 Good afternoon, and thank you so much for joining us for this symposium this afternoon. My name is George Lopez, and I have the great privilege of serving as the vice president for the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peace Building here at the US Institute of Peace. Welcome all for this great celebration, not just of a book, but of a set of ideas. Before I ask Pamela all to bring up and introduce the panel, I wanted to begin with a small story. I am a recovering academic, having spent 39 years teaching at colleges and universities, and in the fall of 1996, I walked into my large introduction to international relations class with a heavy book managing global chaos under my arm, with lots of students sitting out there in an auditorium much like this, holding the book because it was the book for the course. And as you do on the first day of classes, you go through the syllabus, you have some Q&A and etc. And one brave student in the middle of the room, raises his hand and said, So, and he's holding up the book. We're not going to read this whole thing, right? Now, being an insecure academic and worried about the quality of the challenge that had just come to me, I thought for a second and I said, oh no, not possibly. You're going to memorize it. And a bunch of students, but managing global chaos, which is what that course did, was mirrored by really dozens and then hundreds of courses over the last decade, through four volumes produced by this fabulous team of Chet Krocker, Pamela All and Fen Hampson. This particular approach of creating, if you will, a bible of all the best there is about conflict, its dynamics, its changing nature and potential solutions, is the signature that this group has given us in the field and particularly given us to USIP for over a decade. So we're delighted to have this symposium and book launch today, a number of the authors and particularly two of the editors here. And we're particularly thrilled to be able to kick this off with a particular kind of beginning, a keynote, if you will, by Ray Sagerin, who is a vintage for this volume now in 2015. We wouldn't have had you in 96, because our consciousness hadn't caught up to what people like you do. This is somebody, and it's not going to be unusual for me to say, has published in foreign policy. People in this room say so what? Well, if you've published in foreign policy, have you also published in science, in nature, in a variety of other blogs and been on television, radio, etc. and had award-winning books that get you a Guggenheim. This marvelous professor and program director for the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2 will lead us in a whole new way of thinking about our world adrift, talking at the beginning stages of the octopus. Thank you so much for joining us and welcome, Ray, please. So I just need what's on my screen to be on that screen. There we go. Okay. Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you for inviting me and letting me crash the party of the book with my little thin chapter at the end. I am going to talk about a lot of things here today, some big concepts from nature, and I really won't be able to have a thorough discussion about them. That's why I put up my email and my Twitter and I truly welcome this conversation to continue at any point in the future. A lot of these ideas are from my book, Learning from the Octopus. I know I'm supposed to be selling the other book, so we'll leave that aside for now, but that's where you can catch up on some more of these ideas. And I want to thank my friend, Bobby Long, who did this amazing octopus drawing that appears in some places. There are other drawings in this talk that are a little more mediocre, and those are my drawings, but the really good one is Bobby's. So I hope this isn't a surprise to the editors of this volume, but the world has been adrift for a long time. So it's important to recognize that history and that history of things moving, things being unpredictable and things changing. And the solution to a problem of a world constantly being adrift is not to try to stop it. That is not the solution to a world adrift, trying to put all your energy and to stop something that is just going and moving and happening no matter what you do. The solution to being adrift is to adapt, and there is no better source of information as to how to adapt to a world adrift than biology. Biology is an enormous sample size, and the entire sample of biology is about how to live with risk and uncertainty, because those are the two irreducible facts of the world we live in. The world is full of risk and it is always uncertain. It is a 3.5 billion year old database with literally uncountable diversity when you think not just of different species, but individuals within those species, cells within those individuals, etc. And amazingly, all these things come up in biology that are all the things we talk about in this volume and more generally in international relations and statecraft and peace building. Things like deterrence and strategic partnerships, and there's lots of asymmetric conflict and arms races and even recalcitrant actors or belligerent actors, and that's really unfair to the shark. The shark is just doing what a shark does. And that in fact is the other reason that biology is such a powerful set of data to use when thinking about managing conflict, because biology really is about as value neutral as you can get. This is my friend and hero in marine biology, Ed Ricketts, who appears in a number of John Steinbeck's novels. He was Steinbeck's best friend, and he's sort of a marine biologist-philosopher, and what Ed says here is great. He says, studying animal communities has this advantage. They are what they are. They cannot complicate the picture with worded idealisms, and I think any of us who have dealt with conflict and different parties has had to deal with those worded idealisms that are covering what is the true nature of the problem. Biology shows you in raw detail what is the problem and how you solve the problem. Now, in a world adrift, biological systems do have limitations. Specifically, they are not able to plan, they are not able to predict what's going to happen, and they are not able to perfect themselves. So if you had any notion that biology was a planned exercise, look at this ridiculous fish here, the Mola Mola. This is the ocean sunfish. It is an absurd looking animal. If I asked any of you to design a fish, you would never design a fish that looks like this. But it's been incredibly successful at doing what it does. It got this way by solving problems and adapting. Organisms in nature do not have the luxury of being able to predict what's going to happen in the future. Sometimes we assume because, say, organisms before a big tsunami or earthquake are acting strangely that they're predicting what happened. They're just much better at observing changes and patterns in the world than we are. So they're like an early warning sign, but they're not predicting, they're observing. And organisms are unable to perfect themselves. We often hear the term survival of the fittest. It is not at all survival of the fittest. It is survival of the good enough to reproduce yourself. That is all you have to do. And if you think about it, it's impossible to even identify what is perfect. Discovery Channel will tell you that the great white shark is nature's perfect predator. And I say, you know what? It'd be way better if it had laser beam eyes. There is no way to say what is perfect in nature. The great white shark is an awesome predator. It's really good at what it does, and that's all it needs to be. So this is what they do instead. They are, because they can't plan or predict or perfect themselves, they have to adapt. And these are three of several hallmarks of adaptable systems that we've discovered through the years that are very consistent across biology. The first is that adaptable systems use decentralized ways to observe change. And the octopus is a really good exemplar of this. When it wants to change its color to match its environment, it has millions of skin cells spread all over its body, responding to their local environment, which gives the octopus as a whole its camouflage. This is a good system for quickly and accurately observing change in your world. Secondly, biological systems, all biological systems are massively redundant. This is amazing because biology is constantly stressed for resources. And yet, it spends a lot of resources making multiple copies of things, making little variations on multiple copies of things in every level of biology, from the genes to cells to individuals to populations to ecosystems. There is massive redundancy in biology, and it is a way of mitigating this uncertain world that you live in. It's a way of hedging your bets. Then all biological systems are symbiotic. No organism does it on its own. Every organism is engaged in symbiotic partnerships with many other organisms, and these take on a huge diversity of forms. And many symbiotic partnerships came out of relationships that used to be in conflict, and the partners found that they could solve problems better together. And those symbiotic units come into conflict with other symbiotic units, which then become larger symbiotic units. The history of life amazingly is a continual spiral towards greater and greater cooperation. That is amazing and profound. And what symbiosis allows an organism to do is to expand your abilities to adapt, because you will never be perfectly adapted to your environment. Now, organisms are quite a bit different from institutions, from things that humans make. And I'm going to talk about institutions very broadly, thinking about any kind of institution, a business, an NGO, a state, a collection of states. And I think that, although I'm using broad brush strokes, I think you will see little bits of truth in everything I say in every institution that you've ever worked with or worked for. So institutions are organized to reward centralization. They reduce redundancies. They're constantly looking to be more efficient to cut the fat and to get rid of all that wasteful redundancy. And in many ways, they resist symbiotic partnerships. And that organization pushes them to do things. And we've seen this in all the institutions we work with. They like to develop strategic plans. They like to use predictive models. And they always look for perfect solutions. And there are a whole host of consultants out there who love selling institutions predictive models. What I've noticed as I look through these kind of clip art flow charts of the predictive models is they're all fairly similar, no matter how complex they are. You get a bunch of data, you throw it into this predictive model, and out comes a pot of gold at the bottom. But the little secret of all of these is always, there's always this box on the side. This one says business understanding. And I've seen others that say situational awareness. I'm guessing my hypothesis is if you look at organizations that had a predictive model that ended up working for them, I'm thinking that this box is actually probably really big in their organization. And the predictive model actually didn't do much because that box is where the people who are observant and intelligent about the situation they're in lies. Likewise, organizations are always telling you to give 100% or in this case, become your goal, give 110%. If I had that motivational poster up on my cubicle, I would kill myself. I mean literally I would kill myself because if you give 100% or 110% to one task, that leaves no energy to do everything else you have to do. Or to do something different when the environment changes. Now biological systems, however, are quite a bit like what I'm going to call, because I haven't seen a good term for it, so I'm just going to cop a term here, adaptable cultures. These are all these things we're reading about constantly these days, things like crowd sourcing and crowdfunding and maker spaces that are using 3D printers to generate the internet of things. And technology enabled networks which Sheldon writes about in this book which allow for things like citizen science in my field which is an amazing breaking of the academy and letting individuals do science and contribute to science. And also business things like Airbnb and Waze and Uber, these are all of a type, they're all decentralized redundant symbiotic systems that are adaptable and solve problems in our world. And the writing about these, especially early articles, the kind of things you'll see five or six or even eight years ago in Wired magazine is almost utopian in nature. There's this idea that maybe these adaptable cultures are almost causing the demise of institutions or completely replacing institutions. And these things are happening everywhere, increasingly they become legitimized in one of Chet and Fen and Pamela's chapters. They have all the elements they're talking about of symbiosis, redundancy and decentralization. And so a question comes up, do we believe the hype? Is this really that this decentralized network world is going to replace the role of institutions in our world? And I basically kind of was going along that path in many of my talks on this topic until I had sort of three wake-up calls. And they were all about the three exemplar examples I've used in all my talks about adaptable systems. The first is the octopus itself. And it's a wake-up call for me because I was talking about the decentralized symbiotic nature of the octopus. But I had to recall and remember that the octopus has an amazing central controller. It has an incredible brain, a thoughtful brain, a problem-solving brain. And so I realized that the octopus is really more of a balanced organism that uses both the central controller and these decentralized elements to solve problems. Now on the human side, I always put up DHS as sort of my exemplar of a centralized bureaucratic top-down organization. And I've had many laughs, especially with DHS people, about this kind of organization that was created after 9-11. And more seriously, one of the big failures of DHS, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and simply the organization and how that got in the way of FEMA's ability to respond. So that was always on my mind. And it wasn't until a few years in of talking about this that I had any bother to turn the spotlight on myself and the tiny little institutional world that I have any control over, which is my university classroom. And I realized, oh my God, my university classrooms are organized just like DHS. I'm the professor in the red box there. I have this universe of information out there. I select what I want my students to learn. I push it into the classroom, that green triangle. And all my little boxes are my students lined up there. And I expect them to get that information and spit it back to me in some organized fashion. So I'll return to what I did about that. But then my third exemplar, which was what I thought was the example of how to do this right, Google Flu Trends. So Google uses all of us as those decentralized observers, as decentralized redundant observers. And when we're typing in flu-related terms, because maybe someone in our family has some symptoms. And what was amazing with Google Flu Trends is it precisely tracked the centralized CDC trace of flu, except Google claimed they could get you this data two weeks earlier. That seemed amazing to me and a great story about a decentralized system, except that Google Flu Trends stopped working. So a couple years ago, Google Flu Trends just went off the map and in fact almost doubled the prediction of what flu actually was in that particular year. So the geniuses of Google immediately got to work and looked back at it and realized that they could bring it back onto a tight correlation with the actual CDC data by taking little bits of the CDC data and reinserting it into their algorithm and it came back into line. But again, that shows you, like the octopus, the need to have this balance between what can a centralized institution do and what can this decentralized world do for us. So those wake-up calls made me think about how can we have a symbiosis of what institutions do well and what these adaptable cultures do well. I've talked about what adaptable cultures do well, but what institutions do well and that is useful in this new world adrift or this old world adrift is that they often have a vision, a global vision, a vision that's much wider in time and in space than individual local actors can have. That's important. They can understand what boundaries might exist or what we might want to see for boundaries or rules or norms in going after a certain problem. They can certainly provide resources to independent actors and may be able to amalgamate resources more like the octopus. All those skin cells running around need resources and it's that central brain and mouth and other parts of the octopus to get those resources and spread them out to those actors. And often the reputation of an institution as excellent cover is a place for these independent actors to be able to work and know if I solve this particular challenge out there, there's something that's going to help me spread it out and get it out there and sometimes it's just the reputation of the institution. So you combine these skill sets and what you get are the conditions for natural selection and this is the thing that's been missing is how do you mimic this amazing process of natural selection which as Richard Dawkins has said is a simple process that ends up giving us redwood trees and humans and amazingly natural selection is both a theory and a process. It's the whole ball of wax and what natural selection has done is this very simple process of taking variation, selecting among that variation and reproducing the winners in that selection is led to everything, that whole huge database of biology. But how do we replicate it safely, ethically, in our own world? Because we often talk about how we've sort of stepped off the path of natural selection. How do we bring it back in? And this combination of the best things that institutions can do and the best things that adaptable cultures can do is how we get there. So the step that institutions have to take to start this symbiosis going is very simple and it just involves changing from a posture of giving orders to issuing challenges. So when an institution gives orders it says we know what's best for you, go do it. When an institution issues a challenge it says we're all facing a problem here. Who among you can help us solve this problem? That's the switch there. And this capitalizes on all the strengths of an institution. You need the vision to even understand what is the best challenge to put out there. You can't just go out to a bunch of people on the internet and say would you design something really cool for us? It helps to have a vision of what is the problem that we need to get at. It helps to have boundary conditions and rules about what you want this solution to do whether it's a technological solution or an intellectual solution. What are the ground rules of this game we're working in? Because it's no good that someone invents something that doesn't do anything useful or can't work in the particular environment, conflict environment or business environment that you're working in. Certainly institutions can provide resources to a challenge. And when British Parliament issued a challenge in the early 1700s to figure out how are we going to understand longitude at sea and they issued a broad challenge they put a lot of money into it. But it turns out now that we have a very rich database of challenge based problem solving just in the last 10 years that it takes very few resources because if people believe in the mission of your organization or the mission of the challenge, what the challenge is trying to solve and this relates a little bit to the reputation part they will fall all over themselves to solve the challenge. And we've seen again and again that people will not worry about the resource or the monetary prize to solve the challenge. Sometimes it's a boon to their own reputation. Sometimes they're just convinced that they want to solve this challenge and no one has asked them before. So you take that and you combine it with these elements of these adaptable cultures and it happens quite naturally. Once you issue the challenge all these decentralized agents start responding to the challenge and they bring their own little redundancies to it because each person out there is sort of a redundant problem solver with slightly different skills and abilities and that leads naturally to working symbioses because someone who has a set of abilities says, well, I can solve part of this challenge but I'm really going to need say a computer programmer to help me solve the whole challenge and so symbioses develop naturally out of a problem that needs to be solved. And so here's just one quick and simple example of a challenge when Android wanted to get in the game on mobile one of the things you always do in a business is you develop a logo and most businesses, 99.999% of businesses develop a logo and hold onto it for dear life. You don't touch the logo, you don't mess with it, we'll sue you if you do. Android did the opposite. They said, here's our logo, this cute little robot, do whatever you want with it people. It's totally open access. And so you had all these people taking memes on this logo symbiotically mixing the Android logo and R2D2 and DOMO and the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert and what it did was spread this logo all over everywhere much better than the institution could have done on their own. Just a simple example there but there are challenges that are turning up all kinds of things in every field now. Now we bring it back to the institutional side so that's great. You've got all kinds of great stuff out there but the thing about adaptation is you can't just adapt once and say, oh, we're great, we adapted, done. You need to keep that cycle going. That's why you want to create a selective system, a natural selective system that keeps it going. There's a couple of things institutions can do to keep this challenge-based problem-solving going. One is you use your vision and your sense of what are the boundaries that I'm willing to work within to maintain diversity. Diversity of people, diversity of ideas. I have Dennis Rodman writing the horse backwards here because one of the great basketball coaches, Phil Jackson, recognized this and what he called it was was maintaining your hayokas, protecting your hayokas. A hayoka is a Lakota Indian spirit who would cross-dress and ride his horse backwards and Phil Jackson recognized that Dennis Rodman, this person that the institution of basketball wanted to totally eliminate. He did cross-dress. He did do weird things. But Jackson realized that he was needed to bring the chemistry of these other superstars he had together and to be someone who could make the team work in a different way. So the idea is who are the hayokas in your institution that you need to protect in some ways. And history is littered with these people like the fighter pilot John Boyd who are constantly fighting against the institution when they should be lauded and protected because diversity is the essential element of natural selection. Without diversity, there's nothing to select. And you use your resources and... Thank you. You use your resources and reputation to replicate success. Too often, institutions focus on failure and after action reporting about failure. Nothing in nature focuses on failure. When you fail in nature, you didn't reproduce yourself in your little experiment on how to live in this world is over forever. Every living thing is an example of learning from its own successes. And so you need to make space in your organizational culture for identifying those successes, even little successes, out of a larger failure and learning how to replicate those. That's how you build from success to success, just like nature does. It doesn't build from failure to success. It builds from success to success to success. And so you put this all together and you start to get this spiraling pattern of ever greater growth towards more and more problem solving. And if you've been listening, what I've started to slip in here is the idea that the institution and the adaptable cultures are coming together symbiotically, but the institution itself is not just saying, how can we make the world change around us? The institution is changing itself. And so we get some wisdom here, the idea of being the change. And I'm sorry for anyone who has this bumper sticker. Gandhi never actually said be the change you want to see in the world, but he did say something quite close, which is if we could change ourselves, the tendency in the world would also change. And that is a very, to me, biological statement because every biological organism is both changing itself and changing the world around it, and those changes in the world around it are feeding back on its own changes in this recursive spiraling pattern. And if you want your institution to be an agent of change, the institution has to change along with everyone else you're asking to change. So putting the spotlight back on myself and my Department of Homeland Security style courses, which are very typical of every university course, I had to say how can I change my own institution? And I recognized as I tried to look for what is blocking my system, I realized that there was this document. There is this document called a syllabus, or in business, it's called an agenda, and it is the guardian of central control. In fact, it's the guardian of the worst aspects of institutions because it makes an assumption that your course or your meeting is going to be predictable, and it makes a plan about what you should be talking about. I have to make my syllabus at the University of Arizona a year and a half before I teach the class to get it all approved. I've never met any of my students. I don't know what they want to learn or what they need. Fortunately, it's made of paper. And what we do in my class now is the first day of class, I say everyone take out your syllabus, and then I say let's rip it up. We rip up the syllabus. Just a little aside, people ask me, well, why do you even have a syllabus? I have a syllabus because my dean is an agent of change. Sometimes you have to be like a virus and cover yourself in a protein cloak that allows you to get into the body without the immune response. So I dutifully make my syllabus and go through the learning outcomes assessments and all that, but we rip it up and then I say what do you want to learn about this topic and what could you help teach your fellow students about this topic? And from those two questions, every student has to lead a class period because I can't possibly teach them every subtopic within, say, marine conservation in a semester. So I let them choose what they want to learn about within that topic. And then every other student has to respond to that on a course Wiki site that we create. So every day has a new course Wiki page, just like Wikipedia, except it's everyone putting in something that they've learned or are interested in in this topic so that when we come into class, everyone has some little piece of ownership of this class. So if one class period looks like, these are real data, I'm going to show you in the next slide. This is what my class looks like now. Now, every student is out there in this universe of information, which is constantly changing. There's no way stuff I have on marine conservation from a year and a half ago is as relevant as something that was just posted on the internet that last night when one of the students grabbed it and put it into the course Wiki. And they're riffing off each other, off them, off other classes, and it's all going into that green triangle, the class, and look at me, I'm the red box there. I'm not doing anything. I don't have to do anything. This thing is a self-generating system, and it goes. These kind of decentralized classrooms are much more adaptable to new knowledge. They're easier to run. They're far more effective in my experience. And here's the thing, and this is the crux of when you want to be the change. They are impossible to predict what's going to happen. I know they're going to be good because I've been running them for a few years now, and I know they're going to work. First, I was terrified that they even work. Now I know they're going to work, but I never know what's going to happen. For example, one year I had a student who wanted to teach about shark conservation. She was very interested in sharks, so she gave some information about sharks. One of the biggest problems with shark conservation is that they are finned, their fins are cut off, and they're not ready to be seen there. In this particular year, I happened to have a student in the class who was Chinese, and what he put up on the Wiki site was his wedding menu. And then he talked about in class because everyone said, hey, what was that you put up? I can't read Chinese. Tell us about it. What he said was, this was my wedding menu, and unlike all of my friends' wedding menus, it does not have shark fin soup on it. And let me tell you what hell my bride and I went through and that story, which was so relevant to all the students and his peers in the class about peer pressure, cultural pressure, parental pressure, was so powerful. It was a lesson I never could have told citing some FAO statistics about sharks. And that will never happen again in my class, but at that time it was the greatest lesson that I could have had on shark fin soup. And so that's why when you start developing adaptable systems, you find again and again and again they develop what we call emergent properties, things you would not predict by the elements that you put into this adaptable soup. You could never predict them. It's also known as serendipity. Serendipity is this. It's these simple molecules forming something like an octopus or a redwood tree or a human being. And we should pay attention to that because a world adrift needs a little serendipity. Thank you. Thank you. There will be an opportunity to ask great questions after we go to the panel. If I could invite the panel to come up to the stage. Thank you. I'm going to show you exactly where you're going to sit because this is not going to be adaptable. You're going to sit here. You will sit here. You will sit here. You will sit here. You will sit here. You will sit here. Sorry about that, Ray. Yes. No. Yes. My name is Pamela All and I am a senior advisor here at USIP. I'm also a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation in Canada. And I am an editor of the book, Managing Conflict in a World Adrift. I'm very pleased to be here today to ask questions to our wonderful panel. The panel are very illustrious people all by themselves, but they also happen to have written chapters for a book. So we will be talking about their ideas not only in their chapters, but also their ideas in general. So let me introduce them. To my left is Chester Crocker. He is my co-editor and co-author in a number of these books, but his day job is as James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown. He was the chair of USIP for a number of years, the board of directors of USIP for a number of years. He also was at the State Department. Many of you may know him as the former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. He serves on many boards, both corporate and non-profit. And as I said in the beginning, he has done a number of books, some of which have been done with USIP. And the title of his chapter, I'm going to tell you the title of everyone's chapter so you can understand where they're coming from. In the book was The Diplomacy of Engagement in Transitional Polities. To his left is Ellen Lebson who is the president and CEO of the Stimson Center which is a public policy institution which was awarded a MacArthur Foundation institutional genius award. She is herself a Middle East expert and she's also had a long career in government including as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council. To my far left is Sheldon Himlefar who is president and CEO of the recently established Peace Tech Lab and he's the founder of the USIP programs in media and conflict and science and technology and conflict. He has also worked in the private sector he's worked on the Hill and he was head of search for common grounds media division and did a lot of work on the ground using media for conflict management. And his chapter is promise and parallel the role of technology networks in conflict mitigation Ellen's chapter which I forgot to tell you is from someone's to turbulence the global awakening. So welcome to all of you and delighted that you could join us this afternoon. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and it would be great if you could answer both on the basis of your chapter and your broader experience and come up to questions from the floor and Ray will join us for that time. So managing conflict in a world adrift is not the title we started with as you well know in 2011 when we were starting to think about this book we called it managing conflict in an age of awakening. So the first question really is does a world adrift actually capture the world environment that we're in today? And if it does what does it mean to be adrift? And how are we adrift and what are the reasons for it? And I'm going to start with chat on this one because we actually made the final decision to change from awakening to adrift and so I'm not going to answer it but I will ask you to start us off. Well I think the short answer is that we are living in a world adrift we're seeing an unregulated diffusion of agency, authority and responsibility to all sorts of other actors unregulated it's not a centralized system and so you can see that in various aspects you can see it of the normative divisions in our world today which are getting more and more pronounced you can see it in the questioning of established state boundaries in one region after another you can see it in the uncertain relationship between governments and societies wherein governments are playing defense and societies are playing offense quite often and you can see it in the system overload many decision makers governments powerful and less powerful face systemic overload of issues and challenges this creates a situation in which it's governing is not as much fun as it used to be let me leave it there for starters Helen you really wrote the central chapter on awakening so your thoughts Pamela if we think of the macro picture instead of a drift I might say unhinged we used to think we knew what the sort of organizing mechanism was and either some of the screws are loose or things are that central engine isn't working quite as well as it used to but since my chapter was about the bottom up stuff the sort of individual empowerment the role of kind of the super empowered individual the spontaneous creation of networks and new organisms that are defiant of the state to me the word adrift is a little too gentle it feels peaceful and gentle and I really think what we're seeing from the end of the cold war through the Arab spring is a kind of agitation or turbulence it's more volatile it feels more aggressive to me than a drift because in the good days the early days of the Arab spring the happy days of the color revolutions we thought we were seeing a kind of evolutionary process of greater freedom that should have led to a greater sort of sense of satisfaction of sort of that index of happiness or whatever that at least some countries think is a relevant metric of success and instead what we see is that this period of redefining state society relations has not settled down at all we're seeing lurching back and forth between states trying to reassert control but I think the story is not over yet it's not the end of history it's not the end of we're not either all moving in the democratic direction or all rejecting it it's a messy world in between well animals may not be able to predict in their adaptation but we can so whether we do it right or not is another question but I do want to follow up this question a little bit on the driftedness to ask you for your thoughts of what's next where are we headed and you know this is a surprise question so your thoughts may not be fully formed on this but I do want to point out something that Ellen said in her chapter which was that we may be lurching between 19th century border and religious wars and a new global culture of highly networked and highly educated young professionals and you know is this are we going into a bifurcated world where you'll have almost two classes of environments or will it be something else and since Ellen I used your quote I'm going to start with you well I think there's no question that there's winners and losers there's winners and losers at the state level and at the community and at the individual level so I think that we should not assume that it's all going to aggregate up into one story that moves in a single direction and again the Arab Spring which I was writing in the period where we were sort of shifting our understanding of how the Arab Spring was playing out of this lurching back and forth which I think is something to consider and if we think of some of the global trends with the demography countries that realize late in the game that demography was going to be part of their destiny of whether you can achieve greater equality of access and opportunity or whether you're going to have within single countries enormous discrepancies maldistribution of income etc so it's the bottom of the pyramid that lurches to the 19th century wars and yet we still see very exciting elites around the world where young people can be more global, more mobile more cosmopolitan so there's many different stories here but in this discussion I was thinking just of the news this week that here big country Nigeria has to postpone elections because a non-state actor has made the state feel vulnerable about its ability to control its own territory. In India triumphant ruling powdery now is trounced in municipal elections by a party called the common man so we keep having these examples of unplanned unpredictable bottom-up occurrences that make states feel less confident that they are the unit of governance and I think what we're seeing not all of these stories that we're telling are necessarily about violence and conflict but they are about that your point about loss of control very uneven quality of governance. Can services and you know can political entities deliver services so that the pact between people and the state is understood and I think that's where the systems are getting freight around the edges. Chad? I think it's going to have to get worse before it gets better that's the short version we're seeing a loss of coherence in the solving of problems and that loss of coherence means loss of unity of action it's not that I want to see a centralized brain controlling conflict all over the world but we are seeing the breakdown of coherence and unity of action and you know there's some obvious cases of that the lack of unity over dealing with Ukraine the lack of unity over dealing with Syria explains why these conflicts go on and continue I can put it the other way the exceptions prove the rule think about places and examples where we are seeing unity of action and we are seeing coherence I think of the example of negotiations in the Philippines over the territory called Mindanao very very impressive complex unity of action I think about the international response to the initial wave of terrorist incursions into northern Mali it's quite an impressive example there are lots of different kinds of actors coming together the current negotiations in Colombia are quite an interesting example of unity of action but those are exceptions not the rule I'm encouraged you talked about lack of unity as I said I think we are going through a real period of adaptation if you will and I'm very encouraged about what I'm seeing local levels in terms of local communities adapting when you talk about unity the way the local communities in the Kenyan elections stepped up and found all sorts of ways of promoting a peaceful election it was very much bottom up and top down similarly communities are learning more about how to build their own resilience so I don't know that this is about lack of unity at a government level or whether or not we are just seeing a complete transformation in terms of that disaggregation if you will of ownership of the levers of power that is being of course facilitated by the information technologies and by the way what concerns me is that the story is by no means written in terms of the ability of the march of technology to continue to facilitate this progress meaning that in all of the international governmental bodies whether it's the international telecommunications union ICANN whatever there's a huge debate going on between those governments who would like to control those means of communication and others that are in favor of a freer governance structure there's a huge debate going on so I really think that that is going to be a major determinant about stability in the future whether we are able to keep those channels as free and open as they have been today and to conflict management side of this equation here and staying with you Sheldon your thoughts on the role that social media can play in conflict management you've already alluded to it a bit there are many people who say social media can be captured by anybody it's a neutral tool therefore you can't really count it as a useful mechanism of conflict management I would like to hear your thoughts on this I'd sort of like to speak more broadly than social media around the technology environment and here I think it's we're going through a complete transformation in this world of conflict management and peace building and I've written a piece about this recently that you know I was in India in December and met a group of 13 year old girls who lived in literally one of the poorest places on earth the Dharavi slums largest slums in Asia and they were using the MIT app maker that's available online do-it-yourself app maker to create a mobile app that sounded an alarm and sent a message to their networks and located them in the event they were confronted by some threatening situation, a gender violence situation that's a group of kids without any resources doing conflict prevention in their communities and I'm seeing that everywhere we go whether it's Afghanistan or Pakistan or South Sudan I'm seeing those kinds of racial change everywhere and what I think that means is this field which was for the last 30 years conflict management field about professionalization of the field where we were creating university programs dedicated to conflict degrees in conflict management we're at USAID and state department they're creating departments dedicated to conflict management here we're seeing the democratization of conflict prevention thanks to the change of information flows the change of capital flows those girls are now online trying to raise money for their work by crowdfunding it's a completely new game for our field and I think that if we are going to as you know the Wayne Gretzky metaphor or advice that the puck is going to be 30 years time that's what we're going to see we're going to see lots of young we're going to see lots of individuals local communities that actually own this space of conflict management conflict prevention in a way that we've never seen before I think it's a big change coming up in our field thank you Ellen could we turn to the Middle East for a moment and maybe you could give us some of your thoughts about the roles of the United States or how is the United States positioned as a conflict manager in the Middle East today I've got my arms working well it's a it's a painful question because I think we are in a period where the US is seen is generally seen and I think now has absorbed this in our own analysis of less leverage and influence than we used to have wanting very much and part of this was our own kind of liberal values when the Arab Spring occurred we sat back and said we don't want to impose ideas, solutions, next steps we want to wait until these newly empowered government societies individuals indicate what it is they want from us Libya for example in the so-called Libyan government to tell us what they needed in terms of security and in hindsight the Libyans deeply regret that we NATO the US didn't come in and sort of say here's what you need we can help you now so there's this awkward readjustment I would say of power relationships in which the United States is trying to demonstrate great respect and acknowledgement that change has to be indigenous, authentic coming from these countries themselves and as a consequence we almost compound the problem of a perception of reduced American influence and leverage I think there's still great energy there's a lot of smart ideas about through assistance programs engaging with civil society I think there's so much goodwill in the United States to try to contribute productively to those countries where the security environment permits us to still operate but it's these are very hard times I mean if you think of our relationship with Egypt where the attitude towards independent action by civil society is very tough right now they don't want international NGOs playing in that field anymore they've created an environment that's less congenial for their own domestic NGOs so it's I would say a hard time to try to either measure or be particularly proactive and optimistic about our role some in some of these countries I think we have to wait for a slightly more propitious moment I was struck in the national security strategy of President Obama that instead of talking about the Arab world more generally he kept talking about Tunisia the one country left that is still on track to have an institutional change in a democratic direction Alan mentioned the word leverage a number of times and I know this is a particular interest of yours and I think over the last 10-15 years we have learned the limits of hard power in the conduct of foreign policy but I wondered if you saw the sources of our leverage coming from in the future that's a big question and I think I would start by paraphrasing the President's reference to not doing stupid stuff you get leverage in soft power by avoiding doing the wrong things by not creating bad precedence not creating vacuums so that's a starting place I think we also can get leverage by developing our coalition building skills and we are pretty good at that domestically in this country we are superb at building institutions and linking institutions together and it happens symbiotically it happens spontaneously but internationally where we are more accustomed to foreign policy is sort of like football there's us and there's them and there's white hats and black hats and so forth so we need to develop and invest in our civilian agencies in their capacity to build coalitions I think there was a reference earlier to diversity I think that Rafe mentioned we need to institutionalize ways to have multiple advocacy systems in our foreign policy decision making process now that's a mouthful but what it means is keep your ears open and remember that diplomats get paid the same for listening as they do for speaking and it means that presidents who are smart surround themselves with people who are smarter and it means that people listen to one voice from the interagency so there's lots of things about developing our soft power I think we could do better at building confidence building mechanisms around the world it's needed in Eastern Europe it's needed in the the East China Sea and the South China Sea so there's lots of things that we can we can do we need to build decentralized coherence if I can try to kind of sum up what I heard from the keynote here I'm going to go on for another several hours but I do want to give a chance to the audience to pose their own questions now that I've monopolized you for this time and we'll invite Rafe to come back up to the podium please if you could I think there will be runners with microphones if you have a question could you get their attention so you could even form oh you can just raise your hand please please identify yourself and your affiliations and to move your ass in the question my name's Peter Humphrey I'm an intel analyst I'm troubled that so many of the world's conflicts are attempts to frustrate self-determination and I wonder as an evolution of a species whether it is in time to sacrifice the holy cow of territorial integrity and replace it with an ethic of routine referenda routine plebiscites to the point where at some time the UN will enforce self-determination rather than territorial integrity we're just losing too many hundreds of thousands of dead populations of territorial integrity and I just want to call for a new evolution in foreign policy is that a question is it possible is it possible would someone like to take this on it's okay to take apart countries if you do it by negotiation we've seen the soft landing of the former Czechoslovakia it can be done what you do not want to do is take apart countries at gunpoint and there are alternatives to breaking up countries into more independent units which is autonomy agreements as you know which sometimes work maybe sometimes they don't so we have to look at some of those examples I'm thinking of Ache for example in Indonesia might be a case that one could point to or what's about to come up in Mindanao I'm going to go through those thank you very much a wonderful panel and a wonderful original presentation from the biological perspective I'm Steve Mosley I represent the United Nations Association of National Capital Area I'm also on the board the Alliance for Peace Building none of you has talked about the United Nations in this state of need for adaptation change could you comment on where you think there are successes on which we can build successes our first speaker talked that have been performed by the United Nations or how might we help further either as civil society or as a government to some extent to make that institution be more adaptable and more successful on these issues well I think I can link the first question and the second question because it's about sovereign the UN system is based too much on this sacred unit of political authority in the state and has always stopped short of actually creating a supranational decision making body and from the US perspective historically that's been a good thing we've not wanted the UN to be truly a global global government but many other countries look at it differently but it is whether state sovereignty is a more adaptable concept it's been imposed somewhat rigidly I think the demand for reform in the UN system has been pretty clear and pretty steady for certainly since the end of the Cold War when the United States and Russia actually learned to behave more productively under UN auspices to an end all those proxy wars of the Cold War period but the UN really lags behind in getting to the finish line on some of the ideas for reform I mean I was just talking to the Japanese mission to the UN they've tried about six different ways to say why can't we be given a little more to do in this institution why can't we redistribute some of the authority and decision making power in the UN system to the countries that actually pay the bills and care about being global citizens etc. There is a over democratization if you will that every state has an equal vote and there's no it's very hard to build consensus the US strangely enough I think is often a rather passive actor we in theory like the idea that the UN should modernize and reform itself but we never have as big a stake in it as other countries do so we have not been I think a very dynamic proponent of UN reform I just want to say that with age comes wisdom so I'll chat I might take issue with Sheldon on a couple of these issues concerning the UN system tell it to the Chinese the Chinese have decided that the UN is a forum of choice for their global diplomacy they have many times increased the size of their contribution to UN peacekeeping in order to raise its game and they are paying a lot more for the UN peacekeeping budget the US taxpayer pays about 27-28% of the UN peacekeeping budget but the executive branch doesn't want to talk about it because then people will say well they're going to come with black helicopters and take away the US institute of peace so there's a problem there about the domestic politics of the UN and yet we rely on the UN very heavily especially for conflict management and conflict response in Africa where the UN spends about 80% of its energy I think it's a complicated picture I'm not sure where it is please Ken Dillon, Ciencia Press this is for Dr. Sagaran you have here a pretty receptive audience do you receive invitations to present from countries like China and Russia and what happens when you do present there I haven't I haven't gone to those countries I thought the first steps of me entering hostile territory was going to the Department of Homeland Security going to State Department going to some businesses that are rather stayed like Coca-Cola so the domestic challenge was there enough so far so I haven't explored how other countries would respond to this but what I always find no matter where I present is that there is a receptive audience even if the institution is not receptive or isn't acting in that way in that there are these people these Hayokas in every organization that are just trying to make change and the thing that I try to emphasize is you don't need to change the whole institution top to bottom you need to change that area within which you work and maybe have some control over your little universe like I did with my little classroom I'm not changing the University of Arizona they will ask for a syllabus until the sun blows up but I am changing my classroom and that's working and I'm spreading that knowledge and that's how you affect change even within a larger institution Hello I'm not sure if this is working I'm Terry Taylor and I was fascinated by the earlier discussion about the UN because I'm working at UN headquarters at the moment and so I was fascinated here that while I resist getting into the questions because I disagree with some of the points but I wanted to get I hope you don't think this is just semantics but the very title of the book this is a term that drives me nuts at UN headquarters because there's some fanciful idea that somehow conflict can be managed I'm not talking in a military sense I'm talking in a political sense and also the idea that conflict can be prevented that's another term that drives me nuts in the UN and these words are really important or a conveyor message of impossibility in my view an unreality and the ideas put forward by Rafe he knows why I would agree with some of the points all the points he made is that we're not yet haven't yet grasped the bottom up importance of the processes that are going on whether it's in communications or science and technology the evolution of that and the democratization of everything Joe and I put it well decades ago about the democratization of violence but we have to spread that idea to everything else and we're missing the successes and some of them are illustrated by your experience in search for common ground and myself in the Middle East by working cross boundaries where there's a convergence of interest and that's where we should be looking so the question is have we got the wrong terms because they really do have fundamental effect and we should think about managing to survive conflict in a world of drift and please all of you should feel privileged to answer that question no? well but I agree with Terry that the phrase managing conflict almost sounds like a concession to me we're not going to be able to prevent it so therefore we'll manage it and it conveys a false sense of control that it's somehow manageable so I realize it's a hard choice of how do you convey as few words as possible what really is a range of responses to a messy world and I think this is how we've used that word within the conflict resolution field there are fights between conflict resolution prevention management, transformation and you can get caught in the vocabulary for a long time we tried to find a word that was flexible and stretched over all of these topics but you're right I mean it's not hard there is a distinction between conflict resolution and conflict management Terry as you well know and the terms get debated a lot as Pamela has just said the focus on conflict management is managing the violent aspects of a conflict you're not going to get rid of conflict conflict is universal, conflict is human conflict can be constructive conflict can be transformative but the issue is do you manage or limit or prevent the degree of violence and human tragedy that comes from conflict that you can't address you can't necessarily control its full dimensions I think we had one more question here is that right and then we'll have to cut it off I'm Elizabeth my question was I've spent the last 18 years in fragile states and conflict zones working as a conflict specialist and so my question is actually very similar to Terry's and perhaps we've touched on it I was going to posit that there was an argument that was sort of teased at from the side of a couple of the panelists and I truly enjoyed everything that was said firstly thank you but there was a comment that sort of is teased out that perhaps conflicts are organic in nature and that we haven't really we don't have predictive planning and we ought to look at deconstruct that model that we can my experience is that a lot of times we have strategic plans but there's not the longitudinal funding one, often, particularly my work with the UN UNTAP was never fully implemented so it was and the second thing is that there often is a dichotomy between the work of the NGOs in implementation and civil society and the work of the multilateral institutions on the governance level and until that is solved and local ownership is certainly sold in the data of implementation until that is solved that the modeling is there and if there were to be ownership and longitudinal vision and public and longitudinal planning and implementation of those plans that conflict resolution or conflict however you want to call it the terminology is not very good in English but we could do far better that it's not a matter of the paradigm not working and I'm wondering if we could have any comments on that that's just my personal opinion I'll just take the first part of that question about if we could have the resources to then implement our plans that is part of the reality I imagine if organisms in nature could gather the resources to exponentially grow their neurons they could do much more in terms of the planning and predictability thing but if your situation is that in this environment funding environment, political environment you cannot get the resources to implement a plan it means your plan doesn't work because the plan is part of a larger universe a part of a larger environment and that's exactly why these organisms don't plan, don't predict and don't try to perfect themselves I don't imagine it's because they haven't tried to it's that natural selection has run that out because it was just too much of a waste of resources without enough return and so you have to look at the situation in terms of where is my institution in reality in this situation when you want to think about being adaptable Rafe's octopus the centralized brain and the decentralized tentacles I just wanted to pick up on one of the things you said the choice isn't to invest all the effort in civil society or in the state, it's both and it's how do we promote both more empowered citizens more capable non-governmental organizations but not at the total neglect or expense of some form of centralized political authority so it sounded to me like you experienced and I think in many aid programs there's sometimes a romanticism that civil society can do at all and I actually am looking for that greater balance between the central and the decentralized of you know you still need to be competent you want it to be responsive you want it to be attentive to the demands of citizenry but you don't want you know all these interventions to be totally on the sort of new politically correct non-governmental side in my view but to this point about resources and investing in both the civil society and in institutions the disparity if you will between a $600 billion defense budget and a $60 billion international aid and diplomacy combined budget speaks volumes to where we think to what we think is our primary conflict management strategy it's war fighting and unless we rethink that balance you know it's the military teaches this very well a vision without resources is a mirage and if we're really going to make a shift we need to rethink that balance and I also think we need again in this brave new world of citizen peace builders we should be thinking a lot harder about a world in which there are six billion cell phones and only tens of thousands of blue helmets and diplomats in the world how do we empower those six billion people with cell phones to become peace builders I really think that was one of the themes your last slide on Gandhi if we can change the way we think we can change the way the tendencies of the world I think there's a big shift in thinking about how do we make it in living in a world we're really of scarce resources of global interdependence and therefore where everyone has to be a peace builder I think one of the things that needs to be said in a discussion like this is that there are so many different types of conflicts that we're addressing not all the same and they don't call for all the same skillset if we're talking about the Syrian civil war that's one set of issues and challenges if we're talking about resolving a conflict let's say within Nigeria that's a very different kind of if we're talking about what to do to head off the US-Russia standoff which is becoming a fundamental and very to me a dangerous pattern in contemporary international affairs that's a different set of skills that we're going to need to work on so we really have to figure out what our priorities are who's good at what and where the US can establish a set of priorities for its own diplomacy the number of issues that a president can focus on in a given year is really quite short as we have seen Thank you very much great talent and great career and I now have the pleasure of introducing Nancy Lindborg who is president of the US Institute of Peace and has been so for eight days and before that until the end of January she was assistant administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistant at USAID and before that she was president of Mercy Corps, a global aid agency which does terrific work she has been living in conflict on and working on conflict for years and we're absolutely delighted that she has chosen to come here and lead USIP into its next chapter and I hope all the way through it so thank you everyone, thanks Pamela I am delighted to be here and one thing I will not do right now is attempt to summarize what was an extraordinarily rich conversation and exactly the kind of conversation that I'm so delighted we're having here at USIP I would just make a couple of comments and first and foremost a big congratulations to Chet and to Pamela for their accomplishment of editing this book it's really a book version of the kind of convening that I think USIP does exceptionally well where you've got all of these voices and ideas and thoughts edited into this volume that can really create, catalyze and prompt the kind of conversations that we just had here in all the classrooms I know you're going to want to bring that into a biology conversation but this is exactly the kind of work that USIP is chartered to do and has excelled in doing and then bringing these kinds of convenings that cross boundaries where you have different institutions different disciplines coming together to get that richness of conversation that helps us think differently about what are without question growing in different challenges in the world and Rafe I want to thank you for putting that framing around the conversation I'm extremely heartened that nature is a continual spiral of ever greater cooperation and I'm surprised we didn't, that's the one thing that I wanted to pick back up on because we are without question in a world of conflicts that have been seemingly at an ever accelerated pace and I came out of USAID at the end of 2014 which was a record year in terms of violent conflicts that turned into crises of humanitarian catastrophe such that they rated a level 3 which is the worst UN rating for humanitarian crisis. All of them are unique and distinct crises and it feels as if things are really falling apart but there are also in the backdrop extraordinary indicators of progress in terms of human health adherence to norms that will bring us forward on greater peace and greater stability and so we need to be balancing these pieces together and I also appreciated the conversation about is it a drift is it agitated and I want to challenge all of us to continue to think about that word as a part of a point of departure for the ongoing conversation so thanks to all of you for being here today for the work that I know many of you in this room are doing as you think about these challenges and I invite now all of us to continue the conversation at the reception which is just out the doors yes so just head out the doors but thank you to all of you thank you for your continued engagement with these issues and we look forward to continuing the conversation as a part of US Institute of Peace Thank you