 Welcome. I'm Melanie Greenberg, the president and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and it is such a joy and a pleasure to gather here in the magnificent headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace to explore together some of the greatest challenges facing us today during a very tumultuous time at home and in the world. Today's theme is peace and democracy in a turbulent world. Why? 1.5 billion people live in fragile states where a lack of effective government structures and restricted space for civil society contribute to cycles of violence. We know that corruption is a major source of grievance in many states and serves as a key driver for extremism and conflict. We've seen recently with the Ebola conflict how a lack of trust in governance can exacerbate other kinds of crises. And we know that when security and police forces are either overly aggressive and restrictive or overly weak, that's a very important source of unrest and a source of lack of trust in government, which I might mention is not only a problem in the South Sudan's of the world, but in the Baltimore's of the world as well. Conversely, we know that when there's both an effective social contract between government and society and effective space for citizen voice and cooperation, these provide the scaffolding for resilient societies that can resolve their differences through consensus building and through politics rather than through deadly violence. What we'll explore today and in the next two days of our conference is how peace building and democracy come together and how we can develop joint approaches to the tremendous global challenges facing us in the years ahead. This intersectoral dialogue between peace building and democracy takes place within a larger initiative at AFP that we're calling peace building 3.0. And in peace building 3.0, we understand that conflict happens in very complex systems and no one field can take linear solutions and solve these complex problems. We need to work together as peace builders with democracy, development, rule of law, health, education, women in peace building and all understand our places in these systems and how to learn to cooperate between fields with very different methodologies, philosophies, ideologies. So this conference in our discussion today is part of that effort to bring different fields together to recognize our complexity. Before moving on to our wonderful program and we're just so honored to have Undersecretary Sarah Swoll here with us today, I wanted to make a few thank yous. This is one of the few times that we'll all be together in the course of the day. First, to thank USIP for hosting us today, to thank Nancy Lindborg, USIP's new president, one of my great heroes in the peace building field, and it brings us such pleasure to work with you here at USIP that we look forward just to wonderful partnership ahead. And great thanks also to Lynn Woodham and Sarah Ogosi who've made our planning for this conference. There were a lot of moving parts, just so joyful. So thank you. Also AFP staff in the room, can you raise your hands if you're here? I can tell you that AFP staff and interns have been working literally 24 seven for the last week and very hard of the last nine months to bring this all together. And I want especially to thank Emily Malotsi and Becca Weinstein for all the work that they've done. And I know all of you have worked with them to register and to say thank you very much. A quick thank you as well to AFP's board and our donors who are here today, many of whom have traveled across the country to be with us. But I especially want to single out Tom Farrow and Chip House for giving us the financial and institutional wherewithal to start doing this work around peace building 3.0. And also to Bob Berg who has just endowed a lecture series called peace building and the challenges to peace building in the years ahead. So we are now guaranteed of 10 years of discussions like this, looking at the frontiers of peace building. And finally, I want to thank my parents, Jane and Larry Cohen who are sitting in about the fifth row here. And my father's childhood friend, Tully Plesser, who's joined us as well. We have a sweep of history here in the room today. So thanks to all of you and we look forward to a wonderful day ahead. One note, everything today is on the record. We do have journalists in the room. It's being webcast to around the world. So this gives us a wonderful opportunity, but just to let you know that this will be quite open. Thank you. And it's wonderful to introduce Nancy Lindborg. Thank you, Melanie. And great to see everybody here today. There were a lot of hugs around coffee as we prepared to come in and that's always a good sign for people who are taking this opportunity to come together and really dig into some of these critical issues. Melanie, thank you for your comments. And I want to also give a special shout out to Melanie who's been a real thinker, leader, writer, scholar in this field who's really helped us think of peace building as a much larger endeavor that encompasses the kind of issues we'll be talking about the next several days. So Melanie, thank you for your vision and leadership. This USIP AFP conference partnership is really one of the signature activities that we do together. And I'm delighted to be here for it. And I very much applaud the title and the set of topics that will be looked at today. We are clearly in a turbulent time where there is the need for people to come together as Melanie said, across disciplines, across ways of looking at the world to understand how to bring all of this energy and knowledge to bear in a world that is definitely going through some difficult transition times with no indication that we'll be through it in the near future. I had the great honor of being sworn into USIP as the president just about three and a half months ago. And as many of you know, USIP is an independent, nonpartisan, congressionally funded institute that really dares to envision a world without violent conflict. And I can't imagine a better or more audacious vision and one that all of the people of USIP are pleased to be able to dedicate their work and their time to. We do this by really seeking to build America's national capability to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict. And we support peacemakers at every level, national, regional, and local. I've had a chance to visit a couple of our field programs in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and just recently Burma, and have been ever more impressed at the ways in which people at the community levels are connecting up to the national levels and supporting peace processes with a lot of creativity and a lot of determination. This is a great assemblage over the next three days that really does bring together people of very diverse interests. And I'm eager to see how the conversation evolves. I'm also very honored and eager to introduce our special guest today, Sarah Sewell, who is the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the State Department. And Sarah was sworn into this position just over a year ago, a year in a court, probably seems like a lifetime, Sarah. I know that you've been on the road and working hard. Over the last decade, where a number of you have probably had a chance to meet Sarah, she taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she was also the Director of the Car Center for Human Rights Policy. And in this position, she launched the Mass Atrocities Response Operations Project, or MERO, and directed the program on national security and human rights. She served on a number of boards, and in her time as Undersecretary, she has become a leading voice for mass atrocities as something that we need to pay close attention to and get ahead of. She is a champion for action, and she's bringing her full energy, her vision, and her commitment to a very critical role in the U.S. government. Sarah, thank you for being with us today, and please join me in welcoming her. So thank you, Nancy, for hosting this super important conference. I'm really pleased to be here with you all this afternoon. And thank you, Nancy, for your assumption of the leadership of the Institute for Peace. I think that all of us who have watched the Institute have really high hopes for its evolution and the ways in which it's going to contribute to realizing that audacious vision that you described. And thanks, Melanie, for your introduction and for leading the Alliance for Peace Building. It's really... It's nice when you work in government to come to a meeting that is full of non-government people and know a lot of them. It's really nice, and to respect their work and to feel connected to their work. It's a privilege. And so I want to just begin by thanking all of you for your very important contributions to this audacious vision of peace that we are all working toward. So this morning, I would like to talk a little bit about, before joining in a broader conversation, about how the U.S. government is working to reduce the risk of violence worldwide. And to give you some sense, which is, I think, sometimes difficult to convey because the context in which government policy is made, and no one knows this better than Nancy, but is sometimes mind-numbingly bureaucratic and procedural and mechanistic. And feels very divorced from the kind of interpersonal relationships that you can see and feel in touch on the ground in the fieldwork that many of you engage in or support. And yet, the kinds of changes that fall into this category of mind-numbingness to an external actor are sometimes of fundamental importance for outcomes in terms of policy and therefore translating into action on the ground. And so I hope you'll bear with me if it seems somewhat arcane and abstract and just trust me that everything that I'm describing in our small world, some of my teams here in the front row, counts as a significant success and the result of a lot of elbow grease and hard work. So when I took this job as undersecretary for civilian security, I saw it as an opportunity to essentially continue the work that I'd been doing prior to rejoining government. It was an effort to strengthen the U.S. collective effort within government to pursue the American values that I think inspired most of us as we joined this work, tolerance, liberty, human dignity. And the values are ends in themselves. The values are our words to which we and our politicians pay homage. But they are more than our national values. They really are universal values, and they really do lie at the cornerstone of not just our peace and security as members of a global community, but indeed for the stability and the sustainability of the international architecture into the 21st century. So the office that I'm in now at the State Department leads the department's work at the intersection of security and human rights. Sometimes uneasy nexus that I've occupied for a very long time, I'm sure some of you would describe yourself as having lain at that nexus as well. And the bureaus within the undersecretariat range from the Counterterrorism Bureau to the Conflict Stabilization Bureau, narcotics and law enforcement, human rights, democracy, refugee assistance, human trafficking, global criminal justice. So when what is known as the J Bureau was created, for some people it seemed like a really odd melange of different bureaus with very different and competing missions. But if you occupy this nexus that I just described where you see as fundamental the relationship between rights and security between justice and peace, this constellation of bureaus makes all the sense in the world and offers hope in a very concrete if bureaucratic way that the United States can join together the strands of security and peace in in a form that has been elusive in some some periods of our history. So if you assume that human rights and security are closely interwoven, you see security as a means of promoting human rights, and you see that crises and instability weaken the social and governmental structures that are necessary for protecting citizens from abuse. So our core mission at J is to encourage and support rights and justice respecting societies in which people can live freely and safely. And so since coming to the office, I've really put an emphasis on improving the government's ability to respond to mass atrocities, the use of systematic violence against civilians. This is not a unique focus of mine. You will all know that President Obama some three years ago identified the prevention of mass atrocities as a core national security interest of the United States in addition to being a moral responsibility. And he committed the United States to becoming a global leader in preventing wide scale violence against civilians. The President's National Security Strategy and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Q2DR, see I'm already numbing you, that was rolled out just two weeks ago by Secretary Kerry, reiterate the importance of preventing mass atrocities as a strategic priority. And as global citizens, as people who read the newspaper, we cannot help but understand that this issue looms extremely large for the world as a whole. Places, in particular, those that are already marginalized and vulnerable if not already riddled with conflicts, so places such as Sudan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, all at risk. And to meet these threats to prevent conflicts from escalating, the government is seeking to improve the ability of countries and local communities to identify and quickly address the risks of large scale violence when they arise. We all have a role to play and I'm simply going to explain how we've been seeking to strengthen the State Department's role. First, the promise of prevention. Government policymaking, institutional policymaking, sometimes individual policymaking, we all know that prevention is the wisest investment of resources and yet it's often very difficult to actually work our systems and our choices to prioritize prevention efforts. It more effectively mitigates risks before crises erupts, it reduces the costs that come with full scale response, saves lives. Preventing threats is just not an automatic reflex for government nor is it typically reflected in the way that we budget. We respond to ongoing crises, that is sort of what catapults a complex checks and balances system to actually move. And prevention is something that because it works over the longer term and because it often works in avoiding the foul in the non-barking dog, it's harder to show the concrete results that so many are focused on whether they're in the donor community or whether they sit in Congress. So the importance of prevention is confronted by the difficulty of actually prioritizing prevention in complex decision making. And so the role of your organization's outside of government is to constantly press us to do just that. We are working within state to try to do that within the context of government decision making. To incorporate prevention thinking into the mechanics of government, we are seeking to institutionalize prevention in ways that go beyond what is commonly understood and talked about, which is the Atrocity Prevention Board as an entity. We're working to institutionalize prevention in all aspects of the way that the State Department thinks about and executes its responsibilities. So the fast moving threats, the wolf at the door, the urgent inbox is what tends to preoccupy the government. One of the advantages of being a functional bureau within the State Department is that we can think more long term and more strategically about what lies over the horizon. And we are better positioned to bring prevention concerns and priorities to the balance of our colleagues at state that are focused on the immediate crises. So we have worked to build mechanisms within our government deliberative processes and within our budgeting and within our are the way that we think about who's in the room for a given discussion to make sure that prevention is on the agenda in a way that is more central than has typically been true in the past. The APB itself, the Atrocities Prevention Board, scans the horizon to look for emergent threats and is charged with helping push the system to prioritize those challenges in a preventive vein. And the early warning indicators work that many of you have been involved in and that has gone on for a long time outside of government has now been incorporated within government, within the way the intelligence community thinks about its responsibilities and how it defines its priorities. And building on that institutionalized change, the Atrocities Prevention Board is better equipped to do that work of early identification. So we will look every month at a handful of countries that have been identified by the intelligence community at where the risk factors lie in that particular country or region. And we will see to identify gaps and opportunities that can be met in advance early on. So the Atrocities Prevention Board does in an interagency context in which Nancy was a critical participant when she served in government for AID. In an interagency context sets the tone, but the real work has to happen within agencies as they identify what it is that they can do and enable either programmatically or in terms of budget or in terms of diplomacy to work on the prevention angle. So let me take this abstract description and try to make it more concrete. And I do this with a great deal of humility because I'm going to talk about the example of Burundi. And as you all know, the current political crisis in Burundi with the president having asserted his right to run for a third term in contravention of the Arusha Accords has caused enormous dislocation and increased violence and refugee flows within the country. So I'm going to provide this example that looks at the Atrocity Prevention Board's efforts vis-a-vis Burundi starting from two years ago. And the claim that I'm going to make is not that we were able to prevent atrocities forever, but that we positioned the U.S. government, our ambassador in Burundi and the concerned international community in a much better place to respond to what are now the risks of mass atrocities and violence. So the APB, looking based on the intelligence communities scanning of the horizon that I just referred to, this institutionalization of the prevention of mass atrocities agenda into the way the government prioritizes issues, had identified Burundi as a country at risk. And some two years ago, the different agencies of government came together and identified gaps in our programming, in our understanding of the situation, in our peacebuilding efforts on the ground, in the communication among key actors within Burundi and worked to scrounge together some $7 million worth of resources to support programs and efforts that aimed to fill those gaps. So the funding bolstered coordination with partners, it enabled the department to deploy civilian conflict experts to augment what was a very small embassy team. And it laid the groundwork for a much deeper understanding and faster understanding within the government of what is going on now as we prepare to potentially respond to these increasingly worrying signs in Burundi today. So we're working within the State Department as I think about the atrocities prevention interagency process within the State Department. We have a responsibility to instill within the bureaucracy itself, not just have it lodged at the level of the whole of government, the prevention analysis piece and where that, I have directed that to reside in the Conflict and Stabilizations Operations Bureau. It is a redirection of the bureau in the sense that the bureau had become very programmatic in its focus. We are seeking to restore a balance between the analytic and policy side of CSO's work with its programatics. And what CSO is doing in coordination in most cases with AID that has really been a leader in this field over the long haul in terms of its conflict assessment work. But AID and State have come together to refine their conflict assessment tools as they relate to mass atrocities. And we are instilling within the State Department training, training that exists for foreign service officers and other State Department employees, but also creating toolkits that will go out to posts that are at risks and are available to anyone who is deploying to a country that is on our screen as being potentially at risk of mass atrocities. CSO is also rededicating itself to capturing lessons learned. I have been amazed as coming from academia at the difficulty that the, at least the State Department appears to have in capturing learning and conveying it in other than a person to person point to point manner. And so institutionalizing best practices, institutionalizing case studies so that those who come to the next crisis don't have to learn the hard way is a priority that we've established for CSO. Disseminating those resources because the regional, first of all, everyone within the Foreign Service at least is constantly moving and rotating through. And so while you may have regional expertise, as you all know, conflicts are very specific to a particular context. And so knowing what happens for countries over 10 years ago doesn't necessarily prepare you well for an emerging conflict in country X. That's that's different. But also the constant churn means that that there is, there is more of a difficulty in raising issues that are not considered to be the top priority of the crisis issues. So we, we have to both provide the tools for people to make the prevention case and we have to provide the reinforcement psychologically for people to feel that it is important and indeed expected that they will raise the prevention case. And so that is really what CSO is seeking to do within the Foreign Service culture and within the bureaucracy at the State Department. We have to look at our existing activities. This is another thing that CSO will be doing in partnership with others to investigate how existing investments in the rule of law in gender equality or political participation can lay the foundation that can contribute to preventing violence. There's a lot that the State Department does long term that with more attention and more tailoring can serve multiple purposes. And you know, the longer I am backing government, the longer I see the enormous, the more deeply I understand the enormity of challenges that are out there globally, the more I appreciate the limitations of our own resources and our own reach. The more I firmly believe that everything that we do, whether it is development or whether it is institution building, absolutely needs to be done through a prevention lens where it is, it is multi-purpose investment. And there are tweaks in the way that we can do this that I think will yield big benefits going forward. And this relates very much to the third emphasis that we've had in the State Department within the J under Secretariat since I came to it, which is this notion that's very familiar to all of you and that's very familiar to our colleagues at AID, but that is not typically the way the State Department has thought about its work because the State Department typically is focused on embassies that deal with governments and relationships that are intergovernmental and meetings and processes that are intergovernmental. We at J really look at the world through the lens of the global citizen. And so we think about strengthening communities. And so this this emphasis on what it means to promote sort of the strength and health and resilience of communities is something at the local level is something that we are seeking to to inculcate throughout the Department. When the forces of instability threaten the fabric of a society, we we the odds are increased that the community can resist those threats when we strengthen the health of that community. So whether you're talking about conflict and general, whether you're talking about violent extremism, whether you're talking about the the marginalization and use of violence against a particular subset of that community. These are all risks that have security implications that can be addressed by strengthening community processes. And the State Department's tools, which tend to be geared toward government partners, can be adjusted and augmented in ways that really develop the community piece and focus on the relationship of the community to the government in ways that are also extremely helpful for community resilience and for governance in general. And so that's that's an enormous cultural change that we are just beginning to address. And again, you all are expert, you all have been doing this for a long time, harder evolving within government process, certainly at state. So the long term peace building doesn't begin and end with a focus on national governments. And so this is why as we as we looked to, for example, the challenge in the Central African Republic, part of of our augmentation of resources, some 30 million dollars went to community and grassroots peace and reconciliation programs. Part of our effort was having President Obama record a radio address that was broadcast to the people of that country. Governments everywhere are strengthened when they work in partnership with communities. And so trying to create a balanced approach to peace means that we have to leaven our approach to foreign assistance and partnership to think beyond governments to think about not just civil society, where I think the State Department has evolved in terms of both who it communicates with and who it sees as partners in development or foreign assistance work, but also really focus on the communities themselves that are the the embodiments of that global citizen that we increasingly need to think about in a world in which borders become less important in many respects. A fourth feature of our approach is partnerships. I've touched on this already. The ways I was really struck in a really positive way when I returned to government in the State Department by the prominence that is attributed to civil society organizations in dialogue, both in the field and in Washington. The role of non-governmental actors I think will only continue to grow. We within the State Department increasingly see not just the layers, but also the breadth of multinational or multi-organizational partnerships as being essential to anything that we do. And it's not simply a function of limited resources. It's a function of the need to have multiple pressure points or multiple engagement points on any given problem set. So, for example, we at J have started a dialogue with the European Union, the Civilian Security and Development Dialogue that aims at bringing the EU apparatus to include DEVCO into a discussion about how do we strengthen community resilience and how do we work collectively when we are mutually concerned about a country at risk? We meet regularly with UN counterparts, both individuals who are special rapporteurs on issues like genocide or transitional justice, but also with the internal apparatus within the UN leaders of initiatives such as Rights Up Front that seek to help the UN make much of the same preventive change that we are seeking to institutionalize within the State Department. And at the local level, the community engagement, one of our big challenges is trying to learn how to bring our investments in communities back to Washington. And I have a feeling that we could probably learn from some of you in how to best do that, but we certainly do rely on the Institute of Peace because of its many events and because it's just next door. So it's so easy to come and hear from people who are in Washington from the field, from local communities about how programs and engagements are working and affecting them. So in some, when the Secretary announced the release of the QDDR, he said, power dwells increasingly in networks rather than hierarchies. We have to engage with an ever-expanding array of organizations, groups in regional and subnational leaders. This is really a fundamental challenge for us, but it's space within which you move seamlessly and so I hope we can rely on you to continue to keep us honest and evolve our efforts in taking communities and citizens seriously in national government policymaking. I want to just say a very brief word and we can talk about it more in the Q&A if you wish, but the emphasis that the President and the Secretary of State are now putting on the prevention agenda as it relates to the threat of global terrorism I think is a really noteworthy evolution and I want to flag it for you. It may not be what you all think of as central to your own work as peace builders, but I can tell you based on my travels, including most recently with the Secretary in Kenya, the issue of community resilience, the issue of interfaith dialogue, the issue of government community relationships is absolutely central to preventing the rise of violent extremism and that next generation of threat. And I believe that the work that you do and that we are seeking to do better within the Department of State and in conjunction with our colleagues at AID, at the level of the citizen, at the level of the community, at the nexus of government and community and citizen is absolutely vital for dealing with a panoply of challenges but centrally to this question of violent extremism and terrorism. And we have seen that as important as the use of force and intelligence tools may be that at the end of the day this is psychological, this is a question of belief, this is a question of pull factors, this is also a question of underlying causes and push factors that have to do with alienation, with marginalization, with a host of things that are really central to the work that many of you have studied and been active in. And so when the White House convenes a summit on countering violent extremism and the main word at that summit is how do we prevent violent extremism? That's a really important and positive and energizing possibility and an invitation to all of you to think about how you can contribute to that expansion, to that complementarity of our current hard security approaches to countering terrorism and how do we think about getting ahead of the curve? How do we think about preventing those next generation of extremists from emerging? How do we think about keeping communities healthy so that children can be protected from the lure of this, this aberrant, nihilistic, ideological and behavioral pull? How do we prevent that? And that, I think, is peace building at its core. That, I think, is a huge opportunity for all of us. I think it's an opportunity that if we fail to really engage it, if we fail to embrace it, to walk into that space that sometimes at an uncomfortable nexus, because not everyone in the peace community wants to talk about terrorism or wants to feel that their work is somehow connected to an anti-terrorism effort. But I promise you, this is an invitation that we do not want to pass up. This is a door through which we must walk because the peace building is so central to what it means to promote tolerance, those values that I mentioned in the beginning, liberty, tolerance, inclusion, freedom, human rights. This is fundamentally at risk in any struggle against terrorism. And the more we can use the non-kinetic tools, the more we can act earlier in a cycle of radicalization, the better we can harness all layers of society in fighting against intolerance and nihilism and violence, the closer we will be to the world that we all wish to see. So I hope very much that for those of you who are already engaged in work at this nexus, you will recommit yourselves and that we can support you. And I hope for those who have yet to venture into this space that you will find it possible to do so because we really do need your help. So sorry to go on so long, but thank you very much.