 I think we're about to get started. So thank you all again for joining us today on Resolve's third annual global forum. We're really excited to have you here and I am very excited to be able to introduce our next salon session. So my name is Katera Arya Ineshaad and I am a research associate and project manager for the Resolve network. And over the past year I've been helping to coordinate our newest research initiative in LinkChat Basin. So in 2017, in partnership with USAID, Resolve embarked on its second research fellowship and exchange project to better understand the politics of religion in higher education in Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria. This is a subject that's often talked about in CVE circles but not very fully fleshed out I guess in the research. So in order to illuminate and bring up local insights to better inform policy and practice, we embarked on a three country case study with our research teams here and our research advisor, Dr. Jacob Uro Uro Jacob. So to present the findings from their research, I would like to hand over the time to them and Dr. Jacob who will be facilitating the discussion and also give them all my thanks for being wonderful partners in this effort. Thank you. Thank you so much Kat. Kat and the entire Resolve team have worked really, really hard on this research and the findings are really, really interesting. So thank you so much for coming out for the saloon discussion on the LinkChat region. May I get the researchers, the fellows and the principal investigators to please introduce themselves starting with Dr. Dama. Good morning everybody. Yes, all right. Research is mainly based on comparative religion and politics, mainly religious identities and ethnic identities both in Cameroon chat and Nigeria. My involvement in this research is mainly dealing with the regulation of religion in higher education, mainly how university students can be through higher education counter to violence extremism. This was the main research problematic we were dealing with, with Professor Brandon. Hi, I'm Dr. Brandon Kinhammer from Ohio University and I was the principal investigator for the Cameroon portion of the project. Hello everybody. I'm Dr. Medina Sabdelaziz. I'm the research fellow for the Nigerian country study for this research. I'm from the Nigerian Defense Academy. Good morning. Abdullah Sunay. I am a principal investigator on the Nigerian case and I am senior research fellow at the Zensko Moderna Orient in Berlin. Good morning. I am Orinati Remadi. I'm the research fellow for chat and I'm working for a Chadian, small social scientist level called Sand Research and Anthropology and Science Human Crash. And I'm also lecturing at the Department of Anthropology at the Jamena University. And I'm Daniel Isengar. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Quebec in Montreal in the Centre Francaupé and I was the principal investigator for Chad on this project. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let me stay with you Dan and Romaji. Can you tell us the core findings of your project in chat? Yes. So thank you. I may start. I think that we came out with some three main findings and seen as we have been working on secularism and the way secularism is implemented within the higher education sector so what we came out with first is that there is a big ambiguity related to the way secularism as such is accepted in the country in general but also the way it's accepted within higher education and even the way it's implemented within the curriculas and also the way faculties are organized. And second, we also came out with the fact that in the country when talking about secularism or when talking about language for teaching or administration within universities we have a big overlap of language issues and religions. This is to mean that most of the time Arabic and French are dividing universities so dividing students and the faculty members but also are provoking kind of two different curriculas within the same system and so most of the time you have the departments or the students divided following religious languages when it comes to Francophone departments or Arabic department most of the, or totally all the students from Arabic departments being Muslims the same thing for the teachers etc. So this is to conclude and to end up to Dan we come out with the fact that the state despite his secular agenda is unable to implement on the field a secular teaching curricula and the rejection of secularism as an idea is growing so within Muslim communities mainly. Yeah, perhaps I'll add just a little bit of context to say that one of the main objectives of the study was to get a handle on the different debates over the role of religion in the public sphere and institutes of higher education whether they be public universities private universities teacher training colleges or cultural centers across the region are important places where those debates are taking place and so what ended up coming out exactly what Ramaji was explaining is that you have different cleavages or groupings of people based on a variety of different socially constructed identity factors that kind of create a positionality in those debates and the state is both an actor in those debates but also something that structures those debates and so that's really what we've tried to capture in our findings. Did your findings surprise you at all? Yeah, I mean it's a little surprising because when you just consider the idea of secularism being enshrined in the constitution so it's surprising to come on the field and see that actors that normally are controlled by the main state are able challenging this secular agenda but at the same time it's not that surprising because if you see the structure of the state and the way the state is implementing on the field all its agendas this is not that surprising and at the same time to finish you can also see that this is not too much surprising because the state is playing a game with religious actors giving them more room on some issues refusing rooms on some issues so those people in in turn they also play the state to fulfill their agendas so it's a little surprising but not that much. Yeah, I think I would simply I agree entirely there are some surprising elements and unsurprising aspects it's not surprising to find out that there are debates over the role of religion and the public sphere it's not surprising necessarily that there's an Arabic and French division in that debate but what was surprising is how actively engaged some religious leaders on university campuses depending on their affiliations are being are shifting their stances appropriately to try and pressure the state in different directions I'll come back to you a bit later on because you've raised some very important issues now, Adama and Brandon can you tell us a bit more about the research in Cameroon and some of the co-findings Sure, so the top-line finding of relevance for policy makers and practitioners is that there's very little evidence that VE organizations are active on Cameroonian campuses that they're recruiting we don't see a lot of evidence for VE support among Muslim college students but what we do find is that increasingly as the Cameroonian war on terror has progressed and as there's been an increasing securitization of Muslim life particularly on campus we do see that simmering tensions and conflicts and resentments about Muslim access to higher education about the inadequacies of the primary and secondary school institutions in Cameroon are starting to bleed into campus life that increasingly particularly for Muslim students who are on non-Muslim majority campuses in the southern part of the country that there's a perception of government wariness towards them, a perception that they are increasingly perceived as being potential VE actors even where there's not a lot of evidence that that's the case this is undermining confidence in the sense of fairness and balance that's implied in Cameroonian secularism so like Chad, Cameroon has this francophone heritage of Laicite that nominally suggests the separation between religion and state but that in practice is often I think understood by a lot of Cameroonians as a promise that the state will be fair and balanced in the way that it manages religion and there's an increasing sense among Muslim students that that's not how it's really playing out for their experience. They see campuses as places that are Christian spaces that are difficult for them to get equal treatment on we don't think that these are likely to manifest as VE dynamics but they do produce really challenging political consequences that we think undermine potentially the ability of the Cameroonian state to fully incorporate those students into public life later on Romaji? Sorry Adama What Brandon was saying is that daily reality we are facing in our campuses as far as religious regulation by the state is concerned there is a duality in the state discourse that they are against any financial or political support of any religion be it Christianity or Islam but when we look at on the knee since the prayer stand is from Christian origin there is a kind of state support on the knee to Christianity on the campuses compared to Islam and those are the sources of let's say not conflict but tension between Muslim student union and Christian student union and this is really difficult for the state to solve the issue as far as the management of the universities are concerned because Christian students are receiving a kind of foreign support from Christian organization outside the country Muslim students are receiving almost the same support from Muslim or Arabic countries but the state is denying the Islamic support in order to promote Christian support upon Muslim students and this is really difficult situation in Cameroon actually. Did you notice this contributing in one way or the other to maybe extremist opinions on campus? So one of the interesting things that you note on Cameroon universities is that there's not nearly as much intra-Muslim conflict to visible on campuses as say in Nigeria I know you guys are going to talk about that and a lot of that really does come down to the role that the state plays in regulating not just religion but civil society more generally there's really only one Muslim students association that's registered with the state and has the ability to kind of manage religious life on campus for Muslims and that sort of need to work with the state to be visible to the state to be legible to state authorities diminishes a lot of Sufi Salafi conflict, it diminishes a lot of Sufi Salafi conflict, it means that the Muslim students really sort of put on a brave face in front of the state how deep that reconciliation is to what extent that's masking sort of deeper conflicts underneath I think is difficult to get at under the political context but once again we see very little evidence that what it's doing is leading to VE support I think that there's a pretty near as we could tell and we looked pretty closely near universal understanding that VE appeals are not particularly campuses are not amenable places for VE appeals in Cameroon now whether that's because Muslim students are resistant who show up on campus or because campuses are resistant that's harder to tell that's in some ways a different project but we really don't see a lot of evidence that VE organizations have a lot of obvious ways to make inroads the Cameroonian government's fear that that's true compounds other problems was this surprising though I mean I don't know that it's I mean I think it's surprising to the Cameroonian government I don't think it's nearly as surprising to us I mean these dynamics sort of play out in different ways in the different countries that we've looked at but I mean the idea that extensive state management control of religion has a range of impacts some of which are good and some of which are really problematic I think is not a surprise and so it's been good for intramuslim conflict on campus it's been bad for the situation of Muslim students who find themselves facing what they perceive to be increasing discrimination and lack of access interesting, Nigeria presents a much more complex case today let me invite Medina and Abdelahi to tell us more about the Nigerian case to then we go findings yes so the Nigerian case is somewhat complex because it's kind of similar to what the Chadian research finds in some cases and also similar to the Cameroonian situation but also different in all dynamics and I'm going to start with the fact that just like in Cameroon there is no direct evidence or link to show that violent extremist tendencies are present on campus especially because there was a lot of attention when Boko Haram started with understanding that it was some university students who had turned their university certificates to decide to join this group and that kind of placed an assumed focus on the fact that there might be extremist threats on the university campuses but the research that we carried out didn't show this direct link however from the research we realized that student religious associations especially the Muslim Student Association and the Federation of Catholic Students for the Christians these two groups and the other subgroups that they have on campuses have a lot of power and controlling influence and especially ability to control behavior on campus and this ability to control behavior, ability to influence their members to carry out agendas of this association is kind of risky as it is and then more importantly is that apart from the fact that they have power, religion is being used as a very vibrant resource on campus just the way it is used as a vibrant resource in the Nigerian society and it means that the competing factors that we have between religion itself like the Salafi Sufi competition the Sufi Shia competition that we have in the Nigerian society is also being extrapolated through these associations on campus and so this competition for fellowship competition for spheres of influence are also being played out on the campus and these are some of the risks that are beginning to play out they are not directly extremist but they also are risks that should be the attention should be paid to When I read your executive summary and the full report itself what surprised me really was that you did not find any evidence of linkages between religion on campus and violent extremism, Abdulahi did that surprise you? Not really I have been working on similar issues but in a different context in Niger but I also started some research in Nigeria and then looking at Zaria context the kind of configuration of religious organizations religious figures for example the Shia the Salafi so I already knew the significance of religion and religiosity as for example in the case of the student organizations these organizations are really socialization spaces and they really play a significant role but you can see it beyond so in a way that wasn't surprising to me but one element that was a bit surprising to me in this research was the role of the faculty members so we are talking about student religious associations but actually one thing that maybe get lost in this kind of terming or naming of this organization is the faculty members because these organizations are very much related to the staff I mean to the staff but also to the faculty members so they have this patron system they call it in the context of Hamadu Bandu University so and often one of the category or the main one of the main patron is really the faculty member which is basically those who are supporting these organizations in terms of financial resources but also in terms of getting organized creating opportunities for activities but also networking with other religious organizations beyond campus itself it's fascinating most secularization theorists would say that the advancement of modernity would somehow result in the diminishing of religion and superstitious beliefs in that sense an idea over the past few years Nigerians really advanced economically technologically in so many different ways and something you said which I found quite interesting religion occupying social space can you talk more about that within religion occupying a space that's beyond transcendental ideological meaning but maybe providing a space for identity for group identity of fulfilling social meaning I think what really what was clear and really what came up clearly in our research is really that kind of there is that transcendental dimension of religion and identity but really what you see with these organizations is the social dimension the kind of the way religion offers opportunity to come together to opportunities for grouping for being for me a social group in a context where I have to say grouping is really important so you have to find which group you belong which organization you belong to so that is really something that religion helps to do on the specific context we conducted this research and I think I would also want to take it from what Abdullah said is the fact that in Nigeria as it is it is very not religious in the sense that everybody does some practical consistent worshiping one in the fact that religion is now such an identity tool that groups can mobilize as it is in order to achieve specific aims and in the context of this research that was done on campuses these religious associations have mastered the art of mobilizing religion transcending religious roles and carrying out activities that go beyond their expected roles as religious associations and this activities basically place them in the heart and purview of the students so much that they become so influential in galvanizing either support or galvanizing views to support their agendas so I think also apart from the fact that religion is an identity tool more importantly is the ability for these associations to mobilize religion for their goals now that's quite fascinating although you did not find any evidence of connections between religion and extremism on campuses there in Nigeria what happens when religion is mobilized as you said what happens when a strong leader emerges what happens if there are grievances strains political opportunities emerge did you consider that so in the research there are two distinct examples that show what happens when first religion is mobilized for goals and this happened in the Mautech issue Mautech is the medieval Adama University is located in the northeast of Nigeria and here it was a simple case of a campus election which was supposed to lead to the emergence of a student union president but a Christian student had emerged as the winner and the Muslim group refused to accept this leading to violence and campus leading to the death of one student and the closure of the university so eventually when grievances kind of trampled upon like you said religion is the grievances are aggravated the first result is that it would lead to violence and campus which is one of the risks that needs to be mitigated the second is with the emergence of leaders as you said most of these associations especially in Amadwe Lo University they pride themselves as being spring boards where most of the leaders of the country is like a practice board if you are a student leader of the associations then it seems like it's much more possible that you become a political figure in Nigeria and it is true because they have a lot of alumni most of their patrons are also former members of the associations when they were in the universities and that's why they still have this link but this ability to prepare students as leaders played through in the emergence of Ibrahim Elzakezake who is the head of the Shia group he was studying economics and it was a time when he was a student that he started to promote Shia ideas and because the university was of us to any kind of ideology which they do not see as nominal as it is right now but he emerged and then he was expelled but this did not stop him from starting the Shia organization right now with a strong presence in Zaria but contemporary the Shia is becoming targeted for different reasons some organizations think they are extremists using that in quoted inferences like it's possible like you said for a leadership for organizations that are not nominal to emerge in this kind of spaces and it is also possible for leaders to emerge in this kind of contested spaces interesting so just if we think about this as a CVE issue one of the things that comes up in all of our research is that in all of these countries the state plays a fairly big role in trying to manage what religion is like on campus state recognizes these organizations in some cases it provides them with funding it makes it difficult for other organizations to emerge it really is this desire to sort of centrally manage to a certain extent the role of religious expression and what emerges is a clear pattern across all of these cases is that this is not a successful operation we still see religious violence in Nigeria on campus in fact religious violence is somewhat more common on campus than it is off campus we see conflicts in Chad we see resentments in Cameroon and it's really not at all clear that there are the institutional mechanisms on campus beyond the sort of simple fact of attempting to control what organizations exist and who their leadership that really allow religious communities to solve these problems practically and so we think about what sort of CVE programming would work there is this sort of tendency to think about it in terms of oh we need peace building or we need messages of tolerance and really what comes across in all of these instances is that there are not places for these organizations to sit down in workout access to campus to work out where we're going to how we're going to do this balancing these things come out because the states all sort of assume that these things are taken care of by making sure that these organizations are formally represented rather than it being a sort of a space where these things can be worked out in practice there are not a lot of places on campuses in the Lake Chad basin where you can work out religious conflicts privately or before they pop up onto campus life Abdullah what I wanted to add to what Medina said is yeah of course there is no direct link between in our findings we didn't really see any direct link between these religious activities or religious association and violent extremism but there is something also which is which needs to be kept in mind is really religion has become a source of conflict and it's really a site or a reason for a lot of competition on campus or friction confrontations even so you think about for example the opposition between the Salafi and the Sufi the Tijania in particular over let's say the control of the mosque or competition or rivalry about okay the resources because students are supposed to pay basically religious fees or fees that later on go into the hands of the religious association so in the case for example the Muslim students so the fees those resources go into the hands of the MSS the Muslim Student Society but the Timsan which is the Tijania organization doesn't get any of those so they have grievances so they are asking themselves what is MSS doing with those resources so those are the kind of situations where though there are no direct relationship between these kind of activities and violent extremists we found that those could be enough reasons for radicalization on university campuses in particular the Hamidu Bello University and I think sorry Jacob and I think to kind of put together the point that Brandon and Abdelay were making is the state would find a way to influence Japanese and Campos but most times they do it through the university authorities themselves and the positions that are taken by university authorities sometimes and in the case of ABU also influence the competition and the grievances so for example in ABU the university has chosen to recognize only the MSS as the single Muslim Association Muslim Student Society as the single Muslim Student Association on campus when there are in ABU alone 17 other Muslim religious associations that are not recognized and Timson which is the Tijania Muslim Student Association is one of them there is the association for the Shia Muslim students too so the decision to recognize only one association which is accused of being Salafi as it is is to the detriment of the other associations who are now having to compete with MSS for the control of the mosque for the use of the mosque for the control of finances which goes directly to the MSS and the position that the university authorities have taken to recognize just one association is detrimental as it is especially when you compare the position of ABU authority to school authorities University of Ibadan who recognize that there are seven different student religious associations giving room for everybody to be expressing with their views giving room for everybody to have access to basic amenities as religious associations so just like the state I would say also the role played by school authorities university authorities also needs to be organized so it's the idea then of creating sort of a multi-dimensional space for various religious identities to be and to exist let me come back to you Remaji and Dan what then do you think in the case of chat what are the possible stimulations what are the possible strains maybe at the macro level that can lead to extremism what are those triggers that can lead to violent extremism what did you observe well I think one of the big things that we walked away from and I guess maybe I should preface this by saying something that surprising is maybe not surprising now is that we didn't find this linkage between university campuses and violent extremist groups but something that is there is the potential for other cleavage and grievance to develop across the lines of language in particular and that has to do with the fact that certain resources are given based on universities that are there's a university that's primarily Arabic speaking right and so resources are directed toward that university differently than they would be in another public setting university which is primarily Francophone then in other public universities you may have a department of history or some other discipline and you'll have faculty members that teach in French and faculty members that teach in Arabic but the administration at the university level has one person in charge and they'll either belong to one group or the other and then of course opportunities for teaching opportunities for resources opportunities for research they end up being perhaps unfairly distributed and that leads of course to a mix of cleavage and grievance within those groups and it doesn't help to establish aspects of collaboration or negotiation over those grievances like we've talked about in some of these other cases I don't know if you want to add something Romaji? Yeah I want to add some little thing it's about the way the state is controlling the universities and one of the reasons who made the fact that we didn't find very close link between VE and the campuses is also the way the campuses are managed by the state you know in Chad as they have been explaining in Nigeria in Chad there are no possibility we have what the state called the official trend of Islam in the country being here the Tijania and so there's no place for the other trends to enter the public sphere officially and so on the campuses there is no possibility for teachers when they claim being not Tijani or even for the students there is no room for them and so on the campus it's very difficult to make a clear link between VE and the campuses because people want play a role that allowed them being part of the system but what we should be what we should care about is also what is going on besides the universities because if those people they don't have voice in the official life of the campuses at the same time they can study abroad in other universities and get back in the countries they have a lot of associations although they don't have official part in the debate they are growing this may be something that may end up in more radicalization because they are not given part to the official debate and so we have associations one of the associations called Ansara Suna who is a quite solid association who receive a lot of funding from other countries that are doing a lot of activities but this association is not allowed to enter the public sphere being the universities being the medias but at the same time the influence is growing in the country so I'm sure that even though students don't play the appartenance to such associations I'm sure that behind the university they are getting more and more close to those kind of association so this is something that we should also care about interesting so for the policy makers in the room the practitioners in the room what recommendations do you have Brandon and Adama if one is interested in undertaking any programming or intervention or even research in Cameroon as far as the Cameroonian case is concerned I think the state must be fair to religious leaders or to religious associations when it comes to Islam we have northern Cameroon which is portrayed as being Muslim part of the country and we have twice curricula one from Islamic studies and the other one from standard official let's say western studies and those two types sorry those two types of educations posing a kind of conflictual issue in higher education students can register from primary secondary schools until GCEA level in Islamic studies when they are to enter university they cannot find the same curricula they have to shift into western education and this is really conflictual for more than 30,000 students why? because they cannot face the same language of education which is French or English while they are coming from Arabic speaking background this is first problem the second problem is that the type of Islamic education they received so far was authorized by state but this type of education cannot lead to professional integration in the national sphere so they end up without any job at the end of their training without any future in this type of system in this type of government and they still look at the other side how the government is implementing a policy to help Christian students, Christian associations so the claim is now if the state fail to be equal to both religious sides let Muslim students also have their own university a Muslim Muslim university in northern Cameroon the state is not against the government is saying we are ready to provide you an authorization to open your Islamic studies to your Islamic studies your Islamic university please but the initiative must come from the community don't expect any financial support any political support from the government because we are dealing with a laicite kind of secularism in Cameroon so the Muslim society and Muslim students are waiting the government to give them a floor to have a kind of equal visibility at the local level and at the national level without being fair to those communities I think the government will be complicating the situation of religious identity or religious understanding in northern Cameroon compared to the rest of the country Interesting, what spaces are there Brandon for possible programming or intervention? So again one of the persistent things that we see is that even for former students, current students who lack access who struggle with employment afterwards there just doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that VE is an attractive alternative for them this is the good news, it means maybe that there's not a ton of need for what you would think of as traditional CVE programming on campus however with the securitization of Muslim experiences in Cameroon, with the ongoing war on terror there is a persistent underutilization of the resources that exist on campus that could be potentially useful in a broader CVE terrain in Cameroon, right? So we think about Kamsu, the Muslim Student Union the one Muslim organization that they recognized on campus when we talked to their leaders they were very eager to be involved in CVE style work not just because they see VE as a problem in Cameroon, but because they also recognize that doing so would help to sort of inoculate their position with the state they could say we're involved in CVE works we represent the sort of mainstream position of students on campus there's not a VE problem on campus perhaps this would lead to more resources but it's been hard for them to break into that, right? There's a real need I think for international partners to engage with Muslim students on campus not as a problem or a potential risk but as a resource moreover, and I think that this is another issue that comes up in our own research too, is that there are a lot of sort of broad resources on campus people who want to get involved researchers, faculty university administrators who recognize that there's a VE problem in Cameroon would like to get involved but they're not really able to participate as full partners because they're not able to access the CVE research, they often lack the sort of methodological training to do the kinds of projects that we've been able to do and they're often engaged with again as potential the participants rather than resources and so they need to be able to bring them into offer training not just to sort of run another set of workshops where we can take photo ops but to really sort of engage in finding ways that they can be participating in building CVE knowledge to bring them in as equal partners in this work would take advantage of what they're able to offer in a way that really has not been leveraged so far we didn't find a lot of evidence that there had been more than a kind of shallow engagement with those Muslim intellectuals, with those Muslim university faculty and researchers and that's something that we see as a real potential next step Thank you Abdelahi, what do you reckon are the greatest opportunities or spaces that are available for programming or for the research? I think for me the major place where focus of programming especially policy programming needs to be focused on is identifying who exactly are the major influencers that can actually affect behavior and for me especially with this Richard it has to be the associations but more importantly is that we it's kind of good to play safe right now because we say there are no direct links between what is happening on campus and violent extremism but most of the students don't even would not recognize violent extremist leanings if it comes to them right now and I think that there needs to be some kind of preparation for them to understand this extremist leanings to understand how programming for violent extremism can be expunged to students to understand and be prepared for this kind of programs for this kind of leanings to them when it comes it's more like knowing being prepared they do not have that and I think this is one of the areas where policy research or policy programming can be done but secondly also is to look at funding that is coming to these associations from their patrons sometimes not just the faculty lecturers the faculty members that Abdelay mentioned but sometimes the patrons of these associations are politicians some of them are wealthy individuals outside of the university campus and it means that the ability for them to fund these organizations also would guarantee that they would get support from these organizations for whatever agenda they would have so I think policy research or policy programming also should look at where funding is coming to these associations and guard against the ability to use this funding to either funnel any kind of negative control or funnel avenues through which extremist ideologies can be gotten to the universities through this Abdelay let me be more specific with you what would you caution against in terms of future policy formulation what would you really caution against in this case don't bother about this area I think it's very important not to exceptionalize these organizations I think really looking at these organizations they are I mean when we look at their dynamics their competition the kind of revelries going on I think it's really important not to put them out there as really exceptional organizations so that would be my really strongest recommendations while dealing with these and that I think it should be a major element to keep in mind for policy makers so for example how they feel about okay the kind of unfair treatment they are some are getting from the administration or from the government or from the state those would be elements that should be taken on board well in terms of recommendations I think that the biggest recommendation I would make is that I think that inter-university and inter-department programs aimed at collaboration would be essential if we can start to bridge these divisions that have started to emerge around language and religion across different institutions that are really beneficial and there's a real desire amongst my Chadian colleagues to do research and to engage in projects and to have those kinds of opportunities and resources and so anything that can facilitate that from a policy point of view I think of a positive thing that could be something as simple as identifying different research centers that represent different linguistic groups and having them collaborate on a project together what I think that should be something that should be avoided I don't think there's any need for counter-messaging programming in the university institutions of Chad at least not at this stage and I don't know that throwing week-long seminars to bring people together around living together peacefully is something that's making a huge difference at this stage I think that really just brings together the people that are already living together peacefully I guess I can end on that somewhat controversial state Romaji Interesting I would say almost the same thing because the core issue we pointed out in our research is the overlapping of language and religion and to me the most important thing to do is trying to work in order to stop languages dividing people following religious lines and so the main thing to do is for me a kind of designing a universal curricula whatever the language Arabic or French the curricula to be the same and giving equal opportunity to all Chadians whatever the language is this is one and also is working you know to make those religious curriculas that are very tough actually in Arabic teaching universities to make them less obligatory than they are actually this also maybe a way you know to give equal chance for everybody whatever the teaching language is and the real thing to avoid is you know the about the role of the state as I said and people that may read our brief will see that the state is playing using identity markers mainly religion and other things the state is like playing a chess game with all those markers and it's about stop playing that game because people on the field they also have agency and so ignoring their agency and their ability to play also a game against the state this is also something very dangerous fantastic just ask you one question the crisis in the English speaking part of Cameroon did that affect your research at all or even the methodology you choose to adopt for the project did it come out at all yes as far as identity manipulation are concerned I think we are facing the same problem no matter how English speaking Cameroon would like to portray the uprising that's going on actually as the kind of separation from the former French type of state going from republic type of state to federalism still the government still manipulating the regional identity and that's what they don't want to hear they don't want to hear that we are English speaking Cameroon and we are French speaking Cameroon and within two type of positions there is violence actually as a matter of discussions there is no other negotiations than violence when it comes to Northern Cameroon it's not the same issue there are some issues of misunderstanding between local population local community and the state but there is no use of violence to explain their misunderstanding so the two issues can be put together as far as resolution of conflict are concerned in Cameroon in actual situation if I can add one thing to that I've told the story a number of times now since I've been back from Cameroon one of the things that we would hear occasionally as Adam and I would go out to do interviews with Muslim student leaders with Muslim organizational leaders was oh you're here to talk about extremism we should be talking about those extremists in the Anglophone part of the country and it's easy to sort of write that off as a deflection or ethnic linguistic chauvinism but I think it speaks to the degree to which a lot of Muslim communities in the actual Muslim communities in Cameroon feel very much like they are targeted as extremists that they are understood to be a potential problem or risk and there is this very clear desire to deflect that or to show that they're not the problem or the only problem now obviously this has the implications that Adam has suggested it makes it hard to bring Anglophones and Francophones together in Cameroon but it also they didn't come to that understanding by accident or in a vacuum it is very much the case that these communities have been treated as potential extremists and that's been a big part of the programming that's been run not just in Cameroon but that's been sort of implicit in a lot of international partner activities and I think our research really speaks to the need to find ways to engage Muslim communities in Cameroon that don't implicitly suggest that they're the potential problem Fantastic, thank you so much please round of applause ladies and gentlemen for the research Thank you, thank you I would say that the research report will be available sometime soon but currently the executive summaries and the core findings are currently available Thank you One more round of applause for Adam