 Welcome to the two-day symposium, Men, Peace and Security, Agents of Change. Really excited to be here today to speak on the issue of gender, peace and security. It's the first time that the program has specifically addressed the other side of gender. Decided, you know, we want to start looking at the other side of women, peace and security, men, peace and security, and it is the other side of the same coin. We have tended to forget about men and men as gendered beings, and so this symposium was really to put the spotlight on men, on masculinities. The tendency among us is to use gender and women interchangeably. However, this leaves us with half a solution to many of the problems that plague women and girls in conflict and fragile settings. Today, we're going to talk not only about the role that men play as perpetrators of violence or leaders of peace process, but their role as victims and witnesses of violence and equally important as critical change agents. With this conference and where we are is evolving toward the recognition that partnerships between men and women are really going to be the best way to serve everyone's interest. Generally, the idea of masculinity is very central to how boys are socialized with the aim of making them into men. That kind of socialization takes place through so many social mechanisms, such as rights of passage that a man has to go through. What young men express is that they're actually seeing in one way what they feel it means to be a man, non-violent, showing your emotions. On the other hand, these young men are actually experiencing all the time the stress from the society that they should be these macho men who are protectors or warriors in their community. I do think it stands to reason that in our patriarchal society where men and women are socialized by many of the same forces and standards women too participate in perpetuating a set of messages about men and about women that aren't always helpful. We need what I call reconstructing our understanding of religious texts. Religious texts that are meant to bring about peace instead have historically become texts used to advocate violence against the other. In the Quran, men and women are the protectors of one another. When the world is falling apart and one is not able to be quote-unquote man because the circumstances have changed, there's war. What else do they have to demonstrate their manhood often is to demonstrate that manhood through the use of violence. Being a man is always considered to be being the one who is defending the honor of your country, being the one who is always somehow attacked and being the one who is always protecting your own land. We got over three and a half decades of war. All these are leading towards that the youth has no other choice and option except going towards violence. We started doing research into young men around the theme of violence. A lot of that violence, politically motivated violence, the young men that we were working with grew up in the troubles. Some of these young men had parents, family members, all killed or impacted in some ways as a result of the conflict. I suppose the scary thing for us and part of that research is that young men were saying about violence that it was part of everyday life. This ex-combatant, when they are being assembled, you don't only take the guns from them physically, you take the guns from them mentally so that when they go into communities they will be able to understand that they need to protect this community. A lot of the combatants were recruited when they were still children. So they're still in their formative years when they start joining an armed group. We shouldn't be surprised the vast majority of them have been perpetrators of violence but at the same time many of them are also victims of violence. We need to understand this when we want to reintegrate those ex-combatants back into society. Reintegration of former combatants and support of traumatized communities is one and the same thing and effective DDR has to recognize that. The entire generation of South Sudanese young men had only been military men and very little else. While there are no jobs for them, it means that they will be civilian men with guns and the result of all of that is that violence continues which is the paradox of peace in South Sudan. The statistics depending on which study indicate that much higher levels of young men are experiencing sexual violence at the hands of other men than we had understood to be the case and that's certainly true in conflict settings as well. The men in Northern Uganda now feel they have been disempowered since they can no longer play their masculine role as heads of their families and as a result the men take to drinking and causing terror in the family. When we do demonization and reintegration we also provide economic reintegration support for ex-combatants. Someone talked about the monopoly of violence and I think I hope we also have broken the monopoly of peace that that's not only something that women strive for and are good at but what we're trying to change with this as well is to say that men hunger for peace and equality as well together with the women's rights activists who have pushed for 1325 and all the other peace processes. Far too often too many organizations, people, society, media can blame lots of people in this but they see young men in a negative light. We want to build on that positivity that young men have and grow young male leaders. The point has been made and I think it's worth reinforcing that there are lots of good men out there, there are plenty of good men out there. The problem by and large with masculine cultures in many places is not that many men are doing terrible things is that many men are not saying anything about the other men who are doing terrible things. By the time my dad was my age he'd been dead for eight years and part of what got me first interested in studying men and masculinity was this astounding thing that men are dying so much younger than women. In the United States it's about five and a half years, in Russia it is 13 years and so I think the toxic side of masculinity is part of what we are paying for with our lives in many cases and so examining gender can really be a healthy thing for men. I talked before about how proud I am about some of the training programs that we put together for women to take part in peace processes but where are the training programs for men in those kinds of issues? There is nothing that warlords and participants in government forces learn in their everyday work that prepare them for maternal child health care programs or girls education. I think the key instrument here is to communicate because mindsets as you know take time to change to try to identify domains in which we can have those in uniform and those who are not in uniform collaborate to identify the security priorities and see how they can together work on these issues. It's about holding people personally accountable. In my mind if you hold people accountable for their actions it will have an impact. We have the ability to do that, we need to do that. Unfortunately most of our institutions are not equipped to have a gendered lens and so what we need to do in many cases too I think is retool some of our institutions. There's a hegemonic or a normal idea about what men are but so many men don't fit that either and certainly women don't. This has taken us or at least me into some new areas where I'm learning a lot and I feel it's just the beginning of a learning process and how we intellectually spell out the men's side of gender issues and conflict. I think it's easy to assume that most men are resistant to change most men are kind of inevitably opposed to gender equality that's not our experience our experience is in fact quite the opposite. I think there is room for leadership and gender roles and on the issue of men, peace and security I mean we're just starting.