 Welcome you to the public event, building peace from the bottom up, post-war peace building and local intervention. My name is Kathleen Kenist and I direct the Gender Strategy and Policy Team here at USIP. Thirty-four years ago USIP was founded by Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible. It's practical and essential for US and global security. We are very pleased today to be co-hosting this event with the Conflict Analysis and Resolution Center at George Mason University. The theme of this event is in line with our core principles on partnerships. As we know that our impact is wider and more enduring when we work together on research with academic partners to gain a greater understanding about the practice of peace building and how to better measure its impact. We come together today around the recent work of Dr. Pamina Furchow, Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason and also a former USIP Senior Jennings Randolph Fellow. About five, six months ago Pamina and I were having coffee and I'm an anthropologist so this work really speaks to me at a core level. And I said we really need to amplify this work and I was excited to take on the opportunity to highlight this latest work of Pamina's called Reclaiming Everyday Peace, Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War. And we're going to hear a lot more about it over the next hour and a half. I'm thrilled that we have a terrific group of experts who will shed further light on this nexus of work on peace building. And also to help introduce this morning, I am very thrilled to invite a fellow anthropologist Dr. Kevin Avruc, who is Dean of the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Resolution and Professor of Anthropology at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason. I thought my title was very long, but Kevin, he has published more than 70 articles and essays and is the author, editor of six books, including a book that USIP published in 1998, Culture and Conflict Resolution, one that is followed by many students of peace building and certainly experts refer to it regularly. He was a senior fellow here at the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace. He's also been a Joan B. Kroc Peace Scholar at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and a Fulbright specialist at the Mava Via Peace Research Center. And so, Kevin, I invite you to the podium to share some opening remarks and to introduce our guest, Pamina. So I want to use my time to place Pamina's work in the context of the field, in a sense genealogically in the context of the field. Pamina's book is one step and a really important step in a trajectory of peace and conflict studies that goes back 30, 35 years at least. And this is a trajectory of work in theory, in research, and in practice that moves us from one binary to another. It moves us from the universal to the particular, from templates to contexts, from outsiders to insiders, from elites to locals, from prescription to elicitation, from expertise and expert systems to participation and partnership. Kathleen referred to my own part in this movement, which began in 1980s with my colleague Peter Black at George Mason, with our insistence that both for conflict analysis and for resolution, one must pay attention to culture. That is to significant cultural differences, beginning with the insight that not everyone negotiates the same way. This was the heyday of getting to, yes, as a foundational book, that not everyone negotiates the same way in English, and that if there are communicational impedances, you just need it to speak slower and louder. So we argued for the importance of culture, and in 1996 I was fortunate to be awarded a Jennings Randolph Fellowship for a project that was then called Discourses of Culture in Conflict Resolution. Now, whatever the definitional quagmires that surround the notion of culture, and there are many, and whatever its resistance to operationalization, it is in the end mainly a shorthand for talking about context. The context is political, economic, sociological, psychological, and existential. I think what was radical then in 1980, using the notion of culture to kind of crack open the hard-shelled egg of what was then approached to conflict resolution based in game theory and kind of behaviorism, you know, culture has seen its day, I think, now notions like discourse and narrative are probably much more generative of interesting work. More of a coming to culture as an anthropologist implied for me a methodology. And the methodology was, not surprisingly, ethnography, which was close to the ground. It was a concentration on the local, concentration often not on the elites, but on the villagers, if you will, and a concentration on local knowledge, on what Pamina calls indigenous technical knowledge. Now, at the same time that Peter Black and I were pushing culture, that master scholar practitioner, John Paul Letterac, was addressing two of the issues that I mentioned. And interestingly, they were mentioned, they were elaborated in two books, also published by Euseb Press. Firstly, on the matter of valuing the local, he proposed the now iconic pyramid that I think many of you have seen of a schematic for peace building, in a book called Peace Building. The elite level, the middle level, and what he called the grassroots. And like any pyramid, it was widest at the bottom, because there were always more villagers and peasants than there were ministers and professors. And in a way, that argument was the first time, to my knowledge, that we in the field were directed to look down, to look at the grassroots. And I actually remember being with John Paul, this was when we were involved in the late 90s in Somalia and then in Haiti. I remember John Paul presenting this work to folks, mainly from the Department of Defense. And there was a lot of non-comprehension in the room, let me put it that way. The notion that, first of all, the military had anything to learn from civilian peace builders, but particularly that had to pay attention to the grassroots. Now, for John Paul, the grassroots level was still fairly monolithic. I mean, he didn't differentiate very, very much on different kinds of grassroots, not only on the local, but what is today called in that literature, the local local. I mean, even going beyond the kind of local elites, these are local elites that not so ironically tend to be thrown up by outside intervention and resources coming in, not driving the white land cruisers themselves, but right, right around them. So there was that. And on the matter of participation that I mentioned in a different book, Letterac proposed the distinction for third-party interveners of prescriptive approaches, where one comes in with, you know, have process will travel, and illicitive approaches, which is when one tries to draw out from the folks their own ethno-conflict models, their own models of what causes conflict, and their own ethnopraxis, their own indigenous modalities of conflict resolution. And of course, all societies have both. And then, of course, with other kinds of interventions, the notion of nation-building, which is really state-building, and the liberal peace, which is making the world safe for foreign direct investment, and the many, many critiques that follow. So this, to me, is the genealogy into which Pamine's very, very important book sits. And it's important for a variety of reasons. First of all, it offers us a very nuanced sense of what peace looks like, what she calls small pee-pees looks like. And it gets us past the seminal, but in many ways still the stultifying distinction between positive peace and negative peace, in part by conceptualizing positive peace in terms like social cohesion and human rights and conflict resolution at the local level, and negative peace in terms of the distance in time and in space from actual physical violence so that peace looks different the further a community is from the actual traumas of physical violence. Secondly, it is a great improvement methodologically, although Pamine has heard me grumble more than once that I think in many cases methodology is the last refuge of scoundrels. It is a great improvement, certainly upon my approach, which would have been an ethnographic approach, because it is one that uses mixed methods and attention to hybridity in a very, very robust way. And I hope you'll say something about that. It is an important contribution, inter alia, to the ethics of practice and the ethics of peace building, if only for the simple reason that if you go in with a universal template and you go in prescriptively and you go in not differentiating communities, you are as likely to do bad as you are to do good. And those are at root the ethical questions that we need to begin with, which is do no harm. It's not an entire ethics of practice, but it's a foundational one. And finally, it is important because, and I know that Pamine deeply considers herself a scholar and a researcher, but to me it is a really important work that informs practice. It is a work that practitioners ought to read, and also a work that donors ought to read. And the education of donors is probably the most difficult task that we face. And I hope that this book, which is one step on this trajectory of looking at the local and looking at context in a very methodologically vigorous way, will have resonance not just in the world of peace theory and peace science, but in the world of practice. And that is why we are very, very happy to have Pamine as a colleague at ESCAR because whatever our sins are, and they are legion and I'm dean, so I've hidden most of them from people, we are certainly committed always to making our scholarship and our research engaged with the world and to hold up the ideal of the scholar practitioner as the true icon for what is at root a normative field. So Pamine is assistant professor of conflict analysis and resolution at ESCAR. She is, as Kathleen said, a former USIP Jennings Randolph fellow. And her main research surrounds the study, as you'll hear, of international accompaniment in communities. That doesn't play as important a part in this book, except that it brought her close and experienced near, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America and Uganda and in Colombia and that's where the main case studies come from. I won't take more time because I want you to present your own work, but as dean I'm very happy to count you as a colleague and very happy to help welcome this book and this research into the world. Thank you so much, Kevin. First of all, I want to thank you all for being here and for your interest and support of finding ways to amplify the voices of people who may be neglected or marginalized in peace building and development work. I would also like to thank Dr. Kathleen Kunast for her support throughout my time at USIP, in part because of her encouragement. I continue to be involved in consultancies at USIP and I'm now leading a significant project with the Institute on Reconciliation Indicators and their use for USAID project planning and evaluation in Sri Lanka. I want to thank Kathleen and also Tina Hegedorn for their help and hard work in making this event happen. This book and the Everyday Peace Indicators Project more broadly address one central and overarching question. How do we measure peace and what are the results? I came to be concerned with this question early on in my career as an activist and peace builder, working on disarmament and conventional weapons issues in DC and London. I was bothered by the patronizing ways in which we often would prescribe solutions for war-affected countries and communities without consulting them first or considering that they might have knowledge to help combat issues related to their own peace and security. So it was fortuitous that I met Roger McGinty while we were at the University of Notre Dame and we were fortunate enough to be funded quite early by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to pilot the utility and potential of the Everyday Indicators for measurement and evaluation purposes in the peace building field. So my book Reclaiming Everyday Peace provides conceptual and methodological discussion about the utility of participatory numbers. That is, numbers that are generated from the bottom up using rapid rural appraisal techniques such as the Everyday Peace Indicators approach and explores the challenges with top-down measurement approaches of difficult-to-measure concepts such as peace and reconciliation. Since the 1950s, the measurement of peace has evolved significantly, although much of measuring peace still primarily involves measuring armed conflict and war, such as what is done by database programs such as the correlates of war program, which some of you may have heard of, or the UPSILA conflict database program. There have been some other global attempts at measuring peace, most notably the Global Peace Index and the reconciliation barometers such as the South African barometer, which emerged in 2003, and more recently the SCORE project. In addition, there are project-level evaluations now in monitoring and evaluation of peace building work, in some cases, that attempt to measure impact on peace and reconciliation, primarily using randomized control trials. All of these efforts have in common that they are top-down, external, and prioritize expert indicators. So why is this problematic, and for whom is it problematic? The challenges with the top-down process of indicator generation and quantitative measurement is reflected in the debates between interpretivists and positivists, where interpretivists are generally more concerned with capturing all attributes of a concept, as well as the relativity of concepts, whereas positivists are more concerned with what is measurable and generalizable and identified as belonging in a conceptual data container. Although these contrasts are somewhat of an epistemological caricature, they represent some of the main methodological tensions that exist between scholars working from these different standpoints and represent the potential bridges the everyday indicators and participatory numbers more broadly could build. This extends to those concerned with who is prioritized and represented in measurement and indicator development processes, which have become crucially important for procuring resources, as we all know, and funding in the development and peace-building sectors. The quantification and measurement of impact in these sectors has skyrocketed, and evidence-based decision-making has become the norm with the professionalization of the development and peace-building industries since the 1980s. For the most part, without numbers behind something, there is no hope for advocating on its behalf. Therefore, these numbers, which are usually based on indicators, are of incredible importance, and should therefore be based on the needs and priorities of recipients of assistance, rather than the understandings of what outside actors and experts believe is necessary. So how does the everyday indicator approach address these debates? The everyday indicator approach uses existing indicators based on indigenous technical knowledge, as Kevin mentioned, which is the body of knowledge generated or acquired by local people through the accumulation of everyday experiences, community interactions, and trial and error, that people use in their daily lives to determine whether they are more or less at peace. The everyday peace indicators systematically capture these indicators and analyzes them in order to be able to say something quantitatively about local peacefulness, according to locally generated indicators of peace. So for example, an indicator like being able to walk alone at night might be coded into a daily security category, or an indicator like antennas on rooftops may be coded into an infrastructure category. These categories are then aggregated into dimensions like security or development. Instead of using everyday people exclusively as data sources, like more traditional and top-down approaches do, the everyday indicators involve people, and this is key, in the generation of the tools to collect the data, the quantitative data, as well as sourcing them of data. This also increases measurement validity for those of you who are concerned about these matters. As we are able to be more certain that what we are measuring is peace or reconciliation, or whatever difficult to measure concept, we are trying to say something about, according to local definitions of what that means to people in a particular locality. I don't have time today to go over the methodology in detail, but there is much more to be learned and there is much more available on our website at everydaypeaceindicators.org, if you are interested, and also obviously in the book. The book goes on to use the Everyday Peace Indicator methodology to make claims about peace-building effectiveness at the local level, using quasi-experimental matched case studies of villages in Uganda and Colombia. Villages had as similar as possible demographics, histories of violence and displacement, religious and ethnic composition, but vastly different levels of external intervention after the violent events. Villages were matched for their similarities in everything but the amount of intervention, with the goal of matching villages that had little to no intervention with villages that received enormous amounts of external interventions. And these villages had received a reputation among the international community as laboratories for peace in their countries. My findings show that the localities with high levels of intervention, particularly prioritized social issues such as community cohesion, interdependence and conflict resolution over security and development when identifying their everyday peace. This is important because these are the areas of intervention that were least attended to by external actors in these villages. Therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, localities that were saturated with high levels of interventions did not have substantively higher levels of peacefulness according to these community-generated indicators of everyday peace. The results suggest that there are disparities between what localities need when identifying peace in their communities and the interventions external actors prioritize in their peace-building and reconstruction efforts. Interestingly, the localities with more intervention reported higher levels of development in comparison to the communities with little intervention. So that demonstrates that development interventions were effective at attending to community development needs. However, they also reported higher levels of insecurity, which indicates that with these reconstruction efforts after war, there are significant security risks to communities but also that they don't have the social structures available to protect themselves and they have an innate feeling or sense of insecurity. My findings suggest that conflict-affected communities with large amounts of assistance in reconstruction and development require more interventions pertaining to social cohesion and community social relations than those with little-to-no assistance. Infrastructure, security, and development projects are often, usually, prioritized over relationship building and actors often end up substituting the building of a road for real engagement with the root causes of a conflict. However, these localities are actually much more in need of these kinds of relation-building efforts that can be supported by the international peace-building community than those that have had to rely on their own efforts in reconstructing their communities after war. In addition, the localities in this study prioritized social and development-related indicators when defining their everyday peace. However, overall, people chose indicators that fell into multiple categories, representing both positive and negative peace, demonstrating the multi-dimensionality of peace. This is relevant for empirical measurement since the majority of top-down attempts, as we've already covered, at measuring peace use indicators that focus primarily on violence reduction. Also, the fact that people define and identify peace differently from context to context over time has major implications for how we design and evaluate programming, as is reflected in this passage from the conclusion of the book. In a follow-up focus group in Atiak, I found myself debating with the participants about an indicator they wanted to eliminate from the original indicators list developed by the community three years prior and used in this study. I was in Uganda to reconvene community members from Atiak and Odec to test and update the initial list of selected indicators. This particular group in Atiak was insisting that one of their previously selected indicators was no longer relevant. Incidentally, the indicator in question was the only indicator used by EPI, or the everyday peace indicators, that is included in the measurement of SDG-16, the Sustainable Development Goal 16, walking alone safely at night. I argued to the group that actually this would be a good measurement of peace in their community, but the villagers did not agree. They insisted that this particular indicator was now obsolete since no one in the community felt safe to walk alone at night any longer due to increased insecurity. Therefore, it could no longer be considered an everyday measure of peace. With recent crime waves precipitated in part by the large influx of South Sudanese refugees to camps near Atiak, the perceived insecurity of villagers had increased dramatically, so much so that they no longer dared leave their homes alone in the evenings. Therefore, the indicator had lost its utility for helping villagers to assess whether they felt more or less at peace. As we can see, how people understand and identify peace is not only multi-dimensional, but is also multi-temporal and changes over time. Therefore, the findings of this study have major implications for how we measure peace conceptually, as well as how we measure peace-building effectiveness on a project level. It demonstrates the importance of including localities in the generation of statistics and numbers, and not just treating people as data sources. The everyday peace indicators and the wider field of participatory numbers has incredible potential to help us advocate on behalf of marginalized people, where their needs and priorities may get lost in an increasingly quantitative world that prioritizes numbers for policy change and guidance. Thank you. I'm going to invite the panelists over there. Thank you so much, Hamina. That was really inspirational in terms of its roots, and certainly its future impact for the field of peace-building, and we have gathered here some of your colleagues, and we're very thrilled to have them and also to hear how their own relationship with this kind of work has evolved. So it's really, I'm going to introduce you individually, and on Pamina's right is Roger McGenty, who is the professor at the School of Government and International Affairs and the Global Security Institute at Durham University. He edits the academic journal Peace Building, and he is the co-founder of the Everyday Peace Indicators Project with Pamina. Roger, give us some of your own background in how these indicators and this work is moving the field of peace-building from your vantage point. Well, what's quite interesting in terms of thinking about indicators is how we lead very local lives, all of us. These are lives that are rooted and networked and relational, that they are full of everyday personal interchange and observation. And in a way, that is the stuff of life, that is how we embody and enliive our daily existence. And somehow that story often is written out of how we measure and how we conceptualize peace and transitions towards peace. So the Everyday Indicators Project is a way of trying to capture that, of trying to take seriously aspects of life that sometimes are easily dismissed as being anecdotal, as being too local and therefore unable to be factored up or to tell us anything about a wider area. So the Everyday Peace Indicators Project is a classic example of corridor conversations between myself and Pamina about how to capture the everyday. And of course that is wonderfully encapsulated and detailed in Pamina's book. Thank you so much for those introductory remarks. We hope to dig down a little further as we hear from all of our presenters here. Our next expert panelist is Dr. Anthony Wanis St. John, who's a friend of the Institute of Many Years. He researches international negotiation, mediation, military negotiations, ceasefires, humanitarian negotiations and peace processes in particular. He is advisor to the Academy here at the Institute and works on civil military integration. Anthony, your thoughts. Thank you and good morning. I come to the EPI concept a little bit as an outsider and when I first heard about Pamina's work, I think you introduced yourself to me to conference a couple of years ago and told me about it personally and through my acquaintance with Roger. I recognized that I had been working on the other part of the binary for a long time on the negative piece. And I will probably continue to do so for a long time because it's so hard to get it and it's so awful when we're missing peace even in the negative sense of it, in Gautung's negative peace sense. But the EPI concept was immediately attractive and almost seductive intellectually because of the immediate way in which it calls attention to the shortcomings of our almost imperial and post-colonial ways of trying to help and thinking that we know better than the folks that we are trying to help, how to help them. I'll stop with that. Thank you. Thank you, Anthony, and I appreciate your honesty with how this work has influenced your own. Our next expert to the panel is a colleague, David Conley, who is the Director of Learning, Evaluation and Research here at the Institute of Peace. David joined us about six months ago from his work in the Netherlands and the UK, and is somebody that we welcome to this area of research and interested in your reflections. Thank you, Kathleen. Well, I very much enjoyed the introductions today and the genealogy. What struck me, I think, adding to this was that I guess in my understanding, you can trace this back even to the 1960s and the very important work on participatory planning and participatory development. And I think for me, the main shift is, and we can see this in Pamina's work and Roger's, is that maybe we started off where we thought of communities, or the local locals, as part of processes of development, conflict resolution, peace-building, and that shift to actually recognize them as drivers of these types of processes. And that is a huge shift that the research, the scholarly research, is really trying to keep up with. And of course, alongside practitioners and policy makers. So in that sense, as has been remarked today, this is extremely important in further recognizing and the empirical basis for that. Just one other comment, if I may, that when we think about this shift to perhaps quantitative, and I'm sure we'll come back to this, I can see that in some ways, but I'm not sure that is certainly always the case. I mean, even with my sort of experience with whether UN agency is a World Bank or conflict-affected governments, is that you see quite a variation there. You see different things going on, and not necessarily an arc between sort of qualitative to quantitative. An example of that was a couple of years ago, I led a study in Mali, and it was a short study. And my assumption going into that study was that it would be donors who'd be driving a more quantitative approach to the evidence base. That was why I'm sure of it. What I found out was that that was not the case. Actually, and this I think speaks a lot to the work of the EPI, there were a number of different drivers determining the types of methods that were being used to monitor and evaluate. Obvious ones that I'm sure you would all think about, which was, of course, capacity, the capacity in the local NGO community, but also seeing the kind of the local and indigenous approach to decision-making coming through. So I was proved wrong in that one, very happy to. And of course, that's just one country context. You realize if you go to Afghanistan or elsewhere where USIP works, you will see different things going on. And I think, again, Pamina's work with its, really its foothold at the local level, the country level is so important in understanding the types of complex processes which we're seeing in Peace Booker. Thank you so much, David. And Kevin, moving back to you after your opening remarks, what are we missing here? Where are the gaps still to be filled? And how can we do a better job of bridging as you offered the various binaries? So towards the end of Pamina's book, she refers to something that has been referred to a long time and that is the lack of cooperation, of sequencing, of cooperation, collaboration, sequencing, division of labor that often occurs with always well-meaning interventions. And she alludes to the culture of NGOs and INGOs and so forth and sometimes the lack of transparency or almost always the lack of transparency and the competition for with donors and often donors are funding the same project from different NGOs and so forth. And all of that we have seen before. We've seen laments about the lack of collaboration and sequencing and timing and division of labor and we've also had some discussions of the peculiar culture of the peace building world that sometimes means that it is very, very difficult for that to occur. So all of that has been referred to but it seems to me that if we look at EPIs and we think of them as long as we don't lose the granular illness, if we think of them as being aggregated into security and development and social cohesion and conflict resolution and human rights and so forth and we connect that as she does with different communities and different stages of distance from the actual war or the actual violence that EPIs could be used as a way of addressing the problem of lack of cooperation, lack of collaboration by not having three or four different NGOs or donors work on the same problem in a place where that is no longer the main problem that maybe social cohesion is a problem. So we've seen the laments about lack of collaboration. We've seen the observations about the funny culture of our world that sometimes makes that collaboration hard but I do think that if we paid attention to what the EPIs are telling us that would be one way into addressing those problems. Thank you, Kevin. I'm gonna come back to Pamina now that you've heard from your colleagues and I would ask you to respond to some of their comments and what you see as some of the major challenges ahead. Thank you, Kathleen and thank you for your comments. Although I think there is so much more to be done and we have been spending an enormous amount of energy and money on evidence-based work and in peace building and establishing evidence-based peace building in order to advocate for more money, more resources, more effort towards peace building and reconciliation work. However, I think it's a real, it's a conceptual jump and assumption that this is really effective in procuring resources and also and maybe more importantly in convincing governments that are the recipients of peace building interventions to actually use this evidence-based to change their policies. So this is a project that Roger and I are embarking on that involves looking at how institutions, municipalities or different organizations within governments and peace processes digest data, in particular local level data and how that influences the environment and their decision-making processes and the progression of the peace process. And maybe I'll let Roger say a few more things about that project. Okay, in a sense, everyday peace indicators and many other projects have piloted and engaged in fairly robust methodologies to find out granular bottom-up types of information in societies hopefully transitioning away from conflict. In a sense, we know what the local thinks, but the next step is to work out what happens to that local level information when it winds its way up through institutions, through ministries, municipalities, INGOs. How is that data treated? That local level bottom-up, sometimes community and crowd-sourced data. Is it aggregated? Is it edited? Is it ignored? Is it easily dismissed? So as Pominio says, the next stage of EPI is to engage in institutional ethnographies to try and track what happens to data as it moves up the chain. And also to ask the question, what happens when bottom-up data meets with top-down data? Because there are issues of power there in that some data is regarded as being more important, more reliable, possibly more authentic. And I think that that's something that, one thing I've noticed is that virtually every peace-building scholar wants to be an anthropologist when they grow up. So some people like Kevin and Kathleen have been there before us and are probably saying, if you had have listened to us decades ago, but certainly one thing that we're noticing particularly in the scholarship world is how anthropology and sociology and many of those other very perceptive disciplines like gender studies have a lot to offer in allowing us to access the relational and the networked nature of peace. And as we think we are seeing with EPI data is also relational and networked. I love that, Anthony. I'm gonna turn right to you on that data is also relational. And what are the chances of us being able to do this kind of ethnography of institutions and how data actually moves through from an NGO perhaps to a government institution or bilateral? Well, I'd say the quick and dirty answer is that it is filtered through the biases of the minds of the people who receive that information. All of us look at information selectively. We look for the things that we most relate to. Sometimes we take some special attention to things that surprise us, but often we are looking to confirm what we already believe and that's no surprise to anybody who's a student of psychology or social psychology in decision making. So yes, the encounter between the two worlds of data is likely to produce some interesting surprises, maybe some harmonies, but also maybe some clashes and some lingering resentments even because those who do with an idea that they're doing well and doing right and for the right reasons might feel like, well, we have something to offer that you need and you just don't know it that you need it yet. So I imagine there could be some donor and practitioner driven resistance to the idea that people actually know what their lives are like and have an idea about how to make them better even if it doesn't look that way to the outsider. So it's a fascinating possibility to look at what happens to the EPI type information as it migrates upward and gets translated into funding decisions, project decisions. I don't have any experience on that myself, but I would like to bookmark a topic for further discussion perhaps later about an idea that has migrated outward from the peace building world into government circles here and into the international organizational world about how we assess conflictivity and how we figure out if a country, a locality, a place is about to spill over into violence or is in sort of a stable state or is escalating further into conflict. Conflict assessment models are now, they used to be something quite radical. Now the Pentagon has several of its own. I've worked with State Department folks to train people from the interagency in the use of conflict assessment models. It's no longer radical, but what EPI shows us is that we have to think still more critically about the insider perspective. Are we asking the right questions for the right levels? And it seems to me that we can do a lot more to understand conflict and how it emerges and how to prevent it and then what to do about it if we look more deeply and more closely at the participants, victims, and folks most directly affected by conflict. Well that's a great challenge and it's certainly one that is at a crossroads and EPI I think can add to that world that we have come to accept as the norm of conflict assessments and David with that in mind, do you know of any or have you been a part of any of this analysis of data on the way up from the local level? You brought up your Mali example but think through some of the other areas that you've worked in where data has been you think positively integrated from a local level to a more integrated upper level. I think what we've seen is two things in relation sort of the evidence base and the relation between evidence and policy making decision making is that on the one hand it is greatly underfunded at the project level. I mean most agencies will still struggle to spend maybe 5% of their budgets on sort of M&E just to give a sense and that's at a local right sort of project level but at the same time we have seen I think in terms of knowledge and learning greater interest increased interest in the role of evidence in decision making both obviously here in the US and thinking back to UK and Netherlands there's a number of important initiatives to indeed you know try to bring together the different strands of data and I think on that note I mean what I would like to suggest is that maybe we lose the whole top down bottom up how helpful is that actually maybe in some ways it is but I think it's quite limited I'm not the first person to say this but it just struck me in our discussion today because actually what we see is much more complex than that than bottom up and top down. We see different types of data and directions of data and I mean we saw this here at USIP very interesting work on sort of collaborative impact design that the colleagues here have been pioneering in the case studies of Columbia and also Central African Republic and there you know even at that sort of country level the different types of data strands and the direction of data happening and then indeed how through true collaborative action how you can bring that up to donors who themselves if I want to generalize are becoming much more involved in their programming I mean this is another shift as well they're taking us to generalize a much greater interest in the types of programming that they do that's very different from say 20 years ago in the peace building field. So I think it's the challenge is still there that the budget and the spending on evidence on data is still relatively low it's still a challenge even to meet sort of 5% 10% of budgets but we are seeing interesting initiatives for example the Netherlands in funding of sort of a knowledge platform with military NGOs, universities, et cetera to try and essentially bring together important studies research being done and to bring that directly to foreign affairs and the UK has been involved in other initiatives and also here in the US so there are I think important efforts to try and do that in terms of concrete examples I can't think of one right now but maybe I'll come back to one and just one last point in this is I'm interested to see how does the how do they, at the EPI everyday peace indicators how can they fit or align or work within the kind of the project cycle at the local level which still is a driving force whether we like it or not the kind of the standard project cycle how does it indeed fit within that and when I think about that I also think about prevention to what extent the EPIs can have a preventative dimension which indeed you touched upon in your example I think of Uganda yeah so I also wanted to raise that in thinking about how the indicators are used let's pick right up on that I'm gonna ask the panel for their own comments yeah that's a great question and I think also an opportunity to really plug my work with USIP at the moment on Sri Lanka because I mean we started this project in 2012 it's been a few years but it's a relatively new project so we've been evolving becoming more and more sophisticated I'd like to think and so initially we just piloted the idea and piloted it as really more of a I would say research methodology than really an applied tool and but it became clear very quickly that it had potential as an applied tool and there was a lot of resonance and interest in the policy community and by practitioners and organizations NGOs and donors and so an opportunity arose for me to work with USIP to lead a project in Sri Lanka funded by USAID to develop reconciliation indicators as a part of policy and program planning and evaluation of their reconciliation programming at a local level part of their reconciliation programming not all of it and this has been a really interesting exercise when I mean that we're just beginning now but it's very exciting for me because it demonstrates really I think the comprehensive cycle that EPI has the potential to assist or to provide information for so EPI or the everyday indicators have the potential to influence programming in the sense of being able to help guide what programming is implemented so the design part of design monitoring and evaluation but then also the indicators being indicators that can produce quantitative data also have potential for monitoring and then eventually the evaluation of that programming and so that's what we're doing in Sri Lanka together with USAID and USIP to really test whether that's possible and how much added benefit that has I wanna say though you ask about the standard project cycles that has been a challenge and I think I mean we made it very clear that in order to do EPI we have to think ahead and I think that's the case that should be the case in any project we should be evaluatively thinking from the very beginning and so using EPI you do need a little bit of forethought because you have to go through and the indicator generation process at the beginning of a project so that you have a baseline so that you can also help guide programming with those indicators and then eventually use them for evaluation so it's I think a real tool for evaluative thinking in a project cycle in a program cycle. Roger, do you wanna step into this? You know, I'm tempted to say what she said but it's a really interesting question, David and I was struck because I don't live in the policy world I have the great privilege of being a full time scholar that this term the project cycle in a way is so artificial and I can see that it has been naturalized obviously in the policy world but no one lives according to a project cycle people live according to conflict cycles or peace cycles or indeed a life cycle and I guess the bigger challenge that practitioners and academics have is to try and work out how their projects and programs can match more succinctly a demand led way of thinking rather than a supply led way of thinking because if we follow a project cycle then we're perhaps necessarily we go down a path dependency route that is supply led rather than demand led and of course all of this I recognize is much easier said than done the most important person in any organization is usually the person who sits in the office next to the director, they're the financial officer and they work according to budget cycles and particular time periods so I recognize that it's easier said than done but one of the nice things about EPI is that it allows us to listen to narratives and ways of thinking that are disruptive that are awkward, that differ from the neatly packaged language that I might prefer as a scholar and that many people in this room might prefer as a practitioner so one of the things that I welcome from this project is the disruption that it has caused in my thinking and I think that's a good thing because it challenges us all. Anthony, do you wanna pick up this project cycle binary of some? Sure, let me see if I could put an example around it to see how it could play out let's say USAID wanted to put some money into a project that is a donation to Columbia to demobilize FARC soldiers and reintegrate them into society. It will have a laudable goal, it will have a reasonable theory of change, some money attached to it, a project cycle as always, maybe some M&E built into it but if it stays at the national level and there are national level institutions who are in charge of that work in Columbia then we're missing a great deal. We don't know where those people will go. We don't know what the condition of the communities into which they will try to reintegrate is and how it will be affected by their arrival. If there are jobs waiting for them there or if they will resort to illicit and criminal activities if there are family members you can support them. I wonder if EPI type methodologies could be used to take something that is essentially a national level practice, fund this project in that country and turn it into a very finely tuned locally relevant series of engagements that work very closely with the data that are out there and related to that would be how quickly can we make that data come alive? Because when somebody in London or in the Hague or in Washington decides to spend money on another country's problems then the project cycle does sort of take a life of its own. It has to be spent, implementers must be found, et cetera and those things are, I've seen with my own eyes they take more importance than capability, expertise, dexterity, local contacts, it's who's around sometimes. How quickly can we get EPI type information into a project so that the project actually succeeds? There's some of that in the work that you did but I wonder if we can discuss it even further in the future. Camino, do you wanna respond to that and then I'm going to open it up to our audience? Okay. Yeah, I think that's a great example. We can maybe work on that together. And it's a good question and I think it speaks to sort of the pathology of the monitoring and evaluation sector and also the donor schemes of funding projects and these short timelines and difficulty and one of the reasons for this lack of evaluative thinking, right? Because everything has to happen now and yesterday. And so it makes it difficult for forethought and spending some time actually even conducting conflict assessments in some cases, right? So, I mean clearly this is a process that requires time, it requires money and it also requires some time will on behalf of donors and implementers to work in a way that they are not accustomed to. And I think, so this is gonna be, it requires a culture change and a culture shift in existing approaches to program design and it also, I mean it requires a shift away from thinking about donor priorities, thinking about the priorities of the international community and perhaps some of these fads that sometimes we bring in to the things that we fund and focusing on, because we want these projects to work, focusing on the people that we're actually working with and on their priorities and being open to be guided by them. So I think it does require a culture shift and I think it requires some, not just evaluative thinking but some space for thinking ahead that at the moment isn't always there. Well now you've begged the question but I have to return to our resident anthropologist here. Is it possible to have this kind of culture shift from where you said? Yes and the keyword that we've used is disruption. Yes, that's how cultures shift. Thank you. So I'm gonna open it up now to the audience. Thank you for your interest and oh great, we have a lot of questions. I think I'll take about three at a time to allow the panelists to think about it and maybe I'll start from the front and move back and then come to the right side. And if you would mind just stand up, introduce yourself and keep your comic brief. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Danielle Rief. I'm the Chief of the Learning Division in USAID's Center for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. I've worked in many of the same places as Pamina. We've worked together in Columbia and Uganda, South Sudan and I was until recently in Sri Lanka trying to bring the everyday peace indicators into our USAID social cohesion and reconciliation work there. Very exciting, so much potential. One of the reasons that I was really motivated to do that is because throughout my experience, 15 years working in conflict affected environments in the field, so often we would go to talk to communities about peace and reconciliation and we found that simple linguistic barriers were so enormous in many local languages, just these words, peace and reconciliation don't exist and they don't resonate and you don't even have language, common language to be able to communicate with your beneficiaries about the things that you wanna do. And so very, very difficult to get information and Pamina's methodology really provided a way, a really structural methodological approach to try to solicit views and opinions and feelings from communities. So really filled an important gap. Anyway, I just wanted, because there's been a lot of commentary about the donor community and how difficult it's gonna be to bridge the gap with donors and how difficult it is to work with donors to change the culture and whatnot. I don't necessarily have a question, I just wanted to say that we do care and we are trying to bridge those gaps but we're faced with some very structural challenges related to the program cycle, related to the way we do business. So just the one that I wanted to mention was that, we go out with solicitations for your 10 or 15 million dollar social cohesion project and everybody writes big fancy proposals and we sign a contract or a grant with a big organization to do all kinds of work and in order to win that solicitation they've had to articulate very clearly all the activities that they'll do and where they'll do them and be very specific and then the EPIs tell us that wait a minute, maybe in local communities we should do more of this or less of that or something different and our implementing partners come back and say, but wait a minute, we signed a contract with you that says we've already agreed to do all these other things. So anyway, there are challenges but I personally am very excited about Pamina's work and yeah, I just wanted to voice my support. Thank you so much, we appreciate that and really from one of the funders, please. Hi, my name is Kim McClain and I'm the Regional Director for the Americas with Global Fund for Children, small foundation based here in DC that gives small grants to grassroots organizations that work with children and youth. I'm coming in and out, my apologies. All right, got it. And we are developing and hoping to be able to undertake some investment in Columbia around peace building with children and youth in that environment and I'm really intrigued by these indicators and the question I have is when you work with the community, with community members and representatives in the community to develop this tool, what's the real investment of their time to participate in that? Not to mention of course all the people then who participate as givers of data when the tools are actually applied and used. How have you seen that those people who invested their time to participate in this process have found this useful? Have these indicators been useful at that local level for work that they are leading? And what ways besides being able to support the extraction of quality data for better decision making by donors in those outside the communities or as the communities of course I'm sure see it as well if we can get money from this we'll participate. So linked to those strings of getting money but are there other ways that these are useful at that local level as well? Thank you so much. Next question. Okay. I'm John Hoven. I'd like to follow up on David's question about how should EPI fit in the project cycle? And Pam's particular example of going back to visit one place three years after and finding that one of these indicators walking safely alone at night had become obsolete. I in the normal everyday decision making this sort of real time learning and decision making is commonplace. And it seems like that might be a useful direction to go here as well. Instead of taking these EPIs as known and firm useful indicators here and now that we follow up in your methodology for developing them and use the current EPIs as a starting point for what may be relevant and useful here and now. And asking the questions for what is the evidence for what really matters to us here and now. Coming up with our, and our own indicators may not even be quantitative. I mean, the fact of someone saying nobody feels safe to walk at night is compelling evidence even though it's not measurable. Thank you, John. Next question. Hi, my name is Sarah Cobb and I really enjoyed the discussion and the presentation of the book, et cetera. I have a question. I had lunch on Tuesday with a group of folks from Afghanistan who were in the part of it working on the peace commission there. And they were telling me about why the negotiations weren't working with the Taliban. I said, well, have you talked to them? They said no. And why haven't they talked to them? That's interesting. And there's a military and state department folks at the table. And of course it comes down to the construction of these folks's enemy, right? Which precludes the possibility of engaging them. So the question I have for you is, how do you imagine the EPA, EPI, I'm sorry, navigating the discursive fields that are already in place, which constitute some locals as legitimate sources of information and other locals as enemies or combatants or folks that can't be considered? Thank you, Sarah. We're gonna go all the way to the back of the room and I'm gonna continue the questions. You all have a lot to answer for here, but I think it's important. We have one at the very back and then I'll come to you. Hi, I'm Lauren Oweng. I'm a director with IBTCI in the Crisis Conflict and Governance Practice. We hold a lot of M&E support contracts with USAID. I think as a former peace practitioner, I can see how EPI is extremely useful at the project and implementation level. Because it allows you to put a lot of nuance into your programming, which is in peace building is community focused. I think my question now though, is I think, I guess, moving up and how does it move up to the donor? To what extent are the findings that you have going through an EPI process comparable or generalizable? Because at the end of the day, unfortunately we make decisions by this community needs interventions more than this one. This is how we're gonna prioritize. I think this also gets to Pamina, your point about how you could use EPI for design. So thinking more at a strategy, a country strategy or a program design level. To what extent are these findings generalizable? Because program design is not at the local level, project design is. Thank you, Laura. And I think we had a question right here. Thank you. Thank you. Estratro Hadar Jennings Randolph, senior fellow at USIP. Fascinating research, congratulations on the book. I'll read it as soon as I can. Great work. My question is a little bit like a follow up to what Sarah said and issued that Anthony raised. How can you use or did you think about ways of using EPI in designing interventions or like dialogue interventions for example? How can they be used? And especially I'm asking this question because like you may have different locals, right? Different, but you may also have very different sort of perceptions of local peace indicators within the same community. So like threat perceptions for example or different processes of social influence, I don't know biases, agenda setting, et cetera, will get different parts of the same community to value different things and to perceive things differently. I'm just, I'm from Turkey and just one example would be at the community level with there are a lot of Syrian refugees right now for example and there are a lot of tensions at the community level but if you ask people, everybody would agree that the place has become less peaceful and they would blame the refugees for that but they will not leave their houses in the evening because they're afraid of running into some refugees, et cetera, they think they're dangerous but is this really, how do we assess this kind of indicator? Because there is also a lot of prejudice and bias associated with that, right? So how do we use EPI in other words to engage people in a dialogue process around these issues? Very interesting. Is there any other comment or question because I'm going to then turn it back to this panel and I'm gonna ask you to just take any one of these questions and we'll see if any aren't covered and I'm going to begin with Kevin to see if you might take one of these questions on and if you need any reminding, I have them written down but I'm sure you're in your mind and we're gonna just walk backwards and Pimina you will have the last word. Well I wanna reflect on my colleague Sarah's comment which is you can't have a dialogue if you're disallowed from speaking to some of the participants and some of the strictures of the war on terror and who you can talk to and who you can talk to at least as an American makes a lot of the work that we do in places like Afghanistan or in Iraq virtually impossible. You know that if one is breaking the law by speaking to a Taliban person then you might as well pack up and go home or find workarounds but the workarounds will always be disruptive, right? They will always be in some way rubbing against the grains and the rules and yeah, that's a problem and some of us in this field I know routinely break the law and who we speak to. David? Thanks. Well there's been a couple of questions I think and sort of observations remark around the project cycle and indeed the constraints that many of the donors have. I mean I think what's interesting is just maybe just to pick up on some of those points is that the project cycle really has evolved over the years means many different things and made it from places and we've talked about Afghanistan already that just one example, Sierra Leone being another where really in terms of bottom up now to use that phrase are sort of citizen led forces, community driven. We have seen structures which maybe come from the outside and prescriptions very much being adapted to the local context and a very clear sense of agency there in those processes. Now if you go to other contexts and I think this is where we need to be of course be mindful where war has had a truly devastating impact in that immediate sort of environment certain things will not be possible because of the continued threats, the insecurity, the trauma, the lack of capacity. So of course that reminder of different things will be possible in terms of what we can ask of the conflict affected, what can be expected when it comes to data. And as the example I think from Turkey that in some of these contexts the whole collection of data whether it's done from communities upwards or from ever is incredibly sensitive and in some cases impossible actually. So I'm sure the API is already addressing that in these types of contexts which where stability is not present and actually the gathering of data by anyone is incredibly difficult and it could add to the threats inadvertently. I'll pass on. If I understand the API correctly I think I misunderstood it years ago was that there were a set of indicators that you could just put on a list and go into a village and check them off these are the indicators that, right? But the indicators are generated by engagement and dialogue with people who have real experience and also to Ezra's point, possibly real distortions in the way they think as any human being might have. So it is an interesting question how you address, how you go beyond one overwhelming overbearing voice or a dominant story that people are telling that may or may not be based on real facts but that reflect stereotypes and prejudices. I wonder about that. And what the level of conflictivity is in a particular area would that impact how people talk about the indicators? I imagine that there could be a way one day in which before you do any kind of project you just the way we check the weather before we go out and the weather is millions of data points, we understand what is the weather conflict wise, what is the weather in a place where we want to do good work and we bring the right things to do them because they are matched to the situation. Sounds like people are trying to do that and we still have structural problems in the way we do that but that sounds like that's the way we need to do this eventually real time indication of what's required. Roger? I'll follow up directly on that, Anthony and respond to John's question which was exactly on that, the need for real time indicators because as you said, John, the societies are fluid and below as scholars and practitioners we would like to engage in longitudinal measurement and we would like to see how particular indicators change over time societies don't work like that. The indicators that people find most resonant change and I think one approach to that is through technology and I know that there have been attempts to develop apps that will allow people to give that real time feedback on social or humanitarian conditions. Of course there are problems or possible challenges to that and that is whether the app can be captured in a sense, whether dominant voices capture that and that gets back to what you were saying, Sarah. I mean I was very struck by the focus group work from EPI that there was a discursive infrastructure and that was laced with power, issues of gender, issues of age, issues of whether one was for the government or against the government in a particular location. What we did get at though were different sorts of narratives, narratives that were counter cultural, counter hegemonic, that disrupted the official narrative in a sense the official narrative would tell communities that the big issue facing you community is A, B and C and through everyday peace indicators communities were able to tell us actually the issues facing us were D, E and F. I think that was good but I think what we're never going to get or I don't think our methodology will get at is the hidden transcript. There's a reason for that because it's hidden. People go out of their way to hide it but we all play multi-level games in our discourse and it does seem very difficult to get to that hidden transcript. I'm gonna disagree but I'll get to that. I'll try and answer some of the questions that weren't answered by my esteemed colleague. So the indicators, your question about the indicators being useful at the local level. I think that they could be. One of the challenges is that what are we using and I guess one of the questions is what are we using these indicators for? And up until now we've used these indicators to try to advocate for communities. And who are we advocating to? Well, donors, governments, NGOs that require some kind of level of rigor and process and systematization. So that systematic, or that requirement for a systematic methodology, requires some kind of technical expertise and that makes it more difficult for communities themselves to be able to do this process. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't be able to use the indicators to advocate for their needs. But I'm reluctant to say that this is a tool that can be left to communities to do on their own. We have, however, used it in a very applied and exciting way using PhotoVoice. And I don't know if anyone's familiar with PhotoVoice but it's a participatory process using photography to amplify local voices. And we did a project in Columbia which is still ongoing, there's an exhibit. There was an exhibit in September in Bogota and there will be an exhibit in February in Cartagena and then in the Montes de Maria region. And where villagers photograph their indicators. And that was a really interesting and engaging way of using this as a tool for discussion and dialogue nationally in Bogota or regionally in Cartagena. But also locally we'll be doing exhibits in their local municipalities as well as in the villages. And so the idea being that this can also be a peace building tool beyond just a scientific one. I wanted to answer also the question about the comparable or generalizable issue that was brought up in the back of the room. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name. But you know, I mean, EPI is really, it's a methodology, a methodology that can fit into a variety of different research or evaluation designs. And so the everyday indicators have the potential possibly to be scalable. And we are testing this with funding from the Carnegie Corporation at the moment in Columbia. Again in Columbia, doing a lot of work in Columbia. And it was a fortuitous event actually that happened. We were approached by a group of indigenous activists that wanted to build a bottom up barometer of the peace accord because they felt that they couldn't trust, I mean, there's been a history of mistrust between indigenous groups and the government. And they felt that they couldn't trust the government and its accountability tools and its statements about its impact. And so they approached us to build this bottom up barometer. And we agreed to join forces and to test whether we can scale the everyday indicators to be able to say something for an indigenous group. So we're testing this for the Pasco indigenous group in Narinio in Putamaio. And we have a working paper, which I'm happy to share. If you email me, I'm happy to share that. But I'm a cognizant of time, so I will move on to the other question, which I think was yours, that my colleague, other senior Jennings Randolph fellow, who asked a really interesting question on when that I'm struggling and dealing with a lot right now in this Rolonco work. Because how can we use not just the everyday indicators for dialogue, but also how do we reconcile indicators that are possibly offensive, right? And racist, and because communities aren't necessarily always politically correct in their identification of reconciliation or peace. And what do we do with that, right? So we're seeing this in the South and the Sinhala majority communities, who for them reconciliation means that Muslim gives up a seat on the bus for them and that they are seen as being superior to Muslims, that is reconciliation, or that there are no Muslims. And so that's been a struggle, but also a really fascinating thing to observe and something that we have been adapting to see how we can use that to also inform programming, right? And so instead of using everyday indicator process in the sort of traditional way of using indicators as a basis of questions and surveys, being able to track how that iterative process of the everyday indicator collection over time, how those indicators might change with interventions that deal with these issues that people, or the different ways that people are conceptualizing and understanding reconciliation, and that conflict with the way that we understand reconciliation and how we want them to reconcile, right? Being able to use that to influence the programming, I think, has huge potential. So that's what we've been looking at doing and something that's been a really, really interesting and I think important learning experience in the trajectory of the everyday indicators. Thank you, Pamina, and I want to thank all of our panelists, Roger, Anthony, David, and Kevin. What an amazing morning and thought-provoking from discourses of culture to methodology that's disruptive, that creates dialogue, that is discursive definition of power and looks at different narratives. We have a lot to continue to think about and work on collaboratively. I want to thank George Mason University for your support in this effort and thank you to all for your attention and engagement. We want to invite you to a reception now and it's just right outside this hallway really to benefit from this community of practice. This is, the relationship building here is key and we're grateful for it every day. So thank you all.