 Good afternoon everyone. Very happy to be here and very happy to be with such a great panel for this discussion. I'm going to share a little bit of data that we have on a couple areas that are relevant to this issue of rebel governance. So I'm focused mostly on sort of how armed groups are responding to crises, particularly we'll be looking at climate change and COVID-19 today. So during times of crisis or emergencies, you know, we know from literature that armed groups often try to take advantage of a weakened or distracted state to advance military means, to recruit or establish a presence, or sometimes to try to actually govern and enhance their legitimacy and credibility with the local populations. So we'll be talking about that in light of these two, probably the biggest crises that we've faced worldwide today. So this comes I think as part of a larger project that we're working on that's not specifically on these two issues where we're trying to understand with this whole group of partners that you see here how and why people exit armed groups and sustainably reintegrate into civilian life. So we're doing this, you can see on my little map, we're doing this in Colombia, Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and in Iraq. So there's all very different multi-method studies. We've been working with a whole host of academics, some of you might be in this room, from neuroscience to political science, from social work to criminology to really understand how you would measure somebody's sustained reintegration, what that might look like, and how you would do it in a way that you create tools that are both universal, but also contextually specific. So that's what we've been working on, and in the course of that work we've come to touch on these two issues and sort of how armed groups and how populations are responding to them. So this just gives you an idea of, we're collecting a lot of data. This was March, and you can just see all the different surveys that were happening simultaneously. I'll just tell you very quickly, and this is not the level of detail I should give you about our sample and sampling methods, but I'm happy to explain later, I just want to get to the results that we have emerging. So this is based on two studies in Nigeria. One was a survey of 275 community leaders across Borno State, and the other one is our midline survey. We do surveys with ex-combatants, formerly associated individuals, and community members who've never been associated as well. The midline survey is predominantly ex-combatants, so that's about 800 people. In Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, we just did the survey in March, that's why you see that huge spike. We have about 1,000 people in Chad, a mix of ex-combatants and community members across Lak Province and Hadralumus. In Cameroon, in the north, in the far north, we have about 800 people, 52% of them are ex-combatants, and in the Difa region of Niger, we have about 516. Over 100 of them are ex-combatants as well. So this represents about 1,600 ex-combatants in the various surveys that I'm talking about. In Colombia, we have not, we have just started in the last month. Another reason you see a spike, doing work with people coming out of the differential process for FARC dissident and criminal groups, and we're doing work on reintegration and reincorporation, but the data I'm presenting is community data on their perceptions and experiences with armed groups in response to these two crises. Moving on to climate change and climate change-driven recruitment in Colombia. So in Colombia, more than 80% of the communities that, you can see sort of where we've run these surveys, more than 80% of people that responded to our surveys said they had experienced climate change effects, whether it's changes in rainfall, temperature, extreme weather events. And this has had pretty significant impacts on livelihoods. So of those who acknowledged climate change effects, 79% knew someone whose livelihoods had been negatively affected. Of those, 13% knew someone who had joined an armed group as a result. In Colombia, it's not just climate change, it's also environmental degradation. And this is felt also very widely, we can see in the data, but particularly in rural areas. So this is illegal logging, illegal mining, or sometimes semi-legal logging that's happening, but with armed group involvement. And of communities that were affected, 30%, for instance, said that they had noticed changes in deforestation in their own community. So the numbers are pretty significant. And this environmental degradation is important because not only does it actually impact and potentially exacerbate climate change, but it also renders the population vulnerable to its effects. And it's completely intertwined with conflict dynamics in Colombia. So, for instance, several armed groups that are still active are logging for profit, or they're incentivizing deforestation to help allow the transport of illegal goods. And so this is really integrating. We're also seeing people whose communities were impacted by mining or deforestation struggling to make a livelihood, and that themselves could help spark, whether it's resources over water, but also sort of the dynamics of recruitment that armed groups can take advantage of. If we turn now to Lake Chad, climate change impacts are even more widely felt. So across four different surveys across four countries, 60 to 80% of respondents were noting specific climate change effects. And there's been a lot of reporting of late, particularly in the northwest of Nigeria about the potential for armed groups to exploit conflicts over water and other related attention points to try to expand their influence. We think we have some of the first data, particularly in this case study, that directly links climate change effects to armed group recruitment. So I'm happy to share that with you right now. So this is based on our community leaders survey. 85% of community leaders say they know people who are struggling because of climate change effects that they answered previous questions on to make a living because of those changes. 37% of those people say that they know someone who joined Boko Haram or a similar group because of those challenges, but it's not just kind of rebel insurgent or listed groups, but also self-defense forces or volunteer security outfits that we're also seeing recruitment driven into. If you look in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, you see, again, similar effects of people who are being impacted, and of those being impacted, do you know someone who joined because of these difficulties? These numbers are pretty significant, but these are people in the community who are saying this about others. What about when you ask ex-combatants themselves? The numbers are pretty similar. So in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, we see ex-combatants when they are asked. If they have experienced these challenges and whether those challenges were one of the reasons that they joined the armed group, pretty significant percentages are saying yes. And what's really notable about these numbers, I mean, 53% of our sample in Niger is how many people in our sample tell us they were coerced and don't admit any agency in getting involved in the first place. So that suggests this problem is actually even more significant. So generally in this space, I don't think we're seeing a lot of rebel governance going on. We can't really tell if it's a push or a pull or both that's leading to this recruitment pattern. But at least in Colombia, you do see, not in sort of the classic way of armed actors taking, of governing sort of a public purpose, but they are regulating for sort of private purposes. So we see that kind of behavior. Where we see something a little bit different is when we shift to looking at COVID-19. So we were already collecting data when in this region, you had Boko Haram very specifically, at least in its messages, respond to the pandemic. And we saw armed groups doing this all over the world, whether it's white supremacists who were trying to weaponize COVID, cartels in Latin America giving out goods in PPE, or the Taliban, some of you probably saw their press conference and their hand sanitizer campaign. So we had these groups responding in this way. And in Nigeria, Shakao, who was the leader, who formerly was the leader of one of the largest Boko Haram factions, issues this tape on the heels of some of the largest attacks that they have ever conducted in the very beginning of the pandemic in April, 2020. And the messages of this tape are that the origins of the virus are at attack from Western nations. This is a war on Islam. Alternatively, it's also a punishment from God. But the followers of the group are immune to the virus. And then there's one specific critique of the government response, which is their head prohibited group pair because of social distancing restrictions. And so he calls on people returning to pray shoulder to shoulder. So we wanted to know what the impact of this was. And just to say, luckily it was relatively minor. So we were really worried this would enhance vaccine hesitancy and create issues for the response, but it didn't necessarily do that. The only place we saw a change for those who admitted hearing the message, which were not that many people, hearing the message didn't actually have a huge effect, but hearing and trusting the message did shift opinions in sort of two spaces. So those were two messages that the government essentially wasn't talking about. So one was immunity. It just wasn't something that was part of sort of the public health messaging campaign. And then the other one was the origins of the virus. And so those are two things where we do see differences in how the population was responding, but we didn't see an increase in hesitancy to sort of admit the reality of the virus or to take the vaccine. And that's probably because there had been such a long running polio vaccine campaign. And it makes sense because we did see a slight shift in youth who weren't around for that campaign. And so may not have sort of historical memory. Again, not a lot of governance happening, but certainly sort of an opportunity to critique the state. We see something slightly different in Columbia. So in some ways you see a similar reaction to Boko Haram. So initially you see this decline like we do all over the world in the first like month or two of the pandemic, a decline in violence. And then you see a real increase and actually surpasses pre-pandemic levels. And so it's hard to read this, but what you can see here is the blue line is monthly caseloads of COVID and the orange line is conflict incidents. And so they are tracking together. So we see that's kind of a similar reaction. But in a different way, we also see what's happening in Columbia somewhat differently. So there's not a message that's critiquing the government. In fact, all the messages are reinforcing. They're the same as the government's. People should be washing their hands. They should be social distancing. And actually the messages didn't really seem to permeate the population very much. But the population was extremely aware of the actions that armed groups were taking as a result. And the restrictive measures they were putting in place to essentially enforce the government's public health policies. So they started using violence and coercion to restrict. These are active armed groups, bark dissenting groups, criminal groups, and we can't necessarily distinguish amongst all of them. So they started restricting movements, setting up sort of roadblocks into communities, limits on gathering and prohibiting outsiders from visiting. But they also started issuing punishments. So there were reports of killing people who were COVID positive, and engaging in sort of property damage, burning motorcycles, threats for those who weren't following their guidelines and issuing fines as well. So the other thing that we see, and again this is more along the lines of sort of taking advantage of the pandemic, is that we'd noticed this sort of increase. And this is also in the media as well about how armed groups had taken the opportunity with COVID to start targeting social leaders that they had already had an issue with. So we see that. So our team, we have local teams in each area where we do this work. So our local team in Columbia believes through some of their qualitative work that they've done that the reason that the armed groups were responding this way was not only to sort of enhance their legitimacy, particularly from the idea that they would be seen as protecting the local population, but also to usurp the state and to perform state functions to show that they could. They were also mostly operating in areas where the state is weak and the predominant sort of state institution is the military, which may not be as well suited to running public health provisions in some cases. But there's also indications that a lot of this was done for self-preservation. There apparently was quite a concern within groups that they themselves would be impacted by COVID and that would operationally weaken them. So they didn't want that to happen. So at least initially they really tried to restrict movement to really to save themselves. So I have rushed through a lot in like a really, really quick period of time. There's so much more to say and we have a lot of other stuff that is also more directly on this topic. So just to say, I'd like to thank you. I'd love to continue the conversation. I left my email up there. So feel free to reach out and I can explain more about what we're doing and we can see if it overlaps with what you're doing. But just to say, we've also been collecting particularly and everywhere we work, but particularly in the Lake Chad Basin information on what Boko Haram did when they occupied communities. So we have a whole list of services we ask about and we ask about whether they ran courts. The percentages of respondents who say they did run courts in the Difa region of Niger is extremely high. I think it's 77% much lower Chad in Cameroon. But what's interesting is when you ask people what sort of services or functions they perform when you ask if they did dispute resolution, it's almost zero. So they're operating courts but people aren't seeing them as resolving disputes. So that's a super interesting thing that I think we have to explore a bit more. Thanks so much.