 I want to, can everybody hear me? Good, okay, I want to welcome our online guests as well. Thank you for joining us today for the Rise Rollout. My name is Michael Fallon, I'm the Managing Director of the Center for Thematic Excellence here at USIP. And I have the privilege and the honor to moderate this panel for our preventing and encountering violent conflict, violent extremism team in the center. We've heard this morning from Ian Moss from the State Department. We've heard from the authors of The Rise Guide, Lisa, Chris, and Mike. You've had a chance for some breakout for some greater granularity on the elements that are addressed in the field. Today we have on this panel, the practitioners who are applying these tools, who have helped formulate The Rise, they've informed The Rise Guide, and are now applying it very specifically in various countries and regions, and we're gonna hear from each of them. This afternoon you'll have another breakout session opportunity, and we'll hear from some regional perspectives as well before winding up the day with a little bit more of a break. I'm honored to introduce our three panelists working in Tunisia, Central Asia, and East Africa. I see that Fauzia has joined us online and we welcome you as well. But first let me introduce Sabreen Laribi, who's the USIP Mid-East North Africa Project Officer, who's going to discuss the project in Tunisia working on stigma reduction and female family members of people who went abroad to join ISIS. Welcome. Next will be Noah Tucker, Senior Research Consultant for Oxis Society for Central Asian Affairs, and he'll be discussing work on rehabilitation and reintegration of women and children returning from Northeast Syria to Central Asia. Welcome, Noah. Fauzia joining us from Nairobi is President of Women in International Security in the Horn of Africa, and we'll discuss the women preventing violent extremism work that she leads in East Africa. So we're gonna hear from each of them individually for about 10 minutes and then we'll go into a discussion period with some questions and hopefully we can emerge some points of focus for further discussion. Let's start with Sabrina first. Thank you and welcome. Thank you. First I'd like to ask to thank everyone who works on this very creative event. I've been very focused on the Tunisian context and today the knowledge in the room was fascinating and very informative to me. I'm sure you heard a lot about Tunisia since the Arab Spring, but today I want to talk about the context of what the communities have witnessed in terms of violent extremism from 2012 until 2019. There were high rates of ISIS recruitment from many marginalized neighborhoods. On the outskirts of Tunis and the south of Tunisia and so on, and many young men joined ISIS and left their mothers, sisters, wives, witnessed the severe surveillance of the security forces on the ground. So they've been bearing the consequences of their relatives' actions and so on. And this has started, we started to witness huge divisions in many marginalized communities, mainly Dua Asia. This community is on the outskirts of Tunis. It has high rates of ISIS recruitment and we as USIP Tunisia, we work through a network of local peace builders and facilitators across the country. They've been trained on peace building approaches, PVE and so on. They reached out to us and they obviously identified a driver of tension within the community and huge disparities, especially the isolation on the women, the mothers, the sisters and the wives of returnees in Dua Asia. So the first thing we did is we formed a social club, a social women club in which women who have family ties with extremism and other women from the neighborhood who have no ties with extremism. And in this club, we adopted a gradual approach by just introducing artistic cultural activities, PSS support, psychological social support through individual and group therapy sessions and gradually they started discussing violent extremism concepts, PV concepts and how all of this context is like pushing more for their isolation from the community. Through this social women club, the discussions started to change and move after two years. With the trainings on PV, with the discussions and the debates within the community, the discussions started to shift from based on trauma, trauma discussions to what can we do for our society? And that's when we knew that it's the right time to focus on institutional reintegration after when we went through the social reintegration. It was not easy, it took some time, we got a bit frustrated in the beginning, waiting for beams of light for things to happen, but after two years, seeing that the women from the club are identifying drivers of tensions and are calling for USIP support to address them was a great opportunity and a great sign, a healthy sign for us to move to institutional reintegration. And that's when we conducted two community dialogues with the local government, with security forces, with the municipality, in which the women have transformed from being isolated and stigmatized to advocacy and advocacy movement, and advocacy peaceful movement that want to discuss how to address and prevent violence and youth violence in Dwarisir with the security forces. It wants to challenge the police practices derived from dictatorship and how those could be a driver also of violent extremism in those neighborhoods and so on. Throughout these community dialogues, many women who were enduring domestic violence by men from violent extremists based in Dwarisir have been transferred to security forces in charge of protecting women's rights. They've also security forces and the women started adopting a non-kinetic response to address youth violence in middle schools. And as of now, like in the past year, and it's still ongoing, the women are launching town halls, campaigns, speaking with the personnel of the education system, with the teachers, with the parents to engage into raising the awareness of the local community towards what are the drivers of violence and violent extremism and what environment we have provided for our children in these middle schools and high schools for them to become very vulnerable to the ISIS recruitment. In parallel, the women had many aspirations. One of them is we want to, we feel great, we feel healed, we feel integrated, accepted. The destigmatization happened internally before it happens externally. And that readiness led to them pitching an idea, led to them pitching an idea about establishing a cooperative. And for us as a peace building team in USIP Tunisia, for us a cooperative is more things we structured, we hear of, that are more under the mandates of entrepreneurial organizations and so on. But we took that opportunity, we were like, even though we are experimenting in those community dialogues, we want to take all the knowledge and the theories from USIP, apply it to the context, but also listen to the needs of the community. And that readiness led us to supporting the establishment of a cooperative in which they used all the handicraft skills to produce organic products and launch small businesses. So as of today, USIP is supporting the cooperative by developing a business plan for it. We found also an opportunity in the law, in the Tunisian law for the cooperatives, they can dedicate 15% of their revenues to social responsibility fund or social responsibility activities. And we are going to use the revenues to help reintegrate and rehabilitate more women and wives of foreign fighters. The cooperative idea came from the community, it's not, we won't take credit for it. But when we adopted it and we listened and we took the time to reflect on USIP's vision and pillars and how to connect that to the local community, that sweet spot, we found it and that led to the governor being very supportive, a private sector is supportive, everyone, the local resources are being mobilized to support the cooperative. Many things, other things happened also during the pandemic. Many of the women voluntarily started engaging in the community to prevent violent conflicts between citizens and security forces. One of them literally prevented a man from self-immolation in front of the governor's office. And that was started the revolution in Tunisia, by the way. It was very symbolic and very inspiring in many ways. We've been talking to many peace-building organizations and initiatives in Tunisia to get inspired, to coordinate on what are our entry points and how to go about this. There haven't been enough data provided by the Tunisian government on the number of returnes or how to access them. So this still has, it's still a taboo, let's say, in a way in the public opinion but also on the government level. So our approach, our entry point was the community. The bottom-up approach is really effective because it provided us with genuine profiles, provided us with genuine beneficiaries. And it's the local facilitators that have been trained by USAP that are identifying these entry points in someone. So this has been a best practice, especially in a context where on the national level, if there isn't enough entry points or access, the best way to go about it is the community because we have a lot of allies within them. Yeah, I'll leave the rest for later. Thank you so much. And I really note how much of the community agency, once you reach that transition point where there was engagement from first expressing the trauma and moving to problem solving, it seems both within the community and they became creative, but also with local government and others who wanted to also engage on this. Thank you so much. Noah? It's already on, okay, got it. That was a problem that solved itself. Okay, well, good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for having me here. I am, I guess by, I have a hard time explaining who I am a lot of the time. I'm an anthropologist by training. I've worked in the anthropology of conflict and in community development and things like that, primarily in Central Asia. And in the last couple of years, I've been really extremely fortunate to get to be involved in a number of the programs, both sponsored by the US State Department and some of our great colleagues here and work by USIP in Uzbekistan in particular, working to support practitioners who are implementing the rehabilitation and reintegration programs for Central Asia. And Central Asia is kind of a different case than many of the others that we're talking about here. Not just because so many people left a place where to go to somewhere new where they had no particular logical connection, no shared language, no shared culture and things like that. And also people were not, their own communities weren't for the most part directly affected by these conflicts. So everything happened somewhere else and people come back. And in some ways that makes it a bit easier for them to come back, it gives them some advantages. On the other hand, it also makes it very easy to overlook the community level conflicts that were in place that helped to push and pull them out into Syria, the things. And when we're returning people back to those same communities that they left because for them it appeared that a caliphate or defending their brothers and sisters in the faith in Syria or in Iraq was a preferable situation for them and their children. When they saw a better future for themselves in war-torn Syria or war-torn Iraq, then they saw in their homes, returning them to their homes is also fraught with an awful lot of problems. A bit different than some of the others, but at the same time quite complicated. So I'll get a few minutes to share with you today. I'll try to share some general things that we've learned and some of the challenges that we continue to face. What I can offer sort of is experience speaking with returnees and with the practitioners who help returnees in, I counted them up earlier today. I guess we're at 18 different cities and four different countries. Now we've had the outstanding ability to sit and do both focus groups and individual interviews and to work in longer term in a practitioner's network that includes some of the returnees themselves. So some of them we've gotten to work with for some time and I think it's really, to your point, about giving people the opportunity to be involved pro-socially and to relate to one another and build new bridges. I think these are a common pattern that come out. One of the interesting things about Central Asia as well is that we have a sort of accidental natural experiment, which is I guess how all natural experiments work. We have four different countries that have returned more people from the Syrian conflict than anywhere else in the world. We're at about 1,800 citizens who have been returned from the camps in Northern Syria and in some cases from the prison system in Iraq back to their communities of origin or at least their countries of origin. And in those four different countries, all of them, I think yeah, this is fair to say, and all of them, there's been at least two different approaches and so you have a fascinating system where you have eight different approaches by my count that you can identify and say, okay, we've got people coming from sort of the same problems that returning to broadly the same sort of challenges and we've done it in eight different ways and now we get to look and see which of those works and sort of which work better. And I have to say, the first piece of really good news is that all eight approaches, if we define success from the public safety standpoint, from the question of is there recidivism? Do people come back? Are they a threat to their communities that they left? The answer is sort of a resounding no. It's been five years that a lot of people have been back. Kids who came back as 12 year olds as 13 year olds are now entering university. They're starting their own lives and across these eight different approaches that range from having a full system with well-funded benefits and things like that all the way to nothing, to be honest. We won't say where that one was, but this was part of the natural experiment. Not different countries have different resources, different parts of the countries have different resources. There are a couple of instances in which fairly large groups of returnees were sent back with no support at all, no specialized support. So they just get the same access to the same benefits and services that everyone else in their community has access to, which in many of these cases, returning to peripheral communities is quite low. In terms of recidivism and public safety, all of them have been successful. So that sort of solves one of our first problems, but it invites a question of how do we define success? And does this actually, is that the question that we should be asking? So we'll complicate that a little bit. And I wanna say too that in this case as well, particularly for those countries who are considering returning citizens or who are still wrestling with this, the Central Asian case is very instructive because we see that the vast majority of people who are coming back, the overwhelming majority, are children. So this is really, this is a humanitarian endeavor more than anything else at its core. And Central Asia is not totally different or an outlier from the rest in that most of the people, many of those who still remain in our whole and our roach and the other camps are children. A lot of the children are quite young. So they're not, the question of whether or not they're going to strap on a suicide vest and go blow themselves up or something like that is not there. A five-year-old is not a threat to us. A five-year-old is a case that deserves our humanitarian compassion and Central Asian governments have been really outstanding in the global community at showing that compassion and acting on that compassion. And as much as I've spent most of my career criticizing their human rights records and things like that, this is a case in which I have to give credit where it's due because they have acted well ahead of many of, for example, our European country colleagues who continue to refuse to bring people back. Only around another thing that we find in this, while there's no way to make this a scientific number, but among the adult women as well, at least in the Central Asian context, it looks like the best guess that we can get at it is only about 20% of them were ever ideologically radicalized in the first place or were ideologically motivated. And so one of the other themes that's come up through the day is that maybe ideology is not the focus of these things and the Central Asian case in all of these eight different approaches show us that ideology is not the thing that we need to particularly be concerned about. It is for some and it's certainly for those who remain ideologically motivated for those who have a great deal of sunk cost in their experience in Syria who lost children, who lost family members to this cause, it makes it a bit harder and it certainly makes them less willing to engage in the rehabilitation program. But for 80% of the people, that's not an issue. So it's a problem that's already solved. We learn from the Central Asian experience beyond that, that their successes, first of all, show the importance of relationships. So families that welcome them back, counselors and organizations that build relationships of trust and tighten it communities like those of Uzbek and Southern Kyrgyzstan that welcome back their children and work together to help them succeed. So this is another thing that we see rather than yes, there is stigma and yes, there is stigma from the broader public, but often within the communities themselves, welcoming back their own children, it has been very positive and whole communities are invested in helping it go well. A great example of building these relationships is my friend and colleague, Gulnaz Razdikova, who is kind of the lead counselor for the Kazakhstan program. And she's created a network, in particular during the pandemic, when people couldn't come together of a hundred of the adult returning women who are together, they support one another, she answers their texts and calls basically 24 hours a day as they come into trouble and building those relationships of trust and being there to help them with family counseling, help them work through economic issues, help them work through these other things, through that relationship of trust has led to a remarkable amount of successes and to people who now are in a position where they can help others. The second thing that we see is the importance of giving returnees a sense of belonging, a sense that they do belong to the communities that they're coming back to and this has been a bit of a delicate dance in the Central Asian case in particular because before the abrupt decision to return people, the messaging from government and law enforcement was often that people who went to Syria were traders, they weren't real Kazakhs, they weren't real Uzbeks, they weren't any of these things and there was a very abrupt about face that not all of the public went along with and saying that no, these are our citizens and we have responsibility for them but among the women that we've spoken with, the families that we've spoken with, especially in the cases where things were successful, which are the majority of them, the sense of belonging that I am, there's a Russian phrase, ньятлем немаря часка сударства, that the Kazakh councilors used often. So this idea, you are an unseverable member of our society, of our state and that was their goal to communicate that. A vision for the future, for adult returnees themselves and their children, which means first of all, having basic needs met. So it's not about getting into ideological rehabilitation and these things is, do you have a place to live? Do your children have food to eat? Do you have warm clothing for the bitter cold and Uralsk, which is just across the line from Siberia? These are things that ended up creating, helping to create that trust and pull people back into their homes. But while most of the returnees are doing well, one of the things that we do see come up very often is that many of them in particular, the women and older children have suffered traumas that are difficult for most of us to imagine, not just in their time in Syria or Iraq or in the camps, but in many cases, a lot of the women in particular suffered physical and sexual abuse before they ever left and that this appears to be a key element in making them vulnerable to have being mobilized, being taken, joining, you know, whatever, wherever we go across the spectrum, trauma plays a clear role in it and the infrastructure for helping them deal with that is lacking in many cases, both because you weren't allowed to have trauma in Soviet psychology, which would probably not be a surprise to anyone. But second of all, because the Soviet experience and the Russian colonial experience also did a lot to destroy the cultural ties and the cultural narratives, the cultural tools that people had developed in indigenous societies to deal with these traumas in the past and helping them to reconnect with those things and resurrect some of those things is a huge task that is not gonna be solved in a couple of years and so we're at the point now where unfortunately the Central Asian Returnees and the Central Asian Returnee programs are in a bit of danger of becoming victims of their own success because this has gone so well up to this point, the governments themselves are by and large wrapping up the programs and ending the support that the returnees have, but we have hundreds of children who are entering adolescence, who are in adolescence now, who have gone through things that are significantly different than their peers that have gone through things that no child that age should ever go through and they are left with very little support for what they have. So the long-term success of this is in jeopardy for that reason and we also see that women, even those who have been quite successful in the general measures of their lives are also because of the stigma that they face, incentivize to hide the degree that they may still suffer from trauma. So we did a survey with Dr. Wein and Dr. Ellis and another team we designed a survey and gave it in Kazakhstan to about 104 of the adult women returnees and it included a standardized mental health screener and we saw only about 15% of people who responded in a way that would show a likely psychiatric diagnosis for psychological distress, either PTSD or an anxiety disorder, which is not all that different than the normal population, but one of the things that we find is that when you talk to people about these issues, very often the first answer is no, no, I'm fine, everything is fine because there is this real desire to be normal, to appear normal, to prove to others that you are not a threat to them and so they are very incentivized to minimize these things and I'll close with this. In a session that we did with our practitioner's workshop that included about five of the returnee women themselves, we talked about those numbers and interrogated whether or not these seemed accurate and a couple of them were just really insistent that they were fine, they were normal, one of them even said sort of a throwback to those of you who watched the Big Bang Theory, we've been tested, we have all of these doctors who have tested us and they said that we're fine, so you just need to leave this alone and not hassle us about this, we just want to be normal, but then at the end of that, as Dr. Wein, who's a psychiatrist, often does, he opened up an opportunity for people to come up and talk to him individually and one of the women who swore that everything was fine in her individual session admitted that she hasn't slept at night for two years, so she doesn't sleep until five, six o'clock in the morning, she sits up at night in fear of having nightmares, in part because she can't stop the circular thoughts and these things, so everything was fine in the group but individually she hasn't slept in two years, is that a foundation for long-term success and what is our definition of success? Is it that there are no longer a threat to public security or is it that the people that we've committed to bringing back and supporting can live happy, healthy lives as pro-social members of the community and I think this is a question that the Central Asian Experience invites us to ask, so thank you and I'm sorry for going over time. Thank you, fascinating and I do think the measure of success question should continue to rise to respond over the longer term. I want to turn to Fauzia now, you have the floor. Good afternoon, good evening. It's actually evening here, I hope I'm audible on that side. Like my other panelists, thank you for having us, it's been a really insightful discussion so far, I've managed to at least catch a few of the discussions that have been going on virtually while here in Nairobi. So as mentioned, I will be focusing on the Women Preventing Violent Extremism Project that we undertake within the Africa Center at USIP and to actually hear what some of my panelists have done is to also paint a picture of the space of it. This is in Kenya. So since we've had the military offensive against al-Shabaab, which is the primary of the Violent Extremist Organization within East Africa by African Union, the Somali forces and so on from 2011, you've seen many of those who are engaged in the US either being defecting or being detained. To encourage those defections, we've seen a number of multiple amnesty decrees that have been used over the years. For instance, in Kenya, around April 2015, we had a presidential decree that actually was very clear that there would be amnesty. And this was really announced at the heels of the Garisa Investi attack, where for most who've been following what is happening in the East, in East Africa, we had almost 148 students that were killed during that period. So even though it was a surprise to many, it indicated a turning point in Kenya and the approach towards addressing terrorism and looking at the issue around those who had joined and given opportunity for defection to happen. Short after, we expanded on what I would say, actually the expansion of the amnesty and putting police as well as advancing on the national strategy of countering Violent Extremism that has been in existence from 2016. So around 2019, the modifications that was done was looking at how do we safeguard the brave voices as well of those who report and also those who are inclined to defecting. And first of all, I think we've had more iterations on policies around using the words that have been used to return news, even though within sisters, we do not use the word return news. So what are some of the reasons? There was defection as from 2015. One, like many places, there's usually that switch between camps, that one either moves between ISIS or al-Qaeda in most instances and there's a level of dissatisfaction. And so seeing that the amnesty is in place, you find some end up thinking about deflection. Secondly is the issue of a second chance. So for most, amnesty could be seen as a form of hope for a second chance. This is in this category as well, we see a lot who came out because even during the screening process were disillusioned by what they found out. But because my session today is going to focus on gender, when you now unpackage and look at defection around women and you open up the conversation, you'll see most of them leaving because of what I call loss of identity. And this could be because either they lost their spouse, you could also see those who are coerced coming out, those who inadvertently were put into spaces where they become associated with persons who leave. This is when we had the phenomenon around sex slaves, also seeing a lot of them defecting. So for the WPV project that we have been undertaken for a number of years, we look at it from a gender responsive approach as we undertake what I call a very transformative approach towards how we use the power of gender and especially mainstream gender in addressing violent extremism. In most instances when you have any conversation, when you go into communities that have faced terrorism, you'll notice the challenge around terminology. We see it even when we're doing the question around the integration, rehabilitation and so on because we have those we call retanis and when you go into communities and in the case of Isafika, what are retanis? What are they coming back from? Comes back into questions because not everyone is coming back having been directly interested in joining. So what we use in most cases is individuals formerly associated with a violent extremist organization. So if you take a moment and imagine the faces of those who have endured the horrors of terrorism, for most you find they are those whose lives are really been shattered by the violence. We have those, their dreams have been stolen and hopes dashed. Yet within this so-called darkness, you find those who still have the strength to rise and reclaim what has been taken from them. And this is really the heart of what is resilience which even comes out really clearly in the rise documentation that has been presented. The flame of gender equality is what abounds and provides the guiding path towards a safe and more inclusive world, especially when we are looking at unpacking what gender is and really looking at interventions geared primarily to women, even though we do understand gender is about more than just women. So gender equality, when we place it at the center of our fight against terrorism and violent extremism, when we've seen it's a beacon of light that eliminates the way forward. We see it as a call where women and men can be called upon as agents of change. As we challenge gender stereotypes and address some of the vulnerabilities that make us susceptible to radicalization that leads to violent extremism. When you go into communities and you see communities advocating or cheering or praising violence against women, these communities are very vulnerable to violent extremist ideology. And this is gonna come through as my colleague from Tunisia was talking about how interventions in Tunisia. I want to actually pull out what we call Sisters Without Borders because this is a remarkable network of women and men, peace builders that span Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and most recently we've added the OP. The platform is made up of individuals from diverse backgrounds, cultures, we have different age sets, we have young people and what I call young attack. You can pack the group. You have those who are also survivors of terrorism, those who have actually been in contact with persons formerly associated with violent extremism and we come together with a common purpose. The common purpose is similar to what has been said. It's the element of building bridges of understanding and resilience. So the initiative that Sisters Without Borders Network, it started with 12 persons and these have steadily grown to more than 40 spanning the different countries and these are organizations that are really, really stepping up to ensure that we are enabling prevention within our communities. One of the key elements of prevention that when you go into communities and tackling the issue of violent extremism or terrorism is you find not everyone speaks from the same page because different stakeholders define prevention differently. If you talk to security actors, prevention to them implies a collection of information is the intelligence aspect of it, but when you talk to communities, prevention, you start seeing what is popularly known as the drivers. They want to have a better life. They want to be able to get employment and so on. So some of the interventions we do is to make sure that as we partner, as we engage because we work across different stakeholders, so that we are all talking from the same page that we are looking at prevention from the element of ensuring that we have policies that are addressing the challenges communities are facing that we have a lives of people being improved in order to make sure that they are not becoming more vulnerable to VE. In Uganda, the network focuses on community engagement, a challenging extremist ideology, walking with survivors and fostering social cohesion. We've done a number of our NS campaigns, in terms of dialogue, including vocational training. The purpose is to empower both men, women, boys and girls to become idiots of change. Uganda is also where we have really utilized the radio to bring out the voices of those who are victims of terrorism because in most cases, we don't necessarily in the context I come from, have this space where people can actually hear about the plight of those who have been directly affected by the active terrorism. In Tanzania, we are uniquely addressing the challenges the communities face through education initiatives, economic empowerment programs, as well as community outreach, looking at ways we can uplift marginalized individuals while fostering resilience. Here in Kenya, where the network originated, the grassroots organizations engage in community dialogues and so on, but looking at really challenging the extremist narrative and advocating for inclusive policies and while nurturing a culture of peace. So the network has successfully established partnerships with government offices, emphasizing a gender inclusive approach when it comes to even policy making and including the language that in most cases is used. And so we've really had the benefit of having really tremendous support from some of the leading government agencies like the National Counterterrorism Center that has also worked hand in hand with us in the interventions we do. We have been able to also be amongst those who pull out and showcase some of the challenges that are being faced that may not necessarily be addressed. And this is within the, around the period of 2016, 2017, we saw a number of women who were actually being taken as sex slaves of al-Shabaab. We have a nice video on this which was televised on Al-Jazeera. This is called Daughters of Al-Shabaab, which I'd encourage everyone to go and watch because it tells you about how they join why they stay and how they live and their rehabilitation activities that take place post leaving the groups. So what makes the network survive and grow even in times, which is even difficult, including when we had COVID, I know we don't talk about it as much, but during COVID, this is a period where the world, I would say, was starting to look inward. You'd find most people, even the narratives had changed to be more like us and them. So it was mirroring narratives we see in the news. And instead, the women I work with and the men I work with actually stepped up interventions. We actually grew as a network during the COVID period. So that is why it's really, really interesting to see the different categories of resilience that is clearly outlined within the rise action guide because the linking capital, the bonding capital, this is when we really see how resilience of community based on where they come from, they practice with the same language, they understand the challenges, actually become a key element in not only prevention, but addressing any issues that can arise that is not necessarily anticipated. One of the key elements in our way of work is we work very, very closely with the SAP and the team at USIP because it's all about co-creation. We're able to build a collective approach because we are co-creating together. And this is really essential, especially looking at the fact that we have been able to sustain this for, I think next year will be our 10th year of undertaking interventions that really have changed lives in within East African communities. But this requires having frameworks, having the frameworks or nomadic frameworks and guidance that actually speak to the context of that particular area and the issue being tackled. Context in that because it supports the language that will be used because as in many places, languages around me is still new. It's still not well understood in English. So you can imagine in local language how communities really end up understanding the issues as well. So it really takes time to build those, the frameworks which include the training programs and the technical assistance that is required. So this is where I think is the strength in USIP as a partner to us has been in ensuring that we are able to come up with these robust mechanisms that build on real partnerships. I call it real partnership because at the end of the day, it's about building on trust and transparency. And these are key elements even when doing integration and rehabilitation more broadly. So the achievements in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania is actually a clear showcase of what transformative power of gender mainstreaming is because it goes beyond just discussions where you find most people would share, this is what we are doing, but this goes beyond the discussion because you find the persons I work with who work tirelessly on the ground in areas deeply impacted by terrorism. And you see how the trauma taking the case of what Nick has mentioned. Because you come from communities that are getting help, mental health is still something that people are grappling with. Mental health in most cases, even defining mental health in long-term languages is still something that is being done up to now. In my own community, when someone has a mental health challenge, the only word that is used is they are mad because there is no proper language for the different types of mental health challenges someone can have. So it's one of the critical elements that can be addressed also through collective action. And this is why we do what we call a pairing. We look at mentorship as also a form of trauma healing. Within the network, we have those who are directly affected by the survivors of Gharisa attack and the dosage that happened recently. And we pair them with those who can be able to support with their healing. This could be red coats and so on to provide those services that they would need. And when they start asking questions, because the questions still come, why did this happen? Why did it happen to me? Why did they come to this particular place? Why do they do what they do? And the why question that keeps cropping up needs to be answered. And because it takes time to actually get some of these responses, if you're not well attached to the right people to give you the right support and also to respond to some of the questions that come up, especially with those who have been directly affected, we make sure we have that conversation and include even those who initially were individuals who are formally associated with someone who was directly affected by the EU. To give you an example, the lead entity in Uganda is a survivor of the Kampala Bomi. Within the network in Kenya, we have this spouse of one of the perpetrators of the Kampala Bomi. So you can imagine the conversations that would happen in such an instance when people meet. Most recently, there was even an event which was not happened by us, but there was an event where the persons who are associated with those who directly undertake an active violence were talking about as being a sister, as being a mother, how these two affects them and the stigma they receive. There was an individual in that space who stood up and said, I had no idea that they too are affected and have a sense of guilt because to them it's only those who died within terrorism acts are the ones who have families who died directly are the ones who are the ones affected more. And so this was a healing opportunity for both of them because they were able to even forgive the person's family who had been a perpetrator of a violent act. So the importance of having the broader conversation from trauma healing to bringing in the voices of victims, from bringing in the voices of those who are families as well of those who are joined VEOs is really, really important. So for us as we forge partnership and bridge the divides between governments and civil society and other stakeholders, we amplify the voice of women in particular and ensure that there is meaningful participation of women. This comes from the fact that we did a lot of community policing initially. There's always that perception that women are not necessarily those who can come to the forefront. They are softer in quotes. And therefore in instances such as this, they should not necessarily be engaged. And this comes from cultural barriers and stereotypes and so on. So working slowly to create that transformative engagement within communities so that people understand the value of having the women within discussions around the integration, rehabilitation, policymaking, coordination and so on is critical because women too are gatekeepers. When you bring someone back into those communities, you will find women and you'll find women, either those who are grieving or those who are even supporting some of the extremist organizations. So it's important to ensure that women are incorporated within the whole sphere when looking at spectrum, so you're doing a true integration and rehabilitation. And for us, partnerships is key. So as I sum up, behind our policies and resolutions that we have, we have lives of people who are yearning for peace, justice and equality. And I say equality because sometimes the perception when we talk about gender is always about women but I just to put in, not all men are equal in communities. They don't have the same social status in political gains like in other men as well. So this is where when they are frustrated, we see some of them becoming those who perpetrate violence in their communities. So recognizing that we advance in gender equality is not just a moral imperative but it's a strategic necessity. When you are looking at violent extremism, counterintelligence and so on. So it's really important to continue to look at how best we can engage especially on the issues and the equality. So I'll stop there and we can engage during questions and answers, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Fauzia. I would like to mark that we are near end of time. We started a little bit late but your presentations have been thorough and really informative. What I'd like to close on however, is the thought around the perpetuation of this process. The value of an action guide, Fauzia, you read my mind. I was going to draw out a little bit more how it has changed your work, how it has facilitated your efforts and you explained very well on language and otherwise. But I wonder if Sabine or Noah, you too would speak to extending the experience and the lessons that you've gained thus far beyond your specific country or region and projects and how you see these sorts of frameworks in form or as iterative pieces grow to be of greater value and carried forward. Sabine? Yeah, I mean the presentation from Kenya definitely confirms a lot of the practices and the best practices that we adopted in Tunisia and worked. Excited to hear the successes with other governments to being more brave than other governments and being open to reintegration and rehabilitation and I'm looking forward to talk to you on that, to pitch a positive narrative that would reassure public institutions and ministries that I would like to talk to in the next weeks and pitch to replicate the experience of Dwaris and other places and have them feel more comfortable to discuss this topic. What, so I have a lot of questions other than reflections, which is what should be the best narrative that we should adopt to convince, let's say, a fearful, scared institution to go this route? What are the benefits? How should we pitch it? Wow, that's a really good question and a really urgent one. And I would be, I feel like I'm not, this is a question that is complex enough that it will take more than one of us to answer it, of course, so I don't know, I don't know if I, you know, what I can give. I think, you know, one of the things that I think the Central Asian experience highlights is this question of whether or not people can change. And I think this is something that we hear in all of these experiences and it sounds like in each of these contexts, we have sort of two answers. One is that while the people who are coming back may not fit the stereotypes that you had of them in the first place and so maybe they don't have to change, you know, many of the people who are returning, again, the Central Asian experience, which echoes the same as many others, shows us that most of these people who were talking about returning are children, so they're not child soldiers, they're not, you know, these other things, they are, many of them are small children who have grown up in a very difficult environment where they lacked even access to nutrition and things like that, that were quite basic. So I think we can change, one of the pieces of advice to give, I guess, is to change our view of the challenge. You know, the challenge is not so much, it's not that we're bringing monsters, you know, back into it. So I was at a different event in Europe a few months ago and one of the presenters from one of the European countries that will leave unnamed, because it was Chattamouse Rules and all that, was saying like, well, you know, you're going to bring these kids back and then they're going to become school shooters, you know, this from a country that has never had a school shooting to my, to as far as I'm aware. You know, why, what is this idea that, you know, these, they are not, I think one of the things that we have to tackle and that our experience shows us that the, for the most part, you know, while ISIS was a terrible, terrible organization, these children who are coming back were not part of that organization. They weren't part of these things, even many of the women who were coming back were not party, at least voluntarily, to many of those things. And so it is a bit of a different, we're solving a bit of a different problem than we had thought originally and so that they're not. And I think this speaks a lot to, you know, something that was said in several of the presentations this morning as well, that we, one of our steepest tasks I think is de-exceptionalizing these issues. You know, these, yes, even those who join voluntarily, join a violent extremist organization, this is a, this is a maladaptive outcome that's very destructive, but it's just one among many that these communities are suffering from and if we don't treat it as that, as, you know, one symptom of an underlying disease, then I think we will, we're missing the problem that we need to be solving. Thank you, thank you. We're going to close here to allow for you all to join three breakout sessions, one of three breakout sessions. Fauzi, I want to thank you, particularly virtually, and also ask a round of applause and thanks for our panelists.