 Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace and its program on mapping of the role of religion in fragile states. I am Paul Hughes, and I am the acting vice president for the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation. And what you're participating in today is a project that has been in the works for quite some time. Here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, we believe that peace is possible, peace is practical, and that peace is essential for the national security of the United States. I come to that by way of experience. I spent 30 years in the United States Army, and when I retired, came to the Institute of Peace to work on Iraq, to begin the program that we have had going in Iraq now for so many years. Having been involved in the planning for post-conflict stabilization of Iraq, I can tell you that in 2003, the vast majority of the planning staff and of the political leadership of the United States thought of Iraq in very simplistic terms. It was predominantly a Shia country with some angry Sunnis that we have angered because we overthrew Saddam. But it was a much more complex mosaic than that. And the mosaic consisted of so many different religions and different communities that had been put upon by Saddam over the 35 years of his rule. And so we began to see a much more complex challenge in what needed to be done in Iraq in terms of conflict reconciliation and resolution. In 2006 and early 2007, here at the Institute of Peace, our religion program hosted a conference of religious leaders from all across Iraq, and it was probably one of the most amazing sites I had ever seen, all of these leaders who had come, who represented their religious communities, some of them numbering just barely over 100,000 congregants. We had the leaders of the Christian sects of Iraq, the Qaqai, the Sabean, Mandin, the Shia, the Sunni, the Yazidis, the Shabbat. It was a very interesting group of people to see in their various religious garbs. And yet they were all talking to one another here. But this was before Iraq really exploded into its civil war. Since then, people have decided that there is a great value in learning about the various religious communities and ethnicities of countries that are in conflict. They all play important roles in reconciliation through their ability to influence people and the way that they influence people so that they learn to sit down and talk to one another and try to reach a common understanding and a balance in their lives. So this mapping exercise that we have gone through and still are continuing is one that does what maps are supposed to do. Maps tell you where you are. They tell you what the terrain looks like. They help guide you to your destination. And so with the work that Anne Wainscott and her various colleagues have done in this project, we hope that this will help others determine where we're going to go, where Iraq is going to go, where South Sudan is going to go, and so many other countries that are in conflict. One of the things that is important to recognize is that minority communities, whether they're ethnic or whether they're religious, typically are the ones that suffer some of the worst abuses that mankind can visit on himself and his brothers and sisters. And that has been so true in Iraq and so true in so many other places. The mapping hopefully will help guide us to a better future. And so with that, again, welcome to the Institute of Peace. If you have questions about it, look for the staff that are around it around here and we can help explain what we do in more detail. And at this time, I'd like to turn the podium over to my colleague, Susan. Good morning, everyone. It's wonderful to see some familiar faces and some new ones here at the Institute this morning. We're so glad to have you here for this event. This feels a little bit like our coming out party I was saying to Amy Lillis earlier in talking about this religious landscape mapping project that we've been doing now for several years. We're excited to share it with you. So my name is Susan Hayward and I lead the religion work here at the Institute. The religion program is the oldest thematic program at the Institute. It was created in 1989 and it was created in response to a perceived gap in understanding and engagement of the religious dimension of conflict and in peace building. In the first decade of the program, we explored issues of ethno-religious nationalism, state restrictions on the free practice of religion, state and social discrimination based on religion, and the ways these issues drove violent conflict. We were involved in helping to stand up the Office of the International Religious Freedom at the State Department as part of our work, appreciating how it could help in the effort to advance peace. In 2000, the religion program broadened its mandate. Being recognized just how critical it was to transform some of the drivers of conflict related to religious discrimination and religious identity divides, we began to focus on strengthening the capacity of religious actors and faith-based organizations to advance peace and inclusion. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka to Colombia, we have worked with some extraordinary religious peace builders, who are often on the front lines of violence, seeking to bring communities together across conflict divides, to push back against social and state discrimination, to push for peace talks, and to ensure that the needs of all communities are addressed in those talks. Oftentimes, the work of these faith actors goes under the radar, little seen or appreciated by the policy analysts and media. It's our job to see them in the religious program, in the religion program, and we've come to recognize just how critical they can be for the work of peace, just how transformative their work can be at both individual and societal levels. So building on what we've learned, we've sought to spread the gospel, so to speak, to encourage fellow peace practitioners and policymakers to understand the religious dimensions of conflict, and to engage within the religious landscape to advance peace. These days, following 9-11, and with the specter of religious discrimination and violent extremism on the rise, most don't need much convincing, but what we hear often is that while many understand the need to understand and navigate and engage within religious spaces, many people aren't unsure how to do it. The religious landscape in any context is complex, political, dynamic, it's not monolithic. There is diversity within and between religious traditions. There's competition between various religious actors. There are complex ways in which religious institutions and state institutions interact with one another. How do we even begin to navigate that complexity, we heard from our colleagues, without unintentionally exacerbating divisions? Who do we work with, and on what issues? We recognize that not all religious engagement in peace building is helpful, that sometimes it can be done in ways that have unintended negative consequences. We recognize most policy makers and peace practitioners are not trained in religious studies. We recognize that their ability to navigate constructively the religious landscape, much less engage it, requires some support. Hence we launched our effort several years ago to begin mapping the religious landscape of conflict settings, about which you're going to hear a lot more shortly. Now, this work of mapping, it's not easy. You can't pin down a sector that is complex and constantly changing. So we do this with a great deal of humility, but we do it because we think it is critical to the work of peace. What we have found in our nearly 30 years of religion work at USIP is that religion can be the source of a great deal of local resilience and capacity of communities who are caught up in violent conflict. But ignoring the religious dimension can be to the great detriment of peace building. We hope this effort can help ensure that policy makers and practitioners understand, appreciate, and engage effectively within the religious landscape in conflict settings, because doing so is critical. This mapping initiative is one way we are constantly seeking to refine and adapt, and we're very open to feedback from all of our partners and all of you about this method as we continue to strengthen it. So we look forward to hearing from you as we move forward. And with that introduction, I'm going to hand it over to the moderator for today's event, Director Rosarie Tucci. Thank you, everybody. Okay, so we're going to dive right into the methodology and the research. I want to welcome our panelists. So please come on up to the stage. Next we're going to hear from my USIP colleague, Pawasha, who has led the drafting of the methodology. And she'll talk about some of the unique aspects of the methodology. And she actually conducted the first methodology in Libya. So Pawasha, please infuse your insights on that mapping along the way. Then we'll dive into, we'll explore the Iraq religious mapping and my colleague Professor Ann Wayne Scott, who led that mapping in Iraq. She'll go into some of the preliminary findings in the research thus far on that mapping. She is an AAR fellow that has been here with us for the past year. Then we'll hear from Zaynab Qasam about her observations in the field, some of the challenges of doing this research. And then we're going to turn over to the South Sudan religious mapping. And we're going to hear from Jackie Wilson, who led the religious landscape mapping in South Sudan about her preliminary findings. And then we welcome Caesar Peter and his insights into the research in the field. And we'll hear also some perspectives from Monica. And just to mention, these are our local partners and this research would not be possible without our local partners. So thank you so much for working with us in this research. And we'll have a Q&A and hear all your insights and receive your input again into these preliminary findings. So let me hand it over to you, Paul Washa. Please. Take it away. Wow, it's wonderful to see such a packed room in your interest on this religious landscape methodology that we've been working on actually since 2014. So quite well for a little over four years. This actually started, as Susie mentioned, with the importance, recognizing that there's a huge gap in knowledge about the religious sector and a lot of the fragile states and conflict-ridden areas that we work in. And USIP and the religion program being the oldest at USIP had been doing mappings along the way, but it wasn't systematic. So we'd go into a country, we'd go and ask questions about who are the religious actors, the institutions, what's going on before we do programming. We didn't have a systematic way of approaching it. And often it was when the religion team experts had the time to go in and do it, particularly for religious engagement and not other programs. So we wanted to systematize it and develop some sort of a methodology that all of USIP programs could do as they go into country context or as a reevaluating programs in the country context where they're working. When I came on board in 2014, there had been some civil society mapping that had been done in Libya that had shown that there was a really big need to understand the religious sector more. So there had been some groundwork laid saying, okay, these are the gaps. We know the religious institutions are doing some work in some areas, but we want to learn more about it. And there had been some desk research done. And this was really important to lay the groundwork to really understand the background and the history to what was going. The conflict was ongoing in Libya to understand that. And so part of the methodology was to really start with consultations and doing desk research. So it was starting with getting a baseline, understanding what the diaspora community knows, what they can share with us in terms of consultations and doing desk research here before we go out to the field. I'm not moving my slides. Let's see here. All right. So one of the objectives of the first religious landscape mapping was to evaluate, to understand and evaluate, but really evaluate the ongoing, but also the potential contributions that Libya's religious sector has for peace and justice. And it was important to understand the democratic transition and to be able to explain that not just for religious programming, but also to policymakers and practitioners. And then to identify avenues where we could further engage the religious sector for peace building. So based on those objectives, worked on our theory of change, which basically the problem statement says that there's a lack of information, that there's a perceived gap, and that in order to do effective peace building, we need to be able to understand and assess the role and impact the religious sector has. So if the role and impact of a country's religious sector is effectively mapped, then the religious sector can be engaged effectively for peace building. Very simple. So one thing that was interesting, that we sort of had to take a step back, is to understand what our definitions are. So when we talk about a religious landscape, what really do we mean? It's a broad term. We mean that it encompasses a wide range of actors and trends and relationships, discourses and other aspects of religious beliefs and practices within a society. And often times there is a big question about what do we mean by religious actors? When we talk about religious leaders, it can be very exclusive, and we try and broaden the term to talk about religious actors, but that can be ambiguous. So for the people that we work with on the ground, for our researchers and in our publications, we try and be more specific about what we mean about religious actors. And that's inclusive of both formal and informal religious leaders, men, women, youth, lay leaders, change agents who are religiously motivated and or use religious language to lead others. And I think our further mappings take a little bit further in terms of influence and legitimacy, so it's interesting to see how further mappings do that. And with religious institutions, for the purpose of the mapping on Libya that I was working on, it was formalized into entities explicitly concerned with regulating, articulating or promoting specific religious practices and beliefs. The way the methodology I was working on, I was developing, was saying, okay, here in Libya this is how we're defining religious institutions, but that might be different and you need to have that flexibility to understand on the ground how other people define religious institutions in the countries and contexts where you're mapping the religious landscape. And so we'll see in the subsequent presentations how some of this changed and shifted based on the context. So the overall sampling technique was purposive, that is that participants are selected because they're likely to generate useful data for the project. Basically it means that we're looking at expert sampling, key informant interviews was our main point, so we basically were looking to talk to experts who knew the field who were themselves religious leaders, religious actors, working with religious institutions or engaging with this religious sphere in their community. And we also used snowball sampling, that is to ask who would you recommend us to speak to or if there are leaders that came up as important that we need to talk to or civil society that we need to talk to, we work to include those. But what was really key to the whole research was the local researchers. And one thing that I advocated really strongly and that's what's really important, particularly for working on sensitive topics like religion and in conflict-ridden areas, it's important to work with people on the ground who have the networks themselves. And so the way we recruited local researchers was those that had local networks who themselves were in those cities where we were looking to do research, who could within their networks do the interviews safely. So they had trust, they had access to the people that we were trying to interview and they had security because they were already locally living in those areas. So for our sampling coverage, we tried to be as diverse as possible, trying to target all of the large areas but also trying to target the diversity. So we were trying to get into the Amazigh areas, trying to interview people who are Ibadi, so from different faith backgrounds. And that's generally how the methodology is being approached. So it's not only the majority, but we're trying to also get voices from different kinds of minorities that exist within the country. We do a semi-structured questionnaire, so mostly qualitative, to guide the researcher. And we work on training our researchers to be able to ask follow-on questions or follow-up questions, understanding who in the religious sector does what in relation to peace and how. Some of the different types of questions in the methodology, of course we have the demographics, but the way we approach religion is looking at opinions, like what do you think of this religious institution? What religious institutions are there, observations? And then from personal experience, so how did you experience this religious institution or religious leader or who do you go to for spiritual guidance from a personal experience perspective? And then we ask analytical questions, which religious trends are impacting the conflict? What roles are religious institutions playing on X, Y, and Z? What are the relationships between the state and religious institutions? Those are some of the kinds of analytical questions that we ask. So obviously we face a lot of challenges in the work that we do with in fragile states where there can be ongoing conflict. In Libya there was fighting that started soon after we began the research in 2014. Local researchers were unable to conduct all of their interviews, particularly in some of the communities that were on the outskirts and were hard to reach in the mountains and also were ongoing conflict was happening. We had researchers who could not travel with their interview transcripts, but were able to participate in the analysis of the workshop and bring orally bring some of the experiences and their own analysis and what they heard from their interviews to bear. And finally, unfortunately, one of our researchers, Tophik Min Saoud, was killed in the fighting, he may rest in peace. So we have a lot of challenges that do exist to doing research in fragile states. After the information was gathered, part of the methodology is to have debriefing sessions with the researchers and we do participatory analysis. Because a lot of the interviews from us coming from the outside, it's hard to understand the context. Certain fatwas are referred to, regions are referred to, language save, for example, they say this place has a lot of history and background. What kind of history and background comes to bear and understanding, for us to understand and contextualize the findings and understand the religious landscape in that area. So it was really important to have the local researchers give us that kind of context as we started to do the analysis. And they themselves were able to look at the findings that they were able to gather and they thought was important from the research. And that also helped to shape our findings in the reports. So having their voices is a really important part of the methodology. So this is one way that I found with the Libya mapping that it was helpful to put together and relate how different organizations, institutions, individuals are related to each other on a spectrum from sort of a continuum to visualize the relationships to each other. So you have Vasati, which is more like a moderate, centrist viewpoint, and then you have the extremist viewpoint on the other side. And the lead researcher, Zahra Langhi, who's pictured here, she was very helpful in helping me put this together and understanding how all these relationships exist within the framework of Libya. So this is one way that we can map different institutions in terms of how they're related to each other. Part of some of these institutions are within the government, so you can see governmental institutions and how they exist within the trends and also in relationship to some of the individuals. Some examples of findings, so we were looking at reconciliation. One of the questions was, are religious leaders involved in supporting the democratic transition of Libya through conflict mitigation efforts? And we had 55% of our respondents saying yes. And then in terms of potential, how do you see the role of religious leaders in achieving national reconciliation? There was 70% had positive responses. And finally, I think this was really key to understanding the role of the religious is do you think religious leaders or tribal leaders would be more effective in mediating between armed groups? And interestingly, the highest was a hybrid of those who are both tribal and religious leaders. So at the local level, and as we've been talking about this, that's been really important, that it's that hybrid of local tribal religious leaders who are able to do this kind of work. So this is some of the interesting findings that come out of this kind of mapping in Libya. And so I just wanted to end with this overview of the six-step methodology that I developed. And it's a structure that has flexibility that both Ann and Jackie have been able to adapt very well to the context and have added in the richness to it in the work that they've done and improved upon it in Iraq and in South Sudan. So it starts with, like I said, asking the questions and defining what are the terms that we're using and how do we understand them. And then refining the scope of the mapping to look at who are we really going to map and who are the leaders of influence? What are the areas that we want to do, sort of doing an overview? And then getting into the interview strategy, developing the questions, what questions would work best in the most sensitive areas. In Libya, using the term religious leader did not work. In South Sudan, Jackie will give the example of how politics, you can't talk about politics. So some of those are really important. Language in the interviews is to be aware of. And our local researchers are really key in helping us understand what language worked and what didn't. And then it's the data collection. And what's, I think, really important about data collection that we've done in the methodology is it's not just about deploying the researchers and having them go out, but there's a constant back and forth that we've had where they've been reporting back and we've been able to get feedback and improve on the research and their interviews as they've gone along. And then finally, we have the data analysis stage where we've been able to, I think we have some great examples of beautiful charts and maps and also wonderful quotes that we've been able to put together that help give the richness of the landscapes that we've been able to map so far. But one key thing I think it's important, and I don't think we can overemphasize it enough, is that the landscapes are constantly changing. And so even with Libya as I finished the mapping, the next day there was a change. There was a fatwa, the next day there was an attack. Everything just kept changing. And with those changed to keep updating, I did a flash survey in 2016 to say, OK, well, how much have things changed? Are people's opinions about the same? And we've tried to integrate that into the methodology to find ways to do flash surveys, to confirm the data. And as things change, we try and keep abreast of it. But at the same time, this is a snapshot of the religious landscape at a certain time and place, and things change drastically. So we think it's helpful as a foundation as we begin to engage. But also we need to remember that things change. And so what we write here needs to also be checked with what's continuing to change on the ground. So with that, I'll end and hand it over to my great colleagues here. Thank you. Good morning. It's such a pleasure to be here with all of you. This is just the funnest thing I've ever done. And so if you're considering a religious mapping, one, your way underestimating how hard it's going to be. And two, I hope you have the most lovely team to work with as I had here at USIP. So what I'm assuming is that you're all deeply interested in doing your own religious mappings. And so I'm going to talk about my experience kind of at the 10,000 foot level in a way in which I would implement it if I was doing it again. And if you want me to dive a little bit deeper into the details of the Iraq context, I hope you'll bring that into the Q&A. No good presentation by someone with a PhD does not begin with disclaimers. So let's get a few of those on the table. First of all, USIP has a long-term relationship with the organization with which we worked, Senad, and with the people we work with on the ground. And so when we were pursuing a religious mapping, it was with the intention that we would be building the capacity of local researchers with whom we'd have a long-term relationship. And I think for a lot of the people in this room, that is a shared objective as well. The research is not just an end in itself. It's an end toward a greater goal. And I think that sometimes when you're dealing with people like me, PhDs, or other scholars, you have to be continuously reminding them that you're integrating this project into a larger relationship. And so the scientific goals of the research are sometimes subjugated to the relationship needs of the long-term conflict context. Second, I can't emphasize enough what Paul Washa said. You cannot map the religious field of any country. This is not possible, in a sense. And yet we're still trying. And we still think it's worth doing because getting a snapshot at any given individual moment is better than what we've been working with so far. Oh my gosh, Samir, my former student, hi. I got a fan club. OK, the second thing I want to emphasize, because I'm a political scientist and they pay me to say things like this, is that when you're doing interview-based research, it's not the same thing as doing a survey. And so you can't make nationally representative claims. And so I have not told you how many people said certain things because I know what you will do. You will go back into your life and say, 40% of Iraqis think this, and 30% of them think this. And that's not actually something. It's not a type of conclusion you can draw from interview-based research. Rather, what we've tried to do is draw in the richness of people's individual experiences. So in the draft report, what you would see is a lot of quotations. What do people say? How do they describe their religious experience? How do they describe their relationship to religious leaders, religious teachers, with whom they're engaging on a daily basis? And as I engaged with USG and State Department officials, in particular, I was really struck by how eager they were to have this perspective. And so I want to emphasize that to you as you consider your own religious mapping, don't underestimate the desire of government officials and other peace-building organizations to hear the voices of just everyday citizens and how they're engaging in a conflict context. Finally, I just want to mention that we've done one round of data collection. We're planning a second round. So in addition to all the disclaimers I've given you, this is still preliminary findings. So let's go ahead and jump in. As Paul Washa mentioned, the first step in any major research project is consultations. What's already been done? What are other people doing? And this is something that has to be maintained throughout the life of the project. Because six months in, you're going to find out someone's doing the exact same thing you are. And you're going to initially be really annoyed. And then you're going to realize, no, I have a partner, someone to confirm data with, someone to have a conversation with. If you haven't laid the groundwork with sufficient consultations, you might miss partners that can really refine and improve your research. There we go. Second, I just want to emphasize the importance of desk research. Not only in the initial stages of the project, but ongoing. Let me tell you, trying to keep up with everything that was written about Iraq is a nightmare. But I did try to do it this year. And I'm happy to share my enormous literature reviews with those of you who would be interested in that. I just wanted to highlight here the breadth of the reports that had come out even just in the last few years on the religious sector, including this top line. I'm referring to a series of reports, which we do have copies of out at the table that were commissioned by USIP on conflict dynamics among minority communities in Iraq over the last two years. So moving into the actual research design, Paul Warsh has already taken you through our definitions. But I do want to highlight that it was our intention and our hope in the research project to uncover religious women and religious youth who wouldn't normally be contained in this category of religious actors. And I would say we were much more successful in identifying up-and-coming young youth religious leaders than we were in identifying women religious actors. Part of that was explained in the Iraqi context, because as a scope condition for our research, we only chose to include in our report people who had a regional or a national level profile. Anyone who only had a local level profile, we didn't want to draw attention to them, give their names to government actors, whether in Iraq or elsewhere. And so what we found is that the way in which I designed the project was not a good way for identifying women religious partners. And I'd be happy to engage. If those of you are doing a specific mapping with women, I'd be happy to engage with you about the ways in which I think that could have been done better. Second, just to highlight the concept that I was most interested in was influence. And the reason we decided to shape the entire mapping around this concept of influence is because in our primary consultations, this was the question we heard most. What does it mean for a religious leader in Iraq to be influential? How does that actualize in the ground? How does that shape behavior? How does that shape political outcomes? And how can I understand that behavior sitting here in Washington, DC? Here, I have slides for each of the goals of the project. I don't think it's necessarily worth going into each of the goals in detail. But the slides, I wanted to include the slides to remind myself to talk about how essential it is for you to have a written document in which you record both your goals and your objectives for the project. I know this seems so obvious. But coming into USIP about a year ago, beginning work on this project, knowing that I was building on a previous effort, there was just a lot of commentary that was made to me about the things we were going to accomplish with the mapping. And I started to get really stressed out. Like, we are actually, I'm a political scientist. We are not going to accomplish all of those things. And so what I needed to keep myself honest and in order to be more clear in my initial consultations was to start keeping a list of what other people hoped we would accomplish in the mapping and then making real choices, what is and what is not possible. And so I can't emphasize enough to you the importance of creating a document. I just called it the RD2 document, research designed to. It was actually like draft 80. But I just stopped renaming it after draft two. Where I highlighted, these are the goals of the project. These are the objectives of the project. This is our theory of change. This is our methodology, et cetera. And I shared those in all my consultations. So it allowed for those initial consultations to begin at a higher level than if we were just having a kind of explanatory conversation. If you'd like a copy of that document, you can email me. I'll have business cards available. So I'm a professor, and I always plan way too much for class time. So I'm laughing that one of my students is here seeing me do the same thing in front of all these impressive people. So the main research question is probably already evident. By this point of the presentation, I really wanted to understand the influence of religious actors. But then we were really hoping that in addition to this national level group of religious actors whose names you all already know, that we could get into the mid-level. Who are the people who are negotiating between national level actors and local level actors? And I do think we were successful at that. And I think that's a really useful perspective to take on a religious mapping. Because a lot of times, we're all talking about the same set of actors. And that's not really constructive. So let's try and go down one level of abstraction. OK. So as Paul Wacha has already explained, our focus was threefold. We began with desk research. We had a field research component that was managed by our local partner, in which she will talk more about. And then I did this super rudimentary social media analysis. I follow all Iraqi religious actors on Twitter. It's the funnest thing ever. But I haven't totally figured out how I'm going to analyze that data. But it's really useful in terms of gauging topics that are being discussed, the sophistication of people on social media, the ways in which people are building community. So I do recommend us as a community of practice that we start engaging about how are we mapping the religious field in the social media space in a much more systematic way. So our timeline, our initial training for the researchers was done early November. And then we debriefed researchers. So we had a conversation about their conclusions from the research they did about six weeks later in December. This was a way-delayed timeline. There were a number of factors that delayed us, the primary reason being with the referendum that was held in the KRG. We didn't have access to our bill, where many of our initial activities were planned. So we moved training and events to Baghdad. And then obviously that takes more time and more money for those of you working in Iraq. And then earlier this year, I analyzed the data and wrote the report. And then we did tons and tons of consultations with the current draft. And then we'll do it all again with the second round of data collection. So just to emphasize, how did we go about training the local Iraqi researchers we hired for the project? I think this was the most kind of a contributive part of what I offered to the mappings. Because I was coming in already with so much already having been illuminated by Paul Wash's methodology. So what I really tried to do was provide a really substantive training for researchers, not just explaining why are we doing semi-structured interviews for this process. Why aren't we doing surveys? Why aren't we doing focus groups? Why did we choose the methodology we did? And what I wanted was the researchers to leave with a better understanding of in what context they would pursue different methodologies. And even since our research concluded just in December, some of our researchers have gotten involved in a subsequent second research project and are applying those skills. The major factor, I would say, when you're working with elites from conflict zones who are extremely busy and who have a lot of email themselves answered during the day when you're working with them, the training has to be as interactive as possible. So we really focused on doing interviews together. How do you introduce yourself at the beginning of an interview? How do you introduce the project? How do you readjust if the interview goes off track? And one of the things I found the most productive in this regard is if you have a really substantial and robust conversation at the beginning of the training about what the objectives are, the researchers are better positioned later to adjust interviews to bring them back to the objectives. And so in the end, I think we spent three hours talking to the objectives of the project. I think I had budgeted something like 15 minutes. So I will emphasize that it's worth it to plan in a really substantial amount of time where you really go through what are the overarching goals, what are the objectives, what will this research be used for, who will it be used by with local researchers if you're working with them in order to make sure that they can make adjustments on the fly in the field. One thing I'd like to emphasize, a lot of people in Washington are doing a lot of interviews around the world. We're working with local researchers. They do not know what rights they have, and they are not communicating to the people they interview what rights the interviewees have. And so I cannot stress enough being really forceful and making people aware, especially when you're working in a conflict zone, they do not have to participate in this project. And if at any point in the project, they feel uncomfortable with it or they feel it in any way compromises their safety, I actually ask my researchers, please don't do this. Please don't do this if you are not absolutely sure that it's acceptable in your social network, in your context, in your community. And please just let us know, you can stop at any time. And I also provided a lot of different people they could communicate that point with. They could communicate to Senate. They could communicate to me. And there are a few other individuals so that if they felt embarrassed about bringing this issue to one person, they could bring it to someone else. So I'd just like to emphasize the ethical side of this as much as possible. I'm way running out of time, so let's just show you some pretty pictures. So here we are doing an interview workshop. Here's a way in which we allowed the local researchers to shape the research process. We had drafted initial questions that we thought they should ask in their interviews. And then we had shot those around with various other researchers who had worked in the Iraqi context. But then at the training itself, the researchers were allowed to change the language of the question guide in order that the objectives of the research could be met. And so that's another reason why the researchers have to really understand your research objectives if you're then going to allow them to reshape the questions they ask in the interview guide. It was really funny because we did two separate question guides. And they both obsessed about one word, like both groups independently focused on the same idea, what they thought needed to be changed in the question guide. So it's really confirmative to do this work with a really thoughtful group of researchers. We also did a practice public interview where two of our researchers interviewed one another. Everyone watched, everyone practiced taking notes, and then they compared their notes at the end. This is a really great way to show new researchers that they have not systematized their note taking practices yet. And you have to really provide really substantive information about how you take notes. And so what we did was we did the public interview first. We compared their notes. We showed them that they had all said totally different things were said during the interview. And then after that, we followed it up with a note taking workshop. Once they were interested, how should I take notes? We were very clear. When do you write in the first person? When do you write in the third person? When do you write things in quotations? How can you indicate to the principal investigator that a point was really important? And one thing we did with the Iraq report that I really enjoyed later when I was doing data analysis is just asking the researchers to write about the feel of the interview. Like, was the person mad? Was the person happy? What were some of their gestures? And we got great information from one of our researchers. They were people slamming their hands on the table. They were yelling. I have to go smoke a cigarette. So if I hadn't have asked for that information, they wouldn't have given it to me. And then I would have way misunderstood the tone with which certain conversations were had, especially since I was working in translation in order to speed up the process. I was working from translations in the interview transcripts. So I really needed that texture. And I would emphasize that when you work with local researchers, that you ask for the just general mood of the interview. Okay, I think I'm like totally at time. So, oh no, I'm over time. Okay, sorry, bro. So I'll just say that we did a note-taking workshop. I'm happy to provide all those slides to anyone who's interested. And then if you wanna know about how we debriefed the researchers, I have like a handout and I'd be happy to talk to you after this session. So let me just bring us up to the, we're gonna actually turn to Zaynab and hear about implementing the research in the Iraqi context. Thank you. It's good that the cuff attack, it's went like five minutes ago, so I can speak more clearly now. So glad that I'm joining thanks to USIP team for inviting me to join this really interesting gathering and to reflect the findings, the challenges, and really the learning journey about this project. So it's really amazing and really looking forward where these findings will lead to next step. It was a learning process, not only for the researcher, it was also for our team, for myself in the same time. We expected the challenges and then we even designed what might be the solution to be for those challenges. From the designing phase itself, from the first workshop itself and then the debriefing and the second one, the reflection and the analysis. For the researcher, the challenges, which I can summarize quickly, maybe for the time available, the sensitivity of the project itself, the title is like the religious actor mapping in Iraq versus the timing while we've been conducting the research itself. So the sensitivity came like because it's about the religious spectrum in Iraq and the question that we expected from the interview is like why you are doing this now? Who you are? For whom those results will be used? To do what? Are you trying to empower the religious actor in Iraq? The sensitivity lead to more perception and maybe misunderstanding that we expected from the beginning that the best solution is like to define ourselves and to deduce both the researcher and the donor sponsor for this project and why we are doing this very clearly. And then we agreed as the whole researcher teams about those messages because if you start correctly, then you can assure more positive engagement and then more clearly environment so they can reflect more safety. It's like when they trust you, they can reflect more. So what we did expect? They face it and they face it very well because when we defined as a researcher and the team, like this is USIP work and this is the network of Iraqi facilitators and in cooperation and with local NGO, all together they do trust the three. First of all, because the researcher presented their area so they are not outsider. So the researcher from Najaforan Bar interviewed the informants in their area so they trusted there locally and they do trust USIP because this is not the first time USIP is working in Iraq. So they are aware about the previous programs and where they are working, what they are doing in addition to Senate's background. All together they made really a good positive steps in the beginning because once you are blocking the beginning then they wouldn't like, like it would be crushed down from the beginning. So that was also one of the things that we invested good time to explain how we will explain about the project. The second challenge we face, I mean the researcher is like, the written transcript is like what to reflect? Shall we write it down while they are talking? Shall we record it? How it will be misunderstood? Why we are even recorded? Then what to write down? And then it's how they can differentiate between adding their own perceptions as a researcher and between separated. This is not about you, it's about the interviewees themselves. And this is even a stand-in to the reflection is the challenge how they can differentiate between their own understanding as a researcher where they do believe and what we want exactly is the interviewees what they do see in the scope of the religious action in Iraq. One of the things is that we assured us to do is that how the researcher also understand and in the same time reflect it aside because while they are continuously doing those interviews they are exploring more findings. It's like how they can avoid jumping into the conclusion from the beginning. And most of you as a researcher, you know like what is the damages might be created when you jump to conclusion in really early stages of the research and how you can like separate it aside and maybe really to employ it once you reach to the conclusion and to the analysis phase later on. And that was really the documentation session really they invested us to learn. So we had some questions like if we face this challenge, if we face this situation, so they ask Dr. Anne, what would you do? So she reflect also her own experience and that was one of the really interesting things that we didn't bring a trainer to do some structure question. We brought like an expert in this field but this is not the first time they are doing such a research. So they get the experience, they get the technical support, they get like really the portion that such a sensitive work really require. So when they moved along with this process they moved more confident and that's why they've been able to contribute with another projects later on with the Senate. I mean it's supported by a different donor. They felt like we need to do more. We are now more strong to do more interviews and this is what we learn from practicing and this is what lesson learned. We need to avoid this. We need to do this. And I think this is what's accumulative learning process can benefit even their communities and Iraq and the whole general. Thank you. So since I like took all your time earlier I'm just gonna move really quickly through our findings. These are just preliminary findings from the first round of data collection. So you guys already knew that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is the most influential religious actor in Iraq. We can give, we can put a lot of flesh on those bones. We can give you a lot of quotations about how do people describe his influence and what ways does it shape their behavior but maybe that's not the most like fascinating finding for you all. Here's just a sample of the type of ways in which he's described in interviews. He is a man in whose silence there's a philosophy whose silence is almost like a scream against many voices that are empty. One thing I found really interesting in our interviewing about Sistani is that some of our respondents suggested that other religious scholars have been being less vocal about their views on politics in order to amplify Sistani's voice. And so we might start looking for coordination in the religious sector that is not immediately evident but that might be quite intentional in order to shape the discourse around particular issues. I think that's something that needs more research, particularly in this case. Of course, we found that the other Marjai in Najaf were extremely influential. You guys already knew that, but you're all here, right? Like talk to me about Maktatal Sutter. What was really interesting to me in the findings for this research is that Maktatal Sutter was mentioned in the first question by virtually every single interviewee. So the opening question was who are the most influential religious actors in Iraq? The answer was almost always systematically, Sistani Sutter, Amar al-Hakim. And so you would anticipate that that means he's a very influential religious actor. However, for the entire rest of the interview, Maktatal Sutter was almost never brought up again in more specific questions about engagement between religious actors and their constituents. And so I think what this points to is the fact that there's a deference to the family lineage that Maktatal Sutter comes from to his father and to his father-in-law in a religious sense, but there isn't really a relationship with him as a religious leader in the same way as we see with other religious leaders. Much more a populist nationalist leader, which I think has been confirmed. So we've already talked about this. Here's the first phase of data collection focused in the South among Asunia and Shia areas. For those of you who are working in the reconciliation space in Iraq, one thing I found really fascinating was the way in which virtually all of our interviewees distinguished between two separate reconciliation processes that they saw ongoing. The national political process that they deemed to be among political parties and the local social community-led dialogues that are necessary for reconciliation. For the most part, our interviewees do not desire to see the involvement of religious actors in that national level political process. And that is because they view it as a deeply corrupt process, a process where people have benefited financially at the expense of the Iraqi people and they wanna see their religious leaders standing apart from the political process. At the same time, that does not mean that they do not want religious actors involved in local-level community social reconciliation dialogues. So I think this is a really important way in which research can inform the programming of peace-building organizations. I know our local partners had some pushback from funders saying, oh, Iraqis don't want religious actors involved in politics, so you can't invite them to a dialogue process. But it's very important to understand clearly what context you're hosting a programming event in first. And I think research like these type of mappings can inform that. Okay, probably like way gone over already. We identified the returned importance of the Hussania, this is kind of like a Shia mosque in Iraq, ongoing conflict between Najafi and Karbala scholars who are sometimes referred to as the Shirazi-een and a crisis of faith among many religious groups. As a result of ISIS, not just the Sunni. And I can answer all of that more in the Q and A. One of the most surprising findings for me was just the broad and widespread respect for Christian leadership in general and Kaldian patriarch Louis Raphael Isako in particular. He was mentioned an enormous amount by our interviewees and I think he is a really strong partner for peace. As I mentioned earlier, we didn't identify as many women religious leaders as I had hoped. And I'm interested in hearing about your guys' ideas about doing that more in the future. We did do interviews in Najaf, so we did ask the key question who will succeed Sistani. The sense in Najaf is that it's his more scholarly son, Muhammad Bakr al-Sistani, rather than his more administrative son who manages like his institutions and his Fatwa network, Muhammad Reda. But again, this would be totally unprecedented for a son to succeed his father in as the major leading religious leader in Najaf and it'll probably take 10 to 20 years for that to shake out. And I'm probably over time. So I'm just gonna say really quickly that I think one thing we really need to pay more attention to are the up-and-coming religious leaders. Our preliminary research identifies Ali Thalqani, more followers on Facebook than Maktad al-Sadr, Kamal Al-Haydari, who was one of the most named religious leaders as someone who had changed someone's religious belief or behavior. And Hussein Takriban, his real name's Hussein Ali, but he's known on Facebook as Hussein Takriban. He's a member of this class of young seminary students who are really becoming very critical of the religious establishment. They're taking like a John Stuart-type approach to social media. How can they make like a funding video? He'll be like playing video games and then he'll be like flirting with his girlfriend and then he'll be like critiquing a religious scholar, like really like kind of entertainment type of social commentary that I think has received way too little attention by academics and elsewhere. So as I said, we were really impressed by the level of respect for Christian leadership. The Shia religious landscape appears to be undergoing dramatic change. That's not being monitored closely enough. And the Sunni religious establishment remains deeply fragmented with very few national level religious figures rising to the surface. And I will now hand it over to the South Sudan team. Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you all for being here and I'm also excited to be part of this process and be part of this really impressive team of scholar practitioners that focus on the religious sphere for the Institute of Peace. So I think what my participation in this project also highlights a key point and that is that you don't necessarily have to be a PhD political scientist to do this research. We have religious scholars, we have professors and I consider myself more of a pre-academic. I have an interdisciplinary doctorate but I've really been kind of doing conflict resolution work around the world and including in South Sudan and Sudan since around working on those issues since about 2002. And so I bring to the table a bit of deeper understanding of the cultural context but also many questions that remained unresolved and the role of religious actors was one of them. So I'm here today with my colleague from 4CA Consulting who's our local partner and this is Cesar Taban and we'll go back and forth on some of the findings for you, the green button. So I'm fortunate to be able to build on the presentation that Paul Washa did and Ann's presentation and you'll see some similarities and then we'll also highlight a couple of areas where there were key differences but we're applying the same methodology in a very, very different context in terms of South Sudan as compared to Iraq and Libya. So some of the similarities we also started with desk research and I'd like to thank two research assistants, Rachel Chang and Adeeb Yusuf who contributed tremendously to the understanding of the religious landscape. We also conducted consultations with people, some of whom are in the room today and so I'm appreciative of all of them. Something that hasn't been mentioned is that we all participated in the institutional review board where you apply your research and get approval for the research protocols and it forces you to think about the contextual challenges that you might face, the risks that your researchers, your interviewees might be in and then how you're going to deal with those so that was an important part of the process. We also prepared a question guide and even though I drew upon question guides that Paul Washa and Ann had produced that was an incredibly agonizing experience because there are so many questions and you really just have to parse them. We did internal reviews, we did external reviews. You were constantly reframing what the most important questions were because there are so many challenges, so many issues that you need to delve into and you are time limited and so we would look at our list of questions and I know Ann would say that's a three hour interview and it would go back, you would go back and edit the questions and parse them again and then when we brought the question guide to Juba and had our local researchers look at it, again there were some challenges and we went down to different terminology so should we say religious organizations or religious institutions? How would those words be perceived? And then because South Sudan is a country of 64 tribes and numerous languages, we also had our local researchers take the terminology and the question guide and translate it into the local languages that they would be doing research in and then they would come back and say that that term doesn't translate well so we have to find another term. So those were very rich discussions but even after we started the research as we started getting preliminary, the early interviews, we would get feedback from the local partners and the researchers about phrasing in the questions and maybe we should rephrase a particular question to make it more constructive or to make sure we're getting the information we need. So that was the review. As part of the process, I had the opportunity to select a local partner organization and in South Sudan that was actually, there was an unexpected complication and that was that several religiously affiliated institutions were very interested in participating in the research and so that raised the question of whether a religiously affiliated institution would buy us potentially the research and so through a competitive process, we ended up selecting 4CA Consulting which is a professional consulting firm but that does use South Sudanese researchers and we'll talk a little bit more about them because one of our objectives as well was to build the capacity of South Sudanese researchers and really leave that capacity behind and improved at the end of the project and I think that we have done that. So then we came up with criteria for research locations and I think when I started, as when you started, we probably had a list of eight or 10 places, locations that we wanted to do research and as you can see, we narrowed it down to four so we had numerous criteria in terms of selecting the research locations. We needed ethnic diversity, we needed geographical diversity, we also needed experiential diversity so South Sudan has been undergoing extremely damaging civil war since 2013 and that informed our research in that we determined that we would limit the interviews and the context of the religious landscape to when the war started in 2013 so we were not going to go back to all of the rich religious history that's present in South Sudan but instead we were going to focus on how things had changed since the civil war began and again, the four research locations, each of the people in those areas experienced the war in very different ways, some experienced more displacement than others, one of them, Juba POC is a protection of civilian side just outside of Juba town and Juba town is a very diverse area and some people have referred to South Sudan almost as a city state now because many people have come from outlying areas and reside in Juba now so it's very diverse, it's very complex, it's religiously diverse and Iambio had also experienced displacement and we've got some data in terms of the ethnic diversity now as compared to what it was before the war and it has changed. Anyway, so we did this in consultation with our local partner because we had to understand what was feasible in the context of an ongoing violent conflict in South Sudan so we did not want to put our researchers in danger and that also limited, it was one of the limitations of the research. Our objectives, we had three, so first of all, very similar, identified a legitimate and influential religious leaders and so some of the work I've done in the past has focused on the concept of legitimacy and so I really wanted to understand what religious actors do to earn legitimacy because legitimacy, legitimate leadership has been a challenge in South Sudan and so this was something that was kind of perhaps maybe more unique to the cultural context in that dynamic and then also how they were using their influence since 2013 and also to assess their impact and then also we wanted to understand the challenges religious leaders were facing and then also make recommendations for policy makers, for practitioners and also for religious actors themselves in terms of how to address some of the challenges that they're facing and this gentleman here is Bishop Paridi Taban who is probably the most famous South Sudanese religious actor. He granted me a very nice interview and gave me a copy of his book and he is basically retired and but he has earned his legitimacy in numerous ways that came out in the interviews in terms of going to areas of violent conflict, mediating local disputes and he also created a peace village that is really a model, potential model in many ways and it's very interesting effort. So one of the things that we did that was a bit different in addition to the qualitative interviews, the semi-structured 100 key informant interviews, we decided that in part through consultations with a group that is associated with the Peace Tech Lab here. So the organization is called Keshev and I met with the Keshev researchers who were doing data analysis in South Sudan and one of them said to me, you know, South Sudan is a data desert and I thought, well, we have to do something to also collect some quantitative data and so in addition to the key informant interviews and at the end we actually added a flash survey. So 10 questions that gave us some statistics, some data and so we like statistics. But so I thought this particular one was interesting. I just wanna point out a couple of things. Is this the laser? Okay, so the first question here is, I don't know if you, I don't know that you can see it. How important are religious actors or institutions to bringing peace in South Sudan and 99% said either very important or important, right? So to me, that's a very strong indication of legitimacy of religious actors in South Sudan for peace. And then we wanted to know what are their most important peace techniques and you can see they're 54% of their most important peace techniques are prayers or sermons. So we thought that was interesting. So we had another question, actually a Dalai Lama quote, praying alone does not solve the problem, we must act. So we asked that, do you agree or strongly disagree with that particular quote and actually 83% of respondents strongly agree with that quote. So now I know that religious actors and institutions are legitimate at a very high level. They're most important peace techniques or prayers or sermons, but 83% of our respondents indicated that praying is not enough, that they must act. So then we needed to create a question to ask what does acting mean to you? And we came up with 65, the respondents, 65% indicated peace conferences are a form of action that religious actors do. And then the second highest response was sermons. So you can see that sometimes the challenge of research is really interpreting these responses to really understand what it is that it's telling you. But I wanted to give you some idea of some of the data that we captured. So we also did a two day training of the researchers that actually extended a couple of days. I think it ended up, I don't know, I think I stayed in Juba for about a week and a half. But I'd like to ask Caesar to talk a little bit, to introduce 4CA and talk a little bit about some of the preparation of the researchers. Yeah, thank you very much. First of all, I'm very excited to be here today and grateful for the collaboration between 4CA and the USIP team. Before I move on, I would just like to talk briefly about 4CA Consulting. It's a locally registered company in South Sudan. And we've been operating since 2011. We implemented over 250 research projects throughout the country for different organizations, international or even government institutions. So throughout the conflict, we've maintained our presence in South Sudan. So building on that experience, 4CA together with Dr. Wilson, we collaborated in making sure that we have training manual to ensure that we conform to the methodology that is already in place. So that is to make sure that all the researchers have the necessary skills to implement this work. So we initially agreed to do two days of training, but then we ended up doing more than that. We, I'm sure, like five days or so. But in the end, everyone was happy, everyone felt comfortable to do the fieldwork. So we trained about nine researchers and all these researchers are permanent staff working with 4CA Consulting. So each person has at least done one research project before. So basically the training focused on qualitative interviewing skills, probing, not taking, and how to make sure that we don't bias our influence responses of the respondents or interviewees. So the sampling for this is basically, as mentioned before by the previous speakers, we were looking at snowball sampling. So basically we talked to one respondent and we asked them to recommend people that we could interview. And adding to that, there was a flash survey at the end of the survey. So basically we did key informant interviews with respondents, then in addition to that, a flash survey with the same respondents. So after that, we also, depending on, we analyzed the data, then identified gaps where we need to get more information. So we developed the focus group discussion guide and we conducted two focus group discussions, one with the religious actors and one with non-religious actors. So as part of the training, after the five days of training, each researcher was asked to do a pilot interview, then we looked through the field notes from the pilot interviews and then gave them kind of feedback on areas where they should improve based on the pilot interviews. Okay, so as we mentioned, South Sudan is experiencing tremendous levels of violent conflict and so we experienced a lot of challenges because of that, it affected our research locations and there were also some sensitivities. So we had another researcher who was supposed to be here with us today and she could not make it. So we have a video from Monica where she's talking a little bit about some of the challenges that we faced in the research. So if we could bring up Monica's video, please. My name is Monica Mehipai, South Sudan. Challenges we face has researchers in the field. The most challenges we face has researchers in the field who was getting information and getting the religious actors, additional leaders, shown as much as we can. Leaders to feel free, to give us the information we want by explaining to them why we are collecting the information and whatever they will be telling us will be confidential. The relationship between information, especially when it comes to some sensitive questions, such as you can to make them feel free that really what they are saying is going to help us to find the dealing with the challenges you are facing. Thank you, Monica, and we miss you. I just wanted to wrap up because we do want to have time for some Q&A. So we also built the capacity to local researchers. I wanted to share some of the most interesting findings. So probably the most surprising finding was that the South Sudan Council of Churches was not named as the most influential religious actor because it's really kind of the go-to for international organizations. And so we're still trying to understand this. We think to an extent it has to do with the fact that people are really connected to their local religious institutions and actors. And they also see aid delivery that is humanitarian assistance that comes from religious organizations like Norwegian Church Aid or Catholic Relief Services, for example. And so the South Sudan Council of Churches is not like it's a label on every package of food that's delivered or every service that's provided. But it's behind the scenes and it's an umbrella organization. So it definitely has a presence. The religious actors do have legitimacy as we saw, but they may not be using it for influence to stop the war. They're not able to stop the war. And in part, this is interesting because they were recently asked to help mediate at a high level revitalization forum, which is a national level peace process in Addis Ababa. And this is another clear indicator of their legitimacy, but we're really trying to understand how they fared and how we can better support them in that effort. And this is also important that, oh, sorry. How do I go back? Their efforts, the efforts of religious leaders may be stymied by spoilers. And probably the most surprising aspect of this for me is not really appreciating in advance the extent to which religious actors have suffered for their work. Women are very highly respected, but their roles are very almost menial at the local level, but many respondents indicated that women should have stronger roles in peace processes, in elected office, and also in religious affairs. The next generation of religious leaders, we had a really hard time. We had people that were identified at the local level, but nobody that really rose above the surface. So we're really trying to dig into the data to see if we can identify others. And I'm sad that this was surprising, but across the board, almost unanimously, our respondents indicated that the Muslims in South Sudan, we don't know the percentage we can estimate, but there's no firm data on it, are very collegial community members. There seems to be no problem with relationships there. And then finally, nonviolent action is really not well understood. Many of the religious actors said that everything to do is nonviolent, which is good, but they didn't understand kind of strategic nonviolence. And so we're really trying to understand that. So I'll end there so we can have some, can you make? Okay, so we have about 10, we'll go five minutes after, if that's okay. So we have about 10, 15 minutes to take your questions. We'll take a few at a time. We have some mic runners going around. So who would like to start? We have a question right here. Okay, we'll take these two and one over here. Hi, my name is Kara. I'm with the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. So we're obviously very interested in this kind of work, we're trying to do it ourselves, but we specifically look at the role that religious actors have to not just understand their local constituency, but go out and do active peace building work, either through their constituencies or after attending trainings of ours. So now that you understand the importance of these actors in these specific spaces, do you see a place for that kind of work? Do you think it's too soon? Do you think that the capacity that they have in their natural context is strong enough to do active peace building work? Yeah, we're gonna take all three at once, if that's okay. Thank you. I'm Richard Parkins with the American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudanese, and thank you for these excellent, highly informative presentations. It's been a very rich morning. My question is, as mentioned, that there are 64 tribes. There's been a proliferation of conflicts throughout South Sudan, and many of these conflicts have their own characters. We appreciated the reference to contextualizing where the violence happened. So you have a lot of context, if you will, in dealing with South Sudan. So could you comment on how do you accommodate or how do you adjust for the variety of incidents where the conflict is so vicious and so intense, and how do you then extrapolate from your research and your findings to the multiple conflicts, or does that really matter? In other words, how important is it to be aware of the diversity of conflicts in a situation such as South Sudan? I'm sure it's a concern that would be applicable to other places where there are multiple conflicts with multiple contextual dimensions. Can you give me one more of that? Oh, thank you. Thank you for this very interesting session and event. I have two questions, actually, if I may. The first one is regarding the changes that have swept the region over the past three decades, as we know. For example, I am Libyan, and I know that in Libya, at least 30 years ago, we didn't know anything about Salafis or any Jihadis or any of those groups in Libya. We were mostly Sunni Malikis, and we have Sunni Muslims, and we have a minority group of Abadis who are the Amaziks. So all of these changes that these people who have been crossing the borders and changing the landscape of religion in the countries, and I think it may have all started after the Afghanistan War, or maybe with some other changes in Iran and Saudi, but has this been also included in the mapping? Because what I have seen now is the mapping of what's happening currently, and this does not represent really what these countries are religiously based on, or the majority of their society. So has this been included in your mapping? And my second question is, where does this mapping of religious leadership or authority, or where does it lead us? If we are looking for change in the Middle East and looking for democratic processes and looking to implement the democratic thought process and ways, where does this religion come into it or fit into it? Because we know that what's happening, the conflict, most of the conflict in the Middle East has got a background of, I mean, we usually think that it is due to the oppressive regimes, the lack of economic opportunity, lack of enough education, lack of women empowerment. So I would like to know, where does women empowerment, for example, come next to religious leaders empowerment in peace building and reconciliation? So these are my two questions. Thank you. Okay, great, thank you. Who would like to start? Jackie, you wanna? Yeah, just let us know which one you're answering. Yeah, I'm gonna take the first two, actually, because I think they're related, at least in the context in South Sudan. So some of the religious actors that I've interviewed and some of the responses really indicated a very strong expertise in local peace building work. And so specifically in areas where there's violent conflict, maybe between clans or sub-clans or cattle raids, and religious actors really have the tools to consult with the stakeholders because they're very local and they often maintain a presence in a community during violent conflict. They know who's who and they know who to talk to and who to listen to and they can persuade and use their influence for that local peace building effort. And so we've seen numerous examples in South Sudan. Some of the questions that I have and I'll continue to ask are how do we make those sustainable? How do we build on the successes that the religious actors have had? And also are there gaps in their capacity or resources to do those particular, is it mediation skills? Is it negotiation skills? Or are there other conflict analysis skills? Any other tools that might be useful for them that they themselves find lacking? Zaynou, did you mean that, Zaynou? Yes. Also like in the report of Iraq, when we like the main objective is like to test what is the means and what is the basis of the influence, whether it's like it's negative or positive influence. But once you understand those two things, the means and the basis, then you can understand how you can engage them later in the peace of processes. And we all know like if you cannot make it an inclusive process, then that would create more negative implication because you are executing really a lead actor regardless their type of influence. That's why some people like in the civil society are against of empowering or what they do see as empowering of engaging the tribal leaders. They see like this is against empowering the civil society itself. But others see like, no, this is really an inclusion, holistic process. So that's why I think this is also answering the question from like from Nimia, where does this need? We are not like, let's say that the peace building action, it will be lead by the religious actor leaders here. It's like one of other or one among other actors that might contribute and play a really positive role. And we are using them as a partners as we are including them. And we might design a future steps with them is that where it is the best fit in, it's like where they can play more broader role, but not like as a lead role because that would might be understood that we are eliminating other important role. The findings for the Iraq is that we found really a huge positive role for women in religious spectrum and even outside. And what I found it really interesting is that they are encouraging in Sudan for increasing more women role. The only difference is that we don't find really powerful examples on the community level in Iraq. It's more in the political level. It's the opposite in Sudan. They want to raise up like the role from the bottom to up into maybe in a future more national reconciliation efforts. So I think those two experience are really interesting to be shared among. Thank you. Anything to add? I can, I'm a professor. I can answer all the questions consistently, but maybe I'll just, maybe I'll just take the clincher. Where does the mapping lead us? Even being a political scientist, it's not my goal. This is me speaking personally, totally unaffiliated from USIP for a second. It's not my goal to implement a democratic thought process anywhere. Even in my classroom, right? I'm the dictator. But I do think what the religious mapping allows us to do, and this does hit on the second question to a certain extent, saying we were focused on the current context. And part of the reason why we wanted to focus on the current context, frankly, as I began this project, I was horrified at the level of information available in English on the religious sector in Iraq after 15 years of whatever you want to call the relationship between the United States and Iraq. And so I think first of all, we just have a data desert. Second of all, we have some stronger studies of some sectors and not of others, so just getting a sense for what is available about different communities was important to me. And we are a peace-building organization, and so in one sense, we really just need to know what's the current context in order to design. Part of our work, the goal was to design programming initiatives that would work to contribute to peace-building reconciliation, and so we needed to map the contemporary context. I will tell you that I'm planning a book project in which I work on the historical nature of this project. Okay, and commercial. Okay, all right, let's take one more round. We have a question here. We've got one up here, and one right there, so that's great. Take the last round of questions. Hi, my name is Kelsey Richie, and I am a graduate student studying national security and religion, and interested in continuing these studies. So one of my questions kind of builds on that. As we're looking at these different conflicts and contexts, how important is it to understand the specific religious sects that you're working with in order to implement these peace-building initiatives? How important is it to understand kind of those minute details of what each of the religions do and don't believe when you're looking at the fragmentation? Hi, where are you? Alexander Kraut from Insight. My question is Iraq related, so I'll address it maybe to Dr. Ann. Did you find in your research any differences of views between, let's say, local actors and leadership, in particularly in the Christian communities? Maybe even fissures, perhaps. Between local actors and? The leadership of the, yeah, thank you. Can we have one more question? Rosie Berman, Tom Lantos, Human Rights Commission. How have you found ethnic divisions and religious divisions interacting? Okay, who would like to start? Do you want to? Okay, I'll start with the last one because it was interesting. We asked a question about the extent to which different religious denominations worked across ethnicity, because we did want to see if specifically the churches in South Sudan, which are the majority of the religious institutions there, are working across ethnic boundaries. And what we found is that certain denominations conduct their services in either Juba Arabic or English or a particular local language. So in the Juba town, for example, Bari. And that other denominations conduct services, they have different services for each, I always say not ethnic group, but language group. So for example, I attended a service in Juba town that was attended by Anuak and Shilok because their languages are closely related. And so only those people who had been displaced from certain areas, but from those particular groups attended that service. So the intention, I think, is not to be ethnically divided, but the languages, the diversity of languages really means that people gravitate toward services that are conducted in their mother tongue, whereas others will gravitate toward services that are conducted in Juba Arabic or English or that. So I think there's an opportunity there to highlight this so there could be more services conducted in the languages that span different ethnic groups and maybe try to change that dynamic just a bit. Yeah, so I'll stop there. Just to clarify, one of the methodological choices we made in the Iraq-specific research was to not interview religious actors themselves directly. So we weren't interviewing Sistani, we weren't interviewing McPetal Sutter, we were interviewing regular, everyday members of civil society to ask them who they perceive of as the most influential religious actors. In fact, in some cases, there were people who were really militantly secular, were hostile to religion, who we were interviewing because we wanted to have that full range of perceptions of influence. So I can't speak to differences between the views of the leadership and the views of individual members of communities based on the transcript data that we have. What I can say is that because we're doing a two-stage data collection, something that's really interesting to me, the finding I mentioned about the widespread respect for Christian leadership across sects, we have Yazidi, Shia, and Sunni all saying relatively similar things in one particular interview question. What I'm really interested in is now that we have that first round of data collection. We can use that in our question guide in the second round. So I wanna ask specifically to the Christian interviewees we work with in the second round, what is your response to this preliminary finding? Do you think people were just saying what they thought they should say, or do you feel that your religious leaders are widely respected in the Iraqi society? So I think the second round has a real opportunity to flesh out the findings, but the structure of this doesn't speak to differences between leaders and individuals. I will say, and it kind of responds to a question that was asked earlier by Richard Parkins, is that I think the extrapolation that can be done from this research to broader conflicts is if we do speak directly to the religious actors themselves, is a set of best practices. How do religious actors want to be engaged by the Iraqi government, by foreign governments, by foreign peace building organizations, by local NGOs? What experiences have religious actors had in conflict zones that were positive in collaboration and what ones have they had that is negative? This would really fulfill a need here in DC in particular where especially over at the State Department people have expressed we want to collaborate with religious actors, but a lot of times when we reach out to them they just don't respond to our overtures and so we wanna know how do religious actors want to be engaged on what issues? Do they wanna work on corruption? Do they wanna work on collaborative CVE policy? What are the issues that religious actors are most interested in? And so I think there really is room for a third iteration of this project where we take this list of influential religious actors that we've identified and we speak directly to them and we say, what do you want? On what subjects do you want to be engaged? What good experiences have you had? What bad experience have you had? And how can we use best practices to help inform religious leader engagement in other conflicts? Great. Great, thank you and that's a nice segue into what we're doing here today and where we could go forward with it. So I'm gonna wrap up here just a couple quick notes but first let's give the panel a round of applause. So just a couple quick notes. We know this was process heavy or big focus on methodology, but I think that helps to highlight that while there are a fair amount of sensitivities and considerations in doing this work it can be done and it can provide very helpful information in how to engage religious actors in conflict resolution and peace building. So thank you for the teaser. We look forward to reading your full reports. I do wanna remind you that we have the Libya report out there which actually does have recommendations and ways forward. So that's the type of reports that you could look forward to at the South Sudan and a rock religious mapping. We also have a mapping underway in Myanmar in the Rakhine state and we're considering what other country we could do this mapping in next. So with that, let me thank you all for coming and if you are registered for any additional follow on meetings, if you need to know the location just come see me or Melissa in the back and we'll be happy to direct you there. So thank you again.