 of the broader challenges of how can we most effectively build peace in societies that are coming out of or transitioning from violent conflict and how to implement sustainable long-term peace. Part of what I think is particularly important, and this is something I think that both practitioners but also scholars in the field have recognized, is that the time to ask these questions, to begin to deconstruct, if you will, power sharing is well before we even get to peace agreements. And that is, how can a better understanding of power sharing, what works, what has not worked, how can that influence the nature of the peace agreements that we are working towards, that societies, countries in conflict need to, what needs to be addressed in order to have what I would call an implementable, if that's a word, and sustainable agreement, so that you have a comprehensive peace process that is in effect able to look long-term and think about how can power sharing be constructed in the most effective way. So I think this next hour and a half to two hours will enable us to have a robust conversation about first deconstructing power sharing with the view that, okay, then how can we most effectively construct power sharing? We at US Institute of Peace not only work on this topic and you'll hear from one of our colleagues, Susan Stegan, who's the director of our Africa programs, but we look at this and we're investing in this as it relates to peace processes. We're doing this in a sort of multi-faceted way. We have, we're in the process now of reviewing or soon to review grand proposals around peace process design in which this is a critical issue. We are developing our own internal capacity around peace processes and we have just hired a few new senior program officers, one of whom, Tamana Saleh-Kuddin, he's here with us. We have a new senior fellow, Ezra Chuhadar, who's here. So we feel this is a really important area in which to invest ideas for programming, providing support for peace processes and enhancing thought leadership around this area. And some of the key questions that emerge are, in other words, what are the most effective power sharing arrangements? And we've seen and we have a lot of cases, as you will hear, a lot of cases to draw from to help us understand power sharing. I mean, you can go back to South Africa or Mozambique as examples of power sharing that have had a long history. But there are also power sharing arrangements that because they have oftentimes frozen cleavages within those societies, and I'm thinking of Lebanon as an example, is that an effective power sharing arrangement or has it, in fact, exacerbated conflict dynamics and drivers of conflict? So part of the challenge here, and I think we have a great panel to do this, is to think about not only what we need to have effective power sharing arrangements, but also what needs to accompany power sharing. This does not, it cannot be that power sharing, we will find the arrangement that will work, but how does it, a good power sharing arrangement, how does it incorporate or at least align with security needs and a robust peacekeeping force or de-mobilization and disarmament efforts, as well as the building up of strong political institutions, the rule of law, et cetera. So part of the challenge is not just deconstructing and then constructing power sharing arrangements, but in effect, what also from the view of international donors, the international community, what also needs to be strengthened and in what way? So I think we have a great panel, a lot to investigate in this area and we're delighted you're here and we look forward to a robust conversation around this. And now I'm happy to introduce my colleague, Rotucci, who is the director of our inclusive societies programs here at USIP. Thank you, Jeff, for that introduction. Okay, so I'm just gonna introduce my colleague very quickly and then we are gonna have two conversations, we'll start with Susan. She'll talk a little bit about the broader origin objectives and criteria for effective power sharing and then I'll hand it over to our team of academics and researchers to talk about the findings of their research on the relationship between power sharing arrangements and political trust. So very quickly, Jeff mentioned Susan Stigand as our director of Africa programs. She's also authoring the upcoming report on power sharing, what makes Unity government able to make and implement decisions and also welcoming our colleague Caroline Hartzell, who's a professor in political science, at Gettysburg College. She used to be a JR fellow here at USIP as well. You focus on the means by which civil wars are ended and the implications, the terms of settlements have for peace that follows, including the implications of power sharing settlements for the duration of peace, as well as for the nature and democracy of post-civil war states. We also welcome Matt Hody here, who's an associate professor at Townsend University and is the author of several books. You have their bios, if you'd like to look closer. And Clark Letterman, who is a survey research specialist at the Research Triangle Institute International. And both of them worked with Caroline on the report that we'll talk more about today. Can power sharing peace settlements help build political trust following civil war? Okay, so Susan, let's begin with you. We know that it's important to clarify the objectives being pursued by the parties to conflict and the mediators as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about the critical questions to be asked before considering power sharing arrangements as an option for political settlements? So what are the conditions in a country context that must be understood, including the historical context and anything else you'd like to share with us? Thanks, Ro. Good morning, everybody. Maybe I can take this question in two parts. And the first I think is as mediators and parties are thinking about whether this is an approach. It strikes me that there's a fundamental question for people to answer about what is the strategic objective? Is the objective to end violence? Is the objective to attain lasting sustainable peace? Is the objective to provide a transition that is essentially the bridge towards sustainable peace or perhaps the first bridge? And perhaps there are other ones that we'll have to follow. And I think too often we are probably not honest enough with ourselves about what we expect a transitional agreement to deliver. And in that context what we expect power sharing to deliver in and of itself. And so I know that some of our colleagues will go into this question of can you do both simultaneously? But I think that's an important question. A second question comes about what is the purpose of this? What is the driving reason to look towards power sharing? And I think a power sharing arrangement suggests an acknowledgement and an agreement that the people in the parties who hold guns or the people in the parties who are acting as spoilers for whatever whether it's an electoral crisis or a civil war that they have to be accommodated in. And so that is a decision. And I think recognizing that that decision is made rather than saying that people with guns and people who are spoilers in fact have to be excluded or have to be dealt with through some sort of judicial or exclusion mechanism. And these are hard, hard questions to answer. But we often I think in peace processes there's an assumption that power sharing is the answer without stepping back and recognizing that there are some fundamental decisions that have been made along the way. And then I think the other thing that mediators and others have to think through is who will be part of it? Who will not be part of it? And the implications for that. What are the assumptions and preconceptions and experiences that countries are coming into the negotiation with? And so at risk of speaking about a conflict that there are others in the room who are much closer to and have deeper experience on when I was involved in the negotiations on the South Sudan conflict in 2014, people were saying, are we going with the CPA model, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was in Sudan from 2005 to 2011? Are we using an Ethiopian model? Are we using a Zimbabwe model? Are we using a Kenya model? And so people clearly came in with either a personal experience, experience as mediators, and that very much shaped the approach that was taken fundamentally. In many ways I think that actually often closes off the conflict analysis that needs to take place to answer some of those fundamental questions. And in some ways restricts imagination. And so I think part of our job is to open people's imagination towards these ideas. And then the final thing that I think that needs to be thought about and often is not is how does a political power sharing arrangement translate from a national level to a more local level? Is there a translation at the state level and the local level? How does it translate in the security sector? And so this depends partly on how you divide different roles and portfolios, how you divide special agencies and commissions, oversight bodies. And how does it play out in a legislative capacity or another key independent commissions? And so I think we are partly guilty of replicating a fixation and a love affair with executives and cabinets. But in reality, decision making, good governance, long-term sustainable peace requires all of the different bodies of government to be involved in those conversations. So that's I think before the questions start. The research that I've been involved with together with the Innovations for Sustainable Societies at Princeton University, we took it as a given that there was a decision for a power sharing government and didn't make an assessment about whether that was a good decision or a bad decision, it was. And applied the question of how can unity governments be structured so they can best make and implement decisions. So govern essentially. And there were kind of four themes that stand out, the research is still being pulled together. So this is very preliminary in nature. But I think the first is that there has to be some political trust, commitment and willingness amongst the parties. And if we're being realist about this, I think the parties have to believe that a power sharing arrangement is better than the alternative. And that's either because they're excluded otherwise or because there would be intense pressure from the international community or from their constituencies. And we saw that I think the power sharing in South Africa, as Jeff talked about, it worked well because the parties were bought into it. The power sharing arrangements in the 2015 agreement in South Sudan did not work well. And we looked at Cote d'Ivoire as well. And there was a period where the arrangements worked really, really well. And as the peace process got closer to the elections and it was clear that the interest and the calculation shifted, the power sharing arrangements fell apart. The second aspect is trying to narrow down the numbers of decisions that need to be made and that a power sharing government has to actually implement. Because we know it's hard to make decisions and often unity governments are burdened with these huge agendas that are not implementable by any government, much less one that is trying to balance various interests. And so Cote d'Ivoire I think is a good example where there was a short specific program, Tunisia. They had a very specific mandate to prepare towards elections and trying to figure out what is that agenda. And I think this is also a really important point where civil society and civic voices can be integrated in to help to define what that agenda looks like. And along the way it's possible to either limit the number of decisions or to delegate decisions to a more technical level. So for example, I'm forming cabinet committees that are delegated responsibility to try to come up with technical responses rather than putting everything into a political arena. So having broad guidelines, specific mandates and then technical ways to work through decisions. The third pillar I think is really having clear, formal and informal dispute resolution mechanisms. And for anybody who works on peace processes this sounds like a bit of a throw away but it's often something that I think is thought through at the very end or once you hit a roadblock in the implementation. And so being clear about what are decision making requirements at the outset and often in power sharing it's on a consensus or sufficient consensus model. What are the ways that if there can't be agreement, if international partners come in, if there's a referral mechanism to an alternative body. And then I think as important as the formal ones have to be those informal back channels that are established. And I think there's some great anecdotes about how that played out during the Kenya process. And I think all of the peace agreements that we looked at that was just a fundamental piece. And that's a hard one for us as peace builders to figure out how do you facilitate that because it is so much premised on relationships. And then the fourth aspect of the final one is the role of monitoring mechanisms and having sufficiently robust both international and domestic monitoring mechanisms as a way to check in and make sure that progress is being made in the right direction to course correct if necessary. And in my view this is fundamental to starting to build the relationship between citizen and government that should be a model going forward. So the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation that came out of the 2007, 2008 election violence, they had regular summits along the way that were led by prominent African leaders and they were broad public conferences. And it was used to really keep this question in the public eye. In Cote d'Ivoire, there was an evaluation and monitoring committee as well as an integrated command center on the security side. So there was both the political function as well as the security one. So those are the broad pillars that we've pulled out. I think there's more specific things on how do you decide who gets which seats and which portfolios, but that's very far into the weeds. No, thank you. Those are some very concrete suggestions that you provide us to think about. Let's just go a little bit deeper on one country in particular, South Sudan. What are some recommendations you would have because they're thinking about power sharing arrangements currently? What are some of the, how would you apply these pillars to come up with some recommendations in that situation? Yeah. So my colleague and I wrote on this publicly recently so it won't be a surprise if anybody's seeing what's on the website and I'll steer this towards, use this to steer people towards USIP's website. But I think there's, in 2015, a power sharing agreement was signed. It took much longer than anticipated to form the unity government, largely because of security questions. And the unity government really only held for a couple of months. And so now that people are back at the table trying to revitalize this agreement, the conversation continues to be premised around power sharing. And what we've posed in this article, and I think is our general question, is power sharing the right answer in that circumstance? And it definitely does not meet the criteria of minimum political trust amongst the parties, an agenda that is implementable in a particular period. There are no formal dispute mechanisms and the experience in 2016 suggests that the informal dispute mechanisms are largely missing. And the monitoring mechanism that was established hasn't had the political weight behind it that it needed to be able to take issues forward or put pressure on the parties. So I think there needs to be a real fundamental rethink about whether power sharing is the answer in this particular situation. And that's a very hard conversation. South Sudanese civil society has spoken clearly with different groups saying that they think that a more technocratic government is required. And this is another model where having the political actors playing a more advisory role and delegating the implementation of a short specific agenda to a more technocratic government has been done in other places. My biggest concern about the focus right now in South Sudan is it becomes about who gets which seats and it's sort of about moving the deck chairs around on the boat rather than getting to the fundamental questions of leadership, of the relationship between citizens and government. And it's a really tragic situation where parts of the population don't trust one party and probably won't buy into or implement an agreement unless that changes. Other parts of the population don't fundamentally trust another party. And so it really suggests a moment where some sort of bold, courageous, new approach is needed. But at the same time, we know that peace processes don't work. You can't just get rid of all of the people who are the power holders. So the one, I guess, positive thing that I will note on this is that there was a shift in the language and the peace agreement and they shifted back from power sharing to responsibility sharing. And I think if that could be built out in a meaningful way, perhaps not under the current iteration and formation, but that was the essence of power sharing was to represent the needs and interests of diverse constituencies. And it would be, I think, useful to get back to a stage where power sharing just isn't about who gets which ministerial portfolio and therefore who has access to what power and what resources. Oh, that's very helpful. Okay, so we'll come back to some of these points, especially in our discussion. So start thinking about some questions, but first we're gonna hand it over to our research team to tell us more about the work that they've been doing. So in particular, I wanna mention, choosing, you said monitoring mechanisms and citizens to judge a success. So I think that's a little bit about what you're talking about in your research. So I'm gonna ask you a few questions and then ask you to tell us more. So in particular, how have you found that power sharing arrangements build political trust with its people and establish a foundation for good governance? You explore the case in the Philippines, which we'll find out more about. How did the people perceive that power sharing arrangements helped deliver these particular political goods? And then finally, what recommendations you have to improve power sharing? And then after we hear more, we'll go into discussion, so please. Okay, great, thank you. I'm Carolyn Hartzell, first of all, I just want to thank US Institute of Peace, Rowe, Susan, Jeffrey, and everybody else who helped make it possible for us to be here today. We're excited to be here and to talk to you about this and to get feedback from everybody. Let's see, I have this awkward position here. Just really quickly an outline of what we're gonna cover and most of these are, I think, points that respond to the questions that Rowe just asked us. So especially, you know, taking care to define what we mean by terms like political trust, political goods, peace settlements, and the like. And we'll talk a little bit more about the case of Mindanao in the Philippines, which is where we did a large-scale survey, so the results we talk about are gonna be based on that. So our motivation for this study. Matt Hoddy and I have done extensive work on power sharing, but in particular, our work is cross-national in nature. So all civil wars that end with power sharing agreements from post-World War II through the beginning of the 21st century, and we crunch data and outcomes, you know, results. And basically, a lot of our work has centered on the role power sharing helps play in making for a more durable piece, right? More recently, we're looking at issues that we talk about as being related to quality of the piece. So for example, the role power sharing plays in terms of post-conflict democratization. But all of this work, again, has been sort of from the 40,000-foot perspective, right? These data, these large-scale data projects. And what we really wanted to do was get more insight into how power sharing works on the ground, so to speak, right? What are its effects on citizens? How, what role does that play in terms of what helps make or not for a durable piece? So this project is our first effort to really do that kind of digging and to go exploring what implications, not all of them, obviously, in this project, but what are some of the implications that power sharing has for citizens? So in particular, we use this survey to look at what we call micro foundations of the piece. What's happening on the ground? And again, as Roe indicated with her questions, we're particularly interested in the role that power sharing might help play with regards to political trust on the part of a population. And here in particular, I mean, our survey actually makes it feasible for us to look at levels of trust at different levels of the government, but today we're gonna be talking about trust in the national government. And I'll talk a little bit more in a little bit about why that might be important. So again, we're trying to get beyond just this look at elites and this assumption that elites, the power holders, have to be part of this kind of agreement, but there's generally been this kind of implicit assumption in our work that, well, once the elites are there, well, then they'll represent their followers, they'll represent citizens, they'll take care of their grievances and the like. That's a mighty big assumption, so that's what we're trying to start digging into. All right, so our central hypothesis spelled out for you here. Our expectation is that individuals who think a peace agreement, who believe that a peace agreement has actually provided them with improved access to what we call political goods, in which I'll define more clearly in a minute, that if they think a peace agreement has improved their access to political goods, that they're gonna have more trust in the national government. And as I'll explain in a moment, this doesn't come out of nowhere. There's lots of evidence, although not focused on post-conflict context, but more generally in societies like the United States, Europe, across the world, people who think that national governments are helping take care of their needs have higher levels of trust in national government. So we thought this was a particularly important question to look at in the post-conflict context. We go on to spell us out a little bit more here. Well, how does this matter for peace? Well, we think if you have higher levels of trust in the state, in the national government, you should be more supportive of the post-war government and thus more reluctant to return to conflict. So we're positing that there's a link between levels of political trust, satisfaction with the government, and a willingness to stick to the peace. And again, if we find support for this, we think it helps identify at least one mechanism, not the only mechanism, and not necessarily the most important mechanism, but certainly a mechanism through which peace agreements could help to promote peace among citizens at the national level, again, moving beyond just this elite focus. Really quickly, this picture was taken in Marawi. So the way this worked out is we applied for this grant from the National Science Foundation, we got it. And the conflict in Marawi broke out two days before we arrived in the Philippines to carry out our survey. So we've got some photos in here. Certainly what was going on in Marawi was a very big issue in the Philippines as a whole, but especially in Mindanao, where we were carrying out this survey. Here's our first key term though, political trust. And the simplest definition is that it's a belief on citizens part, that authorities are responsive and will do right by them. You can speak variously of trust in government, you can speak of trust in different levels of government, national government, local government, municipal government, et cetera. You can talk about trusting government institutions. So again, for this particular project right here that we're gonna talk about today, it's trust in the national government that we're emphasizing. And as I said before, there is considerable research that shows that political trust is linked to evaluations of government or institutional performance. If you think your government is performing well, then you're more likely to have trust in the government. And then also there's some research that positive emotions regarding government can enhance trust. So if you feel really positively disposed towards the government, that's also gonna make you more likely to feel trust in the government. So why did we choose political trust to look at? Why is this the thing that at least for this project we're arguing is important to get a better grasp on? Excuse me. The first point I would make here in terms of this is that there is extensive research that shows that exposure to violence has a negative effect on political trust. So in a post-Civil War setting, trust is already compromised. Especially if you've had high levels of exposure to violence, if you've suffered at the hands of security forces, if you've suffered at the hands of non-state actors, your levels of trust are compromised. You might have less trust in the government because they were unable to provide for your security. That is something we think government should do. They should be providing for us to live in a safe environment. More directly if you were targeted by government security forces. Of course you're also gonna have lower levels of trust in national government, right? But in particular here, in terms of the relevance of political trust in post-conflict settings, starting with the argument that trust is already gonna be compromised because of levels of violence, we make four points here. One is that the more trust there is, the higher likelihood of compliance with a peace settlement, all right? Here again, peace settlements are often designed to foster trust, but among elites, right? So what can you do? Give them these seats, for example, and checks and balances and that kind of thing. So a way of maybe hoping to induce a bit of trust on their part, certainly a commitment on the part to the settlement. But the point we wanna make is these settlements don't give very much thought to how you foster trust on the part of citizens, right? But we're arguing if there is more trust among citizens then there's probably a higher likelihood of compliance with a peace settlement, not just at the elite level, but at the citizen level as well. An ability to manage, peacefully manage future conflict is likely to be contingent on trust in the government. Untrusting citizens are less likely to comply with the law and that will probably increase the risk of conflict recurrence, all right? So this makes sense to us. Also, levels of trust could impact the level of compliance with post-conflict reforms and policy changes. More than likely in the wake of a civil war they're gonna have to be policy changes made, right? And so if citizens have low levels of trust they're not gonna follow along with those policy changes. And in fact, World Bank devoted its 2011 World Development Report to this very issue, right? So there's certainly an extensive literature on this. And then the last point we put here is one that actually there's very little research on but we think it's an important one that levels of trust could definitely impact the potential to foster transitions to democracy somehow consolidate democracy in the post-conflict environment. There's some literature that shows that in mature democracies some level of skepticism and government is actually positive, right? But we don't think that that's gonna translate well to the post-conflict environment where there's already so much insecurity and uncertainty. Skepticism is probably not a very good ingredient for success in terms of transitions to democracy. So again, our focus is on peace settlements and whether they can help build political trust. So can the terms of peace agreements help foster political trust? That's the question we're really directly wrestling with here. Generally speaking, we think it's reasonable for citizens to expect some kind of a so-called peace dividend after a civil war ends, right? They think things are gonna get better. They hope to see some sort of positive payoff from the peace after all this conflict. Also interestingly, elites may also foster those kinds of expectations on the part of citizens, right? Especially if you're trying to make sure your follower stay with you. You wanna be able to say, well, I'm gonna be able to sort of provide these benefits for you. Stick with me, stick with the peace. Interestingly though, it's also possible that some of those expectations can be negative in the wake of a civil war. And just to give you one example, it would be the case of Columbia where ex-president Jorge Uribe, for example, was very adamantly opposed to the peace agreement and really was a huge voice in getting people, and really trying to get people to vote no, and of course the referendum failed by an infinitesimally small margin, right? So sometimes elites may actually foster negative expectations for their own purposes of peace agreements as well. So it's not a given which way this is gonna go in terms of political trust. So a couple key points to make here as we start to set you up for our study. We assume that citizens are gonna have expectations of peace agreements, but that's only true of citizens who have actual knowledge of the peace agreement. Now when we say that, we don't mean deep, deep dive knowledge, right? Like all the intricacies in every single line of a peace settlement or anything. But it is actually interesting, as we found in the case of the Philippines, how many people say they really knew virtually nothing about the peace agreement? And we'll come back to that in our conclusions because that's got some interesting policy implications. Another point we make is that it's reasonable to believe we think that in a post-Civil War setting, different groups of citizens might have different expectations and perceptions of political goods delivery and thus show different levels of political trust. So if this isn't just across the board, all citizens have some shared perception, right? Different groups of citizens are gonna have different sets of expectations. And we distinguish among these groups on the basis of group grievances, right? So who are the aggrieved citizens? Who are the people who probably previously felt excluded from power or access to power or access to goods and services, right? And by who gets the treatment, in this case, a peace settlement is often designed to ensure that those who were previously excluded now have some form of inclusion, right? So we distinguish on the basis of who were aggrieved and who perceives a peace settlement as being something that's actually going to perhaps help deliver the goods to them. Having said that, finally this key term, what are political goods? They can be conceptualized as government performance. I've already kind of hinted at this, right? Outputs or outcomes, they're often discussed in relation to the concept of governance, which Roe mentioned earlier. Here you have kind of a more technical definition of political goods, which I'm not gonna go over in detail. But here, just to let you know, these are the particular sets of political goods that we focus on in this study. We actually have more, but for the purposes of today's analysis, we focus on four key political goods. Safety, a sense of security or safety, which I've already alluded to as being important. If a government can help provide this for people, I mean, we think that this should be very valuable in the wake of a civil war. More generally speaking, what are called public goods, you'll often hear reference to public goods, right? So this is probably the one everybody's familiar with as a form of political good. And these are goods and services, access to education, access to healthcare, et cetera. So that's one key form of public goods. It's the one that's most often been studied. It's the one we know most about across societies in terms of having an impact on political trust. Another one, which we think is really important and which Jeff mentioned earlier in some context, was the rule of law. And we define that briefly here as predictable, recognizable, and fair adjudication of disputes. And another one is just a sense of fairness or equity, right? There are other possible political goods one can talk about as well. Participation, representation, justice, inclusion. And we do get at some of those in our survey as well, but for today, we're just focusing on these key four political goods. Again, there is some literature that looks at the effect of these on trust, but not in a post-conflict context. So we sort of draw theoretically on that literature, but it's kind of an open case about what happens in the post-conflict context. With that, I think I hand off to you. Thanks. All right, so now that we've got sort of on the ground, what I'm gonna talk about is where we conducted the study, so really giving you a little bit of background on the conflict in the Philippines and efforts at the resolution of that conflict. So it'll give you a sense of the particular peace agreement we're considering here. So where we conducted this study, as Carolyn mentioned, was the Mindanao region of the Philippines. And we view this as sort of an ideal site for this kind of research because we see variations in governance. So there's in one region of Mindanao, the arm, that acronym stands for the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao. And in that region, we see autonomy, we see self-governance for members of the Muslim community. So we can in effect look at territories inside the arm and outside the arm. And looking there, we can see first, whether those inside the arm have perceived enhanced access to political goods. And secondly, whether or not this access to political goods enhances their trust in the national government. So really, those are the two sort of core questions we're examining here. So to give you a sense of where the arm is located in Mindanao, this autonomous region, where you wanna focus your attention is on the green. The green is that territory that is defined as the arm, anything outside of the green is really those areas that don't receive the treatment that we're interested in, that access to the autonomy arrangement. Excuse me. And what I'll be talking about in a minute is how the arm got this particular territorial reach and also how we see power sharing in the arm itself. So a little bit of background on the conflict itself. Historically, we have seen Muslim groups in Mindanao fighting for independence. And at the current moment, there are really four major groups that people discuss. And of these, the two that are listed here at the top are the ones that have negotiated the most with the government and gotten the most attention. These are the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The other groups are decidedly smaller and they're perhaps more notorious. So for example, people know Abu Sayef because they have been engaged in things like kidnappings as a way to raise revenue and attention to their cause. So because we have so many groups fighting for independence in Mindanao, we can think of this as a multi-dimensional conflict between Muslim rebel groups, the Philippine government forces, and local Christian militias. Adding complexity onto that is also the fact that there is also conflict among clans in the Philippines. So this is known as Rideau-based conflict and also contributes to the violence and instability in the Philippines. So estimates are among these groups fighting that we have to date approximately 120,000 deaths and millions displaced. There were reasons for optimism during the mid-2000s where we saw sort of a dip in the amount of violence that was occurring in Mindanao, but recent events suggest that that might have been sort of just a lull. And of course, as Carolyn mentioned, the most obvious recent example of that is the Battle of Marawi, which occurred in 2017. Unfortunately, when we were trying to conduct our survey. So what about the arm? What I'm gonna talk about now is how the arm got its current sort of structure and how it tries to attempt to deal with the conflict that we see in the Philippines. The idea for the arm first emerged in 1976 in a negotiated agreement between the President of the Philippines at the time, Marcos and the MNLF, one of those groups that I mentioned as one of the more prominent in this conflict. And the agreement that we see reached in 1976, this Tripoli agreement, was that there would be potential regional autonomy for 13 provinces. There would be a referendum to determine whether those provinces wanted to opt in or out and it would create a single autonomous region for those groups that opted in. Not surprisingly, Marcos soon reneged on that agreement in part by offering to create two autonomous regions rather than one. That was rejected by the MNLF and we see a return to hostilities. A second attempt to really get the arm off the ground comes in 1989 and here it's President Corazon Aquino who is in power. And she puts forward a law that is to create the arm and also, again, encourages a plebiscite to determine which people or which provinces which be members of the arm. That vote is held and we have four provinces opting in to the arm arrangement. In 1996, the contours of the arm become much more well defined because you have a final peace agreement reached between the MNLF and the Philippine government. And this is really where we get to this idea of power sharing because if you look closely at the 1996 agreement, you'll see that it has substantial elements of power sharing. Now the way Caroline and I have in the past characterized power sharing is by talking about four different dimensions, the political, military, territorial, and economic. And when we look at the agreement reached in 1996 between the MNLF and the government, what we see is all four of those dimensions specified in the final agreement. So what I'm gonna speak to is how we see those different dimensions in that 1996 agreement. So in terms of territorial, it's pretty obvious, right? We have the arms territorial boundaries defined and this is going to be the era where Muslims who opt in have an opportunity for self-governance. So that's territory. Political, we see political in the fact that there is the establishment of a consultative assembly to govern the arm. The leader of the MNLF, who is Norma Maswari, is given executive power within this new arrangement. So we see Muslims in this region given some degree of true political power. Military, included in the agreement was a provision that 7,500 MNLF troops would be integrated into the national military of the Philippines. Lastly, economic. We see economic power sharing in the fact that the government, because Mindanao is so impoverished and underdeveloped, offering greater and greater aid to Mindanao in an effort to jumpstart economic development. So in all of these dimensions, we see power sharing. So it's clearly a power sharing arrangement. Now, with this agreement, there is also the promise that a new plebiscite will be held with the idea of, again, seeing if those in what are considered sort of the homeland of the Muslim community would wish to opt in. So that occurs in 2001. And what we see is those four original provinces that had opted in with the original plebiscite stay in. In addition to that, we get one new province. That's Basilan and a city of Marawi joining in as well. So hopefully what I've given you a sense of is sort of what this conflict focuses on, how they've tried to resolve it. I'm now gonna turn things over to Clark, who's gonna talk a bit about her study. All right, thank you, Matt. And I'm going to try to be as brief as possible here, but I just want to talk a little bit about how you design a large-scale survey in an area that has experienced conflict and a survey that can sort of answer the type of very complicated and sophisticated questions that we were looking at. So just got a couple of slides. So the first thing that I would like to talk about is the sample, right? So we have to figure out what areas are we going to do this work in. So for our sample, we chose five provinces and in the most conflict affected area. And you'll notice when looking at this map, you should see areas that are shaped that look very similar to the map that Matt just showed you a moment ago. And so for our survey, we looked at two provinces outside of the arm, so bordering the arm, but not included in the treatment, and then three provinces inside the arm. So in order to get to the sort of, so that's the basic sampling frame, but then to get down to the individuals, how did we do that? So we had a sample that was basically divided proportional to population size. So areas within the survey sample that have the largest populations are more likely to have survey interviewers come to that area and do the research. And so also an important element here is the division of the sample and to several different strata because we have not only areas inside of the arm and outside of the arm, but we also have areas inside of the arm that may be voted for exclusion on the local level. So the Borengae or the local community voted not to be inside of the arm, but they were included anyway because the larger province or municipality voted to be within the arm. So in that case, we have folks that are living inside of the arm who may in fact be dissatisfied with the peace arrangements. And then we have the Converse Situation where there are areas in these two provinces that are bordering the arm where folks voted to be included, but then they were excluded because the province as a whole voted for exclusion. So this is a long way of saying that the borders of the arm are somewhat jagged in terms of folks that wanted to be included and folks that wanted to be excluded. And the final point here is this was actually quite a large survey sample. So we had over 3,000 individual interviews that we conducted in this area. So this is a nice robust sample that we can get some pretty statistically relevant information from. And so I just wanna talk a little bit about the description of the sample. So give you a little flavor of the types of respondents we were talking to. So this is a primarily rural population, 85% of the population living in rural areas. The breakdown by religions, roughly 65% Muslim, 35% Christian. We have the 1% there that's sort of traditional animist religions. Education, you'll notice 42% have elementary school level education or less. 37% have high school or middle school level education. And the 21% there are folks that have done anything at all post-secondary education. Average household size, relatively large, 5.6 individuals per household. And then interesting socioeconomic statistic, the overall, the average household income amongst our survey population is about 1 third of the national average in the Philippines. And that really points to the fact that this is one of the sort of poorer, more undeveloped areas of the country. So that gives you a little idea of the population we were talking to. And then to go back to the issue of exposure to violence, because obviously that's very relevant to our research questions. So we ask a question, how often is there conflict in your community? And you'll notice here that only 12% of respondents said there's often are always conflict. So that seems like a relatively small number. And also that 12%, they were really concentrated in two barangays. So two sort of, I mean, eight barangays. So very sort of concentrated population. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that they answered this question this way, but that doesn't mean that historically the population has not been exposed to violence. So if you'll notice here, almost 50% of the population that we interviewed at some point, while living in Medinao, they'd been forced to evacuate due to violence from the conflict. And then 37% of people described themselves or their communities as being physically attacked at some point in the past. So there is a relatively high level of exposure to violence. And so this is also another very key point as we think about the relevance of peace agreements to individuals within a population as opposed to elites. Only 45% of our study population said that they had any knowledge about this 1996 peace agreement. And obviously this is going to be some of the factors that influence that are age. Obviously folks that are older are more likely to know about the agreement. Folks that have a higher level of education are more likely to know about the agreement, obviously. But the overall sort of takeaway is that less than half of the population actually is aware of this settlement. And another interesting fact is the percentage of folks that were aware is roughly the same inside and outside of the arm. So you might suppose that the treatment group, which would be the folks inside of the arm would be more aware of the settlement. It's had more of an impact on them, but we didn't really find that to be the case. It was roughly the same. And then another interesting sort of piece of information is men were 21% more likely to say that they knew about the agreement. And this could be, I mean, so we actually know from other studies that a lot of times men sort of overestimate their, when somebody asks about knowledge of a certain fact, like men will overestimate what they, they will inflate their knowledge to surveyors. So that could be where that's coming from, but that was another interesting point in the data. And so this is all, again, just a way of saying that this was a really robust sort of methodological exercise that we used. And I will turn this back over to Caroline and she will talk to us about the results. All right, so, oh, thanks. I'm used to bellowing at my classes. I don't use a mic. All right, so we want to start with sort of one of our first key questions, which is to what extent do people have a perception that the peace agreement has or has not provided them with these four political goods that we're focusing on here. So here's one of the political goods we ask about, which is the level of security in the community. So the question asks, to what extent do you agree that the 1996 peace agreement has helped to improve the level of security in your community? And the responses can range from strongly disagree to strongly agree. And what's interesting here is that we've grouped the responses by whether the respondent was inside the arm or outside the arm, right? And here you do see different, and up at the top left-hand corner you can see that these are statistically significant differences in their responses, right? So the people inside the arm, which again are the ones that get the treatment, right? They're the ones that get the arm created for them. That's what the peace agreement sought to do. These are people who felt excluded before, wanted some access to self-government, et cetera. They have a much higher number of respondents, percentage of respondents who respond with agree or strongly agree to the question about, they believe that the peace agreement did help improve the level of security in their community. But it's also important to see that, I mean, when you look at the outside of the arm folks, you've still got almost 60%, I'm sorry, a math challenge here, almost 50%, right? 40.7 plus 6.9% of the population agree and strongly agree that it has helped to improve the level of security in their community. So that's one political good. A second one is availability and quality of goods and services. This would be education, healthcare, et cetera. And again, we see statistically significant difference in their responses on the part of folks inside the arm and outside the arm with a pretty significant number, for example, in the agree category in the arm, almost 50% right there. And certainly about almost 63% between agree and strongly agree, saying, yeah, this has helped improve the peace agreement has helped, my perception is it has helped improve the availability of goods and services. Our third category of political goods is rule of law or more equal treatment under the law for all members of the community. Writing these survey questions, this was a really interesting one because we have the concept of rule of law. Well, how do you actually translate that into all these languages in a way that actually makes sense to people? And working with the survey team in Mindanao, we came up with the idea of the concept of more equal treatment under the law for all members of the community. Again, also a statistically significant response, difference in the responses here for people both inside the arm and outside the arm. And then our final category, do you think the peace agreement has produced a more fair outcome for your community? And again, also statistically significant responses to this. So we are getting these perceptions clearly and there is clearly a difference in terms of the communities, those who live inside the arm, who perceive they got the treatment and those who are outside the arm who think, well, that was for them, right? In terms of these perceptions of getting these public goods, right? So where does this all fit in? This is our attempt to avoid making a slide that just has a table with a bunch of coefficients in it. We'll see if this proves any easier to look at. What you have over here are basically our variables that we're looking at, right? Our main variable are these, our main thing we're interested in is the effect that political goods provision, they're the people's perceptions of political goods provision. What effect does that have on their level of trust in the national government? Now, because of problems of multicollinearity, we actually couldn't use each of the political, the perceptions of each political good by itself. We couldn't ask just look at security, just look at put all four in this. Because not surprisingly, there's some relationship between these political goods. You can imagine that how you feel about security probably also has something to do with how you feel about other goods and services, et cetera. What we did was create a political goods index, right? So we took all of these responses to the political goods, different four, different political goods, and we created a political goods provision index that we use instead in our analysis. So we have the political goods index and as our main explanatory variable we're interested in, and we have other variables here as well. Gender, age, religion, household income, level of education, political affiliation, level of exposure to violence, perceptions of corruption. We haven't said anything about that yet, but that actually proves to be quite interesting and whether you're in the arm or not. And just to make our findings kind of as clear as possible here, kind of boiled it down to the main points here. What we have in the arm, the dark blue ones here, dark blue font are variables that prove to be statistically significant. And what we're reporting here are called odds ratio. So if something increased, the odds that a person would have a higher level of trust, it's the up arrow. If the factor has the opposite, a dampening effect, that it would affect political trust, it has a down arrow. So what we see is that the political goods, right, if you're in the arm, that does have a positive impact. It does increase. So their perceptions of this political goods provisioned by the government increased their level of national trust, but only in the arm. The arrow is upward pointing outside the arm, but it's not significant, right? So our hunch that this might matter more to some groups than others did play out, right? The people who are in the arm, who the peace agreement was designed specifically, you could argue, I mean, a peace agreement designed for everybody if it can help secure peace for everybody, right? But who have the perception that this thing helped deliver these goods specifically to them did have a positive effect. Islam has a, if they're in the arm, a negative effect. Again, these are people, this just means that if you're Muslim, you're predisposed not to have high levels of trust in the national government because your perception is you've been ignored by them historically, you've been mistreated by them historically, right? What's really interesting, and we haven't really thought much about is why is this arrow pointing up for people outside the arm who are Muslim? We haven't really explored that yet. I don't think this is a very big percentage of the population. It's also not statistically significant. Income, okay, I'm not gonna really say much about that, political affiliation, that was the only thing that held across the arm for inside the arm and outside the arm. And basically what this seems to actually be showing is a very high level of support, interestingly, for the current president. Why? I mean, a lot of people just think, ugh, right? He's from Mindanao. He's the first president of the Philippines that's been from Mindanao and he is widely supported within Mindanao. So that's probably reflecting that. And then corruption has a very negative effect within the arm and we haven't fully explored this yet but there are perceptions in the arm that the arm government in particular has been massively corrupt, which is kind of an interesting thing having to do with groups that get access to power and resources all of a sudden and then don't, they aren't seen by their citizens as necessarily funneling those down the line to them. So I think that's it for this particular slide. And just a few points by way of discussion then to kind of float out there. And I have another couple slides after this and then kind of opening it up to everybody. So just summing up, what we find is that although a significant percentage of citizens with that number being higher within the arm perceive this peace agreement as producing positive benefits for them, this has a significant and positive effect on political trust only among citizens whose grievance is the settlement directly sought to address through the various power sharing measures. So the perception that a peace agreement yields political goods matters but again only for some of the respondents, right? So individuals from different groups appear to have different perceptions of a settlement's political goods provision and different implications for trust. So kind of teasing out some of the possible implications here. We think this suggests that there should be more and you actually mentioned this Susan in terms of designing these peace agreements and how sometimes it's like, oh, the Ethiopian, like almost like it's a shelf. Like let's pull the Ethiopian model off this shelf and try that one on today, right? Versus really kind of thinking more organically about the nature of the conflict, the actors. But here we're saying, well, there might be just another thing that should be given more thought and that's political goods, right? How are these gonna be, are they gonna play out? How do they play out? Questions maybe we should think more about who should get what in order to build trust. And some other questions we might think about are should measures be included in a settlement that are designed to enhance the trust of citizens who don't belong to the groups with grievances, right? Would that give them maybe more buy-in? Communication strategies, right? The fact that less than half of the respondents knew about the peace agreement actually says something important when you think about the importance of communication strategies. So how do you get people to know, not necessarily every nitty gritty piece of a peace agreement, but how do you get them to know, to be aware that there was a peace agreement to know a little bit about the contents, to be able to call people, their representatives on things like, well, this seems to be saying we should be getting more of this and we're not, right? Kind of to hold them responsible. Other things about communication strategies, I'll go back again to the example of Columbia. A recent study showed that there that a lot of people actually knew very little about the settlement, right? There was a referendum held on it, but not very many people actually knew very much about the settlement. Instead, they relied on elite cues. So they looked to certain political elites, listened to what those political elites were saying about the settlement and took their cues from them. And in one case, as I mentioned already, for example, Alvaro Uribe, who called for a no vote, people voted no because Alvaro Uribe was telling them to, even though they didn't really know much about the settlement as a whole, right? So again, the importance, I think, of communication strategies comes out of here. We may want to think about strategies that target certain audiences, for example. And then we just need to end with a point about the limitations of the study. It's only one case. It's the Philippines, right? So issues of external validity. Also, this is an interesting case because it had, as Matt said, all four types of power sharing. Other settlements have only a couple, et cetera, different combinations. And then the other thing was because we had to use this political goods index, which we still think provides a lot of information, we can't tell whether any particular type of political good kind of produces more bang for the buck than others. And it would be really interesting to know that, although again, that's probably likely to be contingent upon a particular conflict environment, the history of that conflict environment, et cetera. And so one last slide, a peaceful type slide here, right? From the Philippines, thank you. Thank you. Great, so both the academic researchers and Susan have given us a lot of issues to consider. We have a tremendous amount of wealth of experience in the room. Ambassador, thanks for joining us. So let me open it up to questions. If you wanna share any reflections or ask a particular question about the study or about the criteria and pillars that you've laid out, Susan, let me open it up. Who would like to begin? Oh yeah, thank you, Anisha. Great, thank you, Ezra. Thank you, no other questions. I'll take up the opportunity to ask the first question. Thank you, it's very interesting research. I think it's also very valuable to have both a survey and a field experiment combined, and it's great. Thank you for sharing that. And as you were presenting your results, one of the things that I thought about is, and you mentioned that in the future research, your future research agenda, sort of, what it would be also interesting to look at the perception in the mainland because conflicts, they take place in a zero sum sort of mentality, right? And oftentimes we see a lot of polarization around power sharing agreements. So, and in this case, people in Mindanao and in ARM have benefited from this, but how do the others perceive the situation? And I'm working on backlash, resistance, so in that sense, I think that would be really interesting to look at as well, while people in the ARM benefit from this, how do the others perceive? Not in Mindanao, but in mainland, maybe in other parts of Philippines, even if it doesn't affect them in terms of public goods, but they may still be perceiving that this agreement is depriving them of something. And I think that's also an interesting perception to tap into and maybe another survey project for you. I don't know. Hi, thank you again for the research. I'm interested, this is obviously expose analysis, just if you have thought about in a sort of ex ante way that governments aren't the only people who can provide political goods, does the ability of non-state actors to provide political goods have any effect? Thank you so much. This was such interesting results. I found it very interesting in your opening comments about the role of course correcting mechanisms and how important they are. And I think Susan touched on that. And it would be really interesting from your research to see if you found a desire for course correction, given that this has been in place for so many years, are there people in the arm who maybe because of corruption or lack of public goods want changes to the peace deal? And are there people, for example, outside the arm or on the fringes of the arm who would like to be included or et cetera? I mean, do you see that a decade or two in to such a peace deal, is there a desire for course correction? So 20 years ago, when I was 10, I was involved in Mindanao and there was a conversation then about the decentralization, the potential for federalism. And I know that that conversation has continued to come up. And I just wonder if that came through in any of the discussions, because presumably that could be a longer term governance mechanism to address some of these autonomy issues, not just in Mindanao, but the broader challenges across the country. So your question about the perceptions in the mainland are interesting. I mean, we didn't obviously do this in the mainland as well. Our effort to try to get this a little bit was by in fact, serving people outside the arm as well with the notion that they would care to some extent because they're in Mindanao, right? I mean, the Philippines is actually really... Well, as a whole, because Mindanao as a whole is impoverished, you could say that there might be some level of grievance that way. But generally, outside the arm, you're talking about areas where it's more Christian, right? The population is much more densely Christian. Inside the arm, it's much more Muslim. So they don't share the same level of grievances because it's the Muslims in particular who feel discriminated against. Christians are coming in and in their view taking their land, et cetera. So we didn't focus on the mainland. I mean, this is a pretty big survey just alone in Mindanao, but we did try to get a little bit at perceptions by asking people not directly in the arm themselves. But I think your questions about backlash, resistance are actually fascinating ones. And I think the case I would again, invoke one more time here is Columbia because the study that I mentioned earlier, they actually did a field experiment. And in it, what they did was, the treatment was to say, to actually take one of the provisions in the peace agreement, but invoke the FARC. And so when they said, the FARC is particularly interested in this particular measure versus, sorry, versus saying just to the other half of the group that got the, not the treatment just said, you know, this particular measure has been suggested as part of the peace agreement. People, the response was much more negative when they use the language of the FARC is in favor of this particular peace measure. So, again, queuing, resistance. I mean, also, it's sort of interesting to me that some of this might have to do with how you frame things and package things. So certainly I think there is potential for backlash or resistance. I think the Philippines is interesting because of its geography. So in Manila, kind of got this sense that, you know, that's Mindanao, okay, that's a place that has the potential for great wealth because it does with the resources there. And yet, you know, it's very impoverished. It's also important to say the peace agreement has not been fully implemented, the 96th agreement. And so I'm not really sure that there's this sense that I live here in Manila and I'm suffering because everything's going to Mindanao because it really hasn't fully, fully been implemented, right? So I didn't get the sense that outside of Mindanao there's much of a backlash potentially against us. Now that's saying something different at the level of Congress, which I'll come back to your question. Yes, John, you're spot on. Yes, governments aren't the only ones who can provide political goods. It's interesting there the extent to which NGOs have been involved, USAID through the GEM program, for example. So there are lots of non-state actors that have been involved there. It's not always exactly clear that the citizens carefully distinguish between who did what in terms of our focus group discussions, for example. There's some interesting statements to the effect that, you know, it seems fungible as to whether they interpret it or not. Now sometimes that has actually been the goal of USAID, right? I mean, we brand everything from the American people, but I know when I did an assessment in Columbia, they were very carefully not branding it from the American people because the whole goal was to have the perception that the national government was in fact doing something for these previously ignored areas now. So, but that is actually a very interesting point. It's not just, you know, and we haven't analyzed the data yet for the other levels of government, but it'll be interesting to see what comes through with that as well. Course-correcting mechanisms. So one huge course-correcting mechanism is the fact that there's now an effort to have another peace agreement, right, on the banks of Moro. So that's, it's sort of like, and this is with the MILF, right? So that's one way of saying, well, you didn't get it right with the MNLF, right? Among other things, not full implementation, not enough powers, et cetera, et cetera. So you could consider that the MILF trying to force a course-correction of sorts, right, by trying to get another peace agreement going, which is stalled right now. Yeah, issues of corruption certainly resonate within the arm. Yeah, so, so, and Missouri got caught for it, right? Got jailed, so. And then federalism is fascinating because Duterte has seized on that again, saying, look, this is never gonna go anywhere, the whole autonomy arrangement. Let's just make an end run around it and go for a federal solution, but Congress is really resistant. So, I mean, they don't wanna give up their powers as they perceive it to this kind of arrangement. So that's not really going anywhere either right now. So I have just one thought to add on the question that the folks in the Capitol, Manila, are not really focused enough on this, that they're gonna have an opinion one way or another, or at least one that's strongly voiced. But when we were doing research on the 96th agreement, what we did see in Midna now was that there was a very substantial backlash. You had protests from Christian groups concerned about this. I even remember that a report that said one of the signs that was being carried by the folks that were protesting was Ms. Wari Stinks, right? Who can say a blunter than that, right? So there was this strong backlash. The way I think about that backlash is that often it should be considered more an opportunity than a problem for the peace agreement. Particularly if it's not widespread because what that gives an opportunity for is the people who have signed on to this agreement to signal that they are committed even in light of this opposition, right? So they're willing to endure this criticism. They're willing to endure these challenges and still stick with the peace signals to everyone that they are truly committed. So the way I think about it is it serves as a costly signal of a commitment to peace. And then there was that other question that was about course correction. And I think Carolyn spoke about this a bit, but I do get the sense when we look at the more recent efforts in an agreement, the 2012 agreement, that there is some sense that the MNLF got a good deal. That there's not a need for course correction as much as there is a need for more of it. So when we talked to some of the people in our elite interviews, there was often this discussion of using the 96 agreement as a model for the more recent agreement. So in this case, it wasn't a view that something need to be fixed. Instead, those groups that didn't get on the peace train the first time, right? And have been left behind now have the sense that this is an opportunity for them to get on board as well. First of all, thank you also for your research. I had a question about the political goods and the relationship to the root causes of the war or the violence in the first place and so specifically indigenous land claims, languages, like all of that. And basically is there a correlation between how you define political goods and whether the root causes of the war were addressed through the power sharing agreement? My question is a little far afield, so maybe you wanna answer that one first and then I'll jump in. So thank you. We're gonna get back. I think when we decided to focus on political goods as part of this, to be honest, we really started with the literature on political goods. So our categories of political goods, I had the definition I didn't read by Rothberg up here for example, comes out of that literature, which does not pertain just to conflict countries or countries emerging from conflict, but certainly, his focus has been on governance issues and good governance issues in particular. Obviously that's hugely relevant in the conflict context. Obviously, there have been failures of governance that are related to conflicts, but certainly also issues of exclusion and the like. So we didn't pick the political goods. We didn't select them on the conflict per se or necessarily look at the Philippines and say, well, what are the root causes of conflict there? They're out of this more general literature relating to governance issues. I think certainly a lot, at least the four we chose to start with here do clearly relate to conflict, right? I mean, there's a sense that there hasn't been equal, a rule of law hasn't prevailed, that there's not fairness of access to treatment under the law. Huge sense of insecurity in some areas. I mean, the statistic is interesting that you start with, but then you start to drill down and you see that nearly half the population has had to evacuate at some point because of a security issue, et cetera. So security certainly is as relevant. In the focus groups discussions, the first thing they wanna talk about is access to public goods, right? Education, healthcare, potable water. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So it's obviously, it turns out to be hugely relevant to them. And you can imagine in any conflict context where these are often countries that are impoverished, so these have been lacking to begin with, but then are further compromised by the conflict, right? And then our fourth category, we just felt the sense of fairness would be another issue in an area that has felt marginalized. So there's my long-involved answer. We didn't choose them on the conflict, but we think many of these will be relevant to conflict areas. I was recently in Pakistan where they have sort of the flip side. The Christians are the ones who suffer most. And so we had an interesting sort of brainstorming session and came up with an idea that's based on commerce rather than politics, which is what if sort of like the fair trade logo, there was an interfaith harmony logo and your business would have to meet certain standards in order to display this logo? And then, because one of the problems in Pakistan is there's so much conflict people are afraid to go there. So their economy is really suffering as a whole. So if in the process of establishing these interfaith harmony standards, people actually became friendlier. Plus maybe people in Christian countries would be more open to buying Pakistani goods if the Christians there were treated better. So anyway, so this is just in the idea stage, but would there be some possibilities for using commerce as the tool for motivating people? Yes, please go ahead. We'll do a few more questions because we are getting close to time. So if you have any remaining questions, please ask. Thanks very much for the research. You mentioned that actually while you were doing the survey there was some conflict going on. And given the generally satisfying answers that people got, where's the support for violence coming from? And did that show up in your survey? Do you want to speak to that? Yeah, of course. Yeah, for violence coming. Anybody else, please go ahead. Take those? Yeah. Okay. The Interfaith Harmony logo, isn't there an economics thing here at USIP still? Is there someone who focuses on econ? Oh, actually not so much. Okay, sorry. But maybe we should. Yeah, well I don't know. I guess I was kind of all caught up in the mechanics of this. It sounds fascinating, right? I don't know anything about this. I was just, one thing that was interesting was that in Mindanao there certainly are a number of interfaith efforts going on to address conflict at the local level, for example. And we met with the bishop there and had a really interesting, heavily involved in those kinds of efforts, but not on a commercial level, for example. I guess I was thinking about the intricacies of what you were saying. I was wondering, would a store or something that had the interfaith logo on it, would they worry about being a target, maybe? So I just was wondering about the, if your market, if it's meant to peel more to external markets, then maybe that would work. But I guess I would wonder about whether that would make you potentially a target. Well, let's go to the question of the source of conflict that still exists, because I think that can help us get at, okay, so what do we do, what do we do now? What's happening? So the support for violence? Yeah, so that's actually a very good point to bring up, because I think we are seeing a dynamic happening in Mindanao that's very similar to many other conflicts. So if you think about Northern Ireland over time, like that's a situation that I'm a little bit more familiar with, you have sort of over time a splintering of the main sort of rebel or opposition groups, and as they splinter, they become smaller, but also more violent at the same time. And I think that's really what we're seeing in Mindanao at this point. So there were areas, and obviously we're not going to say exactly what those areas were, but there were certain areas where you would get, where our interviewers would go in and people would say, yes, we support Naote, we support what they're doing in Morawi right now. And, but it was a very like localized sort of phenomenon. Whereas at the same time you have, during the conflict in Morawi, people that are members of the MILF, members used to be rebels now, sort of somewhat integrated into the security forces, that were sort of doing the cordon part of the operation in Morawi. So they were providing the humanitarian relief and sort of ringing the city while the Philippines military was going in. So you really do have a splintering of these groups. And I think there's always going to be some residual pockets of folks that have, ideologically not predisposed to being a part of any sort of power sharing arrangement. I mean, that was fascinating when we were there reading the English language newspaper with Duterte calling on the former, you know, MNLF and the MILF with whom they're back and forth on the peace agreement, calling on them to help the armed forces with the, you know, with security issues and with the fighting in Morawi. Wait, what's going, you know, so that was really interesting. But yes, these smaller, more radicalized, violent groups were certainly involved in, were part of the, were what was going on there in Morawi. Okay, great. Do we have any remaining questions before we wrap up? Okay, then let me thank our panelists for providing again some really insightful recommendations. I'll just go through them quickly to leave you with these thoughts. Susan, you mentioned your four pillars, ensuring political trust among the parties, narrowing the decisions that they need to make, having clear, formal, informal and formal dispute mechanisms and monitoring mechanisms. And Carolyn, you and your team left us with thinking about considering organic constructs of power sharing versus, you know, using these off-the-shelf models. How to provide those who might feel that they didn't receive something from the agreement. What can we provide them? And thinking about communications and how we communicate what's happened in the peace agreement. So let's give them a round of applause for their discussion. And thank you all for coming as well to learn more about this. Have a good day.