 Good afternoon. I'm Alana Lancaster, and I am a senior program officer in the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation and here at USIP. And I would like to begin by showing you a video in just one moment. Thank you. Kenya has a youth bulge. The community kind of see youths as a challenge. They find themselves marginalized. We used opening learning circles. We also used world cafes where they would write what they would feel is their response. And we also used theaters of oppressed. This process has helped the youth researchers to actually learn more about democracy and active citizenship. Collectively, the process of participatory action research is in itself building peace. Having young people participate in research work, this is what I always wanted to see. Thank you. What happens when your research project comes to an end? You've collected your data, spent countless hours analyzing your data and even more hours writing up your research. You've targeted the appropriate journals or perhaps you've had some of those testy conversations with your publications team. You submit your manuscript and with relief you turn your attention to everything that you have put on hold and you wait patiently or maybe not so patiently for a response from the editor. No news is good news, right? The editorial team liked it and good enough to go out for peer review. Accepted with revisions. Revised and resubmit. Revisions are minor. So you revise and resubmit. Congratulations published. Your colleagues think it's really good research, strong research and this work will greatly contribute to the field of knowledge. But what happens next? Not for you but for the communities where you conducted your research. What are the impacts on the lives of the people with whom you worked? We stand here today with an offering and the offering is PAR, participatory action research. The three of us, Munira, Skip, Felix and I believe that PAR has a lot to offer you, researchers, practitioners, policymakers. And at the same time we argue that PAR has even more to offer the communities who are most directly affected by extremism and whose safety and well-being are why we do the work. I'm a relative new kid on the block. I came to this work, to this VE, PVE, CVE space in July 2015 when I joined the institute. One of my first tasks was to design and deliver the third or three workshops on PCVE, VE to a group of education stakeholders from Africa and the Middle East. I was quite confident in my ability to design, deliver and engage in one week workshop for educators as I come from an education background. But I was less than confident in my ability to design a solid training engagement on CVE. But like any good academic refugee transitioning back into the practitioner space, I turned to the literature. And what I found was this, I think you know this all very well. Violent extremism is highly locally contextualized, small-scale initiatives are better than national and large-scale programs in reducing violence. And there's limited research on the relationship between education and CVE. What I couldn't find at all was community-led research in this space. Research in which the communities themselves identify the area of inquiry, determine the research design and analyze the data collected. By the end of the summer of 2015, Skip and I had joined forces. And in January 2016 successfully facilitated the training in which education stakeholders from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Jordan came together and explored the ways in which participatory approaches can be used with vulnerable youths, youth in communities. That's my Kenyan English youths and communities in addressing the root causes of radicalization. It was successful and by late 2016 we had secured a small amount of funding to pilot a participatory action research project with USIP Generation Change Fellows. The project kicked off in 2017 with the aim of elevating and amplifying the work of youth peace builders. Youth need to be seen as active producers of knowledge rather than passive recipients of knowledge generated by others. Knowledge generated by communities must be recognized and understood as legitimate. That was the aim of this pilot project and it was actually at August 7 Memorial Park in Nairobi where I met Munira. Thank you. Hi everyone. I was born, bred and educated in Mombasa. I have worked as a community volunteer, a social worker and a peace builder. I'm the co-founder of Lonamak, an acronym that stands for Three Counties Found in Kenya. That is Loi Tok Tok, Nanyuki and Machakos. Lonamak is a community-based organization in the heart of Mombasa founded by a group of volunteers in 2015 which core operations are the achievement of UN Resolution 2250, creation of self-spaces for women affected through VE and the empowerment of our local communities. My journey as a peace builder was at its peak during the 2014 Masjid Musa attacks in Mombasa County. The mosque was being used as an indoctrination cell, unfortunately, by the late Imam Abu Drogo. The clashes between the young people and the police raiding the masjid led to tensions across the county and the country respectively. After that we saw an influx of heavy programming from civil society organizations, international organizations and which had a lot of focus around research on the root causes of violent extremism. The research was basically, unfortunately, extractive. It had the traditional methodology of specifically targeting people like myself who had the courage to speak about radicalization in Mombasa when no one had the courage, later learned, wanted to be associated with terror-related aspects. The environment was tense when disappearances and killings of prominent sheikhs and imams took place and Mombasa was a hotbed of terrorism and cooperation amongst community leaders for peacekeeping and radicalization was minimal. However, in 2015 we formed a community-based organization called Lonamak which created peace and cohesion in a non-coercive manner. As a part of USIP's participatory action research pilot program, Lonamak conducted research in three sub-counties within Mombasa. So these three sub-counties are actually the hotspots for not only radicalization but for also organized crime. And when I say organized crime, I'm talking about the gang kind of culture. PAR is a very participatory research approach that centrally places the community as the drivers of change. Communities have been, in the past, been used as data providers, you know, enumerators and validators in traditional research approaches. However, PAR provides the community with knowledge and power to shape and change their communities in all their different local ways. All this was evident during the inception workshop in which every member of the community was represented. So this workshop basically had members from the county government, civil society, faith-based organization, youth-led organizations and NGOs. The workshop's main objective was to create a statistical platform for community members to share out their challenges and problems as well. The output of the second workshop, which is, I think this is where the magic happened, which is the research design workshop, was creatively and smartly forming the research question. So basically in your traditional ways of research, you usually have a research question at the back of your head, right? But with PAR, what comes out of such kind of an interactive conversation is what actually forms the research question. So the research question is a contribution of everyone in the room, not necessarily what you think as the researcher. I know this is very radical. Since the massive moosa attacks, youth in Mombasa have had a disconnect with the police. However, the PAR process has helped to bridge this gap. During the data collection phase, researchers who are local youth who have had a range of basic primary, secondary and some who have gone to college, engaged senior government leaders as active citizens. PAR has transformed our community-based organizations in the sense that bigger NGOs now recognize the work we do at the grassroots level as youth-led organizations, like Clonomac and my fellow PAR facilitator who could not make it. His name is Sungora, who runs the Maniata Youth Entertainment Organization. And right now we see it as members of the CV Engagement Forum, which is a macro entity body responsible for coordinating PV programming at the county level. And I'd like to welcome Skip. Thank you, Manera. I'm Felix, or better known around here, at the Institute. I skipped, but I did show up today. So why is this important? What does this kind of process mean for research? And what does it mean specifically for all of you as researchers into CBE? Well, let's start from a purely utilitarian perspective. PAR helps us as outside researchers have a better set of more grounded data. Our partners in the community have deeper relationships and more clear understandings of the dynamics in the community. They can steer us in new directions that we may be blind to. Now, cognitively, as researchers, we're often like the man who's dropped his keys at night under a lamp post. Did you drop your keys under the lamp post, sir? No, no, I didn't drop them there, but that's where the light is. We often build these, these cognitive lamp posts out of our own preconceived ideas and we're only looking for answers where we already expect they're going to find them. Working with community researchers pushes us out into new territory and often reveals new insights for our work. But, caveat, this only happens when the power dynamics change around research. To work with community level researchers equitably, you as the researcher have to give up some of your power and let the local researchers go in directions that are clear to them. This change in power relations is at the heart and core of PAR work. PAR is very different. It doesn't sit within a positivist paradigm of knowledge creation. PAR is the constructivist approach to building knowledge. In CVE, we aren't going to find one universal answer to this issue. What works is going to be contextual and impacted by local factors and local actors. Those nuances can be more readily brought to light through dynamic engagement with the community where the local co-researchers find solutions that make sense within their specific milieu. Because power is core to PAR, the process of conducting participatory research helps the co-researchers become more aware of how power works in their lives, both positively and negatively. They find language to talk about the structural power issues that they know surround them, but they may have difficulty articulating. Through PAR, they also understand how better to enhance their own power to act collectively and to harness the power of research as a practical tool for change. Just don't take it on the airplane. Because we as professional researchers often limit the role of local partners only to data collection, the fullness of the research process remains unclear to these partners. Design, as Manira has discussed, analysis, writing reports, and using the findings to influence change, these seem like skills that only research superheroes with advanced degrees can accomplish. Through PAR, however, the process and use of research are demystified. The co-researchers in the community understand better how research happens from start to finish and how it can be leveraged to create change and meaningful impact where they are. In this way, PAR opens up possibility for change happening at multiple levels simultaneously. We as the outside researchers use our traditional inputs, out traditional outputs to leverage for policy change or building theory within our professional spaces. The co-researchers on the ground use their findings to work for change simultaneously at the grassroots. Moreover, they now have the tools to carry out their own work, their own research. They embed these skills within local organizations and governmental bodies. They train up others to use these same tools. We have seen this with our team in Kenya. The organization that Manira founded and discussed, Lanamak, has embedded PAR as a tool in their community work. The same has happened for her partner and co-facilitator in this work, Nicholas Sangora, who Manira mentioned. His organization now uses participatory research methods as the central mechanism for how the organization engages with community and conducts learning. Moreover, the youth researchers who are part of this overall process are weaving these tools into their own work outside of these organizations, whether that be as community mediators, as people who are working directly in the area of CVE, or even as coaches building more collaborative sports teams. This is the great thing about PAR. Everyone can utilize these tools in the spaces and communities where they are. In this way, PAR is valuable because it creates the opportunity for ongoing impact and change through capacity that is built in the local group to support ongoing work and research independent of the original process. PAR builds the capacity of co-researchers in the community and provides practical tools for them to continue using research as a force for change long after the outside research has wrapped up. So to emphasize this point in particular, keep in mind that our project with USIP in Mombasa ended about 18 months ago. The reports have been written, everything has been published, our pilot project has ended. However, the story of PAR in Mombasa County isn't yet finished. As illustrated by Dr. Ilana and Skip, PAR is what we find useful as PVE practitioners at the grassroot level. And I now stand in front of you as the county director for CVE at the governor's office in Mombasa County. And to be honest, we have incorporated PAR into our policy in how we program and the way we conduct research. Through PAR we conduct research on how as a county government we are able to reintegrate returnees back to their communities and how do we formulate a reintegration framework. So if you look at the county government mandates, one of our mandates is the social services. So right now we are conducting a research on how do we link our social workers into learning how to reintegrate returnees back to the community, but also not forgetting that reintegration in our country currently is the work of the state government. So we are looking at how do we connect the nexus between what the national government is doing, what the county government is doing, in able to reintegrate returnees back to the community. As a community-based organization, LONAMAC is integrating PAR as a research methodology into finding out the roles and impacts of women as returnees and foreign fighters in the country. With the recent dosage Nairobi attack, security analysis distinguished that women are no longer VE victims but perpetrators as well. Participatory action research is a bottom-up approach that helps the government learn from the community. It is what VPV practitioners and researchers have been looking for. Before I joined the county government, I co-founded LONAMAC and it is because of PAR that now we are able to connect or rather get a feeling of, you know, you've worked for the community before and now you're in government. So for me, my work is much easier because of the PAR process. And we have created one of the best strategies in the world. That's the Mombasa County Action Plan for PVE. That's a multi-agency approach in the fight against extremism. Our governor, who is also the chairperson of the steering committee working group under the Strong Cities Network, recently commissioned research that uses PAR outside the CV spaces in a different sector altogether, which is economics. So I think we stand here offering you PAR as a useful approach in widening the field of research and extremism. PAR generates actionable knowledge. PAR deepens engagement with community, provides community with powerful tools to address extremism at grassroots level, provides locally informed solutions and expands our network of allies long after our time on the ground comes to an end. If you're interested in learning more about our work in Kenya with PAR, we have publications outside. So thank you very much for your time and attention.