 My name is Robert Lamb. I'm the director of the program on crisis conflict and cooperation here at CSIS. Thanks to all of you for filling up this room today, and thanks as well to all of you who are watching live from the internet. This will be the last C3 conference, and will soon be known as the old CSIS building. In two months, we're moving to a new building on 1616 Rhode Island Avenue, and I personally am very excited. It's got amazing new conference facilities, not to mention nice new offices. There's an addendum in the program that should be there. I would just have you take note of some of the program changes that we've had to undertake due to some unforeseen circumstances. We have a great agenda today. Everyone who will be speaking today, all of the panelists, most of you here in this room and watching from the internet live today, are all involved in a very interesting field, involved in somewhere or another in working to reduce violence and conflict, whether the risk of violence to mitigate its effects to prevent it. The field, broadly speaking, has a wide number of sub-disciplines, whether you call it post-conflict reconstruction, transition, stabilization, consolidation. There's a lot of different words, peace building as well. But all of these fields have one thing in common. Whisk away under tight security of those who are reaching for their rights. Would all of us in these different sub-disciplines of peace building, stabilization, reconstruction, transition, and consolidation? What we have in common is that the demand for civilian powers is not going away. Public opinion, will wax and wane. We were for humanitarian intervention before we were against it. People were for counterinsurgency before they were against it. The media might be with us, they might be against us. Congress might be providing more support, might be providing less support. But the truth is there's always gonna be conflicts. And the demand for the United States to do something about them isn't going away. That doesn't mean the United States should be the world's police, doesn't mean the United States should be intervening everywhere in the world. It does mean that there's always gonna be pressure for the United States to do so, and there's always gonna be temptation for the United States to do so. Which means that once in a while, the United States is gonna intervene somehow. Now, there's a clear preference in our data set and through the broad experience of most of people in our field that the top political leadership of the United States prefers to use civilian power to respond to these crises before they aspire out of control. We prefer not to use military power. There's some notable exceptions, but the overall broad trend is clear. The problem is that the support given to civilian institutions to respond to and support transitions, stabilization and reconstruction work is really pretty poor. So the demand for what we do in this field is not going away, and so we really better learn how to, as a society, to support civilian power. So that's the public message that we wanna send, that the American people should not lose faith in this field. They seem to be. Another message of this conference though, and it's gonna be a theme throughout the day, is that while we've had some successes in this field, we really do need to do a better job of giving Americans a reason to have faith in what we do. In 1927, there's an economist named Alan Young, and what he said is that even an industrial dictator with all the power to move capital and labor in the world could not compress a half century of normal progress into just a few years. That's a lesson that we've been learning over and over for 85 years. In 1949, the World Bank said that development and reconstruction of any society has to be led by the people in that society itself, and those of us in the outside world who wanna support that can only support that, and we should coordinate with each other, and we should coordinate with the people in that society and their government. That's a lesson we've been learning for 64 years. The World Bank also said in 1949 that it's not just the capacity of the people who live in that society that's a constraint on their ability to reconstruct and develop and stabilize, it's also donors' blindness, our ambitions, our objectives, our assumptions, sometimes our arrogance. That sometimes we don't understand what's actually happening in the places that we're trying to benefit, and so we implement things that we know how to do and they don't work and then we wonder why, and we've been learning that lesson for 64 years as well. Now in those 64 years, we've done a lot of really great things in the world, not just in Europe and Japan, but more recently in the Balkans. There's been great progress in Colombia and many other places as well, but the truth is we keep learning the same lessons over and over. I was joking to a colleague last week that there's really only about 13 lessons in our field and we just keep learning them over and over again every decade, we just call them something else. And the truth is if you read the 1927 Allen Young, the 1949 World Bank, even Albert Hirschman in 1965, who said that what we think are constraints in a society that we're trying to help might not actually be constraints. The human capacity for creativity and survival is pretty enormous and what we think should work in a place might not be what locals think can work in that place. That's another lesson that we've been learning for decades. All of these lessons sound suspiciously familiar if you read the Paris Declaration, the Accra Agreement, Busan commitments, any of these documents that we keep coming out with every few years. So I'd like to humbly submit a research agenda for our field. Whenever we do a program evaluation, whenever we do social science research about aid effectiveness, whenever we collect best practices and lessons learned, let's not just end with the policy recommendation that we should do X next time, where X is coordinate with a local population or let the host society take the lead or fill in any one of the 13-ish lessons that we all know. We should do that, obviously. But don't stop there. Do a little more research. Ask, why didn't we do that this time? It's not like we didn't know. What we need to do is research on our own institutions, not only the good technical capacity assessments and needs assessments and political economy assessments of the recipient societies. It would be useful for us, for our own research agendas, to look at the political economy of our own organizations, understand what's preventing us from understanding local population, preventing us from implementing a lot of the things that every few years we tell ourselves we need to learn how to do. Because the truth is, conflicts aren't going away. We're gonna be getting involved in these things for many, many years over and over again. Our data set showed that about every two and a half weeks is a new political crisis in the world. It's rare for the news to actually demonstrate that, but this summer we've had Syria, Turkey, Egypt, about every two and a half weeks. It kind of matches our data very nicely. There's a lot of other topics that our field should be looking at. One of them is gender. What you'll notice on our agenda today is that it's pretty male dominated. A lot of the research in our field in dealing with gender treats women as victims and there's a pretty rich and growing literature on that topic. There's a fascinating small literature on women as perpetrators of violence and conflict. It's very fascinating. And there's a new and growing literature and interest on women as peacemakers in conflict areas. And that's a line of research that really should be pursued pretty vigorously. Last week the Fund for Peace released their failed state index and Christa Hendry, who's here today, said that the three Ds should be placed by four Ds. That it's not just development, diplomacy, and defense, but the fourth D should be data. With the release of the new GDELT data set, a quarter of a billion data points. Who did what, when, where, with what attitude? Geocoded precisely. This new era of big data. This is a new world. Mirror correlations and regressions are not gonna be enough. If you're going out in the field and you're collecting data and you're not geocoding it, you're living in 1995. If you then take that data and fail to share it with other people in a way that's accessible and aggregable, you're not being helpful. This goes to all of us. We've collected data. Now we've tried to make our data set available online as well. But sharing data, aggregating our experiences, and especially geocoding it so we can pinpoint where it's happening and understand better the subnational space-soul dynamics of what's happening in our field is gonna be critically important and it's something that we can no longer afford to avoid. Finally, there's been a lot of interest in the private sector, recognizing that in fragile states and in conflict and violent areas that official development assistance has not made nearly enough progress there as it has in other places. And so now there's a lot of interest in wondering, well, maybe the private sector can do something that the public sector can't. There is indeed private sector activity taking place in conflict zones. We don't always recognize it as such. It's informal, it's done by illicit actors, it's done in sectors that we don't quite understand, but it does happen. But we also need to be cautious. We can't believe that just increasing private sector activity in a fragile area or a conflict zone is going to automatically lead to good development outcomes. We have to study much more closely what the potential for positive spillovers are. How do you capture the positive spillovers? How do you avoid the negative risks of increased private sector activity in conflict areas? Now these are topics that our program is actively engaged in. These are topics that our program is actively fundraising around. And these are our topics that a lot of us should be collaborating with each other a lot more on. And I want to encourage that. So today as you listen to all of the speakers, as you raise questions, as you talk with each other over coffee, I want you to think too closely about the two basic messages of the conference today, which is the American people can't lose faith in this field because the truth is the demand for this field isn't going away. And we in this field need to be worthy of their faith by continuing to rethink how we operate, what we're trying to accomplish, how we're studying it. So welcome. We have an exciting program today. And thank you for all of your attendance. Thank you as well to IRD and AEcom for co-sponsoring with us today. Thank you, Arthur and David, for your comments. And thank you, Dr. Hamry, for opening up today.