 Good morning. We're delighted to welcome you to a discussion of a wonderful new book focused on diplomacy in a turbulent world, which has been compiled and edited by Pamela Hall, Chet Crocker, and Fenn Hampson. This book is an important contribution to the field of conflict resolution and couldn't come at a better time. We all know that international relations are shifting. They're no longer primarily about managing threats to a well-understood balance of power, but now also about managing the realignment of power and addressing threats to the planet, ending humanitarian catastrophes, including pandemics. In the face of climate induced scarcity, the rise of aggressive middle powers, the continuing presence of violent extremist movements with broad reach, and regional swings toward third-terrainism, we need to embrace new methods of diplomatic collaboration. The days when it was enough to dispatch an envoy to conduct closed-door negotiations with a few elites are close to being over. The contributors to this volume are helping us to rethink how we do diplomacy to face these new challenges, whether it's competitive and instrumentalist diplomacy, stabilization diplomacy, or governance diplomacy. At the US Institute of Peace, we're contributing to new directions in diplomacy, including by stepping up efforts to build strategic stability with Russia and China, working with partners to address the intersection of climate change and conflict, and promoting new forms of soft power, including through the congressionally mandated establishment of a new Gandhi-King Global Academy. We're delighted to host today's discussion, and we look forward to hearing from this impressive group of experts. We invite everyone to engage with us during the conversation on Twitter using hashtag diplomacy for tomorrow. I'm very pleased to hand over to Dr. Checkcrocker, the James Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University, and the former chair of USIP's board. Well, thank you very much, Lee's. I'm delighted that you were hosting this, that USIP is hosting this event. Our purpose, as you said, is to discuss some of the ideas in this new book, Diplomacy in the Future of World Order. It's not formally a book launch, but more of an idea launch. But we're okay if somebody wants to look at the book and see what it looks like, that's what it looks like, and you can buy it anywhere you choose, where you buy your books regularly. So the biggest idea in a way in this discussion is to explore the future of what we call peace and conflict diplomacy. We use this term in the book, and all of the authors addressed it and made contact with the term to encompass three major diplomatic arenas. The first is managing great power competition and potential confrontation. The second is managing other people's conflicts. So that's a second kind of peace and conflict diplomacy where major actors like the UN or the US or the EU decide to engage on a specific problem like Libya or Kashmir. And the third type is managing threats to the international system itself. We are living through such a threat at the moment with the challenge posed by COVID-19. This project began back in 2015, some time ago. It accelerated in 2016. We had author workshops with some of the authors as we were recruiting authors back in 2017 and again in 2019. So it's been it's been a long term process. And during this process, a lot of things have changed. I know that yesterday at USIP, there was a discussion of the National Intelligence Council's new report, Global Trends 2040. Well, a lot of those trends are important as elements of talking about how peace and conflict diplomacy might work. I'm not going to repeat what's in the Global Trends 2040 account, but some of those trends are part of the backdrop, part of the environment for our discussion today. And I think we need to keep them in mind. Trends like polarization, trends like the decline of authority and the rise of algorithms instead of experts. Another trend is the decline of what I would call confidence building measures and stabilization measures in relationships between the United States and our major, our major rivals. So the, the issue of strategic stability is very important. What's different about this project and what made us want to do it is that the book is not just a bunch of talking heads sitting in Washington or New York or London or wherever. It's a global book. It's a global book that looks at the world through multiple lenses with authors from multiple regions who have expertise on multiple functional topics as well. And I'm proud to say that all the authors do not agree with each other. And nor should they. That's not the point. The point is to tease out a variety of views reflecting the way people see the world evolving in different regions. So we, we do not in this, in this volume in this exercise, we do not have a single model of the future. We don't have a sort of a unified prediction of the future. We have multiple scenarios. And some scenarios are more likely to be prevalent in one region than another region. The three, the three broad scenarios, which my, my friend and colleague, Fen Hampson will talk about in a moment relate to the possibility of return to kind of a Cold War geopolitical situation or the opposite, which would be a return to the liberal rules based order. What we thought was the case until maybe 2015, 2016. And then there's a kind of a third option, which I guess could be summarized as variable geometry or a la carte multilateralism. I'll stop there so that let Fen develop those, those ideas in a moment. But we think that there are different kinds of diplomacy that relate to each of those scenarios. So under a scenario of geopolitical confrontation, we're likely to see a more transactional opportunistic diplomacy, which is purely tactical and looking at getting the best deal. So for example, when President Bolsonaro of Brazil says that he'll save the rainforest if somebody else pays for it, that's what I would call transactional diplomacy. Or when former President Trump says that he might be in the market to buy Greenland, that's sort of a transition, a transactional diplomacy. And there probably are other examples telling Morocco that we'll recognize their sovereignty over the Western Sahara. If they make nice with Israel and join the Abraham Accords, that's an example. Under the liberal rules based order, we see a more values based to governance based type of diplomacy. For example, doing what we can to try and salvage the Good Friday Accords in Northern Ireland to support their survival despite all the tensions created by Brexit. Trying to push on Venezuela to get improved governance in Venezuela, working for human rights despite the challenges of the transition in Afghanistan. So those are examples under governance, governance diplomacy. I think there's also an international governance dimension to this as well, which we tease out and which we can all talk about. For example, the Paris Climate Accords would be an example of that or the JCPOA would be an example of that where you're at the intergovernmental level, you're working on governance, not at the internal level inside of states. Under the third model, which we call to summarize it variable geometry, our best hope I suppose is a kind of a concert, not a single concert, but a concert depending on the issue. So you could have concerts at the regional level, concerts at the functional level that are based on specific challenges, like for example, climate or pandemics. The basic point about variable geometry is that you can sometimes arrange to have cooperation without institutions or maybe to put it better cooperation inside and outside of institutions so that it's not either or it's both. The bottom line and this is my concluding point is that diplomacy, as Lise has rightly said, is going to be a central challenge and a central requirement for the age that we are now entering. It'll be more important than ever and we're going to need a diplomacy that is agile, that is networked laterally, that creates consensus around issues around regional challenges and around specific cases. So that's the kind of diplomacy we're going to need and we're going to have to be able to connect with different kinds of actors, official actors, multilateral actors, non-official actors and so forth. So we're going to need to have some rules of the road on many different fronts. I think I'll stop there and turn the floor over to my friend and colleague and USIP Vice Chair George Moose to lead us forward and moderate our discussion. Over to you George. Jeff, thank you very much and thank you for so elegantly setting the table for our panel discussion this morning. There's a wealth of ideas in the book and I appreciate your allusion as well to the discussion we had yesterday or the National Intelligence Council's latest Global Trends Report 2040 because there is considerable convergence as you might well imagine between the discussion we had yesterday and the discussion today because the trends that we talked about yesterday in fact are the trends that are forcing the changes that we are seeing within the realm of peace and conflict diplomacy. It's a great pleasure for me to be with you all this morning and to share the screen with five distinguished international affairs experts. Each of our panelists this morning has in one way or another significantly advanced the field of diplomacy whether through diplomatic service, insightful research and scholarship or both and I would note that four of our panelists Dr. Durso, Dr. Hampson, Ambassador Gehenno and Dr. Tan have contributed chapters to the book that is the inspiration for today's discussion. So joining us today are Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and distinguished professor in distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She has over 30 years of experience in the US foreign service including as US ambassador to the Republic of Yemen. Dr. Solomon Durso is a chairperson of the African Commission on Human and People's Rights. He previously served as adjunct professor of human rights at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Dr. Finn Hampson, one of the three co-editors of the book is currently chancellor's professor at Carleton University and president of the World's Refugee and Migration Council. He formerly served as the director of the Norman Peterson School of International Affairs and as director of the Global Commission on Internet Governance. Ambassador Jean-Marie Gehenno is a distinguished fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and a member of the UN Secretary General's high-level advisory board on mediation. He previously served as president and CEO of the International Crisis Group and as undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations at the United Nations. And last but not least, Dr. C. Sing-Town is a tenure professor of international relations at the S. Rajaratnan School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He previously served as deputy director and head of research of the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies and founding head of the Center for Multilateralism Studies both in Singapore. Welcome to you all. Thank you all for joining us this morning and for being willing to share your wisdom and insights into this question of the future of peace and conflict diplomacy. To get us started, I'd like to ask each of you to respond to what is in fact the initial framing question in the book, Diplomacy and the Future of World Order. And that question is this, how is the practice of peace and conflict diplomacy changing? And what do you see as the most important implications of these changes? And I might add of the trends outlined by both Lee's and Chet in their opening remarks, which do you view as the most consequential for the practice of peace and conflict diplomacy? And let me begin with Dr. Hampson as one of the book's co-editors. Dr. Hampson, fan. Thank you very much, George. And I also want to thank the United States Institute of Peace and its leadership for organizing this event to discuss some of the ideas in our book. When it comes to the future of diplomacy, to answer your question, I think it's fair to say, and we do talk about this in the book, there are essentially three kinds of diplomacy that characterize relations between states. The first is what might be called instrumental or competitive diplomacy. That's the diplomacy of developing spheres of influence managing alliances and so forth. The second is stabilization diplomacy, which is to manage relations to de-escalate conflicts or to prevent conflicts from escalating. And the third is what might be called governance diplomacy, developing new norms, rules of state behavior. Some would argue that we're moving into a world of much more competitive or instrumental diplomacy, but I think it's fair to say that if we're going to manage great power relations, we're going to need heavy doses of stabilization diplomacy. That's the diplomacy of confidence building measures, reviving arms control, strengthening non-proliferation regimes and so forth. Because the risk of escalating great power conflicts is obviously much greater today than it was in that unipolling moment after the fall of communism. We may, at the same time, see less demand for governance diplomacy, particularly when it comes to changing the character or complexion of the institutions of states. I think that's just become a lot harder. That's the diplomacy of democracy building. It's the diplomacy of peace building. It's not to say that we don't need it, but there's a lot more pushback to that in the current environment. Great. Thanks for that nomenclature fan to get us started. Let me turn to Ambassador Baudin, who's, Barbara, you've spent a lot of time in a part of the world where we've tried to practice stabilization diplomacy with mixed results. What would you say about the ways in which these approaches to peace and conflict diplomacy are changing and the factors that are driving that change? Well, first of all, thank you very much for including me in this panel and enjoyed reading most of the book, haven't gotten through all of it. I think we're all very much aware that President Biden has announced that diplomacy is back and multilateralism is back. My concern is that there are an awful lot of observers who think that we are going to hit a reset button and go backwards to a time when the U.S. saw itself as indispensable and irreplaceable and that we can go back into all these various flora and we will once again get the daddy chair and be in the lead. One of the things that happened over the last four years and it was an acceleration of trends that were already occurring is that the world moved on. And one example of this is that when we pulled out of the TPP, Korea, Japan and Australia kind of went okay, got together and moved it forward without us. And we teetered on the edge of moving from indispensable to irrelevant in the world, maybe too big to ignore but not necessarily to be taken seriously and certainly not seen as reliable or consistent. So our place in diplomacy and our place in multilateralism has changed. Another major change and again accelerated not started over in the last administration is that the world that a diplomat diplomacy operates in is far more complex than the textbook version of an ambassador talking to ministers and coming up with agreements or secretaries of state. It's fragmented and it has become layered. There's horizontal if nothing else the number of states that are engaged in diplomacy has grown exponentially. It also is vertical. It goes upwards to multilateralism either ad hoc or institutional a lot more mini-lateralism Korea, Japan and Australia regional organizations and ad hoc coalitions. And then it goes downward to non-state actors and these are not just terrorists. Non-state actors include civil society, international advocacy groups, international humanitarian groups, cities and states, provinces, governance. California, you may recall and when Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord, California very nicely said, well, that's great. We're still in it. And whether or not that was entirely legal is a different issue. But a diplomat diplomacy all of these various scenarios need to be more than a three-dimensional chessboard. And any diplomat who just talks to his or her governmental counterpart is a very poor diplomat. Because of the change in how the world is now structured, diplomacy needs to be far more agile. It needs to be more flexible. It needs to be more adaptive consensus. I'm not sure if it was ever truly possible to go into a government and say, by the way, I want you to do this. And the answer was yes, sir. I think that the idea of the unipolar world was far more a figment of American imagination than anything any of us saw on the ground. But to the extent that we had that, we don't. Most of the issues that we also face are not amenable to military or other hard power. And so again, diplomacy is going to become the major tool, not the fallback, the default, the prelude and after, but it's going to have to be front and center. I think the major challenge of all of that that's outlined in the book is nationalism. And again, this goes a little bit too, we don't get the daddy chair back. And some of this is right and proper. And so, we're not going to be far more. Countries that states that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, barely existed. We're just coming out of colonialism. We're just coming out of poverty. We're just emerging now have a generation or two of their own policymakers, their own elites, their own non state actors, their own social media. And they are defining their interests and deciding their tools. In many cases, irrespective of great powers. And what we have is kind of mini hegemony going on, where the Turks, the Emirates and the Saudis are playing games, are furthering interest. I don't want to sound trivial like I'm trivializing it, have to find their interests and are going ahead and pursuing them in Yemen, in Syria, in Libya and other places, as they see in their interest. And they may or may not be in concert with our interests or Russia's or China's. And so, as the states come into their own, they are going to be far more independent actors. And we are going to have to deal with them as actors and not as agents. Thank you, Barbara. Thanks very much. That's actually a good segue to Dr. Derso Solomon, because in Africa, we in fact see a region which increasingly has asserted its own role, agency in addressing issues of peace and conflict. And indeed institutionalized within the Africa Union, with which you have been affiliated. We also are seeing one of the phenomenon that Barbara has just described, which is the increasing and increasingly intrusive role of other powers, both global and regional, in African affairs and the effects that that is having. So, tell us how you see that landscape of peace and conflict diplomacy changing and what are the implications for Africa? Thank you very much, Ambassador Muth. And I wish to also join others in thanking the USIP for organizing this event, inviting me to be part of the discussion, and also the editors for inviting me to contribute a chapter. The changes that are happening in the world, particularly those that you mentioned, such as global big power competition has very serious repercussions on the African scene for a number of factors. As you rightly said, since the turn of the century, with the transition of the Organization of African Unity to the African Union, efforts have been underway to institutionalize peace and conflict diplomacy on the African continent through establishing both norms and institutions that provide the framework for pursuing peace and conflict diplomacy on the African scene. And these have led to most important developments in the area of the development of norms and this respect. It's interesting to note the appropriation of the Cold War normative developments in the international scene and adapting them to the African situation and the establishment also of institutions that are meant to advance, promote, and ensure the implementation or try to ensure the implementation of these norms. These norms range from those relating to the promotion of human rights to those of peace building and also conflict prevention, as well as protection of the life of citizens, particularly from some of the grave dangers that the continent witnessed in the 1990s, including genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, for example. Of course, these happened, I think it's important to recall, against the backdrop of major developments. One has to do with the withdrawal of international engagement for provision of peace and security on the African continent. What the late former Secretary General Kofi Annan said, Africa was left to fend for itself, so to speak. And it is in that context that member states, of course, a certain group of leaders managed to mobilize others into transitioning the OU to the African Union. But this drew on and sought to complement the global collective peace and security architecture that's anchored in the United Nations Charter. So when there is big power competition, parallelizing collective action within the UN Security Council, and if that's paralysis and competition spills into how African related issues are managed, then that directly affects how these African issues are handled, simply because the decision making process in the African Union takes into account and relies on collaboration, coordination, and support from the international system, whether that is the UN through the UN Security Council and the support that it provides, such as, for example, the support package for the implementation of the African Union mission in Somalia by the United Nations, or the European Union through its Africa peace facility. These were critical support infrastructure necessary for implementing the African peace and security architecture. But if greater competition between big powers is going to shift attention away from and resources away from these engagements to other more pressing quote unquote areas, then that can affect the effectiveness of an already struggling peace and security architecture that is trying to stand on its feet. Of course, admittedly, I think the other issue that we feel concerned about is the possibility of any one of the conflict since being sucked into this big power competition, completely taking the possibility of pursuing peace and security diplomacy with Africa's active engagement. And this has been seen, for example, in the scenario what we have witnessed in Libya, which is a very interesting example. It was not African actors that were at the forefront of trying to establish peace, it's others. And then those are the kinds of issues that we feel concerned about. Thank you, Solomon. And your description of the connection, the interrelationship between regional architectures for peace and security and the international ones, I think was a useful one. And I think a good segue to Ambassador Geheno, Jean-Marie, you also talked about in your chapter, you talked about the diffusion of power, the fragmentation in the way of power, the impact that's had on the international system. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you see this whole realm, this whole field of peace and conflict diplomacy shifting and the forces that are driving it in that direction? Well, thank you, Ambassador, for your question. And thank you also to the editors of the book for asking me to contribute a chapter. And like Barbara Bodine, I've not yet read the full book, but I'm immersed in it. And it's an incredibly rich book which reflects the complexity of the world we are now in. And that speaks to your question. I think that during the Cold War, there was the kind of defining issue, at least we thought that way. And during the post-Cold War period moment, there was a defining power, group of power. Now we have neither a defining issue, we have multiple issues, nor a defining power, no power or group of power has enough influence to really shape the world. And that really raises a question whether there can be any kind of international order without the existence of such a power. It's a question that really challenges the United Nations every day. And I think there is today what I call a sense of loss of control, that you see more and more that countries are inward looking. And as a European, I look at the European Union, which certainly has been a major actor in development aid, not in strategic matters, because it's not unified enough for that. But in other, in soft power, it has been a major player. But we see that the European Union is more and more inward looking and that the COVID crisis increases that. I think all countries today look after themselves first. I mean, there is a sense of fragility that is pervading, I think, the international arena. And the ongoing G7 summit is not going to change that, I'm afraid. So what does that mean for diplomacy in our world today? I think the optimism and ambitions of the first decade of this century are gone. There is a much greater sense of the limitations of what foreigners can achieve in helping countries stabilize. In some ways, this newfound humility may be a good thing, because there was the overconfidence led to some big mistakes. The sense that you can shape the life of others is somewhat dangerous. I mean, peace is in the hands of those who have made war and you cannot make peace for them. So that humility, in a sense, is good. But in another sense, it's dangerous if it leads to indifference. And today, I'm struck by how we have a horrific humanitarian situation in a number of places around the world. And frankly, you see much attention given to them. No, there's a great enemy today is indifference. A sense that let's try to address the issues at home before we address any all those issues of countries we know very little about. Does that mean that we should give up? I don't think so. But I mean that we should be much more nimble. As a previous speaker said, there are now a number of new actors who are focused on one issue or another. And more and more, we're going to have alliances between those actors on an adult basis. I mean, of the three scenarios that are described in the book, I definitely think the third scenario of practical cooperation in an adult way is the most likely scenario. And I'm not talking there just of alliances between states. When I look, for instance, at a situation like Libya, we saw that the UN mission has worked with NGOs, subcontracting, so to speak, some aspect of the peace process to NGOs. I think we're going to see more and more of those cross cutting alliances between different types of actors. And so that's what will make the world resilient. It's not going to be big powers coming together and deciding what the future of the world is going to be. I don't think that's going to happen. That top down approach is gone for good. I think it will be much more of a horizontal approach where actors who care about a particular issue will come together and make a little difference or a big difference starting at the margin. But the addition of all those efforts can actually be transformative. Thank you, Jean-Marie. Let me invite Dr. Tan to tell us how all of this relates to Asia and Southeast Asia, where the history, the tradition has been somewhat different. Many of the concepts that we've been talking about here don't seem to have been readily applied or evident in Southeast Asia. And I wonder what these trends in terms of peace and conflict diplomacy suggest to you. I think it's also fair to say that until fairly recently conflict in Southeast Asia has been pretty well managed through whatever means, formal and informal. We now have a very notable exception to that. But can you help us understand what these trends mean for arguably the most important emerging part of our planet? Well, thank you, Ambassador Moose. And thank you to USIP for involving me in this excellent project. I just want to echo a lot of the comments that my colleagues on this panel have already so very eloquently made. In the Asia Pacific region, one of the big issues obviously is great power competition. And I commend my colleague from Africa, Solomon for highlighting just the immense difficulties and challenges that his neck of the woods faced in terms of great power competition and the very same kinds of logics hold true for Asia as well. Great power competition has really raised the prospect of the major powers becoming spoilers rather than providers and enablers of peace and security. And it's really just somehow compressed, I think, the strategic space that's available for Asian states, smaller states to be able to exercise some freedom in terms of their foreign policy. And so you hear the often increasingly very tired, but not retired mantra that Asian countries would make of not wanting to be forced to choose sides in this great power rivalry. And I think that's really stifled the ability, the opportunities for smaller countries in the region to exercise diplomacy in the ways that they have been normally accustomed to. So I think that's one of the major challenges that we've faced. The prospect therefore for regional actors, regional countries, regional organizations to rise up and exercise some level of engagement in assuming responsibility for their region is obviously very, very important and significant. And here I think the attempts therefore by regional organizations like ASEAN, which we all know have really just not been the most proactive in terms of taking responsibility for their region, I think that's become very apparent now. I think ASEAN is Frank's level best. It's not doing all that it necessarily can at this point in time. But I think the opportunity therefore for it to do more is certainly open. I guess one more prominent diplomats from my home country of Singapore once described ASEAN as essentially a cow that everybody expects to act like a horse. And so I guess that's one of the concerns that ASEAN is constrained and limited, not just in terms of institutional design, but also in terms of its propensity, at least as member states, to collectively work towards peaceful ends. I think it's trying to level best, but national interests do get in the way. And so I think the floor is wide open now for for institutions like ASEAN and for major countries in the region to work together collectively. But then again, I think the limitations and constraints are quite obvious, but everyone needs to try to figure out a way forward. Thank you. So I'm sort of going to start off our sort of next round of questions, but let me actually pick up on what you just said and ask you to invite you to share with us a bit more, a bit more of a reflection on what, for example, the United States Abiding Administration could do to help create a larger and more propitious space for regional actors, ASEAN and others, to be able to play a more effective, a larger, more robust and more effective role with regard to peace and conflict diplomacy. Are there things that the U.S., on the one hand, might stop doing that are complicating your lives or alternatively things that the U.S. could do that would actually be supportive of a more robust role for regional actors with respect to peace and conflict diplomacy? Well, thank you for that. I think the comments have already been made earlier on by my fellow colleagues with regards to the United States coming back, if you will, and we do take the cautionary notes that it's not going to be back to things as normal in the past, but I think for the region as a whole it very much welcomes the Biden administration's assurance, if you will, that the United States will, from henceforth, take very seriously its role and responsibility as a global leader and that it would play a proactive role in encouraging, mobilizing the world and indeed even the Asian region to collectively work toward positive and peaceful outcomes. I think that message has been very well received by the region as a whole and I think that being said it's fair to say that the region also recognizes that strategic rivalry between the United States and China, that's a given, it's a fact, and it's going to be ongoing, but at the same time the region believes that cooperation is nonetheless possible between them. I do take the point that many American friends have made to me that it's not exactly the easiest thing going forward because it's not for lack of trying on the United States part, but our Chinese friends need to get their act together as well. They need to accommodate, acknowledge, and recognize that the U.S. has proprietary interests in the region as well, legitimate interests and as a residential power. So all of that being said, I think what the Biden administration has promised the region that it will in the midst of strategic rivalry with China nonetheless still seek ways to cooperate with China. I think that's a message that the Asian region welcomes very, very strongly and in that regard I think it opens up possibilities for regional actors to come in into that space and to help nurture great power relations in ways that would move the region towards a much more positive, peaceful ends. So I think what the United States is doing today I think is something that the region strongly encourages. And thanks, Seng, for that. I want to pivot then to Solomon on a very similar note or similar theme. As you've outlined, one of the successes of, you know, we often look to the African Union as kind of a model for the role regional organizations might play, can play in this larger system of peace and conflict diplomacy. And one of the things you noted is that when it was designed, it was designed quite deliberately to be integrated with that international system, not separate, not a part, but it was very much seen as part of that larger system. And part of that, of course, is an expectation that that larger system would also be a provider of support and assistance when and where needed. And we know that the establishment, the standing up of major peace operations, for example, is something that's unreasonable to expect Africa to be able to do on its own. This is an area where it needs external support and assistance and guidance. But by the same token, as we alluded to earlier, what comes with that external support and assistance is also sometimes less helpful interventions of those external actors. How can the African Union, what can the African Union do to condition the behaviors and the activities of some of those external actors so that they in fact are more supportive and less disruptive? That's a long-winded question, but I think you know what I'm getting at. Thank you again, Ambassador. I think there is a similar sentiment as the one that is expressed in Asia, where the sense here in Africa is one that says we don't want to be forced into choosing taking sides. So that sentiment is very pervasive. In terms of the most that we can expect from the role that the African Union may play in limiting and also perhaps avoiding some of the negative consequences of these developments is the possibility of the African Union taking leadership, particularly in terms of taking initiatives for responding to and deploying peace and conflict diplomacy. Of course, in a context where the African Union is able to secure a situation whereby as has been the case, I think for most part when it comes to African issues in the UN Security Council, the tradition has largely been one of the various actors supporting initiatives of the African Union and it was not a major area of contestation. There were some flash points where that contestation and division played itself out, but overall the trend has been one of those competing global powers supporting. The challenge, however, is when the African Union is unable to provide that kind of initiative on which international actors can build in order to craft a successful conflict and peace diplomacy. So there are instances where some of the developments such as, for example, then the resort to invoking sovereignty, it's increasingly, for example, shifting the way peace and conflict diplomacy is being debated in the African Union away from what used to be a collective approach to one where sovereignty is being invoked, basically to lead to a situation where effective collective action is not really taken. Many countries, including, you know, relatively bigger countries, have increasingly become inward-looking and other in that of that and not only inward-looking, but also they are themselves tied by internal political and security challenge. And this has presented its own set of challenge. And in that kind of scenario, I think what you would end up having is the expectation that the countries like the US necessarily to engage, particularly when it comes to serious humanitarian issues are emerging and for dealing with that and responding to that are the result of conflict. If no collective action is taken at the African level, obviously there is expectation that the US and other countries would step in, at least, to limit and contain the excesses of the humanitarian situations. Thank you, Solomon. I'm going to come back to you in a while because I want to make this a little bit more specific and concrete because you're sitting at an ababa right now. At the heart of, I think what is arguably the most threatening current conflict situation on the continent, I want to invite you a little bit later on to talk to us about how that African peace and conflict architecture is being applied or ought to be applied in the situation and how it ought to link to external actors, the United Nations, individual countries, etc. But let me, at this point, Jean-Marie, putting on your old peacekeeping hat, there seems to be at least some sort of consensus that peacekeeping is and will continue to be a useful tool, notably, I guess, in Africa, but perhaps elsewhere. Interestingly enough, there seems to be, despite all of the disagreements between the US and China, there does seem to be some shared understanding between the two as respects, as regards to peacekeeping, China's increasing role in peacekeeping. I recently participated in a session with Chinese experts on multilateralism who suggested that peacekeeping, indeed, might be an area of cooperation, one of the few in this current era of contestation between the US and China, and that potentially it could help to minimize, mitigate the, and perhaps even resolve, some of the conflicts that we see on the African continent. Wondering what your thoughts might be on that? How do you see the future of peacekeeping and this potential for peacekeeping becoming an area of US-China cooperation, at least to a degree? Well, I think the big multi-dimensional missions that had the ambition of really reshaping a country, that's probably not going to happen. That's over. But at the same time, I completely agree with you that all the big powers don't want states to collapse. If there is any hope for international order, it's still based on functioning states. And so efforts to shore up states as the bricks of an international order, they will continue. And in that respect, you do need in some cases a real force. It's a notion that you can just solve everything through nice political agreements is wrong. Indeed, peacekeeping without a political process is bound to fail. But a political agreement that does not have the reassurance of a force to back it so that it elevates the threshold for potential spoilers, that's a very fragile political agreement. So I do think that there is a future for peacekeeping operations. What may be significantly different from the past in my view is that more and more we are going to see a juxtaposition of force rather than just one force on a particular theater. When the Sahel is a good illustration of that, where you have the peacekeeping mission in Mali, the Minusma, you have the G5 forces of the regional countries, and you have the French force, and you had some US special forces. So you have a combination of forces and how those forces can work together. That's going to be more and more, I think the operational question that will need to be resolved. But I agree that the Chinese will not want Africa to become a place where there are big spots that would not be under the control of the state. They have a major investment in Africa. They don't want that investment to be lost because of spreading chaos. So there will be political support for some transformed peacekeeping. Thanks very much. I appreciate that. I'm sure Liz will appreciate that too, because she too, the US Institute of Peace is banking on the hope that indeed, precisely in situations like this, the US and China might find ways, there might be a convergence of interests and actions that would lead to efforts to create greater stability and over the longer term peace on the African continent and elsewhere. Barbara, how does all of this relate to a world, part of the world that you know very, very well from your extensive experience, and which is, I would argue, one of the most conflict-prone areas of the world? And what lessons can we draw here about the possibilities of regional conflict management and conflict management diplomacy given such really difficult charges and cases as Libya and Syria and Yemen? I would note that back in 2011, the Arab League actually, as I recall, came out in favor of an intervention in Libya to stabilize the post-Qaddafi era. That didn't last for long for reasons which I think we know, but nevertheless it was an interesting indication of a potential for regional diplomacy. I wonder what you think that potential might be today, if any? You just took my opening line. I'm not sure there's much at all. Listening to my colleagues saying, and Solomon in particular, there is no regional architecture in the Middle East. It simply does not exist. The Arab League has been a hollow organization possibly its entire life, but with the Arab Spring taking Egypt, Syria, Iraq out of the Arab League, whatever Arab League there was effectively ceased to exist. The GCC for a while was kind of the default Arab League. Those were the only states that were still standing and they certainly had the money. The GCC, of course, imploded for a very long time. A very small organization of six states had two different halves and almost at war with each other. There are not the regional organizations that can do conflict management. In fact, I would flip the question and say that the regional players are the major source of conflict in the region. If it's nationalism or sovereignty or their own definition of both their political and commercial interests, it is the regional actors who are driving Libya, are driving Yemen, and are driving Syria in many ways. Syria is the only one where you really have the Russians playing a sort of major role, but the problem in the Middle East is, I would say as a start, it's very hard to even define the Middle East. Iran is a Gulf state, but it's not part of the GCC because they're Persians, not Arabs. North Africa sees itself as separate, neither African nor Arab or some combination of both, and the Eastern Mediterranean states are having their own problems. What you have in the Middle East is almost, you can pretty much go across the Middle East and see state collapse. Lebanon is a failed state at this point, and so looking to regional actors to help with conflict management is, you're asking the arsonists to come and put out the fire. Part of why have they become so aggressive? For a very long time, except for Iraq, who invaded at least three of its neighbors at some point or another, they tended to stay within their own borders. We certainly had problems with the nature of the regimes, but they weren't externally aggressive, and over about the last 10 years, starting with the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia in particular, the Emirates to a very large extent, a few others have become far more the aggressors in trying to stabilize the region the way they think it should be stabilized, and it's a very top-down, very military type of effort, and none of the other states really play very much. Part of also what I think drove them, and you asked this question earlier and I didn't quite get to it, is our own role in this, particularly our efforts at democratization. Iraq was a failure as soon as we went in, because we had in a sense adopted the trope of the military coup that comes in and says once we have the country stabilized, we will return it to democracy, but they never quite get it stabilized in their terms, and you never get a return to democracy, and we went in with a military force, and we said once we have Iraq secured, then it can move into democracy. Well, if you lead with security first, you end up with security only, and we never got to democratization, or to the extent that we tried or thought we were doing it. We had a very structural definition of democracy. We didn't look at local patterns, local culture, local, if I heard one more member of the military talk about how Arabs can't do democracy, because they don't have a sense of compromise, something that is sort of lacking here now, but they don't have compromise, yes, but in the Middle East you have a strong sense of consensus, work with that. We tried to securitize and then structurally democratize a region, and it has been a failure. Another reason that many of the states in that region have now taken matters into their own hands, not in a way to stabilize it. There is nothing going on in Libya that is a stabilization effort. There is nothing that is going on in Yemen that is a stabilization effort, but it is their attempt to shape their own environment in a way that they think will serve their interests, economic and political and values. So we don't have anyone to work with, and we are not welcome in many ways, and we have a lot of relationships that has been increasingly open discussion that we need to recalibrate our relationship with Israel. We need to recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia, and in a sense we need to recalibrate our relationship with Iran. Those are going to be long-term and major efforts before there can really be any effort at deescalating these horrific, the Palestinian issue, the Syrian issue, the Libya issue, the Yemen issue. In some respects, that part of the world, Middle East, it will define undefinable. Middle East strikes me as being perhaps the most fraught, because not only do you have the contestation between and among regional powers, you have a total absence of consensus amongst external actors, and behaviors on the parts, on the part of those external actors which, if anything, are contributing to the internal, the region's fragmentation and contestation and conflict. So whereas one can see some possibilities, for example, in Africa, of a like-minded states coming together to stabilize countries, I don't readily see that in the Middle East. Would that be fair? Yeah, I think it was John Ray who brought this up, but the situation in the Middle East is marked primarily by indifference. You can't ignore the Middle East, it won't let you, but there is great indifference. We don't really want to be engaged there, and if we don't have to. The EU isn't really engaged there. China is not in the Middle East, maybe yet, but it's not there. And the Russians are in Syria, but they don't really have, they do not have a traditional relationship with any of the states there, except for the Syrians, that they can build on. The Arab world doesn't see Russia as a regional player. The Chinese, because they are such major consumers of oil and gas, may, maybe, but they can't offer the Belt and Road construction projects, which they can in Africa, to large parts of the Middle East, because they can do that themselves. So how exactly the Chinese are going to try to play in the Middle East? I don't know. The Russians don't really have a foothold there, and we have become increasingly disenchanted with our ability to do anything effective, and are seen as ineffective. And the EU's role seems to be mostly stop the refugees. Yeah, it's, as you say, a region of the world at the moment is characterized by contestation and indifference. It's hard to know where to go. Let me, Fen, if I might, let me come back to you, because in your chapter in the book, and you've written elsewhere, you explore what you describe as this concept of international concerts as an approach to conflict management, and particularly given the increasingly multipolar character of our world. And this is not totally frivolous, but in what ways is this concept similar to or how does it differ from the old 19th century version of the concert? But I guess more relevantly, how do you envisage, how do you imagine these concerts? Who conducts them? Where and under what circumstances might they be relevant and effective in dealing with our current agenda of peace and conflict diplomacy? Well, I will resist the temptation to give Kissingerian style lectures in history, George, but the 19th century concert had two variants. I think, as we all know, the first which emerged after the Congress of Vienna, and that was following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the second after the unification of Germany. But in both cases, the concert involved ad hoc gatherings of Europe's key leaders to discuss their differences and ensure they didn't get out of hand by developing rules of the road for state behavior to maintain the territorial status quo and the balance of power. It was called a concert not because of what the key actors did, but as some of you may know, because at the Congress of Vienna the evenings were attending musical events, and that's where the idea of concert originated. It was not so much a gathering of friends, though, but a team of rivals who understood in a very fundamental way if they didn't cooperate, the world could disintegrate into anarchy. It was informal and non-institutionalized. The 21st century idea of a concert, as Chet mentioned in his opening remarks, has a lot more variable geometry in terms of the participants who are involved in promoting cooperative solutions to global order. Such ventures can be led by middle powers, heads of international organizations, heads of regional organizations, and civil society actors. But like the original concert, to come to your question, the parties worked together informally in a pragmatic ad hoc manner outside of the arena of formal institutions or alliances to promote new norms and rules of the road. And I hasten to add that it's not to protect the status quo as it was in the 19th century, but to promote the peaceful and negotiated resolutions of dispute, to avoid major great power conflicts. I think we see traces of concert diplomacy if we're looking for an existence theorem in the efforts to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. I mean, that was very much of a concert effort. The multi-dimensional efforts that have involved civil society actors in the Colombian peace process, for example. The development of the rapid response mechanism in the G7 to promote information sharing on cyber attacks and threats to democracy. And perhaps most recently, and this is a Canadian partisan statement, the Canadian-led effort, which now has involved 58 states who have signed up to a declaration of arbitrary detention in state-to-state relations, which is partly directed at China, but China is not singled out in this. This is to develop a new norm that states should not be in the business of taking the citizens of other states hostage. I'm not optimistic that this is a a hammer that can be used for every conflict nail that we face in the world. But as Chad has argued, there is an argument to be made for developing a concert that involves great powers as well in the continuing crisis in Yemen, because there is a regional vacuum, as Barbara mentioned. That does require engagement in a constructive way, not a hands-off approach, in the Horn of Africa. The Central American Migration Crisis, which is the subject of the Vice President and Tony Blinken's trips, they have both argued for a regional approach that involves not just the Central American countries, but the three amigos. Let's get away from the Monroe Doctrine approach to dealing with these kinds of migration problems at the border. Arguably, mentioned that when it comes to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, which are driven by regional power contests and national impulses, there does need to be a break there and the application of what we would call stabilization diplomacy in a concerted way, in a concert way, to prevent the outcome that we all fear and that some have said is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thanks, Ben. We have been having such a good time that I have neglected one of my most important responsibilities, which is to invite questions from our audience. And for that, I apologize, audience. And indeed, several of you have already placed questions in the chat. And if I might, let's turn to them and let's invite also our panelists to be lightning in their responses to the questions that come up. The first slide is from Amos Olovatoye. He writes that, despite the influence of global powers at the United Nations Security Council in promoting peace in Africa, what are the inclusive measures Africa needs to take to promote peace and security on its own? And Solomon, may I ask you to leave us off on that? And perhaps if you can incorporate into that your thoughts about the current crisis in the Horn, that would be interesting. Thank you very much. As I indicated in the chapter where I think how major global developments affect peace and conflict diplomacy in Africa depends not just in how these developments interact with African situations, but also what African countries and institutions do about what is happening on the ground already. That matters a great deal. So from that perspective, if you think of various conflict situations, I think what you find is what are the comparative advantages of regional organizations such as the African Union, for example, in responding to conflict situations. One is the issue of proximity and the possibility of the African Union providing a platform for deliberation and consensus building among the concerned actors and potentially articulating an African Union normative-based political proposal on how particular conflict situations may be addressed. But this also depends on the nature of different conflict situations. So if you have, for example, what happened in Sudan in 2019 following the outset of President Bashir with the seizure of power by the military and the risk associated with that of basically reversing the clamor and hope and expectation of the civilians who played the lead role that's culminated in the start of Bashir, the African Union had to deploy its normative instruments in order basically to push back what would have been the military's ultimate disruption of the transitional process in Sudan. And it used this exceptional norm which is the banning of unconventional change of government or seizure of power by the military. And in deploying that, it basically threw its weight behind the civilians who have been campaigning and clamoring for a civilian traditional process and thereby providing that avenue for political negotiation which was among other things laid through the AU Special Envoy for Sudan, chosen by the Chairperson of the Commission. But importantly, with the participation of quite a number of actors, the US, European actors, Gulf countries, the role of these different actors needed to be negotiated in order to achieve a semblance of an agreement among the local actors on the course that the transition needs to take. Of course, it requires continuous engagement in order to sustain it because the balance of power between the military and the civilians is a very delicate one. If you have other conflict situations where much of the threat comes from non-state actors often involving, for example, terrorism, then you have a different kind of approach emerging. This is often security heavy, but it involves ad hoc coalitions of regional countries. It's not happening necessarily within the AU framework. It is basically countries of the region. For example, in the G5 style that Jean-Marie made exactly, in the lecture Basin, the MNJ team, the multinational joint task force that is trying to control the activities of Boko Haram because it has become a transnational and a trans-regional threat for the regional countries. This happened in the Central Africa region as well where the anti-LRA campaign was organized again on an ad hoc coalition of affected countries bringing their troops. Often the challenge with this is, as have been said by Jean-Marie again, is it hasn't been premised on and supported by a political framework. And that is where I think the challenge comes. And what the African Union has been trying to do is basically without that kind of political framework and a norm-based engagement dealing with the issues that created the space for these actors, it would be difficult to actually get out of this situation. And if I may come to the Horn of Africa situation, just one thing to say, which is it may be the case that there could be an instance in which the AU may find itself in a position of paralysis in terms of basically really achieving a political consensus among its member states and even initiatives taking off the ground, even if those initiatives come. And in that kind of situation, I think obviously it's difficult to imagine that political solutions would come from outside as far as the political resolution of conflict is concerned. What one hopes for is what I call containing and limiting the evil that is violence and the humanitarian disasters that comes with it. But that doesn't give you the political solution. And it falls back on African actors, regional organizations and the AU therefore, one way or another to assume responsibility for that. But the unfortunate thing is we are in a time on the African continent where we suffer from a death of leadership across the board. And that has created this ineffective or lack of engagement, effective engagement despite the existence of the African Union infrastructure for conflict and peace diplomacy. So I want to thank you for that. That's a topic to which we could devote an entire session on its own. And maybe we'll have an opportunity to do that. I want to get a couple of quick more questions here before we wrap up. William Flavin, this is for Jean Marie. Jean Marie, you talked about the role of other actors in this conflict and peace space. And William Flavin asked, can you speak to the impact of transnational criminal actors, including cyber criminals, on the practice of peace and conflict diplomacy? And I'd also note that sometimes difficult to distinguish the criminal actors from the ideologically motivated actors. Yes, I want to transition with what Solomon was saying actually in the Sahel. You have transnational actors who sometimes connect with criminal agendas in drug trafficking, on-straficking, on-straficking, people-straficking. We see all of that. And I think the fundamental challenge that these new actors pose to conflict management and conflict resolution is that they have no real interest in full peace. They don't want full war because full war is not good for their business, but full peace would not be good for their business either. So this gray area where you have weak, permanently weak states suits them perfectly. And any negotiation becomes very difficult because we work usually traditionally on the assumption that when you negotiate, you negotiate about power, you negotiate about an end state that means peace. But the best end state for criminal actors is a state of meet a peace no war. I think that you're right. They certainly further complexify and complicate this whole landscape of peace-speaking, peace-building. If you've got actors who frankly are benefiting from the conflict but don't want to see it get totally out of hand, how do you manage that? Sometimes in the Sahel you see that one day you have a caravan of traffickers that works with the enemies of the government and the next day it works with some parts of the government. So it does complicate things terribly. It does indeed. Dear panelists, I want to thank you. I wish we had another hour. I'm sure we could easily fill that hour with your insightful observations. But I hope that what we have done at least is to highlight the importance of this book and its contribution to our understanding of peace and conflict diplomacy. I'm going to stop there and invite Pamela All to share with us her thoughts, reflections on both on the book, but more importantly on the conversation we just had. Pamela, over to you. Thank you. Well, I am just going to start by saying thank you to everyone. This is an excellent panel. I wish books themselves were a bit more interactive, so we could have had this conversation all the time when we were writing the book. But this has been excellent. And Barbara, thank you for joining us and bringing perspective as well. And George, as always, wonderful moderating a very complex set of questions. I just want to leave this room by emphasizing one of the thoughts that has been recurring throughout everyone's talk. And that is really the changing nature of diplomacy in terms of who does it. The days of state-based diplomacy, they're not over, but they're decreasing in number, where you just have groups of states coming together and deciding things. The days of states working with intergovernmental institutions like the UN, they're not decreasing, but they're certainly becoming more complex, particularly with the entrance of regional organizations into the mix that may be playing constructive roles or, as we heard from Barbara, perhaps playing not constructive roles in the conflict. So you're already starting with a much more complex playing field. And in our idea of concert, which Fen talked about and Chet also mentioned in terms of variable diplomacy, we envision a place for many other actors. In fact, we think it's very, very important that we introduce room for NGOs, local civil society, associations, business to also have a voice in this diplomacy. So going to this idea of a concert and an orchestra, it may mean that some people in the orchestra, some chairs in the orchestra are going to have to shove over to make room for these new voices. And it may mean that we're all going to have to learn new pieces. And I'm thinking, saying about the horses and the cows, maybe they're going to have to learn how to harmonize instead of insisting on their own identity. One thing is for sure is that it's not going to get easier. We're going to be introducing a level of complexity that we haven't seen yet. And I think that's perhaps it's not, I don't want to end this on a download. In fact, I think this might be an up note. But it's something that we have to in fact be ready for. Diplomacy won't become easier. It will become more complicated. But with good orchestration and perhaps co-conducting of several conductors, we may get to the point where in fact, peace and conflict diplomacy, which includes all these different actors, is in fact more effective than it's been in the past. But thank you to everyone and thank you to USIP for offering us this chance to all be together. And thank you to our audience. And look forward to hearing from you soon in the future.