 Good morning everyone. Good morning. So we're going to get started. So good morning everyone. Welcome. I'm Melanie Greenberg, the president and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and it is such a joy and a pleasure to gather here in the magnificent headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace to explore together some of the greatest challenges facing us today during a very tumultuous time at home and in the world. Today's theme is peace and democracy in a turbulent world. Why? 1.5 billion people live in fragile states where a lack of effective government structures and restricted space for civil society contribute to cycles of violence. We know that corruption is a major source of grievance in many states, and serves as a key driver for extremism and conflict. We've seen recently with the Ebola conflict how a lack of trust and governance can exacerbate other kinds of crises. And we know that when security and police forces are either overly aggressive and restrictive or overly weak, that's a very important source of unrest and a source of lack of trust and government, which I might mention is not only a problem in the South Sudan's of the world, but in the Baltimore's of the world as well. Conversely, we know that when there's both an effective social contract between government and society and effective space for citizen voice and cooperation, these provide the scaffolding for resilient societies that can resolve their differences through consensus building and through politics, rather than through deadly violence. What we'll explore today and in the next two days of our conference is how peace building and democracy come together and how we can develop joint approaches to the tremendous global challenges facing us in the years ahead. This intersectoral dialogue between peace building and democracy takes place within a larger initiative at AFP that we're calling peace building 3.0. And in peace building 3.0, we understand that conflict happens in very complex systems and no one field can take linear solutions and solve these complex problems. We need to work together as peace builders with democracy, development, rule of law, health, education, women in peace building and all understand our places in these systems and how to learn to cooperate between fields with very different methodologies, philosophies, ideologies. So this conference in our discussion today is part of that effort to bring different fields together to recognize our complexity. Before moving on to our wonderful program and we're just so honored to have Under Secretary Sarah Swoll here with us today, I wanted to make a few thank yous. This is one of the few times that we'll all be together in the course of the day. First, to thank USIP for hosting us today. To thank Nancy Lindborg, USIP's new president, one of my great heroes in the peace building field. And it brings us such pleasure to work with you here at USIP. We look forward just to wonderful partnership ahead. And great thanks also to Linwood Ham and Sarah Ogosi who've made our planning for this conference. There were a lot of moving parts, just so joyful. So thank you. Also AFP staff in the room, can you raise your hands if you're here? I can tell you that AFP staff and interns have been working literally 24-7 for the last week and very hard of the last nine months to bring this all together. And I want especially to thank Emily Malotsi and Becca Weinstein for all the work that they've done. And I know all of you have worked with them to register and to say thank you very much. And a quick thank you as well to AFP's board and also to Bob Berg who has just endowed a lecture series called Challenges to Peace Building in the Years Ahead. So we are now guaranteed of 10 years of discussions like this, looking at the frontiers of peace building. And finally I want to thank my parents, Jane and Larry Cohen who are sitting in about the fifth row here. And my father's childhood friend, Tully Plesser who's joined us as well. We have a sweep of history here in the room today. So thanks to all of you and we look forward to a wonderful day ahead. One note, everything today is on the record. We do have journalists in the room. It's being webcast to around the world. So this gives us a wonderful opportunity but just to let you know that this will be quite open. Thank you and it's wonderful to introduce Nancy Lindborg. Thank you, Melanie. And great to see everybody here today. There were a lot of hugs around coffee as we prepared to come in and that's always a good sign for people who are taking this opportunity to come together and really dig into some of these critical issues. Melanie, thank you for your comments. And I want to also give a special shout out to Melanie who's been a real thinker, leader, writer, scholar in this field who's really helped us think of peace building as a much larger endeavor that encompasses the kind of issues we'll be talking about the next several days. So Melanie, thank you for your vision and leadership. This USIP AFP conference partnership is really one of the signature activities that we do together and I'm delighted to be here for it and I very much applaud the title and the set of topics that will be looked at today. We are clearly in a turbulent time where there is the need for people to come together as Melanie said across disciplines, across ways of looking at the world to understand how to bring all of this energy and knowledge to bear in a world that is definitely going through some difficult transition times with no indication that we'll be through it in the near future. I had the great honor of being sworn into USIP as the president just about three and a half months ago and as many of you know USIP is an independent, nonpartisan, congressionally funded institute that really dares to envision a world without violent conflict and I can't imagine a better or more audacious vision and one that all of the people of USIP are pleased to be able to dedicate their work and their time to. We do this by really seeking to build America's national capability to prevent, mitigate and resolve violent conflict and we support peacemakers at every level, national, regional and local. I've had a chance to visit a couple of our field programs in Pakistan, Afghanistan and just recently Burma and have been ever more impressed at the ways in which people at the community levels are connecting up to the national levels and supporting peace processes with a lot of creativity and a lot of determination. This is a great assemblage over the next three days that really does bring together people of very diverse interests and I'm eager to see how the conversation evolves. I'm also very honored and eager to introduce our special guest today, Sarah Sewell, who is the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights at the State Department and Sarah was sworn into this position just over a year ago, a year in a court, probably seems like a lifetime, Sarah. I know that you've been on the road and working hard. Over the last decade where a number of you have probably had a chance to meet Sarah, she taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where she was also the Director of the Car Center for Human Rights Policy and in this position she launched the Mass Atrocities Response Operations Project or MERO and directed the program on national security and human rights. She served on a number of boards and in her time in this, as Undersecretary, she has become a leading voice for mass atrocities as something that we need to pay close attention to and get ahead of. She is a champion for action and she's bringing her full energy, her vision and her commitment to a very critical role in the U.S. government. Sarah, thank you for being with us today and please join me in welcoming her. So thank you, Nancy, for hosting this super important conference. I'm really pleased to be here with you all this afternoon and thank you, Nancy, for your assumption of the leadership of the Institute for Peace. I think that all of us who have watched the Institute have really high hopes for its evolution and the ways in which it's going to contribute to realizing that audacious vision that you described. And thanks, Melanie, for your introduction and for leading the Alliance for Peace Building. It's really, it's nice when you work in government to come to a meeting that is full of non-government people and know a lot of them. It's really nice and to respect their work and to feel connected to their work. It's a privilege and so I want to just begin by thanking all of you for your very important contributions to this audacious vision of peace that we are all working toward. So this morning, I would like to talk a little bit about, before joining in a broader conversation, about how the U.S. government is working to reduce the risk of violence worldwide and to give you some sense, which is, I think, sometimes difficult to convey because the context in which government policy is made, and no one knows this better than Nancy, but is sometimes mind-numbingly bureaucratic and procedural and mechanistic and feels very divorced from the kind of interpersonal relationships that you can see and feel and touch on the ground in the fieldwork that many of you engage in or support. And yet, the kinds of changes that fall into this category of mind-numbingness to an external actor are sometimes of fundamental importance for outcomes in terms of policy and therefore translating into action on the ground. And so I hope you'll bear with me if it seems somewhat arcane and abstract and just trust me that everything that I'm describing in our small world, some of my teams here in the front row, counts as a significant success and the result of a lot of elbow grease and hard work. So when I took this job as Undersecretary for Civilian Security, I saw it as an opportunity to essentially continue the work that I'd been doing prior to rejoining government. It was an effort to strengthen the U.S. collective effort within government, to pursue the American values that I think inspired most of us as we joined this work, tolerance, liberty, human dignity. And the values are ends in themselves. The values are our words to which we and our politicians pay homage. But they are more than our national values. They really are universal values and they really do lie at the cornerstone of not just our peace and security as members of a global community, but indeed for the stability and the sustainability of the international architecture into the 21st century. So the office that I'm in now at the State Department leads the department's work at the intersection of security and human rights, sometimes uneasy nexus that I've occupied for a very long time. I'm sure products and law enforcement, human rights, democracy, refugee assistance, human trafficking, global criminal justice. So when what is known as the J Bureau was created, for some people it seemed like a really odd melange of different bureaus with very different and competing missions. But if you occupy this nexus that I just described where you see as fundamental the relationship between rights and security, between justice and peace, this constellation of bureaus makes all the sense in the world and offers hope in a very concrete, if bureaucratic way that the United States can join together the strands of security and peace in a form that has been elusive in some periods of our history. So if you assume that human rights and security are closely interwoven, you see security as a means of promoting human rights and you see that crises and instability weaken the social and governmental structures that are necessary for protecting citizens from abuse. And so our core mission at J is to encourage and support rights and justice respecting societies in which people can live freely and safely. And so since coming to the office, I've really put an emphasis on improving the government's responsibility to respond to mass atrocities, the use of systematic violence against civilians. This is not a unique focus of mine. You will all know that President Obama some three years ago identified the prevention of mass atrocities as a core national security interest of the United States in addition to being a moral responsibility and he committed the United States to becoming a global leader in preventing wide-scale violence against civilians. The President's National Security Strategy and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review QDDR, see I'm already numbing you, that was rolled out just two weeks ago by Secretary Kerry, reiterate the importance of preventing mass atrocities as a strategic priority. And, you know, as global citizens, as people who read the newspaper, we cannot help but understand that this issue looms extremely large for the world as a whole. Places, in particular those that are already marginalized and vulnerable, if not already riddled with conflicts, so places such as Sudan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, all at risk. And to meet these threats to prevent conflicts from escalating, the government is seeking to improve the ability of countries and local communities to identify and quickly address the risks of large-scale violence when they arise. And we all have a role to play and I'm simply going to explain how we've been seeking to strengthen the State Department's role. First, the promise of prevention. Government policymaking, institutional policymaking, sometimes individual policymaking, we all know that prevention is the wisest investment of resources and yet it's often very difficult to actually work our systems and our choices to prioritize prevention efforts. It more effectively mitigates risks before crises erupts, it reduces the costs that come with full-scale response, saves lives. Preventing threats is just not an automatic reflex for government nor is it typically reflected in the way that we budget. We respond to ongoing crises, that is sort of what catapults a complex checks and balances system to actually move and prevention is something that because it works over the longer term and because it often works in avoiding the foul in the non-barking dog, it's harder to show the concrete results that so many are focused on whether they're in the donor community or whether they sit in Congress. So the importance of prevention is confronted by the difficulty of actually prioritizing prevention in complex decision making. And so the role of your organization's outside of government is to constantly press us to do just that. We are working within state to try to do that within the context of government decision making. To incorporate prevention thinking into the mechanics of government, we are seeking to institutionalize prevention in ways that go beyond what is commonly understood and talked about, which is the Atrocity Prevention Board as an entity. We're working to institutionalize prevention in all aspects of the way that the State Department thinks about and executes its responsibilities. So the fast-moving threats, the wolf at the door, the urgent inbox is what tends to preoccupy the government. One of the advantages of being a functional bureau within the State Department is that we can think more long-term and more strategically about what lies over the horizon. And we are better positioned to bring prevention concerns and priorities to the balance of our colleagues at State that are focused on the immediate crises. So we have worked to build mechanisms within our government deliberative processes and within our budgeting and within the way that we think about who's in the room for a given discussion to make sure that prevention is on the agenda in a way that is more central than has typically been true in the past. The APB itself, the Atrocities Prevention Board, scans the horizon to look for emergent threats and is charged with helping push the system to prioritize the those challenges as in a preventive vein. And the early morning indicators work that many of you have been involved in and that has gone on for a long time outside of government has now been incorporated within government within the way the intelligence community thinks about its responsibilities and how it defines its priorities. And building on that institutionalized change, the Atrocities Prevention Board is better equipped to do that work of early identification. So we will look every month at a handful of countries that have been identified by the intelligence community where the risk factors lie in that particular country or region and we will see to identify gaps in opportunities that can be met in advance early on. So the Atrocities Prevention Board does in an interagency context in which Nancy was a critical participant when she served in government for AID. In an interagency context sets the tone, but the real work has to happen within agencies as they identify what it is that they can do and enable either programmatically or in terms of budget or in terms of diplomacy to work on the prevention angle. So let me take this abstract description and try to make it more concrete. And I do this with a great deal of humility because I'm going to talk about the example of Burundi. And as you all know, the current political crisis in Burundi with the president having asserted his right to run for a third term in contravention of the Arusha Accords has caused enormous dislocation and increased violence and refugee flows within the country. So I'm going to provide this example that looks at the Atrocities Prevention Board's efforts vis-a-vis Burundi starting from two years ago. And the claim that I'm going to make is not that we were able to prevent atrocities forever, but that we positioned the U.S. government, our ambassador in Burundi, and the concerned international community in a much better place to respond to what are now the risks of mass atrocities and violence. So the APB, looking based on the intelligence communities scanning of the horizon that I just referred to, this institutionalization of the prevention of mass atrocities agenda into the way the government prioritizes issues, had identified Burundi as a country at risk. And some two years ago, the different agencies of government came together and identified gaps in our programming, in our understanding of the situation, in our peace building efforts on the ground, in the communication among key actors within Burundi, and worked to scrounge together some $7 million worth of resources to support programs and efforts that aimed to fill those gaps. So the funding bolstered coordination with partners. It enabled the department to deploy civilian conflict experts to augment what was a very small embassy team. And it laid the groundwork for a much deeper understanding and faster understanding within the government of what is going on now as we prepare to potentially respond to these increasingly worrying signs in Burundi today. So we're working within the State Department, as I think about the atrocities prevention interagency process, within the State Department, we have a responsibility to instill within the bureaucracy itself, not just have it lodged at the level of the whole of government, the prevention analysis piece. And I've directed that to reside in the Conflict and Stabilizations Operations Bureau. It is a redirection of the Bureau in the sense that the Bureau had become very programmatic in its focus. We are seeking to restore a balance between the analytic and policy side of CSO's work with its programatics. And what CSO is doing in coordination in most cases with AID that has really been a leader in this field over the long haul in terms of its conflict assessment work. But AID and State have come together to refine their conflict assessment tools as they relate to mass atrocities. And we are instilling within the State Department training, training that exists for Foreign Service Officers and other State Department employees, but also creating toolkits that will go out to posts that are at risks and are available to anyone who is deploying to a country that is on our screen as being potentially at risk of mass atrocities. CSO is also rededicating itself to capturing lessons learned. I have been amazed as coming from academia at the difficulty that the at least the State Department appears to have in capturing learning and conveying it in other than a person to person point to point manner. And so institutionalizing best practices, institutionalizing case studies so that those who come to the next crisis don't have to learn the hard way is a priority that we have established for CSO. Disseminating those resources because the regional, first of all, everyone within the Foreign Service at least is constantly moving and rotating through. And so while you may have regional expertise, as you all know, conflicts are very specific to a particular context. And so knowing what happens for countries over 10 years ago doesn't necessarily prepare you well for an emerging conflict in Country X that is different. But also the constant churn means that there is more of a difficulty in raising issues that are not considered to be the top priority of the crisis issue. So we have to both provide the tools for people to make the prevention case and we have to provide the reinforcement psychologically for people to feel that it is important and indeed expected that they will raise the prevention case. And so that is really what CSO is seeking to do within the Foreign Service culture and within the bureaucracy at the State Department. We have to look at our existing activities. This is another thing that CSO will be doing in partnership with others to investigate how existing investments in the rule of law in gender equality or political participation can lay the foundation that can contribute to preventing violence. There is a lot that the State Department does long term that with more attention and more tailoring can serve multiple purposes. And the longer I am back in government, the longer I see the more deeply I understand the enormity of challenges that are out there globally, the more I appreciate the limitations of our own resources and our own reach, the more I firmly believe that everything that we do, whether it is development or whether it is institution building, absolutely needs to be done through a prevention lens where it is multi-purpose investment. And there are tweaks in the way that we can do this that I think will yield big benefits going forward. And this relates very much to the third emphasis that we've had in the State Department within the J undersecretariat since I came to it, which is this notion that's very familiar to all of you and that's very familiar to our colleagues at AID. But that is not typically the way the State Department has thought about its work because the State Department typically is focused on embassies that deal with governments and relationships that are intergovernmental and meetings and processes that are intergovernmental. We at J really look at the world through the lens of the global citizen and so we think about strengthening communities. And so this emphasis on what it means to promote the strength and health and resilience of communities at the local level is something that we are seeking to inculcate throughout the department. When the forces of instability threaten the fabric of a society, the odds are increased that the community can resist those threats when we strengthen the health of that community. So whether you're talking about conflict in general, whether you're talking about violent extremism, whether you're talking about the marginalization and use of violence against a particular subset of that community, these are all risks that have security implications that can be addressed by strengthening community processes. And the State Department's tools which tend to be geared toward government partners can be adjusted and augmented in ways that really develop the community piece and focus on the relationship of the community to the government in ways that are also extremely helpful for community resilience and for governance in general. And so that's an enormous cultural change that we are just beginning to address. And again, you all are experts, you all have been doing this for a long time, harder evolving within government process, certainly at state. So the long-term peace building doesn't begin and end with a focus on national governments. And so this is why as we looked to, for example, the challenge in the Central African Republic, part of our augmentation of resources, some $30 million, went to community and grassroots peace and reconciliation programs. Part of our effort was having President Obama record a radio address that was broadcast to the people of that country. Governments everywhere are strengthened when they work in partnership with communities. And so trying to create a balanced approach to peace means that we have to leaven our approach to foreign assistance and partnership to think beyond governments, to think about not just civil society, where I think the State Department has evolved in terms of both who it communicates with and who it sees as partners in development or foreign assistance work, but also really focus on the communities themselves that are the embodiments of that global citizen that we increasingly need to think about in a world in which borders become less important in many respects. A fourth feature of our approach is partnerships. I've touched on this already, the ways. I was really struck in a really positive way when I returned to government in the State Department by the prominence that is attributed to civil society organizations in dialogue, both in the field and in Washington. The role of non-governmental actors I think will only continue to grow. We within the State Department increasingly see not just the layers, but also the breadth of multinational or multi-organizational partnerships as being essential to anything that we do, and it's not simply a function of limited resources. It's a function of the need to have multiple pressure points or multiple engagement points on any given problem set. So for example, we at J have started a dialogue with the European Union, the civilian security and development dialogue that aims at bringing the EU apparatus to include DEFCO into a discussion about how do we strengthen community resilience and how do we work collectively when we are mutually concerned about a country at risk. We meet regularly with UN counterparts, both individuals who are special rapporteurs on issues like genocide or transitional justice, but also with the internal apparatus within the UN leaders of initiatives such as Rights Up Front that seek to help the UN make much of the same preventive change that we are seeking to institutionalize within the State Department. At the local level, the community engagement, one of our big challenges is trying to learn how to bring our investments in communities back to Washington. I have a feeling that we could probably learn from some of you in how to best do that, but we certainly do rely on the Institute of Peace because of its many events and because it's just next door. So it's so easy to come and hear from people who are in Washington from the field, from local communities about how programs and engagements are working and affecting them. So in sum, when the Secretary announced the release of the QDDR, he said, power dwells increasingly in networks rather than hierarchies. We have to engage with an ever-expanding array of organizations, groups in regional and subnational leaders. This is really a fundamental challenge for us, but it's space within which you move seamlessly. And so I hope we can rely on you to continue to keep us honest and evolve our efforts in taking communities and citizens seriously in national government policymaking. I want to just say a very brief word and we can talk about it more in the Q&A if you wish, but the emphasis that the President and the Secretary of State are now putting on the prevention agenda as it relates to the threat of global terrorism, I think is a really noteworthy evolution. And I want to flag it for you. It may not be what you all think of as central to your own work as peace builders, but I can tell you, based on my travels, including most recently with the Secretary in Kenya, the issue of community resilience, the issue of interfaith dialogue, the issue of government-community relationships is absolutely central to preventing the rise of violent extremism and that next generation of government and community and citizen is absolutely vital for dealing with a panoply of challenges, but centrally to this question of violent extremism and terrorism. And we have seen that as important as the use of force and intelligence tools may be that at the end of the day, this is psychological, this is a question of belief, this is a question of pull factors, this is also a question of underlying causes and push factors that have to do with alienation, with marginalization, with a host of things that are really central to the work that many of you have studied and been active in. And so when the White House convenes a summit on countering violent extremism, and the main word at that summit is how do we prevent violent extremism, that's a really important and positive and energizing possibility and an invitation to all of you to think about how you can contribute to that expansion, to that complementarity of our current hard security approaches to countering terrorism, and how do we think about getting ahead of the curve? How do we think about preventing those next generation of extremists from emerging? How do we think about keeping communities healthy so that children can be protected from the lure of this aberrant, nihilistic, ideological and behavioral pull? How do we prevent that? And that I think is peacebuilding at its core, that I think is a huge opportunity for all of us. I think it's an opportunity that if we fail to really engage it, if we fail to embrace it, to walk into that space that sometimes at an uncomfortable nexus, because not everyone in the peace community wants to talk about terrorism or wants to feel that their work is somehow connected to an anti-terrorism effort, but I promise you this is an invitation that we do not want to pass up. This is a door through which we must walk because the peacebuilding is so central to what it means to promote tolerance. Those values that I mentioned in the beginning, liberty, tolerance, inclusion, freedom, human rights, this is fundamentally at risk in any struggle against terrorism. And the more we can use the non-kinetic tools, the more we can act earlier in a cycle of radicalization, the better we can harness all layers of society in fighting against intolerance and nihilism and violence. The closer we will be to the world that we all wish to see. So I hope very much that for those of you who are already engaged in work at this nexus, you will recommit yourselves and that we can support you. And I hope for those who have yet to venture into this space that you will find it possible to do so because we really do need your help. So sorry to go on so long, but thank you very much. Thank you, Sarah, so much for that speech. It is such a joy as a member of the peacebuilding community to hear a government official, especially one which has you have such a 30,000-foot view over so many fields, echoing the values that we place on prevention of positive change in the world in a very sophisticated nuanced way. You're not saying that it's easy and we very much appreciate your offering to join us in this challenge. So thank you so much. And it is wonderful to have a chance to talk with both of you who, I guess together, have the 60,000-foot view on the whole peace and development and security landscape. And it's wonderful to have this opportunity to go a little bit deeper. So could everyone hear okay? Are mics good? So I have a range of questions for you, but I wonder if we can start on the CVE question on which you ended your talk. And to share some perspectives of how USIP is thinking about CVE and PVE, ways in which we can help you, Sarah, in your role. And one question I have is, to what extent is it enough just to do good peacebuilding and development? Do we need to label it specifically as CVE? And one concern that we have in the peacebuilding community is a certain instrumentalization of our work. And so our partners in the ground field, we're not doing this to create sustainable, healthy communities, but to root out the cancer of the extremists. So where do you both come down on the labeling issue and how to make sure that we have the trust of local partners in doing this very ambitious work? You know, this is, I think, a really important question because as anytime when you have an emergence of an important new collective effort, there's a certain bagginess in the definitions. And so what exactly is in countering what's in preventing violent extremism? I think it's a really important robust debate that's going on. And it's understanding how do the Venn diagrams of good development work, of good peacebuilding work, and of good countering and or preventing violent extremism, what's in that set of Venn diagrams? Where are the overlaps and how do you understand not to overly instrumentalize approaches, motives, you know, aspirations of the people with whom you're working? So I think we're walking down that pathway together. Fundamentally, I think, as Sarah said, if you are helping communities to be strong, to be resilient, to realize their own aspirations, connect state society relations in a more positive, productive, effective way, that you are working upstream and there becomes less of a distinction between preventing peacebuilding and development. But the further you go downstream, I think these efforts start to differentiate more as you need to more specifically address the already difficult strands of violence or extremism that may have existed. Thank you. And this is a good conversation for all of us to continue to really focus on and get clarity and agreement on the terms on what we mean by this and how we understand success. So I think one of the interesting opportunities for all of us as an international community interested in peace will be to look at the UN's new countering violent extremism approach. Because when I would urge you all to listen to Bonki Moon's address at the countering violent extremism summit in February here, because he used the word prevention, I don't know, maybe a dozen times. I mean, for the Secretary General, the pivotal opportunity as he described it in his statement was to take the prevention approach and essentially instrumentalize the counterterrorism narrative. I mean, let's not imagine that instrumentalization works in only one direction. And I know that the concerns of those who work in peace building is always a fear of co-optation. But I think what was so powerful about the Secretary General's framing of the work against violent extremism was his exposition in a room full of some 60-plus leaders of states of very different characters, his characterization of the responsibilities of governments to citizens as a core element of what it means to prevent violent extremism. So there are different ways to think about which part of the debate is doing what to which other part of the debate. As we move, as Nancy quite rightly said, upstream to think about the earlier interventions and to think about how all of the actors, government, external funders, communities and citizens, civil society organizations, all have a particular sort of responsibility inside of opportunities vis-a-vis violent extremism. So A, I think that when we talk about prevention, we are on the most solid ground. But whether you want to think about governance or not as part of the prevention equation, I see the preventing violent extremism conversation as being a huge opening for the stakeholders within a society to talk about governance in a way that is related to a security conversation that governments are very accustomed to engaging in. And so in very important ways, the preventing violent extremism conversation leverages our ability to talk about governance in ways that might not be possible or heard otherwise. And so again, I think it's just a huge, huge opportunity. And I think that this lexicon question will be not settled by ever, but I think that as the UN releases its new approach, I think that will be a very useful touch point for a universalization of what we mean in this vocabulary. Because whatever we do or say within the U.S. government will be A, one microcosm, B, bureaucratically derived and not necessarily coming from a free form space in which one can start with the language that you wish. But I think it's also sort of besides the point as we move toward global partnerships in thinking about what it means to go upstream on the violent extremism challenge. And thank you very much for setting out that framework, Sarah, because one complaint that the peacebuilding community has had about the CBE discussion to date is a certain over focus at the community level. And of course, we believe that's critically important, but it sometimes lets governments off the hook on issues like corruption, which are such drivers of conflict. And so you're saying about how there used to be that dialogue between the local, the governmental levels, and then the global level is critically important and something that I'm not sure our field does as well as some other fields like global health, where those kinds of different levels are engaged much more easily with each other. Well, if I could switch gears for a moment and ask you to imagine this whole audience as a group of kindergartners, if you could give them some advice about what they could do in their lives to become peacebuilders and to play a role in this world that's changing so quickly, what advice would you give them? Use your words. I do think that is certainly where it would start. And one of the things that USIP really focuses on is bringing people together who might not otherwise have a chance to sit down together. And so it's engaging in conversation, have the conversation with that bully across the room and find common ground and find a way to move forward. I believe that fundamental to a lot of good peacebuilding is the understanding of how to do that and of the importance to do that. And that if you move to violence, you probably aren't going to solve whatever the problem was. I think that's a key point because as we see the next generation, which is so much in a technological bubble, where you get very easy to have your own views reinforced, I think we're losing a very basic skill of how you talk with people who are different from yourself, which is one of the key elements of the DNA of peacebuilding. I agree so much with what Nancy just said and I think it relates to my admonition to all of you that I hope you will enter into what you may label as security space because I think that the divide between those who do security and those who do peace is a really dangerous one because I think that at the end they're so integrally connected and that some of the biggest challenges to peace are in the way that the security debate is framed and that only if you enter into that debate and you listen hard as Nancy suggested, can you begin to find ways where you have those common interests that you can work toward. And I have always found in my work on civilian protection that the strongest arguments, not the only arguments, but the strongest arguments for those who hold a strong security frame, as their point of reference, is to talk about the security self-interest in changed behavior. And that requires engagement and that requires engagement with actors that you may see as being the problem, but if we don't engage on that question, who will? So you've touched on this, both of you, in your remarks about the necessity of reaching across different fields. In your own career, Sarah, in human rights, and traditionally there's been a little bit of friction between the human rights community and the conflict resolution community, how do both of you, in a very concrete way, work with fields that have different terminologies, different frameworks? I mean, how do you start to be the worker bee cross-fertilizing them? Do you have tricks of the trade or insights you could share with us? I think fundamental to the whole peace building field is the understanding of how to look across the various divides. And, you know, Sarah, you've mentioned several times now the importance of engaging the security side. I look at the dialogue that's happened over the last few, I don't know, is it almost a decade, about framing it as human security and as an effort to reach into the hard security and all these other fields. Similar to Sarah, when I was in government had a bureau at USAID that had nine marquee brands. And, you know, what is quickly, quickly apparent is that you've got to bring these specialties together. And I have in the past used the story of bringing my elderly father to Mayo Clinic after having seen specialist who isn't ever really able to understand what the problem is. You go to Mayo Clinic and you have a team that's working together to do a diagnosis of the overall system. And it's when we're able to bring these various expertise together to better understand inside of a system what the issues are and how to move forward that we get better traction. And, you know, inside the government it is filled with, and outside the government, all of us end up specializing more and more and more and working inside systems that are further divided from the other specialties. And we just are not going to have the impact that we need. We're not going to understand the complexities that exist in a particular conflict that doesn't so helpfully divide itself up by the specialties that we have. So I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have going forward on both the bureaucratic front, on the diagnosis front, and thinking about it in a systems way, and understanding how to address complexity and get to the other side of that with the kind of actions that will have an impact. I think the will is there if we take care of models. So how do we incentivize that kind of in systemic engagement within these very complex bureaucracies? Money is a really good incentive. And that's part of the reason why I have been talking about the value of having flexible funding for atrocity prevention or funding for preventing violent extremism that requires people to argue how they're going to work together to achieve a result. Because there's nothing... The fundamental way to get people to work together is to get them to all work collectively on a problem that they all care about. And if you're problem focused as opposed to turf focused or terminology focused or paradigm focused or whatever focused, problem focused, all things become possible. One of the best ways to get people to be focused on a common problem is to have a pot of money that's dedicated to the problem. And then it just changes the fundamentals of how you come together. And that's me speaking through a bureaucratic lens. But I think it's one of the least appreciated but most powerful elements of what Congress can do as it looks to fund in sort of national security, foreign policy development objectives is to articulate the kinds of results that it wants to see instead of deciding sort of which pieces that it thinks it wants to privilege. Because to Nancy's point there are a variety of tools that can play to a problem set. And you don't know until you deeply understand the problem set which are going to be most opposite for that particular case. So that's how I think you do incentives is with money. That also speaks though to a role that NGOs could play in supporting the budgets and the flexible funds that would then make that kind of joint action possible. So we can talk more about that. I want to open the floor to questions in just a moment, but I had to ask a final question. It is not lost on me that we're three women leading different kinds of peace building organizations. And I wonder if you could say a role if you could say a word about the role you see in women in peace building, but also a potential problem that I've been seeing just in informal research in Washington. So I went to American University and was giving a couple of lectures and as a guest in classes. And the course that was basics of peace building was 27 women and one man. And in the course that was security in a modern world, it was reversed. And so are we facing a gender issue in the peace building security field? And also what are the bright spots you see about working on women in peace building internationally? I think your illustration goes to Sarah's point about how to talk in the security, the so-called security world. And at our peril, do we come up with a division along the lines of gender that addresses so-called soft peace building over here and hard security over here with gender lines. So that's a very good cautionary illustration. It also speaks to the earlier point we were talking about on the how vital it is to bring these pieces together and to see security in a broader frame and discuss more broadly. I think the, you know, there are different ways in which women are socialized traditionally. I think the question will be going forward in a world where people have maybe more conscious understandings of the gendered way in which we work that might shift. But we still, I know at USIP there's a lot of attention paid to making sure that we bring men into the conversation about how to address women's rights and women's roles and that it does have to be everyone at the table to get guidance. Well, I'll wait to hear more guidance and we'll continue with Q&A. We have mics up here. Oh, so we're going to be passing mics around. So maybe we'll cluster questions. I know that a lot of people want to have direct input. So hands with questions. Yes, I see Howard and Peter. Why don't we start with both of you and I'll keep scanning. Thank you. I've been interested for a long time, because I had to deal with it on the ground for a long time, in the relationship between state and USAID and defense on the ground, which is a different story from what we read in the QDDR, which since I'm retired I don't have to read anymore. But I'm particularly interested, Sarah, in what you were saying about getting the State Department and embassies more focused on community building, which always I saw, because I'm a USAID person, as a USAID responsibility, and I never saw the skills or the incentives or the interest among State Department people for really getting at the community level in a constructive and programmatic way. And I wonder if you're trying to accomplish that, or what you're trying to do is sensitize at a sort of higher level so that on the ground, state and USAID programs can be much more complimentary than they sometimes are. Thank you. Thank you. Peter. Thank you. My name is Peter Dixon with an organization called Concordes International, not American. But we bring people together who might otherwise be shooting at each other. And my question relates to the security and peace fields and how they do or don't connect with each other, because I'd just like to ask how you think the constraints and the targeting of so-called material support. Thank you. Fred Tipson, a proud alumnus of the Institute of Peace. Kudos to all three of you for leading the fight of making this about holistic approaches to specific contexts and solving problems in a very localized and holistic way. Is this a mic on? Sorry. I'm struck, however, by the fact that our efforts at prevention seem to be disregarding the increasing scale of the problem that we're facing, the increasing scale of the stresses that are generating violence in various parts of the world. So our challenge to talk about preventing much of this violence is probably becoming increasingly unrealistic. The growing number of young men who have no prospects in life, these underlying causes of violent extremism, livelihoods, degree of government, legitimacy, and so forth that are being exploited by leaders but have underlying causes that are not resolvable. And I just wonder how you think about this, and I'm talking about climate volatility, population growth, things that we probably cannot change in the short term, but which will lead to much greater stress in societies from Pakistan to Nigeria to Egypt, etc. The business of peace building can't be the quaint reference to small scale, national only discussion of issues. Somehow we're, I don't seem, we're not coping with the broader range of what's going on in the world that's generating the kinds of conflicts that are going to only get worse in my opinion. Okay, well thank you. Three questions that could really be the focus of three conferences. Exactly. One on how to get the State Department emphases better focused on community. One on the material support question, and are we constraining peace builders from talking with the people they need to be talking with. And then the scale of the problem. Sarah, would you like to start? So the response to the question about communities is that I do see political officers as moving beyond, in the field, moving beyond the question of going to visit the detained human rights activists to learning more about what's going on with communities and who are their leaders, what are their leadership networks, what are their main concerns, how are their views represented or not to local or national government. When I was in Kenya, we traveled, Lee and I traveled out to Mombasa and with a young political officer who spent his time talking to community leaders in Mombasa. Religious community leaders, you know, local neighborhood community leaders, civil society leaders had a forum in which he regularly engaged in dialogue with them. And so I think that communities are increasingly recognized as a focal point for political work and understanding and assessment. And it will vary, I'm sure, by the capacity of the post and the accessibility of the communities. But I think what's really important, and this pertains especially to my personal view of how we think about preventing violent extremism, and it relates also to the third question about macro causality versus micro manifestation of inequality or injustice, which is that violent extremism does not, it's not sort of a blanket that washes over the world in one fell swoop. It's something that works through seams and weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And so the prevention work, as it looks, as we look at terrorist networks and we look at where they're currently strongest, the hot zones with conflict or safe haven of terrorists, and you look then about how they spread out to buffer and periphery zones. If you start at the periphery, again to Nancy's point about as upstream as you can go, places that are at risk but are still very permissive environments, but where you can trace the vulnerable networks, those communities that are most likely GP targeted by extremist organizations that are operating next over, you can identify where the most important vulnerabilities are. And those are communities really worth investing in in terms of understanding and in terms of supporting. So my view about how we as an international community look at the threat of violent extremism is not that we need to turn the entire globe into Marine County in order to combat violent extremism, is that as we can predictably understand where some of the biggest vulnerabilities lie, where some of the populations are most vulnerable, and that is where we need to concentrate our effort. Because we don't have, to the point of the third question, the resources to fix everything right now. If we did, we wouldn't. So I think communities are increasingly important, but I think they have different degrees of importance in different contexts. And I think they're particularly important for us to understand and work with and reinforce in the context of the violent extremism challenge. On material support, I think there are often untoward consequences of public policy decisions. And I think there is no question that I have heard from many organizations that the material support prohibitions do have, do create challenges for peacebuilding organizations, particularly when they want to work with those that are closest to the problem set on the violent extremism problem set. So I would acknowledge that that, I've certainly heard that that is a serious issue. On the final question about underlying, about the big sort of tectonic pressure points that are increasing the potential for vulnerability and inequity and violence, absolutely no one actor has enough resources to deal with them. And we could get into a long discussion about the international system and the limits of the UN and why, you know, this is my view about why it's so important to involve the private sector in discussions about preventing violent extremism when you're looking at, you know, assistance budgets that are just a minuscule portion of the foreign direct investment value in many of these countries that are most at risk. So there's no question that no one entity can do it all, that we need everyone engaged and that, and that while the, neither the US government nor the international community has enough sort of resources and energy against any single one of these thematic threats, whether it's climate change or inequality, that you can't do everything at once. And so you have to make choices. And so to my mind, the prevention agenda then needs to become more specific. That's why, to my mind, the prevention agenda is not the development agenda. The prevention agenda is very distinct from the development agenda and development tools have a real role to play in prevention once you know what it is that you're trying to prevent. If you're trying to prevent mass atrocities against civilians, if you're trying to prevent the spread of violent extremism, you need to look at the risk factors for those activities and you need to concentrate your development and your peace building efforts in those areas. So to me, it's not a question of do you do development or you do do you do conflict prevention. It's if you're going to do a certain kind of prevention, where are you doing it? With whom are you doing it? How do your development tools and then your other tools, whether they're foreign direct investment or whether they're, you know, judicial capacity building come to play in that community because of that vulnerability because you've identified that risk factor. Thank you. Nancy, do you want to take any or all of those? So let me just make a few specific points to compliment that. The first on the state aid conversation, I would just add that I was very happy to see the QDDR take on this issue of taking more risk because none of this work can be done as long as our diplomat and development professionals cannot leave the the embassy or the the aid mission. And so we need to unleash our government officials so that they can get outside and do that work. It's very important to have all the NGO partners and all all the other actors doing that work but the more that we keep our our official Americans locked up inside the worst that will be for us as a country. So that's absolutely critical. On on the material support I absolutely agree. I think it over and over again it becomes a significant problem both for peace building and for humanitarian work and we need to find more nuanced ways, more carve outs, you know, more more ways of making that help without also being a hindrance, without canceling out other efforts that are absolutely critical and I believe that's an important piece of work. On the on the scale issue, Fred, absolutely, Sarita, everything that you said, I would also add that this is why there is such an effort on global partnerships and I would say a part of those global partnerships are actually the creation of these, you know, or the further solidifying critical norms around state behavior and expectations and how much of this, much of the violence that we're seeing is fueled by or prompted by the kind of grievances that stem from corruption, from inequality, from basically fragility at the state level and so we had a wonderful group of African women leaders here earlier this week, parliamentarians, ministers, et cetera and they were they were furious with the lack of leadership at the very top of their countries and the inability of the UN to make a difference on these issues and they're ready to mount, you know, a walk across Africa or something, some kind of mass action to really underscore that it's not okay for leadership to continue on the way it is and so I think it's both creating a greater understanding of this normative action and, you know, there is a lot, especially augmented by digital media, there's a lot of energy for people to have it be differently and it's harnessing and supporting and enabling that to happen which will be a part of the equation and everyone is different, every conflict, every seam is different and so at our peril do we apply mass solutions. Some more questions? Yes, up here and then Chick. Hi, I'm Kim Hart with Search for Common Ground. I wanted to build on your comments about increasing collaboration by having problem focused funding. I think that's really accurate and it's a big challenge here in DC as we all know with accounts like the complex crises fund getting zeroed out every year and some of these really critical global accounts that do fund this type of work. So I just wanted to hear a little bit more about how your teams are building that with the hill, looking forward, and how our community can help. Thanks, Chick. Hi, thank you. It's so good to be here and Nancy, it's so good to see you in that chair. We appreciate it very much. My biggest concern overall is one that we've referred to a couple times in terms of scale and scale means resources, it means money for the institutions that are engaged in violence prevention and peace building. The organizations and bureaus that you represent are doing extraordinary work but so incredibly under-resourced in comparison with virtually everything else that goes on in the U.S. government and as you all know it wasn't very long ago that we went through a real struggle just to keep this institution alive, let alone be being adequately funded. Part of the challenge in getting particularly the Congress to even pay attention to these institutions and what you're doing is a lack of confidence in the efficacy of peace building, a lack of confidence that we can actually that you actually can do it, that it can make a difference. What can messages do you take to the American public and to the Congress? What message would you encourage us to take to the people we connect with and in our advocacy efforts on behalf of what you're doing to help strengthen the case, to get the case out there and to begin to scale up the financial resources that make it possible for all of us to do what we're trying to do. Thank you. Good, thank you. I've just gotten the word that we have three minutes so maybe we can use that opportunity both to answer the questions and to wrap up with any other comments you'd like. Sure, thanks Mon. The conversation about resources is one in which I think the administration has, the Obama administration has talked about the importance of funding foreign assistance and it does seem to be an issue that the hill has a different perspective on and that is not historically an aberration and so this is a long-term challenge that we've had exacerbated by the facts that you all know that you know most Americans are under the false impression that we spent oodles of money on foreign aid when of course we spend an embarrassingly low on the amount when compared to other developed countries and so I don't have a silver bullet on that. I think we have in seeking to talk about the importance of prevention within the State Department we are trying to highlight the fact that when everything that we do is committed to in a specific line item for a very specific purpose that is divided up by by sort of bureaucratic budget-driven process it just becomes hard to stay focused on the the integrated problems you know we can have and this relates to the second question on on metrics you know the hill has said very positive things about our HIV AIDS program in large part because the results are so easy to measure and you know this is this is like you know we focus on the crisis because it's here we don't focus on prevention because it's not here yet and you know we focus on the things that we can measure the results of even if there may be not the only things that are important and so the challenge to just build now into the answer to the response to the second question is to be able to articulate the value if not demonstrate the value of prevention work or of peace-building work it's a huge challenge for the atrocity prevention work that I mentioned because how do you show the results of a non-barking dog first of all in the case of Burundi that I offered up as an example nobody wants to crow about Burundi because we're very worried about Burundi right so how do you take credit for two years worth of investment that you believe has helped to prepare us better and helped to prevent violence when violence could emerge at any moment right so that's that's tough in and of itself but the non-barking dog which is to say whether it's the Nigeria elections or whether it's the Kenya elections where we believe that our efforts diplomatic and programmatic we're very important contributors to the lack of a result that we feared that's just a very hard case to make and so I don't have a great answer to that I do think that that it is a chronic liability for the way we we do our foreign policy budgeting so first of all and just very quickly the complex crisis fund from my old seat is one of the most important otherwise unencumbered funds that there is to Sarah's point about the budgeting process it's really important that there be the kind of funding that enable a faster response to an unanticipated crisis not to not to undercut the upstream efforts but you do want to have that flexibility I would note you know this measurement issue is something that is always a struggle and in fact you may want to mention the lunch today Melanie on that but you know the causality will remain a challenge I believe there is a very strong argument that must continue to be made about the fact that the more we we focus on getting ahead of problems it's more cost-effective than doing massive responses either to a natural disaster or to a war in a conflict where you have to resort to military means it is definitely in our national security interest to try to prevent conflict from happening and it's a very very at the in the scale of things investment to make in that effort and it's certainly in line with our values as a country and the more we do it in partnership with frameworks and with networks where we are collectively working on a problem and not so worried about the particular causality of one act or another but more how are we achieving the the desired outcome of of peace and stability the better off we are in getting around some of the complexities of of measuring and if you look at some of the shifts that are on the table for the post-millennium development goals for the sustainable development goals it is just imperative that we have goal 16 in there which is the heartbeat of bringing together democracy with peace building and that will provide a global framework with indicators that all of us can feed into and I I think that will be that plus frameworks like the New Deal for Engagement with Fragile States where you have negotiated frameworks that a number of actors are feeding into at a very local level we need to be alert for those opportunities we need to be rigorous with our own efforts and partner with others in frameworks that enable us to really understand progress and it will take that kind of concerted effort to get us where we want to be as this ever interconnected interdependent globe on that note thanks to both of you so much for a fascinating discussion actually after the next panel have more information about our lunch which indeed for those of you who are interested will focus on all the questions you wanted to ask about negotiation we will have a 20 minute 15 to 20 minute break listen for the gongs or am I supposed to be oh Linwood yes sorry it's behind me Linwood will tell us everything we need to know thank you thank you Melanie and Sarah and Nancy for this wonderful discussion and thank you for participating in that discussion as Melanie has said well we're on break now for approximately 20 minutes we'll return to Carlucci and we'll have a discussion with our first panel talking about the the the challenge and the threat of silencing of voices and that will be kicked off by framing remarks by Rosario to chief from USAID thank you very much I hope you all got some caffeine I think we're operating in what we sometimes call peace building standard time which is about 10 minutes behind everything else so welcome back I'm absolutely delighted to very briefly introduce the next panel which talks about the shrinking of civil society's space and as you heard this morning from Nancy and from Sarah in order to connect with communities there has to be a vibrant civil society that can speak back and one very troubling and disheartening trend that we're seeing around the world are rules which make it impossible or illegal or even fatal for civil society actors whether they're religious secular around particular issues around capacity building to come together and build the kind of social cohesion that we need to build peace so if you look around the world Russia Central Asia parts of Africa one of the strangest saddest most Freudian examples I can think of this is that South Sudan so recently independent of Sudan has initiated a very restrictive civil society law modeled on Sudan's so it's a great pleasure that I introduce Rosary Tucci who will be introducing today's panel and Rosary was recently appointed the Deputy Director of the Center of Excellence on Democracy Human Rights and Governance at USAID and for those of you who might not be familiar with the center it contributes to the Dodger Bureau's efforts to prevent crises and further political transitions by working to strengthen new and effective democratic institutions and enabling peaceful political transitions so Rosary welcome we're delighted that you're here so first let me thank USIP and the Alliance for Peace Building for making closed space a core part of this week's conference my role this morning is to first frame the discussion for the panelists and conveniently dodge the difficult questions we'll leave those for the expert panelists and second to share just how serious the US government is responding to the backsliding on democracy starting at the very top and here you'll see in the president's own words when citizens are free to organize and work together across borders to make communities healthier our environment cleaner and the world safer that's when real change happens so to frame the discussion I'll talk today about the changing political landscape the changing role of civil society and the impact that closing space is having on civil society and then finally the importance of responding and how we are responding to these changing dynamics in the US government so first I'd like to draw your attention to the screen a few facts on the screen about the changing political landscape not to be too dramatic but a bleak picture becomes more somber since last year we've been quoting the 50 laws were proposed that restricts space for civil society with 20 enacted unfortunately when we dive a little bit deeper we see that in the past three years 117 laws have been proposed with 74 enacted and so across the board these laws are curtailing the freedom of assembly association and expression whether it's a proposed law in Cambodia that's happening right now it's being proposed right now that severely restricts the activities of civil society organizations or the recently passed law in Uganda I think it was just in March that grants the NGO board broad powers to refuse registration to NGOs or even worse a series of restrictive laws and the best case example of that is in Russia over the past decade starting with a 2006 2006 NGO law that introduced difficult to meet reporting requirements for NGOs and then again in 2012 we've got a requirement that organizations must register as foreign agents I think most of you are familiar with that law and a number of laws in between so this rising tide of restrictions is shrinking civil society space but it really as many of you know it cuts at the very fabric of democracy civil society exists to ensure that people's voices are heard felt and most important manifested so Melanie used the word disheartening and it's exactly the word I was going to use it's disheartening to see this trend particularly after the democratization era of the 1990s but I think we can say that the challenges that we are seeing unfolding today are because civil society organizations have been so successful and they're perceived as a threat and again we have a quote from the president it's precisely because citizen and civil society can be so powerful that more and more governments are doing everything they can to silence them I'm going to move now into the role of civil society and just give you a little bit of the flavor of the changing roles that civil society is playing in its most traditional fashion it's our long-standing media partners for instance in Ukraine who were speaking out for freedom in the Maidan holding the government accountable for his actions we are also pleased now to be supporting civil society organizations who are actually partnering with government we see this example in the feed the future initiative where jointly civil society and government are coming together to create metrics to create messages and to come up with solutions to food and security and interestingly enough I was going to raise the example of our support for civil society organizations in Burundi to support youth-led organizations to reduce the risk of violence before the elections next month we'll remain hopeful that there's a positive and peaceful outcome but as this morning's event show that remains to be seen but as these roles evolve we must help civil society organizations adjust to the change the changing operating environment particularly in closed space for instance i'll give two quick examples we know that the source of funding for CSOs is changing right so CSOs can't really rely on the same levels of ODA development assistance that they once were receiving now this is particularly acute in closing space because when you have further restrictions on receiving foreign funding it makes it even more difficult for organizations the second example i like to give is around the new technologies that are evolving every single day while civil society organizations can count on these technologies to help broaden their base and reach out to more people unfortunately they can also count on unfriendly actors to be one step ahead of them enthroning their actions and this is what's creating a whole new set of challenge we call digital security challenges so that's something we're looking into so given this context why do we have a responsibility to push back on the pushback i think that's a common phrase that people are starting to use but i would say that that this is obvious to many of you but if we lose a functionality of civil society who will be applying the critical accountability measures who will ensure that the government doesn't lose touch with the concerns and the needs of the people and who will ensure that those typically excluded from the dialogue are part of the discussion um i don't know for any of you who might know the former deputy administrator of USAID don steinberg i'm going to channel my inner don right now um he never made remarks without mentioning those typically excluded so women youth internally displays people lgbt and indigenous populations i think that's a good precedent to set so i'm following in his footsteps the other reason we have to respond and it was raised um this morning as well neighboring countries will continue to take notes we saw south sudan shockingly taking notes from sudan um and they're pushing the boundaries of the restrictions that they can apply in their own countries the u.s government has put forth a robust agenda to combat this backsliding it's what we call stand with civil society and this this agenda we call an agenda it was crystallized last june in a presidential memorandum if you guys are familiar with the presidential memorandum but basically what it says in very general terms i'm going to pull it again from something nancy said this morning use your own words that's essentially what it's saying use your own words so for us representatives during our visits and our everyday business engage with civil society broadly and often each time we encounter a restrictive law speak up say something and take action continue to support civil society despite or in in light of the restrictions that are taking place and most importantly play that facilitator role between governments and civil society essentially model the type of change we are asking other governments to take i'm just gonna rift off of it's a little this is our stand with civil society and some additional quotes from president obama if we want to take a more practical long-term approach we know the political society space is expanding and contrasting at any moment in time so it's our job as academics policymakers and practitioners to figure out how we do three things this is how we're framing it prevent adapt and support civil society during these shifting times i'm most familiar with the foreign assistance but but the diplomatic efforts are equally as important in fact when we work together we can create a robust response hopefully capable of combating some of the most challenging environments i'm just going to give you two quick examples of some of the work that we're doing uh at usa id first to prevent further restrictions i'm just going to pull up this real quick we have a cso sustainability index and what this document does is it tracks trends uh seven civil society dimensions across 65 64 countries and this gives our civil society actors a tool that they can use in advocating for reform so this is one one way we are trying to prevent the restrictions a second thing that we're doing is called the lead program and this provides civil society organizations with legal analysis both long-term and rapid response legal analysis that they can use to mobilize action when a restrictive law is proposed and we are also trying to be innovative and using innovative approaches so we are currently right now creating what we call innovation hubs and these innovation hubs are designed to connect civil societies across regions and provide them with the expertise training resource and ict tools to better equip them in these closing space environments i'll also just give you two quick highlights of some work that's being done in what we call the diplomatic space we of course supporting the communities of democracy uh through by strengthening the diplomatic action and state department also has a program called lifeline which provides emergency assistance to cso's who are under threat sees as some of the tangible programs that we're doing um to help civil society organizations i'm gonna pick up one more document here we have one more document i will what good would i be if i didn't come with some handouts this is our best practices document we just recently released this in january and it's a short compilation of some of the best practices and how we can do program smarter but this is just a start we know we need the assistance from any of you to help figure out uh what are some more best practices uh and some of the questions that we've been asking um or how can we better connect civil society in closing spaces peer-to-peer learning across regions i mentioned the hubs but there's many more ways that we can do this and what are in general what are some of the tools that can we can use to help civil societies mobilize more effectively i'm going to leave these hard questions like i said to the panelists and i'm just going to leave you with one thought so this is our mission this is usa's mission statement and i raise this because it's really important to know that inclusive peaceful democracies are core to our development work poverty reduction economic growth democracy and national security are all intertwined and so we what i'm basically saying is we can't implement agriculture and global health programs without also addressing core democratic governance in human rights issues that are impeding states for providing services for their own people otherwise we risk either having a job that we have to do endlessly or worse yet we risk leaving millions of people unheard um and and uh neglected in the background but we have an opportunity in front of us and we really should take advantage of that opportunity so i'll leave it there and um we'll welcome our panelists thank you rosary for giving us the u.s. government perspective on this issue of the crisis of shrinking civil society space around the world i'd like to invite at this time our our next uh panelists uh george lopez from our academy vice president of the academy at us institute of peace will lead a discussion on the topic of silencing voices active space for civil society engagement is a foundation for sustainable peace however around the world there is an alarming trend toward government restrictions that are making an exceedingly difficult and more dangerous for conducting this work today we have before you a panel that will highlight the key issues and potential solutions for both peace building and democratic prince practitioners george linwood thank you and and thank you rosary for this marvelous introduction the overview of the u.s. government approach to this it is of course a very very complex and now compelling question with the closing of civil space and this panel is really a a fabulous one to kick off this discussion because of the diversity of experience of our of our panelists as you see we have four uh we we break tradition of the last panel we do have two men uh trying to be as inclusive as we can uh sir michael lee comes to us from the german marshal fund and with a a long history of involvement in the creation of civil space particularly in the transition from communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s to now but also much more recent and pressing work in the ukraine situation so his remarks are going to be focused partly on on on that and in engaging this question uh tanya faffenholz is is for many of us one of the best scholar practitioner practitioner research scholars in the field basing her work of course out of the graduate institute in geneva she's deeply involved in in two particular projects one which addresses the core of our of our program this morning on the the widening of civil society space and how that can be done with engagement across cases and across groups but also a broader look at the inclusion and inclusive dimensions and challenges of the peace building enterprise uh maria stefan is my good colleague as a senior policy fellow here at the united states institute of peace many of you know maria from her work with her colleague erica chenneweth on on proving empirically to us that nonviolent transition and nonviolent civic engagement movements of protest are more likely to change regimes towards democracy and towards transition than violent ones are but she's also been very active in the transnational space of civic mobilization and its importance in in what we do not only for peace building but for linking peace building and democracy commissa kamara joins us as a well-known specialist and senior program officer from the national endowment for democracy with particular emphasis on programs in west africa the creation and maintenance of the sahal strategy forum and with a good deal of case experience as well so we have a marvelous and rich program i've invited the panelists as they feel comfortable to either speak from this television interview newsroom style or to come to the podium so we thank you for your attendance each of our panelists has been very disciplined and trying to bring their remarks within seven to ten minutes which only touches the kind of work they've done but it ought to give us good basis for discussion we'll begin with sir michael thank you very much for that introduction george and for the invitation to be with you today i want to share with you the experience i have had at the european commission in brussels over many many years working with the former communist countries in central and eastern europe and then also working with a further group of countries to the east and to the south around the mediterranean rim the particular feature of this work and why i think it might be of interest at the start of our discussion is it's virtually a unique case in which a group of countries authorized as it were an outside authority to intervene directly within their societies to support transition towards democracy as they were candidates for membership so the legitimacy of this intervention came from the demand within the countries themselves it's very rare to find this around the world and as we heard in the introduction this morning uh the space is closing with countries that do not have this kind of very strong incentive however i do also have a rather somber message in that even with the tremendous incentives that the european union was able to put forward in the form of membership financial support and other means what we see these days is considerable backsliding even in this particular case the european union is very aware that the criteria for membership including democracy rule of law protection of human rights means democracy not only in the narrow sense of electoral democracy but in the much more profound sense of liberal democracy touching the whole of society and yet here we are a decade or so after the dramatic enlargement to 10 and then 12 new member states 10 of them from central and eastern europe former communist countries we actually have one of these countries hungary which was at the forefront of the transition in the early days whose prime minister is declaring his personal opposition to liberal democracy and his preference for another approach so this is even in the case of a country that has had all these benefits that is a member of the european union and of nato how much more difficult therefore might it be with countries that don't have this very strong structure of support and of incentives early on in the transition process the european commission identified civil society as crucial to back up this transition process and support for membership and established a well-financed civil society facility providing three main types of support support on the necessary legislation to permit the activities of civil society in countries where civil society had been crushed for two or three generations and in some cases where it had been rather weak even before the advent of communism financial support to shore up such organizations and then people to people programs to bring them into contact with counterparts in older member states with a view to sharing best practice and building up partnerships this was particularly necessary because of the many many challenges these societies faced the traditions of the rule of law were weak corruption was and is a major problem some of the issues that we rather take for granted in western societies related to non-discrimination gender equality protection of the environment were all very new to these countries stepping back from all this i think one can say 10 or 11 years later that on the whole this process has been successful and we do see in most of the countries concerned thriving civil societies and democracy that is not seriously at threat but we also see negative tendencies the persistence of of corruption and even the calling into question of the notion of liberal democracy itself the european commissioners found that as long as these countries had not yet assigned their act of accession and there was still a doubt as to whether or not they were going to succeed in the process we had maximum leverage but as soon as this process was complete and they were on their own we saw very diverse trends including serious backsliding now if this was true in the countries with this very strong incentive how much more true was it with the next ring of countries around the european union covered by our so-called neighborhood policy where we have tried to strengthen democracy and respect for the rule of law and human rights but without the incentive of eventual membership and there the experience is is far more mixed as anyone who reads the newspapers every day every day knows in the case of eastern europe moderate progress has been registered we saw in the introduction there's pictures of the maydan which to some extent are encouraging but we know also that the overthrow of the ancien regime in ukraine has unleashed other forces not all of whom are liberal but looking more generally across the southern caucuses north africa and the levant these days it's perhaps only tunisia and even there with a question mark where we see strong local ownership of this process and this really brings me to the abiding conclusion that we have reached as a result of this experience and that is that outside actors certainly can support can share experience can build alliances can bring counterparts into contact can launch education programs involve young people mobilize diplomatic pressure but the indispensable ingredient for success in this effort is a strong demand arising from within the target country as it were itself let me just read you a brief paragraph of conclusions from a recent analysis that the commission has made based on its experience ever since the overthrow of communism and with a view to financing support for civil society activities over the next seven years this very short quote is as follows the commission recognizes that a genuine culture of active citizenship cannot be created with financial assistance from the outside alone external donors may over influence civil society activities organizations that are excessively dependent on international domestic public funding can in some instances hardly be considered genuine civil society and risk delegitimizing their activities in the eyes of the public the conclusion drawn from this is not that this activity should be stopped on the contrary but that what we should do perhaps is double and quadruple our support in the case of those societies where there is a clear demand welling up from within the society in other cases we should do our best but also with some modesty based on experience and with the understanding that the key actors must come from within the societies concerned themselves thank you thank you thank you George thank you Melanie and the Alliance and the Institute for inviting me it's a pleasure to be here and I have three issues to talk about and that is a look first a little bit at what are the different dimensions of this shrinking space then what are the challenges within civil society itself and then what are the strategies in civil society support different dimensions of shrinking space we have heard already the legal space I don't have to add anything to that dramatic I wanted to highlight the physical space also I mean what we see and we have heard in the previous panel about violent extremism that's an extreme shrinking space for active civil society groups when we hear reports at the human rights council in Geneva for example about groups in Syria under ISIS controlled areas how the space shrinks I mean that's you can imagine so this annex the violence from all sides that are committed are like extreme shrinking of the space and I think that's that's a crucial problem in civil society support so it's not about when we talk about strategies it's not just about the best way to support it's really about also to address violence and protection issues and I think sometimes the peace building community is not good at protection issues so we support our partners but do we protect them are they still alive tomorrow to gain to benefit from training that has been conducted the other dimension is dividing and co-option strategies by governments and we see that all around the world it's not that civil society is that good entity it's just waiting for our brilliant support all the time civil society is as divided as society and there are elements in society in civil society that are co-opted by governments and of course we tend to work with the others but we shouldn't ignore that and that's going on and it's deliberate strategies by governments to do that I wanted to talk about a particular sort of resistance issue that is going on and we saw that in our latest data multi-year project on broader inclusion as Michael mentioned with 40 in-depth case studies and all across these case studies what we have seen is that governments are extremely good at resistance for change it's not only resistance in civil society so we have the obvious resistance we heard about physical space legal space but there are soft resistance and I wanted to highlight an example the undersecretary was talking about Kenya let me take the Kenyan example great success violence has been absolutely reduced during the elections which is a great success but it doesn't stop here the story of Kenya but it stops in terms of monitoring and attention and that's the problem what has happened since this nonviolent election is that we see a systematic revision of the gains of the peace deal we see commissions that have been explicitly set up in order to reduce the causes of violence like the national integration commission in Kenya that are the commissioners are not renewed and when the commissioners were renewed you will find all the friends of the president there you have all power status nominated by only one ethnic community but the interesting thing to all these things the constitution that has had tremendous gains addressing the causes of conflict the best constitution the country ever had it has been amended 10 or 12 times already to remake the gains of the peace process nobody says anything not in civil society not in the international community there's no monitoring we're all happy that the violence was not there during election and we have have done well in prevention is that enough so I think we should take a second look and be more careful um I might sound a bit critical I thought as another American and not getting an American funding I can play that role today so let me continue and it's becoming even worse now okay let's look at number three shrinking space and that's ourselves so I argue that the peace building community right large is contributing to shrinking space of civil society and I tell you why I'm also a member of alliance for peace building evaluation peace building aviation consortium and we had interesting debates on Monday how come that we are still talking we see this here we're talking about prevention we're talking about linking security and development we're talking about counterterrorism I'm in this field since 25 years I have heard it all talked about that in the early 90s we talked to the mid 90s we talked about it after September 11 and we have spent enormous amounts of money and resources into research into evaluations into all that we know a lot we're not just starting from scratch but it seems we always do and the consequences for civil society are that they have to go with the flow now they have to rewrite their project proposals from resistance to service delivery to anti-terror and they're just there to report and report and rewrite and rewrite and their space for action is shrinking and it's because of us just wanted to highlight that um let me see whether I have also I'm gonna have some positive things as well don't worry but let me start on the challenges women's civil society I think we in the peace building community are right to support civil society and to support the peace constituencies that's our role and we should do that but we should not be ignorant of the rest there there's so much research on the NGOization of civil society that goes on and we see that in every crisis going on you mentioned Ukraine we see that again in in Ukraine that we have a shift from advocacy work to service delivery work we have a shift of gender roles where uh human rights uh women organizations become now the protectors of the man going to war because the narratives change and the gender roles change because of war we have a lack of strategic vision in many civil society organizations we've been working in Geneva a lot on the process in Libya and Syria for example because UN has offices there and you will see that all the civil society organizations coming to Geneva and all the UN agencies engaging there's a lack of a vision what to exactly support and civil society itself has a lack of vision but what is done is negotiation training leadership skills training conflict resolution training but where is the strategic advice strategic support to organizations um and making them fit for resistance let's put it like that um on the Libya case just one example again the UN has tried to set up a very inclusive process with parallel tracks with the main negotiations with a civil society track a women track all these tracks are totally independent from each other and we know that this has absolutely no effect but it's still happening it's still going on we have all this knowledge so um what do we do with all this there's still hope um of course there are very many good organizations out there and i have been also working for the european commission in my previous life and as a donor i mean one thing i have learned is don't bombard organizations that are good with too much money because then they can't be good anymore they need money of course they need support but i think what is a clear problem in the peaceful in community is that we live in the silos and we tend to talk to our like-minded our like-minded here our like-minded i had often the impression how can that we have still problems in the world everybody i talked to is totally convinced of inclusion of anti-terror of i can't understand it so it's a problem with whom i'm talking to apparently and i think that's what happening we're talking to ourselves and we're very happy among ourselves and our like-minded friends are brought everywhere so that's a crucial problem and another problem is this disconnect between the program and project work and the political work and civil society support work if you want to help shrinking a sort of opening space for civil society it's not enough to do a nice project we know that these all this has to come together and all this has sort of double strategies we need the international NGOs that lobby their governments to push support to other governments and we should not just be too much in our comfort zone and say like well there's these nice governments we are having these deals and partnership agreements it's i mean let's face it there's one word that the peace community doesn't really like and that's power but let's face it when we talk about why is space shrinking it's because nobody wants to give up power easily and i mean who would so there's not enough strategies around in civil society both locally and with international supporters to counteract elite power and all sorts of powers and resistance within and outside of civil society and i think we should really address that issue and build it into the programs and strategies we have for the kenyan example i mentioned many human rights groups in kenya said if we would have only worked with parliament we didn't understand that parliament could change actually the laws we had lobbied for and so there is this multi-layer strategies necessary and i know we're talking about this joint strategizing and all this but i think every organization has to really understand which part of the puzzle they are contributing to and we really need for ones work on the blockages so two more last points one is monitoring what is really crucial what i've seen in so many countries now and also our research confirms that monitoring is really key and monitoring mainly takes place on human rights monitoring that is not enough we need to systematically monitor the gains that have been there when we supported our partners we have to monitor whether the gains that have made are still in place and out of from that monitoring and that data that is there there needs to be systematic advocacy campaigns and the support can then be channeled more directly and much more targeted the last point i would like to make is instead of reinventing the wheel all the time i think we should really work on the question of the blockages why are we having brilliant conflict analysis but programming looks the same why do we talk every 10 years about the same thing but nothing changes so we know all this what are the main blockages within our institutions within civil society within governments that hold us sort of that prevent us from doing what should be done and what we are verbally all the time claiming to do and i think that should be an engagement of the peacebuilding community to really list these blockages and come up with a compact of commitment to work on these blockages and with that i leave you thank you very much thank you Tanya Maria well thanks very much George thanks Tanya for that nice and feisty setup for my remarks very nice i'd first like to offer a shout out to Melanie and the organizers for making governance the focus of this year's conference i think we know that bad governance systemic corruption is a major driver of violent conflict and certainly violent extremism around the world so it's wonderful that the premier peacebuilding organization is taking governance onborn in such a serious way in addition i would say that the closing space for civil society is i think an underappreciated threat to international peace insecurity for all the reasons that my colleagues laid out and i'm grateful that this issue is being taken more seriously not only in this town but certainly internationally um we're fortunate at this point to have some excellent research i'll wear my academic cap for a second we're fortunate to have some excellent research that has been done on this phenomenon of closing space for civil society and on authoritarian pushback and i would just mention a few the great work by tom carothers and diane gourmand at the carnady endowment for international peace who focused on this phenomenon civicus the global civil society network has a great enabling environment index that's been very helpful the international center for not for profit law which is focused more on the legal enabling environment and my old professor sarah mendelson has just done some work from the csis on why governments target civil society and what can be done in response um so we're fortunate to have that research out there now and the reality is that there's actually a skill set involved in closing space for civil society just as there's a skill set involved in waging civil resistance and nonviolent movements governments basically are learning from each other how to do this um and one people are starting to talk about a dictator's playbook so there are certain techniques and tactics that governments are using to shut down the space for civil society whether it's finding ways to criminalize uh descent whether it's um proactively using state-run media to perpetuate foreign conspiracy theories whether it's outsourcing violent repression to non-state armed groups whether it's eliminating foreign funding for civil society so that playbook exists and i liked um rosary's point about well in in our case what is then the pushback to the pushback and how should we be countering um what is systemic learning and and and action by these regimes um a colleague larry dimon has referred to the past decade as a past decade of democratic recession we've seen a third of all new democracies fail uh since the third wave of democratization began 30 years ago so it's a pretty um it's a pretty seemingly bleak picture when it comes to democratic development but in the midst of this democratic recession and systemic crackdowns on civil society around the world we're also seeing an upsurge in people power movements so some people have referred to the arab spring and the popular uprisings in the middle east and north africa um the social justice movements in brazil and malaysia um the pro-democracy movement in hong kong as sort of the fourth wave of democracy to use a samuel hunnington's uh term and certainly the past decade plus has been an extremely contentious uh period so we're seeing you know crackdowns in global space but an upsurge in human agency and uh people power movements uh around the world and what are we talking about with people power so we talked to my colleague talked about the professionalization of of civil society and this endemic problem of elites not wanting to give up power well what people power is about is how ordinary citizens who are organized in non-traditional groups labor unions professional groups women's collectives hip-hop artists who are organized all these groups coming together and engaging in extra institutional and sometimes extra legal nonviolent direct action in an attempt to shift power in society and in attempt to challenge um power holders and essentially to advance basic human rights and freedoms um this method of struggle involves both confrontational actions and also obviously engagements with governments and with power holders but the the the theory of change is that sometimes you need to shake up a system in order to get to meaningful resolution into peace building and that's sort of the essence of people uh people power historically we know that social movements have been major drivers of economic social and political change um we know from women's rights movements from environmental rights movements certainly uh ban banning the land mines campaign just a few examples of how organized citizen movements have transformed global politics um some of you may be familiar with the research that i've conducted with my partner Erica Chenoweth um we wanted to ask the question and answer the question how effective um really are nonviolent movements and historically how effective um have nonviolent campaigns been against the toughest of the tough opponents so dictatorships foreign military occupations um movements for territorial secession and self-determination until Eric and I undertook this quantitative study there had been no attempt to compare uh systematically violent and nonviolent campaigns to figure out which one was historically more effective so we found um that after collecting data on 323 campaigns from 1900 to 2006 we found that the nonviolent resistance campaigns were twice as effective historically as armed campaigns against these formidable foes and not only that in a point that's very relevant for this conversation today we were very interested in how the resistance type affected the society that followed and the society after the transition and we found a very strong positive correlation between nonviolent resistance and both democratic development and consolidation and civil peace so there seems to be something um inherent in the process of nonviolent organizing building broad-based coalitions negotiating between strange bedfellows which happens during movements that seems to be conducive to democratic development and so this this work on movements i think is particularly relevant to this challenge of closing space because the reality is that we can no longer support civil society using the old methods in the old ways it's become very difficult in most parts of the world to support traditional NGOs and CSOs and also there's a there's a fundamental flaw in the business model you know the professionalization of civil society but also you know creating donor dependencies is not healthy for civil society and supporting groups that have no local constituency and mobilization base is simply problematic it detracts from what civil societies are supposed to do so i mean you know we know that collective action can help open new democratic spaces and so we need to think about supporting these actors that historically have been in the forefront of these types of changes so we think about the ladies in white in cuba we think about ballet sitoyen which my colleague will talk about the citizens broom in burkina faso we talk about the union for democratic front in south africa trade unions and civic groups the polish solidarity movement non-traditional civil society actors who ultimately immobilize people for fundamental change the challenge is that supporting movements is not easy it's it's actually quite difficult to do the model is different the structure of often leaderless diffused decentralized movements is certainly different from traditional NGOs and CSOs you have this whole idea of the kiss of death dilemma well if there's foreign support is this going to delegitimize and undermine the effectiveness especially if it's coming from us government and other bilateral donors you have this idea that activists don't think in terms of log frames they really don't and their M&E is going to be very different from what we're used to frankly so so in thinking about what support could be helpful and i'll end on this point i think there are two basic categories of external actor support for nonviolent movements and social movements and the first involves the tools in the approaches creating an enabling environment for nonviolent citizen action and the second is providing timely catalytic support to sort of the frontline defenders and activists so the enabling space and then the direct support. I co-authored with two colleagues Sara Flakhani and Nadia Navivala a USIP special report that's out available on the tables and basically in the report we are advocating for a movement mindset when it comes to supporting civil society which means coming up with innovative ways to support these local change advocates and we're not talking i'm glad you mentioned the money part this is not about throwing a lot of money at movements the worst thing we can do is to create a marketplace for activism which would absolutely kill meaningful nonviolent movements but what it does mean is actively showing solidarity using the tools we know i wish more foreign service officers studied the diplomats handbook for democratic development support it should be a mainstay in the foreign service institute we have a military engagement handbook now that shows how militaries can help create and support democratic development in non-democracies a military engagement handbook and i think what we talk about it is how external actors can help provide new help create fora for activists and civil society members to learn from each other so the peer-to-peer learning at the end of the day is incredibly incredibly important it's so much more effective for activists to learn from activists who from other countries who've been tortured in prison put in jail rather than western active uh intellectuals or educators coming in and talking about frankly why civil resistance works so it's very important to to provide those spaces that's why i'm quite excited frankly um rosary about what usa is doing with these civil society innovation hubs it offers a huge opportunity to connect closed and open spaces traditional and non-traditional civil societies that can fundamentally help activists learn from each other and finally i would say you know in the area of international organizations and even world bank i was actually speaking at the world bank yesterday about people power and peace building and the question was well you know should the world bank get in the business of supporting movements and providing you know probably not um probably they should not be thinking about providing direct support to activists but what they can do of course is they have different leverage points with governments and they can help in that enabling environment space and they can also through their social accountability work support civil society do social monitoring auditing of services which at the end of day is a form of people power and a form of social mobilization so i would say i would encourage folks to think about what a movement mindset means in your own work and i hope that this will translate into the discussion after thank you thank you and last but not least camissa good morning everyone all right so it's a little difficult to go after everybody but i'll try to do my best so i would like to start off by telling you about all the great things that the net does our main mission is really to strengthen democratic institutions around the world and specifically to assist civil society organizations mainly for funding but also through strategic guidance and counsel so please tell the world bank not to get into that for example and specifically in the africa program one of our main objectives has been to develop civil society capacity to work constructively with their governments wherever possible and also to resist the urge of joining these governments in either an appointed quality or an elected as an elected official capacity more generally i would like to say that the role of civil society in consolidating democracy an opposing authoritarian rule is historically undeniable and i'm sure each one of us here can cite at least dozens of countries where civil society organizations and the grassroots communities they represent have made their voices heard and and could not be silenced i am thinking the spring i'm thinking the african spring which may have started back in 2012 in senegal when youth movements have pushed president abdulaiwad out of power when he was seeking a third term and more recently the example of a blessed compagny of Burkina Faso has made the headlines this is all very positive however on the african continent and elsewhere in the world civil society has become cumbersome to authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments and heads of states who wish to remain in in power basically and that is because by nature civil society is diverse and its actions and initiatives are complex and they operate on many many fronts imagine a person basically who would want to make the sun disappear by just hiding it with both hands i'm not sure that that person would be successful at that and that's basically what civil society organizations are to authoritarian governments CSO's actions and struggle have to be analyzed in the context within which they occur and i would like my very short presentation to focus on three main countries that perfectly fit in the title silencing voices and shrinking democratic spaces and these countries are the gambia which doesn't receive much media attention Ethiopia and Burundi uh to start off the gambia is i would say the last remaining full-fledged dictatorship of west africa president yaya jame who took over in the military coup in 1994 and has recently escaped a coup attend has progressively removed all liberties pertaining to the press or to NGOs working on public policy related matters very much like in Ethiopia in the gambia independent media and eight NGOs are not operating in a free manner and state control over their activities is extremely extremely heavy in Ethiopia the 2009 charities and societies proclamation the CSP prevents organizations receiving more than 10 percent of their funds from foreign sources from engaging in activities that seek to promote democracy human rights conflict resolution and protection of the rights of women minorities and and ethnic groups the charities and society agency which is the NGO regulatory body in Ethiopia established under the CSP has excessive powers to monitor NGOs interfere in their internal affairs and decide whether an organization needs to be dissolved or not going south of Ethiopia in Burundi which has been making the headlines over the past few weeks and even this morning due to the violent protests following currencies as candidacy for a third term CSOs have very high capacity and I would say they're maybe the strongest of the Great Lease region however in that country judicial harassment arbitrary detention and threats to human rights defenders have been under rise notably government officials have regularly been summoning human rights defenders activists and journalists in reaction to statements and reports on human rights so I would like to quickly mention some of the strategies used by the NED in these closed societies first of all it is important to support these organizations all groups that are in country who are seeking to work creatively within the very small spaces that they have at the NED what we've done is we've funded both what we call soft projects that work in a collaborative manner with the governments as well as supported more active or adversarial initiatives that are undertaken by informal groups or activists who may not be registered formally as an organization but are actively advocating for human rights and democratic rights in their countries second strategy that we've had and I think that it's maybe one of the most important points that I will be making here is that in closed societies most activists or some or many activists journalists are being forced into exile so it is important not to forget about the large and politically active diaspora of these countries so it is important to support initiatives by activists that are also based outside of the country and could have an impact within these countries related to this for organizations that are based in countries there are ways to support offshore projects bring activists from the country outside of the country in a safer environment to discuss among themselves to share knowledge with peers for example and it is also important to support regional and international advocacy efforts for these organizations that are based in country I would like to conclude by saying three things first of all the de facto civil liberties civil society organizations should enjoy around the world need to be solidified and expanded second point harassment of CSOs in one country or the other cannot and should not be isolated the regional repercussions of such need to be analyzed for adequate response and finally there are groups out there who are ready to take to take risks to defend their liberties and oppose authoritarian rule these groups need assistance they need guidance and most importantly they need support be it material support be it financial support or even moral support thank you thank you commiss and and thanks to our panel the discipline that this panel has exhibited given all that they had to share with us I think is is very very important we're we're down to about 20 minutes before lunch so I I think I'm going to resist the temptation to to pose some questions myself let's turn it over to you with the richness that was given us and again we'll have folks with the mic they're already hands up and a lot of hands up so let let let's begin with these three good women in a row right here and I promise you will go to a second and third round thank you so much hey one of the good women is happy to speak I'm Mindy Reiser I'm vice president of an NGO called global peace services Maria your presentation was fascinating and I would like you to speak about something that was once upon a time called routinization of charisma and that means how you take a movement with a lot of energy a lot of grassroots support a lot of charisma and then help it channel its energy and its vision into a political system how you take these ideas and structure them into a parliamentary process without adulterating and losing that commitment and energy thank you such a good clear question the second one right behind here thank you I'm Julia Roy I'm president of partners for democratic change and perhaps it's a follow-on comment and and then a question regard with this idea about the professionalization of civil society and the concern that we have after that third wave of democracy where so many of us in the room were a part of working with and strengthening NGOs in countries and what I've seen a lot of most recently is this factionalization of civil society in those countries between the divide of NGOs who have been doing this fight now democracy and human rights or peace building organizations for more than 25 years and then they see their colleagues and their donors say nope not anymore we're actually really interested in people power and we want to go to the kind of sexy activists and it's really causing a lot of conflict locally and you have people who should be working together who perhaps aren't working together only because we see this really kind of movement towards trying to find the sexy activists I mean that in quotes who are bringing about real change but then that really we need to be making those linkages and helping through our funding sources and if we're concerned about the business model then how do we also support as pieces of this funding pipeline how do we support those different business models of thinking about kind of their sustained work in newsways and with with that I would love to hear more from commissa about how she actually gets money to those movements really because that is a big challenge for us just in practical terms if there isn't an NGO with a bank account how are you supporting them thank you thank you and the last one for the surround to rose up thank you my name is moira burst and I work with an NGO called peace brigades international and our work is to protect human rights activists and other members of civil society in parts of the world where the space is is closing for them and so I want to ask about the question that tanya raised about about protection and it's not just a self-serving question because I'm actually interested in your thoughts on parts of the world where pbi's model doesn't work I mean we our model requires a space where countries care at least a little bit about their international reputation and the international levers of of aid that can be brought to bear on those countries and and so are on the ground monitoring and observation and physical presence in those countries can help inform those relationships but what about countries where where that kind of a model doesn't work where the countries where the governments don't really care about their international reputations and are willing therefore to ignore you know the kinds of international advocacy that that we all in this room might do thanks thank you three good pointed questions to individuals and and well stated in each case Maria start us off so that was a great question about the routinization of chrisma I hadn't heard that phraseology before very interesting and essentially your question is sort of helping movements pivot from protest to politics is that yeah so I mean first of all I think the sort of the single charismatic leader as the head of a movement is more the exception vice the norm I mean we know the Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Alhansansu Ki and like but most the vast majority of other successful nonviolent movements tend to be less focused on a single individual and I think there's something to be said about when you're doing training and capacity building and skills building sort of supporting decentralized leadership and the replication of leadership within a movement I think that bodes well for what comes after as well so sort of moving away from the charismatic leader model which is problematic frankly in so many respects and sort of focus on developing decentralized leadership I would also say so there's a lot of debate well when should we help youth movements form political parties or when should we be pushing them towards parties parties are critical I mean parties are a glue a huge part of the glue between sort of popular movements and democratic consolidation but obviously there's no template for in this you know movement should always become parties no they probably shouldn't be I think actually what's happening in Ukraine right now um is a fascinating case of you know many members of the Maidan movement many hardcore activists have entered government and at least one I know who was always on the outside protesting the government in corruption she's now overseeing like donor funds coming into the government and monitoring so you have this yet whereas a lot of activists have stayed on the outside so I think you know but encouraging them to think through alternative pathways to political participation what it means to engage in a constitutional reform process parliamentary processes political that should be part of the thinking as they're doing movement organization protest demonstrations that has to be sort of forefront um did you want to take the fractionalization of NGOs taking take no I mean so the point on so I don't have a necessarily averse reaction sexy activists I just most of the activists I know and I'm sure you know are like some of the most courageous and imperiled and threatened people and so I think finding ways to support them and show solidarity is actually critically important and should not be sort of seen as sort of a side effort in the like I agree with you that this divide between traditional and non-traditional civil society is problematic even in the report that we've written we're not saying NGOs and CSOs should not be supported that they should not exist absolutely not CSOs NGOs especially in closed environments can sometimes provide convening space and they can help build capacity and inculcate skills for non-traditional civil society actors that's happened in Egypt and some other places and so I but I don't think that the effort has shifted to supporting non-traditional civil society actually I think it's still pretty much focused on a lot is focused on CSOs NGOs so again the regional civil society hubs could play a very interesting role in bringing together traditional and non-traditional as well as closed and open spaces do you want to comment on that Tonya too I think I want to add in that way bringing some of the questions together and take it from a strategic angle what I see is as you rightly said is the transition from movements that happens often place is you see them either going into becoming NGOs or they become political parties and both is not wrong in a way but what is missing in key moments of transitions is definitely the strategic vision for that and the support is often like okay what do you need and it's very often focused that the partner is taken as the the holy kind of thing the partner needs yeah instead of saying like well yes we want to take your needs serious we want to understand the context but there is a lot of comparative expertise out there and we would like you to get to know about that and here I'm a big fan of a scenario planning and I would like to link that also to the protection question I give you an example if you have in a fragile environment for example you do media training you do journalist training you work with editors to change all this the usual things we do and then if you then don't work with scenarios to understand like okay what are the different options in the country what could happen and is my journalist training still relevant in this or that scenario then the problem is that we don't move into protection with that same project if we have not planned for it and if from the beginning of the start we have said under these conditions we cannot it makes no sense whatsoever to continue journalist training in Sri Lanka they have continued to do journalist training while journalists were killed by weekly and it took like another year until a fund for journalists to fly them out of the country basically and give them assignments abroad was set up and I think this should not happen this should be planned in and that's the same for this transition between movements and NGOs when we have different scenarios we need to show the activists what are the options and the last point I wanted to make is about what you made earlier the peer-to-peer the peer-to-peer exchange is important but I would also put a caveat to it it depends extremely how it's done in that sense I mentioned that yesterday in a number of workshops we had I call it death by context what happens very often is when you put activists together in let's say the wrong format they will all tell you about the context for ages because they think you need to understand it and they will not pull out the lessons learned that are relevant for the others so we need to prepare well for this kind of peer-to-peer we can just throw them together and say exchange and I think this is what I have seen and it has not been effective and we have to learn from that thank you can this are the questions that were addressed about the money how do you how do you get the money to them well we've been very creative about that so these organizations there are sometimes informal or made up of individuals so there are different ways you could wire money to their individual accounts you can wire money to other organizations who have the right to receive money from friend funding or you could do it next door like in another country so we don't smuggle money per se I don't want to say that but there are many ways and we can talk about it later on the record there you go let's do another three or four here you've got them right there in front of you yes thank you very much Adam Kaplan USAID's office of transition initiatives I'd like to pose something that was mentioned early but then didn't get addressed in later comments the closing of space by non-state actors yes we have to deal with belligerent state actors but the non-state actors seem especially immune to any pressures comments there please thank you right and back Aaron Chastain Catholic release services I really appreciated Maria's reference to the devil's playbook and my question is about probably a key chapter in that which would be the financial action task force which has been ghostwritten just across the town at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and its neighbor at Treasury has anyone actually documented and researched the costs of such measures at the individual organizational and institutional levels to civil society leaders activists and to their organizations and obviously at the institutional level looking at exactly what you're talking about the space for civil society could I ask you which particular measures because there's a whole range of recommendation number eight number eight where it used to be that service delivery was the one area that civil society was allowed to operate fairly autonomously and now that's being targeted all right thank you oh we have one right there next to you and then one in the far back hi my name is Kathleen Callie I'm a graduate of Queens University Belfast Maria I was wondering if you could expand on what what an enabling environment is what are some of the tools that you could apply I thought that was a good suggestion and Titania if indeed there are too many peace builders in our space and we're asking organizations to do more reporting than they are able to do their work is would it be a valid suggestion to have peace builders play some sort of strategic advisory role in those organizations say you know instead of you doing all this analysis and reporting we'll sit in and do it for you and advise thanks thank you and there's the last one up the gentleman on the computer there second to last row thank you I'm nowhere to quite a mongo from word peace foundation at Tufts University I have quick two quick questions about people power could you hold the mic closer please I have two quick questions about the people power and the diaspora from Egypt to Tunisia and Libya to Kenya and Ibarundi people power proved instrumental in shaking the order regimes however this movement proved unable to fill the void as a result just violent forces took power what can be done about that the second question we know that in the post-war or second world war the diaspora proved an alternative to fascist regimes in Europe can this happen in Africa and other places like that what what is being done in the peace building work today thank you for a rich array of questions I know my panelists have their eye on the clock so let's begin and be succinct Tanya you want to all right I'm starting with a closing space by non-state armed actors are you I think you mean I mean it's it's it's a complex issue of course we can talk about the consequences or the dimensions let me just pick out what it does it does what was mentioned before already of course cause a lot of migration people leaving and then we have a split in civil society who stays because the ones who stay let's take Syria as an example they are now split between the two different controlled areas there's no communication means so one issue here is and then you have the ones in the diaspora that go to different areas and again you have a split what happens is different things like you for example set up want to set up civil society consultations what happens is that the UN regularly says like all these people are not legitimate because you know they are not inside they are not this and we should counteract that and make clear like what does that mean then what happens is there's a need for joint communication channels between these organizations that needs to be enhanced and these are in my view support projects what is extremely important and not really happening there's everybody supports certain actors for example in Syria brings them usually to Istanbul and there's lots of work with these groups in good work but they're not kind of coming together and what we know definitely is like if and that links also to what Maria said if the the biggest strength of civil society at certain moments is really sort of the the joint positioning coming together and sort of making a point that's almost impossible if you are so fragmented and divided so how can this support of common positioning and common strategies I think is a major thing that needs to happen on the crowded space yes I think I mean of course you can't counteract crowded space and working with individual organizations in in terms of them becoming more effective but I think it's a very good strategy and I think it has become more practice now that organizations really give not only money but really get strategic support organizational development support but still I think it's still underdeveloped and many organizations tell me for example to say like if you get money from that and that organization you I mean you can't you have to have a reporting officer you have to have this I think that should be really planned more in and we're still talking about and but it's still happening but I think the strategic coming together and the facilitation I think we need facilitators of facilitators and mediators and peace builders in the sense that a more I mean in the Sudan peace process they appointed taboambiki to become the mediator among mediators because there were 30 plus mediators claiming to wanting to mediate apparently all unsuccessful and I think that is what is also needed let's face it international NGOs are also competing for the money the locals are competing for the money the movements are there and don't want money but competing for other things so this is a very very crowded space out there and there's no often no entity that brings organizations together the European Union has a meeting of our partners come together USAID has one our partners come together and it's where is this like space that is created to say like what are we doing collectively and I think here from outside this could be much more supported thank you Michael may ask you and your historical perspective the last question about the post-World War II diaspora and diasporas generally and how how the European view of the diaspora may may affect the civil society space issue hard to make a horizontal comment about that in specific cases clearly there is a role and you look at some of the conflict situations in the Balkans or around the Mediterranean and if the diaspora of one of the parties takes a more enlightened and solution oriented approach they can have some influence on the parties to a conflict who they themselves don't see beyond the day-to-day so you know we have seen that in the Balkans have seen it to some degree in other situations too but diasporas can also exacerbate the problem because they are cut off from the day-to-day reality they're sitting safely in whatever society they may be living in and it costs them nothing sometimes to take more extreme positions so it would be hard to come to an overall comment about that thank you though thank you others want to react to a couple of the last questions here just you know another point on the non-state actors in closing space for civil society I think I would just in terms of like what to do about it and how to empower so I think the best work in my field on how to support citizen mobilization against non-state actors is probably by Oliver Kaplan at the University of Denver he's done great work and how civil resistance was used in Colombia and Syria and some of these other places I've begun to do a little bit of work on the role of nonviolent action against ISIS in Syria in Iraq but you know it's a very obviously a very difficult context and I think the thing to bear in mind too is that the rise of these non-state armed groups and extremist elements is directly linked to bad governance in most places so helping civil society address the drivers and deal with certain governance issues it's not the whole answer but I think it's it's it's a large part of it on the enabling environment so there's a lot of work that's been done on how to support a legal enabling environment so for example when governments are starting to discuss or enact new rules and regulations restricting civil society activity coordinating diplomatic pressure so organizations like the community of democracy specialize in coordinating sort of you know pressure on governments when they start to do this but also engaging with government so helping them develops you know laws that protect for example the financing of extremist groups in the society but you know being willing to accept foreign support and foreign funding for certain civil society actors so engagement but also some pressure so the diplomatic aspect as well the diplomats handbook has a whole toolkit for what diplomats can do out at post to engage with civil society and with dissidents to convene meetings between government reformers and opposition elements to use interpositioning to show solidarity and worst-case scenarios support asylum and exit so the diplomats handbook and it has like 14 different case studies it's a living document so like a treasure trove of material for that and then the military you know actually militaries and democracies have tremendous leverage over militaries and non-democracy so everything from you know mill to mill education and training to the relationships built between officers as a result of training and education and and joint exercises those relationships can be you know worked and used in context where for example security forces are facing their own citizens engaged in nonviolent activity protest demonstrations phones can be picked up you know calls can be made you know think about your professional your legacy do you want to be known in history as that officer who shot at his own people so there's actually there there are lots of like small tools even that militaries can use and then i'm on the stage with george lopez who's like the world's leading expert in sanctions and targeted sanctions so how targeted sanctions can be used to you know target the enablers of violence insist in systematic violence is something that also contributes to a more you know a conducive enabling environment that's a final comment maybe final comment it is definitely difficult to identify a specific agent of change somebody or this one organization that will overnight really change the political context of the political environment in which the countries is currently i think that it is important to think about funding for example i know that this has come up several times during the discussion it is important not to flood these organizations or these individuals or these activists with a lot of money but if you commit to supporting them over time and when i say over time not over one year not over two years but maybe 10 years in small increments that's that's when you will be able to see to see changes so and i'm talking to all of you here who are us aid us government state department whoever who issue request for proposals for two-year projects it's not enough it's it's never it's never going to be enough but if you divide up this amount of money over 10 years that's when you might see results ladies and gentlemen you've asked fabulous questions cheer yourselves cheer our panel and i'll turn it over to linwood thank you george thank you panelists for this great discussion i have a few administrative announcements we're about to break for lunch lunch will run from 12 30 to 1 30 a p.m the main lunch room will take place in our great hall which is down here to my left your right as you're funneling down now we have an opportunity to sit down with with a number of folks from alliance for peace building to discuss measurements and effectiveness which is a subject that often comes up in this context so if you wish to participate in an opportunity please go upstairs into b241 where the members of the peace building evaluation consortium advisory board and the effective interreligious peace building global act advisory council for small group discussions in which you set the agenda so this is a very free flowing conversation that you can have over lunch talking about the very difficult issue of measuring effects outcome driven approaches and the different lessons learned and best practices that can be applied so again lunch beginning now until 1 30 we'll come back here and we will convene with the innovation panel thank you very much next the next stage in our dog and tongue I know what does this make number like six is that the guy from the world bank you know what's his name again james yeah james hi judy she's really nice judy welcome back everyone welcome back i hope you all had a good lunch for those of you who might not have joined us this morning i'm melanie greenberg the president of the alliance for peace building and we are thrilled to be here with all of you moving into our afternoon session every year we host an innovation panel and the idea is to try to shake up your thinking about some areas that might be clearly within the realm of peace building or a little bit outside but to give us some new conceptual lenses and this year your shake up and thinking is going to be very literal since we have an incredible panel coming up on peace building and neuroscience peace building and neuroscience and the link between them is revolutionary for our field it helps us understand what does the brain look like on violence how does our brain actually manage fear bigotry in group and out group relations and conversely what does our brain look like on peace what do we know about altruism the harmony of sacred values and reconciliation and then even more intriguing how do we design peace building programs to take those hardwired biases into consideration what does this mean for evaluation will the gold standard for evaluation be that peace building participants brains have changed and do we map that are there processes that we need to change or reinvent based on what we know about our brains this will be an ongoing area of inquiry for the alliance for peace building and it's an area that we join all of you or invite all of you to join with us and we're doing this in partnership with a number of our members who've already done groundbreaking work in this area you'll hear today from Beyond Conflict and Tim Phillips is the founder and chairman of the board the Alhibri Foundation has done some fascinating work around this Mari Fitzduff who's here with us today from Brandeis the Solia which is now part of Searching for Common Ground and a number of other organizations thinking about those links between the brain and peace building so today we are very fortunate to have Emil Bruno with us and Tim will will officially introduce him your mind is not playing tricks on you we are supposed to have a third speaker Betsy Pollock from Princeton she unfortunately was supposed to take the train down today it was caught up in the Amtrak closure and despite heroic efforts to try to rent a car and drive from Princeton a dissertation defense this morning it just couldn't happen so the show will go on but will slightly expand the format to fit the time so it's my great pleasure to introduce Tim Phillips who is the founder of Beyond Conflict and a real visionary in the peace building field he's worked for years at the intersection of transitional justice and peace building and has made it his mission to create a whole subfield around neuroscience and peace building so we're delighted that Tim is here with us today that Ina Brewer AFP's board member is also here and I turn this over to you Tim to make a formal introduction so thank you well thank you Melanie I guess this is working it is a pleasure for me to be here and I'll soon introduce my friend and colleague Emil Bruno and then we start off by saying I want to thank the US Institute of Peace the Alliance for Peace Building, Elhibri and the other partners including MIT that have worked with us on this initiative over the last really three to four years and the title of this session is rather bold that it's revolutionary when you think of peacekeeping in issues of reconciliation but I believe it's appropriate and I think it's accurate we live in a time in which many conflicts remain intractable many peace agreements remain fragile and we see an increasing desire by many to identify by race ethnicity and nationality over any shared sense of nationhood we also work in a field that is seeking more effective ways to measure impact to understand change and improve outcomes across a range of challenges while we also have a vast literature and experience that shows what works or what seems to work we also have a lot of experience about what doesn't work and a lot of this is intuitive as Emil will point out the questions we ask and the frameworks we use are fundamentally shaped to measure and are based on a framework or a fundamental operating system or assumption that believes that humans are rational actors that leaders and communities apply reason and even in the service of real politic to serve their goals but is this fundamentally true are we principally rational actors who will also deploy violence as horrible as it is or division and fear without any regard to bias or the emotional basis of these choices or are we as Emil in Betsy would have pointed out first and foremost deeply unconscious human beings with limited conscious access to what drives most of our behavior are we as a retired neuroscientist once told me which got us interested in this work and our core emotional beings who can only think rationally when we feel that our identities are understood and valued by others if this is true and science is showing that it is true then don't we have a responsibility actually an obligation to better understand the structure of the human brain to understand how the brain gives rise to the mind or as one scientist said to me everything we experience all our senses everything we experience as humans is the result of neurons firing in the brain so therefore don't we have to understand what those neurons are doing in the brain behavioral scientist neuroscientist evolutionary biologists and many other disciplines are now showing us more fully what it is to be human as i said that we are deeply emotional beings who blend emotion and cognition in the service of survival that as an example that we experience social rejection as physical pain in the brain that that part of the brain that registers trauma cannot fully differentiate between emotional and physical trauma or the research of many others on sacred values that we process those things that are sacred to us in different regions of the brain than every other calculation that we process and when we hold on to a sacred value deeply whatever that may be for us when we are approached through a trade-off through a regulation we hold on more deeply to those sacred values and respond with aggression so think of that in the context of the second amendment debate in this country think of it if you have a deep religious commitment or a parent with their children you know sacred values empirically we know what they are but to recognize through nor imaging another research that they are processed differently in the brain is a very powerful insight emil will give you a glimpse into this emerging body of work emil represents a fraction of the emerging generation of scientists who are applying science to some of the most difficult challenges we face as a species i want to end by mentioning that this event we're doing today or at least this panel as part of this broader event is part of a broader initiative that we have launched and with partners on neuroscience and social conflict it's not a panacea it's not saying that science has all the answers what it's saying and suggesting that to really understand what drives humans to and away from conflict to greater coexistence is that we need to understand how we as humans operate on the most basic and most fundamental of levels emil will give us i think a hint of that and then we'll have a chance to go into q and a and then i may will maybe uh all have a chance to tee up some questions but i want to turn it over to my colleague emil bruno who we've worked closely with for the last three years and also his colleague rebecca sacks at the sacks lab in mit emil is a research scientist if you've read the new york times sunday magazine two months ago you may have seen an article about emil's work on empathy which is part of an initiative that we adjoint you to get doing together on the roma the roma for example eight million strong in europe and one of the most marginalized discriminated groups of people in europe today literally the european union has spent 80 billion euros to reduce discrimination and nothing has worked various funders have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and nothing has worked and the question was could you apply experience and insights from behavioral sciences to come up with a different way of addressing this problem and i think emil will probably touch upon that as well and the last thing i'll say that really touched me and i think it was emil and rebecca who mentioned it a few years ago what's really important to recognize or to think about is not what people say or what they think but it's how they think and when you recognize that how we think is deeply unconscious and we don't have conscious access to most of what drives our decision making that's a very powerful thing to understand so with that i'll turn to emil and take it over thank you well first thank you all so much for having me here and being here i'm really odd at the work that you do and i come to this research not just to learn about the brain and how humans work but actually to serve this community here i want the work to give you some information that might be helpful and so i'm going to present to you my path so far on on that route and i'm going to try to give you a little bit of the vision i have for how neuroimaging can apply to to peace building conflict resolution so i come to this work actually from my personal experience mostly just by happenstance i found myself in some very interesting places at some very interesting times this was before i was formally working as a scientist i was in south africa in 94 when it transitioned from apartheid to democracy i found myself in shrillanka visiting friends and narrowly missed one of the largest tamel tiger strikes where they blew up the international airport right right after i arrived i was in ireland where i volunteered at a conflict resolution camp during the troubles and i've spent a few summers now living in the west bank doing research so what what really struck me across all these different conflicts was that despite the fact that these span three different continents they involve seven different languages and at least seven different religions that there were some remarkable similarities right first there are the kind of structural similarities that conflicts share there's competition over scarce resources there's often physical separation between the groups but what really caught my attention were the psychological forces that seem to be driving conflict and how similar they seem to be and i think this is captured really nicely by this quote by anwar sadat who was talking about the conflict between egypt and israel where he said yet there remains another wall aside from the physical wall this wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us a barrier of suspicion of rejection of fear of deception a barrier of distorted and eroded interpretation of every event and statement and i think what's really nice and insightful about this comment is it mentions both what we think of as emotional biases that we have in that conflict groups have towards each other but also these more biases in these more what we think of as cognitive or deliberative processes so i've been very interested in in these questions of how how do we identify and measure but also how do we get past these types of biases and there's actually you know a number of groups that try to do this and a number of people are in the room who do this really inspirational work and this is the reason why i went and volunteered at this conflict resolution program so these programs like the one i volunteered in are designed to try to bring these groups together to try to ease the animosity that exists between groups here's a heartwarming photo that you might see in a brochure for a conflict resolution program this is me visiting with a group of Protestant and Catholic kids in Belfast they were eager to cross into the other neighborhoods to visit their new friends you know at at risk to themselves but what really typified this program for me was not this photo but what had happened three weeks earlier because at the immediate end of the camp when most of the volunteers had left a fight broke out between two boys and it immediately split the group down partisan lines and there was a 100 child full-scale brawl so to me i of course went away from this program thinking what the hell had we just done had we made things worse and are there other programs that do a better job of course there are hundreds of programs that are that are engaged in this peace building work i had friends who were working as volunteers in other programs and i came away wondering are there programs that that work particularly well are there programs that that don't work very well are there best practices that we could implement if i were trying to implement a program in the future what guidelines would i use and when i just started researching this myself i found that the answers weren't very satisfying to me so i think there's a reason to believe that it might not have just been a fluke that the program i was involved in might not have been the only program that that fails over time and and we actually have some evidence from psychology to suggest that this is the case here's my favorite example of a common sense intervention that failed this is not a conflict resolution intervention but it's an intervention that's designed to change people's behaviors this is at the petrified forest national park in arizona and at the petrified forest there was this sign your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year mostly a small piece at a time and of course this is an intuitively appealing common sense intervention it's designed to shock people into stopping this undesirable behavior but a social psychologist who went and visited the petrified forest and saw this sign was actually horrified because there's a lot of research in social psychology showing that our behaviors are actually really strongly influenced by descriptive norms what we think other people are doing so they thought that this intervention might actually be backfiring might by causing the behavior that it's trying to prevent but they weren't satisfied with just documenting this they wanted to run an experiment so as good experimental scientists do they created a number of different conditions so they created a sign that included no norm it just said please don't remove petrified wood from the park it had a little circle with the arrow through it and a hand reaching down trying to grab a piece of petrified wood and then they had another sign that included this social norm that many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park changing the natural state of the petrified forest this one had a picture of three hands reaching down and this sign so it's emphasizing that a lot of people are doing this so you shouldn't do it and then what they did is they got the graduate students to painstakingly mark individual pieces of petrified wood in the forest so that they could quantify how much petrified wood was actually stolen when each of these signs were in play and they compared this to a baseline with no sign and here were the data so three percent of the pieces they marked were stolen if they had no sign up if they included the sign that had no norm it decreased it pretty substantially about a 50 percent decrease in theft when they included the sign with the social norm it about tripled the amount of petrified wood that was being stolen from the park okay so this is crazy right we are we are being driven by forces that we might not be aware of and there's actually good neuroscientific evidence to explain why this is happening and this has to do with how our brain is organized oh but first I just have to point out that once you have this in mind you're gonna see unintentional social norms all over the place here's here's an anti littering campaign from california saying cigarette butts are the most commonly littered item and they show copious cigarette butts strewn across the street the the intuitive assumption is that people will stop this behavior but the norms-based literature would say this is the exact type of thing that would encourage people to throw their cigarette butts on the ground since they're shown that everybody else does it and slightly more tragically here's a paraphrase of a pamphlet drop from the the military over Somalia and it of course in arabic said in Somalia over 60 percent of the young males in your community are involved in piracy help us keep your young boys safe so this is again emphasizing that everybody's doing it and then asking people to stop doing it and the assumption will be that this actually increases the behavior that you're trying to decrease okay so now the neuroscience why is this happening well my favorite analogy of how the human brain works is that and this is actually has its roots in the first experimental neuroscientists buddhist so it has a long tradition but the analogy for the human brain is that it's like a rider sitting a stride an elephant and the rider represents that portion of your brain that you have direct introspective access to that you can communicate with and can understand the processing of the elephant on the other hand represents the large part of your brain that you have no access to that you're completely unaware of that unconscious part of your brain and so why this is important and interesting is that we develop interventions that have an intended effect but they're designed for the rider on the elephant oftentimes these interventions have an unintended consequence though that's affecting the elephant that other part of your brain and the output the behavior you get is a combination of the rider and the elephant but oftentimes the elephant has more of an influence so you get up what you end up with is an intended effect the moral appeal to for people to stop stealing petrified wood but the unintended consequence the the expression of this norm that everybody's doing it has more of an effect on the elephant than than the intended consequence on the rider and you end up getting an output that's opposite what you intend and it's not just norms that have this effect we know some of where this is happening in the brain we we know that it's not just norms that are having this effect we can have unintentional threat primes if you even just suggest that someone's draw someone's attention to their mortality that someday they will be dead to try to convince them to to do something like save for the future that's again an intuitive appeal to the rider on the elephant the unintended consequence is that ends up being a threat to their existence and we know that threat activates a whole different set of brain regions and it causes people to become authoritative to to obey authority more to engage more in conformity and it increases their xenophobia so this is again an example of the elephant being affected in ways that we're not consciously aware of and we know too that this is happening in the brain we're starting to get an understanding of the specific neural structures that are guiding these types of mental processes okay so I think this means there are at least two things that we can take from this that are relevant to conflict resolution and peace building one is that we have to accept the possibility of unintended consequences of all of our best intentions that is intuitive appeal and best intentions are not enough you can have incredibly well meaning people who are very smart who have the best intentions and they could create a program that unintentionally drives behavior in the opposite way than they intend so it's very important I think to accept this possibility of unintended consequences and I think what that means is you have to critically evaluate your programs to make sure that the outcome is what's desired what what you intend and second that we should come up with ways to measure the elephant directly to figure out how we can get access to these unconscious processes so first just a couple of examples of this experimentally testing interventions this is of course the principle behind evidence-based medicine medicine has found that intuitive medical interventions don't always work there's this wonderful swan gets catheter that was developed it's really beautiful instrument you thread up through the leg and it allows you to look directly at the heart as you're performing open heart surgery the problem is it doesn't help at all for recovery from surgery right that the the mortality rates are exactly the same as if you didn't use this catheter so the evidence shows that that's not an effective intervention and even worse that a common practice for diabetics coming into the into the intensive care unit was to do a do an extreme treatment of glucose lowering and it turns out that that process that was used for many years and had this intuitive appeal is based on biology it actually killed more people than it saved right so if they just looked at the evidence if they just compared these interventions to each other they find that sometimes their common-sense interventions are not the ones that are actually working and this has actually been started to apply a group has started to apply this to economic interventions particularly in Africa this is the poverty action lab headed by Esther Duflo at MIT and they've done some really inspirational work where they've looked at a bunch of these anti-poverty programs so these are programs that are designed to keep kids in school and what they did is they just looked at these different intuitive programs and they quantified how many years of extra schooling they actually bought them over control condition for each hundred dollars spent and these are the programs unconditional cash transfers that's just you transfer one time large sum so that people can repair their roofs or invest in education conditional cash transfers are like food stamps you can only use them for certain things and it's like doled out monthly merit scholarships for high achieving students free primary school uniforms that's often an impediment for kids in Africa going to school they don't have the uniform they need de-worming is just to take care of intestinal worms information on educational returns this is just educating parents about the potential earning power of your kids if they're educated and what they found was that so I've asked this to audiences to have them raise their hand for their favorite of these interventions and I think this is generally how funding goes right now right that you have you have a representative from each of these organizations stand up and the most charismatic and convincing one gets the most money but this I think is a much better way to allocate our money our resources is to look at the evidence for which one is the most effective and most cost effective and you can see here unconditional cash transfers buys you an extra 0.02 years of schooling for each hundred dollars spent and as you go across the line you see that there's a dramatic difference between the programs that are most effective and the programs that are least effective right so this is you know hundreds full difference in the actual impact and you wouldn't get that just with your common sense right that your intuition would not lead you to this conclusion so this is an illustration of how important this can be so both for medicine and for economics and I think there's no reason not to use it for peace building as well and in fact some people have done these heroic efforts to organize really careful experimental designs randomized control trials of social interventions of psychological interventions even in in wartime and unfortunately Betsy wasn't won't be here to speak I'm a big fan of hers though so I usually present some of her work anyways so I am going to tell you one of the studies that she did that I was really impressed with so her first study that she did this was a randomized control trial that was in Rwanda right after the genocide and the idea was to present villages with a radio drama that's kind of fashioned on Romeo and Juliet and it's designed to challenge the norms of conflict that existed in Rwanda and what she did is she got individual villages to agree to listen exclusively to this radio drama so they would bring it to the the village the village would gather around the radio and weekly they would get the updates and she got other villages who are distant but were matched on size and socioeconomics to agree to listen to a health-based message program so it was another program it was a radio drama they listened all together as a village and she just randomly assigned these village to one one of the conditions or the other and then she evaluated what happened she evaluated the change in specifically in the norms of the community over time so this is an extension of that this is repeating this procedure in the Congo about five years ago and again she had a soap opera that she had people listen to but she added another condition now which was a call-in talk show and again the villagers would gather around and they would discuss it afterwards and they would be listening to these things so either they had nothing they had the the soap opera or they had the soap opera and the talk show so it was three different conditions they had and she randomly assigned again villages to experimental and control conditions and here the data that she got and and this is one of the the most brilliant outcome measures i've ever seen for these types of studies this is one of the things that Betsy does incredibly well the outcome here is how much salt was donated by village members two members of the opposition group and how she would do this is she would plant research assistants in the market and they would be there with a clipboard and as people came to get salt they would say we're accepting donations today for needy members of a group and inevitably the person would ask well what group and the researcher with the clipboard would say well is there any group you'd feel particularly uncomfortable donating to and the person would say well yes of course and they would name their their enemy group and the person would say well that's actually the group we're asking for donations for and so she could get donations specifically for that group's most hated enemy outgroup and then she quantified it and she saw okay well for the groups in the control condition do you get less salt donated to the needy members of that group versus the experimental condition where they were in the village that that listened to the soap opera and in fact she did so this replicates her work in Rwanda shows that these types of soap operas are effective at changing both norms that people feel towards the other group and conflict and also changes their actual behavior but when she looked at the condition where they also had a talk show she found that the talk show actually eliminated the positive effects of the soap opera so again here's an intuitive intervention this talk show that actually backfired it eliminated any of the positive effects that they got from the soap opera okay so we meaning tim and and beyond conflict and myself are trying to implement these types of interventions in europe with respect to the roma population so tim gave you a little bit of a background but the the roma are europe's largest minority group and they've been subject to all sorts of historical injustice for the last millennia that they've been in europe kind of culminating in the the holocaust the roma were as affected by the holocaust during world war two as the jewish population but it's not really commemorated or acknowledged and i think and and they're all sorts of dramatic current injustices being visited upon them you probably see them in the news once in a while i think it's typified by this comment that was made by not by some guy during a hot mic moment but this was actually a published editorial where zolt bayer the founder of hungary's ruling party said these roma are animals and they behave like animals they're incapable of human communication in articulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls you know they need to be eliminated so this this is unambiguous expressions of extreme prejudice towards this group so our goal is to try to see if we can shake some of the psychological foundations of of bias that are driving the widespread discrimination across europe towards this group so how we're going about it is kind of the models that i just showed you we're trying a couple of different interventions and we're going to see how they compare to each other in changing people's attitudes so one of the interventions is a psychological intervention that was developed by psychologists the idea of this intervention is you present people with a fake article and the fake article includes information that either says that groups and individuals are malleable that is we are born with brains that are designed to change and that's kind of a fundamental principle of our neural structure so that people can change dramatically given a different environment or you give them an article that says groups are generally fixed that they don't change very much over time and what they found is that in conflict regions for so for israelis arab Israelis and Palestinians when they're in the malleable condition when they just read this article that argues that groups are malleable and and that are our dispositions are not fixed that they have a much warmer attitude towards the other group and this actually holds for six months and and predicts their support for major compromises on the conflict so this is just a one-time article that they read and it kind of changes their perception about people and groups in a way that's measurable over time so we're going to test this type of intervention in Hungary in particular towards the Roma so this is one intervention that we'll try another one is based on what i think is a really clever economic self-interest argument developed by the world bank the argument goes like this the majority ethnic Hungarians that are kind of typified by Budapest have this traditional bell-shaped curve for their population demographics that is you have a lot of people in the middle ages and they're not having very many young kids and so if you just project this forward when the people who are now in the bulge right the baby boomers as we have here in the u.s when they get older and they start drawing pensions and and needing more healthcare um then they don't have enough young people there to to supplement them the argument goes you have a large group of Roma people who are having a lot of children you have a choice then you can either educate those kids and they can become your future workforce or you can prevent them from being educated and not offer them jobs and they can become your future welfare recipients and so it's an economic self-interest argument i think this is really interesting it has this intended economic self-interest appeal but of course this also i think has an unintended effect which is it might be a threat prime this is actually exactly what social psychologists use to prime people to be feel threatened by other groups you say here's a here's a minority group that's growing over time and they're kind of going to be uh increasing in numbers and so the fear is that this will actually backfire that this will have a have a net negative effect but i think an interesting question coming out of this is it might presumably it's going to have a positive effect on some people if we can figure out what types of people are most positively affected by this we could actually target these intervention to those people and this is a piece of the intervention equation that i don't think has been explored at all in in medicine in economics and i think it's something that could give a lot of traction in these types of messaging campaigns that if you can predict beforehand who will be most receptive to an argument you can target it towards that that group of people so for example these kids responded really well to the program i was involved in if these kids have a stable trait that we can measure we could then select kids who have that trait and put them into this type of program and then you might have more of a chance of having a positive effect or put another way if you could have a stable trait of kids who you know probably won't be affected positively by the program you track them to a different program so the the next piece that i think comes from this reality of how the human brain works is that we need to measure what's going on with the elephant here and not just the rider typically when we have evaluations of programs we're asking people to self report and self report is inherently about the rider telling you you know what it thinks so the most common way to do this is through social psychology social psychology has been using indirect measures to examine neuroscience for a long time i think the analogy here is that a neurologist doesn't need a brain scan to diagnose a stroke in fact you want them to diagnose a stroke with indirect measures right whether the person is slurring their speech whether they don't understand language then you can diagnose it right away and so social psychologists have been doing this for a long time they use these indirect measures physiological measures but also measures of how much people endorse a certain norm for example in schools they find that the likelihood of someone bullying another kid has nothing to do with how that kid reports personally they feel about bullying it has much more to do with how they think bullying is normalized in the school so if they think their school is a place where kids are bullied that's the best predictor that they will actually bully so you can get an indirect measure that's predictive of behavior without asking them to self report how they feel but just as with neurology neuroimaging has a place to play there that you can guide treatment and particularly guide surgery with neuroimaging techniques i think neuroimaging has a role also when we're talking about peace building and for the last bit of my talk i want to share with you some of the ways that i think neuroimaging specifically can can help with peace building and some of the progress i've made so far so this is all enabled because of a reality of the brain that is the brain seems to be organized into functional units that specialize for certain tasks so just by happens it didn't have to be organized this way but fortunately it is it means that the level of detail we can get where the brain scan gives us information that's predictive of behavior that is if you can get a signal from a large group of neurons in one of these brain regions that can tell you something about the processing that's going on which is wonderful so there are a few ways that i think are this this is more the theoretical piece so there are a few ways that i think neuroimaging could be used practically to help with peace building one is to characterize these unconscious biases that we might not be able to self-report very well or at all one is to use neuroimaging as a neural focus group to predict population behavior by looking at individuals brains as they respond for example to information campaigns and finally neuroimaging as a neurodiagnostic for individuals to determine like for those kids in irelands which kids might respond best to a program in which kids might not so i wanted to just present you with some studies that have been done outside of the realm of intergroup conflict that i that i'm trying to adapt to intergroup conflict situations so the the first one is characterizing unconscious bias so this study was very simple it was done a number of years ago there have been other versions of this but the basic study is to show people just pictures of black men and white men and then to look at the brain response to it and what they find is that in white college students they tend to get this activity in the amygdala this part of the brain that we know processes fear and threat and they get that response more when they're seeing the pictures of the black men than the white men but more importantly and interestingly for this study they did two different conditions they either flashed the face on the screen so fast that the rider the conscious part of the brain wasn't even aware that they had seen anything or they flashed it on the screen long enough that you were consciously aware and what they found was the dashed blue line is the subconscious presentation so you're being presented with this photo and you don't you're not even aware you saw it that's what gets the largest response in the threat centers whereas if you present it for a little less time you get less of a response in the amygdala and the reason for this is that you can consciously control that response to some extent so this is again in the amygdala but we know now from other studies we've characterized parts of the brain that actually control the amygdala's response in a top-down manner so you can have these kind of deliberative control processes that are motivated to damp down your your automatic fear response to another group and so this is some indication that this might be happening when white college students are viewing these pictures and that if it's so fast that your conscious brain isn't aware you're not able to bring these these parts of your brain online and you get kind of the full blown fear response okay so this this is the type of study that again reveals something that we might be completely unaware of another study is a really wonderful study done by emily folk that illustrates how neuroimaging can be used as a neural focus group so what she did this was an anti smoking study what she did is she had smokers in los angeles who had an intention to quit come into the lab and she had each of them watch different anti smoking campaign ads so the the first one campaign a was the talking cartoon cigarettes who are trying to convince each other to get their their human more addicted to them ad b was what this was the the dark comedy so this is a woman smoking alone in her bed at night and in a fit she throws her cigarette out the window there's a two-second pause and then she jumps out the window after it so a bunch of ads like that of that variety and see are those totally depressing ads you've seen of like the realities of addiction and the black lungs and all that stuff so she had them self-report which one of these campaigns they thought would be most effective using them as a typical focus group then what she did is she put them in the scanner and had them view these ads and she looked at this part of the brain that we know is related to norms so that represents subjective value to something so this is a part of your brain that registers how much you value something even if you're unaware of how much you value it and what she found was that the neural responses were completely different that is the brain was valuing the really depressing one much more than the cartoon ad and the other one and then what she did the critical next step was she got new jersey to agree to play these ads in sequence and see how many people called into the 1800 quit number at the bottom of the ad after each of the campaigns and what she found was that the call volume was predicted by the brain and not at all by their subjective responses right so the elephant predicted behavior was the rider didn't at all and anybody who's done focus groups probably knows that this is this is typical that focus groups are terrible at predicting actual outcomes okay and then finally neuro diagnostics so this is applying the same kind of prospective procedure but to individuals and this has had some traction with PTSD PTSD is obviously a really tragic condition and we want to avoid it we don't want to put people who have a susceptibility to PTSD in situations in combat situations where they would get full-blown PTSD so they've done some studies where they've looked for this is actually anatomical markers to see if people with different brain structures size brain structures are more susceptible to getting PTSD or not this was a really carefully controlled twin study and they found that people with a different size certain brain structure the hippocampus were more susceptible to getting PTSD in in more time they've also looked at whether whether neuroimaging can be used to predict how responsive people are to treatments that are designed to to alleviate the symptoms of PTSD so right now there are two dominant treatments for PTSD one is pharmacological and the other is cognitive behavioral therapy and they each are about 50 percent effective and you can't tell from the outset whether that person is going to be whether they're going to respond to which of the treatment so right now it's just a coin toss so the hope is that you could use neuroimaging to predict which would be best for an individual and you will increase dramatically your your your outcome your efficiency of treatment so this has been demonstrated for PTSD it's also been demonstrated for things like dyslexia that they gave a number of kids a battery of tests everything they could think of on self-report measures it was 18 different tests and they had them do a neuroimaging scan and the neuroimaging scan was the only one that predicted future outcomes none of the 18 behavioral tests did so that's there's promise for this for predicting responses in individual individuals okay so these are these are three different ways that i think neuroimaging can be used i've done a little bit to characterize some of the some of the biases that i think are most relevant to to intergroup conflict and i'm just going to share one study with you right now and i'll touch on the other two and and then and then i'll give you my future directions of what i'm hoping to do in the near future so the first one that i've examined is cognitive empathy so this is the ability to think what somebody else is thinking this i think of as one of the outcome measures that i'm particularly interested in is trying to understand whether someone is open-minded to the other side's perspective and so what i did is i brought Arabs and Israelis and control participants who are Americans who are not aligned with either group into the lab and i put them in the scanner while i presented to them narratives about the conflict so i presented to them a bunch of these narratives Palestinians have wasted 60 years they could have developed a modern economy but instead they chose violence and terrorism this is the type of thing that Israelis say yes this is totally rational completely reasonable and Palestinians will say that's completely ridiculous and irrational and we presented them with a lot of these types of statements right likening Israel to South Africa's apartheid regime which gets the opposite behavioral response in rationality and then i gave them a bunch of control statements that i thought both sides would think were irrational this one blaming hurricane Katrina on the wickedness and sin of New Orleans both sides thought that was pretty irrational and then a bunch of rational statements like this one extolling the health benefits of the watermelon right who could disagree with that so for each of these i had them rate how reasonable they were not how much they agreed and we got the predicted responses behaviorally but what i was really interested in how how their brain was responding so i use these control statements to identify in each person what parts of their brain were lighting up when they were reading about the irrational statements versus the rational statements so this is an example from one person so this is if you cut the brain straight in half this way you see the kind of red marks or the the places where you get more activity for the irrational statements than the rational statements and you see that this is pretty stable across people and we can actually get a quantitative measure of how much activity you get so this is an Arab participant and you can just take the difference in how much activity they get for the Israeli statement versus the Arab statement and you can plot it on a graph so psc is just the amount of brain activity you get so that the brain based bias and the reasonableness is how reasonable they thought the statements were towards each other here's this one person plotted and then if you plot everybody out the Arabs in red and the Israelis in blue you get a nice correlation here that the the brain activity correlates with how unreasonable they think the other side is and you can also note these two little blue dots in a sea of red those happen to be two Israeli peace activists who worked on behalf of Palestinians so ideologically they're looking like the Palestinians in terms of their neural activity and we've also done this most recently with Democrats and Republicans evaluating actual proposals and we find a similar area that's that's active for when you're considering the out groups proposals versus your own groups okay so the hope is that we're starting to kind of add to the toolbox that we already know of in the mind and that we have these regions of interest that we can focus in on and look for changes over time that this might be some precursor of open mindedness so there's a couple of other studies I've done I focused on affective empathy so how much compassion you feel towards the other group and I I just have had people read stories such as these I found some really interesting distinctions between reading about other people's physical pain which gives you a constellation of brain regions that are very stable and strong in individuals but I find when I have them read about emotional pain of others that they're completely distinct so what's interesting about this is your own personal physical and emotional pain are processed in similar brain regions but when you're empathizing with other people's pain and suffering they're completely distinct from each other and I'm trying to explore the significance of this over time and then I've also looked at at this you know warm and fuzzy measure of dehumanization which is just where do you place these groups on the evolutionary scale there's something as overt and offensive as we could possibly imagine and we find that when people are doing this process that they're actually very deliberative deliberative about this we often think of bias as being these automatic emotional responses this is not one of those this you get no activity in the emotional regions of the brain instead you get it in the deliberative regions of the brain so it seems like people are kind of very deliberately dehumanizing other groups okay so there are a couple of future directions you know I want to apply the neural focus groups and the neural diagnostics to actual intergroup conflict and I'm going to work with Emily Falk the one who did that anti-smoking study to do just that in a couple of months so this is just an overview of what I talked about I talked about how common sense interventions can fail with the example in Arizona I talked about why this might be so based on how our brain is organized I talked about what that means that we should evaluate our programs and not just assume they're going to work and I talked about how we can use neuroimaging to potentially measure these things and the last step will be of course applying the neuroimaging back to the evaluation so that's it I just want to thank everybody who's helped with the research and the funding and I'll offer my brain up to any questions you might have so I think we have probably about 10 to 15 minutes of questions so if you could ask your question concisely quickly and and no brain teasing so who is the first person here and if you could identify yourself this jump yes and I think there's a mic right here thanks my name is Matt Pete's with FHI 360 civil society director first of all this is one of the best presentations I've seen at any development related event ever so thank you so much to the organizers for inviting you I think this is what the earlier speaker Ms Puffin Holtz said when she said we need to talk to people who are from outside our field this is really great um did you ever find any explanation explanation for the lack of success in programs like seeds of peace that bring people together and the idea that they'll exchange you get to know each other and reduce their prejudices about the other the the one experimental study I've done about that was a behavioral study that I did in the Middle East where I had Israelis and Palestinians communicate over Skype and my so I was a I was a high school teacher before I started this this whole researching gig and that's I would travel during the summers and that's how I ended up in all these crazy places so I what I got from both the observations from the minority kids in the high schools that I was at after going through these diversity training programs and from Palestinian kids who had gone through the programs is they seem to experience a backlash about six months after the program where they were taught to trust the other side and then six months later they're going through the checkpoint and they're treated the exact same way they see that nothing structurally has changed and they felt not only negative towards the other group but now they felt betrayed right because before they didn't have trust now you've built up trust and you you eliminated it so there seemed to be a backlash from that experience and so I I also thought that the program is is often designed by well-meaning members of the dominant group by by wealthy Americans who are going to Ireland to set up this program and that their intuitions are based on what will work for the members of the dominant group not the the subordinate group and so I tested this in this experiment in the Middle East I went to the the West Bank and I had a research assistant go to Tel Aviv and we had Israelis and Palestinians communicate over Skype and we had both groups either engage in perspective taking so listen to the other side this is really common for dialogue programs listen to the other side and kind of actively respond to what they're saying or I had them play the opposite role which I called perspective giving that is you get to talk about your concerns and the other person's goal is not to evaluate what you say not to agree or disagree but just to reflect back what you said so to actively listen rather than waiting for their turn to speak and I found that the effectiveness of the intervention was opposite for the groups that Israelis their attitudes towards Palestinians increased the most when they were perspective taking and for Palestinians their attitudes towards Israelis changed the most when they were perspective giving and the opposite intervention didn't work at all for either group and then I did the same thing with Americans white Americans and Mexican immigrants in Arizona and found the same pattern so these programs might be built and if you look at like if you some researchers have cataloged how many utterances people make in these dialogue programs and the most common finding is to find that Israelis make twice as many utterances as Palestinians which is exactly the opposite of what you would want for an effective program based on that research so this might be one of the components that's driving the the lack of success in some of these dialogue programs and can I just add to that point when I was mentioning earlier what this retired neuroscientist said to me three years ago that our capacity to think rashly depends on being understood as we see ourselves and it goes to the reference you just made disempower groups need to be seen they need to be understood as they see themselves because it's about feeling safe and when you feel safe you could then begin to think more rashly so these things all tie together is there any possibility in the future that a vaccine be invented to control the violent behavior of a human week well the way I look at it that's what you all are doing you're you're developing incredibly innovative programs to try to control violent behaviors my job I think is to to give you tools to decide whether they're working or not right so there are some psychological interventions that we can develop based on evidence-based results from psychology and I'll definitely try those out but most of the interventions that I want to try are the ones that that you all are developing and and I'm just you know I recognize that it's really hard especially for established programs you mentioned seeds of peace they've been around for a long time so at that point it's really a threat to have your program evaluated from the outside and I think that's scary and I totally understand how you'd be reluctant to do that so my hope is that as the new generation of scientists grow up who are developing tools to evaluate these programs as we're growing up with the new generation of intervention programs that we can start the ground start from the ground floor that the program can start with evaluation in place so then it doesn't become a threat 10 years after you're established it becomes part of what you use to fine-tune your program to tool it so that that's my overall dream is that that kind of marriage could happen over time I thought it's our hand over here in the back first and then we have one more after you I'm sorry just unless the organizers give us five more minutes. Tatsushi Arayi School for International Training first of all I really think this presentation was revolutionary to me so really congratulate and thank you so much from the bottom of my heart and I wanted to ask you about the focus group being not so good predictor indicator whereas practitioners use focus group and interviews a lot so I'd like you to help me and help us understand the tension and connection between that the functioning of the amidella according to the study versus like a rational brain an emotional brain kind of in conflict fighting each other or controlling each other whereby like the result of the study about that that aspect may or may not tell us a true story about how the rationality and emotional brain are actually you know competing with each other controlling each other if you could conclude that so that it becomes helpful for practitioners yeah I think it I mean that's a that's a key really interesting question I think you have to design really controlled well controlled studies to start answering that but the takeaway point for me is not that focus groups never work I think in some situations a focus group can tell you exactly what you want to hear and and we find that some of our explicit self-report measures are very good at predicting behavior like if you ask Hungarians how they feel about the Roma you can ask them how they feel on this ascent of man scale and the degree to which they like blatantly dehumanize the Roma is a really good predictor of how they're going to discriminate against them in educational settings elsewhere right so so there the rider is a really good predictor of outcomes and there you want to use it right it's easy it's cheap in other circumstances then the explicit measures you ask the people and they self-report they're not very good at reporting this and and I think it it just always depends upon the specific intervention that the intervention that includes the norm right that including the norm wasn't a part an intentional part of their intervention at all but that's the part that that the kind of elephant that the unconscious brain keyed in on so whenever you're developing a program you have to realize that you're going to have a bunch of elements that are directly appealing to the rider but you're probably also going to have a bunch of elements that are appealing to the elephant and the problem is you don't know what those elements are right because they're unconscious because you can't self you can't reflect about them so I could look at an intervention now and I could look for some cues are you saying anything that might conjure up feelings of mortality if you are then that's probably going to be affecting the elephant in ways you don't intend are you unintentionally including a norm in the messaging or the program that you have if you are then that's probably driving behavior in that way but there's probably dozens of other things that could be in there and I think this is why we have to keep evaluating the programs because we haven't identified all of the things that are that are pushing the elephant without our awareness right it's hard to study because we can't introspect about it and then was in the back and if we could because I was able to get us four more minutes so if you could so it's a 30 second question my name is Ted Johnson I'm from the college school at Brandeis fascinating thank you very much was wondering if you had also looked at the aspect of culture and cultural neuroscience has been a fair amount of work on that and whether or not the norms that you described in many instances are indeed cultural you cited one of the studies on here which was the the stereotype threat which was the Claude Steelework on African Americans who were taking the GRE because and didn't do well because they thought that it was just not something that they could do well on until they were later told that take another portion of this test which was designed by African American scientists and is perfectly benign in that instance and they did much better so the the self-referential threat went away and then you can also think in terms of the notion of the the the norm that police officers have toward people of color with respect to their propensity to commit crime and that how that changes when police officers actually get out of their cars and do community policing so by changing the social cultural aspect of it some of these things are dealt with does your work look at potentially bringing together both culture and the other aspects of neural of the programming that you're talking about yeah well I think if you if you define culture as your environment more broadly I think that the response of African Americans to stereotype threat so this is if you if you have African Americans take a test they'll score lower than white Americans on the test if you if you just give them the test and say here's a here's a hard test but if you instead say before the test these are just a series of word games now they they score equally right that the African American performance actually increases about 40 SAT points just by changing your instructions about what the test is right and the and you can do this with Asian women if you prime their identity as women and you give them a math test they'll score 40 points lower than the men and if you prime their identity as Asian and you give them the math test they'll score 40 points higher than the men you can do with athletics you can have black and white athletes perform a task and you can change how well they perform at the task based on what stereotype you prime so I think culture here just means you could you could take a group of people and put them in an environment and make them aware of a stereotype and that's now going to affect their performance and it's going to affect their performance in ways they're not consciously aware of right that it's it is driving the amygdala which is very very good at at mobilizing your resources to avoid getting eaten by a lion but it's really terrible at taking an SAT so if you if you're relying on your amygdala that's not the right thing to do when you're taking an SAT and so you can you can do these types of things but one of the remarkable things about that is if you first teach people about stereotype threat like I just did with you you're no longer subject to its effect it eliminates the effects of stereotype threat so this is an illustration of the ability for us to bring some of these unconscious processes into your conscious brain and thereby inoculate yourself against them which I think is one of the most hopeful examples that I've ever seen in psychology of an intervention and I'm mystified at why we don't spend five minutes teaching every third grade student this reality because it could have a dramatic impact on on closing the achievement gap. Before we go to the last question there is also a research that shows when you think of SATs and other standard tests in the United States if you remove the questions in the beginnings such as race, ethnicity to the back the participants will score anywhere from 10 to 20 percent higher and it's all about priming anxiety if I understand and within the brain in a very unconscious way and it's about threat and the other thing before to the last question I think it's really important to say because I think people will be wondering where does this overall work go we're at the stage working with partners here of this larger initiative which is going to be working across disciplines working across labs and in practice to bring together these communities for those of you who are in the academic world you know collaborating across silos is almost an evil and what we're trying to do is not only get the collaboration across the various research silos but bring in theory and practice together and that's been the work for the last three years and it's the work we continue to do in the future and we're very open to hear from all of you because this is going to be an overall collaboration and it's about reframing what drives human behavior and within this broader context it's particularly interested in these broader issues of conflict and reconciliation whether we think of them globally or we think of them in our own communities and the way we've been thinking about this is one track is education like today the second track is research bringing together scientists and practitioners and others to ask what is dehumanization how do we understand empathy how do we understand stereotype and the third is translation which is at the end of the day how do you translate all this knowledge and growing research into our real-world problems such as what Emile's been doing with us on the Roma or some of your other projects and this is really key work and so I think you know this is at the cusp you might say an inflection point but it is I think really to fundamentally not only reframe and understand what it is to be human but I think knowing what drives this behavior is empowering and liberating to people because if you look at this issue of bias and race with policing in the United States today we have been approached by Scotland Yard and what they found is just talking to their white policemen and women that they are biased not necessarily racist because every single human being is biased it changed the way they respond they now no longer feel stigmatized they no longer feel ashamed or sort of pointed out that you're acting in certain ways so just knowing this like you were saying about stereotype changes people's reaction so one final question and then we're going to thank everybody from let's go an extra 10 minutes thanks should be on is it on okay it's on thanks Ned Lazarus George Washington University and both in reference to the the first question and to your outstanding to your outstanding presentation and research the question of dialogue groups and generalizing I think this applies in some way to the peace building community but specifically the because of the example that you presented of a failure a fight at a there are hundreds of dialogue programs which are very different methodologically many of which incorporate the research about asymmetry that you've mentioned in a very sophisticated way the specific program that was mentioned seeds of peace I happen to do a longitudinal study of the first 10 years graduates of the program found that 50 percent of them were involved in peace building for three years after the program and that 20 nearly 20 percent of them were involved in peace building as adults 10 to 15 years after the initial program the thing that made the difference was follow-up programming and so where there was follow-up programming there was much more success that's one prominent case but there are many and so I want to state this not about that program but just about our field as a whole I think that there are actually in terms of stereotypes I think there are stereotypes that peace building is not effective that dialogue is not effective that are based on the fact that we work in contexts where the conflicts are intractable where the conflicts are long-term and will be continuing and our interventions don't immediately resolve the conflicts or all of their corollary effects and I would I just want to raise that because I think it's actually in some sense we're helping internalize a stereotype of our own work but also in terms of the presentation whether it's important to present examples of success as well as examples of failure and failure is very important to present as well and no no denial of that I agree yeah and so that's why I wanted to present some of Betsy's work I think that she's been the one who's shown these these great successes in these psychological interventions that that they have consistent effect in really tough situations and I totally agree that just because some medical interventions don't work or even backfire you don't want to conclude that medical intervention shouldn't be done right that that's not the right statement to make and I think the same is true for peace building right just because you can demonstrate that some of them don't work or some of them some of them erase the positive effect of others the conclusion there isn't to stop peace building the conclusion is just like in medicine and just like in anti poverty programs in Africa to evaluate them to compare them to each other and to stop seeing that or to try to transition away from seeing that as a threat and see it more as an opportunity to to to improve the field right because ultimately that's what we're trying to do right we're trying to make the world a better place and so we want to make sure that we're implementing interventions that are that are doing that and not doing the reverse thank you hi everyone if you can bear with me for one more minute just a couple announcements so this was a fascinating talk and if you're interested in more we are going to be having an affinity group session on this on Friday on the third day of our conference so join us and we will now have a 20 minute break and we'll be starting our next sessions concurrent sessions at three o'clock countering violent extremism will be here in Carlucci we have Mexico will be happening in the Cuthwari amphitheater and Youth in Conflict in B241 feel free to ask any staff or stop by the registration desk if you need directions and also just to give you a quick preview of the next two days of the annual conference we're going to be starting the mornings with a morning soap box from 8 30 to 9 we're also being having a peace building marketplace with exhibits from a number of our members and other partners and a virtual reality experience from Project Syria on Friday so enjoy hi everyone can you hear me so welcome back from lunch thank you very much for being at the conference i'm first order of business if anyone lost black reading glasses you can pick them up at the registration table you can also meet several lovely people at the registration table but i just wanted to let you know so my name is john philson i'm the senior policy manager at the alliance for peace building and this session is called who are you calling extreme it really explores issues of governance radicalization religion and terrorism and thanks very much for for being here before i introduce our panelists um i wanted to ask you a question if that would be all right raise your hand if you are a parent maybe you can picture um a child that you have had when she or he was maybe between the ages of 16 and 22 um if you have younger children maybe imagine a time when they will be that age if you don't have kids yet maybe put yourself in the future you've loved them their whole life you've sacrificed in so many ways they have special personality and charm and you love them more than life itself imagine you are making dinner one day and your closest friend frantically calls you on the phone and says there's been a bombing at the boss marathon and you say that's terrible um and they say no go go look you know they're saying it's jihar or picture your your child who you love dearly they're saying it's him they're saying it's her and you're incredulous you don't believe it you say um well i'm sure they're they're mistaking and you race to the television and you look and there's the media cycle flashing the picture of your child um and you just can't believe it and your world is over um the world is different today there's something happening here and it's very important for us to have real conversations about what's happening in the world today and what we collectively are doing about it so because of technology and globalization we are so interconnected today than ever before at any other time in human history that any single person who is really determined can create massive harm and massive destruction it's not only a terrorist attacks but a story of one disgruntled air traffic control employee in Chicago has a has a very uh micro uh dispute with his boss destroys some air traffic control equipment and hundreds and hundreds of flights are canceled a live disrupted funerals you can't go to weddings you miss um we're just interconnected that's that is a reality of the world we live in today and all of us including governments are trying to figure out what to do so the obama administration in february rolled out a a plan for countering violent extremism uh at a cve summit in february and this new strategy really focuses on root causes of extremism and radicalization and on the one hand if we look at where we've been since 9 11 uh in terms of policy and engagement our community our peacebuilding community certainly would say this is a this is a positive step the theory goes that if the drivers of exclusion and mar marginalization are addressed if people have the democratic space and the and the freedoms to believe openly in in in the there in their faith or to pursue the things that they want in life through nonviolent means then people don't become terrorists right if young men and young women feel respected if they feel included they don't become terrorists or so we think but how much do we really know about extremism and where it comes from i'm so glad we had a panel prior to lunch about the neuroscience of conflict and then it's implications for conflict i think it's so relevant so many unconscious processes that tell us what's happening in the world tell us who we are who others are who our relationship is to them that we're not even conscious of and the problem is we don't know each other very well and so whether it's global jihad or whether it's a global war on terror whether it's uh student activist movements or whether it's state repression our approaches to this issue in the situation are based on misperception and mistrust because we don't know each other very well so what i would like to do is have an honest conversation about extremism about governance and especially about intercultural understanding or lack thereof uh so i just want to set the tone briefly for our our discussion and again really appreciate you being here and i'm very pleased to be joined by four excellent panelists you'll see in your program that uh imam johari abdu malik the outreach director at darla hidra islamic center uh is on the is on the ticket but he wasn't make it able to make it he has the the flu unfortunately um but someone you don't know from your program is michael nabil who i will uh introduce in a moment to my left is miss ulema hadawi she is a visiting researcher at georgetown university her work is focused on the experience of american muslims post-911 and more recently on the recruitment of women and girls to isis uh next to her is miss susan hayward she's the interim director of religion and peace building at the us institute of peace's center for governance law and society and she really leads the institute the institute's work where peace building intersects with faith and faith-based actors and mr david hunsaker is a senior conflict advisor at the office of conflict management and mitigation at us aid he has worked around the world in us aid missions in religious peace building and development approaches to countering violent extremism and finally our our our bonus michael nabil is an activist and blogger from egypt uh he was the founder of the know to compulsory military service movement in egypt he was a he he has been a political prisoner there um for for his beliefs and his activism in the the democracy movement so with that i would like just like our panelists to to speak with you for a few minutes and then what i would really like to do is have a genuine conversation with our panelists and all of you about some of these very important themes because it really matters so thank you very much for being here so first miss uh salema please thank you very much john hello everyone thank you the us ip and afp for having me it's a great privilege to be in this panel i would like to begin with the fact that women committing acts of violence or joining terrorist groups is no news and i think to better understand this phenomenon we need to step out of the narrative according to which women don't commit violence or that specifically in the case of isis women are targeted by the group and victims of brainwashing the women i followed are actively involved the ones who joined clearly made the first the first step in getting in touch with isis what we know about isis is limited to what they want us to know so analyzing why people join this group consists of making a risk assessment in the context of imperfect knowledge it is critical that we see this phenomenon away from sensationalist and journalistic narratives for security reasons what needs to be examined is not so much why people join rather why or how they become supportive of the group since the us comes forth in top claim locations among isis supporters according to a brookings report for the purpose of this research i created a special account to follow over 200 twitter profiles of which 155 are women i also looked into tumblr accounts and analyzed over 40 of them along with some ask and facebook pages when available so my first preliminary observation is that there are two categories of twitter accounts revealing some of the strategic hierarchy in the use of multimedia accounts that belong to women who seem to be part of the leadership and others that spread the messages transmitted by the leadership accounts the second preliminary observation is that there is a difference within the narrative depending on whether women are in isis controlled territories or are still in the west the ones in isis controlled territories diffuse more propaganda material whereas the others reinforced the dichotomy between living in the west or what is called dar al-harb versus living in dar al-islam or under islamic ruling so i'll go um quite rapidly because i i know we're it's not working okay so i could sum up four major themes in looking at all their narratives or discussions the first one is that they twist the war on terror into a war on islam in order to inflame feelings of isolation often in the media we hear that actually isis attracts people who are out of job and this fails to explain how socially well-off people join as well extensive sociological research on jihad has shown that lived humiliation and discrimination favor alienation which in turn encourages radicalization another reason for young muslims to turn to jihad is their difficulty to reconcile living their faith with belonging to a nation state isis addresses both and online supporters of isis issued for instance two twitter campaigns through the hashtags war on islam that we just saw in which they tweet several messages and news explaining how the west is fighting incarcerating and humiliating muslims and the other hashtag is do not vote make bayal through which they argue if muslims participate in politics they are betraying their religious principles all of which only inflame pre-existing feelings of disenfranchisement and alienation my second point is that they promote violence and see it as a sense of empowerment so these for example these japanese anime and the twisters so you have aya the liberator fighting oppression and hate or aya the swords master this should give me more time and these images also of course they show women fighters other images show them when in a bmw and all this reinforces their feeling of sisterhood adventure freedom and sense of empowerment this is for example and one of the tweet that was released so i was seen as a woman in the kitchen clearly disempowered then moving to a sister so which gives them a sense of equality these are real obviously oh yes and these are the kind of some propaganda images so this is about the state releasing their first idea with a chip or discarding leaders of soda that are expired and how the state is actually taking care of its population in the west women project a romanticized image of isis balancing tradition and modernity they claim the mujahedat follow the steps of the wives and daughters of the prophet to appeal to young crowds they also personalized japanese anime as we saw and then the third point is that their purpose is really to marry a jihadist or a fighter raise future fighters and look forward to becoming a widow because their husband would obviously become a martyr which raises their social status within isis this is one of many twitter accounts related to arranging marriages this is obviously one of the propaganda messages and the other tweet is about a woman congratulating the other of the martyrdom of her husband agenda is paradise paradise yeah and this is the promotion of violence so they were talking about the texas attacks and in the second image you have a kick correspondence in which at the very end you have we have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states so they're talking about future attacks in us my fourth point is that the women seem to be more in charge of the online battle than their male counterparts so we saw that they promote violence now they encourage videos and they spread messages about fighters they're also released in arabic a hashtag about giving online tactics and how should women do and during wartime and this is the message itself so women should get ready for combat useful tips and recommendations from omab the largest raria which is a who is a saudi woman women relay messages from men in the battlefields and ask the twitter community to stop posting about some specific combat zones they also would either issue shoutouts in support of fellow members coming back from suspension or call to block certain accounts believed to be spies as shown here this is one of the online qiha tactics i can go uh delfurter later this is how they support future convert to islam or those who think of joining isis this is the shoutouts we know many people are very twitter savvy here in this room so we'll start right yeah i just would like to conclude by emphasizing that these women have a strong sense of moral superiority which makes them immune to contradictory discourse even a religious one the reading of their communications and blog posts shows how these women maintain their convictions by repeating how the west is corrupt and that they hold the truth and practice a pure islam this perspective gives strong moral justification to performing what they call his raw which is the religious immigration and gives them a sense of self entitlement that is characteristic of every legitimate self-anointment they call muslims living in the west coconut muslims and when religiously legitimate critiques come out of us islamic scholars their responses political they show images of the mentioned scholar with bush for example and this image is enough to delegitimize anything he could say in a broader spectrum the issue of western muslims joining or supporting isis raises two major questions one about the place of religion in the public sphere in secular countries and for muslim communities the opportunity to emphasize and perhaps better transmit existing counter narratives away from the salafi takfiri ideologies thank you very much thank you very much salemah susan yeah hi everybody and it's great to have you here at the us institute of peace as john said i'm the director of the religion and peace building program here and i want to start by telling you about a symposium that we held last september in partnership with the network of religious and traditional peacemakers of which muhammad el-sanusi is the dc representative i'm glad to have you here muhammad we brought for this symposium we brought together religious actors from around the world from many different contexts that are experiencing violent extremism that's couched in religious terms and this included a representative from the sultan of soketo in nigeria it included a woman from pakistan who works with mothers who to help them identify radicalization among youth this included a buddhist monk from miyanmar and a buddhist layperson from sri lanka who are watching the rise of of nationalist buddhist movements there that have been fueling and justifying violence or oppression against muslim minority groups this included a woman from libya who has been following the role of various religious actors and institutions and responding to the the rise of violent extremist groups operating in libya it included a vast array of people from different traditions people from very different contexts and male and female religious actors in order to to come together and to try to understand what are the drivers of of some of these violent extremist movements and what can religious actors do to to address them and we did an exercise at the beginning of our day together where george holmer who is the coordinator of the cve work at usip handed out a bunch of post-it notes to everybody of all different colors and she said i want you to just start writing down one per post-it note one of the push or the pull factors that leads people to join violent extremist movements don't think about it too much just start writing them down we gave people about 10 minutes and they just they started going post it note after post it note after post it note and we collected all of them and um after you know about 15 minutes of this we had an entire wall that was covered in different colored post-it notes that included everything from poverty or economic inequality to um religious ideology or false understandings of religion to trauma and hopelessness to lack of livelihood to many many different factors those political those issues of governance those that were issues of of economy and of livelihood and jobs those that were issues of ideologies and religious interpretations or social segregation of different religious communities those that were um psychological issues of of experiences of living in insecure environments and and experiencing ongoing episodes of violence it was many many different things were identified and we tried as best as we could to try to categorize them and map them out but but one of the things we acknowledged after having done this exercise is that there's no one driver of violent extremism just like there's no one driver of violent conflict that we can point to there's many people who are poor and who might practice forms of conservative even what we might call extremist religion who don't necessarily join violent movements and and and that what what it seems to be more is something of a tipping point where these many different factors come together and create vulnerabilities of individuals or societies to join these movements and that when we seek to understand violent extremism generally but more especially the ways in which to counter it or address it we have to take into account this really complex web of factors that if you'll forgive me using some buddhist terms there's this mutual arising of all of these different causal factors that that lead to this situation of violence and we have to take that into account in order to understand how to create sustainable and strategic solutions to them after we created this huge cacophony of colors of post-it notes on the wall we then asked those who are with us to identify which drivers in particular religious leaders are already addressing or are well positioned to address in their communities and a couple things came out of this portion of the exercise one was that counter narratives are obviously something that religious leaders are well positioned to address when violent extremism is being couched in religious terms and and they see themselves as being crucial to playing those roles as legitimate authorities within their their religious traditions to be able to challenge some of the religious interpretations that fuel prejudice or that fuel violence but they also and I should say as well that this is both male and female religious leaders and this was again religious leaders across different traditions especially recognizing that religious extremism in one community can fuel it in another community as well like what we're seeing in asia but they also recognize that counter narratives is not the end of what religious leaders can do to address violent extremism that they're also well placed and are already addressing some of these underlying drivers so one thing that they recognized in particular where the psychological aspects that they can and do play roles in addressing some of these these elements of of hopelessness or these elements of belonging or these elements of inclusion that again are not the only sole driver of people going into movements but are playing a role in what leads some people to join some of these movements they also recognized themselves as playing a role in some of the issues of economic issues and some of the political issues and being able to help with jobs training for youth and with livelihood support in mobilizing communities to address issues of governance and corruption the next day this group met with leaders from the U.S. government in order to relay some of their at this point a little bit more focused recommendations about how to best support religious actors who are trying to address some of these some of these drivers and you know they they raise the issues like that military solutions alone are short-term and are actually fueling some of the some of the grievances of communities who are already living in very insecure situations and when there's military incursions to try to address some of these it fuels some of that sense of insecurity and some of that trauma and so on and that ultimately military solutions are not going to address some of the underlying drivers and as they were they were making these recommendations and talking about what they were doing and what they could do more with greater support to address the the multiple factors it really struck me that a lot of what they were saying and recommending were things that we've we've heard for a long time we've heard before within the peace building community because while this is a pivotal moment right now in in the world and why while the the actions and the visibility of groups like the islamic state and so on are modern and that they're using technology and they're using social media and they're using you know all of these new tools to to fuel recruitment to to get visibility to promote their cause the underlying drivers that are leading people into these violent movements are very similar to what have led people to join the Tommel Tigers in Sri Lanka that led people to join the IRA and Northern Ireland that have led people to join violent movements throughout history and and and so I think we need to also bear that in mind as as we think about how to address these pivotal issues now and the different multiple factors and the different tools that they're using that we can similarly use in our in our attempts to address it but to to recognize that that at root are some of these same issues that have existed for millennia that that lead people to to violence as a way to address their grievances thank you Susan yes David thank you John thank you for to the Alliance for Peace Building and to USIP for inviting me to speak on this panel I do have to start out by saying that I'm here in my capacity as a subject matter expert providing an operational level perspective not a policy one so the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those with the USAID the US government the national endowment for democracy who's up next to my name but who I have no affiliation with but rather these views are my own and based on my experiences inside and outside government so I think similar to what was said by the previous speakers our first step when dealing with violent extremism and radicalization is to begin by demystifying it when we look at violent extremism and from where we sit it seems that the provocative and brutal actions of the extremists evoke shock and fear it seems completely outside the bounds of rationality but that's exactly the response that they intend to provoke they use mind-boggling savagery to spur fear and to cloak themselves in an aura of mystery that fact the fact that contemporary extremists portrayed themselves as religious and couched the recruitment and appeals to religion further adds to this sense of mystery among more secularly oriented observers it's also used to appeal to potential recruits there's the novelty of well this isn't my grandma's religion it has edge and because they're they're so adept at manipulating religious motifs we often fall into the trap of falling for the rhetoric but the rhetoric has more to do with theater than it does with theology so as Sulayma said you know when religious arguments are made against them you know they come back with with other arguments that are political etc and you know it's a shame that Imam Jihari couldn't be here to speak to some of these issues but actually the religious arguments are the easy ones to make it's the easy win that we have but there's so much more at play so we have to pull back the curtain and expose the real face of these groups and look closely at how they prey on individuals feelings of shame desire for redemption their isolation their frailties their insecurities their aspirations and their vulnerabilities and by doing this we can begin to dismantle their ability to recruit and manipulate but it requires a multi-layered and a nuanced approach at us aid as a development agency many of our tools are ideally suited to deal with the push factors those conditions that are the underlying vulnerabilities that make communities vulnerable to be mobilized by malign actors including violin extremism the these underlying conditions favor the spread and the appeal of violin extremists as susan mentioned social marginalization systematic human rights abuses frustrated expectations relative deprivation within their societies but what the research consistently shows is that it's the pull factors that are in fact the most vital when looking at who joins a violin extremist organization or not so what are the pull factors and how do they operate well they're the factors that make joining a violin extremist group attractive to an individual they're the personal connections its family its friends its networks those who you know who you know you trust and who may be involved in some of these things or they promise fulfillment and reward whether it's in this world or in the next it provides an outlet for those who are seeking adventure instead of being trapped perhaps in a go nowhere job or without a job in a village somewhere around the world terror groups employ predatory tactics not dissimilar to child molesters particularly on the internet these tactics exploit identity seekers desire to focus on monolithic ident bloom and in her book bombshell described a lot of the ways in which al-qaeda in iraq for example was using female operatives to actually arrange for people to be for women to be raped and then they were persuaded based on their senses sense of guilt to undertake suicide missions in order to redeem themselves i mean these people are at the core criminals and we see other recent examples i don't know if any of you were watching pbs new news hour just the other night but there was a story of young lucas dom a danish uh young man who had adhd had a history of identity seeking trying to find his place in society and a history of criminality and you know it was those things that isle prayed upon in order to entice him to go to syria and we see this issue of a criminal past and a violent past coming up pretty repeatedly in recruits to these organizations particularly the foreign fighters but we also have to make a differentiation between the the homegrown or the territorial territorialized groups and how they manipulate real grievances that are existing in society and how they're able to build upon those and the more transnational groups that deal more in larger perceptions of the war on islam or uh other kind of macro political issues you know territorialized groups like isle hamas hezbollah ashabaab in samalia you know they have a nationalist dimension they're well embedded in society and they and violence is often a means to an end but at the same time we have to look closely at some of the mechanisms they use i mean if we look at isle as an example in many ways it resembles the republic of fear that was described by kanan makia in 1989 uh and is booked by the same name and um those similarities are for a good reason because the methods employed and those employing them are holdovers from the bathas regime in iraq who have commandeered the local al-qaeda affiliate for their own purposes overshadowing even the parent organization coercion not religious legitimacy is the cornerstone of their movement while also capitalizing on real grievances around marginalization of the sunni population in iraq so as i said the the more transnational groups do focus more on kind of uh the looser and more vague and unrealistic aims and we can talk a little bit more about that and that's where we see the foreign fighters but it's important for what as peace builders can we do well we have to look at both the tactical and the operational level at the tactical level we need to look more closely at the pull factors those networks the individual motivations etc but we have to also acknowledge that there's a narrower space for development and peace building actors uh around pull factors but we definitely have a role in bolstering and sometimes helping to build positive social networks at the operational level what we can do is address the push factors in general and targeted ways decrease the vulnerabilities increase the gap between communities and or at risk groups and those criminal elements that would prey upon them strengthen the communities existing mechanisms to be able to resist those pressures so we should consider taking a systems approach to help us understand how interventions impact different factors that drive radicalization and how those efforts are complementing activities in other spheres most fundamentally we need to understand that these are not in fact other worldly phenomenon or issues that defy rational analysis peace building activities regularly seek to provide opportunity where it had previously existed provide voice to those who have been silenced and provide healing to those whose minds and bodies have been damaged our approaches to violent extremism don't differ in fundamental ways from what we are already doing but we have to take the time to analyze and assess the specifics and focus our efforts where we can best impact the system in which recruitment and mobilization takes place thank you thank you david and finally michael yeah thanks john and thanks for fb and zero site people inviting me to speak today um well i i come from egypt i i was raised by a christian family in egypt my family um and so because of that i was uh all my life subject or a target of of Islamic terrorists uh then later when i grew up i chose to became an asianist and to advocate for peace between Egypt and israel and that made me more of a target to terrorist groups in several occasions of my life i needed security to protect my life and in several occasions of my life i was i received the threats from people who call themselves democrats summarize activists as like as terrorist groups um later i've been living in germany in europe and and i could see uh some of the social reasons why it which contributed to some people leaving europe and united states and and going to join some terrorist groups so i'm i'm trying to speak from my personal experience here um i first i want to emphasize on what sarah said um that there is no simple answer there is no one reason um we are dealing tourism or extremism as a complex phenomena and for any complex phenomena there is a complex answer uh it is i have been several arguments which people argue is it religion or is it politics or is it is it poverty uh it's it's it's very simplistic to assume that there's one reason for tourism or extremism uh as if it is would be very simplistic to say that there's one motive for murder or rape or or any other crime um i think to properly understand extremism we somehow need to understand how a terrorist think or how an extremist think it is if you want to uh protect yourself from theft you need to somehow understand how a sieve think if you want to protect yourself from hackers you need somehow to understand how a hacker would think as the same thing was radical or extremist or tourist you need somehow to understand how what motivates people to become radical or extremist or violent um i think um um so lima spoke about this issue how they propose uh how some groups propose uh their um what they do or or their choices as the seek of freedom as the seek of strength power um i think there are more to contribute in the subject uh so as an example uh isiline c9 is yet in their promotional videos uh they picture themselves as protectors of civilians against the crimes committed against civilians by the Egyptian army uh so there is a situation in c9 Egypt the Egyptian army used massive use of force against civilians many civilians are being harmed uh systemically uh by the Egyptian military and then these groups present themselves to the public we are protecting civilians from the abuses of the dictatorship uh so for for them i'm not saying that's how it is but for them they feel that they are fighting for justice they are fighting against injustice and there are many cases of extremism and terrorism and radicalism in history which can be compared to this as an example uh when when there was some terrorist groups from island uh making attacks they were not they didn't consider themselves as terrorists they consider themselves people who are fighting for independence the same case can be said about several conflict situations in the world conflict terrorists uh communist terrorists were motivated by what they saw to be social justice or economic justice um so they there is a need to more understand what motivates people to be extremists or or or uh terrorists because most of of or many cases it happens under good motives or good intentions even if they they end up doing the wrong thing but that's not how they think it is um there's one yeah another personal experience to contribute about that um when i persuaded in the and the egyptian uprising in 2011 uh the egyptian police forces started shooting us with tear gases uh and and uh after the the gas like the youth away in the air people were like holding the tear gas canons and and the redonet made in united states um and for our society is different than how it is really is uh we have to understand that there are maybe thousands of people millions of people who their only idea about united states is the the drones hitting places in their countries or or arms exported to their dictators uh just just to make the comparison obvious other people in other countries they will see volunteers coming from united states to help their local communities people who volunteer through the p-score and similar uh uh groups who go and and dedicate part of their lives to help people in other societies so in some societies people see the good sign uh good part of our of our culture all societies people are trying to help and sacrificing part of their lives to help but people in other countries see only the drones and tear gas canons and the liplins and and the f-16s and similar stuff so there's a need before we ask question why these people hate us we there is a need to understand the context how these people develop their picture about united states about about democracy about many other things um there is also the the uh just to contribute to what can be other possible reasons uh there is a i believe there's a correlation between um how united states react to a specific government or or authority and how people in this country see the united states and and the western democracy in general uh Nathan Sharansky in his book the case for democracy uh explains this phenomena and use the example of soji arabia and iran and why there are many young people in iran uh has favorable opinion about united states in opposite many young people in soji arabia uh have negative opinion about united states and he uh expressed that this is because the united states has been friendly um to the soji government and somehow don't have a problem uh with how the soji government systemically oppresses its own citizens and that wasn't the case which they're on uh the problem is that many of the us allies are dictators and responsible for horrible things and by by the us government or the european union or any other country by supporting this dictatorship it becomes part of the problem it's not a it's a dispute and when you take a side you become systemically or or eventually an enemy to the other side um and and i i mean i think this this need to be a discussion about this thing is it's really our problem to take a side in a society and bring or give people more motive to hate us uh and and that lead me to the last point uh who can be a partner for fight on extremism or fight on terrorism uh because yeah there is a coalition now made to fight isis or to go to contribute fighting radicalism in several countries and many of the countries joined these as this coalition are not that much different than isle in their policy or in their religious uh detroit so as an example i grew up in egypt and in egypt there is a famous sony institute or other uh and most of the religious um teaching of others not that far different than isle as an example um so having the wrong allies and the wrong partners in the fight against terrorism um it will lead to two negative negative points first point is that it will make it look it's okay to make these things as long as as you are doing it on our side so there is a message broadcasted to millions or maybe billions of people out there telling them it's okay to torture people as long as you are our ally it's okay to occupy territory of another country as long as you are our ally it's okay to to assassinate people to kill people it's okay to public hanging so because like if if united states government is okay with its allies doing the same things including Saudi Arabia and others uh then then white strong eyes do the same so the message being broadcasted generally to to many audience around the world that it's okay to do these things as long as you are our ally um as a peace activist in Egypt i had to deal with the Egyptian occupation of halayu which is a Sudanese territory and and the subject was completely undermined because Egypt is an ally to the United States um one personal experience to contribute in this matter i was tortured by the Egyptian military in Egypt in 2011 and later i had to speak i i got the opportunity to speak to a formal military intelligence and i discussed the case with him um and his reaction was like um yeah i'm sorry it happened to you but that's how we do our job uh do you think other secret services don't do that don't you think do you think United States doesn't torture people uh the the argument which was made that it's okay that's how we do our jobs that's how we do the job done uh and by United States doing these actions itself or having allies who do these actions and United States not objecting to them it sent a message to these people who are potential recruited or jihadists that it's okay everyone does it United States does it everyone does it so it's okay if we did it and the problem was with it is not that it's immoral it's not that it's unjustified it's not that it's a crime the problem actual problem was the world is that we are doing it while we are not on their side and that's a message and ideology being put casted on on a on a gross level and and that need to be addressed um and yeah i think that's fine thank you thank you Michael yes thank you those are all very very powerful comments well there's um sophistication of recruiting the fact that there's no single factor or or are the are the pull factors stronger than than the push and certainly our our need to understand the larger context of drivers uh that that really frame this situation you know Michael to to your your point so what we'd like to do is is open a conversation with you all um and i would like to before we um take some questions and comments i would just like to frame the conversation by by saying you know Michael your your your point about the military officer in the secret police he says you know this is how we do our job um this is symbolic of what we're seeing in the world this cyclical um and interdependent relationship between um extreme beliefs and actions and the traditional state-based tools that we have available to us to provide a sense of safety and and i think that's that's a um an important issue just to mention you know the context of um you know in washington or the obama administration cve uh initiative has a nine-point action plan of ways that they're going to turn the the concept of countering violent extremism into effective work how they're going to operationalize it in other words and you can find uh this information online but i'll tell you what's not in those nine um action points one is genuine dialogue between the us and the them uh the people that we are seeking to prevent from being coming recruits the the communities that that they come from the larger cultures and cultural narratives that in which they live there isn't a suggestion that we ourselves need to be in dialogue across cultural barriers or or religious faith barriers to be able to communicate and obviously extremism is not an issue about uh muslims or or uh islam only extremism is in all of us it's a human thing but that's something that's clearingly absent the other thing is global factors so support for repressive regimes or um trade in military equipment and or in legal frameworks that really squeeze the democratic space in in other countries and finally there there there wouldn't be any suggestion that we should take a look at ourselves and what we think about other people and what we tell the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and who we are in the world something as simple as well if we hammer them enough eventually they'll get the message what uh president limborg said this morning you know if you were talking to a room full of kindergartners the first thing she said use your words um it's eventually we will discover through experience that you can't hammer people and get them to do what you want you actually need to talk to people and show and show respect in in many different ways and so my fear is that this initiative is going to seek to to program a solution um let's take let's take the best practices let's take what what works and what doesn't let's look at push factors pull factors and let's let's set up new funding streams and and grant cycles and we'll get we'll get all of the large operational NGOs uh to to um frame their proposals in terms of CVE rather than development or then conflict resolution or then governance um because that's what we we see is needed in the world but it doesn't it doesn't take account of of all of these factors um so that's enough for me it's overstepping my bounds as a moderator i'm sorry about that i you can see a little bit of passion here when we're we're talking about some of these issues um i would like to open it up to you and also pose a question to you in the audience that we would love to hear from you what's missing in this debate what perspective would be outrageous to say right now in a comment or a question simply because this is a culturally our our social cues are such that we wouldn't we wouldn't talk about this uh right now because we're you know we're wearing suits and we're in you know nice building and that's not how you do it um but but what is missing that we collectively are are critically overlooking as the whole world our government and other governments try to figure out how to respond to the the status of human relations that we find ourselves in today what's missing so i'll just leave that to you to to answer or not but let's take a couple rounds of questions or comments we'll take three to time um we have about 17 minutes so it's not that's going to go by very quickly so i'm going to ask you to be very brief much briefer than me uh again hypocrisy acknowledged um so i saw i saw david's hand and then i want to try one back here and over here and then we'll get to another go ahead david and please introduce yourself david steel brandy's university and i've been a consultant in religion and conflict for over 20 years um i would tend to answer your basic question by saying their serious look at religion has been missing in many cases as a very contributing factor and i was actually very happy to hear the last comments in regard to that i don't disagree with a lot else marginalization um fear in terms of tactical approaches my concern i guess is about the stereotyping of who these people are in terms of criminalization for example um their studies that are very different than ones david that you mentioned by jessica stern for example at harvard who talks about interviewing people where she didn't think she would find that religion was a basic factor in it and found that it has been as she interviews them who changes her mind so my question to you is how much do we then want so much to identify this in ways that we understand already and know how to respond to already and don't take into consideration the factors that are new and different and we don't understand thank you here on the side hello my name is julie imposed i'm a program facilitator for icerm the international center for ethno-religious mediation in new york and um it got touched on but i just want to bring up the fact that the title doesn't really include um the radicalization of islam so we're in the conversation do characters like david koresh and timothy mcvay and ruby ridge and and things like that word is that belong because that for me is the glaring missing point um i don't like to push i don't like to point outward until we look inward and um these these are older examples but you know it goes on and on and on so that's just a really pertinent point that i wanted to make thanks thank you very much and finally up here my name is heather coltman i'm the dean of the college of arts and letters at florida atlantic university where we're launching a new peace justice and human rights initiative my question to my answer to who's missing or what's missing is are we talking to the 15 16 17 18 year olds here in this country are we talking to kids involved in model un programs or other related programs who would already identify an interest in and some knowledge of this kind of topic let's get the teenagers perspectives not only from this country but perhaps in other countries and maybe that's happening i i don't know i'm just i would be interested because all of us are you know older our brains have been formed what about the kids whose brains haven't been formed yet thank you very much i want to give our speakers any chance to comment or or react at all or we can take another round of comments questions about stereotyping missing missing elements of extremism non-islamic extremism that are are abundant and young people the role of young people where are they well i mean i'm both of the first two questions i mean i i was trying to get to exactly that point by or those points perhaps little in eloquently in that absolutely religion is a factor among many but it is not the only factor and unfortunately we in this over simplification that happens in the 24 hour news streams you know religion tends to pop out as the unifying factor for isle and several other organizations that are in the news i mean statistically here in the united states there are many more acts of terrorism committed on an annual basis by right-wing groups here in the u.s. then by international islamistic extremists so i mean yes we we focus on certain things and what i was advocating for is that we look at what the phenomenon is where it is and start to deconstruct it so that we can deal with those issues as they present themselves and if there's a religious element to it absolutely we need to have the religious voices at the table dealing with that if there are you know real grievances that need to be addressed whether they be human rights issues governance issues what have you those need to be addressed and you know let's face it part of the reason why islamist terrorism is in the news these days is because it's a legitimizing philosophy you know marxism has largely fell to the wayside nationalism while it still unifies many does not have the cache it once did for many people in a globalized world so you know islamist rhetoric islamist extremist rhetoric does have a certain legitimacy that appeals in a globalized world so there are reasons for this but absolutely i don't want to stereotype there's no one pathway to radicalization there's no one common element but if we look at each instance of individual or communal radicalization there are things that we can begin to understand and that start that begins by doing the analysis and demystifying the problem i'll say a couple things one agree religion is part of the soup the cocktail that that leads to violent extremism one thing that i get concerned about is that when we when we focus on the religious solutions again we jump to that counter narratives that if we can just come up with the right religious messaging then that will pull the rug out from under but we know that it's not just about the ideas it's not just about the theological propositions that there's other elements that we might ascribe to spiritual faith these issues of of hope and belonging and what do we do in the face of injustice and as violence is a violence legitimate response and and all of these things that are also playing into that you know quote unquote religious umbrella and we need to take account of of those more nebulous or complex or complicated factors in addition to some of the other institutional issues one thing you know you know i said i was very careful in my presentation to say that it's it's not just a muslim problem it's not just islam and i and i work in Sri Lanka and Myanmar and other places and in Nigeria where you see forms of buddhist what we call it might call extremism or christian extremism and then of course here in the us we see forms of it as well and and i think we need to be careful to to continue to recognize the the different forms in which extremism arises including those from different religious traditions as well as those from from different secular ideologies but i think we also at the same time need to recognize that the the the muslim elements of the muslim world in particular are struggling with this right now in a very acute way that i think other religious traditions have in the past too and so how can we the the pressing question for us in the US is how do we respond to that in a way that doesn't fuel this narrative of the war on Islam as well and and i think that's something that a lot of policymakers here are are struggling with so the final thing on youth i would just say that in my experience and a lot of these zones of conflict in which i work they the youth are actually at the front lines and they're doing a much better job than us oldies although i say that also acknowledging that at the beginning when the question was asked if who here are parents none of the people at the front of the room raised their hands um you are oh sorry david has kids i just didn't raise okay he doesn't like to acknowledge it but he has kids but the the youth have really been some of the most courageous and some of the most front line responders um in in manmar for example it was the youth groups in particular who came forward to do some of the interfaith work and to challenge some of the the rising buddhist nationalist rhetoric that was seeming to fuel some of the the violence that was taking place there and i've seen that in other places too and there's there's a number of programs like generation change a number of especially some of these technologically savvy social media campaigns that have really been youth driven and youth led and that and the old fogies have a lot to learn from thank you susan so why don't why don't we take another round and maybe um i give give michael on saline my chance to address those ones so we can hear from them as well um yes olivia and then and one here go ahead i wanted to just here's a mic a little bit deeper in the poll factors with iso in particular um i was really struck by sunday times article magazine article a couple weeks ago about the british fighters and how i forget the statistics but the majority were college educated middle middle class families were so programmed as peace builders to think of things in reaction to grievances but it really didn't feel like it was coming out of grievance it was more i was reminded of the generation that went to fight the spanish civil war that there was this tremendous sort of romanticization and i think sulema that really came through in the twitter pieces that you were showing in facebook with the women and i was then thinking about the thing we just heard about neuroscience and how what we think will be effective counter narratives often backfire um you'd spoke david about this not being your grandmother's religion that there's this sort of excitement and edge to it and i wonder if we're creative enough in thinking about how to address that aspect of it you spoke about its legitimacy so i just feel like there's there's more to understand there and really curious to your responses okay thank you for some wonderful presentations my name is judy bars hello um i think the cv e uh conversation often focuses on the trees rather than the forest and what i mean by that in this case is you know brilliantly alluded to by michael and and followed up by john but what what we failed to do is engage in what can only be a radical critique of a situation where we basically went into a war in iraq which created the circumstances in which um you know the the the isle the rise of isle became possible uh in in combination with you know decades of failed policy in the middle east supporting dictators and the rise of the air spring and protest and the you know the disintegration of of of the social order the political order that has ensued which creates the vacuum i think having actually worked at usip from 2007 to 2000 to 2007 during the iraq war what strikes me most is how we in this peacebuilding community are often expected to come up with a sort of bucket brigade you know to come up and clean up the mess after it's been you know created and art i think a challenge is to figure out how we can remind people that it's not just a matter of coming up with the specific techniques to work with the damaged individuals who've resulted from these political circumstances but to um you know remember to position front and center the failed policies that led us to this situation in the first place and to you know prevent you know continuation of those policies thank you judy and finally thank you my name is melinda holmes i work with the carter centers human rights program um i think that probably most of us agree that religion is an important component to this specific conversation but i wanted to push a little and ask what should we be doing when it comes to thinking about the role of religion more broadly and i want to ask that because just as it doesn't work very well to only talk to muslims when there's violence occurring or when there's violent extremism or worried about terrorism i don't think it works very well to only think about religion when it comes to the role of religion and violence and so i wanted to ask much as we may not see where the youth are because we may not understand their ways of of acting their ways of mobilizing maybe we aren't really understanding religion and its role very well because we're not where religion is with the youth with um sort of the masses and so i was wondering if you could comment on how we can advocate for a more effective and broad look at the role of religion in public policy and society at large thank you thank you very much so uh selena or michael i don't know if you have any initial um reactions otherwise um anyone on the anyone else go ahead but i have two comments uh first i agree with the uh statement came from uh zbeck about that we shouldn't make a stereotype that terrorism is somehow correlated to islam uh tourism happened from different groups and actually making this uh correlation in public makes it look like that terrorism is also wrong when it happens from a muslim but when it happens from someone else it it's okay lots of violent groups use uh examples from andela not from andela that in many eyes he was counted as a terrorist until he reconciled with the regime at the time and then he is not a terrorist anymore so it seemed that the the the act of terrorism is considered a politic uh decision or politic side if you are in my side then you are not a terrorist then you are freedom fighter but if you are on the other side then you are a terrorist and i think that's why the neutrality needed in in this aspect is the um referring to other thing about um i think uh the second point extremism for me is as a symptom to a real problem is there is a real problem could it be uh poverty could it be uh foreign intervention could it be um dictatorship could it be whatever it is so there is a problem extremism is just a way to to express the problem people are angry and they carry guns they kill people they do crazy things but why is there angry that is a serious problem i think we need to address the real problem not the symptom we need to fight the disease not the symptom disease i think religion contribute to this process as just finding and execute to do it so as an example in in my country lots of people like criminal groups they rob people and to justify socially they would say okay um i rob only from i steal money from rich people uh and by by making class differentiation they make it they make their crime to to seem justifiable i'm stealing from the rich people or stealing from other people or i'm stealing only from christians because god allowed us to take christians money or properties of christians so i think religion contribute to this process as just by providing a way of justification or making it so saying it's okay but it's not the real problems the real problems that people has the motive to have the motives to do these actions and and they have the intention to do it and and religions then come and justify it some religious interpretation just fight but it's not the real problem i i understand that by just offering justification to crimes it's a problem in itself but it is not what motivates people according to my experience it's not what motivates people to do these actions people have the intentions to do it and and then they try to look for ideological or religious justification for these actions there's a quick comment because i um first of all what happened in iraq is really sectarianism and as was said earlier isis uses the ideology of batis movement with uh islamic references and i keep hearing religion as if islam contained in itself a problem when it doesn't it's really an ideology coded with islamic references that they use out of context historically completely wrong and they use to attract people because when they come across naive uh young girls or boys and they say well it's your religious duty to come and join us and fight for us etc that's how they they gain uh force so i i think we should really be careful in using words just like religion or islam it's not religion or islam it's muslims certain muslims who create a problem thank you um please join me in thanking our panelists for all their comments today and for your comments as well and your and your thoughtful remarks on this topic and from a peacebuilding perspective we know this this isn't new per se but rather gets to a lot of the heart of the issues that we've worked on for a long time and i for one refuse to believe that narrative and identity is impossible to change and so we can only work in the micro factors in programming or or in the microcosm i believe large change in the way we think the way we think about ourselves the way we think about others is possible and that needs to be front and center in our strategies for this moving forward um in any case before you get up a couple of uh logistical announcements so following this session if you've registered and paid for the gallery walk and reception that will be in the leeland atrium it's where you walked in and found the registration table there's a photo exhibit of usip's work um leading up to our peacebuilding efforts prior to the afghan elections last year as well as photos from tom farrow afp board member and director of the center for global health and peacebuilding and tom has a particular unique eye so you should look at some of his work for everyone else thank you again very much if you are coming to tomorrow's session it doesn't take place here at usip it will be at fhi 360 it starts at 8 30 there's a soapbox where you can make individual uh announcements to everyone else to let them know something you're working on if that can help facilitate you finding people that you're interested in connecting with faster so please join us tomorrow as well and thank you again everybody for for being part of the session