 Good morning, everyone. My name is Carla Copell, and I'm Vice President of the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. It is my great pleasure to be here to welcome you this morning for what we're very proud to be hosting, both because it brings together an exceptional set of experts and because it marks the release of a new book that one of our own, Yonah's class, has produced based on extensive research around election violence prevention. As I think most of you know, the U.S. Institute of Peace has been around for over 30 years and is committed to the principle that peace is possible, practical, and cost-effective. And we work in a range of places around the world, both in the field and here in Washington, D.C., on themes such as preventing electoral violence, as well as country programs in places like Iraq where we're honored to be hosting the Ambassador this morning. As you know, and the reason you're here, free and fair elections are an incredibly important part of the transition and maintenance of democratic institutions and are important signals, both domestically and internationally, of the rule of law, peaceful passage of authority, and transfer of that authority. Yet we know, and Yonah's has brought this to light, that there are strategies for ensuring that elections are fair and peaceful. Some are more effective, some are less effective. And really the purpose of our conversation this morning is to suss out what experiences we have drawn from where you can come this way, it's okay. That tripod is difficult to navigate. What processes are most effective and least effective and how they can best be applied in, no, don't apologize, it's a tough room to navigate around the world. And we've been working in this area for quite some time. The U.S. Institute of Peace has offered training courses for election officials, commissioners, and civil society representatives around elections and the operation of elections. We've also engaged in preventive activities in the field, working with local media, security forces, election management bodies, along with programming for youth on fostering dialogue between police and community representatives and disseminating codes of conduct. That, those activities have been, we've undertaken in Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. And finally, as I'd mentioned, our training and field activity is coupled with in-depth research that is independent and looks into how these elections have been carried out and with what success and not. Again, congratulations, Jonas, on your work. Today, what we're gonna do is start out with a conversation involving the ambassador of Iraq to the United States, the Kenyan deputy chief of mission, who is here, I might add, substituting for the honorable member of parliament, Gatenji, who unfortunately wasn't able to make it, but we are thrilled to have Derek Acheru here. Thank you so much, sir, for coming to join us. As well as ambassador George Moose, who is our tremendous vice chair of the board, and previously was the US ambassador to Benin and Senegal, as well as assistant secretary of state for African affairs. So thank you, George, for coming. I'm really looking forward to hearing this initial conversation. What it will do is usher in a day-long investigation that is global in nature, and I'm excited to hear some of that as well. Now, I should say, before I invite the panelists up for this conversation, that we recognize that Iraq and Kenya are obviously very different countries in very different places, but they do both have upcoming elections. And so I really invite the conversation about what comparisons can be made, what are the contrasts, and what are the implications of that for the kinds of assistance the international community can provide and the kinds of work that their governments themselves can undertake to ensure a successful election process. With that, I will cede the floor. I really look forward to a robust conversation, and I thank you all for joining us. My last comment would be that we do have an overflow room, and I just wanted you to all be aware that, as seats empty, we will bring folks in from the overflow room to enable people to participate fully as space is available. So thank you very much, and welcome again to USIP. So I have more chairs than we have. Okay. So the challenges of logistics are complicated whether we're talking about elections or we're talking about conferences. My name is George Moose, and I'm, as Carla mentioned, the privilege of serving as the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors here at the Institute. But in my past life, I spent an awful long time working for the State Department. And during that period, there were two things. One thing was the theme of conflict, how to deal with it, how to prevent it, how to resolve it, how to build peace after it. And as part of that, that, as a subset of that theme, or as an important complement to that theme is the issue of elections. Because so often, we looked at elections as being the means, the vehicle by which we were either going to address and resolve some of those conflicts and hopefully to be able to sustain peace after conflict. But we all know that elections can in fact, in certain circumstances, be the source of even greater tension and potential conflict. And so one of the purposes obviously of this conference is to talk about what, in what ways can elections contribute to peace and in what ways can we build peaceful electoral processes that have a greater likelihood of allowing us to sustain peace in the aftermath. For that purpose, we have two commentators to get us off. Our purpose here, our charge this morning is to set the stage, set the table for the conversations that will take place during the remainder of the day. And for that purpose, we have two accomplished, experienced commentators to get us launched. Ambassador Yasin, who I just learned, really didn't aspire to be a diplomat that has become a distinguished one, nevertheless. And our DCM from the Kenyan industry, Mr. Gatero, thank you very much for joining us this morning. And so what I'd like to do is start by asking each of you some questions. And Ambassador Yasin, you were welcome back. You were just here on Monday when the Institute had the privilege of hosting your prime minister and prime minister Al Abadi, elected prime minister. Thank you for the question. Who talked extensively about the extraordinarily complex political sectarian challenges that are facing Iran at the moment. As well as the progress, a notable progress that has been made as we speak in pushing back the voices, the presence of extremists, both ISIS and other groups that would liken themselves in some sense to ISIS. And so given that extraordinarily complex context, the first question I'd like to ask you is what really is at stake in this election for Iran? What are the stakes here? What, in what ways does this election have the possibility of contributing to the evolution that we've seen in Iraq now going back to 2003? Well, thank you for hosting me. Thank you for the work that USIP's been doing in Iraq. It's quite remarkable and there are people who are more qualified than me to talk about it. So I won't, if you get a chance, please do give them the floor. I'd like to start off by talking about a certain similarity that we have with Kenya in the sense that we are a country that is quite diverse both politically and ethnically. And so one of the things we've tried to do to come up with the working model of governance is to have something where there are no complete winners and no complete losers. So for example, if you go to the regional elections, you'd see that the political group that would get the highest number of votes would appoint the governor. The group that comes afterwards would appoint the president of the provincial council. Then after that would be the chief of police. And we've had that also at the common level where we try to have as many people around the table as possible, which makes for sometimes unwieldy governments. They're very, very large. And I know that at one point Kenya did exactly that. They basically took the winners and those not so winners and put them in the government, which we do very, very large government. So this was our practice until oil prices went down and the government had to sort of reduce them. So there is a certain contagion and democratic processes of governance, which is I think a good thing. But for the coming elections, I think to many Iraqis, it really is a restart because the Iraq that you see now is maybe a resurgent or reborn Iraq. I mean, remember where we were just two years ago? I mean, 40% of our territory was taken over by probably what is the worst evil force on earth. And we've clawed our way back and we're about to defeat this force. And in ways that actually have surprised and thrilled many of us through a process that is essentially Iraqi. Of course, there is a huge contribution brought in by our allies in the coalition and principally the United States who have transformed our military, helped us, should I say, transform our military, beginning with reinstilling morale in the troops that were completely vanquished two years ago, that are resurgent and willing to sacrifice themselves. I mean, the prime minister always mentions the fact that you have to sometimes rein them in. They've been willing to put themselves at risk and sustained high casualty levels precisely to protect civilian populations. So all in all, the Iraq that you have today is different from the Iraq that you had in 2014. And this has translated into popular demands. People want better participation. People want fairer government. People want better services. And so one of the things that they've been clamoring for, some of them, is renewed, independent, Electoral, Higher Electoral Commission. And it's quite interesting that in Iraq we have, I think, two areas of exceptional expertise acquired through practice, which might seem contradictory, but might in the end turn out to be quite symptomatic of the world we're getting into, very, very capable special operations forces and very well-practiced independent Electoral Commission. To the degree that some of our experts were used by many organizations, including the United Nations, to help bring about elections during the Arab Spring. But what I would like to talk about, if you would allow me, is, and give me a few minutes to talk about it, because I think it's a really important thing, is the need to make sure that the Electoral System that is put in place reflects the nature and the conditions of the country they're in. And be robust in terms of ensuring fair participation and fair representation. And what do I, I don't want to get too technical, but when the first elections were set up in Iraq, the idea was to have a, to apply an Electoral System that was representative, so that you could garner all the votes and make sure that there is a total representation of every single community in Iraq. So basically, the communities that are sort of an inch deep and a mile wide would also be represented. The problem is that to do that, the United Nations Electoral Team chose a system where the Electoral District was the entire country. And a system that was completely represented and representative, proportional. And so many people who were in the periphery of the country in the provinces saw names that they didn't recognize. And that kind of fostered identity voting. You vote for the names that you recognize. So if you're a Kurd, you vote for the Kurdish names if you're, then you had official players like the Muslim Scholars Association who actually banned certain communities from voting. And this was catastrophic because it meant that certain communities would not vote. And when you have identity voting, your representation in parliament is not only proportional to your population in the country, but also to your rate of participation in elections. So we had a very skewed electoral chamber which forced the Iraqi government to try to bring in people from outside of the chamber, council representatives to representatives of the Sunni community, which was the opposite of the original intention. The original intention was to have the constitution drafted by Iraqis who were elected by the Iraqis. And so this is really important. I think what ought to have happened was to lay the elections a little longer so that you can draft a new system based on, say, smaller districts, say the province with a fixed number of participants proportional to the population, which would have ensured more fairer representation. So I think this is one of the lessons that we have to draw from this. And in fact, I was gonna ask the question that is out there given the context that you've just described and what's happened over the last two years, the battle against ISIS, the effort to reclaim that territory, the other tensions sectarian and other. The question has been raised whether this is a good context, a propitious context for the holding of these elections. And I gather there's even some thought of postponing the provincial election so that it corresponds with the timing of the parliamentary election school. Is more time needed to undertake precisely those kinds of preparations? There is a reluctance in Iraq to delay the elections. I mean, think of what happened in and around the surge. We've lived through very difficult circumstances and if there had been delays in the elections, they were very short term. Since regime change in 2003, we've had one, on the national level, we've had one referendum and four national elections with a peaceful transition of power and changes of four prime ministers. Not very common in our part of the world. In fact, I remember sitting in discussion with David Ignatius in 2009 in the Rashid Hotel. He didn't quote me by name, but I told him, look, what's remarkable about this election is I honestly do not know who the next prime minister is going to be. That is a really far-reaching statement. I don't know that we're in a similar situation because our body is quite a bit of popularity with the conduct and the prosecution of the war against ISIS, but we will hold elections. I don't think that any government would last without holding these elections. It's a popular demand. We can come back and then talk a little bit later then about what, given that commitment to the elections, what will be required in order to... Yes, please. There is one point that I ought to mention. I mean, I talked about identity voting earlier. One of the interesting features of the political situation in Iraq right now is that the lines of political confrontation and debate happen to be just as much within communities as between them. And so there is a possibility that post these elections, we will have a number of groups from different communities that can come together on a common political platform which would embody, I think, a really sought-after transition from identity politics to idea politics, which is what you have here in this country. Thank you for that introduction. Let me turn then to you, Mr. Gichiro. Kenya certainly is no stranger to identity politics, if anything, that's been one of the challenges of organizing politics and the conduct of politics and elections of both. In 2008, we saw this in a big way with the violence that the company had surrounded the 2007-2008 elections. 2013 was a very different scenario. And I'm wondering what you foresee, which elections are we going to see this time around and what are the factors that you believe are conditioning the elections that will take place in August? And what's at stake for Kenya in these elections? The stake is very high for us to have free and fair elections. I think from the challenges we had from 2008, we ended up having a new constitution in 2010. And from these constitutions, it creates independent bodies within the government that function independently of the registrature, the Gichiro and the executive. We also had less online from 2013 that we also implemented. The government has actually developed programs and I can share with you or kind of gone through a process. We already have what is called election operation plan for 2016-2017, which I can share with you that. But more important, I just want to share with you the challenges that we have right now. And then I can go back and see your question. Due to the level of competition, elections in Kenya excite a lot of anxiety. Elicit a lot of anxiety for elections. And candidates tend to, as you said, ethnic nice voting, ideologies come prevalent and sometimes the politics is not the product of issues. So that's a challenge that we have to make sure that candidates do not incite their own ethnic group against whatever come out of their elections. And that's one of the areas that are the challenges of holding politicians accountable for the statement they make in public and to concentrate more on politics of issues than on the politics of ideology. Advantage we have right now, the electorates will become more educated. They are more informed. So chronologically from 2013 onward this way, the electorate is more educated. The mechanism have been put in place to deal with such vices, including electoral offenses of act 2016, where we actually politicians being held accountable and they are being monitored for head speech and actually brought even you. In other challenges, it's technology. Technology is another challenge. There is a requirement with the new electoral commission, a new electoral parliament act to transmit all election results on the fly from 47 regions of the country, but not all the areas of the country is automated. To mitigate that, the government has issued a backup plan which has been passed by parliament last December. The other issue of technology and it's the issue of misinformation or I will say is toxic social media sometimes where you have false information coming out. And by the time you bid that, it's too late. So that's where also the government has put a lot of resources on social media, where they monitor on Twitter, on Facebook, what activities are going on. Because some of this information are very toxic. They are, as you said, more ethnic lining and they are ideological, they are not issue based. And that's a challenge. And I'm sure even your country, you went through the same challenges of the fake news and all that, yeah. Yeah, the other issue is political party nomination. I'm sorry, political? Political party nominations. Party nominations, yeah. There's a lot of competition because we devolve, with the new constitution, we have 47 counties. So we have 47 United States, I think of it. And these are very competitive governor positions. They are very competitive. So if we don't manage this, it can be very chaotic because it's very competitive again. In that we have implemented, and I can share with you the plans we have for political nomination process and how it should be organized and how IBC will play a role on the nomination process and how vetting of this nomination will be done so that people who get this nomination are people who are vetted in terms of character and economic responsibility. There is also another challenge we have is constitutional requirements, particularly on gender rule. We have to make sure that we, in the two-third majority rule for gender rule. So we have to make sure that we fulfill that. Otherwise, if we do that, it's gonna be a challenge. Post, the contest, yeah, yeah, yeah. The other issue that we are dealing with is also voter apathy. We find that, I think they did a poll last week, I post poll and found almost 10, 15% of voter apathy or they have not made a decision on who are they gonna vote. We have about 10 million Kenyans with IDs who have not registered as voters right now. So with this, we have initiated a new campaign. The electoral IBC started a new campaign for elections. We just finished a big campaign in February and even now, anybody can vote, can register for voting throughout until the third process. That's a fairly significant list of challenges that you've outlined in it. We were talking about elections in, what, six months? Five? Yeah, yeah. And I know that one of the concerns has been that, in fact, the new commission only took, the new leadership commission only took over, only assumed its duties in January, which leaves a lot of work to be done between now and then. And I guess the question would be, for those external partners, and you have many who are involved here, I know UNDP, some of the organizations here in the room have been involved with, what would you wish of them? What does the Kenyan government, the electoral commission wish from them in terms of a focus on things that need to be done, absolutely need to be done between now and August, and things that would give greater confidence to the electorate regarding the conduct of the elections and thereby hopefully also mitigate the sources, the potential sources of violence around the elections. One of the important things you just mentioned is we constituted the IBC last year, and that was very important because it is a bipartisan effort to include everybody, be the opposition of the government to make sure that all their comments and all their input is included in that. That is very important. The other thing you have to understand is that the technical people are still there. The commissioners are just the seven, eight of them, but the people who work in the background are there, so that one is there. So I think the challenge is more technical than anything else on time-wise. We have teams, we have NDI, National Demographic, and I think we have IFIS there and other NGOs who are working along with the government. We have a lot of... The government has put in about $430 million right now in IBC, and one of the immediate challenges right now is to clean up the database, the registry. Make sure the registry... And you know this is more technical than anything else, so make sure the database is cleaned up so that it's audited and it's one registry. So within the period that is given, the only challenge right now is the meaning is auditing the registry and cleaning up, and that can be done within 30 days. And I think they have already secured that facility to be done. We have also formed bipartisan programs working with NGOs. We have... NIC National Cohesion and Integration Commission to deal with issues of conflict during this time, during this election process and post-election process. So these people, these are bipartisan, both parliamentarian, NGOs and other governments who can come together at a particular time and go over the issues of studies that are coming out. Let me, I want to come back to Master Yasin in a second here, but you mentioned, and then all of these issues, always a key factor is the behavior of the politicians. And you mentioned yourself, the issue of holding politicians, political leaders accountable. I know during the Nigerian elections and where I was part of the mission that was there in Nigeria, one of the things that was asked of all the political leaders was a commitment. Kofi Annan, for example, was asked of the political leadership a commitment to respect the outcome of the election. How do you hold the, how, what's the plan for holding politicians accountable? And this has been an issue in Kenyatta. And I think the president, our president, current president has announced publicly, you know, that he, if the elections are held and he's not the winner, he will accept the winner at any time. I think he's also good. He has also come up publicly to announce against any violence on politics. We have also involved the Christian organization, the religious organization in Kenya, inter-religious organization in Kenya to come out and us push that electoral peaceful elections overrides electoral process. And the important of that is very important as to if all the politicians come out in public and announce like the president has done that no election will be a free and fair, no violence, no, on that. That would be a very important statement for him to do. Thank you. Ambassador Yasin, you mentioned that the challenge in Iraq as it is in Kenya is how do we, how do make the elections fair in terms of both participation and representation? And more over how to convey that to the electorate so that they perceive that in fact, the elections are being organized and prepared in a way that is fair and representative. Tell us a little bit about how one approaches that in the context of Iraq. What are the things that the government, others, other institutions are doing to create that climate and then convey that impression to the people that in fact everything is being done to ensure their fair representation and participation. The most important marker that the government can work on is to provide a safe and secure climate. And I'll talk about this first. It's not the only element, but it's the most important one. And so far, the government has taken steps to, for example, during some of the elections at the worst times in terms of violence, there was a curfew on cars. Cars were used as car bombs and added to the insecurity. And actually, it had a transformative effect on the city, on Baghdad, for example. You'd see kids walking in the streets. They'd play soccer, people would walk miles to go to vote. And in a sense, there was a happy air around these elections. Sort of a feel-good moment where people could go back and do the things they remember doing before the violence came. So there's that. Is of course one thing that is a new development since 2003, which is a free and very hyperactive press in terms of media, television, written journals, newspapers, things like that. And the most important development of the last few years, social media. And so people are extremely engaged in this. If you look at most Iraqi politicians, they're very, very intent on following up what happens on their Facebook page. And the number of likes they get and things like that. I mean, this is new to us. So I think, I mean, I'm not concerned that the elections will not take place well. There have been some calls from certain political parties and perhaps with a certain level of popular demands, that there be a revision of the Electoral Commission adding, you know, professionalizing it rather than having it being composed of members of the chosen from parliament. Right. I mean, if you take, for example, if you staff your Electoral Commission from the parliament itself, then you might still end up having something that is politically neutral, but also politically closed. It won't have newcomers, you know? And so maybe the answer would be just to professionalize it, make it more technical as you have, which was the case in the beginning in 2004. As I understand it, one of the evolutions over the last several years also has been a growth in the number rather, 60 of a growth in the number of political parties appearing on the political scene. How has, how is this likely to affect the way in which the elections are conducted? What impact does that have on sort of the perceptions of going back to your terms, the representativeness and fairness? How do you, how does one be inclusive? Can one be inclusive given that reality that you have so many more political actors, if you will, on the scene? And what do they represent? Well, if you look at the, at the list of political parties that run candidates, they're very representative. The problem though that we currently have with our system is that the electoral districts are still very large. And it's sort of a hybrid system where you vote on a electoral list, but not on the electoral list. You vote for a candidate on the electoral list. So basically two numbers, the number of the list and the ranking of the candidate on the list. And it leads to a very, very skewed distribution of votes. So you'd have a large number of people who'd get just under the step required to be elected. But then you have certain superstars that get many times that number, typically former prime ministers. And so that gives them an outweighed influence on the political process. So in a sense, previously we had a strict list where the chance of your being elected depended on where your political party placed you. Now it is on the willingness of your, the superstar of your list to choose you. And I think one way of going around that would be to make up for smaller electoral districts. But then again, that goes to the point that you talked about, which is voter registries that have to be very, very precise. And that's a technical issue for which actually we would appreciate some help. You sort of anticipated my question because again, differences here. Iraq has a fairly sophisticated, robust set of institutions here. And it does then raise the question, what would you envisage as being a contribution from the international community, both in terms of governmental, intergovernmental organizations, but as well the non-governmental sector, which has always been very active in this sphere. One thing that would help, of course we have old institutions, but unfortunately because of the sclerosis of the last 40 years under the former regime, we haven't really made up for, caught up with the modernizing. So many of our practices and procedures are still antiquated, paper dependent, very heavy. I was really interested by what we were talking about in terms of using technologies. One way of trying to promote the development of quick and accurate voter rosters is perhaps to develop a smart national ID card, which there have been some companies in some countries that are willing to help us. But if we were able to roll that out before the next elections, that would be considerable help. Thank you. And this is an issue I know that there are some folks in here affiliated with the Kofi Annan Foundation's election integrity initiative. And one of the conversations they are having is precisely to give countries advice as to which of these technologies actually is useful and helpful in addressing the real problems that you confront. So the problem that you've identified is how to have a clear sense of who is and who's not elected. This came up as well with Nigeria, as you know. And I know you've looked very closely at the Nigerian experience. Tell us what lessons have you drawn from watching those other elections? I think the most important thing is helping countries like us to trust with our own electoral system. And everybody's a stakeholder in this. Be it you as NGOs and other non-governmental organizations working in different countries to call upon the stakeholders, be it the position of the government to be able to come to trust the electoral system of a country. If we, and also educate the electorate on the constitutions that they have, it's not very important because like us 2010, IBC is a very independent organization. It's very important to inform the electorate, to inform them that this is an independent body that's not run by the government or run by the opposition, run by the dependent. So the onerous is on the non-governmental organization who are helping countries like us and them also to rein on the politicians and the people, be it by partisan, let them move. We have to trust this electoral system because it's very fundamental that even in this country, when the integrity of the electoral system is at question, that become the whole dice go down. So I think the very important of us organization to build our trust and to build our trust is very important where everybody is a stakeholder on it and they will build on that. Good. I'm mindful that there are lots of knowledgeable folks in the room and I'm sure we have questions that they would also like to put on the table as we are setting the table for the subsequent conversations. And so let me at this point open the floor to questions from the audience. Perhaps we didn't have enough coffee this morning. You've been quite comprehensive. Thank you. Sorry. Good morning. Thank you. To the question to Ambassador Yasin, I think working on Iraq, I see the problems of having Iraq as one electoral district. The problem it brought and going to the 18 province-based electoral districts broke it down a little bit. But on the shining star, basically taking from a perspective of some of the electorates taking a significant number of votes, if you break it down further to within, for example, province, to more districts within the province, it makes the logistics maybe more difficult. But it also open up and it has the benefit of bringing democracy and electoral elected officials closer and more accountable to a smaller constituent. So I see that benefit. But also you run the risk of getting Iraq into the politics of redistricting and gerrymandering, and that in a highly volatile country like that. I would appreciate your thoughts on that, if you what kind of problem that may bring. Jim, obviously there are lessons to be learned from looking at the American experience when it comes to what happens when you try to draw those local districts. So gerrymandering is a sign of the maturity of the electoral process. So let's get there. Very diplomatic, you know. But you see, there is a disparity. For example, in this country, people know who they vote for. In Iraq, the parliamentarians can't pin down a community that they're responsible for. So it tends to be diffuse. So bring it down to smaller districts would, in a sense, heighten the sense of awareness and accountability in parliament. Tie them a bit more to their roots, if you will. On the other hand, granted, it could lead to a greater fracturing of the political landscape with the emergence of more local issues. It's a compromise. As always, there is no ideal solution. You have to choose between what's good and less good and not worse. So I don't have an answer to that. This is why we have an independent electoral commission in the parliament that has to debate these issues. Of course, the problem is the parliamentarians have been elected and have an vested interest in the continuation of the current process. So how do we get them? It's the same problem I have whenever I hire consultants to help me sort an organization. I mean, I hire them to put themselves out of business. Sometimes they're not willing to do that. Yes, please. Just to follow up a bit, because I think, Ambassador ESM, you mentioned a couple of times, if you move the electoral competition, the political competition, from being concentrated all in one place, the winner take all political structures, and introduce these smaller districts, that it helps to diffuse power and give more stakes to more sections of the population. And Mr. Kachuru, I think Kenya, gives us one of the best examples in the world. I know you've heard me say that before, but it's true that after 2007, 2008, extraordinary levels of electoral violence, the process that Kenya went through was very inclusive. And the constitutional reform allowed the creation of the counties, which now gives more and more possibilities and a diffusion of power. And I won't let Ambassador Moose off the hook on this, because I know that you've looked at this in a number of countries in terms of the effects of concentration of power and winner take all politics as compared to what these two countries have done. So could you speak to those, that particular question? I was going to ask our political scientists about that, but I think your practical experiences really would help us a lot. I think I agree with you. The fundamental issue of devolution, I think, in Kenya is very, very important, because it makes everybody a stakeholder of the government to the local level. So at the local level, everybody is a stakeholder. And because of the elections, everybody for the few participating in the elections, and you are right, it diffuses the power, distributes the power across the 47 countries in Kenya. That's to be a very important part of the new constitution, devolving power to the local government. Everybody for you, they are participating in their local say, in their local government. And it kind of diffuses the element that we have to have one of ours as the president of the country. That's good. Well, it's a compromise. We've only tried one way. Let's try the other. Follow-up, then though you do create competition at a local level that can spark violence locally that has ramifications. Is that, I suppose that's another Kenya-specific question, but it's Iraq-specific as well. That would be novel, because we've had competition on the local level, and it's been contained. It would be sort of bringing more granularity to the national election that you'd see at the local level that's already there. That's what you put me on the hook, I will say. I mean, we've all seen, particularly in many countries across Africa, where one of the things that makes those national elections so contentious is that there is, indeed, so much at stake, right? Because whoever captures government has enormous authority to do all kinds of things, to dispense favors and contracts and spoils of victory. And that means that competition becomes even more. It's not just a political competition. It is, if you will, it's a survival competition. And so to the extent that one, this is obviously larger than the elections. This goes to the entire political system and the political process. And how one gets at that is another matter. There is already, in Kenya, been this one significant change, which is the devolution to the provincial level, which is something I know that Kenya's international partners were very keen on precisely for this reason. But it's the start of a process, but it's not a complete process. Anyway, as the ambassador said, there are pros and cons. There are trade-offs between how much of this authority is focused at the national level and to what extent you actually devolve authority to local level. But I'm saying too much, and I see a question over here. Hi. Good morning. I'm Gail Irvin. I'm team leader for the Kenya Initiative with Mediators Beyond Borders. And I know there's a lot of focus on post-election violence and setting up the elections. And partly because of devolution, while the pastoralist communities are getting a lot of benefit from that, there's also a devolution of political interests and political violence. And currently, because of the terrible drought that is occurring, there is already pre-election violence that's very, very significant in Laikipia, Beringo, West Bacote, ECO Lo, a lot of the central counties. So my question is, is there a focus? The government has been doing a great job in cracking down public comments by politicians. I know one of the local politicians was recently arrested for inciting violence. And there's still a real problem with the media, that the media, even with articles that are submitted that are fairly written, they'll get edited to say it was the Pocote community that did it. So there's a lot of incitement occurring. So my question is, what is the government doing for the pre-election violence? And what kind of support do you need from the international community to deal with politicians capitalizing on the resource problems to incite violence? Part of, for people who aren't knowledgeable about Kenya, part of that is to move voters around to different districts by burning them out of their homes. And let me just add to that, because this is a question that was submitted from next door in our overflow room. And it goes to the same point. The question is already one, it's beginning to see pre-election violence. And in that, one is already beginning to see the role that social media is playing as a driver of tension and violence, and raises the question. And it's a tough question. On the one hand, one wishes to find ways to manage control, mitigate that. On the other hand, one does not wish to see government overreaching in ways that can be interpreted as being political. So how are Kenyan authorities and the Electoral Commission and others thinking about that issue? And coming back to the point, what if anything, can the external partners do to be of help in that regard? And I wanted to ask this question, also one of my partners colleagues from the embassy can follow up on anything that I miss out. I think the issue of drought is a global issue, where we have global warming and we have the Saharan Desert moving southward. That's no problem. This is something that occurs every time we have drought issues. So I think the issue is more of how do you economically empower these people, these pastoral communities to be able to survive during drought? We have a program right now that will actually be implemented with the help of the World Bank for what is called insurance profile, where you insure the pastoral is cattle. So during the drought, for the number of cattle they lose, they get an insurer or they get a payment of it. So that's one program that is going on right now. The government, I think, put aside a big budget for mitigating the drought in this pastoral community. And I think also going back to holding the politicians on these devolved units accountable for the rhetoric that comes out of that. And that also comes to non-government organizations that have relationship with the media also to hold them accountable. Because some of these media outlets, the news they convey is always negative news. And positive news don't make stories in Africa. And this kicks in. So whatever you hear in the news, it's just the violence. And you don't hear the good stories that are happening. The program that the government is doing, the communities who are being resettled, the boreholes that are being done, you don't hear that story. You just hear these negative news. And I think sometimes some of these NGOs make money out of this crisis. So we have an element of that sometimes. And you have an element where the government is really working hard, but it's something that is beyond any country in the world with a global warming. With the parsley is an issue that is a long term. And I think the government now is the fundamental thing is economic. How do you help these parties, communities, mitigate their cattle during drought? How do you stop them from invading ranches? How do you stop them from fighting one another for the grasslands and the watering hole areas? And the fundamental problem is everybody has to work together on this one to mitigate this issue. And I think Agnes, do you have anything that you want to add? I'm Agnes. So I'm just going to add one or two points. I think what you'd like to see as a country from the international community is first of all to reduce these misconstrued signals of actually calling what is really happening right now with the drought pre-election violence. Because this is not about what you see in Laikipia is not about elections. It's basically a pastoralist trying to seek pasture for the livestock and trying to find a way of surviving. So when we have our partners or the press labeling that pre-election violence, then you'll already have people on the electorates thinking that this is politically motivated, which is not. The president has also urged the county leaders in these areas to try and stop their people from going because the government is addressing this issue. And you will see that it has been giving support to all counties, not just the counties that supported the ruling party, but even other counties in the ones that are in the opposition by giving aid assistance to both of them. And then the other thing we'd like to do, we'd like to see as a country is we want to urge our civil society organizations, because most of them are funded by obviously NGOs from out here, not to go around talking to this specific pastoralist that the government is not helping you at this point. The government is doing all it is trying to address the situation in some areas. We thank God it has started raining. So we'll hope to see reduced violence in those areas. But please let us not call this post pre-election violence at this stage. Thank you. Thank you. It was very helpful. Well, I'm mindful that we have just about exhausted our limited time here. But I wanted to give our two panelists just an opportunity to say any last words that they would like to, in words of wisdom, they would like to leave with us before we adjourn this panel. As a stark note, the Iran-Iraq war tend to leave much in terms of new and imprint on art of war. I think it's remembered for it's the first major conflict at 20th century that wasn't started by weapons manufactured in an OECD country as launched with Cascavill attacks manufactured in Brazil. The interesting thing is that the bulk of the Electoral Commission that the United Nations sent us to help us conduct our elections was practically entirely made up of Latin Americans. So in a sense, the democratic experiment in Iraq is owed, in great part, to Latin America, a continent that has unfortunately also had its share of dictatorships, and that now has gone beyond that, and we're looking at emulating their example. Our Kenyan elections will happen in August 8th, and in full gear. And we sincerely, and I'm very sure we're going to have a very peaceful elections. Government has established mechanism to enhance inter-agency cooperation where both the bipartisan and NGO and community can come together on issues that can arise before and after elections. And I think that's very, very important. Nations have been put in place to have very transparent and credible elections. We have instituted a judicial, the judiciary has been given mandate to manage post-elections complaints and mitigate any issues that come about that. There is also National Cohesion Integration Commission that has also been instituted to help before and after elections. So it's our honest wish that, and I think I'm very sure that we're going to impress the world with a very peaceful question, where our institution of electro body will be, it will evolve, it will grow again and become more trusted bipartisan institution. Thank you. Alastair, you said you had a. Yes, I have to give great credit to those champions of elections, IFAS and the NDI and IR and all those international organizations that have really done a fantastic job of educating population that did not know what it was all about. They did a fantastic job. And I have to express my gratitude. And I hope they keep it up. Thank you. That's a great note on which to end. We often wonder, those of us who labor in this rocky vineyard, whether, in fact, our efforts. Not to forget USIP. Not to forget USIP. Whether our efforts do, in fact, make a difference. I think we have evidence of that, you know, as documented that in his book. But it's nice to have that testimony into that fact. Please join me in thanking Ambassador Farid Yassin and Mr. David Cheru for getting us well launched on our conversations today. And now let me invite you on this class to inaugurate the second panel. Appreciate it. That's good. That was a mid-crouch. You need to go this way. Thank you very much. I look forward to reading you. Thank you. I understand. I understand you have to rush. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Ambassador Yassin and Mr. Gacheru for your insightful comments. And thank you as well, Ambassador Moose, for raising such pertinent questions. Good morning to you all. My name is Jonas Klaas. And as a senior program officer, I lead USIP's research on election violence prevention. And I work with my colleagues here at USIP in the design of training programs and prevention activity in the fields. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity today to familiarize yourself further with the work that we conduct here at USIP. And more specifically, I'll present some of the key findings from a recent study that we concluded on the effectiveness of commonly used prevention approaches. The full findings are compiled within the book, Electing Peace. I see a copy there laying on the second row. As Carla mentioned this morning, working on elections is often considered to be a very technical exercise. Since most of the organizations that work within this field emphasize the quality of an electoral process and do very important work through technical assistance by ensuring that elections are held in a free and fair manner. But free and fair elections, as we have seen in the past decade and even before that, are no guarantee for election security. And stable elections, on the other hand, are also no guarantee for democratic quality. Surely these goals are often mutually reinforcing. But beyond promoting credibility around election process, at USIP we recognize that election violence prevention certainly requires us to identify windows of opportunity for bringing conflictual parties together, but also to identify those who would benefit from violent elections. And very importantly, election violence prevention is often about protecting communities that are at risk. But election violence prevention is also a very sensitive stream of peace building work. There's always the risk that election programming is perceived as intrusive, affecting the outcome of the elections. By the incumbents, the opposition, or the broader electorate may have this strong perception. Now, international organizations and regional organizations, they often operate in elections on the basis of an explicit invitation by the government only. Now, for peace building organizations and for international monitors, it is crucial to remain transparent at all times, therefore, and to remain cautious in highlighting room for improvements. So why did we decide to take on this study on election violence? We noticed that much of the existing research really looks at the drivers and triggers of election violence, the perpetrators, the victims. But we saw a strong need in looking more at the practice of prevention, like what works in a certain situation, what does not work, and under which conditions does this holds. We noticed that some of the closest partners that we have, US government partners, the UN, the African Union, IFAS, NDI, and the many domestic society organizations that we work with, we really noticed that they wanted to see a stronger evidence base to guide election activity. So for those reasons, electing peace really aimed to identify what works and what doesn't, and then feed that knowledge into our own programming here at USIP, our election programming, and that of our closest partners. And there's really a wealth of options to get engaged in elections. You can conduct peace messaging campaigns. You can set up monitoring campaigns, work with the police, work with election commissioners. But so far, we noticed that the selection between these different tools is often made without a strong evidence base or a needs assessment. More often, the selection is driven by the mandate of an organization or their familiarity with a given approach. If you're a small NGO operating in northern Nigeria and you've built up a strong reputation around youth programming, if the elections are going to come up, you're going to make a case for youth programming, regardless of whether you have some kind of indication whether it's going to make a difference in mediating risk around election violence or not. So that's why we conducted this study. The objectives were three-folds. That is to identify prevention models with measurable impacts. We tried to help prioritize prevention programming in a given context. And we wanted to support the development of an evaluative framework for preventive action. And what this will do is come up with, select one of the existing typologies for election violence, and then tie that to specific prevention tools that are deemed to be the most promising under those conditions or combination of prevention tools that are the most promising. We selected five recent elections for this evaluative research, Bangladesh, Honduras, Malawi, Moldova, and Thailand. And all five of these, they saw recent elections. But importantly, each of these also displayed similar levels of risk, but ended up expiring very different levels of election violence. So that setup really allowed us to come up and raise the question, is it prevention that made the difference across these cases? We also selected eight commonly applied prevention tools, which you see here on the left, all of which are considered to affect certain attitudes, behaviors, and structures that are out there, and that may help mitigate the risk of election violence. We also looked at several contextual vulnerabilities, and those are listed on the right, including different electoral systems, but also high uncertainty around election results. And each of these presents a prominent theory about what drives election violence, but they have mixed levels of support in the literature. So what do we find in a nutshell? We have some strong indications from our research that prevention works, and I'll briefly guide you through the following table. In the top horizontal row in white are the different levels of violence that was experienced in each of the selected countries. In the vertical columns below there are the codes that represent the scope and quality of a given tool in that country. And they have the far column on the left with those numbers in bolds that show the correlation scores between that prevention tool and the level of election violence. What we noticed is that in Thailand and Bangladesh, where violence was minimal or absent, really experienced relatively high levels of election violence, whereas Moldova and Malawi saw minimal levels of violence but intense prevention activity. We used additional analytical techniques beyond the correlation analysis, of course, because correlations are what they are. You can't really draw any causation from this, including historical comparison. But I wanted to raise now the point around the second finding that we have here, is that prevention techniques are not equally impactful. We noticed that the state really seems to hold the key to peaceful elections. The two most promising tools that we saw, which is security sector engagement and the quality and scope of election administration, they really seem to be at the core of the state's responsibility in the election process. With security sector engagement, we primarily looked at the presence of security forces at key election events, but also the support that they receive and the existing regulatory frameworks that they operate within. Evidently, with the security sector, poor implementation of prevention doesn't just have a neutral effect. Well, in fact, it also increases the risk since police, as you know, may be a common perpetrator of election violence in many contexts. And we saw the same effect with the quality of the election administration. To election management bodies in Tunisia or in Tanzania, we really say your work matters, not just for organizing free and fair elections, but also in terms of violence prevention. And the third key finding from the research is that the impact of peace messaging and youth programming due to the way that they're most commonly implemented, the impact thereof seems to be either unclear or absent. And the main reason for this is that in our analysis, we see that the objectives of these types of programs, they seem to be often too ambitious. These are short-term engagements, people starting their work a few months before the elections, parachuting in and withdrawing from the election process a few months after. Now, I know that there's exceptions to this, particularly larger donors and bigger organizations that have more staying power are able to circumvent that, but the most are smaller civil society organizations that only have a budget to do programming just for a few months. You can't really change voter attitude and behavior in three or four months. These are very ambitious theory of change that's underlying this programming. I just returned from London last night where I attended a research workshop at King's College. Professor Sarah Birch and her team just concluded a very similar study here, but applying a quantitative methodology instead, which fully confirmed the findings from our research. So I was quite satisfied to see the outcomes of the research. They saw similar findings about the impact or the lack thereof of peace messaging, while also highlighting the importance of training election commissioners and the police, which is very much in line with this. I wanted to add a brief word on preventive diplomacy as well. It's a very vague term. The way we defined it and operationalized it is that preventive diplomacy is often practiced by internationals, per definition by the internationals, I must say. This can be special envoys, neighboring countries or regional powers as well, something we often forget about, but they have often the certain access and leverage that our internationals don't have. And they can apply like international organizations, certain sanctions, the threat thereof, but also incentives, such as access to regional organizations and such. And the findings on efficacy of preventive diplomacy based on the initial data set are quite remarkable. It seemed that preventive diplomacy corresponded with higher violence levels. So the degree, the greater the degree of international diplomatic intervention, the more likely that there was violence, but evidently there's no causal effect at play here. It's not that preventive diplomacy causes more violence, but the relationship can really be explained by the use of diplomacy as a crisis management tool, and that makes sense. When do the cables come out? When are special envoys being sent out? It's when there's either the risk of violence is around the corner or the violence is already occurring. So I think preventive diplomacy in many ways is a bit of a misnomer and it's used as a crisis management instrument. I think I'm quite intrigued to try to visualize what preventive diplomacy 18 months or 20 months before an election would look like and what the impact thereof may be. In conclusion, there are several challenges that keep election practitioners from preventing violence more effectively and I'll just mention one, and that's the timing of our efforts. Making the case for traditional conflict prevention is already deemed quite difficult because we're dealing with a counterfactual here. Why invest more money away from ongoing crises towards events that are not certain to occur? Compared to traditional conflict prevention, election violence prevention does have one advantage though and that's a specific date is set for the elections, allowing you to prepare your activity well in advance towards a concrete risk. But despite this advantage, our efforts are often still poorly timed. We usually start too late and leave slightly prematurely. I really was struck by a comment in 2013 when we conducted an assessment of preventive activity in Kenya. The comment by one villager in Marzabit was really telling. He mentioned that every four or five years we receive a painkiller in Kenya, but what Kenya really seems to need is more therapy over the long term and that's why we apply a conflict prevention approach to elections at risk of violence because we're convinced that only sustained approaches towards root causes really can realize long term impacts. Now with the comparative research finalized, we're now starting the second phase of our work which will focus on Kenya and Liberia through practice evaluations with partners in the field. So now it's time to take a bit of a deeper dive into some of the cases that we covered with our research, particularly looking at Bangladesh, Thailand, and Honduras. So I'm glad that our second panelists have already taken their seats. It's Jeffrey McDonald, Duncan McCargo, and Elizabeth Murray. So my role will now shift a little bit from being a short presentation presenter from a facilitating panel. But please help me and give me a round of applause for our facilities here. So all three of our guests, they played a really instrumental role in the research behind electing peace. Jeffrey McDonald, he is a professional professorial lecturer at the Department of Political Science at George Washington University. Together we designed the research methodology used in electing peace, well actually he designed it and I took part of credit for it. And he also lets the field research in Bangladesh. Duncan is a professor of political science at the University of Leeds and is a leading authority on Thailand. Together with his colleague Petra Desatova, Duncan lets the research on Thailand. And then finally we have Elizabeth Murray. She's a senior program officer with USIP's Middle East and Africa team and the lead researcher on Honduras within this project. I wanted to briefly recognize also the involvement of Dominic Togsdorf. He's a program director at Heinrich Böhl Foundation and he lets the research on Moldova, as well as Manuela Travaglianti. She's a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the room and conducted the research on Malawi. Manuela will present her research in the following panel. So full bios were made available so I'm happy to get this started. We adopt a very similar approach in this second session so slightly different. Don't go through long panel presentations but really try to make it discussion style so we'll see how this works and if this is a good experiment to move forward with. So let me start with a brief question for Jeffrey. I think it's very important that we all understand the concepts that we're dealing with here and that we're on the same page of what we're talking about, election violence. So I'll ask Jeffrey, election violence is a relatively new concept as far as I understand it. How is it different from traditional political violence and other types of political violence? Sure, so this is, I mean in some ways this is a deceptively difficult question and that election violence is a kind of common sensical explanation in that it's violence that intends to shape the process or outcome of an election. But embedded within this definition are concepts that need further unpacking and specification that actually do create some complications. The first is timing, right? Election violence is linked to an election cycle or at least an election, but when does that cycle begin? And there's some literature that says the election cycle begins a year to a year and a half prior to the election day, right? Running through to when the election is announced, others will say it starts on particular events. So when candidates are announced or candidate lists are put forward. In some countries the election period is already defined. It's a month or two months prior to the election and other countries like the United States it is seemingly endless, right? And starts at minimum two years prior to the election, right? And so finding those boundaries of the election cycle are often in theory we can come up with it in practice in some countries they're relatively difficult to find. Another challenge is intent, right? So it intends to shape the outcome of an election and how do we determine intent? And in particular countries that have significant levels of political violence to begin with, right? Trying to determine when political violence morphs into election violence is challenging, right? And this was certainly the case in my country that I studied it with Bangladesh which has very high levels of political violence kind of almost constantly, right? I think as Elizabeth probably talked about in Honduras issues of assassinations or criminal violence, right? And so determining that intent, right? In some ways it takes on a kind of you know it when you see it kind of definition but it's tough to determine exactly when violence is trying to shape an election or when it's being caused by something else. The other issue is the nature of the violence, right? And generally we talk about both lethal and non-lethal violence and it's carried out by both the states and non-state actors. Now lethal violence is relatively easy to measure, right? Body counts, right? You can count that, right? With some degree of accuracy. Non-lethal violence though. Intimidation, harassment or destruction of polling booths or other kinds of centers, ballots. This is difficult if not impossible to measure quantitatively, right? But we need to kind of figure that out if we're gonna actually measure the extent to which election violence occurs in any given context. So again, kind of broadly the definition is violence carried out by state and non-state actors that is both lethal and non-lethal in an attempt to shape the outcome or process of an election, right? Very kind of technical, a series of kind of sub components in there. Relatively straightforward in a way but when applied to any given context it actually can be very challenging to operationalize and measure. Thank you, Jeffrey. Perhaps moving on now with a question for all of the panelists. You looked at countries that are slightly different. I think election violence is a more common term or more recognized term in some of the countries that you studied versus others. I think Honduras is one of the examples where election violence is a term that doesn't translate too well into Spanish and also a topic that is not recognized very often in Central America and beyond. So maybe a question and I can start with Elizabeth but I definitely appreciate the views of Duncan and Jeffrey on this as well. What did election violence look like in the country that you studied as part of electing peace? How intense was it? Who was the main perpetrator or victim? A little bit of your thoughts please. Thanks, Jonas. Election violence in Honduras in 2013 looked a lot different than what was feared and allow me to briefly explain the context and you'll see why. In 2013, you still had very high polarization in Honduras following the 2009 coup and the wife of the president who was deposed in the coup was running for the presidency in 2013 and society was very polarized, still very polarized four years later on whether this coup should have happened and on which candidate they would support. Consequently, there was a fear of mass demonstrations in Honduras, mass confrontations and violence in the light of day that would be very destructive. This fortunately did not materialize. What you did have were targeted assassinations and some degree of intimidation which as we've noted is very difficult to measure and these targeted assassinations largely mirrored the pattern of criminal violence that you see in Honduras and as such they are extremely difficult to analyze. So the National Observatory on Violence in Honduras which is housed at the National University in Honduras said that there were 48 election fatalities. You could ask a number of Honduras analysts, a number of Honduran citizens who would and you would find they would agree with that and you could ask many others who would say, no, none of those were election related fatalities, those were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or those were people who were mixed up in other sorts of criminal activity and any of this is plausible in Honduras where in 2013 you had a homicide rate of about 70 out of every 100,000 people. For those of you who look at homicide data that's extremely high, one of the highest in the world. After looking closely at the data I do believe that some amount, at least half of these 48 fatalities were election related violence because they disproportionately targeted members of one party. The Liberator Party which was formed in support of deposed President Mel Zalaya and it was the party of the wife of Mel Zalaya, Xiomara Castro who was running for president. That said it's extremely unclear, it's very murky. The victims as they were listed in this analysis were challengers, they were incumbents, they were family members of candidates and incumbents and they were political party activists but the perpetrators were incredibly unclear just like the criminal violence in Honduras, these election related fatalities were never thoroughly investigated and as such it's difficult to pinpoint who carried this out. Okay well China's 2014 election is something of a murky topic since it was an election that was eventually annulled by the court so it's a failed election to begin with. Everything that sort of could have gone wrong went wrong during this election and trying to work out exactly what constituted election violence and what constituted other modes of political and purely criminal violence is difficult to pin down. Petro and I came up with a figure of 30 fatalities of one of our Thai colleagues who studies election violence also came up with a figure of 30 fatalities reassuring but his list turns out to be different from ours so it's the same kind of problem. I think we could broadly categorize though the fatalities and the election violence in Thailand into very simplistically two types. One type would be what you might call competitive election violence where people are essentially killing their opponents or they're killing people who are working for their opponents. That's pretty classic and that's been going on in Thailand consistently since the 70s and especially the 80s. What was a somewhat disturbing new feature of this election was more emphasis on what you might call ideological violence. In other words, there was a struggle going on. The context of this election is that the election was forced upon the government. It was not time to have an election. The government was forced to dissolve parliament based on mass street protests. Again, we have a military coup in the background here. 2006 military coup where former Prime Minister Taksin Chinawat was ousted from power. He then had to leave the country but his sister Yinglak was Prime Minister from 2011 to 2014. So you had protest movements who were attempting to remove somebody from office forcing them to call an election and then proceeded to disrupt the election such that the election would end up being annulled which is what happened. So you actually had violence against the election taking place which is something we hadn't exactly had in that way before in Thailand. So part of the violence is the fatalities but part of it is a larger mobilization of people onto the streets and a huge amount of intimidation. Intimidation in many ways looms larger than violence itself at a lot of junctures. So what the protesters were able to do was to prevent voting from taking place in a number of areas especially in the Upper South and in Bangkok. If you can't get 95% of your elections done on the election day then the Constitutional Court can annul the election and say that it's not valid and that's what ended up happening. So the violence was partly aimed at preventing the election from taking place and preventing it from taking place doesn't mean just preventing it happening on that day but actually with a specific eye to instigating a judicial maneuver then to annul what has happened and with a specific eye to precipitating another military coup which is exactly what also happened in May. So the election was in February and three months later you have another military coup. So very complicated series of things. Hope I haven't completely confused you if you're not familiar with this case but you've got an overlapping of primarily two modes of violence, competitive violence and then what you might call ideological violence. Thank you, Duncan, definitely a different context than what Elizabeth described in Honduras. Jeffrey, can you give us a flavor of what election violence looks like in Bangladesh? Sure, so Bangladesh was the most violent of the election cycles that we studied in this study and was certainly violent by international standards as well. There's kind of probably between 400 to 500 election-related deaths could be higher. I mean it kind of depends on which stat you look at but it was significant, right? We're talking about far more significant than any of the other cases we studied and to think about perpetrators and victims gets complicated because there's not one answer to this question. You kind of have to rewind the clock a bit to kind of 2008, the Awami League which is the current party in power, they're elected and they take in the lead up to that election kind of two decisions that significantly raise tension. They begin to engage in 2009 in a war crimes tribunal that is looking to kind of try and convict those who committed crimes during Bangladesh's War of Independence in 1971. The tricky part of this is that many of the people accused of committing those crimes in 71 are now opposition leaders, right? They're members of parliament. They lead the political parties that are challenging the incumbent party. This trial process began with some degree of international legitimacy but quickly came under intense criticism both internationally and domestically as essentially a witch hunt to try and execute their political opponents. In this context in 2011, the Awami League also eliminated the caretaker government. The caretaker government was a system put in place in the 1990s, ostensibly a kind of technocratic, non-partisan administration of the elections to attempt to remove some of the partisanship from the process. They eliminate this in 2011, which looks to the opposition as an attempt to centralize power and rig future elections. So these two actions, the war crimes trial, the removal of the caretaker government set the stage for 2013, which is the election cycle leading into the January 2014 election, which is enormously tense. The opposition led by the BNP and Jamat declare boycotts throughout the election cycle and on election day, which they enforce with significant violence, beatings, killings, throwing Molotov cocktails at buses that are violating their boycotts in the street. The state in turn responds with enormous violence, opening fire on crowds, abducting political opponents and executing the mass imprisonments of political opponents. So you have this reciprocal cycle of violence that begins kind of on some ways prior to the election cycle, but flows straight through to election day and through it. So who is most responsible for this? It is hard to say, right? And depending on which human rights organization you look at, they'll kind of pin more responsibility on the state or on the opposition, but certainly both sides contributed to a significant degree of tension and violence on the ground. Definitely a very polarized society. Duncan, in your research, you indicated that election violence is the norm in Thailand. Looking forward, is do you envision peaceful elections in the foreseeable future in Thailand? Okay, I wish I could say that I was confident the problem could be resolved. I mean, since we wrote this chapter and did the study, there has been not an, in fact, I have another project with USIP to study the 2016 Thai general election, which you may be aware didn't take place, unfortunately, because of the military coup. What we did study last year was a referendum. There was a referendum on the constitution that had been prepared by the military. And unfortunately, what we saw again was that element of ideological violence coming in. And we also saw something that didn't clearly emerge in the 2014 election, which was the linkage of an insurgency in Thailand's Deep South. There's a Malay-Muslim majority area of three provinces in the southern border region. And what you saw in that referendum vote was that the people in the Deep South, some of whom have been involved in a long-standing insurgency, more than 6,700 people have been killed since 2004 in that insurgency. They sort of joined in the election violence activity. There was a lot of intimidation going on in the run-up to the referendum polling in the Deep South. And then in the immediate aftermath, global headlines were made when a series of bombs went off across other parts of southern Thailand in major tourist areas, which is something that hadn't really been happening very much before. So that's unfortunately a disturbing trend because it suggests that even though the long-term prognosis, as it were, for the competitive violence may be positive. There's been less competitive violence taking place at least in national-level elections, probably not the case in local elections, which continue to be very sort of dark and messy. But the encroachment of ideologically-based violence into that referendum following on from the ideologically-based violence of 2014 is rather disconcerting. And until some of Thailand's core political polarizations have been dealt with, it's hard to see how you can really envisage a decline in that kind of ideologically-based violence because it's coming from a very, very profound set of disagreements among different people in the society. Dioprognosis, but I think a realistic one. Elizabeth, when we think of Honduras, election violence has not always come to mind, as I mentioned, particularly given the prevalence of criminal violence there as a priority, security concern. When we've talked about the problem of election violence and moving on now to prevention, given this context, do you identify specific challenges for prevention around election violence or peace-building in a country where election violence is not a priority number one? It's, I think it's very difficult to work on election violence in Honduras because it's not really identified as such by many people. We, like I mentioned, there are several reports and some people would agree with the presence of electoral violence in Honduras. But interestingly, we did a lot of interviews and I think you were there for me, there with me, where we asked leading Hondurans about the presence of electoral violence and they said electoral violence, we don't have that here. We're a peaceful country, which is really in Congress in a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, but I think highlight the fact that it's just not thought to be a big problem and it doesn't rise above the everyday criminal violence. So the 48 maximum fatalities that took place that were election-related certainly weren't enough to raise the monthly average homicide rate in any meaningful way, so it's difficult to get anyone to take electoral violence seriously when it just doesn't stand out from everyday violence and you would have to meaningfully address criminal violence in Honduras to take down electoral violence and other forms of political violence and that would take massive reform of the security sector, which to be fair is underway to some degree in Honduras over after the work of a police reform commission that's been active for the past year. Several of the leading organized crime figures have been apprehended and extradited to the U.S. That's also big progress, but there is still so much work to be done in creating a Honduran security sector and justice system that is capable of apprehending, investigating and prosecuting crimes that are carried out by so to speak, mid to lower level criminals. Taking out the big guys and the big women, they're not all men, certainly helps, but there's much more work to be done and a lot of the crime is driven by inequality and poverty, so as you can see, it's a really complicated problem and addressing electoral violence would take an effort to address everyday violence. It's also worth mentioning that electoral violence is only one form of political violence in Honduras. The intimidation of journalists and the murders of journalists in Honduras are significant. Very important to note that the murder, intimidation and threats of environmental activists and indigenous activists is a huge problem in Honduras and merits the full attention of the Honduran authorities and the international community as well. Thank you. Before we open it up to the audience, perhaps a final question for all of the discussions. So the research that we conducted, primary looks at questions of efficacy, what works and what doesn't and the findings that I presented are comparative findings which draws from the data from all the various cases, but is there a specific lesson that you drew from your case about the effectiveness of prevention and perhaps we can start with Duncan this time? Okay, well Petra and I kept looking for the silver lining, as you know, silver lining's a little bit difficult to come by, but insofar as there is grounds for optimism, Thailand has always had a very vigorous civil society and very active academics and other sorts of social activists who try to play a role in these processes. So if we go back to the 1990s, for example, there was an organization called Poll Watch that was interested in monitoring the entire electoral process and very much promoting peace, promoting good elections. What happened was that Poll Watch was then institutionalized into the election commission and some of the idealism and the energy of that civil society organization was sort of bureaucratized and things started to go a little bit awry at that point, but it's certainly the case that Poll Watch continues to exist that you had even during this very contentious 2014 election, you had groups of people who were arguing for a middle ground, trying to do some peace monitoring, trying to put out more positive compromising messages, and I think you need the pressure from those people. I know the state comes out in all of our analyses as really the dominant player, but given the problems that the Thai state has at the moment, I think the state needs some pressure from those kind of groups, from people of standing and influence in the society, because we can't just leave everything. At the moment, the military are calling the shots and we can't just let the military call all of the shots. The resurgence of those organizations, I hope, might be something that could be a feature of the next election that would be a more optimistic direction to move in as well. I think that an important lesson, and you lived in your introduction, Jonas, is that the intervention has to be targeted to the context. In Honduras, Jonas, you mentioned that preventive diplomacy is not shown to be a particularly powerful tool throughout the study, but I actually think that it was incredibly effective in Honduras and given the context. So you had a 2009 coup that was really a blemish on Latin America, which considered that it had consolidated democratically 20 or 30 years prior. Consequently, Honduras was temporarily expelled from the Organization of American States, a very influential regional body. And when the OAS, Honduras was reinstated in 2011, but the OAS sent signals that the peaceful and democratic elections in Honduras in 2013 really mattered to its regional standing and to sort of the region standing in the world. And the OAS began sending in high-level visitors more than one year prior. And I think this really, this had, and I think you also mentioned this, Jonas, this had kind of downstream effects. I think this led to the security sector dumbling down on the ways that it could be impactful in preventing electoral violence. And the electoral management body really taking on this challenge quite seriously, because it saw that the international community, the OAS, as well as the United States, a major donor, was watching. So this may have been effective, and I believe it was effective in preventing some of that, that mass violence that could have happened, these confrontations in the street, which were managed pretty well in advance and prevented by electoral management and security sector. But preventive diplomacy isn't going to prevent targeted homicides that happened in the 12 months prior to the elections. And so I think that any sort of future interventions in Honduras or elsewhere need to take into account the different types of violence that might be likely and design interventions according to the nature of each of those types of violence. Thank you, definitely a good example, I think, of the way diplomacy can be applied preventively rather than reactively. Jeffrey, any final thoughts? Sure, so I think in Bangladesh is in some ways a tough one to study from this angle because virtually all of the tools in place that we were studying were kind of weak or non-existent there. Save preventive diplomacy, which did, which there were attempts, but were ineffective. I think Bangladesh does illuminate one of the core kind of arguments of the book that the state plays a kind of outsized role in determining whether there will be violence or not. And in Bangladesh, the partisanship of the election commission, which largely consented to the removal of the caretaker government and consented to an election process that seemed deeply flawed, as well as the security services, particularly the Rapid Action Battalion, the RAB, which kind of operates as almost a kind of praetorian guard for the state and the party in power engaged in significant violence, subductions, political killings, right? If you have a case like this where the state is effectively dedicated to a flawed process, it is likely to overwhelm any NGO efforts on the ground if you have peace messaging or youth programming or civic education, right? You can do a lot of things that could be good. However, if you have state actors dedicated to a flawed process, I would argue that many of those efforts are likely to fail. And so it's key to have the state on board with a non-violent process, which takes its own kind of intervention and prevention process to get political elites to make those kinds of compromises, to become dedicated to that process. Thank you, Jeffrey. I think it's time now to take some questions from the audience. I see a lot of knowledge and skill in the room and the representatives from many organizations that have worked on these issues in the past. So any questions on the case-specific insights that we saw or some of the comparative results, feel free to raise your hand and microphones are right in front of you. So please, Sarah. First of all, I just wanted to thank you, Jonas. I know a lot of us have been looking forward to the launch of Electing Peace for a while. So thanks for taking the time to share the findings of your research with us. I had a question about the regression analysis that you ran. It looks like you developed some kind of an index for each of the different country cases to measure sort of scope and quality you were saying of the intervention. Was wondering if you could give us a little more information just about how that index was put together and what fed into it. Sure, happy to. So the codes that we saw earlier, happy to pull them up again. Codes that we saw here, and I'll definitely ask Jeffrey as well for some of his thoughts, reflect the scope and the quality of a prevention program in a given country. So let's say that you have a 0.25 score on voter consultations in the case of Moldova. That means that voter consultations were probably either completely absent from the area or they were conducted in a non-ideal fashion. So sometimes that means that voter education could be conducted by some of the political parties or by the government only. Or that the government did not see the need to do voter education beyond the capital. Dismissed the rule areas for example. So the higher the code on a specific point on the scale here, the better the scope and the quality of a prevention technique. So that really allows us to draw some insight on whether the better you do your programming, the better you do your prevention, does it actually have an impact on the risk and the outcome of election violence in a given case? In other studies that I've seen, sometimes the coding is just a zero or a one. And that does not allow for the necessary nuance about quality. Again, referencing the workshop that I attended yesterday, there was some research that was being presented there on the presence of monitoring missions. And so the difference between sending 200 monitors to a given country or two monitors and not necessarily recognizing the lack of capacity in the monitoring mission may have was not necessarily recognized. The same thing was done for a study that was presented on there on peacekeeping. So the coding there is a peacekeeping operation present in a given election, yes or no. But peacekeeping operations are notoriously understaffed and underfunded. So if you send out an understaffed peacekeeping operations, then it's likely that you're gonna make things worse by creating certain expectations about the change in attitudes and security that may be able to be provided. So I don't wanna draw it too far, but I hope that provides a bit of an insight in what the coding exercise looked like. And Jeffrey, if any additional thoughts, feel free. Sure, I'll just clarify two points as well. So I mean, there's often we'll get a question on kind of intercoder reliability, right? Is the coding accurate across cases? And we tried to control for that by having a few meetings with the authors in which we went through our coding process and said, I gave the election commission a 0.5 in Bangladesh and you gave it a 0.5. Does that mean the same thing across these countries? And so we made an effort to make sure that we were in fact, applying the codes evenly and accurately across cases to try to make them comparable. That said, I also have to acknowledge the limitations because anyone looking at this will say a correlation score across five cases, it's gonna be, it's limited, right? And so, okay, yeah, right? So when we look at these scores, right? If you did a small change in any of the coding scores, there would be a significant change in the correlation because there's only five countries, right? So it's important to acknowledge that the numbers themselves we were using to help us discern the patterns across the countries, right? Once we saw the pattern, we then used the case studies to evaluate the causality to say, all right, we see this correlation, is it in fact true that the security services or election commission are important, right? When we look at preventive diplomacy as being highly correlated with violence, we then had to say, well, how is this the case? What is the story behind this? So the numbers just again helped us discern a pattern. We told the story through a kind of a process tracing method within the cases. Thank you, and perhaps to add one last word, we are now doing similar approaches in both Kenya and Liberia, so we'll be able to add the data to the existing data sets, which will certainly strengthen the quality of what we already have. Please, Gabriel. Thanks. It's a fascinating study. My question is about whether or not there is variation kind of within some of these variables, whether violence was measured as a single thing or whether different types of violence followed the same pattern, or did it just eliminate violence totally? Did it vary according to the actor that was engaged in these particular activities where the international organizations performing better than local, et cetera, and time span and budget? And then finally, also each of these different interventions target kind of different forms of violence as well, and security sector will target the most serious forms of violence while voter consultations might reaffirm voters or intimidation or lesser forms of violence. And so I wonder if any of that was also taken into account or picked up in any other way? Thanks. Thanks for that question. And also add one question that came from the overflow room. Question relates to the delay of elections and maybe some of the other panelists may be able to offer some thoughts on that, on whether the delay of elections may be associated with more or less election violence in cases around the world once they are eventually held. Maybe, Jeffrey, you can start with the first question. I'm happy to add some. So you want to start with the first question? Sure, happy to. And then we can go. Was there a variation based on election violence type? We don't know. Certainly the methodology we applied has its advantages in that we can cover more countries. Still, it's a small n, too small, but it does have the advantage of having some type of reach. We recognize that in order to get more nuance into what types of election violence are associated with underlying dynamics and which prevention techniques may be more promising in preventing different types of election violence than we need to start working more on the subnational level. And that's what we're doing now as well with looking into Liberia and Kenya. And in fact, what you described, whether we have that type of information is in fact what we're trying to work towards in the next two to three years is that we would have a typology of election violence which is tied to promising prevention instruments because certainly what works in Bangladesh will be quite different than what it works in Honduras, given different contexts and different types we're seeing. Maybe others can chime in here or address the questions on the delay of elections. Just on the sort of variation of types of violence, it's so hard to, because as you know very well, so little of these incidents are ever thoroughly investigated, it's so hard to separate what's electoral violence from the actual noise. And we also, we had this debate about whether should, in the case of Honduras, should overall homicide rates be taken into account when assessing electoral violence as sort of mild, moderate, or severe. And so we sort of settled on doing this empirically, which led to a medium level of violence in Honduras, but it was a really complicated exercise because none of the reports really detailed what had happened particularly. I mean, it was murky at the level of homicides, the greatest crime. It was even murkier when you talked about intimidation and then it was just completely unclear when you talked about sort of minor incidents, intimidation that it might happen over SMS or more minor things. So it was really hard to separate it out. You mentioned the security sector and I wanted to throw in one point on Honduras that I thought was interesting. And I think the way that the security sector either prevented or allowed electoral violence in Honduras highlights the fact that within these interventions you can have both positive and negative effects on electoral violence. So I talked a lot about targeted homicides and you could very well argue that a weak security sector allowed for these to happen in many ways in Honduras and in the year preceding the election. But there's also a really unique innovation in Honduras by which the entire police force comes under the command of the electoral management body 30 days prior to the election. And it's pretty unique. It takes the police force out of what has been a troublesome chain of command over many years. And when you talk to Hondurans about well, how was election day? They'll say it was peaceful, no problems. And it was the presence of the security forces that made it so that you certainly weren't going to go out and commit a crime on election day in Honduras because that would be sort of the one day that you might be likely to be apprehended. So that's just to highlight that within these interventions you can have both sort of positive and negative impacts on electoral violence. Please, Duncan. Yeah, I mean the delay question is a tricky one in Thailand because for the most part Thailand's elections have been premature. There's only one parliamentary term that ever went to its conclusion which was tax in Chinowat's first term from 2001 to 2005. Other than that, none of the elections that have ever happened in recent decades in Thailand have been on schedule. They have been part of a cycle that's been disrupted by military coups, mass protests, judicial interventions, internal collapse of coalition administrations and the like. So, but I would suggest that the premature nature or the failure to adhere to a systematic election timetable does seem to be a factor in Thailand's relatively high levels of election violence. We're now getting into a new situation though because the military hunter that took office in May 2014, if took office is the right words, is showing no particular enthusiasm for holding elections. So Thailand's may now become an example of election delay and we'll be able to see how that plays out. Happy to take some more questions, please. Third row. Good morning, everyone. My name is Emmanuel Davalillo and I'm an international electoral observer with the OAS. And for the past few years, I was assigned in Haiti where one of the most striking aspects of the whole prevention initiative was the gender dimension and how women experience electoral violence in a very specific way. So my question is, how does your PV model integrate the gender dimension? Thank you. Please, Serena. Excuse me. Elizabeth, I know you said that in Honduras, the violence was, you don't really disaggregate it between that and the criminal organizations. But I'm wondering with the others, how does the election that you looked at compared with what came before it and also what was the awareness on the ground within either the NGO community or the international community on what they were dealing with? Two good questions and I'll add a third, which comes from the overflow room, which I think is also relevant to all the presentations. How do you suggest getting the state on board into improving the quality of election management or improving the quality of security sector engagements? Seems to be two different types of categories out there where the state is unable to organize proper elections and is very eager to get support from outside. And in some situations, the state may be more unwilling to receive external supports from international actors. So how do you deal with that second type of category in a state like Bangladesh, for example? Any starters? Jeffrey? All right, so the gender dimension, I mean in some ways it relates to the earlier question on other ways to disaggregate this concept of violence and of prevention. You can think about types of violence who perpetrates it, where, right? Or different ways to understand it, but as well as the victim, right? And who are the victims of violence? I'm not sure, I think in Bangladesh, the gender component didn't necessarily emerge as a particularly important one. And I say that to say only that kind of within the data and the narrative of the violence, it was often kind of considered kind of an elite level phenomenon that was often perpetrated by youth wings that were mostly male. That said, women certainly were victims of this violence and I think it's important to think potentially next steps for this research is to how do we kind of tailor the framework to potentially better understand that gender dimension, right? And potentially the other cases could speak to that better than Bangladesh. In terms of the historical comparison in Bangladesh, this was the most violent election in its history by all accounts or at least by most accounts. And in terms of prevention, it was the weakest level of prevention. So within my case, while I didn't necessarily replicate the coding process, I looked back across election cycles and was able to kind of impressionistically look at what was the level of partisanship in the election commission, the level of monitoring and evaluation or monitoring programs and other things. And there was an interesting correlation and that the 2014 election cycle had the least amount of prevention tools historically and correlated with the highest levels of violence historically, right? And I felt that was a kind of interesting confirmation of the counterfactual that potentially a greater degree of prevention tools could in fact have made a difference. In terms of just briefly how to get the state on board, I mean, I think just speaking anecdotally on Bangladesh, the opposition made it easy for the state to kind of push forward, to be violent in turn and to push forward with a flawed election because the opposition engaged in a violent boycott of the election process, which is largely viewed as a mistake now by the opposition, right? They had kind of no kind of moral card to play in the process. And by violently opposing the election, the state was able to violently put down that protest and there was very little incentive for the state to come on board. So in some ways, it's a contextual issue as to how to get the state on board. Thank you, Geoffrey. And definitely in the next session after this, just go over, is there a lot of work on this social? Surely be able to tell a bit more about the gender component in terms of election violence. Duncan, please. Okay, well, just to continue on the theme of the 2016 referendum campaign and how that played out compared to the 2014 one, yes, there were these spectacular bombs that went off and five people were killed in election-related violence, so that's a lot less than the 30 in 2014. What we saw was that if the security sector, i.e. the military who are currently running the country, decide that they're going to make sure that a particular election process goes ahead, it can go ahead with relatively little disruption. Now, the problem there is that you have a very heavy-handed security sector where you've sort of banned people from having open discussions about the content of the referendum and the draft constitution and really, really suppressed a lot of political activity. But at the cost of suppressing political activity, it turned out that quite a lot of the violence could be removed. So clearly, if you could get the security sector to see it as being in its own interest to manage a free, fair, and much more satisfactory electoral process as a way of validating and legitimating their period of rule at the end of the military coup, that would be the way to proceed. If the military could be persuaded, it was in their interest to use their powers for good and not to get too carried away in trying to suppress dissent. You could actually see the possibility of a process. And you don't have, of course, with the military in control, the standoff between the military and the police, which was a big theme of the violence in 2014, because if you've got opposing elements of the security sector competing with one another, that is really a recipe for disaster. Elizabeth, any final thoughts on those questions? I think that certainly getting the state on board depends on whether they perceive it in their interest to carry out a free and fair election. But it doesn't hurt when you can get all key politicians in the country to speak with one voice, that a sort of transparent electoral management, that an effective security sector in the months preceding the election or the day of is in everyone's interest. So if you can have unified voices among the candidates who may be very much at odds with one another, I don't think that hurts, and that does add a degree of pressure. And people power matters also, right? If you can have citizens saying louder and louder and in a more unified voice that we want our security sector to protect us and then lead up to the election and the day of the election. And we want the electoral management body to be nonpartisan. If you can get people exerting pressure, whether it's through quiet campaigns on social media, whether it's in the streets, whatever is context specific and safe, it certainly depends, that doesn't hurt either. And I think that international pressure, and I know this is, it really depends case to case. Sometimes it can be deleterious, but I do think that international pressure, particularly from regional organizations, can be effective saying, you know, it matters. It matters to the rest of East Africa that you have a peaceful election, country X, because that's our regional reputation on the line. And finally, the voices of elder statesmen and elder stateswomen, whether in the country or in the region or elsewhere, can also be quite influential. Thank you, Elizabeth. We will take a short break now, but please don't go anywhere. We have five brilliant people still coming up in our next session. This final session will cover some new insights on effective practice, but also challenges and opportunities for prevention in a few of the upcoming elections. You'll be in the very good hands of NDI's Pat Merlot, who will facilitate this session. And I'm also particularly excited to hear from the newest addition to the USIP family, Mr. Borash Pokarel, former head of the election commission in Nepal, who will join that session as well with others that you see here on the slide. So join me in thanking the panelists, please, so we'll get in 50 minutes. So, yeah, I would imagine you're going to be talking to no one directly from the application at some point. But they're all very, our area is full of very nice people. They're the director and co-director of the application. They are super nice. It's worth going in and getting relaxed, and that's, uh, our area is, uh, isn't it relevant? That's good. That's great. Congratulations. Yeah, I wanted to take a real breath. Of course. Yeah, I was happy to do it. But that's not a lot of line of records. Well, I'm really looking forward to the real action film. Yeah, it'll be very interesting. Yeah, it'll be great. I'm happy to see you apologize for most positions. Yeah. Yeah, that's... Um, so I'm... Yeah, that's an interesting, I had that thought. Yeah, with IRI, because really, academically, you could be a program officer, but experience-wise, you're probably more of an associate level, you know? And so, it's hard to say where you fit within those two positions, you know? And so, the associate level, it's going to be, obviously, you know, it's a little lower level. It's a lot of kind of minutiae, logistical stuff, probably less travel than other kinds of positions. But I would imagine with your background, you could kind of just go for a ladder. I can deal with it, you know? I just see that experience as hard, so... Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, it's kind of just how DC works, right? I mean, you're going to have to start at the lowest level, pay your dues. I know. At least, there's not people who are like, why don't you intern? I'm like, I haven't tried your degree. Yes, exactly. I don't want to intern. A master's degree from an Ivy League University. I'm no longer an intern here. Like, let's come on. I don't care if I'm on the bottom or I'm just, like, having an intern. Yeah, no. Maybe I'll see you tomorrow. I'll be around, so maybe I'll catch you, probably walking by. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, definitely good luck. Are you coming to the next panel or are you headed back to... I'll probably be at the office. Yeah, I'm actually my direct boss. Will you be staying here? I will be, yes. Oh, I'm on the move it up. We're going to make sure that you've got us here. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, it's true. My stuff is there. My boss can be at the office. Gotcha. So, I have all day. And then I'm getting coffee with the photographer. Oh, cool. Yeah. Very nice, very nice. Oh, I didn't hear about her. Yeah. Yeah. You've gotten in the car, I think. Yeah, because she does African stuff. Yeah, she does. This is, like, the last thing that she did in Latin America. Now she does African stuff. Okay. Weird. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Good to see you. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, come get us your day. You too. And maybe we'll see you tomorrow. Yeah. Good luck. These two? Okay. As long as there's nothing there, I should say I would take these two for sure because the five seats in here are the panelists that will be up there for the next one. Definitely. No, no, it's that they're going to be up there. Oh, I see. So they will definitely actually be up there. Oh, these people, the coats. Yep. The two that have nothing there. Uh-huh. Okay. That is definitely going to be an opening. Yeah. What do you have? You falling off the edge? So the crisis, the limited time? The limited time? So many persons? Yeah. We'd warn you if it wasn't. It will be fine. Yeah, it will be fine. Brin Lane said she sent you something. Mark's very excited, so. The clean group coming back in. It's very good. Yep. Oh, I think we'll have another because there were still 25 people of the overflow that are interested in joining. Coming in. We'll definitely have a full run. Nice. Yeah. Welcome back. Congratulations, everybody, for being disciplined and timely and you had a 15 minute opportunity to escape. So since you didn't, I assume that means that you're alert and ready to continue the process. We're lucky to have our panelists here where we'll sort of open things up and anything goes in terms of the questions that might be asked. With two academics who are doing very important work in the field, Inkin von Borzerowski, who is at Florida State University, and Manuela Tragovoy-Glionti, who is at University of California Berkeley. Two places that I can't think of being better to situate yourself while you're looking at the problems of the world. And then we also have with us my colleague from the International Foundation for Election Systems, Jessica Huber, and my esteemed friend, Bukharaj Pakharal, who has already been called out by previous speakers, who has the distinction of not only running elections in Nepal, which were quite violent sensitive at the time, but who has worked internationally in a number of roles. And we are together in what Ambassador Moose mentioned, Kofi Annan's Electoral Integrity Initiative, which takes a global view of this, one part of which are so-called experts like ourselves, the worker bees, and the other part are senior personalities like Mr. Annan and others who together we collaborate to try to identify elections from two years out that may be violent sensitive or otherwise have a risk of taking things off the rails in what we might do through our informal collaborations to bring attention to those things along with some issues. So I'll not take much time and just reframe and maybe emphasize a couple of points along the way about violent sensitive elections. And the first point I would thank both Agnes and Elizabeth for noting for us that there is violence in society. It happens outside the election context and it happens within the election context. That violence sometimes has no political motivation and sometimes is politically motivated and motivated in different ways. So there's a diversity of ways to look at this that we should consider. And I thought I might just list a few of the elections that have been violent sensitive looking at last year. We've already mentioned Haiti, Jamaica also is a place where it's been a big problem at times. Gabon perended election violence on the large scale afterwards but there was a very significant threat that was there. The gubernatorial elections in Nigeria, whose states often have a bigger population in some countries in the world, there was a post-election violence sensitivity that's continuing to this day in Macedonia. And then we had cases where there traditionally has not been much election violence but the sensitivity levels were up in Zambia and in Ghana where I think the USIP can take some credit for the work of Ambassador Johnny Carson who I was privileged to be with during that election. And then we had an exceptional circumstance at the end of last year in the Gambia where we saw the mobilization of international forces crossing a border in order to help have the transfer of power that was willed by the people and to prevent violence in that circumstance. This year we're looking back at the Gambia, in fact next month in parliamentary elections. Iran's election presents a unique circumstance with the potential for violence as well of a different type. In May, Nepal's local elections has violence sensitivities as we will probably hear. The communal elections in Cambodia in June, a different set of circumstances. We'll be looking, of course, as we mentioned, at Kenya's elections in August and Honduras comes back into focus in November with the presidential election. And when we roll into next year immediately we're presented in South Asia with elections in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan where violence of course of different stripes are part of the milieu in each election. And that's not enough. We have the Democratic Republic of Congo which should have presidential elections next year and the threats of violence of different types that exist in DRC. Cambodia comes back around, Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone, there's violence sensitivity and of course Zimbabwe towards the end of the year which brings up a different set. So what I'm trying to get at here are a couple of points. I mean one is in each of the years I've listed fewer than 10 elections. I may have missed a couple, we could debate that. But there are in each year at least 50 towards 100 elections that transpire. It's a subset of elections but it's a set of elections that merit even further attention than it gets and how we have this discussion today and of course the book that USIP came out with I think is very valuable in looking at this. There are different types of actors and different forms of violence and different goals around electoral violence which I think we've touched on in the earlier part of the conversation. One set of course are violent extremists whose goal is destabilization and even state destruction. And if we look at Iraq as the example there that we had to contend with, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria and other countries and this even is a factor in Kenya. Typically we discuss the political antagonists and how their competition leads to electro-related violence where the object is to gain an electoral advantage. Typically by exploiting and mobilizing based on social cleavages which have underlying deep-rooted grievances often as in the case of Kenya and that leads to the elimination of candidates, the assassination of Benazir Buto or some of the examples that we heard of from Honduras that have come to mind, suppression of political participation which tips electoral balance, creating of no-go zones in terms of uneven political competition that can take place, the protest against electoral outcomes with a goal of changing those outcomes and even in some countries there's example of post-election violence in the form of retribution for how particular small villages or population segments voted. And the next set I think we have to consider which also was noted are the state actors themselves. Here the idea is to promote and perpetuate incumbency typically, making use of the police and security forces and mobilizing groups that support the grueling political parties to carry out violence with impunity that is no state action. And one of the things that I believe we'll get at on this panel is that you have to be able to have accountability, break impunity if you're going to address violence over a period of time in electoral cycles. Criminal syndicates, as we heard in the case of Honduras, are also particularly in the northern triangle of Central America but we could even look at the role of criminal syndication in the attempted coup in Montenegro following the last elections and some of the destabilization in the Balkans and indeed there's even some implications in Western Africa. And the last which is a little harder to get our fingers on, that is it's not so easy to personalize, comes from incitement via the media, particularly vernacular media, local media in some countries and incitement in social media. And in particular we've been able to track the effects in Facebook and Twitter, all of which require certain types of responses and understanding the goals, pre-election period affecting voting patterns. On the immediate post-election period as I mentioned changing the outcome of the official results and then retribution from there. The respondents in all of these, I think we've mentioned so far, probably a half dozen that have to be considered. They're the state actors in the case of the security forces, the election management bodies, and of course law enforcement prosecutions in the courts, which we'll get to in this panel. The election management bodies, the effectiveness of the election has been mentioned, but the transparency of that activity so that the public can see into it and have confidence which reduces volatility is a factor that we will address. And the special measures that election management bodies can take, such as convening liaison committees with political parties, Kenya, Ghana, and other places provide us good examples of how this has reduced volatility and potentials for violence over time. Among civil society, there are the peace campaigns that have been mentioned, but there also is the work on early warning that has been done not just in the election period but picks up in the election period. And the work of citizen election monitors in some 90 countries around the world in long-term observation of election processes working together with the early warning systems. And the work of citizen election monitors on election day, the so-called parallel vote tabulations, PVTs, for independently verifying the quality of the election day process and verifying whether the election results are something that can be trusted or not trusted, has had a big impact in reducing and mitigating potentials for violence in a number of countries. It's been mentioned, the work of diplomats, the resident corps, and special envoys, and preventative diplomacy. But international NGOs, we know the work of the Carter Center and other international observers in our governmental organizations, like the OAS and so on, the role that they play. And then I would not mention so far but end with the role of the political parties themselves. That is, parties have to invest in mitigating the potentials for violence and see the self-interest in that. And that will go to some questions of costs for violence and what can be done to make those costs higher and bring things down. But the liaison committees by the EMBs often help bring this about. The Nigerian example was mentioned earlier by Ambassador Moose, and there what we had was the EMB, Professor Jega, the head of the commission, working very hard to bring these parties together around a set of accords. The diplomats working hard to bring them together, the civil society interlocutors doing this, and then Kofi Annan and others played a role in bringing that cap to the signing of an accord, and then the monitoring of whether that accord was brought to bear, which also was done in Ghana in a very useful way. So there is a really wide variety of actors and a whole host of questions that I'm sure you're going to want to ask. And we'll move to the panel. I'll start by kicking you off in the same format. So let's start with our academic friends. And really the work that you've done that looks at the efficacy of the types of measures taken to prevent violence is where I'd like us to focus based on the work of the prior panels. And Incan, in particular, if we could start with you, to discuss the kinds of incentives and disincentives that have been brought about, such as sanctions, the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach, that's been taken on how to mitigate potentials for violence. All right. So just to clarify, do you want me to talk broadly about these incentives or about the findings and the research of Manuela and mine? What do you want to know? You can start broadly with the research and then bring us down to the specific focus. That would be good, because I'm going to ask Manuela some more specifics. OK, sure. So I have a book project underway where essentially the central tenet or the two parts of the argument are A, which I think is already widely coming out from the discussions right here. More credible elections are less likely to turn violent. And I think we can agree on most of that. It's not deterministic, but there's a strong undercurrent of this theme. And then the second argument is that international election assistance can help increase the credibility of elections and so also help reduce violence levels. Now sometimes, and I'll get to this in a moment, credibility of elections can also be reduced by international election assistance. And I'll mention that in a moment. But election assistance broadly, and I'm talking about international election observation by the NDI, by the Cotter Center, by the European Union, et cetera. And then secondly, I talk about technical election assistance. So IFOC's work, UNDP's work, voter registration, cleaning up the voter registry to delete ghost voters, to enroll all the young voters, voter education campaigns, just financing the election so it can actually happen, providing the ballots, the ballot boxes, providing for the logistics. So anyways, the argument essentially and the findings from the book are two-fold. So in the pre-election period, both international election observation and technical assistance, as I just described, can in general increase the credibility of the election and tends to reduce somewhat the level of election violence. And so here, what we're talking about in terms of the causal mechanism is one of credibility and accountability for the potential perpetrators. There's been a lot of work by Susan Hyde and others on how international election observation can detect and deter fraud and manipulation on election day. And so you can essentially sort of carry that over to election violence because you're also observing some things that are going out on the ground either directly or indirectly from the people and stakeholders that you speak with. And so if people are more accountable in the sense of that their actions might get called on and publicized in the election press statements that are being issued, then it has some deterrent power to hopefully keep them from engaging these things or at least do them in more subtle ways and in other times and directly in front of the election. So that's a pre-election story. It's mostly a positive finding, at least in my work so far, and this is kind of Latin America and Africa from 1990 to 2010 cross-nationally that observation on technical assistance can have a positive effect pre-election, reducing violence. After the election, there seems to be a differential effect in that technical assistance, again, can increase the credibility and capacity of the National Election Commission, reduce technical glitches, have a more smooth process, reduce the delay until votes or the results are announced and so help cut against rumors breaking out in this time period. Sometimes, so election observation then comes in and essentially not just observes but also assesses the election credibility, right? It's the quality. Is it good or is it bad? And it's a really important role. And so this is where sometimes, of course, when observers see manipulation that's systemic and that's widespread and it may have affected the outcome, they obviously come out and have to say this was a non-credible election. And so in those cases, under certain circumstances where I can highlight, it sometimes creates incentives for the electoral losers, particularly if it's very close elections but it was a lot of manipulation to challenge the election result. And so these challenges sometimes then lead to clashes on the streets, lead to security forces encountering with reactive violence and those desk and spiral, interactional physical violence. So there's some conditions on that but essentially there's a differential effect. Now, how can international actors try to change the incentives of folks on the ground to engage in election violence? So one of them coming out from the book has essentially increased the accountability of local actors to try to call them out on the actions and try to prevent them or deter them from doing certain things. I think another one is active mediation, both long-term before the election and it's sort of kind of not preventive but the retroactive diplomacy, right? That's happening there. High-level diplomats and ambassadors going in and try to talk to the parties in power because while it is youth leaders or the youth wings who are frequently perpetrating this on the ground, it's often the party system that's actually bringing this about. And so that's one. And then from the technical election assistance, I think it works a little differently in that you're essentially trying to prevent technical glitches to give more room for rumors that might not happen. Sanctions, I haven't particularly worked on sanctions yet, maybe Manarella can work on this a little bit more, but I haven't seen much effectiveness which sort of goes with the general sanctions. I'll think out, talked enough, I'll let it over. Yeah. I know, do you want to pick up and after you talk about the particulars of the findings of the study, maybe you could take us into some of your other work that relates to the role of ethnicity in bringing about both election violence and how you use addressing it to curtail election violence. So let me actually start exactly from what Incan has left. So in terms of incentives for what politicians, what international community and international actors may be providing against violence, I think the best incentive would be to make violence for politician custody. So one of the main factors that they're producing electoral violence, especially when it's strategically perpetrated by political elites is that it can probably pay off. So if implementing violence may be costly for them, and so in terms of losing legitimacy, losing actually political power, then in those cases, I think the international community impact could be particularly strong. And I'm thinking about the case of Malawi, which was the one that they studied for this book. And so it was very important that politicians were taken accountable by very legitimate both national and international organizations. So in those case, for them, implementing violence would have incurred the cost in terms of legitimacy and in terms of loss of political power. So that's probably one way in which we can think about providing incentives for not implementing violence. Regarding my work, so I think probably the ones that is particularly connected to this theme is the most recent collaborative work that I've done in Cote d'Ivoire. So I've been looking at the effect of civic education and peace messaging as well on people's attitudes and behavior in Cote d'Ivoire. So what I've done, and what is actually particularly important in this case is that Cote d'Ivoire is a context in which violence is widely anticipated. So violence did occur in the 2010 election, so people fear to start off with violence. So civic education and peace messaging have been identified as one of the main interventions to prevent this violence. So what I did with my collaborators at UC Berkeley was to implement a randomized control trial in which we partnered with one of the main civil society organizations in Cote d'Ivoire and we implemented a civic education treatment in Abhijan, which is one of the main series. We followed up with a survey. So we did survey people that were living in the neighborhood where the civic education treatment was implemented and also people living in neighborhood where the civic education treatment was not implemented. And so for this survey, we wanted to measure attitudes toward the electoral process. So what we did find was that attitudes toward the electoral process and in terms of confidence toward electoral process, fear that violence could be violent, differed significantly between people that were exposed to the civic education treatment and people that were not. The interesting point was that actually the direction of this impact was different. So the people that felt that election could be more fraudulent were those that were exposed to the civic education treatment and in fact the people that fear violence the most were the ones that were living in the neighborhood where the civic education treatment was implemented. So now the question is obviously why this happened. So it is possible that since the context of Cote d'Ivoire and Abhijan in particular was violent, then possibly the civic education treatment was reminding people of the potential for violence. It is also possible that people were perhaps introduced to talking about politics with our agents so they were much more honest and straightforward in explaining their own opinion in the survey. So we're still working on that and I think that this is actually particularly interesting because it may say something about how we design civic education programs because the way in which we implement them on the ground may actually make a difference in how people are perceiving them and the extent to which they may fear violence in those elections. If you want me to say very briefly on Burundi or at least in ethnicity. So my work in Burundi was on the causes and the consequences of electoral violence during the 2010 elections. And I think this connects with the discussion that was done by the ambassador Yassim on Iraq. So he made a really interesting point in which competition within communities, within ethnic communities is as prominent as competition between ethnic communities, which is exactly what I found out in Burundi. So Burundi is an ethnically divided society. Competition between Hutu and Tutsi was particularly strong and it led to a very long civil war. But what was evident in the 2010 election was the violence was really taking place within these ethnic groups. So it was members of the main Hutu political parties that were fighting against each other. So it was mostly political competition for power rather than ethnic competition for power. They was leading the game in that sense. And so, and I think it was interesting to see the conditions under which this happened within these districts as well. Prefacing my next question, I want to thank Immanuel for raising the gender issue because from all of the various types of electoral violence, no matter who the perpetrator is, and no matter what the goal is in the listing in my introduction, each and every one has a gender aspect to it. That is how it targets women, how it affects women as candidates, as voters, as electoral workers, as observers and so on, and how the response comes back is different. And so this is something that our colleagues at IFAS have done really strong work on and we at NDI collaborate quite a bit. I won't give a pitch for NDI on this because I want to hear directly from Jessica and how you would elaborate these factors for us. Sure, thanks Pat. Well, I was glad to hear this question come up in the last session and it's certainly something that colleagues at IFAS, NDI, academia around the world are grappling with which is this issue of what about violence against women in elections. And so what IFAS set out to do was to look at the typology, the definition of electoral security and see if we could apply a gender lens. And what we found is that we needed to expand our traditional understanding of election violence to make sure that we included, of course, both what we would call more public examples of violence. We've talked a lot about assassinations and protests, these things that are visible, that are verifiable and that are things that can report on, but what about private violence or violence that isn't physical, such as intimidation, things that might happen behind closed doors may happen where it cannot be verified because it happened between two people in a place that was private. And so that's what IFAS set out to do is to expand our understanding of electoral security, to apply it to conversations that we were having with a lot of people really. This is one of these things where I use it as an opportunity for advocacy among colleagues here, but when you get down on the ground, women are like, well, thank you for finally bringing this up. There is an element of relief and validation that this is something that is of deep concern to us. We see this, of course, with public figures, women who are candidates or elected officials who are under attack, not necessarily because of their ideology, but simply because they're women in politics, we see online violence, which is something that NDI and IFAS are now partnering on to expand understanding of how this impacts women in particular. And so maybe to give you an example from a tech, since there's a lot of technical election people in the room, one of the examples we have is so we know that if a poll worker is threatened by a party organizer to say, you must stuff the ballot box, right? This is something that we can sort of capture in our existing understanding of electoral security. But what happens if that poll worker finished her training for the day and went home and her husband said to her over dinner, by the way, the political party came to us today and said, you need to go back tomorrow and stuff that ballot box. And if you don't, I'm gonna get in trouble, so therefore you're gonna get in trouble and the threat of perhaps domestic violence or divorce. One of the things we were hearing a lot about is spousal abandonment as being a legitimate concern and threat, financial violence being a concern and threat. And so right now, we would all agree that that certainly sounds like electoral violence to us, but we haven't necessarily set up reporting mechanisms or definitions to really allow that to be counted among the concerns related to election violence. And the other point I would just add, perhaps before turning it back over, is just that why we've talked a lot and Pat's named a number of elections that are happening coming up that we're concerned about that are being flagged in terms of potential for violence. The other thing that we have to sort of push forward with understanding violence against women in elections is that this can happen and does happen in every single context, right? So it doesn't matter if we're going to see a failed electoral process or riots in the street, we have to address this concern of violence against elections, even in places where we are not expecting violence. So while I am also and our team here that's preparing for elections in Kenya is concerned and we have extensive gender programming throughout that mechanisms that we're partnering again with NDI on, I've also been to Sri Lanka in December because they have elections coming up in July, local elections that nobody's talking about in terms of election violence per se, but you do have a gender quota going into effect for the first time in that country. So we're moving from 1.8% women as elected local officials to 25% in one election. And so we're watching that very carefully and our team there is very concerned that this issue may be relevant, so thanks. That's great and I hope the start of what will be a more fulsome conversation on this point. And Boharaj, I know that your work here is going to focus on preventative diplomacy. I think in some ways, Anken's elaboration of findings from the studies lets you off the hook a bit on that front. So, and I did not pay her in advance for what she had to say about all of that. So maybe what I'll turn to you as someone who was responsible for an election in a country where violence was a real threat, it had been an ongoing threat for some time outside the elections and the entire political circumstances and where you had to manage the election body and at the same time build relationships with the security forces and somehow try to help the outsiders contribute in a way that was meaningful rather than a way that was a distraction. So I'm going to put you on the spot to talk about how your experience evaluates the role of the outside interventions. Before saying something about the question, can I ask one thing that how many of you in this hall have been engaged in election management? I serve few hands, thank you very much. Actually, it's a very difficult task. Saying and doing in the election is very, very, I have seen very big gap. Now, I'll focus to my own, my case from Nepal so that it becomes very much clearer. The time when I was asked to conduct the election, just we had this peace process, just the peace process was there. Nothing was at hand, zero level. The previous commission was kicked out because of certain credibility issues and there was no legislation, there was nothing. What electoral system, where, when, what to do? Nothing was there in the table. So, I had to start from the zero level and that zero level was a big challenge to me but that was a big opportunity. So, as the election management, being the chief election commissioner, I try to grab how I can use that opportunity best for the country. So, just giving few examples of that. One of the major factor of our conflict was the, you know, the discrepancy in the representation. Just, I will give you one figure, you know. We have two sub-sector population with 13% each. One population in the past was representing about 45% in the parliament and another ethnic group with the same figure, they were at the zero level, was that the justice? That was the biggest issue to me. So, I try to see from that angle and then I try to, you know, use the international capacities and international experiences that how I can address my country, you know, to resolve that issue. That's the way whether it is good or bad, there is a debatable issues but we introduce the quota system and that quota system, at least, you know, in the past, woman representation in the parliament was less than 5%. That policy bring 33% plus women in the parliament. That's the way how, you know, I try to capitalize whatever the international practices are there and how that can benefit to my country. Secondly, you know, the main, whatever being in the election side, my own experience is that the, how much the election bodies are more, you know, are more flexible, more, you know, transparent, all those things. So, based on my previous experiences, working within Nepal, working with the government, working in the international side, you know, I've totally focused on, you know, how to make my, you know, how to build the constitutional credibility once if I have the credibility, people will trust me, whatever I say. So, from the very beginning, from my first day, the time I make, you know, my decision, my first decision was to make all the commissions, proceedings open to all the press. So, I continued, you know, dozens of, even a day from the second day, I started consultation process with all, political parties, civil society, NGO, ethnic committee, everyone in the society who are available, within the three months, I had around 150 consultation at that time for meeting. All they were covered by the media, and that created a certain level of environment that the people were talking, oh, these guys, they would do something. We have to trust them. And the second thing, how, you know, all these were based on the international practices that I had learned. And the other thing that I have to share with this gathering is that I asked my commissioner because, you know, my, from my perspective was that, managing the election itself was a bigger challenge. Secondly, even if I do the election, if my 100% election is perfect, if the results are not accepted, just few months earlier, I had seen the Kenyan case, I was very much concerned on that. So my whole focus was that how I can create an environment so that, you know, the results will be acceptable. And for that, you know, the main, what I did was, you know, how to show the people that this commission is trustable, trustworthy, credible. And I asked, I never, I didn't allow my commissioners or any people from my commission to visit any government ministers, government offices. Instead, I invite the ministers in my office. I invite the cabinet in my office and all those things were televised. I asked all the political leaders. Even that time, he was the president of the country. But being the one of the political party leader, he had to come several times in my office and all those people, people who are seeing through the camera and then they trust, you know. So that's the way how, you know, we can build the credibility, the consultation, transparency. And if, you know, we can use those tools whenever I listen about the election, you know, I have been engaged in various part of the election. And whenever I go there and whenever, you know, I try to communicate as a peer communicator, these messages, sometimes, some places, they work and sometimes that didn't work. Just I'm seeing the Jeffrey face, you know, in Bangladesh. In 2008, I was engaged. And in 2013, also I was engaged. 2013, the commission was more accommodative. The environment was more, you know, more accommodative. The listen, many of the tools, they work. However, in 2013, there was another dimension who did not, he did not disclose, I have not disclosed about the regional dimension. Because of that dimension, none of the tools, they work. Even because of that, everybody was so much, you know. Nobody wants to listen to anything. Whatever they wish, whatever they want to get the result, they would like to do that. So that's the tendency. So, you know, how I'm seeing is that, how, you know, there are the best practices internationally, but what I have to ask with this, you know, forum is that there are, you know, some gap in the information, knowledge, all the local level in the community, people cannot understand whatever the research outcomes are. Number two, how they are communicated to the communities. What are the languages? How much the people can follow, you know, all those things. How much they are, you know, supported by the contextual environment. And sometimes, if, you know, without having, just I'm not blaming to anyone, but just I'll cite one example and I'll be off. You know, I was in such a crisis, you know, that how to manage, how to make the success because I was looking for the painkiller. I was trying to get anyone's advice. And sometimes, you know, what type of people who are coming to me that like now, I have also wear the tie, you know, but, you know, people very fresh, very talented, they have very, they know all how to, you know, use all these technologies and all those things. And then just the land, my country, few days earlier, and they come to my, and they were asking, Mr. Pokrel, yes, these are the solutions. You have to do this, we did this here in that country, we did this in that country. So these are the solutions that they can, but why don't you, you know, apply these solutions? And then my response to them and even the international, you know, high-level figures who were visiting that time were that plans, see, this is my head. I have already lost my, half of my, you know, here, my head, still I have not understand my country. Now, we are here seven days, and you know, my country, thank you very much. You know, sometimes these are things, you know, how the message are communicated, where it is communicated, what the message, what languages are, you know, so there are multiple things. So thank you, Pat, for giving a little bit longer time. No, no, I think what you've elucidated a number of things that we want to get at. And part of it was you added a term that I think is critical for us to embrace, and that is trust, there's public trust in the institutions and the processes that you talked about. We have addressed in our prior conversations about the efficacy, the effectiveness of the election management body, the security agencies and so on, but if that's not done in a way that's inclusive as you describe, and in a way that has public outreach as you describe, then we're really not building the kind of trust that helps to bring down the potentials for violence. I think that's something else that's worth highlighting. I'd like to take one more question and just address it generally to the panelists, and that is, among the other things that you've witnessed from your own personal experiences engaging in quite a number of countries on different continents, is there something about the domestic capacities that should be built that the international community often overlooks? We know about international observers, we know about assistance to the Election Commission, but do you see other gaps in countries that might be useful to address, to highlight in a circumstance like this for people who make policy and who will affect policy and actions in many countries around the world? I'll try some. Is there a gap? I think there's already a lot of things that are being done. I'm not sure these will be particularly innovative, but I think from the international election observation side, there's usually long-term observers that are in-country for several months, sometimes even a year out. I know NDI in Liberia currently has like 14 months even before the election. So I think for the short-term observers, it's often really hard to reach far ends of the country, so particularly in a place like Liberia where there's really bad infrastructure, rainy season, hardly roads back into the rural areas. So there's a challenge there in terms of infrastructure of actually getting to the places where they need to go. And this is where I think the capacity building for domestic election observers is really important because they actually spread within even the rural, rural areas where it would take internationals three days to get, and so they can't because they would miss their flight back, right? It just doesn't work that way. So spreading out more across the country, I think the other one that's currently a gap at least in terms of what's mostly in terms of election assistance, although it does exist in terms of conflict prevention, is really local level community building. So if they are in a situation where the electoral court, like the weekly institutionalized context, right? The electoral courts, even the judicial system is very weak. There's little enforcement, little accountability for the perpetrators, and the police is really weak, maybe even under heroic assumption that all the police actually do wanna protect people equally, right? There's capacity dimensions that maybe they don't get paid. Well, if you don't get paid, you have to resort to other things to still guide your family. So if you can't build these institutions from the top down, these local level community building structures where you try to have interactions between the police, neck magistrates, local chiefs, local traditional leaders, representatives on a community level, to try to protect these communities from the bottom up, right? Build these networks long before the, and that's not where the painkiller comes in, right? If you do this just two weeks before, that's the long-term trust. You can't pull that off. And so I don't think it's currently, at least the way I've read about it, seen as an election programming is usually like long-term conflict building, but I think pulling these very elements into mainstream election programming would be a contribution. And I'm sure you all are working on this somewhere, but yeah. That is great, thank you. Does someone else want to pick up? And maybe even we could highlight the question about electoral justice, which is an area that it seems to me, from my experience, there's an awareness, but there's not a great depth of work on electoral justice. So I won't elaborate, but I'll just throw that out as well. Okay, great. In the first question, in my own personal experience and the data from Nepal, it shows that whenever we talk about electoral violence, I'm focusing on that. 64% perpetrators and 75% victims, they belong to the political community, whether they are the candidate within the party or the refrigerator. So depending on the country context, until and unless, again, and why I'm taking this point is that until and unless we can better prepare our political actors who are the main players of the game, it is very hard. So that how to make a connection or investment to sensitize them that elections has to be won by any means. So how to content, how to, that is one of the big area I have seen the gap nationally at the international level. So on the issue of domestic capacity in relation to violence against women in elections in particular, there's a lot to be done here in terms of getting out of our silos for response. So we have electoral security stakeholders that are traditionally election officials, security sector, these types of individuals, civil society of course, but one of the things we've started doing is talking to the women's movement in country and in particular the gender-based violence community, those who respond to and aim to prevent gender-based violence. But I will say that when this conversation happens as we're beginning to talk about it, we have sort of blank stares from both communities. So when we go into election commissions, they're saying, what, why are we talking about this? Why would we be focused on this tiny little piece of the problem, right? So that's one election commissioner asked me that question. He said, the whole house is on fire. I don't sort of have time for this. So we tried to unpack that a little bit and explain that this is part of the bigger concern and indeed and in fact, a root cause. And then on the gender-based violence community, I mean this is completely new for them to be thinking in terms of sort of where their cases might be coming from. And so there's an oftentimes sort of, again, sort of moment of blank stare but by the end of it nodding heads and saying, yes, we think we could partner with an organization like IFAS or local partners on a hotline because we get domestic violence survivors in calling us all the time and perhaps that's the way they could finally report on domestic violence. And then on domestic violence as it relates to politics or elections. And then just a quick thing on impunity. I think we could probably talk all day on that question. But again, if we've missed sort of entire incidents of violence because we haven't defined them in this way, of course we have women that are saying, I don't wanna be a part of that process. I don't want to participate in a place where there's complete impunity for the types of violence I might experience in that process. And we do believe that this is in fact and indeed a barrier to women's participation, both watching what happens to public figures, to women in particular, if they engage in the process but also saying, well, what happens to me if I'm threatened in these ways and it doesn't seem that there's any chance that there will be justice for me. So that's definitely a concern that we're adjusting, trying to. Sure, I will just add just one more thing which is connected to accountability to security forces, the concept of electoral justice. So it seems to me that one potential gap that may be worthwhile to address is how to involve citizens. And when I say citizens, I'm really specifically thinking about borders into the electoral process and into keeping the government accountable for any forms of violence, for any forms of injustice. So this is really coming from a few observations. For instance, in the project on civic education in Côte d'Ivoire, it was most likely a top-down process. So we were teaching people which were the rights we were teaching people that violence was not acceptable and so on and so forth, but we were not involving them into taking actions and keeping politicians accountable. So probably having a more active way of involving borders into the electoral process may be helpful. In Malawi, I saw exactly the same thing. So the Electoral Commission was very transparent but citizens didn't know about all the rules that were available to them. They basically didn't know how to file a complaint and so on and so forth. So basically they were very resigned and so perhaps pushing for a more active participation of borders into the promotion of electoral justice, into accountability of governments, it may be something that could probably produce nice efforts, I think. Let's move to your questions. My name is Henry Atem, student with the University of Minnesota during elections management. My question looks at the immediate impact of electoral violence in the preceding elections. It may take impact on the vulnerable and minority population because much is talked about, political party leaders, civil society organizations, but not much is focused on the minority. We made mention of the women, but what about the minority population like tribes, you know, Christians in some cases, like what's happening in Nigeria. Our side, Cameroon, as I come from Cameroon. Presently we are facing a very peculiar kind of violence are the Anglophones and the Francophones. Cameroon has eight regions, 10 regions, eight French, two English, the reverse of Canada. Now the Anglophones are protesting, saying they have been marginalized. And they are even calling all the elected officials to resign from government and come back to their regions. It is alleged that some groups in the Anglophone region want a boycott in the elections in 2018. So my question is, what tool, what best practices can we put in place so that even the Anglophones who are settled in Francophone regions feel comfortable to go out and vote? Also I happened to have observed elections in 2011 in Ivory Coast, and I met about six women who voted during the election between Alison Watera and Babu. And I asked them why they were not going to the post to vote. And they said, what happened? They didn't want to witness it. So the immediate impact of electoral violence in the preceding elections is more on the voters than even the political leaders. So my question is, how can we mitigate that to make sure that that lady who has a scar on her leg from the previous elections is able to go to the polls in the preceding elections? Thank you. Thank you. Let's take three questions and then we'll have the panelists in the floor. In my own research, I definitely believe and have found that the credible elections and electoral institutions have an impact on pre-imposed election violence. So if we backward engineer that, if a government is not allowing technical assistance to come in, say, IFAS, for example, just spitballing, come in before an election, say in August, what does that foretend for that election in terms of pre-imposed election violence? And the answer to that might suggest that the political will of the government is a necessary but insufficient condition for pre-imposed elections. Easy question. Thank you, sir. Let's go up towards the back. I'll come back for you in the next round, sir. Was there someone in the back besides? Ben, you all go ahead. So very briefly, with regards to those cases where we have countries in which peacekeeping operations or large-scale interventions of this kind are actually largely responsible for the logistics and everything that has to do with the actual holding of elections, how is it possible or would it be in the panel's opinion to make sure that there is a transfer of that capacity to address these issues of prevention of electoral violence, which is normally seen as one of the tasks that these intervention missions have to undertake but that the state forces may not be so well-inclined to? Thank you. Your question relates somewhat to Stephanie's question, I think. And, Sharon, why don't you go ahead? We'll take yours so we don't be sure we don't lose it. We'll take four. She doesn't have a mic. Maybe she can, if you could... She used one of the other ones. It's about the BVR kits in Kenya. Yeah, so at what point in the next election do the international observers come and follow up on the recommendations they made in the previous election? Because right now the elections are in August. The BVR kits have been bought. That is not enough. You need to train workers also, the poor workers on the ground. So what is the time limit? Or at what point do you come and who is to be blamed in such a situation? So let's take the political will question first. And that is just to combine and restate the political will of the government to muster the resources to address in advance those factors in a given country that contribute to potentials for violence. And in some sense I think this relates also to the role of international missions and how they might contribute to mustering that will. And then we'll come back to the follow up question. I think that's a separate question. Can we do that? I'll take a step. So yes, so strategic selection is huge, right? So the findings that I was sharing from the book project are essentially conditioning on are you likely or not to even have that type of intervention and then controlling for, so this is all very statistical lingo and I apologize, but essentially controlling for your likelihood and your willingness and the ifes or whoever to actually give you that sort of assistance. What's the effect of this assistance on your level of lecture amount? The question of strategic selection is very important. It's a different paper of mine that I've also published, which I didn't really fish in. Because it's just on essentially the problem here is there's a lot of work on democracy assistance and whether it works or not. Few people have actually that who gets this to start with and so there's two strategic selection of assistance. One is by the government to ask for kind of election observation or technical assistance or whatever they want. And then one is for ifes or USA to even make the money available, right? Or NDI to then apply and carry out that project. And so these are sometimes not necessarily independent like they can arise from a domestic context where UNDP works very closely with the stakeholders in place to then generate the request. Oftentimes it's very separate processes but there's two strategic decisions and so they usually need to be taken into account. Now specifically, yes, there is a number of countries which I think we can also, Zimbabwe would be one, think of where those sorts of international election assistance projects are not lit and for the specific purpose of, well we actually do not wanna have international election observers telling us what we just did. And so there's definitely a strategic selection problem of certain governments knowing the decision of how much do I wanna manipulate, how much do you manipulate violently and how much do I want the international scene that is connected, right? And so that certainly has some implications that are in there. Continue it. Well also it depends on what type of governance it is. So but without the strong political will, nothing can work, not only it. Because if the gate is closed, how we can do, so in that case, how that gate can be opened, we have to use those tools. Probably I think in that case, though it did not work in the past in some countries like in the Zimbabwe, there is the role of the international community and the diplomacy, where who can influence, where who, how, you know, those factors as they will come in our understanding. And secondly is serious about the observation mission. One thing is from the observation community, it needs to be made clear to the countries, to the people population that the observation mission, that does not go with their own wish. They, you know, depending on the country context, most of the country, they have to request, on the request and they will go. So if the countries make a request on time, if they open the door on time, and they can land earlier. So that is one point to what I have. The second thing, the observers report has been very much instrumental in improving the process in many part of the world that I have seen. The observers, you know, if they have used the long-term, certain observers and give the, you know, list what are the complications, what are the areas that has to be improved and how that can be improved, something like that. Those reports can be in a document and that will help in reforming the process. And even some observers, they make that, you know, the condition to send another observation whether you have met their conditions or not. So it's all depends on the country context, how they would like to use it. This comes back to Sharon's point about follow-up. So I think what we've got here is there is an interface between the domestic will of those who have the power to act and the will of the international community and the interface between those wills can be more productive in some countries than others. If we're talking about Robert Ugabe, there might be less productivity in the interaction than if we're talking about some other country and somewhere else. And then there's the relationship between civil society and governmental actors, both domestically, those civil society actors who can raise the issues, who thus raise the stakes to help create more will and awareness of the need to act earlier the better. And the same thing in the international community, there are international voices that can help the donor agencies, the diplomats and so forth to act. And in fact, you know, I would say just from the narrow perspective of elections, there is probably three networks that are useful. There are the citizen election observers in so many countries who often take on the follow-up activities on recommendations and advocacy for electoral reform, including in the arena of factors that lead or mitigate violence. There's the network of international observers that are based around the declaration of principles for national election observation that is an ongoing activity among the main organizations that talk about which countries are you going to go to or how are you going to do the follow-up and there's an accountability that has to be improved there. And then there's a chapeau. There are things like the Kofi Anon Foundation's international electoral integrity initiative, which brings together people who can sometimes influence decision makers in countries. And we can tap people like Ambassador Moose and others who have an ability to talk to governments like this government about what they do. So there's a dynamic here that doesn't always work so well and sometimes does work much better. And if it's the DRC, it's much more complicated to get traction than it is if we're talking about Haiti or some other sort of place, that sort of editorializing and add to that. But so let's turn, because we're coming close to the point at our, to the question about targeted communities. When there are specific subsets of communities that experience violence, minorities, religious minorities in some countries, ethnic or tribal minorities in some countries, and past violence, which has been perpetrated, which may be based on deep root causes and so on, the effects of those on upcoming elections, what can be done to help raise the comfort level in those population segments, I think that is something worth commenting on. And I know that there are people on this panel who have insights to offer. Thank you. No, I think it's a great question and I think it's exactly the question that we were trying to look at in Côte d'Ivoire. So if we have a history of electoral violence, what kind of intervention can we do so that people are incentive us to participate? I do think that probably there are two actions to take, one will be in the short term and the other one will be in the longer term. So in the short term, I think that probably one of the most important one will be to ensure security, so that these targeted communities are in fact able to go out and vote without fear of repercussion. Now, how easy it is to do that? That probably, it's harder than saying the team words, but that would be definitely probably the most effective way of ensuring participation. On the other side, in the longer term, I think that working on creating norms of tolerance, norms of non-violent resolution and disputes, abiding to legal way of conflict resolution, electoral conflict resolution, it may be particularly relevant, but this is probably a longer term effect. So when I say that people that were exposed to civic education campaign, that were in fact raising the awareness of the possibility of violence and basically encouraging people to basically get out and despite the violence, then so the fear of those people was higher, right? So those people fear that they were more likely to be targeted by political intimidation and political violence, and they also feel that it was not safe to vote. But on the other side, exactly in these communities, we didn't see any differences in the intent of voting. So basically people that were surveyed in the communities that received the civic education campaign and in the community that did not receive the civic education campaign showed exactly the same intention to vote. So they said that they were as likely to go to vote, which is quite interesting because we would expect that if they're afraid of voting, then they wouldn't go out and vote. And on the other side, the actual turnout was much higher in places that were treated with civic education. So I think it's not an easy question. So in a way, we may be priming some psychological effects, but in the longer term, behavior may actually differ. And I don't know if you want to add anything. Sure, I mean, I think to take them in a minority population question, when we were looking at the issue of violence against women in elections, we were asking some of the same questions you were, which is really I think about how do we help people access justice, access these mechanisms. And so our assessment tool that we have in our violence against women in election framework does look at women as not a monolith. So we do address issues of ethnicity, of gender identity and sexual orientation, et cetera, because we do want to sort of unpack issues related to violence against women in elections in all contexts and all types of women. We are already identifying socioeconomic factors that depend on women who are candidates versus women who are voters, et cetera. But I think that issue of sort of asking that expanded understanding of what we mean by electoral security that incorporates the experiences of all people who are attempting to access the electoral processes is a similar one that we could build on. And then I think in terms of response, one of the things that we've thought about in terms of our monitoring tool and looking at ways that women could communicate, again, I think the supply is not perfectly to minority populations is we were so focused on verification and making sure that we could proceed with a particular case that we were missing opportunities to have self-reporting or these hotlines that we are coming up with, or we even thought about, okay, women, and this, again, in some cases could apply to minority populations, don't have the same levels of freedom of movement, but we do know women in a particular setting have access to health centers on a regular basis. So what if we went there? That's not something that electoral security people are necessarily considering, but it's where the people are that we're trying to reach as well. So kind of coming up with ways that we can access those isolated or minority populations is definitely a part of what we were thinking in terms of the gender perspective. And then just to say that I think then, if we can sort of begin to look at those avenues, we may not be able to deal with impunity in the moment, but we can identify trends for prevention. So we can identify that this is the place where these incidents were happening and in the future we can deploy boxes in places where we know women are gonna be or minority populations, the call lines, these types of things that maybe will help mitigate or prevent future incidents of violence. And exactly on this point, and I think it's probably a more academic suggestion, but we always, I mean, we do know that minorities sometimes and people that were affected by violence do not participate in election, but they're also big groups of opposition supporters and human rights activists and civil society activists that do participate despite being threatened by that. So, and that's actually one of the things that we do not know among the academic and petitioning communities. So just by looking at those communities and trying to understand which are the factors, the individual level factors, the community factors, the legal factors that are basically driving them to taking actions and standing up against the government, that may perhaps allow us to devise better ways of ensuring that everyone in the minority, even those that perhaps are not as brave, may be able to participate as well. So I think that it really highlights a gap in the literature, in the academic literature that I think would have really big implication for policy in this sense. Thank you, I think that's both very important points. And since I want to respect and not abuse your rights and let this run over too long, I'll ask the panelists, if any of you have some urgent points that have not been made that we must make before we close and noticing that no one has raised their hand, I do think that the- I actually want. Please, great. There's a lot that we don't know about election violence. And I know this is one of the questions you were kind of too short on, Asim. There is a data problem here. There is an attitude that changed, but behavior really does not change. There is a data problem of where election violence occurs because most of them take them from media-based newspaper records, which I know it's data that's posted online. It doesn't mean it's good, all right? There's a lot there that I don't think we capture in data sets, or that we know about, particularly in the further remote areas, where no one self-east of Liberia when we're going in, where no one will know what's even happening there, observers will not be there. There's issues about who the likely perpetrators are, what their dynamics are about where they go, why they go, target certain communities, how they choose between violence and fraud and vote buying. There's a lot of stuff that we don't know. So if anyone's interested in working on election violence, please let us know. I also want to briefly highlight that, so Jonas and I, this project in Liberia and Kenya tries to get at some of these very questions, how they choose also between different types of violence that's going, is it hate speech, is it intimidation, or is it, you know, physical attacks, like what is being done if it is intentional, right? So, yes, there's a lot to learn. That is beautiful. I mean, I do think that what we're addressing now is where do we go from here? This conversation with USIP has really contributed so much to over the years, and with this particular project, there are ways we have to move forward with it. And I do think that this point about, in a sense where there is violence with impunity, there will be continuing violence, and in fact, there may be escalating violence. Transgressions that are not answered are invitations for further transgression. So how we build accountability, one of the areas of course being electoral justice, another area being what are the domestic actors who the intermediaries, the peace commissions, the religious leaders, even the trade unions and so on, that can be activated along these lines, including community level mediation and so forth, over a long period have to be addressed. And I think, from my point, one other thing that hasn't been mentioned, we haven't explored much today, is the role of media and social media, and particularly in incitement to violence. And alongside of this, we have to note a new factor in the last few years, a couple of years at, as engaged, and that is that it doesn't just come from within a country, that there are now also hostile international election interventions that are done in ways that study communities, identify cleavages, and drive polarization. And we can look at this particularly in Ukraine, where that has driven towards violence. It is a factor. There are places where violence is not the issue, as we've experienced in so many other countries around the world, including this one. But that has to do with issues about how information is transferred, and how information is spread. And studying that just in the way that, Inkin, you talked about how we really have to look at population dynamics. And this is part of looking at electoral violence in the broader question of electoral integrity as we move forward. And I think looking at fake news, real news, where do you go for sources that exacerbate problems, or sources that help mitigate problems, is part of not just the lexicon now, it's really part of our work. And our responsibility calls on us to figure out ways to add this to our work. So I'd like to end by first thanking USIP for making this all possible and bringing us all together, and thanking all of the panelists for taking the time to come and contribute your findings and your perspectives and insights. And most of all, for thanking all of you for taking the time for creating the audience, for which if there was none, none of us would be here. Thanks very much.