 Good afternoon, everybody, welcome. My name is Nancy Lindborg, and I'm pleased to welcome you here to USIP. For 30 years, USIP has remained committed to applying the kind of tools and techniques, field programs, and research that really pushed towards the vision of a world free of violent conflict. And the conversation that we're having today, I think, is evidence that remains an important and vital endeavor with the evidence of 60 million people who are displaced around the world from conflict and from violence. And so our belief is that it is critical that we continue to push forward on this mission of envisioning a world free from violent conflict and that what we're talking about today is a vital part of moving that forward. Today's event is part of a series of conversations that we have had here at USIP on the theme of conflict, violence, and fragility. And it's a conversation that has included Jim Kim, Madeleine Albright, Steve Hadley, David Miliband, who's back with us here today. They have been lively conversations. We have this moment right now between the sustainable development goals with the historic inclusion of Goal 16 and as we move towards the World Humanitarian Summit. So today's conversation is a very important part of that journey that we're all on together right now. And to get us started this afternoon, I'm delighted to introduce one of the real movers and shakers of this conversation overall and in particular today. And a long good friend of mine, Rick Leach, has really spent his career working on these kinds of issues. He was on the House of Representatives Select Committee on Hunger, where he was very involved with campaigns related to hunger, to the vital issues of food assistance. He's been involved with the World Health Organization, the Department of Health and Human Services, and throughout his career, he has steadfastly tackled the most pressing crises of his time. As the president and CEO of World Food Program USA, Rick's really at the crosshairs of a lot of what we're talking about today. And in that role, he's played a really critical role of shaping the conversation around world hunger, raising a lot of the difficult issues and convening us to tackle what the solutions might be. So please join me in welcoming a good friend and a very thoughtful person in the community, Rick Leach. Thank you very much, Nancy, and the US Institute of Peace for hosting us today and a panelist and moderator for joining us. For too long, the war in Syria has been about numbers. 7.6 million people internally displaced, 4.1 million refugees, 200,000 people killed. But the crisis in Syria is not about numbers, it's about people. It's about people like you, like me. And last month, when that image of this little boy on a beach face down on the coast of Turkey helped to transform those numbers into a human being, that little boy's name was Elan, he was only three years old. And there are a lot of other stories, there are a lot of other human stories. Person like Fatima, she's Syrian refugee, 52 years old, living in makeshift camp in Lebanon with her husband, her two children. A colleague of ours, Dina El-Qasabi, met with her a few weeks ago, talked to her about life as a refugee. And in her camp where Fatima lives, the World Food Program cut food assistance in half, lack of resources. Same situation is true throughout Lebanon, all refugees, food assistance cut in half. Jordan, same thing for a lot of the refugees, Iraq, same thing for a lot of the Syrian refugees. So now Fatima and her family, forced from her home, living in a country where she can't work, where her kids aren't in school, now is trying to survive and not doing well at it. She told Dina, and this is, it's hard to imagine, that to help her children cope with hunger pains because they're not getting enough to eat, she actually ties a scarf around their bellies and pulls it tight. Almost as obscene and wrong as that is, we actually have a terminology for this. The UN, we call this a negative coping strategy. You don't have enough to eat, cut your meals, put a scarf, pull it around your stomach, a whole host of things that we find to be unacceptable. I don't think this is a negative coping strategy. I think it's a failure of humanity. That's what it is. And Fatima, her family, the little boy, that's the human face of conflict. And it's not just Syria. Right now, as you know, there's conflicts raging in Yemen, in Iraq, South Sudan, Central African Republic, throughout the world. In fact, right now there's 14 conflicts, 14 wars going on that are displacing millions of families from their homes. And as Nancy just said, we have 60 million people who are displaced. We haven't had that number of people displaced since World War II. If the total number of displaced people actually was a country, it'd be the 24th largest country in the world, right after Italy. And the reality is the situation's not gonna get any better in the short term. In the foreseeable future, we're gonna have this kind of a situation that we, the international community, have to grapple with. People displaced by conflict are generally displaced for about 17 years. So the world needs to step up. We need to step up in a way that we haven't done since World War II. Humanitarian agencies and NGOs serve as lifelines on the front line. Incredible work done in very difficult, very dangerous circumstances. But the reality is that the humanitarian needs are far outstripping resources. And the need will continue to grow. Last year, the UN coordinated appeal sought $19.5 billion to deal with the humanitarian needs. This is the record for the UN. Never in the history of the UN have they sought that amount of support. About 60% of it was met, 60%. That to me, that's a failure. That's a failure of humanity. This year, circumstances likely would be worse. There's not one of the humanitarian response plans that are even funded at 60% at this time. The humanitarian response appeal for Syria and Syrian refugees, right now is 44% funded. It's a $4 billion shortfall right now to take care of people displaced by war. Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, who himself was a refugee, said, the system isn't broken, it's just broke. So what does that mean? The result is malnutrition. The result is a lack of hope. It's desperate families making the decision that it's better to get into a rubber dinghy and risk your life than to stay in Lebanon or Jordan or within Syria. No education, no opportunity, no hope. A few weeks ago, heads of state met in New York City, 70th anniversary meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. When they arrived, the humanitarian appeals, the global consolidated humanitarian appeals were 44% met. When they left, a week later, General Assembly concluded, not much had changed. That's a failure, that's a failure of humanity. So that's why we're here today, to grapple with the difficult question of what do we do? How do we rise to meet this new challenge, this challenge that will be on our doorstep for the time and the foreseeable future? So look forward to discussion and at this point, turn it over to Jim Fallows. Greetings, thank you very much. Rick, thanks to USIP and WFP for sponsoring this program. Thank you all for coming into our panelists. I have three introductory kinds of comments to present to you. My name is James Fallows, I'm a writer for The Atlantic. One is a technological introduction. For those of you who are live tweeting this or following the hashtag that we would hope you would use is hashtag aid crisis, singular crisis, aid crisis. And the Twitter handles for the relevant parties are at USIP and at WFPUSA, World Program USA. So that's the technological introduction. I'm gonna introduce something about the theme next and then I'm gonna tell you about our wonderful panelists who we're gonna hear from with, they'll give some introductory presentations, we'll have questions and then I'll open it up for you all. I'm here as the journalist on the panel. And the function of journalism, believe it or not, is over time to direct attention to things that people need to know about. We do a lot of other things beside that, but that's our reason for being, of marshaling attention to things that people wouldn't necessarily realize if it didn't come across their daily can. As we look back through the history of world events and of journalism, we recognize often there's a huge gap and the lag time between problems that need to be addressed and attention that is properly focused on them. The joke version of this in journalism is that when there's weather in New York City, it's national news, the weather's someplace else, who cares? The refugee crisis right now is one of the most, is a signal episode, especially in the United States, but worldwide too of a gap between an emerging worldwide true crisis and disaster and the resources of the world, especially richest countries and paying attention to it, directing political effort, directing citizen attention and all the rest. Our purpose here today is to help citizens in the United States and around the world who are watching this on a live stream or see it later on to understand the crisis, to know what the sources are, to know what the possible solutions are and just to be equipped to support more constructive actions in their own nations around the world. So we hope that when this session is over, when we leave at our assigned breakup time of 1.30, you'll have a chance to hear answers to the questions you have, but more broadly to have a way to think about this situation, how serious it is, what the real problems are and so that's our goal for the moments ahead. We could not be better equipped with the three people we have to lead this discussion. I'm gonna introduce them in the order in which you'll hear from in the next few minutes. First we're gonna hear, on my far left, you're right from David Milliband, who you know very well as the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee who is right at the heart of these refugee crises now. His background of course, he's a former foreign secretary of the UK, a former environment minister of the UK, someone well experienced in international US UK affairs and so he will lead off the discussion helping with framing remarks. Then we're going to hear from Philip Gordon who wins the prize for adaptability under stress. Until about midnight last night, Sandy Berger was going to be here and he is now indisposed with diseases that are going around. So we are at least equally blessed to have Philip Gordon here. He has a wide experience in national security. He's worked both in the Obama and the Clinton administrations, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations before that senior National Security Council official, special assistant to the president on the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf region, former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and National Security Council back in the Clinton administration. So he knows the terrain on which this drama is now being played out. And then we're going to hear from the USIP's own president who you heard from a moment ago, Nancy Lindborg, who has been extensive experience before coming here early this year as for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance and was then a long career as head of Mercy Corps which obviously is involved in the NGO aspects here. We're going to have our panelists talk about what is going on, how serious it is, what if anything can be done, what the priority list is and thinking about these issues. So let's start with David Miliband please. Could you in a few minutes tell us what are the most important framing thoughts about the state of the crisis, its origins, you've written about blip versus trend, how you think, just set it up for us, how to think about the world refugee crisis of this moment. Thanks very much, Jim, it's good to be here. Thank you to Nancy for hosting me again and thanks to Phil for joining the panel. I want to say three things to you. First of all, address the question, why should there be record numbers of people fleeing conflict around the world, both as refugees and IDPs? Secondly, what are their needs and their situation? And third, what can the humanitarian sector do about it? And I'll do that within my five minutes. Four minutes or five minutes, I don't know, but I will do that basically a minute and a half each. So four and a half minutes. Why is this happening? Why should 60 million people be fleeing conflict around the world? Why should there be 40 million IDPs and 20 million refugees? Essentially three reasons. First of all, a very difficult one to talk about, a one that is easier not to talk about, but which is not honest not to talk about. There are fundamental questions being posed within Muslim majority countries and within the Muslim worlds about the reconciliation of democracy, modernity and theology in very fundamental ways. And the fact that IRC, an organization founded by Einstein to rescue Jews from Europe in the 1930s, should now have at least 40% of our beneficiaries being Muslim tells you that there are fundamental questions that are being asked. When I was in Lebanon last May, an academic said to me, look what you've got to understand is, it's not just quote unquote our version of the Reformation, which you sometimes hear said in Western capitals, it's a combination of the Reformation, the Declaration of Independence, the American Civil War and the collapse of communism all at the same time. So the first driver of the major refugee and IDP flows are these convulsions in the Islamic world. The second is that there are a growing number of weak states around the world, symbolized sadly by South Sudan, states that are neither able to meet the basic needs of their own citizens nor able to contain ethnic, political and religious difference within peaceful boundaries. And a country that was 99% united in its referendum for independence has now become divided within three years of its independence and four and a half million people are in food need, one and a half million people displaced within a population of 10 million. The third reason is in my view is that the international system, the international political system is weaker and more divided than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And in some ways you could make the argument, I don't know whether we'll go to this, this isn't really a foreign policy seminar, but you could make the argument that while the international political system isn't more divided than at any time since the Cold War, obviously during the Cold War, it isn't more divided than during the Cold War, the Cold War was a singular division of the world into two blocks. You can make the case that the international political system is more fragmented now than it was during the Cold War. But so I'd put to you, if you're asking yourself the question, why should this be happening? Why should there be the number of wars within countries that are driving these flows? Those would be my three answers. A second point, I think it's very important that people understand there aren't just more needs, there are different needs. The current 60 million refugees and IDPs are more urban than their predecessors. 60% of refugees and IDPs are in urban areas, not in refugee camps. They are younger than their predecessors, 50% of them are under the age of 15, I think was the statistic that I saw. They're more Muslim, as I've said, they're displaced for longer, the 17 years figure that Mr. Leitch, President Leitch rightly referred to, shows you that you've got a elongation of the displacement within countries and across borders. So I think it's really important that people understand that there isn't just more need for which we need more aid, there is different need for which we need different aid. And it's very, very important to me that we have a debate about better aid, not just more aid. It's true that we need more money, it's true that it's a scandal the World Food Programme should be halving, it's voucher level of support in Lebanon from $26 to $13 a month. But we need different kinds of aid, to speak to the more urbanised, longer term, etc. populations. Thirdly, how does the humanitarian sector have to change? I think it has to change in some fundamental ways. It needs a much clearer set and more focused set of shared outcomes that it's trying to pursue. If you think about the sustainable development goals that were rightly referred to, they hardly mention people in conflict. There's one goal, Goal 16, which is devoted to peace and tranquility, and that's a step forward. But if you ask yourself, what's the goal for kids caught up in conflict? In the education goal, there isn't a target for that. If you ask, what about women and girls suffering violence? Is there a reference to women and girls in conflict in the commitment to equality for women and girls? There isn't that reference in the target. So we need a shared set of outcomes to bind the humanitarian community together. Secondly, we need those outcomes to bind in the development community as well as the humanitarian community. Because many of the places that we're working are fragile states, not necessarily poor states. At the moment, Lebanon and Jordan, the World Bank isn't allowed to work there because they're middle-income countries. That's a ridiculous situation, given the level of need that exists there. I would argue there needs to be much stronger evidence-based to what the humanitarian sector does. We at IRC have said that we're going to make all of our programs evidence-based or evidence-generating in the next five years because we want to strengthen the evidence base of what we're doing. It's not strong enough at the moment. And finally, and in conclusion, we are the humanitarian sector of $22 billion of a sector of the global economy. Before you think that's a lot of money, Facebook paid $19 billion to buy WhatsApp. So that's the relative valuation of the sector. But if this was a low-tech sector, if you want to call this a low-tech sector of the economy, it would be investing $75 million a year on proportion into research and development, into R&D. But there isn't a systematic R&D fund or funding in the humanitarian sector. We've got to start thinking about ourselves as a sector that's got to take seriously the need for those kind of breakthrough initiatives. So my point to you is that there is a decade of disorder. It does have fundamental roots. It does need to be tackled by politics. But its symptoms, which are humanitarian misery on a very large and changing scale, can be addressed in a more effective way if the humanitarian and development actors, so-called, get our act together. Great. Thank you very much, David Milban. That was an exemplary presentation of cause, needs, and solutions. So thank you very much. I'd like to turn now to Philip Gordon. Obviously, there were some strategic issues that David was referring to. You've been directly involved in some of the strategic, both sources, solutions, and tensions involving here. In SGU, to have a sort of complementary strategic and political perspective to the one David Milban just gave us, I'd like to focus on one particular aspect, too. I mentioned earlier that crises have different salience depending how close they are. For example, the Mariel refugee flow into the US was big news here because it was in the United States. And the Mexican border situation is there's been an arms-length view in the US towards this European Middle Eastern situation with the rare exception, as Rick Leach mentioned, of these emotional photos. So give us the strategic and political setup and talk about the difference, perhaps, in European and North American perspective. Absolutely. Thanks, Jim, and I will certainly get to that because I think that actually describes an aspect of the European piece. Let me, David Nancy, obviously the real experts on this topic, what I can try to do is put it in a political and strategic context, especially, as you say, coming out of the administration, handling particularly the Middle East questions over the past couple of years. And I would start by saying, this is absolutely, unambiguously, a political, strategic geopolitical issue as well as a humanitarian one. I mean, there's no question about that. It is clearly, first and foremost, a humanitarian issue. And we should care about it first and foremost because there are an awful lot of people suffering. But as we all know in this town and elsewhere, that's not always enough to motivate people to do something about it. And so you do have to address the question, not only why should we care on a humanitarian level, but how does it affect our country? And as I say, I don't think there's any doubt that the US has material strategic interests in helping deal with this issue. And let me lay out a couple of the layers of that. Particularly, I mean, if you wanna start with the implications of the refugees coming out of Syria, which is generating more than anywhere else, there are several levels. One is the immediate neighbors. We have a strategic stake in stability among various countries in the Middle East. Well, so long as this number of refugees are flowing out of Syria into Lebanon, where we know that some 25% of the population of that already fragile country are Syrian refugees, it is astonishing that Lebanon, frankly, I think most of us would have thought by now accepting what Lebanon has accepted, it just wouldn't exist anymore. It is almost ungovernable in the best of circumstances. And we sat around the table and talked about this each successive year, getting more and more unsustainable. But it is hard to see how Lebanon, with its fragile ethnic balance survives if the refugee crisis continues. Now Turkey is obviously much better able with its larger population and more resources to deal with an even larger number of refugees. But you're already up to two million now, not just hanging around at the border, but spreading around in the country at a time when that country itself is undergoing tremendous political change and polarization. And particularly when one of the remedies you might think of to deal with the refugee crisis, which might be supporting the Kurds to help deal with the conflict in Syria, has direct implications for Turkish politics and stability in itself. And we're seeing that play out now. The more we do on the Kurds, the more you see President Erdogan running on a nationalistic platform redoing the election. So Turkey and other key NATO partner under great pressure from this, Jordan, we've consistently increased our assistance to Jordan, but it is not keeping up with the flow that has potential to stabilize Jordan. Then you get to Iraq, which is unstable for all sorts of other reasons. So the point is one, all the immediate neighbors of Syria have the potential to be destabilized and that affects our strategic interests. Then we get to the Europe point, which you mentioned, absolutely rightly. It gets your attention. Those of us who follow these issues have known for years that there is a tremendous and unbelievable humanitarian tragedy unfolding before our eyes. It has been relatively easy for people in Europe and the United States to overlook it. It is a statistic. Oh, you know, what is it? Two million, four million, eight million? It's something you read about in the paper and move on until there are specific cases of human beings whose faces you see and poor families getting into rickety boats and showing up in Europe and then the clashes at the borders and all the rest. That I think has gotten people's attention in a way that will potentially inspire people to do more about it, but it also has the potential to undermine stability in especially the poor Balkan countries where we've invested so much to try to bring it about and also the tensions within the EU. And I think there's been some unbelievable battles among EU leaders with already some costs like suspension of the Schengen arrangements at a time when the Eurozone is already putting pressure on the European Union. So strategic pressures there. And then finally, there's an element that I would stress that we sometimes overlook, which is the sectarian implications of the refugee crisis, both locally and globally, but to sort of sum it up, the refugee crisis has the potential to inflame sectarian tensions and the sectarian tensions have the potential to inflame the refugee crisis. And that, again, to go back to Syria is what is happening more than anything. People say Assad is a magnet for terrorists, which he is, but what's the real magnet for terrorists is the conflict and the killing of in particular certain groups which inspire and inflame the anger and resentment of those who are willing to then become foreign fighters and go and join the fight, which then has sectarian implications elsewhere. And so it spills out and magnifies and will create more refugees, which then inflames sectarian differences. So I think when you put all of those together, hopefully, whether you're in Washington or Berlin or anywhere around the world, you understand that this is not just a matter of humanitarian concerns but geopolitical and strategic ones. Just two things to end. One is as a policy matter, what does this mean? It means, obviously, and this will sound like a platitude, but it puts an even greater premium on ending the war, ending all of the wars, but again, going back to this Syrian case. And I actually think that it has gotten to the point, the combination of these things, the refugees getting to Europe and the Russian deployment, which has many potential negative implications, has the potential to mix things up in a way that might provide an avenue forward. We can talk about that in the discussion. Last thing I would say in terms of reactions and policy implications or implications for how we think about it, as much as we might like to believe that ending the wars is the prerequisite, they are likely to get worse before they get better. I think any honest assessment, whether it's Syria or elsewhere, has to understand that for all we must do and will do, they are likely to get worse before they're likely to get better and therefore we need to understand. Again, that's what David Nancy can address more directly than me, but from my point of view, we almost need a paradigm shift in the way we think about dealing with this. I'll just give one sort of illustrative anecdote. I don't, for all of the discussions we had in the Situation Room about the military campaign against ISIS or other military campaigns, I don't remember discussions of the cost of the military deployments. So it might, the overall cost, yes, but it might cost $20,000 to fly an F-15 to take out an ISIS post. I've never heard anyone say, let's not do that sorty, it just costs too much. I have often heard people say, boy, we feel badly about the refugees here or there, but you can only ask Congress so much. And I just think that paradigm of how we think about these things, once we accept that this issue is not going to go away and it has humanitarian and geopolitical consequences, maybe that comes into play a little bit. Thank you, there is a lot to follow up on here, which we will, but for our first round, I wanted to turn to Nancy Lindborg. You've heard David Milban framing the overall issue and Philip Gordon now talking about the strategic underpinning. David was talking about a number of sort of specific organizational changes in the way that aid is delivered and the way we think about doing it. Tell us, you're the head of an institution that is designed for peaceful ways of resolving conflicts. How should we think about the way that aid is now being provided, the role of NGOs? Tell us from your perspective how we should think about this issue. Great, thanks Jim and thank you both to David and Philip for laying down an excellent basis. And I'll speak both from my position here at USIP but also a long engagement over the last 25 years on these issues. And I wanna first of all thank Phil for making your comment about the way that costs are not considered militarily in the way that they are agonized over and pennies found for humanitarian issues. And I think this goes to a fundamental opportunity that we have on the basis of never waste a crisis in that the 60 million number of people who are displaced is really grabbing attention in the way that it hasn't before. And it does give us an opportunity to focus the conversation both on how do we improve the humanitarian enterprise but even more importantly, how do we understand that this is just a symptom of a far deeper set of problems that we absolutely must come together within the United States and with global partners on taking a different approach to looking at what is behind these protracted conflicts not just in the Middle East but also in this arc of fragility that we see in the Middle East and into Africa primarily where you've got a confluence of countries that have illegitimate repressive and or weak governments that are the primary source of these 60 million refugees. When you look at the humanitarian infrastructure, the stress comes from the protracted crises. I think the latest figure is about 66% of contributions from the key development donors goes to protracted crises. And at that point you need to really, I think bifurcate where you have natural disasters and where you have conflict induced disasters and crises. And I say that because I actually think we've made more progress on dealing with the natural disasters in terms of increased investment in disaster risk reduction, increased investment and partnership with country governments in getting ahead on the preparations. What we saw with the Philippines, with the typhoon a year and a half ago was that they actually were able to evacuate 800,000 people in advance. There were good preparations. There was a lot of death that was avoided. On the conflict front, I think we have the weaknesses or the fault lines within the humanitarian system are more deeply on display. And so I wanna talk about three key areas that I think are under discussion that we need to get very serious about and we need to seize the opportunity of the World Humanitarian Summit, which could either be a really nice couple of days in Istanbul or it could be an opportunity for us to really push forward with seriousness of purpose how we tackle this. And so the first is around financing. Rick noted that the system is broke. It is absolutely broke. But it is more than just the mo beta kind of conversation. We need to engage a broader set of contributors to this and we need to rethink how the funding goes out instead of in these multiple tiny segments that keep our NGO and UN partners working on three month or six month or even 12 month approaches because these are not ever solved that quickly. And so just the duration of the funding, I would underscore what David already said about getting the IFIs, the multilaterals, engaged earlier because we know that they need to be a part of the conversation. There needs to be a greater understanding that this is a shared global burden and you don't have an opportunity to opt out of addressing this so that it's not a begging bowl where our State Department colleagues spend a huge amount of time dialing for dollars, please help with this crisis. So there are a number of good solutions on the table. I think that the hope and the opportunity is to do a forcing function where you really get global buy-in to a different way of funding and looking seriously at some of the good proposals. Secondly, it's a structural problem. We have spent the last 50 years proliferating expertise, institutions, sectors and mandates that have created a series of unbelievable stovepipes that get in the way of really tackling the problems that we're trying to solve. And this has been extremely evident in the Syrian crisis where you've got mandates getting in the way of really being able to look at what is now quite a long-term crisis and doesn't neatly break down between refugees, IDPs, host communities. We need to look at how you create greater porousness within the UN operational agencies so that you get greater efficiencies. We're seeing some good progress on this with the way that UNHCR and World Food Program are sharing, loading up of resources onto debit cards so that refugees get what they need with one debit card, for example. But we need to really push that for greater efficiencies in part to get the confidence of a greater global donor community. And we need to take a really hard look at how the US, which is the largest contributor, and we should feel very proud of the generosity of the United States in meeting these needs. We should do more. But we are not optimally organized. We have our own humanitarian spigots divided across several different of our agencies. And we see that we don't have one senior person who is able to go sit at the international table with the same weight of the seniority that comes from Europe, comes from the EU or European countries. And so we dilute the power of our effort. We dilute it and we become a little bit hostage to our client, the respective client UN agencies where you have USAID channeling funds to some of the organizations and state to others. So we need to do a serious rethink on the institutional arrangement to get rid of stovepipes to create greater efficiencies both at the UN level and within the US. My final point is that, and it picks up on something that both David and Phil said, we really need to not get too distracted with the humanitarian part of this situation. What you find, and I think we found this in the situation room, is that sometimes because the humanitarian action is actually on the ground and it's making a difference that the focus is there as opposed to the harder problems of what is behind that, the terrible governance, the corruption, the lack of accountable governments and that's why I think goal 16, which is a historic consensus agreement by the nations of the UN to include accountable, inclusive societies, access to justice for all and strong institutions at every level as a part of a global goal that we need to really create the institutions and the consensus and the commitment to move forward on that. Without making progress on that, we will continue to just be working on the humanitarian problem and as I said to the South Sudanese delegation that was here last week, the United States has just put half a billion dollars of humanitarian assistance. I'm looking at Dina Esposito, half a billion into South Sudan humanitarian over the last year. That should have been development assistance. But we also need to bring the humanitarian and development sectors much more closely together. Great, thank you very much, Nancy. So, David, I'm sure there are many things you would like to follow up on. I'm gonna actually divert you in a somewhat different direction, though, unless you have a... Well, you don't know what direction I was gonna go in, so, anyway, I look forward to being diverted. Okay, so this is in your role as the one of us on the panel who's actually been a successful elected politician and that you know what it is to deal with national politics. Some people might dispute that it's not successful, I think. You have been and may well be a continually successful politician. You're the one of us who started out outside the United States, although you now work here. And it's about the long-term politics of this issue. We've all discussed the ways in which politics are part of the source of the problem in these troubled countries. They're also a very important part of the response of how much money nations decide to spend, how much attention they pay to the mechanisms, how many foreign people they accept within their population. I've been traveling a lot in the U.S. in recent years and you find in odd places in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they have enormous Somalian, Sudanese and Congolese population that actually has been integrated very well. But even in the United States, as we know, there are huge tensions over immigration and the nations of Europe were not set up as nations of immigrants. So the idea of having all these people come in as a more trying political challenge for them, the final part of this setup, you may remember a French novel that came out 20 or 30 years ago called The Camp of the Saints by a man named Jean Raspayee. It was a dystopian novel saying what will happen when Europe is overrun by these refugees from North Africa and the Middle East and we're gonna have to close the borders. It was sort of a tea party type, tea party ahead of its time model. What are you seeing in Europe and the world political situation as a whole about being able to absorb into its fabric people from other places, other religions, other languages and how will this affect the refugee crisis? Well, look, it's a great question. I think that it was Simon Schama wrote a piece in the Financial Times three or four weekends ago where he said that the three great challenges of the next 50 years are first of all, climate change, secondly, global inequality, and thirdly, how different people learn to live together. Now, the good news is actually there's loads of examples of different people successfully living together, notably in this country, but not only in this country and in very crude terms, if you think about one end of the spectrum requiring what I would call assimilation, a middle point talking about integration and a third point talking about vulcanization, sort of separate communities. And you see France as an example that demands assimilation, quote unquote, Republican values, that's not to do with your Republican party, but the Republican tradition says that if you're gonna become a French citizen, you have to absorb and live out a set of Republican virtues and it requires assimilation and subjugation of religious and other identities. A middle point which is about integration which I think is a good word which recognizes that in diversity people will have private identities but there are also public identities and public rules that they have to live by and then a more Balkanized situation which ironically, the separate communities problem sometimes comes from the, sometimes French assertion of a Republican demand can lead actually to separate communities but it's happened in other countries as well. But I think that the evidence is absolutely clear that when communities are integrated economically, culturally and socially, when in the words of the former chief rabbi of the UK when they build their house together, then people want to live in the house. If you build the house together, you live cooperatively in the house together and certainly our experience as a resettlement agency in 26 US cities is that when parents get English language teaching and education and employment, when kids get education, you're on a cycle where in sewer falls, there is a welcome and it's a striking global feature that the most integrated communities are those where integration is the most popular and it's the communities that have the least diversity that are most afraid of it. I mean, that's the optimistic reading. So the first thing is to say that there's a lot of history to this and obviously it comprises economics as well as cultural and social phenomena. There's a wholly separate discussion I think which is the extent to which religious difference and racial difference pose different challenges for integration, but let me not go there. Secondly, briefly, the European situation, the easiest and simplest thing to say is that the faster the change, the harder it is to manage. Sweden has gone, I think, from being 4%, I think minority to 14% in the space of six years, that's challenging. That's very, very challenging because the discourse in Sweden is about thousands of years of history which was relatively monochrome and has now become, and the country's been changed fundamentally in a short period of, where's Lindborg? Where's that? So suddenly it occurs to me. Sweden, there you go. So you can put me right on whether I've got the Swedish story right, but the challenge for Europe is gonna be the speed of absorption, I think less than the principles of absorption. Let me just make a third and final point, which is that there's a danger that we put, that we say that there's a humanitarian box which is symptoms and there's a political box which is causes, and I argue that there's a third and intermediate box. It's true that there is a demand to deal with symptoms and when human life is on the line, it's immoral not to respond to it. However, I think that the protection of civilians in conflict situations is an intermediate box that is very, very important. If you think about the Syria crisis, there are four and a half million refugees, there are seven million people inside Syria who've been displaced who are now homeless. And there are many more who are being besieged either by Assad on the one hand or ISIS on the other. And it was interesting to me when I went to Lesvos in Greece, which is the island where half of all the refugees arriving in Europe are coming into Europe. They're arriving at 6,000 a day at the moment. A lot of them are coming straight out of Syria. I've got in my head the engineering graduate students from Damascus University who said to me, I said, why have you left? They said, well, last week I was an engineering student and I decided I had to leave because I got conscripted into Assad's army. And so he left. There was another family from Ghouta, which is in the west of Syria, which is a Damascus suburb, barrel bombed by Assad on the one hand, terror of ISIS on the other, straight out into Europe. The failure to protect civilians in war zones is true for Afghanistan as well. 20% of the refugees arriving in Europe are Afghans at the moment. The failure to uphold international humanitarian law in the conduct of war is as big an issue as the erosion of the status of refugees who cross borders as a result of war. So I think that it's true that one does have to get to the political roots of problems. And I always say to people, we in the humanitarian sector can staunch the dying, but it takes politics to stop the killing. But there's also an intermediate category, which is that the way in which war is conducted, and remember after the Second World War, all sorts of Geneva conventions and other protocols were adhered to. And I think it's a plausible and fearsome possibility at the moment that the way war is being conducted is decreasingly respectful of the interests of non-competence. And that is part of the story here. And our failure to protect non-competence or the failure to protect non-competence, leave open who needs to do it, is a major driver of the kind of symptoms that we're seeing. And I think that Nancy wanted to follow up on this, but I had one brief clarification question for you. There was a lot of attention in the United States to the reaction in Hungary last month to the current flow. Is the Hungarian reaction an outlier or is it a sign of a broader recoil you're seeing? Look, Mrs. Le Pen has got 27% of the vote in French opinion polls for the presidential election. So it would be complacent beyond parody to say that that was an outlier. I mean, it's ironic, given that 200,000 Hungarians fled to Austria in 1956 and were welcomed as refugees. So it's appalling as well as ironic some of the reaction. But I think that there's a really, really important point in this, which is that in my experience, the politics of this becomes very, very difficult when refugee status and migration status gets confused. I think people do understand that if you've got a well-founded fear of persecution, which is the definition of a refugee though, that there should be rights associated with that. Compassion is induced, and as long as compassion is combined with competence, people will put up with it. If they think, and this happened to us in the UK in the late 90s, if people think that the asylum-stroke refugee system is getting mixed up with the economic migration system and that you can't tell the difference between the two and it's being competently run, then you've got a very big problem. And I think that's, there's a lot of the fear. Well, first of all, just two points. A lot of the politicians who are trying to use immigration and refugee status as a club to beat people with are deliberately confusing the status of the refugee with the status of the immigrants. That's why they talk about a quote unquote migrant crisis, which I always say to people, it's not political correctness to call it a refugee crisis, it's correctness. Right, so the first thing is that there is some deliberate obscuring of the... We've had that in our politics recently too, yes. But secondly, it's not simple to divide because you actually have quite a lot of examples where there's mixed reasons for people to float. So I don't want to pretend it's simple, but I do think that defending and the integrity of the status of refugees as people have well-founded fear of persecution is really important for the overall politics of the country. So Ned, did you want to follow up? I have a political question for Phil, but do you have a quick follow up? Yeah, a couple of comments. First is, especially given what we spend a lot of time thinking and working on here at the US Institute of Peace, conflict is natural. There will always be conflict, it occurs. The issue is how well is it managed and how do you keep it from becoming violent? Because once it becomes violent, that you have the terrible humanitarian consequences and outflow of refugees. And so as we think about your comment, David, about how people get to learn to live together, but also the roots of a lot of the refugee crisis, it's how do you ensure that you have the kind of governments that are inclusive and accountable, but that know how to manage conflict so that it doesn't become violent. And those are tools, those are techniques, those are approaches. We can do more and we can invest in increasing that. Is there a specimen of such a government you would point out to us now in an area with conflict? I would say that for all the problems we have in the United States, we have managed to take conflict over and over again and enabled it to in fact lead to transformative change. The big movements with women's rights, with environmental, with the anti-war movement, I mean, these challenged our system. They ultimately were resolved without convulsive violence that tore us apart. Can I just make like a 10 second point? I know I've spoken too much. But isn't the American lesson that came out of the Civil War that you need a legitimate system for the sharing of power? And the ultimate distinction between here, and if you think about the problems in Afghanistan, the problems in South Sudan, the problems in Iraq at the moment, they're about whether or not there is a legitimate system for sharing power between different communities. And that is the absolute fundamental. If power is legitimately shared, then communities can live together. And the other- And relatively accountable. But I wanted to make two other quick points. The first is your third box about protection. I'm trying to think of, I think there's a different issue related to that and that is the human cost is just not considered. And so as war is waged, that doesn't go into the equation. And the example of Yemen right now is so stark and so potent that the human cost that's happening right now in the midst of that war is just not on the table. And it should be, there should be a way for that to be more front and center, both in terms of how the conversation unfolds, but in the considerations of what is done and what isn't done with costs for if you are not protecting people. And so it's bigger than just civilian protection. It's the whole consideration of the human cost, not as an afterthought once they become refugees. And then finally, the terrible conditions that are in the region right now, which everybody has alluded to, gets to the point also of why this refugee flow has so exponentially increased into Europe. And the lack of education and opportunities, except for in Europe, is something that goes again to where are we spending money and how are we addressing the crisis? We can't resettle our way out of this. There's no solution that is just resettlement. And so it goes to where is the investment? Where do we rethink what is humanitarian, what is development to create longer, more durable solutions right now? Because we know this isn't gonna go away. So it's about to be your turn. I'm gonna say I'm the Civil War. The Atlantic was publishing articles during the Civil War. We did a famous one in 1867 saying that among its lessons is it's much better to have a huge industrial base than a agrarian base if you wanna win a war. So. I was, Joe, you got us going here. So before we turn to the political, I was gonna add one thing on this, which is that we should be careful not to project our American experience or our aspirations on the European picture. And by experience, I mean, you can take analogies, oh, it works pretty well here. I know a case in South Dakota. And therefore, why shouldn't it work in Europe? I think there are all sorts of historical and cultural and legal reasons why that analogy one has to be careful with. And by aspirations, I mean, as David said, it might be ironic and it might be appalling. But as analysts trying to do policy prescriptions, we need to understand that there are sometimes appalling things. And I agree. I do worry about the consequences, whether it's Marine Le Pen or Victor Orban or Swedish far-right parties, where we might like to say, the best solution is for them all to take more. But if they don't have the mechanism for deciding who takes how many and in what way and what is done for them, and if certain societies will react in a certain way, it doesn't mean we can't make prescriptions and we can't say what's right, but we also can't ignore it and just pretend that that's not the case and find ourselves with a situation that neither we nor they can cope with. And my political question is, is there a significant difference either in analysis or prescription between the United States and its European traditional partners on this issue? Do they feel the United States is doing enough, doing the right thing? Do we feel they're shirking or are we all approaching this more or less the same way? No, everyone always feels like the other guys aren't doing enough. And I think that's probably fair to say in both directions, right? I think that was partly my point about what I just said about the projection. I think plenty of Americans say, well, I mean, first of all, it is after all in that region and they should be doing a lot more. And you see an awful lot of applause here for Merkel and criticism of Orban, which one understands. And what Merkel is doing is honorable and inspiring and one hopes that she's right and it will work, but it's just such a natural tendency to say that the solution here is for those guys to do more. And I think you got that to some extent, but less or so from the Europeans, because I don't think too many Europeans really think that the solution here, a lot of them would recommend that the United States take more, but I don't think they're really seeing it as, that's the way to fix this problem. We're at the stage of the program where I'm gonna turn over to you in the audience for questions, but before doing that, I'm gonna ask each of our panelists in to do something that is unfair, but perhaps useful. That people remember, usually, they remember at most one thing from a public discussion. And so, if there were one thing you wanted people to remember from this discussion to inform their consideration of these issues, their political views, their support for refugee organizations, et cetera, David's starting with you. What's the one thing you would like people to... From my many points of wisdom on this, I would like them to know the following fact, which I haven't told you yet. Over the last four years, the United States has taken 1,800 Syrian refugees. You cannot force your way into a global leadership position while you're only taking 1,800 refugees into this country and on this issue. And the reason is not that resettlement will solve the problem, but the failure to recognize the symbolic significance for the countries of the Middle East who've taken 2 million refugees in the case of Turkey, 700,000 refugees in the case of Jordan, 1.4 million refugees in the case of Lebanon, 250,000 refugees in the case of Iraq, the failure of the U.S. to take more than 800, the U.K., I think, has taken 450. The tell that comes from that failure is very, very significant. And so, if there's one thing that you remember, it's that fact, if there's one thing you can do, is to try to urge your congressman and your senators to take seriously that this country, which has got so much to teach about the way refugees can become contributors to society, not a burden of society, is not in this crisis playing that role, and that has ripple effects that go beyond the sheer numbers. Again, admirably done, a new number, an easy to remember number connected to your main point. So, thank you. So, Nancy, the one thing, if there were one, you would want people to retain? This is not fundamentally a refugee crisis, that as important as it is to do the resettlement, we need to use the energy around this issue because it has come to people's shores and people are paying attention to what is not a new problem, but it's now expanded so that it's come home to us. We need to use that energy to think differently about how we about the architecture and the financing of the humanitarian system, but even more importantly, about how we tackle fragility within the United States and as a global community. How do we deal with the sources of conflict that becomes violent that is fundamentally pushing these 60 million people out of their homes across the globe? And without doing that, we're gonna continue to be working on the margins of the problem. Thank you. I feel like this is a presidential candidate forum. What enemy are you most proud to have made? That's right. I think I started with my bottom line but it never hurts to drill down on something and it has to do with the resources that would be necessary to deal with what I think is going to be inevitable in growing problem. It would be easier to say, the lesson in all of this is we need to resolve the region's wars and I guess I kind of did say that, but I also said, look, when you just analyze what's going on in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, there aren't easy fixes to these problems and getting back to presidential forums. You will have forums like this, say US leadership and deploying our great power, that's not going to do it. We're not going to do it and that's not going to do it. So this problem will be with us. And again, I think it's easy to moralize and pontificate about what the other guys should do. Well, if you can't stop the wars, then damn it, Europe should take two or three million more or vice versa. That's not going to happen smoothly either and so we need to recognize that fact and especially in the region. If we care not only about the humanitarian dimension of it, but some of the geopolitical spillovers that I mentioned, we need to understand that this is a huge challenge for our world and far greater than for many decades. Great, thank you and well done by you all. So it's now time for questions from the audience. I don't know if there's a microphone going around or just I'll repeat a question to you. Yes, please. A microphone is coming to you. Yes, there you go. Thank you very much. I'm Mindy Reiser, Vice President of an NGO called Global Peace Services USA. David, you made the important point about international humanitarian law. Who will enforce it? You'll be honest? Yes. I mean, I think that the, there's a couple of points about that. One, because international humanitarian law is on the journey, isn't it? I mean, it's a process that has been seeking to make progress. And I think that the chilling thing is that there was a peak of commitment to the sustenance of international humanitarian law in the mid-2005 with the responsibility to protect and all of that. After striking 20 years ago after Rwanda, people said, and after Bosnia eventually, never again. And that led to commitments. It led to the Rome Statute. I know the US is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, but a lot of our countries are. And I think there's now a lot of buyer's remorse about some of those commitments, not on my part, but among some countries, notably in respect to the responsibilities to protect, which was 190 countries signed up to the principle in 2005 that governments weren't allowed to abuse their own citizens and they weren't allowed to export their problems to the global system. And what you're finding, sorry, this is a long window, we're saying there are two answers to your question. One, you've got to win the philosophical argument that it's not acceptable for people to abuse their own citizens. Internal affairs, the biggest division in international politics today is between those who think that what goes on within a country is only the business of the government of that country and those who believe that there are universal values that need to be followed. But secondly, I would say when who's going to promote that, who's going to enforce international imaginary law, you can only do that through accountability and you can only have accountability through transparency. And I think we're at the stage at the moment where transparency is being undermined and without transparency, you can't then enforce the accountability. And so in the different forum, whether it be in respect of civil wars or wars between states, there are different international institutions engaged, but unless you're willing to expose and then follow through, then it's not going to be enforced. Thank you. Does either of you want to add humanitarian law? Well, I would just say that an important dimension is engaging other than just the state actors and that the more that people in civil society are equipped with knowledge and then some of the tools to bring accountability about enable transparency. This has, we've seen progress on this over the last decade and it's something that is an important aspect to keep pushing. I mean, the world is moving beyond pinstripe to pinstripe and we need to continue to enable that and look at how those who believe sovereignty, Trump's fundamental human rights are pushed. So a question over here or who has a yes, a question from a gentleman here in the middle. And also questions are coming in via Twitter. So you Twitter people, feel free to send them in too. Thank you. My name is Alex Apodite. I'm with the Center for Law and Sustainable Development out of here in Nigeria. To ask my question, I'm going to have to maybe combine what Nancy said and what Philip said here. The focus I have on here is saying that when an issue is primarily humanitarian, it's a little difficult unless you could make it, I guess, a strategic political issue. Just this week, the US government sent soldiers to Cameroon based on the Boko Haram problem in Nigeria. And the rest of the world are mostly Nigerians are saying why this late because the problem has been going on before and the previous administration sought the assistance of the US government and it was believed that for political reasons they refused to provide aid. So are we now saying that maybe if you have a crisis in your country, you should maybe wait for it to escalate or wait for it for the world to feel that it must become strategically political and then ignore the humanitarian cost or the human cost as Nancy had said. I think I would start with you, Philip. Sure. I mean, I can't say anything about the specific timing of deciding to send troops to Cameroon and the Boko Haram issue, but as the general point, it is a reality that one can better motivate public opinion in Congress when there's a strategic interested stake. I don't mean at all to suggest that we don't very often do things for purely humanitarian reasons. We do and we're a very generous country and I can think of countless examples of where we're doing it just because it's the right thing, but it is also the case that there are a lot of right things to do around the world and as a country and Congress, people are just not prepared to satisfy these unquenchable needs because it really, it would never stop and therefore you really see action when you can tie it to a strategic interest of the country, otherwise it's difficult to sustain because public opinion will be moved by the initial humanitarian cause, but over time it becomes costly and we've seen it time and time again. So it does matter whether we like it or not in terms of the sustainability, whether people are persuaded. That certainly doesn't mean that country should wait until it's so bad that it poses a strategic threat and I would like to think that we also take action to forestall things from becoming a strategic threat and that's our job in government to do so and we do it as much as we can, but there's still that fundamental reality that in the end people are really most motivated and sometimes only motivated when they see the self or national interest involved as well. Do you wanna add an order? I would only add that going to my comments about the importance of really looking at the roots of these issues, the election with President Buhari now in charge is the best cause for hope that Nigeria with help from partners including the United States can really finally address this critical crisis and that's where I think the help from outside the country in terms of enabling an election to go forward without violence, relatively speaking, fair and free is crucial and has turned the corner for Nigeria, hopefully, we're all hopeful. Can also say that people tend to only notice the cases where obviously our actions to prevent things from getting to that point fail. So again, we do spend a lot of time in government thinking what can we do to bolster Lebanese government so it doesn't succumb to the refugee crisis or Jordan and when we succeed, obviously no one notices or talks about it, they notice it when it becomes spillover and violence and it's nothing you can do about that. There's a gentleman in the middle who has a question while the microphone goes to him and then you, I'm gonna ask a Twitter question. So the microphone bearers, if you would go back there. Oh, somebody way back here. Okay, yes, you can ask your question. Yes. Thank you, Rabin Pasha, I work on youth engagement and entrepreneurship in Iraqi Kurdistan to promote resilience and stability and I was formerly with USAID Middle East Bureau. And could you speak up slightly please? Okay, is this better? Yes. Okay, thanks. I think I appreciate some of the things that we talked about specifically here with the geopolitical and economic and power sharing drivers of the refugee crisis and situation. I just got back from our bill in Iraqi Kurdistan and Nancy, I missed you by about two or three days where I work on the youth engagement and entrepreneurship to promote resilience and peace in that region. And I see it as a way that is very critical to both prevent the migration that's happening as well as prevent the violence and extremism and the level of despair. And when I was there and Nancy, you probably have had very similar views, I saw the youth issue really percolating at the surface and boiling. And this is not something that's just unique to Iraqi Kurdistan or Iraq and the broader Middle East. And could you steer this towards the question please? Absolutely. I would love to hear how we can really address that broader engagement in both in the economy and society of the 70% of the population which is under 30 in the Middle East and specifically in areas which are more stable now but could become even less stable. And I think my question would be how we can and what could be done from our side, from your side because a lot of these governments and Kurdish regional government being one of them are really desperately asking for advice and technical assistance to further stabilize. And when I turned to colleagues and I worked at USAID, I've worked with the administration, we're still hesitant and really investing in the development and economic and engagement of youth. So what can we do to engage youth as a way to prevent the stability? And then secondly, how we can further assess. No, but I think. That's enough, thanks. But how we can assess this, have more data on the drivers of fragility so we could prevent this in the future. Great, thank you. Yes, Nancy. Well, I completely agree with you and I think it goes to the terrible choices that we have to make because of our budget constraints globally and certainly with, if you look at $500 billion that we spend on our defense budget versus $47 billion that is the entirety of our civilian engagement overseas, state aid and other smaller agencies. That imbalance causes us to make terrible choices including the fact that there is such underinvestment in both Iraq, Syria and the region through the humanitarian appeals and then the fact that we still artificially separate what's humanitarian and what's development. And what you're talking about is absolutely essential which is the building of resilience of youth both in the host communities that are equally vulnerable right now and with those who are displaced so that we create opportunities for education often for trauma counseling, for enabling them to be entrepreneurs and we should definitely be prioritizing that with additional funding instead of having a 50% funded Iraq appeal and 34% Syria appeal so that we have to make terrible choices about whether it's life saving food or life saving education. Just real quickly to add on, it goes to the point I mentioned a minute ago about what you do to try to forestall a crisis about what you do once it's there. Once you're at Syria or Yemen or Iraq levels of violence investing in youth and future in entrepreneurship are really difficult. That's why we do need to think about and I think we do everything we can do in those bastions with potential to avoid it and just one concrete is I just signed a letter calling on Congress to fully fund our administration's request of assistance to Tunisia which is a case where the gap between what was requested and funded maybe $40 million, you could burn up in a conflict zone in a military spending in a day or two and that's the sort of thing that does seem like a better investment than waiting until you're dealing with a crisis that. But I would argue that now more than ever you need to invest in the youth who are displaced or who are hosting displaced people in Iraq, Lebanon, insides here because otherwise you create a whole generation of no education, no opportunity, no hope and as somebody said to me when I was in Erbil we have seven camps for the displaced here in Erbil. There's not enough education, trauma counseling, opportunity, we have seven time bombs and so we need to invest now and help people create some possibility of a future even especially in those places. Yes, the woman here who has the microphone. Hi, excuse me, my name is Shannon Scrivener. I'm with Oxfam America. Thank you very much for your presentations. I just wanted to ask a question about the broken system that was mentioned several times and your comments in particular Nancy on this broader community and maybe I heard your comments wrong but it was on the broken system especially around finance and we need to broaden the communities that sounded like or the community in the system who we work with in terms of UN agency and INGOs and it's beyond, I'm thinking about the Bricsom countries, I'm thinking about the donors that aren't part of the humanitarian system as traditional at the UN. I'm thinking about local actors, national local NGOs that may not get that funding as well from the UN agencies or from the INGOs so in terms of broadening the community of actors I guess within the humanitarian system and then your, both your points that were several points were made on development is really important piece of this issue so what are the hopes that the World Humanitarian Summit that the development piece of this will be addressed? Who would like to answer that? Nancy I think it was directly to you. So on the broadening the financing it is absolutely true that it needs to be more inclusive both for how the money comes in and how the money is distributed and I think that some of the proposals that are being generated right now think more broadly about that, some of the global funds, some of the ways to make it not possible to opt out and definitely countries that are not currently participating. There is a lot of I think good thinking about how to reorient actions so that it's more about building the capacity of local partners, being more inclusive. I think the humanitarian world is very self-reflective and has put a lot of time and thought into that. One of the problems however is this disconnect with the development world. So you may actually do a lot of good work under humanitarian funding but then there's no follow on help from the development world and so absolutely critical is helping the development world to think differently about when and how they get involved and I believe we've made greater progress on this in the world of natural disasters and getting upstream with disaster risk reduction than we have in the world of complex crises and conflicts where the development world is not necessarily equipped or in the mindset that that's where they should be putting investments whereas I would argue it's absolutely essential to bring forward I think David you mentioned the World Bank funding and to also get upstream so that we're thinking about the risk of conflict as much as we're thinking about the risk of a natural disaster. So I think the gentleman in the front row and these two people in the front row while the microphones go there I'm gonna ask a Twitter question, a brief fact one for either I think David or Nancy. Stephen Richardson asked how important is access to quality education and a refugee response? What percentage of the budget should go to education? Do you have an answer? What percentage of the budget should go to education? First of all it's very important the we call education a lifeline not a luxury in refugee situation because the temptation is to think okay let's just keep people alive but given that they're out of their countries for a long time, education is incredibly important. The second point is that in countries like Lebanon there's grotesque failure not I don't mean by the Lebanese but by the international system to help support them at the moment 300,000 Syrian kids in Lebanon are not in education and they basically haven't been for the last four years. So Madeleine Albright, the forum that happened here called that a petri dish for radicalization which is a pretty powerful phrase that Lebanese are now extending their so-called second shift to allow hopefully another 100,000 kids to get into school but that'll still leave 200,000 kids out of school and frankly across the war zones that we've been talking about in 30 countries it's really an art of thought. The figure I've got in my head is that the European Commission announced at a breakfast that we hosted at the UN General Assembly that globally 1% I think of the humanitarian budget goes on education and they are raising it to 4% they're raising their figure to 4% the figure that I would urge you to think about is I think I'm right in saying there are 38 million kids in conflict zones who are not in education out of the 57 million kids globally who are not in primary there must be primary education and anyone who's interested we can deliver a very good education for $700 a person so if you know a rich person go and talk to them and tell them that for every $700 we can get another kid in school for you or in education for you. So we have two people in the front row and I'd like them to ask their questions back to back and then we'll get answers so first this young lady and then this gentleman here. Hello, my name is Adju Vilanovic I'm a student at American University in the School of International Service my question is how would you characterize the reaction of European citizens to the incoming refugees compared to the past and current US reactions to the immigrant situation occurring in Central and South America? Thank you and now the microphone over to your side. Thank you. My name is Chris Cox and I'm the Chief of Staff for Action Aid and International Aid Agency. I was very glad to hear Mr. Miliband mention not only that we need more money but we actually need better aid I just want to pick up on that we've heard some statements today that particularly USAID is very generous which I believe in terms of top line number is true but the quality of USAID is very problematic a lot of the aid is tied so actually getting the money to people who really need it is a big challenge. So what do you think needs to be done to make aid better? Good so about the European reaction and making aid better which of you David do you want to start off that? I mean it strikes me that the only fair thing to say about the European reaction and frankly about the American reaction last year to the Central American miners issue which you were asking about as well is it's polarised. Some people are incredibly compassionate and supportive in Europe people are opening their homes they're taking people in, ditto in the US but some people are incredibly fearful and incredibly abusive and so it's a polarisation it feels like. On the better aid front I mean my mantra is about a clearer bottom line in terms of the outcomes we've set our own outcomes framework in the IRC now which is governing where we're spending to try to make sure that we're really delivering well. Secondly I do think this evidence point is incredibly important in development settings so in stable poor settings in the last 10 years there have been 2,500 randomised control trials or equivalent evidence based studies so the money is going into what really works. In the humanitarian settings and the conflict settings 64, we don't have the evidence base and it's not good enough to say well how can you test out what works in a war zone it's almost even more important to test it out and our experience is that you can. So there's an evidence piece of it. I think thirdly there is an what I would call an effectiveness piece which too often is discussed as an efficiency piece we have on our website 93 cents in every dollar goes to the front line goes to programmes and that's great and everyone loves it but what people should be saying is well how effective is the money that you're spending on the front line and that's where I think the points that Nancy's been making about how long term is the grant is it focused on inputs or is it focused on outcomes is there real flexibility about local circumstance there's all sorts of issues about the effectiveness of the impact I think is probably a better word the impact of the aid not just the efficiency of the aid I think is really important. I will defend in a public forum good management of an organisation even if it doesn't appear in the ledger as being spent by a programme is important we should be defending that we should be defending evaluating the impact of our programme it doesn't appear as for a beneficiary but it's important. So the third thing don't worry there's only four points but the third one is about the effectiveness piece and the fourth I did mention earlier is this whole sometimes people call it innovation but that's become one of those words that is meaningless because everybody uses it about everything. We particularly want to talk about the need for an R&D function and I think this notion because R&D has a particular meaning and it's about systematic fast fail, fast iterate mechanisms to test breakthrough initiatives and that's what this sector needs let me give you one example which is really powerful and I'm afraid raises both good points for WFP but also challenges for WFP and that is about the use of cash instead of non-food items or food items and giving out to people. The good news is that in the Syria region the WFP has really embraced the use of cash or debit cards because it's obviously difficult to get the food in and actually where there are markets functioning it's really powerful to give people cash or e-vouchers. The trouble is 3% of the total humanitarian budget the global 22 billion is given out in cash even though it's empowering for beneficiaries even though it delivers benefit to the local economy and it's not just that 3% one reason that the 3% is low is inertia in the system and vested interest but another reason is that we don't have good technology platforms yet to deliver the cash in a secure way and make sure you're not giving the same amount of cash to the same person very expensive set-up costs and R&D, we're actually working on this at the moment a serious R&D approach would drive down the set-up costs and drive down the amount of time it takes to set up a functioning cash distribution system and you could really drive change across the humanitarian sector if that works. So there's, we're almost out of time you can have a, well actually there's a woman in the back so if you can ask your question in two sentences we can get your question in and then we're going to and then you can respond with your thought too. Yes, wait for the microphone please. Right there. My name is Colette Chabot and I'm with George Washington University and I do a lot of work in Muslim countries designing and evaluating education programs. I want to ask people to think a little more carefully about the use of we're going to use evidence-based approaches. Everybody wants them. They do not grow on trees, they're very expensive so making a distinction between little things, little innovations that we can actually show feedback and effectiveness, I just, we must not be dragged into this policy discussion that we're going to prove it just like anyone else. In an unstable situation, we are going to have continuity. Point noted, thank you very much for your concession and Nancy if you'll open up. I want Nancy to get the last word so can I go first? Yeah, go ahead. I'll go first, I'll be brief and then you get the last word. I just want to say one thing on these respective reactions. I'd be awfully reluctant to generalize either the US or especially Europe. We have seen unbelievably, both on an emotional level and a policy level, we've seen unbelievably heartwarming welcoming of refugees and immigrants and policy arguments notably from Chancellor Merkel that this is an opportunity for Europe and we have a demographic challenge and these people will resolve that and build our societies and create a better future and at the same time you have setting aside the far right reaction, other responsible leaders. I think David Cameron has taken more of a view that this is a challenge that our societies cannot cope with and so you have this huge spectrum just as in the United States. And I guess my point is that we are going, that's going to be a policy debate for the next decade or more and a hugely important one, just as here, and I think 30 years ago we did immigration reform in this country, to once and for all resolve the issue. And you will note that in this presidential election campaign, it's like issue number one and I think for Europe it's going to be even more because of the proximity to refugees and the challenges, particular challenges in Europe. I think it's going to be a debate for the ages. Good and thank you and a concise last word from this. I wanted to say about the question about effective aid and a couple of quick points. USAID has pushed very hard on greater resilience approaches that bring humanitarian and development together so that it's a joint solving of the problem. Easier to do with natural disasters than in conflict. One of the constraints is the inflexibility of the funding. There has been enormous breakthroughs on the use of cash, especially by our colleagues from the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and Food for Peace, where there have been very interesting innovative solutions using market forces in highly restrictive environments like Somalia. But without greater food aid reform, which is fundamentally a congressional mandate, there is a limit to how much of that cash can be used. And so that's an issue that I urge everyone to become engaged in. And secondly, the inflexibility of some of the funding. And the complex crisis fund is one of the best tools that's available to have more flexible approaches in conflict environments. Again, that needs protection and advocacy to ensure that that's protected. And the conflict of approaches that need to be underneath a lot of what we do in both humanitarian and development to reduce the risk that conflict will become violent and overturn all of our development gains is also a critical piece of effective aid. Thank you. So, McCollough, Richard Leach to give us a final word. But as he comes up here, please join me in thanking David Miliband, Nancy Lindborg, and Philip Gordon. We've heard a lot of really good ideas and recommendations from the panel. I just want to very briefly note, it's not just about money, but we as a nation, we stand for something here in America. And when the circumstances are required, we step up and we lead. And I think now is one of those times when we, at the highest levels of government, need to step up and lead at a higher level. I just want to conclude with a quote of a very well respected theologian, philosopher, activist, Abraham Joshua Heschel said, some are guilty, but all are responsible. So we all are responsible. Thank you for being here today. Thank you.