 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Tara Sonnenschein, Executive Vice President here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And I know many of you have been here for a long day, so I have both the pleasure and the burden of introducing the third panel. And I say burdensome only because I know that it is 3.20 on Thursday. You're beginning to think about the long weekend ahead, so my real job is to keep you awake and animated. And to do that, I want to very quickly say that this panel is going to move us from theory into action, into the practical initiatives and paths forward that take all the wonderful ideas you've heard today and begin to really open the floor. So I'm going to do very little today except get our speakers up here. And I've asked them all to very quickly trim and start exing out lines in their remarks so that we can get to questions very quickly. You have the bios of these very, very brilliant speakers. If you think everything has been said this morning and this afternoon, you're not correct because there is a great deal more to be heard from them. So what I'm going to do is quickly tell you, as you can see who everybody is, and then they're going to come up in succession without anything in between. So buckle your seatbelts as we move quickly. I do want to also say that you're all invited to the tribute and reception that will be coming up. I don't know what we're serving, Abby, at the reception, do you? Good stuff. I'm trying to think of all the possible incentives to keep you here. So with that, let me just tell you that, of course, we have with us Dr. Edward Luck, currently serving as UN Secretary General Special Advisor. He's done everything in the world, IPA, UN Association, on and on. Heather Conley is here, and I'm delighted that she is here. She serves as Director and Senior Fellow at the Europe Program at CSIS. She's been at the State Department. She's done everything you can imagine. Everything? No! It's late in the day, and we said there's good stuff coming, so she hasn't done everything yet. I don't know how to go after that. I think we went a little bit out of order, but that's okay. Ambassador John Herps, I am not going to read his bio, because that would take the rest of the afternoon, all very just incredible places, and we know him most from Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the Senior Foreign Service, member of the Senior Foreign Service, our own Lawrence Wucher, who, in addition to everything you would read about him, does not say that he returned recently from how many days at the Auschwitz Conference, eight, for something? How is there a few days? A few days, and a very interesting prevention conference that I hope he will reflect on. And lastly, Peter, I've told him already I am not going to get the Dutch correct on Van Thul, 50%, but we agreed Peter for now. So with that, I'm going to begin to let the speakers come up, do their remarks, and then very quickly we will turn to all of you for the Q&A. Thanks for hanging in there with us all day. Thank you, Tara. It's a great pleasure to be here, although I have some second thoughts after that introduction. But I will try to be brief. It's a great honor to be here with David Hamburg, who I think invented or reinvented prevention, and with, obviously, has done so much with the UN itself on these issues. Let me just say that for the UN, prevention is really second nature. I mean, any organization that would be so bold or so foolish in this opening preamble to say that it is trying to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, the words added by Virginia Golderslee as the dean from Barnard, has to be one that has prevention in its blood. If you look at the very first purpose in Article 11, it is about prevention as the first tool in terms of maintaining international peace and security. And as Ambassador Yates said this morning, way back then, that the very fact that we haven't had World War III in many ways confirms the fundamental purpose of the organization. And I think besides the charter, and you see so many things in Chapter 6 and 8 in particular but elsewhere about things that deal with prevention, but in addition the very comparative advantages of this institution, and sometimes it's hard to remember that there are some, but there actually are some that would tend to go in the directions of prevention. The very universality of the organization, the sense that in some cases it brings a certain legitimacy, that other bodies can't, can be a particular advantage. The fact that it has some distance, it's not a regional organization, it's not the neighbors, at least originally the idea of peacekeeping itself is supposed to have distant peacekeepers from smaller countries. So the idea that it was going to somehow nibble on your sovereignty and be a long-term problem wouldn't be there as much. And very importantly, the sense that it's a place of norms and values, now we don't always like those norms, we don't always like those values, but it does bring a certain sense of standards to the prevention of conflict. Now, in addition to that, I think it's worth looking at the history just very briefly. One, I think much of what the UN was doing, particularly much of what Secretaries General have done through good offices, mediation, fact-finding, all the other things through the years, really was about prevention. Peacekeeping itself, in many ways, was to prevent either the recurrence or escalation of conflict. Peacebuilding was very much to prevent reoccurrence and recidivism in terms of conflict. But it was so endemic in what the organization did, it wasn't very well articulated as a strategy. And that's where I think David and Syvance and the others in the Carnegie Corporation project did a lot to sort of talk about structural versus operational prevention and really putting it in a way that people could think about in a very straightforward way. And very importantly with Kofi Annan as the Secretary General to carry your message, had a very strong messenger in that regard. So it wasn't that the UN had to find prevention, I mean prevention was really in the DNA of the organization, but it needed a better way of thinking about that and I think David made a particular service in that regard. Now, just before closing, and I am going to be quick, I wanted to say a word about the prevention of genocide and about the responsibility to protect. Given that this seems to be my full-time application working on responsibility to protect for the Secretary General and working with Francis Ding, the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide and now working to form a joint office, thought I might say something very briefly about that. It seems to me that the prevention of conflict and the prevention of atrocity crimes are not the same thing. And very often the literature had said that these things are very closely associated with armed conflict. That's sometimes true, but many cases, and we've seen this recently in Kyrgyzstan, are not related directly to armed conflict. So we can't simply take the tools and the methodologies that we've used to try to prevent conflict and immediately say, therefore, we're going to prevent things like atrocity crimes and R2P-type crimes. Second of all, we have to look at the kinds of tools that we have in this area. We do have in Francis's office an early warning capability. It's fairly rudimentary in some ways, but also it tries to draw together information from throughout the system. The UN doesn't lack information. It has a field presence in human rights and humanitarian and peacekeeping and political affairs in the sense that it never did before. So it has a lot of hands-on information, and very often in the places where you would most want it. And there's about six or seven major streams of information from the field to headquarters, but in good UN tradition, of course, they don't talk to each other very much. So one of the things that we're trying to do is bring them all together in this joint office and see the patterns that are happening in some of these countries and see what the likelihood is of a rapid escalation of, in some cases, a fairly chronic human rights violations into something much sharper and much more dangerous. But I think as we're going forward in this, we have to ask whether, in fact, have we made progress or not. Much of this, of course, was spurred by Rwanda, Stravanica, the lessons of the 1990s, but are we doing better today? We're obviously focused a lot in recent weeks in Kyrgyzstan, and it doesn't look so very much better. But on the other hand, if you look at the kind of international engagement and you compare that with people doing their best to look the other way with Rwanda, there has been, I think, a significant change. We've seen the OSCE, the High Commissioner for National Minorities, and Francis and myself trying to coordinate it a little bit on how we move forward. He's been using the term ethnic cleansing to describe what's happening, what has happened in Kyrgyzstan. In many ways, this is the most classic situation for responsibility-protector ethnic cleansing that at least we've seen in the last several years that we've been working on this. Now, has the organization responded in quiet ways? I think it has, diplomatically. I think the messages have gotten through to the parties. He's in desist. Their impunity isn't what it used to be. But on the other hand, can we move the Security Council? Can we move particularly one permanent member in the neighborhood who's been a little cautious on international involvement? There sort of remains to be seen. But I must say, in the informal kinds of discussions on these issues now, we don't see the kind of resistance to seeing this in sort of R2P terms and seeing this in mass atrocity terms that one might have at another era and another time. So it was said early this morning that at the end of the day, I think Dick Salomon said that it's a question of political will. But the question is, how do you shape that will and how do you make it move in particular situations like this? That's where I think political concepts like R2P can be quite important to that. And the constant, a little like the water against the rock, trying to get the Security Council to change its perspectives. I think that rock is changing its shape a little bit, but it is still a rock, and we're still rather small drips trying to influence it over time. But I think if you look not only at Kyrgyzstan, but you look at Kenya, which is the first case where we try to apply R2P and to discourage any more escalation, what appear to be ethnic cleansing going on there. You look at Guinea. There have been some cases, some sort of quiet successes. But I think in every one of those cases, you'll see the UN be a piece of the puzzle. But certainly not the whole puzzle. All of this is done with partners, regional, sub-regional, bilateral. And so I think the real question is, can you get many parts of the international community moving in the same direction in some of these crises, not only to prevent conflict, but very importantly not to allow the kinds of crimes against humanity that we're seeing unfortunately in too many places. I don't know it's a little too early to write an assessment, but it does seem to me that the old saying that success has many fathers and failure as an orphan applies to the UN's work in these areas. The failures are very conspicuous, the successes are very quiet, and again involve many partners and many fathers. So I'll leave it to other scholars here to write the history of this, but at the moment at least we're trying to forge ahead in a somewhat different way to hopefully reshape that rock in bits and pieces. So thanks very much. Thank you, Dr. Locke. We will turn to Ambassador Herbst and I would just have folks mark down the vocabulary challenge that you've laid out about prevention as a catch-all for genocide prevention, for conflict prevention, and whether or not we have made it too big. Thank you. I'd like to follow on the initial insight from Dr. Locke and apply it to the U.S. government. By and large, you might say, the State Department and USAID and other parts of the U.S. government looking overseas have had conflict prevention as one of their core responsibilities. But there's no question that we have decided to take this to a very different level. The political element has always been part of the State Department function, but over the past several years my office, the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization has begun to look at the operational or you might say field view vision of what's necessary to prevent conflict. And we've come up with, in partnership with many others including our friends at USAID, some tools which can be used for this. For example, we've created something called the Inter-Agency Conflict Assessment Framework, something building upon AID's Conflict Assessment Framework to look at the drivers of conflict. And we have gone to over a dozen countries and applied this tool and helped our embassies reassess the types of programs it runs in order to prevent conflict from breaking out. We did one such program in Liberia and we presented the findings of that program to President Sirleve Johnson who was delighted and asked that we share it to a presentation for a cabinet. We've done it in places from Ecuador to Bangladesh to Southeast Asia. And by and large the results have been very, very positive. We have an office in SCRS called the Office of Conflict Prevention and they in fact oversee this ICAF and they work with their sister office in USAID, the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation. Another tool we've used is to actually develop projects designed to prevent conflict. Of course, our office has not had its own funds for doing this. We had to get a loan from the Defense Department. You've all heard of I think the 1207 program. And many of these programs have been designed in order to prevent conflict. Just to give, and we actually have done over 30 countries now, something like 330 million dollars worth of projects to give you one example, one of the early ones we did something called the Haitian Stabilization Initiative. And in fact, underscoring the fact that what we're building in SCRS is an inter-agency capacity, designed by our friends at USAID. And this program helped put police back in city Jusley, the principal slum in Port-au-Prince. We did that by training the police, by establishing a police headquarters and also equipping them. We also developed in connection with that some community building and work creation programs. Early warning is an important part of Conflict Prevention. One of the good things in my predecessor, one of the many good things in my predecessor, Carlos Pasqual did in SCRS was to ask the agency to create an early warning list of countries that may come into crisis. And so one was produced five plus years ago. And that list comes out every six months laying out the countries where there are serious problems and which may fall into instability. And of course there are equivalents of that that are publicly available for foreign policies if in Berlin or other countries. I want to keep this short but I'll just mention two more things. One of a general variety which is the capacity we're building is a capacity meant to work with many others. We created the Civilian Response Corps as of last Friday. We have 1,042 people. We're deploying them all over the world. We have 40 people on the ground in Afghanistan. That's not so much Conflict Prevention. But we have an operation right now in Sudan and in Kyrgyzstan which both could fall into the category of Conflict Prevention. In Sudan it's a question of what's happening with the referendum in coming up next January in the south which the south has the right to vote on independence. There's no question there will be substantial changes in Sudan. There's no doubt those changes could be messy. There are at least two sets of category-wide problems related to that. There are north-south issues which could lead to out-and-out conflict. The other are problems relating to governance in the south as whatever the result of the referendum there will be a need for greater governing capacity in the south. Our office has put nine people on the ground mainly in Juba but also in Khartoum to one, beef up our missions to deal with the numerous problems that are coming down the road and two, to assess those two sets of problems those that involve north-south tensions that involve governance in the south so we can help mitigate those problems. We'll have another eight on the ground by this time next month by the end of this month and based upon their assessments we'll be putting perhaps another dozen or two people out in the field to hopefully lead to a transition which will not be a violent one. In Kyrgyzstan we put people out over the past about five or six weeks. We were the State Department present in Osh when the violence broke out unfortunately the violence broke out and we couldn't stay over there for the first few days and we helped get other people out. We are also planning now to perhaps go back in once things actually things have calmed down some and when the State Department goes back in it will be our folks who are there to do that. When we go out whether it's in Kyrgyzstan or Sudan we have a substantial planning capacity a capacity able to enable us to not only ensure coordination across the US government our principal failing of our operations in the past in Iraq and Afghanistan but also to ensure maximum coordination with international actors both governments and also NGOs. Certainly when we go into any of these places we need to be sure what others are doing and we need to be sure that what we do is value added and not operating across purposes or in duplication and actually just to finish in Sudan the UN is planning a major operation on the ground to keep things calm they want to have three or four people out not just in every state capital in the south but also in the county capitals and we are talking to them about how we could put people out beyond Juba which would be value added. Thank you very much. Heather and we would like to know the question of resources and how economically one sustains presence on the ground and whether you can go in and out or whether you need that permanence. Tara, thank you so much thank you for this kind invitation to be with you this afternoon it is technically impossible to talk about the EU in five minutes or less just with that caveat I am delighted to give a very brief overview of why I think the EU is in fact a very powerful actor to prevent conflict and as the director of the Europe program at CSIS I don't often describe the European Union as a powerful actor I think it is sometimes a challenged actor but I think in this case it deserves a lot of credit so I am going to describe some of the tools that the European Union has used I think very effectively and then I would like to just touch very briefly on three examples where again I think the EU has made a significant contribution certainly to conflict prevention I think the EU is so powerful because it is the largest provider of humanitarian and development assistance I could stop right there and probably sit down but it is huge has important significance in its drive and development assistance I think an interesting question that we will have to look at in the long term the European economic crisis may alter that but at this point a very significant driver of development assistance the European Union has presence on four continents out of a in total it has led 24 civilian and military missions right now nine are currently active I think the policies of the European Union itself have promoted conflict prevention its enlargement process particularly in the western Balkans and then I think its partnership model particularly in Africa where it is promoting good governance a strong focus on rule of law and good governance so it's a powerful actor I think a lot of the credit needs to be given to Chris Patton who was then external relations commissioner for the European Union who really focused and made sure that the EU and everything it did from its funding mechanisms to its structural work made sure that conflict prevention was embedded in all of the EU's policies and certainly its development work and it's developed again you'll hear similar to what Ambassador Herbst was saying the EU has developed an early warning unit it has created a watch list it has developed what they call intelligence fusion centers which brings in the data that's needed to start working on are we heading towards potential conflict it has created a check list for root causes of conflict and I'm going to very briefly just touch on the areas that this checklist looks at legitimacy of the state rule of law, respect for fundamental rights civil society and media relations between communities are there already embedded conflict resolution mechanisms sound economic management social and regional inequalities and then the larger geopolitical situation the European Union has developed a larger European development fund of which it's developed a governance initiative and I'm going to focus a lot on governance and rule of law because that's where the EU tends to spend a great deal of its money and its capacity in developing better and improved governance mechanisms in 2007 the EU launched a program called the instrument for stability it's a fund it's a long term fund that supports crisis response projects around the world focusing on mediation confidence building interim administration rule of law transitional justice and it's recently been working on the role of natural resources as a driver of conflict two other initiatives it's created a peace building partnership program which is again part of this larger instrument for stability but it looks at how to strengthen civilian expertise in peace building and looking at ways to enhance the dialogue between EU institutions and civil society all of these programs have actually culminated in last year the EU developed this larger effort known as the EU implementation plan they've been doing this in pilot countries Burundi Haiti, Yemen, Sierra Leone they're trying to build an integrated effort what the EU terms the comprehensive approach and looking at all its programmatic activities in three areas political cohesiveness now in the EU with 27 members I assure you political unity and speaking with one voice is perhaps the trickiest of EU efforts but they're trying to develop that policy unity within the EU to attack the implementation plan coherence what in our terminology we call the 3Ds again it's trying to bring in the security, the development and the diplomacy all together and finally aid effectiveness and Ambassador Herps was saying that on the ground field coordination that is so challenging the EU also focuses on again those root causes of conflict they see poverty reduction as the key goal of conflict prevention with a great focus on governance and rule of law but they don't stop there, they look at trade policy they look at social and environmental policies the diplomatic the political dialogue the cooperation with other international actors again it's a very much focused on a holistic approach in 2003 the Europeans created their own security strategy not dissimilar from as we developed the national security strategy and they developed they determined their five major threats and within these threat columns their three priorities were conflict prevention rapid response and assistance so again everything is infused with that prevention three examples and I'll close with this where I think the EU has been particularly effective in three very different ways the EU's rule of law mission in Kosovo the EU border assistance mission to Moldova and Ukraine and finally it's been completed the EU force in Chad and the Central African Republic let me just briefly explain very fortuitously this morning we had the head of the EU rule of law mission CSIS who's phenomenal and gave a wonderful picture of the work that the EU is doing on police judiciary customs reform it's the largest civilian EU mission under their common foreign and security policy they're focusing on organized crime and corruption again that strong rule of law it's making a huge difference it's not a political body getting back to that political unity question five EU member states have not recognized Kosovo that makes EU policy towards Kosovo very challenging but they have found a work around to maintain technical assistance and advisory and that's been an extremely effective program working very collaboratively with K4 on the ground with the NATO operation yet NATO and the EU are working together right now and that's a later discussion we can talk about after questions secondly it's called UBAM it's the EU border assistance mission on the border between Moldova and Ukraine about 200 people so very very small mission it's helping Moldova and Ukraine customs officials prevent and detect smuggling, trafficking in persons and goods but I think it's most important the assessment of the security situation along the border, its risk analysis its stronger interagency coordination among local actors it's a tripwire and it's a preventative mechanism that's been on the ground since 2005 and finally that EU force and Chad this was the most multinational EU operation in Africa thus far it included about 3,700 troops and it was basically the bridging operation until the UN mission could take over predicted civilians, refugees, IDPs did some demining provided it facilitated the delivery of humanitarian assistance and it was a nice bridging for when the UN mission of which many EU member states remained in and transitioned to the UN force but right behind that mission under the European Development Fund the EU provided 311 million euros to support good governance and sustainable development in Chad it's a nice complimentary rolling effort are there challenges to this you bet and as I said, trying to develop unity of purpose amongst 27 member states is always a trick added to the fact that after implementation of the Lisbon Treaty the EU has created a new institution, the European External Action Service and if you close your eyes what this is trying to do is combine DOD, USAID and the State Department all rolled into one working with 27 different foreign ministries to create a one single source for a comprehensive approach it's a great experiment to watch and we should all be watching very very closely the EU is not a global player but it does have a global impact particularly in the development assistance but I think it's strongest mandate it's a regional power and that's in the western Balkans and the eastern partnership countries of the Caucasus Moldova Ukraine and Belarus with their integration policies and surely they're developing greater capacity in those regions and I think that for one is an important contribution to stability in Europe, thank you. As Lawrence makes his way up we will just jot down for those who want to come back to the comprehensive word the whole of government concepts and whole world concepts and how we're going to get all those actors on the same page Lawrence. Thanks Tara. I'm happy to have an opportunity to talk a little bit about the conflict prevention efforts of ECOWAS the economic community of West African states we were looking forward to welcoming the director for political affairs from ECOWAS but he was called to lead their election monitoring mission in Guinea so really conflict prevention in practice there but we felt that ECOWAS is an interesting enough case of a sub-regional intergovernmental organization working on conflict prevention that we wanted to highlight their efforts. The first question is why is an economic community working on conflict prevention? ECOWAS was founded in 1975 to promote economic integration among the 15 member states of West Africa but through the period since then West Africa has witnessed many devastating violent conflicts particularly the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone multiple conflicts in Nigeria and numerous other lower level conflicts and there has been an increasing recognition that violent conflict has prevented ECOWAS and its members from achieving the core economic integration goals set out in its charter what we then had in 1990 was really kind of innovation under fire with the creation of ECOMOG the ECOWAS ceasefire monitoring group for Liberia and then in the period since then in the 20 years since we've seen a sort of move to formalize and fill out the peace and security mechanisms within ECOWAS so let me highlight the progress and I'd say that we've seen impressive progress at the level of norms and institution building come back to the question of whether or the extent to which those have actually been put into practice consistently in 1999 ECOWAS members adopted what they call by shorthand the mechanism but it's officially the protocol relating to the mechanism for conflict prevention management peacekeeping and security so first thing to note is that conflict prevention is in the name of this mechanism which really sets up the peace and security architecture in essence it parallels chapters 6, 7, and 8 of the UN Charter so the first thing that the mechanism does is create the institutions and supporting organs within ECOWAS including a mediation and security council a council of elders a commissioner or what would become the commissioner for political affairs, peace, and security and an early warning system which they explicitly say is for the purposes of conflict prevention it also this document enabled ECOWAS to take certain kinds of conflict prevention actions on the initiative of member states of the mediation and security council or even of the commission the president of the commission itself which is really the secretariat so things like fact finding missions mediation facilitation negotiation with parties are given to the authority of these various components of ECOWAS a couple of years later in 2001 there's a new protocol adopted the protocol on democracy and good governance and this really strengthens the normative foundations particularly focusing on the need to prevent internal crises that often emerged from crises relating to governance and democracy or extra constitutional changes in governments so what you see is things like a rule that no ECOWAS member state can change the electoral laws six months in advance of an election and ECOWAS the commission has the authority to dispatch observer missions for elections before through and after the electoral period now note this is given the commission of ECOWAS this authority it's not declared to be with the consent of the members state this is actually quite a progressive provision a few years later back in 2009 we have adoption of the ECOWAS conflict prevention framework which was several years in germination and to my eyes it's really perhaps the best existing intergovernmental framework on conflict prevention as such first it draws on much of the scholarship that has emerged in the last 20 or so years on conflict prevention for example it distinguishes between structural prevention the so-called root cause or earlier prevention and operational prevention responding to crises or emerging crises it discusses the differences between underlying structural risk factors what you might call accelerators and then triggers and the way ECOWAS can understand its relationship with each of these and in fact it invokes the responsibility to protect which actually in the version that came out of the 2001 Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty so that's I think certainly a strength of the conflict prevention framework it's also quite comprehensive it describes 14 components of ECOWAS action to prevent violent conflict and for each of those components it then describes ECOWAS activities benchmarks and capacity needs in certain respects this reads to me like not all that different from what the QDDR process here in the US is aspiring to do to match the goals needs and specific capacities I would say there are grounds for a critique though this is an extremely ambitious document and you can if you know the real capacities of ECOWAS and the limits of the capacities of the interstates you can't help but observe that there's a bit of a mismatch between the ambitions articulated in this framework and the existing capacities of the institution furthermore I would suggest that 14 priorities is too many and if you have a bit more of a skeptical reading you might see that this reads a bit like a shopping list for international donors one of the 14 priorities if it's interested in media that's also one of the 14 priorities understandable for an institution like ECOWAS which really survives on donor support but perhaps less than perfect for a strategy document then I think if we look at where things stand today with ECOWAS in the West African region the challenges for taking this very good framework and set of norms and institutions that have been created putting them into consistent practice to have a robust conflict prevention mechanism the challenges are still quite considerable the first and maybe the foremost is that the political commitments in these documents really are abstract and don't immediately translate themselves into action in specific cases like an emerging crisis in the region or their discernible signs of risks in a particular member state and the commissioner for peace and security decides that there are actions that ECOWAS should be taking it's still up to him to try and cajole, persuade and find space within the politics that inevitably play there's still quite a bit of deference to political leaders in the member states and for them managing their internal problems and I think we probably should say internal problems in quotes second really challenge relates to capacity and I think I would try and say it's not simply limited capacity but it's that the effects of having limited capacity on an institution which is trying to respond to so many demands we find playing out over and over again this tension between the desire for institutionalization and the needs to respond to immediate crises and that's certainly I think a theme that we've talked about throughout the day that plays itself out at the UN in the US government and elsewhere but I think it's particularly acute when you have an institution like ECOWAS which is resource strapped to begin with it tends to promote a situation where you have a small number of highly capable, highly linked in individuals who are running from crisis to crisis responding but where are they where is the ability to then fill in under them at that level below and build up that new cadre that we need to find and third challenge is really not about ECOWAS per se but just about the context they're working in and I think we've talked about today particularly was underscored in the Latin American discussion this morning there's an increase in complexity when we look at violence and violent conflict or violence writ large in these countries and what we see is maybe a little bit less of the kind of classic political violence of a rebel group trying to overthrow a government but we see more of the nexus between criminal activities criminal violence and the ways that threaten weak regimes and governments to give two quick examples Guinea-Bissau a small country in West Africa some of our colleagues in the room were involved in some NGO efforts to engage in conflict prevention there in the past several years and I think from what I understand with some considerable success but at the same time they were engaging the sort of political parties Guinea-Bissau became one of the main drug transshipment areas and the drug cartels became increasingly powerful and really more powerful in many ways than the state and threatened the underlying stability we also see a place like Niger where we had in the last year the sitting president Tanja trying to manipulate the rules to extend his rule and that led to a coup and now we have a sort of fragile transition period trying to find its way towards a new constitution and democratic and civilian rule meanwhile there's an extreme food crisis that's being responded to we also have questions about potential Islamic radicalization there are questions of whether Al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb is operating in parts of Niger and we at the same time still have sort of bubbling remnants of older rebel movements in the Taurag rebellion so I think what we see is a complexifying if that's a word of the security environment in West Africa and it's causing extreme pressures and challenges on an institution like ECWAS even as much as they've committed to taking robust action to prevent conflict thanks we will complete now with Peter our set of formal prepared remarks and if people would begin to get their questions in order we'll go after Peter directly to the floor thank you and thank you United States Institute for Peace and especially Oberyn Williams for inviting me I'm very happy I'm the last speaker I realize in a long list so I try to follow the orders of our facilitator and not to bore you it's my job to talk you through the role of civil society organizations in relation to conflict prevention why are civil society organizations important first of all they have information about realities on the ground they have information about where conflicts might brew they also might have some ideas about solutions to conflict situations civil society organizations provide inroads into local communities and they are often present in situations where other actors have left where even the government may have withdrawn in fragile states in places like Somalia if there is no government there will still be civil society organizations they build relationships between communities they offer opportunities to help in mediation in the academic literature this comes with different language some call it social capital building trust credibility it leads to a possible contribution to ownership of peace building processes the ownership that we are all craving for civil society organizations have capacities to implement preventive action to implement in very early phases and delicate phases of rebuilding societies concrete projects on the ground we just heard some introduction on how that can relate to economic development so there is a huge potential in civil society to contribute to conflict prevention and peace building do we optimally make use of that potential that I think is the question what is the good news there well I represent the global partnership for the prevention of armed conflict a worldwide network with more than a thousand members organized in 15 regional networks so the good news I can bring you today is we have a network and that's not a small thing I can tell you because networking in civil society on the issues of peace building and conflict prevention is a relative latecomer I think it's an interesting observation to share with you this afternoon there are various reasons for that the recognition of the role of civil society in issues of conflict and peace building has been more difficult compared to the recognition of the role of civil society in humanitarian assistance or in issues of social and economic development after all wasn't conflict and security the business of states and governments and what did civil society want there at that negotiating table it took longer time to get that recognized and to the extent we have something like global governance in place the issue of security human security has been separated from for example the series of UN conferences taking place in the 1980s and the 1990s on the number of... to the extent we have something like global governance in place the issue of security human security has been separated from for example the series of UN conferences taking place in the 1980s and the 1990s on the number of global issues you probably remember we had Rio de Janeiro on sustainable development we had Vienna on human rights and we had Copenhagen on social development all opportunities for civil society organizations active in those fields to meet and to gel so to say so the collaboration between civil society organizations in those fields is older it led to the formulation of the multilateral development goals the MDGs they were mentioned earlier today and as I'm sure you will know a goal on security on human security is conspicuously absent in the MDGs so that is something that we may consider repairing a bit in September there will be the 10 year review conference in New York but I think if we want to progress global governance on these issues we may want to revisit the MDGs another point that I'm not sure many of you have ever thought about is civil society organizations in this field are relatively small the largest single organization that has a designated mandate to focus on peace building is international alert based in London it has about 100 staff and that's all that is very small compared to oxham international care catholic relief services world vision you name them the large players so we're talking about qualitatively civil society organizations Kofi Annan in his report on the prevention of armed violence in 2002 basically asked civil society to get its act together on the field of conflict prevention and so a series of regional conferences took place 2002-2003-2004 leading to a global meeting in the UN headquarters now almost exactly 5 years ago as we speak and I think it's fair to say that in that conference the global partnership GPEC was launched what have we been doing in those 5 years apart from being active in a number of cases for I just don't have the time to go into the details right now I think it's again fair to say we have been mainly building the network because that is work and that relates to issues referred to in various interventions earlier today complexity is the problem of our time it's written all over the discussions today and so what we are learning in our network is to act simultaneously and to act multi-dimensionally from local to national to regional to international level that is very difficult it needs to be learned and that's what we are learning in GPEC so I'm happy to report that to you it's what we are learning right now in Kyrgyzstan just last Thursday I was involved in a phone conference where we had some of you may know our chair is Imal Wenbombande from Boaneb he was on the phone 45 minutes with our regional initiator in Kyrgyzstan who is up clearly in a difficult situation which I could play the tape of the conversation for you here in this room because in such conversations you can listen to what the added value of a global network is Emmanuel bringing his experience his thinking to Raya Kaderova helping her in that situation to think through strategic questions, question of how to deal with the media, how to move forward how to respond to statements of at luck and so on so that's I guess the good news what are the challenges and what is the bad news? well, political space is the problem the political space for civil society organizations to make this potential contribution to articulate their voice the political space is limited in many contexts and in some cases it is closing down we operate in fragile states we operate under repressive regimes that do not want to hear any critical voice that do not want to listen to information that they don't like the deny freedom of expression freedom of association that may put people into jail and in a worse case may even kill them this is a serious problem and this is where the European Union, the US government can and must play a role I think to help protecting the space for civil society organizations it's really important to do that the problem is not limited to fragile or repressive states the problem also plays out in northern countries and in that regard I have to return to a question asked this morning about a recent ruling of the US Supreme Court which in effect makes contact with listed terrorist organizations a criminal offence this my dear friends is a bad ruling of the US Supreme Court it creates an untenable position in the field it is not possible if you work in Gaza not to relate to Hamas it's just not possible um so with all respect for the efforts to curb terrorism which I don't think is something anybody reasonable will disagree with but this is not the way to go we have to talk to the bad guys sometimes and this ruling needs to be reversed or the interpretation rather of what is a terrorist organization probably can be repaired by the US Congress because I'm afraid that it will really hurt the US image abroad finally what are the main challenges and where are opportunities that we are working on I'm happy to echo a number of the earlier speakers who have referred to the importance of the role of regional organizations we very much believe in the role of regional organizations and we are very actively working on promoting the relationships between civil society and regional organizations why well I can repeat the number of the arguments already made today regional organizations are closer to potential conflicts they have no exit option if you have a potential conflict in your region you cannot walk away from it like the UN can if it wants to or NATO or my government running out of Afghanistan there is greater legitimacy there is greater effort and I think we are encouraged by hopeful signs that to see organizations like the African Union taking on a more active role and thanks Lawrence for I think an excellent explanation of what a sub-regional organization like ECOWAS can do in setting best practices really interesting and important for all of us to look at so we are looking at that we are working on that and yesterday I was meeting with the Assistant Secretary General of the OS Ambassador Ramdin and I am happy to report to you the GPEC and the Organization of American States will convene a meeting of regional organizations later this year precisely to discuss this issue how can we further improve bolster active interaction between civil society and regional organizations focused on conflict prevention and peace building thank you well thank you to all of the panel members they have given you many paths to wander down the ever present danger of a total flare up between Hindus and Muslims remember that India one country has more people than all the 53 countries of Africa combined remember that Muslims make up 14% of approximately between 150 and 160 million in India when the population was one quarter this size at the time of partition there were between 1 million and 2 million people killed on both sides so potentially this is not a small problem Ashutosh Varshini who was at Michigan at the time he did his study is now at Brown looked at this and he came to two surprising conclusions one that there's approximately 500 to 1,000 districts altogether in India the problem is a serious problem that repeats itself in only 18, 1, 8 of these districts second surprising conclusion in these districts when you control for the different variables the single factor that explains success in dampening and muting Hindu-Muslim tensions as right breaks out and preventing large scale killings the single biggest explanation for success is not government policy but the presence and role of civil society actors if there are pre-existing civil society where they are integrated they run into action immediately and drop that so that's a very important example for the positive impact of civil society compared even to government that's as a comment the question is both to John Herbst you both talked about Kyrgyzstan and the problems which I agree with I'd be very interested in your assessment of the potential impact of the recent referendum as you go forward and as the panelists answer if we can keep in mind the goal of really establishing the initiatives that are going to work in Kyrgyzstan being a difficult one but Ed Locke and then John Herbst thank you I guess Ramesh Ramesh of course is one of the fathers of Responsibly Protect had a very active and important role on the ISIS commission I'm not an expert in Kyrgyzstan I would just say that I wouldn't assume that we've really crossed a threshold here and that all is fine many people were watching Kyrgyzstan very carefully including at the UN including in Francis's office for quite some time I don't think many people expected the kind of violence exactly when it occurred and how it occurred and so yes there was early warning but we still in some ways were caught unprepared and I think that's probably true today as well and so having no expertise on the issue I would just err on the side of caution that things could fall apart referendum did some good things hopefully but it set up a political system which would probably be highly contested and one assumes that the violence was not random it was part of it and there were elements that probably were organized and incited which is why some of us think you know some kind of either national or international inquiry over time might be helpful whether this is the right time for that I don't know it might be too disruptive but I do think that there's a lot of tensions that people have seen there for decades but I don't think I want to refer end I'm in a bit of a difficult position in answering your question because our office is in Kyrgyzstan you might say as a as a asset at the disposal of our ambassador Tatiana Gifelov-Volkov and the person in your question is really more a political one I have some views on that because I spent some time in Central Asia but it's really more appropriately addressed to Bob Blake the assistant secretary for South Central Asian Affairs I can safely say though that the referendum is I think a step forward that it does enhance stability but following up on what Ed said the extent of that is by no means clear the problems which led to the recent violence are by no means resolved and this is an area that needs more attention and will be paying attention Before we go to the next question Ed Luck I just wanted to follow up inquiries Do they have any impact on this prevention arena We have inquiries they often come late, long after and one is forced to wonder what value they do play in prevention Well, it's very hard to know cause and effect on these things but I do think in most of these situations we're taking a long term perspective and obviously an inquiry isn't going to quell immediate tensions and put everything behind one but it does seem to me the narrative, the understanding of one's history, the understanding of what happens and why is very important in the long term and it may lead to reconciliation it may lead to some difficulties for some people but if there are very different views within society about why things happened how they happened who did what to whom I think it just makes it easier to point the fingers in these kinds of situations it's so often that historical incidents, imagined or real are cited and one few very often is that we're being persecuted by others in our society, one group by another and based often on myth and things that are passed down without any careful inquiry so I think in the long term this sort of thing can be helpful in a society and should be encouraged at the very least for those of us in the international community we need to have a better understanding of what happened and why where we did well, where we did not do well where we might have done better because it does seem to me we need to have a lot of accumulative lessons to be learned and so this can be a piece of that puzzle and it could be one never knows but it could be that kind of an international presence that kind of a discourse internally encouraged by international actors who are seen as impartial could be helpful in bringing some things to the surface and maybe disputing some of the rumors and some of the other things that tend to go around in these kinds of situations over here, then here and if a few of you would like to come around we can go side by side Thank you My name is Eli McCarthy I'm a professor at Georgetown University John, I have a question for you I'm really intrigued by the Civilian Response Corps I think it's a pretty good idea and I was looking at some of the experts that are listed as a part of it and I was wondering if you think it's wise and if you'd be willing to commit to two new types of experts the first type would be something called nonviolent conflict intervention or nonviolent struggle examples would be like Jean Sharp or Michael Nagler in academia some of the key practices would be like non-cooperation or unarmed peacekeeping such as the nonviolent peace force is a good example of an organization doing that right now so that would be the first type and then the second type would be non-cooperation and religious affairs Okay One, we are regularly reviewing the skills that we need and in fact that we did a review about a year and a half ago there will be another review at the end of this year I can't say we had considered these before I can't say we've been thinking beyond the technical skills we originally recruited for I mean the original concept was to bring in experts in various functional areas to help governments develop capacity in those areas but the idea was always to match those skills with area expertise so something that I've been telling my folks to look at is let's bring in a professional anthropologist to that level of analysis and also to help us reach out to the community of anthropologists so that we can have access to deep area experts people who know certain tribes and certain countries and so on Your two suggestions make sense and we'll take a look at it and what we will certainly do over time is have outreach to many of the various communities including these so we can pull in precisely the right person for all the conflict questions Thank you One thing to add on the religion the institute has been training been working with state and other organizations to bring the religion and peace building dimensions into the overall toolkit if you will for foreign service officers. Peter do any of these groups either non-violence or religion based fit in this community or network that you were talking about? Definitely yeah and thanks for the command Ramesh I appreciate it a lot of course and yes what can I say I mean as we speak the discussion is how to reconcile ethnic and religious issues and that's what we're working on so yes Coming over here Thanks so much for your time. Brian Sal with USA the Africa Bureau working on Somalia though my question is I was a little surprised in the discussion of conflict prevention not to hear more about transitional justice in particular about legal international mechanisms for combating community and my mind at this point is going specifically with the Kenyan context to what extent do you feel there is a role for the ICC, the ICTY, the ICTR and those types of mechanisms as an essential component of in my mind with conflict prevention looking forward and trying to address some of the current concerns I'm going to go to Lawrence because we wrestled with many of these issues in the genocide prevention task force and so I will give you the hot potato Sure, thanks I think it's a good question I would say transitional justice broadly conceived is an important conflict prevention tool I have a fair bit of skepticism about the prevention potential of judicial mechanisms like the ICC or the ICTY which by design are targeting a small set of leaders or orchestrators of broader kinds of violence I think the literature on deterrence on systemic deterrence based on justice mechanisms suggest that you need to have an expectation among potential perpetrators that they will be held accountable and I don't think there's any kind of reasonable expectation that you could think a potential perpetrator in Kenya or anywhere else would have that they will be held accountable by the ICC just given the number of people who are being tried so I think but broader the question of transitional justice to try and promote the reconciliation and move through grappling with past injustices and extreme violence I think is very important Heather I just want to since you deal with the political will issue of many European countries whether where are we on a consensus view of transitional justice and its role in prevention well actually I just came back yesterday I was in Belfast for several days at the Transitional Justice Institute looking at Northern Ireland and your question to her on the inquiry you know with the release of the Saville report and the role that transitional justice has played in Northern Ireland actually a fascinating example of in that particular inquiry which was 12 years I cannot I can't recall the exact figure but it was an extraordinary amount of money to do that but it had an enormous impact on both sides of the issue as many of my colleagues said there is no one truth to be found in an inquiry but there can be many truths that can be discovered and the fact that this report was really accepted by both sides as being an accepted truth there was a huge role that that actually played now the 12 year time horizon and the fact that it was part of the Good Friday peace agreement it was a broader effort but I've seen where inquiries do play a critical role transitional justice I think again is something that the EU has been focusing on again it's been the challenge of implementation and I see it infused and embedded across the board in their rule of law process and the capacity building to deal with it but that is a very long term effort and I think sometimes it gets just overwhelmed by the press of other issues and the implementation of other programs Ed did you want to comment on this? If I could just comment on Lawrence's comment and I try to make the practice of never disagreeing with Lawrence but on the question of deterrence I know the literature and I know that's what people tend to conclude but one has to recognize one that yes it may be a rather few number of leaders who might be affected by this but those are very often the people inciting the violence and helping to organize the violence and so I think that's not insignificant second of all you know you have to think about what tools do international diplomats and others have to play with in these kinds of situations it's not a huge list and so we hate to throw out you know one saying they're not very effective because you probably don't have really effective ones to call on so you're choosing against among a series of rather ineffective choices and it does seem that in Kenya I mean both Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon Secretary General and he was there they both use the ICC the question of impunity isn't what it used to be themes and it seemed to have some effect on both sides you know you need not only national leaders but there are opposition groups as well so it's very anecdotal but it does seem to me that it's suggestive that it may not be a bad thing because you can't promise that the Security Council is going to do anything you can't promise more forceful measures you may or may not be able to say something about sanctions in case of Kenya I think they were real EU and the US put real economic pressure on but on top of all that you are dealing with individuals and to bring it home to them they can you know get around sanctions they can do other things but they personally could be held accountable I think can weigh on people's minds and it's certainly not something to throw away just because it's not super effective because they have to see the choices there aren't super effective choices so you choose among the lesser lot Now quickly stay here and then come to these two questions and then we will come back over here Yeah, David Grant from Nonviolent Peace Force and I have a question about the Israeli and Palestine since that was highlighted this morning I've spoken with the Arab partnership with prevention of armed conflict which is a member of G-PAC one of your regional organizations as well as of course several organizations inside Israel and as a nonpartisan organization we just can't find a way to deal with that and I wonder in the network have you struggled with that to get an opening there I should say also that in Mindanao in the Philippines we have now a formal official role as part of the international monitoring team between the Moral Islamic Liberation Fund and the government of the Philippines and I wonder if you see this as a wave of potentially where civil society can play a role that the UN for instance cannot especially in Israel and Palestine Peter That's a good question and we are dealing with it as we speak because we plan to come to an international steering group meeting to Beirut later this year it is difficult to deal with amongst others because civil society organizations in a number of Arab countries are under law in Lebanon for example that if they are seen to be active in any form or shape or in a formal sense with Israeli NGOs they are liable so that is a problem that I'm not able to resolve out of the hake unfortunately so what we do is we arrange opportunities to meet for civil society representatives from the different sides in other settings in an informal way and that is happening frequently and we are benefiting from some participants we have a few organizations that historically were able to register as an Israeli organization and as a Palestinian organization including I'm sure some of the people that you know and work with so they also help to build those bridges so we are able to maintain a thin line of communication between the different groups on the different sides of defense and to keep communications going Over here Thank you very much Dennis Sandoli from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University I was wondering how each of you in your respective domain sees reconciliation being fostered between the warring factions Reconciliation like transitional justice seems to be an endangered species Thank you very much Which one of you would like to make the case for against more activity on the reconciliation front I'll make just a quick comment I think we've talked throughout the day about the often cyclical nature of conflict and so in light of that I think reconciliation efforts are critically important and if we take the long view as I think Ed was suggesting reconciliation among communities has got to be an important piece of a broader set of tools for conflict prevention and when we think of conflict prevention we should remind ourselves we're not talking about necessarily preventing disputes but preventing disputes from escalating into violence and so there are lots going to be intergroup disputes in every society and that's often quite healthy what we need to do is try to help and facilitate reconciling to past injustices or violence so that current disputes and differences can be managed peacefully Yes, follow on Thanks Bridget Moyks with the Friends Committee on National Legislation Thank you all very much for the work that you're doing and for sharing it with us I want to return to one of the themes that Ambassador Yates started with which is the balance because this seems like a particularly important panel to address this question and I'm partly one of the values of prevention is that it should be much less expensive require fewer people so you don't have to invest huge amounts in it but the gap still between the massive amounts of funding that goes to reacting afterwards through military intervention or what not compared to civilian capacities I don't want to ask what all your budgets are that you're working with but I know they're very minimal and for instance in the U.S. we have a great opportunity in the sense that you have people like Secretary of Defense Gates making the case for civilian capacities to help prevent and mitigate but we still have a congress that keeps underfunding these programs so just last night the House Appropriations Subcommittee cut funding for things like the Civilian Response Corps and the Complex Crisis Fund and there will be more spending passed tonight so I'm just trying to figure out how do we grapple with this problem that we still seem to have won an argument that people recognize the importance of these tools but we haven't won the budget yet and how do we get the honor? I don't know why but I feel drawn to go to Ambassador Herp's first to this question I agree with you Bridget that we've kind of won the argument to the extent that people have paid attention we've won the argument but we haven't truly won it or you might say the victory of the logic has not been institutionalized and I think the only way to actually do that may be a bridge too far that is to establish a national security budget which includes the State Department, includes USAID and includes parts of other budgets which have a national security impact this may be purely a matter of packaging because national security gets an immediate I.I. in ways that other parts of the budget do not but it has the virtue of making sense there's no doubt that as a result of smart prevention programs by the State Department and or USAID we prevent a situation in the country where we have real interest at stake from spiraling out of patrol A. we protect our security and B. we do it on the cheap but our culture has come to accept the notion that guys in uniforms are doing national security and whereas others even if they are in fact doing national security are not necessarily doing that on the UN front how do you handle this balancing you have obviously people in uniform and not and so your balance of the pie for prevention yeah I'm probably the wrong person to ask about resources because in responsibility protect we have not period we don't have a penny that's been given so far in this area which may be why we're doing fairly well at least in the theory part of it practice might be a little more expensive but I think that would change now we're up to this point we didn't want to take any voluntary contributions from countries because it would be from the north and we didn't want to feed into this idea that this is a northern idea and make the north south peace any worse so literally we haven't had a penny because the assembly has yet to vote any money in this area even my travel has to be covered by hosts or by others or foundations or whatever or by international peace institute and have no staff no staff on R2P at this point and full time job in the outside so it makes life a little bit complicated but in Francis Sting's side which is more established it's still pretty modest he has I think five people on regular budget and four extra budgetary very short term we're now trying to convert the extra budgetary posts into budgetary and add all of two people on R2P but we're trying to create in one office everyone works on everything but for the early warning for the assessment for the advocacy for the political work you don't need a lot of people and you don't need a lot of money and I think sometimes this is probably heretical to say here sometimes I think a lot of people a lot of money is in the way because you focus too much on the bureaucratic issues and the other things and the message gets a little confused and so much conversation so much coordination this that and the other thing now obviously most people at the UN would not agree with that they look at the same thing and they say peacekeeping it's now getting to $8 billion a year and if you look at the Department of Political Affairs or peace building or genocide prevention I don't think that's really important it's not the question of how much money is spent on the other things the question is whether you have enough resources in your area to do what needs to be done and I think for the UN which never has much money other than in peacekeeping due to much of anything and that of course is very small compared to what governments spend UN peacekeeping is much cheaper than when certain governments I won't mention them do the same things they're much more expensive than when the UN does it but I don't think trying to do everything in the cheap is necessarily the way to go but there is a multiplier effect and I think the question of the values the politics, the standards really in the end are very important and you can throw lots and lots of money in people with a bad policy and you still have a bad policy at the end of the day so I guess at the UN you sort of get used to thinking about why doing things on the cheap is not always such a terrible thing but you have to have a certain minimum to get by but UN standards are nothing compared to governments or the EU or whatever the UN is very very thin it's very very broad very very ambitious but in any particular area it tends to be rather thin and now in the field I mean vacancies rates of 40, 50, 60, 70% are not unusual in the personnel system and the human resources system I see Abby has some familiarity with that you know this is very hard to bring people in and very hard to move people around very hard to replace people aren't doing a good job so that makes it a bit worse but I think for the UN it's what it is and that's what matters most and if that's helpful to have that kind of a presence that kind of universality of operation it's not first and foremost how many people you have there but I think obviously for organizations that are more heavily operational because I think a lot of what the UN does is political and symbolic it obviously matters a good deal more Peter and then we'll take two questions in a row and have everybody answer them so that we we don't lose the opportunity Peter I'd just like to comment on Brigitte's question one conflict prevention has always been a story hard to sell to donors right? how do you prove that something didn't happen that's the classic question so I think it's important that we continue to bring out the stories of success like the Kenya, the Guinea or you know Ramesh example just now I think we have to continue to do that a second observation is that we live in a time where practically every government has to cut drastically in budgets in my observation in any case in Europe the extent to which this field survives is not bad I mean if you look at the recent cuts in the UK for example if it survives and you know it's revising a conflict prevention program and there will still be funds which is you know so it's a relative thing but so in a regressing market we're holding out not so bad so that's put that some like 30s I think we do have a job to do in educating let's say the new philanthropy the people who start to build foundations who made their money in IT or whatever and who started with more charitable sort of objectives and where we have to start educating them on this more complex story because I think it's important for us in the long term to reach out to them the European parliaments if we sat in and listened to their debates is would we discern a chord similar to what we would find in our congressional debates with these national security issues or is there a different spin on it well it's funny because Europe is being very public about its austerity we're doing it Congress is doing it quietly long term unemployment benefits and maintaining this on a continuing resolution it's doing it by other means because debt reduction is becoming a political imperative whether as in Greece that you have no option but to do it and in Germany you're sort of doing it preemptively to show leadership to other European countries that may not be showing this leadership but it's also sticking specifically to Germany I believe it's a frame of reference of how Germany would like to see EU evolve economically over time but I think in picking up on Peter's comment I agree with you the austerity measures thus far as we understand them and I think this is going to be a continuing story has protected in the UK's perspective ODA and defense spending but I think what this gets to and it links to what Ambassador Herbst was saying it's the political thing chiseled away at here we're seeing particularly European leaders that are being led very much by public opinion the leaders aren't leading public opinion they are growing less adventuresome they are focusing on the domestic policies and this is eroding political will we have the information we know when the crisis emerges but so often the political will is lacking and that's what I think this economic crisis long term may weaken political resolve to tackle conflicts and I think again Afghanistan for the European perspective again where public opinion comes in has a tremendous impact on future types of activities again it will be interesting picking up on the national security budget perspective if we start thinking of these not in silos but as a continuum where constantly diplomacy and development is continually working together and evolving and you know when failure happens then you go into the security realm if we start thinking like that we might be able to see where this holistic approach really has an impact but until we get out of the silos Europe is a great experiment I think in trying to break down those silos it will be years until we see it has any impact maybe that's how you get out of the cycle a little bit let's take two on this side and answers and then two more and some closing thoughts this is ancient history by now you've taken quite a while to get over to this side I agree with Lawrence Woucher in taking an agnostic position Juan Mendes who headed the International Center for Transitional Justice coined that phrase for me agnostic with respect to the preventive functions now whether the ICC and similar courts are justified is no question in my mind I fought alongside Michael Posner and many others in this country President Carter to try to get us to support the ICC there are very good reasons for doing that but if you ask does it serve a preventive function I think it's extremely difficult to know but there is a piece of empirical data that's quite interesting Priscilla Hayner who was one of the founders of the International Center for Transitional Justice unfortunately has just left it a good book covering about all the transitional courts that then existed I think this is 31 and it's a new addition coming out and she finds that if the trials or whatever you call them are on radio and television it has a very powerful effect huge audience it's far beyond what anybody expected and her inclination is that if you want to have a preventive function or hope to that that is the best possible way now we don't really know at least she doesn't want the reactions were exactly but the level of interest suggests that people may come away with something important about injustice I also would like to express to you that ICTJ is not dead not dead at all just hired a new president for ICTJ person lots of new money for it despite the recession the International Center for Transitional Justice is still alive that's only one part of the field of course but let's not give up on it I think that there's plenty of room for growth in that field yet and a great need for it thank you staying right on this site Hi I'm Kathy Gopel with National Defense University of course I would be the one that would bring up the role of security in prevention and particularly as we look at things moving to more of a regional focus the capabilities don't really appear to be there and also the U.S. is very involved in all of the regional I'd say security issues usually around the world so where do you see that going and where do you see that needing to go and as an American taxpayer I'd really like to know because everybody else is cutting their budget so I'd like to cut ours as well there's something we're talking about a lot in the exercises where you run at NDU which is we are going to have budget cuts somewhere so how will the regional organizations pick up that slack so let's take security Melanie if you can add one and we'll even go over here and we'll try to put the three to the panel well thank you Tara for organizing this panel thank all of you for your views it's really a fascinating way to end the day and the course of the day is how much we've learned since David Hammer's Carnegie commission on preventing deadly conflict about the drivers of conflict the political and security mechanisms needed to prevent conflict one thing I'd like to ask you at the end of the day today is what don't we know that as U.S. implementers could wave your magic wand and come up with a new program for Abbey or for USIP or for the government or for universities what don't we know Yes, hi, Mindy Reiser Global Peace Services USA somebody once said let a thousand flowers bloom in many ways of thought content we have a number of organizations working in prevention, international international crisis group in some ways GPEC and I'm wondering how all of this can be mobilized and should it be coordinated we have resource constraints are people really complementing each other in what they do do we want this wonderful proliferation to continue or are we sometimes tripping over each other and in a resource constrained environment how can we maximize the impact of these important initiatives what I'm going to suggest we do is firstly to take these in reverse order and go down the line Michael Lund the great conflict prevention expert argues that there's too much political will and that there's a dispersion that it's spread too thin and that it's really more an organizational challenge than a traditional political will so I want to go down the line on political will feel free to wrap into it where we go on security and of course on the question of what we don't know is going to be your final closing remarks from each of you which will lead us to Abby's conclusion so political will too much too many organizations add luck too many players in a crowded stage well anyone from the UN should know about incoherence and lack of coordination it's a perennial in the organization although I think it's actually getting better it's a little shocking but it is I think a little bit better from what we see institutionally the big question is do global regional and very importantly sub regional groups interact particularly on mediation conflict prevention peace building this sort of thing mediation per se and I think a lot more thought needs to be be given to that there is more relationship now for example between the UN and the AU not only the peace and security commission council and the security council meeting annually but also desk to desk cooperation and same with some of the Latin American institutions and certainly with the European ones so some efforts are being made but I think a lot more needs to be done in that area I think the thousand flowers or hundred flowers blooming is really I think much more referring to the civil society efforts and my impression would be that although I'm saying this from some distance is it maybe the more the indigenous very local groups or maybe not included as much as they might be and those connections aren't as good as they might be I'm not too worried about 100 global organizations all want to do something and humanitarian affairs relief it's a bit of a mess but I'm not sure in this area it is as critical but I do wonder whether the local forces are being squeezed out a little bit the question about what we don't know I think it's terrific I'm so impressed by what we don't know I mean it's so vast I see all this research, I see all the studies and then you come to an individual situation and say wow we don't have the fairness in terms of what to do about it and we see something that works one place doesn't work in the next I think comparative lessons cross-sectoral trans-regional kinds of things lessons learned are very very important and encouraging dialogue among these groups but I think we've reached the tip of the iceberg on these things and I think we'll continue to do that I think it's the nature of the problem and never quite be solved I'm not sure which kind of security you're thinking of Kathy but when you were talking about it I was thinking about security of personnel which is not unimportant and the UN finds now that there are people it's a premium and going after UN people just as there had been with humanitarians and others it's a very different thing than it had been let's say 20 years ago and that inhibits a lot of missions it inhibits the mobility of people getting out and reaching out where they should be reaching out I think it creates problems for costs just the cost of the security to begin with but then you're getting much less utility out of the people that you have and it's not only your international staff but very importantly your national staff working with these kinds of missions are in a lot of trouble I mean when you sit down with all the SRSGs all the special representatives you know one of the prime topics of conversation now is yes we want to go out and protect people and yes we have protection mandates etc but we're having a really hard time protecting our own people and that leads to some very very unattractive tradeoffs so in that sense the pervasive insecurity is really very striking because in many ways it's a nation state system which is being attacked by others who simply reject it from A to Z in many cases and you know the kidnappings the assassinations, the bombings the intimidation I mean that is deterrence and it's a very sad kind of deterrence and it's very purposeful and very targeted and it's very sad to think that's sort of what we're getting to in some ways at this point in time in many places but that to me is very very worrisome Ambassador Herp's closing thoughts Regarding political will there are by no means too many actors official actors in this field the problem of global instability is so large the more countries and organizations to get involved the better off we are that's the more partners to address the problem but on the you might say the unofficial side the think tank side I don't think there's any doubt that this area conflict prevention peace building stability operations has been the fastest strongest growth field in political science over the past 20 years and there's certainly some crowding in the field institutes that have come in late want to get involved and you find the same themes coming up so that's just something to keep in mind there's certainly not too many NGOs in the field but they're the same categories of governmental actors the more hands we have the better off we are Regarding the role of security since the question came from NGU the thing that struck me was once you talk about soldiers you failed conflict prevention conflict prevention has a very important security element but again if you're talking about conflict prevention that security element would be in the form of trainers or advisors so the locals can maintain a certain level of stability once you have such instability that police cannot do it then you're into a wholly different circumstance I agree with Ed regarding the question of security of actors in this field of the people we put into the field we've been doing a lot of work on that in SCRS frankly the restrictions on state department if that matter USAID operations is way too restrictive we're going to have to move beyond those heavy restrictions we have to allow a certain amount of risk to put our people into the places where civilian action must be done having said that managed risk is not the same as full hardiness and you know I was in Sudan last week one of the big stories there was the fact how a couple of folks were pulled I guess they were NGO were pulled out of a fortified compound in Darfur in the middle of the night that shows you how some of the bad guys are looking at targeting whether it's NGOs or UN workers or traditional diplomats have always been more of a target than the UN and the NGOs let me just ask you I want to make sure that I was listening carefully are you suggesting that then prevention if you work in the Pentagon is not should not really be in your doctrine or thinking or planning because if they get to you if you get to a uniformed person it's too late should we therefore say prevention is not part of that plate our military needs to have prevention in its doctrine in fact it does we've seen all sorts of developments over the past several years however I was making the definitional point that once disorder is such that you need troops in to restore it you're no longer in a prevention situation but prevention should be part of the doctrine because the military has all these resources which can be used for preventive purposes last item what we don't know again this field has gotten so much attention that doesn't mean it can't be more this is just my personal view nothing more and that is that what's most useful are careful case studies of what's happening and then building on that maybe sort of comparative analysis that that is always going to be useful this is not a science it will never be a science it's an art of the most difficult kind and the more information you have regarding how people have worked on it whether for success or for failure would help improve that touch that the guy who's doing the stuff needs to have in order to have a chance of success Heather on the political will sort of coordination issue again I just I have the Kosovo example in my mind because of our discussion with the head of the EU rule of law mission and he anecdotally said listen we are tripping over each other all day long in Kosovo we have not only EU US engagement we have individual EU member states that are in there and that's just in the rule of law for that technical advisory it's always a challenge I think you ask any serving ambassador who's had to coordinate coordinate coordinate it's you know so if that's an example of political will saying I want to be a part of that and I want to send my program there I would argue there's a lack of political leadership and that when it comes to and I take a look at transatlantic issues where is the US EU strategy about taking Kosovo after the ICJ ruling where is the long term vision this is going to be a 20-30 year process of integrating the western Balkans that's going to require vision and leadership and that's what I think is missing right now understandably the press of domestic issues and other pressing issues so I think we have too little of political leadership to drive some longer term vision what we don't know oh dear that's a for me that's too long of a list but the one thing that I've been struck with and I've taken a recently of course with the recent G8 G20 meetings I've really taken a look at how the G8 is starting to integrate towards the G20 and I look at that in part under the development assistance rubric here you have like minded countries spending a great deal of money now some have pledged and not fulfilled read Italy others have done much better read the UK but as these issues move in a broader category to emerging economies are they going to show the same leadership and dedication challenges of which conflict prevention I agree to Peter about the MDG how we insert that are they going to show leadership as well as perhaps the G8 countries reduce their engagement and the G20 come into it that's a trend I think we just have to watch we're in this transitional phase quite frankly and we're sort of making it up as we go which is okay but we'll have to understand what that means so that's what I don't know and I'm watching and finally one area that I think on the on the role of security and I at the U.S. is working on this the EU is coming to it is security sector reform this means working with the security actors again encased in a rule of law setting that helps to work through some of these issues it can enhance capabilities but it enhances how we you enshrine policing you know even military in in these rules so when an emergency happens they have the tools to address it that may be one area that we want to explore Lawrence as we come around full circle to this morning when Mary Yates was here she talked about the small victory of getting a position at the NSC that I think David Pressman holds for genocide prevention one of the recommendations that had emerged from the Albright Cohen effort and so it raises the question is one answer to put the right people in the right positions of leadership on prevention related issues would that change or would it potentially improve the attention and the operational end of it I don't think we should imagine that there is a an institutional or a personnel solution to this massive challenge at the same time I would say that institutions and matter and personnel and the way you structure them do matter and make a difference and can make the problem easier or harder the more you can incorporate regular processes to raise the not yet crisis situations on people's radars as Ambassador Herbst was discussing earlier and try to prompt decision making at earlier stages in the process the more likely we are to succeed if I can turn to some of the other questions quickly I've been really impressed how much interest there's been from uniform military and defense department officials in conflict prevention now they largely think about conflict prevention in preventing conflicts where US troops might be deployed but nevertheless they're trying to wrap their arms around what this concept is and how they can contribute and what does it mean beyond their mil-to-mil relationships and training and so forth the related point is I think civilian capacity to go to Bridget's earlier question doesn't equal preventive capacity you can think of lots of civilian capacity we have which actually doesn't help us do prevention and some military capacity may actually help us in the preventive roles to the political will question I think it's important we recognize that conflict prevention is a political process we shouldn't imagine again that it's a technical process that we've just had enough scientific studies about what works that we'll be able to then do it which leads me to the what we don't know I think as we look at the changing power distribution around the world it would be very interesting to me to have a panel like this with Brazil, India, China Nigeria, Indonesia South Africa what are their conflict prevention ideas initiatives how do they think about these issues and I think finally on the what we don't know even if we don't imagine it's a technical or scientific process we have to try and move beyond the toolbox metaphor I think and try and strive for strategy development if we think about foreign policy strategy and other domains whether it's the cold war deterrent strategy or others it wasn't just a matter of what we have a set of tools and then we'll offer them to the policy makers in any particular situation but there was really hard thinking about what is the influence we have using this tool on this particular context what's the likely counter reaction of the other actors who have influence and how do we then kind of put this together anticipating reactions and counter reactions into something that looks like a coherent strategy not a rigid one but one that can be adapted and refined over time I'm going to give Peter the last word I think you said you have a thousand members in your network I hope you don't consider them flowers just blooming but where do we go from here looking from the Netherlands where the flowers are blooming on the issue of political will and players I don't think that that's the main problem in this field and certainly not from a civil society perspective if you look again at the issues of social economic development health education I think there's a lot more overlap there than in this field I think we pretty much have worked together in terms of coordination can we do better yes but should that be our main focus I don't think so security I think there's a lot of work still to be done on civil military dialogue there's more happening and it's not exactly a love affair but I think there's really the people need to understand that establishing human security is a joint responsibility and coming that sort of leads to the question of what do we don't know the Carnegie report establishes already conflict prevention is too difficult too complicated to do it alone and if there's anything we have learned since the release of the report is how true that is so the answer to the question what do we don't know is that we have to take it as a point of departure that you cannot know everything all information all actors well enough if you engage the complexity of conflict prevention and it leads to the conclusion that what we need is teamwork which for me is a better word than multi-stakeholder dialogue I always get lost if I use that you know I mean for me it's what I try to establish in my own office and in our relationships and the teamwork the purpose of the teamwork is to establish a capacity that is hybrid a capacity that is able to move from local to national to international level and a capacity that is able to move horizontally and that has to do with you know at an individual level with language capacities for example in my office I have conversations in six languages going on and you know that's important you have to live that reality you have to live that variety of understanding and realizing if you have a debate on a certain issue that there is always this other truth always this other point of view because that is the point of departure of understanding differences and of reconciling conflicts so that's you know I think for me that's the answer to the question what we don't know well I want to thank this very strong panel for all the insights speaking of teamwork today's full day was really a team effort but teams also take leaders and we've had this day under the wonderful leadership of Abby Williams who runs our conflict analysis and prevention program and has served in the UN so has been through lots of team building exercises there and he has the task of stitching together into a tapestry in a very short amount of time all the lessons learned from today so that we can move to the tribute and reception I want to thank you for your contributions it is no mere formality when I say that we've had a really stimulating and productive conference and I think the high level of interest in the conference we had to stop the responses at 200 because we haven't moved into a new building yet has been matched by the quality of the discussions we wanted the central focus of the conference to be on the unique challenges and opportunities associated with preventing the initial onset of full blown conflict what is sometimes called primary prevention because while all conflict management and peace building efforts have a preventive dimension the importance of primary prevention cannot be overemphasized and I was pleased that we kept this focus throughout the conference we began the conference with a strong message from Ambassador Yates about the Obama administration's commitment to conflict prevention as expressed in the new national security strategy and also I was pleased that she emphasized the need to recalibrate the balance of policy attention and resources giving to conflict prevention, peacemaking and post-conflict peace building Tara, our executive vice president has left I was going to say that I am sure she will take that in mind in allocating resources in the centres here at USIP but let me highlight some key points I think emerging from our discussions the panel on regional challenges this morning highlighted areas that are at risk of breaking out into large scale violence including North Korea, Iran Yemen, Lebanon Pakistan and the Caucasus and I was struck that there is quite a close symmetry between those areas which were highlighted and the priorities which we have established through our own process for the centre for conflict analysis and prevention I was also pleased that the panel mentioned the importance of paying attention to transnational threats such as the water issue in the Middle East and refugees in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula so not just focusing on conflict and country areas but transnational issues as well I think it was noted that their ongoing challenges involved in the advancement of conflict prevention and effective conflict prevention strategies a number of these were mentioned the unwillingness of governments to acknowledge that their countries are at risk and that they need help the interest of certain governments to exploit ethnic social features for political gain and to retain power the fact that many countries do not have stable mechanisms for political transitions as in Eurasia that countries sometimes have outside powers which meddle in their countries and the tension between national security threats and prevention of mass atrocities but I was pleased that at least today there is a clear recognition that progress has been made in the field of conflict prevention both at the normative level as Lawrence mentioned where the echo was framework with R2P within the UN context with the AU and the principle of non indifference but it was also good that we had examples of cases where prevention was tried, worked and different we have the example of Guinea and Kenya even though Kenya of course is still at risk for the next election but Guinea and Kenya were mentioned as places where broad based international effort and organized domestic support contributed to success at difficult times and those efforts of course were Africa led and during this panel we also have examples of the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo the border assistance mission in Moldova and Ukraine and the EU force in Chad so we had specific cases of where it has actually worked I think we got insights into how conflict prevention strategies could attend to cross cotton challenges specifically with regard to governance of the challenges the five gaps that Ramesh mentioned the knowledge gap, the normative gap policy gaps institutional gaps and compliance gaps which are critical in dealing with that particular cross cotton challenge a theme that ran through the panels was of course predictably the role of the United States and the US role necessarily will depend on the challenges of each region and the nature of cross cotton challenges and but the roles of the US would include assessing the extent to which governments are themselves the sources of conflict and a concomitant willingness to confront those governments working with other governments to forge a consistent approach to countries at risk difficult but necessary and of course in the case of Eurasia upholding the Helsinki principle that borders must not be changed by violence but perhaps having an openness to revising Stalinist border settlements through negotiation and supporting a greater cooperation between groups like the Shanghai Grouping and NATO on the cross cotton challenge certainly in the case of non-proliferation the US role could entail continued support of the NPT and making its application more relevant to the problems of today taking more practical measures to strengthen the IAEA and to invest financially to secure all the nuclear sites this would be a relatively low cost investment which would will yield high dividends and of course on the panel today Ambassador Herbs has mentioned that the US has developed some tools to improve its capacity to prevent conflict for the early warning lists and of course perhaps the potential of a civilian response score to play a constructive role in conflict prevention on the final point about USIP one of the overall goals of the conference was to identify priority areas for USIP's future work on conflict prevention looking back and reflecting on our discussions it seems that we have been able to meet that goal I think we've got some very good and promising ideas in terms of our future work it was suggested that it would be helpful to develop certain areas first to focus on issues of perhaps crime and violence which played countries in Latin America and perhaps in some countries in Africa as well, Guinea-Bissau was an example second perhaps to find a systematic way of capturing lessons of what has worked in conflict prevention in places like Macedonia and the other less known examples which I have mentioned and capturing those lessons and practitioners involved in those activities third over lunch we had a discussion and the suggestion that perhaps we could look at how world would establish and identify complementarities among institutions and the comparative advantages of relevant institutions in particular situations fourth I certainly gathered at least from the second panel we were reminded that economics is critical but an often forgotten element in conflict prevention strategies the presence of a growing number of young populations in the poorest countries in the world underlines the importance of focusing on economic aspects of conflict prevention strategies so we certainly in the centre would have to think about the need to link economics more closely to the conflict prevention agenda we are and also another suggestion of course from this panel the role of civil society and civil society networks and their contribution to conflict prevention and how can these actors civil society and other actors do a better job in dealing with problems simultaneously and at different levels and then of course finally we had suggestions of perhaps looking at the role of regional and sub-regional organisations as part of the research agenda Lawrence mentioned that perhaps one would have a panel which would bring together representatives from emerging countries Brazil, South Africa and so on to reflect on their views on conflict prevention so he has just given himself a task for the future and I think we are going to consider all of these ideas over the coming weeks and I hope that some of these proposals will be developed at some stage in the future finally let me just make this observation one of the strengths of the US Institute of Pieces are convening power we can bring a diverse group of people together in a non-partisan environment to have an open a frank and an honest dialogue to generate ideas and to come up with practical proposals to address important and challenging issues this is both an important asset and our compass so thank you very much again for your participation