 I'd like to now welcome our second speaker to the stage. Dr. Pamina Furchow is an assistant professor of conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University. Her research interests include political violence, transitional justice, especially victim reparations, reconciliation, and peace building. In particular, she is very interested in the study of international accompaniment of local communities affected by mass violence. Her specific focus is on the role of concept formation in the measurement and evaluation of external interventions and how local people can be included in these processes. Please help me welcome to the stage Dr. Pamina Furchow. Pamina Furchow, and I'm a professor at George Mason University, and I'm actually also a former senior Jennings Randolph fellow here at USIP, so it's really wonderful to be back. I'm going to talk to you today about a project that I've been leading for about six years called the Everyday Peace Indicators Project, and this approach was developed by myself and my colleague, Roger McGinty, from Durham University now in the UK. In order to address our concerns about measurement validity and concept formation in traditional approaches to measuring a difficult-to-define concept, such as reconciliation, governance, peace, justice, and violent extremism, the usual way to measure these kinds of concepts is to start with experts or scholars or in the cases of evaluation, which some of you may be more familiar with, program managers, usually sitting in Washington DC or London or capital city, far away from the communities where the research is carried out or the evaluation is carried out. Many of you may be doing that yourselves and very familiar with that process. So just to run through the process, experts come up with their own definitions for these difficult-to-define concepts, like peace or violent extremism in this case, usually based on broad theories that are meant to be applied in many different contexts around the world. And they use this theoretical definition to develop different signs or indicators to measure whether there is more or less peace or whatever social phenomenon they're studying, so violent extremism, for example, in the places that they're studying. They might use these indicators to develop a survey or then come up later with focus group questions or interview questions. These ways of measuring difficult-to-define concepts typically don't change from one country or another or from a region to another, definitely not from a village to another. For example, a survey in Colombia would ask the same questions in most cases in Bogotá as it would in Cartagena. So why is this problematic? Well, outsiders may not fully capture the concept in the way that it is being lived or understood on the ground, therefore leading to concerns about measurement validity or whether or not that tool is valid. They might not fully capture what the concept means at the community level, so at the village level or at the neighborhood level or reflect how the people on the ground understand it. Outside experts will have difficulty framing questions and indicators in a language that can be locally understood, so extra processes need to be taken in order for people to understand what they're talking about. So communities really are best placed to identify their own indicators of the social phenomena they experience since they're already doing this in their everyday lives. In other words, people are already using their own everyday indicators to determine whether or not they are at peace or reconciled or there's more or less violent extremism, for example. So why not gather those indicators and analyze them for policy use? So instead of letting experts decide what these concepts mean in different parts of the world, the everyday indicators approach starts off by asking people at the village level or the neighborhood level how they define them and then it uses their answers to come up with locally specific ways of defining and measuring these concepts. This process is also useful for planning and evaluation purposes of peace building related work. The process that we've developed involves four key steps. First, we develop the indicators through a series of focus groups by asking people what signs they look to in their daily lives to determine whether they and their communities are at peace. So speaking to individuals in focus group environments to really get the tangible signs, what are those signs that they use in their daily lives to determine whether they are more or less at peace or whether there is more or less violent extremism, for example. These indicators are highly localized and contextual. Here are some examples of indicators from past studies. So for example, in Atiak, Uganda, can the Bodaboda cyclists ride to certain areas? As you can see, it's very context specific, very almost anecdotal in some cases, but it's a local experience. And this one, when you dig a little bit deeper, you can see that it has more layers to it because Bodaboda cyclists who in Northern Uganda are the taxi drivers, right? They often ex-combatants, and so they're plugged into post-conflict networks. And clearly it makes sense that people are looking to them to decide where they can go and where they can't go, right? And we've done this study in other places as well, in Afghanistan with USIP. We did a study on violent extremism indicators where, I mean, lists and lists of indicators, but an interesting one that I saw was, and sort of related to radio, was TV antennas. Whether or not there were TV antennas in a village allowed people to have a better idea if there were a lot of TV antennas in a village, allowed people to understand if there was more or less violent extremism in that particular context. So as you can see, very contextual. Again, it's important to stress that what we're gathering are indicators that people are already using in their daily lives or what we call indigenous technical knowledge. So people are not inventing these indicators for us, nor are we asking people to create indicators for a particular project, for example, right? We are sourcing indigenous technical knowledge. So these are indicators that people already use in their daily lives. And what we are doing is not creating new indicators. We are sourcing them and then analyzing them and using them for policy guidance. Going back to the process, the indicators are then verified through a participatory process that involves the community. And this ensures that the indicators are as representative as possible of the community and also narrows down the list of available indicators so that we, first of all, have a manageable list of indicators, but also oftentimes in folks groups there'll be someone who comes up with a one-off indicator. But this process really narrows down the indicators and also creates a list that's meaningful for the community and representative of the community. These indicators can then be analyzed and also be coded into categories in order to help with planning and design of the projects. And so the individual indicators can be analyzed or it can be used for policy guidance, but also we also code the indicators into categories because it can be the problem rate that you maybe are not seeing the forest for the trees. And so in order to be able to, or sorry, the trees for the forest, anyway. Anyway, in order to be able to see a little bit of a broader overview, we can code them into categories. And we usually do that through process tracing of the actual indicators. So we create categories that are inductive rather than deductive. But usually those categories end up shaking out to be policy areas of interest anyway. And so then we can say, for example, one area is particularly concerned with issues to do with human rights whereas another one is more interested in security or is defining peace more in terms of development or whatever so that you can zoom out a little bit because sometimes it is almost too localized, right? So it's important to stress that the difference between the everyday indicators and regular indicators is that the indicators themselves can already tell us a lot about what peace means to people on the ground. And therefore it can be independently analyzed to guide programming. So the indicators themselves are analyzable. But then the indicators also provide the basis for questions that allow us to understand more about that concept in a community. And sorry, there we go. I was pressing the wrong button. So the indicators can provide the basis for surveys but also for questions or existing data. You can populate the questions with whatever data is available. We typically populate them into surveys because there isn't a lot of data available at the very local level. And so one way is to survey the communities over time with the indicators in order to understand whether they are at peace according to their own indicators and how that changes over time. And that's particularly also useful in evaluation. The everyday peace indicators approach is concerned with rigor, validity and reliability but it really also prioritizes local voices over external voices in the development and evaluation of programs and in measurement in general. Therefore we consider ourselves an approach to produce participatory numbers and statistics that work with communities to produce policy guidance in a language and a format that policy makers can use. So the idea being that we are galvanizing communities to really help work with us to produce numbers but include them in the process of creating those measurement tools, right? Where they're usually excluded in that process. They may be sources of information but they're excluded in the process. And so we're including them into that process recognizing that policy makers often have a need for numbers. So if you'd like to learn more about the project we have a website which you can check out everydaypeaceindicators.org. And you can also pick up my new book on Amazon which is here. And the book engages with the academic debates on concept formation and makes an argument for participatory numbers and the everyday peace indicators approach in particular. And it then goes on to make arguments about local level peace building effectiveness using the everyday peace indicators in a quasi-experimental design in villages in Columbia and Uganda. So thank you very much.