 Good morning, good morning, good morning. I'm Jill Welch and as Vice President for External Relations here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, it is my great pleasure to welcome you here today during International Education Week, which has been celebrated since the year 2000, sponsored by the Department of Education and the Department of State. Today's event is in partnership with an organization that's very near and dear to my heart, NAFSA Association of International Educators, and this is a collaboration that has been going on between USIP and NAFSA for many years, so we're most pleased to welcome you here today in the audience, as well as those of you who are joining us from online. I believe some of the participants joining us from online include Kennesaw State University in Georgia, with whom USIP has a longstanding relationship, Salisbury University in Maryland, and Dr. Abdullah's class in conflict and cross-cultural conflict and intercultural conflict at Temple University in Pennsylvania, among others. So welcome everybody. For those of you who may be joining us for the first time at the U.S. Institute of Peace, you've joined us at a particularly wonderful milestone in our history. We're celebrating 35 years of making peace possible, and we were founded originally by Congress in 1984 when some dear World War II veterans in the U.S. Congress wanted to make sure that there was a way forward in peace and conflict resolution and that there was a study of how we might prevent violent conflict in the future. So Ronald Reagan signed the Act in 1984, and we became the nation's national independent non-partisan institute with a simple but very bold mission to serve the American people and the government to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict abroad. We were originally founded as the idea of a peace academy, and that history actually goes back to George Washington, who in his last address to Congress called for an Academy of Peace and an Academy of War. And the Academy of War began just a few years later with what became West Point, and 200 years later we finally have the Institute of Peace. And what we were originally doing and still do was to be devoted to the study and scholarship of conflict resolution. But as the world evolves, so did we, and today we continue to focus on research and analysis, but we also work on the ground in fragile and conflict-affected areas. In these places, we train peace builders and build up local capacity in some of the world's toughest places. Lastly, we convene the world's greatest minds to discuss the greatest challenges the globe is facing, as well as to develop global solutions. So our priority in the first decade was to partner with academic institutions to develop the field of peace building across the country, and at that time that really didn't exist. So over our 35-year history, we've given 967 grants to colleges and universities throughout the United States and around the world, and we've hosted more than 150 senior fellows from colleges and universities. Through our Peace Scholars Program, we've honored a total of 331 awards to PhD students at 83-based universities, U.S.-based universities, in support of their dissertation work, and these peace scholars and these fellows, many of them have gone on to strengthen the field of conflict resolution and peace studies and make significant contributions. So with these long-standing ties between USIP and academia, we have now about 400 colleges and universities around the world who offer peace studies programs, and students across the United States can now major in peace studies or conflict resolution. We also have a global campus, and that is available to any citizen, any student. It's online, and so you can access our courses, the one called Introduction to Peace Building is our most popular, and we have a number of courses there on our global campus to offer scholarship and learning. So we started with this academic focus, and then as the world evolved, so did we, and from the depths of the Cold War to the post-Core landscape, we now see historic levels, the refugees, violent extremism, environmental shocks, and extreme poverty, providing new challenges to those of us who envision a world in which we can resolve conflict nonviolently. And so we've adapted our strategies and tools to address this new world. I invite you to take a look at our strategic plan on our website. If you're interested in further partnerships and what is going on in this more complex world in which we're operating today, we're basically grounded in the theory that peace is possible, peace is practical, peace is a process, and peace is a priority, and everything we do, we do in partnership with others. So we welcome further partnership. So now it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Esther Brimmer, the executive director and CEO of NAFSA, who's going to welcome you on behalf of NAFSA and introduce our amazing keynote speaker and then moderate a discussion in Q&A. Dr. Brimmer. Good morning. Good morning. Good to see all of you here and for all those who are joining us online. Jill, thank you so much for that introduction. I just want to take a moment and salute your career and commitment to peace building and your connections between USIP and NAFSA. We're delighted to be part of the program today, and it's great to see you. So I'd like to thank USIP on behalf of NAFSA for the long partnership on international education and peace building issues. We are so pleased to be collaborating with USIP on this program and delighted to be back here in this beautiful building again. Thank you for your hospitality. I would also like to welcome those who are joining us online and who are since we are live streaming this event. This event occurs during International Education Week, as Jill has already indicated, and it does afford us an opportunity to shine a spotlight and to celebrate the contribution of international education to addressing the world's modern day conflicts and related issues. NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, is the largest and most comprehensive association advancing international higher education. With 10,000 members around the world, we are based in the United States, but we have members in over 130 countries. Founded in 1948, we provide professional development programs, products, and services that support professionals in international education. NAFSA is guided by a strategic plan, which expresses the association's mission, values, and its purpose. That strategic plan states in its preamble. NAFSA believes that international education advances learning and scholarship, fosters understanding and respect among peoples of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, is essential for developing globally competent individuals and builds leadership for the global community. We believe that international education lies at the core of an interconnected world characterized by peace, security, and well-being for all. Indeed, NAFSA believes that diversity in our classrooms, our communities, and our workplaces in our strength. And indeed, campuses and classrooms can be venues where people can learn about each other, and scholars' research can help us better understand human societies, the eruption of conflict, and the possibilities and the promise of peace. NAFSA is delighted to be working with USIP during international education week's 20th anniversary year. Educators in the United States and other countries are highlighting the contribution of international education to human well-being. And indeed, this week, in addition to this event, NAFSA will present its 2019 Senator Paul Simon Awards for Campus Internationalization, which includes a panel of presidents from the winning institutions that will also be webcast live. On Friday, NAFSA will present the seventh annual NAFSA Research Symposium, which will be held at Gallaudet University. We've just presented our new data on the economic contribution of international students to the US economy. And this afternoon, we will host a webinar on Education Abroad and Financial Aid. This is an area of deep importance to NAFSA. We will further explore the contributions of international education at NAFSA's 2020 annual conference and expo in St. Louis, Missouri. There are brochures and materials outside, available outside. At that annual conference, we will host our inaugural seminar on peace and social justice that will focus on the response of higher education to the refugee crisis. Indeed, these are issues that have long been important to NAFSA. And we think it's important we work on all fronts in this area. And that is why I'm particularly honored to introduce today's keynote speaker, Melanie Greenberg. What I'll do is I will introduce Melanie Greenberg. We will then have her remarks, then we'll have a moderated conversation, and then we'll actually open the floor for questions and answers. Now, I've known Melanie Greenberg a long time and have a deep and profound respect for her commitment to peace building. And I've always learned from her over the years, so it's a real honor to be able to introduce her this morning. She has a career-spanning dedication to building peace and advancing human well-being. She is managing director at Humanity United overseeing the peace building and conflict transformation portfolio. Melanie comes to HU from the Alliance for Peace Building, where she served as president and CEO. Before joining the Alliance for Peace Building, she was the president and founder of the Cypress Fund for Peace and Security, a foundation making grants in the areas of peace building and nuclear non-proliferation. She has also served as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and was director of the Conflict Resolution Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is back when we first met. She previously served as associate director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and deputy director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. She is also a member of the International Advisory Board at the United States Institute of Peace. She holds her bachelor's degree from Harvard University and her doctorate degree from Stanford Law School. It is my honor to welcome Melanie Greenberg. Good morning, everyone. Nobody tells you that peace building is a contact sport, so please excuse my boot. I'm just turning on my timer. Well, it is such a great honor and privilege to be here speaking at a joint conference with USIP and with NAFSA. Both institutions that have served as load stars throughout my career. I've engaged with both of them in countless ways, and I feel when things are looking grim in the world, I look to the visionaries in both of these institutions to help remind me that peace is indeed possible and that a new generation coming up is showing the new kind of energy we need to resolve the complex conflict and problems that we have in the world. I first worked with Jill Welsh at NAFSA in 2011 when the Washington Post published an article in which the current USIP President, Dick Solomon, was quoted as saying, I wouldn't be having this problem with congressional funding if I didn't have the word peace in my building. This sparked a very lively conversation in the peace building community as we thought about things like, well, what about the novel War and Peace? It was called War and Conflict Mitigation and might not have had quite the same ring to it. But NAFSA, USIP and the Alliance for Peace Building, where it was at the time, joined together to develop a new narrative specifically for Congress around the word peace, freeing it from its associations with tie-dye and Birkenstocks and repositioning it as a powerful and achievable strategy for human security everywhere. Esther Brimmer and I met even earlier in 1997 when she worked as a senior leader at the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, founded by Dr. David Hamburg, who died this year and whose vision for conflict prevention has shaped the peace building field in profound and lasting ways. The work of the Carnegie Commission shown a laser focus on the need for both structural prevention, the organizations and structures that we need for peace, and also operational prevention of the processes that we use for peace in a world where the optimism surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union had diminished drastically with the rise of horrors such as Bosnia and Rwanda. In rereading the final report of the commission, its words ring true today more than 20 years later, echoing current USIP's current exhortation that peace is possible, peace is practical, peace is a priority, and peace is practice. Here are some words from that report. Three inescapable observations form the foundation of this report. First, deadly conflict is not inevitable. Violence on the scale of what we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere does not emerge inexorably from human interaction. Second, the need to prevent deadly conflict is increasingly urgent. The rapid compression of the world through breathtaking population growth, technological advancement and economic interdependence combined with a readily available supply of deadly weapons and easily transmitted contagion of hatred and incitement to violence make it essential and urgent to find ways to prevent disputes from turning massively violent. Third, preventing deadly conflict is possible. The problem is not that we do not know, we do not know about incipient and large scale violence. It is that we often do not act. I think those words could be equally true today. I'd like to talk with you today for a few minutes about the progress of peace building since those early days of prevention. And I hope to inspire you, all of you, to act for peace. Since the power to make and sustain peace lies within each of us and the need for that power rings down upon us every day as we see violence, displacement and polarization emerge forcefully on every continent, here at home and around the world. So first, when I think about peace, I think about the DNA of peace. And I think there are really two strands that intersect when we think about what runs through all peace building at the highest diplomatic levels or in the most local communities. And these two strands have really inspired me throughout my career. First, peace building is a field that is very closely tied to theory and ideas. Most practitioners that you meet will be able to tell you which theoretical frameworks they find most compelling. And they talk deeply with one another about the ideas driving their work. This primacy of ideas in peace building is closely linked to the role of the university in peace building. Universities have played an outsized role in developing theory, especially along the interdisciplinary lines that are so necessary when you're working with with complex issues such as conflict and prevention. To give us a few examples, the Hewlett Foundation funded a network of theory centers in the 1980s and 90s, specifically to help universities develop systemic and interdisciplinary programs, new ways of thinking about conflict resolution in a rapidly changing world. Some of those universities include Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, George Mason, University of Wisconsin, US UCLA, and a number of others which laid the groundwork for peace building as an expansive intellectual network, training both academics and practitioners. Other schools arising from religious communities like Notre Dame, Eastern Medinike University, and Earlham College help not only to train first rate academics and practitioners, but also help set the ethical frameworks for the field. Universities are crucibles for peace and social action. And in every country, including our own, students exposed to the ideas of peace are taking their education into their own hands and seeding peace, even in the face of daunting violence. Two years ago, I spoke at a seminar in Colombia, where more than 500 students studying systems engineering gathered to talk about how they could take their skills and implement the peace agreement throughout the country. In every sector from food security to police reform to health, these students wanted to use their knowledge to create a new future. This energy is one of the things that gives me the most hope. And I continue to marvel at the role that universities play in teaching peace, then serving as conduits and a signal amplifiers for a new generation of peace builders. The second strand of DNA is what John Paul Letterac calls the moral imagination. This really captures the idea and the ability that people who admire deep in conflict can imagine a future that includes their enemies, where sustainable peace is possible. And in every conflict, you find a few transformative people who have a gift for imagining what a joint future might look like. There's some very intriguing neuroscience research saying that the brains of peace builders are better able to hold two simultaneous realities or two different frames to a problem at the same time. And this perhaps is a clue to the moral imagination and that ability to imagine a future that looks so different from what we have at the moment. But I would posit that this is what universities do. They cultivate moral imagination. You see people and experience ideas so different from yourself. You create cultural bridges. For those lucky enough to study abroad, you learn new cultures and understand there's not just one way to live in the world. And I would argue that these are skills not just for that small number of professionals who go on to become professional peace builders. It's important for everyone, if you're going into banking, science, community action, social work, to have that DNA of peacebuilding in your curriculum, in your studies, in your extracurricular work gives you the tools that we need to handle a world that's increasingly polarized. I also find throughout peacebuilding that these strands of DNA underlight all peacebuilding activity. And it is so interesting to be in conversations at the State Department, at USAID, at DFID, at the United Nations, even in the most technical institutions and to find people who are looking beyond the bureaucratic parameters to really find what that new future can look like and how they can create a structural difference. Speaking for a few minutes about where structural prevention has gone since the days of the Carnegie Commission, I'd like to reiterate the idea that peace might occur if we can get our institutions right. And I think there's a special emphasis on democratic, small, the institutions that can help voice, create voice for citizens. That led very much to the idea of positive peace. That peace is not simply the absence of violence, but peace is a conglomeration of good institutions around education, anti-corruption, security sector reform that can lead to a society that can resolve conflict through negotiation and dialogue and governance and not through resorting to weapons. But I think the idea of structural prevention also caused a real watershed shift in the field, probably in the late 90s, but said that peacebuilding can't happen as a small field by itself, but has to expand into democracy, humanitarian assistance, governance, that peacebuilding is really like a daisy chain of a huge number of interlocking fields, and that is really where we get our power. You also saw, I'm just going to check my clock again. You also saw in areas like transitional justice a real need to set up international structures like the International Criminal Court, taking a highly legalistic and rights-oriented approach to justice based very much in setting up institutions. The Apogee was perhaps a 2011 World Bank report and the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States from 2011, which are now seen as having some real elements of failure, but at the time the idea of aligning institutions with civil society was quite radical, and I think that if we, even if we move away from some of those more formal programs like the New Deal, that the idea of how you link structure with process, government, donors, and civil society is increasingly important. The World Humanitarian Summit also came with these ideas that said how can we start to think about linking the structures of humanitarian aid with local communities and start to build better bridges between the two? The problem that has emerged and where I see the pendulum swinging is that institutions are not enough because often large institutions ignore local realities. I've heard some people refer to this as a ghost map that when outsiders come in to map the resources in a country for resilience, for conflict resolution, they often miss the organizations that are not there in the capital speaking English or whatever the language is, driving Toyota SUVs, but they are deep reservoirs of knowledge and experience in marginalized groups in small communities. And how do we move from a structural approach that works from the outside in to a model of accompaniment where we as outsiders can recognize the legitimacy of those local communities and work to really accompany them in their own wisdom and knowledge? Another major shift that I see from structural prevention to looking at issues more of local communities, I would call people power. And it's again the recognition that local actors have the best ideas for how to resolve conflict, absorb shocks and create national and regional solutions from the ground up. This is not sufficient, but perhaps certainly necessary. We're seeing an increased interest in personal and community responses to trauma, understanding that almost no aid program or conflict resolution or peace building can happen unless we address the deep trauma that we now know bridges generations that occurs from living in war and violence. But we're also seeing peace building moving beyond the professionalized sector to expand to movements. Institutions change when there is demand for change. And we're trying to change the demand curve through social movements so that institutions are more responsive to local needs. You only need to look in the newspaper now at Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Bolivia to understand where the social action is coming from. Some of the best research in the world is happening here at USIP on social movements, how social movements interact with peace building and what are the power of citizens to demand change in more responsive peaceful governments. Not only that, somewhat more under the radar, how do we move from the kinetic in the street kind of movements to the negotiations that happen beyond behind closed doors when you're negotiating new social contracts between government and the movements in the streets between citizens and their own governments. But there's a quieter change as well. Citizens taking peace into their own hands. And just to give you one example, in South Sudan we support at Humanity United a network of youth leaders about 25 small number who believe that they, by forming horizontal ties that bridge divides in South Sudan, that avoid the corrupt government, but also what they see as a highly repressive system of tribal elders, they can create new realities in South Sudan. There are 30,000 soccer players who are coming together, youth, to play soccer for peace. There is a group called Take Tea Together which gets 1,000 people at a time together to drink tea and to talk about what it means to imagine a future across ethnic and geopolitical lines within South Sudan. So that kind of ground up network weaving if it can react with good governance, for me is a sweet spot of peace building where I see the most hope in the future. I wanna thank all of you for your dedication to peace and helping create tomorrow's peace builders. I feel that peace building is developing a primacy and legitimacy it's never had before. It's moving beyond even academia to where people feel it's something they all hold. And I look forward to working with all of you to make that change happen. Thank you. Melody, thank you so much for your inspiring remarks. We have a few minutes now to dive more deeply into several of the points you raised and then we'll open the floor for our audience to ask questions. Let's start off with civil society. You talked about the roles of a variety of different type of civil society organizations and movements. Could you talk a bit more about particularly the role of civil society institutions such as institutions of higher education in some of the aspects that you discussed? Okay, thank you Esther. So civil society takes a huge variety of forms. We tend to think about them as NGOs but in fact they are all the places where people gather where their voices can be amplified and where they can find commonalities they might not find is in day to day interaction. It's been so interesting working in public peace processes where you see citizens often kind of grass tops people with influence in their communities coming together because there are often more commonalities between say psychologists or professors on either side of a divide than there are between the middle and the extremes. So universities are places where you can start to find those connections where as I said earlier you can seed ideas for peace. People develop new frameworks. They're experiencing people who are different from themselves ideas that are maybe dissonant with what they grew up with and those are all what we need for peace building that unless you can really understand a perspective other than your own and find ways of looking at a problem from 360 degrees change won't happen and universities are just central for that. Indeed you talked about the particular skills that everyone needs to have not just formal people formal peace builders who work on this in their career as a career commitment but what skills do you think citizens need to have and how might the universities contribute or higher education contribute to developing those skills that are so important for building peace? Well probably 10 or 15 years ago I would never have made this remark in public but I think first of all understanding yourself understanding your own responses to fear and division being able to tamp down some of that fear response and anger well negative anger anger also has its role. So first how do you understand yourself and how do you work with other people to really understand a view different from yours? I don't think we're learning that anymore especially in a world where you can be in your own social media bubble. So we've really stopped knowing how to have a dialogue with someone who has a different view without condemning them and just a very short anecdote I used to run trainings for congressional staff and one of the things that we wanted to teach was active listening but you can't tell a group of seniors congressional staff that you're doing active listening. So I asked my husband to say well can we come up with a different term and he called it forensic engagement. But we actually asked and we very purposely paired them up with Democrats and Republicans and we asked them just somebody's gonna talk with you for five minutes about the role that government played in their lives growing up and you just had to listen and ask questions and many of them said it was the first time certainly in their professional roles they just could listen because they're so used to coming up with arguments in the next round and so that skill of listening that skill of managing your own emotions critically important. It was fascinating as you say the role of research in helping us understand ourselves indeed I was phrasing your point about the ability to hold two different possibly contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time and begin to try to process through things that may lead in different directions and dealing with that type of complexity and the challenge of doing so. Can you come a little bit more about some of this new research that's looking at some of the neurological paths and some of the mindsets that also influence the approaches to pace? This I think is one of the new frontiers in peace building. Of course we've had an explosion in neuroscience and understanding the brain structure and especially we have a much better understanding of the role of trauma and violence on the brain. But we're also finding now is that the brain is exceptionally resilient and there are actually ways to rewire your brain for peace. And I was involved with long-term research funded by USIP that looked at what are the rituals and processes every culture, every society holds which help bring people together to tamp down the fight or flight response to create a safe space for sharing key core values. And which really have a way of helping people find meaning to turn away from extremism. And we're able to chart those pathways in the brain even to know where values are seeded to understand how we can start to humanize our enemies. How we think about in-group and out-group dynamics. So please watch this space and for those of you interested beyond conflict a group in Boston is doing really interesting not only the bench research but then translating that into social policy. It's fascinating to look at the intersection between science and medicine and our understanding of the human brain and human societies and the influence thereof. And indeed there's been a long tradition of the intersections of peace building and public health and understanding the public health analogies whether it's the prevention analogy and indeed the thinking about in-groups and out-groups as well which I think is quite important as well. And indeed this is an important evolution in over the last 20 years or longer on peace building as well. And indeed even Dr. Hamburg who you mentioned his doctor is actually, he's a medical doctor as opposed to a PhD. Indeed there were many people who worked in the field who had been part of the public health framework. And so that's important to transition. What else do you see in terms of the future of peace and research and thinking about building peace because indeed the importance of the positive peace the positive actions for peace to which this very institute is dedicated. Are there are additional trends that you'd like to highlight before we open the floor to the larger questions. Well thank you for that and maybe building on the public health theme. I think one of the most interesting paradigmatic changes I've seen in the last five years has been what is a systems approach to peace? One of the main questions we've faced is how do we think about aggregating for peace? How do we think about scale? And you can't really understand that until you think about the complex systems that give rise to conflict and violence. And once you look at a systemic approach rather than a one-off intervention you get a sense of where the leverage points and leverage points might look really, really different. If you look at a systems map there's certain nodes that you can find where there's just energy in the system for change and that doesn't always come out as peace building. Sometimes it's anti-corruption. Sometimes it's health. And so if you can find those smaller ways that shift a larger system it really can lead to a much more resilient and sustainable result. The challenge though is coordination. That how in a field as atomized as peace building that comes with such a huge range of practice do we actually start to coordinate that we have a shared understanding of those systems? So I think that's another space to look for and there's some really interesting graduate work being done in that. At the party school for example at the RAND Corporation their new dean is completely redesigning the curriculum so that everyone who comes is systems sensitive and inviting an architects, political scientists, technologists but the idea that to train in public policy you have to understand systems. Very interesting. You've given us a lot of food for thought and I'm sure prompted many questions from the audience gathered here. I'd like to invite questions. Please raise your hand if you have a question. So we'll come to you with a microphone. Please make sure you introduce yourself and ask a question rather than make a statement. So, questions? The lady right here on the out? The lady here. She's coming around with the microphone. Hello, my name is Anne Solkovsky and I have a friend who is founders, the EO of an organization setting up a private school system in the country of Niger where I used to work and live. It is the least educated country in the world surrounded by Boko Haram and Al Qaeda. It seems to me after listening to you there's an opportunity for her to work with both USIP and NAFSA. How do I start, you know, what do I tell her to, and how does she contact you? The easiest way to get information about NAFSA is actually our newly designed website, which is at www.nasa.org. And actually it has our emails and also all of our addresses where we're headquartered right here in Washington. We of course are a membership organization so what we particularly would focus on is what our members are doing in these areas who are working particularly in education. No, what we'd probably do is share with you what some of our members are doing. Some of the resources are for members but there's also resources available for the field at large, yes. Can you USIP as well? I should, I should. May I ask Jill to speak for USIP? Sorry, yeah, yeah. Thank you Melanie. So it's also a very good resource to use our website but our public education program tends to be the best avenue for connecting the American public with the work of the Peace Building Institute with the USIP and also I'll give you my card. Okay, thanks. The gentleman next to her? The microphone's coming. The microphone helps people who are listening online. Oh great, I'm David Smith. I'm from the Forge Center for Peace Building Humanitarian Education and I'm also a member of the NCAC Fulbright Association Board so hopefully there are a few Fulbrighters in the room and I also worked at USIP for 10 years. One of the concerns that I have is the inside the Beltway versus the outside the Beltway and I've spent a lot of my time outside the Beltway and when we think about peace building and conflict, there is a perception of an elitist kind of community that is kind of running this. So we come from selective schools, we come from selective environments and I think about folks sitting in far away places in the United States trying to grapple with what peace building is about and how it applies to what they're doing and how they come to understand what the peace building community is up to and how they engage in that. So any ideas of how we can get outside of our bubble in Washington, get out into the hinterlands, getting people who are often very far removed from Washington engaged in the work that we do. I think you've raised a really profound problem for the peace building field which is that for years we saw our issues as being what we did outside the borders of the US. Even though there's a very robust conflict resolution, we don't call it peace building but ecosystem within the US. And only in the last five years I would say have peace builders started to say, wow, we really need to work at home. That the problems that we're seeing abroad around polarization, police violence, we're seeing right here. There are a number of organizations that are working at a couple of levels. One is at a narrative level. How do we create a narrative framework that Americans can understand? For if you're living in somewhere far outside the Beltway, how do you recognize these issues? What actions can you take every day to build peace? It's just not a framework I think a lot of people have. There are also groups like the bridge network that are linking groups that are more associated with political action to groups that are working on community organizing and really conflict resolution within communities to try to bring scale throughout the US. But I think this is a really profound issue for our field and we need to find ways to reach those people so that they, that to quote USIP, understand that peace is both possible and practical and in fact that it's an issue for us. I'll just mention one of the things we find at NASA because we have members literally all over the country that listening to what our members are saying, they're doing particularly those who are working on cross-cultural learning in their classrooms with international students and American students and that those processes are actually quite rewarding and listening to what people are actually saying and doing around the country's apple. But thank you for your question. Questions? Yeah, man, back there with the, yes, there's the microphone. Hello. My name is Damian Jugović and I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina. You mentioned it in your key speech. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm also a Fulbright researcher in the field of positive peace. So you're hung out on a steer of cultural and structural violence and I am affiliated with George Mason University also, one of the universities you mentioned. My question here is how to address cultural violence, particularly in the education field, to be more direct speaking of cultural violence that is happening in historical narratives through the historical narratives and history curriculums in schools. Where I come from and in general speaking of the Balkans, we've been trained on peace building in the last maybe 25, 30 years. On one hand, we are confronting the system which is teaching us violence and legitimizing violence through this cultural violence and history curriculums. What are the best tools to address these cultural violence especially in history curriculums and books? Thank you. You phrased that question so beautifully. I think we know generally in peace building that those who write history textbooks have huge control over how peace will play out because you're influencing a new generation and so those are highly, highly contested spaces. I personally am not an expert in how, how do you bring negotiation around a historical narrative? I mean the narratives themselves when you have peace processes are often the source of negotiation. That's what you're really arguing about. So I would actually ask others in the audience who've perhaps worked in this area to speak with you but to say I do think it's an understudied part of the peace building field where we really need better understanding broadly. And then also what does it look like to have external support in context which are so deeply contextual? There seems to be a mismatch there. And I think the next panel may touch on that. We have time for one more question then out the lady there. Hi, I'm Mona. I'm from the United Arab Emirates and I'm about to finish an undergraduate degree in international relations. So my question mainly has to do with like in an area like the Middle East where our education actually is very prevalent. How like education is there? People do get educated. Almost like the majority of the people at least in the Gulf region do have higher education degrees. But even in places where conflict is prevalent a lot of people do have higher education. They do have that access. But you still find that conflict still arises. Like there are so many issues in the region even though most of the region is educated. So what can you do as a youth when you know that everyone is educated but they're still not finding methods of resolving this conflict? What can you do? Because like from what I see we're using a lot of social media to resolve this conflict. But sometimes like it just doesn't work out. So how can we as a youth help change the region even though we are educated but that's still not working? I think we could spend many years discussing that question. So education by itself doesn't guarantee peace. And so the question you ask really I think is how are you confronting entrenched ideas of power which is keeping conflict going? There's a very interesting report that was issued this past year on youth peace and security. Part of the UN Secretary General's report on UN 2250 which is on youth peace and security. And we saw around the world where young people many of whom are educated or elites saying we do not accept this table. We need to actually have our own table that we want to be in positions of power where we can change the narrative around conflict, the power structures leading to conflict and are really starting a movement of youth around the world who are pushing back in different ways. Some of it through social movements, others through working through bureaucracies but I'm really seeing a power and an energy now and a new generation that's questioning those power dynamics and actively changing them. So I don't know if I have very specific advice but to say that I think there is a generational shift that just says we're not gonna tolerate this anymore. And I think if we keep watching for another 10 or 15 years, that will happen. Please join me in thanking Melanie Greenberg. I'd like to return the floor to Jill Welch. Thank you Melanie and Esther that was just inspiring and educational. So it's just a sheer pleasure to be doing this with you. So our next panel is a group of academics and researchers who are highly distinguished within the field and we are very pleased to have a variety of viewpoints from a variety of perspectives up here today. So I'll just briefly introduce them and then we'll get started. To my immediate right, your left, right? Yes, is Dr. Lenny Traberger. Dr. Berger is the Senior Director of Fellowships in the Honors College at George Mason University and in that capacity she's helped students secure more than 50 prestigious fellowships such as the Fulbright, the Boren, the Gilman, the Udall and the Critical Language Scholarship Awards. She promotes internationalization through student advising, university service and research. She serves on the Board of Directors of NAFSA Association of International Educators and in 2015 she received GMU's prestigious Spirit of King Award for diversifying study abroad. She received Derby A. in Art and International Relations from Stanford University and her PhD in Art History from Duke University. Next to Lenny Tra is Dr. Thomas Hill. Thomas is a clinical associate professor at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU's School of Professional Studies where he is director of the initiative for peace building through education. He oversees the peace building concentration within the Masters of Science and Global Affairs program there. He earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, a master of international affairs from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Pennsylvania. His specialization is that he's a peace building practitioner who has been both a practitioner and a researcher for more than 15 years with extensive experience focusing in Iraq. Next to Tom is Dr. Shreen Khadasan Khosropor and a former community college student herself. She's now Austin Community College's department chair for interdisciplinary studies, founder and director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies and a professor of psychology. She's developed two new degree programs at ACC Global Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies and is developing an African diaspora studies for the 2020 academic year. She holds a BA and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. And next to Shreen is Beza Tesfaye who's the senior researcher for Mercy Corps. She is a research and evaluation specialist with a focus on migration, conflict and governance related projects. Her experience in development and humanitarian work and extensive experience in field support in over 40 countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East make her a very welcome addition to this panel with all of her field experience. She has a BA in public policy and international affairs and an MPA from Princeton University. So please welcome the panel and we'll get started. So I'm gonna start, yeah, there we go. I'm gonna start by just asking each of you to comment on the overarching theme of this panel which is what is it that higher ed can do to build sustainable peace globally and locally? Lenny, sure. Is this on? It will be, yeah. Okay. Well, first of all I'd like to thank you so much Jill and USIP and NAFSA for hosting this event and for inviting me to participate. I, as Jill mentioned, am on the board of directors of NAFSA and the incoming vice president of public policy and practice. And I'm also editing a book on social justice and international education that will be released during the annual conference in May in St. Louis. And I'll be talking about that book a little bit later. I'm very fortunate and proud to be representing George Mason University today because George Mason has been a leader academically and practically in the peace building field. We have one of the oldest and most prestigious programs in conflict analysis and resolution. And what I believe is most important about this program is that it has a dual focus on international conflict analysis and peace building and domestic conflict analysis and peace building. And I believe for many reasons that these two fields are, they go hand in hand. And George Mason University students, some of whom are here today, are working very diligently to acquire the skills and the tools to be able to go out into the world and do this work. I, as a result of my work, believe that higher education has a very crucial role to play in peace building. And in the work that I do, both as a scholar of African art and also in my administrative work as a fellowships director, and am trying to work specifically with students as individuals and help them to understand that through their curricular choices, through their commitment to language fluency, to their understanding of their responsibilities as becoming educated and receiving higher education, that they need to go into the world and to understand that their role is not just to go out and get a good job and make a salary and get things that are just for them, but they need to be able to engage with everyone in the world around them. And so through my teaching, I've taken students overseas to South Africa specifically, where we have studied things like the trauma of slavery and applied that back here to the United States. It's great to be able to help students understand how important it is to step outside of who they are and what they believe and really consider problems from multiple perspectives. My appointment is based in the Honors College and that is the central tenet of the Honors College curriculum is that students at George Mason's Honors College engage in problems from multiple perspectives. So they need to understand that when they arrive on campus that the whole goal is for them to have the beliefs that they have are going to be challenged and they're going to have to both discuss those with people who think differently from them but also be willing to have their minds changed and be willing to think differently about that. So through my teaching and research and through my individual work with students, I see that higher education is one of the primary vehicles that we can produce students who go into the world with not just a sense of purpose, but a depth of purpose and that's really important for students to understand that distinction. Thank you. I think the main thing that I would say that universities can do from my perspective in the peace building space really has to do with institutionalization. Really thinking about what they can do to use their institutional strength to normalize lessons around peace building and development of peaceful societies, both since we're talking around this divide about domestic and international, both here and abroad. I found this both at my current work at New York University where I've been for more than 10 years and prior to that at Columbia University. I've spent a lot of time working with international partners now through the peace research and education program that I direct and one of the things that was really evident to me is that when working with international partners, particularly in Iraq, many, many people were interested in peace building. Many people wanted to get involved, participate in programs, especially with American academic partners. The difficulty was in getting that work to have long lasting effect. And what I really discovered over time was if the institutions abroad were not willing to really institutionalize peace and conflict studies or some form of it in their formal curriculum, in their university structures, it was unlikely to have long lasting effect. And it's the same here in the US. It's often difficult. We were having a discussion just before about sometimes universities in the US have difficulties bringing peace and conflict studies into their departments, into their curricula because of structural impediments that exist at the state level or at the university level. So to me, the main thing that really universities can do is build it. I'll give you a very brief example to wrap up. At the, in Iraq, at the University of Dahuk, I've been working there with colleagues there for almost 20 years and worked from the very beginning, actually on a project that was initially funded by the US Institute of Peace here in 1999 and 2000, to work with academics in Iraq on developing peace and conflict studies, programs and curricula. It really didn't stick until one of those universities, the University of Dahuk, decided it was going to form a center that then led to the creation of an academic program that now exists. It's in its fourth year. Now there's finally a cohort of 300 students who are studying peace studies and human rights at the University of Dahuk, and then that's hopefully going to lead to graduate programs. And this is where it really begins, I think, to get some traction and begin to normalize peace-building as an idea in society. Just before I move to Serene, I wanted to pick up on that point about the importance of institutionalization. I'm really thrilled to hear that USIP was there at the beginning of that journey for you, and I know that's been the case for many in academia. Another example of that is in Afghanistan where USIP has been active for nearly two decades now, and we basically worked on a peace and conflict studies curriculum, and eventually the government adopted it, and now it's in all the universities in Afghanistan. So Serene. I'm delighted that community colleges have a seat at this table. Thank you, Napsa, and USIP. As you know, I'm at a community college. I also started my education at a community college, and I really believe that community colleges have an enormous opportunity to reach a large segment of our community. Depending on how you look at statistics, somewhere between 38% to 47% of students in higher education take courses or get their start at community colleges. In addition, our student population tends to have more of the underrepresented population. We have veterans, many immigrants, international students, refugees, and asylees start their either language learning or college credit courses. We have a lot of the students who take developmental or remedial courses are here at community colleges, dual credit. We have a large number of high school students who take courses at community colleges. So I think programs in community colleges in peace and conflict studies have an enormous reach. In addition, some of the restrictions imposed on us by our state higher education coordinating boards that make institutionalization of peace studies a challenge have actually made our programs more creative and have them have a wider reach. So our degree program is interdisciplinary studies, peace and conflict studies. It's a two year associate degree and you can imagine in the two years students, most of the courses they take are the core courses that every student has to take. History, government, some sort of social science or behavioral science, composition, that kind of stuff. So what we did to, since we can't create a course and call it peace studies or the psychology of peace, what we've done is we have infused our existing courses with a focus on peace and conflict studies. So a student might sign up for my intro to psychology course because that class, the time and location fits in his or her schedule and not pay attention to the note in the course schedule that says this is a peace and conflict studies course and lo and behold, that student spends 16 weeks engaging with every chapter related to psychology and peace and conflict studies. So Melanie was talking about neuroscience. When we study neuroscience in that course, we look at what happens in the brain of a child. What does research say happens in the brain of a child who's been exposed to violence and childhood and what is the developmental course for that child? So take that to every topic we study. And so we have courses in theater, in dance, humanities, ethics, comparative religious studies, composition. So we end up reaching a wide range of students, some of whom frankly I don't care if they go to study peace studies. I think we need some peace builders but we also need people who are coding for artificial intelligence, people who are in the healthcare field, people who are social workers or any field who have this lens of peace and conflict studies to take forward with them. So Beza, you're in a bit of a different role and I was wondering if you could speak to what you've seen and how NGOs are doing peace building work and with your programs and your research. So I'm good morning everyone. Thank you to your SIP and NAFSA for this opportunity. I'm really honored to be part of this distinguished panel. So to answer your question, I guess it will be useful for me to give a little bit of background about Mercy Corps. So for those of you who don't know, Mercy Corps is an international development and humanitarian organization. We're based in the US but we work in over 40 countries globally and our mission is really to help move communities that are in situations of fragility towards resilience and we work on multiple issues in some of the most difficult environments. We are currently working in 17 of the 20 countries ranked at the bottom of the Global Peace Index. These include places like North Eastern Nigeria, Afghanistan, Somalia, DRC, Iraq, Northern Syria until recently and Columbia where we work with Venezuelan refugees and migrants. So we are really at the frontline of some of the most pressing crises situations in the world and our goal again is to provide people with life-saving support but also to help them build better lives in the future. The team that I work on is called the Research and Learning Team and we are a small team that focus solely on research and learning and that is somewhat unique in international organizations and NGOs but it is absolutely critical to our mission of ensuring that we are having a positive impact with our programs. This is very critical to us because oftentimes when our programs are based on assumptions rather than evidence, we don't have the outcomes that we intend to have. We can fall short of our objectives and in some cases we might even do more harm than good. So research is really part of program excellence and high program quality of our programs. What does this mean for peace building work? So peace building and conflict in particular is a field that I think is still lacking in rigorous evidence on which we can base our programs. And this is partly because as Melanie mentioned, these issues conflict, instability, violent extremism, these are very complex issues and so it's difficult to do research on them. And then we also have the challenge of access being able to go to countries that are conflict affected and do surveys or interviews or collect data in any form. So security is always a challenge for us and these constraints both analytically and logistically I think have contributed to the fact that peace building is still based largely on assumptions and intuition rather than evidence. And so as part of the research and learning team, this is what we're trying to work against. We're trying to push ourselves to do better to actually implement programs that are founded on strong, rigorous evidence. Thank you for that. So I wanna kinda pick up on a couple of points from each of you and then we'll probably go back to a couple of general questions before we open it up to the audience. But for Lanitra, I would like to ask you to talk about the book on social justice and when you look through the lens of social justice, what is it that you think institutions can do better to respond to modern day conflicts around the world? Sure, absolutely. Well, I'm very privileged to be serving in the role of the editor for this book. We are excited for its release in May because we've assembled a very strong group of authors who are working on social justice issues in a variety of different contexts. The book is divided into three parts and the first part is written by authors who are on the ground doing work. Some of them are doing work with girls education in India, for example. Others are involved with helping resolve conflicts so that children can go to school. We have a poet, Padraig Otuma, who has composed an original poem based on his conflict work in Northern Ireland. And then we have some authors domestically who have been doing a lot of work with individual students and helping students study abroad through innovative programs. The third part of the book focuses on international students and building a social justice curriculum to support international student learning here in the United States. And the focus of the book is how people are working around institutions since so much of social justice work involves conflict with institutions. You're at a place and you feel as though your voice is not represented, you don't see yourself in the history, you do not have a seat at the table, and so how do you work around those challenges? And so each of the authors speaks to how their work, how they define social justice and how they have done specific work around that. One example is one of my colleagues, Tania Hope-Navis, who is the director of the Ralph Bunch Center at Howard University, is writing about the importance of foreign language fluency for students at historically black colleges. She is trying to build connections between students at HBCUs and students in Columbia, Afro-Columbian students specifically. And in order for those two groups to be able to really speak to each other, they have a lot in common, they have a lot of challenges in terms of racial justice and social inequality in their respective countries. But if they can't communicate, if they can't talk to each other, there's no way that they can share those challenges. And so she is very focused on building language fluency at Howard among students so that they can go to those countries and they can engage in meaningful dialogue with each other. So that's just a small taste of what some of these amazing authors are doing relative to social justice. Each author has their own definition, their own working definition of social justice that drives their work. But primarily the thing that they have in common is that they are oftentimes in conflict and working against institutional barriers. This reminds me a bit of some of the conversation that Melanie brought up in her remarks and some of the questions from the audience about how we adapt and evolve our institutions in order to be more responsive to the people power of citizens who want an equal play. And now I'd like to ask Tom a question about his views on this institutional piece. I mean, this is something you've thought a lot about so maybe you could just comment some more on that. Sure, thank you. So the first piece I think is building institutions that can, as I said earlier, normalize the values, the practice of peace building. But as others have already said, the difficulty is that sometimes those institutions can be very inward looking, can be very elitist, can be very disconnected from other parts of society. And so one of the things we've tried to do at the Peace Research and Education Program is work with academic partners to help them build capacity in peace building in a way that looks contextually appropriate for where they're based. So mostly I've worked for a long time in Iraq, as you've mentioned. More recently I've worked with partners in Colombia and in Kuwait, and the three very different contexts. And what is important is figuring out ways to help those partners build programs, institutional programs that are relevant for the communities outside the walls of the university. So at the University of Dohuk in Iraq, we were working with them to help them build their program. And then at one point, maybe seven or eight years ago, one of the vice presidents came to me and said, is there some way that we could get our master's students out into the community to share what they've learned, particularly in these disputed territories between the Kurdistan region and where the central government has control? And so we started to think about, okay, what might this look like? How could we get those people out there in areas where they would be both safe and welcomed and to sort of stimulate thinking and dialogue and really building up some peace building capacity? And we ended up working with the University of Dohuk to develop a peace building, we called it a peace education program, although I have my own critiques of that framework. And worked with, ultimately, the University of Dohuk instructors, about a dozen of them, actually, I think about 18 of them altogether, went out and ran workshops for 4,000 young people outside of the university, none of whom were university students, very few of whom would have had access to the university, many of whom turned out to be the displaced when the crisis with Daesh began in 2014. And so that was one example. Another example that, again, is consistent with a different context is we have a partner in Colombia, the National Public Administration School there, that, again, doesn't have a peace studies curriculum, so to speak, or a peace studies department, but has research groups around the country. And there was one in a town called Al-Hasiris, which is one of the really historical birthplaces of FARC, and the young people wanted to do research to help the community better understand, well, first it was to help them better understand how people felt about the peace process leading up to the referendum in 2016, and what they found is most people didn't know anything about it, really knew very little about it before the referendum, so they decided to engage in what was really an action research program to help people understand more about what this referendum was going to be about, what the peace deal contained, what the elements were, what some of the outcomes of it might be, and they just ran workshops, nonpartisan workshops, not advocating for one position, a yes vote or a no vote, and what we found was Al-Hasiris was the only town in Wiela department that actually voted for the peace deal. And so there are these ways that universities can get deep out into the community, I think, to have effects. There has to be an institutional base, but they also have to have this commitment to really going out and working in contextually appropriate ways with the communities that are surrounding them. And that is a perfect transition to Shireen because your college, the very essence of community colleges is to have a community centered approach, and I'm very curious if you could comment on the youth question, what is the role of youth in these peace-building efforts? Maybe you could talk a bit about if youth are given a chance, and then others, if they'd like to chime in about youth after. Ash, I don't know. That's for Beza. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's, I apologize. That's okay. But do you have a comment about youth before I turn to Beza? They're interested. They're interested and they want to know how to do it. Don't just tell me theories. Don't quote Lederach, Galtung. Just tell me what I need to do to get along with my family and my community. Yeah. Yeah, I have that base. Okay, I actually agree with Shireen. They are interested. So for us, I mean youth are very critical to our peace-building research and our programs. Youth are at the same time the most likely perpetrators of violence, but also the most likely victims of violence. So they have a huge stake in peace and an important role to play in it. All of our work, again, really brings youth into the center when we're doing peace-building, conflict resolution, programming. And a good example of this, which you mentioned is some of our work in Somalia, which led to a couple of studies that we published maybe two years ago around secondary education and violent extremism. So for many years in Somalia, we were funded by USAID to implement a program that was providing vulnerable youth with access to secondary education. These were young people who would otherwise not have the opportunity to go to school. And it also provided opportunities for young people to have a voice through civic engagement activities. And the broad objective of this program was really to stabilize Somalia, was focused on some of the hotspot areas in South Central Somalia and Punta Land. My team, we did a couple of studies that were funded by USIP to look at the impacts of this program on actual attitudes towards violent extremism and even people's likelihood of joining or supporting groups like Al-Shabaab. And our research found that education by itself was not effective. It was actually mixed in some cases. It reduced violence in some cases, actually that people too want to support more violence. But the combination of education and civic engagement proved to be more effective in multiple contexts where we did this research. And that was a huge insight for us because when we think of what we can do to prevent young people from engaging in violence, we often think of training them, giving them education and skills. But we don't also think about their lack of opportunities to use those skills in a meaningful way. And so for us, what we are trying to focus on in our youth engagement, our work with youth and peace building, is not only, again, giving them skills in education and training, but also finding ways for them to engage economically and politically in their communities as a way of preventing them from engaging in violence. USIP also has the Youth Program Generation Change, which is very much about empowering youth in peer-to-peer training. So it's the trainer program that trains youth who live in conflicts or conflict affected or fragile states. And they do peer-to-peer training on a year long basis. And then once a year, a group of them go and meet with his holiness, the Dalai Lama in Dharmesala. And they have a conversation over two days about resilience. And he is always just as moved by it as they are to see these youth who give so much hope for their future. So, Shareen, I know that USIP resources were important to you when you were developing your program at Austin Community College. And I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about the evolution of the program and its impact and what you see as the next evolution of what you're trying to accomplish there. Yeah, so USIP was our gateway into this field of peace studies. For a number of years, the USIP ran a summer seminar, actually two, one for universities and one specifically for community colleges. David Smith, who I believe is here, he's kind of peace education zero for us. I applied and USIP supported my travel here and my week long stay here. And as a psychologist, I've been interested in issues related to cross-cultural approaches to non-violence and the psychology have to say about it. As an Iranian-American whose life and the lives of a lot of people I know have been directly affected by the kind of conflict that changes lives, I was interested in the area but I didn't know anything about the disciplines of conflict studies and peace studies. So that week we got immersed into what these disciplines are and we also were exposed to models that already existed in community colleges. Some call themselves like human security studies or whatever name that made the program palatable in their community but they were all essentially the same kind of thing. And so I went back to my college and started working with my very supportive dean and department chair. And so here we are, fast forward 12 years later, we have a degree program in peace and conflict studies. We've actually, this is our third year but we already have a couple of graduates and 20 some students have declared it as a major. We have a center for peace and conflict studies and we're soon going to have our ninth annual symposium. So what really propelled the program forward after the initial obstacles of, Melanie, when you were talking about people saying peace and all these ideas that are too idealistic, we actually were discouraged from using the word peace in the name of our program. People thought it might be just a hippie-dippy kind of thing who's gonna take it seriously. But what propelled it forward is that once we started offering courses without a program, without a degree program, students got engaged, so engaged that they wanted to go tell everybody else and ask why don't we do this more often and then faculty got really engaged and so what we have had, what we've been working on a lot is to develop the capacity among our faculty who are interested in teaching in peace and conflict studies to know what these disciplines are. These are formal academic disciplines, peace studies, conflict studies. If we're teaching a course in ethics with a lens toward peace and conflict studies, our faculty need to know what that is so they can incorporate it in their courses, theater or whatever course we have. Where we are now is really developing more courses. Recently I put out an RFP request for proposals for courses to be developed and got so many that my budget can't cover it, but my vice president, one of the administrators said I will cover all of them. So there's lots of administrative support because there's student and faculty interests. Fabulous. So I wanna take an attempt here to connect policy to practice. There's a very interesting conversation going on in Washington today about the importance of prevention and this conversation has been a long time coming. Congress charged USIP with convening a study on what we could do to prevent violent conflict and we had a blue ribbon task force chaired by Tom Cain and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairs of the 9-11 task force who did their work and then concluded with this a steer group of bipartisan appointees to the task force that we really have to double down on prevention. So I'd said earlier that USIP is charged with preventing, mitigating and resolving violent conflict and what we often find is there's been too much emphasis in the world on resolving violent conflict and not enough on prevention. And so the task force recognized that the trillions of dollars spent over the last decade really haven't prevented a rise in violent extremism and made several key recommendations of what exactly we need to do to shift that in the direction of prevention. But I wanted to ask you as practitioners and as researchers, how you see that prevention lens playing out in your work? Okay, so most of my work is in sending students abroad and in people-to-people exchanges and through that work I've seen how powerful and transformational it is for a student to leave their home country, go into a new context and really interact with somebody as an individual and the transformational work that comes from that usually inspires them to continue their studies, to become involved in policy making and to treat someone a little bit nicer than they did before. And so I really believe that investing more in people-to-people exchange is very crucial and specifically within that realm, I believe that we need more people at the table who look different than the current composition. And so diversity, equity and inclusion are crucial in those efforts. So being able to go to under-resourced places where people don't really talk about conflict analysis and peace building, being able to bring more students into the realm of cultural exchange is crucial. To that end, I've been working very closely with the State Department over the last year to expand the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of the Fulbright program so that more students who have previously been unaware of the Fulbright program are interested in participating and when they actually go on those programs that they are able to have the full experience and fully participate in that experience. I'm pleased to say that that work has resulted in just a proliferation of students sharing their individual Fulbright experiences. We previously thought of Fulbrighters as being mostly elite, mostly from certain backgrounds in certain schools and that's really not the case. Fulbrighters are coming from minority serving institutions, community colleges, they're coming from a wide variety of places and they're having a variety of experiences. And so I worked with a group of students who had a very difficult time on their Fulbright grants and said that that was unacceptable to them. So they created a platform called Fulbright Noir which is available as an Instagram platform where you can go and see the variety of experiences that students, black students in particular have had on their Fulbright programs. And so if you're someone in the middle of Nebraska or somewhere else who's not connected to these networks but wants to know what it looks like to be a Fulbrighter, that's a place where you can go. That movement has spread. So there's a new program called Fulbright Salam for Muslim students. There's Fulbright Lotus for Asian students who are on Fulbright and it just caught fire organically. So I think that that's really important for us to think about when we're thinking about prevention. The next diplomats, the next peace negotiators, those young people are at under-resourced schools and institutions right now. And if we don't do our best to make sure that they understand the opportunities and the platforms to make their voices heard, then we are doing everyone a disservice and we're not focusing on prevention the way we want to. Great, thank you. Lanitra, I want to completely echo everything that you just said first of all because I think there are two points there and I want to re-emphasize them and maybe build on them. The first one is in this idea of transformation. I think prevention has its roots fully in people who can have their way of thinking transformed through different educational experiences whether those are study abroad or exchange opportunities or simply going into a program and opening their minds to thinking about some of the core issues related to peace building in ways they haven't thought about them before. We've tried to do different things in the program where I teach, for example, I run something that I call the Joint Research Seminar in Peace Building and what we've done both in Iraq and in Colombia is bring students from the other place to New York for three weeks during the summer, work with a group of our students to develop research proposals and then a few months later have our students and I or another professor go out into the field and actually do participatory action research projects with them and there are issues of language that you brought up earlier and really cultural negotiation, intercultural work that are absolutely transformative. I've had students who've gone through this program say this was the most difficult thing I've done in my graduate school experience and by far the most valuable thing and I think that's where that transformation comes in. The second piece I want to pick up on is the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion piece. Now, and I want to take responsibility for this because we can't leave this to the people of color to have this conversation. It's ridiculous. I teach in a program where I get lots and lots of women students in my program. I get lots of, I get people of color in my program. I get very few white men who want to study Peace Building and I've put the call out to say, where are you guys? What is it? And I observe very much what it is. There's many, many more young white men who want to study security than want to study Peace. I don't know if it's a matter 100% of potential financial gain down the road, although I know that's some of it. There are issues related to still the associations with Peace and Peace Building that don't feel particularly masculine to a lot of men but this is something we really have to get over. So when at one time I think absolutely creating these opportunities for people from underserved and marginalized communities and for people of color and for women is essential, if we don't get white men mainstreamed into these ideas in this country, we're going to lose. Okay, much has been said that I totally agree with. So let me just say what we are doing. As we created our program, we decided we wanted to allow our faculty and students to decide at what level they wanted to connect with Peace Studies and Conflict Studies. So our program addresses those issues at all the layers from the intrapersonal level all the way to global. So intrapersonal, as you can see in Melanie addresses as well, those, your own internal framework influences every other layer of conflict and peace approach or avoidance. So our program is not just focused on the global part. And I think that has helped our students and our community connect with it in a way that they may not have if our focus was only on international conflict. Secondly, you know where I found more of the white men is in telling all the rest of us what Peace Studies is, what conflict is and how we should do it. So to address the issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in every event we have, we make sure that we have basically a reflection of our community sitting up on the stage. And that includes having community college experts. So while we are next door to the University of Texas a great national institution and they are very generous with their time and they come and serve on our panels, we make sure that we have community college experts also on the panel. And because we want our students to see that could be me. If all they see is the same old elite people or the young elite people they may not see themselves up there. And third is to, when we say prevention, we all know from inside the field, we know that we're not talking about preventing conflict. We're talking about preventing violent conflict. But when we say that to our community, they're thinking, no, I need conflict. We need the conflict to change things. Things aren't working for me. So kind of making that explicit as we're talking with them about that conflict has a role in your life. It has a role in our society. This is how we can approach it. These are some ways we can approach it so that it's actually constructive and transforms things into a better structure rather than distracting something bad. I'm so glad you raised that point about conflict being inevitable. I mean, we're human beings and there will always be conflict, but it doesn't have to be violent conflicts if we work toward these preventive measures. Did you want to add anything on prevention, Beza? Sure, so from our perspective, we very much welcome the shift towards prevention. It's really, really important. What we are doing is both on three fronts. Programmatically, for years, we have been focused on prevention and that those programs tend to take more of a systems approach, so we don't just focus on individuals. We look at the broader communities they work, they live in, and then the societies as well, and we try to push for change at multiple levels. In terms of research, we focused our research agenda to really focus in on understanding what works to prevent violence. And so we are commissioning studies in multiple contexts, different countries that look at different types of programs and combinations of programs and then tries to measure their impact on actual reductions or changing attitudes towards peace and conflict in those countries. And then lastly, I think very importantly, on the policy and advocacy side, our policy and advocacy team has been leading a 66-member coalition to support the Global Fragility Act, which, if passed, it would be the first whole-of-government effort to actually try to reduce fragility and prevent conflict in many parts of the world where we want to have that kind of effect. So this is a really exciting space and I hope we'll continue to push for it. Thank you. So we have time for some audience questions. Let's see if we can hear from some people we haven't heard from before. If you'll raise your hand, the microphone is coming around. So let's start right over here as she had her hand up first. Yes, thank you. Please identify yourself and keep your questions short. Oh, excuse me. Hi everyone, thank you for being here. My name is Lanisa Johnson and I'm an Education Officer with USAID. Lanitra, you touched on something that I really loved and it's access to opportunities that people of color or disenfranchised groups may not know of. As someone who has personally been a survivor of an international terrorist attack and can use maybe my story to speak about peace building and I think of other students or young or youth who have had this opportunity. What are ways that researchers are finding that people who may not have access to higher education or these opportunities could use their stories to be a spark for peace building in their own communities without maybe using higher education as an option. Thank you for your question and I'm sure everyone else on the panel has some thoughts on this as well. I would say that being a committed member of your community is important. So the number of times that you share your story and experiences will magnify the effect of what you're trying to do. And you never know when you have a conversation somewhere that someone's listening to you but you don't really know what they're gonna do with that information. And so it's really important to be able to be open about your experiences with a wide variety of people. I do encourage my students to share their experiences both within the academy but also outside of the academy and the driving force behind the work that I do as an administrator is to help students understand that social justice and peace building are not nine to five jobs. So you don't go at nine and leave it at the office at five, it's who you are. It's a way of being, it's a way of moving through the world. And so that means that when you're at home and you're out in a community, you are sharing who you are and having those exchanges. The secondary schools are an important place for us to bring our message of cultural exchange more broadly. So we talk about these issues a lot in higher education but they're surprisingly not as much discussed in secondary schools, particularly those that are under resourced. So to be able to go as to something as young as a kindergarten class and to be able to talk about what it means to look at a map, to be able to talk about international stories and experiences, that really is an important time for young people to start making those connections. So even though we're all here to talk about higher education, there are so many different ways that you can engage with people on other levels that will make a very important impact. Other questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you for the time. My name is Masume. I'm a Fulbrighter from Lehigh University in the program of competitive international education. And the question that I have, I think is mainly before the USIP but any other folks, I would be very happy if they have any answer to that. That when it comes to the case of Afghanistan because I'm from Afghanistan, so how much of the project that you have been done is based on the research? The result of the research, either your own organization have done that or the research of any other scholars or researchers. Because what I have seen based on my experience and a researcher in the context of Afghanistan, the contextualization has not been mainly highlighted and a lot of the research has been very short term period and also a lot of them has been kinds of like something that I cannot be that they imagine exactly the understanding, have a deep understanding of the context of that environment, what's going on. And I appreciate those projects but I don't appreciate some of the results of the project. Right. Thank you. Thank you for the question. So at USIP, we are organized both in terms of regional teams, including an Asia team which has an Afghanistan program and thematic areas where we study issues of women and youth and faith leaders and also counting violent extremism, environmental shocks and a lot of other issue areas. And so our research agenda is often where it comes together and we are actually launching a research agenda in this fiscal year in which we will try to better connect the practice and the policies. I think because we've been involved in Afghanistan for so long that the research has driven some of the programming and USIP always works with local partners when we're in country. I loved what the other panelists said about community context and being contextualized to the people who you're there to really partner with and we work very hard at that. I think as peace builders, everybody is always looking to do more and to do better and so I'd be happy to further engage with you and connect you with either our LER team. We have a learning education research team as well at USIP and or our Asia team. In the back. Thank you. I'm Munaza from Voice of America. I'm also from Afghanistan and my question is also about Afghanistan and Pakistan, the border region. So Afghan youth are very much interested in peace building activities and just because they are the actual victims of conflict but there are very few opportunities for them to learn. I know there are scholarships but they are really limited and are there also some trainings which Afghan youth could attend because there's also this challenge of getting a US visa for the Afghan students and most of them they try to attend conferences and peace building related trainings, researchers but they're not given visa so what are the opportunities for them to get engaged in those peace building activities? Thank you. Thank you, it's an excellent question and I'd like to after I answer on behalf of USIP I'd like to invite my colleagues if they have any comments on this question of getting youth involved and opportunities. I would call out two. One is the generation change program I spoke of earlier and that program runs every year and we have Afghani participants every year in that and there were some who were able to come to Dharmsala in this last trip which takes place always in October with His Holiness the Dalai Lama but that program is really powerful because it is peer led, train the trainer program and there's a network of youth who stay in touch and help build resilience among each other. So that program is one opportunity but of course not everybody can participate in that opportunity so on a broader scale I would refer to our global campus which is online on our website and there are a number of free courses particularly for university students but not just for university students all you have to do is go in and sign in and create a login and then you can access a range of courses on mediation, negotiation, peace building, introduction to peace building, et cetera and we'll be building that curriculum out always so there's some resources there as well. Excellent question. Anybody else have anything to add to that before we move on? Yeah. Just to build on the online component now online education is never going to replace the experience of a face-to-face interaction with an instructor and especially in transformational work but I also think it's very, very valuable because it does provide opportunity to youth who may not get it. I know in Columbia we've worked in the rural areas where only 1% of youth have any access to higher education so we've been thinking about how can we develop some online programming there in areas where there is pretty good internet access to at least start the conversation, at least catalyze some thinking with youth in those areas and one of the things I'd love to see all of the different university partners do is start to think about that. How do you develop those resources especially in other languages because it can't just be in English or else again you're just hitting the elite so we're trying to do some of this both in Spanish in Columbia and in Arabic in Iraq and obviously there are many other languages, important languages that need to be covered so I would hope that in the higher education community we can start to grapple with that. So we have a question from Sarah on Twitter and I think it's a question for Melanie so I'll pass the microphone down. The question is, what are some new methods for assessing the impact of these new peace building initiatives such as the soccer and tea gatherings mentioned in the keynote? So is that something you can comment on? Basically I think what Sarah is curious about and Beza you might also be able to speak to this of new research methods is I think underlying the question is these new initiatives that come up whether it's involving youth in the fascinating ways you said and the tea gathering is quite large actually. Is that something that's been evaluated yet or is that to be evaluated and then maybe Beza you could comment on research as well. Good, thank you so much for that question. Should I face this way or? I don't know, yeah, I'll stand to that. We actually, but that program have a full-time learning team. We're working with Search for Common Ground which goes to South Sudan regularly. Looking very much at how do you examine the entire peace building system which I mentioned earlier and then start to look not only at perceptual kind of data. How are people who are taking part changing but are we looking across the whole conflict landscape of South Sudan to see where this might be moving the needle? It's very early on but we have almost daily updates. There's a learning platform that the participants themselves put kind of their perceptions, their observations. We also work with a researcher in Portugal who's a network theory expert who is applying network theory to this work so working with the real-time data. So it's really a new frontier that these are new kinds of evaluative techniques that we need and it's really important to emphasize they're in real time. The idea of doing an ex post evaluation a year after the fact really misses the whole point. But Beza, if we want to speak to that also. Definitely. Yeah, there are a whole host of methods. We can use ranging from purely qualitative to more quantitative methods. What we are trying to do to assess impact of some of these programs is trying to apply impact evaluation methodologies that include things like randomized control trials. So these are not new methodologies but they haven't been really applied to peace building programs or to the peace building field and that's something that's somewhat newer. And we've done this in collaboration with higher education institutions like we've collaborated with Princeton University, with Yale, with Tufts University and others to carry out these rigorous RCTs or other quasi-experimental impact evaluations that allow us to actually determine what would have happened in the absence of a program. What is the actual situation that could have occurred which essentially gives us the ability to measure change? Other questions? This gentleman up front, Kathleen. Thank you. Great program. Bob Berg, Long Ties with the Alliance for Peace Building and I chair a modest advisory for UC Davis. 12 countries have, is their scope of their ministries of education, lifelong education. And when I think about the exciting work going on at Austin which thank you, Cherine, for telling us, I wonder, and I also think about the end of the youth bulge where universities are gonna look for other age cohorts to keep their finances going. I'm wondering whether there is action to address the needs of other generations, mid-career, post-career, on peace building, training civic leaders and community leaders so that we find a broader constituency and that we don't give up on those who haven't been trained on these things. I'd like to invite all the panelists who would like to comment on this question but it reminds me of the conversation we were having last week when we spoke about veterans and some of the outreach to the veteran community. As I mentioned, in my opening remarks, USIP was founded by World War II veterans who wanted a better way and NAFSA was founded after World War II to make sure that the Fulbrighters and the other students coming over would have a deeply grounded and positive experience. So the profession of international education became professionalized in order to make sure that outreach happened. But I think you raise a really important question. I know you spoke a bit about going out into the community but maybe we could also touch on the veteran question in addition to anything else you might want to share. And if you would like to say something. Yeah, I mean veterans are some of my best students so I love their presence on our campus and I love working with them. They tend to have a much broader perspective on life in general but a very specific commitment to helping contribute back to communities where they may have witnessed conflict or participated in conflict. And so I very much appreciate the opportunity to work with them and support their goals. I, in thinking about this question, I realized that I do quite a bit of teaching at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. And those have been some of the most meaningful teaching experiences that I've had. I most recently taught two courses. One was on the legacy of lynching photography in America. And the second course was on photography and apartheid in South Africa. And both of those classes were very difficult subjects but the groups were very engaged and brought questions to the material that young people don't often ask. And I found that they were very eager to go back to their communities and implement some of the things that they had discussed in the courses. And so it often makes me reflect on my teaching because I see how much value life experience brings to the table but how eager people who you might think are set in their ways and not interested in changing are hungry and searching for new ways to think about the world. And so I do encourage my colleagues at George Mason to go and teach at Oli and I also teach at the Adult Learning Institute at the Jewish Community Center in Northern Virginia because these are fantastic places for scholars to test out their research and their findings on a very different audience but also to engage with people who are very interested in going back to their communities and using these ideas. I would agree with that 100% and I certainly think that the Veterans in Our Program have the same experience when they come in. They're some of the most engaged, interested and have some of the most relevant life experiences that they can really bring to some of the, sometimes younger students who haven't had those experiences and that creates a great environment in the classroom. The other thing I would say is that there's this problem, Bob you're highlighting it with the sort of the youth bulge and universities focusing on youth and obviously that's very important and it won't be that way forever. It's not only an issue of demographics, it's an issue of economics and we went through a change as I know a lot of graduate programs did when changes happened in the economy over the last 10 years and our graduate population started skewing much younger and we did not now have as many sort of mid-career or career-changing learners as we did so I think we have to be conscious about that and really think about how to respond to that. The other thing is, and I think Linda you were speaking to this a little bit, it's not, age is just a number and it doesn't necessarily mean that younger people are more open to this and older people are not. I think we see lots of examples to the contrary and so one of the other things we've thought about a lot is how do you do intergenerational education on these issues? We don't talk about this very much in the US but I know in a lot of the other places where I work this has become a huge issue. We've tried to develop, one of my colleagues has developed a great intergenerational conflict transformation simulation, try and say that without stopping to breathe. But it's really very valuable. How do the young people who are learning these ideas and are eager, how can they then interact with the older generation if as you point out the older generation isn't sensitized to it. So really thinking about can we bring those two groups together, sensitize them maybe differently and then bring them together and give them new ways of talking to each other and working with each other. I think it's very important. So just to build on what you said about intergenerational, one of the beauties of being in a community college is that I have literally had a grandmother sitting next to someone sometimes younger than her grandchildren. And so the kinds of discussions that we're able to have in class are really rich. And while we are an undergraduate institution, our students are not the typical undergraduate 18 to 21 year olds. I think the way a lot of, well, with no exaggeration, I have to say that veterans had an enormous role in convincing me that this was a really good effort for me to kind of devote 10 years of my life to. The first time I taught the pilot at the course, intro to psychology with a focus on peace and conflict studies, I had seven students, I had a seminar, three of whom were veterans, one of them was a Green Beret. And I told them, I'm just learning about this field of peace studies and conflict studies. So I need your help. And they really did help me learn and convinced me that I should stick with it. And so veterans really enrich our program and need our program. I think we kind of need them too. A way that I think we can engage across the wide range of potential students is through one of the things we do at our college is workshops in conflict resolution or conflict, basically foundational skills of conflict resolution. And those are sort of the added value for a lot of people who are already working. And they want more of it. We have more demand that we can meet. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry, okay. Sorry. Okay. So I would like to make just a few closing comments and to thank all of you for being here today as well as online. But before I do, I just want to make a couple of resource announcements. On behalf of NAFSA, I'm at USIP, but on behalf of NAFSA, there are two resources I would direct your attention to. One is nafsa.org slash community colleges for other community colleges who are watching online or in the audience. NAFSA has put a big emphasis on outreach to community colleges in the past few years. And so there are many resources available there. And also on behalf of Esther, I'm inviting you on her behalf to their conference in St. Louis, Missouri, which is in May Memorial Day week. And that is where a conversation will continue on peace building and the connection to higher education as well as some of your social justice topics that you touched on earlier. For USIP to stay engaged with us, I would encourage you to sign up for our Vince mailing list on our website. Please encourage your students to take a look at our global campus resources that I mentioned earlier. And we have a weekly bulletin you can sign up for which will actually really help you see the work we're doing in the field. So a lot of people come to this beautiful building on the Mall to experience events here. And we have a field staff, 20% of our staff are out in these very difficult places working on the front lines. And our weekly bulletin highlights much of that activity so you can see what's happening there. So with one more announcement on behalf of USIP, tomorrow we are launching the Women Building Peace Award nomination process. This is a brand new award that USIP is launching in order to show our commitment to the power and resilience of women peace builders working every day in fragile or conflict affected countries. And so that will be available tomorrow on our website. And we encourage nominations. It's all by nomination, not self-nomination. And the winner will be awarded next October, a $10,000 award. And there'll be a ceremony here at USIP to honor her, to shine a light on the role of women in peace building, something that is under highlighted. So we really wanna be sure to call that out. So I want to thank first our panelists. It's been a really interesting discussion. I think you've all brought something different and unique to this discussion. And I know that our viewers in the audience and online can see themselves in your work and be inspired to work further toward peace. For us, I believe in this room and online, peace is security. So I really believe that we don't need to be at all bashful about envisioning and working toward a world without violent conflict. It's why we're here. I wanted to thank also Melanie Greenberg for inspiring us today with her remarks and Dr. Bremmer, Dr. Esther Bremmer of NAFSA for that wonderfully moderated discussion. For the staff, I do really wanna just quickly call out Michael Colma and Irina Schubert from NAFSA as well as Ellie Soloway and Victoria Bishop and Yusef Sultan from USIP. So thank you all for being here. Thank you for joining us for International Education Week and we look forward to celebrating again with you next year.