 Good afternoon. I feel incredibly tall. I think usually, well, anyway, it doesn't matter. I think usually the podium is next to the thing, so this is a different sound. I'm Carla Coppell, and I'm a Vice President here at U.S. Institute of Peace, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you this afternoon for what I know will be a terrific conversation around the role of communities in resisting violence and conflict. I have to say, when I was looking at the work of our wonderful group of speakers and preparing for the conversation this afternoon, it made me think back to a visit I took to speak with a group of Syrians who had come out of Syria into southern Turkey in Gaziantep and were telling the most incredible stories of how they had negotiated successfully at a community level to get ISIS to leave schools. So that they could reopen their schools, how they had worked with community members to maintain and reopen bakeries, because in their part of the world, the maintenance of the manufacturer, local manufacturer of bread, was critical to enabling communities to stay in place, notwithstanding conflict. And so having that bread and that bread production was critical. And it made me think that how much commonality there is around the world, though we won't be focused today on Syria, that there are communities all around the world who are really striving to create space, notwithstanding war and conflict. And so I'm eager to hear how the discussion unfolds, and it was a great pleasure to read Oliver's work and analysis from Columbia. For those who are interested, I am told that we should be tweeting using hashtag people power for peace. And we are recording the conversation, and it is being cast as well, webcast as well. So greetings to those who are viewing online. And what we're going to do is have a series of opening remarks from our panelists, and then we're going to turn it in for a discussion. And so I'm going to invite our four esteemed speakers up to the stage. Oliver Kaplan, who was just concluded as a senior fellow with USIP, and is it concluded formally? I don't know. I don't know. As assistant professor at the Corbelle School of International Studies at the University of Denver, Mauricio Garcia Doran, who's the executive director of Jesuit refugee services in Columbia, and Ana Sanchez Garzoli, who's senior associate for the Andes for the Washington office on Land America, and Steve Pumper, who just today begins work as the director of US programs with Crisis Group, and was a senior policy scholar until, what was that, Friday? Yeah. Friday with the US Institute of Peace. And really look forward to a robust conversation. Take it away, Oliver. Thank you, Carla. And welcome, everybody. It's great to have you here. And I just want to say that I'm really grateful for the opportunity to spend time here at the US Institute of Peace. It's really an amazing place. And the one thing I've noticed is it has really an amazing culture of gratitude. And it's been just really a great experience being here. But, you know, peacemakers go figure that they have this great culture of gratitude. So wonderful. I'd just like to say a few thank yous before I get into some formal remarks. I'd like to thank the whole nonviolent action team here at USIP, including Maria Steffen, who couldn't be here today, and especially Tabitha Thompson, who played a really critical behind-the-scenes role in getting this, helping get this event together, as well as the USIP's public affairs office. I'd also like to just note that USIP's Columbia work is synonymous with Ginny Bouvier. And her inspirational work and early reports really validated my early steps and kept me going as a student working on this project. You know, thinking that if someone from USIP really believes in a topic, it must be worth pursuing. And she is sorely missed, and we honor her by continuing the struggle for peace and justice. And I know that she would be very pleased about us coming together today. And I just want to say it's great to see so many friendly faces in the audience. And I really appreciate you coming to celebrate this project with me and digesting it. It really means a lot. It's been a long road, and it's nice that this project is seeing the light of day. I'd like to welcome some current and former students from the Cornell School at the University of Denver who are here. Great to see you. And I'd also like to just note that in this project, I had to take on a lot of debts of gratitude to colleagues and student research assistants and many other people who gave input from around the world. So I'm really thankful to people in Columbia, the Philippines, and elsewhere who shared their time and insights during the research. And so I'd also just like to give a brief welcome to the panelists who are here. Mauricio and I were friends from the beginning of the project. And it's always good to know that you have a Jesuit in your corner. Mauricio has accompanied a lot of communities, and he said to me early on if I was ever in any trouble to give him a call, and he would come for me. And I'm really glad I never needed him, except for now. And I'm really glad you came. So thank you, Mauricio, for coming up from Columbia. We also have Jimena Sanchez, and I've really admired Jimena's work and advocacy and commitment from afar. And I'm humbled to learn from her expertise and reflections. And Steve, I recently met here as we were both fellows at USIP, and I can't think of anyone better to consider the broader implications of this research for violence prevention. And so really I know that the expertise on stage and also our expertise in the audience is really humbling, so it's great to have you all here. So I'm going to speak for about 10 minutes just to give an overview of the argument and some of the findings, because I know, well, most of you probably have read the book, but maybe a few of you haven't read yet, which, you know, as a professor I won't take too much offense at, but I thought I would just give an overview so that people sort of understand a bit about where the book is coming from. And so the book deals with the puzzle of how civilians protect themselves, when caught between armed groups. And civilians face problems of things like the fog of war, where identities are vague, as well as things like the law of silence, where civilians are so afraid that they don't talk or cooperate with each other. And yet, while we often focus on violence and victims, many victims have also, or many people have also survived. And so to start, I'd like to just go and contrast the experiences of two villages from a case study that appeared in the book. The villages of La India and San Tropelle, which are both in Colombia. And in 1998, in the villages of San Tropelle, paramilitary forces brutally executed 12 woodcutters in this village. And yet, just a short time later, in 2001, this same group was preparing to kill 11 residents of La India, but they didn't because a community organization that had formed there, known as the Peasant Workers Association, came to their defense and advocated on their behalf. And these 11 people lived. And this is really fascinating and raises a puzzle. How are communities like La India able to act? And more broadly, how common are these actions? And how can we tell whether they affect violence? So that's really where this book comes down. This is a real puzzle because it's not obvious that unarmed civilians in civil wars can protect themselves non-violently against heavily armed combatants. And yet, we see cases where they do. So to study this question was a bit difficult since community actions are often hidden and occur in rural areas where the conflict plays out. And so to study the question, I really had to get out there and go to different villages and small communities and try to understand people's daily life and how they dealt with the conflict. And so in Colombia, this meant taking quite a variety of forms of transportation, including what are known as chivas or country buses, which are basically a bus put on top of a Mack truck. Jeeps or, as Colombians refer to them, willies, motorcycles, bestias or beasts or mules, lanchas or motor canoes, and actually some unbelievably steep hikes in mudboots, which were quite exhausting. I also did a little bit of fieldwork in the Philippines and include some case study analysis of cases from Syria and Afghanistan as well. So I want to just go over the main argument in very simple terms. The main argument posits that as civilians organize, they can implement non-violent strategies, and these strategies will lead to, in some cases, reductions in violence. And I want to just read a short quote about the importance of organization. This was a time when I attended a church service with members of actually the peasant workers association who were quite organized. And I sort of saw this in full relief when I was at the service. So I'm just going to read a couple sentences here. As the service began, the people sang hymns and read along from the prayer book. I quickly lost my place, however. So I quietly nudged my companion, an elder conciliator from the community to ask him where we were. So it was not to disturb the songs he whispered, I don't know. Since he was following along and singing the pages with his finger, I quizzically asked, what do you mean you don't know? And he looked over at me sheepishly, shrugged his shoulders, and said, I don't read. And so this was really a fascinating moment where I realized that this person who was an extremely humble, humble means, humble background was part of this really powerful community organization. And that as these kinds of people could organize, it gave them the capacity to confront violence. And so in that community, some of the non-violence norms that they were organized on came from the Adventist church and sort of being in that environment, hearing that response was really striking and really underscored the importance of organization. And so really what that organization does is it creates power where there is no power, and so it gives communities an internal management capacity. And I look at two types of, really two types of organizations. Around the world we see things like formal peace organizations, such as the Peasant Workers Association, and actually this is a picture from 2013. And we also see other less formal organizations, and in Colombia I look at what are known as junta councils or village councils, and these kinds of councils we see in a lot of places around the world. And those, in the case of Colombia, these are locally elected councils that historically had inconsistent contact with the state, but helped with public goods planning and later came to take on protective roles. One example where I saw this was studying the case of the towns of V&E and between them in the department of Cundinamarca where I did some field research. And in this town I discovered that a very proactive priest in the early 1960s helped stimulate collective action in the community after the church roof collapsed. And based on that he organized people to help rebuild the church and what he told me when I actually met him in Bogota when he was in his late 80s was that that sort of showed to him that it was possible to organize around other issues as well and it left a lasting legacy of community organization and this came in to be very important when the conflict arrived. And so when I interviewed residents they told me various stories about how important this community capacity was one man said in a quite funny quote United we move ahead alone we're screwed. So, para adelante cuando unidos solos jodidos and sort of speaks to the broader power of organization of these village councils that they see that was so important. So, that didn't quite, that shouldn't quite come out this was going to actually I'll skip back to the some of the strategies we see here on the cover. So the main thing I look at in terms of non-violent strategies is how civilians advocate for their own autonomy and self-rule. And I look at different strategies so that communities can rule their own communities including managing what type of violence is visited on a community. And I look at really approximately six principal strategies that I identified in my research covert actions such as internal strategies of managing the community and these include things like norms or a culture of peace mechanisms for dispute resolution so disputes don't reach armed actors in early warning systems and then also identify what I call overt strategies or external facing strategies and these include things like investigation mechanisms to clarify the fog of war and halt threats by armed actors against members of the community dialogue and also protest and one of the sort of latent strategies that some communities also take as arming so local self-defense and I actually don't study that so much because the book is largely about non-violence but it's a strategy that occurs and should be acknowledged. So let me just skip ahead to where we were. So one example of one of these strategies I saw in the Philippines is that some communities known as peace zones have mounted efforts to ban weapons from their communities so you can think of this as community-led gun control keeping armed actors from entering the communities with weapons. Another strategy is protests and so in Colombia this happens quite a bit when armed actors convene communities to try to get them to submit to their will and they often will hold these meetings in places like the community Polideportivo or the multi-sport court which is sort of the largest space in a community where you see things like soccer and basketball in the same space and these cases where communities were organized it was more likely to see some kind of protest calling out the armed groups for their efforts to repress the community and these would often exacerbate divisions within the ranks of armed actors and in some cases pull on their reputational concerns. So the book also has some statistical analysis about how these community organizations are correlated with violence and I just want to show a single graph here which is sort of the core result from this analysis which shows that where communities are more organized you see on average a 25% reduction in forms of selective violence and so this was based on a much messier regression analysis but it sort of speaks to the effect of these village councils so where you have higher levels of village councils you see less on average less violence and so why might this be this is a difficult question to answer but as part of the research I interviewed ex-combatants to understand why their groups took the decision to use violence or not and how was that conditioned on community capacity and the nonviolent strategies that civilians used and so I'll just have a couple of quotes that I think were really enlightening one quote was from a FARC sub commander that I interviewed a former FARC sub commander who said an adage that's either Shakespeare or Aristotle I'm not quite sure which one but the quote is a single swallow does not make a summer and that's sort of to imply that a single individual alone won't have so much effect or influence but a whole group of people a flock of swallows is something that the armed group has to take into account and can't ignore and so that community organization to implement nonviolent strategies really figures in their thinking according to that quote paramilitary groups actually made similar quotes and there's a quote from community minutes that I had access to when they had meetings with armed groups they were taking notes word for word and one of the quotes that a paramilitary said is to a community that was sort of trying to inquire about whether they could defend their autonomy of paramilitary influence one of the paramilitary said if it's the entire community that wants it we would respect the decision but if it's only two or three people that don't want us we will stay here we will continue to be in the community and again they voiced things like reputational concerns and moral concerns and so I'm just going to wrap up with this nice picture of the horizon for some final thoughts and then I'm happy to turn it over to the panelists I think it's really interesting especially what we're seeing in Colombia today is that a lot of these communities that organized actually ended up outlasting a lot of armed actors and this was underscored in a journal entry actually of a leader from the peasant workers association where he when I looked at these records he wrote the following to you that wanted violence this ended in shit for the right to life, peace and work and so you can see there's quite a humorous undertone to some of these quotes and the Spanish version I think is even maybe a bit funnier and actually rhymes so I think that's a really important point that these communities should be taken seriously because they've had these lasting effects and they've survived quite long periods of violence and so just to wrap up I think the goal with this work was to try to translate what people were doing who don't necessarily have voices and aren't always heard to explain to others how they did things and how they survived the difficult years of conflict and I think if I got halfway there doing that I'll be happy and I'll take it a final thought that a number of the local peacemakers that I've interacted with have said peace is an everyday process or that everyday especially in conflict zones we need a continual effort to promote pro-peace norms of nonviolent action and make sure that people remember these ways of behaving and I think that implication stands true for Afghanistan and Syria and other countries I think the main takeaway is that there are tools that civilians have innovated that we need to understand and we can think about what if we invested more in the importance of civilian peacemakers and so in short I think we should look to civilians as a source of peace thank you and I'm happy to turn over now to our panelists thank you so much Oliver and I should have started I think by saying congratulations publication of resisting war and thank you as well for a sort of quick and concise summary of the case that it's making and with that as our starting point for the conversation I'm going to turn now to Mauricio for his comments on the frame that Oliver has provided and give his observations and thoughts well it's impossible to start speaking without having in memory Jeannie Bouvier the last time I was in USAP many years ago was in a panel organized by her and we really in Colombia are in debt with all her contribution to building peace in the country she was really amazing she was connected with everyone in all social levels in all regions of the country yeah it's an amazing memory I still remember the moment in 2007 when Oliver Kaplan entered to my office at SINEP asking for help in his doctoral research about the way communities in the midst of the conflict resisted to the armed actors this was the initial contact of a long-term connection and collaboration between us when I was researching for my PhD thesis on the peace movement in Colombia I used categories that were applied to the peace movements in Europe and in the US but always adapting and adjusting them to the reality of a country which are an ongoing armed conflict specifically I took categories used by SINEP to see the type of strategies deployed in the peace movement in the US basically four of them educating, protesting organizing and politicking in the Colombian case one more emerged given the importance of the resisting dynamic of the population in relation to the armed actors so I introduced it in my research and in the collective action for peace database nevertheless the focus of my PhD dissertation was not only civil resistance but also the whole peace mobilization in the country in the Colombian context we have lived an academic paradox there is an amazing volume of work concerning situations with plural violence that plagues the country but a poor contribution of explicit and critical studies of the peace and resisting initiatives to war in this sense clearly we can say that the war of Oliver Kaplan is a meaningful contribution to fill the gap existing in the academic war in Colombia and also elsewhere related with civil resistance in war times thank you Oliver for this contribution in a unraveling the complete reality of resisting as civilian actors in the midst of an armed conflict showing their capacity for agency and autonomy this is not a black and white situation where you have a clear path for the armed actors but it's really a continuum that drain from a total position to complete capitulation to the armed actor this is to say that resisting is a gray area of interactions among civilians population and armed actors in this sense and I want to highlight the methodological approach used by Kaplan because it combines not only quantitative and qualitative methods historical sources of data and qualitative fieldwork but also it looks the way to respond to the complexity of civil resistance in the midst of an armed conflict with several differences and particularities dependent on the regional context the moment of the conflict and the armed actors involved Oliver Kaplan pay special attention to grasp the specific attitudes of the armed actors towards civilians I can confirm from my own experience of working with displaced population in a very conflictive region that at least two important issues emerge related with this relationship of the armed actors with the communities the first one is the image they have of the civilian population is if they see them as a collaborator or if they see them as enemies there is a incredible story I have with the paramilitaries when time we were working with the peace communities in the Bajua Tractor River and we used to have church agents we used to go to speak with all the armed actors we see the guerrillas, we see the paramilitaries we see the army and we tried to keep the situation looking for security for the communities one time we were with Carlos Castaño he was a leading man in the paramilitary groups and we were with the peace community leaders and they presented to him the community and what were the purpose what they were doing and when they finished to speak Castaño said what you say is really true you are the most interesting experience of counter-revolutionary work in the same he feel that the communities were no affecting the work they were doing the presence of the paramilitaries in the region and was possible to negotiate some security issues related with the communities because they can see the situation in that way the other issue that are important for the armed actors is the territory dispute who control the territory and how strategic is that territory this is a key issue that Oliver mentioned in the book in the research and in this sense I had a few bad experience with the guerrillas to be honest in the sense that obviously FARC was in the midst of the population in many cases was connected with the population with family and so on but the mechanism for social control of the communities was the presence of militias of militianos within the communities and the crazy scene was to keep this working they use selective killings in order to maintain the communities a complete loyalty to the armed group and there was a way of keeping, maintaining and we have to move in this complexity and also we have experience with the militaries because given that they don't have a continuous presence in the territory people feel them more as a occupation force that's a really ally of the communities so there were tensions with the sometimes I remember one time a commander of the navy asked me father people don't support us they don't sell us fish, they don't sell us banana plantae, they don't sell us other things and I remember I told them well you arrive and you go later and people have to keep here facing the armed actors so if you if you will stay here and protect, really protect and give security to the communities they will support you but no in this way I give this example to show the complexity of negotiating security negotiating protection negotiating autonomy of the communities in the midst of different armed actors how communities protect themselves question that Oliver tried to respond in the book is crucial in the war we do in GRS with population force to displace in addition to the humanitarian support we give to the displace population we also work in preventing new displacements one critical issue is the topic of civilian agency specifically how to empower communities and their capacity for resilience so that they can resist the pressure of the armed actors in the regions where they live without having to flee and migrate our accompaniment to people in these circumstances could be enriched with many of these elements that Oliver has found in his research in Colombia for instance organized community collective and no violent way have greater resilience to armed actors than those who are not the tactical repertory they can use is clearly described by Kaplan in chapter two it's a very interesting that this type of research of this type of approach to the civil resistance could have a very practical support in the work we are doing because despite the peace agreement with FARC there are still violence in Colombia and we are facing the challenge to support communities that are still in the midst of the conflict so a reflection like Oliver Kaplan has done in the book is really useful for us and help us to develop and train people and to help people to empower themselves in order to be able to resist in a civil and no violent way in their own land Thank you so much for those comments I have to when you were talking about the willingness of the community to engage with you made me think very early in my career I was working in the Philippines and there was insurgent activity where I was working and I said well you know should I be concerned is there a time I need to leave in the community and said no no no we've talked to them they know you're okay you can go ahead I said alright I guess I'm taking your word for it yeah they know they're insurgent movements and what the situation is yeah so very interesting Jimena Good afternoon I'm Jimena Sanchez and I work for the Washington office an independent non-government organization based in Washington that basically monitors U.S. foreign policy towards the region and we've been very privileged to develop a series of partnerships with many of these resistance and peace communities throughout the years and been able to facilitate their access to U.S. policy makers to help further their agenda Ginny Bouvié is sorely missed she was somebody who was always incredibly supportive of these communities that in some respects were not very well liked by a lot of people because of the fact that they refused to follow one political agenda or the other so I think she'd be happy to see that what is being done today and continuing and I think that Oliver's book is incredibly important because the history in Colombia is not just the violence the massacres the horrible things that took place during the conflict and that ending but also the resistance of many different civilians throughout that time who are able to negotiate and navigate in the midst of an incredibly complex security situation and it's that civil society those civilians and resistance movements are really going to build the democracy in Colombia now in the post conflict especially in some of the most remote areas so everyone knows Colombia is very unique in the sense that there's a form of Colombia and then there's the actual Colombia it's a country with one of the highest displaced populations in the world and with the most advanced legislation to address displaced people but it's also one of the places where security is least implemented for displaced people and civilians and among those displaced and are specific groups mostly rural populations and Afro descendants and indigenous people we've seen that throughout the conflict in Colombia or the conflicts in Colombia especially the one the longest standing one with the FARC civilians have taken on different forms to resist and these have different names like peace communities you have spaces for peace you have urban peace spaces you have humanitarian corridors and then you've also had the development of nonviolent guards to try and keep the peace especially among ethnic groups what are these basically they're basically self-protection strategies and they're based on international humanitarian law basically what these civilians have done is taken the notion of international humanitarian law and made it a reality in different parts of the country by interpreting it to their situation and scenario and using that as their credibility in order to prevent being harmed and being able to advance and so theoretically international humanitarian law in particular the principle of distinction between civilians and non-civilians the concept that there are certain spaces that can't be occupied by different armed groups because that places people in jeopardy and then the UN guiding principles on internal displacement which are extrapolated from humanitarian law as well as human rights law combined have been basically what these communities have used as their political basis how does it work well basically you have designated spaces that the community determines are areas where none of the armed groups both legal and illegal can come into the space because in Colombia groups were always being the fight basically was through civilians you saw not as much direct combat in a lot of these rural communities as much as you would see groups trying to fish out the militias or folks who they thought were basically supporting the other group and so by creating that space you have first more of a guarantee that these groups are not going to basically stigmatize that whole community is one way or the other or say that they are collaborators so you would have that actual physical space then you would have the development of a culture within that community of peace which also included in many rural communities their own self education system because these areas were so insecure that teachers did not want to teach there or so poor that the state really didn't reach those areas and in the case of Afro-descendant communities you also had within that context what is known as ethno-education so basically a whole educational curriculum based on the type of society they wanted to live in versus what was really what they were living in you also had rules often such as all weapons are banned alcohol, drugs were banned and all of this was very much enforced by a specific council or grouping of elected people in the community but basically it was every member of that community committing to these principles and watching out for the others to make sure that there was coherence and really the more coherent the communities the least they suffered in terms of violence although they weren't completely immune to it this was accompanied by political accompaniment so national organizations in Colombia would physically be present in those areas would basically document the situation and alert the world and all the institutions about what was going on and also help with legal cases to further justice in these situations so you have the communities like in the Bajo Atato of Cavida which were basically displaced Afro-Columbians that found themselves in a situation in an urban setting after 1996 where thousands of people were forced to flee due to a paramilitary operation called Operation Genesis throughout the whole region to a situation of complete desperation where they saw that in urban areas they could not survive the skills they were discriminated against for being Afro-descendant and for being from rural areas and they decided we're just going to go back and we're going to try to live within that context you have spaces like the urban space in Buenaventura Puente Nayero which is basically one street and now they're trying to open it up to two streets where paramilitaries cannot go in and Buenaventura an area where there have been some very disturbing practices such as the chop-up houses by some of these illegal armed groups became an area, this space where such houses were closed down and within that area people could actually beyond security also start to cultivate different community activities that they weren't able to do before out of fear you have the famous San José de Apartado peace community which is another example of this place anyhow during the Alvaro Uribe Vélez years unfortunately part of the attitude of the Colombian government was to promote something called democratic security policy that basically erased the notion of distinction between civilians and non-civilians and many of these communities that were throughout the entire country weren't able to survive through that but some did and the ones that did formed a network in the country that is called COMPAS that basically went on to become a collective political voice and had a lot of input into different issues having to do with victims transitional justice and reintegration and so forth during the peace process. At the same time you also have urban groups the IDP groups with other self-protection mechanisms and you've had the indigenous resistance movement which is the Guardia Indígena which basically the concept there is if an armed group is coming in to do something they shouldn't be doing about 100 indigenous people get together with their sticks and pressure the group to leave or if something bad is committed they basically hold those actors accountable a similar process is seen with the Palenqueros which is the black communities in the Bolívar department also with these guards why these guards and not the police well because in Colombia you've had a really bad history of the public forces being involved in the violence a lot of distrust with them they have fear of interacting with these communities because they could have reprisals due to one of the groups affected so I think this is a very important history that is now and still is ongoing so now we're in the so-called post conflict we're really in the post accord phase because security remains a major concern in Colombia so much from the part of the FARC and less so now with the just signed a ceasefire but more from the successor of paramilitary groups and other criminal groups that continue to operate throughout the country and see many of these communities and these people as a major affront because of their high profile because they're the ones who are going to be presenting cases in the transitional justice because they're the witnesses and so right now I think it's very important that the world doesn't lose attention to what's going on in Colombia it's important for there to be visibility of what's going on you can say that very positive things have happened but there needs to be work in order to consolidate that and also these folks need that political protection so that they can continue to move forward another issue is the ethnic perspective Colombia is not a monolith it's a very diverse country with very different regional tendencies and different ethnic perspectives and also it's a country that is always praised because of the integration of gender in its peace accord but actually getting that gender perspective implemented on the ground is a lot of work so these groups are going to be important in the reconstruction of memory of what happened reconciliation and in strategies to prevent the violence from starting again it's important for them to also bring a lot of this knowledge to other countries in other communities in the world since it could be a source of knowledge useful to other communities it's also very important that organizations that accompany them like Peace Brigades International or Fellowship of Reconciliation these are internationals that basically physically accompany these communities and report about their situation internationally continue to receive funding to be able to work and lastly that like I said earlier that the international community really monitor and encourage Colombians institutions to respond to these situations and to incorporate the recommendations of these communities moving forward thank you so much I really appreciate the additional texture you gave to this idea of a community being organized and what that means within the Colombian context and also you provided a perfect segue to our next speaker Steve because you talked not only about Colombia but the juxtaposition of international law and norms so take it away Steve so I know it's the time is moving on and we want to have room for discussion so I will be effusive in my praise and brief in my remarks so I join in the culture of gratitude that Oliver spoke of it was really just wonderful to be part of this community and nice to be back just 12 hours after I left and to be part of this panel in particular yeah I know it's been a terrible separation but good work back together this isn't about me it is about a really interesting piece of work and very impressive in its scope and useful in challenging us to think about how the experience of Colombian civilians asserting their autonomy and helping to protect their own families and communities might become a model for other parts of the world and it's interesting that you alluded to those norms Carla I was just struck by him in his presentation about the role that IHL has played in sort of providing a sort of neutral language for you know arguing the case for the protection of these communities in a world where one hears an awful lot about the degradation of IHL norms and can sometimes emerge from conversations with a sense of utility when talking about the role that IHL plays out there to understand that just how important that it has been for these communities is really to me anyway a nice sort of shot in the arm I guess I was asked to speak to the broader question of you know applicability beyond Columbia because of the experience I had in the last administration working on atrocity prevention policy at the National Security Council where I helped to organize and chaired a body called the Atrocities Prevention Board that was focused on protecting vulnerable civilians all around the world the sort of premise for that work which is that the United States has a strong national interest moral responsibility for preventing atrocities against civilians even in countries where we don't have traditional strategic interests or economic interests is one that's gained quite a bit of currency over the last two decades the emphasis found recognition in the national security strategies the Bush and Obama administrations the bipartisan genocide prevention task force report which was co-authored or cosponsored by USIP and the mass atrocities directive that President Obama issued in 2011 in a 2016 executive order and I believe it's still a concept that has some currency in the current administration although they're not as vocal about it those documents the directive and the executive order continue to be operative so the United States government is in the atrocity prevention business but of course aspiring to prevent atrocities and actually preventing them are two very different things one of the Obama administration was that by organizing the US government to keep an eye on flash points and emerging crises and by committing to treat these crises as priorities even where traditional US strategic and economic interests were not at stake we could make a difference that this was mostly the case in countries that we might otherwise have looked past as a government the Burundi excuse me the Burundi's in the Central African Republics and sometimes success in the space involved helping to freeze a crisis at bad rather than watching it slip into conflagration but the experience was generally affirming in the sense of giving the sense that you know focused effort could actually be worthwhile in terms of helping save lives that said there was real there were real limits that we found in this model for prevention we saw in Libya that throwing every collective response tool in the UN toolkit to meet an atrocity situation wouldn't necessarily guarantee that a stable country would emerge on the other side in Syria conversely we saw that if the international community failed to muster a collective response it would even look worse so to come back to the book Resisting War we live in a world where I think the United States government and other like-minded governments do see their interest in preventing atrocities and protecting vulnerable civilians all around the world but are also very much in the market for better tools to help meet these objectives so what does the book tell us about how to do this I actually walked away with three broad points first and I think most self evidently there is a tendency I think for policy makers in a big government like the US government to focus when they're thinking about prevention on tools that give it leverage over potential perpetrators so that they don't engage in abusive behavior and that's of course often necessary but what I think Oliver's book is very useful in reminding us is that we need to be looking at the potential victims as well and thinking about how can we help them provide and be a bulwark against abuse we need to be thinking about the benefits of helping communities to organize to use their moral and reputational leverage to provide each other with early warning and that was something that we heard about civil society doing some terrific work on back during the counter LRA efforts during Joseph Coney's heyday and also alluded to this gathering evidence that can be used for sanctions designations and prosecution if there's violence this is the kind of work that's probably best done well in advance of a potential crisis for example if there's a flash point election on the distant horizon that leaves a chance to engage and organize at the community level second the somewhat tangential point concerns the role that vulnerable civilians can play in shaping the national debate around tools of atrocity prevention folks who follow this field know that the US government places an enormous emphasis on accountability in the idea that perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humanity can't be allowed impunity but our rhetoric the government's rhetoric frankly often outstrips reality because perpetrators in countries that don't cooperate with or support accountability efforts to give one example Omar Bashir a fugitive for international justice leader of Sudan too easily travels from country to country in his neighborhood neighboring governments are either hostile to the accountability or agenda or don't want to turn on a neighbor or some such but those kinds of attitudes really need to change if we want the accountability agenda to achieve all that it promises to achieve and I think that's only going to happen if there's a grassroots effort grassroots support for accountability doesn't have to be the international criminal court being invited into every single jurisdiction because I know there are sensitivities around that could be a regional or a hybrid court so long as it's actually an independent and impartial forum where people can be brought to justice the bottom line is a useful expression for civilian autonomy in my mind one like that I would like to see encourage would be to insist that those who commit mass murder not going to get away with it even if they have high office the last point Oliver's book is very careful I think not to over claim for the impact of civilian autonomy in terms of managing and mitigating violence in some communities you registered a 25% diminution in violent deaths which is nothing to dismiss it's saving that number of lives is very significant but it's also not a panacea and of course the book also notes that as conflicts escalate become more protracted this mechanism becomes less effective so this is just a reminder that when we think about atrocity we need to be in a compound state of mind how do we empower civilians to do more and how do we mobilize community opinion around accountability and how do we generate more effective leverage against perpetrators and what do we do when the UN fails to support collective action etc that challenge is sufficiently big and complex and varied that we can't afford to focus on one approach to the exclusion of others so again thanks to Oliver for a stimulating read and to my panelists for this great discussion and I guess I turned it back to you Carla great thank you great set of issues and I wanted to actually first turn back to the group and ask about this 25% because we started in Oliver you said there was 25% less violence in these communities that were organized and then we had various discussions about organization whether in Colombia or elsewhere and I'm curious the extent to which you view the organization as something that was derivative of historic or traditional or customary norms within these communities or whether this was the kind of organization that could be imposed from outside through capacity building or training or the guarantee of authority to a community from an international organization or from a central government so that we can then kind of think about within that broader context how you get to that diminution in violence thank you everybody I'll take the first stab at this question so the key question is where does organization come from and I think there are a lot of sources I think in a number of communities they've had histories of cooperation either in Colombia or elsewhere in part because of absence of the state but in part because of different problems they had to deal with in providing collective goods but the real question is can they be imposed what are the sources of organization and actually one of the sources that I saw in Colombia and as well in other countries is actually histories of violence and so violence can be thought of as having two effects it can harm organization but it can also stimulate organization and so I think thinking about those conditions is really important I go into it a little bit in more depth in the book but I think there's an argument to be made that violence in some cases actually stimulates cooperation to then go and address violence and actually I think Mauricio's book shows this quite well where peace movements were a reaction to in many cases to violence I think some of the examples in my book actually speak quite well to international efforts to assist communities that want international assistance and that want to organize as well as local level and Colombian government efforts to help organize communities and so the example of the priest who saw the church roof collapse I think is one example the Peace Corps was involved in Colombia for quite a while I think we actually have some former volunteers who were involved with that work at one point and they were also a key source of bringing external expertise to help people get organized and sometimes I think people just need they want and need a catalyst and in those cases I think international support is helpful they can also share ideas and strategies and then the community can decide for itself how it wants to proceed with those I'll limit my remarks there and let the other panelists jump in because in fact they were quite involved as sources of helping communities come together so I will say that is true that there is a reduction of violence in some context but obviously there is a combination of factors a combination of elements that made this possible because you could find communities that in similar situation but without organization or without territorial control or without other factors they they face a critical level of violence and it depends in many cases of the of the armored actor it's not let's say it's not unknown that near 70% of the killings during the conflict were of the paramilitary groups they were really and normally they use massacres no selective killings tend to use the guerrilla groups and you can find this in different places and depending on these people are able or not to negotiate this and to find a way of managing the situation with these different armored groups but I think it's very interesting that Oliver can find in a historical period and making a correlation that this reduction of violence is true when there are organized communities able to manage the relationship with the armored groups in other level and not only in a very reactive level but they catch on space for negotiating and dealing with these complex actors and I think this is what is possible to find and there are to say there are space for self-protection and space for autonomy but this is not a this is not a self-evidence in the sense it's not that always could be in this way it's a possibility but depends on how the communities wore this and sort this out and they can resolve always in a very complex relationship with the armored groups and they say they move in a gray area and it's not a perfect relationship it's not always the same case but it's a possibility that you find in a very concrete cases Yes, I would agree with everyone here that this is not a panacea and it's not something that necessarily always works it's also something that requires a lot of effort in terms of sustaining it has to happen with an organized political response with an international response with times a judicial response for it to really have an effect is it something customary from history or is it something that can come from the outside I mean I think it really depends on the communities you're talking about when you're talking about indigenous communities or the Palenque which is the free black state and Bolívar that resistance came historically from ancient times before and during colonialism with other communities in rural areas or displaced communities you've seen that it's a reaction to the violence but to give an example in the Curvado community in the Choco you have a situation where lands were illegally taken over by paramilitary groups and multiple oil palm companies have planted their operations in collectively owned African Colombian lands and there you have seen that these communities have been able to sustain themselves because there's been a judicial response there are 13 basically company owners and investors being investigated and several have been arrested for their links to paramilitaries and for having caused displacement while you have the Yurumangi community another African Colombian community in the Valle de Calca area that basically decided that coca was the main source of conflict and insecurity in their area and they banded together and decided to eradicate the coca and there the response of the state was really to do nothing they saw that there were reprisals right away against them by the FARC at that time for ripping up the coca and so I really think it's a very fragile thing that needs to be nurtured and also depends on how much of a political response it receives Great I have several more questions all lined up but I wanted to turn the floor over to you all because I'm sure there are questions or comments in the audience so we have microphones that will be passed around if you have a question please identify yourself and pose the question we can bring them back up to our experts Hi I'm Jory I'm a PhD student at University of Maryland from reading your work and other people's work I've seen that sometimes the civilian resistance comes from a single person potentially a priest or another religious figure a shaman and sometimes it's much more of these community organizations how much have you seen one versus the other and have you noticed that one's more successful when confronting rebel groups Interesting question so this is a tricky question you know what comes first organization or a leader of that organization you see both but I think it's more likely that you'll get leaders from communities that are organized and take someone to organize it but I think that leaders are more effective good leaders are more effective when they have the backing of the community and I think the quotes from the FARC leader and the paramilitary leader suggest that that backing is what makes the armed groups take the civilians into account and it also makes it harder to just target a leader and disrupt the community organization so where the organization is stronger that's not an effective solution in a sense for the armed actors to shut down that community and so that backing it's not just the leader alone but actually that capacity to continue on so If I may just and get your questions ready but I just wanted to key off of that because all four of you talked about the need to build up organizational capacity whether it's in Colombia or elsewhere and Mauricio you talked about building community resilience and Oliver you talked about investing in civilian peacemakers and I'm curious if you all or Steve from elsewhere have certain ideas with regard to what the investment is that leads to that organization to back up the leaders how do you make those investments are there certain keys to success I will say very clear at least for the most successful experience I have known in Colombia they pass through a very long period of formation they have a training many many times a choose based training in many regions and then in working together and after 10 12 years 15 years of working in this the situation of violence obligate them to act and they are ready for this because they have been building this community capacity so in the moment in the critical moment of violence they have the capacity to react and also something that Oliver say to react despite some of them can be killed and there are other people ready to take the lead and to move the movement forward and this is very critical because in many cases they for example in the case of La India that Oliver mentioned in the book sort of the leaders the main leaders were killed but they can react positively and can reorganize themselves and there were new leaders taking the lead and you can also see this in some of the peace communities and you find this in the indigenous communities and you find this in many cases but they have a very long history of training, formation, preparation and organizing themselves is not a three days workshop and they are ready for this no it's a very long process and it's a way of finding hope in the midst of a very difficult situation I would just add that in terms of what type of formation and so forth I would ask the communities themselves or often in the case of the communities we work with they ask for what they think they need at the time and just like father said it's something that is often stronger in the second or third generation after going through periods of starts and tries and tribulations and seeing what really works for them in that situation what is interesting is this compas group that has brought together these different communities and they've started doing like self capacity like one community that went through this and Putumayo is now doing it in another area of what they learned and so forth but I think more than anything the investment needs to be something that is thought through with them and seeing what they need and I have the sort of least direct experience I think with these communities of the folks up here but my you know when I was looking through the book the memory that was evoked and I mentioned it in my remarks some of the work that invisible children and some of the other NGOs did in Uganda and the DRC on early warning back and I think it was 2010, 2011, 2012 sort of coming to communities and saying look we know you have a problem here is a capability that we can give you that will help you protect yourselves so I think there is a role for bringing certain kinds of well tailored solutions to a community and saying we'll teach you how to use this as a measure of protection Hi thanks Jenny McAvoy from Interaction I think one of the things that a number of you have actually touched on is the nature of the relationship between the armed group and the community and that seems to be a really influential and even decisive factor in the degree to which a community is able to influence the armed group I wonder if you can take that a little bit further and you know did you see or have you seen situations where the armed group or armed force is distant and feels no immediate sense of moral legal or political affiliation or obligation towards the affected population and therefore how does the community adapt and are there community strategies which you have seem to be effective in that kind of situation Thanks I think what we'll do is take a couple questions and then circle back and I don't want to be accused of bias to this side of the room so Andre if you could help me out oh okay great here in here go ahead Shaska Hello my name is Shaska Byerly I'm a fellow here I have a question for Father Mauricio and it builds upon a comment that he had made earlier today in which Father you were speaking about in your experience the linkages between corruption and the civil war the violent conflict in Colombia and what struck me was what you said that a lot of the community organizing and this the protection of the community I mean organizing to protect themselves also had to do with accountability and I wonder if you could just elaborate on that a little bit please Hello my name is Nastasi Stippo I've been working with the International Peace and Security Institute on the Americas program I focus on reintegration process in Colombia and my question is pretty simple is do you see a difference in accepting the reintegration of ex-combatants in these communities that are more organized so or any difference yeah or similarities etc thank you Who'd like to go first in terms of more legal affiliation towards the affected population you know this is just not not in not with a great study with evidence behind it just from experience having worked in Colombia many years I saw that in cases of the guerrilla groups what was a factor was their reputation in different areas because of the fact that they wanted to win over populations or recruit different populations when it came to paramilitary groups it was really the visibility are there going to be consequences is this going to be a big international outcry that's going to force the Colombian government to investigate such an area so then that person may actually be held accountable for whatever they're about to do so I mean I think those were different what I did notice however over the years and became a big issue during the peace process is that none of the groups had any sort of I guess affinity with Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in respecting their autonomy and that became a major bone of contention between those groups and the FARC in particular and the groups that we worked with worked very hard to organize themselves to change that around and turn that around and get themselves included in the process and while there have been some successes like an ethnic chapter and so forth you know there's a long way to go getting that actually implemented in terms of reintegration I've seen a lot of rejection from these communities they don't want any of the former farm combatants around them why because those groups have committed atrocities and problems in their area however I've seen also the willingness in terms of indigenous groups to do healing processes and take some of their traditional practices as a way to cleansing that in order to you know get past it a few comments related with the relationship between armed actors and communities I seen that something that is very critical is what is what is the what is the level of autonomy communities can negotiate with the armed actors it depends on to understand the armed actors feel that the communities could be a threat for them or not a cool question the control they have over the territory to put an example the most amazing leaders I had met in my life was Edwin he was member of the peace community in Natividad de Maria in the Atrata River and but he had the crazy idea of having a project working with youths in order to prevent they to be recruited by the armed actors but this was a scene in a context of violence and both for paramilitaries and for the guerrillas at the end of the day he was killed by the guerrilla but far because he was going to the communities doing workshops and training youths in order to offer alternatives in this regard but this was critical in that context because for the armed groups the possibility to recruit new members was a key issue in that context so you find this in a way that is necessarily for the communities to find a way of managing and in some way not questioning the control of the armed group but finding the way of making a possible space for living together in some way so in all these cases there is always a room for negotiation always and some people feel well how are you going to negotiate with a paramilitary group or how are you going to negotiate with the guerrilla well people have to negotiate because they are living there and they have these armed actors there every day not only for a short period of time that you go there and you stay with the communities so they have to find a way for doing this and I think this is a very complex and something that I was worried in this point is something they need to analyze and to have the capacity to understand what is the context and to understand they have the capability to manage and to move in this context in this specific context and situation because maybe today is critical to challenge the but in other circumstances it's possible and it's critical that people have the capacity to discern this to find if it's this or not possible and they have to be very very wise in analyzing the concrete context in relation with corruption and civil war well I feel at least in the Colombian case it's clear that the army groups all of them need a lot of resources if they want to keep moving the world and this is a very critical point so it doesn't matter if these resources come from drug trafficking if they come from illegal mining if they come from properly corruption using the resources of the state that they do in many of the regions in Colombia the army actors use resources for education for health and other things so the point is they need to do this in a continuous way if they want to keep the momentum of the confrontation because they need resources for having people they need resources for arms for ammunition so this is a critical point and for then there is no ethical standard related with this and in many cases the corruption corrupt the same army groups because some people within the groups feel the opportunity and try to use this money that they receive and there is no control and you have seen I remember a few cases in which a leader of the commander of the guerrilla live with a lot of money because this was an opportunity they tried to find a way of this and regarding the reintegration process I think it depends of the type of community in general people that have lived in a difficult situation of violence are more open to process of reintegration and also of reconciliation you can see for example for the referendum of the peace agreement where this referendum had more support well it had in more conflicted regions you have the example of bohalla bohalla was a municipality where in a confrontation with FARC and the paramilitary groups FARC sent a cylinder a gas cylinder as a bomb and they they killed 100 people in a church and this community vote 95 percent in favor of the referendum they say we have to support the peace agreement but in other regions that didn't suffer with the conflict they don't support the peace agreement you have these paradoxes in many cases these communities are more open to find spaces and in some way they have learned how to negotiate with different actors and have to find a way of living together so it's different to have this but there are cases in which without having some justice and some reparation is very difficult to do this if the victims don't feel that they in some way find a way and are recognized as victims it's very difficult to accept that a demobilized actor that arrives to the community with some support of the state can live with them I'm going to turn very quickly Steve wanted to say something I'm going to give Oliver the last word this is just Jenny's question similar question that I had had Oliver maybe when you're summing up you can address it but the impression that I had had was that one of the ways that these communities drew closer to the armed groups was to create these investigatory mechanisms we were basically self-policing mechanisms to flush out collaborators and that they were offering a benefit to the groups to some extent I mean that's an uncomfortable dimension to all of this and I'm sure it's something that you highlighted as being a prominent feature of some of the communities that were most successful in this space yeah I think that's right I think overall the relationships between the civilian population and the armed groups can vary quite a bit from place to place and so some of the findings are really some of the average findings but you have cases where communities are essentially co-opted by armed actors and you have other cases where there's sort of a blurrier relationship you have cases where the communities sort of demand or acquire a reduction in violence by reaching some kind of cooperative arrangement with armed actors to police their own communities I just have a couple of comments on the different questions so I'll be quite brief because I know we're about at time but in terms of the reintegration question what I've seen is that in other research actually that more organized communities seem to have more offerings social participation offerings for ex-combatants and so you see actually higher levels of ex-combatants, social participation in those communities although I think Jimena's right that this can also vary quite a bit from community to community in terms of how what kinds of violence was committed and what the attitude is of the community for ex-combatants. One interesting thing that I've seen in several communities including the Peasant Workers Association is they actually through their ability to negotiate with armed groups negotiated certain demobilizations of rebels who basically facilitated and guaranteed their exit from the conflict so that's kind of an interesting positive thing and as Jimena mentioned we see that among indigenous groups and in other communities in terms of corruption and accountability one of the things that these communities often do is either as Jimena also indicated they fight for example the coca economy or they try to stay away from the coca economy at least in the case of Columbia and you see this in some other conflicts as well one of the ATCC leaders said you know he who is involved with cocas not to be involved in the organization so they kind of try to draw these bright lines between people in the conflict and out of the conflict and finally just sort of returning to the final question I think Jenny was hinting at and I think Steve mentioned before sort of what are the conditions for generating this protection can you do it when groups armed groups and communities have distant relations or few incentives to cooperate can communities protect themselves in the threat of higher level or more aggressive forms of violence and I think the answer is yes but again the effects I've talked about are kind of average effects but one of the things that we've seen is that in some cases communities can stem massacres the peasant workers association was founded in the midst of very intense violence and so I think in you know that's an example where even in quite intense violence you can have violence reducing effects by organizing and then finally sort of addressing the situation in Columbia today the current situation involves what are known as criminal bands or which are in many cases used former paramilitary groups have gone criminal and some of the main effects that I see in my research are a greater influence on reducing violence among actually the paramilitary groups less so less detectable but still present with guerrilla groups and I think it's because in often cases the guerrillas were closer with communities in some ways or have fewer incentives to commit as much violence and as Maricio mentioned the paramilitary is actually committed according to indicators most of the violence in the conflict and yet there's where you see sort of these more violent groups you actually see reductions conditional on community organization and yet this became much harder when these groups went criminal because they had fewer ideological motives and the peasant worker leaders say there were fewer incentives for those groups to actually negotiate with the community or there were just fewer figureheads to negotiate with so they would say you know who can we negotiate with within the criminal bands if they don't want to talk to us and so that's actually a challenge some communities have found ways to actually negotiate security with those groups but interestingly you see that there's an example from Mozambique where the Renamo movement demobilized and became more criminal and civil society movements there also had more trouble negotiating with those elements and so in terms of the strategies I think the internal management strategies are sort of the covert strategies that communities use where they're actually managing their own populations they're developing early warning they're keeping people from supporting or being recruited into the armed groups are actually the things that are most effective but again this is a question that requires more research and so hopefully that's what this event stimulates and so with that I'll wrap up and thank you great please join me in thanking all of our panelists