 Good morning, welcome to our session. We're gonna give it a few more minutes for people to join. I'm gonna get started in about one minute. Okay, good morning. Welcome to the School of Security Studies Conference. My name is Miranda Milcher and I'm chairing this morning's panel. We are very excited to have you all for this session. I am obliged to tell you that it is being recorded and live streamed on YouTube in perpetuity. So that is your notice. Today's panel is going to be focusing on this overall theme of order and chaos, looking specifically at post-conflict-conflict civil wars. How do we understand this complexity? And so this panel is also showcasing the wonderful talent we have in the School of Security Studies. I am a PhD student in the defense studies side of the school just finishing up my PhD. And I look at the post-conflict reconstruction processes for integrated militaries with my case studies of Mozambique and Angola. And I am joined on this panel by two fellow PhD students in the School of Security Studies who not only have made available their time and expertise, but also are calling in from very early in the morning from the East Coast of the United States. So thank you both for being here with your coffee. And if I could ask you each please to introduce yourselves briefly, starting with Whitney. Good morning, everybody. My name is Whitney Grespin. And I just wanted to say thanks for having me and thanks to Miranda for putting this together. And also to the defense studies department, which is the half of the school that I'm in as well, for all of the support that they've given me through the studentship and small bursaries and other field research. My work looks at the US use of contractors to deliver partner military training. Thank you. And Stanislava? Good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you all. It's almost light in here in the East Coast. We're excited to have this conversation. I, as Miranda mentioned, I'm a student in the war studies department. I was a practitioner for quite a while, because I know many of us most of us here in this panel have. And I'm looking at the relationship between special operations forces, and particularly civil affairs, who do engagement with civic actors, NGOs and populations and so forth, in low intensity conflict, what we call the Grey Zone will get into this discussion. I'm very excited to be speaking to all of you and I'm really looking forward to your questions. So thank you, Miranda, for putting this together. Great. So how this is going to work? I'm going to ask Whitney and Stanislava some questions. We're gonna have a conversation, essentially, about this idea of who are these non-state actors in conflict zones? How does this impact our understanding of what is conflict and what is not? And then we very much invite you to participate as well. You'll see at the bottom of your Zoom screen the Q&A function. There's a chat and a Q&A. They are actually separate in the webinar. And we would kindly ask you to put any questions you come up with in the Q&A button, particularly. If they go into the chat, it's gonna be really hard for us to find them. So please put them in the Q&A. We're gonna come to them at probably at different points during the session. Some might be at the end, some might be throughout. So don't feel like you have to wait for me to say, please put your questions in now. Go ahead and put them in as soon as you think about them and we'll try and get through to everyone's questions. So what are we trying to figure out? What we're interested in is this idea of this dichotomy between conflict and post-conflict and how it's way more complicated than that. And that doesn't actually on the ground, particularly with the field work that Stan Slava and Whitney have done both in their PhDs and in their careers more broadly. This idea is that there's a lot more complexity happening. And the particular aspect of that complexity that we're interested in digging into this morning is these ideas of non-state actors. And again, often in media, et cetera, we hear about non-state actors and we kind of think terrorist groups. We think ISIS, we think not, nasty groups are trying to be governments. But there's a lot of other kinds of non-state actors running around. And also it is often hard to kind of draw the boundary between what is a state actor and what is a non-state actor. Is it to do with chain of command? Is it to do with who pays for things? Is it to do with what they think they are? Is it to do with what civilians think they are? There's actually a lot of room for gray area here. So my first question for each of you, both of you, is when in your research and in your practice, you're dealing with kind of this category of non-state actors, who are they? What are we actually talking about in your particular experience and research area? So I will reverse the order and ask Stanislava to go first. So thanks so much. I would just give a very quick pitch of this and then I want to see your thoughts as well. So certainly in my research, as I mentioned, I'm looking at how the U.S. military engages with non-governmental organization. Just to preface that, SOV in particular, Special Operations Forces deal with, particularly with state actors officially, they go to train other militaries and who basically try to support them to counter various violent actions and so forth. In a lot of cases, it's the host nation military who actually provides basic services to its populations, which of course is something which a non-state actor, as you asked, could potentially also be a non-governmental organization. So where there's a void of basic services, whether it be medical education, you certainly have instances where the military are literally like running these services for the populations. Where it gets interesting is when the U.S. military steps in and also engages with various budgeting authorities to provide some of these kinds of things to win over the populace, if you will. So it almost becomes a competition between them, providing a non-state actor-like service to a civic population. And of course, without, just to give a quick overview on the non-state actor side or certainly on the NGO side, as we're discussing here, you have local and international ones which they themselves compete. And one last thing to throw in while you mentioned conflict and post-conflict, just to make it even as messy as mud, oftentimes you have preventative measures and how can we avoid conflict? How can we not get to that point? Because of course, if you have a basic services, if people can't kind of live their normal lives, that in itself is a point of tension. So where I'm looking at it is before you and Whitney get to it, the conflict and post-conflict bit in saying how can we use these basically vulnerabilities and tension points and take care of them before we get to the conflict and post-conflict bit. So we don't compete with other actors who are also trying to win over the populace. And I'll leave it at that because I know both of you have a lot to say on this topic. Great, thank you. Whitney, what can you bring in and make it even more complicated? Oh, well, that was an excellent primer and preface. And before we start, I also just need to say that these opinions are my own and they don't reflect those of any of my affiliations past or present, blah, blah, blah. So I look at contingency contractors, which we can later on get into the nitty gritty of what that captures and the different contracting mechanisms that falls under, but more broadly, if we look at the typology of the kinds of groups that fall under that category, they're also sometimes referred to as mercenaries or private military firms or private military companies or private security companies. And sometimes also crosses over into the profiles of foreign fighters. But my work and kind of how I streamline all that is again, looking at the contract mechanism and whether the entity falls under a contracting officer and a contracting officer representative in terms of oversight. So they are sanctioned by, hired by, supported by and overseen by the U.S. governments. I would also build on what Stanislava said by saying that contractors are present during all the phases of military operations and they're typically in theater before and after those military phases. And ideally contractors should be the facilitators, mentors or advisors of those state services rather than really being a standalone force. That's not always what we end up seeing, but in many instances, it's the contractors who end up being able to offer that institutional memory and continuity that stays whenever the troop rotations become more frequent than we'd like to see for the level of familiarity that's really required in those environments to effect change and have those relationships with the partner nation militaries to be as effective as possible. Right, so that's opened up a whole bunch of things that now we can pick into. So first, just to continue on this idea of giving a preface, to help people with their mental geography and place things on a map, what sorts of countries, regions, conflicts are we talking about that you two have particular sort of experience with? I know it's quite a range. So just give us some ideas here. Whitney? Sure, so my project started in the CENTCOM, the Central Command Area of Responsibility, so the good old CENTCOM AOR, and it really picked up after the 9-11 attacks and the global war on terror. And then as I tracked industry growth during that period and my professional opportunities led me to work more in the AFRICOM AOR. However, I would assert that contractors are present everywhere that the US government is. Stanislava, what additions do you want to make to that? Yeah, of course. Great question. So much like Whitney, a lot of our experience certainly is related to the big wars. So my background was in Afghanistan and also on the multilateral level when I was a native for a bunch of years and we kind of saw partnership, like many countries doing this together. So that is almost a whole other topic in and of itself. But when I decided to do this, I wanted to look at everything that people weren't talking about because I felt that we had had a very strong saturation in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I said, well, we're looking at high conflict. What is all of this looking low conflict, preventative, small scale? So I actually literally went all over the place. So Whitney was talking about the Middle East and calm. I felt to myself, I'm going to go and identify and see because it's special operations. Some of their stuff is covered, but not always. It may not be outwardly advertised, but particularly this NGO-soft relationship is something that NGOs sometimes kind of advertise on their websites. They're doing work with these organizations. So I literally came up with my own map. And I have talked to people in probably, not to give you everything, but not even all the countries out. I'm still kind of trying to collect the data, but Kenya, Somalia, Lebanon, Jordan, Colombia, Ukraine, Kosovo, you name it. And you can both imagine these are places that are literally across the spectrum. I wanted to look at that because I thought, here's a big war in Iraq and Afghanistan where we're putting so much where $50,000 for a military contractor, someone else may mean nothing, but a small village in Northern Burkina Faso, which receives some kind of assistance for $10,000 could actually mean the make or break of the relationship with that community. So I thought, what are these missions telling us collectively across about our own functional behavior as an organization and vis-a-vis the relationship with NGOs? Can we, can what happened in Kenya be applied in Senegal or in Burkina or applied in Colombia? And one of the things that has come back consistently has been, oh, it's so different. The context is dependent, which is very much true. You certainly cannot compare, East to West and South America and so forth. And yet the organization has kind of a cookie cutter approach when it comes to kicking off its planning and going to navigate these missions and spaces. So I thought, everyone is telling me it's different, but yet we keep doing it the same. What's broken here? So this is what I'm after. And it's fascinating to be on the outside and asking people inside to talk about themselves and what they think of others who also see themselves through themselves. So it's almost been trying to triangulate several groups vis-a-vis each other. Great. That actually leads really nicely to my next question, which is before we get into the ways that this can perhaps go wrong or be complicated or murky, what is supposed to happen? What is this cookie cutter? What is the on paper? What is meant to happen? What is the purpose of these interactions? So before we get into kind of what actually happens in reality, what is the understanding in probably a small office somewhere on the East Coast of the United States when these sorts of things are being planned? Whitney, do you wanna start off? Sure, thanks for that. And yeah, it can be pretty labyrinthine, especially I look at both Department of Defense and Department of State initiatives. So it is many offices across many locations who perhaps don't always have the opportunity or initiative to talk to each other and coordinate and de-conflict. I would say that ideally the vision of having contractors there is for to be an enabler, to be a facilitator and really to be a force multiplier. And whenever I pinned down sort of what that looks like and what the motivations are even though there are some tensions which we'll address later, I found that the primary four that it boils down to in favor of the use of contractors is expediency, cost, continuity and risk dispersal. And so I'm happy to dig down into the specifics of those but I'll hand it over to Stana Slava for her take on the NGO perspective, NGO soft perspective. Yeah, so exactly. What's happening in these conference rooms? What are these people talking about? Of course, the ultimate question for the military, there's almost like an obsession with like what does the end state look like? And because we're talking about some very messy spaces, one of the things that I've encountered in my research is that we get so much obsessed with defining the job, we forget to do the job. And what I mean by that is there's kind of an ambiguity as to what this looks like. So before we get into measure of success to actually answer your question, what's the point of it all? So certainly for SOF and particularly where the 95th Brigade not to be technical in terms of you guys, but basically they're the entity within SOF who are trained in different languages, they're trained in different cultures, they're almost like warrior diplomats, if you will. Certainly this is what they were at their genesis. There's been a whole other thing that's happened with Iraq and Afghanistan, where SOF have been away from their roots and become much more lethal force, which is another discussion altogether. But certainly the number one thing is, Whitney mentioned the confliction, but a lot is also access and placement. Some would say it's a way to understand these populations or the NGOs. In fact, this is where the NGOs get very prickly because they feel that the military is there to collect the information about these places so they can do a better job at their missions. And of course, the truth is every organization collects information to do a better job at its mission. It's kind of how it's used that really gets things very tricky. But the access and placement bit, certainly my research involves, as I mentioned before, budget authorities, providing certain basic services, not for humanitarians, but building a school, digging a well and so forth. And the argument that I'm making is that, being a humanitarian-like actor and seeking access and placement are not mutually exclusive functions. You could do good by trying to meet the mission at hand. And of course, the moment you put yourself into a humanitarian, which many military will say, I really don't want to call myself one, I'm not one, you encroach on the space of those who truly are doing this work. And that's where it gets really, really tricky. But to caveat it by one additional point is that, because remember, we're talking conflict, post-conflict, quick conflict, those things are bouncing around each other. Some places are so inaccessible. What I've been saying is that you may not see an international NGO, you might see a sort of a local one, but you may never see an NGO under its flag or a diplomat in that community, but you will see a military person providing some kind of a civic function. And in the eyes of the populace, we're kind of the most important center of gravity. This becomes the development actor. This becomes a humanitarian actor, even if something as small as providing vaccines to cattle, which is absolutely critical in herd communities, for example, or whether it's passing around PPE or doing medical exercise and so forth. So it's almost like a multi-face actor that they will constantly trying to engage with him. Great, so that's helped us understand Stanislava for your stuff, kind of how we go from what the initial impetus is to what actually ends up happening, which is much more complex. Whitney, with the actors that you're looking at and working with, what does the reality look like? Well, so I would first like to go back and kind of frame that the side that I look at is sort of the opposite of what Stanislava described in terms of having maybe an ambiguous goal or trying to figure it out, right? Good contracts should have clear deliverables, but not all contracts are well written, right? Like there are clear statements of work or performance work statements about what the work should be, what the outcome should be. Ideally, they would be tied to strategic goals. That's not always the case, right? So this is a little bit outdated, but Sean McVate, whenever he wrote about the experience of Dinecore being hired to rebuild the Liberian military, right? That statement of work was less than 10 pages. That's not a very specific course of action to follow. So I'm happy to talk about that in sort of windows of opportunity there. I think that all of this leads to the discussion about like the ambiguity of the role of contractors, right? And where that poses problems or tensions and signal relations and also internal to the mission, right? Because a lot of these contractors are embedded alongside the uniformed personnel, but there's often, you know, attention that they're treated as second or third class citizens, right? They don't have authority for fair reason, right? They're supporting the US government. They are not acting on behalf of the US government necessarily. And so you see those tensions and then there's also security concerns and arming contractors, right? That's what we saw with the Blackwater issues and New Source Square continues to be a challenge in these complex environments where, you know, are you going to allow contractors to be armed in self-defense? Is it personal self-defense? Is it defense of the mandate? Like it would be with UN peacekeepers. Are we going to allocate US military personnel to act as guardian angels? Will there be third country nationals who will be subcontracted to provide that protection? There are a lot of flowdown issues. I mentioned the civil tension and kind of the persona or bravado that comes with a lot of the personalities that you see who have maybe made a career in contingency contracting. There's also individual and organizational conflicts of interests, right? Like is the goal of the contracts aligned with the interests of the company? How do you write a contract that addresses those tensions and mitigates the interest misalignment there? And then generally just contract management, right? Like poorly designed contracts, lack of intergovernmental coordination and de-confliction, lack of sufficient oversights, intellectual property control, especially whenever you're looking at training systems that are intellectual property, but they fall under trafficking and arms regulations, right? How are you controlling that? And then the sufficient monitoring and evaluation and accountability mechanisms. So there's no shortage of windows of opportunity to improve the practice. Yeah, and just even for my own research, I look at peace treaties and the security provisions within peace treaties. And yeah, the idea of you have a very complicated job and you've only been given 10 pages of guidance brings very true. This idea of, and in fact, my entire argument is that you have to be specific, that you actually have to write these things down and you have to even be specific about how you're going to deal with the things you can't imagine yet. So deciding kind of, if something unexpected comes up, we have already decided that this is going to be the decision-making mechanism. Here are the people who are going to be on the committee. Here's who gets what vote that those things actually can make, quite literally can make or break whether a peace treaty can successfully end a civil war. So we see this kind of idea of, it's one thing to have goals, but then you also have to write them down and then you have to write them down in a way that actually translates to the environment. So as you said, and I think perhaps optimistically, windows of opportunity, windows of opportunity perhaps for things to go wrong. So this kind of leads us on to this next question of there's clearly a lot of room for confusion within the organization before we even get to actually doing the thing. Just who is doing it, from where, what's the scope? And then we actually get there and the people actually enacting these actions, again, lots of room for confusion. What kind of relationship are you meant to have with the different pieces of your own organization? What relationship do you have with the local people? How does all of this work? But let's switch for a second to trying to illuminate the confusions perhaps on the other side that I know Stanislava has mentioned a bit. What do people actually on the ground receiving these services or perhaps next to receiving of those services if they're not the direct audience? What happens there? What kind of communication is maybe meant to happen? What actually happens? How does this further complicate the picture? So Stanislava, you've already started us off on this so I will go to you first and then Whitney you'll add on from there. Oh yeah, so I just want to preface with quickly saying that because of COVID I think all of our researchers have had to kind of shift and reconfigure so I've actually been able to do some interviews remotely but I've not physically been able to go to the field yet. And a lot of the questions around what do populations think about this have come by talking to the military and NGOs and ask them what do you think populations think about this? And so just to add to our previous to kind of an additional answer to the previous question is whenever we talk about these entities engaging with each other for those of you that have not had the opportunity to be in the field yet you kind of get in country and there's the conversation in its official setting and the conflicting in our agency people talking to each other at the operational level or at the embassy level but then once you're hundreds of miles away from the embassy and you're actually on the ground what I argue to be a whole ground operator culture and these guys are almost like they're the ones doing the work and not to say, oh this strategic document I just agreed with and what I'm going to do X, Y and Z is going out the window but the truth is ground truth is ground truth and you work with what you have and you need to make decisions there's a reason why I'm called an operate tactical operational strategic and so forth so if that wasn't a mess enough for you that should kind of further complicate things with all of that said this population this relationship with the populace is extremely important because that's what's feeding the ground truth so if you're not to get on military on you but if you're the target group and of course you say something like target group to an NGO and they want to run the other way but what we really mean a target could be whoever it is you're trying to convince your deal with could be a situation could be individuals could be a problem and so forth if you are almost receiving feedback if you will that whatever it is that you're trying to do is not working of course you need to readjust and shape shift and this is in my conversations with the military and certainly on the ground is there's a couple of things you kind of have the immediate thing that comes to mind do I have the electrical line that's running am I able to provide for my children bring food on the table and so forth what is this outside actor whoever they might be helping me do these basic things and of course there's like larger things such as oh well the host nation forces so corrupt and so bad thank God the Americans are here kind of thing and of course you can make this argument kind of across the board with any outside actor but the one thing that's come back consistently is that despite the fact that we think that we know what those needs are we sometimes do a pretty good job at talking to people and understanding them and sometimes we don't because we're so hyper focused on the achieving the thing and of course people are not fools in fact in these zones people are extremely resilient it's not their first rodeo they've been as we keep saying they've been shifting from conflict post conflict pre to outsiders to insiders these are kind of pretty hot and sophisticated places certainly from could be just from a development point of view or both development and military and you can see it's kind of mixed one thing that's popped up is not to shift on a whole thing on China but Whitney you could probably speak to this more is Chinese going into a lot of development in Africa for example and even among my own conversations with colleagues they say well if you go to a person in a country in Africa and you say who do you want developing your road who's going to come back and follow up the military have these very short term deployments and much of it is you know who's there physically and if the military is risk averse and doesn't say not to go somewhere which sometimes they are then you almost have like a lack of presence but from a idealistic point of view and kind of whose values you ascribe to some would say well if you kind of went to a community and you told the person here's a passport for China use a passport for the US where would you rather go you know I'll let you all come up with your own philosophical answers to this question but it's almost a kind of overall larger competition and of course the person the people in the middle are the populations and they could it could go one way or the other and I'll stop here because I have a lot more ads of this topic but I'll leave it for Whitney to respond. Yeah thanks I agree with a lot of that and I wouldn't presume to speak on behalf of a recipient stakeholder even though I've been very fortunate to have a lot of field experience but I think that there's not as much appreciation or integration of the host nation perspective as I think ideally we might want in terms of the contract design I would say though that I think that that's circumstantial rather than intentional in a lot of cases because many US government entities themselves don't often have the freedom of movement to get that ground truth right like they're inside the wire because of force protection issues which is why contractors and implementing partners who are outside of chief of commission authority are then hired as a measure risk dispersal that I mentioned earlier so that they can go out into those higher risk environments to collect that information and I would also note that I think that this goes back to intergovernmental de-confliction is that maybe the reporting that then goes back to the contracting officer there's often some loss of utility in that translation about what maybe the implementing partners recommendations might be and what is actually feasible within that mechanism or under the policies of that particular sponsor so it gets to a lot of technical bureaucratic paperwork but that feedback does need to be more efficiently I think integrated into changes in the scope of sorry statements of work. And so picking up on that we've actually got a great comment anonymously in the Q&A so thank you for popping that in saying that as someone who normally works on the ground and who has been working a lot with ensuring their avenues for affected populations to express opinions and perceptions on the humanitarian aid response I can strongly confirm the NGOs and military actors ideas about how they are perceived by communities needs to be approached to the mention caution we are rarely seen the way we think we are and I think what's been really helpful in both of your responses is helping illuminate some of the reasons that those perceptions can be so off some of the ways in which internally externally both of those things combined that the types of information available the ways of collecting that information the ways of reporting that information the ways of understanding that information make it even harder to understand what the recipient population might be thinking and of course we always have that issue of no one knows what the other person thinks about them that's just a general human thing and it was I think really helpful in your last answer the both of you to illuminate just how many extra barriers they are there are in terms of getting that perception so thank you for that comment in the Q&A please do keep your questions and comments coming Stani go ahead If I guess I just want to add one more thing because this is the this kind of thing you know how do you know with a lot of you know how do you know what people are really thinking one of the things which has come up a lot in conversations with interviewees is too because this is the gray zone and it's all about ambiguity and as opposed to try to put things in but you know the military is all about quantitative this is part of my research was you know what is the military doing what does it feel comfortable with which is qualms and predictability and percentages and so forth ability to make quick decisions but whatever they're doing I'll do just the opposite of that so in conducting qualitative interviews which is really kind of leaning to the uncomfort of the work and much of it has been around how do you how do you know how do you measure how do you know and some in some cases it's like there is no way to kind of hear people say it you see as it's all kind of hearsay people tell you one thing or another but there's also a behavior component to it for example, if you feel how do you know the security situation is improving maybe people are going out into the marketplace more often maybe they're going and digging their kids with them versus before where if things are on the brink of you know breaking down they will just be in and out maybe shops are open longer maybe children are playing around I mean, I always turn it back to like what would you do in your own community if you're an active shooter you probably stay inside the house what would you do if things were feeling okay you'd probably go roaming around the town or doing things and so forth so some of it is so much through the lens of security we forget to think that the gray space could mean different things for different people I always use the argument of like if you were the IMF or the World Bank what could be like chasing the black for the military could be a country in the brink of economic collapse for the IMF where they're no longer willing to issue a tranche of money because the conditions were met so there's so many lenses through which to view this and the whole idea here is to understand that other actors see it differently and then you're not being able to physically get there talking about private security companies with me like they probably have to go hire someone to give them the security they need to operate in the space so it's so multi lens the least favorable we can do ourselves is have this very myopic view to meet the mission because we're not planning when we have those objectives and we're planning the mission part of the plan is the military is not how well do I interact with the NGOs it's how well do I meet the mission and talk to the populations and wind them over if you will regardless of who else is trying to do the same if I may just jump in on that I would flag that I think that there's been a very positive step in addressing that through the 2018 stabilization assistance review which was a joint project between the Department of Defense Department of State and USAID which was just a huge step in looking at what's the interagency approach to stabilization I think we're not calling it stability operations anymore I think it's just stabilization writ large but it takes years for that to trickle down to the different communities and especially to the different contracts because contracts are written and allocated fiscal years in advance but I would just flag that as a heartening opportunity that was taken advantage of So actually on that Whitney I was wondering if you could give us a bit more in terms of these contracts when we go back to this question of like how do you measure what is actually taken into account Stanislava you've given us a great idea of kind of the operational the tactical stuff that you can actually observe how much of that is actually in those contracts what do the contracts in your experience Whitney what do they measure what are they looking for Yeah that's a great question and I don't think that there's really an answer or a satisfying answer because of the variety of contracting mechanisms and authorities right so it depends on the type of contract you know is it an IDIQ which is indefinite delivery indefinite quantity and then there are specific task orders that fall under that really huge contract mechanism right which is why we see so much like subcontracting down through companies so that you know you get one company that is very specialized who's providing a service to a bigger company right and that just kind of adds to the potential interest misalignment um uh sorry the coffee hasn't kicked in so I completely like yeah there's so many different kinds of contracts are there any similarities that you've seen even just within a particular type of contract or within a particular type of space in terms of the types of things that they are looking to measure as success or failure yeah so I think um one of the things that I would like to see more is is sort of like what are the capability outcomes rather I mean specifically for the the training programs security force assistance programs is like what what capacity have we built rather than how many students or attendees have have we graduated right and is it actually you know for these training programs is it did they complete the program or did they graduate from the program right like did they show up every day or did they actually demonstrate proficiency in the skills that they were supposed to be building um so right so that that trickles down to the tactical level it's much harder to um to to track right at like the ministerial level whenever we're looking at um organizational capacity building because you know how do you how would you do that in the U.S. right like how efficient is the Department of Defense and um right like different different stakeholders uh would have different evaluations of that um and no to my knowledge there is not a uniform um kind of uh profile of what uh these these programs would ideally deliver but I would say that for the Department of Defense I believe it was a year or two ago because now they've been filling the bill it's that there there was a huge oversight contract issued through the Defense Security Cooperation Agency so perhaps even internal to DoD they are looking at you know how do we standardize this and sort of um uh translate lessons identified into lessons learned so that brings us really nicely on to our next question which was not only brought up in the Q&A but was on our plan to talk about next anyway so it's lovely how those things go together um let's talk about this idea of lessons learned first of all is that even a thing can we learn lessons that are applicable from one situation to another even for example the same place the same people but a very different sort of security situation um can is that even possible to take lessons from one place and move them either to another place or to another time or both um is that is lessons learned even a useful thing for us to be thinking about Stanislava do you want to start off yes um you know this is like being the the ultimate question that we as of course we're practitioners we go into this academic exercise we want to come back up with some like very you know oracles here's the answer here's the answer to the lesson we should learn and apply um I don't unfortunately of course it goes back to measurement and all the other things we've been we've been discussing but um I think it's much because I'm looking at the how as opposed to the water or the why um what I found is that um if I can kind of reconfigure the question thank you so much to by the way to the audience for this um and I'd like to give it in the context of behavior that I've seen in terms of the my interviewees um and I interviewed as I mentioned the NGOs and in the military um and to some extent populations but particularly in the NGOs in the military I will break them down into sort of roughly three groups what I call um the loyalists being lightened and the converted and I can speak to which uh group feels most of these comfortable with with kind of the lessons learned thing uh the loyalists are sort of the uh group which is very keen on you know the mission you know we have we as an agency at the at the center of the universe we need to meet our mission and so forth um the the loyalists came both on the NGO and the military side um and they didn't really see coordination with civic actors and non-state actors um necessarily is is um bad but they they just kind of were very very honed in on doing their work which of course ties into lessons learned because we keep talking about the need to talk to each other and with other actors and yet you see this girl that's kind of like well I showed up and I made one call and the guy didn't get back to me from ex NGO and I moved on with my life which of course is not as we all know it's you know sort of like operational art there's definitely a science to it um the enlightened is the group that actually was more comfortable with the notion of that lessons learned are not always lessons applied but we need to keep trying and they're the group that did not see the engagement with civic actors as neither good nor bad they kind of saw it as necessary they understood that this is a complicated space that you sometimes are making it up as you go along and sometimes you have an amazing plan that you as a company took you know 10 years to come up with the formula to having a great operational plan and understand the uncomfort that comes with the fact that you can't measure it all you can measure some but it doesn't mean that you should stop trying and the third group basically or the converted and these are of course people that sort of you know went in the other direction and said you know it's all wrong we can never learn our lesson and I'm just I'm just I'm giving it up where is he you know where is he more I've been in the military for X amount of years was immoral I need to I'm now kind of joining the other side or in some cases you see people who are in the Peace Corps and then decided to go via the civil affairs route and of course to answer all this is you almost need three groups you need like a black hat and a white hat and someone that's constantly questioning you because this is where you identify what your lessons are you don't know what you don't know so a lesson is all about we did it wrong we could have done a different me and there's someone that can help us or we just kind of keep keep keep trying on our own so I know I'm not giving an answer to the to this audience's question but my argument is that if we think about it that way we might be getting closer to to you know to the to the outcome I love that framing I think that's really useful of those groups and sort of what they're what they're buying level is I would say that from my side I think that like the the biggest way to translate a lesson that was identified into a lesson learned is to have that on the ground contextual awareness and knowledge which is why I think contractors are often used for that for that continuity right like when I managed program in Afghanistan a number of my guys had been there for you know six or seven years right like the those personal relationships and that advising and that experience right like embedded at the ministerial level um like can't be duplicated right and whenever you have military personnel who are you know coming in and out every like six nine 18 months right it takes the first three months for them to have a clue what's going on then they have x period of time to actually like do their job and then you know there's like a two or three month handover period at the end and that handover period is generous and that is you know if the next person actually comes for a replacement in place training or if it's just you know like here are my handover notes like this is the guy's you know like office like good luck um you know that's that's such an incredible loss of institutional memory and right if you were on the partner nation side to know that like these you know your advisors your mentors are coming in and out um you know just about every year you know but if you don't get along with them personally you just wait them out you wait for the next person to come along or if they're pushing an agenda that doesn't align with what your institutional agenda is right because of interest misalignment maybe between what like uh the the donor nation wants and the recipient institution feels that they need right it's a waiting game um I would also say that that leads us to the trap of like the insularity that I often see in these like complex environments of the donor nations and international stakeholders right like they will be in a green zone they will stay in the bubble of their camp they will not necessarily talk to each other and their experiences aren't informed by the reality outside of the wire you know in the camps in the ministries on the front lines necessarily um and and I think that that's where we see the highest threat of repeating the mistakes of the lessons that we identified before but haven't really like um mobilized into a change in the actual execution of the programming so if I could if I could just add one more big way one more bit in my own findings so Whitney's been talking about um private security companies uh and um a lot of them are retired military or people that have kind of you know left their career but what I've also observed is that some of the NGOs themselves recruit individuals who are from the military uh again this is the the civic affairs hub otherwise if you'd like gone from like you know SF like highly lethal to like being uh Birkenstock that's very unlikely that's probably the third category I talked about but what we're finding is that there is a almost like an underground if you will institutional link where these people know one another they work with one another um and now they see it from the other perspective so a lesson learned opportunity would be oh now I'm on the other side oh now I see why DN Gerald's are doing it this way oh maybe I can now I have sort of my you know my blind spots have been unblinded because I because I see it oh and who's in the middle oh it's all these populations or ministries or you know recipients that we're trying to work with so as you see this um shift and I can't speak to from you know like from an HR perspective why NGOs do it so why some NGOs choose to do it this way of course there's lots of work with armed groups and so forth um that you know that makes a military person like very good uh candidate for for this kind of stuff but uh what's important to remember is that you're now you are having this institutional knowledge from from the you know other organization that's now shifting into uh the the one which is always in the eyes of DOD let's face it DOD is such a big machine and kind of a big master on the ground specifically in a non-commissioned space um it's extremely difficult to compete with them uh and maybe we don't need to that's part of the lessons learned um but we're seeing a lot of um very interesting uh dynamics going on and now I'm making the argument with the war in Afghanistan ending you have a whole generation of you know contractors that are coming to an end people that have this amazing experience that are going to go and get employed somewhere uh whether it be security companies whether it be the NGO space whether you know whatever it might be but um I am predicting that there's definitely going to be some kind of an absorption of these experiences in individuals and it's very much going to drive what this space might look like so that actually brings me quite nicely to the other part of the question for the both of you um which is that if we are thinking that there's some validity in this idea of lessons learned with all of the caveats that we've raised but there's something sometimes that can be learned in some situations have done properly um in your experience your research your work etc are there any examples that you've seen of good practice I hesitate to say best practice but good practice that even if it's a tiny example like you've only seen it once but you're like hmm you know what maybe if that was expanded just beyond once that might be nice so not so much what are your biggest lessons learned but what are perhaps the most overlooked ones or ones that you've seen that'll happen a little bit but could do with some expanding doesn't need to be an exhaustive list but if there's one or two things that kind of pop into your head as oh I was that looked kind of good I wish we saw a bit more of that um if there's anything that particularly springs to mind my entire PhD I had a whole chapter on all of the lessons learned so I took a very direct method with this in terms of how to write peace treaties um but yeah if either of you have any perhaps starting with Stanislava yes um the one thing which comes to mind uh it's a great question by the way because we're always focusing like what's broken and why it's not working but what's great and why why could it potentially work the the one um the one area so this there's a whole notion to kind of winning hearts and minds uh around this uh around certainly around my topic and the thing that comes to mind oftentimes is um so I'll pick Columbia for example the US has had a very long relationship with Columbia it's historic we've been kind of training their forces and one of the examples which came to mind was first of all any organization's branch we deals with civilians can be very demonstrative of how the host nation military sees civilians as actors in the conflict so there's not a separation between you know like here's the military and here's everybody else no no we're all actors in the same space and one of the um great examples um that I've observed through conversations is the profit professionalization of the civil first great branch for the Colombian military where they really are talk about working yourself out of the job um great examples of where they have such a tight knit um sort of in with the populace that um it it's there there's kind of you know the soft professional being in the background and not really doing anything just kind of showing up for the mud cap for the medical um sort of for the you know it's it's like they're like medics uh who you know they provide um uh Planned Parenthood they provide uh preventative checkup and so forth um so really seeing the host nation military in the leads meaning that they are it's a people action integral and this is kind of the ultimate success right like you want to leave and the place supposed to be be be fine to function on its own um and it's um the the the person that said to me all I had to do just show up and somebody get show me my my seat I want to always preface that by also um the fact that there were there's NGO involvement so there's definitely like host nation military NGOs talking vis-a-vis each other of course ideally in ideal world you could say well the military shouldn't be involved at all they should just be left to these civic authorities but as we know there's constant there's countries that are constantly shifting but they're like almost in a permanent state of of conflict and and deconfliction um so we just need to accept that there's a permanence to the civil military interaction in these in these cases uh and if the military is going to be providing services this is what it means for the here and now um any how they do it as opposed to by force they do do it because people want to uh what it looks like on the recipient side of course is a different question too but to understand that there is a function and void they can fill and how they do it really drives the these perceptions on this not so much as to what they're doing like if a person getting their title from someone and they need it it doesn't matter who's giving it to them but they need to have it versus if their actors are fighting each other out is to who should be responsible for this i don't know if that answers it but it's the first thing that comes to mind there's there's lots more of course Whitney are there any you can think of um yeah so i would i would start with uh like know the history and know the environment so that you understand the the drivers of stability and instability and the priorities of your partners uh both individually and organizationally right like there there's quote that i'm probably going to butcher a bit which is uh if you don't know history you're a leaf that doesn't know it's part of a tree right and that's sort of that that knowledge of the history and the background and the context ties into the second recommendation that i would have which is you know get to know the other stakeholders in your space like no one buddy like knows more than everybody collectively so like use that bring that together talk to other people um have that understanding of their work and their perspective like um frame frame your understanding right and scaffold the work that you're doing um and i think that also speaks to the permanence that stanice lava highlighted of the military right like the you're not going into these unstable environments and and thinking that well i don't know i guess maybe some people do but it it would not be the most holistic approach to go into these environments and think that you can really affect change without having it be um your efforts be um aware of and informed by what what some of the biggest inputs and stakeholders are doing great um so i i think that that makes a lot of sense um and i'll just add a few on the peace treaty side the actual writing and implementation of this um and it's one that i mentioned earlier is having a plan for when things go wrong um actually writing down and having everyone agree ahead of time um how are you going to deal with unforeseen issues particularly when there are so many different stakeholders involved um when you're looking at well there's a un mission which in and of itself how many countries are involved in that mission um there are multiple different diplomats on the ground there are the local military sometimes there are two militaries or three there's also different ministries you've got the ministry that's paying for everything versus the ministry that's technically in charge of everything um there's a lot of actors to potentially de-conflict and so one of the practices that i've seen is just having a plan in advance for how you're going to try and de-conflict those things um even if it's something just as simple as there will be a committee and one person from each of these entities will be on that committee they will meet every week and in the event of a tide vote this is the organization that gets to break that tie can be that simple um but having that plan and having every all of those stakeholders sign on to that plan before things actually start um is incredibly helpful at least from the research that i've done um so we've got about half an hour left ish so please do keep the q and a coming um if you've got we've got some good ones already um so let's kind of pick up some things that have been mentioned um first of all this topic of Afghanistan Iraq the idea that we've got a ton of people who have had all sorts of experience now um and kind of what's going to happen next um specifically we've got a question from one of our audience members Jim about what do we think with all this experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is it all going to unravel and more importantly and perhaps more relevantly um what has been learned or not learned in all of this experience um so perhaps Whitney the idea of institutional memory might be a place to start yeah i think generally ultra-partisan slava i think that she spent a lot more time in afghanistan uh than than i did so i can speak to the the longer term picture but i um have been very impressed and very privileged to to work with ministries in afghanistan and seeing the progress that they've made um an institutional reform and oversight and really um building institutions that that work for them rather or seeking to build institutions that work for them rather than necessarily having institutions that were designed for them without enough um i i don't know without enough i can contextual um input but it's yeah it's it's a wicked problem and i don't have much more to say on that at this point fair enough admitting when we don't know things as we all know is a really key part of our search stanice lava anything you want to add i think that um the question is what do we think will happen to afghanistan with of course the big news that has come out recently um i i would not allow myself to take to take a guess on this uh we all have uh perspectives uh if you ever want to or no just put on cnn msnbc any of them at night and i'm sure plenty of people can can guess on this but because we are um i'd like to think we're of the tribe that's looking forward and see how we can do the stuff in the future better um i would uh i think one of the key things exactly is to i think we've mentioned that and i will say again um to make sure that we understand that wherever we go next or whatever you know wherever these actors have been talking about get employed next um is not where is not like where they've just come from and i've had people tell me this you know molly for example oh um i had a couple of interviews talk about well we were just told that you know molly's like afghanistan which goes completely against everything we've been talking about that no two conflicts look alike and if there's almost a um sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in this that if you treat something like the other thing it becomes that things really break it down uh in simple terms for this early in the morning but the truth is um no two conflicts are alike and the notion of um kind of sitting back and understanding is what you were saying the historic hand um bringing together um naranda you mentioned different parties um everyone talks about coordination but no one really likes to be coordinated especially when you're dealing with some you know pretty pretty um alpha driven cultures and you have competition sort of you know competition of i always say that you can have multiple masters on the ground which is what we've been talking about but the one with the most power um can the most money and equipment generally would be the military especially if you have a bigger footprint um will be the master of the mole so i think what we do need to think about is that um there were moments with iraq and afghanistan certainly around serp uh commander's emergency response program which is where a lot of this humanitarian development stuff came in where the military um really went went out i mean afghanistan again is big it was a nation building exercise it was a it was very different context um i think what is good for us to remember it just because you didn't these things didn't work in a great in a in a kind of the greater context in the big wars they're not all bad in the smaller context there is utility for stability operations there is utility for doing humanitarian types of projects even if the military cannot be humanitarian so let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater and think about the fact that some of these things work just because they didn't work in a particular place doesn't mean that we're not doing them period and one of one of my findings has been um that no one really like the military doesn't i guess it's not just military it's all of us we don't like to do things we're not good at and successful at so we're just going to stop doing them that's the wrong approach it defeats the purpose of thinking outside of our comfort zone and operating the gray space the gray space is basically everything between full on peace and full on war so go figure 95 percent of what we do uh so i would say that we need to remember the light we really need to remember the lessons and and we apply them with all the respect of the context with which we're working because these things are not playgrounds and experimental cases these are real people and real conflicts and real impact and if you get it wrong you can really have a very very um very you can creative um you know the do no harm against a whole other topic in this field but it can be extremely dangerous yeah i i would just you know applaud you for that and and echo that and and just say also generally you know at the human level it's rude to show up in a country right or or in any relationship right be like well i had this experience so i'm just going to project that on to you right like the the lessons that we identified slash learns should be seen as like a menu of options that are informative in terms of like they're they're structuring but but not prescriptive and and mandating tunnel vision um so so there's a lot to be learned um i guess i guess we shouldn't say learned from uh we're criticizing here there there's a lot to be observed about about how these um interventions can can be tailored and textualized fair enough um so we've got kind of two interesting questions we're now formally in the q and a section of things so please keep them coming um so we've got questions about kind of these different actors and how they do or do not um agree with each other so the first one um came through the q and a which is the idea of are we sure that humanitarian slash development NGOs and civil military so f share the same objectives um so i think we've pretty clearly answered so far that no they definitely do not need to share the same as objectives and probably often don't um so i'm going to pick up the second part of the question surely across the defense contracts there are some shared objectives so is it better to have something kind of systemic is that out there um and then the questioner justin also offered a um everyday peace indicators as a resource for people to look at in terms of local populations perception of security so perhaps whitney you could pick this up um in the contracts that you look at and analyze to what extent are their shared objectives even just amongst a particular category you know if you're just looking at um department of defense contractors is it different every single time um do those objectives stay the same more than they should kind of how do we understand what these objectives look like and how responsive they are yeah that's just a very difficult question to answer because of again like how many different contracting authorities there are and how many different sort of not necessarily chains of command but like actors in different spaces right like SOCOM special operations command could be putting out uh contracts uh you know that that differ like have a similar aim is maybe like what the office of transition initiatives at USAID is doing and they could be doing them you know in the same space but not necessarily um always getting um on the same page to the extent that would be ideal right which is why it comes back uh to to um to my approach like everybody should talk to everybody that they can right and and um and streamline those objectives although i know that this is DOD specific but i would um also say that like DOD is so big that it's maybe not a rational ask that um every contracting office knows or has visibility i mean they should have access right but not necessarily immediate visibility on on what other um contracting offices are putting out um but it as i mentioned i think that the the DISCA uh contract that came out well very interesting that it's a contract about contracting um about security force assistance is a step in that right direction to make sure that there is uh that communication across uh across the enterprise lovely thank you um and then moving to Stanislava i've got a bit of a different related question for you that came from our watchers on youtube which is exciting so thank you for that um this idea of uh specifically post conflict regeneration so i suppose i can probably speak to that a bit as well um this idea of kind of who are the best actors for this when we look at kind of recovery regeneration um do we think that that is something that's best placed for NGOs to work on is that military actors is that the private sector um is that some combination so um what kind of are your initial thoughts perhaps on the role of NGOs these are the other kinds of actors particularly in either i suppose moving away from kind of a tense time to a more peaceful time whether or not an official conflict has happened um versus in the kind of official post-conflict time period how would you sort of think about that uh i mean i think the kind of the automatic answer is that you want to be able to have a government that can perform services which NGOs are performing but of course it's pie in the sky if if if that could get fixed i'm sure we would have figured it out uh and or somebody would have figured it out and we would have found a way for this to happen um and not to take us off on a limb but look the world population is growing um just if you were to think about you know x amount of people per one service provider whether that be uh military police um doctors nurses you know security health third you name it very hierarchical this is kind of what it gets to um we we can very much uh predict that there's there's a shortage of these things um i don't again i don't i don't really have a kind of a specific core answer um but what is interesting is that local NGOs you know we talk about NGOs but these people are not just NGO workers they're also living the community they're recruited from the communities in which they work so maybe we shouldn't get too much ahead of ourselves and think that we can get it all fixed in our lifetime but understand that there's there's a much stronger link between those in need and those providing the needs and becomes almost this ecosystem in and of itself you know big thing that international NGOs have been doing is we try to hire as many local um staff as they can there's a whole thing between international national NGO staff but basically it's it's they better understand the needs you know what better way to have someone work on the need than the people who have the need to begin with be part of the thinking and the mission planning um and to understand that that is its own yeah that is kind of its own um you're it's always going to be a separate um thing to tackle there's no way for me to deploy uh a soft civil first whoever come back to my hub in Fort Bragg and like have figured it all out um and that's that's another thing right that that the hub for the need and meeting the need understanding the context is there on the ground it's in our communities it's you know the neighborhood in DC where you are right now with me and I'm you know I'm sitting in New York and I mean these are you know this is you know all politics is local not to take us down to basics but kind of that's what it comes down to and the um and and the culture that exists within SOF in doing the staff you know they all come back they train together they look at the same thing together it's kind of this reinforcing thing about the problem same thing happens at the local level so um that that kind of gives you some flavor of an answer but uh it's it's I would say one bit at a time and to recognize that there is a real agency that um is within integral and absolutely critical and without it um without agency of the populace and the people who are trying to benefit it it kind of defeats the defeats the purpose so that answer actually beautifully leads on to the next question that's just come through the q and a which I'm going to direct at whitney um if you don't mind um as it focuses pretty heavily on private contractors so the question from an anonymous attendee does the increasing focus on localization of humanitarian response so the things that starmas lava has just talked about um get much of an airing outside the humanitarian sphere in these operating environments if so how does it take shape with private contractors in particular if it's there is it typically driven by donor governments or by the contractors or someone else so this whole idea of like things should be local does that actually trickle down anywhere whitney um yeah because a lot of the times well actually I just want to go back real quick and um and just say starmas lava I think that you hit the nail on the head and all that stuff and and ideally um you know for security force assistance and defense institution building like we want to be working ourselves out of a job right like we want to be building the capacity of the the host nation governments to to be able to robustly supported citizenry um sorry so I just thought that there was a follow-on to that question that popped up um so yeah the the localization I a lot of the time the so the demand for the contract right the demand the the demand signal is coming from that complex environment right like sometimes the good idea fairy in washington dc like well well you know come up with the contract and the contractors will arrive and be like okay well like who wrote this it doesn't really have a lot of ground truth but I'd say that overwhelmingly it's um maybe not overwhelmingly significantly substantially um it's that there was a need identified in the ground the demand signal went back to dc for the contract to be written for the contractors come out and deliver that work or or assistance um uh so this does go back to sort of like the possibility that things could get lost in translation between um an entity leaving the wire and articulating what that what that need is what the demand is it go into the contracting officer um you know all all of the legal um considerations that go into what can what can be performed right there's also an entire um section of of work performance that's considered inherently governmental that that contractor shouldn't be undertaking um but there is a consideration of the local environment right I mean this is also a very difficult question to answer right because are we talking about do d are we talking about Department of State are we talking about the USA um like what exactly what what sort of intervention uh does this question um triangulate to but I would say that it is um the the best contracts or the demand room ones that that are coming from the ground okay lovely I think that those I love how those responses went together so thank you for our q and a for allowing us to do that um so I don't see any other questions um so I'll use this time while we see if any others want to come in please give us your questions um but is there kind of anything else either of you would like to put in from your research anything you found that's particularly interesting perhaps to our audience um anything that you really want people to take away um kind of bit of a little bit of a free for all while we see if there are any other questions uh starting with Whitney I would just say that it's been such a privilege over the last couple years to engage with this community um academically in in addition to sort of the the practitioner side that was that was more my past um uh for for any of the the younger students or not younger earlier students who are who are out there I would definitely say make sure that you're involved in like the right communities of practice right so for me that's i us that's erga mass it's the conflict research society it's the peace science society right it's even just um reaching out to people via twitter or linkedin who maybe um you you wouldn't necessarily cross paths with otherwise but are very interested in their work so actually status law and I were connected through linkedin maybe two or three years ago and this is the first time that that we're actually interacting like this but you know we email back and forth regularly and that's also part of the idea that it takes a village right it's not only a village in the terms of contracting but it's also in this um this academic practice um and uh and and you know for me my interest in in making my scholarship policy relevance um so um so yeah I guess that would be my my biggest uh note there yeah and just to pick up on that I mean this is a brilliant example we're all um currently PhD students in the school of security studies um I know the both of you I don't think any of us have ever met in person um in fact none of us have met in person uh and yet we've had all sorts of incredibly helpful conversations um professionally chats research all manner of things have happened um and that is really a testament to the importance of having and creating that kind of community um so that was lovely to have that in there and look people are even willing to wake up at four in the morning to speak on a panel for someone that they've never met in person um status law anything you'd like to add yeah no I I also I'm really grateful for this opportunity I hope that we provided collectively something to the audience and you have some thoughts to to take away with you um I think that this new medium of communicating this way has proven that um things are much more accessible than we think before it used to be about you know doing in person interviews engage in meetings in person and so forth um I think we're kind of in the renaissance of research I think we are we're understanding that maybe some of the answers that we're looking for are literally just literally a zoom call away um with that being said being completely understanding that uh that's not how it works and you need to um you need to be in person to build you know to build to build trust and and to have relationships uh relationships vis-a-vis um others and you know a zoom may not tell you uh you know what it smells like in the amazon uh but but it will definitely give you a perspective um I think much with much like with the work that we're doing and lessons learned in our respective fields is to really question the status quo and and question whether the way we've been doing it is the right way to do it um and um encourage all of you to um to talk to one another and be be very bold in uh your thinking and ideas and you know bureaucracies I mean we're what we're talking about with Whitney and I and Miranda we for work you know bureaucracies are difficult to change they take a long time they're they're formed by humans and at the end of the day they are human enterprise uh people having a need for assistance and one is no different than you know people needing to do a job for a paycheck inside of bureaucracy or you know wanting wanting to meet the mission so at the end of the day there's always a human behind each of this and um I think certainly um an opportunity for there to be more connectivity regardless of where we physically happen to be lovely um so we have got one additional question and if there are any others out there in the universe please send them in we've got about 10 minutes left so we might have time for one more after this one um now it's a bit of a long and involved question so I'm not going to read it all out I'm going to sort of distill it to what I think is the core essence um which is this idea of particularly with private military contractors you know quote mercenaries um we've tried to stay on the optimistic side but let's dive into it how can this go wrong should we be thinking of mercenaries in the same lens as former foreign fighters in terrorist groups um should retired mercenaries be thought of in the same way as former ISIS fighters um as security risks as legal things to be adjudicated um where do we draw that line um can we draw that line um so how do we understand this given the proliferation of non-state actors of all sorts of different kinds and for probably obvious reasons Whitney I'm going to put you on the spot with this one um yeah I'd say that we can draw like very very clear distinctions right based on the UN definition of what is a mercenary right there are six very clear guidelines um that that dictate what what a mercenary um is and um similar with foreign fighters actually the work of Dr. David Mallett has addressed this about how how are foreign fighters different slash overlapping than mercenaries and then uh the entire like body of scholarship that I look at which is um you know these these companies who are legally contracted like under international law right are members of international code of conduct associations are clearly vetted by governments who employ them um right like our um are subscribing to working within a legal system are completely different than you know the the mercenaries of um um of pop culture really um I'm not saying that they don't exist but I'm saying that that's a completely different argument than than to really discuss the appropriate typology of PMFs, PMCs, PSCs, PMSCs depending you know on um what categorization you you prefer right and then um can dig down into that a little bit more about like what are what are the different types of services that these companies provide right is it logistics is it um you know the kidnapping and ransom insurance that goes with it or is it the tactical field advising um all all very different and all highly regulated highly highly regulated within the industry versus um mercenaries and foreign fighters. Wonderful answer I knew you would have one thank you um always fascinated to learn about definitions of aspects of security that I don't personally uh research directly so thank you for that I'm now going to go look up that those six un criteria just because I'm curious now I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one um so as we've sort of come to the end of this I don't see any further questions um so I really just want to finally thank you both for this um Whitney and Stanislava um I really appreciate you both being here and waking up really early um I hope that this was as interesting for you both as it was for me audience watching I hope you learned some things got some food for thought um maybe ranted at your screen a little bit who knows um so I hope this is interesting and I strongly recommend that all of those watching uh check out some other events in the school of security conference um and yeah get in touch with any of us if you are interested in learning more about our individual research thank you and enjoy the rest of your day thank you