 Good morning everyone. Hi, welcome. My name is Leanne Erdberg. I'm the director of our Countering Violent Extremism Program here at the United States Institute of Peace, and I am delighted to welcome you here today. For those of you who are new to the Institute, we were founded by members of Congress who were also veterans of World War II, and they had returned from the battlefield convinced that the U.S. needed greater capacities to wage peace, as effectively as we wage war. It was a bipartisan effort, drawing broad support from both parties, and in 1984 President Reagan signed into law the United States Institute of Peace, an independent, nonpartisan, national institute charged with the mission of preventing, mitigating, and resolving violent conflict abroad. We fulfill that mission by linking training and analysis, research and policy, and by working with local partners on the ground in conflict zones around the world. We have offices in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tunisia and Nigeria, just to name a few. And when it comes to violent extremism, we know that significant knowledge gaps still exist, and they continue to pose obstacles. To help address these gaps, USIP is proud to host the Resolve Network, which stands for Researching Solutions to Violent Extremism. It's a global consortium of researchers and research organizations committed to more rigor, more empiricism, and more understanding of both violent extremism and the sources of resilience. We've seen through our work and through our research that the rise, spread, and evolution of violent extremism is one of the most challenging issues we face today, especially as it interacts with existing conflicts or creates new ones or further damages already fragile contexts. And deadly violent extremism is on many people's minds today, following the terrible mass shootings over the weekend in Texas and Ohio. I'm still at a loss for words for the horrors that loved ones and victims are feeling right now, the newly empty sides of the bed, and the people who are rereading that text message over and over again. Those that are in hospitals right now asking why did I live and others died. This weekend added more families and friends to the list of the forever injured, forever scarred, forever harmed by violence. And this is a type of grief and a type of violence that exists in way too many countries around the world today. In fact, as found by a USIP-led task force on extremism and fragile states, worldwide attacks have increased fivefold since the year 2001. And extremist groups have spread to 19 out of 45 countries in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, sowing chaos and undermining already challenging circumstances. Here at an institute committed to the notion that peace is possible, we want to help uncover new ways to do better at addressing some of the most wicked problems surrounding violent extremism. So today, we are tackling the problem of how governments and communities are grappling with what to do with their citizens who traveled to the so-called Islamic State and other conflicts when they return home. With the territorial caliphate extinguished, more than a hundred countries could face the task of not only reintegrating their citizens, perhaps tens and thousands in total, but also preparing their communities for a future with living with people next door. Some who were part of these violent extremist groups will face trial, and some will face incarceration, but not all. Some will eventually be released from prison, and many others will reintegrate directly back into communities. So local communities need to be prepared, and society has a public safety imperative to pursue rehabilitation and reconciliation. People need processes to enable them to abandon their violent attitudes and behaviors, but communities also need avenues to enable social cohesion and to avoid further violence, revenge, and re-radicalization. Yet we lack the language in our public discourse to even talk about people who are disengaging from violent extremism. As far as most of us are concerned, one's a terrorist, forever a terrorist. And while the radicalization is a very complex process, there are many, many different paths to violent extremism, inherently it's social in nature. So disengagement and rehabilitation also need to address social factors too. To not only help somebody disengage from their violent attitudes and behavior, but also rebuild the bonds between that person and society and generate a new sense of belonging. Currently, we, scholars, media, government, community members, can be unintentionally using language that underscores trauma, anger, and fear. We reinforce a person's identity as a terrorist or a fighter as a jihadi or an ISIS bride, and it may contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Luckily, for those of us who study violence and conflict, we are not the first discipline to work with highly stigmatized populations. In public health and criminal justice, in social work, practitioners have learned to leverage language as a tool to shape attitudes and behaviors, to reduce the burden of stigma, and to ease open spaces for engagement. And in these spaces, communities can be presented with opportunities for social learning, for re-humanization, and reconciliation. Let me be clear, I'm not Polly Anish about the real violent risks that violent extremist group and people who are a part of them pose. And this conversation does not take away for the need for clear justice and accountability mechanisms for those who have committed atrocities and other crimes or enables others to do so. This is not about forgiveness or absolution. But once justice systems meet out their sentences, prison time has been served, or those who did not commit crimes were never charged, this need to call a spade a spade must grapple with the other reality of how we enable communities new to the front line to get reintegration and reconciliation right. Because all of our safety and security depends on it. This is a tall order, which is why I am delighted today to be joined by four incredible experts who will help us further unlock and unleash new avenues for addressing this challenge. Today's event for a quick rundown, I'm going to introduce each speaker individually. They'll give about a 15 minute or so presentation, I'll then introduce the next speaker and they will present. When everybody's finished presenting, we'll move to a moderated question and answer session. I'll take questions from the audience in groups of three. We're also accepting questions live online on Twitter and from our overflow rooms here at the US Institute of Peace. With that, I'm going to start introducing our speakers and get today going. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. R. E. Kruglansky. Dr. Kruglansky is a social psychologist with extensive research experience on the dynamics of violent radicalization. His model, drawing from human needs for respect and significance, is outlined in his latest book from Oxford University Press, The Three Pillars of Radicalization, Needs, Narratives, and Networks. Dr. Kruglansky is going to provide foundational context on the social psychological drivers of violent radicalization with attention on the role of marginalization, group dynamics, significance and respect. With that, please help me welcome Dr. Kruglansky. Thank you very much, Leanne. Good morning to all. I'm very honored and pleased to be here. Thanks to USIP for arranging this event, organizing this event, and thanks for Leanne, Michael, and Chris for inviting me. As you all know, radicalization that progresses into violent extremism has been and continues to be a major issue for nations around the world. ISIS has lost its caliphate, but it's far from being defeated, and neither is Al Qaeda, and they continue to launch attacks and attract followers and inspire individuals to join them all over the world, hundreds of attacks in different parts of the planet. So the question is how do we understand this global threat and what can we do about it? In today's talk, I would like to present a psychological perspective on this issue that I believe to be important. Many psychological phenomena, many political phenomena that shape history and determine the fate of nations are rooted in human psychology. Macro level phenomena such as poverty, poor education, or oppression occasionally contribute to radicalization. Sometimes they matter less and sometimes they matter not at all. Why? Because they matter only when they activate, when they are in circumstances that activate the psychological mechanisms that promote radicalization. Psychology is the basic discipline that addresses radicalization. And most importantly, if we understand these mechanisms, we can not only understand it, but also prevent radicalization, the world over. Over the last decade, several decades actually, we have been carrying out field research in various parts of the globe with empirical research with hundreds, if not thousands of extremisms and terrorists in jails and other locations. And on the basis of that empirical work, we have developed an integrative model, a model that on the one hand capitalizes on insights, important insights of outstanding social scientists from various social science disciplines. And that model integrates in the sense of showing how their diverse insights combine into understanding of a process whereby radicalization and violent extremism take place. We suggest in fact that three parameters of the process are critical. They've been emphasized singly by different models. We combine them together. And the three parameters are individuals' motivations, the need component, the first N, the narrative that tells individuals how to satisfy their motivations, and the network that validates the narrative and dispenses rewards for those who serve their needs in terms of violent extremism. Let me say a few words about these three Ns. The need is critical. After all, radicalization is located at the individual. It's the individual who decides to don a suicide belt to pick up a weapon to travel thousands of miles in order to join the fight and kill people wherever they might be. Therefore, a very important question that was posed by terrorism researchers was what is the motivation? Why do they do that? What makes them take those risks, make those sacrifices, risk life and limb in order to join the fight? And terrorism researchers have provided an answer in terms of a list of different motivations or motivational cocktail as Diego Gambetta put it. For example, the perks of afterlife has been one motivation. They do it in order to enjoy the perks of afterlife. Or they do it because of their adulation and commitment to the leader. Or they do it because of feminism to show that women can also do it. Or they do it because of vengeance. And all of these motivations have their place and are important in specific cases. But I submit to you that underlying all of these motivations, there is one universal need. And this is the need to matter and to be significant, to have respect, both self-respect and respect from others in one's community. Now, this quest for significance, how we call it, like with all motivations, isn't active at all times. We do not quest for significance 24-7. So the question is, how is this quest activated? And the simple answer is it's activated when significance acquires special value. And it acquires special value primarily when one loses significance, when one experiences humiliation, disempowerment, disenfranchisement, discrimination. And this can be one's own failures, one's own lack of luck, one's own circumstances that promote one's suffering. For example, stigma attached to Palestinian women who are accused of extramarital affairs or who are infertile or disfigured by fire. So it can be a very personal thing, having nothing to do with international conflict. But it can also be something that has to do with one's social identity. When your group, religious group, ethnic group, racial group, is discriminated, humiliated, you feel this discrimination as your own thing and you're then motivated to restore your significance. And that humiliation, that discrimination provides an opportunity to great significance gain, to become a hero, a martyr for the group that was discriminated against, that was humiliated, that experiences the grievance. Now, the quest for significance is a universal human need. As Jean Vanier put it, all of us have secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes and martyrs. The quest for significance is something that all of us have, a little baby quest for attention because otherwise it will not survive. Adult human beings also live for recognition. Nobody wants to feel disrespected. How then we acquire respect? How we require the sense of significance? The simple answer is that we acquire significance through living up to our values. It's the values that trickle down to those who serve them and lend them significance. And of course, the values vary by different cultures and different groups. The narrative element of our three N network does, it ties violence to the values that lend one significance. It shows how to attain significance through violence. It tells you to gain significance in this particular circumstances, you have to join the fight. You have to kill other people. You have to be ready to take risk, sacrifice yourself, maybe die on altar of the cause. And that gives you significance. So the narrative function is very important. We all crave significance. We are not all terrorists. We are not all violent extremists. We have other avenues to significance. We serve other values. But if you're exposed to a narrative that tells you, you have been insulted. You have been disempowered. Your group has been slighted and insulted. And you have to stand up for the group, join the fight, and protect the group's glory and significance. At that point, you will become a violent extremist. And finally, the third N is the network. Why the network? Network is important because we are social beings. The network of people who we respect, our in-group, so to speak, defines for us what is the social reality, what is real. And it validates the narrative. Without the social network, we would not know that actually you have to fight. It's important to fight. The network tells you, yes, it is what you need to do. Agreement of the network validates the narrative. And beyond validation, it dispenses rewards. It admires people who serve the value through violence and through extremism. It tells you that you are a hero, you are a marker, you're going to be forever engraved in the collective memory of the group. You may go to paradise and so forth. What kind of network? What are we talking about? The network is very widely from proximal, face-to-face networks of the kind that Mark Sageman made famous. A bunch of guys that get together and inside each other to action. All the way to virtual networks. Networks on the internet that are particularly influential these days, for I, that people attend. So you don't have to be in physical presence of these networks. You know that if you carry out a shooting, if you ram your vehicle into people and kill them, you know that if you pick up an axe or a knife and kill alleged enemies of your group, you're going to be appreciated. So it's a kind of implicit network that you do not have to be in physical presence of. Now what is unique about our model and how does it relate to alternative conceptualizations? After all, social scientists have been studying valentic extremism for many decades and they've provided very important insights. I think that what's important about our model is that it brings these insights together into a unified functional portrayal of valentic extremism. Some people in some models through light illuminated one part of the elephant. Our aspiration is to embrace the entire elephant and provide the reasons why the different parts work together. Let me illustrate that by examining some very important contributions in this domain. Ted Kerr's famous book 1970 Why Men Rebell emphasizes the idea of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is the idea that your group does not receive it's just deserts, it's slighted, it's discriminated in comparison to other groups. And of course, this touches on the quest for significance. It is a loss of significance. But there are other ways of losing significance. As I mentioned, even sources of significance are personally based, your personal failures. And we have plenty of evidence that personal failure leads people to embrace collective causes in the interest, in the service of regaining their significance. Of course, Ted Kerr doesn't emphasize the aspects of narrative, the ideology and he doesn't emphasize the aspect of the network. So he does identify an important element. But I think that those other parameters are also important and we bring them together. People talk about macro factors, economists and others, poverty, oppression, poor education and they all came to the conclusion that neither of these alone promotes violent extremism. In terms of our model, these factors also address the loss of significance. If you're poor, if you're oppressed, you do not feel very good. You feel insignificant. You feel you do not matter. But of course, not all poor people and all oppressed people become violent extremism. You need those other ingredients to the mixture. You need to have the narrative and you have to have the group, the social movement that supports the narrative in order for this to combine into this combustive mixture that creates violent extremism. Scott Atron, my friend and a great colleague, emphasized the issue of sacred values and devoted actors as an important ingredient in violent extremism. Yes, definitely, but sacred values are important because they allow people to serve them and therefore become significant. It all comes to the individual and their motivations and the motivation for significance is served wonderfully if you sacrifice your life, take risks, are ready to die on alter of sacred values. So sacred values are important in conjunction with those other elements. Mark Sageman, of course, made famous the issue of networks. And networks are important. Again, why networks are important? As I said, they're important because they validate the narrative and they dispense rewards. They pronounce you a martyr or a hero. What about radicalization? Radicalization is, in some sense, a reversal of radicalization. So the same three elements that promote radicalization, if you reverse them, they promote radicalization. For example, the importance of narrative, the importance of counter messaging is of paramount significance. You have to counter the idea that Islam is served by jihad against infidels. You have to promote the idea that there is tolerance in Islam and the ideology is actually a misinterpretation of what the prophet intended. You've got to have a counter narrative. We are sentient beings. We listen to reason. And narratives are what provides justification, what provides the rationale for our actions. So the narrative is important in radicalization. The network is very important in radicalization. We have recently completed another book on German neo-Nazis and those who left the movement very often left because they connected to an alternative network. They meet somebody, they meet a friend, a romantic relation that draws them back to the mainstream ways of thinking. So the network is important in promoting radicalization. Finally, reduction of the dominance of the quest for significance, activation of other needs, need for love, need for relatedness, need for having a career, having a life. And nobody expressed it better than a former member of the BASC terrorist organization, Etta, who explained why he wants to radicalize. And what he says is, you say to yourself the S-word, I better get myself a lie because time is running out. It's a matter of being that much older and in my case specifically of wanting to get married. You are going on 40 years old, you're going to get married next year. And you say to yourself, well, S-word, man, I mean, at this stage of the game to go packing a piece, that would be a bit, because you just got to S-word, well, we've got all to live a bit. The other needs are activated, the quest for significance is reduced. Now, I mentioned the empirical evidence on which our theorizing has been based and time is too short. I probably already exceeded my time. But I would like to share with you the story of one research project under the radicalization of Tamil Tigers of Elam, the LTTE, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. You all know who they are. They waged a 30 year long succession campaign to create an independent Tamil State. They were recognized as a terrorist organization. They employed violent and brutal tactics, high profile assassinations, suicide bombings, child abductions, use of civilians as human shields. They did a lot of damage. 100,000 victims, civilian victims over the course of 30 years, 50,000 fighters killed. Huge devastation, one of the most vicious terrorist organization in the history of this phenomenon. They had their air force, air tigers, they had their Navy, sea tigers. In 2009, more than 11,000 Tamil Tigers surrendered to the Sri Lankan military after a bloody battle in which thousands of civilians lost their lives in 2009. And the government at that point launched an effort to rehabilitate the surrendered terrorists. And they were placed into the radicalization facilities of different kinds. It was our great luck to be able to enter those facilities and carry out research on all the 11,000 extremists. This is Gautabai Rajapaksa, who was at that time Secretary of Defense and he was the architect of the demolition of the Tamil Tigers. The radicalization programs were adopted from the Saudi programs and other programs that were launched, tried to distill the best elements of those programs. They had educational, vocational, psychological, spiritual, recreational, cultural, family and community programs. And the idea was to equip the detainees with new capabilities to reintegrate into society after release. These are some of the pictures of the programs. In terms of our framework, the need had to do with respect and dignity. They were accorded really respectful treatment. They were not even referred to as detainees or terrorists. They were called beneficiaries. And this was also adopted from the Saudi program. The narrative was on the ineffectiveness of war and emphasized the importance of tolerance and coexistence. And the network, there was extensive use of families and community integration in order to embed them in social support of their changed attitudes. We were able to carry out controlled research on close to 500 that were exposed to a full fledged program of educational, vocational, psychosocial and so on. And we also had a control group. It was important to see whether this program is effective as opposed to individuals who are over the same time exposed to a much more limited program. So this was our minimal treatment group. And we looked at it three waves of data at six months intervals. And as you can see, over time, the full treatment group, their radicalization that we measured in various ways decreased significantly over the minimal treatment group, which suggests that this particular program was effective. At the end of it, they were much less radicalized than when they entered. And what is interesting for all of us who are empirically minded that their attitudes toward the program was related positively to reduction of extremism. And this was mediated by their feeling significant in the program, feeling respected, feeling that they mattered, that they are cared for. What about long term success? This was immediately after the end of the program. Does this last? This is the end. So we examined extreme attitudes of beneficiaries who were released from the program. And again, the number of programs that they participated in was negatively related to extremism. And this was mediated by significance. What's particularly interesting, that they were less extreme, that comparable sample of community tamils who were never part of the LTT organization. And what is a bit more troubling is that those of the tamils who had the connections to their network of erstwhile comrades were less, were more extreme than those who did not. So this is the community and the tamils were connected to a former members of the LTT were a bit more extreme than those who were not. And also tamils who were connected to the diaspora, who was radical, tended to be more extreme than those who had no connections to the diaspora. Sorry about taking so long. Therefore, conclusions. I think that these results offer a glimpse into the mechanism of the radicalization process. They support the 3N model and they suggest that effective radicalization should utilize a multi-pronged approach that empowers the tamils through reconnection with mainstream society and that remains on guard as to potential re-radicalization. In the same way as people radicalize, they can de-radicalize and they can re-radicalize. The human mind is very malleable. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for a lot of information on empirics as well as theory and I hope that many others find that they can learn even more about Dr. Kruglinski's work in his latest book. Next, please join me for a warm welcome for Shannon Foley Martinez. She's a former white supremacist who now helps others disengage from violent extremism by emphasizing empathy and compassion. She'll provide some remarks on the effect of stigma, the importance of empathy and belonging and pro-social engagement in the rehabilitation process. Please join me in welcoming Shannon. Thank you all so much for having me. I don't have a slide show. I want to just take a moment to just honor those who have died this week at the hands of people who took the ideas that they were wrestling with and looking through and chose to enact catastrophic violence as an expression of those ideas. There are lives that are irrevocably changed, lives that are lost. The timing for this event is pretty uncanny because we are currently engaged inside this country in a discussion about the language that we use and whether or not that language holds power and whether or not language influences behavior. Pope John Paul II had a saying Lex orendi, Lex credendi, Lex vivendi. Essentially, how we pray is how we believe is how we live. I've thought about this a lot over the years about the words that we use change our thoughts and how we think and our thoughts then change how we live. In a perfect scenario, from this moment, not a single human would radicalize into violence-based ideology. If we had our way right now, perfect world, no one would take that trajectory. It still leaves a whole lot of people who are still currently in that movement or whatever movement of choice, whatever expression of their violence-based ideology. The best scenario for over this past week would be for the young men involved to have turned away from their ideologies before they committed catastrophic acts of violence. But then where do they go? What do we do with them? And how do we treat them afterwards? From the time I was 15 until just about the time I was 20, I was involved in the violent white supremacy movement. I had a pretty dysfunctional childhood, but not overtly abusive or anything like that. Pretty run-of-the-mill, 1980s white middle-class dysfunction. At the age of 14, as I was doing what most 14-year-olds do and grappling with my identity and who I was in the world and who I chose to be, I felt pretty certain that mainstream culture was never really going to be a place where I could posit my identity and gravitated towards counterculture. The first place that I really looked, one of my very first favorite books was actually the autobiography of Malcolm X. I loved the power of the ideas and the revolutionary nature in which they were presented. I would end up going into the punk movement. And then shortly after I was 14, shortly before I turned 15 years old, I went to a party where I was raped by two men. Because of my childhood, I knew that I couldn't tell my parents. I knew that they would blame me for having lied about where I was going and having been drinking at that party, that they would be more angry about that than upset that I had just been sexually assaulted. I took that trauma, shoved it down, became consumed with rage over the course of about six months. The angriest people in the periphery of the subculture where I existed were the neo-Nazi white supremacist skinheads. The rage that I felt resonated deeply with the rage that they felt I spent more time with them. I started listening to white power music. It broke down the barriers for me of using racially charged language and introduced some of the ideology and some of the some of the talking points of the movement into my vernacular. I began to read some of the literature that was a part of the movement. Over time, I would have a complete and utter physical echo chamber that I lived in that was only about this movement from the time I woke up till the time I either went to sleep or passed out drunk at the end of the night. Very luckily, I ended up not having a place to go at one point. I was dating a young man who was in the army. He was also a white supremacist skinhead. He was in the army. He was in training. And so I couldn't go live with him. And at that point I didn't have anywhere else to go. Luckily for me, his mom, who was a single mom and had three younger sons besides him, said that I could go live with her. I'm pretty sure she knew what our ideology was. She, even if she didn't at the time, I looked very gruff that my external appearance mirrored the internal realities of my life. And I looked very angry, carried myself with bravado and really didn't take anyone's shit. Asward. Hey, C-Span. She chose to see past this violent hate-filled creature that I'd become and chose instead to see a hurting and struggling young woman. She set some parameters about, you know, trying to get a job, helping her with stuff around the house, and included me in all of the day to day family activities, going, taking kids to Cub Scouts, throwing frisbees, reading the Chronicles of Narnia to the boys at night. She created enough stability in my life that expanded this space around me so I could begin to shift and look and examine where I was, how I had gotten there. The ideology for me actually fell away relatively quickly as I had this space and stability. One of the other very crucial things that I think she did for me is that she reconnected me with a sense of future. When you are living a hyperviolent, echo-chamberic life, there is no future. There might be a future in terms of the movement or what you hope will come from your belief system. But in a personal sense, there is only right now in a couple minutes from now. She challenged me on ideas like, don't you want to go to college? Don't you want to make something with your life? Beyond just introducing those ideas, she tangibly connected me to the resources that I needed to make that happen. She didn't just say, hey, don't you want to go to college. She was like, let's find out information. Let's find addresses before the Internet. Let's find out how you can contact these schools. Let's take you to sit for your SATs. Here is a number two pencil in your hand. Get in my car. I'm driving you there. She didn't just introduce ideas to me. What I didn't know while I spent these five years in the movement is that not only was I actively dehumanizing other people, but that in order to do that and maintain that viewpoint and way of living, that I also had become deeply dehumanized. I was much less than human. I actively had to work at seeing other human beings as not human in order to project all of the things and wretches that I felt inside out onto other people. I think one of the reasons that this woman was so transformative in my life is because she initiated the process of rehumanizing me by choosing to first see me as a human with a broken and twisted need set that was being expressed in terrible ways rather than just as an ideologue or as somebody that was not worth it. It is a hard sell to gather resources and to invest time and money into even discussions about reintegration of people from violence-based extremism. I had no idea that one of the main reactions in most of the comment threads of anything that's ever out there in the media or on the internet about me would be a challenge to the very idea that people can fundamentally transform their lives. When we are talking about reintegration, it is paramount to examine whether or not we genuinely believe that people can transform. The objections are either I never really believed that in the first place or I still believe it now, both of which are categorically untrue. It was an ideology that I would have died for. I hoped I would die for it. My belief system is utterly transformed, I believe, in the co-empowerment and genuine equity building of all human beings. That is the first focus we must have when we are talking about any sort of reintegration. Is it worth it? Are these resources really worth spending on these people that have chosen these terrible belief systems and put forth heinous actions a lot of time? I am a mom of seven children. Age is almost 22, down to three years old. They are phenomenal human beings. They fight for equality and justice, equity building in their lives on a daily basis. They will, they certainly transformed my world. They transformed the communities of which they are part on a daily basis and I feel absolutely certain that they will have a piece in transforming the world. I think it is worth it to invest resources. If we look at things from a restorative justice point of view, and instead of just seeing the bad actions of one person, which they are, I hold personal responsibility for the choices that I made and the things that I did. We don't always do a good job talking about that. We talk about people falling down rabbit holes, sliding down pipelines, getting caught up in some way that releases them from personal responsibility and I believe that to be a mistake in terminology, it is important that I accept responsibility because it is the only way to get towards making ongoing meaningful amends. I first have to say I did this. I take responsibility and I am sorry. How do I make amends? However, when we talk about that, I so resonated with what you had said, the way that I frame it is that we all have a basic needs sets beyond food shelter clothing and the way that I see it is that we all have the needs to give love and be loved, to feel truly seen and truly heard and to feel like we have a meaningful connection with something greater than ourselves. Every single person that I have ever worked with and helped disengage from violence based extremism that this essential needs set was broken and those brokennesses were compounded by multitudinous factors. From a restorative justice point of view, we have to see that bringing people back into the fold doesn't just help that individual but it helps the entire network. We have to see that even though the actions are the responsibility of one person, that the ecosystem involves us all. Terrorists still have come from a family. They still have lived in communities. There is many layers of fracturing of those three basic needs that have led to their trajectory towards an immersed in violence. When people leave and we are trying to reintegrate them back into society in more pro-social ways, it helps heal us all. It heals the broken fabric that was part of the trajectory inwards. When we devote resources to healing those among us, we all become stronger for it. I can leave my finger broken and I can still get through life probably with just the use of my other fingers but how much stronger will my hand be if all of my digits are well and thriving. Let's talk about that just for a second. I am a female. I am a female who became a violent white supremacist. There was a sense in which I found twisted sexual empowerment in my position inside a movement that is based on dehumanization and objectification of people perceived as weaker. Women definitely fit in that category inside that belief system. On the outside, I wasn't really super successful with boys and dating and stuff, but inside I could pretty much go out with whoever I wanted because I was one of only a few women. Because sexual abuse as sexual assault was part of my trajectory inward, it felt very much like sexual empowerment. I didn't know that at the time. I was just doing what I was doing. But there was more to it than that. I was an active participant in my own radicalization that I continued to amplify my willingness to use violence and willingness to take risks. I was not a passive agent who was simply the arm candy of someone else in the movement. When we use words like jihadi brine that we remove the sense of agency and that quest for significance that we just heard about. We say, well, yeah, but we're actually reinforcing a lot of the viewpoints that exist with that. We remove also the ability for someone to take full responsibility, come to terms with their actions, which is a crucial part of reintegrating us into society. One last challenge that I will mention is that in terms of the modern world, there are entire radicalized trajectories that exist nowhere except online. There are people who have stories of going into the movement in these thought places and thought spaces. When we talk about movement particularly in terms of the far right, all right, white nationalist spheres, it's very much a literalist resistance. There's very much, and there are very overlapping ideologies. I believe that we will see ideologies get more and more convoluted and enmeshed over the next several years. It will be harder to pinpoint a single ideology which looks like what we used to know it was. But these trajectories don't really exist anywhere outside of the Internet. There's no actions taken. I mean, maybe they have conversations in real life with other people where they are, you know, where you bring your ideology there. But the echo chambers is completely digital. This is a challenge for us to figure out how to navigate those spaces and how do we address people and how do we treat their trajectories into and then hopefully out of these violence-based ideologies when they have not traveled across the world and yet it's still a multinational network because it's the Internet. It's everywhere. Do we treat them as though they are the same or different from people living this out in the physical space? Do we offer the same sorts of services? Do we prosecute them the same way? Do we hold them accountable the same way? I don't know that I have answers, but I do think that this, that there is very much a trend towards, you know, like even just like a virtual caliphate or, you know, in conjunction with the physical space because obviously the most catastrophic thing is when that digital world leaks out and becomes catastrophic violence and action, like we have seen over and over again. With that, I will turn the mic back over, but all of you who have the influence to do so, I just whenever you're challenged about programs, talking about reintroduction and helping former violent extremists, please remember my face. Please remember my story. Please remember the value that my life has now. If I had never been given that chance, I would never be able to be here and I would never be able to spend the rest of the breaths of my life doing as much good as I possibly can. Shannon, thank you so much and thank you for reminding us of the empathy and compassion necessary to really accept the humanity in all of this and thank you. Please allow me to introduce our next speaker. Dr. Paul Thibodeau is a cognitive psychologist who's an expert on the ways in which language influences cognition. He will present on the cognitive power of language, framing, metaphors and how they shape perceptions, generate empathy and reduce stigma. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. If my slideshow pops up here in a second. So I'm a psychologist of language and I'm generally interested in the ways in which we use language to think about complex problems. I'm going to start with kind of an obvious and somewhat silly point and that's just that solving big problems is really hard. So how do we fight world hunger? How can we fix a broken educational system? How can we or what can we do about a crime epidemic? And when does language marginalize people? These are all big important questions. They're nuanced. There's no magic bullet solution to any of them. But as a society we're tasked with solving these kinds of problems. And in my work I'm really interested in the metaphors and narratives that are embedded in these kinds of questions and that are embedded in the ways that we think about these problems. So when we ask the question how do we fight world hunger, we're positioning world hunger as an enemy in a war that we have to defeat. When we're fixing a broken educational system we're implicitly or explicitly thinking about the educational system as a machine or a vehicle that we can just fix. When we talk about a crime epidemic we're talking about crime as a virus. And when we're talking about marginalizing people we might be thinking about sort of people on a page. Some people are in the middle, some people are on the outside. So language is an important window on the world. In particular when we're talking about big picture sociopolitical issues. Those are issues that we have some direct perceptual experience with. We can see depictions of world hunger. We can see depictions of crime. But those kinds of issues are not the same as a concept of a bird for example or a concept of a tree. We can go outside and see trees and birds and hear them and experience them directly. And with these other more abstract complex sociopolitical issues most of the information that we get about those issues is through language. Reading the newspaper, hearing other people talk about them. So language is a primary and critical source of information about the world. And one way of thinking about the way that language works is that it just sort of describes the world. Describes our thoughts. It's a tool for communication. And a follow-up question might be does it shape the way that we think about the world? Does it shape our thoughts? And if so, how? So I'm just going to talk through a few experiments quickly that illustrate the power of language to shape the way that we see the world. Early work on this question was done by Elizabeth Loftus and Palmer in the 70s. And in this experiment participants watched a video of a car crash. And then they were asked to estimate the speed of the cars that got into the car crash. And they varied the verb that they used to ask the question. So one group of participants was asked about how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other? And other participants were asked that same question but with the verb collided with instead of smashed or bumped into or hit or contacted. And so there's variability here in the emotional valence and sort of the vividness of these verbs. And there's a corresponding sort of variability in the speed estimates that people are giving. So when a really vivid verb like smashed is used, people give a high speed estimate. And when a more neutral verb like contacted is used, people give a lower speed estimate. All the participants watched the same video. And at some level these questions, these verbs are all asking the same thing. Reflect on what you saw and just give us an estimate. But there's a dramatic difference in the estimates that people give. In my own work I'm really interested in the power of metaphor to shape the way that we think about complex problems. So I present people with narratives like this where people are exposed to one of two different metaphors. And most of the information in this report is the same but there's a different metaphorical frame. So participants will read something like crime is a beast or virus ravaging the city of Addison. Five years ago Addison was in good shape with no obvious vulnerabilities. Unfortunately in the past five years the city's defense systems have weakened and the city has succumbed to crime. Today there are more than 55,000 criminal incidents a year up by more than 10,000 per year. There's a worry that if the city does not regain its strength soon even more serious problems may start to develop. Participants read one of the two versions of the report either the beast version or the virus version. And then they're asked a simple question. In your opinion what does Addison need to do to reduce crime? And we've done this experiment with a free response format. That's how we started doing the experiment. And people would write things like well law enforcement should be strict during the justice system harsher and things like study the causes of crime and implement strategies to address the causes. And so when we were first starting to do this work we were just looking through these responses and two big categories emerged. So some people were emphasizing more enforcement oriented solutions and some people were emphasizing more social reform oriented solutions. And so we would code people's responses into these categories and then we would look at whether people who read the virus version of the report would give different responses, different types of responses than people who read the beast version. And we found that they did. So people who read that crime as a beast would tend to emphasize enforcement oriented solutions to crime, increase the police force, lengthen prison sentences. And people who read the virus version would give relatively more social reform oriented responses on average. So fix the educational system, create jobs for people. And so this was a pretty dramatic effect. One word difference in a crime report that had mostly the same information across conditions was leading to a 20 point shift in the kinds of suggestions that people were making. We also followed up using slightly different methods where people would evaluate specific policies as opposed to just responding freely. So maybe the metaphors would make something come to mind more easily in a free response format but maybe it wasn't really making people think differently and maybe it wouldn't affect how people would actually evaluate these policies that we provided. So we would provide some policies that were enforcement oriented and some policies that were reform oriented. People would read the same report, either the virus version or the beast version, and then they would pick one of these as their preferred method for solving crime. And using this multiple choice format, evaluating actual policies, we see the same effect. So the first two sets of bars are from experiments with a free response format and it's just showing the proportion of enforcement oriented responses. So people who read the beast version of the report are more enforcement oriented than people who read the virus version of the report. People who read the virus version are more reform oriented. Those are the only two categories that we're really coding. And we're seeing this effect using a variety of different methods. Another line of work that is related that I want to talk about briefly and then I'll unpack some of the cognitive mechanisms that I think are at play is some work I've done on obesity and looking at narratives for obesity. In the context of obesity, I'm going to use the term narrative rather than metaphor although I think they're very similar and we can talk about some of the similarities and differences. But there's a variety of very salient, popular narratives about the causes of obesity and some focus on the individual and limitations of an individual. So talking about being overweight as sort of a sin, a failure of self-regulation. And at the other end of the extreme, we also talk about how the environment can contribute to obesity. The new deserts and the lack of support, stigma associated with being overweight, those factors can contribute to obesity. And so we've run some studies that are similar in design to the crime, virus and beast studies where people read a narrative about obesity and then make some judgments. And in this study, the judgment that people made was about blame. So who deserves blame for obesity? And we had people answer questions that were related to individual blame and societal blame, environmental blame. So some participants read the sin narrative that focused on the individual. Others read a narrative that talked about overweight as an addiction, sort of a medicalization of the problem. A disorder narrative was sort of similar to that one. And at the other extreme was the environmental narrative. And what we see in this plot is that after reading a narrative that emphasizes personal failure, people are happy to assign a lot of blame to an individual for being overweight. And they don't think the environment plays a big role. At the other end of the extreme, people who read about some of the societal, environmental causes of obesity are showing the opposite pattern. So they're happy to attribute blame to the environment and are much more forgiving to an individual. In this study, we also asked people about their support for public policies designed to reduce the prevalence of obesity. And we looked at policies that were more protective, so education campaigns, treatment programs, as well as policies that were more punitive, so allowing insurers to charge higher premiums for people who are overweight, for example. And what we find is that this measure of blame, how people are thinking about who deserves blame for this problem tracks almost perfectly onto how they're thinking about these treatment programs. Sorry that this graph is a little bit tricky to see, but what it basically says is that the more that we blame an individual for being overweight, the more we support punitive policies and the more that we recognize the environmental factors that contribute to obesity, the more we support protective policies. And there's a growing stock of evidence. Lots of experiments now are showing the power of language to shape the way that we see the world. So one very positive line of work, in my opinion, is work by Carol Dweck, showing that talking about intelligence as something that's malleable, something that can grow, can really change students' thinking about education and the role of hard work and practice in education. There's a lot of issues, so addiction, some of the problems that I talked about in the context of obesity also apply to addiction. It's a stigmatized health issue. And talking about it as a disease is a really profound effect on how people think about addiction. Reduces stigma, encourages people to get help if they need it. Talking about cancer as an enemy in a war has become a topic that's garnered a lot of research interest recently. And there's trade-offs associated with this metaphor. So on the one hand, it seems to be very effective at raising money and grabbing our attention, and that's important. It's a really emotionally salient metaphor. War is a salient, attention-grabbing topic. But it's, as Susan Sontag sort of talked about in her book, and this is supported by her research, they can leave people with cancer feeling sort of marginalized. If cancer is an enemy in a war and a doctor is the person fighting that war, then the person with cancer is just sort of a battlefield and nobody really wants to be a battlefield. And the last experiment is a little bit raw, so I won't go into it in too much detail. But talking about immigration as a contamination in the nation's body has really negative effects on how we view immigration, and that's become a pretty prevalent framing recently. So language shapes what we see. It's not just a tool for describing reality, it's also a tool for thinking, and it affects the way that we think. How does language shape perception? That's the main focus of my lab, and I'll just talk about a few mechanisms here. So metaphors and narratives and even stereotypes, a big part of their function is that they ground the novel in familiar terms, and this is basically the process of categorization. So if I see an animal in the world and somebody tells me, and maybe I've never seen it before and it sort of looks kind of new, and somebody tells me it's a bird, well then I can make a variety of inferences about what that animal can do. And metaphors, stereotypes, narratives are culturally salient, familiar abstractions like bird categories or tree categories in some sense. They help us simplify and understand complexity. So when we talk about crime as a beast or crime as a virus, we're leveraging what we know about how to solve comparatively simple problems for the purpose of thinking about these more complex ones. So a beast problem is fairly straightforward. If there's a lion that escaped from the zoo and it's terrorizing a city, well we need to capture that lion and contain it. If we have a crime epidemic in a community, we're not going to capture and contain that crime epidemic. We need to diagnose and treat that problem. And so there's structure to these metaphors and to these narratives, and when we use them to talk about novel situations, complex sociopolitical issues, we're leveraging that structure. So one of the functions of language is to ground novel experiences in familiar terms. And another is that language guides our attention. It shapes what we see. It shapes the process of making meaning. So in this description of a crime problem that I started with, there's a lot of ambiguous phrases. So we're talking about how Addison didn't have any obvious vulnerabilities and how in the past five years the city's defense systems have weakened. And those phrases aren't necessarily calling out anything in particular. They're kind of vague. So what do they really mean? What does it mean? What makes a city vulnerable to crime? What does it mean to say the defense systems in a city have weakened? And what we're finding is that it really depends on the context in which they're used. So when a beast metaphor starts this paragraph, people call to mind the police force and the criminal justice system. That's what it means to make a city vulnerable to crime. A weak police force and a bad criminal justice system. But if people have just read a virus metaphor, the ambiguity in these phrases is resolved differently. People are thinking about poverty. They're thinking about infrastructure. They're thinking about education. And so the way that we're talking about problems is having a direct influence on those problems. But it's also shaping how we seek out other information and how we interpret other parts of the world, how we resolve that ambiguity. And in a follow-up experiment, one of the ways that we've tested that particular interpretation is just by moving the metaphor frame from the beginning of the report to the end. And in that situation, we don't get any metaphor framing effect. So when the metaphors are at the beginning of the report, we see people who read that crime as a beast are more enforcement-oriented. But when those phrases are presented at the end, there's no difference. When people have already resolved these ambiguities without the help of these metaphoric labels priming them to think in one way or another, the metaphors presented at the end aren't reshaping and reconfiguring those mental representations. So language guides our attention. Language also evokes emotion, and Loftus and Palmer's work illustrates that really nicely. So the verb smashed is just much more emotionally salient than the word contacted, and that leads people to give higher-speed estimates in that task. And the last point that I want to make about how language shapes the way that we think is that this process is often unconscious, so both in the production side and on the comprehension side. In the studies that we've conducted on crime, in some of the versions, we would ask people afterwards to identify the part of the report that was most influential in their subsequent judgment. So underline the part of the report that led you to give your suggestion. And people would typically identify numeric information. They thought they were being really objective. Only about 5% of participants would identify the metaphors having any influence at all in the way that they were thinking. So it wasn't a particularly salient feature of the report. In follow-up studies, we would ask a more targeted question. So we would ask people at the end of the study if they could remember which metaphor they got. And about half could remember, and about half didn't. And then we looked at whether we saw these framing effects among both groups. So we might expect to see the framing effect among everybody who remembered the metaphor, and maybe they're using the metaphor actively to think about these problems. But if people forgot the metaphor, it's really unlikely that they were actively using it to think about the problems, because we asked this question just sort of a minute later. And what we find is the metaphor framing effect among both groups. So people who remember the metaphor are showing an effect of the metaphor, and people who don't are also showing the effect of the metaphor. So at least in some circumstances, we feel like we have pretty good evidence that people aren't aware of the influence of language on the way that they're thinking. What about the capacity for language to stigmatize and to build compassion? So at a cognitive level, stigma communication creates simple categories, us versus them, and it assigns blame to them. It evokes negative emotions, disgust, anger, fear, and it has real effects on people. It generates negative attitudes. It isolates the groups and individuals who are stigmatized. On the other end of the spectrum, empathic communication at a cognitive level typically situates a problem in a broader, more complex ecosystem. It evokes more neutral or positive associations, and it engenders compassionate attitudes, connecting individuals and groups. So to conclude, language is a window into the world. It's our primary source of information about lots of really important socio-political problems. It shapes what we see. It's not just a tool for describing our experience of the world or describing what we're thinking. It actually metals in the thinking process, in the perception process. And it does this by grounding novelty and familiar terms, guiding our attention, and activating emotion, often unconsciously, which highlights the stigmatizing and empathic potential of language. Thank you. So now we will all watch what we're saying. We know the power of language. Thank you so much, Paul. So our next and final speaker is Dr. Holly Nyseth-Brem, who's a sociologist who has studied reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. She's going to provide an applied example in the context of post-genocide and the role that language has played in reconciliation on stigma and against those who have faced justice. So please join me in welcoming Holly. All right, good morning, everyone. Thank you all so much for being here, and thank you so much to the USIP for coordinating this fantastic event. As I'm sure you're all very well aware, during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of civilians essentially took up arms against their neighbors. They grabbed machetes and clubs, and they went out to hunt tootsie. And throughout this, upwards of one million people were killed and about 250,000 people were raped in about three months. In the aftermath of this horrific genocide, the government of Rwanda held people accountable by creating a localized justice system I'll tell you more about shortly. As you see in this photo, this meant that essentially Rwanda's incarceration rate soared in the aftermath of the genocide. Since then, people have steadily been returning home. Almost always they return to the same communities where they committed violence, and sometimes they return to the same village as their victims' families. The research project that I'm going to be telling you about is looking at this reentry and reintegration experience. And as was mentioned, I was asked to talk particularly about this as a case study. So just to contextualize it, the broader study, the study is seeking to identify three core questions. As you see appear, first, how do we theorize reentry and reintegration in the context of genocide? Second, what obstacles do people convicted of genocide face as they reenter society? And then lastly, but very importantly, what are the individual, family, community and state level factors associated with successful reintegration? Of course today, I cannot tell you about all of this. Instead what I'm going to do in the next 13 minutes is this. I'm going to start by telling you briefly about one of the core theories that guides this project. One of many, and I'm happy to talk more during our limited discussion afterwards about the other theoretical frameworks. Then I'll tell you very briefly about the context of Rwanda and about my methods. But just to preview that, essentially I've been following 200 people as they've left prison and returned to their communities. And I've also interviewed about 100 Rwandans about what they think about this reentry and reintegration and we'll be going back to Rwandan September to continue these interviews. Then I'm going to talk about three core insights as relevant to language. So essentially as relevant to our discussion today and then I will conclude with broader implications in particular. As you'll note, I have notes because I'm going to try very hard to stay with my 15-minute limit. If I'm speaking too fast, please just feel free to raise your hand. I'm going to try to get through this so we do have time for Q&A as well. So to begin then, I am a sociologist and a criminologist. And the good news is that criminologists have been studying reentry and reintegration for decades. Of course, it's important to note that political and biased crimes like genocide or terrorism are different from other crimes like homicide or rape or burglary. They do have a lot in common. Because of this, I draw from theories of criminology and one of the many theories that criminologists use when they look at reentry and reintegration is called labeling theory. Labeling theory essentially posits that labels matter. So how we label ourselves, how other people label us, this can influence not only our self-concepts but actually our actions and how we interact in the world. So put another way, people's identities and behaviors are influenced by the terms that others use to describe and to classify them. In our case, this is important because people who are labeled as deviance or particularly terrorists or generously dares often face new problems that are associated with this label. In societies that then stigmatize or demonize individuals with these labels, often these individuals face little chance at respect and reentry within mainstream society. And this is in turn important because these individuals can then turn to other communities that will accept them sometimes violent subcultures. So importantly, as we think about reentry and reintegration, we have to think both about how people label themselves and how they understand themselves and their actions and about how their communities label them as well. So as I mentioned, I'm looking at this in the case of Rwanda. I should have mentioned this project is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and I have a separate grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation that has basically enabled me to create a data set of all people who were tried for genocide in Rwanda. As you see in the figure here, about 200,000 people were found guilty of participating in the genocide, specifically in violent crimes against people. And about 6% of these individuals were women. You'll see the figure here, if you can read it on the bottom, it's fairly small but it says category one, category two and category three. So the first report system essentially split crimes into categories. Category one and two were violent crimes against people like genocidal homicide and these were met with prison sentences or with sentences in community service camps. Category three, the one where you see the very large bars, these were crimes against property essentially looting during the genocide. These were not met with prison sentences but rather with fines that are meant to be reparations. So for this project, I focused specifically on category one and category two crimes. As I mentioned, I'm following 200 people as they leave prison, so as I'll talk about in a moment, I first talked with them in prison in 2017 and I've been following them since their release. Of these 200 individuals, 180 were convicted of crimes of genocide, 20 were convicted of other crimes, more ordinary crimes if you will, like homicide after the genocide so I have a comparison group. I'm not talking about them today but I'm happy to talk more about some of the comparisons during our question and answer. As you see here, 19 of these individuals are women as women did also participate in the genocide and their sentences ranged anywhere from 8 years to more than 25 years. They are re-entering communities across Rwanda into both urban and rural communities importantly. Very briefly, I am talking with these individuals at set times, so as I mentioned I talked with them before they left prison to learn about their prison experience, why they did what they did, how they expected re-entry to go and then I've been finding them typically at their homes but sometimes at a neutral location if they don't want me coming to their homes, six months one year and two years after their re-entry and reintegration. I'm currently at the one year mark in particular and as I mentioned at the outset I'm also talking with community members so when I began this project I interviewed 100 people about what they thought about these people coming back to their neighborhoods and as I mentioned when I go back in September I will also be talking with people again. It's important to note that there's been a little bit of attrition interestingly in the ordinary crimes comparison group three people have recidivated and are back in prison, none of the people who have left prison for crimes of genocide are actually back in prison, an important point that I'm happy to return to later as well. So what I'd like to do with my remaining time is to tell you about three core insights that are relevant to our discussion today. As you see here, the first is specifically how the people I'm talking with talk about themselves. How do they label themselves and how do they talk about the violence that they committed? The second then is how their communities are talking about them. How do they label these individuals and talk about the violence they committed? And the third is a really important point about social factors that shape these narratives and shape the reintegration experiences of everyone in this study. To begin then with how people label themselves if terms like reintegration and re-entry are actually meaningful terms, they presumably are going to involve more than someone just physically relocating back to their community, but actually some aspect of symbolic, moral inclusion. When people return to society, often this means that they have some type of rights of passage. And a right of passage is basically a ritual that signifies a change in state or an age or something important in someone's lifespan. These are remarkably consistent across cultures worldwide. You can think for instance of bachelor parties, graduation parties, events and rituals that basically mark some kind of transition. When you think about people who are reintegrating following violent extremism you might think that these are particularly important because they allow someone to have a clear break from their prior life and a clear re-entry into their community. And indeed this is what I have found for some individuals in Rwanda. So some of the individuals that I've talked with have told me about how when they come home they were met with family dinner, community members came over and just welcomed them back. Many people have purposefully been given space at meetings to talk about what they did, why they did it, take responsibility, express forgiveness and remorse and talk about how they look forward to moving on. Just a couple of examples, one person talking about re-entering said it was a joy, it was a celebratory moment and people were happy and were very supportive. They brought maize flour from making porridge so really they were supportive and this was a sign that they were happy to see us back. Another person told me there are people that I never expected to help or to greet me and they did it. Neighbors would come with Fanta, some friends would come and give me small amounts of money. These rites of passage undoubtedly influenced how these individuals were talking about themselves and this is really important. One person shared this is an amazing situation beyond comparison to be back and also it kind of corrected my feeling people hated me. Many people time and time again had these narratives of redemption that drew a stark line between who they were during the genocide and in prison and who they are today. You see some of many examples here, I became a citizen again, many also said I became Rwandan again. You see I am no longer a genocide heir or I am a new person now. These are important and they point to a couple of important take ways. The first is the importance of first person or person first language. So you see this here, someone says I am no longer a genocide heir. While it can be tempting to call individuals who engage in violence a terrorist or a genocide heir, many people really struggled with that as it really placed the action before the person and they said that there is a separation between who they are and their actions. This is tremendously important and I heard this time and time again and it also lines with research on the importance. We have it here in the U.S. where there has been a movement to talk about someone who committed a felony, not a felon or not as an ex-con. This matters and it mattered in how they were seeing themselves. Many people also shared that they strove to engage in community activities that really align themselves with how they saw themselves. So for instance, they went to church, they went to meetings, they tried to show their neighbors that they were changed and they also tried to live up to how this changed. This is important because it signifies that communities have to have space for people to have this type of interaction in their communities. It might be voting to allow someone to be a protective and member of society, it might be community service, whatever it is, these communities do actually have to make space for people to be engaging in them and living up to this positive pro-social view of themselves. Turning quickly to some of the community narratives, how these individuals see themselves is undoubtedly influenced by how their communities see them. And interestingly we've talked already today about the allocation of blame and responsibility. Many of the people with whom I've spoken do take responsibility for their actions. But something that's very important to note in Rwanda is that there is also a very complex structural view of what happened during the genocide. So while people do take responsibility, many Rwandans will tell me when they talk about why the genocide happened, they go all the way back to colonialism and they talk about how Belgium essentially created divisions between Rwandan people. They also talk about how local leaders in the government really created a structure in which the genocide was possible, in which they encouraged people to participate and they created fear. This is really important and again while it does not necessarily take away the blame, it does allow people to contextualize actions and importantly communities to understand why people did what they did. This is important because they don't just see individuals as bad people, they can see them as good people who engaged in bad actions. And they can try to understand that these actions were shaped by a confluence of factors. Some individual and some motivational, but some certainly shaped by these broader structural factors. And this in turn humanized them as they were coming back. This aligns with Braithwaite's differentiation between the two types of people. The first one is reintegrative shaming. Reintegrative shaming is what we want to be striving towards. This basically reaccepts someone as a member of a law abiding community. And one of the four core aspects of this is disassociating someone from their actions and recognizing that good people can do terrible things often based by a confluence of their individual motivations and this powerful social structure. And this is really important in the narratives that we tell about especially in communities that are accepting people and reintegrating people who engaged in violence. Finally, and I'll try to go particularly brief so we have some time. I want to note that this is not monolithic. So often we talk about re-entering reintegration as if everyone who's doing this is the same. This is not the case and as a sociologist it's really important to note that your social locations, so your age, your gender, your SES, your ethnicity, this all shapes your experiences and it all shapes how people view you. In the case of Rwanda, please allow me to make two quick points and two examples here. The first is SES or socio-economic status and related power. As I talk about these experiences that people are having, the people who are being welcome, the people who talk about this as this great experience, importantly it's actually the people who are fairly poor during the genocide. These are people who are better able to lay claim to this narrative that there was this really complex structure and that the local leaders were encouraging them to participate. The people who are local leaders within the community do not benefit from this complex narrative and they are the ones that do not tell me stories of people welcoming them and they are having a much worse experience re-entering and reintegrating. Perhaps more importantly is gender in my opinion. The women in my study are frankly doing much worse than the men. Most of the men have spouses, most of the women do not have spouses that are far worse off economically. I think this is tied in large part to gendered ideas about who can and should engage in violence. In Rwanda, just as here and as most places, if not all places in the world, there's often this dominant idea that men are the ones who can engage in violence and that women who do it are somewhat evil or different. If you've all heard of the book Mothers, Monsters, Horses, I encourage you to check this book out in particular. In this case, the women are still seen as different, as evil, as bad. They're not necessarily benefiting from some of these narratives or some of these dominant views within society as well. To wrap it up and talk about a couple of takeaways, if you're going to take away something from these 15 minutes, first person, first language. As I mentioned earlier, it's tremendously important, albeit a little clunky, to talk about someone who engages in terrorism rather than terrorist or someone who engages in genocide rather than a genocidare. I've heard this straight from the people who tell me that this hurts them on a daily basis in Rwanda when someone still calls them a perpetrator or a genocidare and they're trying to disassociate themselves from this. Second, writes a passage in reintegration markers. It's important to mark these transitions. We have a lot of markers when people leave society, when they integrate into a violent extremist group, when they enter prison that really mark this transition, but we often fail to have markers at the other side. And many of the people in my study have told me that some of these small markers, whether it's a couple of Rwandan Franks or Afanta, really do something to actually help them feel like there has been a transition. The third point that structural narratives of violence can humanize people is tremendously important. And again, I have the caveat here that this doesn't take away their blame, but it does situate their actions within a broader social structure. A structure that we know is very powerful and exerts a lot of influence on individuals. And then finally, that reintegration experiences will vary by social location. So again, just a reminder that as we think about programs that aid re-entering reintegration, we have to be thinking about how individual differences, their gender, their socioeconomic status, their age, their ethnicity, are going to shape how they view themselves and how others view them in a variety of ways, and we must keep this in mind as we design programs. So with that, thank you so much and I look forward to our discussion. Well, thank you so much to everyone. This was an incredibly information and content filled hour plus, hour and a half plus. So we don't have as much time for a question and answers as we originally had hoped, and so I am going to abdicate my moderators prerogative by asking the first one and instead go to three questions quickly from the audience. I will ask that people quickly identify themselves and please limit it to a question. If it is a comment I suggest that you speak to our speakers afterwards for commentary. So please, we are looking forward to questions. Yes. Paul, you are outside of your lane here. So given what you have heard as we think about how we reintegrate people who have committed crimes in this country in your part of Ohio even, what have you heard today that you think would make the most sense guiding professional peace builders as we go forward? Thank you. Other questions? We are going to try and take three. Yes? Go ahead. In terms of reintegration programming, what would you say I think this is for Dr. Holly most pertinently, what would you say the biggest differences are in the program criminal justice reentry programs particularly for gang members or other violent offenders? What are the biggest differences between people coming from this context? Thank you. Is there a third? This is, okay, cool. So, yes, I definitely feel, just want to acknowledge that I do feel a little bit out of my lane. And in terms of thinking about specific sort of language in this domain about how people are reintegrated in society and the kinds of language to use, I don't know if I have a specific suggestion, but a lot of my work points to a basic distinction between language and metaphors and narratives that are simplifying. So, the beast example for crime is a really simplifying metaphor. It makes things fairly straightforward black and white and the solution is very clear versus more systemic metaphors, metaphors that situate a broader problem in a context. And so I think one of the takeaway points from the work that I've been doing related, that relates here, is to think about that distinction really situating a context is critical. A couple of things for the first question that was directed at Paul, I'll probably just add that I think in the US this complex narrative of the structural factors of crime I think could be recognized in the US as well. We know that people who engage in crime in the US are not just acting based on their individual motivations. We know that the communities there in matter. We know that a host of other factors shape this but often we don't talk about that when we're talking about the individuals and we just bring it back to the individuals. So whether or not the Rwandan government intended to do this when they talked about the genocide, I'm not sure but they did create this complex narrative that did recognize that it really is this interplay and I think that we could learn from that. For the differences for reintegration programming in Rwanda versus reintegration programming in Rwanda I'm not an expert on reintegration here in particular but some of the differences in Rwanda that I think have been striking one is that they're also preparing the communities for people to reenter. Often when we talk about re-entry and reintegration and we studied as criminologists here we're mostly still focusing on the individuals but not on what the communities think of re-entry and reintegration and in Rwanda in large part I believe because of the massive level of the re-entry and reintegration they also took the step to prepare community members to talk about the fact that people would be coming home to talk about what drove them to do what they did and I think this is a large part about why this re-entry and reintegration is at least in part working. I think this could be adopted in the U.S. I've heard of several programs that have done something similar but in terms of the criminological research I know there's not as much that really looks at the community. One other key I didn't highlight much in the talk would be the importance of jobs. So in the Rwandan context most individuals have a fairly agrarian lifestyle. We know that in the U.S. context when people leave prison when they leave any situation that left them away from their community that having a job is particularly important of course for their socio-economic status but also to help them feel like they're a productive member of society. So programs in the U.S. in particular emphasize the importance of jobs are really important whereas in Rwanda this frankly hasn't been as important just because most folks are farmers on their own land so I'm focusing instead on some of the other factors but will be remiss if I didn't mention the importance of jobs and similar factors in the U.S. So much. I'll take two more first. Yes. Thank you panelists. My name is Kyle Dietrich from Equal Access International. I'll forego the comment because of time but so do you have I guess Dr. Kuglansky, Shannon as well, anybody who's involved in kind of in the space. I'm curious examples. I mean our research identifies critical significance belonging all of these things agency as critical factors so if those are critical to engagement and I appreciate the framing around disengagement and not deradicalization because of different processes what examples do you have of effective programs that work to reintegrate or rehabilitate what we call off-ramping individuals that also are asset based right that still tap into that need for significance agency belonging etc and so we're not stripping away those critical pieces that led them into this radicalization journey that are potentially valuable for social transformation we're just taking away the violence and the chosen path. I'm going to take a couple questions. Thank you. Hello, Alex Snyder with the State Department one of the areas that we talk about trying to change the stigma is actually with governments themselves as we're trying to reform so as opposed to individuals sort of government actors whether we're talking about police officers, military officials, governments themselves as we're trying to reverse this history of being seen as predation I'm curious if you have any specific guidance or suggestions for changing that sphere. Thanks. Hi, Charlotte Cayman I'm with Navanti Group. Some of you mentioned the use of counter messaging to effectively take people who are already on this radicalization process and kind of steer them away from that path but for some of you who mentioned what do you do when there's no other place to go and you're already on that path can you speak to the effectiveness of counter messaging or some of the strategies behind it to be your people in a way and maybe take one more? The importance of the need for significance is great in the process of radicalization and in the examples that I know for example the Sri Lanka example of LTE the program equipped individuals with alternative means to significance through vocational training through a variety of domains through they endowed them with significance and show them a way of integrating into society through professional activity that are alternative to violence. That said one must not underestimate the importance of violence as a primordial means of gaining significance. So for example one individual who was well integrated he worked as a translator, was providing for his family, we asked him how do you feel now that you have integrated? He said I feel okay but I felt better as a fighter. I mean there is something about dominance that pervades the evolutionary world animals do it little children do it, sophisticated nations do it, there's something about violence that really requires a lot of effort to counteract through alternative means but these alternative means of professional activity and embracement by the community, the kind of integration that Holly talked about are critical. If you are integrated in a community, the community supports this alternative means of significance this is likely to be effective. I mean programmatically in America it doesn't really exist. I mean that there are NGOs out there and individual people out there doing the work of disengagement and reintegration but I mean we don't have an exit program in any real sense of the word and in terms of counter messaging I just did some work with one of the tech companies and working on some trying to identify some counter messages that are out there that might be effective and I think one of the things, I think it can be effective at particular points if you very simplistically look at the trajectory of radicalization as sort of like a parabola that most of our efforts are always focused on the vertex which is actually what I believe to be the most difficult time to actually get somebody to disengage so for counter messaging to be important it has to number one have it has to legitimize the grievances that are already being felt by the people who are beginning to delve into their radicalization process lots of the material that's out there particularly in terms of like the extreme right wing white nationalist space does not legitimize the grievances that young white men in particular in this country are already feeling it just blows them off so it misses completely the other thing is that it has to hit its target demographic if we're all just, I mean I'm a middle woman I have no business being on tiktok but there's counter there's counter content that can be hyper effective there because that is where young people are that is where that the bad actors are utilizing these spaces extraordinarily effectively to spread their messaging so we have to make sure that the content that we are putting out is hitting the demographic where and how they are consuming the materials in the first place and it has to offer and this is where counter messaging goes terribly wrong it has to offer an alternative pathway it can't just be like being a nazi's bad well we all know that most of us know that but it doesn't give them anything else to do to deal with the grievances that they have to find the meaning and a sense of agency that they have and so I think counter messaging can in fact be very effective at particular points along the trajectory but that it misses its mark overwhelmingly I want to also add to the counter messaging issue counter messaging would not be effective if it's disjointed with the general elements of radicalization as Sharon pointed out if the counter messaging is insulting the individual labeling them in a way that would be derogatory that's going to miss the point if the counter messaging is devoid from the support of the network it's going to miss the point so counter messaging has to be integrated with the other element it has to address the need identify alternative means of significance of fulfilling that basic motivation and it has to be validated by a group if you address the counter messaging at the individual whereas the group remains untouched the individual will quickly revert to the old way of thinking because individuals are embedded in groups and the groups are the epistemic authorities for their beliefs and worldviews so it has to the counter messaging has to be integrated with the whole panoply of factors that create radicalization otherwise it's likely to be ineffective just one example an attempt to radicalize individuals through a very complex theological arguments was ineffective because people who are radicals they don't really care about the theological intricacies they care about the needs of becoming heroes and the narrative is just a crutch it's just a rationalization for fulfilling their motivation so it has to be as I pointed out integrated it has to address people's motivation it has to be validated just a couple of other things to add then and the counter messaging point this is not my area but I would like to just briefly point out that the messages that people receive and the different types of violence we're talking about is quite different from what we're talking about in terms of the context of violence and the context of violence is quite different from what we're talking about in terms of the context of violence or can be quite different so in the case I talked about genocide actually the average age of someone who participated at the time was 34 which is much older than a lot of the ages that you're going to see for people who do participate in violent extremism and this is important because in Rwanda participation in the violence was framed as a way to stand up and to protect their families and their communities so this is a very different message that people might be getting in other circumstances so I just want to add a note to pay particular attention to the types of messaging that people are receiving because this is going to vary whether it's terrorism or genocide or a different type of crime on the question about governments I must admit I don't have a great answer but I have a couple of thoughts as I mentioned in Rwanda the local leaders who were part of the government are not having great re-entry and reintegration experiences and I think this is in part because this dominant narrative of the violence really does not talk about the structural factors that were at play for them but really places a lot of the blame for the genocide on them I do think that sociologists of organization could tell you that bureaucratic structures are tremendously powerful as well so there is space to talk about the different structural factors that shape leaders actions or shape the actions of police people or others who were engaged in the violence the other thing I'll note about the case of Rwanda is that they made a concerted effort to involve police to involve members of the government in the transitional justice process and many of the people that I spoke with in the aftermath of the genocide said that they didn't trust the government at first but then they were able to engage with people at a more local level within their community and that this helped them to regain some of the trust in the government to add on the government point one of the things that struck me as important related to that is sort of a leadership issue so if the leadership really believes in the government and the power of the government to effect change and do good you're not fighting such an uphill battle and it seems like there is a big uphill battle to fight right now in terms of the language I could certainly imagine narratives that emphasize the relationship between the people and the government and government organizations and how government organizations really are just people representatives of a country and emphasizing that could potentially break down some of these us versus them barriers so I was going to take another round of questions but I recognize we are already over time so I'm going to take this opportunity to first of all thank my incredible team here at USIP starting with Chris Bosley, Michael Darden and Desmond Jordan whose brainchild this event was and have brought it together seamlessly thank you so much for all of the hard work you've put into this and second thanks to all of my incredible experts that have joined us today who have imparted incredible amounts of knowledge and information for those of us who are working on violent extremism every single day we have lessons and cross comparative studies that we need to be bringing to bear into this wicked problem so thank you and on behalf of USIP thank you for everyone who has joined today and look forward to participating more in the future thank you