 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 and 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. 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 could help you, Sarah, in your role. And one question I have is, to what extent is it enough just to do good peace-building and development? Do we need to label it specifically as CVE? And one concern that we have in the peace-building community is a certain instrumentalization of our work. And so our partners in the ground feel we're not doing this to create sustainable, healthy communities, but to root out the cancer of the extremists. So, Ed, 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 peace-building 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, 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 peace-building 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 Bonke 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 US 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 peace building 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 peace builders and to play a role in this world of changing so quickly, what advice would you give them? Use your words. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, but 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 peace building 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 gonna 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 it's 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 peace building. 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 and 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? 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 gotta 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 after 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 gonna have the impact that we need. We're not gonna 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 do it in a way that recognizes people and bring them into the partnership with equal mutual respect. But one issue with the Mayo Clinic that you mentioned is that the doctors there are incentivized to work in a system that they are rewarded for that which is very different from normal healthcare models. So how do we incentivize that kind of systemic engagement within these very complex bureaucracies? Money is really good, is that it? 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 gonna 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, if you're 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 national security, foreign policy development objectives is to articulate the kinds of results that it wants to see instead of deciding 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 gonna be most opposite for that particular case. So that's how I think you do incentives 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 wanna 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 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 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 how vital it is to bring these pieces together and to see security in a broader frame and discuss more broadly. I think 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 together. Agree with that? Good. Well, let me do a quick time check with the powers that be here. Because I have on my watch, we have about 15 minutes, but our clock is saying 41. Guidance? Well, I'll wait to hear more guidance and we'll continue with Q and A. We have mics up here. Oh, so we're gonna be passing mics around. So maybe we'll cluster questions. So 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. Hi, thank you. 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 USA 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 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. Peter. Thank you. My name's 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 for proscribed organizations constrains the ability of those who want to counter violent extremism in a very direct way. Thank you. Thank you. Why don't we take one more, Fred? 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, little 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, et cetera. 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 gonna 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, Leon 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, local neighborhood community leaders, civil society leaders had a forum in which he regularly engaged in dialogue with them 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 seems and weaknesses and vulnerabilities and so the prevention work 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 create challenges for peace building organizations particularly when they wanna work with those that are closest to the problem set on the violent extremism problem set. So I would acknowledge that I've certainly heard that that is a serious issue. On the final question about the big 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 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 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 while 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 do you do conflict prevention. It's if you're gonna 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 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 embassy or 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 the other actors doing that work. But the more that we keep our official Americans locked up inside the worst that will be for us as a country. So that's absolutely critical. 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, 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 scale issue Fred, absolutely Sarah to 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 or the further solidifying critical norms around state behavior and expectations and how 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 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 a walk across Africa or 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 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. 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 is 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 of 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 US 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 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. And 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, Ron. 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 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 sort of bureaucratic budget-driven process, it just becomes hard to stay focused on the integrated problems. We can have, and this relates to the second question on metrics, the Hill has said very positive things about our HIV AIDS program in large part because the results are so easy to measure and this is like, we focus on the crisis because it's here, we don't focus on prevention because it's not here yet and 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 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 were 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 it is a chronic liability for the way we do our foreign policy budgeting. 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 undercut the upstream efforts but you do wanna have that flexibility. I would note, this measurement issue is something that is always a struggle and in fact, you may wanna mention the lunch today, Melanie, on that but 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 focus on getting ahead of problems, it's more cost effective than doing massive responses either to a natural disaster or to a war and a conflict where you have to resort to military means. It is definitely in our national security interests to try to prevent conflict from happening and it's a very, very 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 desired outcome of peace and stability, the better off we are in getting around some of the complexities 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 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. Well on that note, thanks to both of you so much for a fascinating discussion. Actually after the next panel we'll have more information about our lunch which indeed for those of you who are interested we'll 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. Ursula, am I supposed to be? Oh, Linwood, yes, sorry to see you 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, 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 challenge and the threat of silencing our voices and that will be kicked off by Framing remarks by Rosario Tuchif from USAID. Thank you very much.