 Good afternoon everyone. Good afternoon. I'm sorry to be joining late and therefore not be able to hear all the presentations. It's very early in New York. My apologies for that. Just a few comments from my side and I hope to be to engage more directly in the discussion. We are clearly facing a very difficult time in history where so many different risks are emerging and are interacting with each other. This is something that I think really started in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall where we had a fairly stable bilateral bipolar world that first moved in the 1990s to a more unipolar world that was for some time relatively stable but certainly at the UN had a period of euphoria even in terms of what we thought that the international system could produce and in terms of collaboration but also in terms of peace dividends by reducing military expenditures and that world order very quickly became a much more fragile and interconnected and vulnerable world that already showed its ugly side in the late 90s through various financial crises that both in Latin America and in Asia revealed itself and that I think process continued certainly in the 2000s with 9-11 and various other risks arising around terrorism, violent extremism, organized crime and interconnectedness between these different issues as well and therefore we live at the moment in a much more fragile world that is multi-polar and maybe even chaotic as the Secretary General has said and a complete reassessment of course of some of the instruments that we have is necessary also because of the war in Ukraine. What we saw already over the last 10 years or so that the number of violent conflicts were increasing, they were becoming more protracted, more complex and driven by multiple factors that were often difficult to identify, were changing over time partly because of connections between terrorist group and transnational organized crime groups and therefore become much more difficult to address through the traditional tools of the United Nations including peace keeping operations and special political commissions and on the one hand and facilitation and mediation and using the good office of the Secretary General on the other hand partly because of two important characteristics. First the number of non-state armed actors increased a lot in Syria alone there are more than a thousand non-state armed groups and that is significantly more difficult to to reach a peace agreement as was so successful during the Cold War when we basically could put together two different groups negotiated peace agreement, put peacekeepers on the ground to support the implementation of the peace agreement and that and that went very well in in southern Africa and central America etc. The other important factor is the really fast increase in external engagement in civil wars and that was for example clearly documented in the UCPD data but analyzed also in the UN World Bank Pathways for Peace Report and that makes these traditional instruments of the UN so much more difficult. So one of the consequences I think of all of this is that that peace building has become so much more important and the focus on prevention as clearly within the UN we spending or the international community in general too much resources on crisis management and crisis response that are clearly unsustainable and therefore focus on prevention and peace building through more comprehensive and coherent approaches that is really should be a responsibility of the entire UN system is so critically important. So maybe I'll leave it here for some introductory marks and then I'm happy to engage further in during the discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you Henkian. Thank you to all the panelists. I'm sure all of you will agree that we've had quite a riveting display of knowledge and we've done a tour de tabla from Syria to Columbia to Mozambique and to South Africa. I would like to open it up for questions from the audience. So we have three. We'll start with the lady on the right and then the gentleman there and in the middle the two and then yourself. Okay. Hi. Thank you so much. So actually my question is for the paper in Turkey. So I was thinking about so the results that you have and the difference between Kurds and Turks kind of got me thinking I don't know the context very well but I was thinking so do you know if most of the people coming from Syria if they are Sunnis or shits so what I'm thinking here is that this relatively at the same time Kurds were fighting ISIL so they were fighting as Sunnis although they are not from the same group so I was thinking if maybe this is what's kind of going on here in terms of perceptions so that was like my big question and then I also have a question for the Columbia paper I have a raw so I know that the paper is already published as you said but I was just thinking if you have so because part of your treatment was to come up with these road map for solutions so I was thinking this is this going to differ from village to village right so do you have some variation there and can you look at that maybe I don't know if you look at that in the paper maybe it's a spill of paper I don't know yeah thanks yeah yeah I'd like to collect them so there was a gentleman at the back and there were three gentlemen in the middle if I understand so let's let's collect three and then we'll we'll come to the answers thanks a lot I have a question to Rob Blair and the Columbia study that's fantastic work thanks a lot and following up on the previous question sorry please introduce yourself as well oh sorry about that my name is Krzysztof Krakowski I'm from Collegio Carl Alberto in Turin so following up on that question I would imagine that some of the violence in the post-conflict setting can be related to some illicit activities that emerged during the war and continue to be present in these localities such as drug trafficking wouldn't can uh uh juntas the acción comunal in combination with legal authorities somehow address these issues because I would expect that there might be in this place as some sort of backfire effect because you know you can't go to the police with something which is illegal and the second one very brief our juntas the acción comunal in a way some some ways discriminatory I don't know against poorer people against people from some ethnoratial groups such as indigenous or afro-colonial communities and how this combination with legal authorities can address that problem thanks and then can we come to the middle and there are a couple of questions and the gentleman behind as well thank you um so my name is uh Tom Dierkes I work at swiss peace and the University of Basel Switzerland um I actually also had a question on the colombia paper um but I but maybe one that is well connects to the other questions um in your presentation you you mentioned the work by Anna Arjona um I think one of the key takeaways from that book is that uh rebel governance differs uh geographically between different territories by the same group um and also the strength of pre-existing institutions have an influence on that um I was wondering whether you saw that in your own research uh whether uh let's say um um strong forms or sophisticated forms of rebel governance have an effect and and does that uh leave different legacies uh in well the cases that that you looked at um thank you thank you my name is uh Olane de Mufta from Conwest Africa uh my question or comment goes to the second presenter of the of the paper uh in your conclusion the paper conclude that the community rely less on armed group and that uh you recommend for uh exploiting complementarity between the state and the common authorities uh based on my experience in Nigeria particularly in the northwest we notice that the community rely more on armed group than the state and common authority and that we also realize that the common authorities and the state are even perpetrator of conflict in the area so therefore people believe to go for the support of the armed group neglecting the state and the common common authority so here my dilemma is this that don't you think the issue of trust and the need for peace badly matter in establishing whether complementarity between the state and common authority will work for peace or not thank you thank you so much um should we have a stab at answering the questions and then we'll move on uh to to the second round of questions if that's okay thank you for the question first uh thank you uh actually this is really good question um unfortunately the Turkish government is not sharing us the information about the ethnic you know uh diversity in the Syrian refugee population but we have some information from the survey studies and um it shows that the majority of the Syrian refugees in Turkey are Sunnis actually Sunni Arabs but this is not that much relevant for the for our analysis because uh majority of Kurdish people are also Sunni uh Muslims so I think here the issue is whether they were Syrian Kurds or Syrian Arabs and um in the period that we analyze here so far it looks uh until 2015 and actually the Syrian Kurds migrated or refuged uh to Turkey uh right after the Siege of Kobani if uh you followed from the news so there were almost 400 uh thousand Syrian Kurds who had to migrate to Turkey because of the Siege um so our analysis therefore just not capturing that part very well but once we extend it uh the time horizon hopefully we'll capture the impact of this and it's very important thank you um yeah thanks everyone for those really um thoughtful questions I'll answer I'll try to answer all of them um so I think a couple of questions were sort of about heterogeneity like heterogeneous treatment effects by different sort of types of variations so one um heterogeneity by the strength of rebel governance so we definitely find heterogeneity across these communities in terms of how strong rebel governance was in the past we don't actually find that the program was more or less effective in those different types of communities I should say though we don't have a lot of statistical power to examine that sort of heterogeneity which exists at the at the community level so I'm not I'm hesitant to make too much of those results but at least based on what we found there's definitely heterogeneity so totally in line with Ana's work um but it seems like the intervention is equally effective no matter how strong those rebel institutions were in the past with the caveat that you know we're a little we don't have a lot of power to really to really pick that up um the question of whether response routes vary by community so they do so they're tailor-made to each community um and this is something we have not explored at all really um which I mean you know there's so much data it actually makes me think Michael and I should probably sit down after this and think about what we can do um because we have you know we have like pictures of the response there's a lot we could do basically and we've done none of it so that's a really great idea um that we just haven't explored um Chris Christie your questions um I think there are communities where the junta's are discriminatory they tend to have you know in most places the majority of the population of the community is a member of the junta but you definitely talk to people who who don't trust the junta who feel that the junta um you know excludes them and part of the intuition behind the project is you know maybe by introducing state presence you create sort of an exit option for those people and this was actually sort of partly inspired by work that I had done previously in Liberia where we where we saw exactly that dynamic where like providing police presence um was really helpful to people who felt that they were excluded by communal institutions um as to whether they can address illegal activities that's really tough um I think my instinct is to say probably not I think probably you know in places where people are engaged in a lot of activity illegal activities that they're not going to report to anyone um I suspect this intervention is probably not going to do a whole lot of good there and actually maybe related to um the question about northwest Nigeria so we're working in context where there is some level of peace already established and I think that's that's a pretty important scope condition for this project so we intentionally avoided places where there was a lot of violence going on because we thought well for one thing this just isn't safe for the implementers we didn't want to send people out to go get hurt you know in the process of implementing this intervention but we also thought you know these just aren't the types of communities we're building these sorts of bridges between state and communal authorities is really going to be all that effective we need to be working in places where they're now they're not I wouldn't say they're like all that peaceful there was still plenty of conflict right but they weren't war zones they weren't places where armed groups were in sort of active violent conflict with with one another so I think that that's when we think about sort of where this intervention might travel you know where you could implement it those are the sorts of situations where I think it's less likely to be effective where there's a lot of violence going on you know I also think we really assume that there are complementarity so we assume that there's some level of trust in communal authorities but maybe they struggle to enforce their decision we assume that probably there isn't a lot of trust in state authorities but they have some capacity to provide enforcement their context where those things just aren't true right where where nobody trusts communal institutions where the state has no capacity at all and there there really aren't any complementarities to exploit right so so an intervention like this I think would also be less effective in those sorts of settings now I should say I think there are lots of places where the state has some capacity and communal institutions have some trust so there there is an opportunity to build bridges but there are also places where that's just not going to be possible great thank you um so we'll move on to this side of the room are there any questions for Thomas or Pedro perfect yourself and then the gentleman behind questions for Thomas or Pedro hi yes I have a question for Pedro so you seem to describe an interesting trade-off between attitudes for democracy and attitudes for muslims if I understand correctly your conclusions and so I was wondering if you can do anything to disentangle what kind of messages work best to you know reduce them the attitudes for negative attitudes for muslims while keep increasing the attitudes for democracy but like if you can do anything about like you know you change the type of message and you see whether there is like map out the difference in this kind of trade-offs between these two types of attitudes and then kind of have like you know some kind of a policy brief that you can see which is best basically and yourself and yourself we'll take a couple and then and then answer my name is Samuel risk I'm the head of a team working on conflict prevention peacebuilding and responsive institutions at UNDP's crisis bureau in in New York I have about 20 questions but I'll ask only one very brief question and uh I'll ask some quick ones for everyone and I won't say anything again I didn't see a definition of communal institutions what are those exactly are those like cbo's etc organized or not I think it'll be helpful to know what what those are exactly I don't one of the things that you just explained now I think answer is part of my question but I think it requires a little bit of digging the relationship between the central state and local authorities when especially in the context of violent extremism when when you try to get the central state back to to support local authorities particularly on security sector it becomes really problematic because that was part of the problem in the first place so it seemed to me that you were arguing in a way that might actually reinstate the problem locally by using the the capacity and the authority of state authority authority to recover part of what's happening on the ground be great to hear about the decentralization discussion because some of these countries actually have decentralized processes so what are we actually promoting in the end a question to everyone you're all dealing with highly vulnerable communities as individuals or as communities would love to hear about the ethical standards being used in some other spaces these are this is called do no harm in other spaces it's conflict sensitivity one way or another may not necessarily be the business of researchers but in the end you have an impact one one way or another and then yeah I think this is this is the very last one the TRC presentation very good I think there there's a there's a recognition in the end that you did actually find that there are changes not necessarily with the black population but with the white population that is in segregated areas this might be an expected outcome but I think it would be great to figure out how this in the end promotes reconciliation when already the people that have changed are either part of the choir those you might assume to do this but the long-term reconciliation processes would be great to hear thanks okay brilliant so yeah I've got you so we don't have much time left so may I suggest that we've recorded these these questions your last question directed at the TRC Thomas if you could respond to the last question of the gentleman from UNDP and Pedro respond to the the question for yourself we'll take one more after that and wrap up if that's okay unless there's anything burning and I would like to say please definitely seek out individually all these amazing people and ask all your questions it's just in the interest of timing that I'm doing this so Pedro you're up and then Thomas thank you very much for for the questions for the comments so on on the the question on on the messages and and the interaction with with the attributes that people see on muslims and non muslims so we we don't have variation in in the messages we have something that I haven't mentioned in the presentation for briefness which is we have variation in terms of only muslim messages and also the christian message so so that that we have we haven't explored that much yet this is very preliminary we we will do that now in terms of message content it's not very there is no variation there but we we definitely are interested in checking the effects on the stereotypes that people attribute to muslims and non non muslims we have the detail of each stereotype and and we will be looking at at them individually I've I've just mentioned something general on positive stereotypes but we we have the detail and we'll be able to interact that what we find there with the effects that I showed on attitudes on democracy and and and social social issues then there was the comment on on ethics which of course it's very important we we followed the typical procedures for for ethical for ethical verification namely in terms of consent and the appropriate use of the of the data I must say that our data collection was relatively less intrusive than typical because everything is by phone here so in that sense I think we we we are we were less risky not not exactly because I mean of course all the context on COVID and the fact that of course these locations are some of them locations with conflict made them made these our option thank you great thank you and Thomas were out of time but please the last question of the gentleman from UNDP okay I will try to be very quick then so that we can all go for lunch so yeah I think you are totally right and that we should explore the the long run effects on on on on peace and this is actually so this what we presented here is really the the first step of of the project just trying to look at whether the TRC has an effect on on the attitudes of individuals the next step will obviously be to to look at whether the behaviors are impacted and that's where we will come to to this kind of border picture on on peace building by looking at data on intermarriage on crime and so on so so that's definitely something that we do plan to do and for your other questions about the ethical standards we already knew when we started this project and that and there were studies pointing to adverse effects on psychological health and so on and so first it was also quite important to take this into account and to use observational data in order not to take any risks in in this dimension so on our side that's how we tried to to take this into account