 Good morning and welcome. My name is Carla Copel and I'm a vice president here with the United States Institute of Peace and proudly chair The board that oversees the resolve network. I will say on coming in this morning into this room I said this is the bubbliest pre 9 a.m. Crowd I've ever seen So you're you know enthusiastic energetic and engaged either that or you're just morning people and we're benefiting from that Thank you all for joining us. It's great to see so much interest Focused on a really important topic and to have so many old and new friends here some of the Folks who are in the room or people haven't seen for over a decade. So it was wonderful to be reconnected with all of them Hopefully you know but if you don't the United States Institute of Peace is an independent National Institute That was founded by Congress over 30 years ago And is dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is essential to us and global well-being We believe peace is not only possible, but also practical and for over 30 for over 30 years We've worked with partners in conflict zones around the world to prevent and resolve and end conflict Violent extremism began to take center stage for US IP as we launched programs on the ground Particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 9-11 attacks We saw in real-time communities in Kabul and Baghdad struggle to stabilize in the face of political and sectarian violence But over time we've also seen groups like al-Qaeda more fracture reform and emerge in places far beyond the Middle East and South Asia and The emergence of ISIS or Daesh has emboldened other more locally Based groups like Boko Haram and the Taliban and that's required shifts in strategy We've learned lessons about the implications of the repression of political dissent and what happens when counterterrorism strategies go wrong We're also witnessing tremendous resilience and a growing willingness Across the international community and in local communities around the world to push back and to build pathways for individuals and groups to exit violence We know now better than ever the importance of local engagement to the success of efforts to counter violent extremism Over the last couple of years We've worked closely with our partners to lay foundations for a network of local researchers who can advance data-driven policy responses To violent extremism because we believe that that local information knowledge and data Crossed with a global sharing of that information is really essential to taking on the challenge Two years ago resolve was a little more than a twinkle in the eye of a handful of adventurous researchers Candice are you a adventurous researcher whose eye twinkle was critical in this? I think so We started out with just six partner organizations, but today there are 24 partner organizations They met yesterday. They are all firmly committed to the president at the premise that research on violent extremism Will have the greatest impact if it's empirically driven and locally defined And we also know as I've said that broad global collaboration will be essential Particularly as movements morph and move and to maximize the likelihood of success in preventing and addressing violent extremism Our partners operate networks in networks across six regions of the world Balkans across North Africa the Sahel Middle East Horn of Africa South Asia and Southeast Asia Many of them are in the room today It is also a credit To the incredible resolve team that we're all here today led by Candice Rondo Along with Megan Loney Bethany began Kat Ardina John and others across US IP who have tried to be helpful in incubating resolve The resolve team is proudly graduating its first crop of local researchers from Bangladesh Who you will hear from some of them today and you will have seen some of their research outside and This is the first networks lay research leadership fellowship program We're poised to bring in a new group from the Lake Chad Basin and we hope that this is the beginning of crops of researchers in Being brought into the fold and integrated into this global network in moving forward Much of our success to date has been due to steadfast support We've had from partners at the State Department and that's why it gives me great pleasure to introduce your next Introduction in your next welcoming speaker Acting assistant secretary Tom Hushack for those who don't know Tom. It's worth mentioning He's no stranger to tough lessons in hard places and I have to say when I got this I thought it was funny and I mentioned this to Tom, so I'll mention it to all of you as well He is before taking before beginning at CSO. He served in hard places, but most recently in Vienna Which I thought was a funny juxtaposition as Juppie chief of mission for international organizations But he also served several tours in Afghanistan In leading provincial and capital-based reconstruction and rule of law efforts Was the director for Central Asia and helped post in Moscow Dushan Bay and Khartoum He was not in the cast of spies like us Few people are better positioned to talk about implementing policies and programs to address violent extremism And few people are better equipped to talk a little bit about The course of the path that the resolve network has taken and where we want to see it moving forward Thank you for joining us this morning. Thanks to all of you for joining us this morning and to those who are watching online I'm looking forward to an energizing an important discussion involving all of you and an excellent group of experts We've have gathered here today. That was a nice introduction So thank you Carla and thank you very much to USIP for your role in nurturing resolve into this This great partner and a partner. We rely on already quite a lot in in The State Department. It's exciting to see resolve now producing and sharing and discussing actionable research This is an important milestone in the network and helps all of us policymakers and Practitioners put evidence at the center of our collective CDE efforts putting research into action is a main mission of the Bureau I've been fortunate to lead this last year the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department For three years or so. We've been Supporting research and analysis to unpack what drives violent extremism and we're happy to be able now to partner with resolve And draw from resolves growing body of research for our own analysis CSO is known within the State Department for using advanced analytics to test assumptions and explore correlations that have helped shape the Department's discourse on violent extremism in general for example our work with Terrorism data suggests countries with above-average levels of state-sanctioned violence and abuse double their risk of violent extremist organizations emerging and Countries with the very highest levels of state-sanctioned violence and abuse quadruple the risk What this means is that government simply cannot use human rights abuse Cannot excuse human rights abuses by their security services if they want to defeat terrorist groups for the long term In fact ensuring that security services respect human rights is central to reducing grievances and recruitment into terrorist organizations The link this link was highlighted by Secretary Tillerson Last week at the community of democracies ministerial where he initiated a high-level Discussion on how democratic governance and democratic values counter terrorism We're now translating this into Interaction for example last month CSO and the Bureau of International Law Enforcement Narcotics and law enforcement outlined potential Incremental steps to lay the foundation for community policing efforts in in Afghanistan for the US Embassy in Kabul We compiled this plan from the best practices of law enforcement experts in academic research the research suggests that success of community policing hinges on shifting law enforcement from over reliance on arrests and strict enforcement to to more traditional Community focused police work such as patrolling investigating crimes even Conducting traffic stops in a in a kind of organized way so So With this more proactive the research has shown us that this more proactive Policing approach would be much more Beneficial to to tamping down the emergence of more extremist organizations a US government community policing training program in Tajikistan Based on similar Principles as established a sustainable and collaborative Collaborative partnership between police officers local governments religious and civil society leaders and members of the community And so there are a lot of places where we know that this approach will work in addition To law enforcement this work builds capacity to prevent radicalization and violent extremism Any effort must be tailored to the political and security environment. That's in the particular locality But across contexts Successfully utilizing community policing as a CVE tool requires law enforcement Commit to reform and engage in extensive trust building with civil society So in addition to community policing approach another related finding from our work is that individuals Who have been forced to pay bribes for basic services were more likely to support violent extremism? So this suggests that it's the personal experiences with corruption rather than a general perception of Corruption as a national issue which contributes to violent extremism This calls for a focus on addressing corruption at the very local level As it affects people's daily lives where people feel it the most Rebuilding trust in government can help stem recruitment into terrorist organizations There are other lessons learned that I'd like to share with you I've brought some copies of a new joint document that CSO and USAID have just finalized It's out on the table with the other handouts It's a two-page preview a teaser of sorts of a larger paper that should be published by state and USAID in the next couple of months on Gathering up lessons learned on CVE policies and programs So please take a look at that We know violent extremism is context specific a combination of national structures community level Social factors and of course very personal factors. We must Amplify our impact by working with partners around the world to collectively be collectively identify and analyze especially these local factors These combine in different ways in different places This was in part. This was in part our Recentral assumption and launching resolve two years ago, which was research on the local dynamics of Violent extremism Conducted by local researchers is essential to more effectively and sustainably preventing radicalization and recruitment into violent extremist organizations and that work And that is work. No single organization or sector can do alone. It will take all of us working collectively By grounding our understanding and policy in empirical evidence and at the very local level The resolve network can help save people and communities from the heartbreak of violent extremism By short circuiting terrorism with interventions grounded in local realities I'm using that word local a lot on purpose Interventions that are aren't attuned to these local factors risk breeding new recruits and Generations of support for violent extremism Looking ahead though And this is a theme Carla also brought up. We're looking forward to results continued research Focusing equally on mapping risk factors as we have discussed Already and on uncovering resiliencies in communities. So in some ways understanding the social resiliencies applicable to cve is much harder than knowing what the risks and drivers of violent extremism are But we know every society has its own exceptional elements that can be harnessed for prevention For example, a women's networks connected through tribal intermarriage in Somalia can facilitate awareness about radicalization Societies are not always consciously aware of their resiliencies So thoughtful surveying and research can uncover and validate Existing social practices and mobilize them for cve efforts This is one of the best ways we can be prepared to confront the next wave of radicalization around the world Resolve with its commitment to capacity building and local networks can become a source of resilience in itself And to this end one of the activities i'm most excited to To have you hear about today Is the development of a curriculum to build build the capacity of local researchers Resolve secretariat and the university of san diego's jone b croc Institutes for peace studies piloted a capacity building program this month for researchers in bangladesh And i hope it will become a model for other resolve Partners to undertake capacity building and research programs in their regions and countries of interest One research area related to conflict and cve that the network could explore is the other side of radicalization and recruitment to violent extremism Looking at how to encourage How to encourage defections and disengagement of fighters from from armed groups This summer at the state department We hosted a symposium on engaging defectors deserters and disengaged fighters in modern conflicts A long title but a very Interested group of participants We can we convene practitioners to discuss civilian approaches to encourage Fighters to leave the battlefield including those who have joined violent extremist organizations such as boko haram CSO launched multi national has since launched a multinational community of interest on the topic Which now supports the department's efforts to encourage defections from violent extremist organizations and other non-state armed actor Groups by sharing lessons learned and best practices on how this is being carried out So we've tried to take the same approach taking local lessons We've learned from one place such as encountering the lord's resistance army and applying them in other places such as Countering boko haram and and encouraging defections from in the lake chad region So this new group is itself becoming a network of resiliency in vulnerable places where some of these practitioners work most actively so this is As this vital research comes together Resolved partners will need to help practitioners creatively transform this good research into actionable politically feasible policy recommendations and programs for both local and national government leaders The work of our partner researchers will touch the lives of vulnerable communities in Insofar as that identifies opportunities for effective policies that governments With whom we work around the world can put into place We have the opportunity to increase the impact of resolves research on government policies If we are intentional in pursuit of greater collaboration and dialogue between governments and Between governments and researchers as represented by the resolve network So similarly as resolve partners, we should bring our private sector implementers into conversations That incorporate their lessons learned Some of their work may be proprietary. I'm speaking of Contractors that we employ as implementing partners But but funders for resolve projects should include a requirement for some of the research That they conduct to be shared through the resolve network To benefit the wider community. So that's one of our aims in cso and I hope it is of other funders as well Shared research and a shared research agenda is what will strengthen our common work with resolve as an institution So a prime example of resolves online a prime example of this collaboration is Resolves online platform, which is connecting local voices to global conversations on violent extremism this collaboration among local researchers And and between local researchers practitioners and policy makers As the as the collaborative platform expands Um, we'll help policy makers and practitioners around the globe Amplify the the research that resolve is doing And employ it in our own analysis and programming So cso has already benefited extensively from the great research conducted by resolve and in recent a recent example The latest collaborative publication by resolve network partners the governance nexus Challenges us to focus on nonviolent tactics employed by violent extremist groups and their supporters To figure out when governance failures begin to have salience to the broader Community so this period may represent the tipping point between Prevention and reaction that may require us to calibrate our our activities And hopefully get more onto the preventive side than the reactive side After violent extremism emerges Cso is thinking through this problem and our future programs and policies will be stronger and more effective as a result of the Incredible research that resolve is making available to all of us. So once again, thank you kandis and your team Karla and usip. I know there are other people from here as well from usip For bringing us together for what I hope will be a frank exchange On the challenges we face and that our societies face from the threats of violent extremism And and I wish you the best of luck in the next program over the couple days And of course in the in the year to come with resolve. Thanks. You hear me. Okay Thanks tom and karla for for those Nice welcoming remarks. I want to welcome you all here. This is the second time around for the resolve network Putting on our our great big show We have a lot of folks from around the world here today as was mentioned by our opening speakers Including of course our panel who I'll introduce in due course In particular, I just want to point out that, you know, we have some folks from Bangladesh here who Really marked this sort of the beginning for us Of a journey that we hope will continue And there are some of them here are in the front row, but you'll be able to see them later today And hear a little bit about their experience of trying to dig down deep on some of the drivers of violent experience extremism in their own country where they're, you know, really big challenges With social change and social dislocation Polarization around religion And the role of the state And citizenship It's been for us as a team a real experience Just to get an eye full of what it looks like Outside of the, you know, the context of cnn And all the sort of news coverage, but to see the real day to day struggles that researchers in in these countries really confront When they're trying to do to open up the dialogue on violence in their own countries It's very difficult and very dangerous work And we are committed to making sure that Researchers who do this work in places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan You know, Kenya can do so safely and that they feel that they have a community So a lot of the people that you see here today at the various panels Will be able to tell you about that We really encourage you to go online Look up their work Exchange views with them contact them. They're a great resource and that's why we've built this network I'd also sort of talk to you want to talk to you a little bit about sort of my pathway here Before introducing the panelists who also have taken a long journey here I think what we all share in common actually is We probably have been doing this now for good 16 17 years sometimes more I think in some cases Each one of us, you know has had The great privilege and also I think the great struggle of tracing the evolution of You know, certainly u.s counterterrorism policy the evolution of violent extremism As we knew it back in 1998 to 1999 I started on this journey as a cub reporter with the new york daily news working with the investigative team there My second day on the job was 9 11 And I was a little confused and a little scared But that really started me on this journey to better understand not only Really as a reporter but as a new yorker Who saw Great destruction in the city. I spent Day after day at ground zero attending to some of the first responders there as well as You know spending time at funerals For those who were killed In the world trade center. So I know well, I think The the deep impact that can have on a community how it can Really tear a community apart when big violent events occur And how difficult it is to find your way back to peace But I spent a lot of my life trying to Connect with people who are committed to that return to peace And I think we have that here today with our panelists First I want to introduce of course, jenny of ebdo. Some of you may know her She's been around the circuit for a long time Geneve Is actually now a lecturer at the elliott school at george washington university But she's probably more well known for the work that she's done tracing You know social change and shifts around religion and particular political islam in the middle east She's the author of a number of books one of which i'm reading right now Main street in mecca That really traces the the the journey of american muslims After 9 11 and all the challenges i think that the muslim community in the united states has has faced You know with the sort of retrenchment against Islam and islamophobia the rise of islamophobia in response to To some of the events after 9 11 I'm pleased to have you here with us today jenny of course ali sufan You may know him from his many appearances in many books not the least of which of the looming towers He's sort of a featured character, but he's also the ceo of the sufan group Which brings us analysis and intelligence from from the field on the current state of terrorism and security around the world He of course is a former fbi agent who really began tracing, you know al qaeda from from the beginning Investigating the attacks on the embassies in tanzania and kenya first and then uss as coal And then of course the attacks on 9 11. I'm very glad to have you here today And sahara z's Recently moved from taxes to the great state of new jersey Where she is a law professor at rutgers university Also a profoundly prolific Writer who spent a lot of time actually taking on the critical challenge of the intersection of race and religion And responses to the the national security crisis that we find ourselves in even 16 years later after the attacks on 9 11 Sahara has also written a book on the muslim menace, which i'm just beginning to read I'm trying to do my homework. There are other books as well and other reports We're going to talk a little bit today just about sort of their experience And and try and sort of understand where we are the title of this this panel is after raka Um confronting the the new wave of violent extremism Um, and I sort of was you know casting around looking for catchy titles But it occurred to me that uh, what's happening today, uh in the middle east is I think two big tectonic shifts One is uh, obviously this sort of the loss of of territory for daish in in iraq and syria So, you know, this is sort of a a battlefield Tactical change that we've seen Over time that has very big implications for the communities in places like raka in places like mosul That are now trying to rebuild So that's one tectonic shift and I think it also probably has implications strategically For the way we see daish more of over time And so we want to talk a little bit a little bit about that But also there's this other shift that has occurred over the last year and a half two years that I think we've seen which is The the crisis in iraq and syria has driven so many people Also afghanistan has driven so many people out of the country Into the arms of europe and other Refuge refuge locations around the world, but in particular in europe, of course, we've seen a real reaction there And that reaction, um, I think has given rise to deep-seated Anti-muslim and anti-immigrant Sentiment that has also begun to kind of manifest itself in the rise of populist rhetoric As well as I think in some ways helped some authoritarian Leaning parties and even governments in the middle east Really consolidate their hold on power So, you know interestingly, you know, you have these two dynamics You know coming into play You know the question is so what does this mean, you know, what can we anticipate? Um, I will start with you genive, uh, you know from these two shifts In terms of how communities respond to violent extremism and how governments should be responding to it Well, those are two huge questions, of course, but um the work that i've been, um Conducting in the region Since 2013 really focuses on the shiasuni issue and the violence that's occurred there and the causes for that And so I think that if we sort of narrow the discussion You know isis has been largely responsible For a lot of the sectarianism that's happened because it has polarized these two communities in a way that we hadn't seen before before the the sort of emergence of isis as we know it today And um, the reason for that is is primarily because A lot of their violence was Perpetuated on a sectarian agenda. So that's sort of how they justified their violence Um against the the shia anyway and how they justified To some degree the even the establishment of the so-called islamic state that this was supposed to be a purest islamic state They had a monopoly on religious interpretation And so and that's to some degree why it was successful in these two countries that they where they occupied territory So the challenge now after isis is That this kind of religious animosity has emerged and it's hard to Retreat back to pre isis the pre isis era Because it's not only affected extremists, but it's affected general populations So if you look at iraq for example, a lot of the sunnis were displaced By isis from some of the territories that they occupied and weren't allowed to return And the sunnis of course in iraq some of them at least some of the tribal leaders supported isis Because they were marginalized by the shia government in iraq So these this kinds of institutionalized marginalization is very hard to reverse post isis so that's to me that's the Long-term effect of a group like isis is that you can defeat them militarily you can defeat you can you know Reconquer their territory, but on a social and societal level The the ramifications I think are very long term and that's what's unfortunate even after The defeat of isis in some areas in the Middle East So ali no way back. I mean There's no post isis future here where we can reconcile absolutely. I think we're going to find a lot of Post isis now how the post isis is going to be That's yet to be seen But I agree with with what we heard today. I would like to put it also in a geopolitical context Um sectarianism and what isis did was a symptom of a disease that existed in the middle east And that's a geopolitical disease sectarianism is being used as a tool Of geopolitical influence between two regional countries that's looking to expand their influence in the region iran and saudi arabia And as long as we're using sectarianism as a geopolitical tool Supported by petrodollars from these two countries We're going to have That system that exists that it creates it creates a group like isis and creates group like al-qaeda when we have Some kind of an agreement on who will have what piece of a pie between iran turkey and saudi arabia The environment that create groups like isis and al-qaeda Will basically cease to exist and you will start seeing people moving away from that This is all a manufactured A crisis between regional powers funded by regional powers supported by regional powers influenced by regional powers And we see that now not only in iraq and syria We see it in yemen and what's happening between the zedis and the sunnis I mean the zedis and the sunnis have been living together in yemen forever Nobody knows who zedis and who sunnis i mean and and now you have a civil war that's dividing the country and the only people who are literally Benefiting from that civil war in yemen or al-qaeda in the arabian peninsula before the saudi war in yemen al-qaeda and the arabian peninsula were Were less than 1,000 now the numbers is five to six thousand and this is official numbers I think the number is way higher than that I think what we see today if you want to go back to the tactical to the terrorism elements of it to al-qaeda and isis You know isis started as a terrorist an underground terrorist organization And then it went to an insurgency and then it created a protostate And now with everything that we see in mosul and rakha and other places It's going back to be an underground terrorist organization. So they're going to find themselves Exactly where al-qaeda found themselves after 9 11 when they lost their base of operation in afghanistan Isis is going to be stateless states the islamic state the so-called islamic state is going to be Stateless, and if there is no caliph they're going to be looking for a new leader One of the things the united states did and the coalition did very very well Basically killing every number two isis has isis Basically, we don't even know who's a number two now because everyone who has assigned us a number two has been killed So you're going to have an ideology and you're going to have a narrative And how are we going to find this ideology and find this narrative isis's power Is not only a state and rakha or musul isis's power in an ideology that that they use social media and they use Social networks in in different communities to include in europe to promote that to recruit that friends getting together and joining the islamic state Looking for identity looking for something, right? So all these guys now We're going to be dealing with with a problem where the islamic state realize or the so-called islamic state dash Realize that they are not remaining and expanding as was the motto of the state when it started But now they are trying to move from a state to a terrorist organization and isis comes from the same salafi jihadi movement as al qaeda After 9 11 al qaeda changed their approach and that's uh after 9 11. Sorry after the arab spring al qaeda changed their approach Osama bin laden actually one of the last orders he gave To his commanders before the navy seals bullets took him down Was just not do not focus on the united states and the west anymore Try to create vacuums In areas that's affected by the arab spring and prevent anyone else From filling that vacuum Because anyone who's going to fill that vacuum they're going to be the new american agents there And they did a great job in doing that in places like yemen in places like syria in other places and we see now Al qaeda is not only in afghanistan al qaeda in They are in syria. We see syria probably is a backbone of al qaeda organization. They are in yemen They are in the islamic maghrib and in as sahel. They were able to unify You know across ethnic and tribal lines under the leadership of an algerian abdul musab abdul wadud and They they have relationships with many different groups like j.i. That's building the network again in southeast asia And also, you know ashabab is still operating in sumalia So we have an environment when everybody is looking at isis. This is like the the the the big thing that we're looking at but however the The tree that isis came from is growing and it's spreading around the middle east And it's all fine and dandy until they decide to go back to attack the united states and the west And to go back to the ways they used to be before the arab spring But but it's it's roots if you talk about the tree but you talk about the roots and I think it's a hard I think it's very well positioned to talk about this I mean, you know what makes narratives appealing is sometimes there's a kernel of truth in the story, right? And one of the narratives is that, you know You know, kairu is corrupt You know sanat is corrupt and these governments, uh, you know our Um, you know crumbling from within So so I just want to start by saying that countering vion extremism Is not going to be effective if there is no alternative non violent way to express dissent Or to oppose the status quo and that applies in the united states as well as in the middle east And so for those who are genuinely interesting interested in countering vion extremism Which presumably everybody in the room is You have to take seriously people's grievances because what some of the studies have shown including a recent report by csis That was you know based on on a commission of experts is that grievances drive a search for Violence justifying ideology It's not that violence justifying ideology search for grievances per se or that's not the first order problem And that's why many people who are muslims or who understand islamo may not be muslims will tell you this is not about islam Because 30 or 40 years ago. It was arab nationalism or socialism or some other Ideology that was used by people who thought they had a just cause and felt that they needed to use violence in order to um, you know to Fight repression whether it was the colonialists or others So when we're talking about the sectarianism I mean not to speak about it per se in iraq or in syria or in other countries Bahrain because I think it's very locally focused But it's something that we can learn here is When resources are allocated and people are treated in ways based on their Identities particularly if they're immutable and I consider religious identity to be immutable at least quasi immutable Then you are going to have wedges that groups states or non-states can drive to create those divisions in society that can start out With protesters who drive over people To people who have guns and militant groups and start fighting with each other And I raise that because I think this is a serious problem that we have here in this country That hopefully will never escalate to that level But when you think of islamophobia or antisemitism or or racism against certain groups You know be cognizant that if certain groups start to be if particularly if state power is used To disparately allocate resources Who gets a job who doesn't who gets a high quality education who doesn't Who is disparately disproportionately? Harmed in the criminal justice system, which is oftentimes if you ask people In egypt if you ask coptics or in iraq or in bahrain or in syria and other player lebanon Obviously it's to bearing degrees But oftentimes there are grievances. We're treated inferiorly by the state and then that legitimizes our Co-citizens to treat us inferiorly and then that's where things start to be vulnerable to exploitation So and I agree with geneva and with ali in terms of The regional and I would say not just regional geopolitics. I would say international Geopolitics and I think this is something that many of us in the room appreciate although I don't think we've done a good job of Acting on it Which is american foreign policy and european foreign policy in the middle east is a very active component of what's happening in the region We can't we can't I think it's disingenuous of us and people in the region think it's disingenuous of us To go and be very concerned with vion extremism as we should be But not take the responsibility that our government and our taxpayer money is in the game And so as long as we do that we're not going to be credible actors incredible voices So I just want to to highlight that and That relates to kind of the second point which we can talk about further is The our role in supporting authoritarians and our role in you know ask yourself What did we do when the egyptian people did something that many of us thought was impossible I was amazed I was Just completely. I thought I was reading a book not seeing something live, which was that Citizens non violently in the millions overthrew a very repressive regime very repressive Read the human rights watch report under about cc right now. That's called we do unreasonable things here about torture in egypt This has been going on for decades. Mubarak did it said that did it and also did it cc's doing it Imagine living in a society like that and being able to non violently overthrow it and what did we do? What was our response? Well, we don't want to interfere Well, it's their business, which it's true. I mean we do have to respect sovereignty But then when cc wants military aid and when cc wants counterintelligence And support and counterterrorism support We say well we'll help you and then decide well. Why is there's why is ices? You know why is synih falling apart? Why is ices getting stronger in synih? Why isn't there a non violent? political opposition movement in egypt after a law they just passed to Denaturalize and strip individuals of their citizenship if they are political dissidents There's a new law that just got passed in egypt should pay attention to it And you know if you criticize them what they're going to say Well, isn't that what you all do? Don't you take doesn't Europe now take citizenship away from people accused of being foreign fighters Didn't you all send us your people during the extra the extraordinary rendition? Didn't you all waterboard? Don't you all have guantanamo bay? So we need to connect those dots if we're going to be very if we're serious about countering violent extremism So ownership let's let's talk about ownership of this very complex Policy framework called countering violent extremism So so how are you pointed out something, you know, they're apparently you know fine people on all sides You know, we don't know But real deal is right right wing extremism Has a has a narrative too that narrative is you know predominantly white and christian and european And yet for some reason That doesn't always sort of make it into the center of the conversation when it comes to policy prescriptions And it it does I think erode the credibility In on some on some level of this policy framework But the second piece which you point out and I want to hear from both of you a little bit about this is you know credibility around us and european support for You know governments led by people like cc You know, here's a man who has been At the forefront of repressing dissent For the better part of you know a decade and now is actually, you know You know in a position to do that What does that mean what message does it send when we send, you know, sort of the toys And the and the guns Without without conditions I mean should part of the policy framework for countering violent extremism on some level You know engage with that Take responsibility for it. Is that part of countering violent extremism making sure that You know that governments that are repressive and in the way they Execute the rule of law are in some ways barred from using You know european or american funds in order to suppress their own people I mean, that's you know, that's a question that that you know, washington has been grappling with for for decades And I think that the view from the region as sahar said so eloquently is that You know american policy is very duplicitous. I mean Even if you take I mean if we can just sort of narrow the conversation Even if you consider I mean forget about the ambivalence when mubarak on the days of the eve of mubarak's overthrow You know how we people were getting sort of mixed messages From the united states whether the obama administration was supporting his ouster whether they weren't But then when the muslim brotherhood came to power I mean this was like it or not a democratically elected government I'm not going to get into the I wrote a book once about the muslim brotherhood But I won't get into the details about the brotherhood. It's a very controversial subject now in washington But in any case this was a democratically elected government and again ambivalence Because The united states and the europeans as well less so the europeans, but couldn't they they didn't know what the position should be The brotherhood became a repressive government as well to some degree Because I mean for a lot of reasons, but one of which was that they didn't know how to govern They had been a banned opposition movement since their inception in 1928 so So, you know, did they know how to govern? No, did they make errors? Of course But nonetheless they were a democratically elected government the first in egypt in modern history so When there is ambivalence at these critical moments in time The way it's viewed from the region as as sahar pointed out is that It's it's hypocrisy and it's not only on a sort of massive policy level. I mean, I'll just give you an example every few months for example Bahrainis come here who are part of the banned opposition in Bahrain And they they're, you know, they try to have conversations with people in the white house with people in the state department about the human rights situation of Bahrain Which should be noted by this government It's another post-arabra uprising situation where, you know, the opposition has been marginalized their clerics are in prison or under house arrest There's basically not, you know, the the opposition has been banned Descent has been crushed But they can't get a hearing with anyone in the us government of any importance And so they go to congress and they try to lobby congress and so i'm just trying to give you specific examples So when they go back to the region And they go to a rock which they do because they're now I mean the other thing that we have to keep in mind is that post-arabra uprisings There are transnational networks now, you know, what happens in iraq doesn't stay in iraq what happens in syria doesn't stay in syria And a lot of the opposition movements Have networks now throughout the region There are Bahraini groups now based in lebanon in beirut opposition groups because they can't operate freely in Bahrain So They go back to the region and they say well, we didn't get a hearing in washington Um, you know, nobody's interested in human rights. This is the i'm just telling you this is the perception people aren't interested in human rights Because it isn't in the best interest of us policy So this country that we you know boast is concerned about humanity about Human rights about racial rights Somehow the message that's received is that the united states is much more concerned about security issues So in Bahrain, there's a base a naval base in another country There are other security issues and the same has been true about egypt And so I think that just generally speaking The narrative we have to get away from is to view these countries now, especially post-arabra uprising as a choice between Islamists and dictators Because that has always been sort of the narrative through which americans have viewed these countries and Generally speaking People have come down on this with the dictators as the preferred alternative to islamist and you know, I think that I mean because i've spent so many years writing about islamist, but not necessarily the The the ultra extremists, but I think we have to understand post-arabra uprisings that there are islamists of many many stripes They're not all violent They're not all they're certainly not democratic But we've got to stop viewing these people as cartoon characters Who behave only a certain way and who are not have no constituency because they have as holly pointed out A lot of people support them for various reasons And so we have to become much more sophisticated about our understandings of the effects of dictators And the different stripes of extremists And it's time to view the region in my opinion In the multiple layers that it exists and in the complexities that exist because it's not It's not it's no longer if it ever was which it wasn't a choice between the us siding with dictators or islamists um And so I think that's that was particularly true in the narrative about egypt is that One of the reasons I think that so many mistakes were made when the muslim brotherhood came to power Is that despite all these years of existence of the brotherhood and I lived in egypt for many years in the 90s So I saw Sort of the rise of the brotherhood during those very important and critical years and they're Really what I think was a social transformation of egyptian society But the united states didn't understand that because no one talked to the brotherhood or they did on rare occasions No one really took the movement all that seriously And that's true of a lot of movements whether they're extremists whether they're Moderate islamists And so I think there also has to be some sort of reeducation Of the foreign service in this country because there seems to be An allergy toward taking religion seriously So it's not you know, there is a religious component and maybe my colleagues will disagree But there is a religious component to these movements. They don't they're not just about violence. Okay, and that's To some degree Why they have such resonance within populations. They're not just a bunch of crazy people You know beheading their their their brothers. I mean that's not it's it's a lot more complicated than that So what they're promising is something I think also It's an alternative. It's an alternative. They're promising an alternative I mean in iraq they promised an alternative because As was pointed out earlier The states are dysfunctional. They're collapsing if not weakening states That don't provide for people what they believe they should have and to your point kandis citizenship So it is about citizenship and I think that what has fundamentally changed at least in some Arab societies is that people don't identify Don't have a national identity or at least they have less of a national identity than they had pre-arab uprisings Now, you know, they're shia or they're sunni or they're christians or they're some they have some other identity They're not necessarily iraqis. They're not necessarily egyptians. That's a reflection on on the governments But I think you know, you see that in south asia too. I think there's this now kind of growing division Uh, you know, uh, you see it in pakistan You know, am I a pakistani first or am I a muslim first? These are big questions before we get into we have about five minutes. I think maybe before audience q&a But ali, I want you to respond to some of what you heard but also ask you a question You've been on the inside. Okay, you've you've interrogated. Um, you know Members of al-qaeda, you know their journey. You understand sort of what they're about You know, that's sort of that first hand sort of evidence-based approach that we often talk about Instead of this fantasy, but this is a real challenge, right? The dichotomy between, you know security And then kind of dealing with social transformation What's behind that from a law enforcement perspective? How do you cope with that in a fair and just way? Well, I think you know We can discuss al-qaeda. We can discuss isis tomorrow. We'll probably discuss a different group. We're fighting an ideology, you know Let's go, you know, I I don't like to focus on specific groups, right? We're focusing on ideology and this ideology is creating What we call violent extremism or whatever term we're going to be using for it today But where is that ideology coming from? Yes, it takes many different shapes and forms You know, it can be a knife attack in paris or a bomb in london or weaponizing a truck in knees or Even using a car as a missile in charlottesville, virginia, right? But i'm just going to focus on the jihadi Salafi element of it as it relates to the middle east and i won't be discussing, you know, the domestic Elements of the rise of white supremacy and neo nazi groups in the u.s That ideology comes partly from religion Now what kind of religion it's religion that is being promoted by our friends and by our allies Specifically, yes, saudi arabia When isis talk about the rawafid and ashiah and then you need to kill them You see that in saudi arabia textbooks when the imam of the haram in saudi arabia say, may god Give us control over the necks of the christians and the jews and the rawafid What does that mean? And you see somebody from isis beheading somebody You cannot say that that is not the religion. This is an idea of A government that's trying to use sectarianism in its extreme form as a geopolitical tool against its enemy As a geopolitical tool to expand its influence in the region We see that we saw that in the 80s because they were fearful of comedies expanding the iranian revolution and we supported them with that They established radical madrasas all over the place not only in afghanistan and pakistan But also in indonesia and malaysia in the philippines and africa and from these madrasas We had al qaeda many of these people who join al qaeda everyone almost who was involved in some You know some form of terrorism in the east africa embassy bombing in the uss call had access to these madrasas that were funded from our friends Right Many of the people that i talked to had access for these madrasas or the ngo's that operated at the time Some of it was still remnants of the afghan jihad some of it from bazenia But it the money and the ideology all came from one place and today we see the same thing We're talking about cc. Well cc just happened yesterday. This is a problem is a generational problem You know, we've we've seen what's happening today in yemen and the massacres that's happening in yemen and guess what when you talk to the yemenis Yes, the saudi's are bombing them, but it's american planes and it's british missiles and towards the end We're gonna pay for it We're gonna be handing we're gonna be holding that back Right, you know, we have 15 hijackers came from one country And the only thing we did You know, we're selling them more weapons and giving them more green cards due to whatever they want in in the region Right imagine at least 15 hijackers imagine if two of the hijackers were from iran We'll be invading tahran by then right So this is where The problem with our policy is the problem with our policy agree with sahar There is some kind of a hypocrisy And and that hypocrisy caused the situation in egypt with the cc. Remember At the time the united states Government and state department. I have to be fair for them. They supported the Mercy government they supported the government because it was democratically elected Right, but the saudi's and the emirates were really upset that the muslim brotherhood now is ruling egypt So they started a campaign in washington to convince the united states to at least sit on the side When they take back egypt because they were fearful that the muslim brotherhood is a social and a political organization That might probably force for change in the gulf states And you know what at the time We want them to be happy We want to give them what they want because we wanted to sign that deal with iran So we gave them carte blanche in yemen. We gave them carte blanche And other places even you know if you want to say in libya later after that we gave them that and the region is a mess So we have a lot of vacuums now We have a lot of problems and we have a lot of big messes in syria and in yemen and other places And to where is the end? Let me tell you the united states government and the american people have to pay for all these things because these guys When they recruit they are not recruiting against saudi arabia. They are not recruiting. They will recruit Against the united states, you know, they will Summa bil laden for example a few times Mentioned saudi arabia in his 1996 declaration of jihad But most of his terrorist attacks were against the west and the united states You know towards the end they know where the money is coming from and they don't want to upset People government or non-government who are giving them money. So when we talk about the ideology That's creating terrorism this ideology is going to continue As long as it's funded as long as it is being utilized as a geopolitical tool as long as it is Being utilized to control societies and as long as we are silent about it and we're not pushing These governments to change their ways Unfortunately, we can talk about counter violent extremism. We can talk about stopping the ideology We can talk about moderate islam All the things means nothing As we speak today Billions of dollars is being spent in southeast asia. I'll give you for example, indonesia at the time of bali The bali bombing in indonesia. They had about 30 School madrasas radical madrasas, right today 63 They operated by ji nobody is focusing on that because that thing in south philippine is very sexy. It's isis So let's focus on that Right. They are building the network They are building the network and they they repeat the same thing again and again and again Expecting different results. Guess what? We're not going to have a different results It's going to be the same thing. You think you can control these people And then you won't be able to control these people and we've seen that in syria We've seen that in iraq and we've seen that in so many different places across the region We are fighting an ideology. We're not fighting organizations. This organization will change tomorrow They will have a different name Some of them maybe will rejoin al qaeda under the leadership of hamza bin laden bin laden son When i have won al qaeda leadership decides that he is that he is You know, it's time for him to take over But at the same time we're going to be we're fighting We're fighting a social network now that look into this ideology as an identity It gives them a sense of adventure and give them a sense of belonging And it gives them a sense that they are challenging the world order that they feel is unjust and as long as we don't deal with these issues We're going to be talking about this for many many years to come So hara wants to jump in i'm going to let you jump in but then we're going to open it up to the audience so I want to respond a little to janeve and ali's insightful comments agree and some and disagree on some points So first is to say an islamist is a terrorist is like saying a republican is a white supremacist I mean that's really what i think and that's how i interpret and i think janeve is is correct Yes, there are some people who self-identify as islamists, which i define as a political actor who Self proclaims that their religion Is the basis for their political platform and it informs the policies and societal structures that they seek in their particular country Some of them will interpret it in a way that will justify Violence like white supremacists who do use very conservative beliefs That may overlap with some republican beliefs, but by but doesn't mean that all republicans support what they do It's kind of like concentric circles And to say that i realize some republicans will go that's so offensive Well, that's what a lot of political islamists will say when you call them terrorists Is this just because someone claims they have they use religion and i also use religion in my world view of my politics Doesn't mean that i'm an extremist as they are The second point and this is where Getting back to your question about White supremacy and christians vis-a-vis the rise of the alt right and other extremist groups Why aren't we as americans or why isn't europe because it also has a very serious problem I think it's a problem with the far right movement turning extreme Why don't we associate that with whiteness or christianity or their immutable characteristics, which they do have in common I think the answer is simple because they're human beings to us We humanize them we see them as members of our political community as our in group And so we have the sophistication and and and understanding to be nuanced about it individualize the problem understand There's a politics to it understand their socioeconomics to it the historical background And so we can intellectualize it and our inability to do that on issues related to political islam confounds me Until this day i cannot i understood it may be the first year two three four after 9 11 People needed to catch up there was there's a shortage as ali says and junef says of experts real experts on the middle east But it's been 16 or 17 years later So i'm not i don't think we really have much of an excuse beyond admitting that maybe we're just prejudice I mean maybe we're just prejudiced and we cannot accept That people from that country are human beings and to understand there the conflicts there the way we Understand or analyze the conflicts in the west and then that's a whole different problem We have to deal with i mean then finally i just want to talk about the role of religion And and when you use the term ideology as opposed to groups So some of you may know about the letter to berdadi which was signed by hundreds If not maybe even a thousand over a thousand Imams and religious leaders some of whom are formally Qualified or or experts where they went to al-azhar or they went to a Islamic institution to to get an education some of whom are imams by virtue of their community reputation and constituency They all And they went and it was theological they went go and look it up. It's online and it's translated into english And they took on isis's or dash's Ideology on the merits on the theological merits and said no we interpret it differently Because the truth is religion can be interpreted in many different ways and it's been used to Support the crusades and it's also been used to You know support peace Religion is i see it as a vessel that can be used for can be filled with many different things from love hate Peace violence. So I think we need to also acknowledge that even though Yes, they are using the theological Disputes that go back centuries that created what we now know as shia and sunni That that whether it's state and non-state actors and there's a reason why Saudi Arabia Portrays shiites in a negative light one is geopolitical because it wants to weaken iran and it was very afraid of the 1979 Islamic revolution because they saw it as a shia revolution and they saw it as a geopolitical Shift in the region's you know power structure But also because they have a significant number of shia in their countries who are mistreated and discriminated against And they need to justify that just like we have to justify Some people will justify our very Racialized criminal justice system by implicitly or explicitly stating that there's something wrong with the black community in America And therefore it explains why mass incarceration exists such that most people in jail are black Well, there just must be it's them not the system So this happens in every country and and so even though yes religion is relevant I still don't agree that it is about religion per se. I think it's about power I think it's about Control and dominance and yes the dashes of the world and the al-qaidas and whoever else is going to come out of the Syrian conflict which there will be groups as we know They are going they do seek a change to the world order whether it's a pan islamic state or They are challenging the wasphalian nation state order. That's true and they're using religion to justify it But you can use religion to justify anything else. So that's where I just I want to add that nuance because we have not in the west Been able to overcome this very fundamental intellectual analytical process Of looking at the middle east and central asia and muslim majority countries the way we would look at our own country and understand that if some president came in And start and try to reignite the catholic protestant conflict, which is very real and killed many hundreds of thousands of people So that's a fault line that we can play You know the the jewish christian divide there's a history to that But does that mean that we all have to fall for that? No So I see it more as a fault line in a wedge that's being played But not one that is inevitable and irreconcilable Well, let let me open up to the floor. What's great about this is you have three people Who actually share a lot of similar world views But very distinct and very subtle nuances in in how you view the problem set. I'm sure that's the case in the audience And so I want to open it up to the floor A lot of thought provoking commentary up here And I hope we'll get some from you if we have um mics Are there questions for our panelists comments thoughts this gentleman back here with the blue tie Hasan My question is actually about what seems to me a focus on the push element in promoting the ideology and often At the detriment of the pull element, which I have the impression has not at least so far Been sufficiently covered when we say for example, then that the the Saudi Wahhabi establishment is Spreading madrasas all over the globe Well, that might may be true and actually it is true, but why are these madrasas being welcome? Why is it that for example the efforts on the part of the malaysians? To spread another version of proselytic Islam that is more geared towards business Not as attractive in places such as Cambodia such as indonesia such such as the philippines. I I think we ought to Not fall into the trap of thinking that if we dry up the the source of this ideology The the radicalism that is being circulating will will simply subside Because it's as much a pull as as it is A push I'd like your comments on that I'm gonna collect one or two more questions or comments. Um, and actually so I don't forget Just kind of keep track a little bit gentlemen here in the blue shirt Uh, this will also you raise your view. Um, this was a great discussion a great panel Um, I think I like to call the us in the region as somebody that works behind the scenes Especially since the u.s. Does support repressive governments and the gulf You know and throughout the Middle East My question does refer to how We should view the war on terror, especially since we're 16 17 years into this phenomena and Do you think this we have to maybe be credible for some of these vacuums? Especially and yaman and libya Afghanistan or rocks area Um, would you consider the war on terror to be a failure of Provocative Should we take one more? Um, can I can I yeah, please Ali? Sorry for interrupting My name is aliyaz. I have two points or rather two questions One Ali Sufan that you have mentioned about the madrasas Unfortunately or unfortunately I've been trying to walk on the Particularly in South Asia. I understand Your concerns and some of the things that you've mentioned with respect to the Saudi funding and of course there are number of them that have been If not the the incubator of the earth, of course they have connections to But painting them in the broad brush Does that help us or does not that help? My my own experience of understanding the south asian madrasas There are other things that they have done and take before 1979. Why didn't we see any madrasa being so radical? They were not rough definitely But prior to 1979 we haven't seen madrasa as an incubator of the earth and to date if I if I Correct an understanding even in terms of numbers Are they more that are producing this militants or As for transnational terrorists at least in south asia. This is very small Maybe engineers are more than you know more engineers have become transnational terrorists That's why that part that I want to you know highlight and I think In painting in broad brush might actually doesn't it would not help us Rather it would be counter in a productive That's my first point and the second point that what I would like to bring in When we are at what point We talk about violent extremism In this town meaning that Has it Will it be only when it becomes threat to the u.s. Interest or is it before that? Should we only focus that it should be on yemen and and and maybe Indonesia but not definitely not in india, you know Because the veneer of the democracy in india Does it prevent us from talking about violent extremism? Because it's not about the religion only there are and it is not only strong We know that we have talked long time about it. It's not about So at what point violent extremism which has not been associated with Islam Or muslim majority countries at what point we are going to talk about that So three very, um Thought-provoking questions challenging questions on some level the first. Um, just to recap What about the pull factors, right? I mean we've been talking a lot about governments and their you know, sort of reactive suppression of dissent What is it that is drawing people back to a more religious Kind of point of view of the world That draws them to that as a as a way to Center themselves in thinking about social justice. What what what is that about? I think And what does that mean, you know, how do you treat that policy-wise? And I think that goes to the earlier, you know, sort of conversation we're having here about, you know, okay Political Islam has elements, uh, you know, obviously of ideology that can be poisonous in some quadrants But it is also a political and social movement That represents A craving In citizens to to get back to the roots of what they know as justice What they understand, you know, maybe from childhood as justice So that's question number one and then two is the war on terror terror failure I am not supposed to answer that question. I will just say it hasn't been going very well. That's my own perspective And maybe we can talk a little bit about that But Ali's point is a very good one and I think that, you know Our experience in this last year in doing research in Bangladesh And I think, you know, even the work that we're going to be now launching in Lake Chad Mason looks expressly outside of the madrasa framework because the reality is On university campuses in a lot of places where you have authoritarian structures That's the last bastion of political open public political discourse And, you know, the the conversation about religion and and citizenship isn't just Taking place in the drosses. In fact, it may not be taking place there at all So, you know, to Ali's point, what good does it do us to look at the problem that way? Good question Let me start with one two three The first one first of all, I wanted to also Hint a little bit on something my colleague Sahar said Look, I'm proud muslim when I talk about the ideology. I'm not talking about Islam I just wrote a book called anatomy of terror and I talk about all the different incubating factors that's feed into radicalization and feeds into terrorism In the book, I basically defended groups that shouldn't be defended according to many people. You're like the muslim brotherhood I talk about political Islam and the different strains of political Islam So this is all fine and dandy when we're talking about Salafi jihadism That is causing the problems around the world We're talking about an ideology that's come from one specific place Man has been like this way before Iran It has been like this where before they found oil in the eastern province of saudi arabia where the shia lives This is a third saudi kingdom. The first kingdom was destroyed by the ottomans sunnis Muhammad Ali Basha sent his son ibrahim Basha Leading an army to basically get rid of Wahhabism in Mecca and Medina Because the muslim world were going crazy with the stuff that they were doing They went all the way to southern iraq. They destroyed the shia shrines in iraq They slaughtered sunnis who didn't believe in what they believed in So the ottoman empire at the time sent an army To stop that ideological narrative that that was considered by al-Azhar at the time Which is the major sunni university for theology the most renowned entity in the world as as heresy So let's you know i'm going to put it within a context The establishment now in the government of saudi arabia is an alliance between the radical ikhwan Not the muslim brotherhood don't consider them the the radical wahabis ikhwan was the house of saudi The radical wahhabism gives legitimacy to the house of saudi And that's why sometimes you see a lot of tension between the government and between the scholars in saudi arabia Sometimes the government want to reform the scholars push back. They don't want to reform, but this is part of it So when i talk about this i talk specifically about a narrative that does not recognize anyone else It does not recognize you if you're a shia It does not recognize you if you're muslim brotherhood if you see who destroyed the sanaha Because they didn't want it to be in the hand of the muslim brotherhood. It wasn't the west It was that narrative Okay, so i'm talking about specific narrative So when i talk with the gentleman with the blue tie since she called you the gentleman of the blue tie When i talk about these kind of things I put it within that context now why malaysia can't do it why indonesia can't do it. They don't have the billions It's a lot of money Why didn't happen until 79 as i said It created a lot of fear internally and i spoke about the geopolitical tension with komeini trying to export his version Of shia radicalism around the middle east So there is there is a reason why they tried to do that, but we've seen That they haven't been able to control that So when all these radical guys go and start establishing madrasas and preaching an ideology and a narrative That is not known to the muslims who live in that area Just the other day Okay in singapore an imam from india who studied in Medina He's giving a lecture On friday and he started praying for god to kill all the jews and all the christians in a place like singapore multi ethnically place So they got him the singaporeans arrested him immediately and he said hey, that's what they say in medina. That's islam. They said no, that's not islam We said the the minister himself said show me any scripture in the quran that said god kill all the christians and the jews That's not islam So they had him go and apologize To the synagogues and to the christian churches in singapore for what he did and they published it in the newspapers How he apologized this is I am all fine and dandy in establishing madrasas in schools It's not about the madrasas ali. It's about what they are teaching there Should you be killed just because you're a buddhist Should you be killed just because you're a blogger and you guys know these things in bangladesh just because you wrote something that they didn't like Okay, what are they teaching there? That's what we're talking about. This is not islam Islam has so I mean anybody who can say oh that islam is it's like a rainbow There are so many different schools of thoughts and theologies and sects and ideologies and beautiful stuff Islam came with literature on poetry and science Not isis and dash You're just sitting to the left One in doubt always go left It's an FBI agent in the room. That's not accurate So jeannie, I want you to jump in and by the way, I want to mention that our our beloved timekeeper is giving me signals So, um, okay, I'll be free. Yeah The only thing I just want to offer a cautionary note Which is that we've spent a lot of this discussion Sort of identifying the suni world as the culprits And I want to draw your attention to the fact that as ali said one of the principle principles and objectives of the iranian revolution in 1979 was to spread a certain type of religious interpretation in the region The arab uprisings have allowed iran to do that many many years later So it's one thing to talk about suni governments being responsible suni groups being responsible, but There is also a lot of violence being committed by shia groups in the region And some of them are militias. They operate Fairly freely in iraq and syria. They're funded by the iranians. And so it's very important not to I mean to see this conversation You know in both respects not just as as a problem that the sunis have created because the shia on the other side Are doing all sorts of things in the middle east that really go Pretty much unrecorded because there's so much focus on the suni side. There's focus on suni salafist There's focus on suni extremist groups, but the iranians the the arab uprisings just to be Simplistic about it. We're a great gift for the islamic republic So I just want I'm not an expert on them addresses But I have read some You know reports and I wanted to mention them because I do think there's some truth to it Which is that when you're talking about the pull factors My understanding in places such as pakistan and other places where madrasas are numerically, you know higher Is that they're similar to the concept of charter schools in the us in terms of its parents who either have Well in the us of e parents who have only access to very very inferior quality of education because the public school system To which they have access to is Just unacceptable and so these madrasas are an alternative to which they don't necessarily know Is may ultimately indoctrinate some of their children to do things that are illegal right or violent Um or in other places. There's just no public schools So it's no coincidence that many of the kids based on my understanding that go there are from very poor Areas and so this gets back to the human rights the human development And all of these other underlying Circumstances that make it much easier to recruit and indoctrinate Young people frequently whether they're Miners or whether they're 18 to the mid 20s, which is what many of these you know foreign fighters fit Under but also those who are local. So when we talk about these issues, we need to be thinking about When these madrasas if there was a Social service provided by the state that was of decent quality Then people wouldn't be as interested in attending or sending their kids there. I'm not saying it's a full proof method If you have an issue with political islam because maybe you would just have a very strong view of the separation of religion and public life Which is a very american view And there are many egyptians who have that view I tell those egyptians Well, why don't you work towards making sure that public education and food and poverty is alleviated? There's food available. There's all these social services that the muslim brotherhood provided which gave them their popularity Which ultimately reflected in the ballot box, which is totally legitimate But if you have a problem with them compete don't just Stigmatize excuse me Criminalize them because you still have the underlying problem someone else will just come in and fit in and you may say Wow, I miss the muslim brotherhood. They actually were much more moderate than than their replacements So and then in terms of the war on terror who it depends on who you are Whether it's a failure or a success If you're the fbi, it's I think it's quite a success. You're See that's the problem with the left they make stuff up and they keep going with it It is a disaster dude disaster Let me make my point. It's somewhat of a sarcastic point, but I think it's a point that we as americans need to need to keep in mind One I think the authorities the law enforcement authorities to surveil to investigate to prosecute have expanded Quite a bit for law enforcement in the united states which affects adversely our civil liberties The budget for counterterrorism is quite high. I read something from the csis report that said and I I question it's accuracy, but maybe I mean it's something around two billion dollars for counterterrorism in 2016 for the fbi which sounds quite high But the budgets have increased exponentially for counterterrorism So if you're in the business of counterterrorism Including being private contractors improving being people who sell military weapons The industrial comp industrial complexes is you know is booming So the war on terror has created business for many people including the dictators because now anytime you criticize CC or whomever, you know, whatever leader they say look I Safety and security and stability and I need this in order to keep so I'm not serious so they don't end up like iran So it depends on where you stand. I think that if you stand from Human rights perspective from a human development from a good governance from a democratization perspective And from a long-term stability perspective, I would say it was a failure in that regard So where we stand right now is between this audience and coffee, I believe So and I don't want to do that. You guys look dangerous Thank you so much for coming here today and and really helping us think through these things Really appreciate the thought-provoking nature and also the nuanced fisticuffs up here. Thank you for It's marked, okay That's fair true Yeah, it's interesting Yeah, ahead of counters and policy and strategy Which included also more practical things Until see we're now 17 December 12. No, no, sorry 2012 December 2012 and I did that for more than five and a half years Before that I was responsible for reforming our whole integration civic integration system and policy So it's a cve relevant topic I worked a lot before that on social cohesion in risky neighborhoods in the big cities Actually at the time also in a way negatively inspired by Uh, the suburbs of Paris Already at the time. So there was a political question What is it that we should do? to avoid certain neighborhoods to completely Uh, basically disengage from that society Become a world on its own At the time, of course, the main as you know, the main concern was not at all terrorism or radicalization. It was crime Sam Oh, yeah, I didn't know that I must say when I look at what our congressmen do in the rare occasions when they leave office Is to learn that after years of service All cities are built for bicycles In a way And it's not in the mindset of the car drivers to reckon at all with The fact that you might suddenly See Sorry Yeah, yeah, sorry Good morning, everybody Good morning, um And welcome to the second session of this of this conference My name is Eva of in camp. I'm the deputy executive director of hedaya The international center of excellence for countering violent extremism Um and this session will be on the topic of violence And more specifically Entering violence. What is it? That make people at the end of the day decide that they are willing And able to use violence and when we talk about violent extremism, of course I'm talking about violence against innocent people primarily But also the other question What about exiting violence And of course from let's say a law enforcement counter terrorism cv perspective This was always a part of the core of what we were looking at Apart from ideologies things that we discussed also in the first panel The main concern was what is it that actually make people An individual take it to the next level and commit an act of violence Uh, and even now what we discussed this morning if if which it looks like will happen The military fight against dash in iraq and syria will be in military ways a success Of course, there are still many questions Related to what is next? What's the game after that? What about violence or peace and stability in iraq in syria? What about dash moving to other places? It was mentioned before the philippines, but maybe they are preparing in other parts of southeast asia like indonesia Libya they tried not really a success, but of course This question of what is it that we should understand In terms of why people actually join and support the violent fight Is still very relevant The whole idea The whole ideology the message that was sent by dash Of course is not gone by their military defeat on the ground And so probably the people who were at the time attracted to them Will still be attracted to them and if it's not them What will come after that I still remember I had discussions with colleagues in my former positions on al-qaeda seems to be almost gone Are we now entering a safer world or not? But there's also the other element and that's why this this topic is very relevant also right now Since the military fight is becoming in military terms a success more and more people will actually leave Leave syria and iraq And will either go to the new theaters or we'll go back We'll go home And then the question is what is it that we can and want to do with those people We can all put them in jail forever Might in many cases in legal terms Not be possible because you need the legal evidence to put people in prison Or you cannot put them in prison forever and at some point of time they will come out again And they will go back to our your communities to our communities Or if we cannot put them in prison because we are lacking evidence what to do with them And so there again this question of is there a possibility to at least at least to work with them And their communities and their families and their friends and their peers To make them Leave the opinion that violence is justified and should actually be out And i'm very happy and also really honored that we will Have a discussion on this very intriguing topic And that's the other part violence for many people of course Unfortunately is also a reason why they want to join Violence for governments, but also for terrorist organizations. Sometimes is the ultimate sign of authority and power And so young people some young people Because of the atrocities that they see online In other forms of media because of the violence that was exercised by this Actually wanted to join because this was the sign of the leader the strong leader that they wanted to join But i will not go into more detail on the topic because we have the true experts sitting on the left side of me And i will start with dr. Dale Ackerman Who is the rulf and richard lecerus professor of anthropology And human relations at darmath college And since 1968, which is the year that i was born He traveled Extensively in the middle east Including long-term field research in morocco and oman And one of his most recent books are muslim politics And the middle east and central asia and anthropological approach It's a great honor to have you here Um Next to him is dr. John worgan Who is a professor in the global studies institute and department of psychology at georgia state university Dr. John has a phd in applied psychology And his research focuses on understanding psychological Qualities of the pathways in two through and hopefully also out of terrorism And he is one of the leading world experts on terrorist psychology And he is currently also focusing on the psychology of religious conference because the percentages of people at least in the western context Who join uh, uh dash who are actually religious conference is very is high And um, he also is uh, researching the process by which children Became involved in terrorist organizations Um, and he is also, uh, a non-resident research fellow of of my organization hadaya and by the way Talking about the reintegration what to do with people who are returning from isle In syria and iraq returning to their home countries of course There's also now a growing concern what to do not only with those who actually joined the fight or decided to travel to join the fight But what about their family members their wives, but also the children Children can be victims, but they may have even become part Uh, of the fight because we know that of course part of the modus operandi is also to use Children so what to do with them. So I think it's a very Again a relevant topic looking at the many challenges that we face nowadays And then, uh, finally on my far left, uh, dr. Mark sageman Who is a senior fellow fellow in the foreign policy research institute center for the study of terrorism And also, uh, the founder of sageman consulting And after a year at the u.s. Secret service, he was the new york police department's first scholar in residence for over One year and then for three and a half years He was the special advisor to the u.s. Army deputy chief of staff On the insider threats, which included terrorists and spies Uh, and also dr. Sageman of course has, uh Offered many, uh, very well known and outstanding research publications The latest one, uh, I think was also about turning to political violence And with that, I think We have set the stage for for a good Discussion the last thing that I was actually asked to also mention to you is that Two of you are also participating in the international panel on exiting violence Which is an initiative that was launched mid Uh, mid 2016 Which is an initiative that actually is about building a community of, uh, uh Outstanding scholars and researchers to study the topic that we are going to talk about today So what is it that triggers somebody into violence? And what is it that we know and understand about the possibilities to actually leave violence behind Um On the topic of of violence and I already mentioned several things. It's one of the most I think complex and intriguing Uh, topics. Uh, there's a lot of violence. There's violence used by states There's violence used by individuals in their own social setting. There's crime And then there's of course violence that is, uh, exercised by terrorist and violent extremist organizations Now there has been A lot of research on trying to understand better Um Both ways going in and going out but even in the process of being a terrorist. How does it work? Uh, but my main first question to to all of you From a strictly scientific, uh, point of view What is it that we do not yet Fully understand or not yet understand enough to also be able to, uh, uh develop practices and policies That should then actually drive, uh, reducing the threats that come from Those people and also the understanding of the process because I think normally speaking It's not that somebody knocks at your door and then when you open this person says well, uh, I'm asking you to join me To kill innocent people It's normally a process Uh, it starts somewhere And then, uh, at some point of time you are in a room and the only possible next step seems to be That you have to use violence against other people Once you're in you cannot leave So this whole process and the good news is we can look at this from The perspective of an anthropologist From psychologist and then from let's say law enforcement security perspective So please what are the main gaps That we are still facing besides me? I'm from law enforcement. I'm a psychiatrist. I'm a sociologist. Sorry I'm not a cup. Sorry Please, uh, can I start with you? Well, that we have a rather broad Uh, range of things that that have been named and since your last phrasing Uh, suggested a number of discreet academic disciplines combined then with law enforcement and Uh, possibly because you're dutch very politely not mentioning political intelligence In a public room I would suggest that one of the great divides In understanding what's going on Is not between the academic disciplines where I think we all agree That like the blind men feeling the sides of the elephant We're pretty good at listening to one another But the great divide is between The world doing law enforcement, especially political intelligence, and I'll give an example or two And uh, and then uh, the people who are trying to understand things let me give an example In 1982 usually anthropologists don't want to deal with government people, but uh, I Got permission from a very very Senior level in the Sultanate of Oman To look at the intelligence documents up to a certain prior year Which amazed me I wrote a one page letter to the very senior person And that person wrote five words Which I never saw the five words written, but I've heard them by several Intelligence officers directors since give him what he wants And apparently in top-down organizations If somebody at the top says give him what he wants nobody asks what the limits are So I had very good conversations and could speak With ex rebels or intelligence people through The early 1970s it was quite interesting thing that came about which even intelligence officers would agree with is When communities Stopped talking To government officers Because they didn't know what was going to come next or the government was incapable That was one of the most clear predict predictors that very bad things were about to happen Or if people were were uh, if people Suddenly stopped talking or would be ambiguous Well a land rover a tribal leader would say went through Roasis last night, but it was dark. I didn't know whether it was an intelligence person or somebody else. I don't know You'd report but not report anything useful I thought of that when because I've worked in morocco since the year of your birth When in 2003 where some moroccan say whenever i'm in the country, they know something bad is going to happen And in this case, there were major terrorist attacks against jewish Uh targets and others in casablanca At a certain time not as much damage as the terrorists wanted because They misunderstood How jews use certain high holy days and when they would congregate so they ended up not being very effective But the activities were less bad than they could have been Because even people in the most deprived Meadon veals or shanty towns around casablanca where the main contact with police Was extortion at that time People saw that it would be worse If for them if they allowed the the Terrorists to take over and they would go to the authorities and talk When you have that sort of rapport when you have an overall sense of community, it can be better Final example, but the reason of the examples is simply to give a concrete sense of how we might learn something Would be marrakesh bombings in 1992 if i remember correctly 93 Okay, good. Thank you where Where somebody in tanjir Missed an appointment with me and the man said he was the head of the deputy head of the mosque greek mosque of tanjir He said i'm sorry. I was with the police and i said are they bothering you again No, he said i am in charge of all the i'm the the Amin of the jewelers i went with the list of all possible algerians and foreigners who are Getting authorization to sell gold recently in other words to finance something and uh and uh And i said but i thought that you were very against working Co-operating with the police. Oh no, he said this is nothing political. This is national This is a national event. So once again a strong sense of community now can work the other way 2004 in antocha That this time i'm getting my year right That's correct In spain where i was at the time see it so it works for spain too. I come there then something bad happens the the spanish police Refused to talk to the morocans because they said oh they only torture so they don't know anything And this might be an older notion of morocan police and security methods And so even the head Of the the antocha bombings later discovered who was a phd student from tunisia Studying at the university that otono mande madrid Nobody from the spanish police bothered to speak with his thesis supervisor Fluent in arabic to see whether he might have something to contribute about the personality or background of the individual It was the morocans who with the names were looking at the extended families of people in morocan offering to cooperate Fortunately now there is such cooperation But each time one thing i would look at in what we're trying to do is not just at psychological things prance invested lots of money In figuring out Psychological ways of dealing with people i let my esteemed colleagues talk about the success of that Don't blame psychology for that. Thank you. I want I want just the contractors In this case, but but the uh the the the more important thing is being open And not having everybody work for long at law enforcement Purposes but looking at signs of healthy communities. When do people in a community? monitor one another And recognize the damage to the community When you allow violence to take hold because sometimes that might be morally justifiable at other times As in anti-colonial struggles, but at other times it might not be So that's it But but the one takeaway that I would suggest is when you figure out how to work with communities And uh, and it's going to come and go. It's tricky. It's a kind of a moving sort of target But when it works, then you're in a good situation Okay, thank you. So this is about the crucial role of communities. I presume also in terms of if you want to Uh Get people away from violence again, you need to communities Build good relationships of trust and don't only use them as a security resource But empower them and give them room To do what only they can do best which is to protect their own community If I'm a suture, please Please dr. Sure. Um, hi everyone I'm going to offer a Different kind of answer There's a different kind of answer There are there's a lot we know about how why when where people turn to Bond extremism and to specifically answer your question from a scientific perspective. There's also Quite a few things we don't know Let's begin with what we know Four decades of social science research on terrorism has taught us two things there's No clear profile and there probably isn't Going to ever be one We do know however that people become involved in violent extremism for a bunch of reasons Those reasons are not that difficult to identify Good research will make those reasons clear Now there are a few different ways in which we can Group those reasons we can talk about push and pull factors We can talk about big issues little issues, but but there's a pretty identifiable Constellation of factors or or shopping list of factors we can identify Some of the bigger reasons would include things like grievances One common theme among People who become involved in terrorism is that they are fueled by moral outrage against something They come to believe that there is gross or grave injustice being done And that it is up to them either individually or as part of a group to act In one very particular way to redress that injustice Sometimes they acquire that view themselves. Sometimes they have to learn it. They have to learn it either through With the help of an ideology with the help of a recruiter With the help of a friendly bunch of guys that can that can help propel them along this process that they themselves might not even be too sure about Ideology plays a an important, but I think frequently misunderstood role in this One of the narratives that's quite popular in in thinking about terrorism is that Somebody first becomes ideological and that then propels them along some kind of Pathway or conveyor belt. I don't see very much empirical evidence for that at all I actually see far more evidence for people becoming Ideological as a byproduct of some kind of involvement So it's quite a quite a counterintuitive idea the the idea that actually you become more radical in an ideological sense The more time you spend committed to this kind of activity Ideology can be intoxicating. It can be so Powerful as a sustaining force and comforting to someone who is trying to make sense of otherwise Fairly low-level and tawdry activity Don't underestimate the role of the little factors in this Adventure excitement camaraderie the thrill of the chase The the personal benefits the lures that very often So-called formers or tend to be reluctant to talk about because they fear it might make them look bad They feel it might reduce their their their their motivation to something not quite respectable so When I could speak about this for at some length my point is to say that We know what these influences are we know what these factors are Where things become a little bit tricky is in appreciating that these same influences can change over time As somebody spends a little bit more time with any of these groups For example, they may become more ideological like I said that For us might mean that the way in which they explain their behavior might change So it can be very very difficult to actually ascertain what what drove them into the group in the first place That's the challenge From a scientific perspective. It's one thing to identify this constellation of of of what some would call risk factors It's a whole another ballgame to try to Figure out how we can harness the predictive value of that And let me tell you the science is nowhere near Allowing us or enabling us to do that My learned colleague to my left here wrote a terrific book recently called a turn to political violence Which I think is a scientifically more accurate way of describing what we've In shorthand referred to as the so-called radicalization process There's a lot we know but at an individual level. I think we tend to lose all sense of prediction here and A lot of stumbling blocks I have to put on my academic hat for a second and say The scientific and academic community writ large is just not yet sufficiently engaged with the study of these issues We're just not there yet. There's a resourcing issue But but academia writ large needs to engage with this far more systematically and rigorously than we have done and That is the rate limiting factor. I think in uncovering or discovering Are making known this this this complicated process Okay, I like to say to my students. It's not rocket science It's it's a lot harder than rocket science, but unless we get behind it and have a plan We're going to be having these same discussions 20 30 years from now just like we're doing right this second Okay, thank you Dr. Mark. She's well, uh Hello Talking is not the best medium for me to convey my ideas. I write and If you want to really understand what I'm trying to say Read what write a write as opposed to what I say I've been just reading and writing the last Half dozen years almost And so I haven't really been speaking publicly But in terms of this question The problem is not what we know when we don't know We actually do know a lot. I agree with john What we are missing is a conceptual framework In which we can understand what we know put things together Unfortunately, we are prevented from doing this and we are preventing from doing this By the concepts we use every day like violent extremism. What the hell does that mean? You know, I've been looking at violence for gosh 40 years now And I still not know what violent extremism means So, you know countering violent extremism kind of You know the role of ideologies is over cognitive view of things as uh john just described that we have ideas and we're going to Follow them through as a psychiatrist. I wish it were true You know, I had patients who never wanted to do all those pathological behavior that they you know perform and and they understood why but they couldn't help themselves so How do we conceive of this and uh The first thing is that most research On this topic is funded by the state And that creates a real problem because that that Gives you a certain blindness As to the role of the state in contributing to violence I was actually shocked this morning when I heard the panelists You know outline how the states whether it's an american state or the saudi states or the iranian states or the iraqi the syrian state Uh contribute to violence it does but the problem is that if you fund it by the state, you're not going to Dwell too much about that. Otherwise your funding will Will end and this leads to stagnation in in research because there is a big taboo about looking at the state So I've been looking not only at islamic violence Uh, you know at these panels not just this panel, but so far For about two and a half hours. We've been obsessed with islam. It turns out violence Is not limited to islam You know, I wish it were you know like that, you know, just forget about those guys and no violence It's you know, it it's heaven everywhere else Well, that's not the case and never was the case And so what I did is I looked at history in four continents over 240 years two and a half centuries and tried to look At the process as you outline of Turning to violence And that's the topic of Of the book and try to see what's common to all of them and what's different to really try to understand What's common and the first thing that I realized is that the process is actually a fairly simple process And I disagree with john. There is a profile. The problem is that it is not an objective profile with indicators It's a subjective profile Every so-called terrorist is a soldier protecting his community. That's how he thinks of himself you know, so basically Soldiers for any state if viewed from the other side could be labeled the terrorist like American Americans are labeled terrorists in the Middle East because we kill people Just as you know, when we see the people who kill us here, we call them terrorists if they're non-state actors So what is this process? This process is very simple The first is an acquisition of a politicized social identity and the collection of those people really create an imagined community a political protest community and under three condition That community some people in that community will become violent The first one is an escalation of conflict between the state and that community and you have to analyze violence in a dialectical way You know, we've known that forever except for terrorism and terrorism you just focus on the terrorist and you forget about anything else There is no context to terrorism. Sorry. That's not how people think of themself or Or behave so you have an escalation of conflict between those two Including a verbal escalation Talking about war war metaphors. I mean just What you see right now in the last week or so between our great leader and the north korean leader It is not conducive to peace Anybody who thinks that is out of his mind So the first is the first condition is an escalation of conflict between those two entities The community that's been stigmatized and the state The second is a disillusionment by people in that community that they can address the grievances through legal means And the third is as john just stole my funder is absolute moral outrage at the egregious attack by the state on one's community Under such condition a few people in that community will volunteer to become soldiers to protect their community And this leads to violence and after you know, the threshold of violence is Is breached Then you have a whole dynamic which of Unfortunately favors more and more violence. So how do you break from that cycle? I'll answer that in the next round of question One one So that That profile is there. It's being a soldier. Unfortunately, you can't really kill people Well, some people do kill people but you can't really do a brain out of c and c. Oh, look at that. The profile is there It's a subjective profile. So yeah, there is a profile, but It's subjective and so all those indicators are worthless Well, those are two different Those are two different points. Um saying that the indicators are worthless Is fair if you're trying to use the indicators in a way that Can't be used but but there is no meaningful valid scientifically worthwhile profile Part of I mean, there's a couple reasons I can give you for that But the one that I want to focus on is your issue that the argument that they're soldiers That for me is a mindset or a mentality But not everyone becomes involved for the same reasons not everyone wants to be a soldier No, but the profile he said is the soldier that that's universal among all of them Show me one example of a guy who actually was one who did not think of himself as a soldier for his community Just one and I give up my ideas That's that's that's a I'm not asking you to give up your ideas, but that's a separate argument again the effectiveness Two or three years ago of the islamic state recruitment narrative was when they very explicitly said to people There's a role for everybody They acknowledged and they embraced the fact that that that some potential recruits out there would look and and think Well, well, this is this is involvement. It is it is it is literally becoming a soldier and a lot of people were turned off by that they switched the narrative and recruitment escalated and increased exponentially We need doctors nurses soldiers teachers Are they all soldiers? They are part of the project They are all as equally committed to it But they they go to it for different reasons with different expectations and have different Feedback if you like from those roles So so I argue all you want about a profile, but I want to see the evidence for it Well, the evidence very strong actually if you Interview those people I can't have you know who have gone and come back and they They don't really You know recruitment is another notion that's totally worthless people were not recruited They volunteered to go to iraq. They wanted to go to iraq and They weren't recruited by anybody It was really very much a bunch of guys who became a bunch of violent guys Who can have tweeted to each other through twitter? And when you live in debaulieu in paris around paris around a lot of the cities in france Where you have no job nothing no future and then your friend tweets A picture of himself In a nice villa, you know North of Aleppo with a swimming pool and then calve a four by four in which he drugs bodies You know people say wow, that's cool. That's jihadi cool. You know, I'm going to go over there and I'm going to become a soldier Yes, they are a few that uh went there for humanitarian reason But again, they went there because they saw their community being endangered And they went there to try to help the community either by fighting or by You know becoming Healthcare or humanitarian thing in a sense. I mean The people who went to syria The physician have not come back home and count blown up people They they've gone there and the reason they come there. It's to really help the community. It's exactly my argument We have five more minutes before I go to the to the floor and I had one question indeed on exiting Violence so and as I said it's more and more even now a very substantial challenge for all of us Uh, are there is there any by the way real scientific research that shows? How that works and what triggers it is it possible? I presume there is but can you elaborate on that and also All of you have worked and researched in different countries and communities also I was also wondering related to the first question Um What about are there and I presume there are cultural differences Uh Between communities between countries that either make this more easy or more complicated That should be taken into account If we try to understand and again from a scientific point of view also as a driver for what to do And I'm talking about cultural values concepts of honor respect shame Uh, how how how does it work within a person? Or the community the family so you have a son who joined the fight now is coming home So what will your neighbors think what is your family thinking? What does your community think? Will you accept him back? Do you Trust him that he will no longer But he's still your son. So how does it Work and I think looking at what's happening now already in some at least European countries These are one of the challenges that people are facing and also of course the broader community One's a terrorist always a terrorist. You're either a good guy or a bad guy. If you're a bad guy, you're a bad guy forever Does it mean we will never accept you back? Yeah, but you are here So please again from From your scientific point of view. What is it that you can share with with us? Good since I'm an anthropologist We always are told that we're the specialists in quote honor But to keep that honor let me step back one thing because one thing that both mark and John have emphasized very much. I think Is how quickly the questions change and how adaptive and skillful the Al Qaeda has been in reaching an audience And in adapting perhaps quicker than states to figuring out what is going on And included in that is is something that I've picked up From a lot of mark's work And and which one has seen at various times in turkey in the last 30 years It's when a state goes after a formal organization as you'd have in a good Marxist group the best defense is not to have a clear Organization to go by networks of influence in which it's never clear What the finances are this is very professional and a lot of organizations specialists say This is the way a lot of modern enterprises that are not terrorist organizations Such as pharmaceutical companies Well Work at the same time, but for me a cue clue Is looking at the nashaid the the you know the kind of the chance that Al Qaeda does in very beautiful ways at various times of saying You know give me my backpack give me my arms My brother you don't have to follow me Just you kind of kind of watch in my back You know in other words, I'm the one that's going to go out and defend you You don't have to do the same thing will do others very mainstream sorts of arguments That do not emphasize the killings and beheadings that's a different specialized Sort of thing to do but for me the important thing Is looking at these changing notions including when the sense of honor for whatever community is or something else is going on But the temporal part of how quickly Groups can change and objectives to reach An audience is very important or in this country now we find major policy breakthroughs coming by tweets Which to me is astonishing And leaving people then to decipher decipher tweets. Well, maybe this is learned from Al Qaeda I don't know but I hope we get beyond it I still want to really give also the audience the the opportunity to ask questions. So if you could please keep your answer Relatively short. I know you again we can talk about this for days, but I want a very quick answer to your question One inevitable consequence of getting involved in terrorism or violent extremism, whatever we want to call it Is disillusionment You will become disillusioned Sooner later it depends on your individual circumstances and for all kinds of reasons One of the big issues that new recruits in particular struggle with is the gaping chasm between the the Fantasies that were either acquired or imagined or or sold at the the recruitment or the becoming involved stage When they were flirting with the idea of what it might mean to be involved versus the on the ground harsh reality Now how you cope with that disillusionment again can vary Some acquiesce. They just uh, you know, whatever metaphor they they double down They they bite their lip and they just get on with the business at hand Sometimes they have to work even harder to justify to themselves What they're doing as a result of that others don't They find it very difficult to cope They seek a way out. Sometimes that way out is open to them. Sometimes it isn't Two main sets of reasons as to why people disengage from these organizations is our movements They either want to get out and they can voluntarily leave or You know fiery death is rained on them from above or somebody breaks their door down and they get caught voluntary versus involuntary disengagement The de-radicalization part of that, which is a whole another issue, which I don't think we're going to have time to get into Um is a related but distinct issue There are at least by my count 45 46 known initiatives around the world now that try to Harness knowledge about the disengagement process to figure out. Well, okay. Why exactly are people leaving? And what can we do? You know, can we can we make known the reasons people get disillusioned And can we do that? Can we use that for two things? Can we either Use that information to try to facilitate disengagement and or Is there any inherent preventative value in making those kinds of stories those kinds of narratives? No, I think there is I think our execution leaves a lot to be Um There's a lot to be said about how poor our execution is there, but the principles I think are sound. That's all I'll say for now Thank you. Dr. Sesson just a very small point one Dale hinted at it In France, which now has probably the largest de-radicalization Project in Europe and the world probably Um They under misconception They think that terrorism is a mental illness And therefore the highest psychology psychiatrists to talk to them to get them out of this illness to cure them from this illness This is complete nonsense political violence is first and foremost political And yet nobody ever wants to talk about politics politics is a key to it. It is political violence now John talked about Individual disengagement and I think it may be important But a lot of people are very committed and engaged in in their fight To me the the real challenge is the people are violent a small small minute Minority in the larger political protest community What you really don't want is that community to become violent all of them So you have to prevent that. So how do you do that? Uh, that that's really extremely important. You need to distinguish The people are violent from the larger community Which is not yet violent but has a potential to become violent You try to isolate, uh, the people are violent and then you try to encourage this community to really Uh, disavow the violence that as ineffective or really not And try then to bring them back to reintegrate them into society To uh, bring them back to the fold And this is exactly the opposite of what every single government that I know with the exception of the Danes perhaps Is doing right now It's the exact opposite Distigmatize that communities they try to put everybody in prison They're trying to come put them through de-radicalization program like in England or France This is the opposite of what you want to do. You want to come Create a sense of social identity that transcend that small narrow parochial community and you know, I'm not saying it's easy But that's really the major strategy and they have to really come start looking at that to to try to Uh, de-emphasize the violence within that community and bring it back to to uh, to society Thank you. So this is another example of how Actually, the community is part of the solution. Well, absolutely So by securitizing that community as such you lose one of your main Tools to actually try to work on the individual That's how I understand what you are saying. That's correct. Um, then the floor is open for discussions Oops, a lot of questions Yeah, again the gentleman with the blue tie. I I can't help it seemed to be the favorite color of today But you were first Hassan, I'm namely police institute. I I take the point about The The idea of defending the community But we live in a world and actually I think that to a large extent whether it is Al Qaeda but far more so the islamic state Has understood completely that the possibility of redefining the community into becoming a virtual one And therefore enhancing the process of alienation That the individual self-recruit will go through And the under actually I would add to that is the notion that Understanding the life cycle of alienation all the way to the point of Disillusionment and actually capitalizing and trying to exploit the recruit Up to the point before The disillusionment and maybe provide outlets before the disillusionment in order for the recruit to remain useful In particular suicide missions. I mean that the be here. I'd like to point to and maybe that addresses the issue of Show me one who's not a soldier Many and I'm talking about dozens of those who joined the islamic state as doctors as engineers as Technicians in order to build a new caliphate Were sent on suicide missions and were actually documented bragging and Boasting about the fact that they're now going on a suicide mission So that this is a process maybe of bait and switch But what it underlines is that Whether it's the islamic state in particular or other jihadist organizations Are very much so aware of the science that is evolving Behind the process of indoctrination the process of exploitation and are trying to do their best Their nashid their anashid are full of individual tidbits that are attractive to various audiences sometimes it's about justice sometimes it's about A feeling of complete alienation sometimes it's about the afterlife But effectively ultimately this is thrown into the public sphere into the public domain and the recruits choose pick and choose What end up being the self recruitment and start the process? So what I'm what I'm Really here offering to you is that We seem to be proceeding with the science of trying to de-radicalize but The enemy is also proceeding with the same science in order to exploit it to the maximum and in trying to radicalize Thank you. So I will take two more Questions and please also due to time. Can you keep it short? And please also really ask a question or say that you have just one comment Yeah, the lady with black and Red side. Yeah, thank you. A banita data usaid Just a quick nuance to mark's point There are governments and communities Which are not throwing the baby away with the bathwater like the nijerians Who are accepting the government governors of nijer are accepting the errant suns back and doing a full-fledged community Reintegration program. So it's not one size fits all in this particular narrative. Thank you Now I will change directions a little bit for diversity reasons We'll go to the gentleman in the front Yeah, the mic is coming I'm in tiaz Ahmed from talk university My my question is similar to the one the the first question that was raised and this is addressed to mark Uh, I can see The soldier profile But then when you profile a soldier you still are using reason But the moment you are talking about suicide terrorist, uh, is it a different ball game altogether? Because there the reason doesn't work And and and it reminds me of of albea kamu's, you know, fantastic statement that the only philosophical problem is suicide The rest can be handled now with suicide Does profiling work because this is the person You know protecting his he or she is ready to kill himself To to do what doesn't see beyond say aren't we going beyond reason? Because once you say profiling once you once you put something there you're still using reason and it looks like Things have gone beyond reason Last question and then I will give the panel the opportunity to the gentlemen on the left in front Yeah Yeah, I think the good news and this echoes venita's comment a little bit is that uh, there are many folks in government And I would say in governments around the world that are actually active consumers of the research of the folks that are on this stage as well as many others and I think that the level at which Those people are actually drawing on the research To inform thinking Program design and this sort of thing Is actually perhaps markedly higher than is often acknowledged Thank you. So we have several questions one relates to well suicide What about reason some people say there are different types of rationalities that people use it's still reasoning But from a different point of view community is virtual I personally think one of the challenge of course was also that the message from this was not Your community that you're actually living in but you're part of a bigger community That's outside of your own So you have to protect the broader community The reassuring at least notice from one government official that actually your research Is being read and also is is a very important evidence base for translating that into policy The lady on the top What are you man? You don't have to of course reply to all of them But what are the things you want to I will now start with dr. Sageman Please the book is albergue a new the myth of the syphus That's the one that you talked about There's on philly. There's only one philosophical question The rest is you know, that's it now What you have is that you have people self-sacrificing For their friends their community and the cause and self-sacrifice is rational What you're talking about is rational choice theory and there I agree with you Talking about self-sacrifice suicide within a rational choice theory doesn't make sense But yet most government use rational choice theory to deal with this This is about self categorization and And cognitive heuristics that I'm talking about you have to have start reading the latest development in social Sciences including process tracing fuzzy set theory and someone and try to apply it to this, you know You can't really just rely on what the rent corporation generated in 1950s namely rational choice theory to understand this And I'm very glad that people read some Contrarian as people call me work But Unfortunately, the result of your policy is nonsense And I I'm sorry To have contributed to it if that's the case Trying to figure out what I should be responding to Here's another reason why you're wrong about pro sorry Keep trying Just because Just because you don't believe in the research doesn't mean it's not right I mean, I probably I'm as familiar as the research as you are and probably more so as you probably saw in my last book Profiling is junk science Yes, and we have been here before And and and I understand from a policy and administrative perspective why it's attractive because it is simplifying An enormously freaking complicated problem into something more manageable. It doesn't mean that it's scientifically accurate I say this to my students all the time. I really don't care What you believe about Terrorist motivation I don't care and nor you should nor should you care about what I think the only thing that matters is evidence There is no profile. We can't even find a solid reliable static profile within groups let alone across them John we agree if you say objective profile, I completely agree with you There's no objective profile and all that subjective profile is a nonsensical idea It's a conceptual idea because you cannot reach a subjective profile because you cannot read people's mind And so yes, there is a profile. It happens to be subjective But all that you know in terms of your objective Indicators that is nonsense. I agree with you It we just using the word a little differently, but I think we fundamentally agree on this I guess you saw in my book misunderstanding Terrorism I have a whole chapter showing that the no-fly list which is based on 10 criterion is absolute nonsense because it has sensitivity and specificity of almost zilch No argument from me there, but but but but to use your own language these words have meaning so so, okay It's one thing to identify common themes in narratives and I'm all for that and that's what we are doing But to to use words like you know risk indicators that then projects the idea that we can reverse engineer this We can't the science is again use risk indicators and I'm with you on that I'm not sure where we are anymore I will give the floor to my I was intrigued by the distinction that you made between Street fighters versus soldiers and I would argue that often it's a gray area between them But immediately like marcos back 250 years. Let me just go back to world war two Where uh edward shills Very well known now dead of not of terrorism The sociologist Was once part of a group of people to figure out that if you wanted to incapacitate Different military units. Who do you kill? And they figure out for the soviets You would kill the lieutenant in a small group for the germans It would be the sergeant once he's dead the fighting unit couldn't do anything For the americans, although mr. Schills was on the allied side You killed the corporal Because that's the level and I will spare you anything I'd think about what we know about Vietnam and what people were fighting for Clue it wasn't democracy It was something much more basic in terms of people involved in fights But then my question would be Is The street fighter part all different. I wouldn't say if the street fighter is coming from a quasi criminal Sort of thing drug grinding or the things you have to do to make ends meet in an economy, which is very frail What are your loyalties to whom and to whom can you make things happen? What we know what mark knows better than myself when you're looking at places like Afghanistan or pakistan the line between the police And the people who are supposed to be policed in tribal areas, especially Is very very gray and they depend upon one another And they don't depend necessarily on the center and the more you can understand the local part of this You might get closer to understanding things and I would like I think like mark each time mark speaks. I'm not sure I know for sure That that the answer is not going to be a universal one Somebody in a part of the american government that Dare not speak its name Once said to me we're getting close to having a universal dna understanding of how tribes work So then we don't have to we don't have to go into specifics anywhere And I thought we were just getting involved again in never mind Let's let's just say i'm sure that somebody is still working on that dna But i'm never going to work on that dna But your question raises the question To me of just what are the units of organization we should be looking for and I am inspired By both john and mark as I understand them at least saying maybe the best way is not by What was your term? Securitizing an entire community such as the shia of Saudi arabia Stigmatizing stigmatize. Okay. Thank you. Maybe maybe I was eliding into the other but but I blame you for that because you asked whether The french project was about exciting violence rather than exiting violence and I I think I signed on for exiting Okay I think there's time for one last Round of questions from the floor the lady with the yellow was already Waiting quite not okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's true So i'm i'm chris fair from georgetown actually I had to I had to point out there was some irony and you started telling us that we need to be Locally knowledgeable when you were talking about the police and fata. There's no police and fata. That's part of the problem But to a more general point I think one of the biggest problems I have with your work professor sageman Is that it's a good old-fashioned dependent variable selection bias and you know that and everyone else knows it And I think this is why I have such problems with you drawing so much relevance from the various Uh biographies that you've assembled is that we we only see the people that we see And we can make therefore some inferences about What they look like as a pool, but we can't speak And we can't say anything about the entire population of people that want to be terrorists And there's nothing that you've ever done in your work that fundamental even attempts to take care of this dependent variable selection bias And this is the kind of stuff that we all as graduate students are are really warned Sometimes we have to do it but you have to be really cautious and in what you do with with data that is so Fundamentally crippled by this kind of bias that you can't do anything to fix Thank you for that observation. There was one gentleman. Yeah, that's a fair point with the gray Yeah, that's you. Yeah Gentlemen, thanks. My name is kyle detrick from equal access And so I I have a question, you know, despite all Of the efforts of everyone in this room I still describe cve as an impoverished space At the same time, I would say ve is an empowered space And so when we look at our approaches to countering preventing transforming I think we're still very driven by A deficit mindset or a deficit framework that we Fundamentally lack of vision For what we want things to look like And a lot of other issues we've we fail to acknowledge our contribution to the problem institutionally personally But as we look or I look as as a practitioner and researcher both How to create programs that not only try to prevent or counter But almost to re radicalize individuals this idea of disillusionment and disengagement I think de radicalization is largely unproven to work I I understand it in a in a post world war two germany setting and other settings But in this setting, I think we need more empowered Off ramps or alternative approaches for engaging people where they are And so I wanted to know from your experience Is there any evidence that that is possible or that those have worked or been effective and if so where thanks Yeah, thank you. That's a very clear question one more question from the gentleman with the red style this time I think Thank you gentlemen. Um, my name is bobo cox and I am from the osgood center as a program assistant So my question is uh, I just attended a think tank Last week for the brookings institute and they unveiled their new study on setting out certain standards for working with civil society organizations NGOs Then basically they're trying to create a profile along those lines So my question to the panel is what this profile set out by the brookings Would that deter other organizations from working with bigger organizations such as the world bank because a representative from the world bank was there at that think tank and they were partnered with the brookings for this study and they would incorporate these standards within their how should I say this Standards with working with other organizations within itself So would this deter certain organizations that are based off maybe in the middle of the east or any other kind of Csso for working with the world bank to try to improve their institution or their capabilities Okay Also looking at the time because we have five minutes left and I want to give the panelists the floor for a final Round of answers also on the disengagement and maybe even related of course disengaged from violence, but A lot of people say you also need to be able then to provide an alternative to Channel the energy that is related to finance That's a policy observation Also, by the way, of course fueled by some practitioners Maybe related to that question. You can also say something on that and then of course Going to the to the other questions Can I this time start with you? Yeah, that can start with me the I think the clue as some people have said in fact one of the last Questioners is Is if you can get people away from violence, then what do you engage them in? In a pragmatic way in northern morocco, there's a NGO I Work with there and president of it actually the american legation It's our old diplomatic mission, which is now a cultural thing and what we've been aggressively trying to do there with an arabic speaking resident director Is to figure out ways of not just dealing with the cultural elite But dealing with local communities and one thing we've done that's taken off very well And which doesn't involve much Much investment is is taking Moroccans doing media studies and so forth into very impoverished villages and getting Intermediate and secondary school students into using Media devices they're already familiar with to create podcasts For admittedly uncertain audiences But representing what their communities and they are doing and the fact of articulating things that has the promise of being Listened to by others is a form of engagement and by accident Not by accident, but by keeping our ears open We would learn about certain us a id projects trying to encourage Community policing very old-fashioned notion, but when it works Which it doesn't always work or it starts and stops But when it works it works remarkably well We are finding and so the question is how to expand it not to say because we're not doing it As kind of a model. We're trying to figure out how to reach new audiences so that our audiences are not people who are Let's say of my age group, which you now know because I first went to Morocco, you know the story But but another group as well And it's this form of communication of giving some but people something positive Which will work We don't have the resources to give people the infrastructure of another renaught Factory, although that helps or big chinese investment or other things to give people jobs But that might come but doing things that can work with communities now Seems to be a helpful thing and by the way the communities in which we're working which we're picking up Are all transnational communities has been pointed out There is not the most remote village in morocco Or for that matter in the arabian peninsula that doesn't have But more so for morocco doesn't have people in germany belgium france or spain and Very remarkably good communications and ways of moving money and people between the two Thank you Dr. Horley two quick comments the first one echo professor fair's point about the control group That I think is another rate limiting factor in terms of the success or progress in terrorism studies Whoever cracks that issue Will help the entire field turn a corner, which we badly need to get around really quickly The point on disengagement de-radicalization. I mean, yes, you're you're preaching to the choir here De-radicalization as as as a word means two things it implies two things They suppose a change that some people undergo That we assume leads to a reduction in the risk that they will reengage in some way And it's also the collective term used to describe what is in reality A bunch of very very very different kinds of programs. They all have the same goal They're all trying in their own way to reduce the risk of re-engagement in terrorism But how they do that differs from program to program, you know, we all know about the The the the Saudi initiative, you know, we've all some of us have been there and I've had the tours and it's fascinating But the question of whether these programs work right now is anyone's guess Because we know that terrorism traditionally has a low recidivism rate associated with it It's low even if you do nothing It is easy as a result for de-radicalization programs to claim success By simply pushing people through But but uh, there's no published work There's no published evaluation correct me if i'm wrong on on on any of these programs a few programs that i'm aware of are Running evaluations internally and these are important because they offer course corrections Well, maybe we want to try this or try that or whatever Those programs will be the ones that stand the test of time and the others will be left Uh, they'll be confined to the trash heap Thank you Not the statement Yeah, so acting on dependent variable I'm glad you raised that question because that was my thinking up to about 11 years ago And and then the government gave me a ton of money to actually create a control group to to to generate a control group And what I found Is that the control group is this larger community my my dependent variable was violence So how did those guys who became violent differ from the guys who did not become violent but in every other aspect were Identical, you know, it was two samples that you could measure So I realized that The the the variable Violence was not stable that people could actually become violent in certain Contacts that not become violent in other contact go back and forth depending on whether the community is attacked And so I decided to use a different methodology than a gross Quantitative comparison between the control group and my sample which I have done if you look at my last two books and Notice that the real difference was a process. So I kind of used the process tracing using fuzzy sets and and and showed the The model on how to move from a nonviolent to violent and still kind of comparing the two in terms of both cross case and Uh, within case comparison. So if you actually look at my last two books, especially the last one It's exactly the methodology that you were Complaining of what do you mean? I interview them in jail. I go to the community. I I can't look at May I may I Oh in terrorism believe me that type of criminality now you're right in terms of criminality But in terrorism now in terrorism it's so focused our attention that most people are violent. I really have Noticed so you're right in criminality. We're only, you know a minority of criminals are caught But on terrorism, it's quite different It's very careful about equating in all to find the the majority of people in prison for terrorist offenses in the u.s Are not there because that's right. I'm looking at just a violent one Well, I think this was a good example of Of course proving that academic debates are never boring But um, I also really because some people are getting nervous because lance is being served Time basically is over But but but I truly uh, and of course, I'm sure the discussion will continue I truly want to to thank all three of the panelists for sharing with us their Scientific latest insights based on the years of research Of course, but that was also not my expectation. It's not that all the answers are There already although we know a lot From a practical point of view from a policy point of view Particularly probably from a political point of view. We have to live with the fact That well not everything is clear yet at the same time. Of course, there's a need to do But I think it should of course be combined with this growing effort to understand better Sometimes even scientists do not fully agree, which is good. There's an academic debate Although the end of the day at least I think there's agreement on the non-existence of an objective profile Which is bad news for us because indeed we would like to have simplicity In terms of well, what are we actually talking about and how to proceed? Reality is that it's not yet there, but there is a Brit source of understanding information Risk factors that basically of course we can and should look into Also in terms of defining our policy And and and driving our practices and keep on learning and I think also the feedback loop From practitioners and policy makers back to scientists Is equally important as Government people reading Research in the first place, so I thank you very much and please enjoy your lunch Run run to lunch But know that there is more to come this afternoon. We'll be back in this room for more panels and also in kathari at 115 If you want to if you're joining us for lunch, please proceed down the stairway this way because it's out that way We're going to try to discuss Okay Yeah, so it's shifted around a bit So what i'm going to do is ask you to each of you to say like this is a very big topic And what are what are the like two most important things that people should walk away with On this topic of the politics of religion in the lake chad basin and then we'll shift to more questions after that So it's a bit targeted, but it gives you a chance to lay it something, but I won't let you talk for any minutes You want to start okay do I need to do anything I can Apparently I just start talking Uh, good afternoon everyone welcome I was saying to the panelists that we actually have the room that reflects the size of the geography that we're going to try to cover In this very short time. Um, so thank you for coming to to this this large room and after lunch The the panel after lunch is always the hardest, but luckily we have an incredibly engaging group of experts And and commentators to to provoke some good conversation Just to make sure that everybody is on the right aircraft going to the right place This is the panel on the politics of religion in the lake chad basin And there are panels running concurrently. So if you meant to be somewhere somewhere else We won't be offended if you you choose to move to a different room So let me start um first just by introducing our panelists Dr. Chris koaja who is at the center for peace and security studies at mediba adamawa university in yola Ambassador john cambell who I think needs very little introduction when it comes to nigeria in the lake chad basin That is remains a leader at the council on foreign relations And professor uber him. Yeah, he uh, yeah, he uber him from the university of florida I think you have their detailed bios in your book So I I will not go into into the depth of the detail and just kick us off immediately In this conversation So maybe I can ask our panelists. This is a very large geography. It's a very broad topic So what what do you think are, you know, the two most important things that this this group needs to walk away with In thinking about the politics of religion in the lake chad basin and chris, maybe we can start with you Thank you very much. I think for me the two key issues we need to look at in Whatever conversation that is going on with respect to the lake chad with respect to extremism Is the centrality of the state The state as the chief protector of the citizens The state as the chief provider For the citizens And where The state is defined by failure Or inability to discharge this core responsibilities Then there's a problem The second point we need to also Recognize and appreciate Is the centrality of the youth When you talk about The present and the future The youth feature prominently And where exclusion Defines state citizens relationship The youth are always the first victims of that and where They see themselves as victims Grievance sets in Where grievance sets in violence take root And where violence take root The whole question of violent extremism becomes a major issue that The state has to contend with and that's where we are today with respect to the lake chad area Thank you Thank you very much Two things The first is we Americans tend to be extremely uncomfortable About thinking about the connection between violent extremism and religion And in fact we have a fairly convoluted vocabulary when we start talking about it A vocabulary on which we do not necessarily agree And yet Religion clearly plays a role There was a study published by the UNDP Earlier in the week Based on A lot of interviews between five and six hundred interviews In which the respondents about 70 percent of them Said that religion and concern that their religion was under attack Had been a primary Motivation for their joining Boko Haram now That leads to my second point And that is how little we actually know About Boko Haram and associated groups In the lake chad basin The UNDP Study based on five or six hundred interviews Well, yes, but talk about selection bias All of those interviews were in detention Still It's what we've got and we've got precious little We don't know what the relationship is between a bubukar shakal And Boko Haram We don't know whether his notorious swearing of allegiance to the islamic state in 2015 was strictly personal Or whether he had in some capacity could speak for the movement that he leads We don't really know what the relationship is between shakals Boko Haram And Ansaru Reflecting back on the conversations this morning My world The world of the lake chad basin Is a million miles away from the middle east We're talking about an area that is under the best of circumstances Far far less developed materially than the middle east And this most emphatically is not the best of circumstances So religion And then a a plea for humility About just how much we know Which is really how little we actually know Thank you very much If we look at the Sahel for the last 25 years we see that A political activism on behalf of islam or that use islamic discourse to justify engagement in Has been on the rise Everywhere in the Sahel. Absolutely And we know that religion play a role as ambassador was saying as and as a discussion in this morning We're emphasizing But I was a little Unsatisfied with the way in which people divide between Think of ideology And local social and political context in the economist terms as if it is an either or It is either ideology or Local context that matter in terms of explaining this Phenomenon I think Both ideology and local context play a role What we needed to understand is What Sort of ideologies are more likely to be politicized in what sort of context This is really the real question And as I was mentioning islamic activism has been on the rise. I'm not only talking about Jihadist activism But different sorts of islamic activism Both peaceful protests to ask for Changing the family code in Mali in Niger or people now rising or Violent riot in Zander after the Charlie Hebdo incident but also political parties or Lobby groups like Sabati 2012 in Mali that are coming out to emphasize These groups use different type of ideologies and all inspired from Islam So how can we understand? The typologies Of different islamic ideologies that are being used in the region And I think from my perspective you can divide them into three major ideologies pietist ideologies that are the dominant Where we have for those who know Nigeria Malmé and Traditional religious actors who Do not want to be involved into electoral politics are trying to avoid engaging in any sort of Engagement into into into Electoral politics or civil society activism or islamic feminism, etc. And on the other side In the middle, we have islamist activists who think that we need to participate into Into electoral partisan democracy and at the end we have those who deny the legitimacy of the state and want to actually Break away from the total concept of a nation-state in order to establish That the caliphate so we have we can think of islamic political ideologies into Divide them into those three categories now in what context Each one of these is likely to be politicized and enacted into action This is The other part of the question that we need to answer and I do think that the context of democracy Provide a better opportunity for islamist activists those who use a religion to engage into Political battle into electoral politics That is a context in which we see them Again in ground on the emerging and we can talk about the case of more thinner can talk about the case of Mali Places where Places that are plagued by disorder already conflict Um border lines place where people feel marginalized by the states just like the um pastoralist pearl Or the buddhuma in the lack lectured region, etc Those are the places where we see jihadist ideology gaining ground jihadist ideology does not gain ground into capital cities In most of the sahel region it is gaining ground in those regions rather than so I think thinking of um them In this way would provide us a better understanding Then thinking of them into the economy's way So I'm going to go back to chris for a second because I noticed in your answer I don't think you said the word religion once And I I suspect that that was deliberate. So I wonder if you could say a little bit more about Your your approach and centering the state and those who are excluded from the state and and where you see Religion fitting into that that political framework Yeah, it it it was deliberate just not mentioning religion because What kind of society are we dealing with in the lectured area? First we're dealing with secular societies where either democracy Or dictatorship thrives in this systems religion is also a major factor And what is religion doing? Religion is increasingly contesting that public space with secularism And in the process we are also confronted with a huge problem of clash And the clash for instance is what gave births to boku haram Boku haram is challenging the legitimacy of the state In terms of the inability of the state to discharge certain core responsibilities that has seen as primary And what religion does is that It provides an explanation as well as an alternative To that failure that we see in the secular state that corruption Exclusion are key features of the modern state modern democratic state but Attempt to displace the modern democratic state With what they call a etiocratic state will mean Altering the present arrangement by introducing a system of theocracy That will guarantee justice that will guarantee equity that will guarantee freedom And that is why The whole question of the extent to which religion has been instrumentalized By vulnerable groups like the youth Gains currency Because they see religion as That thing That will give them hope both now and hereafter They see religion As that shock absorber That will give them the kind of liberation That they need And that as long as the secular state tribes It will be difficult for them by virtue of the current arrangement of both the leadership And the structure of the state to guarantee them that kind of security That they expect and that is why you can see From Nigeria to Cameroon to Niger to Chad down to the Sahel huge revival across religious groups But the other point we need to appreciate is the fact that the revival of religion in terms of its Contesting the public or the secular state is not just peculiar to islam We've seen pentecostalism in the context of christianity Also play in that role The contest for instance in Nigeria just recently between Jonathan and Buhari We saw the role religion played in that election We saw for instance in Borno state in particular Where Boko Haram started The extent to which religion was used by Muhammad Yusuf and his group To begin to question and challenge the authority and legitimacy as well as credibility of the state And that made it easy and possible for them to recruit and mobilize The kind of people the kind of youth We call them vulnerable But the point is that the first category of people That were recruited by Muhammad Yusuf and Koh Were people who went to school. They were graduates. They taught their certificates They were not it was not because they went to madrasa's Where you say they were not given the kind of education they needed for them to secure their livelihood They are why some of them were Having master's degree in sciences in the social sciences But they taught all the certificates and embraced Boko Haram as an ideology Yeah, if I could take up some of these some of these themes Um, I think the point that you're making about State failure as being a an essential part of the context. I think that's enormously important Uh, northeastern Nigeria is uh, and the best of times it's dirt poor It's by far the poorest part of the country My degree the principal city is often referred to in other parts of west Africa as the beggar maker I was at a wedding once in my dooghuri In which at the local airport There were no less than 12 private jets on the ground that had flown in Celebrates So the discrepancy between rich and poor It's very bad all over Africa. It is grotesque in northeastern Nigeria Second point Religious revival Uh, again the point that has been made earlier that this is sweeping across the Sahel And it's not just to be found within islam But it's also to be found in christianity is an extremely important part of the context and let me tell you Relations between Revivalist christianity and various radical islamic groups not necessarily violent Uh, the relations are so bad it would curl your hair I have heard roman catholic and anglican bishops refer to muslims in terms that made it very clear that they did not regard them as human So this again if part of your motivation is concerned that your religion is under attack You can cite lots of evidence for it Uh third point What does Boko Haram say it actually wants? There is no three-point economic program There is no constitutional proposals Boko Haram is remarkably uninterested in state building and in that sense is very different from the islamic state What Boko Haram actually says it wants is The creation of god's kingdom on earth Through justice for the poor By rigid implementation or strict implementation of sharia or islamic law Take each one of those words and none of them is political They are essentially a kind of religious vocabulary This is one reason why it is so hard for secular minded people In abouja let alone in washington to come to terms with it Ibrahim I wonder um, you laid out this very helpful set of categories. Um, does that apply to christian revivalism as well as islamic Well, I am not in my position to answer this question because I started studying christian movement Maybe some other people could But I I do think that These categories Have a lot of currency if we look at particularly in islamic society in each society you You look at you will find People who in some way or another lean toward one or another of These categories. I'm not saying that they are fixed categories. This is more like a framework for us to help us understand those dynamics But there are Muslim societies are facing a lot of challenges in the world today Not only in the sahel, but almost everywhere And what muslim activists are trying to do is to think Of those challenges through frameworks That help them to interpret But also to frame response To those challenges and it is in this effort that Some muslim activists and scholars came up with This set of coherent ideas About now if we look at our relationship to the west, how can we understand it through the religious lens that we have? and Then some would say that well, let us just modernize as they modernize Let us modernize islam or modernize islam is modernity if you want to pick up some concept within Modernity and try to find equivalent of those concepts in islam and say that this is how we want to think about our societies today And this is how we want to respond to the challenges that we are facing We are backward just because we are not modern and we want to modernize those are the categories that I call islamist Now they are others who are saying that no it's not modernizing that help us but going back to the roots To the way we were prosperous during the time of the prophet and the The century that come after the prophet why because we stick To our religion and now that we went away from our religion We have all the problem of the world if you want to go back to prosperity if you want to go back to that Time where we were prosperous who have to go back to to to to the back and these are what we see people saying that We have to go back to the caliphate system This is only system that that that could help us again Our place in the world and then you have others who think that Actually, it is not the business of religious leaders to really think in terms of Politics we have to separate ourselves politics has been messy for religion all over the islamic history We have never gotten actually to implement the the the caliphate that we were hoping for since the 41st Years after the prophet so this is not going to work separate politics and religion this is what will Keep us safe as as as Muslim Leaders and Muslim scholars rather than so and today you look at all the the In each society you find people who rely on them. I would assume that Pietyist groups who think that we should separate we should accept secularism We should my separate states are the majority in the Sahel at least But the movement that is gaining more ground in the Sahel today Is my islamism as we see it. It's not always late to be expressed freely But it is it is growing fast and then jihadism also So before we shift to a bit of a conversation on what what should be the focus to Acknowled address work with these dynamics. I'd like to ask You to reflect a little bit on the coherence across the lake Chad basin So we've talked about some some common themes the state failure the inability To to to respond to needs the marginalization The revivalism and kind of the contestation of what role religion plays in politics Can we can we paint a broad brushstroke across the lake Chad basin and the Sahel or there Important differences and distinctions That that are worth drawing out in particular countries or in an urban rural divide Or in a generational divide that that we should be thinking about as we define Both a research agenda and and assistance and intervention Ibrahim seems ready to answer I'd be happy to To talk about that I do think that there is There is not much variation that we can talk about from the national Difference particularly if I take the specific aspect of management of religion For example or the way that people live in those different countries Yes, there are Differences in terms of how the states different states in the Sahel manager religion We see in certain places For example, if I take the case of Niger, we see the government's struggle That there is this concept of secularism first that the government the government do not Interfer into religions affairs and they struggle with that but at the same time Everybody knows that religion is something that you have to deal with otherwise. It's just can become messy For the government later. So the government is trying to play Some role into bringing in religious traditional leaders the Sarakun and Galgazia The chiefs right to manage religious affairs through them informally Right. This is what we see and it is working and the government policy is to try to Maintain pietism at the dominant discourse in Niger And by doing that they try to promote Sufism etc and not giving a lot of say to Isala movement or Salafi kind of movement, etc And trying to promote that aspect through the traditional leader this to say that this is Islam that we know In our history our fathers and grandfathers did it if we say that it's not a good Islam That means they are all evidence. So this is Islam that we want to keep and this is Islam That we knew are over. We don't want anything new It is a little bit successful in terms of doing that, but on the other side There is a demand that is not being accepted which is creating tension Among those people who want Islam to have more say in politics And that's why sometimes we see rioting because there is no mechanism to absorb that demand That is Been expressed particularly among younger generation In places like Mali it is you don't have any Mechanism by the state to manage religion at all religious organizations manage themselves by themselves and that's led them to be More To have to be more powerful Particularly today in terms of the way that the influence politics Mauritania for example You have a strong It inspires from the Arab world the northern African world To create powerful ministries of religious affairs that try to manage Religion through the state mechanism through the institutions. So we see those differences at on the national level But I would really argue that most differences at the very local level. It is in the community the local district community This is where you really see And I will be happy to talk about that. I don't want to monopolize Maybe we can go down the line. We'll come back to you on that because I think that's that's a fascinating Um, I think the question really is are we talking about the general or the particular? And I think a way to think about it is to talk about a To my mind profound cultural unity in that part of West Africa that Goes across national boundaries Which are artificial. I mean they were drawn by the British French in the case of the Cameroons The Germans at the end of the 19th century They don't reflect a reality on the ground and for the people who are on the ground. They just sort of ignore it There's you know, massive movement back and forth across Across these artificial boundaries further I think in every single case For most people most of the time the state Be it Nigeria, Chad, Niger or Cameroon The state is bad. It's something you want to have as little as possible to do with So you have a kind of you have a kind of unity Now moving that up to the official level of governments There are all kinds of important differences for one thing Chad Cameroon and Niger are all francophone Nigeria of course is anglophone And the official relations between Nigeria and its francophone neighbors the official relationship Most of the time has not been particularly warm First legos and then abuja has been suspicious of the influence that paris retains in in francophone west africa That may be changing because Boko Haram amongst other movements is a threat to all of those states At the official level and so they're they're they're sort of pulling Pulling together and just just to Continue from where he stopped if you look at the the countries Mali, Murtinia, Chad, Niger In terms of commonalities Religion islam is common to these Countries, but when you pick Nigeria You have a country where there's almost a 50 50 Population between christians and muslims and that is why the influence of religion It's also not so pronounced in terms of the way it is in these countries Where you find the leadership professing islam even nationally to a large extent But in Nigeria, we've we've tried as much as possible to ensure that that balance Is provided in order not to create tension Between the two religion But when you go down to the communities That is where you see religion playing a very profound rule in early 2000 for instance the sharia debate The implementation of sharia islam for a state By by by the governor Some other states within northern Nigeria embrace that and attempted to introduce sharia but there were issues in card Kaduna for instance where Most of the citizens expected the state to introduce sharia because we had a christian muslim governor But a large number of the population felt We have a deputy governor It is practically not possible for you to implement sharia and that also led to the conflict and violence that erupted In that in that state so you'll see some Differences slight differences in the way the state has been able to manage some of these tensions associated with religion But the most important point is that Where a particular religion is dominant? You can see the influence of that religion Even from the community up to the state or national level. I think you're right to introduce Nigerian exceptionalism All of the francophone states are quite small in population Nigeria has an estimated 205 million people And by mid-century the estimate is it could be up to 450 million people And that it would then be the third largest country in the world displacing the united states in population Lagos has 22 million people So you are talking about a polity Which is vastly larger and vastly more complicated at almost every level Than than the smaller francophone states Further it's interesting to reflect on the differences between civilian governments and military governments When nigeria had a string of military governments the chief of state Always wore a uniform Not national dress because national dress belongs to a particular ethnic group And at least in the case of baban gear who was chief of state at one point when I was living there He refused to allow himself to be photographed coming or going from a mosque So there is a kind of secular expectation That is That that is very deep So Ibrahim I'd love to hear a little bit more about the the community Side and then also hear your thoughts on on the sense of nigerian exceptionalism One of my worries is as we talk about the lake chad basin because nigeria is so big Population economy we often lose An understanding and a reflection of what's happening in the other sahelian states So I'd love to hear some of your your reflections on that Okay. All right. So let me start with the The community level aspect of it If we look at How how do how do um People for example in capital cities in The sahel countries as compared to people in what I call the secondary cities That we have for example, um, let us talk about in nigeria is and there maradi Um And And then we look at the very periphery for example, and um Let us say gao in mali You see Some pattern of difference in The things that interest people The way that People interact with religion particularly religious ideologies and that i'm not talking about Theologies i'm not talking about theological sects like salafism islamism, but using the religion as A discourse to enter into politics The political behavior That that people Engage into by using a religious discourse Um In capital cities Mostly The places where you see islamism gaining ground is capital cities. Why because this is a place islamists are in competition with Um, uh, with civil society activists feminist group political parties. Those are the people that they are in debate with right rather than Uh, let us say ethnic groups or um drug traffickers or drug dealers in the periphery, right? So and they address particular issues Islamic economy islamic banking because there are banks in in in in bama ko for example And let's say in yami or in in lock shot. Um that are doing things and then people see you look at it and say We want to have something islamic that looks like that You don't want to open an islamic bank in gao for example Or let us say in defy it would have less success The need that people have in certain places in certain communities Have impacts on the type of ideologies that they Tend to that appeal to them if you want. Um, so If you look at the periphery where particularly places where there is a lot of disorder where people already fight for different reasons Where people fight over ethnicity But people fight over natural resources Fishing for example in the lecture division Under the fishing business or pastoral is pastoral land Or agriculture versus pastoralists fighting over land which one already people are Using violence in order to solve those problems. This is a place where somebody would come and say Look, um, you know instead of fighting over This narrow identities. Why don't you fight for something bigger? Religion, um, and then if you die you go to to paradise and this is a place where jihadists have more appeal People are the jihadist ideology have more appeal than in other places Um, you come to bakmako and you start preaching jihadism Or in yame, there are some few some few people who listen but not many people would Would listen to that. So that's what I am saying that if Let us look at the local dynamic at the local level What interests people and how the particular ideologies address those needs ideologies that tend to address those needs More effectively are the ideologies that appeal to people more than the others Regarding the Nigerian exceptionalism Yeah, I would agree that there is a lot of differences between Nigeria in terms of the size in terms of The the the the the language in terms of the way that government approach the the the the french legacy of managing Religious affairs, etc. That is Very Different but let us not let these Differences overshadow the fact that there is a lot of interaction between people you go to Northern Nigeria You find a lot of Salafi group the izala movement is very well implemented in niger and actually the preachers from nigeria come to niger to preach and constantly and Those interactions through those networks of interactions. This is how Um I would say So I want to pivot a little bit to to talk about the the response both by The the countries themselves by the region by partners And I think we often think about the role of the education sector as we're talking about religion and politics And there's a little bit of an obsession with madrasas in particular And I I just like to hear your reflection about is that is that a place where we should Focus attention are we missing something in the other higher education institutions? Are there are there tenets of p studies and approaches to p studies and other core skills that that should be the center of the conversation rather than madrasas themselves I think the The issue of madrasas have dominated discussions around violent extremism Recently there was a publication by a lady hockner that talked about fair games for unfair accusations and That article was in response to woly so yinka's argument where when he said Uh al-madras is the butchers of modern nigeria and he made that statement because of What he felt was the link between the al-madras and violent extremism But the question hockner was supposed was that by design Are madrasas? Or were madrasas established? to radicalize people The second question is at what age do people or individuals sense to these madrasas totally Who has been able to also? audit Or look at the curriculum for these madrasas For you to now make very definitive conclusions or assertions or judgments that madrasas Platforms for which radicalization of these children takes place the other point for me is the fact that most of if you map The category of persons that have embraced violent extremist ideology Most of them are largely above 18 If you look at the presence in nigeria today Most of more than 85 percent of the individuals arrested For either being members of boku haram or supporting boku haram known is less than 20 And madrasas by design We are talking about individuals that are sent to these schools at age seven eight nine And in the process they gain western education for some of them some don't They still continue with the quranic education. So I think it's I'm I'm I'm providing this context for us not to also be too narrow in terms of our analysis or understanding of what education does The point for me Is that we must look at education in its holistic sense And that the pathways is first the point the ambassador raised about Forging an identity of unity Establishing societies communities countries where unity is the central and defining goal In terms of how people should live And the question now is what kind of peace education programs Do we have across these states across the countries within the lectured Area is there a peace content? To the education Is there a peace content to even the religious teachings? Because what we we we see increasingly Is hate preaching Religious organizations have shifted quite significantly From the part of preaching for salvation To a part where preaching is focused on conversion And that for me to convert you I must be able to tell you how bad the other region is But not to emphasize the humanity in the other in the other in the other person. So Education itself It's Might not be the problem in the context within which we fray bit But that the attitude The posture we adopt in terms of What we inculcate on our people all the religious all the religious groups Because it's when we're able to achieve that that the question of What secular education can also give Because where you have a situation that the Religious organizations or the religious leaders preach hate No matter how strong the secular education is It will do very little in helping that society. So that balance for me need to be need to be Recognized and reinforced Fester Campbell, I know you sit on the board of at least one university in the region Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, um, first of all The evidence that madrasa's or the that there is a link between madrasa's And violent extremism the evidence is very weak It's not convincing at all Um Secondly The point that you were making about the Shift in preaching From salvation to conversion Which implies that the religion that you're being converted from Is inadequate? I think that's a terribly important point And I think that goes right across the region and right across both religions both major religions I would add one other element here that we have not talked about so far This morning there was considerable conversation about the relationship between the sunni and the shia And the efforts by saudi arabia and iran to establish paramount seat in the middle east Those two countries have introduced some of that infection in to the lake chad region Where the saudis for example have built mosques and established foundations Designed to promote the salafist form of sunni islam And the iranians have done very much the same thing with respect to shia islam And a consequence of that is that there is now a shia minority In northeastern nigeria where there never was one before How big it is Is a real question they claim that they now have two million All right So I would like to address Last point that ambassador was making but also make a comment about the religious as the religious education aspect Regarding the question about salafism and This morning there was this vibrant debate about Salafism is a problem in the region And yes, I think I do think there is certain Fundamental aspects epistemologically That of salafism that Relate to jihadism But just let us not forget one thing that salafists are also in the forefront of fighting jihadism in the south and everywhere Absolutely In nigeria, it is jaffer mahmood and all the others that are fighting boko haram They are the first one to to to fight against boko haram in mali. You have The dico, etc. They are the first one to come out and condemn jihadist movement in muritania. It is the same so Taking that's why I'm saying that we need to be very very careful when we define um discourse and Between ideological discourse and theological discourse Salafism, wahabism, Sufism, etc. Those are mostly about religious practices not about political behaviors When we want to talk about political behaviors, we want to shift the debate from theology to political ideology This is where we can be in self-ground to make gamma comments That's one thing. So the other thing related to education um I totally agree with ambassador come on that al-majirei and people who study in macaranta my the gardawa, etc are Not primarily appealed by jihadist movement. In fact, most of them I place them in the category of pietists. This is a garda that we know who grew up writing on the on on on the law and law in and selling Those are not the ones that go to it is a peculiarity That muhammad yusuf in borno was able to mobilize among those group But it did not happen anywhere else. But in the sahel at least that I know very well. Most of those people are um go in with the Sufi kind of islam, etc not into into the violent side if they you go to the violent side You need to look into other factors that might have pushed them In mupti, for example in mali you have some of them that have engaged with amad kufa And but that is usually really mostly related to deep grievances about pastoral Pastoralists between pastoralists and agriculturalists That is I think most important driver for them to engage into that So if you look at them we say oh, these are al-majirei and that's why they engage into these groups We're not looking at other aspects of their lives that might have pushed them toward in that direction so That's one the other the the last aspect that I would like to address is university setting Islamic movements in the universities that we have them also over all over in all universities in the sahel almost we have muslim movements that are and um, there had been debate about oh those muslim does Muslim movement in universities tend to go to Jihadist movement Most of the people today that participate in politics Using islam in the sahel they come from the first of all from university setting from the islamic movement in the universities This is muslim society nigerian muslim society and you look at most of the people that today call for Engagement into participation into electoral parties. Those are the ones if you look at muritani at awasul is made of those people if you look at Sabati 2012 in mali You see all of them started their engagement their activism from the university. They accept the states They accept democracy And they want to make changes through the law not by changing the whole system Which is what the jihadists want to so We're looking at the wrong people really you can you may have individual cases And there is always individual cases to cite But if we were talking about trends and the larger dynamics I think i'm uh Those are the good guys It's very interesting. I mean it's not a country in the sahel but uh in in sudan people would say you can predict the outcome of the elections By looking at the outcome of the elections at the universities because you would hate have the same political parties overlaying So before we go to questions and answers and engage engage our audience I want to zoom us out even further and as we're as we're looking at the continent I think there's Over the last several decades the african union has really played a role in in setting norms and standards for peace security democracy And the regional economic communities as well who If anyone is is setting that norm around religion and politics Does that does that sit is there a continental? Component a continental framing to it a balancing of issues in my view. No Now you can get rhetoric But look at the organizations we're talking about The african union continues to be relatively weak It gets most of its funding from european states though It's in the process of trying to develop indigenous funding I would look instead At organizations like the economic community of west african states But there so far as i am aware Uh, they have never said anything at all about the establishment of religious norms. So I don't think it's there Now you no doubt can find some rhetoric somewhere But moving beyond rhetoric is something that is real. I don't think it's there And perhaps those aren't the right seats for that those norms to be set One of the first attempt by echo was for instance, which i'm familiar with To go close to doing that It's the echo was strategy on countering terrorism Which From that definition Most of the terrorist groups targeted Groups that have their origin from religion for instance boko haram, but in terms of the details of Identifying look locating religion As an area of focus in terms of looking at how states Can operate within a regionally agreed template that has not been done. But what? Going forward what I think Should be the case Is for states to begin to look at how best They can take advantage of the opportunities they have Now at the regional level to lecture basing for instance to address that if we Focus on a lectured basing arrangement The major problem with that Is the place of Moltenia and Mali that are not within the lectured Area, and they're not in echo was and they're not in echo. They're they're they're they're in echo was but cameroon And chad are not members of echo was if you focus on the sahel you might also be excluding some So you have a very complex arrangement to deal with Which means you must go beyond the echo was arrangement To begin to bring in the lectured countries To really sit down and and and and do that and that is where the african union As a continental body needed to play its own role But the weakness associated with The operations and structure of the african union makes it a bit difficult for it to play Do you think there's even the political will to try to do it? At the individual state level You We Might find some But it's also A function of the kind of institutions That are in place to do that Because the major problem beyond the political will Is the presence of institutions that should drive change You might have the individuals who are willing But if you don't have the required institution that will provide The much needed strength to drive And sustain that It becomes a major problem because for Nigeria for instance part of the problem we have With respect to security and development and even governors Is this regime specific? Arrangement Where as each leader leaves he lives with his own legacy He lives with his own program the next person comes and starts afresh Which is a bit different from what you have in the united states You have hundreds of years of institutions that have been able to continuity So it's a continuity is the major challenge writing we should even focus on So it's about actors and institutions So um Religion is messy thing particularly in this global world Most of the countries in the Sahel are influenced by ideas that are generated globally It's not generated locally those are Azhar scholars Or it is Abdullah Azzaam and Bilal who write books and then Muhammad Yusuf could inspire could read that book And then he make up his own ideas or Yusuf Khardawi somewhere in Qatar or from that is inspired in people Um in Tawasul movements, etc. Or it is It is very difficult to manage Because people could always go to internet could always buy a bookstore. You could always get cassettes and the recording to do that From the management aspect there is Not even only in the Sahel, but all over the world. There are no any mechanisms to um To manage those ideas and even much less in the Sahel region or even in Nigeria There are countries it is becoming people countries are becoming more and more aware that they need to Try to manage Religion and to set up mechanisms to try to push the dynamic in certain side to empower certain groups To express themselves more than others in order to um Have impact on the Collective consciousness of people locally But compared to the dynamic the global dynamic that is coming to people It's not being very effective and Let us say that at the Sahel level Even this security problem people countries have not been able to come together to put mechanism to deal with it Now they're trying to put in the Sahel J5 Sahel That is only security based response to the crisis. It's not Idea-based. It's not like trying to bring all the ulama from the region in order to Produce a discourse that could address those challenges. There is no other mechanism And even the Sahel there has to be even the J5 Sahel there has to be France And particularly France that brought them together the first meeting that they had to create those was held in You're not able to get together in the Sahel region between different foreign ministers to to to come up with and so these are political issues that are affecting the security issues That are affecting those countries. They are not able to deal with them I mean ideas It is more difficult than So let's bring in The participants here who all have a deep knowledge of these issues and I'm sure some some even harder questions To post the panel will take a few questions at a time. And then we'll bring it back to the panelists Yes here in the front Yes, please Thank you. Gail in England with the one campaign The I'd like to play on the last point that you were making on the The way in which the the g5 force has been emphasized in only security aspects at present Um, and that reminds me of the the UNDP report that the ambassador referenced at the beginning The other fact that stood out for me was not that 70 percent of people were influenced by religion But that 71 percent were influenced by state violence against themselves or a loved one I thought the the dialectic between religion and state violence was critical In that in that study and generally in the conversation today So tangible question What can be done to hopefully liaise between The development sphere and the security sphere at a regional level or at a country level Directify some of those underlying Drivers of state violence And hopefully bring religion into the fold in those conversations as well. Are there tangible solutions there that we had? Okay, thank you Cheryl Hi, I'm Cheryl Frank. I work for the Institute for security studies in In with offices across Africa. So this is a issue that is obviously something of Serious concern for us I'm really interested in the panelist view on The security response in the north in Nigeria particularly around civilian involvement in protection and And in dealing with Bokora The civilian involvement in well civilians now in In IDP camps and the the damage done in the north to civilians And and how we get beyond that And where we move from here Particularly because you know, we have a history in Nigeria even in the cities of the young men ganging up together and And and causing Being the result of a lot of violence and so on. So I I am Asking really about how the security response continues from here in a way that That secures some of what we've been worrying about is is abuses and which are some of which are attributed to Citizens and civilians being involved in Insecure to your responses as well, so Great Yes Kyle Dietrich from equal access So I guess if you can I want to kind of forecast two to three years from now And look at the future in the lake shad basin region You know, we have If isis is being squeezed in iraq and syria In boko haram as at least part of them have aligned themselves pledge allegiance to isis You know from my reading there haven't been a lot of boko haram fighters participating in iraq and syria Likewise, there haven't been a lot of foreign fighters From north africa europe the levante participating in the struggle around the lake shad basin One reason I think is because frankly a lot of isis leadership and And the sort of foreign fighters participating are racist and they frankly don't care about the sub-saharan african cause But project with me What's the resonance of isis's messages across the lake shad basin in terms of the ideology the religious ideology And how is that going to be Kind of mobilized to potentially increase a base For isis when you look at where they're going obviously libya obviously attacks in the west their strategy is changing But what does that look like in the lake shad basin region over the next few years? Thanks Great Why don't we start with that that first round of questions? Don't feel that you have to answer all of them, but you'll feel free to choose the ones that you feel are best State violence, uh, yeah That same undp reports shows that personal The the the personal sort of receiving of state violence is And literally a majority of cases the tipping point for people who join Who joined boko haram? It's the precipitating factor as it were now What do you do about it? Okay There are lots of proposals that Be at the eu be at the united states be at whoever Should undertake massive training programs for indigenous police and indigenous military In fact up to now The states involved have been remarkably uncooperative And in fact under good luck jonathan a very small scale us military training program was essentially sabotaged So this takes us back to the problem of how do you address the underlying causes of violent extremism when part Maybe even much of the underlying cause Is the inadequacies of the state? And after all we have to deal with states We the united states do In connection with this i for one opposed The sale of light aircraft by the us to the nigerian air force On the basis that experience in afghanistan and iraq showed That it led to an increase in civilian casualties, which further alienated the indigenous population Civilian joint task force Uh again, this is an area about which i think we need to be very humble Because we don't know very much about it and i think clearly it varies considerably from one area to another In some areas it seems to me to be a little more than a sort of score settling mechanism In other areas there have already been calls by cg Jtf leaders for pensions Rather like the buying off of the niger delton militants through the amnesty I view the cjtf as essentially a pandora's box Um idp camps Long-term consequences Okay, take a figure one that floats around the un is two and a half million internally displaced persons Plenty of people within the un offices in new york are worried That this will be the next driver of mass migration across the sahara into europe That in other words, this is a major problem ticking away and yet the international community is Relatively uninterested in it two to three year forecast um I see a bokeh haram And the islamic state As drawing on The same theological basis the same Seven century interpretations of islamic texts I don't see Much other connection between the two In fact, I do not believe there has been a single european or north american Who went to west africa to fight for bokeh haram or for any other islamic uh jihadist group And I agree with you That part of the reason for this is plain old racism um The islamic state is has been quite racist In terms of in terms of its outlook So if you were to ask me what is the lake chad basin going to look like two to three years from now I would say Absent addressing the internally displaced problem. It will look very much as it does now That in other words, it will not be any kind of dramatic change And if there is dramatic change Alas, it will be for the worse Two to three years from now Recently the islamic state of west africa and It's one of the emerging threats in west africa Which also is drawing strength from icis but the question of whether members of bokeh haram are linked to the islamic state of west africa Is this something that cannot be confirmed But I think that's a major security challenge That the region and by extension The lake chad basin will confront a threat The threat secondly is the fact that For over seven years that region has been militarized And the militarization of the lake chad basin Goes beyond just bokeh haram But that the whole question of criminality and banditry That is also taking place around that area Is a major challenge for the state And that what criminal groups are doing in that area kato rustling for instance Is a major economy that is thriving And is thriving at a rates With which it has the capacity to also fuel Or fund or sustain Some other forms of extremism If not managed very well, so that's also a trend that Needs to be looked into in the in the in the next two or three years We've seen non-state and groups like civilian jtf Hunters association Coming out supported by the state to fight bokeh haram They've been given trainings. They've been given weapons They are now scaled in the use of these weapons The question is or the question of how the Nigerian state will even retrieve these weapons Is still there What the Nigerian state will do with these individuals and groups that have been trained What kind of disarmament program will be put in place What kind of compensation will be given to this group In a post bokeh haram north east remains a major security challenge Recently we saw what happened in codivoa Between the rebels who fought for quattara Who took up arms went to the street to say You did not pay us well for the services we provided and we are capable of holding the state siege Now that's also a scenario That might play out in the north east if not looked into so we might be moving out away From bokeh haram that has been decimated significantly to a new set of armed groups That might also pose almost the same threat That bokeh haram posed to the Nigerian state and I think the point you raised on basado About the id piece is quite profound. It's a major issue That the Nigerian state the lectured basin area Echo was Europe would all have to face And it's a reality It's something that from the perspective of policy Need to be looked into So regarding the first question about what can be done to bridge security and development The Let us say that people who embraced many people who embraced jihadist ideology who are now called the jihadist are fighting To save their community into an environment of chaos to protect their livelihood Whether they're agriculturalists or pastoralist people This conflict existed before jihad came in And when jihad jihad came in people appropriated it and the continued the same conflict up to now That doesn't mean that they are not affected by ideology. They might be affected by ideology, but they fight They have been fighting for a long time and now they fight. I'm not talking about the case of bokeh haram particular. I'm talking about the case of jihadist movement in Mali Particularly on the border between Mali and Niger, but also in the lectured region you had conflict between the buduma and the pearl that is not That is not starting now. It has been there for a long time and tensions between kanuri and hausa Around the lectured region that is also that go back firing history, but If we look at those conflicts That existed before those are all around natural resources and international development actually in some ways Aggravated them by particularly funding more Projects Into places where the occupied pastoral lands and now pastoralists cannot find land to Grasen animals and then they take weapons to fight back Those are the kind of dynamics that generated the conflict that we see particularly in Mali So better understanding of those problems I think trying to always not look into Different subgroups interest When programming Development project would be really very important. The second issue and particularly regarding security is that That the Sahelian countries are out of guards They're not ready to fight this country insurgency Whore they don't have the capacity. They don't have the intelligence. They don't know who is who Am I in those groups? There is now Paranoia about pearl are jihadist You know everywhere and then you go into the Pearl side or the buddhuma are jihadist, for example, or in Difa. They said, oh These kura neighborhood are jihadist And then you go there you find only a few individuals who are related to that and the bulk majority is just cut Into those and then as you continue Killing those civilians who are not part of the groups You continue aggravating the cases those who did not take weapon because the grievances of the violence That they receive from the state are going back Are taking it now. So it is it is deeply Troubling from particularly the the the military sign of those military are saying Most of the people that Niger for example arrested in Difa. They didn't have anything to do with Boko Haram They were just caught in the islands within the like charts and now brought to jail for two years three years without any proof That index them and that Those people want to go back. They are more aggrieved and Mostly willing to engage into that that thing that they were so there is that aspect that is More information about who is doing that. I think it's crucial But unfortunately in the context of security is difficult to get those informations The question regarding ISIS the impact of ISIS under three years I don't want to predict what is going to happen in three years, but I would like to say that Let us not think about North Africans who go and join ISIS as not a threat to the Sahel. There is no border between The Sahara is not a border people from Algeria come down to the Sahel to commit atrocities etc Those who come back from Iraq, we will end up in the lecture division Or somewhere in the in the in the Sahara around Gao actually right now The movements the jihadist movement in northern Mali are all laid are all laid by jihadist groups jihadist individuals from Algeria or from western Sahara This movement there is a movement actually that is spires from ISIS, which is called Islamic State in the Greater Sahara led by This guy as Sahrawi Is the Abu Alidah Sahrawi Abu Alidah is almost the only The only Arab guy Who From outside who is in the movement and he is a leader All the others are pearl group Fulani Who are laid who are being laid by this One individual at least he that we only hear his name We didn't hear other Sahara is who are part of it Even if you know that in Mujah other used to be some Arab and Sahara is in that group So it's it's not a border I don't want to be apocalyptic, but It is The Sahel might will be impacted by the return of some of the the the fighters from Syria and Iraq I think we have time to take a couple of more questions Up the back, Venita Thanks, Susan Great presentation ambassador Ibrahim and Chris A quick pushback for the ambassador's small nuance It's not that nothing has been done for the IDPs by Europe and the United States I would contend we're doing more for the IDPs And humanitarian assistance there than we're doing saying Puerto Rico at the moment There have been hundreds of millions of dollars Now been spent on humanitarian situation clearly more needs to be done The Bama initiative in Nigerian Borno state is another thing we need to look at that is promising The questions that I had for the participants is Do we really need an echo us or the African Union to set norms for religion? What about the centers like Mauritania? Senegal Mali that have been traditional centers of the host islamic issues Pan islamic issues should not we be thinking about their revivalism Why don't we just take a couple more than we're going to do one last response because we only have about five minutes left If there are any other questions I lied Yes, we'll take one last one Since I see no other hands Thanks that that last question sparks the meals in my head Coming back to inequality in the area in your private jets story At question of domestic resource mobilization there is substantial wealth in Nigeria And there are significant super empowered individuals as well that do have Very large assets. What can be done to also work towards domestic resource mobilization as opposed to What we've seen as a chronic underfunding in the international humanitarian response Great, so maybe we can respond to those and then if you have any last concluding remarks, please You're perfectly correct Ambassador Haley up at the un announced earlier in the week that All together the u.s. Has devoted some three billion dollars to To three famines of which two are in Africa What I should have said Is that the us effort and the international effort to address the idp's is inadequate And in fact in terms of pledges to the varying un organizations that are involved with it only something like 25 percent has even been Been paid in I mean that's That I think is is the issue With respect to Mobilization of Nigerian wealth To address the country's profound social problems How do you do it when the people who hold the wealth Are more or less perfectly contented with the situation as it is I mean Short of robin hood Or alternatively and you will sometimes get this on the third gin and tonic in legos You sometimes will get a kind of riddle Why is Ghana so much better off than Nigeria? Even though Ghana has no oil it didn't then it does now answer Flight lieutenant Rawlings and stakes on the beach In other words a violent social revolution Uh, which let me tell you in the Nigerian context would be pretty awful I would like to address the question about Echo whether echo us or you and or a you need to Interfer into the manager of the religion um I would say that It is important, but it's not the determinant factors that would lead to why is it important because The Empowering having Regional Groups that decides or that could come for example out and condemn religion empower local Religious leaders to do the same not having anybody saying that it makes it difficult for some local leaders to do that and um Religious decision that Ulama in Mauritania make sometimes have impact impact on the region One example in 2013 When the french intervened in Mali to stop the jihadists invasion toward the south There was an important debate in Mauritania. Whether this is Whether this is acceptable in islam or not acceptable in islam 30 something ulama in Mauritania. I came out and wrote a fatwa To say that this is um an islamic. It is an infidels invasion of muslim territory, etc I was in florida and the people called me from zander and told me that Actually is of ulama say it is haram. It is you see it could travel From Mauritania to deep into the Sahel region and um, so that is While when we had jihadist jihadist attacks in workshop all those ulama came out and say that this is an islamic But then in Mali they said it is a different context. This is jihad. This is a good jihad in Mali But it wasn't a good jihad So if you can have a framework where Mauritania and ulama and Mali and ulama who could say wait a minute Whereas what is the religious base in on which jihad could be haram in Mauritania and not haram in Mali That could help really create Plus it empower local religious leaders to speak out about about religion I think I'll just I think beyond the use of force and responding to violent extremism in Nigeria The lectured area The Sahel and west Africa in general One thing we need to recognize is the centrality of social capital That exists within communities and within religious groups and they Have played a major role in holding communities together They've played a major role in providing counter narratives To violent extremist groups And it's something that I think we can Still hold on to Is something that I think is worth supported Is something that I think we need to also research for that to see How we can identify and locate models within communities And how these models can also be replicated in other communities where they might not exist Or they might be weak. I know for instance one of the successes that People like the Marquis Sal had Which he enjoyed today Interestingly in Senegal Senegal is 95 percent Muslim Marquis Sal is a Christian. He was voted president in that country One of the successes for that was the role that the religious leaders played In twatting the effort of Abdullah Iwad To Succeed himself in office or impose his song The religious the religious leaders played a major role in terms of civic activism in the context of the mobilization of citizens Around protecting their mandate. So I think these are success stories That we see working in some of these countries and they are very powerful messages that we can vote Great. Well, um, please join me in thanking our really tremendous panel for this conversation. Thank you for joining us And if I may also make two small Public service announcements, um, if you're interested in following the lake chad basin Let me extend an invitation for you to come back to usip tomorrow just in case you haven't spent enough time here Where we'll be hosting members of a senior working group from Nigeria. Dr. Quagga is a member of that group And the highlight will be a discussion on religion the role of religion in peace in Nigeria With the his eminence the cardinal And then a representative of the sultan of soketo and obi as a quacili Who you will know as the founder of the bring back our girls campaign And then my second psa is that This panel previews So research that resolve will be doing over the next year one on education and partnership with usa and venita's here And one also forthcoming to look at the role. I think of the cjtf and how they can play How they can be how that challenge can be be addressed in in nigeria So that's a psa to please come back next year as well. So put it on your calendars. So, thank you everybody The next one is is about National action plans and what are some of the tactical governance issues that should be on the radar of local governments I cut out the rest of her question But I think that's a really interesting one And then This is what if any signs for local governments? I began to make connection between security sector reform resilient governance systems encountering Well, I think it's we went from cross-border to national to local I'm just I'm just going to read your Because they have bios It's yours. You're not You're you're ahead of trends. Okay So maybe How about we why don't we just talk about why don't we just skip national action plans then and just say as national governments try to come to grips with extremism What are some of the tactical governance issues that should be on the radar of local governments? Are they going to give us a thumbs up when we start? We got one we're supposed to start right now All right, welcome Thank you to all you intrepid souls who made it through the entire day at a dc conference To the final panel discussion. I know you guys are just waiting for the the reception afterwards But thanks for thanks for making us a stop on the way So this this panel is specifically titled Filling the vacuum insecurity governance gaps and extremism By the way, my name is Cameron Chisholm. I'm the founder of the international peace and security institute And I had what I thought were a lot of witty Insightful things to say about governance. But then there were a lot of very witty insightful people who spoke throughout the day about governance systems So I think I'm going to try and keep my introductory Brief very short And and pass it off to the real experts and then hopefully open it up to a conversation as this is the afternoon And and I think that we can have a pretty robust Q&A at the end because this is such a rich topic One of the things I do want to say which I think was an interesting finding of the institute for which I work Was last year we held something called the CVE symposium here in Washington, DC We brought together a similar group of individuals and tried to Mind mind the mind minds of the Of the group and one of the questions that we asked it was military It was ngo's peace builders Government workers etc. It was what are the ideal approaches? One of the most effective approaches encountering violent extremism and what was interesting Across the sectors was that Supporting inclusive governance rose to the top Of every single group in fact 86 percent of the 400 people 386 people That answered said that that was The most ideal And and I think we sit here today a year and a half later With a lot more research a lot more insights On how inclusive governance systems can Support resilience against extremism So we have a very illustrious panel here Who are going to dig in to some some real world examples? Both positive and negative about how governance has either inhibited or promoted violent extremism And and then we'll open it to q&a First to my left we have Cheryl Frank who's the head of transnational threats in international crime division at the institute for security studies Then we have Philip Rothman the associate director for global uh at the global public policy institute Then ferra hawana the associate program coordinator At the sanah project in the small arm survey And imtias gul executive director center for research and security studies so In an attempt to look at overlapping governance systems Obviously you have governance systems that are Transnational governance systems that are regional governance systems that are national Governance systems are municipal and they all interact in very complex ways So i'm going to ask three questions The first is going to really focus at the transnational level the second is going to focus At the national level and the third will focus at the local level And then you guys can ask questions about whatever you want So the first one to all of you You've all recently done research and we had a bit of a conversation about this before on the different aspects of extremism in places like Kenya, libya, pakistan, iraq and all of these cases Really struggle with you know, either cross-border or transnational challenges What kind of impact do these challenges have on the outgrowth of island extremism in the places? And what role the governance systems play in inhibiting or promoting resilience against extremism We'll start with you Charlie started me. Um, so let's um, thanks very much Cameron. Um So I come from the last three weeks of having talked about democracy and Security and then last week spending time at unge and I see colleagues here Hey, eric Who we are talking about? counterterrorism and pve and then coming into this forum And feeling a little bit shaken from the the massive shifts they had to make in my brain each week Simply because this week we really questioned States and states contributions to violent extremism and states contributions to violence And I think that's the starting point um for for me here in this in this conversation and and um talking about the horn of You know, let's talk about the horn of africa for a moment is the the real um difficulties of developing You know the global counterterrorism forum, for example has an east african working group that um, that developed strategies and policies and Um programs for the horn of africa, and we have a vastly complex region that struggles from Dealing with al-shaba and a range of other transnational problems including organized crime and And and general violent crime um, what we have also is a mix of states that have A very little coherence in terms in terms of the strategic responses You have institutions amongst those states and I want to specifically highlight an institution such as The east african police chiefs association cooperation association, which is 15 states including egad As a positive example of how Within a very complex region one can have a core plan About policing terrorism about Uh dealing with cross-border issues pursuit of suspects Mutual legal assistance international cooperation more broadly, etc However, the the complexities of trying to work in that transnational environment, especially by just lumping regions together um Really severe and and I think the the the difficulties are a lack of um A real um understanding of really what we want to do transnationally We can have national plans and for example kinnia has its own strategy on pve um and uh Yet kinnia has an amnesty program for example for people coming back into kinnia from al-shaba um, and so does um Somalia and With vastly different objectives and strategies attached to their motivations. In fact, um vastly different So um the the matters of um Of governance are quite complex in in the context of these transnational things a lot a second thing I want to say or the last thing i'll say on that issue is Matters of accountability and the accountability of states and security forces attached to states um massively different across a region like the horn um And in that cross border environment in that transnational environment um Institutions are different values are different challenges are different objectives are different. So um the um the sort of um the difficulties of working in a transnational environment particularly where we want to encourage accountability and that lack of uh and and limiting state the use of force and limiting government's Use of security mechanisms when you can use other mechanisms Is is quite problematic Given the the need to have a more regional strategy and approach Take over immediately. Okay. Thank you very much for the for the invitation and thanks all of you for for coming I've been asked to join this panel Not because of any particular expertise of my own but because some of my colleagues just worked Just completed a bunch of publications and outputs from a very interesting research project together with partners local partners at the american university of iraq in sulay mania in iraqi kurdistan Looking at what we call politely in the proposal Local and hybrid security forces. So basically we mean militias of various type kinds of legitimacy and various types of connection to the central government And uh, I think what the the key point that stands out for me in response to to cameron's question and this kind of transnational local link In in governance challenges Responding or not responding to violent extremism Is is the fact is or is basically a point that leads me to to challenge the title of the panel a little bit The first word was vacuum and I think the first Kind of point that i'm i'd like to draw out from this hyper local research I won't bore you with the the detailed analysis of various districts of kirkuk and talafar and so forth If you're interested, you're very welcome to go to www.gppi.net it's on the front page and you can click on it and and Read more and but I think for this forum it's it's You know kind of some cross-cutting themes are more appropriate and one of them is simply that there's never a vacuum, right? I mean I understand that we're using this term as shorthand for for central government control That might not be there or central government government might not be providing governance in in a particular area But I think it's important to to to kind of it's it's a misleading Category that that takes us down the wrong rabbit hole sometimes So I think it's important to realize that that there's never that there's never an ungoverned space or a vacuum like that People always need protection. They need food. They need other things And somebody will provide it in in some way or another it might be a very abusive relationship Of course the kind of the the romanticized notion of a of a locally stood up militia that protects its community And is so much less abusive and so much nicer than the bad government forces Is is sometimes true to some extent, but it's often also Just an advertising narrative for that for that militia and and those those groups might be As or more abusive as as governments But the the starting point The the finding or the key point that that this this research is not new but has reinforced for us again Is that it's important to analyze these situations that we that were that were That were tempted to to to call vacuums To analyze them in a non-biased way right that to simply to look at who wields power who wields violence Who has money in these situations in a very very basic very simplistic in a way way That just ignores any normative preconceptions about who should wield power and who should take decisions Who should make rules because only that will lead us to understanding Anything about about those areas and that's where we get where the transnational bit comes in right because while the the The source of the problem Ultimately is always local That that's that's very clear this this This entrepreneurial opportunity so to say to provide governance in areas where Governance is insufficiently provided and governance in a broad way including security Including violent coercion in some areas or justice Um That that entrepreneurial opportunity will be taken by a mix of people That's what we're seeing in iraq in northern iraq by some some groups that respond to the alienation of the shia community By standing up shia dominant forces And getting support from iran that doesn't mean that iran has this kind of you know that that this is automatically A result of some sort of iranian takeover Of of course iran sees itself in a defensive position and and sees itself forced to support Its sectarian brethren across the border There's the Kurdish forces so forth right so knee groups All of whom draw significantly on on international transnational support But that doesn't mean that the sources of the problems and also I think most of the solutions aren't actually local So that's that would be my Kind of Little advertising segment for the next round Great. Thank you very much. So I'll just um, I guess follow up the comments of of my colleagues to the right By talking a little bit about my role, which is project coordinator of the security assessment in north africa at the small arm survey Um, we are looking at tracing exactly the kind of transnational relationships and linkages that are so Difficult to do with the traditional Sort of methodological lens that looks only at a country focus. So it's very much looking Um at the north african region trying to understand it as a cohesive whole Of course the north africa region in this um in this formulation is Morocco, libya, tunisia, algeria And egypt And when we talk about This sort of myth they're often repeated idea of there being an ungoverned space or there being a vacuum And I completely of course agree with the comments that are made that of course this is something that doesn't really exist And I would add to that and these will be um, hopefully my addition to the discussion At least in this region that kind of um sort of pattern of local governance or of Whether the central state is present or not present is very much tied to I think much longer processes of Historical formation of these states of the institutions particularly security institutions in these states and the roles that they play in the political regimes and systems that are Currently in place, which of course have changed or have been affected drastically since 2011 um, so The cross-mortar challenges that are faced in tunisia are I mean in in the region excuse me are different for example If you look at the role of the military in egypt or the role of the military in algeria And you compare that to its neighbors. So the security institutions that play a role in security provision have a very different perception public perception That is felt by the population there and there is in fact as has been mentioned I think in earlier panels Quite a long legacy of autocratic rule in these regions where you have a certain closing off of public space as lack of tolerance for dissent Which of course led to these 2011 uprisings which have been discussed But the cross-mortar challenges are not limited to You know ideological ones or or or new ideas that are spread through technologies and things like that but also much more hard questions of actual networks that are in place that Are involved in in trafficking Of proliferation of not just small arms and light weapons, but of course as has been in the news lately also people also drugs There are many goods that might be of course trafficked and having porous borders in the north african region as well as neighboring Certain other regions like the Sahara Sahel region and the Levant where Borders are also porous, but you have existing also conflicts at the local level. You have a super imposition particularly in the case of libya, which since 2011 has really Fed quite a lot of these cross-border challenges that we have been facing which is related to Um The smuggling networks that have always sort of been in place and the communities that straddle The borders and that function in these in these different countries. It's quite A complex Picture a complex environment Where people have different, you know, obviously there's multiple fluid identities of the groups and in groups that are involved But once you have a local Um a sort of super imposition of a national Excuse me a national Sort of political divide as we see in libya now where you have sort of rival governments. You have two camps Then these political Sort of frames can also be superimposed upon local conflicts where then there is Sort of an interest created in continuing the conflict because of perhaps regional support Uh Support in the financial sense support in the arm sense support also in the political sense So there creates certain lucrative markets that spring up of course around conflicts and armed conflicts Related of course with trafficking and the proliferation of armed groups In the case of libya, there's a multiplicity of uh of armed groups that are are really working and it's a dizzying Array and a balance. Um, what happens in libya and the reason I keep mentioning it is particularly since 2011 the fall of the khazafi regime, um, you have a situation of That affects the neighbors. So you have a uh, uh weapons that are looted from old government stockpiles because of course States are often the major source of Also illicit weapons through diversion through looting through theft and other ways. Um, so It's really become I think a little bit outdated to try to talk about counterterrorism or countering violent extremism within the discrete sort of You know boundaries of a single of a single country because at this stage At least in the region where I work and it seems in in in neighboring regions as well Those demarcations are no longer empirically Sound really Thank you very much Yeah, it's uh very difficult to know address. Um, whatever audience is left after a very front-loaded Two set two or three sessions But still I'll try to come up to the challenge Um Pakistan I because I come from Pakistan. So I have to contextualize what is happening in in Pakistan the kind of trans border threats that It it faces Perhaps can be categorized in two factors One is the structural factors that is the geography of Pakistan and That is India, Afghanistan basically both Relationships are very have been very acrimonious and have gone really from bad to worse in the last few years the second type of Factors are the trigger factors like one is of course Checkered history of relations with India India being seen as a as a hostile enemy country The second big trigger factor was the Cia ISI led sponsored anti-soviet union jihad of the 1980s and the third was the Again another joint project of Pakistan, the United States and other NATO countries. That was a war on terror so the cumulative impact of these trigger factors has been the the birth of the Mujahideen the Taliban al-Qaeda Daesh on the one hand and then of Organizations like lashkar a taba or jashem Muhammad in Pakistan which are focused more on kashmir the Indian part of kashmir and then this is Basically created The kind of problems that Pakistan currently faces these non-state groups Whether it's lashkar a taba the haqqani network or the Taliban in afghanistan They basically are at the heart of pakistan's acrimonious relations with both India and Afghanistan and also at the same time the the relationship The the daisi relationship with the united states is also defined by these trans-border non-state actors and The combination of all these non-state factors has thrown up basically a number of challenges to pakistan including the discourse of radicalization terrorism And they have then eventually hooked up also many of them With the organized crime Taking advantage of the ungoverned spaces as we have been talking about in the northwest and southwest of pakistan The non-state actors that the trans border basically the proponents of the trans-border religious ideologies They as well as the organized crime feed of each other are complementary They provide each other with the social support that that they need they also provide each other with the Havens with the shelters that they need to operate and that is Is an extremely complicated situation For pakistan because some of the groups have also splintered Splintered into proxies for external factors Whether it's for al-qaeda whether it's for daish or for any other outside force So it has then obfuscated the reality as to whether this is terrorism Or this is radicalization or part a combination of organized crime and terrorism or religious radicalization Now the state response to it has been Many many fold i would say there's been a sustained series of operations military operations against Many of the non-state acts is particularly those who have been directly targeting and publicly targeting Pakistan's interest Pakistan security apparatus as well as political figures And then Mark followed by a big operation that eventually was Conducted in north waziristan which borders afghanistan starting in june 2014 Followed up by another one early this year At the same time we saw the birth of a Long-term integrated policy approach To issues of terrorism and radicalization and that is called the national counterterrorism authority Now this national counterterrorism authority drew a lot of flak Including myself from people including myself just because Initially we were hoping for miracles to happen once you know the authority has been put in place But we forgot and a lot of people overlooked that this authority was Created to the context of a myriad of problems on the one hand you have a political ruling elite Which is not ready to give up its hold on the police for instance Which was supposed to be the first which is the first point of contact Which was supposed to be an equal partner in the counterterrorism and counter radicalization That the army was spearheading on the other hand The the bureaucracy which is tardy which lacks vision and there is so much inter-institutional discord within the ministries civilian ministries as well as between the the Civilian segment of governance and the the military so against that backdrop the first five years Or six years basically saw not much happening In fact, its legal foundation came about four years ago when the present government Instruct instituted some legislation for the creation of national counterterrorism authority It is now trying to achieve targets Which many of which are ambitious given the this inter-institutional discord And sort of did partial dysfunction of many institutions, but if you look at look at it from a distance It has put together some framework for any terror legislation proposed legislation for terrorist financing For making the banking systems a little more stringent In order to prevent The terrorist financing and I think it's also created a sort of coordination Better coordination among the four provinces. We have four provinces So it is just taking off. So most of people are very skeptical about this state response to so to say, uh, to to terrorism and radicalization But I personally think and I by nature I'm an optimist So I would I would say the glass is half full That basically a country which has been mired in conflict Fighting many battles particularly from within so it has now got an integrated policy approach To what extent does it bear fruition? To what extent does it really address the problem the core problem that Pakistan faces that is increased religiosity? I wouldn't say radicalization. This is increased religiosity A lot of people tend to look at many problems even of the at the political economy through the religious privilege Which needs a direct intervention At the community level not only by the bureaucracy, but also by the public representatives Whether they are the members of the national parliament members of provincial parliament or members of the district government but the But the ruling mainstream ruling parties are not allowing The district government system to function because they fear loss of territory loss of authority So that's why we are in a state of flux, but I'll end here. I think then we can take take it further Great You all raised some I think some really interesting points Throughout this panel one the fact that there are no such thing as uncoverage spaces. They're just alternative governance systems Um, I think it's also really interesting to touch on the fact that there really is nothing that is truly local Uh, and that's the hyper connected Place that we are in the world, uh, definitely affects governance systems That said We still live in a Westphalian world primarily and many of the solutions That are being or at least Solutions is probably a kind word many of the Responses there we go tend to be through national governments And uh, I know you all work on a myriad of different countries So maybe pick one or two Think about that and as those national governments are trying to come to grips with how to respond to these ungoverned spaces or issues of violent extremism including Developing national action plans If you were going to brief The individuals who are coming up with these plans. What are the the primary tactile of governance issues That you would suggest that they focus on primarily Um So I I have to admit and I I felt Last week when I said this that That it was slightly blasphemous under the circumstances of unga but uh an unga side event But you know the the national action plan Approach Promoted by the un and requested of states now You know set a sort of cycle of exhaustion in place for for most people working Particularly in our african space because policy making takes so long and policy processes take so long And you know we really Under some circumstances believe that you don't need new policy and new strategy You just need to implement all the right things that are in your constitution and that are already in place So it was that level of that sense of do we need this? Although the directive is there yet I also think that um, you know the we we can really serve local communities Through some of these strategies these national action plans If we do not do the quick and dirty exercise of sending in a consultant To design the policy and take a box and then leave But we really engage with the local needs of people and and to just provide an example from some of the research We did in in kenya. I think some of these strategies can help set local priorities and needs Which I think are what the quick and dirty exercises don't pick up on And and the research that we did in kenya on on women's roles in violent extremism picked up Obviously a whole dynamic of issues Um, but um, for example, if you were to ask those women What would their prioritize for national action plans in their communities and the seven affected communities we We looked at they were they would say we want service service delivery from the from the trauma We experienced after terror attacks We would want you to and this is answering your question about What would be the governance things at local level that need to be dealt with they would They want the police and security forces to stop harassing them about their husbands that go That disappear and are presumably in somalia or their sons who are equally Suspected of having left and gone to somalia They would want support from the government and from local agencies and from donors In in they would want to support in terms of Economic support from having lost breadwinners And then so the the priority setting I think is Is extremely Valuable in this in this context if we're going to do national action plans Let them matter in this context so that local communities can Can contribute to those discussions one of the things that and you know I've been doing research in violence prevention for over 20 years One of the things you hear consistently when you go to communities Is stop researching us And unless you're going to bring back Services and things that matter to us unless you're going to bring changes and that happens so seldom So if these process Processes can help engage at least some of those voices and bring those services back into those those communities then Then they would be valuable processes But I am yeah, so I'll leave it at that great Don't you and let's try and keep it to like two minutes So we can get the q&a. Okay Yeah, so I mean in terms of the what we what we saw in iraq. I mean, you know sis is The the supposed islamic state daesh is is increasingly Gone in terms of territorial control The the key thing is not to think that they you know, suddenly the government takes over and everything is fine I mean first of all there's Especially in northern iraq a lot of competition. You probably also the news about the kurdish referendum result About which government gets to govern But also The government. I mean there's there's a reason why the government, you know, why a lot of the iraqi Authorities particularly the military but also everything else collapsed So so quickly in in the face of the is onslaught two three years ago, so It the the key problem Is is basically to establish, you know, simply better governance than the competition, right? And what that better governance means That I mean like Cheryl was just saying I think that that that's the key problem For for policymaking Both for us, but also if I were to advise the iraqi central government or the Kurdistan regional government That is in the eye of the beholder That's locally different and that's why we need to ask Or that's why these these the local people need to be asked the situations are different and the priorities are different And and I think that's one of the problems that many approaches in this governance space Be they under under a counterinsurgency framework or under a stabilization framework or under a cbe framework Have suffered from this attempt to kind of try to to kind of apply general templates and say, you know We need security first or we need roads first or we need education or health first or whatever It differs from from place to place because because local governance systems local governance structures local governments of any kind Can't do everything and so they do need to focus on the things that are You know that they can actually improve upon from this very difficult place They're coming from which was part of the reason for the for the problem in the first place The good thing is they don't need to be perfect. They only need to be better than those violent extremist groups. They're trying to out govern So so that's the positive part, but that means they they they have a chance, but only if they're very targeted Last sentence the problem with that is that there's still a massive contradiction. We're asking politicians in iraq for example You know on the one hand they are focused On survival on stabilizing their situation including their very personal situation and the situation of their families Including by protecting themselves by keeping their entrenchments expanding their entrenchments in the patronage network and so forth But we're also asking them for a massive political change For to give up this patronage system to start dismantling it and to to deliver more effective services So there's a huge political demand That is that is included and a huge contradiction between this this push for stability in a very unstable situation and this push for change in a very unstable situation and I mean just comparing this to the to the problems that we're having in with reforms in stable liberal democracies I mean if I look to to germany and the types of reforms In education or health or the economy economic sector that we're you know always complaining about that they are going to slow Then I have a lot of you know respect and understanding for these Politicians in a country like iraq that are having huge difficulties being pulled apart by these different imperatives Yeah, those are very good points And I will add to them Rather than repeat to them because although I think that it's the service delivery and economic development aspect It was hugely important particularly in my region was north africa where unemployment was a huge huge driver You know economic inequality Lack of services sort of the withdrawal rollback of the Arab state in the last 30 years if you want to call it that with certain moving out of Infrastructure improvements and service delivery and allowing non-state And civil society groups to step into that gap provide those services creating the competition and as you said it should be relatively easy You just have to be better than other groups, right? the the and that's something that I I I wonder is How much work will have to go into it and how much good faith effort to achieve that because um when I think about the case of where violent extremism is You know an issue in north africa like for example in the Sinai Where that population has his Sinai in Egypt rather Where that population has very historically been quite deliberately marginalized demonized by the central government deliberately not starved of resources and services and things like that so you also have a delicate situation in having Coming up with constructive ways forward to improve the situation and overcome historical Inequalities and systematic discrimination of certain minority groups. And of course, let us not forget the really excessive and widespread human rights abuses by north african and arab governments at large against their own populations so sort of These are the kinds of grievances that are really really deeply rooted And are related not just to state weakness, but also state violence a lack of access to justice No possibility to appeal So these are At the national level when you you talk about policies to counter these things that it goes back to the point that Cheryl has made quite well. A lot of these countries have very nice constitutions With very clear articles about things that would be nice if they happened And We could potentially start there which are honoring commitments that are already made honoring commitments at the international level that have already been made The arab states for example and in the north african region are signatories to a number of international conventions that would already Go go somewhere take, you know go advance rather the Um The eventual goal of of encouraging populations to see the government not as a a threat or a A predator As I think is the case in certain regions and certainly in in some parts of north africa And I will just quickly point out because I do realize I've spoken a little bit long It's also difficult when you look at these countries with pervasive state weakness and particularly those where armed conflicts are occurring To then generalize out at the national level. What's the case in libya? What's the situation in egypt? So i've just mentioned the example of sinai, which shares really nothing with the governance in the delta Or a different part of egypt for example, right? So i mean we have these subnational Specificities which go back to our earlier discussion about the importance of local contextualization and these kinds of subnational differences Can be very very stark like for example in southern libya You have also a similar i don't know. It's not identical, but you have a similar situation where Communities have been marginalized and are therefore more susceptible To appeals to use violence to achieve something that they Understandably see no other way of achieving since the state has left no avenues of peaceful expression or appeal Or a public space usage So i'll leave it at that Okay, are you still awake? Sorry Yeah, let's do two minutes on this one just two minutes. Okay It will be two minutes Okay, well, um, we our government came up with the national action plan in december 2014 after a massive attack on a on a school army public school in basically december that year and This was a reiteration A 20 point reiteration of the implementation forceful implementation of the existing laws So this was seen like as a first counter terrorism Framework policy. I don't know. I'm never not sure whether it's a policy or not But this was a national action plan However, it relied mostly On the hard power hard power was deployment of police deployment of the military go after the void latest of the law the It also promised reforms revamp of the criminal justice system Which is the foundation basically of the justice Which often actually is that it is the reason for why people take to radicalization So far nothing has happened as far as the criminal reform on the criminal justice system is concerned It's only the hard power and those policies that i mentioned in my earlier First response that there's an integrated policy framework to deal with the count counter radicalization and counter terrorism issues What is missing from the national action plan is the direct involvement of the public representatives They most of them still fail to understand the centrality of their role In the community policing conventional and non-conventional community policing The police is not being empowered The public representatives do not have the vision or willingness To engage with the community to to blunt The narrative The extremist narrative that is coming out of the mosque and you have mosque in every small settlement They think there's a job of the police the police has no power And generally people think this is a military's job. This is a security establishment job to curb these extremist narratives So our problem is still the missing link the biggest missing link is the involvement of the civilian public representatives in mobilizing the community And together with the community addressing and reaching out to the mullah Who is preaching all sorts of the salafi and the bandi and wahabi versions of islam injecting poison into the minds of the people Which obviously has its impact even if it infects one or two three persons every day in in a respective locality So that is i think our biggest gap right now Um, we are just hoping that with as time passes The military while this continues its operations that the civilians will also take up assumed responsibility And become active members of the active actors of the national action plan Great, thank you. Um, so i'm going to go ahead and go to q and a at this point We want to make sure that we have a robust conversation. So we have about 30 minutes for q and a I'll take two questions at a time And we'll answer and then we'll we'll continue to move on. So let's let's start with these two gentlemen down here Thanks. So one of the panelists the first panelist mentioned, uh, the global counterterrorism forum And uh, there's been an interesting conversation around Sort of the relevance of the national versus the transnational or the regional which i think is absolutely spot on And i would just draw your attention to in the context of a gctf How border security and how our conceptualization of border security from a Counterterrorism perspective is evolving to include and to start to look at community engagement I think that's a really important development that actually Is starting to happen in the policy and in the sort of foreign assistance space But it actually needs a lot of research to kind of Really come in and sort of you know flesh it out or back it up But you know, there's I think a good example of where You know in the in the policy and in the assistance space We're maybe not ahead of the curve, but we're we're doing a better job of trying to kind of keep up with The complexities of the on the ground situation On the national action plans I think a couple of things that are really important here One of the added values and again, it all comes out an implementation, right because you can develop a nice plan as we've seen with you know United Nations youth plans From past years that were implemented in some countries, but never really or just developed but never really implemented It's how do you bring the non-security ministries and agencies of government to the table? So your ministries in youth and sports education Um social development Decentralization of local government how much voice and what kind of a role do they have in developing the plan? And then of course particularly what sort of role do they have in implementing it? And I would second what you've said about the role of Communities and women and I would also add you There too because it's fine to get um You know women community leaders into the room, but then You know, what about the secondary school students or the university students? who Frankly know their peers better than often adults in their community And so they need to be part of any sort of community engagement around developing and implementing National action plans. Thanks Gentleman the glasses Thank you very much So I think the panelists done a tremendous job Debunking some of the misconceptions that marked perhaps practice and in previous years State building counterinsurgency what have you and that is to say everything flows through the capital Everything is state-based and if it's not state controlled and it's ungoverned I think the point was made very cogently that ungoverned is a bit of a misleading concept But if I may be a little bit more challenging, I mean, I think this this really came to me It became popularized really with the scholarship of Ken Menkhaus and his work in Somalia And I just checked his article and governance without government came out in 2007 That's a decade ago now And I'm just wondering this has prompted so many calls to get better at operating and you know With these sub-state spaces to operate with France national sub-national entities With all this realization conceptual progress, are there any Key success stories? Are there any kind of moments or glimpses of enlightened policy making that have overcome the various challenges that you so rightly Note in your respective comments And since I realized that question perhaps unfairly puts you on the spot Give us two or three more if you can't Come up with such a success story Maybe I could ask you to speculate as to why that may be the case What's pulling us back from really doing better on the basis of our conceptual understanding? Thank you. Great. Thank you both So we have role of women and youth in national action plans or other Actors as well as success stories for operating at the sub-state level Who would like to go first? Of course you can Just on the gctf comments The first one is You know the gctf has This the set of good practice guidelines that have been developed over several years I really think that it's it's quite critical for the gctf to shift focus now to Talking about the implementation and the results of those guidelines, right? So so not so much focusing on outputs of guidelines But really the results and what we're trying what we have achieved from those guidelines But I do think the guidelines do create a generic set of values and almost Document a set of Systems and processes that we all agree are good things to have in place And that helps with the with the cross-border stuff. It helps with the transnational Stuff if you if you're bringing a regional group together and talking about What are the five things we went to achieve in courts? Then these are five things in this memorandum that help us Do that So I think the gctf is very useful in that way But I do think it needs to shift focus now and to stop producing all these guidelines And and and making sure that we are implementing them in practice and assessing what we're achieving from that So that's the one thing the second issue when you which you talked about National action plans When you said, you know plans are great, but we need implementation I worry really about having pve national action plans in the absence of evidence of what works in pve So, you know, we have a lot of good theory around pve. Maybe, you know all this We have suggestions about counter radicalization messaging and deradicalization programs, etc There are many good ideas on the table, but we don't have an evidence base on on many of those things So we have lots and little of that evaluation is coming up and we've discussed it in this forum Over yesterday and today About how little of that evidence is coming up and it's hidden in in cabbards and donors offices Where there, you know, it's tucked away in donor reports and so on and so forth So we really need more of that evidence to emerge so that the policy making starts making sense In that we're making entire institutions Based on theory and not on good ideas and not really on evidence based practices So that worries me Not that we don't have to go through cycles of learning and and the criminal violence prevention Field is evidence of that. It's 40 years of learning about what does work So we need to start creating that evidence base and putting it out there and testing it in various contexts also I would say that's a perfect segue to the to the second batch of questions About success stories. So I'm I'm not so sure about specific. I mean, I can't really tell from my own research I mean I've heard that Somali land is land is something that some people hold up as a success story and There are a few perhaps You know decentralization Things of like local autonomy whatever in a couple in a couple of countries But I think since since I I didn't do any research on any of these cases I'll I'll stop there and and there will be much more knowledgeable people in the room And what I what I want to say since you gave me the out about holding back What what's holding us back? I think to some extent there's also I mean much as I You know, I'm subscribing to this to this thing about not everything is is Is state-based? There's also a sub-state governance fetish right that that Social science has promoted to a large extent And that overlooks that that in you know, we cannot I mean, there's no one size fits all Solution to how people imagine their political communities and and where they choose to place legitimate trust in power and and that's You know where we seem to be caught often in our conceptual approach to these things between like the political the political constraints of trying to preserve an arbitrary set of borders and Because of all the the kind of ripple effects if you if you allow one country to split or whatever In in a particular region on the one hand And on the other hand this kind of romantic Thing about you know, if there's like some sort of community that has been marginalized, of course, they should self rule, right? So and I think in between We just have to keep dealing with the with the fact that that it's ultimately its politics and and these these People create these imagined Communities sometimes based on ethnicity sometimes on more complex Melanges of identity factors And political Leaders try to kind of build these communities and sometimes Split them and sometimes merge them And have to find a way of of establishing Something so so I think the risk is that what's also holding us back is this commitment to this cottage industry of providing Technical governance solutions of of saying, you know, I mean, that's that well That's what we're seeing in the past 10 20 30 years that we're establishing all this nice Stuff huge budgets and western governments at the UN and so forth to deliver, you know to deliver services to try to replace service delivery temporarily While while and and that's a convenient excuse For our own governments and I'll only speak of of of my own country in germany and the european union Often in these cases, you know, it's a convenient excuse It's very nice to put a few million euros or a few tens of millions of euros or hundreds of millions of euros into You know resettlement of of internally displaced people in iraq That doesn't have to you know, you don't have to to kind of confront some of the political ways in which our own policies contribute to the problems sometimes or in which we could if we actually, you know It's a very difficult proposition But we we might be able to help local political leaders in a country like iraq empower the ones that want to reform That want to take on the entrenched political system support them in doing so But that won't work if we send like, you know, some sort of technical consultant on this and that agriculture Uh to to back that that will only work if they feel respected and take it seriously And they don't see a german minister only once a year when for christmas visits to the troops or something So so if we if we, you know talk about political problems and political solutions those political solutions will only come through political engagement And not just technical programs technical programs can only support those political strategies if we have one Wow, that is such a very important and succinct point. I'm not sure that I can improve upon it but But I might add to it because the point being made that politics is unavoidable these are ultimately political issues Very complex ones a very context specific ones, but they're not technical issues They are political ones that require political engagement as as philip so eloquently has explained um In addition to that And I would address the the questions at hand. I'd like to just point out that the chiro Even though I probably shouldn't promote another organization's publication while i'm here, but the chiro institute for human rights studies recently put out a very interesting workshop report Uh from a 2015 workshop that they had on cve in north africa brings together a collection of um of researchers and writers on the topic One of their conclusions Which I I really strongly Do agree with is that countering violent extremism requires? Not just the involvement of you know formal state institutions, but actually informal Social groups the rest of society civil society organizations It requires um actual engagement at the local level in an active sense So the finding was that a flourishing civil society Where uh, you know people um can achieve their interests pursue their interests Express themselves in safety without fear of repercussion from state security forces Or other or other groups in society for that matter That is really key. I think to move forward. So i'm not uh, although i'm not involved in national action plans myself I would imagine that that any national action plan That intends to succeed and this also goes back to the point i mean by by our our colleague here from pakistan as well that they There needs to be You know a local Yes ownership consultation. Thank you very much a consultations and ownership In exchange in an iterative process rather than a top-down Instruction of well you're going to do this you're going to do that um, so that was the first question and and and and quite um attached to my response to the second question Which is uh, i'm afraid i have no success stories for you. Um, but i do have um, uh, Perhaps speculation on what might be holding us back and that does go back to the original point made which is it's politically Delicate for international and regional Actors i think in this geopolitical environment within which we find ourselves in 2017 to Balance what they considered to be their own security interests For example, if you look at the european union with the migration question or the tariff is in the united states You have your own security interests as well as your own national interests as it were but um, the the fact that There's a certain uh Sort of reluctance to critically engage with those governments and i believe actually the chiro institute report referred to it as um blind support So that uh, it will never be able to um solve a subnational or local level problem Where the problem is itself caused by the central authorities. So if you have You know sort of external support. Um, that is uncritical That is security focused and that doesn't focus on actually the drivers of grievances the drivers of inequity or the drivers of Violent extremism and nor does it offer a a counter narrative that's persuasive Uh, um, so then it would be very difficult to imagine it's a success story. I think okay, um You know in terms of uh success stories as far as pakistan is concerned Well, they were there being a lot of territorial As a result of the military crackdown In the previously known ungoverned spaces But our real fight is on the ideologically front For that we don't see much pushback at the moment For that, I think we will need a whole of government approach Whole of government would also mean parliamentarians civil representatives. That is missing Engagement with the university students We engage with university teachers. Amir's organization also does that but that's a very small miniscule attempt that is donor driven There's not enough appetite within the governance segments for undertaking such exercise at a national level which we need as much as possible Then I think uh Our problems with india and afghanistan basically they are also muddying what is a continuous source of Uh source of sort of oxygen for the non-state actors proponents of radical ideologies You know, they prey on people using deploying these ideologies This thought process against india against afghanistan as the enemy even including the united states so what We need is a whole of government approach for this to Get ideological success stories that is still missing Um Unfortunately politicians are caught in this four to five year cycles of election Very sad so are they here so are they here, you know everywhere And ours are more driven by fears of losing Electoral territory if they were to speak out against a cleric a religious political leader So that is a big hand handicapped and that's why basically they are holding back from from an aggressive Reaching out approach to to people taking the community on board and talking to these people. So there I think that's a big deficit Great. Thanks. Okay. We have I think in time for another round of questions. All right. These two gentlemen in the back Hi, uh, my question is to mtyaz gole. Uh, you talked about the civil military relations Not being that great in pakistan. I just wanted to draw your attention to The political wing of lashkarate by recently contesting elections for the first time in lohor and they came in third According to the positions after the elections A report by al-jazeera called it An attempt by the pakistan's powerful military and intelligence establishment to Delegitimize the ruling party. How do you view the mainstreaming of extremist organizations in pakistan? And what's your take on this? outcome, thank you Well, I wouldn't Hi, uh, well, that might be a difficult question to follow up on but thanks for being here and sharing your wisdom So I was thinking of a curveball question. So here it is Should we support groups making alliances if some members of those alliances are extremists So, um in the gentleman brought up a salafine So, um, if you want an example Should we support ahrar asham making alliances informing java to al-islamina? And yeah, that's my question Okay, first the directed question about pakistan second Should we get in bed with uh, with extremists? That was the question that's how I heard it Uh, what the the the storyline from al-zira that is a typical western storyline so I wouldn't comment on it We have been hearing this for 20 years 25 years Because it all came about with the support of the west So let's forget about that mainstreaming Well, if a group a body of people group of people is part of that society Uh, if they also possess A huge network Of schools or madaris or whatever you call them What do you do with them? Do you call them? Do you get involved into a genocide of these people or you try to take them on board? I'm not talking about whether the military did it or not. I'm just And please recall the ira Shin Finn was created To create space for to allow ira negotiate with the government with the united kingdom Had they not created shin fin, there wouldn't be any sunday agreement. Good. Was it good friday or good? Yeah, good friday agreement So, you know, there's a state jacket response to such attempts tagging it as attempt by military establishment Trying to legitimize You know what people overlook the fact in pakistan? even an alliance Of seven religious political parties couldn't get more than 13 votes ever In the 2002 elections And that was also because of the incumbency factor that they were Taliban had been Dislaged in afghanistan and there was a crackdown going on So there was this narrative of victimhood of islamist and all together they got 13 It was 13% vote since then they have disintegrated. There is no No religious political alliance at the moment. No religious political party has managed more than five or six percent votes This party of course four thousand votes. They got this point four like four percent votes out of the total votes cast What do you do with this four thousand with four percent people? Do you kill them all? Do you exclude them or want to try to include them in the mainstream? And this way discredit them also because such a party when they whenever they get to power They fail to deliver as much as the mainstream parties So people eventually move away from them So you cannot kill ideologies You cannot defeat ideologies. However, you can trump the ideology or the proponents of that those ideologies by trying to Engage them. So this is my take on that and getting in bed with bad people It's like playing a game of telephone here So we should ask Also the state department should ask The pentagon We should ask the united nation secretary general Everybody's been has been asking urging the taliban for instance of afghanistan To come for negotiations You may like them dislike them You have personal preferences But the problem is if there is A group of people which has continuously engaged first, you know, 133,000 troops Now they're engaging the afghan national security forces as well as US and NATO forces you can't defeat them What's the alternative? Do you continue fighting? This is what mr. Mac master and tell us and probably a wine for this is what seems to be the new strategy but If You give it a shot and if you can manage of course We gave it a shot We negotiated With the people we whom I consider as terrorists the tariqa taliban pakistan They were exposed badly Because everybody that spoke with them in a period of three four months in 2014 They realized that they are not up for peace They are the disruptors So what was the response the response was the operations of the husband which Their infrastructure was dismantled disrupted They were on the run and that's how they then eventually many of them took refuge in the border areas to afghanistan So it's a very tricky question. You know the Do you consider them as beatable? or reconcilable And are they really ready to reconcile in this case in the case of afghanistan? I don't want to comment on that in our case We made a decision our security establishment of the government that these guys are not reconcilable. They beat them out of swath They beat them out of fata The government it has been established so territorially they have established their foothold there Now whether we can sustain it it will depend on the the legislation on the civilian government whether they mainstream the So-called earlier ungoverned areas to which which extent does the government infrastructure Parapanalia is extended to these areas in order to deny the non-state actors The spaces that they had been using earlier for their cross-border activities um Is it on me? Yes, please. Oh, okay. Well, I'll just very briefly since we're running out of time Just to answer your question about whether I guess by we you mean the united states government should involve Should work with or ally themselves with groups. Was that that was a question right? Great. No. No, I just wanted to make sure I understood the question. Yeah I I would have to say that I generally agree with the broad contours of the comments already made But in addition to those comments, which I agree with because the choice really is reconciliation or or not and as he said there's no Nonviolent way of getting rid of people you don't agree with except to speak with them or to others So I agree with what has been said, but let me just point out one thing which I think is very important Uh, at least in the arab world of the arab state system Uh, there has been for some period of time now a certain false binary or dichotomy that is loaded by Usually externally supported rulers that creates a false choice between You know chaos An absolute destruction of the country that you're in based on religious extremism and terrorism and and if we talk to these people We will uh, you know disappear tomorrow and the idea that like well I'm not so bad the status quo where you can't go out and you can't you know You can't express yourself and you don't have services. You don't let it just you know This is all fine because the other option is complete chaos So this is of course a false choice, but it is that is what the discursive frame Is in a lot of these places. So I I would only caution Uh, um, not in the specific case of afro shem or in this specific discussion But if you know if in my personal capacity if the u.s. Government was going to be involved in something like that I would uh encourage them to study the discursive Environment within which they're about to engage to determine whether Such an alliance would be in the short term and the long term which the long term is quite important ultimately damaging first to the population of that country and Or not and Otherwise, um, if it's in any way conducive to the stated interests of the government, I suppose But I think it's important to keep that in mind because it's precisely this dichotomy that created You know the certain tumults and uprisings in the last few years It compounded over many a long period of time. So that's that's I think important to keep in mind and that was my final word Great. We have two more minutes. So Well, I think uh, I will simply donate my minute to share I have absolutely no comment and getting in bed with I'll just point out again that was personal and not representing my institution Well, I mean if okay, so so I I will reinforce what for us said and and make a make a strong plea Away from this particular case because I'm not aware of the details So I don't want to get into into the akhar shams thing But in general, I mean, I think we need to be we need to be willing to talk to everyone who wants to talk to us That should be fine. I mean, they're clear I mean diplomacy has lots of ways of kind of grayscaling this the acknowledged talks blah blah blah, right? and So so that's absolutely necessary and any sort of red line Red lines about talking are not useful in general. They're cheap domestic politics In our own countries I think we need to to get over that but Everything else is is a complicated question, right? What type of support what support are you talking about? Are we specifically giving something to a group? Are we giving something to people in an area that's controlled by a group? And so they might be taxed by that group And and that's a problem that starts even with humanitarian aid where we don't acknowledge a lot of the dilemmas we're having I mean, we're trying to support the survival of people in syria And there's a lot of stuff that we're that we're doing that is effectively supporting both the Assad regime and various other armed groups in syria Because there's just no other way to deliver this And there are lots of kind of self-serving lies that the donors force implementing agencies to sprout in their reporting That claim basically that they're they're doing this logistically while observing humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality Which is in fact not possible And there's so there are huge problems about that in practice and about the very difficult choices that People have to make when they stand at checkpoints and are trying to get their the humanitarian aid convoys through That are much bigger than some of the kind of specific support Decisions that are being taken in capitals So since our time is over, I won't go further into into details I just want to kind of say it's complicated and it's extremely difficult from from afar. I mean By last sentence, I mean remember that the long debate we've had in the west about until we recognize that al Qaeda and Taliban are not the same thing I think we need to be very humble in our ability to analyze and to have an informed discussion In in in any western country in the media and so forth about these particular Groups and how they're morphing and changing over time These are decisions that need to be informed by a lot of ground truth and a lot of details from from a good political analysis on the ground And you know, it's there's no real good Black and white On these things I think there are no quick answers either. I would add No shortcuts So I this is an incredibly complex topic. So luckily we do have a reception right now To geek out about governance issues and and how we engage extremist elements But first I want to thank the panel. This was fantastic You all are incredibly intelligent people and and you've humbled me for just being able to sit on the stage with you And I also since there's uh, no other way to thank I don't think there's an official closing to thank the organizers who put together an incredible day You all did an amazing job and I think we're all Smarter because of it. So thank you, Megan. Thank you, Bethany