professor Mendelssohn and Mr. Patekhin. I'm trying to synthesize this into basically two points. I would really like to know how digital literacy and the ability for the society at large to independently determine that which they see online to be fake or fraudulent or insightful in some negative way from a society standpoint. How that is manifesting in Ukraine and also how we could boost the ability of society overall to increase their digital literacy. You mentioned mechanisms for teaching young people and how to do that. And I think that's incredibly important but I also would contend that I'm 28 and I've been using social media for almost 20 years. Like my parents who turned 60 just this past month, they definitely haven't been doing that. But statistically they're part of a demographic that also votes more often than anyone in my age group or younger. But my age group and younger are the people who have a much higher level of digital literacy than anyone in the upper age groups. So if we're going to be improving society's ability to check fake news independently of someone else having to tell it to them, how are we going to educate all of the demographics so that we are collectively solving the issue as opposed to relying on mechanisms to do it for us? Great, thank you. Why don't we take two more here and then let's get one on the other side. Good morning and thank you. I'm Ron Fisher, Professor Emeritus from the School of International Service. At American University I've been a proponent and practitioner of track two for I guess all of my professional life. And I find this a fascinating question that's been raised about the applicability of track two in a situation like this. I think, Sarah, we might be speaking more about track three, which is more at the civil society level of citizens at large who are still influential and so on. Most of track two has occurred at the middle level of society with influentials or at the elite level with those who have the ear of the leadership. In this case one would think that those higher levels are in jeopardy because the leadership is clearly engaged in prosecuting an ugly war in Ukraine. My concern about applicability in this case would be the ramifications for those who would take part, particularly from the Russian end in Ukraine or in Russia, but also in Ukraine. Because I think unofficial dialogue engagements and so on place people at considerable risk when you're living in a police state. That would be my concern here, and yet I would hope that somewhere there's an avenue to use track two and track three to start to build a peace constituency to support a social movement toward an alternative to using violence as the means of making decisions in this case. Okay, and then over here. Hi, my name is Jenna Russo and I'm a research associate at the Public International Law and Policy Group and a JD Masters in International Affairs candidate at American University. I'm wondering about the context of the United States and how the media plays at the very least an indirect role in fostering disinformation by contributing to sensationalism and was wondering how to foster collaboration since a lot of journalists might be unaware or don't have access to national security conversations or cyber security. How can they become more aware of how to counter these types of disinformation threats and foster more integrity in their own field? Okay, thank you. So let's start with digital literacy. Well, to quote the McCain Institute, Mavericks Needed. I don't know if you've seen this campaign that was launched yesterday. The first place to go is everybody to vote, just vote. We have an election coming up and it's critical. I mean, the idea that older people vote more than younger people simply has to change. People died trying to get the right to vote. So everybody needs to vote. You know, I think we're at a moment where we need to build a field of public interest technologists. I'm working at a university that is on some level already doing this, but I think we need to, let me step back and say that I've been doing some research on field building, how foundations identify issues and then collaborate. And I've been particularly focused on efforts for which I was a beneficiary. In the 1980s, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corp, Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation all came together and sort of said, you know, we've got our understanding of international security is too narrow. We've got essentially great men looking at great men and we need to understand the drivers of conflict in a much more rigorous and broader way. And there was a great investment to grow a new generation of people interested in looking at things like transnational networks, the role of development, the role of climate change. And it greatly expanded our understanding of international affairs and international security. We need essentially to do the same thing for public interest technology. And I think growing a generation that is, you know, this is an important job to be able to understand and teach digital literacy is one place to start. And I will say that I think people born after 1980, this will become the new norm. This is a generation I call cohort 2030. You're going to gain or lose the most from the applicability and implementation of the sustainable development goals, which run through 2030. So you should be focused on this. I hear you about the dangers of track two and vulnerabilities. The truth is this whole open versus closed struggle is part of a dynamic that's been going on since the early 2000s in terms of a real crush around civil society. I mean, they were in some ways the canary in the coal mine. It certainly began with colleagues of ours in Russia. It has migrated since 2012. Over 70 countries have passed hundreds of laws to constrict the ability of civil society to engage. So I'm afraid that the danger is already out there. It's clearly also affecting journalists. The number of journalists who've been murdered has increased. So we're always thinking about, by the way, when you talk about digital security, you should always be thinking about physical security because the two are really quite connected. The third question about the media, I would just say, I think I've come to the point where I feel like the big national media on some level are too focused on one person and covering one person or what that one person says with that one person tweets. And they're missing focus on local news. I think we really need to understand these grievances that are in our society and understand who is working on them and profiling local efforts to reduce the grievance. I mean, I think that example of Baltimore being able to respond effectively to outside efforts is extremely interesting. I've never heard that. And we need to sort of up our game on the local front and dial down a little bit on the sort of the narrative of how terrible everything is because, frankly, that's exactly what Mr. Putin wants to propagate. Dimitro, the gentleman over here was concerned about his very young parents, I might add. And they're concerned about how they would be able to detect fake news. I wonder if you could use that as an example of how would fake radar, the app you're developing, help his parents? Well, first of all, it's not only about media literacy. It's about general literacy and democratic literacy. In Ukraine, we know about different Russian regimes since mid-ages. So our general population is very literate about historical inclinations of our neighbors to recreate their empire, basically. Now they are just using some new tools created, not necessarily in Russia. But another thing is velocity of disinformation and attempts to withstand it. And we in the kind of expert community, we believe ourselves to be immune from buying fakes or sharing them. It's not true. We sometimes need to go back to the very basic things like well, recognizing usurpers as legitimate presidents, for instance. In Ukraine, we had Yanukovych, who used to be considered our legitimate president. But basically he falsified our constitution back in 2010 immediately, just several months after he was, well, let's say, elected. And still, we in Ukraine and people in the West, they kept recognizing him as legitimate president of Ukraine. Moreover, European Union kept negotiations for Ukraine's association agreement with the EU, with the isurper. So the moment Ukrainian civil society stopped campaigning for the EU to accept Ukraine or to sign the association agreement, and we kind of opened that track three, but for civil society, then, and the moment the Western leaders started showing and basically answering our Ukrainian demand for non-recognition of the isurper's regime as legitimate regime, then everything changed. I mean, unfortunately, during the revolution of dignity, we did it only with violence. But that violence was Putin's interest because he misused it to annex Crimea and to start the war as it protects, because he got that picture he needed to show that Nazis and extremists are taking over power in Kiev. And they're still trying to use that agenda. And our local extremists are still helping him to get that picture distributed. So we need to go to very basic things. Like, we still believe Putin to be legitimate leader of Russia. To, you know, technically, Putin's regime is not much different from ISIS, for instance. The difference is that, well, Russian terrorist regime has seen it in the UN Security Council and embassies all over the world. In terms of number of people killed and in terms of using use of force and threat of use of force as a political means, the Russian regime is not less terrorist than any other terrorist organization. We just missed the point when they turned to statewide or even bigger than statewide terrorist organization. And we keep buying their gas. We keep transporting that gas. Well, I don't know. You know, how long would Putin's regime survive without buyers of their gas? One year, two years? And we keep talking about nuclear issues. I mean, it's important. I understand. We still leave all those Cold War threats. But let's just remember, then, sitting at the same table with the terrorists discussing, you know, nuclear treaties is a bad idea. Because for them, this is a different story. For them, this is a way to legitimize themselves. So track three is a great idea. But just please edit this idea with closing track one and track two. And help us up with his parents. Well, what's the app going to do? Well, my point about experts not always be able to detect fakes was that basically it's everyone's problem. So that's why we are taking sometimes very basic information and sometimes very advanced data from fact checkers. And we are just making that fake detection helped by our engine, which can detect fakes automatically. If they are predetected by fact checkers. But because Russians are running out of fakes, now it's possible to use artificial intelligence to detect related fakes. So it's good news. I mean, they still have some oil. And we are still transporting their oil to the Europeans. And we are still helping to fund the Russian terrorist regime. But they are out running out of fakes. And yeah, artificial intelligence can help. Marce. A couple of points on the digital literacy. I think, again, the kind of grassroots initiatives and movements can play a role. There is a campaign which is a pro-truth pledge, which was initiated by academics that has around right now probably 9,000 signatories, including public figures and government officials and different organizations. That pledge basically to say the truth and share the truth. And pledged to adhere to 12 principles of how to identify the truth in terms of verifying information, in terms of even retracting something that was shared and then later was considered false. So that's a kind of grassroots initiative, that pro-truth pledge that one can refer to. And in the context of kind of diplomatic efforts that may discourage Russia from waging hybrid war, the problem is that hybrid war is waged on the cheap. It's a very cheap thing to do that for Russians. So I don't know what can exactly discourage them. And one way to think about kind of deterrence is to think about where the areas or countries where Russia scaled back the hybrid war efforts or information operations. And indeed, there is a region where Russia scaled back that efforts because they thought that they spent much more resources than they are getting benefits out of that. And that area are Nordic countries. And Nordic societies turn out to be extremely resilient against Russian attacks. And that then produced this kind of scaling back. We will not invest so much money in information or disinformation. And basically what we see with the Nordic kind of civil societies, they are very literate in terms of cyber threats and generally democracy literate. Literacy is very high. Civic mobilization, civic engagement, and civic participation is also very high. Public education that would stress participation in nonviolent activism. And that would kind of instill this kind of public ethos and responsibility vis-à-vis what we do. It's also very high. So Russians, the Kremlin discovered that it's very difficult to pierce those societies. And also level of corruption, it's low. So basic Kremlin cannot use that as a tool in its warfare. And that also points to the importance of kind of education in civil resistance, civic activism. And one way, I think, to popularize this type of literacy of democratic participation, engagement, and resistance would be, and you had the question about the kind of non-state actors or companies being involved. I'm thinking here about entertainment industry. I'm sure that many of you might have watched and are watching the men in the High Castle, the popular series, I think, on Netflix. And basically, this is a fictional scenario of the Second World War outcome. Instead of allies that were winning the war, it's actually Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan that won the Second World War. And they, among themselves, partitioned United States. So the East Coast of United States is ruled by Nazi Germany, and the West Coast is ruled by Imperial Japan. And I think it's a perfect scenario for thinking about resistance actions. In that series, they think about anti-resistance, of course, more than anything else, and some type of kind of smuggling networks and so on. But here, we could imagine scenario of Americans engaging in cooperation, civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, to push against external interference and that type of occupation against kind of protecting a cohesion of the local communities against infiltrators and provocateurs. Very much things relevant to how to face hybrid war and attacks by Russia or China or Iran. So why don't we take some more questions? If there are any in the back, we've got one here. Come down, gentlemen, in the tan suit. And then you've been waiting down here. And then we'll take one over here. Good afternoon. Thank you very much. My name is Sam Mohamed Chroma, Executive Director of Condo Reconciliation based in Liberia. And here, we face with very serious problems in Liberia. We have victims and perpetrators interacting in a way that does not help reconciliation. To reconcile, we have the perpetrators in high position that have been enlightened through intimidation and money has changed. Then we have the victims. If they want service from the government, it is the same perpetrator that they have to face to get any government service. Unfortunately, 65% of the population hold ambition is to find a next meal. So to come out as an intervener to see what you can do to bring the parties together, it has been a torso because the perpetrators are in control. By intimidation, you don't have the victims coming forward. With that kind of situation, I know you've traveled and seen practically something identical to that. What kind of recommendation will you suggest that that could work to bring that trust, to build that trust and also create an opportunity for an exchange between, or to bring the parties together? Hello, my name is Andrei Kamenshikov. I happen to be working in Ukraine for the last three and a half years on civil peace building and on organizing civil peace building. And a couple of questions I had, maybe would like to hear your comments. First of all, I think that when we speak about hybrid warfare, the case of Ukraine actually demonstrates the ineffectiveness of hybrid warfare because I'm absolutely certain that the initial goals that the Kremlin had when it engaged were not to occupy the Crimean Peninsula and stir up trouble in the east of Ukraine. They had quite clear goals of splitting the country in half and that failed completely. In fact, what they reached was mobilizing the vast majority of the Ukrainian population in response to their action. And in a sense, people joke today in Kiev that Putin may be one of the founders of the Ukrainian nation. On the other side, I see a major risk in the hybrid war and the fact that there's this risk of one side becoming similar to your adversary in many ways. And I like to comment that open societies win in the long run and I think that's very important and I truly believe in that but I see that there is a risk that in response to these kind of challenges, there's a tendency of open societies to start closing and like this idea of offensive interaction and interacting with people on the other side, interacting between the Ukrainian and Russian population. Unfortunately, that's not always welcomed in Ukraine today so I think that's another challenge. And finally, one last point I would like to make. I think the context of the hybrid warfare creates a unique situation where there's a, where two sides that are in conflict with each other do not even recognize that because today, the Russian official position is, as we know, is Russia is not part of the war, it's not an aggressor. On the Ukrainian side, obviously Russia is seeing the aggressor but I also feel that often not enough attention is given to the internal dimensions of the conflict that also exists. Sorry for this long presentation. I'm not gonna get up because I'm gonna disturb my neighbors if I do. My name is Patty Morrissey and I wanted to pick up on Charles' original point about hybrid warfare has many names. I spent nine years working in the Pentagon on information warfare and information operations starting in 1995. So kind of at the birth of what the heck is this. And in 1990s terminology, this is Putin expertly combining military deception with societal deception with psychological operations, which are all the classic forms of active measures. But I, pulling it up to today and this idea that the population can be mobilized around what you want to see happen. And the sophistication it takes to sort of break down those parts of society that you can sort of radicalize around certain issues and then pull together as a force for instability in another country. I mean, we are in a war, a different type of cold war right now. I think, mage, how do you say mage art? Mage art? Your work, I'm really interested in how you counter that. But at sort of the heart of the dilemma for us is that what Putin and Durasimov are executing is based on lies. It's based on tricking people. It's based on undermining peace and stability and everything we're here to talk about, right? But how do we counter that without falling into that game ourselves? And how do we develop our own mature, our approach to mobilizing the population around the good attributes of democracy and open societies? So I think it's really, it is an existential battle that's going on. And I went back to my IO roots and went, wow, we used to talk about it. This is happening. Great, thank you. Mage, let me start with you. Yes, in terms of that we cannot use the same tools that Kremlin is using against us. So then we naturally shouldn't use misinformation and fake news in response to the same kind of attacks that we are experiencing from authoritarian regimes. And I think that when we look into the kind of movements that social justice movements, pro-democracy movements, anti-authoritarian movements, I think that's where I would look for the answer. It's not coincidence that Vatslav Havel during the height of the struggle against authoritarianism in his country, he was writing about living within the truth, to counter living a lie. And he was talking about basically principles that of kind of truth telling and truth sharing by pro-democracy movements that could be trusted by both kind of alternative media inside of the country as well as outside of the country, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America who would, that would pick up on the information passed by the movements trusting that information, trusting the sources and then spreading that information around the world about what was going on in those countries. And this is the same practice that is right now also needed on the part of the movement. Sometimes it can take a very humorous element as well. I remember Estonians and Finns organizing against Russian trolls by creating a community of online community of elves. So elves took on trolls sharing that truth but also trying to convert some of the trolls to become elves if possible. So again, the creativity of nonviolent resistance actions would be the key here. And that can start from kind of the literacy that we talked about, the democratic literacy in terms of questioning the sources and doing the homework about what we share and how we verify information. This is also the activists that need to ask questions. Those activists in Baltimore that gave us an example of who you are, what are your motives behind your call? Will you join us? Will we see you in the protest? Will you stay with us long-term? What, how you will help us? What are the solidarity and trust networks? So this is this kind of defensive posture about enhancing the cohesion and solidarity within the community against external threats, both against domestic backsliding, I've heard kind of democratic backsliding in our own kind of country. And by extension being resilient against this democratic backsliding in our own country, we are also better prepared to face external threats. So we've got five minutes. So Dimitro and Sarah, want to, a few comments? Go ahead. So this issue of societal resilience I think is critical. And I don't think it's well enough known how Estonia, Finland, other Nordic countries, other Baltic countries have been responding. This has been going on this sort of Russian activity in the digital space for over 10 years. And these frontline states have a jump on our response. There are various digital, some NATO, some non-NATO in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania centers to be able to respond and having a good understanding of what they're doing and where the gaps are and what gaps need to be closed, I think is critical. So anybody who's studying foreign affairs, foreign policy, this should be a critical piece to what's going on. I also think, and this is why Brexit is so hard, the US, the Euro-Atlantic relationship is more relevant and vital than it has been probably since World War II. I mean, really making sure that there's no daylight between us is critical. And it has to be part of our diplomatic response to this and making sure at every level that there's good engagement. One final thought, because we're sort of wrapping up. There's this conversation about corruption but also the literal energy that fuels the Russian economy. If you're an investor, you're not betting on oil in the long term, right? This is another advantage of the agenda that we all agreed to three years ago. There's a huge cluster around climate and alternative energy sources. The money and the energy is going into these alternative energy sources. The money for oil is going to dry up. It's gonna have a huge impact on US foreign policy in the years 2030, 2040, 2050. Imagine what it is to have a foreign policy that is independent of what the Saudis or the Russians or whoever is thinking or if you're European and you've got independent alternative energy sources. The last comment on Liberia. I guess there's just two things to say. One is, I think the best wisdom these days on anything having to do with transitional justice is that it be locally determined rather than internationally determined. But this issue of what I call the present past as a driver of development is something that we're all reconciling with in different ways. It's a driver of grievance in this country. And if we're going to heal some of the wounds, we have to address it. Great. Thank you. Dmitry? Yeah, just one last point. Well, yeah, it's always difficult to comment on other countries. I don't know in the case of Liberia, but I will comment. Mistake we did in Ukraine was, we have still that war, but we already have attempts to reconcile to negotiate with wrong representative. Trying to, well, mobilize supporters on the political issues. And so important would be to make sure that you're talking to the proper people. So you're not reconciling with the guys who made all that possible, all that violence possible. And yeah, it's always harder to implement than to suggest, but it's important to try. Thank you. Thank you. Did you want 30 seconds? I just wanted to add on the corruption and there are so many interesting cases of anti-corruption movements that challenge their own governments. And there is certainly an area within which anti-corruption activists that are engaged in anti-corruption activities and campaigns could work together with Western anti-corruption activists and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists. In fact, I think the one area where the Russian anti-corruption activists could focus on is corruption in the insurgent controlled and Russian controlled areas of Ukraine, which would be Crimea and Donbas, whereas Ukrainian activists could focus and they do focus on corruption within their own kind of Ministry of Defense and as part of the corruption that is present in the context of war efforts. And they could collaborate to establish solidarity networks and information sharing with one another. On the point of the Baltic States, in fact, it's Lithuania that is very advanced in terms of integrating civil resistance, nonviolent resistance into its security and defense policies. They have even the department on civil resistance or unit on civil resistance within the Ministry of Defense that basically produces brochures and information on how the population should act in case of hybrid invasion and occupation. And if the efforts of armed resistance fail, they should engage in a nonviolent resistance actions, including reaching out to the Russian population to share information about basically Russian troops committing atrocities and on the territory of Lithuania. Okay, 15 seconds. OGP, there's a summit in May in Ottawa, the Open Government Partnership. This is a intergovernmental voluntary organization, 70 plus states. It is the leading edge of transparency and accountability. It'll be a fun time, so I encourage everybody to go. And the last point on humor. Humor is really critical in this struggle. The Serbs who helped bring down Milosevic, the first thing they did was stickers. They put stickers in their apartment buildings, just letting people know that they exist and in creating a sense of solidarity. That's great, thank you. Thank you to the panel. Please join me in... I do have two public service announcements before you go away. First one, you've heard it here. One of the important defenses against hybrid war is exercising our democratic institution, so please vote in a couple of weeks. And secondly, in terms of lunch, that was a very important PSA, I am told the first 15 minutes, the only people with green dots on their badges should be going forward to get their lunch. After that, everybody else is welcome. Thank you all very much. Bill Vaughn, you is the best ball. Oh, this is USIP. Renard and Mike, then you, and then I'll do the questions. OK, OK. And please have a sip of how... So I assume you want to be on one of the end. Yeah, that'd be great. It'll be easier. You might also want to tell the other two rooms are packed, so as people come in to tell them to sit inside. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for this session on what do we know about conflict. One note of housekeeping, please. The other rooms are on overflow right now, so please move inward if you can, so it's easier for people to come in and out of the auditorium. We'd really appreciate that. Thank you. So I'm very excited to welcome all of you here. I'm going to falsely or correctly assume everyone in here wanted to be in here for this session and is not on overflow, so welcome all of you. We do have a speaker on the line who will also be participating with us, just so you're aware of that. But this... Thank you. This session on what do we know about conflict is focused around the idea that we have evidence to a certain degree. Sometimes we don't use that evidence. Sometimes we actually need to generate more evidence. So I'm Jessica Baumgartner-Zuzik, and I'm the Director of Learning and Alliance for Peacebuilding. I'm joined today by Michael Findley, who is the Professor of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin. I'm also joined by Lise Morge Howard, who's the Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Renard Sexton, who is joining us on the phone, is the Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University and International Crisis Group. And finally, Rebecca Wolf, who's the Director of Evidence and Influence at Mercy Corps. So we know that the peacebuilding field struggles with understanding the impact of peacebuilding activities and implementation on the concept of peace writ large. And we wrestle with understanding the degree to which our individual peacebuilding activities are actually contributing to larger and positive peace. We also struggle for, in order to better leverage and harness the evidence that currently exists for our field so that we can be not only evidence-driven but evidence-informed. This session is going to present current research that's being conducted alongside Alliance for Peacebuilding and renowned researchers from the Empirical Studies of Conflict and research that's currently being conducted on assessing evidence that peacekeeping works. So please join me in welcoming our panelists, and we'll begin. Great. Thanks for having us. Thanks for the kind introduction. Let's see. How do I make this work? We'll get point upwards up there. Okay, great. Perfect. Yeah, thanks for having us. We want to cover a few things in this talk. One is to talk just a little bit about the idea that we actually probably do have a lot of data and evidence. And maybe that's, in some ways, a trivial thing to say. But in so many contexts, we have lots of isolated pieces of information about specific projects, but maybe we haven't aggregated them. But there's really a lot of data and evidence out there. And, you know, we could probably do a whole lot more to learn across all of this beyond, you know, individual studies of interventions, and then lots and lots and lots of evidence reviews that we've done, right? And so, you know, if we could take all these data and aggregate them in some way, you know, we might be able to learn some broader lessons, including through doing things like meta-analysis. And so we'll present one approach that we've taken today towards the end of the conversation, and then make some broader comments on thinking about the learning agenda. Let's see, advanced slides. There we go. Was that me? Okay. You know, sometimes we hear this statement, we don't have data, we don't have evidence. Yes and no, again, you know, depends on how aggregated this is. We have lots of interventions out there, and if we can just figure out the ways to organize these and then put them together with other sorts of information, we could probably do a whole lot more. But hold this thought for just a minute. We're going to come back to it with an exercise we did. But let me say just a couple of broader comments on the approach we often take to learning and what a lot of, I think, the international development community has done, and hopefully we can learn a little bit from this and not repeat some of the mistakes. So I do a lot of impact evaluation. Many of you probably do a lot of impact evaluation, including using like RCTs, randomized controlled trials. But let me just say that I often hear that, you know, without a carefully designed and faithfully executed randomized impact evaluation, we can't learn. There's some logic in this in some ways. And there's a reason why we want to do these impact evaluations in a rigorous way, construct a counterfactual, so on and so forth. But if we go all in on this idea, we're going to be in trouble. And I think this is what the development community did. And then it's now sort of reeling, trying to figure out like how do we see our way out of this in a sense, to get to broader learning. So in many ways we've got to, you know, say, okay, no end yes to this. We need to embrace what we should embrace, but also think about the broader issues involved. Okay. You know, and so this is, so 3IE puts together, this is the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, right, puts together these evidence gap maps. And they have them for a variety of topics. This is the one for peace building. And I don't expect you to be able to, you know, see all this or even, you know, and the point is not to go through all this stuff in detail, other than to say this is guided by that same logic if you look at what's populated in their evidence gap map for peace building, right? And if you drill down into this, there's a number of studies on here, but actually almost all the entries that are non-grey, okay, the green ones where they're actually trying to say that there are some kind of confident, you know, they're confident about an impact, all come from a single study, okay, a single study. And so, you know, clearly this is not what we, you know, we know a lot more, but in many ways we don't, right, because we haven't taken the time and thought, you know, clearly about a broad, broad approach to a learning agenda that would allow us to populate this in the right ways. But if all we do is the impact evaluation approach, we're going to be stuck just trying to put circles into squares here, and at the end of the day they may not add up, especially if we don't think about what exactly we're doing here. Okay, so RCT is not a silver bullet. I've said this, let me just be really clear. We should do them, and we should do them often, but it's not all we should do. So if we talk about the learning agenda, they should be a critical part, but they can be long and costly, and as you all know well, right, I mean, if there's a five-year program and we're doing the impact evaluation, we can't wait five years for most of these things, right? I mean, we actually have to move ahead. But there's bigger issues too, which is for theory and design reasons. RCTs are often best used for micro-level interventions, right? And so, you know, in many ways, all they reveal to us is like partial equilibrium type results, which can be useful in some cases. But when we talk about peace building and peace activities, right, we're often thinking about the aggregation of lots of activities and these macro-level effects and so forth. And so when we do RCTs, it's very difficult to go down that road of thinking bigger, okay? And one thing that's under discussion right now is just how you generalize from RCTs. So you do an RCT in a given country, on a given micro-level intervention, micro-level outcome. What does that mean for generalizing? Incredibly difficult to figure out. So what we need to do with the larger learning agenda, think bigger, okay? Macro and micro, programs and projects, right? Ideas and interventions, whereas we often focus on the latter in most of these cases and don't have great ways to evaluate and come up with conclusions about the former in each of those. Okay, I already gave that note of caution. We should absolutely be doing impact evaluation and so forth. So what can we learn with existing data? So we did an exercise, you know, trying to evaluate some existing evidence, okay? Trying to answer the question of, does peace building reduce violence? Does it increase other participation? Clearly there's lots of other outcomes that we care about, but for the sake of this particular presentation we decided to answer this question with the help of Jessica, an Alliance for Peace Building, who put together a really fascinating database where they scraped all this information on peace building interventions and got over 2,000 of these peace building interventions. We took that with their help, narrowed it down, cleaned it and so forth, and then set up an analysis that allowed us to try to consider what are the effects on kind of this macro scale for a bunch of peace building interventions. The data cover a variety of different types of interventions, a lot of the standard types of things you would see in peace building. And then we followed the way we implemented this was to use a synthetic control model, and I'm going to turn it over to Renard, hopefully, to explain this. We'll see how this works. Are you there, Renard? Okay, Renard, if you can hear at some point, feel free to jump in. I'm going to keep going in the absence of Renard. So when I talked earlier, I said, there's reasons to be rigorous, right? And we do randomized evaluations because it's one of the best ways to come up with a good comparison unit, right? This is not mysterious to most people that when we evaluate the effect of something we want to be able to compare it to some case in which the intervention of interest is not observed or is not implemented in some way, right? But getting good comparison cases is really difficult. So randomized evaluations can be useful because we randomize some entities into treatment and control. That could be like villages in a country. It could be individuals, whatever. That provides a good comparison unit. But once we abstract from this or go back out to a more macro level, what's the right comparison unit for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, right? I mean, how do you do this if you say we care about peace building on a large scale here as something of like the aggregation of lots of other factors? How do we come up with good comparison units to make good comparisons here? So what we do is a method that's been used a lot in economics and more recently in political science, which is to try to construct something called a synthetic control. So in other words, if there's not a natural comparison unit for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, what if we could actually take a bunch of other countries and weight characteristics of, say, 10 other countries in order to create an artificial or a synthetic comparison unit, okay? And so what we would do then is we would say, okay, prior to a peace building intervention, could we take a set of characteristics for the country that's going to get the peace building intervention and a whole bunch of other countries and then weight the information for the other countries to make whatever the DRC and this synthetic control look, quote unquote, identical in every respect, okay? Hopefully you're thinking, okay, you know, this is difficult to do, right? You know, what does this actually mean? And I can show you in just a moment here. But we follow this approach to try to come up with a rigorously defined counterfactual so that we can compare entities that had peace building interventions with these synthetic controls that did not get them, right? Or these baskets of countries where we've weighted their characteristics so they didn't get them. So, okay. So interventions are designed to affect a variety of outcomes. Obviously, we're not saying that, you know, violence is an outcome, is the only way to think about this or even the right way to think about it, per se. There's often lots of other things. This is just an illustration of what one could do here. There's a lot of other things as possible outcomes. We, in narrowing down the database that Alliance for Peace Building and Jessica came up with, we identified a set of interventions for which we had better information and they happened to be in these 10 cases. So if you will, these are our treated cases, okay? They're treated in the sense that they had peace building interventions in these cases. And then we took all the other countries in Africa and used the information on all of the countries to extract and essentially weight the information and create the synthetic controls. And in doing so, we end up with, you know, an ability to compare our treated units to some controls. Okay. So what do we have here? Let me just explain the graph briefly. So year zero, how do I do the... Okay, we can see this. So where we say year zero, that's the peace building intervention, okay? Now, obviously not all interventions are in a single year, right? Some of them are one year, some of them are three years. For the purposes of this illustration, we just collapse it all that, like that's the intervention year, okay? Or that's when the intervention occurs. And then what we do is we take information prior to the peace building intervention. We take information on the countries and specifically we take information about violence and then try to make these look as similar as possible, right? The idea being if we weight the information across all the other countries in the control, weight the information on the treatments and they look fairly similar, right? Then we've constructed a valid counterfactual, okay? So we have something that's potentially valid to compare. And so if you look at it, the trends look fairly similar, even if not identical in terms of their levels. And then the idea is, okay, the peace building intervention occurs. And so, and then we can examine the violence after the peace building to see if there's noticeable differences. And in this case where we see sort of parallel trends before, you have peace building occur. Afterwards, there's a jump in the level of violence, right? But you see a noticeable change in the levels of violence across the treated and the control. And so one might argue that in a case like this, that our control group that didn't have the peace building intervention, violence increased relative to those that did have the peace building intervention. We could talk about why you observed that level shift. I think there's a lot of reasons why this could happen, including that maybe the parties fear that once you have peace building activities going on, that they're gonna lock in. And so maybe violence goes up to try to shape where it goes or a variety of other things. But interesting at very least to observe kind of the different trajectories after peace building. To go on and just look at some others. This is looking at violence against civilians, just graphed a little bit differently here. Similar trends afterwards, you see this divergence, but it only sets in after about year four after the intervention. If we try to take this and alter the variable just slightly here, then we see something of a gap. They get similar and then you kind of see the divergence at the end here. And the idea being that maybe this is attributable to the intervention. So we can switch from violence against civilians to battle events. With the battle events, you also see it very similar in the pre-intervention period. We've got the intervention and now you see kind of a shift afterwards, but it only sets in at about year three after the intervention. We looked at other things to kind of move on here. This is with protest events. Again, looks very similar prior to the intervention. We now have a peace-building intervention and now you see afterwards that actually in the treated group protest events go up relative at a faster rate than the controls. And here's another take on this as well, seeing something very similar. So what does this mean? Again, this is an illustration. We just started working together with Alliance for Peace-Building to think about how this might work. But hopefully the logic of what we're doing is evident here, which is we're trying to take information across a wide variety of peace-building interventions and think about this at a macro scale. Construct a rigorous counterfactual and then observe what happens in a treated group relative to a control group following a peace-building intervention. And again, this is for illustrative purposes a lot more of need to be done, but potentially there's an interesting story here, which is after a peace-building intervention, maybe you observe levels of violence in the treated group go down relative to the control group, and then they shift maybe to protest, which actually might be a reasonable thing and maybe something that's even normatively desirable, because protest is, for lots of reasons, very different than violence civilians and otherwise with people dying and so forth. So moving ahead, we need to get clear data from donors and implementers of peace-building programs to be able to do this. Alliance for Peace-Building has done tremendous work on this. A lot of, you know, there'll be cleaning to do, but in many ways, validating that against what donors and implementers are doing and so forth and trying to expand this out will be critical. And the more of that that's possible, we can then delve into all sorts of other things. Again, peace-building intervention is defined kind of at a macro level here, violence at a macro level, but one could imagine drilling down into more specific types of activities and outcomes and so forth. And then hopefully if we go down this road, this then suggests a lot of other ways forward in terms of what we could do, you know, which projects, which interventions, whatever, should be assessed using impact evaluations at a more micro level, which should be more macro level. How do we mix these? How do we think about some sort of broader, multifaceted, like learning agenda that we can engage in? Okay. Okay, thank you, Jessica. Thank you to the Alliance for Peace-Building. Thanks so much to our hosts at USIP today. To my fellow panelists, Michael, I think we're on the feel-good panel this afternoon. And thank you very much for coming. I'm Lise Howard. I'm a professor at Georgetown University and I teach international relations, international security. I have to teach international relations to my 200 undergrads at 3.30 today. So I'm here. I'm going to say my thing. And then I have to leave at 3. And I apologize in advance for scooting off. Okay. What I want to do is say four things today. I want to talk about effectiveness rates and peacekeeping, how peacekeepers keep the peace. I want to talk about the differences between peacekeeping and counterinsurgency and then, Wade, actually, I'm just stepping a little toe. Actually, it's a foot into the policy debate. Okay. So first, effectiveness rates. Over the summer, it's actually been about six months now, three of us have been reviewing all of the peacekeeping literature. So Barbara Walter at UCSD, at UC San Diego, Paige Fortna at Columbia, and I have reviewed this literature. We have an extensive literature on peacekeeping now. Maybe we can turn off Bernard's mic. I don't know if he's joining us now. Anyway. Okay. And in looking at a lot of studies, the findings basically shake down into four categories. What we see, and they're all remarkably positive. So the basic findings are that peacekeepers, the presence of peacekeepers correlates with the reduction in deaths, all types of deaths, whether they're civilian or military. Peacekeepers reduce the risk of violence contagion. What I mean by that is they reduce the instances of violent conflict crossing borders, and they also reduce the geographic spread of peacekeepers within countries. So both in civil wars and across borders, peacekeepers reduce the spread of violence. The occurrence, all else, equal. Peacekeepers reduce the duration of civil wars so they don't last as long. And they also diminish the recurrence of civil war. So with conflicts that have peacekeepers, don't recur generally. And these findings are robust. It's actually astounding, the extent to which these findings are robust using different data sets, different measurement instruments. We have more than 20 people with different funding streams, finding very similar results, effects from peacekeepers. So looking globally, it's really quite remarkable, the extent to which peacekeepers correlate with things you would like to see. Now, we also have qualitative studies, and most of my work is qualitative. And in the qualitative studies, very often we're looking at instances of dysfunction, selecting cases where things aren't working out like DRC, where we see a variety of bad practices, self-defeating behavior, a lack of learning, ways in which local ownership are inhibited. So this is not to say that everything about peacekeeping is going well, and that doesn't even get into the debate about sexual abuse and exploitation. I will say that if we look at the instances where peacekeepers have implemented their mandates and departed the countries, since the end of the Cold War, up until now we have 16 cases where UN peacekeepers were deployed, where they were tasked with implementing very complicated mandates. They left, and of those 16 instances, we can say that 11 of those cases were fairly successful. Okay, so how is it? How do peacekeepers produce these outcomes that we would want to see? How do they keep the peace? I have a book that is in production right now. It'll be out in the spring. If you want to know more about it, contact me after. Here's my unabashed plug for my new book. I'm arguing that peacekeepers, unlike other types of military forces, exercise power in three basic forms. They persuade verbally, so they mediate disputes. They engage in information campaigns. They train people in order to change behavior. So they use non-material means to move people toward peaceful interactions. They induce also, which comes in, inducement is material in nature. And it comes in two main forms. In financial forms, they give aid. They engage in lots of development projects. And then there are also enforced sanctions regimes, thinking of the Kimberley process and reducing weapons trades when there are weapons bans. So they persuade with their words. They induce materially, and they also coerce. They do use the means, military means, to defend civilians. Some peacekeeping missions have the power of arrest. They're all mandated to use force, but very few peacekeepers actually use their weapons to protect civilians or to engage with rebels. The UN has conducted its own studies, its own surveys of its peacekeepers, and very, very rarely do peacekeepers say that when they engage with rebels, do they use their weapons. All right. I want to distinguish now, make a difference between peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is our closest form of military intervention to peacekeeping. And very often the two are used in the same sentence, or we have this new category of peace operations in which everything is bundled. And I want to make a distinction between peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. Peacekeeping stipulates that peacekeepers will engage impartially, that is they don't take sides. They deploy with the consent of all sides, and they're not supposed to use force except in self-defense. These are the original doctrinal rules of peacekeeping which distinguish it from other forms of military intervention. In contrast, counterinsurgency is always partial, right? In counterinsurgency, you take the side of the government, which means that you don't have everyone's consent, and it relies heavily on the course of a compelling use of force. Now, I want to see my next slide, but it's not going. Peacekeepers, by their design, come from lots of different countries. They don't train together before they deploy. They don't speak each other's languages. Their material isn't interoperable. Their chains of command are not... So in a peacekeeping chain of command, you can't have a force commander of one nationality saying to a battalion of another nationality to go take out a rebel organization. That's just not the way the chain of command works in peacekeeping. That battalion commander can say, sorry, I'm not going to follow, and there's no court martial procedure. It doesn't work according to a regular chain of command in the military, which is why peacekeepers don't have the capacity or the resolve to use force to accomplish their ends. They accomplish their ends in other ways, right? They persuade and they induce and they protect. They can defend civilians, but they don't take out rebel organizations. And that has been successful for a very long time. That style of peacekeeping has produced these remarkable results. We have, however, recent moves toward combining peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, toward combining the doctrine, strategies, practices of peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, and I will say in 2015, we had the introduction of the Kigali principles right here in this auditorium, where we had this idea that in order for peacekeepers to better protect civilians, that they should start using force. Maybe even that they shouldn't hesitate to use force against rebel organizations, and that if troops hesitate, that they should be disciplined. And the only real means of disciplining is getting fired. That's the main mechanism of discipline in the UN. So if you don't use your weapon, which goes against all the principles of peacekeeping, you can be fired. So this is the introduction of the Kigali principles in 2015. And then last year we had the cruise report advocating that since we have higher levels of casualties among peacekeepers, that peacekeepers should be fighting back. And what peacekeepers should be doing is they should be employing overwhelming and proactive force and maybe even preemptive force. So before rebel organizations even attack, we should have peacekeepers take them out first. So these are these new principles being introduced into the doctrine of peacekeeping, possibly into peacekeeping practices, when at the same time, we know, if I can show you, well, I might not be able to show you. Okay. Counterinsurgency effectiveness rates are negative and they have been decreasing over time. Counterinsurgency effectiveness rates have been decreasing for the last 100 years. It's not just Iraq and Afghanistan. This form of military intervention, especially when waged from the outside, is not effective at achieving goals. And at the same time, we know that peacekeeping, statistically, no matter how you measure it, has been effective. So we're confused, and at the same time, there's a new debate confusing peacekeeping with counterinsurgency and I would argue that it's problematic because in contrast to counterinsurgency, peacekeeping has worked. It just uses different means of power. So I want to summarize. Peacekeeping is effective. Peacekeepers derive their power and they don't have the capacity or the resolve to use force. We could ask them to do that. We could train them to do that. But I would submit that mixing peacekeeping and counterinsurgency will probably produce less effectiveness in the future of peacekeeping. Okay. Thank you. So what we wanted to do after these two presentations, we wanted to first present with you some of the more macro level research that's being conducted both qualitatively by Lee's as well as Michael and Renard, who unfortunately I'm hoping he's still hearing us, but maybe wasn't able to contribute with the support of Rebecca with Mercy Corps and the Alliance for Peace Building, thinking about this more on that macro level because often in the session we had earlier on harnessing technology for peace, we're talking about how are we collecting new data? What new forms do we have of scraping and amassing data? There's a lot of evidence and data out there we maybe are just not using it as effectively as we could. So I'm going to pose just a few questions to my panelists before we open it up to Q&As from the audience. And my first question actually for all of you is related to, we talk a lot about learning from everything right now, particularly evidence and lessons from our projects and implementation, what exactly though do you want programs, implementers, donors, policymakers, etc. What do you want them actually doing with this evidence? Or how do you want them using it? I think so for me they're yes, sorry they're probably two things and so for people in the audience who are not familiar Mercy Corps has been doing a lot more rigorous studies, impact evaluations of our work and working with others to start accumulating more evidence particularly with counterfactuals because we don't know what's going to happen without these programs and in order to convince people that these peace-building investments are useful we need to show that without these peace-building interventions things would be getting worse and so but with that I think we are at a stage of maturity in the field where we can be much more nuanced in some of our approaches and so for example we know that from community-driven development just an overall community-driven development program is not going to build social cohesion unless you but now we need to figure out and innovate on top of that about what would create social cohesion if you're improving say businesses in a community and so we're now at a stage where we need to say okay let's stop doing some of these things but where we do need to put more investments for innovation Renard are you there maybe we can get Renard if he's with us I'm ready to talk if you won't go we would love to have your input Renard excellent thanks I think the main thing that message that I would say using evidence is that in many cases it takes multiple pieces of evidence to come to a reasonable decision or priority on particular things so I think the critical part of this is how do we aggregate what we know in ways that still provide a clear enough message for decision makers because the old saying of the you know give me a one-armed one-handed economist you know still operates very strongly and so I think there are two tasks one is continue to do rigorous RCTs and non RCT micro work do macro level meta analysis and then make sure that the work doesn't stop there that it goes to a second step where sort of the main things can be boiled down and in a way that fits the sort of most pressing policy agenda on the tables of the people that are taking those decisions so I guess what that implies is that going backwards the people that are having pressing decisions on their desks regularly reach out to the people that are playing that bridging role and say this is the sort of question that we'd like answered pretty quickly and how can you take how can you marshal the evidence that exists to answer a particular and narrow question and I think that we as a research community can do better about being able to swiftly not saying in two years we'll give you an answer but pretty swiftly saying this is what we can learn based on what we know today Thank you Mike or Lee's do you have anything else? Let me just add one quick thing to what Bernard said and then I give it to you Lee's is that okay? I just I mean on Bernard's last point about you know trying to turn to the research community well I mean the research community is outside of academia as well but at least on the academic side we've historically not been all that easy to work with right and you know shocker to you all in the room right so if I would say something though I think that's really changing in a big way and some of it I think is pressure from you know like federal agencies and otherwise in terms of like the funds that are provided and what's attached and so forth but you're seeing a change of course I think in the academic community about the importance of engaging with the policy community and so there are organizations now such as EGAP, the Evidence and Governance and Politics Network and Economics with the Jamil Poverty Action Lab and Innovations for Poverty Action and many many many more right so where there's lots of researchers who are I mean just really interested in engaging you know outside of the academy and a lot to bear and you know as Reynard said are realizing that they can't give the answer you know that we'll get back to you in three years right they're willing to engage and recognize the complexities and the difficulty of moving swiftly and so forth right and try to engage with policy organizations in that front so I guess to follow up on that point from Mike is I'm also seeing academics learning how to be much more flexible in terms of methods basically the example from Reynard and Mike today was it's really hard to come up with a counterfactual in these areas it's I I'm doing an RCT in northeast Nigeria and I definitely became clear that I felt uncomfortable doing any RCT where there was a resource transfer within a humanitarian context and so there are certain things in these places we can't do but how can we for example use these synthetic controls or a different study in Nigeria we did both an RCT but we also looked at observational data, data over time to be able to triangulate on these things and I'm seeing academics understand these constraints a lot more from the practitioner community and trying to work with them. We do actually have more than one mic but we can just pass the same one. I'm not going to say very much but I will say that I think the social media and blogging have made it easier for academics, scholars researchers to reach a broader audience and it's just been in the last three to five years that well at least at Georgetown we monkey cages the editors are at Georgetown now but the monkey cage is the if you don't know it's part of the Washington Post but it's a feature of the Washington Post that attempts to convey scholarly findings for people who don't who aren't living this and breathing this stuff every day and between the monkey cage war on the rocks political violence at a glance there are a few what other blogs am I missing that you read anyway those what was that the conversation yeah absolutely we have some new outlets that are helping at least for one side I think it's actually on both sides of this conversation between scholarly work and policy implementation thank you and I can say that you know Alliance for Peace Building is very focused on how do we change the culture to not keep us siloed to build better bridges with academics and researchers who can assist with some of this work it was a very funny photo yesterday anyone who was in the audience that said when in need call an economist after they ask what type of doctor are you and I think sometimes we put a burden on our individual programming to expect sometimes higher level findings or evidence that maybe they're not equipped to prepare or present themselves so as we think about moving forward and being more evidence informed and evidence based and I should say this is the first time I've been able to see the results of both of these pieces of work which was very exciting for me to be presented with that maybe even more jazz than anyone else in the audience but but the one question I'd like to know from you all is how do you think based on your own experience and you know thinking of time leaves as well for you maybe we'll start with you how do you think that we can continue to advance the field how do we better harness not only what we currently know but how do we also collect data that supports and informs not only policy but the programming and strategies that we're carrying out right now if I had the answer into that question I would win the Nobel Prize that is a tough one part of the reason is because many of the things we want to know come from conflict affected areas where it's just hard to gather data and we just don't it's just the barriers to accessing really good information are incredibly high so how we amount those barriers I mean that is not something that's so answerable I think we're a little bifurcated we're talking about peace building and peacekeeping and I know in my own experience at Georgetown a lot of my colleagues are much more complicated much more comfortable talking about aid and development in fragile states as opposed to engaging in the states where there's a lot of violence and I think part of that is just because of what I just said it's hard to do research in when there's an ongoing violent conflict how we get around that how I got around that for this project was I put on a journalist hat so I could be embedded with the peacekeepers while they were on patrol to see what peacekeepers were doing I had a kind of access for this book that I would never have as just Joe researcher because as a researcher you can't necessarily well military organizations don't really like to take us in but they will take in journalists that's a part of the protocol the standard protocol so sometimes it involves becoming dual-hatted I would say if you're really interested in understanding on a micro level which is incredibly difficult the nature of violence and how somebody from the outside could help stem the violence anyway so that's a quick answer Reynard are you there I feel like you're pressing off when you're I'm happy to go but I want to give you the opportunity since you're not right here I would just say that I think that there are many modes of collaboration that we can we can use and I'll just highlight one that's kind of exciting because and then timely just earlier today the international crisis group released a new report on homicides in Guatemala and in particular the impacts of an institution that was set up there about 10 years ago called the CC which is a commission against impunity backed by the UN crisis group has so many terrific resources they have analysts all over the world they have such a broad base of sources for addressing information but to date they hadn't for recently hadn't really engaged in doing quantitative work and earlier this year they brought me on as a fellow to try and bring those new modes of research within their scope and the report that we released today a really nice combination of using observational econometric techniques along the lines of what Mike showed earlier and on the ground source reporting from the analysts in Guatemala as well as people within the policy communities in US and Europe and the results were really quite striking that this commission had prevented somewhere around 4,500 homicides over the course of 10 years and the neat thing about it is that it's very timely because in Guatemala the president is trying to get rid of this commission because it has been investigating high level corruption it's touched this political campaign but because of this relationship we were able to come out with a timely input that had you know relatively swift results and a deep engagement with policy that I as an academic never would have been able to do and so one hand washes the other and we came out with I think a really innovative and exciting product but that came in part because of demand from the policy community people asking on Capitol Hill for example you know we're talking a lot about this institution what has it been effective or not and as a result I think crisis group and maybe as a scholar we were able to respond to that demand with you know a combined methodological approach that was very compelling I think to many people that had been thinking about it much more in the politics rather than in the effectiveness so I just I thought it would be relevant I mean you can I think people in this room can also look at that kind of report which again just literally hit the website today and think about well how can we also do these kinds of collaborations and generate actionable results can I just add briefly to this that I think I mean you were seeing more and more of these situations which academics or researchers go and embed with policy organizations you know maybe it's of interest maybe it's not to the policy community but embedding back into university too right embedding is that the right word coming in doing a stint or whatever at a university so I run a lab at UT Austin we have someone from the UNFAO who's here for a year or two from the CGIAR unit at UNFAO right and it's been incredibly helpful I think for both sides of the equation here to interact with each other and understand better incentives and such so if I had a nickel for every time I've heard academics and policy folks say we need to speak to each other better right like I'd be rich we always say this but like how often do we actually do it and to the extent we could see more of that happening it would be really really useful so yeah so I guess two points to add to this so to Mike's last point and for example I actually spent a year at Yale last year in the political violence lab again to have more of that intersection I think actually on the policy side or out in the practitioner side we could probably do more of finding opportunities to have academics embedded in our organization versus the other way around I probably see it there's a bit of a a imbalance there in terms of that and so because of how do we translate this evidence into action and so actually at least when I was looking at your presentation and I think you make a really important point in terms of why we can't blend these approaches I think for a lot of people in this room we saw a similar thing in terms of development and civil relationships with the military starting to engage in more development action and how that constrained our space as development actors where we could we were in as military even when we weren't because we were engaging in the same activities and I can see that happening to peacekeepers now even if they were still actually doing pure peacekeeping when we start to blur those lines what does that mean in addition to what you said in terms of how do we collect this information in these environments and I think that's becoming more and more critical I would say a lot of the peace building evidence we have is often actually in a post-conflict situation not within conflict situation because that's when we were able to collect the data and so there are other ways we can do it so last year Mercy Corps with Jay Lyle, Kozakeh Mai and Yang Yang Zhao released a report on Afghanistan and we found one we could collect that data because Mercy Corps has been in Kandahar probably for too long we would say something about the environment we've been there over 25 years but we had trusted relationships in those communities we are active running those programs so could collect the data but we also used indirect survey techniques so we could actually both keep the safety of respondents and the enumerators so people wouldn't know what we were asking about and so that's another way you can try to collect this data in violent environments thank you I'm going to pose one last question and we'll open up for questions in the audience in one sentence what is your key take away that you would like to leave the audience with from this conversation and I think I'm going to ask Renard to go ahead first one sentence what's your key take away for them from this presentation and the research that you're working on there's a lot of exciting work being done but it requires friendly collaboration and we can do more of that to turn this back on can I say two sentences because I wanted to follow up from the last thing and then I'll say my last one so we have a plug for econometric approaches which I think is wonderful and I also have to make a plug for area studies while we're at it because area studies are diminishing most of violent conflict in somewhere not in southern Africa right now but on the continent of Africa in the Middle East and North Africa and I would just make a plug for really focusing and building on area studies programs to have genuine expertise in the country in the regions as opposed to thinking about trends more generally which just because so many so much conflict is very specific and local okay so my one sentence takeaway is that peacekeeping is effective it's more effective than even we thought it would be and it's effective in contrast to counter insurgency and so let's not blend the two let's keep the two separate military intervention and let's do it even if we have peacekeepers co-deployed with actual military forces let's ask the peacekeepers to do what they do best and ask military forces to do what they are trained to do so to me it's truly the importance of the counterfactual we saw this in Mike and Reynard's presentation that if we didn't have a counterfactual we would not know that peace building interventions were successful because they had overall higher levels of civilian casualties in some of those slides and so we just saw something in Nigeria similarly where our communities that we worked with did not actually improve as a result of the intervention but there was a policy shock in those areas where our control communities went significantly down the program would not have looked effective if we actually had that counterfactual so I would just say if a peace building field, if we want better more resources we have to show what we do against a counterfactual maybe in contrast to the peacekeeping area I think our understanding of peacebuilding is in its infancy and maybe because of the attention that's been given by peacekeeping at the UN versus say like the peacebuilding architecture which is relatively recent and yet on the other side of the coin here there's so much data out there but we just need to bring it together and work with it in smart ways and so if there are donors in the room being able to figure out how to get better access to the data or the implementers or otherwise to be able to aggregate across all these highly heterogeneous set of actors that are out there get the data together because there's probably a lot we can learn with this and it'll require collaboration it'll require funding it'll require other things but all the pieces are in place I think to be able to do a lot and then advance the agenda further Thank you so much and I'm going to share my one sentence because I can guarantee you that sharing of your data and your work is not easy having myself shared that with fellow researchers on this stage is a comfortable place to be in but when you're able to build bridges and work together and leverage the expertise that others have I really think that we can more collectively achieve and understand the impact that we're all going for so that's a lesson that I'm sharing with you having just lived and I think it ties very well within our conference theme of collective action for peace so we have two mic runners we have three gentlemen right here we have three gentlemen right here so I guess we're going to live Eric Mike's choice whichever one you go to first there we'll take three questions and then we will ask we'll give the panelists a chance to respond that's actually a good idea sorry because Lee's is about to run out in about two minutes does anyone have a specific question they'd like to pose to Lee's so maybe we'll start we'll come back to you yes thank you very much to all the panelists I'm David Yong from Partners Global it's a peace building NGO I have a question for Professor Howard before she runs off to her class I appreciate your caution about mixing counterinsurgency with classic peacekeeping but in my view as a human rights person as much as a peace builder things like the Kigali principles came about to address real problems defects in real cases of peacekeeping that is the prevention of massive human rights abuses even atrocities so I wonder if you're exaggerating a little bit in saying peacekeeping by actually empowering blue helmeted people to use force to prevent human rights or atrocity human rights violations or atrocities are actually becoming counterinsurgency actors but instead are using force in the last resort to prevent massive violations of human rights which have occurred in peacekeeping situations thank you looks like we have one more here and then we'll let you answer Peter Humphrey I'm an intel analyst and a former diplomat I also want to dig down on that last point of yours it's so intriguing I imagine that there are situations maybe you can even name one in the past where you do want peacekeeping forces and coin forces and I'm wondering how you envision that I mean for efficiency you'd like to see them on the same base but maybe that's politically inept so they might be near each other and I'm wondering about the command structure in my mind a common command structure would make a lot of sense because you would dispatch one in one case the other in another case do you think the UN would ever go for that okay I have to do a little sorting because I have a lot of things to say on this point we have numerous cases of successful peacekeeping missions becoming successful eventually because they were assisted by actual military forces so whether it was the defeat of the RUF in Sierra Leone by British special forces French special forces taking out the the air force of the government of Cote d'Ivoire which then enabled a big multi-dimensional peacekeeping mission it's not a traditional peacekeeping mission big multi-dimensional with lots of peace building components the Australian led interfaith mission in East Timor which paved the way for another big successful multi-dimensional peacekeeping mission in other words we see and most recently in the Central African Republic in Saint-Tréphrique we had French special forces who were deployed before they stopped the violence before the peacekeepers arrived and then departed before their mission was complete for a variety of reasons but part of the reason why we have such difficulty in the Central African Republic now is because the French special forces departed so quickly and in in Central Africa they had a the Bungie Joint Task Force so you had French command and UN meeting daily and then at higher levels weekly to coordinate and often with peacekeepers identifying places where they needed the assistance of actual military actors because peacekeepers even in rebel-held territory right now the only way that peacekeepers can have access is if they're not aggressive so if they see somebody violating human rights now they don't have an actual hammer to turn to in the Central African Republic if peacekeepers tried to provide their own hammer which has been the case most recently in the Central African Republic they have failed miserably because they're not designed to do that we can ask them to do that but it won't make them capable of doing that okay lovely to be with you today thank you so much happy to continue the conversation at another time thank you very much for listening thank you and we'll look forward to your book coming out any questions so we're going to return to the question we had again thank you Mark Summers I'm an independent consultant I wanted to who's done a lot of research in conflict zones I wanted to just thought of something that Rebecca said about the need to triangulate and I think if you step back from working in conflict zones in the peacekeeping but particularly in the development world there's this in the broader context is there's a tremendous fixation with quantitative data and if you have the data no matter how suspect it is you use it and quantitative data in these kinds of situations gives the impression that you can actually get good information and even without knowing the context without being involved so you can do good development without ever running into a poor person building without knowing about the details of conflict on the ground so mixed method is really important and I think the issue of triangulating to convince people who are used to getting quantitative data and love quantitative data like every single government on this planet and every single donor institution is really important because there's always this skepticism I guess I wanted to share I was seconded to EGAD to work on as a research advisor and I wrote this manual that's coming out shortly and the starting question is and this is where I just wanted to get your thoughts is why should anyone tell you the truth in these environments where there's conflict because it's much better to mislead or lie and I guess the issue I wanted to throw out to you is in my experience in these environments the big issue is surveillance and people are watching the one they're watching you as a researcher they're watching the people that you're interviewing and if there's a violent extremist group they're surveilling you the government's probably surveilling that same person so how do you deal with that it's like up in the top there hi Sebastian Chaskel from Innovations for Poverty Action I have a question for Mike and I think it builds on Rebecca's point about having a valid counterfactual which as you mentioned the issue with generalizability of studies so what Mike mentioned with an RCT you have the issue that sure you have the results but can you apply them to a different situation I'm wondering for the study that you presented do you have a similar issue where you have now results from six or seven countries at what point do you feel comfortable saying that that should if a different country were to have a similar policy they would get similar results similar with the partial equilibrium effects that you mentioned don't you have a similar issue where if you had this happen in one country you're gathering data from that country but the peace building mission could have affected something in the countries around it and lastly how should we interpret the results that are coming out of different methodologies so you mentioned RCT as the gold standard to what extent do you feel confident that had you been able to do this as an RCT you would have received the same results and is that a meaningful number for us to be able to sort of weigh it or how should we sort of interpret data or evidence that's coming out with different methodologies thank you I think we're actually going to answer those because there were so many at that one time so we were looking at the first one the fixation of quantitative data and the counterfactual partial equilibrium effects and different methodologies yeah on the quantitative question so I you know in many ways I'm very sympathetic to this I think this is not just sort of like governments wanting you know sort of being obsessed with quantitative data I think you see this in a lot of different context that said I don't I mean I'm not familiar with many or any impact evaluations at all that only get quantitative data right or beyond right my sense is that most people are trying to triangulate I think we often in presentations like this and otherwise or reports the quantitative gets like front loaded in some ways because it's so easy to deal with but my sense is that people are at least trying and trying to figure out better and better ways to bring in the important kind of qualitative side of things I think that's being facilitated by you know better software for working with qualitative data but you know one of the big things we're observing is just like this revolution like machine learning right that's allowing us to have humans and machines in a sense work together to engage qualitative information in really smart ways right and so hopefully hopefully you know this allows you know a lot of this important kind of qualitative information which I think has gotten buried in most cases even though people are doing it sort of getting buried but I think that hopefully you know there's a there's change on the horizon I hope in that regard so on the issue of you know what do you say in these sensitive situations I would just say I think there's been a lot of there's been a lot of effort dedicated to trying to use methods to get at sensitive issues and you know these are often maybe associated with kind of quantitative techniques but there's there's no reason why these have to be quantitative I mean but thinking about things like list experiments and endorsement experiments you know being two of the big ones randomized response but then even like qualitative techniques of getting people to say write some things in an envelope or whatever that gets transferred back to somewhere and not back through the research or whatever so you can get like qualitative understandings and stuff people are experimenting I think with a lot of things to try to help us with this you know with this issue something that's not easily done but I think we're moving in a direction of trying to deal with some of it do you want me to answer Sebastian Mike yeah sure yeah obviously really nice really nice points here I think on the generalizability point you're absolutely right that whenever kind of a study you're trying to aggregate you always run into this problem of you know how similar does a given intervention look in a particular place and how much how well does it transfer and there's a whole discussion going on both within the academic and the policy community I think what is particularly interesting in this context is when we're able to it's about the comparisons that we're making and so I think that the critical difference between what we try to do with this versus what we often do when we do in country RCTs or natural experiments is that the comparisons are happening across peace building cases rather than happening within units within a peace building case I think that's where the sort of partial equilibrium question is particularly important in the sense that in many cases if it's top level changes that are happening within country manipulations are never going to be able to measure that and so the idea is that you want to understand both what happens when you do something comparing a case where you did a project versus ones where you didn't and then also trying to then tease out by doing sort of micro level studies to understand why those things happen in those ways so ideally you would maybe have a situation in which you would randomize which post-conflict countries you do your peace building operations in in which case the countries would be the unit of analysis but it's hard to get people to randomize within country studies imagine how difficult it is for them to randomize which countries they do and Sebastian you know that's better than anyone I'll tell you we're only doing our priority country so you know it's very difficult then to sort of back out at the top level these sort of like national level effects so I think the idea is simply that we're able to look at impacts at a different level of course that suffers in the same generalizability challenges that any other type of study does and then that kind of gets to your point of aggregation when we think about aggregating lessons there's a set of assumptions that goes into it and some people and some of them are for example in the eGap group among others thinking really carefully about what assumptions go into for example using covariates or information that you know about cases to extrapolate their effects to other cases and what are the pros and cons of doing that the pro is obviously that since you already have evidence on a topic that has to be able to at least have some sense when going into another context whether we'd expect this to work and things like colonial history ethnic fractionalization language, economic development all these kinds of factors may be predictive on the other hand because we don't actually know which of these factors are facilitating a particular we don't know which factors are determining whether an intervention works in one place because again we can't manipulate them sort of the way they are those are sort of regression based hand waves in terms of extrapolation so I think that's one area where we can do a great deal better and I think the policy makers are in some sense better equipped in many cases than academics about really zooming in on which factors are the ones that should guide how we think about extrapolation so thanks a lot just very briefly to add to this you know I think we talked so much about evidence based policy making this is like all the rage last ever many years but I'm not sure we really take it all that seriously what it means to go on and generalize like what works and how do we develop some of these things I don't think the academics have I don't think the policy community has there's some interesting kind of scholarship that's come out actually from sort of philosophers of science so I won't say a whole lot here in the interest of time to sleep but Nancy Cartwright has this book called Evidence Based Policy Making it's really really terrific and essentially she outlines three principles and this builds a bit on what Reynard said one is you know if we're going to do good evidence based policy making we've got to show that it works somewhere if we want to know whether it's going to work here we need to show that it worked there whatever there is that's sort of the first point but that's like the and that's hard enough but that's the easy one two things are we've got to figure out at what level is the theory of change right just going from micro to macro or some combination and when we generalize ensuring that our theories of change are at similar levels as we move right and then the last one being that we need to establish like what support factors are in one place where it worked right and then think about you know how that translates to a different context which again is extremely difficult and I think where the policy community especially practitioners on the ground are going to have you know so much the advantage over the research community in this regard of being able to do some of those things but their argument is without those three things together we're going to struggle right we really have to satisfy all three of those conditions if we're going to get there so quickly because we're out of time so to follow Mark and I think what Mike just said and Lisa said earlier is also that like that call for area studies and I like it really hit me in working with Jason Lyle who's an Afghanistan expert on our study there because when we got our results he really could put those results in the history of the conflict that the fact that we were able to move attitudes about violence after a 15 year Civil War was actually quite incredible with an intervention that was about economics it wasn't about peace building per se and so we need that qualitative evidence that deep understanding of that context I would actually argue why I think the quantitative work also gets a lot of more credence than the qualitative is actually it's really hard to do qualitative well I would argue it's harder to do that well than the quantitative but we under resource the qualitative and so what we get is anecdotal data not qualitative data and so we need to invest better in that qualitative data and just quickly on the generalizability I do think at that level is the micro pieces where we tend to be able to generalize more but again going to that contextual understanding how we do that micro intervention in Afghanistan around identity versus Kenya on identity the way we construct the intervention is different but we're still getting at that micro mechanism and so the more we can analyze in a sense the heterogeneity between context we can understand how to play with those factors better and so last plug is how we can do these multi country trials where we can better understand those environmental or those policy differences to be able to see when an intervention will work where thank you all so much if you could join me please in thanking our panelists I think we have a brief break then before our final sessions and I know that we have multiple things of research coming out soon in the next couple months thank you I know I had a phone a 6S that was the battery was horrible from the moment I got it they replaced the phone so so I think the batteries might have been bad well it's held up for what well then you were about but it's finally it's done right but the opposite of that is AT&T used to build things that were designed to last 100 years and you don't want 100 year old cell phone that's true well but you know what's really irritating is the washing machine and the dishwasher and all that because the time grew up those things were designed to be amazing and last for 20 years now we buy something and they're I mean we moved into our house we pulled out a couple of cows and they're old I wish I had it back it's like you're breaking so yeah you have about 7 minutes or so all right do you guys have all your speakers here yeah push hard okay all right well good luck you guys do you want timekeepers or anything are you good do you want timekeepers or anything I think we probably have some okay so you'll do that all right so then we don't need anything yeah well good luck you guys first sound reason did either of you guys want time warnings I think it would be 5 minutes yeah yeah from here good day good day right so I'm going to take the mattress oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I 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