 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here. And it's great to see so many friends and colleagues who I know care deeply about the issues we'll discuss today. This is an opportunity for a discussion on preventing violent conflict. And it's spurred by a new EU policy. This is a topic that is near and dear to our hearts here at the US Institute of Peace. As many of you know, we were founded a little more than 30 years ago by the US Congress as an independent federal institute dedicated to very practical ways of preventing and resolving violent conflict. And we have put a lot of focus and energy on understanding that essential state fragility that is a considerable driver of conflict, of the four famines that we're seeing, of the wave of refugees and migrants, and violent extremism. And what are the ways to come together more effectively across the US government and with other international donors and with conflict-affected countries themselves, to more effectively get at these roots of fragilities is an extraordinarily important conversation. Without which, we threaten a lot of the precious development gains, and we also have increased instability to worry about. So the opportunity to have this kind of conversation and the opportunity to look at the more effective ways for donors to coordinate on this issue is really critical. We have a terrific panel here with us today. And it is my great pleasure to welcome our honored guest, Christian Leffler, who's the Deputy Secretary General of the European External Action Service for the European Union. And Christian has worked on external relations at the European Commission since 1996, including advising the EU High Representative on Creation of the EU's External Action Service. And before that, served with distinction in the Swedish government. So delighted to have you here with us to talk about the new EU approach to preventing violent conflict. This is coming at a time where there is really this emerging consensus that we need to do business differently and that we need to look at how do we coordinate our tools. After Christian's remarks, we have a terrific panel who will be introduced by my colleague, Joe Hewitt. And we'll include Raphael Carlin from the State Department, Mark Swain from the Department of Defense, and Alexander Mark from the World Bank, which I think is a wonderful gathering of additional donor views and perspectives. And with that, please join me in welcoming Christian Leffler. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you very much for inviting me. And thank you for joining this afternoon. I'm very happy to be here. I'm happy to share with you some of our thoughts on how best to approach the challenging subject of how to help others help themselves. Challenging in the best of circumstances, and particularly when some of them don't necessarily want to help themselves, which is as we approach crisis situation and a potential conflict, quite often the case. Working on conflict prevention, crisis management, and the various healing efforts that may need to come afterwards, has always been pretty fundamental to our external cooperation and our external policy. It's become more important in a world that's ever more rapidly changing and where the tensions, the fractions, and the contests, the confrontation between different interests within societies and between societies have become more evident. And we're therefore, we need to look at how we can react more rapidly, more effectively, and preferably, more precociously. We come in earlier that we identify situations in ways that allow us to at least propose action or engage in action as early as possible. That is very much at the heart of the so-called global strategy, that global strategy on security and stability that the European Union agreed last year on the proposal of the higher representative vice president, Fadika Mogherini. Within that, and looking specifically at this issue of working to prevent conflict, to address situations of fragility, we have developed a concept which we call the integrated approach, which is essentially about making better use of all the different instruments we have available at EU level, as well as within the member states of the EU. Bringing them all together in a coherent framework, in a concerted effort, we presented, therefore, as a multi-dimensional approach. I'm going to use a lot of multidimensional now, because it's multi-dimensional. We look at every possible angle to try to identify what do we have to address those different dimensions of a potential conflict, of a situation, of tension, of strife in a society. It's multi-phased. We try to come in as early as possible, and then we adapt it as circumstances evolve to have the most appropriate mix at every stage of a confrontation, conflict, a situation of tension, whatever level we're at. It's also multi-level, as much as we work at the national level, at the EU level, at the international level with other partners, such as the US, such as the UN, such as the World Bank or others, in many cases, all of the above, to bring together whatever capacity we have equally in the beneficiary countries. I was going to say target countries, but that's maybe not appropriate under the circumstances, so let's call them the beneficiaries of our efforts. Working at the national level, of course, but also local and regional level, working with authorities, working with civil society, working with government, working with opposition, even when the opposition doesn't want us to talk to the government and vice versa, to see what is the way in, what is the best way we can do this. And of course, as I said, putting this into a multilateral framework, working within the UN under the various umbrellas that exist at that level and trying, therefore, also to mobilize the interesting capacities that exist at that level. One common thread in all this is that whatever efforts we do, whatever efforts we undertake, we have to, of course, build as far as possible on local ownership and put that into a context of governance where we promote a long-term sustainable solution based on representative and accountable governance. Note that I don't immediately talk of democratization because that might lead people in just one direction. Accountability can be developed in many different ways. We happen to think that the best one is through a representative democracy, but we know that we've not always been successful in convincing everybody else that that's the best way or at least the immediate step. And the other fundamental element, of course, is we want to make sure that this is to the benefit of all people in the society or society's concerned and that, therefore, it has to be respectful of a strong framework on fundamental rights, human rights for all humans, men and women, so the gender dimension. We also seek to incorporate as a very important one also because we actually think that that usually helps find solutions. I can say that I think that women are much better at finding pragmatic solutions than we are. So it's of interest to make sure that we have that dimension fully involved as well. In putting this into practice, we've sought to develop a number of tools that it will allow us to pick up warning signals as early as possible. That's where we call our approach to resilience an analytical prism where we try to identify factors that may lead to destabilization, to fracture, to conflict within a society or between countries where we then apply that prism with our member states in regular, what we call horizon scanning exercises where we look at, we pick a number of countries or regions and then try to apply this prism to see do we need to change our policies? Do we need to mobilize new initiatives in this specific case and if so, how do we do it? We then compliment this in the early stages with specific efforts on mediation support to come in and bring people together and try to see if solutions can be found before we move into more acute phases of a potential conflict. If nevertheless we do, then the approach is one of trying to create stronger, positive frameworks for engagement, enabling frameworks where we can bring all our different policies and instruments together and put them in a flexible but comprehensive framework in how we apply them with a country or a group of countries in taking the different policies forward. And that can be policies at very many different levels so maybe, and I don't wanna speak too long but I can give a few examples of what does that actually mean in practice. Let me start with one which is not related to conflict in the sense of interstate or even civil strife but which is to me a very good illustration of a resilience issue and how that is actually multifaceted in how we then need to apply it. And that's one close to here unusually in the Western Hemisphere, it's in Haiti. You'll recall about a year ago, Hurricane Matthew traveled across the Caribbean and wreaked havoc all the way up into southeastern United States. There was extensive damage in Jamaica, in the Dominican Republic, in Haiti, in Cuba and then in Florida. There were a couple of deaths in Cuba because a bridge where people were walking across to evacuate collapsed. It was not to do with the hurricane itself. There were a couple in Jamaica that were none in the Dominican Republic and there were approximately 1,000 in Haiti. And there roads were washed away, extensive damage to agriculture, to housing, to this, to that, the other. Why? We would say, well yes, of course this is because the Haitian society and the Haitian landscape is not prepared. True, but why is it not prepared? Because they have a crap administration because they don't have proper governance because they don't have structures that can plan and execute. So rebuilding the road won't help. That's a temporary measure. That's the plaster you put on, the sticky plaster that it'll last for a couple of weeks or this case, hopefully a couple of years. But it doesn't solve the problem. The real problem, and if we want to build a resilient society, has to go back to looking at the structures of government and build it up from the base. And I think that's a good example because it shows how far away the routes and therefore the solution can be from the symptoms. We sometimes rush in to address the symptoms but without thinking too much of the routes. A very different example. If we look in the Sahel and in Mali in particular, we've been working now for a number of years on a series of stabilization actions to stop the violence, prevent the resurgence of violence in the country, increase the human security both in terms of physical security but also economic security and social networks, frameworks to bring the country back to a more normal and more viable situation to find a path forward. This means working very much apart from the immediate stabilization efforts on building or rebuilding the civilian administration, allowing government, including local government, to take their place, offer the services that people expect and that people, if they don't get them, will feel disaffected, will feel marginalized and may take things into their own hands. That means that we've been working with all the tools we have available from the military to the socioeconomic and to these administrative advisory ones at EU level and with member state capacities as well. A couple to that in Mali, as in a number of other countries, Central African Republic, Somalia, others in the region, a lot of investment on security sector reform, which is a nice way of saying that we want the security forces not just to be more effective but maybe above all, to be better behaved because effective forces that are badly behaved may solve the immediate problem but already sow the seeds to the next conflict. So that accountability, governance, and restraint of security forces is also an important element. That inspires us currently in the work we're doing with Mali and some of his neighbors in the so-called G5 Sahel group where they bring together their resources to better address the problems of transnational crime, radicalism and terrorism in the broader Sahel region. There are, I could give other examples but I think I've probably spoken too long already. What we're doing, that's not exactly in a preventive resilience framework, quite the contrary, in Syria in supporting and focusing a lot of our support beyond the humanitarian on working with Syrian civil society of many different shades to prepare them for the post-conflict days where we hope and expect that they will play an important role in rebuilding the country or creating, expecting, demanding building structures that will allow for greater accountability and dialogue in that society. An example of where we're doing that in a much more collaborative fashion is currently in Colombia with the Colombian government, with Colombian civil society, with Colombian political forces including now with the FARC to see how can we support the implementation of the peace agreement in ways that makes it truly sustainable over the long term. There too is often about bringing back a benign presence of the state to regions that for long had been abandoned by the state because of conflict and where a presence of the state was often seen as oppressive or threatening so it has to be redefined. It's about empowering local communities to build their own future including economic empowerment, working with small holders who've reclaimed their land after conflict and allowing them to create cooperatives and allowing the cooperatives to plug in to the mainstream economy. All this may sound very technical but is a way of creating more cohesive structures and more inclusive structures. A lot of work there too on the reintegration particularly of child soldiers, giving them an education rather different from what they got under the FARC command in the jungle, working too particularly with the exposed situation of women and girls and moving along the reconciliation all the way to actually providing seminars and courses to teach the FARC leadership what it is to be a political party rather than a military or armed movement. If they want to be serious about participating in a political process, they need to know what the opportunities and possibilities are but also what the limits are. So those are some examples of how we try to approach this adapting it in each case to the specific situation of the countries. There are no standard models. There's no quick remedy or easy recipe. We need to be very much context sensitive as we develop the implementation plans for each country or each region. The basic, and I'll conclude with that, the basic rationale behind all of this is that on the one hand, if we get better at doing this, we save ourselves a lot of effort and we save the taxpayers a lot of money because it's always better. It's not easier but it's better and cheaper to solve a conflict before it's broken out into open confrontation. And it's also a survival strategy for ourselves as bureaucrats because if we're surprised all the time and have to run after the latest conflict, we have to keep on redefining what we're doing and we have to drop what we did yesterday to do something else today and something else again tomorrow. If we can therefore catch things early on and we have a breathing space to prepare we think that we will be better at organizing ourselves in a fashion that will then allow us to help others to help themselves. We can only do this if we do it together with other partners. This is very clearly not something that's taken on by one actor, not even a multi-headed actor like the EU and its 28 member states. And therefore, we are appreciative of the close cooperation we have and we've had since many years with the US authorities, different levels, different departments and different parts of the world with many civil society organizations who are our partners in taking this forward and who often show the courage of going into situations where governments would hesitate to send their people and of course with the multilateral organizations, including the international financial institutions who also have important programs and frameworks in this regard. So these new approaches with the so-called resilience and the integrated approach are our humble contribution from the EU side to an evolving international landscape where we count on continued cooperation with all of you. Thank you. The fifth chair is coming. The fifth chair is literally the spare wheel. She's speaking, we're speaking. Yeah, so Christian to the far end. Yeah, number one. Good afternoon. My name's Joe Hewitt. I'll be moderating the discussion this afternoon. Thank you all for joining us. We have a terrific panel. This is a somewhat of a remarkable moment for those of us who think quite a bit about conflict prevention, the fragility of countries and what it takes to get ahead of each of the next recurring crises. There is just a remarkable confluence of efforts that have been committed to the notion that we've got to get better about a preventive agenda. And so what you're going to hear, and you've already started to hear this with excellent strategy that's come out of the EU and Christian's remarks, you're going to hear about multiple efforts coming from multiple places that are all contributing to this effort. So let me quickly introduce the panelists so you can associate names with faces and then we'll quickly get back into the conversation. And while we do that, I invite you to think ahead to some of the questions that you would like to add to the conversation. So we'll certainly leave about at least a good 20 minutes for that. And so please be ready for that once we get to that point. So Christian Leffler, you know, is the Deputy Secretary General of the European External Action Service, the European Union. And then immediately to his left, Rafael Carlin, who is the Managing Director, Office of Foreign Resource Assistance, the U.S. Department of State. And then to his left, Mark Swain, who is the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Stability and Humanitarian Affairs. And then finally, immediately to my right, Alexander Mark, who is the Chief Specialist on Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank. So we've got a terrific panel. Let's keep the conversation going. And I'd like to start with Christian, just some follow-up questions to what you've already started to talk about. The EU strategy is highly commendable because it makes the distinction about how important it is to get ahead of these crises. And recognizes the importance of addressing long-term drivers that can be addressed to prevent eventual crises. It builds on a lot of important lessons that the whole field is starting to appreciate. So for example, it places an important position for political dialogue, changing the politics in a lot of these places. It makes as a central principle of the strategy the importance of doing joint risk assessments, making use of the state of the art in conflict early warning, which has come a long way over the past decade. And it also highlights the importance of recognizing local sources of resilience. And a lot of the places where we intend to work, there are already established places where there is resilience. And we wanna recognize that when we design our interventions in these places. So all of these are really important. Christian, I wanna ask you to talk a little bit more about the road ahead in terms of implementation. You talked a little bit about it in your opening remarks. What I'd like you to talk about a little bit is tell us what success looks like. As this strategy gets translated into implementation at the country level, what are you looking for that would be evidence that things are succeeding as intended under this strategy when the implementation begins to take shape? I think it depends again a bit on the circumstances. One of the greatest indicators of success, this may sound a bit paradoxical, is when people lose interest for the right reasons because they're no longer worried, they're no longer nervous, they're no longer angry. We've sometimes applied that, particularly in interstate, sometimes in intercommunal situations of conflict or potential conflict, and it's somewhat flippantly put it in the context of what the EU does. One of the things the EU does really well is bureaucracy and we're proud of it. And it's actually part of our business model because if you look historically, part of what the EU has done is transform political issues, political challenges or disagreements into technocratic issues. And once they become technocratic, it's much easier to solve them because people either say, yeah, it becomes almost mechanics, or they find that it becomes really, really boring and say just do it. And that's success. That is real success because then you find a solution and people recognize themselves in it and say, it's maybe not everything I wanted, but it's good enough. So that kind of de-dramatization by finding new ways forward, of course that has to be accompanied by complimented often by specific support programs addressing certain communities, addressing deficiencies in a society or in an administration. But ultimately, this is about bringing the different actors together in a way, again, using dialogue. We like talking people into their shoes and we're ready to do it for a very long time if necessary, happy to do it because it's cheaper to talk than most of the alternatives. So I don't know whether that is a satisfactory answer to your question, but it gives you a sense of what we're doing. It probably also gives you a sense of why success is actually fairly rarely recognized because it's boring. And we like boring. Yeah. Let me follow up with a, I think a related question and then we'll turn the conversation over to Raphael. The prevention agenda is in some ways, has an inherent challenge in it that an agenda that I've never heard of referred to this way, but a crisis response agenda. There's a challenge built into the preventive agenda that the crisis response agenda does not have. It's easy to galvanize political support for responding to crises. There's no debate about the importance of alleviating human suffering once a crisis has fallen upon us, but it's going to be a little bit more difficult to galvanize political support for prevention. Can you tell us a little bit about the lessons that your team has begun to compile about how to overcome some of those challenges, to galvanize the necessary political support within EU member states to commit to a prevention agenda? But I think there is a much greater sensitivity now than there was in the past to the advantages and the benefits of trying to come in as early as possible. And that's why we've developed this sort of approach mechanism called what you like, which is not as fancy as it sounds with the horizon scanning. That's a way of trying to also bring our member states together to reach a consensus on where we need to focus our efforts, where we need to direct our efforts in a short to medium term where we see situations emerging which are of concern to all of us, to some of us, where we believe that we might have an appropriate mix of instruments that can make a difference and therefore to encourage member states to agree, to allow us to do it with the instruments and resources, financial resources, another that we have at the EU level and to encourage them to bring theirs into the same framework. Indeed, that doesn't have the same public appeal as looking at crisis management or post-crisis management. But if we can also give them the reassurance that we're not asking them for lots of extra resources to do this, we're asking them to help us redirect the existing resources, then they become more reassured that it is a viable approach that won't put them in difficulties with their ministries of finance, and that always helps. Rafi'am, the State Department is leading an effort to review stabilization efforts across the USG interagency, and clearly there's going to be a lot of overlap and connectivity between what you are in the midst of looking at now and what we've been hearing about with regard to the EU. Can you first talk us through a little bit how this review started, what some of the rationale was for it in the first place and then tell us a little bit about what you hope it will achieve and where it will take us? Sure, be happy to. First of all, though, I'd definitely like to thank Nancy Lindbergh and Joe for hosting this event and moderating it, and very much thank you to the Deputy Secretary General for providing a moment for us all to talk about this. And of course, my fellow colleagues, Mark, whom I work with a lot, and our colleague from the World Bank. And before I jump into this, I did want to throw in a couple of caveats and I think are useful to understand. We're going to talk a little bit about stabilization, but the EU's policy on resilience is much broader than that, which isn't to say that the US government isn't very committed to resilience. It's a particular term at USAID, and a lot of effort is going into working on this. But what we're talking, and I think Mark will be the same, we're talking very much about stabilization. So the stabilization assistance review kicked off at the beginning of the year. We took the opportunity of a new administration while looking back on about 16 years of work, some success, a lot more lessons learned. We were able to bring together a team, a cross-agency team of USAID, the State Department and the Defense Department, to really think about this and really look back. And a new administration always offers an opportunity to think about things differently. But the two factors that really drove a lot of it was stabilization remains critical to our national security. It is a huge element and part of the Defeat ISIS program. And what we've learned from our previous experience, both in this generation since 9-11 and prior to, we have never been able to completely wrap our hands around connecting security gains with established governance. And this continues to be something that we grapple with. And as we continue to work on these issues across the globe, we need to continue to focus on it. Second of all is the importance of, as we talked about, the burden on the taxpayer. There's a lot of emphasis on what is the return on investment for our activities overseas and what are we thinking about. And I think when you look through working in the F Office, Office of Foreign Assistance, we figured in recent years, 25% of state and AIDS foreign assistance outflows have gone to about 16 countries. And they are deeply mired in internal conflict. And this, I think we just have to think in terms of opportunity cost, whether we were to spend this money in those countries or elsewhere. This is largely about rebuilding, retraining, re-equipping, just redoing things instead of doing what we wanna do with our foreign assistance, which is building on things that already work, growing the pie, economic growth, facilitating trade, and making things better and safer for the United States and our allies and partners. So understanding that, we pulled together this stabilization assistance review, hundreds of interviews, surveys, literature review, all that you would expect over the last year. And we boiled it down to some key findings and then some recommendations that we'll be pushing forward. And I think to be honest, none of these for this community that works on it, none of these are terribly surprising or new, but this offers an opportunity to institutionalize them and a new framework to grapple with them. So from our findings, we need to embrace stabilization as an inherently political endeavor, first and foremost. All of our efforts be they diplomatic development or defense need to be focused on that political dynamic in the field. And I think one of the things we get to that is focused on a sustainable settlement that can move forward and sustainably govern in these local dynamics and working with these local partners. Because I think for all of us who've worked, be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere, with lots of resources and lots of effort put into it, we often fall to the more technocratic approach, which hopefully we get to because it's boring and safe later on, but early on it's not good to jump right into technocratic approaches where we focus on how many police and soldiers that we train and equip, whether the essential services, electricity, water, are turned back on without first stepping back and asking political questions, which are much more important than that, who gets to decide who carries a weapon in society? Who decides who gets water and electricity? And those are often the fundamental problems and it's not a lack of technical expertise that these questions are not being answered. There are political choices that local actors or outside actors are forcing on the dynamic and we need to understand those. So that first and foremost, I think should drive almost everything. Our second finding we also found, which again should come as no surprise, smaller targeted programs are better at the outset than big infusions of cash. And I think we've all experienced that in the field of just the management of lots of money, takes over versus are we spending it well? Are we spending it with the right people? Are we working with the right partners? Do we even understand the metrics in what we're trying to achieve? And we think these targeted programs can have a bigger, oftentimes a bigger impact. Second, an agreed upon strategy. Not always a plan, plans change. A lot of these dynamics change as we get into the environment, but we do need to have some overarching goals that we agree on a common operating picture, both at the international level, the national level, and I would say, and sometimes most importantly at the sub-national level out in the field. All of this work takes people. And this is something certainly the State Department and USAID are grappling with to a great degree after the experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and unfortunately after the experience in Libya as well. You have to be present to have a political impact. You have to be present no matter how small targeted your programs. You have to be present to monitor them. And we have to find a dynamic where that works. And then fourth, we need to establish a division of labor. This is perennially the problem of coordination and understanding who does what, who is best at what. And then building that into a common understanding and a common strategy. So coming out of that, most of the recommendations, I'll walk through a few of the major recommendations coming from those findings. And again, there come as no great surprise, but we feel like there is an opportunity and a community. First and foremost, we have to institutionalize the lessons that come out of the findings. As Mark was saying recently in some of our other colleagues, we often joke, this is a pickup game every time. Every country we go to, if you have the right players who are standing by the court, then you get a good game. If you don't, you don't. And we have to have it every time people show up. There's a common, this common understanding, this common background, this common doctrine. Second, we need to develop political strategies and overarching frameworks that are based in rigorous analysis, defining our assumptions, our risks, all these things that again are pretty basic. And yet we've all worked in places where this didn't happen in a year or two into it. People are asking, what are we trying to achieve with this program? And we cannot afford to do that anymore. And then of course, the sequencing issue, understanding when is the right time and place to implement programs. And we can't always, if it just happens to be the person who is assigned the electoral grid shows up first, they can't turn on the power first because as we discussed earlier, until there's a political settlement that understands who benefits from this and is there a communal understanding amongst the locals, whether that's the case. And then fourth, as you can imagine, in this new environment of fiscal austerity, the burden sharing is very important. So understanding the divisions of labor, what people are best at, what people can bring to the table or what they can't is very important. So this is what we're looking forward to. I think Mark will be able to go into some more detail in some specific places, but we're looking forward to hopefully being able to talk more about the review and release a publishable version in the near future. And I look forward to more questions and thoughts. Thank you. That's great. I mean, there's certainly, I'm sure we're gonna get back to it. I mean, Raphael, so much of what you're talking about depends on effective coordination across the interagency. And so I'm hoping we can start to get into a little bit about how we get there. I mean, you're, I think you're right, we have to get there. But there must be lessons that are emerging where effective coordination has happened that we can capture those lessons and use that to inform a standing mechanism so that we're not always relying on a pickup game. So maybe we can get into that. Mark, let's turn it over to you. You have a perspective on this from the Defense Department. Your angle on this is different, but your understanding or your shared understanding of the problem, I think is about the same. So I'd be really curious to hear what this review means from your perspective. Thanks very much. And thanks, Nancy and Joe, for having us here and thank you all for taking the time out to come visit us with us today. My mom looked at the panel and she thought it was a great panel, so she agrees with Joe, it's just a great panel. And for those of you who are taxpayers, I think you'll be happy to know and it's quite surprised and hear that we are working as an interagency with multiple different departments working together towards a common goal. So I think as a taxpayer, that certainly always makes me feel better that, wow, people are actually working together to try to get to the same end. And I think this is a great opportunity. Department of Defense, we certainly care about resilience, but we are talking about stabilization today. In stabilization, we have the preventative and we have the reactive as we talked about and there's that left of bang, right of bang and whatever bang definition is of something bad is happening. And for that, there are times when the US military is the only US government official on the ground at a given time and most of that time happens after some instability, some different time. So there's a role for the Department of Defense to work in stabilization. My office also covers humanitarian assistance and for both humanitarian assistance and stabilization, the Department of Defense does not wanna have the lead for that, that is clearly the lead of the State Department and USAID, but the Department of Defense needs to be supportive of those efforts, along with all of the other agencies in our government that work in this space. So as we looked at this review and we looked at stabilization in general, we also have the issue of fragile states. And so that for those preventative measures, I'm happy to say that we have an interagency discussion going on right now that's been continued by this administration on fragile states and how we look at different countries that are going through instability and put that fragile states lens on and try to determine are there ways that we can work with a specific country and on preventative measures and that's for a whole of government approach. And the biggest challenge with that is trying to prioritize because there's many countries that fall into an area of fragility and a fragile state in different phases and sometimes within a country. You have different phases of fragility of where they are with that. So not even within one country, it's not always very clear of where they are within that phase. So I think for the Department of Defense, we have a lot of experience and efforts that we undertake with that. I would say that again, we want to, my words, we want to prime the pump for stabilization. We don't want to be the pump of stabilization, also for humanitarian assistance. So we have a role for that. If you asked me last year, where are we with stabilization as a government? I felt like we were a little broken because it was 2016 and we did not have a definition of stabilization. So we didn't have a clear definition that we all agreed to as organizations and that's hard to move beyond if you have a different definition of stabilization. In this SAR review, we have a clear definition of stabilization that we all agreed to. And even that little, it sounds basic, but that helps us move forward. Also in the review, it calls out for a structure, a mechanism. So on that right of bang and that after as we're being reactive, if you look at it for humanitarian assistance, our government has long established that we have humanitarian, we have the DART, the Disaster Assistance Response Team, and a disaster, an earthquake, something happens in a certain country. The U.S. Ambassador in that country will declare an emergency, U.S. AID Off the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance sends the DART lead in and DOD supports that DART in all of the humanitarian assistance efforts that we go through. When it's stabilization and we're reacting to that, we don't have a clear mechanism. We're working towards that. And in this SAR review, we talk about a start, not a DART, so we would have a stabilization, transition, and recovery team. And that might be something for us to think about. And talking about, you asked kind of a little bit, Joe, about where's an example of that? You can look into Northeast Syria right now where on the ground we have U.S. military personnel and we also have U.S. AID and state personnel working on the ground in Northeast Syria to provide for those humanitarian assistance and stabilization needs. And the Department of Defense is providing that security. And I think it's a great collaboration of us working together as three different organizations and getting a whole of government approach to address this area. And again, anytime we talk about stabilization, it's a transitory as we transition through different phases. And the Department of Defense is looking for those opportunities where we can assist our interagency colleagues to work in stabilization areas. I also would like to point out, for the SAR review, some other things that we think that are really important with this, we talked about a political endeavor, but also as many times that can be local political, not every one size fits all. And within a country, it's tough to say there's one clear government or the governance in a particular area in a country is based back at the capitol that may be hundreds and thousands of miles away. Sometimes that political endeavor is a local, it's a local political. So I think that's important for us to just think about specifically for Department of Defense, we're working on a DOD instruction for stabilization that we're nearly complete in coordination and complimentary to this SAR review. I think that is very helpful for us to have this definition and a clear way forward for the department as we work with this. And then gaining that experience from the, in Syria where we have state day colleagues working closely with DOD, we might wanna consider a memorandum of understanding for a global memorandum of understanding of how do we do this? How do we replicate that every region is different? I'm not saying that the every activity that's occurring in Syria or Iraq or different countries is the same, but the ability for the Department of Defense, state and aid to work more closely together in the area of stabilization on that reactive side, I think is an important entity. We certainly do it all the time on the proactive side on the preventative side, and it's just an area where we can continue. And then for the future, I think, how do we work with international organizations, the EU, the UN, and I believe that when you look at humanitarian assistance for UN OCHA, they have a cluster system. And again, it's a more established, international way that we work together and UNDP, the Development Organization at the UN is certainly doing more work. They actually have a definition recently released on stabilization, slightly different than our definition, but close, so we're all working in the same area. And how can we be more effective as a government then to plug into those higher level UN, EU, to work with our international colleagues in this space? So I think it's a great opportunity. There's lots of work being done and we can work harder and be more effective. Because as we do that, besides those international groups, we also have lots of NGOs that work in this space that many of you are represented here today. And we have opportunities to collaborate and be cooperative. And if you have advice on how we should do that or areas we should avoid or stay away from, we're always welcome for that too. So thanks. I wanna ask a question and it might be a little bit challenging and then I wanna get to Alexander. You both have talked about the very important role of coordination. Mark, you highlighted the importance of having a common understanding of the problem, which certainly means that when the 3Ds are working together, at some level they need to do a joint assessment of the context within which they're working so that they can work together in coordination. For observers who think about bureaucratic politics and think about the tendencies of large bureaucracies to see the world through their own capabilities, one might say, and I think many people have said this as an impediment to 3D coordination, that one of the hard parts about doing a joint assessment and getting to a common understanding of the problem is that these three agencies, a development agency, a defense agency and a diplomatic agency will define the problem in terms of their own tools and that that in turn might be an impediment to getting to that coordination. Now, as I say that, you put forward the case of North Syria as a place where there has been very good coordination. Are there lessons to pull from that case or other successes to tell us a little bit about why that particular concern is a manageable one? You want me to start? Sure, you go right ahead. I'll give it a first correct. So for example, for Northeast Syria right now, the key to that interagency collaboration is that because of the security dynamics, US, AID and State Department did not have officials on the ground up until earlier this summer, this last summer, so five months ago, four months ago, that's how long they've been on the ground working with the Department of Defense providing the security and the housing and they're not working for DOD, they're doing their own mission and that's the beauty of our government is that each agency has a representative there doing their missions that they've been assigned by law and by their policies and that we're working together on the ground to try to get a strategic effect, to provide stability to that region is going under a large amount of instability and I think that that is a great example of how we are all working together in an area that's very difficult and having that ability to replicate and show that again and to do it again in the future I think is important. We don't know where that next area will be. Every place is different. There's lots of stabilization activities going on in Iraq right now but I would say that the United Nations and there's lots of countries working with the Iraqi government but the United Nations is leading that effort for humanitarian assistance and stabilization and the United States government plugs into that multilateral coordination. We have our own bilateral coordination but working with the Iraqi government in the UN there's a mechanism for AHA and stabilization that just across the border in Syria is a bit more difficult just because of the security situation for a whole host of governance issues as far as a national governance, local governance, so it makes it, it's a different scenario. So every scenario will be different and I think that the beauty of the SAR review talks about this stabilization, transition and recovery team if we would deploy some element like that to the next area they can work with our U.S. Ambassador that's assigned and that'll be a convening body that all of the other agencies, besides the Department of Defense, Treasury and other agencies that work in this environment as critical times can fall upon that and I think that there's opportunities there. And again, not every scenario is gonna be the same but if you have a structure and a mechanism and some over guiding policies then we can fall in and move out more effectively and efficiently. I would completely agree with what Mark's saying which is why it's all gonna work. No, but I think the important part which I think the civilians struggle with more so the military is the development of a joint doctrine, joint training so that you arrive with the same assumptions, not agreeing, we don't have to agree. In fact, most of us would not be earning our paychecks if we agreed with one another all the time. There are different equities of different agencies and we do need to think about how we approach problems in terms of capabilities because those capabilities are often shaped by the intrinsic goals and directions of our organizations and that's okay. But I think it is too often we meet at the moment of crisis and in the field that's manageable because there's so much work and the crisis is so imminent. People tend to cooperate. I've worked at PRT, we've all worked out in the field. It works in the field. It's usually in the Washington format or in the international forum where it doesn't work and that I think with this common understanding that we can approach and through planning processes and strategic processes that back up more I think this is where we get closer to it and I think we're getting some gentle nudges if I can jump away from stabilization and look a little bit at security sector assistance. Congress forced upon us and I think it was a good decision to this new 333 process. I'm sorry to throw out a number. I don't even, I don't know what its name but we call it the 333 process where DOD can now do certain forms of security sector assistance but they must get the like written in blood concurrence of the State Department. Now that could have been a two week blood bath veto process where DOD table drops a bunch of proposals for billions of dollars in very critical places but we decided to turn that on its end and back it up 18 months to the beginning of when DOD's first thinking about planning its processes and they were very open to that and then we showed up with the way we're doing our foreign military finances which is the State Department's security sector assistance. Sorry to throw out all these acronyms. But we showed up with our cards as well so that we can have this joint capabilities conversation of what are we both trying to do? Why are we trying to do what we're trying to do? We don't have to agree but by at least understanding what the other one is trying to achieve you start to develop that common and then you suss out disagreements and you can elevate them appropriately long in advance so it doesn't become this break. And I mean this is different but that scenario that could happen in a crisis process or even better it's not like any of these crises are honestly very new. All of these countries that we work in that are in crisis that are in internal war or internal conflict there is a sometimes generational but even sometimes a few years antecedent to it. We know why and how these countries got this way. So how do we start, how do we back this up and start with those sort of common understandings? And I think that just takes a lot of joint training a lot of just good training in our own organizations to be open to what other folks are trying to explain it again. This does not mean agreement. If all of us are, one of my first bosses said if a state aide and DOD and IC person are sitting in a room and they agree on everything three of them should be fired. We have jobs to do. We have been given by Congress and the president responsibilities that we are supposed to execute that are often in contrast to one another and those contrasts and disagreements should be elevated to appropriate levels where people can make decisions based on those differences. So shouldn't shy away from disagreeing. We should just try and do it in an environment ahead of time so it's not a crisis. So we're not fumbling and wasting critical the golden hour experience. So that would be my corollary to what Marcus said. Christian, you wanna? If I can come in just with a very quick comment proving my EU origins from a bureaucratic angle to show that we have at a very much more modest level of capacity we have a slight administrative advantage in as much as the external action servers that I work in. It's an innovative structure in terms of dealing with external relations, foreign and security policy because we've got the civilian, the state department side and the military, the Department of Defense side under one roof. We are all part of the same organization. The entire EU military establishment, modest as it is, is part of the external action service. So when we develop our approaches that I presented earlier we do it constantly hand in hand on a daily basis between the military staff and the civilian staff. And that helps us then bring the defense departments and the foreign affairs departments of our member states together in a way that they actually sometimes find more difficult if they have to sort it out at the national level. That's very helpful. Alexander. In September, the UN and the World Bank released a preview of an enormous undertaking that you led on behalf of the World Bank that it's, let me see if I can describe it in one sentence and then I'm gonna leave the hard part to you that surveys what we know about conflict prevention and tries to distill lessons that can be used to inform future action. It's an enormous undertaking and the main report is not out yet it will be out early in 2018. I invite everybody here to grab a copy of the preview if you haven't already. This was a huge, this is a huge project as I've talked with you before. Tell us a little bit about first of all, why on earth would you take on something so huge and so difficult? What was the rationale for doing this? What do you hope it will achieve and tell us a little bit about what maybe some of the main findings are? Okay, well, that's a short question. So, well, first of all, it's been a year fascinating experience, mostly because a development organization like the World Bank that is very focused on economic and social issues. It's working with an organization that is very focused on political, human rights, diplomatic issues that we are not at all accustomed to work with because we worked with UNDP also but we work mostly with DPA, DPKO, PBSO for the one who knows the UN. That means the secretary general office which comes from a very, very different perspective than we do. And we try to came with, oops, we try to, sorry, sorry, we try to came with a common report and common understanding about the issues of prevention. So, maybe in terms of why we did it is because what we have been discussing here shows exactly that. That now there has been, maybe because we had this huge spike in conflict from 2010, there has been, I think, a common understanding that there's something else we need to do for prevention. That the situation of conflict and the global situation is changing very, very fast. Things are very different than 15 years ago. The geopolitical situation is totally different and the dynamic, and it reflects inside the dynamic from countries. One thing is we never had so many international intervention in national conflicts, for example. Conflict have never been so protracted. Conflict have never crossed border as much they are doing now. All sorts of issues of this kind that we are realizing that makes things very, very different. At the same time for the World Bank, most of the poor now are in countries that are fragile, countries affected by violent conflict. So, if we want to be effective on poverty reduction, we need to be more effective on prevention. So that's the story, and then maybe I will tell you we did a lot of comparison between countries that failed and countries that succeed, but we did a lot on countries that succeed. That means looking at countries that 15 years ago were seen as very fragile and at risk and that had managed not to develop violent conflict and try to see what was different there. So let me take two examples because we discussed them. One is, and I just come back from those countries, Mali is one of them and Niger is one of them. So when you look at Mali, Mali has been, as you know, has been at the center of many of very serious conflicting issues in some times. Niger also but has managed admirably well to water them. Now when you go in Mali, you see that we have massive development aid. We have massive effort at negotiations. You have involvement of ECOWAS, all sorts of organization. But when you look behind it, you realize that we've built up a lot of what we would call Potemkin Palace. There's a lot of technocratic institution that are not inhabited by the politics. So I think that what you were saying by the politics is so important. It means that basically you have a political process that is happening that is just going on the side of all what we are trying to build formally. You arrive to Niger, and when you start to look at the political policy of development in Niger, you actually realize that they're doing probably much less, in a donor perspective, much less good than Mali. They still have those very heavy public enterprise. Their decentralization is not as sophisticated. But they are much more effective at prevention because prevention is a really politically appropriated topic. It's there, people understand it, and people there understand it. So first conclusion, what makes the difference is mostly androgynous. It's not about how the donor work and what the donor do. We are doing better in Niger because the government of Niger and others in Niger are doing better. We're doing bad in Mali, not because our advice is not good. They are actually excellent. We have much more resource, but because there's not the political elements and political process there. Now, what does it mean this? What does it mean for a donor who wants to be more effective? And that's, I think, the big question we need to have to ask ourselves because we always think of ourselves as much more powerful than we actually are when we get into those type of topics. Well, first of all, we realize that there are a couple of things that needs to be very, very important. We've talked in the theory of conflict a lot about structural factors. So, you know, where the country is positioning and all that, that's really important, right? So Niger has a number of structural issues, the fact that it's at the border of Libya, the fact that half of its country desert. There's a lot of structural factors that favor that. But that's not only the story. Then there's a problem of institution. And that's the WDR 2018, 2011, that really said, you know, institution are really what matters. But they talked about the broad sense of institution, the sort of rule of flow, norms and all that. Of course, as donor, we translate that as organization very quickly and because that's what we can grasp, right? And then you realize that transforming organization is stories that goes for many, many, many years. And therefore, it's good for prevention, for the long-term prevention. But you realize that the incentive of actors are short-term. Actors, when you have risks, are all short-term. So you need to have long-term policies but the incentive are very short-term. So what this report said is that there's actually three things you have to look at. Structural factor, you look at institution, but the incentive of actors needs to be looked at as it is. And we have to see everything with the eye of what it's going to do for the incentive of different actors. And that in itself is something that needs to be there. And what is interesting with the incentive of actors is that that immediately brings the mediation with the development together. Because how you change an incentive of actors is both through issues of mediation, through issues of security, but also through issues of development and others. So bringing this issue of incentive as the central element of trying to think about prevention I think is an important thing. I can again, two things I think we need to do. One is the sustainability of thinking about peace process. So up to now, and that's the little problem with stabilization when it's not taken into a big perspective of peace building, is that when violence stops, we feel, or when the immediate signs of violence stop, we feel that we have finished the business. And actually we have not finished the business. And that's what's shown in Afghanistan, everywhere in Mali, and all that. Building peace is a very, very long-term process. So you cannot go back to development as usual once you've stabilized. So stabilization and then going back to development as usual does not give you peace. The development you need to do needs to be different. So for example, just one example, if you want to deal with inclusion, which is what is very important, it's not only about the poor. Our policies is about the poor, the people who feel not included are very often not the poor. And so therefore, policy of development cannot only look at the poor if it has to address peace. It has to look also at groups that might not be the poor. So you have to do the both, because Mali needs poverty reduction for the long term. It also needs to include groups that might not be the poorest. So that's just one example. The second thing that is really, really important is the inclusiveness. So we see very clearly today that most of the conflict have a root somewhere in grievances. In grievances around exclusion. So that we did massive work on that. We really went through all the conflicts. We had pre-oldering analysis. The grievances around exclusion, again not about poverty, about exclusion, are very important in modern conflict. And that's what you can address very much early on if you have the courage to take that up with government as a discussion. That's the second part, is the inclusion. The third part is targeted, is what I was already saying, is that you need to be able to focus on something that is different than the development you would do for growth and poverty alleviation when you do development for peace and stability. You need to bring both together. So that's in one nutshell very rapidly. Some of the ideas behind this work, which I hope will have some influence on the debate. That's terrific. I'm mindful of the time, and everybody here has been super patient. So let's open it up. I would say let's take two or three questions for the panelists, and then we'll field them as appropriate. And so Bridget, you are first. The gentleman closer to the front. I'm happy to lend my microphone to the cause. Thanks very much, and thanks for this discussion. I just want to go back and pick up on something that I heard mentioned a number of times and ask if you could each, or some of you go deeper into it, which is the role of local civil society. So I work with Peace Direct International Organization. We support local peace builders in countries of conflict who are often doing work to prevent violence or build lasting peace in their societies. And I heard each of you, and I'm really thankful and appreciative of the recognition of the importance of inclusion of local civil society, local ownership, et cetera. When we talk to them, they still feel left out of these processes. They're still grappling with, well, how do we engage? When do we engage? When do our voices get heard? And how do we do that earlier? So they're not sort of given solutions that they're supposed to implement, but are actually leaders in positive change. Hello, my name is Richard, and I'm a student at the George Washington University. You spoke a lot about grievances and how that contributes to these conflicts. But in order for these grievances to stop and for inclusion to happen, the governments need to be willing to facilitate that. And when you look at the governments in a majority of these fragile states, the presidents and their ministers have been in there for decades, and no changes happen, mainly because they're benefiting off of the situation and the exclusion that's taking place. So I'm curious about what roles all of your respective agencies can play in putting some sort of pressure on these leaders to say, look, what you're doing is making the situation worse, and if they refuse to change what you can do to allow them to change, because what's been going on has been going on for decades, and it doesn't look like it will change. Thank you. Okay, thank you. So why don't we start with those two? Role of local civil society and including them, and then secondly, a question about influencing political elites to help push along the needed reforms. So I will sort of put it up for grabs, because it seems like all four of these perspectives, I think, have something to say about each of those questions. Who would like to start? I'll pick somebody. Alexander, why don't you start? Okay, so one thing that came out from this study is that today there's no really success on prevention from countries without building up broader coalitions. So one thing that really comes from the type of peace agreement that happened today from what happened during the Cold War is the fact that government needs to come to much more people usually. So when you look at successful case, Indonesia, Tunisia, countries that, you know, were under very, very strong stress but managed to avoid violence, there was always a coalition behind it. So, you know, the very good example is Tunisia, of course, because the coalition even received the Nobel Peace Prize, but everywhere there has been, in Niger, there's very strong coalition with the civil society and others. So this is really important now, and I think the message passes also, you know, some of the local private sector, it's different groups, but I think if there's one message that comes very strongly, if you don't do that, it's very, very difficult to get to any negotiation or anything. You need to bring really the actors around, and I think there's a conscientization of that, right? So I just... I mean, the report we're doing supports that very, very much. Christian? Well, I could maybe just a quick addition. In a sense, I think the answer to both questions lies in combining them. Working with local civil society is, in one dimension, a way of giving a structured voice to widely felt grievances. It's a way of channeling them. It's a way of bringing them in to a discourse, into a national dialogue or regional dialogue, subnational or whatever. So it's a way of trying to capture the sense of this appropriation or the sense of lack of involvement or the lack of inclusion and giving that a path, a possibility of engagement with as one of the reasons we seek, sometimes successfully, often unsuccessfully, to build structures of dialogue as part of our policy processes. When you get to the implementation phase, it's involving local civil society as part of a constant reality check. Sometimes they can even be implementers, but a lot of the time, they're just partners in continued dialogue to try to understand, are we doing the right thing? Is it reaching the right people? Is it having the desired effect? So, as I say, the answer in addressing grievances lies very much in working with organized local civil society. Rafael, you spoke eloquently about how stabilization can't just be about enabling capacity for delivering services. There was a political part to it. You had to identify whether or not some people, in fact, were excluded in a particular environment from the receipt of services. So stabilization had to fix that political problem. I think the second of these questions has to do with that. Do you want to say a little bit more about what levers can be pulled out of these frameworks? I mean, I think underneath both of these questions and underneath this political nature of stabilization, and I think you have to separate just to step back for a second. Stabilization is often in a much more violent, uncertain environment where there are certain imperatives to do things quicker, whereas in other environments where there is not open violence, you have more time and space to come to this realization themselves. But oftentimes when we are present and active in a place where governance is not clear, where the government is collapsed or the government is under attack, it becomes a different dynamic. And one of the most important things is really the analysis and understanding of the environment that you're going into. So you understand who the players are, what their incentives are, what is the political economy. These dynamics, these conflicts exist. None of these conflicts come out of nowhere. They should only surprise people in the big capitals who aren't paying attention to them because they're looking at other things. People who actually focus on these countries, you can see these problems coming. People surely, you know, can analyze our countries and they know what our political dynamics are. So I think it is understanding these and being able to then talk to the different parties and try and facilitate this, but I think in a stabilization environment, part of politics is that there are tough decisions to be made here. And I think as we look to security and the provision of security, I mean, I think it's very interesting in a lot of the insurgencies and conflicts the U.S. has been involved in in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the ways the insurgents have been able to wedge themselves in is the provision of just raw security. People will accept a lot of injustice and indignity and feel safe. And our inability sometimes to challenge that has cost us regions and space in Southern Afghanistan and elsewhere. And when we've been able to retake it, it has largely been about the provision of justice. Now harsh justice runs its course pretty quickly. But in that time space, how do you start bringing in an inclusive understanding and helping the parties realize that you can't maintain order, the perquisites of power without bringing in these other groups and having peace? But there's no question. Stabilization and the politics of it involves coming to grips with how do we deal with bad actors and how do we engage with bad actors? And nobody wants to hear that, but I think we do have to discuss in some of these places, but we're not going to put tens of thousands of our own troops on the ground. We're not going to impose a settlement. The locals have to make settlements so that their favorite actors have legitimate power and resources and popularity and influence in a society, and they are an actor. And we have to figure out how to co-opt and how to get other groups to co-opt them, how to marginalize them over time, how to exclude them from the very beginning if there are reasons they cannot be included. But there are tough decisions. I mean, there's no one way that we can just get the bad guys off the field because the bad guys are powerful for a reason. If we are unwilling to intervene with total force, which we have found is not super successful, we have to let the locals come to a settlement on their own, which might not be the settlement that we would want in our country, but it may be good enough for peace and if it's good enough in the local context, we really have to think about that. I am afraid we are out of time. I am sorry that we weren't able to get more questions in, but I do want to thank our audience for taking time out of busy schedules to spend part of the afternoon with us. We are sitting, I think, at a moment that's fascinating. We've got the US government, the European Union and the World Bank seized in different ways, but certainly with a common denominator about focusing on the importance of tackling fragility and figuring out how to be smarter about prevention, and that suggests that there really is agreement that this is one of the most serious problems that we have to address as countries begin to develop. So I really appreciate our four panelists spending time with us. Please join me in thanking them and thank you all very much for coming. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon.