 Good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. My name is Ogeana Bogu and I am the director of the West Africa program here at the US Institute of Peace. We are humbled to welcome all our viewers to this important discussion on religion, identity and conflict in northern Nigeria. We had over 400 RSVPs for this virtual conversation, so obviously this is a topic of great importance and urgency. For more than three decades clashes between different ethno-religious communities across northern Nigeria have killed thousands, displaced countless people and destroyed livelihoods. Whether we describe them as inter-communal conflicts or clashes between farmers and herders or banditry and criminality, these conflicts have become increasingly violent in recent years and their possible religious dimensions have also gotten a lot of attention. However, the drivers of these conflicts are complex and span multiple overlapping cleavages related to identity, which includes ethnicity and religion, and livelihood activities such as farming and pastoralism. Addressing the root causes of these conflicts requires a more nuanced understanding of these overlapping themes. USIP is delighted to co-host this conversation today with our colleagues from Mercy Corps, a leading global research and peace-building organization. The discussion today will look at Mercy Corps' new USAID funded research and we will examine the complex linkages between the political, economic and identity-based conflicts that are driving violent conflict in northern Nigeria. We will also discuss the implications for policy and programmatic interventions. Today, we will also hear from practitioners and academics who are working in the field of religion and peace-building, as well as highlight some of USIP's research and data collection activities in these areas. I would like to remind the audience that you can join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag Northern Nigeria Conflict. I also encourage our viewers to send in your questions through the chat function. Before I turn over to the panel discussion today, I would like to call on my colleague, Mr. Mukhtari Shitu from USAID, to give some remarks. Mukhtari is currently the conflict program manager at the USAID mission in Abuja, Nigeria. Prior to joining USAID in 2010, Mukhtari worked as a senior political specialist at the US Embassy in Abuja. In his current position at USAID, he provides oversight to the agency's conflict mitigation and CVE programs, including the community initiatives to promote peace project, which covers six states across Nigeria. He has participated in designing and managing several peace-building projects across Nigeria and also serves on different committees focused on addressing issues of violent extremism in Northeast Nigeria. On a personal note, Mukhtari's home community in Northern Nigeria was also affected by two major violent conflict attacks in 2012 and 2015. Mukhtari has degrees from the Amadoubello University in Zaria, from Bayero University in Kano, and the School for International Training in Vermont. Mukhtari, I'd like to turn it over to you now in Abuja. Thank you so much, Oge, and again, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all our distinguished ladies and gentlemen that have joined us across the world. I also would like to thank the USAID, especially Oge, and Mexico staff and others who have assiduously worked hard to make these findings of the research available to the public. So, as Oge mentioned, my name is Mukhtari Shitu, and I work with the Peace and Democratic Governance Office under the United States Agency for International Development in Abuja, Nigeria, and I also provide an oversight function to the CIPP project which conducted this research. So, the question is, why this research? And this is the fundamental question that the research would try to answer. Thank you for your background, Oge, but looking at the recent intensity of violence in Nigeria is deeply concerning and sad not only to all of us ordinary Nigerian peacebuilding practitioners, religious leaders, human rights activists, researchers, and others. Every day we are enundated with news from Nigeria about how innocent people have been killed, communities displaced, buildings are razed down, and including places of worship, and also the means of livelihood that have been destroyed due to violent conflict. Now, this rising insecurity is polarizing communities along ethnic and religious identities and weakening the structures of democracy. And perhaps the most concerning is the fact that sometimes this violent takes ethnic and religious undertones. Some of the questions that came to our mind during the brainstorming exercise or sessions that we have with Mexico and those who have undertaken this particular research is that are these conflicts religiously motivated? Or are they driven by economic or political or social factors as earlier mentioned by Oge? Or are they motivated by the context or contestation over resources such as land and water point as manifested sometimes between farmers and imposteries? Or are there some underlying drivers of this conflict that are directly or indirectly exacerbating the mirad of conflicts? Or, if I may say at the end, are the combination of these factors responsible for this intensity in violence? So these are some of the questions that hopefully we've provided these answers from the research. But as a learning organization, USAID supported Mexico to conduct this research to better understand the causes or drivers of this conflict. And Ferrucul that equips us with knowledge about trends, dynamics, and actors that are involved in the company to help us understand, but also to help us in designing new programs or make adjustments to the current ones. It also helps to be accountable to the taxpayers what we're doing just to ensure that we're doing the right thing. I like one of the UICP's instructors said in one of the courses that I attended, without data we are just guessing. And data helps us to watch the road before we cross it. So this research is about making sure we watch the road before we cross it. The research findings today may not be able to answer all the questions that we have, but certainly will provide us with the much needed trusted information. And it can open up to several other areas that other researchers can actually integrate or find more data about it. So on behalf of USAID, I would like you for your participation. And I look forward to a robust and engaging conversation around this. And thank you. Thank you very much, Mukhtari. So now I'm going to turn it over to our colleagues from Mercy Corps for the presentation. So I will call on Emmanuel Obudu, who is the Monitoring Evaluation and Learning Manager for the USAID-supported community initiatives to promote peace project at Mercy Corps in Nigeria. Over the last 10 years, Emmanuel has been providing leadership in setting up M&E systems and an improving program performance through monitoring, evaluation and learning across several donor-funded projects at Mercy Corps and other international organizations. He is a certified project manager with degrees in psychology. Also joining Emmanuel for this presentation will be Dr. Ryan Shealy. Ryan is the Director of Research in Conflict and Governance at Mercy Corps. His research is focused on using mixed methods to design and evaluate programs focused on civic engagement and building effective accountable states. His academic research has been published in several journals, including World Development, Comparative Political Studies and Social Science Quarterly. Prior to joining Mercy Corps, Ryan spent 10 years on the faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he also holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University. So Emmanuel and Ryan, I'll turn it over to you for the presentation. Thanks so much. So what Emmanuel and I are going to present today are a set of the key findings and implications from a recent Mercy Corps report titled Fear of the Undone, which Emmanuel coauthored with our colleague Adam Lichtenfeld. As Oge and Mukhtari had mentioned, this study was motivated by recent trends in intercommunal conflict in northern Nigeria, which have become increasingly violent. In recent years, commentators have increasingly highlighted the religious dimensions of intercommunal conflict, suggesting that this violence is motivated by hatred and discrimination across religious lines. Other commentators have de-emphasized the role of religion and instead characterize these conflicts as a consequence of increased banditry and growing resource competition. To help fill the evidence gaps at the heart of these debates, we posed three core research questions. First, what are the main drivers and motivations for violence in north central and northwest Nigeria? Second, what are the specific processes by which religious actors, identities, and institutions catalyze violent conflict? And third, what mechanisms have communities used to prevent violence and mitigate religious tensions? I'll now hand it over to Emmanuel to provide an overview of how we conducted this research and what we found. Thank you very much, Ryan. I'll go ahead with how we undertake the research. To answer these research questions, we drew on multitude of quantitative and qualitative data sources and to examine broad patterns and trends in violence. We analyzed different sources of violent event data in 12 states in north central and also northwest Nigeria over the past 10 years. We complemented these analyses of violent event data with two phases of field research which are conducted in Kaduna and Kano states. The first phase used 165 in-depth interviews with key informants and local community members in both states to capture qualitative insights and the conflict dynamics, the processes, and pathways to violence. And also the second phase of the field research, we use the survey of 750 residents in 15 communities across the two states, that is Kano and Kaduna, and to quantitatively evaluate the factors that are associated with individual support for and the willingness to participate in violence. So what did we learn from the research? In this presentation, we want to highlight four key findings from our reports. First, only some violence has been inter-religious in nature and Muslims and Christians, they have both been perpetrators and victims of these violence. And analysis of data from Akled, the Council on Foreign Relations and Nigeria Watch indicates that from 2010 to 2020, only 9% of attacks explicitly targeted or were carried out by religious group and only 10% of those fatalities were ascribed to conflicts over a religious issue. This finding from the violence event dataset is supported by our survey data. The graph on this side shows that a majority of Muslims and Christians, the survey respondents, they say that members of both faith are responsible for violence in their area, as opposed to paining bling solely on one side. Okay, also we would like to see the second aspect of it, which is rather than being driven by religious belief or hatred, violence that falls along religious line is typically consequence of insecurity and the lack of social cohesion between ethnic religious groups. This slide shows the analysis of the survey data that shows that the more religious people are, the less likely they are to support or engage violence. And this holds across both Muslims and Christians faith. Okay, also instead this slide shows how the next slide which is talking about the key finding is the drivers of the violence. Instead this slide shows how insecurity and weakened social cohesion, they combine to lead to violence. An increase in perceived insecurity correspond with the 25 to 35 percent increase in respondents support for the use of violence and their willingness to engage in it. Meanwhile, a decrease in social cohesion, including intergroup trust is associated with a 43 to 60 percent increase in respondents willingness to endorse violence. The dynamic was echoed in our qualitative interview, including one of our leader that we interviewed who described this pattern saying, I call it share of the unknown, because people know they can be attacked if there is a crisis. Next slide. Okay, the third point here that I would like us to know is that why we did not find that religious belief or hatred is a root cause of violence. We did find evidence that religious identities that provide opportunities and motivation for both allies and ordinary individuals to mobilize violence. This slide illustrates both of this pathway of mobilization through examples from our quantitative, our qualitative interview. If you look at the first quote there, it talks about where they say most people in Kano are religious. The first quote shows how political and religious leaders, they intentionally politicize or they decide to enhance the salience of religious identity to spoil people to action, particularly around elections which create windows of vulnerability by raising the potential for shifts in power between groups. The second quote also, if we look at it, it shows how members of the public make solidarity claims to co-ethnic or co-religionist to Ghana support in a quarrel which can allow interpersonal district to escalate into conflict between our identity groups. Okay, the fourth point which is the last, although we find that religious leader, they can amplify conflicts, they can also be custodians of peace. This slide shows that severe respondents who say that religious leader helped to resolve dispute in that area, they're significantly less likely to support violence. This finding holds no matter how often people say that religious leader actually successful in resolving dispute. I will now hand over to my colleague Ryan to wrap it up here. Thank you. Thanks Emmanuel. So to sum up, the big picture takeaway from our report is that recent intercommunal violence in northern Nigeria is not simply a consequence of religious discrimination or persecution. Rather, our analysis indicates that the violence that we're observing is a result of a confluence of factors, including governance gaps, particularly in security provision, a lack of social cohesion and trust between groups, and the mobilization of religious identities by both elites and ordinary individuals. I'll close by highlighting two recommendations. First, we recommend a shift in how we think and talk about conflict across religious divides away from a picture of a clash of civilizations that is an unchanging root cause of violence. Towards an appreciation of the role the religion can play as a potential catalyst and mobilizer that interacts with the actual root causes of conflict in a given context and is deployed strategically by both mass and elite actors. Second, this shift in mindset and framing leads us to recommend a specific set of programming interventions to address inter-communal conflict in northern Nigeria. This includes interventions that focus on preventing the escalation of disputes into violence by training religious leaders in negotiation and dispute resolution, and paying specific attention to misinformation and disinformation within windows of risk, such as elections. This also includes interventions that address root causes by strengthening intergroup interactions and trust, particularly around natural resource management, and interventions that address governance shortcomings by increasing the effectiveness, inclusiveness, and accountability of security and service provision. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ryan and Emmanuel. Obviously, there's a lot to unpack over there, and I know that we will get a lot of questions during the Q&A, but now I want to move this from the research to the practitioner side, and I want to call on Kaltumi Abdulaziz. Kaltumi is the program officer at the Interfaith Mediation Center, IMC, based in Kaduna, Nigeria. Over at the IMC, Kaltumi oversees peace-building programs in six states across northern Nigeria and the Middle Belt. Kaltumi is often described as a youth leader, a gender activist, and a peace advocate. She has served as a resource person on these issues within Nigeria and across Africa, including in Ethiopia, Senegal, Egypt, and Mauritius. Kaltumi is also a member of USIP's Nigerian network of facilitators, NNF, which is a group of professional peace mediators trained by USIP to resolve local conflicts in their communities through nonviolent means. Kaltumi also participated in a recent USIP data collection exercise to help understand the drivers of conflict in the Middle Belt and not West Nigeria. She has degrees from the University of Abuja in Nigeria. So Kaltumi, as a practitioner who works on these complex issues across northern Nigeria, how has evidence helped to inform your work? Thank you very much, Oye, for the introduction. The insecurity in Nigeria, a lot of people believe has a multifarious and a multi-dimensional relationship with interreligious and ethno-relationship to historical tragedies, bureaucratic terrorism, and political quagmire. However, it permits me to share a practical experience my team and I conducted in Zanfra State, activity and conflict transformation. You know, oftentimes a lot of civil society organizations make assumptions of certain issues and also certain issues. However, there is need for critical analysis. When we are talking about the context of the conflict happening in most of the states in Nigeria, however, I'm going to be using Zanfra State as a case study as I earlier said. During this research, we made some observations through our correspondence and the fact is that these people are as confused as we are. They ask the same questions we are asking. They give us, they ask us questions like, you know, we are poor people, we are farmers, so we do not know why these marauders keep attacking us and killing us. We live peacefully with our, with this peaceful coexistence between the Muslims and the Christians. As a matter of fact, the Christians own, own majority of the medical store which we purchase our medications from. So we do not believe that this, you know, this violence has any association with religion or culture. However, we strongly believe that this is just, this has a political undertone or a divided rule tactics in such a way that at the moment where we are running a wave to seek places of perceived calm, there are people out there stealing our resources. They were precise to say our gold and there are sex traffickers who are taking away our girls. At that moment, the first thing that came to mind was, was this, who, who would have thought about, you know, some of these issues coming up apart from the physical aspect of the violence conflict. However, it is also very important that there is need for a power shift because it seems, it is obvious that the relationship between, you know, community members and their leadership is huge. The gap is extremely huge and this has also affected the security architecture in, in this, most of these communities. Coming through to also talk about the essence of humanitarian responses and also psychosocial support for most of the victims of this conflict. You know, a lot of these people, of these people are left to heal on their own. There's no any form of humanitarian responses so far from the data we collected and also there is no psychosocial support, you know, to assist most of the victims who are from a journey. And I mean, it is a daydream for you as a peace practitioner to talk about or to preach peace to these people when they are suffering in pain because these are people that have lost their loved ones, their means of livelihood, practically everything that they own. This is impossible. So it is, it is, it is very important that we begin to look into that, that aspect. Also, I would like to talk about supporting local ideas and content. I would like to suggest that as, as much as I am aware that most of us as peace practitioners want to support, you know, these community people, it's also important that we, we give them that, we give them an opportunity to own the process. Community, local ideas, you know, they should be part of the, the planet and the implementation of most of these ideas. Jerry's an African, I think that says that he who plays the pipa dictates, dictates the tune, meaning that majority of these victims are the ones suffering from the pain, you know, from most of the violence happening to them. But at the end of the day, they're not involved in the planet and implementation. If we begin to involve them in the entire process, we're not only building their capacity, we are giving them leadership role to be able to manage and mitigate conflicts, you know, facilitate community dialogue and also mediation processes. I would like to also say that the role of women in peace building and in post-conflict construction have, can never be overemphasized. Of course, this is also in resonance to the values expressed by UNSCR 125. And most of these women have critical roles to play at the community level, at their own level, serving the position of mothers, wives, daughters to majority of the perpetrators of this conflict. However, they're not involved in the processes. It is high time we begin to involve these local women, you know, to participate fully in the peace building processes and even including post-conflict construction. If possible, we, I would like to reemphasize that there's need for us to build on already existing structures that these people have at the community levels, structures such as early warning, early response mechanisms, and also alternative dispute resolutions. If we can build the capacity to be able to handle and own most of the processes, most of the processes of, most of these peace building processes, I have, it is, there are signs and hopes that most of this, most of the interventions will be more authentic and more sustainable. I would like to conclude to say that the current violence or insecurity in Nigeria is unpredictably predictable. However, one thing is for sure, the people are seeking for justice and there's a general saying that the costliest peace is cheaper than the cheapest war. So I think it's high time we go back to the drawing board to restrategize, do the needful in analyzing the context of this conflict and also providing local context and solutions to them. Thank you very much again. Thank you so much, Carl, to me. I think really highlighting the importance of understanding local context and inclusion. So I'd like us to move slightly out of the Nigerian context now and explore the general theme of religion and conflict or religion and peace building. And I want to call on my colleague from USIP, Dr. Jason Klocek, who is a senior researcher with USIP's Religion and Inclusive Society's program. He is also an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham School of Politics and International Relations and a faculty affiliate of the University of Notre Dame Center for the Study of Religion and Society. His research and teaching investigates political violence and repression with particular attention to the relationship between religion and conflict. He has published, his work has been published in several journals and in several journals, including the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and on many media outlets, including the Washington Post and NBC News Think. Dr. Klocek has degrees from the University of California in Berkeley and Georgetown University. So Jason, as we've heard from the presentation today, religion plays a complex role in conflict, serving as both an inspiration for violence and as a powerful force for peace. Given your work on religion and peace building, what can we learn from other settings that could be relevant to understanding the complexity of conflict in northern Nigeria? Jason? Thank you so much. Okay, it's a privilege to be part of the panel and tackle some of these challenging questions you just posed. I will start by saying I especially appreciate the opportunity to learn from and reflect on the really exceptional research conducted by Mercy Corps in partnership with USAID as well as from peace practitioners in Nigeria. As you mentioned, my expertise lies at the intersection of religion and conflict broadly speaking, rather than Nigeria specifically. So I thought I'd frame these concluding remarks in a way of setting the discussion in comparative perspective by posing a few questions. In particular, I want to draw attention to four sets of questions on religion and conflict that I find the Mercy Corps research inviting us to engage with and reflect on more deeply. The first is straightforward. What does it mean to say religion is part of a conflict? In some ways, the most intriguing part of the study to me is what the researchers didn't find. That is, they don't find a strong relationship between religious belief and support for violence. And as several panelists have mentioned, that stands in stark contrast to what we often hear in the popular media, which quickly frames violence in Northern Nigeria and other conflict settings as inter-religious. Not just Muslims versus Christians in Northern Nigeria, but Hindus versus Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Shiites versus Sunnis in Iraq, Protestants versus Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland. Subsumed in those narratives, though, are assumptions that differences in religious beliefs or identities drive violence. As a helpful counterpoint, the Mercy Corps research highlights far more earthly concerns, namely insecurity and the lack of trust driven by competition over resources. But the research does more. It also helps us move away from that rather unhelpful question of whether or not people are fighting over religion, and instead look at ways religion might shape conflict, even when not the cause. In the case of Northern Nigeria, the Mercy Corps research highlights how religion is providing opportunities for political and religious leaders to mobilize support in pursuit of other goals, political, economic, or personal. And we've seen that in many other contexts. During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the troubles in Northern Ireland are more recently in Indonesia and India. Sadly, there are too many cases for us to draw lessons from. And this pattern raises a second question, namely why does religion prove to be such a powerful mobilizing force? The main reason highlighted in our discussion today is the way it overlaps with socioeconomic and political disparities. And again, this is, of course, not unique to Nigeria. Similar patterns can be seen in the Philippines, for example, where poverty rates are double in the Muslim majority South and what they are in the Northern region, mostly populated by Christians. Political, economic, and social inequalities also define different religious communities from Iraq to Sri Lanka to elsewhere. But I'll ask, is it just this overlap between religious identities and inequality that makes religion such a powerful organizational tool? Is there also something about the emotive pull of religion, charismatic authority of religious leaders, and attention to other worldly goals that helps mobilize collective action? A third set of questions is inspired by the report's warning that continued religious mobilization could lead religion to play a more central role in the conflict. What would be the consequences of that? Will it lead to more lethal attacks? Or, as Mkhitary mentioned, will there be more attacks on places of worship or against religious leaders, which we've seen arise in since 2015? And will the violence become more intractable once religion becomes more central rather than remaining on the periphery? Unfortunately, scholarship on religious conflict provides little reasons to be optimistic, especially on the last question. Cross-national studies and case studies document the conflicts in which religion plays a central role, even when not the cause, tend to both last longer and be more resistant to negotiated settlement than other types of conflict. A fourth and final set of questions worth considering relates to policy responses, and here I'll be purposefully provocative. Most importantly, we need to ask how can we as external actors acknowledge and respond to religious dimensions of conflict without reinforcing and ratifying those divisions? A key recommendation of the report, as Ryan mentioned, is to identify and elevate religious peacemakers. But could such engagement not also make religion more salient? And how do we do that without instrumentalizing religious leaders ourselves? Moreover, and to Kaltumi's point, how do we enlist select religious leaders without exacerbating other inequalities, including gender inequalities, that cut across and within religious communities? Here I find the additional recommendation to conduct religious landscape mapping in Nigeria, particularly welcome. Recent work by USIP's Religion Inclusive Societies Program points to several productive examples of how to do this, including our most recent religious landscape mapping on Iraq. That said, the task is always far easier in theory than in practice, so we need to consider both the benefits and unintended costs of religious engagement. I'll conclude by apologizing for providing more questions than answers, but then again my remarks are inspired by what I see as the central strength of the Marseille Court research. That is a call to approach conflict in northern Nigeria and elsewhere with a more nuanced understanding of the religious dimensions and robust local knowledge. Asking the wrong questions such as does religion cause conflict or not will not only keep those productive steps moving forward hidden from us, but it could also lead us to do more harm than good. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Jason, for those remarks. We already have tons of questions coming in, so we're going to add your questions to that list too as well as part of the conversation. So as we see through the questions, I'm going to take some privilege as the moderator here and pose a question to Ryan and Emmanuel. So from your presentation and from the report, as we've discussed today, you recommend against thinking of religious animosity as a root cause of violence in northern Nigeria. Can you say some more about the evidence in your research that led you to this conclusion? Okay, thank you very much, Oge. Thanks for this question. We came to this way of thinking about religion as a catalyst or mobilizer rather than a root cause of conflict based on a number of strong patterns in both our qualitative and the quantitative data that we collected from the field. In the overall 165 in-depth interview that we conducted, the men and women that were interviewed, they clearly and consistently saying that conflicts can become religious, but in most cases they are fundamentally about other issues. And as a businesswoman in Kaduna state, she put in her interview that any little spark, people will attach it to religion. And also a youth in Karno state also echoed this idea saying that some people just wrap a dispute around religion so they can gain more support. And if you approach the issue with an open mind, most of the time you will just see that what causes the problem has nothing to do with religion at all. And overall, the central theme in our qualitative interview was that religion is characterized as a secondary factor which has other things that are interwoven with it, which include land and resource competition, insecurity, political competition, and also economic hardship like my co-panelists have talked about. Thank you very much. Thank you, Emmanuel Ryan. Do you want to add some points to that? Sure, thanks. So I'll just build on those examples by highlighting a particularly compelling quantitative finding from a small randomized experiment that we conducted within our survey. So in this survey, experiment respondents were randomly assigned to be read one of two nearly identical versions of a scenario featuring an interpersonal dispute with a shopkeeper and then were asked about their level of support for different kinds of punishment or retaliation, including nonviolent boycotts, recourse to government authorities, or using violence. So half of the respondents were randomly assigned to receive a generic version of the scenario or the control version. The other half received a treatment version, which was identical except that the shopkeeper was identified as a member of the respondents religious outgroup, so a local Muslim shopkeeper if the respondent was Christian, or a local Christian shopkeeper if the respondent was Muslim. The core hypothesis behind this experiment is that if violence is driven by interreligious animosity or discrimination, then respondents who received the treatment scenario that primed religious identity should be expected to favor more severe and more violent forms of retaliation. However, what we find is that respondents are no more likely to support a harsher punishment for the shopkeeper when he is explicitly identified as a member of the religious outgroup than when his group identity is not mentioned at all. This finding is consistent across Muslim and Christian respondents. This is not meant to imply, as Emmanuel said, that religious discrimination does not exist in the region. We certainly did detect some in our interviews, and we don't mean to say that it never contributes to violence, but the evidence suggests that in general discriminatory attitudes and behaviors are insufficient explanations for intercommunal conflict in the region, including conflicts that falls along religious lines. Thank you very much, Ryan. So I will go through some of these questions, and I also want to remind our audience that you can join this conversation on Twitter using the hashtag Northern Nigeria Conflict, and I do want to apologize in advance in case we do not get to your question on here, because there are a lot of questions on here. So I want to pose the next question to Kaltumi. Well, Kaltumi, Emmanuel, and Ryan. Kaltumi, you spoke about the data collection exercise that you carried out in Zamfara State, and that data collection exercise, by the way, was supported through the State Department's Bureau for Conflict Stabilization Operations. You spoke about the importance of engaging community leaders and including members of the community in the design process. Given that community leaders, CSO actors, and local government officials can be effective agents in resolving conflicts, did you find, and I guess this will go to all three of you in your interactions with different respondents, did you find differential patterns in the interactions of these, of elites, with elites? Thank you very much for the question again. Yes, you know, as peace practitioner, a lot of us have the professional experience of conflict analysis, peace building skills and ETC, but then when you go to the community level, they do not have some of these experiences that we have. However, at their level, they are already doing one or two things to solve their own issue, but oftentimes not resolved. So the question now bounce back to us as practitioners is, how can we develop models that local community members can use at their level to solve their own issues? Take for instance, we have we have traditional leaders. I think we've lost a connection with culturally traditional leaders. No, go ahead, you went off screen for a second, technology, new era. Okay, so however, we offer experience and capacity in conflict analysis, the dynamics and the frameworks that are needed to facilitate most of the dialogue processes that occur. So this has resulted to a lot of issues unresolved and community members at their own, at their own level, sometimes unable to add their imputes because of the imbalance. I talked about, you know, the power imbalance between leaders and of course, community members. So if we can facilitate events where there can be of a power with relationship where community members, their suggestions, you know, their recommendations matter, I think if you go a long way in providing more sustainable ideas to solve some of these violence conflicts that keeps people coming at the community level. Okay, thank you very much, Carl, to me. And Emmanuel, as you want to add on to that, I will just pose an additional question to who can't do that to as well, since it's somewhat related. So do you think politics is influencing religious violence more than the interpretation of religious doctrines that supports violence in the northern part of Nigeria? Okay, thank you very much. I would like to add to what Katoome has just said. Like we practitioners, we already have something in mind like most of the time when we are designing our programs, we go to the fields to do just need assessments to talk to the people that we come out and we design. So it would be nice if we have something like the human center design where we can involve everybody in the community, where their voices are very important. It could not be like the top bottom approach, but the bottom top approach where we carry everyone along. To add to the question you just asked, from our interview with respondents in the field, we discovered that actually this is not religiously inclined, but somehow like politically inclined, because many people like politicians are looking for support, so they come up with this religious idea and try to, like Katoome said earlier, divide and rule to make people to say, okay, we just make sure that we move towards this side of the people that belong to our religion and the other side, the people that go to that one too. So I would like to say that from our findings, the conflict is not religiously inclined, but some persons are using it to gather support for themselves. Thank you. Thank you, Emmanuel. So let me pull up another question here. And so according to Ashutosh Varshini that has found different patterns of elite relations in high and local conflict locations in places like Indonesia and India, Jason, I will pose this to both you and Ryan. Given USIP's work, from USIP's work and also Mercy Corps in your work in religion and peace building, have you found, did you find anything similar in this research in Northern Nigeria? You can speak about it from the perspective of the research in Northern Nigeria and Jason more generally from your work on religion and peace building. Whoever wants to start with that. Ryan, do you want to talk about Northern Nigeria first and then I'll jump in on broader sort of perspective? Let's go the opposite direction. You can start with the broad aperture and then I'll point at the other. Okay, great. Yeah, so those I think are examples. I also had in mind as I was reading the report that is Indonesia and India. I also kept thinking of Sudan in the 1970s. This ties to the previous question of once religion is used to mobilize and becomes a part of more routine politics, it often becomes entrenched or spirals into a pattern in which additional elites have to take increasingly more extreme or radical claims. So you get this spiral of becomes really just outbidding. And I think that's a danger that we're seeing in Nigeria. Now, this question is very interesting in that perhaps elites at the national level and at the local level may have different preferences and maybe appealing to different communities. And so I'd love to hear from Ryan if that's happening in Nigeria or not. But it's something at least observed in the cases mentioned at the national level. I don't think we have a lot of data at the subnational level to see how this process plays out. So let me pause there and see if. Yeah, I'll offer a few comments and then we can continue and dig into other examples. We found two types of tactics that leaders and local elites were using to really use mobilized religion as a mobilizer. And the first is salience tactics. So really amplifying religious identities relative to other identities, particularly as we've noticed in moments around elections. And there were reports of this language and rhetoric amping up in advance of elections. And then the second second is boundary tactics or in which there is really identifying religious divides and really redefining membership along sectarian economic and ethnic lines. So thinking about who is in an in or out group in a local area. And again, this intersected with both moments of religious conflict as well as shocks and scarcity around resources. So I'll pause there because I think that even that deeper analysis of some of those mechanisms and kind of roles of specific elites is I think an important area of future inquiry and research. And it kind of starting again from deeper qualitative work and building that. But it is those are a few of the patterns and mechanisms that were identified in our study. Thank you so much. And maybe I'll follow on to that as I see one question here where it's given the challenges and limitations of reliable data on conflict causes, nature of attacks and impacts. Is there a risk that government justice that is arrest sentences may engender more feelings of injustice? Anyone of you want to tackle that question? So again, I can say something sort of maybe at the comparative level. And then if our other panelists want to mention how this might play out, particularly in Nigeria, certainly when it comes to religious discrimination and repression or religious violence and repression, we observe a cyclical relationship. That is oftentimes repression leads to grievances as you're mentioning, which could then fuel additional conflict. But at the same time some research I've done with the colleague Peter Henne, we've also shown that so shown that that discrimination, the violence can also lead to more discrimination. So you get this pattern in which people rebel because they feel repressed or their justice isn't being administered. But then the government overcorrects and tries to repress or monitor or regulate religious communities, which then feels more grievances. And so I'm curious in Nigeria how that might play out both the repression and also the application of justice if it isn't seen as equal. Okay, I would like to take it off from here. From our findings, like one of the respondents in Kajuru, he said that part of what the government is doing, they are not actually responding to perpetrators of some violent conflicts, especially maybe if it relates to farmer and headers. So even when those issues are being reported, you discover that nothing is being done about it. And because of that, there are a lot of grievances and there is tension along the line, especially when it's involved a Christian farmer and a Muslim pastoralist. So you discover that when one is not held responsible, especially if he's a farmer or he's a pastoralist, the other side we feel grieved. And also we want to take the laws into their hands and feel that since the government is not doing anything, I will have to do something on my own. So when there are no responses like that, there are a lot of tension across the religious line. Thank you very much. Go ahead, Keltymi. Okay, just to add to what Emmanuel talked about, during our interview session with some of our respondents also in Zafara State, they made mention of issues that has to relate with empathy. They complained that each time they are attacked in their community, there is no government representative, nobody to come sympathize with them. They are allowed to heal on their own, in spite of losing their loved ones, their livelihoods and practically everything that they've lived for. The government does nothing. The least that they do is to send some military men to their communities and then in a few days, maximum three days, they said, so what is the proof that government really care about us? Another respondent made mention to say that at some point, we decided to defend ourselves. Each time this mayoral does come into our community, we fight back. And at the end of the whole scenario, the government come back to arrest us. Arrest us for what? For fighting back. So there is this confusion. And also, a woman categorically said that because she was one of the women that was kidnapped and released afterwards, she said that these gunmen said to them, stop worrying, the government know about us, there's nothing you can do. Until then, she says she's trying to phantom and understand these words because it really did hit her. If they cannot depend on government security, that means there's no safe space for anybody. And of course, anyone can be evicted. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Kaltumi. And I think along those lines, just to pull on one of the questions that I see here, how can emotional resilience, as in one's ability to adapt to stressful situations or crisis, so how can emotional resilience help in building peace reconciliation? Or can it help in building peace reconciliation? I'll come in briefly on this. I think it's tremendously important to know in the title of our report is fear of the unknown and the theme of our research that came through both in the surveys and in the interviews is this real fear and uncertainty, which does come from an emotional and psychological place. And so having that sense of psychological safety, and as Kaltumi mentioned, really focusing on psychosocial well-being is a first step to then starting to rebuild trust and relationships within groups. And so trying to just bring groups together for dialogue and trust building without addressing that real psychological toll has a risk. So these, in some of our own programming in Nigeria and in elsewhere, go hand in hand. And I'll hand it over to other colleagues to speak about other specific practical examples, but just to highlight a few thoughts there. Thank you so much. Jason, did you want to come in here? Okay. I'll just add that for those who are joining us, they might also look at the USIP project page on religion and psychosocial support. So the Institute is currently working on a pilot project on Colombia and Venezuela on psychosocial support for displaced trauma survivors. And so Kaltumi, I think it goes to a lot of what you're asking. That project will hopefully expand to other places. But here at the USIP, we are thinking about these questions and we'll look forward to partnering with other organizations like Mercy Corps moving forward too. But for those listening, you can check out the religion and psychosocial support page as well. Thank you so much, Jason. And so if I could draw on that question a little bit to pick up on of the questions here, how can we ensure that international humanitarian interventions are better designed to ensure conflict sensitivity and integration of humanitarian peace and security approach in Nigeria? And this is a question that is open to anyone who wants to jump in here. Okay. Like I said earlier, we like to look at designing the program from the grassroots level. Like I talked about the human center design and about the human center design where you carry the community stakeholders along and they can tell you what we work for them and what will not work. Like there are some structures that are already in the community like the early warning, early response structures and just for us to build on those things. And like part of what we do in CIPP, Mexico, we make sure that we build the capacity of the local leaders where they'll be able to address local conflict before those disputes become a violent conflict. So we build their capacity also by also strengthening the local structures that is in the community, not only that by making sure that the early warning, early response system that the community have been using for a very long time, the capacity has been strengthening and we make sure to see how it will function very well. So if we look at how we can design the program from the grassroots level, that is from the bottom up approach instead of the top bottom approach, instead of us having an idea that this is what we feel that what we take to the community is going to work, but rather we meet with the community. This is what we are thinking and they tell us that no, this might not work. This is how we'll go about it. And with that approach, I believe that we'll be able to tackle a lot of these issues in Northern Nigeria. Thank you. Thank you very much. Kaltumi, I see you went on mute. Did you want to add anything here? Yes, I just wanted to add the commitment under the Co-Humanitarian Standard that promotes respect and fundamental human rights of community members in places affected by crisis. I think it's very important for us as conflict as peace builders to integrate into our system and our planning feedback mechanism from community members themselves in such a way that they give us their suggestions, their complaints and they feel safe and confident and transparent while we're there. I think that we help improve our programming, strengthen relationships, trust between community members and field workers. And that would go a long way in making our way as peace practitioners do more of the listening while the community members who are victims of most of these violent conflicts do the talking. It's high time we give that space. We'll be back a little bit in our leadership position. Let them lead the process by giving us most of these suggestions for more sustainable interventions. Thank you very much, Kaltumi. Ryan, did you want to add a few points on here as well? Yeah, just to build on this, I think it's also worth emphasizing that as we look at these types of bottom-up approaches that emphasize really genuine participation to also create spaces for design and learning for specific groups of the community. So within the CIPP program, Emmanuel and I are actually starting to also do work on youth-led action research to center youth voices and perspectives in also identifying drivers of conflict in their communities as well as designing solutions. And Mercy Corps does this work also in other contexts with women's groups and women-led CSO organizations. So really in addition to thinking from the bottom up, recognizing diversity and inclusion within those that aim to really make sure there's a broad set of voices as local perspectives are elevated. Definitely, definitely. And USIP's work in Nigeria definitely employs that bottom-up top-down approach in the way we engage with both government and civil society actors and community leaders. So there's definitely a lot of overlap here in areas for more conversation because I really, this conversation on religion identity in northern Nigeria, this is just the beginning. This is an ongoing conversation here. So now as we look at the international side, we want to come down to the national level as I look at a question here. And it says, is the role of the Nigerian national government more a positive or a negative or maybe in between? More of a positive, negative or an in-between one when it comes to the process of ethnic and religious reconciliation. And you know, who wants to tackle this one? We would call on Kautumi or Emmanuel if you talk more about the role of the government when it comes to the process of ethnic and religious reconciliation. What role the government is currently playing and what role they could play? And what are the entry points and opportunities that exist for them to play these roles? Okay. Let me say the government is actually trying, but we are hoping that they can put in their best. I'll start from Kaduna State. We have the Kaduna State Peace Agency, which CIPP is collaborating with. They are working on bringing on religious leaders, not only that religious leaders, also community leaders, where we are having some of these conflicts onto the same table where they can reconcile them together. Also in Plateau State too, they have the Plateau State Peace Agency and also the inter-religious commission where they call them the Nairaik, where also issues of religion and also conflict will be addressed. And so they have started the process and I think is a snowball approach. We are hoping and believing that as the government, they are also collaborating with peace agencies and peace actors. Something good we come out of it because they alone cannot do it. We all have to put hands together to see how we can make this thing to work. So I think that is what I have to say for now. Thank you. Thank you, Emmanuel. Oh, sorry, Kel, to me, I saw you went on mute, so I was wondering if you wanted to add anything. But I think it's wonderful that you mentioned the State Peace Building Agencies as USIP also works with those agencies in Kaduna, in Plateau and in Adama State. And going back to that notion of a bottom-up, top-down approach, this is a process. This is an ongoing process. And I think get into a point where there is that commitment and then starting from the point of commitment and moving forward. I think the understanding that peace is a process is one that should be driven home here. And then let me go up to a question, knowing that we do not have any climate change specialists on the panel today. But perhaps from your research, the question here is what is the impact of climate change on pastoral family relations in northern Nigeria? Did any of this come up in your research? And Kautumi as well in your conversations and data collection in Zamfara, whether it was there any mention of climate change? So Emmanuel, Ryan or Kautumi, whoever wants to start? Okay, just go ahead, Emmanuel. Ladies first. Okay, thank you. Yeah, so basically, nothing specifically came out, you know, talking about climate change. However, community members are unable to go to their farm as usual, you know, for their for cultivation and for harvest because of the insecurity. That is of course, bedeviling the community. And of course, this has led to high prices of food, services to mention both few. Directly or indirectly, I think having affected, you know, people, you know, be unable to actually go to the farm to do, you know, the normal activities, their daily activities and of course, their means of survival. I think it has one in one way or the other has relationship. And of course, because they also, one of the women made mention about how their farm lands have been destroyed, you know, by either bonding, sometimes people just come and bond, you know, bond their crops in the farm. So this have one way or the other also reduced production when you talk about farming system. Thank you, Kautumi. Okay, I would like to add to that, while conducting the interview in the field, some of the respondents, they talked about the climate change was especially that is affecting the relationship between the farmers and the headers. Like one of the farmer in Kajuru was talking about due to late rainfall and the migration of the past two rallies, you see that some of them, they are moving from where they used to stay and they will be moving to another part. And while they are moving, they just encroach into their crops and destroy that sometimes before the normal practice is that after their harvest, they invite the pastoralist, the headers to come and graze on the remnants on the farm so that they can use the waste products from their cattle as a manure for them. But this time around, because of the climate change, it's not like that again. So they tend to move earlier than the time that they used to move, maybe during the harvest period where they can come in. So it has actually affected the relationship and also causing some tension between them. Thank you so much, Emmanuel. Obviously, there's a lot to unpack there on the question of climate change. So hopefully, another event on this down the road on this. So we have just a few more minutes left. And I want to go around to all our panelists and give each person less than one minute to give any closing remarks, less than a minute to give any closing remarks or any thoughts that you want to leave us with. And I will go ahead and start with Jason. And I see, there you go. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Well, I'll first start by saying that, again, what a privilege it is to join this panel and to have learned even more than reading the report, but by listening to these examples and experiences from northern Nigeria. To me, one of the essential takeaways will have to be the question still of how do we talk about the religious dimensions of conflict without seeing religion as the cause or without reifying those divisions without exacerbating those divisions. There still seems to be attention in our conversation about wanting to talk about those religious dimensions or not, or talk about the religious dimensions of peace building, but not the religious dimensions of conflict. And so I think the challenge for us is at least one challenge for us moving forward is to think about or accept that religion is this pervasive force that's influencing both violence and peace. And that a big question moving forward is considering under what conditions does it need the violence or peace and which actors can we collaborate with to build peace in northern Nigeria and other places. And we can look to other examples from around the world, both for what's been, what's worked well, but also practices to avoid. Okay, thank you so much, Jason. So I want to call on Ryan and Emmanuel, if there's any, you know, take away final thoughts you want to leave for us a minute or less, because I'm being told that we have less than four minutes. Okay, I would like to leave us with this. The people we spoke to, they tended to express greater concern over criminality and banditry than over ethno-religious conflicts. And they were more likely to emphasize cleavages other than religion, such as ethnicity and the farmer-header conflict when discussing inter-communal violence. So thank you. Thank you, Emmanuel. That was perfect. And I will just add a call that has come up throughout this discussion for more research and more discussion and especially more research and discussion that centers local voices and really asks questions and challenges assumptions. And I think that we've done a great job of that today and I look forward to being part of continued conversation and learning. Thank you so much, Ryan. Call to me. Less than a minute. Thank you, okay. Like Elia said, that majority of our respondents are seeking for justice. I would advise that we as peace practitioners, it's high time we integrate nonviolent action to the peace-building work that we do. That way we are able to, the voices of the people are heard and their needs also satisfied. Thank you very much. Thank you, Call to me. And Mooktari, if you're still here with us, do you want to leave us any takeaway points? I think it's just to thank all the panelists for their contribution and the participants who have joined across the world to share and to hear and to listen and to have takeaways. One of the things just before I drop off is the fact that somebody mentioned about conflict sensitivity. I think it's very important for development actors and humanitarian workers to really pay attention to integrating conflict sensitivity in the work they do on the field. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mooktari. And thank you to all our panelists and all our viewers that have joined us from across the world today. Without any doubt, the research findings and our discussions today paint the complex nature of the violence in northern Nigeria. Obviously, there are a lot of important implications for the government and donor-led efforts in ensuring that we prevent conflict and forge peace, the peace that a lot of Nigerians want to see and that the country rightfully deserves. So thank you so much. Again, I invite us all to continue this conversation on Twitter using the hashtag Northern Nigeria Conflict. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Goodbye.