 Good afternoon, everybody. We're gonna go ahead and get started. I know folks are still coming in, but we have a lot to do so we want to get started. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at US Institute of Peace, and I am just delighted to welcome everybody here. This is a wonderful opportunity to dig into a big topic, and I want to thank Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, as well as New York University Center on International Cooperation for co-hosting this event today with us, and a special thanks and shout out to Sarah Mendelson, a longtime colleague and very good friend who was really the inspiration and the ignition spark behind this event, and you know really third times a charm. I don't know how many of you responded for the other two times we've had this scheduled. But as you may have noticed, we had to cancel once because of the funeral of President Bush. Second time was during the government shutdown, so I spent all of last night checking weather reports, having nightmares. The 15 minutes after President Bush, sorry, after President Trump signed the budget deal that put us back into operations, Sarah was on the phone. She's like, can we get it scheduled? So this is even more wonderful that we've had to wait so long to have this conversation, and we really wanted to have this opportunity to get together to talk about how to accelerate progress on what I think I and many of you in the room see as the heartbeat of the sustainable development goals, which is goal 16. And this challenges us to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at every level. This is core to development. It's also core for our mission here at USIP. We were founded by the US Congress in 1984 with the awesome mission of preventing, mitigating, and resolving conflict around the world, which we do by linking research and policy and training to support and partnership with those who are working for sustainable peace in conflict areas around the world. And our experience, I think our collective experience and data and wisdom all tell us that peace is not the absence of conflict, but it's the presence of what goal 16 seeks to articulate, that combination of justice and dignity and inclusive opportunities and fundamentally that social contract between people and their state. And without that social contract, without that foundation, that's when conflicts spiral, often into decades of repeated violence, development gains are imperiled. And these are the countries where you've got that common denominator of fragility resulting in violent extremism, extreme poverty, ways of refugee, civil wars. So when the 2030 agenda for sustainable development was negotiated with goal 16, that was an extraordinary opportunity. That was a breakthrough moment. And it was really the first time that there was this common international recognition. It was seen as fundamental for development and it's fundamental for peace. Goal 16 gives us this very important comprehensive framework for tackling the violence and fragility that lies at the roots of many of the ills we're seeing today. It's a very ambitious agenda. And as many of you know well, levels of conflict have risen sharply over the recent years and we've also seen reversals in democratic government. So in this context, how do we come together to tackle this challenge and what will it take to accelerate progress? Today's discussion is going to focus on a central issue, which is how can the diverse communities that work on peace building, on rights, on governance, on development, mobilize to accelerate this progress. And today is an opportunity to talk about how we build those bridges, how we reach agreement, how we measure action. And it's a very timely discussion moment here in Washington. And I want to, before we turn to the panels, just quickly say that last week we released here in Washington the report of the task force on extremism in fragile states that USIP has facilitated over the last year. And it was led by New Jersey Governor Thomas Keane and former Representative Lee Hamilton, who are the co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission Report. It's very convergent with the core issues of Goal 16. And there are two pieces of legislation that will be coming from both the House and the Senate in the coming week or weeks. And what it tells us is that there is actually a moment to seize, that there is an opportunity to conjoin these efforts and make some progress. And so today is even more important because of that, because of these encouraging moves. So I'm delighted that we have a really extraordinary group of knowledgeable, engaged panelists to get us into the specifics of how we move this forward. And I'll introduce them and then we'll dive into the conversation. We have David Steven, who's the Senior Fellow and Associate Director of New York University's Center on International Cooperation. And David leads the very important Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies project, which brings together the UN member states and many diverse stakeholders to really look at this challenge of delivering on the 2030 agenda for peace, justice, and inclusion. Ambassador Sarah Mendelson is the Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and Head of the Washington Office of the Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. You need a shorter title or an acronym or something. Sarah also served as the U.S. Representative to the Economic and Social Council at the UN. And so she lived and breathed the development of the SDG agenda and has decades of working on this critical issue. Daniel Nagan is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at the Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. We're going to all say that together. And he does very important research on the evolution of criminal and antisocial behaviors and the deterrent effect of criminal and non-criminal penalties on illegal behaviors and the development of statistical methods for analyzing data on crime. So he brings this really important perspective that's not often with us at this table and has published widely on these. Maria Steffen is our own USIP Director of the Program on Nonviolent Action. And she focuses on the applied research training and education and policy and practice information related to civil resistance and has done some really landmark groundbreaking research that informs practice and published quite a bit. Laura Bailey is the Global Lead on Stability, Peace and Security for the Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice at the World Bank. She's worked in a number of transitional, fragile countries all around the world and brings that policy to practice, lens and experience. So as you can see, this is a pretty phenomenal panel. And we're going to dive right in and then turn to you at the end. We'll have time for about a half hour of questions. So, David, I'm going to start with you. So set the scene for us. For those who haven't lived and breathed Goal 16, tell us a little bit about what are the elements of Goal 16? What are the targets? How do we best understand the complexity of what's in there? So thanks so much for inviting me and thanks to all for joining this panel. We are at a critical moment on SDG 16, what we call SDG 16+, so I'll just explain a few elements of that. Up on the screen, we have a slide showing that we have 12 targets in SDG 16 for peaceful justice and inclusive societies. But when you look across the screen, people like Sarah who negotiated these targets, they carefully sowed other targets that directly referenced peace, justice and inclusion across other goals. And that's what we mean by SDG 16+, so not just looking at a single goal, looking more broadly. What that looks like, we just move that on one if somebody is there. What it looks like is we have a series of targets around peaceful society, so targets that aim to tackle, prevent all forms of violence everywhere, so violence in five broad baskets, conflict and fragility, criminal and urban violence, organized violence, interpersonal violence, particularly violence against women and children, the prevention of human rights abuses and mass atrocities and then the prevention of violent extremism. So we have these targets for violence prevention and then a whole series of targets on the left-hand side there around safe spaces, how we create safe communities for people, people to live in. If we move on to the next slide, we have a set of targets around just societies. So on one side we have the kind of classic access to justice rule of law agenda, targets around a series of injustices, particularly things like corruption which we know are reshaping societies all around the world as we sit here. And then on the other side targets for rights and for gender empowerment and gender equality, so giving us a broader conception of what we mean by a just society. On one more. And then finally in inclusive societies it breaks into two. We have targets for governance, for effective, accountable, transparent institutions at all levels and not just governance in the abstract but governance in every one of the 17 SDGs, the kind of institutions that we need to underpin sustainable development. And then on the other side critically we have targets for social, political and economic inclusion. So we hit violence which is reshaping societies, is blocking the pathways for sustainable development for many. Justice which is one of the key issues of our age. Governance at a time when societies are utterly failing to deliver what their citizens want them to deliver. And then exclusion or inclusion at a time when we know that people feel excluded, they have strong grievances and that's driving this populism. So that's SDG 16 plus. So David you lead a project that is meant to set a roadmap for how we get to these targets, how we reach them. How do we measure this? What does the roadmap look like and how do we know where we're making progress? These are pretty abstract. Yeah, so they are abstract and so one of the finance minister early on from one of the countries he said we fought harder than anybody else in the negotiations for these targets and I think other countries would disagree with this but they were certainly the forefront of the negotiations and now we have the targets. We've got no idea what to do with them. So we've been trying to make... This is why we're here today. So we've been trying to make these 36 targets as concrete as possible. So a group of countries came together to form a member state led but multi-stakeholder platform for the acceleration of the implementation of these targets and one of the first things it did was work on a roadmap. Which roadmap we have some copies here described as a first draft of what implementation looks like. The roadmap for peaceful, just and inclusive societies and for those of you who can't grab a copy you can download it off stg16.plus if you go online. The roadmap starts to shape what the evidence tells us works and begins to put it in a language that a policymaker can understand and get their head around. A finance minister can think about where the investment opportunities are. So it sets strategies for prevention, for institutional renewal, for inclusion at a high level and then it gets very tangible on areas of justice, of rights, of fighting corruption where you can really begin to start the implementation and then backing that all up with finance, with evidence and data, particularly evidence of what works as well as data about the problem with advocacy, movement building, communication between countries. Based on this roadmap we've now been out supporting national implementation. So going to countries to work with policymakers to understand what the opportunities look like. Doing a similar thing at the international level. But also trying to give this profile through what we call the grand challenges. So grand challenge on justice. Many of the, some of the people in this room are partners on the task force on justice which is really trying to build a strong agenda around what it means to deliver justice to people, to prevent justice problems and to solve their justice problems in their everyday lives. We have a grand challenge around exclusion and inequality. So the bridge between SGG 16 and SGG 10 which is the goal on inequality. So really trying to bring a group of countries together around how we get serious about implementation about that. And then finally the one we're just getting going which is SGG 16.1. That says significantly reduce all forms of violence everywhere. And we're trying to bring the different communities working on violence prevention together under the aspiration to halve global violence. So just as in the MDG era we talked about halving global poverty and that brought many different development experts together under a common mission. We think that in the 2020s we should put halving global violence at the heart of the SDGs and really use that to drive a process of change. So just to complete the scene setter there are a couple of high-level meetings coming up that are meant to gather people to take stock and engage progress. Say a little bit about that, how you think we're doing by the time these July and September meetings roll around will we be able to demonstrate progress? Okay so a little bit of what should be on your diary if you're interested in these issues. Ninth to the 18th of July we have the high-level political forum. This is a ministerial level meeting in New York every year reviews progress on the SDGs. This year for the first time under review are goals SDG 16 and SDG 10 and the theme of that meeting is empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality. So right slap bang in the middle of the issues that we're working on. It's quite a big jamboree ministers will come from all over the world and they will be reviewing what has happened, progress that we've made in the first four years of the agenda. Then in September we have the first SDG summit 24th to the 25th of September and that's a head of state level summit. So presidents and prime ministers are invited to come to New York, look at all 17 SDGs and they're asked to mobilize further actions to accelerate implementation. So focus on actions and solutions, a clear sense of acceleration so an increase in ambition and a bigger mobilization around the SDGs and our opportunity is to take SDG 16 plus, take the community of actors who are working on these issues, whether or not they directly at the moment connect back to the SDGs and demonstrate that actions are beginning to be implemented as they are, demonstrate that we can do more in the next four years by making clear commitments to increase action and make a promise to come back to the SDG summit in 2023, the second of these SDG summits with some measurable change to put on the table. If we can do that roughly halfway through the agenda, then we're on the game, we can scale up, we can move on. If we don't, it will become one of the SDGs that gradually gets forgotten while the ones that have investment and progress will dominate the limelight. So that's what we have to do. We have 203 days until the end of the SDG summit, so not much time, a lot of work to try and bring the different actors together. Great. So that's the landscape. What it is, what the calendar looks like, and I think as you said, David, one of the key issues is to make sure that we've really harnessed the broad community of actors who have something to contribute. And so, Sarah, I want to turn to you. We just recently passed the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A lot of this agenda relates to a human rights agenda. How is that community contributing, and how does the SDG elements advance a human rights agenda? Well, first, good afternoon, and thank you so much, Nancy and USIP, for hosting us and for sticking in there, even when acts of God and weather and others intervened. So I'm going to say something a little bit negative and then something very positive. There's a lot of doom and gloom in the human rights community and in public debate about human rights. You don't have to look far to find books titled The End Times of Human Rights or The Last Utopia. And I think, obviously, there are many factors driving this doom and gloom, including closing space around civil society and many parts of the world. But I think that at the heart of it, one of the big issues is how relevant is human rights or human rights NGOs for everyday life for people around the world. This is the reason why some governments are able to do this closing space. And I think that there's also been not enough focus on economic rights and this issue of inequality. The good news is the SDGs address a lot of the things that people around the world and their everyday lives are hankering for, particularly on this issue of inequality. Rights are woven through the SDG agenda and 16 plus, we just had a slide show that is full of rights. So there's huge opportunity. Also, this is a universal agenda like the Universal Declaration. It applies to all of us and there's huge power in that. But there are three obstacles or four. It's not clear to me that the human rights community, which is a very broad one, has embraced the SDGs or even that some people working in very prominent human rights organizations even know about the SDGs, let alone 16 plus. But we need to make sure there's awareness in general among citizens, but certainly around the human rights community. We need to be able to translate this in local ways so that it makes sense for people. Oftentimes it gets very caught up in UNE language. And then we need to work very hard to translate it into action. And we've got some concrete ideas of how you do that that we can talk about. Well, let's not just concrete, but how about catalytic? We've got some deadlines marching towards us. Are there any specific actions that you would recommend that the human rights community coalesce around to really harness the potential of SDG 16 plus? First of all, we've got to make sure that the mainstream human rights community knows about this agenda and that they get on board. We need to make sure the donor community knows about this agenda and gets on board. We see a lot of action around the MDGs plus, if you will, a lot of action around climate happily. I mean, I think we all as human beings on the planet are happy about that, but we're not seeing the same kind of donor dialogue or collaboration. And so that really has to happen because it is incentive for action among NGOs. But we also think there's citizens need to know about this. So we're very interested in making sure, for example, young people are aware of this agenda. People born after 1980, who in 2030 will carry forward whatever we're able to advance. So we've got a pilot going in Pittsburgh where we're doing focus groups and survey work with young people on what they know specifically about 16 plus. What are the issues that are burning for them? And how do we translate it into language that makes sense? We're working with the mayor's office to make sure that they're connected with youth voice and understand what's interesting. And of course we're at a university and we've got lots of activity going on. So this kind of, we're seeing a model of youth, mayors, universities being able to figure out what's, where do we want to have our commitments? What is it about equity? And if so, what exactly? And then driving forward on that and being held accountable. And happily we have a mayor's office who is interested in that. We are interested in finding more of those kinds of models, collectives, collaborations around the world. And we think that's how we're going to get progress. So speaking of mayor's office, Daniel, as I mentioned, you do a lot of research. You're not in a world that's deeply connected to discussions of SDG, but you are very connected to things that mayors worry a lot about. And where we're seeing an increasing type and level of conflict, which is through urban violence and criminality. And so can you just talk a little bit about what that looks like from your world and how you see that connected into this agenda? Yeah. First of all, let me frame some observations about trends and violence worldwide. But violence is inherent, is varied and inherently very difficult to measure because much of it goes unreported or unrecorded. The thing that we can, the form of violence that is best measured is homicide. And which is not necessarily a good measure of other forms of violence that David mentioned like domestic violence or sexual violence. But there, the news is generally good worldwide. Since 1990, homicide rates have declined by 40% or more in the US and Western Europe. In Columbia, a country that I've been to several times, they're down by 60%. And India is down by 30%. Do we know why? The answer is not really. I mean, let me just finish this off because I think it's important. But those trends are not universal. In places like Honduras, you know, violent homicides are up by 80%, Mexico by over 100%, Kenya by 60%. And the question of why these trends are occurring isn't really not well understood. To be frank about it, there's been a lot of discussion about this in the US. But those explanations are very US centric and I think, you know, don't to me provide a compelling picture of it. But getting to your point about what do we know, we do know things about what works or doesn't work, you know, in terms of controlling violence and more crime in general. So let me just first tick off something that we know doesn't work, at least in the US. Given the scale of imprisonment in the US, we know that this is a very, very ineffective way of preventing crime and resulting in tremendous injustices. On the other hand, we do know that from research mostly emphasizing the US and Western Europe and Australia, that the police, if properly mobilized, can be effective in preventing crime. I emphasize if properly mobilized. Outside of the criminal justice system, we also know from an area that's called, from developmental psychology, developmental criminology, we know that early life interventions, which emphasize things like proper prenatal care, good prenatal care, more effective parenting skills in various ways, I can pay huge dividends to, you know, two decades down the road in reducing violence of children. I'm sort of interested, so we've got the human rights lens and we've got the criminal justice lens. I want to ask either of you to chime in on do you see a way to mobilize the work, the learnings, the communities of practice and either of those, both of those two communities, to work more, to bring their learnings and where they've seen progress to bring to bear on Goal 16, which requires more of an integrated approach and understanding justice in the criminal sector is deeply related to human rights. Sarah? So one of the things I think that's exciting about 16 plus is that it's actually getting at root causes. I mean, if you think of human rights in a very traditional way, it's really about monitoring compliance with law and that's in some ways at the other end of the spectrum rather than addressing the root causes of the abuse. So for that reason though, I think it's challenging to the human rights community that sees this in some ways as either alien or either they're afraid that there's not a compliance aspect to this, right? That there's no one's going to be held accountable. And I would argue no one's going to be held accountable if no one knows that we've agreed to this agenda and it's providing an opportunity to be able to talk to people where they're at, right? It is addressing so many issues that affects communities around the world as opposed to legal frameworks. It's not to say that legal frameworks aren't important. It's to say and also these other things are happening. I just taught this course on democracy, human rights in the 21st century and so I've been reflecting in part on the 20th century and it's very clear that the way in which the human rights community arose at least in parts of the global north had to do the Cold War and it was a real aversion to dealing with economic rights and we're living through just tremendous inequality around the world but also in thriving democracies. So this is an attempt, an agenda that can help address those issues but also in a very 21st century way in a way that is not really hamstrung by the context in which the Universal Declaration was written. Daniel, how about the criminal justice community? Well, I think that the criminal justice community has an enormous amount to contribute to this as I indicated at lunch. There's a lot of work going on with even as close as George Mason University from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy for how to effectively mobilize mostly policing resources to prevent crime. And in preparing for this meeting I spoke to friends at Cambridge University about their work from around the world and when I asked them about their work they used the same language of the importance of legitimacy, of the police corruption, the rule of law in what they're doing. So the point is they don't talk about SGGs but what their work is doing is very relevant. And getting back to Sarah's point is one thing that has happened in the world in which I operate and maybe I'm one of the primary contributors to this problem is that everything because of my research has been reduced to asking the question what can be done to prevent crime which is and I've been I was bugging Sarah to tell me to give her some literature on human rights in particular because in the next month I'm going to write some things to push back on that and say that particularly among in policing that respect for the dignity of the public it's been argued that treating people in a fair and dignified way is an instrumental way of advancing the crime control objective in various ways. So it's not an end in itself it's to advance the crime control objective and arguing that that's an objective in and of itself as is crime prevention and neither of those goals should have the status of being able to pardon the pun of trumping the other and that they both have to be taken into consideration. But it's interesting they're all in the service of what we've agreed to with goal 16 with the larger that gives you a larger framework to jointly hook on to but I want to turn to Maria because we've talked about a couple of constituencies which are professionals who are working on these issues but obviously there are a lot that your average person can do and this has been your life's work Maria so talk to us a little bit about how you've seen citizen movements really contribute to creating the kind of difference that's envisioned with goal 16. Sure, thanks Nancy so we've talked about the human rights frame the criminal justice frame and we'll talk a little bit about the people power frame. So I think what's interesting and I was smiling when Sarah mentioned that she's teaching her course on human rights and democracy because Sarah is one who inspired me greatly to get into the human rights field in the first place and was the first to offer a course at the Fletcher School on social movements which kind of generated my interest in this whole area so that made me smile. So I think what's interesting about social movements is that they are a way for ordinary people in society to organize engage in collective action using nonviolent tactics like vigils, protest, boycotts you know strikes, civil disobedience as a means of realizing everything that's in SDG 16. So it's a way for ordinary people to use collective power to advance human rights to challenge corruption to fight back against political exclusion to really get at the drivers of violence and violent extremism. So some of my research which Nancy mentioned has looked at the efficacy of major nonviolent campaigns over the course of history. So my colleague Erica Chenoweth and I studied hundreds of major nonviolent campaigns against authoritarian regimes primarily and campaigns for territorial self-determination and we found that the nonviolent campaigns have historically been twice as effective as the violent campaigns. And that we found a very strong correlation between nonviolent movements and both longer term civil peace and democratization and I think this is a really interesting aspect. About eight different studies have been done that have found that civil resistance, people power and nonviolent movements are major drivers of democratic development and democratization. And I think one of the reasons why, so you think of all the classic cases of Tunisia more recently in the Gambia, in Armenia so some of these major nonviolent campaigns, they really focus on communities coming together that otherwise may not engaging in collective action, making demands and really exerting power as a community, as a group. And I think what's interesting about that is that these movements build social trust and cohesion which we know is critical to resilience which is critical to kind of addressing violent and violent extremism. And one example that I would note in the Task Force report on violent extremism in fragile states there is an example of the case of Tunisia. Michael Marcuse has done some research that looked at two communities in Tunisia and found that in one community there was a significantly large number of violent extremist penetration and foreign fighter recruitment. In the other village which shared almost all the same attributes there was practically none and so he looked at why and the single determinant of why there were so few in the one community was that it had a history of nonviolent organizing in labor unions. So there's something about how kind of citizens come together and engage in these movements that I think really matters. And movements take all different forms in fragile conflict affected states. They're environmental movements they're terrorist. They're movements challenging civil war and demanding peace processes in places like Liberia. They're movements challenging corruption in places like Nigeria, Kenya, Burkina Faso. And so I think they're just very different manifestations where communities come together and kind of use these nonviolent tactics to push back, have voice and I think really get at what SDG 16 So Maria you mentioned again the task force report and their copies out on the table for those who haven't read it but one of the things that it does is really embrace what is a core development principle that the development community has known for a long time and that's the importance of locally led change. That it really has to come from within and what you're describing is the ultimate local locally led approach. So how do you actively create the ecosystem to support that kind of change and that kind of action? Yeah, I mean I think there's a growing appreciation in the donor community that movements are significant drivers of social and political change so I think there's more of an embrace now that movements matter how to support them is sometimes tricky and not without controversy in terms of you know as Nancy legitimacy ownership and so sometimes you know if there's a perception of foreign backing or external support that can sometimes you know raise questions about the local authority legitimacy of these groups this is not to say that external support is always negative or it will always harm movements I think some of the most important things donors can do particularly is to invest in kind of the precursor organizing that takes place kind of prior to a peak mass mobilization so investing in key organizing skills because there's a difference between organizing and mobilizing mobilizing is when lots of people come out into the streets they protest they demonstrate but you need to invest in the hardcore people of people organizing building the base decentralizing leadership and these are key skills that I think you know outside actors can invest in activists love to learn from other activists and so sometimes providing space for activist organizers to meet with one another to learn lessons and to kind of learn how to navigate key challenges and providing that key convening space to learn and to plan because a lot of movement sometimes gets stuck in the short term the one month or two months but having the opportunity to think a year two years is really something that outside actors could play the other kind of major category of outside actors support that I would say is kind of helping the enabling environment so you know there's the whole element of providing direct indirect support to activist movements but providing an influencing that enabling environment we know that dictators there's a dictator's handbook out there and there's a authoritarian resurgence that we know is happening around the world and so these same tactics of criminalizing dissent of cracking down on freedom of assembly and association they're across the board and I think this realization that closing civic space is a formidable obstacle to advancing STG-16 and using coordinated diplomatic economic other pressure to keep open civic space to use military and security leverage to you know push back against security force abuses of ordinary citizens which tends to prompt people to violence and so I think using these different tools both to support kind of the grassroots the bottom up but then also the environment in which they operate whether or not they know they're working on STG-16 let's move from people to institutions Laura the World Bank has actually been at the forefront of some of the institutional focus and change was the co-author along with the UN on the pathways to peace really tried to lay down this prevention argument you've had big new funding in the realm of fragility and moving countries from fragility to resilience can you tell us a little bit about what that's translated into in terms of how you're doing things differently at the bank yes 14 billion dollars additional in IDA-18 IDA is the lowest is the concessional window for the financing to the lowest income countries that's a big number it came along with the collective wisdom of the development community most especially since 2011 when the World Bank launched the World Development Report on Conflict Security and Development money doesn't always translate into doing things differently sometimes it translates into doing just a lot of the same thing so when you're a big institution and you're working with governments who themselves have clear what I would call standard development goals and are really a little bit more focused on how you're doing things it takes a lot it takes more than money let me put it that way to be able to help twist the conversation so that you're talking about focusing on some of the root causes that might drive grievance exclusion and pivot to prevention but it is happening so it's happening in a range of ways so inside the institution you have a much greater kind of risk factors much less sort of wait and see and then respond when there's a mess kind of stance which I'm certainly very happy to see there's a systematic attempt to look at certain countries that kind of are on that edge where they could easily fall back into severe violence there's a mechanism for resourcing those countries so in countries as different from Guinea and Nepal they're getting special resources not to do the same thing that they would normally do but to do special programming that addresses some of those drivers of exclusion so if you're in Tajikistan and you're a poor young person in the communities in the Fargana Valley your government surprisingly perhaps is involved in a conversation with the World Bank about how to address some of those root causes differently but I'm happy to say that the world banks are actually not structurally driven by the World Bank institutionally from the top down but are coming from the bottom up and I'm also happy to say that they're informed by a lot of the global conversation that as Daniel points out aren't labeled as SDG but it's very much linked to these agendas so for example I just came back last Thursday from time in Honduras where one of the world banks that I don't say for municipalities it works in nine of the most violent communities in the area of San Pedro Sula and there they are using a locally decided cocktail of interventions that includes things like early childhood development interventions neighborhood communal activity interventions cognitive behavioral therapy for gang members these are pretty edgy things for the World Bank to be financing but the World Bank is financing them and I'm happy to say that I'm happy to say that I'm happy to say that the stakeholders in Honduras and most especially the local stakeholders have decided that this is their line in the sand and that they don't want to anymore be always at the top of the list of the most violent country so I think there's a lot of change happening I also want to maybe give an example that links the kind of interventions that Sarah was talking about. I think there are a lot of interventions that seek to improve people's lives like a road or like a health clinic literally run through a community that has deeper problems that really those problems are never going to be fixed by that road or that health clinic and in the wake of some really tragic gender based violence epidemics in some parts of the world. I think there are a lot of interventions that focus on organization that focuses on survivor based justice but what's interesting about this approach is that they and the only language that I've developed for myself to understand it is they have essentially a dual accompaniment model so they focus on support to the survivor the victim where they have a dual accompaniment on the other side where they're supporting the investigators so that they can actually achieve a conviction so you've got a potentially when it works when it accumulates you've got a decrease in impunity because you've actually got perpetrators being convicted and you've got an increase in reporting which means somewhere after enough of this you've got both reduced impunity. Now this is a really teeny microscopic example but this is the kind of thing that maybe 10 or 15 years ago the bank wouldn't necessarily have even seen much less been able to find a way into supporting so I'm actually quite encouraged by this. Daniel any further advice as the bank is looking at reducing violence in Honduras she named some edgy case I would give is that I think an important part I mean this is for all the SDG activity that another important part of your work has to be evaluation of what you're doing and trying to find out whether it's effective and many things unfortunately don't work and so in preparation for this meeting I was trying to find out if there were any effective valuations of these interventions in places like Honduras and it's hard to find them and they're generally not very well done and so forth but I think to make corrective actions on these things it's very important that things be passed and that's the only way you can learn by doing otherwise it just becomes doing something as an end in itself. Just to finger on this Nancy the World Bank likes to think of itself as a global knowledge bank but it's often really hard for us to mobilize resources to do the serious kind of work so I'm happy to report Daniel will be glad to hear this that particular intervention in of two impact valuations that we're running one in Honduras and one in Mexico so we will see later this year what the evidence says. I also want to go back to you on the what kind of progress at the donor institution level are we having in creating alignment that this is the way that we need to go and how one coordinates so that you don't have cacophony at the state or community level in the future. So I'm happy to talk to you about this setting. I've been in the World Bank for 18 years now. That's a long time and I've seen a significant improvement in alignment and coordination. I think the Washington D.C. Brussels axis is working just fine. I think that the extent to which that alignment gets done, like USAID, the State Department, the U.N., the World Bank need to be aligned, is still differential. It's not as quixotic as it used to be. It's not as personality-based as it used to be. It's much more systematic. I will say that the period of U.N. reform kind of caused a stall in this, interestingly, because it kind of pulled some very important reforms for the peace building work on the U.N. side. I think you're seeing the energy flow back down to country level, so I think that's important. I think there are, but to me the thing that really matters is to be able to drive the idea of alignment and coherence instead of driving it just horizontally at these different levels, so the big institutional level, New York, is to have a lot more connection vertically, so that and to expand the conversation out beyond just the institutions that are state-centered and move into conversations that are people-centered, and that can only really happen at a country level. So, David, I want to go back to you because we've now heard from institutional level, people level, criminal justice, human rights. Do you have any, you've been looking at this from the big road map, do you have any other advice of how collectively we can translate action or intention into action into results? I mean, this is, you are really trying to drive all of this to results. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things is to move beyond the advocacy around problems to talking much more about solutions. So we found negotiations that a lot of the outside pressure was, you know, violence is terrible, there's world is full of injustice, inequality is rising and that was actually pushing countries back into political corners and it was a very top, you know, for those of you who went to New York, it was a very toxic negotiation. It was the hardest part of the SDGs to agree and I think a lot of this focus on problems emphasized that. We continue to see that. You know, and I think this actually goes to stuff that Laura was talking about. We see conversations from the international community where they go into a country and they basically say to the government, you know, look how screwed you are and surprisingly the government doesn't react very well to that. Whereas when the conversation is around, you know, you have signed up to these targets on peaceful just and inclusive societies, what does a peaceful just and inclusive future look like for your country and how can we help you work towards that. You have a very different type of conversation and you get that kind of ownership that you referred to before. I think then when you begin to insert a bit of evidence into the picture you can then deepen that and make it more practical. So going back to the human rights conversation, I think some of the richest and most exciting work of human rights at the moment is building an evidence base about what works to protect human rights. I would recommend the work of the Association for the Prevention of Torture, for instance, in Geneva. They have got good empirical evidence about what a country system can do to reduce the risk of torture happening and its police stations and its prisons, et cetera. And some of it is very simple, you know, record the identity of a suspect within the custody. Again, this is now a different conversation with policy makers because you're not going don't torture, you're going these are ways that you can improve your criminal justice system with exactly what Daniel is saying to begin to have respect for people and to be more responsive to their rights in a way that's not going to end up on your front pages in a couple of years time and cause you big political difficulties. I think the next issue is to go back to those targets, there's a lot of different communities, tribes I think of them working on these issues, and most of them feel somewhat battered. The political climate is difficult, funding has historically been difficult, they've never been at the top table like education and health and they're used to having low expectations and this is a time to massively increase those expectations of what can be a better solution for them and another time to push them into greater jobs, jobs for them and the thing that I'm actually interested in is how the climate is going to get better and better. So I've talked about violence against children we saw they had a solution some years ago, the biggest mobilization for a generation probably ever really talking what works at scale, and then what kind of benefits societies could receive. The World Bank and the OECD are working on the case for investment in justice. So if we want to prevent and solve people's justice problems, what does that cost and what benefits are you going to get? And until we begin to do that, until we talk in the language that people who think in dollars and other currency signs understand, then we're not going to mobilize the investment. Which was one of the interesting accomplishments of the Pathway to Peace report. For those who haven't read it, it does a great job of presenting a business case. But I want to pick up on something that you said and go to Sarah when you talked about the very practical evidence that helps reduce torture. And Sarah, you've spent a lot of your career looking at mass atrocities and that kind of mass violence. Do you see a way to leverage some of the content of the Pathways for Peace, of the fragility legislation of this new task force report to help address, to reduce incidents of mass atrocity and violence? Yes, I'm going to answer your question in a second. But going to this issue of catalytic action, I see two different levels. I talked to students around the country about the SDGs and cohort 2030, this idea of mobilizing young people to demand and deliver the SDGs. And people are really excited about this agenda. It aligns for a variety of reasons with the characteristics of that particular generation. But what can I do? And there's a real need for, I think, a toolkit, an advocacy toolkit. They want to be able to hold their mayor or their representative or their senator or their governor accountable, but they don't necessarily have the tools. And then I think also these high level meetings make a difference. We know that, you know, when a head of state is going to appear, there's a deliverable that needs to happen. Those are opportunities. Those are bureaucratic opportunities to make collective commitments. So I think 2019, just to come back to where we began, is extremely important. I want to focus mostly on the congratulations to those of you who worked on the Global Fragility Act. I've seen what a difference a congressional act can make on human rights issues, whether trafficking, obviously, the Global Magnitsky Act, but the cautionary point I'd like to make is that, and I saw this particularly on trafficking, I know that there's a kind of door that has been opened on the prevention side, but there's a huge amount of education that needs to happen among sort of traditional security walks, bureaucrats in government, whether they're on the hill or senior levels at state, the White House, the Pentagon. We know that the development and the diplomatic agenda are often the third or the second and they're not the first. Even on the Atrocity Prevention Board in reviews of the APB, it's as if the work of AID in development don't even appear in the reviews of what worked and what didn't work, the Atrocity Prevention Board, which was an initiative that USIP, the Holocaust Museum, and the Diplomatic Associate US, it's the third organization on diplomacy, it's an amazing nonpartisan effort of how to get an idea into policy where a group of people, again with this institution and others, worked in task forces throughout 2008 and then there was an election, people who were positive about the Atrocity Prevention Board came into office and through 2011 and 2012 worked to make it real and it exists today. It is part still of the US government but that education about the role of prevention as being critical, we have a lot of work to do to make it real but it is easily and importantly linked back to certainly Goal 16 and I would say I've always looked at Goal 16 also as a way of elevating the important work on transitional justice or what I like to call the present past, the need to address violent episodes of how any society has evolved as important drivers of development and potential conflict and I think 16 can give us some of the tools to do that. So before we go to our audience for comments, questions, I want to ask to all of us here and we talked a little bit about this right before the panel, Goal 16, unlike the Millennium Development Goals and you mentioned it a little bit where you get an easy punch about we're going to have hunger, we're going to give everyone clean drinking water, these are abstract concepts, they're hard to measure, they take incredible cross cutting action. Sarah, you said a really interesting thing about how those who are working on the oceans are mobilizing around the plastics and I bet everybody here has seen something on that. What do we do? How can we create the easy access to the message, a concrete understanding that everybody can hook onto to really move people towards concerted action and galvanize impact on what I think we all think is the most important of the goals. So to any of the panelists before we go to the audience. One answer is to do actual research, focus groups, survey work to understand what resonates with a given community. Is it some aspect of corruption? Is it ending modern slavery, human trafficking? Is it reducing some specific form of violence? Is it access to justice? But making sure that it is, it's a burning issue and it's articulated in a way that makes sense to people as opposed to people working in the U.N. Secretary. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in preparing for this meeting, as I said, I was not really familiar with the SDG. A recent convert. And so, you know, in preparing it, and one thing that struck me about it as reviewing them all is that the solution to almost all of them do depend upon more abstract ideas and I think, and they involve around a government that respects the rule of law that's not corrupt and which has legitimacy, you know, in the eyes of most of the population. And without that, you're not going to be able to effectively tackle problems like the practical problems of violence prevention and so forth. And many others, dealing with the environment, you know, improving the environment, and the list goes on. Laura, how do you talk about it inside the bank? How do you move that through a giant institution like the bank? Yeah. So, I mean, I've been struggling with this because I'm really attracted to the idea of something really universally attractive and compelling, like, have violence globally, right? And I do think that has a power, but if we got into a wonky conversation, both Daniel and I would warn you that, in fact, homicide data is sketchy. It's not accurate in many countries around the world. It cloaks every other kind of violence. And so, I'm thinking about these conversations I had with community leaders in Honduras where they were, interestingly, where, at the operational level, they changed the name of the project from Safer Municipalities Project to Mi Comunidad, my community. And then they contextualized what the aspects of safety they wanted to work on. So I wonder whether part of this is about, yes, having a global language and maybe also something that is universally interesting like the plastics. Maybe there has to be the, for me, my community is. I mean, maybe it has to be that granular, because in some communities that we're working in in Honduras, it's extortion. It's not homicides. And in others, it's gang recruitment. It's not extortion. And so, so that's just a sort of simplistic reflection. The bank, the World Bank as an institution really struggles with the idea of this sort of global norms that we try to believe are sort of universally appealing and important and drivers of good developmental outcomes versus what we call local ownership, which sometimes is just relabeling, but sometimes it's genuinely organically different. And when I try and advance this agenda in the World Bank, I remind people that 30 years ago, the World Bank rediscovered that it was the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development and started working on post-conflict. And 20 years ago, the bank discovered that some of its favored institutions, i.e. states, were a little bit fragile. And that recently, we've discovered there's a thing called violence. And so, I'm being a little bit simplistic. But yes, these things that we talked about in abstract that are all the malevolent outcomes of a lack of success on SDG 16 translate differently into different places. And so, finding that happy space between globally relevant, locally actionable, I think has to be the goal that we're looking at and a big sort of slightly ponderous institution like the World Bank is going to do that slightly differently than a much more nimble organization that, for example, is being supported in terms of civic action. And, Maria, you're not in your head. How does that resonate? I mean, you're working with activists who are very locally focused, for the most part, comment. I mean, I think the nonviolent movements are the antithesis of abstract. People organize, mobilize, take risks because their daily lives are affected. And, you know, what makes organizing and movement so interesting and say different from normal advocacy channels is it's led by and for the aggrieved people, people who are enduring injustices, oppression are the ones who lead movements. So if you really want to get at the heart of, you know, the rule of law and, you know, decreasing violence and all these things, you know, starting with the root and with people who have the greatest incentive to bring about change in their societies. And that's at the grassroots. And that's where the movements in organizing comes in. So I've been asked this question about plastics a number of times. And it's not the graduate. And including by Paul Pullman. And I think they did a fantastic job in oceans in coming together around plastics. I don't think we have that single message yet, but I think we have the next layer down on which we can, you know, we need the communications professionals to do that work. And I think there's essentially four global messages and taking all Laura's points about the fact that they then translate in very different ways in different societies, but half global violence. And it's all forms of violence is not homicides. It's half global violence. Solve justice or prevent or solve justice problems in people's lives. And we have data that there's roughly 1.5 billion people at any one time with unsolved justice problems. Fix the institutions that are failing us and failing us so obviously in so many societies and forth give people a role in shaping the future of their communities and societies. And I think those four messages really encapsulate what SDG 16 plus is about. And they're pretty tangible to people. These are things that people bump into every single day of their lives. You have a quick PS. Yeah, and every community could take those four messages and say, for me in this place at this time, this is what it means. OK, we have we have some mic runners. We have hands. Let's start with the middle back right here. And do we have a second mic? Yeah, right. And just tee this gentleman up, and we'll move forward. Go ahead. Say who you are. My name is Barbara Ween. I teach at American University, and I've been involved in peace education since 1981. I wanted to ask the USIP alum. I worked at USIP for five years. That's right, 1997 to 2002. I wanted to ask you about your partnerships with schools because peace educators and peace education dovetails beautifully with all that you're proposing. In fact, since the 1950s, thanks to Elise Bolding, Betty Reardon, Johan Galtung, and many, many other peace educators, we too have been promoting peace, social justice, economic well-being, ecological balance, and democratic participation. That's always been our mantra. And we're in hundreds and thousands of schools all over the world. So I invite you to find a natural ally with the Global Campaign for Peace Education, and many of the peace education societies and teachers networks we already work with. Perhaps they could help operationalize and implement. So could you talk a little bit about your relationships with schools? Are they on your radar screen? K through 12. I think we're signing you up to be a part of this broader coalition. Thank you, Barbara. Anyone want to comment? As an alum of Quaker School for 13 years, I'm particularly pleased with your question. I was recently talking to a CMU trustee who urged me not to just focus on universities but educational institutions. Because there's actually a lot of work in K through 12. There's a lot of work at the community college level. There are all sorts of different kinds of educational institutions around the world. We'd welcome engaging Barbara on this. I think you're right that there's a natural alliance. I mean, with IYF and CMU, we've been initially focused on universities because that's where some of us live. But there's obviously a broader community. Yeah, just to say, I mean, in SDG 16 plus, we include Target 4.7, which is the target around the culture of peace and nonviolence and education on human rights and gender equality. So I think the door is really open there. And we need this kind of interaction that Sarah's talking about. I told my students that that goal was actually our class. And of course, we continue to do peace education here at USIP. But this, I think, goes to the heart of, does it matter if you know you're working toward this goal? And one of the answers is possibly there is something powerful about knowing that you're connecting up to a global effort for a global change. And so it is about how do we cast a big broad net that brings people together. Back here. Yes. Thank you for hosting. Thank you for this great conversation that we're having. My name is Vahe Mirikian. I am a Peace Building Fellow with Peace Direct. The question I do have is on the shrinking civil society space that we're seeing globally. How does SDG16-plus help counter that? Also, is SDG16-plus coordinated and working with the youth, peace, and security in the US as well? Thank you. Youth, peace, and security in the UN? I think so. Yeah, at the initiative. We're going to take a couple of questions, so note which one. Let's take this gentleman right there. OK, then we'll go next to right behind you. Sorry. Malcolm O'Dell, I lived and worked in Nepal for 13 years, starting in 62, first Peace Corps group. Right now, I'm involved with a Fulbright Rotary Club project to bring community mobilization and women's empowerment to 20 or 30 communities along what they call the Great Himalaya Trail, 500 miles east to west. We're going to put five teams out there to work in communities, bringing these very kind of questions to them, how they can mobilize for economic development conservation and for women's development. So the question is, how can we get the SDG16-plus goals into this project that we've got? Nepal's done some amazing things, as many of you know. It's off the radar because it doesn't have much violence. They transitioned from a royal monarchy and a Maoist war, killing thousands of people to a peaceful transition to a new constitutional government. They eased the king out of power, and they have started a new federal constitution. In line with that federal constitution, we're trying to mobilize communities the length of the country to really become engaged in conservation development, bring the benefits beyond just the Annapurna and Everest areas to the country as a whole. And we'd love to know how we can bring SDG16-plus into this equation as we do it. Great. Thank you, Mr. O'Donnell. Can you pass the mic just straight behind you? We're going to take one more, and then hit it. Thank you. My name is Thomas Liu. I'm a freshman at the College of William & Mary. And so I'm involved with SDGs before I went to college here in the DC area with the United Nations Association. And so at William & Mary, I see a lot of student-led organizations, student movements on different individual goals. But there isn't really a platform of using the SDGs as a way to align the different student groups and student coalitions. And so something we're doing is that we're hosting a case competition based on international development and specifically the SDGs for students to at least understand what the SDGs are and think under the SDG framework. But however, I guess my question is, on college campuses or in communities across the United States and the globe, how is there a solution for us to connect the different organizations and the different movements together under the SDG framework and the SDG umbrella? Thank you. So some great questions. And you should talk to Barbara before you leave. So quickly on closing space, UN, and then college campuses. So the reason why I'm excited about 16 plus is it is my answer to closing space for the following reasons. Number one, the business model of global North donor talking to global South recipient is under threat or global West talking to global East recipient is under threat worldwide. And partly because the civil society organizations haven't built resilience or attachment to the local community. And by listening and responding as a best practice in delivery of 16 plus, they would build this kind of resilience. And I think responding to issues that communities care about. I mean, it gets back to the issue of which aspect of 16 plus are you most interested in? And then holding government accountable makes those organizations or non organizations much more robust. We haven't connected with the UN organization because in part we're trying to do this respectfully disconnected from the UN and have it locally owned. On college campuses, what we'd like to do is organize essentially a toolkit that would help with SDG literacy on college campuses and that would connect beyond the UN associations to their tons and tons of student groups. So the student group working on violence against women should know about goal five. And the group working on human trafficking should know about 5.2, 8.7, and 16.2 and how it's connected in alliance 8.7. So if we can find the resources, I think there's a toolkit around engaging students more widely engaging government structures but also reaching into communities that don't have a UN association, which are many, many universities and colleges across the campus, across the United States. Is there a website or someplace that people can go who are working on these issues and want to plug in? Watch this space, cohort2030.org. We're not up yet. We haven't spent the funds, but we hope to do that exactly. Maria, you work a lot on the shrinking closing space issue. Do you want to comment on that? I mean, I would just offer that I think this is where a movement mindset is somewhat helpful because I think a lot of pushing back against closing civic space is bringing together different constituencies to push back. It can't just be seen as a human rights issue or a democracy issue. I mean, I think of one concrete example in Kenya where there was an NGO bill that was trying to be put through their legislature. And it took not just the human rights folks. It was the humanitarians. It was the private sector. So all coming together and engaging in kind of collective action to push back. So I think kind of the movement mentality is very useful when it comes to pushing back against closing civic space. Cross-sectoral. Laura, did you want to venture? Yeah, I just wanted to respond to the gentleman who was talking about the example of the work he's doing in Nepal. So Nepal, and this I think is super important. Nepal is an example of a country that's coming up. The virtuous spiral that we identified in the WDR 2011 where communities or countries are emerging from conflict. And they're stretching and building the muscles that make them more resilient. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible that they would slip back and that that spiral would reverse. And so I would say to you that one of the things that could be useful at a local level in Nepal is connecting the work you're doing, the goals that you're supporting those communities in achieving to some of the influential government and donors there, including the UN and the UNDP resrep, to point out that part of achieving goal 16-plus is sustaining gains that have been made in the fight against violence and fragility. And often what happens is that when a community or a country starts to make gains and they get beyond the crisis stage, they slip off of our radar screen. But they're not any stronger, right? So resilience is a muscle that you have to keep building. So I think that connecting at a country level the work that you're doing, whether you're an NGO, whether you're a civic organization, whether you're a locally based group, to the idea that we are part of Nepal's efforts to increase our resilience and that SDG 16-plus is our goal. Great, thank you. And David, did you want to chime in? Yeah, very quickly on the same Nepal point and to compliment what Laura's just said. I think I won't pretend to have known this until I just Googled it two seconds ago. That's why we went to him last. But I was looking at what Nepal said at the ministerial review last year, and they talked about how they wanted to build on the inclusive and rights-based constitution of 2015, exactly what you're talking about. Now, in July, we have a ministerial review that is precisely about inclusion and participation, and then we have the big summit in September. So I think one of the ways to keep going up, the virtuous cycle is to begin to own the success at a national and an international level, which builds impetus to go down to a national level. So I'd urge you to be talking to the Planning Commission, and you probably are already, but I think the Planning Commission is the main route in for Nepal into the HLPF process. Let's talk about the plans for July and September, and point out, this goes back to what Sarah was saying. We're seeing some very different types of conversation emerging and some very different types of leadership. The MDG era was about rich countries giving money to poor countries to try and do things better, but these are universal goals and targets. They apply to every country, and leadership is coming from many, many places. For instance, on justice, we're pushed incredibly hard by Argentina to work on these issues based on the network of justice centers they're building in some of their poorest communities. So for Nepal to take a lead on some of these inclusion issues is not just good for Nepal, it's good for us, it's good for everyone. So I think there's certainly something to talk about there. Part of that, of course, is the challenge of connecting community level grassroots to national and international processes, right? Another round. Yes. Let's go, the woman with the scarf right there, and then tee up. Yeah. Hi, thank you so much Nancy. My name is Filiz Odabas-Galdia. I am the Executive Director of International Association for Human Values. I was so encouraged to hear all of you mention a little bit about the importance of psychosocial support in the works that you do. I just wanted to mention, Nancy, you talked about plastics and how easy it is for every one of us to identify with something so tangible when you talk about the oceans and you talk, is there such one thing when it comes to SDG-16? Of course, there may be more than one, but I would like to mention that in my opinion, one such intervention is to teach people how to handle negative emotions. I think we can all identify that we've been frustrated, stressed, angry, you name it, all those human emotions we've experienced in life, and in conflict situations this is even more important. My organization has certain research and evidence-based tools and techniques that we teach in conflict areas, especially to prisoners, about 500,000 all over the world, and these interventions have been included in the radicalization awareness network of the European Union as of last April, and Queen of England just recognized one of our teachers for her contribution to mental health. So my request to all of you is as experts in this field where you get to speak and address large audiences, to please emphasize the absolute necessity to include such interventions in any kind of work that's being done in conflict areas, thank you. Great, thank you, so a recommendation. Hi, Jackie Wilson. So I guess my question, Nancy, I think you just framed it was kind of connecting the local with the national and international, and so a lot of my work here at USIP in the past has focused on local problems and local peace processes, and so I'm well aware of the complexity of what happens, and one of my famous contributions was the 57 reasons why local peace agreements are not sustainable, right? So we all know that these are very complex issues. They're a systemic mix of corruption, lack of literacy, all of these challenges. But at a national and international and an organizational level, we work on countries or we work in rule of law or we work on human rights, and so how do we connect all this together to reach a tipping point? And I just give one more example. I think it was 2005, Bill Stubner tried to get the international peace building community, the diplomatic community, the military, and others to focus on an analysis of a country that was potentially at risk and where there could be a cohesive intervention across all of these different stovepipes. They come up with Guinea-Bissau, they could not get funding to focus on one small African country that was desperately at risk, and so the funding issue is another important part of the question. Great, so I'm gonna take one more question if someone can speak very quickly all the way up here in the yellow. Yeah, coming at you. And then please be brief and then we're gonna do a lightning round and then ask Sarah and David to close us out. Thank you very much. My name is Cleopatra Modizzi and I'm a research assistant and student at American University studying peace and conflict resolution. My question has to do with elites. So what happens if you're working in a country that is not very accepted towards democratic change or human rights change, but they still want to benefit from receiving the funding perhaps for their own purposes. We mentioned the dictator's handbook. So you get the aid, you don't really do much on the ground and you survive in power. How would we tackle that? Thank you very much. That never happens. Okay, do you wanna start with that last question, Laura? You bet. So the answer for an institution like the World Bank whose relationship is directly with the ministry of finance of that country is assuming that they are a member state and that they're in good standing is that we try very hard to find what we call the no regrets interventions. There are ways to improve basic education in that country. There are ways to improve access to healthcare in that country or to improve roads. Those, none of those things are gonna affect the basic power imbalances or elite capture that you're describing. So they aren't gonna be the answer to the SDG-16 problem. They're gonna be the answers to some of the other SDGs. And one of the interesting things I think that happens is when you do improve access to basic services for people and they can maybe use some of their collective communal energy on mobilization and action is that you might then be able to get more of an internally driven movement for change rather than an externally driven movement for change because as all of Maria's research tells us it is internally driven movements for change that succeed. Maria, do you have anything to add on the local, national, international? Well, I mean, I think there are examples where there have been kind of really interesting locally led initiatives. I think about the social audit in different places, Kenya otherwise, and it's one of the research areas of movements and anti-corruption. And I think this is one area where donors can just help connect some of these local initiatives like the audits to more national level efforts and I think there are attempts to do that in some places but that would be one concrete effort. And thinking of scaling, not in terms of doing more and expanding but connecting levels, I think that's like the pent ultimate donor scaling model. Daniel, do you wanna comment on the negative emotions? You actually touched on versions of that when you were talking about how to address criminal violence. Well, I can't speak specifically to the issue of negative emotions but I can say that many of these interventions that I'm talking about are focusing, do focus on parenting skills that are designed in the jargon that's being used of improving self-control and responding in learning self-control without using punitive parenting techniques which creates these kinds of negative emotions that you're speaking to. I would also like say, I didn't remember your name but the last question, Cleopatra, is that in doing my homework again, I've heard your comment repeatedly as a really important obstacle particularly in terms of mobilizing the police to be more effective at preventing violence because as they said, their headset is that their purpose is to protect the elite, not to protect the public. Now, how nobody offered a solution to the problem but you put your finger on a crucial issue in terms of violence prevention. A key issue that USIP works on but I wanna know, Sarah, David, bring us home. So on this local, national, global issue, I think where a lot of us have come out is what we call place-based mobilization. So it's this model that I was talking about before where you have youth voices, you're understanding what they think about in terms of 16 plus. You have ideally the mayor's office that is interested. You have universities as a lab helping to do work but also local philanthropy is emerging as an extremely, and private sector. If you have that combination, you're gonna see huge lift-off. Now, obviously that's not gonna happen all over the world but to the extent that you can find some of those attributes you're gonna find a lot of mobilization around the SDGs. Let me just say, not necessarily directly in answer to your question, Cleopatra, but I spent a lot of time as a Russia analyst and I didn't think of cohort 2030 particularly for Russia but I've had the occasion to describe the initiative to young Russians and they say, well, what about us? We're really interested, particularly around issues having to do with corruption. Even if people were enthusiastic about Mr. Putin, those are not people I was necessarily speaking to, they think the SDGs apply to them too. They wanna be able to know about this and work in their community in ways because it's not seen, frankly, as traditional human rights which is seen as kind of over there and very niche. This is real to them, so to the extent that we're able to reach more in different communities, I think this is gonna be helpful, not just to our colleagues in Pittsburgh but to colleagues in Perm, so on there. Final comment, David. Thank you, I'd love to hear more about the work with prisoners actually so please do let me know more about that. I work on a lot of these issues and it's remarkable how often we strip the people out of them and we get these very abstract views, the work on justice, it's really been trying to get this people-centered view and I was talking to an eminent law professor the other day and it was like justice was something in a completely different room in his mind from law, which he dealt with, so really trying to put the people at the center of this with elites, I've been in a number of countries which would be in that position and I think it is always about trying to find some point of entry, some point of connection. I was in quite an oppressive society recently and actually they were interested in access to justice because they knew that this was really, I was gonna say a word that I probably shouldn't say, angering young men in their towns and cities, their interactions with the justice system so they were interested in that issue if you could tease that out and so I think that has to be one of the, one of the strategies on that. In terms of the big picture, 203 days we've got a lot to do, we need to mobilize as a community, I often see this as a, there was a big sheet of water out there, there are a lot of ships on the water but they're not currently sailing in the same direction and we need to turn them into a fleet and that's what the SDGs can do, they can provide the flags that we can wave at each other so that we do move, move together. We're gonna be doing a lot of work trying to bring people together over the coming months. Do go and look at stg16.plus for information on all of these issues, there's a calendar, there's a lot of resources, there's a newsletter and around April the third there will be a big call or a series of calls where we'll be bringing the global community together online to talk about what we need to do over the next, what will be about 175 days by then. So please join us, please help us. Sarah said this I think at lunch, this is a one-off opportunity. We have to take this opportunity. There's no plan B. There's no plan B. David Steven, Sarah Mendelssohn, Daniel Negan, Maria Stefan and Laura Bailey. Thank you for a lively, informative, very timely and important conversation. Please join me in thanking them and thank you for joining us today. You're all enlisted.