 Robert Moga, thanks for joining us today. Anyone who watches the news would see a lot of violence every day in the news reports. What are your thoughts on the state of security in the world today? Well, I think it's a very situation right now. I think the majority of the news media tends to focus on war zones and, you know, areas of conflict, Darfur, Afghanistan, even Iraq, even this conference. We talked about Boganville. We talked about other areas, Somalia. And I think what's interesting is that when you look at actually patterns of violence and patterns of insecurity, it's true that war zones constitute a major area of concern and preoccupation and it clearly occupies the minds of policymakers internationally. But what is interesting, I think, increasingly is if you look at the numbers and if you look at the actual distribution of violence arising from conflicts, it actually pales in comparison to areas that aren't traditionally associated with conflict zones, such as say Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica. And so I think what's interesting is that over the last 10, 15 years, you've actually seen a decline in war zones overall, a decline in the incidence of conflicts occurring globally. I think this year we have about 15 ongoing wars compared to 30 in the mid-1990s. But you also see a decline in the number of casualties arising in these wars. And I think roughly, according to our statistics, we're talking about 50 to 55,000 people dying a year directly in war zones. Now, if you compare that increasingly to areas across the Americas or even in Central and Southern Africa, where you don't have war zones, you've actually got acute levels of collective violence associated mostly with criminal violence and homicidal violence. And if you look at the global patterns of non-war violence, that is violence occurring outside of war zones, you've actually got something in the order of 450 to 500,000 deaths a year. So almost 10 times more people dying outside of conflict zones in non-conflict zones. So I think this is an evolution and a shift that we've seen over the last 10 to 15 years. And we've been tracking trends with the World Health Organization and the UN Office for Drugs and Crime to try to get a global composite. And I think what's interesting is that although our optics tend to be focused predominantly on situations of war, there is a clear concern with violence occurring in non-war zones, especially in urban settlements. So I think these are some trends that we're seeing increasingly these days. What's driving those trends, do you think? I think it's a combination of things. I mean, some people would say, certainly in the multilateral world, that the rise, the phenomenal rise in peacekeeping operations globally, I mean, we're at the zenith of peacekeeping operations in terms of blue helmets on the ground today and police. Some would say the investment in, there's over 190,000 blue helmets today on the ground and over $7 billion being spent on sustaining these peace missions. You also have a phenomenal rise since the end of the Cold War in the actual peace-making enterprise. So you've had over 800 peace agreements signed since the early 1990s to today. So you could say that in fact what the multilateral world and the UN and all of the various organs of the international community are doing is yielding some really important dividends. So on the one hand, I think we can pat our backs a little bit by suggesting that some of these interventions are actually generating some important reductions in conflicts overall. I think on the other hand, what we're seeing is a rise in other forms of organized and transnational crime. We're seeing an spectacular explosion of violence across the Americas and even now in West Africa and Central Africa associated with drug trafficking and transshipment. And you're seeing a growing networks, global networks that are seeking to control turf and territory and the transiting of various commodities, which is also fueling a certain form of new kinds of asymmetric violence. And I think this is very much in the minds and very much preoccupied in the preoccupations of international policymakers in both the defense sector and the development sector as they start wrestling with these changing dynamics. And the question now is, do we have the right tools that we had in the 90s and during the 2000s to address these other new forms of violence that are emerging outside of war zones? So what's the implication for civil military operations around the world? Oh, I think there's a lot. I mean, I think there's a real question about having to rethink some of our assumptions, rethink some of our analytics, rethink some of our metrics, and in some cases rethink some of the tools that we're using. And I think that if you read the latest military doctrines from, for example, the US or from the UK or I'm sure even in Australia, there is a recognition doctrinally that these new unorthodox, ungoverned spaces, these fragile settings that are outside of traditional war zones are becoming a real preoccupation. So I think you're already seeing a shift in the military sectors, for example. Within the development community, you're also seeing a recognition that development is being disabled by the presence of collective violence. And so you're also seeing the development community increasingly starting to think about how to render their aid more sensitive to these non-traditional violence areas, to adapt their own tools. And so within, for example, the OECD DAC, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development based in Paris, which is the rich club of nations that essentially set standards for development policy. You're seeing many of these policies emerging around development aid being more cognizant, more wary, more sensitive to the dynamics of violence and ways of adapting their tools. And even the humanitarian sector increasingly is recognizing that as violence shifts away from war zones into these non-war settings, where you have spectacular rates of violence, they're also starting to rethink some of their tools and modalities and ways of operating. So the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the premier humanitarian agency in the world today, is increasingly moving outside of areas like Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia into places like Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, as they're also recognizing that there are these challenges. But what it does raise for all of them, I think, first of all, is how do they work together in these kinds of spaces, which I think is the subject of this meeting that we've had over the last couple of days. But also in terms of the international legal implications, when you have a war and they've clearly defined parties and you have international humanitarian law and various conventions and legal treaties apply, there are certain rules and prescriptions on behavior and interaction in those settings. But the moment you go outside of a place like Kandahar into a place like Rio de Janeiro, you no longer have those international humanitarian legal prescriptions, you no longer have, in fact, you're operating under domestic or criminal jurisdiction. So I think a lot of these partners in the military to the development of the humanitarian side are struggling with how to reconcile these new threats with the old existing normative infrastructure that they tended to operate in. And does it perhaps change the skill sets that they need to have? This is a big question. It's a big question. I think that one of the big challenges in this shift of violence is that in the next 20 years, we just passed recently the seven billion person mark in the world. Most of the growth in the world for the next 10 to 15 years for the next 20 years is going to be in underdeveloped settings, mostly urban, mostly in peri-urban areas. So what you see is increasingly the conglomeration of violence in urban and peri-urban areas outside of war zones. This generates a whole range of complications for outsiders who would seek to intervene or promote some form of stabilization in these areas because you're operating within an environment where densely packed populations are compressed together and one has to be very extremely sensitive to the issues of protection of civilians and the operations that take place in those areas. In addition, they have to learn how to work with states weak or strong in these areas that also have a very important role, in fact, a central role in mediating some of the violence. And I guess it can be difficult to know where the violence might come from, more so than if you're in a traditional war zone. That's one of the challenges is that, although we've seen a shift over the last 30 years from international wars between countries to internal wars with various parties who are relatively or not so clearly defined, increasingly to proliferation of different actors and factions. So I think that war zones already present great complications today as compared to, say, 15, 20 years ago. But what you increasingly have in a non-war setting are not necessarily actors who are seeking to assert the state or take control of the state or have a clear political project. But in fact, you're seeing criminalized groups. You're seeing groups that have vested interest in profit, in rent-seeking, and other forms of territorial control. And this generates a whole series of new challenges because you're not quite sure who you're negotiating with at any given moment. And so to sit the parties down and to begin a process of mediation in the classic sense becomes very difficult. So I think you're absolutely correct that they are needing to rethink some of the practices. And this is very difficult for communities who are quite set in their own particular ways and have their own stovepipes. You're now based in Brazil. What have you learned from the local experience there? Well, Brazil's really interesting. I spent a fair bit of time in Latin America over the last decade and a half. And I used to live in Colombia and spent a fair bit of time in the Andean region and through Central America and parts of the Caribbean. And Brazil presents a very interesting case in a way because it almost is a composite of many of the different experiences across Central and South America as well as the Caribbean since it has borders with most of these countries, at least in the southern cone. And what's been interesting in Brazil is in the last 10 years, more or less, you've seen a really rapid growth geopolitically in Brazil to try to acquire a more prominent standing in the world, to try to assert itself within the UN Security Council. For example, it's seeking a seat on the Security Council. In terms of its actions in Haiti, it was one of the lead troop contributing countries in Haiti and the UN stabilization mission in Haiti and Manusta. And you're seeing it also expand its trade and other agendas. So Brazil is sort of waking up, in a way, after a long period of sleep. And what's happening is Brazil is also recognizing that its problems at home are no longer accountable. They absolutely feel most policy makers in Brazil and increasingly elite in major cities in Brazil feel it's time to actually clean up their act at home. Brazil has a long tradition of very repressive policing, very draconian policies, and has a long tradition of favelas, the slums that tend to be scattered throughout the major cities of Brazil. São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Belo Horizonte. So I think what you're seeing increasing even the last five to 10 years is a real effort federally at the state level and domestically at the metropolitan level to really try to rethink their security policies domestically and to rethink ways of promoting safety and security. So a couple of things. In addition to that, you have the World Cup and the Olympics, two of the singular global events coming down the track in 2014 and 2016. And this is sort of galvanized, if you will, the leadership of Brazil to start doing something credible internally. So a number of things have happened, which I think are really interesting, and have potentially lessons for the wider community working on civmil issues and confronting these new domains of violence in the future. The first thing they did at the federal level was they set up a thing called PRINACI, which is a national security policy to try to create a fund to promote innovative security policies domestically. And this was essentially promoted to the Ministry of Justice and was made available to state and city level authorities to fund really creative community policing type strategies domestically. That was in 2007. The second thing they did, and this is Rio de Janeiro specific, is they launched a thing called the Pacification Units Program, the UPP. And this is a really innovative strategy, which basically has a very strong security component and a very strong development component. And the idea is to permanently implant police into some of the most crime affected favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro, as opposed to going in and out in short raids, which had been the tradition in the past, to plant these community policing centers and keep them permanently based inside the favelas. But then to couple that with social welfare interventions in terms of repaving roads, in terms of promoting access to utilities, in terms of promoting better water sanitation, in terms of creating recreational spaces for young people, launching programs to get kids off the street and join boxing clubs as opposed to joining gangs, creating alternatives. So for the first time you had an integrated program that was supported at the federal level, that was championed by the state level, and was implemented by the municipal level. And this is a very, it's already, we've seen some quite extraordinary reductions in violence in areas where they've intervened, and we've seen some counterproductive outcomes as well. So I'm not suggesting that it's all been smooth sailing. And this is a program that runs from 2009 to about 2014, 2015, and the hope is that would be extended beyond the World Cup and the Olympics. But I think it's a really exciting example of how military police, Brazil has actually 58 different police units, but the military police are cooperating with the metropolitan police, and trying to seek a more integrated fashion of engaging into effectively war zones. And they use the euphemism, the Guerno Rio, the war of Rio de Janeiro. And so they're confronting what they see as effectively a war, de facto, not de jure, with a range of different tools that they've drawn from different experiences around the world, but also domestically, and backed up with a very strong development program. And it's generating some really interesting outcomes. Robert Mogher, thank you very much for your time today. It was a pleasure. Thanks.