 OK, well, good morning, everyone. And welcome post-tornado to the United States Institute of Peace, which, for those of you who are joining us for the first time, is an independent, nonpartisan, publicly funded institution dedicated to preventing, managing, and mitigating violent conflict around the world. My name is Maria Steffen, and I'm a senior policy fellow here at the Institute. And I think the most critical thing I'm supposed to say here at the outset is that the Twitter hashtag for today's event is civil resistance, all one word. So feel free to tweet away as we continue the conversation. On this topic of civil resistance and nonviolent movements, our foci here at USIP include applied research and publications, education and training, and active engagement with the policy and practitioner communities. And I'm really excited about today's event, which is all about linkages. Linkages between civil resistance, which is a way for people to mobilize and challenge various injustices and inequities without the threat or use of violence, and different but complementary nonviolent tools like negotiations, dialogue, and strategic communications, and about the critical role that the media play in influencing popular perceptions about resistance. It's not always evident how people power, which is a form of nonviolent action relying on extra institutional tactics like silent marches, consumer boycotts, stayaways, sit-ins, street theater, and the building of parallel institutions, tactics we've seen manifested most recently in places like Uganda, Russia, Guatemala, Brazil, and elsewhere. We're not sure how these can always jive with traditional peace-building processes like dialogue, mediation, and negotiation that aim to de-escalate conflicts. But as we discussed here at USIP during an event last year that was moderated by our president, Nancy Lindborg, it's hard to advance a just peace in many parts of the world without bringing together these different but complementary nonviolent skill sets in strategic ways. I'm especially pleased to welcome those who are taking part in today's event from around the world. So these are individuals who are currently participating in USIP's global campus and are taking our online course on civil resistance and the dynamics of nonviolent movements. And they're from literally dozens of different countries around the world. My great colleague and co-instructor of that course, Darren Cambridge, who's seated here in the front and is known to many of you, will be feeding their questions and comments into our conversation today. Another reason why this is such a fun event, at least for me, is that my fellow panelists and I are all alumni of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The Fletcher School is the oldest graduate school of international affairs in the country and a place that really excels in addressing global challenges through a multidisciplinary lens. I'm proud to say that the Fletcher School has become a mini hotbed of sorts for the study of civil resistance as a powerful alternative to violence. And there are actually a good number of master students and PhDs who are currently churning out feces and dissertations on the topic of civil resistance to include a few of us on this panel. And I'd especially like to thank Jennifer Birkett Picker, who is the director of Fletcher's PhD program for helping to organize today's event. And I'm sure if anyone has questions about the Fletcher PhD program, she would be happy to answer them. So we have a great lineup of speakers this morning who will be animating the topic of civil resistance from various perspectives. You have their bios in the programs and to kickstart the conversation will be Anthony Wanis St. John. Anthony is a dear friend and senior advisor of the Institute who is also an associate professor and director of the International Peace and Conflict Resolution Program at American University. Anthony will be sharing findings from his early research on the role of negotiations in nonviolent resistance movements, which I should note will eventually culminate in a USIP special report, so stay tuned for that. Next will be Ben Nymark-Rouse, who is currently writing his Fletcher PhD or in the process of contemplating his Fletcher PhD dissertation. And Ben will be discussing the effects of violent and nonviolent resistance in the South African anti-apartheid movement, along with the importance of strategic communications between the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement and the leaders of South Africa's National Party. Josh Yeager, who is an Emmy Award winning network news producer, will talk about a training video that he co-produced for activists called Pressing Your Case, which offers tips on how to more effectively use the media as part of an overall nonviolent strategy. And hopefully Josh will answer that perennial question of whether it has to bleed in order to lead. Finally, we have Liz McClintock, a newly minted Fletcher PhD, so congratulations to Liz, who is the founder and managing partner of Conflict Management Partners and an expert in designing and implementing negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership training programs for public and private sector organizations. And I should note that Liz literally just got off the plane from Burundi, where she was out in the field working with government and civil society actors. Liz will serve as the discussing for today's panel, which means she will orchestrate a beautiful and compelling synthesis of the presentations and tease out some of the interesting and hopefully controversial points that our panelists are going to raise. So we've asked each speaker to talk for no longer than eight minutes, and I know they will be incredibly disciplined with that. And then Liz will offer some short, discussant remarks before we open it up to the USIP and global audiences. So with that, thank you all for coming, and I turn it over to Anthony. I don't know. I don't know, don't do that one. All right, is this podium on the left side? I'm just going to close it. We'll figure it out. All right, sorry. Good morning everybody. At the outset, I should say that the research I'm doing on negotiating civil resistance is something that I'm engaged in with Noah Rosen, who's here in the audience, who is a PhD student at American University. So this paper is really me presenting our tentative joint findings rather than just my own. Thank you Noah. Let me start with a small anecdote and then proceed to offer some thoughts on the connections between negotiation and civil resistance. In the first graduate class I took on negotiation decades ago, I remember vividly an instructor putting up a big PowerPoint slide that said, and it was one of those 20 by 30 feet screens, that one of the obstacles to negotiated resolution of conflict was justice seeking and justice seekers. And having come from a somewhat activist background in my youth, I found that jarring, that my own move to conflict resolution was seen by well regarded scholars as contradictory. Years later, I was offering a negotiation training to a group of housing activists in one of the big northeastern cities of the United States where there are a lot of homeless problems. These advocates spent the first four hours of the workshop extremely unhappy with discussing negotiation. And at some point I just asked them, what's going on, why don't you want to engage in this topic? What's wrong with the topic for you? And they told me after a sort of uncomfortable silence, we don't negotiate. We take down targets. And the mayor of the city and the city council, those are our targets. And I took that at face value, but then I said, what if you got the opportunity to make housing policy or to influence it in a way that was something other than direct action if you were part of the conversation? And they liked that idea, but they said we're not part of the conversation. We just try to chain ourselves to the door of the city council rather than think about what to do if we get in to those meetings. So we want to make the institutions uncomfortable with the status quo, but they were intrigued by the idea of being part of the conversation in a more substantive policy changing way. And it sort of embodied what Veronique Doudouet has called the tension between the revolutionary and the resolutionary wings of this bird. They belong to the same bird, to paraphrase some of our political pundits these days. And it helped me to understand that there are some real but also some imagined dichotomies between the way we think about negotiation and conflict resolution on one hand and nonviolent social and political change on the other. Not content with that dichotomy, I've been looking for several years at some of the ways in which there are important synergies between the two. And some of them, when you talk to anybody who knows anything about politics are just kind of obvious. But I wanted to get beyond the obvious a little bit and start digging down to the not so obvious connections between the two. So it's clear to me that people power and civil resistance movements once they take direct action have a number of important effects. I'm losing my notes here. Certainly they help produce dramatic political shifts. On occasion are remarkably successful in having a regime change, people in power depart and producing very, very dramatic but real political change. But what happens after that moment? What happens in the moment when the Duvaliers depart Haiti? In the moment after the Marcos regime collapses. Is that it? And in my mind that there are things to explore in that space between the cataclysmic symbolic and real change and then what happens afterwards. And in that gap, we find a great deal of negotiations. But that's not all. I think when we look at civil resistance movements and some of the important historical cases, Noah and I, we see negotiations sort of 360 degrees around the civil resistance dynamic people and organizations. With my housing advocate trainees, there came a point in the workshop when I asked, so what is communication like within your organization? What are relationships like among activists and the leader of the group who was in the room with us? Very uncomfortable silence. Until somebody said, well, we don't really get along very well. There's a lot of rivalry within our organization. There's a lot of miscommunication. And I said, between you and coalition partners out there in the community, people who are your allies in the work you do, well, we get along when we do things together but there are also important rivalries over resources. There are important and uncomfortable problems in the way that we work together. And they began to see that all of these things are managed by better negotiation. So I did finally get them sort of enthused about the topic when they realized that it was, that they had some assumptions about it that sound like this, negotiation for the committed change agent feels a little bit like surrender. And that might be a dramatic connection to make but it sort of sounds like this and there have been many different versions of it but do we really like to negotiate about rights we feel we're entitled to? Do we like to negotiate and potentially give something up about things that are not really divisible like our identities? Like our need for human security? Like our survival needs? Do we like to negotiate about redress for grievances? There are some reluctances to acknowledge that those things are sometimes not going to be dropped into our laps by the people who need to concede them or authorize them. They are going to be accorded through a drawn out process of bargaining. And therefore there is an occasional but possibly uncomfortable realization that negotiations are necessary. Now when we look at the classic cases of civil resistance there was no discomfort whatsoever. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela whose statue I passed this morning in front of the South African embassy early and waved to him, acknowledged, embraced and understood the power of negotiation to be very, very coupled with civil resistance activities and symbolic actions. So that the struggle actions produce the leverage that creates pressure, often on elites to pressure leaders not to necessarily make dramatic changes in society but to open the door to discussing the specificities of those changes. Noah and I were looking at King's correspondence from the Birmingham jail and the accord that he reached with the local authorities that four point accord was a moment of triumph for King. And it was a negotiated accord that the protesters were able to create leverage for by boycotting the businesses, by surrounding government institutions, by showing sheer numbers and demonstrating commitment, staying power and an absolute, shall we say reluctance to continue to accept the status quo of discrimination of structural violence. Once that was done, there had to be specific asks of authorities. And his specific asks don't look a whole lot different today than they don't look a whole lot different from some of the demands we might see today in civil rights and human rights campaigns. End to discrimination in institutions and end to the visible demonstrations of discrimination enhanced remedial activity to take people whose rights have been denied to them and make those rights come alive again. In his four points he accomplished a lot but then Noah and I realized that this was for King an opportunity to create a local precedent for national level demands. Those demands of course were going to be part of civil resistance activity at a national level but again, they would have to be negotiated with counterparts on the other side who were going to be governmental authorities. Happily at the time the Kennedys were somewhat inclined and supportive of engagement on these matters and wanted them to be negotiated. Strangely, we find some of the most important pieces of literature in the non-violence shall we say canon of literature to be really vocally cynical about negotiation and in this regard I love to look at Jean Sharp's work which is so remarkable but which is so down on negotiation. Negotiation for Jean Sharp is surrender. It is the renunciation of your rights and yet when you look at what he really recommends you do with negotiation he's essentially saying don't do it badly. Make sure you have civil resistance leverage that is manifest and real and perceived before you get to the table. So although the tone of some of the literature especially of the more canonical works of non-violence seems to be very negative on negotiation even those folks are acknowledging that it's an important part of social and political change and I think that helps us to understand that the resolutionary and the revolutionary are not really dichotomous they are complementary phases. So what we have seen and I think this will be my last remark for timing is that there are negotiations to create the movement there are negotiations to bring people on board to get civil society organizations as well as individuals to join it. There are negotiations to get shall we say allies who don't want to join it but to get them to be sympathetic to it and to cooperate with it. There are negotiations once you get to the table and start demanding the actual substantive political change and then there are negotiations to implement those changes. There are connections to mediation that we've looked at and seen that I will just mention without delving deep into and then there is the strategic third dimension here of scaling up what is negotiated locally and making it what for King and Mandela were essentially national negotiations and what today might also be considered transnational even global desires for some sort of change. I'll conclude my remarks there. I hope I'm on time. Thank you very much. So welcome and thank you Maria and thank you to everyone else here at USIP and the Fletcher School who helped to make this discussion possible. Today I'm going to share some initial insights from a research project titled Dear Friend Correspondence Across Enemy Lines. The presentation draws on amongst other things research I've undertaken in the UK and in South Africa. So when we as policy makers or casual observers alike think about nonviolent conflicts the images that first pop into our mind tend to be adversarial ones. Two or more opposing sides engaged in protests, boycotts, sit-ins and the like. This image is of students in Soweto facing off with apartheid era police. This is also how scholars tend to study civil resistance. We draw on theories of civil war and we tend to define civil resistance as a form of asymmetric conflict. And regardless of whether we're thinking about civil resistance as a process of coercing adversaries to give up power or converting adversaries to share power civil resistance is first and foremost seen as that adversarial process. So I want to briefly sort of expand on Anthony's presentation. And this image is of the first few lines of a letter that Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin British Viceroy of India. It's effectively one of the first salvos in the Indian independence movement. And despite being written to Lord Irwin you may notice that the letter isn't actually addressed to him. The salutation that Gandhi uses is Dear Friend. This is actually only one in a series of letters back and forth between Gandhi and Lord Irwin. And this letter serves as the theoretical inspiration for my research. And in this letter Gandhi goes on to not just say Dear Friend but he lays out his grievances against the British. The goals of independence from where and with whom he will start a salt march as well as steps that the British would need to undertake to avert the salt march. So let's think about this kind of communication as a strategic move as Anthony suggested. So first, Gandhi seems to think of Irwin as having a dual identity. He's not simply an oppressor or part of the structure of oppression he's also a potential ally. Second, this type of correspondence is participatory, right? It's back and forth. And this correspondence occurred from the earliest days of the independence movement. Social psychology literature suggests to us that individuals who feel like they're part of a decision making process are more likely to accept an outcome that they disagree with or that they dislike. So point being from early on the resistance campaign conceiving of individuals on the opposing side as being both adversaries and allies or potential allies changes how the participants in the movement, the leaders and members communicate with those on the other side. So here are just two ways of thinking about that sort of strategic communication that Gandhi undertook and that happened in the anti-apartheid movement. There's one way of desegregating it. High level correspondence that seeks to resolve underlying political differences, right? So peace talks, talks about talks and then lower level communication which is not necessarily any less strategic but includes information gathering say from police who might be sympathetic or your cousin, cousin of someone in a movement or exchanging information to build a relationship or even potentially build trust. This also includes sharing information to potentially encourage defections. So this being a USIP audience I'll just highlight a couple key points in the timeline of the anti-apartheid movement. Opposition started as primarily nonviolent. Quite early on in 1961 it switched to mixed, violent and nonviolent. In the Mandela was imprisoned along with others in 1964. In the late 1980s secret and private negotiations about negotiations commenced and then in the early 90s there were proper peace talks talks about a transition in 1994 Mandela elected president. So this image is of a reunion between Nelson Mandela and Christo Brand who was his jailer on Robin Island. Amongst other things Brand helped Mandela learn not for cons which he then used to communicate on a regular basis almost daily based on the archival material that I saw with all manner of officials in the national party government. Brand when reflecting on his friendship with Mandela he says that Mandela wrote of his long walk to freedom and I'm proud I walked some of that road with him. So Mandela's regular contacts with government officials about everything from gaining access to a lawyer to making statements about current events helped Mandela learn about the other side and build trust and even friendships. In 1982 Mandela was transferred from Robin Island to Polesmoor prison two years after the transfer this is where apartheid officials and Mandela initiated secret private high level conversations about what negotiations to end apartheid might look like negotiations about negotiations and if you look closely at the image you can see that the green and yellow sign that welcomes you to Polesmoor describes the prison as a place of new beginnings and indeed it was. The negotiations in Polesmoor and elsewhere set a foundation for later talks including the ones depicted here in Mel's Park in the UK this is an archival photo that I uncovered of one of the eight Mel's Park meetings between members of the ANC you may recognize some young faces there and supporters of the apartheid government these talks started in 1987 and occurred concurrently with talks separate talks with Mandela these Mel's Park meetings culminated with Mandela being released from prison in 1990 so implicit in how negotiation experts analyze, conduct and reflect on conflict is a preference for nonviolence and an aversion to the use of violence but as I mentioned anti-apartheid movement in South Africa used both violent and nonviolent methods so did the violent resistance to apartheid have any positive impacts this image depicts two types of commonly used violent devices by anti-apartheid activists the shaded bars are of devices captured by the authorities and the black bars, the darker bars that were successfully detonated or used by activists in every year the devices captured are far higher than those detonated and moreover the spikes in state-sponsored repression of the activists map exactly onto the spike in violence used by the activists so activist violence led to state or corresponded with state-sponsored repression having said that propaganda images such as this one facilitated mobilization of protests the armed actions of the ANC were part and complementary to the struggles being waged largely through unarmed means and townships and mines throughout South Africa and organizations in the struggle including the United Democratic Front depicted here adopted the ANC's iconography and used it to promote both nonviolent and violent mobilization and so as we think about actions that got Mandela released from prison and that got all South Africans the chance to vote for the first time in a free and fair elections we can recall three main points the first being that violent resistance had countervailing effects the second that correspondents correspondents across enemy lines occurred throughout the antipartite movement from early on through to the end and that that correspondents occurred concurrently the same time as nonviolent and violent attempts to exert leverage and undermine the pillars of support for the for the apartheid regime and the third that correspondents played a role in facilitating the political transition in South Africa that we saw about 20 years ago thank you okay if it bleeds it leads thanks we're going to talk about why that is thanks to Maria and USIP for having me it's a pleasure to be here this spring I'm coming up on 20 years in mainstream network news and I'm required to say at the start that I'm not here on behalf of any particular news organization I'm here on my own time but I've been doing what I'm doing for 20 years and I've been in some strange situations over that time thinking back about it there was the time Charles Manson asked me if I wanted to pose for a family Christmas card with him there was the time I found a suicide bomber application in a Baghdad hotel and upon investigating further found that they were no longer accepting applications because the waiting list was too long these are examples of many situations in my career where I've covered violence but over the years I've also found that nonviolent stories have in many ways been more interesting to me it doesn't seem like the media does enough to cover movements of that type and I know as he heads nodding in agreement that's a recurrent theme we don't do enough we don't do it well enough in covering nonviolent movements and I began to wonder why and really to start thinking about why and it turns out that there are some real answers to that they tend to be answers that activists in nonviolent movements don't like at least not at the beginning but I think looking at them more closely they can be explained and parsed in such a way that they actually wind up making some sense and they also suggest strategies to make the change in my own case thinking about this question led me to make a film which was mentioned Maria mentioned called pressing your case I'm going to show you a very very short clip from it but the film set out to answer a number of really basic questions about the media and it's made for activists in nonviolent movements with no media experience so it wants to know things like how is the media landscape changing obviously social media have had a huge impact and there are both incredible strengths and also some problems with social media which we encounter in my business I can talk a little bit more about that later technology in and of itself has changed things immensely I used to take six people to a story no matter where it was on the planet and now very often I'm going there myself with this that suggests a number of important changes how do different types of media organizations function in different types of systems, governmental systems that's another question that the film asks and answers and then there are some basic stories what do journalists look for in a story and how can members of a nonviolent movement organize things strategically in order to help journalists get what it is they're looking for so there's one really uncomfortable truth at least it's proven to be uncomfortable for nonviolent activists that emerges as a conclusion from this film and it's this activists do not have a right to media coverage it's up to groups to figure out how to get the media engaged and interested in what it is they're doing and there are lots of ways to do it so cutting to the end it doesn't have to be true if it bleeds it leads and I'm hoping we can get into a discussion about that a little later you have to figure out how to get journalists interested and that means developing a media strategy in an organization and there's components to a media strategy which are extremely important the message is one of the most obvious ones designing a message that effectively represents what your movement stands for not only what it stands against what it stands for targeting an audience figuring out how to disseminate best disseminate your message to that audience and of course matching your message and your audience is an extremely important endeavor if they're mismatched you often run into problems in thinking about an audience it's also important to realize that media may be your first audience so this is not a small set of questions how activists should deal with media in order to more effectively collaborate with them so the film as much as activists made disdain journalists or journalists might be a mystery to activists in many cases the film seeks to address how they can work together more effectively and I'm going to play you just a very very short excerpt there's a lot more and at the end I can tell you how to watch the whole film if you want this was made in collaboration with a friend and colleague and academic in the UK who also worked as a journalist for many years cannot perform the requested action this is what I pretend to know what I'm doing should I try again I'm not sure can one of our folks in the booth help us? yeah he's going to do that can we try closing it again? no it is yeah we could do it that way let's do it that way just going to take a minute so just a part about the person with whom Josh created this film his name is Howard Barrell and what's interesting about Howard Barrell building on Ben's earlier I'd like to introduce you are you able to anyway so he'll figure it out Howard Barrell incidentally was a member of the armed wing of the anti-apartheid struggle he's a white South African so he was in the bush leading guerrilla warfare for a while came to the conclusion that it wasn't the most effective form of resistance began to embrace the act of nonviolent resistance of the UDC and other groups and since then has become sort of a leading proponent of strategic nonviolent action so it's sort of an interesting story that builds on Ben's earlier point okay I think we got it okay now we got it we do full screen we also need volume okay I'm going to start this is where the Muslim community meets volume the question is is your story close enough to the audience to mean something to them if not how can you make it so as you think about stories remember what we said earlier news is now taking place in Norway a bomb in the capital Oslo it's got to be tied to something that's happening something that's actually occurring in the moment we cannot tolerate this we cannot bear this the hospital is full of casualties and you need to get the right person from your movement to put the story across get sloppy about choosing your words and you're asking for trouble so choose them carefully unlike these American politicians we're very honored to be back in San Francisco we're here for a great convention we had a great convention our national interest ought to be to encourage the best it's got to be something to get the word across that is a conspicuously careful choice the question is whether we're going to go forward to tomorrow or we're going to go past to the back let's pause here and revisit one of our central points about news stories you don't have a right to media attention you have to figure out how to get journalists interested and if you want to focus on an issue it helps a lot to give the media a person caught up in that issue to focus on among the crowd a frail looking 65 year old woman demonstrates she and the people near her are hit by tear gas and water cannon the retired apolitical English teacher has been elevated to near mythical status on the net take an issue you're interested in then find a person embroiled in it that's your story who killed Neto Agostotan and why the sensationalism that went all across the world let's review the elements in a good story it will usually deliver a clear positive message that supports a favourable image it was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of the nation yes we came when possible it will contain a local angle a neighbourhood business with strong community roots is closing sharp and a link to what is already in the news and always a good central character it's important to assemble these elements as early as possible so that if a journalist shows interest you are instantly ready to provide what he or she wants so that's the kind of information that's contained in the movie which was very generously funded by ICNC international centre for non-violent conflict and we spent years putting it together and got to interview some fascinating people so both from the clip you saw and from the larger movie which I encourage you to see there's a small number of exceedingly important points that need to be remembered activist groups need carefully planned messaging timing and outreach we talk about all of these things we talk about how to approach a journalist and what constraints there are on that kind of interaction it's touched on here in the clip it's critical to remember that stories though you may have a cause that's incredibly worthwhile or better thought of as being about people than they are about issues so a story about an issue turns into a story about a person who's embroiled in an issue and if you are looking to get your story into the media the first thing you probably want to look for is a dynamic person who somehow personifies the issue making this movie made me think a lot about my role as a journalist and it's changed my thinking on that and I hope that as I say that you all will watch it and that it will affect in some sense those of you who are activists how you think about your role in working with us thanks a lot anyone who's interested in seeing a whole movie can reach me at likelystorymedia at gmail.com and I will send you a link good morning, almost afternoon everyone I think I'll stay here as the discussant so thank you to Anthony, Ben and Josh for kicking us off on what I hope will be a very interesting discussion I think what I'll do is pull a couple of threads that I heard and that I found interesting and then there are a number of questions from the online group that have already come in that's watching out there and I'm going to sort of start us off with one question and we'll open it up to everyone else so as I think all of you pulled from this the three presentations there are really critical links between all three Anthony raised for us this tension and explained nicely the complementarity between what he called the resolutionary and revolutionary wings of this same bird and I think understanding that complementarity is critical to movements around the world Maria mentioned that I just came from Burundi and I think one of the challenges is understanding how a movement such as arose in Burundi last April why did it peter out why wasn't that a success and resistance in Serbia nonviolent resistance in Serbia was a success so I think just as a preview I'm sure that folks would love to hear more specific stories we got a little bit from Ben but I know that they'd love to hear more about successes and failures because I think managing this tension between a large group cross-ethnic predominantly young people in Burundi who did rise up in protest very largely peaceful yet it failed to gain traction and I think how can we both understand that situation and then provide advice going forward to similar movements is critical and I think what Anthony underscored and I think is important for us all to remember is those kinds of movements can facilitate what we call in the negotiation and conflict resolution field is ripening of a conflict such that it might become ready to negotiate and that is for me one of the most valuable roles I see of nonviolent resistance is pushing the ball forward on that so something that Ben mentioned is obvious I suppose but sometimes we don't I think appreciate the importance is the role of strategic communication and it's linked directly to some of the issues that Anthony raised as well the example of the group of housing activists negotiation is all around us right we use it all the time and I don't think we could have a civil resistance movement without some negotiation taking place whether that's getting the folks on board getting new people on board as Anthony mentioned yet what Ben underscored is it's how that strategic communication is really how it's managed how it's framed and how it's then used to promote your purpose and Josh nicely followed on that is with the role of the media in Burndi as in many other conflicts the way that was thwarted was by shutting down media so therefore you didn't have that particular tool I'm imagining that some of the folks who have questions might then wonder what can we do in the absence of the media so it's something to stage some of those questions but I think one thing that upon reflection that Josh raised and now I think about the situation in Burndi in particular since I was just there is that this idea that you don't have a right to coverage it's not just that it if it bleeds it leads it's that in fact having a communication strategy which Ben mentioned is so critical then to getting our message out there seems so obvious but if I'm sitting in Josh's seat I have to be able to appreciate what's gonna sell my story and understanding that we don't have this right I think for me makes it a lot I think I could give better advice now to folks in the field I wanted to start off one person asked from Sweden his name is Thomas Nordberg and I think hopefully Anthony addressed this somewhat but was how may the coupling of negotiation and nonviolent action be conceptualized and I think we got a good sense of that so I'd like to link that to a second question by a young person named Emily Hupptuck but we don't know from where and this is addressed I think to all of you actually so whoever would like to go first but if the media shows armed intervention leading to desired change do you think such practices give audiences the sense that such a method of struggle works and may in some cases discredit or minimize the effect of nonviolence as a theory and method of change should we take that? yeah that's really a question for you and your book yeah it is although you know Josh will have a perspective from a media stance but you know the reality is that empirically violent campaigns and violent insurgencies succeed about 25% of the time so it's not as if they always fail they do succeed sometimes and again I'm referencing data collected as part of a book project called why civil resistance works which gathered data on 323 campaigns violent nonviolent from 1900 2006 and you know the findings that Erica Chenoweth and I came up with is yes the violent succeeded against incumbent regimes or foreign military occupations 25% of the time but they were outperformed by a 2 to 1 ratio by the nonviolent resistance movements so historically we can say with good data that nonviolent resistance has been much more effective than violence and not only that in the cases the 25% for these maximalist campaigns where the violence succeeded the effects the societal effects of victory are enormous so there's a very strong positive correlation between both the failure of societies to achieve any resemblance of democracy so if you care about rights and freedoms the societies that generally follow armed victories tend not to be so respectful of rights and freedoms and these are societies that often are going back into civil war within five years after the end of the campaign so just the empirics challenges the notion that you have to have the violence to win but to bear in mind even if you do win think about what's going to be happening in your society afterwards but Josh I think you're maybe better poised to answer the media part I'm certainly happy to take it on look if a team of journalists lands in a city where on one street corner there is a one neighborhood there is a series of coordinated terrorist attacks and in another neighborhood there's a work stoppage I can tell you which one we're going to go to first and that's probably not a surprise to any of you but when you think about what real news is I tend to think Maria's book is a story the fact that nonviolent movements succeed more often than violence does that's a story and that's a story a lot of people don't know what it comes down to at least in my line of work is something that can actually often be reduced to something pretty simple and that is that violence tends to be visual things blowing up people fighting and a large current running through stories that succeed in visual media is drama human drama visual drama are critically important so the question for movements and this is something I've actually helped movements think about is how to make nonviolence more visual and in so doing make them more those events and movements more coverable and again it goes to the question of what journalists tend to look for in a story do you want to take the negotiation part of that in looking at a number of cases classic and contemporary ones it seems to me and to Noah that civil resistance and negotiate function in somewhat the following way and this is hypothetical it's testable there's certainly a coalition building component that has to succeed if it is functions, if you get enough of a mass of people who want to participate and say this is the way we have to do something now their actions, their direct actions reduce the asymmetry of repression the government has all the guns and nonviolent movement assues or forgoes violent responses although of course there are some mixed cases where there are violent elements in a resistance campaign that are connected or separate from the nonviolent ones so there's a leverage creation moment a reduction of asymmetry there is a creation of ripeness or what Dean Pruitt called readiness the psychological change in leaders who now say the costs of the status quo are too high let's find an honorable exit or the best exit we can from having to maintain this extremely costly status quo that's the third part and then fourth and this is I think neglected by both negotiation scholars and the nonviolence literature is there is always the transformative possibility of engagement with your adversary direct engagement with them when you talk to each other when you try to persuade each other when you reason with each other when you listen to each other and learn from each other as Ben was discussing changes happen people change their minds about decisions they've made commitments that they've undertaken and they make new ones or at least so for me those are perhaps four of the many possible connections between the two just to add to Anthony's point about the power of nonviolent action and rebalancing asymmetries of power I think that can be a double-edged sword and this came from conversations I had with Egyptian activists in the summer of 2011 at that point Mubarak had fallen parliamentary elections were upcoming many folks pundits and experts said to the activists and to secular members of the secular movement become a political party engage in elections and now you've gotten rid of Mubarak now you can win the elections you can create the constitution and many of the activists who were in the streets at that point summer of 2011 when we do that they understood their political power their only experience or their primary experience with having political power was precisely because they were outside of those negotiations because they were in the streets because they were in the squares of Egypt and so for them they didn't have many positive productive experiences of engaging in institutional politics that they could draw on whether or not they just needed to learn or to read or to see the data to engage or whether or not they had a visceral reaction it was a very emotional time in Egypt there was a lot changing that I believe also played a role but I think that the idea that just because activists are rebalancing and creating leverage on the outside doesn't necessarily mean that they have the skills or the inclination to engage in negotiations so questions from the audience please we just have a mic coming so just one second and if you wouldn't mind stating your name and your affiliation that would be great so thank you for a really interesting panel I'm Catherine Hughes Freitech I'm the associate director of field initiatives at the National Center on Nonviolent Conflict so I work with this everyday and mainly focus on groups in the field that are either using or want to learn about nonviolent action and civil resistance in a strategic manner so first of all with Josh I just wanted to acknowledge that pressing the case has been an incredible film and resource for us and for many around the world and I actually use it as a core for training that we do for seminars for activists and for practitioners Delighted to hear it so I think the more people that can use it and learn about it it's really very effective and very helpful and we've gotten great feedback my comment and kind of question is starting with Anthony but I think it probably entails a lot of you is mentioning the connection which I think are really important to look at conflict transformation including negotiation and other kinds of tactics strategies with nonviolent conflict one of the words I haven't heard a lot is the word power obviously we're getting to that with asymmetry and some other things that have been mentioned as well as people power movements but for me that is the key part of all of this and why people need to turn to conflict whether it's armed conflict or unarmed conflict to reach just peace or what I would call an active peace if you look at Galtung and others so as long as you don't feel that you have enough of a power balance to go into negotiations as you know you usually don't come out with a strong agreement that can be enforced and that can actually leave to justice which then creates an active peace which then you no longer have conflict possibilities and so I very much hear and think the importance of negotiation as part of the tactics and strategy of this nonviolent conflict but I also wanted to mention on the other hand on the other side of a peace agreement or of any kind of agreement what we see in transitional justice states is it's incredibly important to use nonviolent conflict to use this pressure to keep the strategy and the pressure on to keep somewhat of a power balance so that you can actually implement the agreements and we see so many times that it falls back into conflict or war or struggle and that doesn't when it's not implemented so I can give Israel Palestine a number of things over the years and Nepal is another one that we're looking at a lot so I just want to kind of highlight I think the importance before so nonviolent conflict being used to get toward negotiations and also negotiations within those movements which I think is a really important point but also on the other side to keep the pressure on to implement agreements to implement things that have been agreed to otherwise the power that be the devils and the details and agreements and they just won't be implemented so particularly in a conflict like Israel Palestine once the peace process started getting to the point of each side having to take implementation steps that were costly to itself instead of having popular support for those moves you started seeing popular discontent for those moves and so they would go back to secret negotiations but the implementation parts were always public and right before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated there had finally been a realization on the Israeli side that nothing had been done to prepare the public to support the transition to peace there had been six decades of demonization and zero decades of re-humanization on both sides and so their nonviolent movements their grassroots support for peace on both sides has always tended to be somewhat small vibrant but very small and these days it's increasingly feeling encircled by popular opposition to peace so your point is well taken there has to be continued pressure for things to actually be done that were written down I'd also like to add something from where I sit it's common knowledge that power often depends on attention getting attention and that's one of the reasons that social media have been such an incredibly powerful tool around the world is that they have decentralized the power of information dissemination now as a member of mainstream media I'm also thinking about times where media is actually used as a negotiating tool people negotiate through the media and that happens a lot social media is something we talk about a lot and to go back to it for a second I think one of the problems we in mainstream media have is that there is an accuracy issue just because someone tweets something doesn't mean it's true and so I've had people never never as technology makes things faster and easier and information flies in all directions at once we still have a verification issue so there are some built in challenges as well great thank you Darren do you want to bring some of our online folks in great thank you I'm going to bring in a couple questions from two of our online participants one comes in via twitter from Hamza Agour from Egypt and I'm going to connect his question with another question that came in through the online forum from KetKet who's from Myanmar so Hamza Agour's comment is how can we nonviolent movements and campaigns address the elderly groups of the society that do not use social media only TV so there's a generational element there too how movements use media that's the first part of the question and building off of the use of TV KetKet provides a little context and says in Myanmar most of the people accepted the rumors from the media for more than 60 years when the government wanted to do something to share information with the media there were rumors but the government knew that those rumors would trigger a certain response from the people and then the government could then prepare for that predictable response and in some cases the rumors would then become true so as a result of this practice this has span generations many people in Myanmar lack the skills to identify true information her question is how can and have nonviolent movements develop trust with people regarding the information they put out and how can they counteract the misinformation put out by governments and I connected that with the TV I'm making an assumption perhaps that oftentimes the government's power leverage over media oftentimes is through state run television so that's why I made that connection but it could be okay so there are several points the difference between social media and television is disappearing watching television as people commonly conceive of watching television is something that's probably not going to be around much longer it's really about content generation of content dissemination of content and what device you watch that content on is becoming less and less relevant to what we were going to go about Netflix and back then the question everyone in the media industry wanted to know is how are we ever going to get the internet connected to the television set and until we do this DVD model of business that Netflix was using was hugely successful and the question was are we going to be put out of business when somebody else learns how to connect the internet to the TV an ongoing concern that each new technology will render the previous one obsolete was radio going to mean that no one read anymore television going to mean that no one watch radio anymore and is the internet going to mean that no one watches TV anymore I think that they're fusing the other point you make is also critical and that has to do with media systems they're in a repressive society deciding what is true and what isn't often involves looking at the source and it also involves understanding the way different media systems function how do commercial media function in a free press society versus how state media function in a society where if the president says it's news it's news and I would direct anyone who's interested in this to a particular film that I found very interesting and we used a lot in making this film it's called Burma VJ VJ standing for video journalist and it's about a democratic group activist group in Myanmar during the saffron uprising and how they used hidden cameras to document what was going on smuggled their footage out of the country where it was picked up by mainstream media and beamed back into the country and that sort of gave them instant credibility so I'd like to just ask a follow-up question on this because I think we are seeing it in movements around the world but it does access to media and in particular access to social media is that beginning to create sort of like a gap between elites who have access to all of these kinds of social media outlets and the rest of the population who in a very poor country may have very little access not even to television but maybe only to radio or don't have smart phones etc so what is the impact on sort of this elitist phenomenon that is social media on some of these violent nonviolent movements and nonviolent resistance I would just say sometimes we underestimate the technologies that are out there so sometimes it's shocking in the most remote places that people are using some smart technology so that's sort of a first point but your larger point is incredibly important about the digital divide and what does that mean if you're a strategist trying to think through a nonviolent campaign or movement and frankly it relates to Egypt's question about the role of the elderly because yes they're not always going to have access to social media they don't want to use it so from a strategic perspective it's all about well how do we reach out to and proactively engage groups that may not use these types of technologies but oh by the way there are hundreds of different tactics involved in nonviolent action and nonviolent resistance that they can participate in I mean that's the huge advantage of nonviolent resistance and why it's been so effective everyone to participate young, old, disabled, able-bodied rich, poor there's enough out there that people can do so as a strategist yes there's a role for social media in the initial sort of connections venting and especially in repressive societies gaining voice and gaining confidence in voice that you otherwise wouldn't have it's also very good at flash like organizing flash protests so getting people out for initial street demonstrations, rallies and the like but where social media often falls short and where the sort of door-to-door organizing and mobilizing is most important is sort of in the sustainability aspect so once you move beyond the street protests that may not involve so many elderly people by the way it may involve a lot of young people, energetic folks but beyond that sustaining a movement involves reaching out to all segments of society and engaging them in tactics that they can participate in I remember one of my favorite examples from the Serbian case, from the youth-led movement that helped mobilize the population to challenge electoral fraud and stolen elections in the year 2000 so the odd poor youth movement these men and women were very good strategists and their first target group for recruitment was the elderly why? because the elderly in Serbian society had lots of time on their hands they could distribute leaflets, flyers talk to people, hang out at places make phone calls and they were less suspecting than the young revolutionaries who were leading the movement so they could do things and get away with doing things that the younger activists could not and so it was sort of a brilliant case it was the first group that they recruited that was in the thinking how do we bring this constituency on board and the pensioners were suffering under the economic policies in Serbia so they had an incentive to participate in hopes of changing the system because they weren't faring very well so it just beyond the social media there's a role for it it's more the online offline strategizing and moving from just mobilization and protests and rallies and mobilization which at the end of the day is going to help you sustain a movement and bring in sort of the diverse sectors that you need to succeed not to diminish the value or the importance of social media networks but we've also seen around the world other social networks be incredibly useful for exchanging information and organizing people religious networks for example and this is something we saw in Egypt one of the largest days of protest in Cairo was the day that the internet was shut off and people refer to Egypt maybe as the Facebook revolution these sorts of things yes Facebook was very useful but when the internet was shut off activists went into the mosques and organized through the mosques and that network led to one of the largest protests throughout the Egyptian revolution so I think there are other social networks beyond those that require one of these that are valuable and not necessarily always made the most use of by activists on the other hand many local activists would immediately say no no no here is a local network that we need to engage with Khatchoos in Yemen for example or just one more example just to take a page out of what you said I mean the question I ask is what if on that day those activists had gone into the mosques and filmed themselves doing what they did and then put it on Facebook not always there's often a way of amplifying and expanding your message and one of the things we talk about in this movie is what to do when the media still won't cover you and we talk about how to cover yourselves which is another whole discipline a set of skills that come in very handy my name is Nadia I was an activist for prisoners of conscience in Jordan actually I just wanted to point out you just answered actually part of my inquiry we're talking when we talk about Egypt and Jordan they are deep states the intelligence they play muhabarat I mean I used to organize protests for the mothers of prisoners of prisoners or tortured prisoners whatever and the muhabarat used to threaten them they used to threaten them to fire the husbands from their work and stuff and they wouldn't it was such a hard effort for me to get them to order would tell them tomorrow they'll be released or something don't go if you go you're gonna so the muhabarat works against that so much and even the media guys like you have to depend on independent media for coverage because the main channels there for the government they threaten them and when they come like one guy took a picture of one of the Baltagi breaking my car and they broke his camera you know so you have to deal with these things it's different so there are other ways where you can with your mobile as you mentioned in the movie also that you can take your own pictures and stuff like that thank you great thanks Nadia maybe behind yeah I'm Maria Fernanda from Colombia and my question is referring to negotiations more broadly so thinking of the case in Colombia that there's a very visible business going on and we usually think of two parties but we understand that it's more complicated than that because we think the parties but my question refers also to society in general and what do you think would be key elements to bridge or to create bridges with society beyond the usual one so there's a negotiation that's trying to bring in to society and victims very actively but then what we will think of the passive part of society like the spectators that maybe will be engaged through media but there's a lot of misinformation and my question refers to how to create those bridges to try to accomplish what you were saying of changing minds or understanding the different sides of the story and like enhancing people's thinking also thinking of long term healing that's it I guess the counterpart to civil resistance is elite engagement with the public and that can happen in a number of ways in a place like Colombia you now have the population saying why should people from the FARC or the paramilitaries benefit from an amnesty or from any kind of process that confers real impunity and the moment of peace is now being sort of hijacked with wait a minute somebody has to pay for what we all have suffered for what are really several wars over several decades with multiple belligerence what can a government do about that well governments and insurgents have to do some sort of public engagement some sort of media campaign I think it's got to be more than press conferences and press releases there cannot be a reversal of massive demonization of the enemy with a press release if you've been mobilizing your population to hate FARC for example as long as they've existed they're not going to love them the day the peace agreement is announced that is just foolish thinking so there has to be a combination of public appearances together of symbolic actions together of some engagement with the public in the sense of possible local dialogues town halls ways for people to express their frustrations and concerns and to channel them and to hear somebody respond to them that's costly and it's time-consuming but it can be done I think we're seeing success in these sorts of things in Tunisia I've seen and participated in small temporarily successful efforts like that in Haiti so there are ways to spread out a new message and counter the old message and I think that's part of the answer to your query just a tidbit so the other dialogue based and the public appearances these will all appeal to the rational and the sort of dialogical approaches to bridging divides and engaging the other there's also a powerful role for the arts and I mentioned this Columbia you have so many amazing artists and performers and in terms of what promotes reconciliation often in places and divided societies musicians the dramatists in a peace building process it's underappreciated it's incredibly powerful because it moves the emotions it moves the soul it allows you to reimagine the other and imagine coexistence in a way that these normal processes that we study and we talk about simply don't just as a little example we had the Afro-Columbian group Explosio Negra that performed at USIP and it was all about how their music was trying to bridge divides in society and bring minority groups and majority groups together as part of the peace process so don't underestimate the power of the arts in doing this be quick so in addition to the arts also sport anyone who's seen the movie Endgame and heard the story of Nelson Mandela putting on a spring box jersey once he became president it was incredibly symbolic it was one moment and he had a long history as I discussed reaching across the enemy line but that image has been replayed and re-shown and meant a great deal to people who as Maria suggested may be making emotional decisions as opposed to sort of more rational ones thank you well good afternoon to the panel and thank you so much for your insight engaging this conversation so I know that at this point we were a little past mediation because I was mentioned at the beginning but Dr. Wendy you mentioned it during your presentation and I was wondering if some struggling movements lack disability or they don't draw enough attention to get third party external third party actors to be engaged in the conflict so when the committed agent refrains from employing violence on the team or the government and this of course plays in a disadvantage in the conflict and there is more difficulties in reaching that mutually hurting stalemate that can enable mediation what happens or is it possible really to find hope in mediation for an early exit from the conflict to sustainable incredible negotiations and how can struggling movements bring these external actors not have enough force yet could you tell us your name thank you Emanuel I am a recent graduate from Venezuela and a former grantee of the State Department great thank you and has been at USIP courses here in the building in the past including the mediation one how can mediation help well in the part of my career I worked as a mediator between labor unions and management around the United States mostly teachers unions and school boards who had about the same amount of ranker as the PLO and the Israelis when it came to contract renegotiation time and a mediator can certainly play a role subject to all the usual caveats do the parties accept the mediator will they work in good faith with the mediator will they empower us to negotiate on their behalf with their counterparts when they will not speak to each other directly or can we empower them to rebuild the bridges of communication that they have abandoned or neglected so a third party can play an interesting role certainly I think that King and Birmingham was using the business community not as a mediator but as an intermediary they were in a sense a third party between the population and the civil resistance activities and government why because they could exert direct influence and leverage on government and in a sense they were using the federal government with pressure on local authorities so instead of speaking about mediation per se we could talk about intermediation how do you use other parties to speak on your behalf and there are many many examples of that process all over civil resistance cases and I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of them you know there's this one interesting example to add to that people like King had people that were focused on negotiation people like Andrew Young were their go-to negotiators who is he going to send to speak to the governor or to the mayor or to the city council folks or to the business community designated teams of people whose purpose and task was to persuade the other side to do something they were also in a sense intermediaries, intermediaries between the mass popular uprising and authorities right so although they were not technically mediators they were playing an intermediary role with some of the valuable advantages that those confer on a process may need to take them all together and then we'll wrap there are many but so let's see how many more questions so there's one in the back here if not I'll two and then Darren maybe you have one so go ahead we'll take all three and then we'll wrap up thank you thank you all for a great conversation I'm Orion Donovan-Smith I recently spent a year working in Burundi and Liz I'm very happy brought up the point about the sort of digital divide particularly social media in that context I think it's important to note that that's going to be different in Egypt and in each one of these cases but certainly in Burundi that's a very important factor and it leads to a broader point I'd like to raise and I'll do my best to turn this into an actual question for you guys in a lot of these earlier cases we point to I think India, South Africa and others you have a fairly what might be easier situation to work with you had a majority a movement represented really majority in a society now you have a lot of these cases like Burundi where you have these very decidedly illiberal democracies but areas where you have a protest movement that may not necessarily represent the majority of a population but nevertheless has legitimate grievances and then as the movement goes on the repression of that movement itself becomes another grievance of course very hard to resolve I guess my question is how can and particularly I should say in the case of Burundi you have the least urbanized country in the world I think outside some Pacific islands maybe so you have a relatively small urban population where the opposition has been based there's certainly other it's a little hard to say exactly who all is for against the president but the demand of the opposition has been has been absolute has been that the president not be there now my question is how can you deal with cases where they have legitimate grievances that need to be addressed but maybe that's not you're not going to be able to resolve something as as absolute as getting rid of the president or not particularly when the messaging of the opposition may not be great so I'll leave it there keep it short my name is Kayleen Gordy I'm an intern at the international center of non-violent conflict mine is back on the topic of negotiation and as we third party observers and researchers can see that negotiation is not a surrender for activists and movements how do we shed light on that to the activists themselves so that they are more willing to participate in such negotiation this question comes from Althea in our online forum she writes hi everyone her questions for the panel in the USIP civil resistance course we talk about the six steps of Kenyan non-violence which were born out of studying non-violent movements in particular the civil rights movements in the US in Kenyan non-violence negotiations come before direct action because Dr. Kane believes quote all other options should be exhausted before resorting to direct action but as someone who came into this field through strategic non-violent conflict perspective I was never fully satisfied with that explanation I'm most interested to learn about what the empirical evidence says about the relationship between negotiations and action broadly not just direct action in terms of which comes first is there a generalizable trend or is it more of an iterative process as much of the civil resistance case studies might suggest great thank you so we're going to wrap up and just we'll go down the line how about we do that so those were all really good questions to start with the last one this isn't specific empirical data that's been collected to my knowledge so the one who would be collecting this is Erica Chenoweth at Denver but I think it is possible to collect data on the role of negotiations in non-violent movements so that is definitely one way to get at because it's going to be context specific it's going to be dependent on the phase of the conflict where it's at and it's going to be a question of sequencing interaction so it's going to be a work cut universal principle of what that sequencing looks like but that's something that data certainly can be collected on so I'll leave it with that I'll go on a little bit of a limb I would suspect that often negotiations are a first step and when they are rebuffed rejected or conducted in bad faith by one or more of the parties then people start looking for and among the coercive means that would include massive civil resistance because it is a way of resetting the power imbalances in society and changing people's minds so I'd imagine that negotiation is often a starting point and it is often unsuccessful leads to other things and then you get back to negotiations at many points you have to include negotiations in the empowerment of activists in my experience like the thought of negotiations you have to persuade them that it is part of empowering them to effect change and that people don't just change because you tell them to which is itself a coercive assumption and it's integrating negotiations in nonviolent action training like making that an explicit part of civil resistance training which is possible just to add to that point we every member of a civil resistance movement have to become a negotiator and one of the reasons I say that is because when we have successful movements like the ANC in South Africa or in Georgia for example you have huge blocks of activists of civil society who move over the course of a day into government and in those two instances left a bit of a vacuum behind and so when we think about the need to implement an agreement the need to ensure openness for civil society and for democratic governance someone needs to be left behind in civil society, in the streets holding the new government holding both sides to account so not everyone has to negotiate some people can stay and be activists and still play a productive role in society afterwards very quickly to your question about Bernie I don't know the case all that well but I can tell you that generally speaking there can be a timeline when demands are seen as unrealistic or impossible never going to happen kind of thing activists need to think about the rate and order at which they are unfurling their demands and their agenda and if the initial set of demands are moderate become more and more specific and strident with time you can find a situation where media exposure grants a kind of critical mass it's dangerous to do this but it's dangerous to do this until you reach a certain level of recognition once you reach that level of recognition it becomes less just one last thing I think on Ryan's question it actually goes very much to the first comment which was about implementation and I think that was one of the big failures in Bernie although I worked there for a very long time on implementation but nonetheless will incriminate myself I guess in that regard I think understanding how some of the changes were going to play themselves out and sustaining and this goes to the role of the international community and third parties as well but how were we going to help civil society and government sustain the changes that they'd undertaken such that it would not lead to today and I think some people were not left behind if you will to help that implementation process and to sustain a certain amount of pressure on the government to implement things I think in terms of the digital divide while it exists that goes then to the question of well what are the more traditional means of civil resistance and Bernie's always been plagued I think like other countries where the activists in civil society tended to locate themselves in the capital city and forget about all of those other people in the interior of the country and so having a different strategy a communication strategy, who are we trying to reach who are we trying to convince not just the government but really who is out there who could then join our effort and that part of the negotiation process never really happened I think so that's one reason why the movement could not be sustained in Bernie so just a couple final comments do you want to wrap up? so to wrap, first I want to thank our panelists for really engaging and insightful presentations so thank you all very much thanks to our global campus audience who offered really great and personal questions and comments to the conversation that were coming out and thank you to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for co-sponsoring this morning's event so this is obviously a conversation that we will be continuing here at the United States Institute of Peace on this intersection of civil resistance and peace building so we welcome you to join future events have a great day and thanks to you Maria Stephan