 OK, perfect. So this is the final event of our two-day conference that has been happening over the last two days. I'm sure lots of you have been part of many of the other talks. But we're delighted to host Sanam Naragi-Andalini, who has a plethora of experience in the different themes that we've touched on, and is the perfect speaker because she can offer this holistic approach, touching on all of her different career experiences to offer insight into the multiple themes that we've looked at. So she has 24 years experience in conflict, crises, and peace. And we'll offer an invaluable perspective, I'm sure. And as a very crude summary of her career, in 2000, she helped draft the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, One Women, Peace, and Security. In 2011, she also was the first senior expert on gender and inclusion on the UN's mediation standby team. And this is very much, without speaking too much for you, Sanam, because I know you're going to probably go into this. But fed into her evidencing of how women are crucial first responders in post-conflict zones and should be integrated in a much better way in multilateral responses to violence and conflict. And with that contextualize, with that experience really contextualizing her founding of the ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network, which connects, supports, and funds women peace builders around the world. I would highly recommend going to their website. They have some amazing events. And more recently, she has been appointed the director of LSE Center for Women, Peace, and Security. So an incredible career that we will talk about much more. And we have lots of questions. Just a bit of housekeeping. We would really encourage all of you to submit any questions that you have, no matter how relevant you think they might be. This is very much an informal chat. And throughout this conference, we've really encouraged people to speak aloud their questions. This is usually in person, so we want to encourage that as much as possible. So just pop a note on the Q&A, and we can promote you to a panelist for a couple of minutes. And without further ado, I think we'll begin. Thank you, Sanam. Great to be here with you guys. I know it's Friday afternoon, so thank you for the hangers on and the survivors. I'm sure it's been a long day, but I hope that we'll make this last session fun and interesting as well. So yes, let's go. We decided, for those who don't know, we decided we do it really very much as a Q&A, so that it's a conversation, not just me talking at you, because I'm sure you've had enough of that already. That's great. I mean, hopefully it will be exactly as you just described. So I will actually start with the first question that, for me, obviously, as a person from a Swiss background, I believe everyone watching can see that your name on Zoom actually reads MBE at the end. And since I know that my family is watching, and I'm sure they, just like me, a few days ago, do not know what it means. Do you mind quickly explaining what that is? That's it, and thank you very much. That's a very sweet thing. So it means member of the British Empire, which is a strange title. But it's an honor that is given by the British government. But it's usually sort of given by the Queen in terms of, and I was given it for services to international peace building and women's rights in 2000. So thank you. Although there is a move right now to turn it from British Empire to order British excellence to be more relevant to the 21st century. So that's what it is. Thank you. Arguably, there would also be much less negative connotations that some people would perhaps take if that word of the empire would be removed. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So for our first question, obviously, there has been one hot topic during this entire year. And perhaps without much surprise, our first question will be about the ongoing pandemic and COVID-19. And we would like to ask you, and we have phrased this question in a specific way. You're obviously free to take it quite literally or also not. But if you're thinking and looking at the international response to the pandemic and all the related aspects, what are some of the things that really make you mad? What makes you mad? What makes me mad? What a great question. So I'm going to start. I'm going to actually preface what I'm going to say by apologizing on behalf of the baby boomer generation and the next generation, which is my generation, to all of you because, and my children are the same generation as you, they're in university right now, for the world that we are handing over to you and very much the international system that we are handing over to you. I feel as if these two generations have really not done service to us globally in terms of not only maintaining and strengthening and sustaining what was created back at the end of World War II for us as an international peace and security architecture with development and humanitarian aid and so forth. But really making it fit for purpose for the 21st century. And I say that because the COVID response is a direct indication of that lack of attention, the failure, the lots and lots of nice words. It feels as if sometimes the more you see people kind of expressing rhetorically really important statements about how important it is to do local stuff or how important women are or how important the development aid is, the more they say it, the less is going on on the ground. And what we're seeing with the international kind of response to COVID is that, first of all, when COVID hit, you know, last year, this in March last year, when all of us kind of suddenly realized that this is serious, all of our governments were asleep at the wheel at the earliest stages. And there was the level of actually, I would say profound racism that drove political decisions. So, you know, if you were sitting in the UK at the end of January 2020 or early February 2020 as I was and you were watching what was going on in China on Twitter, you knew that there was something serious. You know, it wasn't that the Chinese are just crazy and they're authoritarian and they like to lock people up in their houses and fumigate their streets at night. It must have been something serious going on. And yet, or that people were wearing masks and, you know, as we saw around the world, kind of people making fun of Asian community, kind of wearing masks in public places. The attitude was, oh, these crazy Chinese, the Chinese are authoritarian and these, you know, there was racism, implicit racism in the response to what was happening in China. Then it spreads and it comes to Italy. And again, the attitude, oh, the silly Italians, what do they know, they're so disorganized, you know, that's why it's happened. Then it went to Iran and it was, you know, images of mass graves and it was, oh, these Iranians and I'm Iranian by background. So all these Iranians are just so dictatorial and awful. Look, they're burying their people in mass graves, right? So, but instead of looking at it and saying, what is going on? How profound is this crisis? It was, this was the sort of lackadaisical response from the UK and certainly from the United States. And then this pandemic comes here and guess what we end up having? We end up having mass graves on Island outside of New York. We end up having really mixed up responses and so forth. So that exposure of sort of the silent or implicit racism that dictates so much of our attitudes around the world, that was something that I found disturbing and you know, on the one I was kind of revealing it but it was also very disturbing. The second thing that I saw was that all of our, you know, I live in, I'm in the States right now but everybody became inward looking, right? We're worried about our own backyard and you know, do we have PPEs in England and you know, and rightly so, right? You know, you have to look at your own domestic setting. But for me, working with this network, the Women's Alliance for Security Leadership that has members in over 40 countries, all of them fragile context, right? All of them were affected or affected by violent extremism across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and so forth. What we saw was that as the world turned inwards, as rich countries turned inwards to look at their own concerns and everybody was stuck at home, literally. The attention and care about what was happening in Yemen or what was happening in Cameroon or what was happening in Columbia or Uganda or Nigeria disappeared, literally people, you know, it just disappeared. And again, the assumptions that were coming out of even organizations like the WHO were worst, you know, it sort of made you scratch your head in terms of how connected are they to the real world and what we've done to the world over the last 40, 50 years. And my example for that is that the WHO was saying, you know, hygiene, hygiene, wash your hands with soap and water, right? I was talking to people in Yemen and in Cameroon and in so many places in Somalia and elsewhere where they were saying, we don't have water, we don't have soap, we have IDPs and refugees, they can't afford soap, right? And this wasn't just one place, it was everywhere that was that is poor, poor and fragile, right? Which again, going back to the original, you know, my original point about what is the world that we've created, it's been in the kind of, if I go back to the 1980s and the beginning of a neoliberal economics and trickle down economics and structural adjustment and, you know, privatization and so forth, what we've seen for 40 years is that we have really gouged out and destroyed social economic welfare and systems and structures, you know, clean water, clinics, healthcare, education, that kind of stuff, that kind of thing we've destroyed. And then you layer it with militarism and conflict and not only we haven't sort of, you know, sort of kept, maintained what was there, we've literally destroyed these things, the water stations have been destroyed. And then comes this pandemic and the WHO saying, hey, go wash your hands with soap and water and there isn't, there literally isn't, right? So what did we see happen on the ground was that, again, through this, this, my network, as of pretty much the end of March, we started doing Zoom calls on a weekly basis with our partners. And it was anybody who wants to show up on a Thursday morning, you know, they could come and we started tracking and listening to what people were saying and then connecting each other. We're all on WhatsApp, but we ended up having a WhatsApp group of women from Pakistan and Cameroon and Nigerians, you know, Yemen and so forth, teaching each other about how to make soap or how to make hand sanitizer. You know, you get the aloe plant, we got the alcohol, we do this. We, you know, it was really interesting, the innovation that was happening. The second thing that we saw what that we did and we saw was that here we were internationally sitting and getting the latest information about, should you wear a mask or not? Or how close should you be to someone? And so forth. And what do you do if you're in a community setting from the CDC here in the US and from the WHO and so forth? And what we did was we would take this information, repackage it in more simple language, get it medically sort of okayed by professionals and then share this with our partners so that they then received it in English from us or in Arabic if we had the time to translate it. And they then were turning this information into pictographs because they were working with and in communities where there's a lot of illiteracy, right? So you gotta, you gotta, you know, how do we, how do you do fist bumps and so forth? We had to, we had our Pakistani partners set up a system where the women that until then had been part of a community volunteer group that again, at ICANN we'd supported who were doing prevention of violent extremism work in their communities and with young people. Those women automatically turned into sharing information about hygiene and how to deal with COVID. And they would do it in a very traditional way of standing on their rooftops in areas and talking to each other across the rooftops. So this is something that's been going on for hundreds of years, means of communication, 100. And so they were doing this on their rooftops and meanwhile in real time and, you know, like we were sending through WhatsApp, okay, here's the latest information and, you know, here's what you need to do about masks and so forth. So there was on the one hand an unbelievable moment of suddenly seeing what it means for our work and the value that we've been kind of espousing, which is that it's really important to strengthen local rootedness of actors and activism and kind of social organizations, civil society organizations, community-based organizations. You need that local rootedness but you also need the global connectivity to be able to share horizontally across countries and then vertically between kind of them and what the institutions are saying and what the world was saying. And this is really, if there's one silver lining that I would say that we need to really get, look into and say, how do we replicate this? How do we strengthen this modality, right? This is the one thing I would say the COVID era has shown us that when the crisis hits, the international actor is irrelevant practically. The first responder is local and actually that's always been the case, right? So if I take you back to the Bay Root, the explosion in Bay Root that happened, the first people on the ground to figure out who was alive and who wasn't and who needs trauma care were local civil society organizations, often local women. Syria, Yemen, who's doing the humanitarian work? Who's doing the mediation with armed groups and so forth? And even if you take the image of a refugee camp and a stereotypical image that, I'm sure many of you have seen in the media and so forth of a woman carrying, holding a baby, right? Often with mosquitoes flying flies and flying around them. That image is shared with us often as, oh, look at these poor people and look at these poor victims. But if you switch your lens and you think about it in terms of that's a mother who has walked, God knows how many miles. We don't know how many other kids she's looking after. We don't know how many other sick or elderly or disabled or whatever, other people are in her care. And this woman has to make decisions on a minute by minute, day by day basis around how does she get access to food? Is she gonna walk and get wood or is there fire? You know, how is she gonna cook? Is there shelter? Is it safe? Can she go, you know, can her daughter go to the bathroom? Can she not? People are making decisions and they are the first responders and they know their context. And so what we as international actors have to be doing is being much more respectful of engaging them and asking them and understanding their agency and then responding and designing our responses on that basis and really becoming humble about who we are and what we are and what we know and what we don't. So that's kind of one that question of local and then the role of the global. The other part of this that again was very frustrating was that it was amazing that the international, and I mean the UN systems and so forth, once COVID comes like any other response like any other crisis, it's a moment for capitalizing on the crisis because it becomes a moment of generating resources and saying, okay, who's gonna take the lead we need to do, build back better like all the sloganeering that goes on. For the 25 years I've been in this space we've been saying every crisis, every issue has a gender dimension. So long as there are men and women, forget about even trying to break down what we mean by gender and identities. So long as we have people who are some, some are men and some are women in the world, you need to have gendered responses in your humanitarian work. You got to figure out where are the women, where are the men, who's doing what, what are issues are they facing and so forth. And to suddenly be faced with yet another UN kind of machinery that was going forward without a recognition of you got to figure these questions out or put the four questions in upfront right at the beginning and instead of having a women's task force or gender task force that's added three months later that was another frustration that I saw and I really, really hope that as you all go into this world of work and these sectors, this doesn't happen anymore. It should be just standard normal things that we think about as a who on the ground, who are the beneficiaries, who are the people we need to deal with, who are the actors? Let's figure this out and let's engage them on a respectful basis on that way. So those were some of the issues that I saw. Sorry about the long answer. No, no, it's fascinating and absolute. And you have to ask, you know given that women have been the first responders for years and it seems an obvious point why haven't the international community responded to that and adequately integrated those responses for years? I think actually that leads on nicely to a question that we had from Emma who asked about your experience working on one, three, two, five and thinking kind of what's the future of that? Do we need a new resolution? And yeah, asking those questions about how we can better integrate those women-centric responses. Sure, thank you. I'll give you a little bit of the history of one, three, two, five and then tell you where we are and where I think we need to go with it. One, three, two, 1325 didn't come from the Security Council. They didn't wake up one morning and say, ah, women, we must, absolutely not, right? It was basically in 1995 at the Beijing Conference for Women, the fourth World Conference on Women. It was a moment post-Cold War where we had a little window which was called the peace dividend, right? We were looking at the world and saying, ah, we don't have the Cold War anymore. What are the issues? Now, already in 1995, we had the Bosnian conflict that had exploded. In the Bosnian conflict, they had rape camps or rape was a direct tool and strategy of the conflict to destroy communities. So women's bodies were literally the battle fields and the front lines of that. We had had the Rwandan Genocide similarly where women of a childbearing age were directly and deliberately targeted either to be killed or to be raped and forcibly impregnated to try and destroy a community. So there was this issue of understanding that we were in an era where the nature of warfare was changing and it was no longer battlefields were no longer out in some, you know, fields somewhere and the home base was safe. Actually the home was the battlefield and individuals and civilians were the targets and that trend has continued to today and remind me to mention this later on, if I forget. At the same time that we saw this, that women were kind of literally their bodies became the battlegrounds between men from different ethnic or religious communities and so forth. It was also in the immediate aftermath of the Oslo peace process or peace agreement for Israel Palestine. It was a moment where Northern Irish women had gotten together Catholic and Protestant and they were making a really big push for involvement in their talks and they were doing a lot of the back channel things. So they came in 1995 to Beijing and while there were other topics to be discussed, you know, women's health, women's education, the more traditional development stuff, they actually created a new topic area which was called women and armed conflict and out of those discussions between, say this variety of people were coming really raw from the wars of Bosnia and Rwanda and elsewhere and then the ones that were actually participating in peace process came chapter E of the Beijing platform for action that was basically saying wars are changing, we need women need protection, we need women need to participate. So this duality of issues. I was working at International Alert which is a UK based NGO starting in 1996 and we were looking at the changing nature of conflict and we had colleagues who were working on the ground in places like Burundi working with women around how do you bring, let's say teachers and health workers, community workers, people who are trusted and who have access together as women to be the mediators and the peace builders and for them to see that when you bring, let's say Hutu and Tutsi women together in Burundi through conflict resolution exercises for them to understand that they have more in common as women based on their experiences in life and what's going on than what divides them based on their ethnicity. So they were coming in and we see this over and I mean, this for me is a repeated exercise across the world that once you bring women together and you actually get them to say, okay, there's been a conflict and there's a war. How's it for you? How's it for you? Your kids, my kids, you're worried about this? Suddenly they realize that they have that their gender identity is much stronger unifying factor than the divisive essence of ethnicity, race, nationality, et cetera. But the point is that people want to keep you divided. People today, Iranian, Israeli, Saudi women, imagine if we could actually all get together and start talking about what's going on in the Middle East. Iranian, Israeli, Saudi, Palestinian, whatever. We'd probably have a lot of creative things to say to each other and we could probably talk about the politics but we could also talk about the social but the laws of these countries, if an Iranian meets an Israeli, it's illegal. If an Israeli meets an Iranian, they get into trouble. So there's a divide, there are sort of ways in which conflicts divide us as human beings. And as women, so Beijing does this, we alert was doing this work. And what we realized at some point was that there is no vocabulary for recognizing what women do. And in 1998, we had the first world conference that was about women war and peace basically in London, actually with Kings College as one of the co-sponsors. I can dig up the reports from that meeting. We had 50 women from around the world. And again, the conversations were between those who were involved in peace processes, those who had been involved in being victims, those who had been fighters. We had a former fighter from South Africa who'd been in the MK, she was called the knitting needle bomber, right? And she was now in the South Africa, at that point she'd been voted into the South African parliament after apartheid. And we started talking about these things and realizing that there's no vocabulary, there's no policy framework, there are no parameters. It's just a completely invisible world. And that's when we started saying, we need a campaign to go to the security council to have a policy framework, to have a global reach. And the campaign was called women building peace from the village council to the negotiating table. And it was consultations around the world in war zones to say, what do you want to say to the UN? What do you want to say to the European parliament? And what do you want to say to the OSC? Those were the three policy targets that we had. My boss basically said, you're going to the security council. So I get sort of sent to New York to work with organizations in New York and mobilize and so forth. And what we did was we drafted our version of the resolution that we wanted. And we negotiated amongst ourselves. So in the sort of working groups, we had organizations that were working on refugee women. We had amnesty that was doing human rights. We had will that at the time was very heavily in the nuclear disarmament space. We had international alert that did peace building. We had to negotiate amongst ourselves. What do you put in a draft resolution? And given that people have come up and said, we care about participation. We care about prevention of war. We care about protection of women's physical and legal rights as refugees and in war settings. And we care about sanctions, the impact of sanctions. So we negotiated, we drafted, we put our resolution down. We were lobbying governments day and night, both in New York, security council members and in London and in Paris and whatever, giving them our resolution. And then finally, when various pieces fell into place, Bangladesh, Namibia, et cetera, came on board, they took our resolution. They worked with what was then UNIFEM and had to then renegotiate because it had to become a governmental thing. So a bunch of the things that we cared about stayed. A lot of the stuff, a lot of the metrics and benchmarks and stuff disappeared, sadly. But a bunch of the stuff that came from women stayed. And that became, if you want, like the mud upside of the flagship resolution. And it still remains important because the subsequent resolutions that we now have 10 women, peace and security resolutions. And then we have other ones that are about women and peacekeeping and things. So there's a plethora of resolutions. But the other ones that have come have come from governments. And what governments often do is they limited and say, you know, this resolution, it's relates to situations of conflict or countries that are on the security council's agenda. It limits it all of a sudden. 1325 doesn't have that. And that's really important is when Columbia was not on its council's agenda, Colombian women could use 1325, you know. So there are different ways that this has happened. Do we need a new resolution? No, we don't need a new resolution. And in fact, every time a government comes on, they want to do a new resolution, they go for a women peace and security one. They, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been a bit of a disaster because we've had pushback from China and Russia. We had tremendous pushback from the US under Trump. But more importantly is that these resolutions, the basics are not being implemented. And the more we think, oh, we need another norm or we need another action plan, people think that the once you have the paper, you're done. No, the paper is a piece of paper, right? It's got to be done on the ground. So for me, the issue is we know we have the language, we have good practice, we have good lessons of what works and what doesn't work. What really needs to do is to have that systemic change and systematization of the good practices and getting rid of some of the inertia and the old boys networks and others that perpetuate the bad stuff. We actually, oh, Livia, sorry, the problems of two of us. But we had a question in the gender panel that I think would feed into that. And Helena asked about how often you don't really, it's only really after a violent event or gendered violence that you then talk about what was the impact of that, the trauma. And by that point, obviously the trauma has already happened. So how can you better integrate preventative measures for sexual violence in particular? And how has the UN got the jurisdiction or the sovereignty? I think I find that kind of debate really interesting to actually intervene pre-conflict or even in a single country if the violence is within the country and it's not crossing borders. I think all of those issues really overlap and it's often quite a messy, there's no real straight answer. Yeah, so again, this is again where the local and the global becomes really important because this is, so in the aftermath of the Cold War, so going back to the early 90s, the issue that we saw with the international system was that it was designed to, the whole UN system in terms of whether it's mediation, intervention, prevention, et cetera, is designed around interstate conflict, right? And that's one element. The other premise, so on the one hand we're saying we wanna prevent, the Charter says we wanna prevent the scourge of war for future generations. We believe in, we the peoples of the United Nations, right? So there's kind of a sense of borderless, we're all in this together, universal human rights and so forth. On the other hand, it says UN is member states, principles of non-interference and sovereignty of state are really important. So again, we come into the 1990s, we have problems in Somalia, we have problems in Bosnia, we have problems in Rwanda, et cetera. And the security council, they're all sitting there going, what do we do? What do we do? And they don't wanna like put themselves at risk and so forth. So in the case of the Rwandan genocide, it took them three months to agree to call it a genocide because according to the Charter, if it's a genocide, you have to intervene. But they were quibbling because they didn't wanna send their own soldiers. Now, if you go back to the preventive side of this, what was happening in Rwanda in the run-up to this problem? General Delaire was heading up the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. He was hearing the rhetoric, it was on the radio, they were talk, extremists who to, radio was calling tootsies, cockroaches that need to be killed. I mean, it was literally a commission afterwards, a Danish commission afterwards. It was like all these early warning signs about who they were gonna target, how they were gonna do it. It was all there, right? Gendered, non-gendered, women, men, et cetera. General Delaire was sending these red alerts to the UN in New York, to the head of the peacekeeping department at the time who was a character called Mr. Kofi Annan. And Kofi Annan was ignoring what General Delaire was doing, was saying, right? They just weren't taking it seriously. And in fact, when things got worse, they pulled out, instead of adding more peacekeepers that could have actually just calmed things down, they pulled out the peacekeepers, leaving a very limited few people. They pulled out international staff. International organizations took out their own staff, they took out their pets, they didn't take out their Rwandese local colleagues, right? This is again, that kind of moment where you say, wait a second, are we in this all together or are we not? And subsequently, there was investigations and so forth about the role of France in actually enabling and supporting the extremist movements. So it's not that, oh, this is just the locals having their own little spat and we don't have anything to do with it. No, we're all, we as the international community, whether it's the powerful countries with the weapons and post-colonial interests and so on are always present. So this is unfortunately, this is the horrific game that that's been played. Because of these various events and it sort of started with Somalia and coming up to Rwanda, there was a move to say, okay, wait a second, this is not working. So we need a new initiative from the UN system which became the responsibility to protect, right? And the idea was that if a country, if a government is not protecting or is basically attacking its own civilians, the international community needs to intervene and stop and intervene, including military, right? So responsibility to protect becomes exciting. Fast forward to Libya, 2011, 2012. I was working at the UN at the time and there's a revolution and people are in uprising against the Gaddafi government and basically in Benghazi, they're saying, he's gonna come and kill us, right? Security council meets at the time that the French presidency before my call. They basically say, we need to take action and it becomes a NATO mission, right? And I remember the night that the resolution was adopted, we were at a gathering and I said, again, the premise of the UN is never again, war and never again, genocide. And I remember when they signed this, I said, I wonder whether this is never again will never happen again. Meaning that if this is a failure, if what they do in Libya doesn't work or we will never again step in to do anything. And it becomes this kind of one shot deal and it becomes this militarized situation. So with Libya, they went in with NATO. From the mediation side, there was a whole question who do we talk to, who will be the new government, right? Who are the new leaders and so forth? And to me, one of the biggest mistakes where that was made was that a bunch of Libyan exiles, many of them Muslim brotherhood and basically came up and said, hey, we are, we're the opposition. There are lots of people in Libya. In fact, the Libyan revolution was started by women. There were lots of really great courageous women, lawyers, democracy activists, human rights activists, et cetera, et cetera. And they were completely erased from the scene. They were completely erased from the discussions. I know, cause I was inside and I was fighting for it and I saw how it gets done. And we anointed, we as in the international community in the United States and others, anointed that the Libyan transitional national council or something and said, okay, these are the guys. And then we brought these guys and we brought them everywhere and we funded them and so forth. And by the way, what we also did was we had NATO doing the fighting and it was a moment of, well, it technically wasn't meant to be a regime change resolution because the Russians would have never agreed to that. On the other hand, if NATO goes in and Gaddafi survives, what does that tell you about NATO? One guy gets to beat the whole of NATO. So it was a really contradictory thing that they set up and it was very much about egos and momentary decisions and so forth. But they get rid of Gaddafi, they put this guy, they didn't want to have a heavy kind of presence of Western soldiers or Western forces because of Iraq, what happened in Iraq and so forth. So they outsourced the security space to the UAE and to Qatar and to these and those guys basically pummeled and funded Salafi extremists, those types of groups, militias to go in and Libya became a total mess and it's insane what we have done to Libya. We're really responsible for this, right? But that became the, so then we come, the worst, if the, and I didn't mention the Iraq war but if the security council decision to sort of not agree to the Iraq war and back in 2003 and the UK and the US went against that decision, if that was one big whack in terms of the credibility of the international system, the next big whack comes in 2015 with a Yemen war because Libya, even Syria, you could argue, okay, these were civil wars, do we go in? Do we not? Should we, should we not? Moment decisions being made at various moments and calculations and so forth, various mistakes but the Yemen conflict, so Yemen has its revolution Yemen has again, lots of women, lots of young people they set up a national dialogue process, the UN helps it was women, youth, tribal leaders, political leaders everybody was part of this national dialogue process, right? The Saudis didn't like it that the Gulf countries didn't like it because all of a sudden the poor cousin, the Yemen is practicing democracy in an area which has sheikhs and dictators and kings, right? And they didn't want this to work and so on the one hand they wanted to spoil whatever attempts was happening in Yemen at the same time the Iran-JCPOA deal was being made and the Saudis at which it was MBS he was all of 29 years old wanted something as a prize or something in return. So the Obama administration okayed the bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and under the premise that, oh, there's this Hutu militia group that is taken over the Yemeni government has fled to Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government wants this to happen. This is one member state bombing another member state this is the entire the security council's purpose in existence is to stop this kind of behavior. They green lighted the Yemen conflict two days later Saudi Arabia was bombing which means that they were preparing for it way before you don't get to suddenly start bombing. It was meant to last two weeks, it's ongoing, right? So it's literally as if the five and then you take the five members of the permit members of the security council UK, US, France all of them have made billions of dollars in selling weapons to the Saudis for the Yemen work. Russia and China meanwhile are doing whatever they want because nobody's paying attention. China's basically bought up the world and the Russians have reemerged and as I say going back to the beginning of the conversation I'm really, really sorry but we are now my generation is handing over to you guys a new Cold War which is US, Russia, China and an era of a mix of on the one hand populist authoritarianism, right? Trump and Modi and these guys but they're gouging out our democratic systems and then authoritarian populism which is that it's, we're all in social media everybody has a say in everything but actually we're not really learning to talk to each other so we're becoming atomized and kind of little tribal conversations and we're totally intolerant of each other but in the era of extreme pluralism geographically in our cities we're all living together our families are more and more mixed up and so forth all right, so instead of taking the pluralism and saying what are the best parts of it and how do we deal and how do we cope and how do we as I say take the global and the local strength and the local where it needs to be and think about what is the role of the global, right? Not to be neocolonial but to actually be helpful we're kind of handing a big mess to you guys which and the COVID world has kind of turbo charged this kind of devolution and the messiness that we're dealing with so that's why I wanted to apologize it's not a very happy picture at an international level the hope that I see is the local work that's going on and the hope that I see is actually a younger generation that's coming in and is skeptical or understands the importance of connectivity and so forth but actually also sees that these systems and institutions are really not doing what they need to do and so we really do need to renovate if you want the infrastructure and the architecture to be fit for purpose for the 21st century and long answer to some questions. I think you managed to articulate some things that many people feel around themselves pretty well so I think that was a pretty good response and I hope, I do hope we can get to I believe it's called Julia's question later on I was just wondering because in the beginning of our talk you mentioned the word boomer, the baby boomer generation and to get some background so I myself before I came here to London to study used to be very active in the Swiss climate movement and what I and everyone else there saw happening with COVID while we were I think having some success in pushing some sort of radical climate justice discourse during COVID the attention completely dissipated and what I think has a little bit since you also touched on the role of women in conflict and what we in the climate movement have been talking about and you also mentioned this a little bit is intergenerational justice and this is also very connected to the issue of youth or young people as sort of a category or an identity category which also suffers from inequalities and some sort of less maybe suffering from oppression and domination and more of a lack of space to actually autonomously really make any sort of decisions or move forward. I'm wondering what has what have been some of your experiences especially with the with the ICAN and in terms of youth and especially obviously in the conflict settings of various kinds would be very interesting. Yeah, no thank you. And so a couple of things I find it fascinating because there's a there's a kind of a nexus of gender, age, race that are the various barriers that exist and I'll be honest with you. I'm 53 and I look at it and I'm like you know really at this point I should be able to you know if we as women have been saying and you know going back to the 1325 argument you know we've been saying we need more women mediators we need more women senior positions in dealing with conflict and security issues based on the perspectives that we bring the experience that we bring and because this agenda has largely come from outside the in the sort of formal systems a lot of the experience my experience it's in civil society I've worked with the UN or I have colleagues who worked with the UN but so many of us sit outside the system and yet even we are still fighting to say can we open those doors so I just this morning I saw there was a tweet of a photograph of a meeting between the UN envoy for Yemen and he's gone to the region he's talking to the Iranians and others and it was a it was a room full of men old white haired men and I'm like it is gerontocracy is is kind of stifling all of us right it's it's there is this you know how we can we can talk about how nice or not you know our various leaders are but there is a real problem when that there the inability to open up space right the inability to bring the next variations of the next generation forward right and to sort of keep keep that space open and mentor and so forth now with women what and with ICANN what what I've tried to do I mean apart from my my own team and my own staff being various ages and young people and you know we have we have everybody I'm definitely the oldest in the mix in the network we have a variety of more experienced people people who've been at it for 20 30 years younger women that have come in organizations that have been either set up by younger women or organizations that are set up by older women and they're bringing in young women so we see that diversity of age and experience coming in and and the the one of the challenges that that I see is that it's really important to be able to on the one hand value the experience that comes by having been around the block a few times right it's it's for example when I you know any 13 any conversation I'm in these days around women at the table in Afghan women should be at the peace table Yemen women like literally I have this is a repeat for me it's like pushing repeat going back 5 10 15 unfortunately 20 years right so what I want to make sure is that if the next generation is coming through they don't start with thinking this is new that this problem or this in the way that it's been framed is it no it's not new this is the same old way that they you know they'll tell you go and get evidence they'll tell you it's the same excuses repeatedly and that and so that's why I've written about it and I said here here's what they'll tell you and here's what you got to say you know or here's a way of thinking to to challenge that what we need is to be able to transfer that experience and knowledge effectively to the next generation right so that so that it's not like oh I've just discovered right I mean it's very it's very nice when people then they've just discovered something but a lot of the stuff how do you transfer the experience how do we how do we shift the practices so that the next generation isn't falling into the same cracks and holes and and by that I mean you know when you come into the workplace doesn't matter what sector you go in in your 20s you're raring to go and and it's great you can do so much if in your 30s if you are keen on working with your children as women or as men but certainly as women it affects your work it affected my work I had to rethink the way the speed at which I could do stuff and and what I was doing but but I figured it out in in various ways and and those experiences you also want to share you want to bring in you know a lot of times it's policy changes that you want to have in place to enable people to continue their their where there's elements of how do we shift the the institutions so that it makes it easier there's also another way of thinking about this and this this I think is kind of where it's where it can get really interesting if I if I if we kind of go very simplistically in terms of generational things and say okay and especially this is for women but we say you know Ruth Bader Ginsburg the former Supreme Court justice right to get into university because it was all men right yet Hillary Clinton got into university to study law so Bader Ginsburg had already opened the space the Hillary Clinton generation goes in they're already there as I looked in I'm the next generation down from them as I looked at it I was like oh my god these women are behaving just like the men I want to go in and radically change from within so I'm going to change the way we get a security council resolution to change the way we talk about you know peace and peace and security and and change the lens and so forth so it's kind of within the institutional structure what I see coming down the pipeline with the next generation is that by virtue of having social media and connectivity in all sorts of other ways and forces of influence outside the system actually it's really it's not just about the climate change or whether it's the the Florida high school seniors here it's really thinking about what your power is right and and the example for the for the gun control question here for me was was fascinating because these these kids mobilized and they realized that okay we can try and change the laws but but it's so corrupt the corporations have so much control of the law makers that they said we have more power as consumers rather than citizens and they went to the you know wallmarks and whatever you know sporting goods stores and and said we're not going to come and shop from you if you keep selling bullets and guns right and those guys looked at it and said this is our this is our next generation of consumers are of our of our consumers so they responded this kind of thing I think is really important for the younger generation to think about where does your power sit and and and and but but at the same time it's like don't forget to pick up on the knowledge and and stand on our shoulders right you don't need to come and stand in the hole that I had to stand in or the or the sort of platform it's I stood on one platform of the generation before me I've created a platform that I've come to know is that in the way that I'm talking about where is being diligent about reading up and and and showing up and talking the other part of the intergenerational and justice part that that I see and I'm glad that you reminded me of this is that in the same way that I mentioned you know we were seeing in the 1990s a targeting of women and that continues violence against women and really it's a masculine supremacist movement so whether it's ISIS or the white supremacist they're really good at co-opting women and using women they don't elevate women to the status of leadership they want them there to help they want them there to have kids they want them there to be spies and messengers and fundraisers and so forth but it's a masculine it's a very sort of white or not a white male but it's a male supremacy movement as I say any of the other side of the other sort of thread that's now emerging is the targeting of children and this to me is one of the most devastating things that we're seeing so if you look at Afghanistan if you look at Yemen if you look at Palestine you know the median age in Afghanistan is 18 42% of the population is below the age of 14 right so if we have empowered and legitimize the Taliban which we have done by the way right and we're and we've set up a peace peace process a power dynamic process a power sharing conversation where Afghanistan is represented 50% by Taliban and 50% by government ex warlords political leaders that are you are letting the past literally kill the future similarly Yemen if we are arming and selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to go and bomb Yemen and the majority of the population is in Yemen is below the age of 18 we are willfully killing children I don't know whether you've seen that the images coming out of the Israel Palestine conflict in the most recent they are arresting kids under the age of 10 Israelis are targeting and arresting boys that's what's happening why are they doing it well you know some crazy guy will say oh because these are the next terrorists you know it's like but there is a there is an insidious question here of what are we doing when not only we're not leaving a client you know an environment that's livable in or an economic system that is that that is kind of balanced equally but we're now literally our families are targeting willfully or by a mission or by commission children and we don't even have a name for it we have a name for killing women it's femicide we have a name for killing based on ethnic or it's genocide what's the name for killing children on mass and fantasize is one word but there we almost need a new vocabulary for this I mean that is that is very true and I have a question for children or young people especially under 18 or teenagers being targeted in this way either strategically or of repression is a trend that we've been seeing and again relating to Switzerland it's just the context I know the most we are about to pass a law which would allow the police without any sort of court order to put teenagers in under house conditions. So I think this is a opportunity to you know there's something really insidious going on and this kind of this issue under the veneer of a democratically elected leadership or whatever actually gouging out the you know our the human rights norms and so forth this is something that again we need we really need a push from the younger from a different perspective. So I think this is one of the things that we need to address because it's if you go back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if we had implemented those 31 sort of you know articles the world would not be in the mess that it is right now we didn't it's been now over 70 years right going back to when this is here if we had just implemented what we were going to do and what we were going to do and where does where does power sit is it that we now have to work with corporations who are as I said this consumer question do we use our powers consumers to do to do that. It's the other thing that I that I really want to highlight for people here is that very often one of the things that they'll do in terms of sort of sending you off on a wild goose chase is to say it's very obvious for me is that it's not that women don't have the capacity or the experience or the or the you know qualifications whatever that is in fact a lot of the men who get these positions don't have that at all what they have is connectivity and access. So and that's that's where the networking and the kind of coming together and being able to sort of as I say from the local to the global opening spaces up and so that's the way that it all works. If you take somewhere like me and Mar right now, you know we we talk we have me and partners and Mary's partners. Part of our thing is what do you want us to say and do what can we do for you that you can't do for yourself and what can you do over so so that again the connectivity this space of extreme connectivity is really important and we have to kind of exploit that in a really positive way. So I think that's one of the things that's really relevant. One of the major issues to do with that is about the transfer of knowledge selective transfer of knowledge and selective transfer of fake knowledge as as over uses fake news is how do you think that plays into kind of or how do you think that affects response to violence or maybe preventative measure methods and yeah let's go with that I think. Sure I mean you know so this is again it's a really good and it's a really complicated question right because part of the reason why the good practices that do exist or the knowledge that that we do have doesn't get disseminated widely enough is that it's siloed right so we're all like in our little and and for me one of the things for example I mean one of the reasons why I'm keen to talk to students you know you if you're studying international relations or if you're studying development studies or if you're studying security studies if you're not getting an insight into what the women peace and security agenda is if you're not getting an insight into what it means to think about these things from a gendered lens or from a localized lens you're missing something and it's really important to get that at a time when it's a formative period of where your mind is open it's so exclusive I mean I'm doing a masters at KCL you know and it's that awareness I think it's hard to come by and part of the reason why that is because within academia you get silos and silos next you know and then people become really focused on what they know and very often teaching is not their biggest priority right so it's not as if they're not necessarily going out and say oh I've got you know I'm going to change the curriculum I came up with a curriculum or you know module you know three years ago I'm just going to keep repeating the same it's like they're not necessarily going out and thinking what what new has happened right so your own professors may not know what they don't know right that's what the other side is that as practitioners and again for me this is why I wear these tie-in wear these multiple hats is as crazy as it may look how do I bring it in into an academic setting and how do I get students to actually see and learn and be able to think this through but we're still stuck that there's gender studies and there's security studies it's not it should be that okay you come in and anybody who is graduating from Kings or from LSE or from A doing any of these social social sciences they need to have a gendered lens because everything has a gendered lens right and me if I put my employer hat on the other side I'm like this is what I'm looking for right it shouldn't be that you come to me and it's the first time as a you know in your job application that you don't know this stuff right so there is an element of changing the institutions up and students demanding it there's another element of thinking well where else can we find this it's on the internet it's on YouTube it's these kinds of extra sort of curricular sessions and so forth but if it's not embedded in the teaching it's really hard to make it embedded in how you think and I sometimes wonder you know how do the medics do it medicine keeps evolving the teaching of medicine keeps evolving not only it's evolving in the medical school but you come out and you've trained as a surgeon or a dentist or whatever you keep having to go back and pick up the new tools you know latest whatever an endodontics and you know whatever surgery it's hard it's hard for people to but they keep doing it and yet in social sciences we don't and I'm coming back to the peace process question I'm like you know we have ample evidence to show that peace processes that are designed around two parties two conflict parties belligerent parties sitting and talking to each other give you bad results end up failing end up fragment creating fragmentation and so forth peace results that are inclusive especially of women women peace builders in civil society have a better chance of survival and yet each you know Afghanistan we've screwed up royally it's devastating Yemen is the next one coming along and already with Yemen we're seeing that even the good practice that existed for the Yemen process in 2015 is already being sidetracked and done in a multi-track process you know here's the formal and then good luck to you down in the bundles on track 15 where we have women it's this kind of inertia and it relates back to people being stuck in their ways of doing things generationally how do they see the world and the inability and unwillingness to try new things for whatever reason because there are no incentives or they feel as if there are no incentives for new practice there are no obligations they don't fail in fact they fail upwards often when they get it wrong yeah no I think those are some very important points I mean in our I'm doing the CSD Masters at Kingston we have one class that is like one week is about gender and then it is mentioned among the other topics that we cover every time or whenever then it's relevant it comes up again and one of the other topics that we mentioned leading up to any question is the international system as we know it because you have talked a lot about how we have all the words we have the nice documents and almost all of the right dictionary and words that we want to use but the implementation is not working out and also piggybacking on one question that we have in the Q&A box obviously a big topic in international relations is reform of the international systems so should more countries have a veto right should the veto right be abolished etc etc maybe from your perspective what do you think should be a few of the things which have to be changed or ideally should be changed in the international system whether it is working and maybe finally get closer to the implementation of these nice texts that we have to finally get that working what are your thoughts on that the first thing I would say is I would like the powerful countries to lead by example right and that's a big it's a big problem because if you're the United States and you're saying ah human rights matters a lot but your ally is Saudi Arabia women's rights really matter we think women are really really important and your ally is Saudi Arabia in terms of how it treats its women and how it has spread Wahhabism which is one of the most extreme kind of intolerant kind of sectarian faiths if you want you have a problem similarly I didn't even mention Israel the hypocrisy question is a big deal there and the issue is that instead of it being that okay we're saying here's the standard that we want and we're all aspiring that way it's become what about it's like well the Americans point a finger to the Iranians about whatever and the Iranians are like well what about you guys and it's really kind of spiraling downwards it's not about kind of being the one who says hey I got this and I'm great it's really about what I got a C minus he got a D I got a D it's going to the lowest common denominator supposed to be the highest common denominator so this is one now basic things and I'm happy to share with you some basic things of saying we don't need to knock everything down right now can we just do some of the little tweaks like at this moment Afghan peace talks why are we not making sure that a delegation of Afghan women peacefulers a delegation of victims of violence a delegation of youth are being invited to Doha to speak to the various parties to sit around the table and why are here's a question for you why are these big men and their guns so afraid of women won't agree on anything the Afghan parties won't agree on it they all agree on excluding women so you've got to ask what are they afraid of and then why does the international community that is funding enabling legitimizing etc all these things on the one hand say oh yes 1325 and we have our national action plans and on the other hand sit there and say well you know the Taliban won't talk to women the Taliban do talk to the women number one they talk to women all the time on the ground and so forth so that's that's nonsense secondly who cares if they don't what you should what the UN should have done is instead of appointing Jean Arnaud who's a very competent very good guy I'm sure but instead of appointing a white Frenchman to be the representative of the Secretary General they should have appointed a Pashto or Dari speaking Muslim woman to be the representative of the United Nations why not is the Taliban going to say oh no we're not going to meet with the UN or are they going to say of course we're going to meet with the UN right so these are both symbolic and important gestures to make every time there's a peace conference every single country in the world wants to come and make some declaration of you know we believe and I think Mexico was present when the Syria peace conference opened regional blow of blood all these countries that say they support women or youth peace and security how about having in your own delegations a Syrian peace builder woman peace builder and a Syrian young person how about saying our three minutes slot that we make a speech we're going to read from their statement or we're going to this person is going to be in our delegation and they're going to read the statement open the spaces that you have I get this is a classic and a really silly example recently I had a there's a big conference coming up and I got an email from a very nice colleague saying I'm speaking at this panel I haven't been on this issue I haven't been looking at this issue for a while can you give me some talking points about really what's going on right now I'm like I looked at it and my you can imagine what my inner voice was saying what I should have said if I get invited to speak on a panel on an issue that I'm not really adept at or I haven't been involved in I say it's not for me to do this can we open it up and give it to somebody else why not so and so it goes back to this point about occupying spaces and not giving why is it that there is a persistent thing of thinking they as individuals you know network of old guys whatever it is and by the way network of women the old girls are just as can be just as kabali in terms of how they keep things tied together so it's really that moment of saying am I willing to kind of think about changing the way I do business as of today you know and it happens so I've been at various points for example the Canadians or the Norwegians there have been governmental conferences and they've put me on their delegation to be the speaker for someone like it's done the EU at one point brought Yemeni and when Federico Greening was the head of the external action service she brought Yemeni and Syrian women peace voters on EU diplomatic visas to the United States to the UN meetings because Trump had banned Yemenis and Syrians from visas to the US which is okay they're going to get diplomatic passports they're coming in it's doable it's been done right it's just a question of whether we really want to shift these power dynamics and be transformative or whether we still want to be like I'm in control and you know you're beholden to me in one way or another that's the shift that needs to happen and that shift needs to happen in the international NGO space it needs to happen bilaterally it needs to happen with the UN system as well yeah I mean one last point on this question what else Security Council in 2019 passed a resolution again in the women peace and security thing that we'd worked on where they explicitly say they call on member states to protect and not harass civil society activists peace builders political actors etc on the ground we have a situation where we have a country now that's on the UN Security Council they have arrested one of my colleagues one of one of our members who's now in jail and one of the things that they've said is that he participated in a meeting with the Security Council that was a if you're going to be on the Security Council you should be abiding by its own resolutions if you're going to be Iran or Saudi Arabia whatever country on the board of UN women or the commission on the status of women which is about women's rights you need to adhere to the provisions of the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women that should be the criteria and that's the kind of thing they vote each other in member states should be saying the criteria for being on the CDOC committee or whatever is that you've ratified this resolution you can't beyond it's the fox in the chicken coop type of thing but you can't have the fox in the chicken you can be roaming outside but you don't put him inside and then say oh what happened to all the chicken you know so it's this kind of dual standards and hypocrisy what's the point of having it on paper if none of you even those sitting in charge of monitoring it are not abiding and implementing and so forth no definitely I think another overused term that it seemed to me at the core of it is really political will and who to make those decisions and how can we put the right people in power and is democracy fit for this all of these big questions which we could talk for hours about it's all of that it's also never underestimate underestimate the degree to which personal competition and incompetence become the factors around which policies are made and that's the most depressing part of it because if I believe that there's a conspiracy theory and there's somebody sitting with a big button and this is why things happen and there's some control it would make my life slightly easier it's actually seeing that oh my god they make the soup in this way and then here we are working on this issue for 20 years and the diplomats change every two years so every two years you're dealing with somebody new who hadn't heard about this stuff even the last 20 years it's not like medicine or science where things build so and then as I say personal and then that is personal competition between people within institutions and stuff can kill a lot of really good ideas I'm going to put you on the spot and say as a last concluding comment what would be your one key takeaway from this talk what would be your one the single most important thing you'd like us to take away today single most important thing is we are and you are going to be living in an increasingly interdependent pluralistic world we need these institutions that were created and with all of their flaws we need kind of a new energy coming in to make them work so engage with them challenge them go inside them change them from within change them from without don't take them for granted and for anybody who's interested back in I have a book that I co-authored called Civil War Civil Peace from the 1990s there's a chapter in it which is a history of diplomacy and for me what's when I always think about this I say 500 years ago two Italian guys were saying we need to have a coming together of nations and then that idea didn't flow for 500 years and then X million people get killed and we come five centuries to the League of Nations and that doesn't work and then finally we get the UN and it's taken a lot of time to get to where we are and it's not inevitable it was not inevitable it does not last on its own it needs to be nurtured and if people who care give up or withdraw those who don't care and those who are in it only for personal gain will destroy and they will willfully destroy these institutions and the norms and so if you are studying law and international relations and so forth go in but go in with this question of always thinking about who is at the receiving end of this what would I want what would I do have empathy and do not assume that you know more than the guy on the ground or the woman on the ground always trying that the empathy question should always be central to the way you think about how would I want to be treated what would I be doing could I cope one night in a refugee camp with a tarp and a log and some you know what would I do right so so that question of respect and humility and then related to that what can I do where do I sit what can I do to make a difference so that it's kind of it imagine kind of an orchestra all the instruments are really needed you don't want you don't want you actually want a little bit of jamming and then sometimes coming together but but everybody has something to offer and and we need to build from where we are not not let the systems get destroyed but what a perfect way to end and I reckon I've taken extra 15 minutes at the time so thanks very much but that was fascinating thing I could sit and talk for hours but I think that's probably people probably sick of us now thank you very much no no it's our pleasure thank you for coming I think now Olivia and I as tradition I think with the eight years this conference has been going on we tend to have a bit of a wrap up summarize the key themes so we'll stay on and just make those last few comments for anyone that's interested but Sam again thank you so so much for everything thank you very much and I and you know let's let's talk again and see whether there's any way of bringing the you know some some conversations between LSE students and you guys and yeah yeah and for anyone that's listening the LSE podcast the LSE webinars on YouTube are brilliant and well yes yeah that's right June 29th is the next one and it's with Agnes Kalemach who is now the head of amnesty May, somebody who's a Myanmar activist and Lucy Taljia who is a Palestinian local council member and a women peace builder so it's called a survival activism under occupation so yeah look it up join us and and talk to you soon yeah let me know if you need anything thank you thank you bye bye