 Good morning everybody. Good morning. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. We're going to go ahead and get started. People are going to continue to dribble in. I understand there was an accident somewhere in the vicinity, so sorry for those who were caught up in it and glad you could make it here. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm really delighted to have a chance to welcome everyone today, including those of you who are watching online. The US Institute of Peace was founded about 35 years ago by the US Congress with the mission of preventing, reducing, resolving violent conflict around the world. And we're dedicated to the proposition that this is a very practical, very possible endeavor, and it's absolutely essential for our collective security. And so we work with partners around the world linking research and training and practical applications of best methods in pursuit of this mission. And here in our global headquarters, we bring people together from across disciplines, from across political lines, to grapple with some of the critical issues that are critical for maintaining peace and stability globally, like this conversation today. So thank you everyone for joining us. And violent extremism is, of course, a topic that many of us have been working with and on for a number of years. Last year, or last week, we marked the 17th anniversary of 9-11, which was the worst terrorist attack here in the United States, and it reminds us of the urgency of our mission to build peace and to resolve conflict around the world. We also, of course, were reminded that before 9-11, there were about 2,000 terrorist attacks around the world. And by 2017, there were more than 10,000. So clearly we haven't solved this issue yet. Violent extremism in the intervening decade-plus, we have seen deeply rooted self in fragile states, particularly in Middle East, in parts of Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. And we're seeing that in these fragile states extremists find very fertile ground for recruiting the aggrieved, the disenfranchised, especially youth, and often are able to win public sympathy by providing the kinds of services that the governments in those countries have failed to do. And we've seen how violent extremism has not only strangled governments and societies, but also endangers U.S. interests abroad and our security here at home. We've seen U.S. allies and partners weakened, triggers of unsustainable mass migration around the world, and incredible disruption of people's lives and societies. Last year, Senator Graham asked USIP to host a task force on understanding the underlying causes of extremism in fragile states, with a focus on the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and the Sahel. These are the kind of task force and commissions that USIP often hosts at the request of Congress. So this task force is being led by Governor Tom Cain and Congressman Lee Hamilton, who come from respectively the Republican and Democratic parties. They led the 9-11 Commission 12 years ago, and they see this as the unfinished business of the unfulfilled recommendations of that task force. And they are joined by a bipartisan group of 13 other leading former policymakers, legislators, and experts. Last week, the task force released its interim findings report, and you can pick up a copy of it on our publications table or find a copy of it online, and I urge you to take a look at it. The final report will not be released until January, so the hard work between now and then is to deliver recommendations on so what do we do about this, and what we see in some of the initial findings of the interim report released last week is the need to really commit ourselves collectively to longer-term approaches in order to prevent the spread of extremism, and one that both impedes the spread of militant networks, and staunches, extremist ideologies, but also promoting better governance, more inclusive governance in the most vulnerable regions, and we know of course, and everyone in this room knows better than most, that every fragile state is fragile in its own way, and one of the biggest challenges in coming up with recommendations on what to do is how to ensure you have the kind of granular understanding to inform policymakers. We often lack the kind of on-the-ground insights about what are the local dynamics that are driving extremism, and it is precisely these knowledge gaps that the Resolve Network addresses. The Resolve Network, and some of you maybe were there at its founding, it was founded in September 2015 with the goal of elevating key research insights and to facilitate exchanges between researchers and policymakers to close that knowledge gap. And so three years later, the Resolve Network has a very strong global consortium of researchers, organizations, policymakers, and practitioners committed to empirically driven, locally defined research on what drives violent extremism and what are the sources of community resilience to that extremism. So USIP is very proud to be one of the founders of Resolve, and to house Resolve Secretariat. The network is made possible through partnerships with the US Department of States Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and the US Agency for International Development. So I want to take a moment to recognize all the folks in both of those bureaus and offices and agencies and thank them again for their support today. I also want to thank the Resolve Network partner organizations that have traveled some from very far away to Washington to join us today. So thank you, especially those of you who had long and arduous journeys. We really appreciate you are being here to enrich and enliven the conversation, and it will be a lively day. We've put together a terrific program. There will be very interesting Ted-style conversations, lots of opportunities for people to engage. I know we have a room full of experts, people who bring incredible experience and expertise to this issue. I hope and I know that you will in the discussion sessions be lively participants. So thank you. I also want to encourage everybody to follow us on social media with at USIP and to participate in today's event with the hashtag Resolve Forum. I also want to make a quick plug before I turn the podium over. Tomorrow is September 21st. Who in this room knows what that day is? It is the International Day of Peace, something that everyone in this room should care about. We are trying to elevate that and create greater awareness. And so in 2015, same year as the Resolve Network was formed, we created the Peace Day Challenge to really raise the profile of the International Day of Peace and gauge partners around the world and to underscore that peace is possible, but it requires local commitment and local action. And so we encourage everybody to step up, take action to build peace tomorrow, share it using the social media tag, hashtag peace day challenge. So whatever you're doing, whatever your commitment is, post it on hashtag peace day challenge tomorrow and join the global conversation. Last year there were many millions of people who did so, so please join us. And you'll find on our website many ideas for action to be a part of this global effort. I know you'll do it. And with that, thank you again for joining us today. And I am delighted to now turn the microphone over to USIP's Director of Countering Violent Extremism and the Interim Executive Director of Resolve and a wonderful member of our team, Leanne Erdberg. She will give some welcoming remarks and give an overview of the day. Please welcome, Leanne. Thank you so much, Nancy. And thank you to USIP for consistent support for Resolve as well as the unwavering commitment to elevating the discourse on really difficult and challenging aspects of today's modern conflicts. Thanks to my amazing Resolve team here at USIP who every day I have the opportunity to learn from, I'm impressed by, and who have seamlessly put together today's event. I am just delighted to be here today as USIP's Director of Countering Violent Extremism and also as the Interim Director of the Resolve Network. And like you, I'm very excited to hear from our speakers and the salon style conversations and then engage in breakout sessions. So today represents an opportunity to all of us to push our thinking and our understanding about Violent Extremism. Yesterday, the State Department released its annual 2017 country reports on terrorism. And I think it many of its conclusions can be read on that document, but I think it really showcases to many of us how Violent Extremism is still evolving. There is so much that we are still learning about this phenomenon, and I hope we continue to seek out new and innovative ways to address Violent Extremism. I also hope that today serves as an important reminder and an important plea to fund research to help us better understand what it is that we're observing. So a little bit about Resolve. Resolve is committed to providing key insights on Violent Extremism. We do this by establishing connections between a multiplicity of stakeholders from academia to practitioners and try and network the community of practice that exists in this room and exists online that is committed to research around the topic of Violent Extremism. We also ask key questions to critical to elevating the field, expanding our knowledge base and bringing more empiricism, more rigor, and more locally informed information to the community of practice. We also hope to inform P&CVE activities undertaken by policymakers, practitioners, and peers. So today, as we start our third annual Resolve Forum, I'd like to focus on three areas that I think are still relatively underdeveloped in our conceptions of Violent Extremism, and I hope we can all leave today with a few more incremental steps in broadening what we know and what we don't know. The first is about complexity. We cannot simplify this challenge to our convenience. As humans, we are deeply desirous of simple linear solutions. X diagnosis equals Y cure. Yet it's hard to overstate the complexity associated with being able to uncover to understand and to address the dozens of factors that contribute in differing ratios in many locations to every individual who joins a Violent Extremist Organization. We must recognize the complexity associated with why and where Violent Extremism manifests, when it spreads, and how it implodes. And we have to address it with a complexity framework in mind. In a complex system, simply put, actors and environments interact with each other and self-organize, often in unpredictable ways. It doesn't mean that progress is out of reach, but it's a helpful frame for helping us move forward. For starters, Kumbaya is not on our menu today. And what I mean by that is complex systems are often distinguished by their ambiguity. That means that people at all levels and all levels of knowledge are going to disagree about what makes the system work and how to manage it. So I think we're going to have to get a little bit more comfortable with limited consensus on some of the most difficult aspects of this challenge. The second thing is that cause and effect is nearly impossible. As part of our community of practice, I think we would all benefit from a conceptual shift away from this linear causality and toward one that appreciates complexity. So I happen to love metaphors, so I'm going to start with one today, which is the vaccine metaphor is not that useful for Violent Extremism. But I'll give a couple that I think that might be a little bit more useful. The first is diet. The second is exercise. And as the redhead up on stage, the third is sunscreen. And what I mean by all of those type of metaphors is we're trying to think about risk factors and bolster Resiliencies to avoid the most dire of consequences rather than being able to inoculate vaccinate or some of the other public health metaphors that I think are very resident in this field. Lastly, I think this shift conceptually can allow for more interactivity and non sequencing of efforts that can show more collective trends and impacts beyond any one vector. Managing confusion and uncertainty in these contexts is critical. It's inevitable, but it's often overlooked in the favor of certain comfort of tactical level outcomes. How many times do we hear the terms rulebook or toolbox when we're talking about this challenge? A complexity frame allows us to move beyond those outputs and toward outcomes. It allows us to demand flexibility and shift away from a static plan and toward investing into local change agents that can develop innumerable solutions to improve circumstances in an unknown number of ways. The second point is a little bit more controversial, but when we elevate research, it means that we also diversify our understanding to include more than just expertise. The bad news is I might be out of a job. The good news is science has so much to offer our community of practice. Empirical research has so much to offer the field of countering violent extremism. Adequate sample sizes subject to rigorous methodologies allow us to see beyond persuasive anecdotes and hopefully allow us to check our gut instincts. Behavioral science has so much to offer us in terms of recognizing our own cognitive limits as we study violent extremism. For instance, we cannot simply will away bias. This applies to bias in the big sense, trying to understand an entire nation based on information of a select few impressions, but also about bias in the small sense, being overly convinced by the last thing that you heard or ignoring pertinent information that doesn't fit our mental schemas. Empiricism also allows us to ask better questions. Earlier this week, one of our researchers associated with Resolve's Lake Chad Basin Project, who you'll hear from later today, mentioned something that I think is worth sharing here. He said that a researcher's job is to hear something. Let's call it a hypothesis. Maybe it's from an expert. Maybe it's from a regular person. And then ask the question, how can I design a study that would prove this to be true? It is in the research design and the methodology that we can test hypotheses and not just accept them as their logical conclusion as first heard. So today we're going to hear a lot more from speakers who are trying to push the envelope on what are indicators and how we can really elevate empiricism in our work. My third point is that at its core, violent extremism is a deeply human problem. We can easily forget this because today's terrorists are so violent. They're so vicious. They're so intolerant that seeing them as human is frankly, it's a logical leap. But ultimately these groups only exist as long as people join them. And people joining or uniting with these groups oftentimes because they espouse something, they espouse an ideology, they espouse a philosophy, a group identity, a family-like structure, a means for meaning, a means for a position. And then they use violence to achieve these goals. So how can we bring about more what we know about human behavior to addressing this challenge? So neuroscience and behavioral science have so much to teach us from why we have a drive for affiliation to how easy it is to dehumanize others and why adventure seeking has such strong chemical components. These all have relevance to this challenge and we'll hear more about that today from our speakers. We'll also hear about personal experiences, the stories that we tell each other and they're incredibly powerful in this effort. We'll learn more about the personal and vulnerable side of violent extremism. We'll also learn about the comedic side and the positive alternatives throughout the day today. This human lens matters because the more that we can humanize communities around the world, we can build their resiliency in not becoming violent extremists. We also can demonstrate to a generation of youth that there are more than a risk factor and in the eyes of international policymakers that they have a stake in their own future and their human dignity matters. So that's a bit where we're coming from and I hope that this overview just lends to the import of today's discussion because these gaps in our collective understanding are precisely why we design today's effort this way. So now we're going to run through the day. In just a few minutes we're going to start our first session which goes until around 1030. These are TED talk style presentations and they focus on the individual and social conduits of violent extremism. You're going to hear from three incredible speakers. Then we're going to have our first breakout discussion. We will exit this room and move into the great hall where we will sit in tables of 10 and each discussion will be facilitated by many of Resolve's incredible partner organizations colleagues here in Washington and USIP experts. Please use this opportunity to contribute your own expertise via our interactive setup and we're going to capture your inputs and hopefully analyze them after the event as well. You will hear chimes when that session is over and those chimes are going to be your indicator throughout the day that you're going to have to move. That first set of chimes will have you moving back into this room and then we're going to hear from our Lake Chad project researchers about secularism in the Lake Chad basin. After that, we'll head back to the great hall for lunch which will be available from 1230 to 130. Then we're going to repeat the day. We're going to start back in here from 130 to 245 for our second set of TED speakers. Four incredible people, three here on stage, one via video in India. We're going to repeat the breakout sessions from 245 to 345 and then we'll end the program back in here From 345 to 5 we'll have another salon style discussion, this one on practical applications of research to policy and practice and then we're very excited to finish the day with closing remarks from Mr. Pete Morocco, Deputy Assistant Secretary and Senior Bureau Official for the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. After he concludes, we're going to have a reception. Don't worry, you don't have to remember all of this. There are staff all around who can help you answer questions big and small all day today. And we hope that you can stay for as long as you can. I'd like to be able to make the commitment that today will be more interesting than your inbox.