 All right, I think we're going to get started. There are a few seats toward the front. If anybody, I see four right over here. Great seats, going, going, almost gone. Come on, move forward if you can. Good afternoon, and welcome to the US Institute of Peace. My name is Kathleen Kinist, and I am the Senior Gender Advisor of USIP. We are delighted to welcome you all here, both in the audience and in our webcast. And I want to let you know that we well be tweeting this event. It's hashtag women movements, one word, women movements. We want you to tweet. Thank you. Thank you. For those of you who are new to USIP, we are an independent national institute founded by the US Congress 32 years ago, October 19, by the way, and dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, important intersection of our efforts on both non-violence and gender. I'm often asked, what exactly does a senior gender advisor do? And I like to think that every day, I work to help make the invisible visible. And today is no exception. That is to say, gender is not simply about women or men as actors. Gender is about the invisible dynamic web of power in equities and arrangements, operating between and across a society. It is violence that visualizes those dynamics. And so do intentional acts of non-violence. To begin visualizing an invisible force is often not very easy. Silence is often coded into our institutions of learning. And so to begin giving shape and sound to an entire field of activity is auspicious. And I think today we are there. It is about making the invisible visible. And that is our task we're about ready to accomplish. We will begin answering the question of how women of different ages, different ethnicities, and different problems have navigated non-violent actions to create change and to make the invisible visible. It now gives me great, great pleasure to introduce two of my colleagues who have helped at the fundamental level of this event and really have gotten to know them over the year in which we've been planning. First, I'll introduce our moderator for the afternoon, Maria Steffen, who has boldly taken USIP into this important new field of inquiry on non-violent movements. Maria is a senior policy analyst here and after opening brief remarks from our presenter, Maria will introduce all of the panelists here today. And I'm also very pleased to have Marie Principe here. She is program associate at the Global Women Leadership Initiative at the Wilson Center. In addition, she was bold and courageous to take on this effort to bring many of the ideas that we've all been talking about for a very long time, women, but also how they have influenced, made visible, the act of non-violent movements. And so it's great pleasure to ask her to take the podium here and share with us her ideas, which you all have a draft copy. It's not fully baked, but almost baked, right? Sort of getting out of your chairs really examines this intersection of non-violent action and women's leadership. The overarching question is, how have women and women's participation in non-violent movements influence the trajectory of non-violent movements and their outcomes? And so this question is really it's little research. There's not that much quantitatively out there, but there is quite a bit anecdotally. And so this report sort of outlines a lot of these anecdotes. So just to back up a little bit and talk about participation in movements, non-violent movements are absolutely more successful in achieving their objectives than violent movements. And we know that in large part now, because of the book that Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stefan just recently released called Why Civil Resistance Works. And so their research has shown that movements that employ non-violent tactics met their state of objectives 54% of the time compared to 26% for armed movements. And so we know that participation is also critical for non-violent movements, not only for the sake of involving a lot of different people, but involving a lot of people with diverse backgrounds, diverse skill sets, and diverse networks that they can bring. So in this book they also looked at 323 violent and non-violent campaigns from 1900 to 2006. So quite a long time that we're looking at. And within these non-violent campaigns they found that they attract 11 times more participation than armed movements do. So women as 50% of the population, if they're being left out of this, not only should we be including women and acknowledging their unique tasks or unique networks and skills and knowledge that they can bring so that they are strategists, they're organizers, and they can help tactically innovate when it comes to a non-violent movement. So there are a couple examples that I just wanna highlight here that you can read more about. In Egypt in 2011 under the overthrow of Mubarak, Asma Mahfouz is now quite often cited as one of the folks who sparked this movement. And in her YouTube video she deliberately used very gendered language to call people to action. She said, quote, if you think yourself a man, come with me on January 25th. Let him have some honor and manhood. Come and protect me and the other girls in the protest. So she's specifically speaking to these gender dichotomies about women being weak and men being strong. Women need protection and men need to do the protecting to call these men and unify the Egyptian population in these protests. And so this is just a really fascinating example of intertwining these notions, I think, of masculinity, honor. And there's also a great example, again, in Chile, of engaging in acts of defiance under the guise of performing gender normative roles, which we see a lot. And then also examples of women exploiting notions about how society views them. And so this idea of women as victims, which we usually, the way that we discuss women as victims a lot of times in political violence, creates a space to pose a moral dilemma to security forces. When there are women that are gathering in a square, security forces are frequently much less likely to open fire than they are on a bunch of men gathering in a space. You see this in Argentina, which is quite interesting. The mothers that gathered in the plaza in the 1970s, as these women were protesting against the disappearance of their sons and their brothers and their husbands, the security forces knew that if they backlashed, there would be backlash if they reacted violently to these much older women also, who sort of had this matronly look about them. And so it's allowed this space, it continued to put pressure on the government, and ultimately it led to a transition. Now there are still challenges that exist because of these inequalities and these gendered norms, and I certainly don't want to minimize those at all, the risk of physical and sexual violence for women is absolutely still an issue. And we don't want to harp on that too much because we want to be positive and speak positively and I'm sure the panelists will also speak a little bit more about that. And there's also the issue of not getting due credit and the civil rights movement in the US is a really phenomenal example of this. Women were instrumental in organizing the bus boycotts. Before Rosa Parks refused to get off the bus, there were women's groups all over the South in particular that were organizing for three years in advance. And very little do we hear about the role that women have played in the civil rights movement and organizing and leading. So if broad participation is a primary characteristic of a successful movement, and more than half of a population is excluded from the planning and organization of a movement, it begs the question, how can it be successful? And in the 16 years since we've seen the passage of Security Council Resolution 1325, research has shown that women's involvement in peace processes leads to more agreements and to lasting peace. So we're learning a lot about the decisions that women make when they're in positions of leadership really across the board. And it's under research because it's still a relatively new idea. So the questions, there are a ton of questions that remain, it takes up about a half a page or more than half a page in the report I think. So it's really a call to action in a lot of ways. But just a snapshot of this is will involving more women lead to the more likely tactical choice of nonviolent action over violence? And thus, will it be more successful? And how does an organization choose violent tactics or nonviolent tactics? And how does women's participation shape these choices, especially women in leadership positions? So with that, we wanna turn to a more robust conversation outside of what the report is sort of just skimming the surface of to sort of get at that. And this next chapter of exploring women's leadership potential in nonviolent movements I think is, again, as I said, a call to action for all of the policy makers, the practitioners, the students, and the scholars who are here today and are gonna read this. There's a lot more work to be done and I for one, I'm very excited to hear what comes out of it next. Thank you. Thank you. Great, thanks so much, Maria. That was really excellent. And I'm really thrilled and honored to be the moderator of today's panel. This event has been a long time in coming. As many of you know, we've had a number of public events on various aspects of civil resistance and nonviolent movements over the past couple years. And every single time, the top questions during the Q and A part of these events has to do with women and women's involvement in nonviolent movement. So it was just a matter of time before we sucked it up here and commissioned a special report on the topic of women in nonviolent movements. And Marie did a fantastic job in writing this with the great guidance of Kathleen Kienis as well. It's been a terrific partnership. And I would say to Marie as a recent graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, she wrote her master's thesis under the great professor Diane Masarana on the roles played by women in armed insurgencies. So it was perfect to have her come in and do a slight pivot to look at the roles played by women in nonviolent movements and apply some of her perspective skills and knowledge to that pursuit. So I think you all are really going to enjoy reading the special report. And before I start today's conversation, and I'll note that we're going to divide the conversation into two parts. We're gonna start a conversation with Elsa Marie de Silva and Julia Basha. And then we're gonna take some questions from you all at sort of the halfway part of this. And then we're going to hear from the other panelists before we have a second batch of questions so that you're able to participate throughout today's event. But before we get into the conversation, I just wanted to talk a little bit for a couple minutes about some exciting new research that's being done on this topic of women in nonviolent movements, some quantitative research that's being done incidentally by my co-collaborator and co-conspirator, Erica Chenoweth, who's a professor at the Corbell School at the University of Denver. So Erica right now, many of you know Erica Chenoweth, she and I co-wrote the book Why Civil Resistance Works a few years ago. So she is co-leading a project right now to collect and analyze data about how women are involved in a strategic, in strategic levels in armed and unarmed movements. So she's looking at the scope, intensity and effects of women's involvements in over 400 mass movements around the world between 1900 and 2014. And the goal of this project, which I think you'll agree is pretty cool, is to test whether movements that have a high level of participation and voluntary involvement by women are more peaceful and more successful than those that don't. And moreover, the project is trying to evaluate whether women's sustained involvement in movements affects gender equality and inclusion once the conflict is over. So great study that'll be coming out. And her colleague, Marie Berry, who's another professor at the Corbell School, is collecting data on women's tactical involvement in nonviolent campaigns. So she's looking at the micro-dynamics of women's involvement in forms of nonviolent action, using user-generated photos from the Egyptian Revolution, for example, to take a look at, is the positioning of women in demonstrations impacting the level of repression that's used, the trajectories and the outcomes of these campaigns. So two amazing quantitative studies being done, which is a very nice complement to the qualitative work that we've begun to do here at USIP. So now I'm going to start the conversation with this excellent group of panelists. You have their bios in the agenda as you all came in, but what's great about this panel is that it's really bringing together the arts, activism, policy, and scholarship all in one conversation, which always makes for a great event here at USIP. So I am really happy to start the conversation with Elsa Marie De Silva, who is the founder and the managing director of Safe City, which is an online platform and advocacy initiative that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. Elsa Marie is a former aviator, incidentally, and the recipient of many global awards, including being named an Aspen New Voices Fellow and a Vital Voices Lead Fellow, and we actually have some great colleagues from Vital Voices here in the audience today. So Elsa Marie, to start us off, in your previous life, you were an aviator. So how can you share with us the story of how you went from that type of work to launching Safe City, which has brought men and women together to use on and offline mobilization to address gender-based violence? Thank you, Maria. Good afternoon, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be here. So 2012 was a landmark year for me. It was a time when the airline that I was working with was going through a financial downturn and ultimately it shut. But at that point in time, I was already looking at what do I do next. And after having been in corporate for 20 years, I was kind of fed up and I knew I had reached my glass ceiling in aviation in India and I thought that I wanted to do something exciting, something completely different where I would improve the lives of women and children, but I didn't know how or what I wanted to do. And in 2012, I was selected to attend the Swedish Institute Management Program, which was focused on CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability in Business. And that really gave me a wide perspective of what was happening in the world and how people were using, especially technology, to change or address many of the social issues. One of the initiatives that I had heard of was Harassma in Egypt, which was crowdsourcing stories on sexual violence. And at the time, I thought to myself, yes, we need that in India, but it wasn't urgent for me. I was thinking more along the lines of mentoring women to achieve their career potential. However, on returning from this program in Sweden, within 10 days, there was this horrific gang rape in Delhi. I don't know if you've heard of it, but this young woman was traveling back after watching a movie. She and her companion took a bus. And sometime during that bus journey, a group of men gang raped her. They beat her companion and tied him up and they gang raped this woman and then went on to insert metal rods into her body. They pulled out her intestines, threw her out on the street, leaving her to die. She ultimately died of her injuries. And that incident shocked everyone, but it shocked me in a way that I started to question a lot of the issues around me. And I noticed that for the first time in India, we were talking about sexual violence quite openly. And all my friends, including myself, had a story to share, yet until then, none of us had said anything about it, even to our girlfriends. And that got me thinking. So I started to research the issue deeply and I found that sexual violence is actually not just an India problem, it's a global pandemic. And the statistics are frightening. The global average according to UN women is one in three women are likely to face some form of sexual assault at least once in her lifetime. And most of this occurs to girls before they reach the age of 16. And yet, none of us choose to talk about it. Almost 80% of us keep silent, either for fear of bringing shame to ourselves and our families, fear of dealing with the police, fear of the lengthy judicial process for justice. And because it's this underreporting and undercommunication of the issue has led to a situation where the issue has become kind of invisible. The official statistics do not reflect the true nature and size of the problem. And if something is undocumented, in my opinion, it didn't happen. And if it didn't happen, there's really no urgency on the part of the authorities to find solutions. So I said, we have to do something. I have to do something about it. And that's when I said, we need to start this crowd map in India to give women and girls a chance to share their personal experiences of sexual violence in public spaces. And all this information is collected and collated as location-based trends visualized on a map as hotspots. And the aim is to highlight these areas that could be comfort zones of the perpetrators. But what is it that makes these locations comfort zones? And could we do something about it? Look at the problem not from a victim's perspective or a perpetrator's perspective, but look at what are the factors? And it's been really fascinating. The last four years has been absolutely fascinating. We've collected close to 10,000 stories so far, making us the largest crowd map on the subject. We found patterns and trends which are very different from city to city. We are also mapping in other countries in Kenya, Nepal and Cameroon. And we have used this information in many ways. So for example, all of us here today use technology to make decisions on which restaurant to eat at or when we plan our holidays or which books to read or movies to watch. Yet when it comes to public safety, if you try Googling it, there's nothing available. And this database, which is a new set, data set that we are trying to put together based on people's experiences, really can tell you information that can help you increase your own situational awareness to make better choices for yourself. But it will also give you that information which you can rally your community around the issue and work towards a local solution which is relevant to you. And I can give you examples going forward. Yeah, I was going to ask, this is a fascinating how data aggregation has been used to inspire community level mobilization. So how were you able to go from this online platform and bringing together the different incidences to offline community focused movement activity and campaign activity? Can you give us an example of an effective form of mobilization? So when I made the career switch, I knew nothing about this topic. So I had to learn, relearn, unlearn a lot of things. And one of the things I decided to do was volunteer with an organization that wanted to mobilize communities around an issue. And I said to them, if you chose public safety as the issue, I will work with you, and they did. And one of the first campaigns we did was in an upscale suburb in Bombay where the issue was on chain snatching. You know, Indians love gold. We love our gold, most of us wear it. So, and usually this is again targeted towards women because you are seen to be vulnerable. And in this upscale neighborhood, a lot of chain snatching was taking place. Yet, nobody went to the police with it because they would rather let the chain go than deal with the police. But we collected these incidences and we had over 150 interviews with women and we then invited the public to an information fair at the local park. And they were shocked because, you know, we often live in silos. Today our lives are so busy that we don't talk to each other. We don't talk to our neighbors and we lost that sense of community in a way. So we don't have this local intelligence. But what we were showing them was these incidences that were happening in their own neighborhood, some of them knew about it and some of them didn't. But we then asked them, how do you feel about it and what do you want to do? And very interesting solutions came off it. One was to create a, you know, a communication tree within their neighborhood so that they could pass on information really quickly. So they chose WhatsApp as the medium. The second was to train their security guards. You know, in Bombay these security guards are very informal. They are the first job a person from the village coming to the city takes up. He's not a trained security guard but he's there as a watchman. So they gave them plastic whistles because these guys were also very intimidated by these incidents and didn't want to really step in when they were happening. So what they did was they had a whistle protocol when things were fine and when things were not. And the third thing was to present this information to the police. We had just 20 data points in a six month period but the police accepted it, changed their beat patrol timings. And for the next two or three years there has been no incident of chain snatching in that neighborhood. So that gave me confidence to apply it to sexual violence. And then we used it in a low income neighborhood in Delhi where our data pointed that the hotspot was on a main road where men would loiter at a tea stall and intimidate women and girls passing by on their daily routine. And in our culture, we can't talk to men directly, we can't confront them. So when asked what would they like to change about their neighborhood, they said we want to just be able to walk. So we organized an art-based workshop and they painted staring eyes with subtle messaging on the walls and the messaging translates loosely to English to say look with your heart, not with your eyes, we won't be intimidated by your gaze, we will raise our voice, we will break our silence. And this wall mural was so effective, the loitering stopped, the gazing was reduced and now the girls and women can walk to their school, college work without fear of being intimidated and it's been two years since this wall mural went up. So yeah, so I mean, it's really interesting when a community comes up with solutions, what can be done. That's great, that's a great example of artivism also, which is a nice theme here at USIP. So we're now gonna turn the conversation over to Julia Basha. Julia, as many of you know, is the Peabody and Guggenheim award-winning filmmaker, media strategist and the creative director at Just Vision, which is a nonprofit organization that highlights the power and the reach of Palestinians and Israelis who are working together to end the occupation and build a future of freedom, dignity and equality. Julia is finishing up production of a new documentary film on the roles played by Palestinian women during the first Intifada. We will shortly be showing the trailer of that film. And she also just gave a TED Talk called How Women Wage Conflict Without Violence. So you're able to find that online. And there was one quote in that TED Talk that I really liked, Julia. You said in it, the stories we tell matter deeply to how we see ourselves and to how we believe movements are run and how movements are won. So the first question I wanted to ask is, what was your inspiration for that TED Talk and how does it relate to your current project on Palestinian women in the first Intifada? Thank you, Maria. And thank you, Elsa. I had not heard of your work and it's just fascinating and so inspiring. So I would love to talk more about what you're doing. Hi, everybody. It's really exciting to be here at this stage. I've been with my team at Just Vision working on this film project for four years now. And when we started making this film, we did not actually know at the time that it would become a film about the Palestinian women. We wanted to make a film about the first Intifada. This was a period that happened in starting in 87 and running until 92. And we knew from having heard from the activists on the ground today, both Palestinians and Israelis, that they wanted to learn the lessons from that time period. That they knew about the deep degree of civil society participation that happened at the time and how unique that was and how difficult in contemporary life in Palestinian Israel, it was being to mobilize people at that level that happened in the late 80s. And we kept hearing this. I've been working now telling stories from the region for 12 years. And for 12 years, I've been hearing from the activists on the ground, please bring those stories to us. But when we tried to talk about that project abroad, particularly in the United States, we got some skepticism around it. There was a lot of why are you gonna talk about the first Intifada? Why are you going back to the 80s? Why don't you talk about what's happening right now? And we kept telling them this is coming from the ground. People who are trying to build the movement right now for freedom and justice are asking for it. But that didn't seem sufficient. So the talk was an attempt at kind of going, challenging ourselves and going a little bit deeper into understanding why this story mattered, not just for Israel and Palestine, but beyond. And I was incredibly lucky to have already had a relationship with Maria, who at the time, I think they were midway through the work with Marie in this report, which you all received today. And it was one of those sort of incredibly beautiful interdisciplinary moments when as a filmmaker, I got to learn a lot about the meaning of the story I was trying to tell in the broader needs of understanding women's participation in movement building. So that became the talk. The talk was an extrapolation from what we had learned was this critical role that women had played in the first Intifada, but that was invisible to the international community and how common and how much of a pattern that is around the world. The film, there's a lot of things to say about it, but I think that the best maybe way to start is by showing the trailer. I don't know if we can turn off the lights. I just realized I never asked about that. So, it's always possible to turn off the lights. I'd like to make sure you feel cozy and... Where are the lights? I bet they're over there. I'll do my best. I often end up causing trouble in these events. And it's gonna play in these two screens. Certainly, what's the appetite for the film coming out next year? So I guess I would, if I were to ask what, over the course of the research and the production of this film, if you could cite maybe one or two surprising findings about women's roles in the first Intifada and beyond, what would you quickly cite? So I think I have three. But I will be very quick. I think the first one is that going in, we were aware that the first 18 months of the Intifada were recognized as the most disciplined in terms of maintaining civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. And when you looked for the reasons, the sort of literature often cites internal battles inside the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or just the pure exhaustion of the Palestinian community who has been withholding this civil disobedience for a long time. And what was absent from the reasons for that, and which became very clear during our research and during our interviews, were that these first 18 months also coincided when the women were actually running the unified national leadership of the uprising, the UNLO, which was the underground mobilizing mechanism, the people who were actually riding the leaflets that you saw on the trailer and telling the population what the actions should be and were actually leading the neighborhood committees across Gaza and the West Bank and putting these actions in place. The second thing is that the women didn't end up in dispositions of power coincidentally. There was an intentional organizing that happened in the late 70s and early 80s to start preparing women to take leadership positions and to organize at various level of the community. So during that time, the four different parties that made up the PLO, which is the Democratic Front, the Popular Front, Fatah and the Communist, were generally led by men. There were women who were very active and these women created separate all women bodies affiliated with each of these political parties that started going outside of the urban centers where women tended to be more active and into the rural areas, into the refugee camps and providing, at first asking, what do you need? So instead of sort of the old model that had been true until then of charity giving, they started going and asking, what do you need? What are the needs of the women across the territories? And in the process of responding to that need, they created these very well-rounded, skilled women who were ready to then be mobilized when the First Intifada broke out. So the women body associated with the DFLP, the Democratic Front, for example, went from, in one year, they started with 25 women, in one year they had 3,000 women and by the time the Intifada broke out, there were 10,000 women with deep relationships of trust that were skilled to get organized. And the third and last point very quickly is that for the women who were active at the time, the goal of women's liberation and equality in Palestinian society was as important as the goal of national liberation. And those went hand in hand and they fought really hard at every single stage in the First Intifada when that was threatened, when there was a sense of putting the national cause and the national interests first and telling women, wait, don't create problems and conflict inside our movement right now because we first need to gather independence and they were very conscious and talked a lot openly about it. No, we don't wanna be one of the examples they cited whether people agree or not with that example who's disputed but they cited the Algerian example as we're not gonna be like the Algerian women that actively participated in their revolution and then were pushed to the side. Unfortunately, of course, when the Oslo process took over from the Madrid process which did include some of the women leaders and in fact the Palestinian delegation in Madrid had three women, whereas at first all the other delegations including the Algerian delegation had no women present and the reason for that was because women were so essentially the First Intifada. When Oslo took over from Madrid, then a process started taking place in that moment that pushed the women to the side and a lot of these women actually during that time left their political parties because they felt that the men, particularly the men who were coming from Tunisia, returning as part of the formation of the Palestinian Authority, did not give the women their due and they lost political power and unfortunately I think we see the consequences of that today. Thanks, Julia. So at this point of the program we're actually gonna take a first round of questions from you all. So if you could raise your hands, if you have questions, we will give you the mic. If you could say your name, affiliation and a very piffy question, that would be terrific. Thank you. On the data, how did you accumulate the data that's the input? I didn't understand where that came from and how you know that that's not skewed by whatever an envelope is. So the data is crowdsourced. It comes every time we are featured in the press. We get a spot of data from that particular city where the report, where the article is published. But apart from that, we work with a lot of partner organizations on the ground so we reach out to the communities and we actually get women to report if they are willing to. We integrate it in our workshops, in our campaigns. We are very active on social media. Almost every second day I get an email from somebody but those are not public space experiences. Those probably would be domestic violence which we don't put on the crowd map. We have a missed call facility for those who don't have internet access so they give us a call. It gets disconnected, we call them back so they don't even have to pay for the call. So we have multiple ways for people to report and but a lot of them come through the communities that we work in. When you work with crowdsourced data, there's no, we don't verify it so we look at the dominant trend. We are not working on an individual case. We are looking at a general trend and pattern and then trying to find a solution for that. So and I spoke at a panel last year with police officers and I was the only non-police person there and they mentioned in that panel that they were already scanning my website for trends and that gave me the confidence to formalize the relationship with the police. So we are now, we send our trend reports to the police in Mumbai, Delhi and in Goa. And to give you an example, this came to my attention just last week. So the Goa police said, okay, it's crowdsourced so you don't have to actually give your name and email. You can just put your story over there, what happened, where it happened and the date and time. But the Goa police said, if you wanna make it a personal report then you get another pop-up which you then have to submit personal details and this person actually did that on her incident at a resort in Goa and she got a response from the police and she put it out on social media saying that I used it and I actually got a response from the police. So yeah, so I think these are new ways of working with information and I'm really glad that at least the police in India are willing to take that step to explore these options because it's a data set that will never come to them till they sensitize their own police forces and make it familiar and easier for women to report. Other questions, so why don't we take the two together right here? So I'm Catherine Hughes Freituck with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and great to hear this conversation, something that we actually train and teach in the field as well as our following up on. So my questions for Julia, I actually was there as you know during the first Cynthia Fata and very involved at that point as a young college student and got to interview and talk with a lot of the women as well as march with them and see the kinds of roles that they were playing. So I'd just like to know a little bit more about what kind of roles you mentioned parallel institutions or I think it was mentioned on the film. So again, I know several of them passing messages organizing local groups but a little bit more about what they were doing and how exciting it is when you look at Jean Sharp's 198 Ways to have tactics and methods. Actually, I've documented at least maybe 175, 180 that they were using. So they had an amazing spread and I do think the women had a big part of that. So yeah, so great film, we'll record seeing it when it's done. Great, thanks Catherine, we'll just take one more. Hi, I'm Sharon Kodak and I have a question for Elsa. Elsa, when you mentioned the kind of simple solutions that you all came up with, you know, of the art, police, you know, basically capturing everyone's story, getting, you know, whistles for policemen. First of all, usually when people think about addressing a situation of violence or harassment, they think of kind of military or militant type solutions. And was it difficult for the crowdsourcing and for the women and everyone who were trying to find solutions, was it difficult for them to come up with these kind of simple and peaceful solutions? Thank you. So the biggest challenge is actually getting someone to share her story. That is the most painful part of it, but once you get the information and you present it, and we present it not only to women, but also to men, we generally have a mixed audience. And it's fascinating because often they always think of these incidents as personal, that it's only happening to me and I was the cause of it. But when you see it happening to many people, suddenly, you know, you're liberated in your mind and you can look at the issue dispassionately and now say, okay, what is it that we wanna do? And I think that is when, you know, whether you're a man or you're a woman, you actually wanna do something about it. So I think that was never the challenge. The challenge is actually getting the data. But you know, when we used art outside a college in Bombay, a girls' college where they decided to message the walls but also put the legislation indicating which of these are the crime. And we had a lot of men stop and thank us and say, oh, we didn't know that this was a crime. Now, you can pretend that, yes, they didn't know. But I do believe that when you have something in the public domain, whether it is information or whether it is art, can you then ignore it? And can you say that I was not aware of it? It does put you on the spot and then you have to behave in appropriate manner, right? So I think the solutions are very interesting because they come up with it very creatively. They place it in creative places. So the other one that we had was in Delhi outside a toilet complex. In low income communities, they may not have toilets in their homes. So they use public toilets. And that usually is a hotspot for women. It comes up all the time in our data. And this one community decided to use the same strategy we used in Bombay where they used the messaging and the legislation and outside that toilet complex, the young men had put a couch and would sit over there and intimidate the women and girls using the toilets. And they invited them to join the campaign rather than ignore them or shun them. They said, why don't you come and see what we are doing? And within a week, the couch was out of there. The young men are now advocating with other young men, telling them what is appropriate and not appropriate. So I think it's also about creating spaces for conversation, especially in cultures like ours where men and women don't really have that opportunity to talk to each other on topics like this. So it's about conversations, about safe spaces, about information, and then let the community decide. Right, Julia, do you want to take the first question? Of course. So the thing that I think tends to be hard often when I start talking in international communities who are not yet familiar with what the First Intifada looked like is that there's been a very strong association with the word intifada meaning violence. So you hear first intifada and you think about at least stone throwing and probably more violence than that. And as Catherine was pointing out, when you actually look at the activities, the vast majority of activities that were taking place during this period, they actually are very aligned with Jane Sharpe's methods and the whole list, almost the entire list was applied at the time. And that is something that is actually agreed with by the Israeli army. The Israeli army at the time, if you look at their quantification of what were the activities like during that period, their data says that 93%, I think we're in 7%, objectivities during the First Intifada were unarmed. And these activities included things like mobilizing an entire new sector of institutions to take care of life. So this was before the Palestinian Authority existed, which now takes care of some basic social services and municipal, you know, provideings. And so it was more of a straightforward colonial regime where the Israeli Civil Authority governed every aspect of the population, the policing and the hospitals and the schools. And that created a very strong level of control of the Palestinian population. And what the Palestinian population did at the time was it withdrew consent. And by withdrawing consent, they created this entire new set of institutions, new schools, which were held secretly because if they were found, there was actually a law, there was instituted by the Israeli Army in response to this, that if someone was found with more than three kids in their class teaching, they could get 10 years in prison. Similarly, victory gardens, as they were called at the time, where in order to boycott Israeli products and start creating your own economic viability as a country, hopefully eventually was the goal, if you were caught planting tomatoes and other kinds of vegetables, you could also get 10 years in prison. And so the measurements were actually very harsh against all these different institutions. The method of communicating what they should do, victory gardens, underground schools were these leaflets, which became a very useful tool for spreading the message. The women were the primary ones who would send it across the West Bank and Gaza because they were, because of issues of gender, less likely to be harassed by the Army. A lot of these women would swallow the leaflets, so there's these little capsules that they would make out of it in situations where they knew would be more dangerous to carry them, and they took up to the top leadership. So as I mentioned, this wasn't just women enacting what was decided by men at the top leadership. People like Rabbi Hadyab, who you saw in the film, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year out of a sudden heart attack, was at the unified national leadership of the uprising. So that was a leadership made up of generally four people, one from each of the major political parties associated with the PLO. And when the men were arrested very early in the defile, that created also a lot of opportunities for the women to rise up and show what they could do. Great. We're gonna take two more quick questions, and then we're gonna ask panelists to offer one minute answers to them, and then we're gonna move on to the second part of the program. Please. Sorry guys, it looks like we're taking more questions from the side of the eye. Oh dear. All right, my name is Amir Thalsoufai from the State Department. I have a question for Ms. Julia Basha. I mean, not to mention that I'm very admired with the work of Ms. De Silva there. So, as you know, and I don't mean to state the obvious here that the Palestinian cause continues to be sort of the essence of everything that happens in the Middle East, despite the fact that it's, you know, recently you could say that it may have been hijacked by other misfortunate events such as the Syria war, Iraq war before that. Nonetheless, it continues to be the cause. Maybe it's dormant now, but I'm sure it will resurface at some point. Anyways, do you or are you optimistic about revamping like Palestinian women and nonviolent movements and at a higher level, like political level, at least in the foreseeable future? Are you optimistic? Sure, let's just take one more and then we'll have for both of you. So, maybe one here. I guess I'm not gonna stand because I'm right here. Hi, my name is Samira. I'm a junior at the George Washington University. And my question is if one or both of you would like to talk about the role of religion you've seen playing in your work and in nonviolent peace movements in general. Two excellent questions and you're gonna address them in one minute each. All right. Yeah. So, you probably, all of these women passed really quickly in the trailer, but Zahira Kamal is one of the women highlighted. She was the leader of the women body associated with the DFLP, the Democratic Forum at the time. And as I mentioned, many of the women left these parties when after Jocelyn Accord and the Palestinian Authority was formed because they weren't given the proper place in the political structure and they disagreed with a lot of the decisions that the men were making. But she was part of creating another political party called FIDA, which she heads right now. She's the general secretary of this political party and I believe it's one of the few, if there is of any, it's like a major political party and she's a woman who heads it and that's pretty rare in the Arab world today. And so I do think that Palestinian women have had a history and continue to have a history of actually a lot of political engagement. There is no question that has gone down historically. The first thing to find that was a height and one of the reasons was because these political parties actually were associated with left wing ideologies. So this was still, you still have a communist party, for example, a lot of these people actually got their training in organizing in Eastern Europe and then they came back. And so it was a time when there was still Cold War dynamics playing in that region. And the First Intifada was a time that simultaneously to this women's liberation movement there was also a backlash and probably these things play off one another. And it was the time when Hamas actually emerged and Hamas was founded in Gaza as a political movement. Until then it was more of a social charitable organization and this woman actually had to fight very hard to maintaining some of their ability to remain in the public sphere. I know personally and have documented a lot of incredible women in contemporary times. One of my prior films is called Budrus and it talks about a Palestinian village in the West Bank that resists using nonviolent resistance the construction of the separation barrier which was gonna basically make it so that this community entirely had to leave where they've been living for centuries. And one of the leaders of this movement was a young woman called the Tizam Mourad. And talking about religions to fit that in, this is a religious observant community of the Tizam Mourad herself is also observant. And I think that there is a very wide spectrum of the world that in my experience that religion plays, religion can play an incredibly powerful and positive role in community organizing and it can also be a very negative role in it. And so I've seen both of them play out. Elsa, did you have a quick additional response? So we are a country with many religions and religion can be limiting for women in their own ways. I mean, every religion has its downside. But we use religion to mobilize communities. So whether it's a Christian or a Catholic church we mobilize them around Hindu festivals. We mobilize women and, you know, so also for the Muslim women and girls. And one interesting example was in Kibera and Nairobi. One of the hotspots was outside a mosque where the young boys would intimidate the girls going to school. And they got the imam involved and he started preaching about this to his audience. And the loitering and the commenting and staring and groping over there stopped. So I think you can use religion to your benefit. Religion is very powerful so. And people come together also because of religion. Great, thanks very much, Elsa. And I would know you all will have a chance to ask additional questions at the end of the conversation. So we're now gonna shift gears just a little bit and talk more about some research but also the policy and practitioner elements of women's involvement in nonviolent movement. So as you will note, we have Mark Lagann on the panel. Mark is not Jimmy Briggs. So in case there was any confusion they look very different. But anyway, but Jimmy noted, wrote to us this morning to say that he was not able to come from New York because he has a terrible flu. So we hope Jimmy gets better. And but unfortunately he was not able to participate today but fortunately we have Mark Lagann who in addition to being a colleague and a mentor of mine is also a friend and someone I admire very much for his work on human rights and democracy. Mark is currently a Centennial Fellow and distinguished senior scholar at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. He's the former president of Freedom House and is importantly for this conversation the co-author of a forthcoming article in the current issue of World Affairs Journal called Women in Global Freedom. So great timing, great topic Mark. So you've just read in this article on how women are promoting freedom around the world. What did you find about the roles that women are playing in advancing economic and political empowerment of women and also of marginalized groups in different societies? Thanks and it's a pleasure to join you all today in this wonderful array of thinkers. With my colleague Rebecca Hughes at Georgetown we wanted to look at different ways that women can in fact advance both the interest of women, other marginalized groups and of civil society in general. And some, our case studies range from the US to Israel and occupied territories as well or Rwanda and Iceland, a couple of takeaways and it's really our work is on the interaction between women active in social movements in civil society and then direct political participation. In Iceland we found a social movement a explicitly feminist social movement that decided to take the step of forming a political party in the Women's Alliance and in the period of 1998 to 2002 it sort of staked out a position. Don't pursue this intensive maximalist privatization of banks and other institutions. And then they reaped support of legitimacy after the financial meltdown of 2008 and used that opportunity in increasing numbers in power flowing out of a social movement to implement social policies helpful including parental leave for both men and women. And then they took a further movement making alliance with a social movement of women within multiple Nordic countries to put in place a model to deal with sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. A model shaped by women and advocated by women in particular in which pimps or traffickers should be punished, something that doesn't happen too often in many countries including in the United States. The buyers being punished but those who are in the sex trade the prostitute people not being punished. I'm interesting a case of interaction as far as Rwanda goes as a case it's of course a rather unique genocide situation which after many men were killed in 1994 and those responsible were held to account remaining the remaining population of those not imprisoned 70% female adult population Kagami pulled them into political leadership with the idea that they would drive economic growth and they did. They also took steps even within the situation of traditionalist community-based instrumentalities for arbitration, for mediation to in fact deal with cases so that there wasn't prison overcrowding. But the question that arises from this kind of special case of Rwanda is one, could women have had that kind of impact if it weren't A for the demographic situation or B for a strong man Kagami pushing for this? The bigger question is Paul Kagami who is a great success in leading economic growth but a brutal leader in eliminating opposition voices. He is bet that mobilizing women in the political system will benefit economic growth but will not put him in danger and that is a test case to see whether women will play a special role, not just for women or for marginalized groups but for all for pluralism and democracy. So I guess that's a fascinating research and case study so if you were to offer a couple of recommendations for practitioners, either those who were involved in supporting civil society from NGOs like Freedom House and others in USIP and for policy makers, what would come to mind about better ways to engage women both in sort of the movement building aspect but then helping them move critically from being involved in activism and movements to political participation and participation in political power making structures. I'm very taken with the research and the activity you and your colleague Erica Chenoweth, party merry men and others in the room have pursued on the use of non-violent methods by civil society. But I think it is important to note not only the way in which you can try and get those who are part of an autocratic or unaccountable political structure to defect from it but to also look at the way the social movement might interact with women in the political system and also whether some rather traditionalist institutions are something that women can influence. Highly male dominated traditionalist bodies that dealt with mediation in Rwanda were something that women actually at a very top level were able to influence. So old institutions and of making alliance with some females in the internal structure of the state. Right. Thanks very much Mark. So we're now gonna turn to Carla Capell. Carla is as most people in this room know the vice president for the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation or ACT here at USIP. She was previously the chief strategy officer for USAID and earlier she was AIDS first senior coordinator for gender equality and women's empowerment as a senior advisor to USAID's administrator. And prior to joining USAID, Carla directed the Institute for Inclusive Security which as we all know very much focuses on women's political participation in empowerment. So Carla the question for you is more from a policy perspective and based on your intimate knowledge of security council resolution 1325 in that experience, what do we know about women's roles in organizing, mobilizing to end wars and to advance peace? Good afternoon and first of all I'll add my welcome to Kathleen's and Maria's since you're in our house. I think I'll telescope out a little bit from these specific cases and speak to you really briefly about sort of some general lessons and I think part of them tee off a little bit of Maria's paper that's coming out and some of them come either from my practice at USAID or previously with inclusive security. The first is what we need to understand is that there is a long global history of women's leadership of movements and you can sort of run off the litany of cases and I was sort of quickly thinking as folks were talking Pakistan, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Iran, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, West Africa, Israeli and Palestinians, India, Lebanon, Ukraine, Bosnia and the list goes on and on and these are only movements focused specifically on nonviolent action for peace building and they're over generations of time and so this is a long history and the question is in part why is it that women are so preeminent in these movements for peace and I would posit there are a number of reasons. One is that what you see universally is a willingness of women to cross conflict lines and that they are working across these conflict lines in virtually all of these circumstances and Na'ilah, we did not set this up but Na'ilah, who somebody I've worked with for a long time in Palestine has an equally robust work across conflict lines with Israeli nonviolent female activists working for peace and she's just one example from any of the countries we talk about including Rolanda and elsewhere. The second is I think that we should realize that part of their leadership of these nonviolent movements is born of their preeminence in civil society so Sandra can speak eloquently to the marginalization or under representation of women in formal governance and political structures and often that is, I'm not trapping you. But often that is accompanied by an incredible dominance within civil society and if you look in places like Eurasia where there's 80, 90% of civil society organizations are led by women, you see a natural toggling to women leading these movements within non-governmental organizations. What is that born of? It's born of lots of things, lack of space within the formal institutions. It's born of a lack of faith in those institutions and a feeling that you can have more leadership from outside of government, born of greater flexibility often in civil society organizations to balance family and career. So there are lots of things that play into that but I think it's important to notice that. I think additionally there is a great hesitancy among women to move to violence and doesn't mean that women can't be violent and it doesn't mean that there aren't women who are active in violent movements but there is a general hesitancy to move in that direction and often these nonviolent movements are actually a conflict prevention or conflict avoidance strategy that they are using to try to move for change and to find another path forward and that's really an important lens through which they're looking at it. I also think it's important that we realize that in many cultures around the world there is a cultural foundation that women have to build on as peacemakers, the normative lens through which they are working sets them up to be leaders within these movements and in nonviolent movements and that creates an opportunity for them that is not necessarily afforded to men, many of whom would prefer nonviolent means to advance an agenda. And then I think the last, and this is more in the realm of the policy environment at USAID and what we saw was that the incredible opportunity that exists that we're not leveraging to tap into those attitudes and those skills finds itself manifest when you do motivate them in for example the incredible role that some of these nonviolent activists can play as mediators. And so you see a growth in programs that take nonviolent activism and then pivot it towards a mediation function, particularly at local communitarian and subnational levels which we have an enormous opportunity to build on. So those are some of the lessons that I think emerge from the implementation of the US National Action Plan on 1325 and some of the research and practice that's been undertaken over the last 10 to 15 years. That's great. If you were to hone in on a couple of shortcomings in the policy community, like what we could be doing better more effectively, what would you say? So I think that the simple answer sort of pivots from the end of my first comment is which is how do we leverage both these movements and these individual leaders within these movements to take better advantage of that skill set and those accomplishments. And the simple answer is to say, oh well we need to involve more women in peace processes writ large. But we've been struggling for this for a long time. So I think what I would focus on rather are what I think are kind of three key ways in which we need to get under the idea of involving women and actually confront those issues that are impediment. So the first is the cognizance and appreciation for the power of these nonviolent movements. And I'll sort of tell a small anecdote related to each of these. During the early stages of the Iraq war there was a very successful mobilization of women for women's rights. There'd been a rollback of women's rights in Iraq where it had been quite advanced actually the situation of women and the personal status law was being rolled back. Women modulated in every way imaginable as a nonviolent movement to ensure that their rights were guaranteed moving forward and to sort of draw a line in the sand. And when I went to talk to some of the analysts who were working on Iraq and we were looking there at some of the most violent insurgencies at the time juxtaposed with this nonviolent movement, I said you should be elevating visibility of this mobilization. This is the kind of nonviolent mobilization we want to honor and we want to elevate. And the analyst said to me oh yeah but it's just women and they haven't taken up arms. And I said well that's kind of the point. And oh by the way women are the majority of the population in Iraq after all of these wars in which the preeminent fighters were males. And so here we were sort of with a set of Western analysts who were basically writing off a mass mobilization that was nonviolent. So raising the visibility of that will be essential. I think the second is we need to think about how we deemphasize the secrecy and exclusivity of negotiations around peace building. And we need to do that for a number of reasons. They decrease accountability of the population. They reduce the extent to which you can bring in other voices and Julia spoke eloquently to the gradual increasing marginalization of women in the Israeli-Palestinian process but you could look at that in various places. But until you tackle those issues you don't bring in these civil society actors. Because what you're doing is you are always you are always favoring armed actors and you're always giving them preeminence and talks. And so that's an underlying challenge of the premise that secrecy and inclusivity is the vehicle to peace when in actuality what that does is it reduces the influence and leverage of the nonviolent actors and de facto women because they are often leading these nonviolent movements. And then the third is I think you need to, and you saw this play out, sorry, you saw this play out within the Israeli-Palestinian context where you had a negotiated Oslo Accord and folks came back home from those negotiations which were held far away and in great secrecy. People said, well, what kind of Accord is this? How does this have traction and relevance to me and how do I drive this forward? You also see it with regard to Sudan and South Sudan and most recently you see it with regard to Colombia, I would posit, where you are not connecting back. And then I think that relates to the third which is you really need to think about how you take advantage of these movements when you have success and use them to help you implement and realize Accords when they're put in place or transitions when they're taking place. And I was involved, for example, in Uganda when there were the negotiations going on with the Lord's Resistance Army and there was a discussion about how do discussions and very secretive negotiations with Kony, how were they brought back to the people of Uganda? And the women in civil society who had been mobilizing around bringing their child soldiers home and reintegration and community normalization said, look, we will put up our hands and we will be the conduit back. We will provide the communication back to local communities in Northern Uganda that will give traction to any accord that is reached. And often there's an incredible willingness, openness and ability given these enormous networks to help build support for peace accords if you tap into these movements when you're moving from a position of conflict out. And so I think those are three important vehicles for moving this agenda forward and where you've seen that happen, you do see greater traction and greater durability and your film made me think of the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell which brought to life the nonviolent movement around Liberian peace. And one of the later chapters of that film talks about how these women helped with the disarmament demobilization and reintegration process when it was going awry. And that was really taking a nonviolent movement that had resulted in a pivot to peace and translating it into mobilization to make that peace stick and to not have a return to violence. And that's the kind of example we wanna cultivate and propagate moving forward writ large globally. Incredibly helpful, thanks so much Carla. So we are going to end the conversation before discussion again with you all with Sandra Pepra. And I should have noted at the beginning of this conversation that we're at USIP very proud to co-host this event with both JustVision and the National Democratic Institute which is doing great work to advance women's participation at all levels from civil society on up. So Sandra is a career diplomat and international development professional before joining NDI as its director for gender women in democracy in 2014. She spent 13 years as a senior officer at the United Kingdom's Department for International Development or DFID. So Sandra, the task that you were given for this conversation as the last speaker was essentially to distill some of the more interesting points from the conversation until now and offer some of your own reflections and to sum up some of the nuggets of wisdom that have come out today. So over to you. Thanks very much. And I have to say now, that was not the task that I was supposed to have. That was not the deal when we started this thing. I said, oh, what do I have to do? She said, oh, just come along, it'll be fine. And now, look. But having said that, really, just to say NDI is hugely pleased to be part of this event and to be looking forward to doing further work on nonviolent social movements with colleagues at USIP and others in the room. The women's political participation practice at NDI actually started out in the citizen participation, social organizing, community organizing space. And we have a philosophy at NDI that citizen participation and engagement is, if you like, it's dual function. Not only is it about achieving policy outcomes or change or reform, but it is in itself inherently empowering. And that is a very strong and, if you like, continuous and persistent principle behind the work we do in what we now call our citizen participation practice. And so what's interesting, and Carla was very generous, is that having started in the citizen participation space, we have over years and decades developed strong practices in the formal political institutions. So we do a lot of work on women and political parties and women in elections and women in governance and women in tech and democracy. And we've kind of lost our citizen participation piece. So it's really a very important moment for us to be part of this conversation. And so I thank everybody for that. Events like this are where I get a chance really to rededicate myself to the cause. And not in some sentimental, older feminist reliving my glory days way, but really to say thank you to the people on this panel collectively and individually. And I'm going to try and in my kind of summing up, just replay some of the things that we heard today. So to Marie first, thank you for proving again that there is hard research to be done and being done on women in hard areas of our human endeavor. Women's nonviolent political engagement and leadership do lead to positive public policy change at many levels, including but not necessarily a priority focused on maximalist outcomes. And I say that very deliberately because I know that there is actually quite a debate about the end of nonviolent social movements going on. To Elsa Marie, thank you for reminding us that women's struggle against violence, just simply women's struggle against violence ranges along a continuum of private and public spaces and that there are opportunities using new technologies to help us overcome and to remove, I love this, the comfort zones of the perpetrator. I think that, you know, that's, I live my life in sound bites and that's my new one by the way. So thank you to Elsa Marie for that. To Marie and Elsa Marie and to Julia and to Carla, thank you for reminding us that women actually can and often do act in solidarity with each other and form alliances with other progressive forces for progressive and transformational outcomes. And that they have the ability to build and sustain political action over time that you've shone a light on women's creativity and of course their courage. Mark, first of all, thank you for being here because I've also committed myself to no longer participating in famils. So you're great and I think it's very brave of you. I just sit up here with us all, but also more seriously, for examining the crossover from movements to political action and to being very careful about putting that into their political contexts. I think, you know, it's all very well for us to talk about this, but to forget that all these things happen in particular political contexts with a range of societal and political forces either again or for the movements and that also has to be negotiated. So thank you for reminding us of that. And I think it's an important piece, not least because it's something that we've been working with Tom Crothers on and looking at how different political contexts work for women's political empowerment and specifically whether there are moments when a focus on women's political empowerment can actually, if you like, change the levers of broader democratic or broader political reform and change. And so that's an exciting piece and I think that's quite a segue to some of the comments you made. Thank you to Julia for reclaiming and affirming the power and importance and legitimacy of testimonies and storytelling. Because I think this often, we lose sight of this time and time again, you know, if it's not quantitatively done, it's not real. And I think even Elsa Marie said at some point, if it's not documented, it's hard to believe it happened. Well, it's actually not for the women involved. It's not for the communities involved. So I think however we tell these stories and bring them to the surface, it's hugely important. And I think, you know, what you do every day, I believe, is to rip aside the veil of invisibility and to help us remove not only the webs of inequity and power imbalance. Who said that? That was you, Kathleen, thank you. I love it. I told you, I live my life in the sunlight. To rip aside the webs of inequity and power imbalances that contribute to social injustice. And that's just inspirational. Carla, well, thank you for not, you know, outing me on something I didn't know about, thank you, but importantly for reminding us of the importance of policy frameworks and femocrats, you know, people who work inside institutions of politics and power, inside, you know, aid institutions or whatever, they're incredibly important. And it's an extraordinary and difficult thing that has been achieved under the U.S. Government's leadership on 1325. And I love what you've said about the next three steps, which I crudely took down as keep raising the profile of nonviolent social movements, women-led nonviolent social movements. Remove the secrecy that we assume has to be part and parcel of peace negotiations because that also amplifies voice and gives people more space. And make women a part of your implementation and your communications and outreach strategy around your peace processes. So there is definitely more to be done, not least because as we all know, diversity is a fact, but inclusion is a choice. And I got that from Jackie. Jackie O'Neill sent the best tweets, by the way. So thank you for that one, too. To Kathleen and to Maria and all the folks here at UCIP, I think thank you for reminding us that peace is possible, practical, and essential for human progress, social justice, and dignity. And I think we, again, have to see the role of women in nonviolent social movement as absolutely central to those efforts. Now, what's left to be done? Ah, there's more. I think, clearly, as half the world currently lives in somewhat democratic states, and the other half, frankly, lives in China, it's pretty much, we all do understand, though, that pretty much all of them hate the current forms and institutions of political engagement. I mean, I'm British, Brexit, I mean, seriously. So there's a whole range of ways in which people are disengaging from the forms of political engagement that we've all grown up with, and that are still the predominant forms. And so it seems clear that social movements, and hopefully nonviolent social movements, are gonna become more and more prevalent in this political space. And in any case, Erica Chenoweth says that there are more nonviolent social movements around today than ever before in history. So, there's clearly a piece of work that needs to be done around how nonviolent social movements are going to impact on our politics going forward. And I say our politics, because I think this is everybody's politics around the world, there's a huge debate going on, and there's a struggle for, if like the democratic soul of political activity. And I think it's important because if we don't start thinking about how these movements engage into some form of structured political negotiation, compromise, art form, whatever you want to call it, I'll be likely to end up with a situation where nobody knows the rules, and then it's basically, my gang's bigger than your gang. So I really put that out there because I think it's an important piece. So understanding how these social movements are going to impact on politics, hugely important. Second of all, I'd love somebody to do, and probably somebody's already doing, some work on whether nonviolent women-led social movements lead to more sustainable and progressive policies more generally. I mean, we know more about this in the peace space because of the work that inclusive security and others have done. But what about democratic spaces and political spaces? Is there a change there to be had, and one, because of women's engagement in nonviolent social movements? And then finally, I think, I was gonna give a shout out to Jimmy because I just thought it was gonna be wonderful to hear what he had to say about Black Lives Matter. But I think that there's something about whether the example of nonviolent social, nonviolent women-led political action has any impact in changing the gender norms, underpinning broader societal dynamics around discrimination and violence. I think, again, Carla, you touched on this in one of your comments. You mentioned women's hesitancy to move to violence. If there are increasing numbers of nonviolent social movements, does, might that have an impact on all our propensities to violence over time? So having run on way longer than I intended to, but just because I was absolutely inspired and energized. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tamara. I hope I've done what you wanted me to do. Oh, Sonner, that was fantastic. See, now you know why I asked you to do that. That was a terrific summary. And so now we have in the remaining 15, 20 minutes, we're turning it over to you. So Kathleen and Marie, if you can sort of turn your chairs around as well and come up here, apparently, like, for health reasons, we can't bring you on stage because you may like fall off. So just turn your, and if folks can, again, same rule, identify yourself and ask a brief question. If you'd like to target it, hopefully you can target it to a particular panelist and we'll go from there. So first round, yes, sir. Just wait for the mic to come. Hello, Garrett Clark from International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. Elsa, I was wondering, I had a question on your project. I was wondering if you received any blowback from some of the community with some of the things that you're doing and for example, maybe there's a specific area where women don't wanna go and that prevents some store person from getting business in that area. And so I wanted to know if that's happening and how you're able to deal with that and help them realize that that's also their problem as well. Okay, let's take a couple more. We'll do these in sort of waves. Let's alternate because we've been told we're discriminating against the left side. I guess I'm gonna take that. Hi, my name's Lauren with the Embassy of Australia. I have a sort of a more general question about how you think that the efforts and the energy that we've talked about today, how that could be led to stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Syria in particular. Great question. In the back. Hi, my name's Elvia Middleton-Desner. I'm an independent consultant in the field of civil resistance and peace building conflict resolution. I was wondering, actually there's a question for you, Maria. I'm wondering if you could just share a few examples of the ways in which women's participation in nonviolent movements really creates a new strategic advantage. I would open that to anybody, but I'm gonna direct it to you. And I think that's because, I think from looking at 1325, we can see how women's involvement in the transitions and the peace processes really brings an added value. I think that's part of what the report was trying to do in terms of looking at nonviolent movements too, is to say it's not just about including women in movements. It's actually that they're bringing some strategic advantages to those movements. So I wonder for the audience if you could highlight what a couple of those examples might be. Thank you. Okay, we'll start with those. So Elsa, blowback, was there any? Then the question of a stabilization, reconstruction. What is the relevance of this topic and this women's involvement in movements for that in Syria and Iraq? Folks can decide who's going to answer that one. And then, for Marie, how women's roles in movements increases their strategic efficacy. So we've had a few incidences where, yes, the community has pushed back. So for example, you're trying to change social structures upside down, right? You're trying to promote independence of women, more mobility and freedom. And that may not be what somebody wants, so. But once you have shown somebody hope, it's very difficult to then take it away from them. So we find that the community, the women and girls definitely want to move forward. And when you show them the path, they just keep steamrolling any obstacles. The second is, in the light of having information and data, it's very difficult to dispute that. So for example, one of the communities invited the police. And they said, we are very concerned about all these incidents taking place. And the police officer actually said, well, we don't have any statistics at our police station. And they had taken physical copies of all these reports and presented them. And they were about 200 of these reports. And he had to make a public retraction of his statement where he said, well, we now have to look at it. So it's very difficult for anybody to dispute the data. And I do believe that there will be tension, but if you create spaces for dialogue where men are made to understand how women feel and they now have a role to play. Either they are with them or not. I guess most of the times they choose to participate in the positive way. So overall, I would say that we've had a very great response and very few of these negative issues. But going forward, we always have to keep in mind that you have to tread carefully because you are upsetting social structures. And it is a power game at the end of the day. Okay, maybe Karla on Iraq, Syria, reconstruction, stabilization, the relevance of women's movement. Sure, so I think that women are currently incredibly important in both Iraq and Syria. Iraqi women, most recently I was meeting with an activist for the Yazidi community, so shining a spotlight on the plight of certain communities, but they're active in reconstruction. I've worked with Syrian women who have been engaged in all kinds of action on the ground, whether that's through local coordinating committees that are striving to keep communities, towns, villages functioning despite the violence and the bloodshed. But there also are examples of movements to, for example, mediate between extremists and locals to have them move out of schools so that schools can continue operating. To keep bakeries open because the existence of bakeries is absolutely critical to keeping communities in Syria continuing to function and to operate. And there are women leading the negotiations around humanitarian access corridors on a daily basis. The challenge is, as we see from this entire discussion, increasing the visibility of those efforts and telling that story so that there's really an awareness that in a lot of these circumstances it is the women who are obviously victims of the conflict but who are also keeping communities together and having real-time negotiations with violent actors to hold up those communities and maintain their integrity. Did anyone else have a point on that one or okay? So Marie, over to you about what is the strategic, Lauren will bring you the, what is the strategic value add of women's involvement in movements? Well, that's a big one. And I invite others to add on to this as well. So I think that one of the things sort of piggybacking off of what Carla mentioned, I think Syria is a really interesting example of this because women have been, being able to sort of fly under the radar, women in Syria have been sort of traveling around and helping to document human rights abuses, for example. And so as a result of that, they're sort of being able to add to this. You know, in Syria, of course is a difficult example for a lot of different reasons, but it's raising this visibility and providing, I don't know how organized the movement is in general, but at least this is a strategy of being able to walk around and have a little bit more, at least qualitative and anecdotal sort of storytelling about what is going on when it comes to these human rights abuses and feeding that into the international community more so. And so as a result of a lot of these sort of pieces moving together in Syria, Syria actually for the first time, there was a formal women's advisory board to a UN envoy because of this. So I think sort of putting together this little, this initial piece of women being able to do something that men aren't able to do because they're underestimated and then resulting in for the first time, there being female representation when it comes to the UN envoy, I think is sort of an example that highlights that. I don't know if that completely gets to the question. So if anybody else wants to add on that also, that's the first thing that came to mind for me, at least. I mean, I think I wanted to second that I think that tends to be often a very common advantage and I would be interested in thinking actually about what happens when that advantage is over, right? Because I think that you're no longer underrated and you're no longer underestimated because we're all saying we want more women to participate. We want to engage women in violent movements. So that's going to eventually probably then lead, let's say the oppressor to no longer think that the women crossing the checkpoint, let's say in the case of Israel and Palestine, carrying the leaflet is less likely to be up to trouble than the man. And so what happens at that point or questions of honor, right? So also in the village of Budur, as I mentioned earlier, there was a very strong women's contingent and they were very successful at first because, so they were the first ones to jump in front of the bulldozer and particularly this girl at Lizamorah was 15 year old, the bulldozer was uprooting an olive tree. She jumped in the hole in front of the bulldozer, the bulldozer stopped and the entire community then said, oh my God, we can do this, we can stop the bulldozer. And now that she could sneak through because the soldiers were less likely to attack her because if they attacked her and put your hands all over her, then the man, we're gonna get angry. And what the Israeli army then responded with was by actually sending a bunch of Israeli women soldiers because they then could actually hold in. So I think just the dynamics that play out as this develops and would be interesting to look at. I just want to add, the whole area of work here is not only informed by peace building literature and experience and democracy and human rights experience, but feminism. And I think we have a tendency for pendulum swings, but one brand of feminist made the observation and I think it was useful in inspiring 1325 in the area of research that Karla has been involved and has been involved in as a practitioner that women have special things to offer. And of course at its most simplified, we all know that women are better at building coalition and coalition's informing consensus that men or they have special qualities and then you end up making a generalization about 50% of the world. And then there's another kind of feminist who denies making any observations about something special about women. And I think there needs to be a slight pendulum swing back to look at some of those qualities without being a maximum of the form of women. Thank you. I wanted to just add two quick points. One is we see exactly this scenario that Julia is talking about in Sudan, South Sudan where sort of first you saw women kind of flying under the radar screen not as recognized and Jackie and I can speak to personal experience and how they could mobilize. And then gradually if you raise attention to them, there's not the space for them to operate as flexibly. As they were when people were saying, oh, you know, they're just women. And so the dynamic shifts and the levers need to change accordingly. I do think there's two questions. I mean, what is it that women can give to these nonviolent movements? And then I think it's what are women-led movements give to formal processes? And I think those are somewhat different. And there's often a quality of information that women can provide because they move in different spaces and they do different things and they're in certain places at different times of day. And there are lots of examples of where women can provide different information. For example, on where arms caches are kept because they're there during the day and so they see those movements. There's one example I experienced was talking with folks, women, Palestinian women post Oslo and they said, well, I said, well, what difference would it have made if you were involved in these talks? And they said, well, we could have defined the borders between the different areas in the Palestinian territories such that you didn't end up with people divided from their wells or people cut off from their schools or people divided from their olive groves. And they said, well, and I can assert that had we changed those borders, it wouldn't have affected the political negotiations but it would have affected the impact of those negotiations on the ground. And I sort of thought that was really interesting but anecdotal until I talked with someone on the Israeli side who had been involved in those talks and I said, this is what I'm told by these Palestinian women in civil society, what do you say? And he said, they're absolutely right. Had we brought them into the conversation, we would have avoided a lot of strife on the ground at no cost to the political negotiation. So that kind of information is incredibly valuable and important and it just comes of living your life differently and we can all think about it in our personal lives. How do men and women, girls and boys, where do they go that is different and what information does that provide? That's great and just to note again, that was that when I mentioned Erica, the channelist research, she'll be able to address quantitatively exactly these questions of the impact of women's involvement in movements both in the effectiveness of the movement itself and then the longer term on political impact. So last round of questions. Okay. Well, let's try to do like four and we'll diversify. So middle here, because we like to show our love of the men in the room. Thank you. Hi, I'm Josh McLeod with USAID and so I wanted to talk, we have some people here who are culture workers who are talking about different kinds of expression and boys and I wanted to speak about expression and mobilization online because increasingly we've been seeing this negative trend of women who have a public position being disproportionately affected online. In fact, often it's quite violent and this has a huge potential to suppress women's involvement in movements and I'm thinking ahead of like what this is gonna look like in the future as increasingly we live our lives online and younger people are living their lives online and movements are emerging online and so I'm curious about your observations but also if you have some positive observations to see how that's being addressed and how that equation is being turned around. Thanks. Okay. So why don't we do one in the front here? Hi, thank you so much. My name is Arom and I'm a Pakistani filmmaker, huge fan of your TED Talk. It's my comment is more bouncing off of what Carla and Sandra said which is the connection between the social movement and then policy and I guess coming from Pakistan, I know there's a long example of women's collecting but the invisibility is huge. So how can we reduce invisibility and the push aside factor and more specifically in the short term, I mean long term it would be education and female male education but in the short term, does economics and does finance play a role in terms of the power of women? I mean it does but like how can we use it to an advantage of maybe making that leap into policy. Great. One more question. Over here. Thank you. Hi, my name is Khadija and I'm a senior at Georgetown. I have a question about the internal dynamics of women and movements. And so I'm curious if anyone in their experience with social movements around the globe have encountered a situation when women's involvement and specifically women's leadership has been met with backlash from the greater social movement space. I'm speaking specifically with knowledge from the student movement happening in South Africa right now to the point where women are assuming leadership, specifically black queer women, assuming leadership has been met with a lot of pushback so much so that they've now, it's like a specific faction of the movement and it's like the feminist problem of the movement. So I'm wondering if you've encountered that and then how women experiencing that have navigated it in order to maintain feminist power but also maintain the social movement goal. Thank you. Okay, so our panelists are going to offer final reflections that will hopefully address these three questions. So, Elsamory, would you like to address Josh's question about online mobilization and the increasing sort of repression targeting women online? Do you see trends in this and maybe what can be done about it? How the economic and financial aspects that may be a Mark Lagann type question based on your article and then the backlash against women in movements sort of was it, how can it be overcome or what was the internal dynamics of the movement when you mentioned the backlash? So go for it. So online harassment is definitely on the increase and yes, women are at the receiving end and I do believe that we all have to treat online spaces as public spaces and just like in the physical world, we have strong laws and legislation and we all know what's appropriate and not. The same applies to the online space. However, I think in many places, we still believe that the online space does not exist or is not equivalent to a physical space. And I think first that mindset needs to change and all the policies and legislation should be put into place regarding that. As for me personally, I have never experienced it and I think it has to do with our handle which is called pin the creep. All right, Mark and Julie, if you had a response as well, feel free to. Just two things on the internet and the vulnerability of women targeted. It has been documented in the last two or three years in the annual reports on internet freedom, freedom on the net from Freedom House. Look in the upcoming report to come out in November on some best practices to take advantage of how to push back. I'm myself taken with the backlash phenomenon and in fact traveled to South Africa to visit Freedom House's operation there not long ago. I think this is an interesting part of the larger issue of civil society space being squeezed. I think in the United States and the policy community and in some of the international NGOs and academics, they're concerned about the kiss of death that might be given to local civil society actors by the outsiders. I actually think a constructive thing if done subtly and not in a patronizing way is indeed for some of those international actors to not be patronizing and be like the parent that stands next to the sandbox and says play nicely with each other. But I do think especially in local country nationals being involved in that civil society dialogue that's actually a practical thing that external forces can play when of course they're naturally concerned about making sure they're getting funding and making sure they're dealing with intimidation. Sandra. Thanks. It's not by accident, it's called the highest hurdle. The gender equality and women's empowerment is the highest hurdle because it is fundamentally about changing the dynamics of power between the gender. And guess what? One set isn't gonna give it up. The other set isn't gonna stop fighting for it. So it's gonna happen and I think now I am going to play my older feminist thing and say I have lived long enough to understand that many, many progressive movements have residual misogyny within them. And we have to unfortunately accept and acknowledge this. I have lesbian friends in the United Kingdom who used to weep at the fact that gay rights in the United Kingdom meant male gay rights. And within the movement, there was a whole lot of discrimination ongoing. So I don't think it's just about the civil society space and the political construct. This is about who we are in our essence. And it's a continuing struggle, we won't give up, but there are ways which we have to start having, in a way, much more honest conversations about it. And the shout out I was going to give to Jimmy because I was hoping he was gonna tell us, as I said, about the Black Lives Matter movement was to hopefully hear that it was a fully integrated and progressive movement on both sides of the gender. But I do know that there is a campaign out that says, that's called, Say Her Name, because Black women's lives are not equally treated, apparently, in the discussion of what's happening in that movement. So it's here and we have to deal with it. And I think we can deal with it with a bit more, as I said, honesty and courage, frankly, on both sides. I wanted to talk just a moment about what happened in the first and the further because they played that really well, I think. And I think there could be lessons to be learned from men today and just to, and then I just wanna address Black Lives Matter was founded by Black queer women. And a lot of the movements today, and the issue of also is around Palestine, human rights, the people leading the way are queer women. And I think it's this fascinating development that we are seeing where there is almost like a double, the experience of having experienced double oppression makes you even more, everything that we're talking about, the reasons why women add things to movements that they have experienced being in the less powerful position. So they know how to navigate power in a different way. Queer women have experienced that twice. And I think we've seen incredibly strategic movements being led by queer women right now. And I just wanna do that shout out because I think it's very exciting. In terms of the first and the further, I mentioned briefly the rise of Hamas in Gaza. And that was a moment when the women, Naila was in Gaza herself and a lot of the women talk about what they had to do. So one of the things that developed was this in position of several different norms, like for example, the wearing of the hijab, which many women didn't wanna wear. A lot of women wanted to wear and wore it and it was part of their culture, but many women didn't. And this started becoming, got to such an extent that when the soldiers weren't around, the young boys would throw stones at women if they weren't wearing the veil in public spaces. And so these women had to, and often these were kids who weren't doing half of what these women were doing for the movement for national liberation. So they actually went to the unified leadership and took a year to actually get the leaders to issue a leaflet, which finally came at the end of the year which was a proper leaflet just stating a whole set of expectations around respecting women and the reason why the leadership, even though they actually had women in it, took so long was because of this desire to keep unity of the movement intact, right? Is this like, let's focus on the holy grail that first goal and not try to like shake up things here. And what they learned was that that year that it took them to make that statement at last cause significant harm to the movement on the long term. And so I think this is our like, if we can start telling that story to movements today, there's a, I think some of you are talking, it's like the short-term gain, right? The fear that you're gonna lose funding or the discompetition and not act. And when we tell the stories of other movements and how things have played out in the past, we can learn lessons and become smarter about how we're deciding when there's conflict internally. Okay, we are at the bewitching hour. Unfortunately, I don't know about you all, but I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today. And a couple of points, I would note the official USIP special report of Marie Principe's research will be coming out shortly. I believe we'll send everyone the link who's attended today, but feel free to take the hard copy with you. I'll also note that on the table, the publications table, we have another USIP special report on the role played by education in training and nonviolent resistance that's hot off the press, came out yesterday, written by Nadine Block. I don't know if Nadine's in the room. Nadine, say hello to everyone. So Nadine wrote the other special report. And thank you all for coming and being part of this conversation and a special thanks to this really amazing panel for animating a really important topic of women in nonviolent movement. So have a fantastic day. I think the best option that you can see is not you alone and not all the great things. I think it's something that moves to other cases and make it safer, drowning you out of what it's made. We're presenting, if you want to...