 Everybody welcome to the US Institute of Peace. My name is Susan Hayward and I am the Director of Religion and Inclusive Societies here. We are grateful to have all of you joining us. I know it's difficult to get up and moving again after a holiday weekend, especially a holiday that's dedicated to eating as much as you can. So thank you for your strength and endurance and being here. We're grateful that we will be having Rabia Choudhury presenting some of the preliminary findings from her research that she has been conducting as a senior fellow here this year at USIP. And we are seeing this event as something of a teaser. So Rabia has been conducting field research going several times out to both Pakistan and Sri Lanka for the purpose of this research and she is at a point now where she has collected a lot of research and is working her way through it in the analysis. And so today's event is presenting some of those preliminary findings and engaging with all of you and those online through hashtag interfaiths in order to share some of those preliminary findings and have a bit of a discussion about it as we continue to do some of the analysis and thinking through especially some of the practical and policy implications of what we're finding. Can I start by asking you all to pull out your mobile phones. In fact make sure that they are silenced or even turned off entirely. We're going to be web streaming this event. It's also being captured by the media so we want to make sure that there's no disruptions. How many of you are first time visitors to USIP? Great. It's a good group. Welcome to the institute. Glad you made it down here. USIP for those who are not familiar. USIP was created in 1984 by an act of Congress in order to prevent, mitigate and resolve violent conflict. We believe that peace is possible, practical and essential. And we advance our mission through engaging directly in conflict zones in order to provide analysis, education and resources for those who are working for peace. This event and the research we will share reflects two internal priorities. The first is the stream of efforts in which I am engaged to understand the role of religious identity into religious relations and religious ideas in driving both conflict and peace. Second is to understand the drivers of violent extremism and promote peace building techniques to prevent and counter violent extremism. Let me take a minute to introduce my USIP colleagues who are here. First is Georgia Homer in the beautiful red, who directs the Institute's initiative, Counterviolent Extremism. Prior to coming to USIP, she worked as an analyst for the FBI and worked with the Department of Homeland Security. At USIP, Georgia helped design and launch our Women Preventing Violent Extremist Project in Nigeria and Kenya and our Resolve Project, which is a global network of researchers working on issues of violent extremism and counter. It's Audrey, immediately to my left here, has been working with us for the better part of the last year to lead the today as a senior fellow. Prior to coming to the Institute for this project, she was a fellow of the New American Foundation and a founder of Safe Nation Collaborative, a CD firm. Personally, I first came to know Rabia through a number of initiatives working on interfaith dialogue and coexistence in Washington D.C. Rising Islamophobia. Also very engaged domestically and personally talking a little bit more on in other contexts today. I'm going to invite Rabia up here to launch us off by giving by both introducing her research partner in in Pakistan, who's Skyping in from Pakistan, Ayub, and also to give us a little bit of the context of what this research was about before we hear from Ayub. Rabia. Good afternoon, everybody. And thanks again, I echo Susie sentiments that you were able to join us. I said, people are coming in on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Do I have to be here on the Monday after Thanksgiving? So anyway, thank you for joining us. I'm going to very briefly introduce who you're seeing on the screen over there to our left is Mr. Ayub Ayubi, who was our local partner in Pakistan during the research. It has done some amazing work for us while we were there. I'm going to give a more comprehensive introduction of him before actually turning the mic over to him. But I wanted to start off first by setting up the context of the study and how it came about and what were the issues that I was interested in and wanted the questions I wanted to explore. I wanted to give a couple of foundational definitions first before we get into understanding like what it was we're exploring here. And the two definitions like we have to, and by the way, there is not a single definition of either one of these phrases, whether it's violent extremism or countering violent extremism, depending on different agencies, governments, actors. There's many, many different nuanced definitions of these terms. For the purpose of this event and for the purpose really of just kind of, so we're all starting in the same level playing field here, I want to introduce violent extremism in the most basic sense, basically being violence motivated by extreme ideological, religious, or political views. That is a definition that most CVE practitioners can agree upon. Likewise, CVE countering violent extremism is broadly generally understood as, and as a working definition, attempts to identify, mitigate, counter, and or prevent, although some people call it PVE, but we're just going to include that in here right now, prevent, pull and push factors that lead individuals to engage in violent extremism. Now, having said that, just as kind of a basic foundation of where we're starting from, the intersection of CVE, countering violent extremism and violent extremism and religion is something that's of utmost concern to many people who work in this field. But it's important to note, and I think we're going to have Susie expand on this a little bit broadly later, that not all interreligious and sectarian violence is categorized academically or even by authorities as violent extremism, but violent extremism often reflects a religious component. And violent extremist groups do use religious messaging for recruitment. They rely on interpretation of religious text to justify their violence, and many of them hold sincerely held, I mean they have sincerely held religious beliefs that actually lead to this violence. So knowing this and knowing how religion is either used in this way or it's instrumentalized or sometimes it's a sincerely held belief, it then becomes really incumbent on religious actors and institutions who want to counter this, that they have to somehow respond and reclaim religious narratives. So, you know, CVE, in the field of CVE, religious actors have been and leaders have been engaged for quite a bit here at USIP and in many other, you know, arenas. And what's interesting that as it comes out when you have conferences when you engage religious leaders, you get a repeated recommendation of more interfaith when it comes to CVE. What should we do about the rise of violent extremism? More interfaith. So the question is then what does that look like? And what we've seen mostly largely is that it looks like very high level interfaith conferences. It also looks like interfaith retreats for youth, which are not like sustained constant contact between these young people, but maybe a retreat here and there a couple times a year and other kinds of programming like that. But while it's a common recommendation, interfaith, there isn't a lot of research of any at all to show any correlation or causation between interfaith engagement and any kind of reduction in violent extremism. The second issue on this is that the way interfaith has looked has been quite limited. Like I said, it's just been a couple of things. I haven't seen a lot of programming or focus on developing interfaith relationships and doing interfaith engagement in a very grassroots that promotes a grassroots organic grounds up type of relationship that's sustained over time. So as somebody who's done a lot of work and advocacy on domestic issues that impact Muslim-American communities, anti-Muslim bigotry, as Suzy mentioned, the interfaith work. One thing that popped up numerous times as we tried to figure out how we're struggling with these issues is this theory called intergroup social contact theory, which sounds really fancy, but basically it proffers that under appropriate conditions when you have interpersonal contact between people of different groups, it reduces prejudice and bigotry. And it actually causes so much resilience that studies have shown in the United States that if you know a single person who is a Muslim, if a person who is not Muslim knows a single person who is a Muslim, they're much more resilient to negative stereotypes. We call it social engagement, social contact theory, but it's commonly known as friendship. That's what it is. So what I wanted to look at is in these particular regions in Pakistan, Southern Punjab was the focus here and in Sri Lanka, what do those friendships look like? Do they exist between young people? And that was the basis of the study. So basically we examined the role of interfaith engagement in the framework of social contact theory, friendship, and countering violent extremists, Southern Punjab, Baksan and Sri Lanka. I want to talk a little bit about these two countries. Why Baksan and Sri Lanka? Well, when I was asked to submit a proposal for this, Baksan first of all, for many reasons, I mean it's on the radar on people who work on these issues for many different reasons, but I also happen to be a Baksani American who was born in Lahore. I have hundreds of family members who live there. The street that I was born on has been attacked numerous times by terrorists. And so I have a natural interest in the region and also in preserving and building peace in the region. Now, when people think about Baksan, they often think that many of these issues are on militancy and violent extremism come from Fata, KPK, Northern regions, but in fact many experts there called Punjab, the region of Punjab the hotbed of militancy and extremism. And this issue has taken such great concern from the government that in fact last year in 2015, the Baksani government banned over 200 outfits that they designated as terrorists or extremist outfits, but many, many dozens still operate. That many experts there, journalists and researchers and academics believe that these are also ideologically extremist groups. Now, the state response, especially in southern Punjab, to these groups that are still operating and active. I mean, of course, some of the in-band ones, the band ones are also operating, but under the radar, the state response has been severe. And that's something I'm going to explore today with Ayub. But even then, even though the state response has been severe, there's still been a very high level of operational work by these groups, particularly, and I was told this by many in my first field trip, basically, was just trying to figure out what's actually going on here. What are the issues we need to be looking at? And I was told repeatedly that the engagement of youth is a big concern because it's done directly on university campuses. And it's done with such impunity that staff and faculty and students are afraid to actually counter it in any way, that not only are they able to hold events on campus, they can take, they can bus students off campus, but even to the extent that they can interrupt lectures, actual lectures, on all kinds of issues, and say we would like to today give a lecture on this issue, this Islamic issue or this political issue, and nobody, and people are afraid to really counter that. So there's a lot of activity on many campuses in southern Punjab, and Ayub can also speak more about that by these groups. Then there's Sri Lanka, and we wanted to look at Sri Lanka for some different reasons. Number one, we wanted to examine a different context, where you have a non-Muslim majority nation, in which there's been rising intolerance and violent extremism against different religious and ethnic minorities, and in Sri Lanka it's been primarily Muslims in that country, but also Christian communities as well. And the last four or five years, actually no longer than six or seven years, there's been a rise of increasing nationalism. And what's interesting about Sri Lanka is that religious identity and ethnic identity have become blurred into this big nationalistic narrative. And a number of different organizations have kind of been propagating these narratives for the last many years. One of them that's very well known is the BBS, the Boda Balasen, and what's fascinating about them is that they are a group of monks, Buddhist monks, who counter intuitively, are in fact supporting marginalizing minority communities, but also have incited violence very openly. What I've been told by people on the ground there is that under the previous government, there was a new administration that was elected into power in Sri Lanka in January of 2015 that's actually pushed back on these groups, cracked down, silenced them a bit. They still operate and they have kind of repackaged in different organizational forms, but under the previous administration they did operate with impunity. They had a lot of support in the government. So when the new, when the election happened, new administration came in, it would seem to be like this is the country rejecting old policies, right? Rejecting this, the government supporting these organizations and these groups, but in fact what happened was in the election, the minority groups, ethnic and religious groups in the country came together as a voting block. Their votes, along with a minority of the majority Buddhist and Alize votes, are what brought the new administration to power. So what that really means is that the majority of the Buddhist and Alize voters still supported the old administration. So this new government's been cracking down on BBS and openly insightful groups, but an expert that I spoke to noted that over the last six, seven years, the way his analogy was that the tinder of hate has been collected, it's just about the match, right? Like, and the right political circumstances could really cause, there's a great potential for violence under the right circumstances. So given this background information, what I came to learn was that both in Southern Punjab and in Sri Lanka right now the issue was not so much violent extremism and recruitment for active violent extremism, but it was about ideological extremism. In other words, radicalization, as some people call it. So it's also important to know that experts have always held that radicalization does not always lead to violent extremism. In fact, you find people with all kinds of radical religious and political ideas everywhere across the world, it rarely, in fact, leads to violent extremism. But violent extremism almost always has some component of ideological extremism. So what we wanted to do then is examine the phenomena in this study of ideological extremism, so then we can develop successful CBE strategies and programming. So I'm going to know that's the background I'll be presenting the actual findings after we hear from our local partner. And I'm going to give you a proper introduction now. So you can you hear me? Okay. Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. Great. Excellent. Okay, so to tell you a little bit about you, he is a social activist and founder of the Renaissance by the Social Innovation Bacassan Organization, also known as RECIP. It was established in 2011 and addresses violent extremism and radicalization through engaging youth. Now, one thing and I have asked you to talk about this today is that's very, very interesting about his work is that it comes out of his own personal journey because he was born and raised in a very strict Orthodox family and was influenced himself by religious extremist ideologies. He had a combination of experiences including education, meeting the right people, having the right conversations that kind of brought him out of that world and enabled him to challenge dogmas. And so he's been working on CVE for a number of years now. And this year he was elected, selected for Atlantic Council's Fellowship for Emerging Leaders of Bacassan. He also recently launched the Meshalli Ra campaign to counter violent extremism and he engages over 1500 students on university campuses across Bacassan. So, Ayub, I'm going to turn over the mic to you for the next 10 minutes and we would love to hear about you and your work and then we'll get to the research findings. Thank you. Thank you, Rabia. As you have introduced me a lot and I will not talk about me but I will talk about the organization that I founded in 2011. I will relate it to my personal journey. In fact, I was part of an extremist movement which was actually, which was related to a political outfit that is quite dominant still in Pakistan. And we were actually, I was recruited by that organization on campus but I was studying for undergrad at college. What was the supportive factor for me that organization recruited me was my background and my family which was actually orthodox and they were always supportive of nonviolent extremism. In Pakistan, actually the nonviolent extremist movements are quite active and nobody challenged them and they are working quite actively on campus and on the streets. And when I say about on campus and on the street, it means that they are, they have the support by 80% population of Pakistan that is Sunni Muslim. And I think that our whole ecosystem is supportive of nonviolent extremism in Pakistan. Further, in 2011 I was interrupted or in fact I was, I was encountered by a leftist organization that was working in the similar college and the encounter was, was not quite a sweet impact. It was a fight with then with then other group that ended up on a debate and they invited me on a study circle in which they were discussing several social political issues. And it was, I think, it was the time when Pakistan was taking a transition from Taliban regime to, or our narrative was supportive of Taliban regime and it was shifting towards more moderate version politically. And there was a very, the debate was everywhere that where should we go now. So that debate at college allowed me to leave Prague and to overcome my radical influences and behaviors. After that, I faced a lot of problems from my family side and they didn't talk to me and it was, it was a very long by thought by my father. And I have gone through a lot of emotional suffering as a result of that and there was a pain and everything and I tried to overcome that. And, but it all required me to have a platform where I could re-channel myself or re-engage myself. And I founded organization to re-engage young people and provide me some hope, cause to work on because for my whole life I have been associated with the cause of the political dominance of Muslims all over the world and within Pakistan. So I needed to re-channel it towards the positive side and towards a nonviolent version of Islam and to more social empowerment. This organization Renaissance Foundation for Social Innovation, since it's, since it was founded, engaged more than 5,000 young people from all across Pakistan through different programs that have been lodged. And two programs that are quite famous in Pakistan, one of them is Colage Peace Fellowship that is a network of youth activists from across Pakistan. We are engaging them in a dialogue on socio-political issues. Second program is Beauty League Symposium. That is an annual networking event for teachers from 1st grade to 10th grade. We are trying to engage them to a lawson space within the classroom so that students and teacher interact in a friendly atmosphere and we are encouraging students to ask more and more questions to teachers and in fact we are trying to develop the capacity of teachers to listen to kids in more open way. So this is the second program. Third program we launched to counter the ideological narrative of extremism with moderate religious scholars and through this initiative we have engaged 1,500 young people in 20 different universities all across Pakistan. And we have created Mashala Raj chapters within the university. The program is called as Mashala Raj and we are still working on it and trying to expand it and also we are trying to provide digital content on social media of Mashala Raj dialogue. This is in a process and we are trying to expand it more. Coming towards the situation in Pakistan right now, I feel that the people who are working to counter the ideological extremist narrative are facing problem from both sides, from the community and from the government as well. Recently I visited the United States for the Atlantic Council fellowship. The situation is quite different for the religious extremism within the United States. It is unlikely in Pakistan. In Pakistan you have to face a lot of investigation from the government side. All the agencies are looking at you. They are thinking that you are a Western Asian, you are a foreign Asian, you are working for them and the people are not even accepting you properly and they are thinking that you are trying to advance them, moderate them and you are trying to dictate them something which they do not belong to. So we have, we are facing this problem overall and I feel that the only hope in this environment is to just be bold and take a firm stand on your cause and create more people and strong network so that you could feel some sense of security within that. Another thing that I want to mention with regards to on campus extremist networks that is also the topic of our research here, recently I was the part of Rabia Vidat, counter-terrorism department of Pakistan has arrested hundreds of young people and professors from the mainstream universities. And the problem is that they are arrested, some of them are executed, many of them are released. They are taking them only from the perspective of extreme violence and the target killing and all that kind of stuff they are taking into account. But they are completely ignoring the soft factor why they have been recruited, what the ideology they are believing in, what the propaganda that is properly indoctrinated in their mind on campus by this, by the extremist outfits, it is totally ignore and the law enforcement and other agencies they are not capable of understanding them. They are totally ignorant of that factor and what I realized out of this that the government always work under pressure and they take that scene when some extreme thing is blocking on the door and just to satisfy the masses they are taking few steps but still the root causes are not taken into account. And the other side is that within the universities the network is gradually growing. Hisbutarid, Alisubarwal Javad, many other sectarian outfits, militant outfits, they are actively recruiting the people from within the campus. And they have a strong whole. Nobody could make them accountable within the campus. So in this situation, it is important to understand that the violent exceeding Pakistan is not the nominal illiteracy or poverty. I was not an illiterate when I was recruited. Many people who have been recruited, recently I completed my own decision on it. The students who have been recruited, they belong to very wealthy families. Not if a wealthy, they are upper middle class, they are recruited, they belong to an upper middle class families and they got recruited by the outfits on the basis of some ideology and the propaganda which they are doing against the state and against the West. So it is not the problem that the donor agencies or the international organization are focusing on everything they are relating to education, everything they are relating to poverty. It is not that phenomenon. We have, I personally, I have gone through this all journey and I have been an active recruiter at my college time. And I think that this is not true in case of Pakistan. I do not know about other countries but in Pakistan the poverty and by education I mean illiteracy, numeracy and literacy skills are not the root causes of violent exceeding Pakistan. And there is a dire need to develop a counter narrative and an active on campus network within the universities that allow young people to have a dialogue. We are not saying you have to be, you have to believe that the government is not corrupt or whatever the government is saying is true or there is no problem at all in the universe or the West is always right. It is not like that. But at least there should be a dialogue no matter what. The dialogue allows people to shed their grievances and bring them on the table. Instead of taking it to the mere extreme side and ultimately it leads to violence. So I think that the dialogue, if there is no dialogue then there is a violence and dialogue that is not the root cause of violence. So I think that the dialogue forums are the prerequisite to engage young people in a counter narrative so that they are engaged actively on campus through platforms. And this is what we are already doing under the campaign of special ed. Thank you so much for your remarks, Ayub. We are going to take questions for you. So we are going to move now into giving you the preliminary results of this research. And I want to emphasize again these are preliminary results. We have been collecting the data for the last four to six weeks and we have yet to do a lot of analysis. There is a lot of data. But some of the initial results I think are very interesting in eye to eye. And I think there are a lot of questions that are very interesting for us and how we approached these questions. Now in Pakistan the primary question that we wanted to explore was this. Is there a correlation between having interfaith or intersectarian which is one of the different issues in Pakistan it is not primarily interfaith issue it is an intersectarian issue. I mean socializing participation in certain organizations. These ideologically extreme organizations. A secondary questions that we wanted to explore also was does the support for extremist narratives differ between these groups? The two groups that we identified were students who were affiliated with these organizations and students who were not affiliated and we will explain how we did that. And how do these groups differ from each other? So in Pakistan what we did was through Ayub and his also local contacts and again he's been doing a lot of work on university campuses and has very good contacts and networks there. We pulled students from nine different universities in Faslabad and four universities in Multan. These students fell into two groups. 35 in each group 35 students who were affiliated with these organizations are you part of? They said nothing. We're not part of any religious organizations, any student organizations. 35 students were affiliated and they self identified the groups that they were affiliated and the ones you see, the nine that you see up on the slide were the ones that were identified by students themselves as these are groups that we are part of or affiliate with. And so in Sri Lanka we randomly selected 31 students from the University of Colombo who are all Sinhalese Buddhists and we did this work there with our research partner on the ground SSA, the social scientist association of Sri Lanka. And we did this work there with our research partner on the ground SSA, the social scientist association of Sri Lanka. Moving on a little bit about the methodology. In Pakistan the well first of all to let you know that the study included basically questionnaire with 30 survey questions, 25 to and for all some narrative questions which is I'll explain why we did the narrative questions. Basically as we were doing our field research and review stuff one thing that kept popping up was the fact that we embedded narratives that have become almost mainstreamed. That seemed like extremist narratives but they become so mainstreamed about people who are in either minority groups or people who don't identify with about other sex and stuff like that. And then we wanted to test the power of these narratives with these young people to see how many of you know how many of them held true to them and we'll give examples of some of those narratives in a visual interview questions. Now in Pakistan the study was conducted over two days and we by suggestion of Ayoub we did it in hotels. We wanted to take the students off the campus and in a different environment in Multan and Faslabad. And in each location the students were administered Urdu language surveys. From the survey group of 35 in each location volunteers were asked to join a focus group. The focus group was dismissed. They would join the focus group between about 15 to 20 of them in Faslabad and from the focus group eight volunteers were asked to participate in short individual interviews. Now the focus group and the interviews were actually audio recorded and the reason for that I just want to note is that those I don't know if anybody knows but I do have a podcast and one of the things I wanted to develop was a short podcast series out of these few months we're going to be producing. And of course they all participated in an anonymous capacity. Now in Sri Lanka students were selected for Columbia University through our local partner. They were administered a Sinhalese language survey. Again likewise from those 31 students we asked a group to volunteer to be with the focus group and from that group to volunteer to be part of the individual interviews. So let's look at a little bit of what we found on the issue of social engagement. Now in Pakistan unaffiliated students and again those are the students who don't affiliate themselves with any organization at all showed a statistically significant higher number of friends of other fates or sex than affiliated students. 17 versus 13 was the average. They also unaffiliated students visit their friends in their homes of other fates or sex at a significantly higher rate than affiliated students about 8 times a month versus 3 times a month. Likewise unaffiliated students have a higher rate of friends of other fates and sex visiting them in their own homes than affiliated students. Now right now I'm talking about the friendships that they reported back on that are in real life friendships not social media. Although social media connections and friendships was something that we did look at. And we got a really kind of crazy range of answers. I have 400 friends. I have 4,000 friends. I mean it was such a an odd range of answers that we are still trying to grapple with like how to deal with that. So right for now we are looking at the in real life relationships and we'll get back to the social media relationships a little bit later. Now in Sri Lanka Sri Lankan students reported much much lower rates of in person relationships friendships with people of other fates. 4 was the average and that actually the 4 is the average of not just in real life but also social media friendships. So much lower than the rates that we found in Pakistan and they also reported that they only socialize with these friends about 3 times a month. Meaning going to their homes or having them over. Interestingly enough 70% of the students reported in Sri Lanka that they would not want their children socializing with Muslims. Oh excuse me, 70%. Excuse me. I'm glad I wrote that up there. Alright, so on preliminary findings on some of the narratives, the two groups in Pakistan they showed a quite a bit of difference in the narrative beliefs that they held. So affiliated students, again the ones who identified themselves as being part of one of the 9 organizations that we had up there were much more likely to agree. They picked true or false. With some of the most negative propagated narratives than unaffiliated students. And again these are narratives that come out of many of these organizations. You find them on social media. You find them sometimes in the mainstream media. You find politicians sometimes using them. But things like Islam and democracy are incompatible. So Muslims should not have a democratic form of government. They should have an Islamic form of government. Muslims can only live under Sharia law. Pakistani media is controlled by the west. Muslims cannot attend holidays of non-Muslims like it's prohibited. Islam is superior to other religions and this group tends to identify as Muslims first in Pakistani second on a much higher rate than unaffiliated students. Interestingly, both of the groups report similarly on the following narratives. Almost all students agreed that foreign powers are behind the terror attacks in Pakistan and they named different foreign powers India, Israel, America. One thing I thought that was really interesting that when we asked them the question, what are their largest challenges to Muslims globally? Even students who are, I mean young people who are facing some really extreme challenges in their own personal lives, their communities, in their regions, including terrorism. Many of them reported back Israel Palestine as a general corruption, but Israel Palestine featured pretty prominently here. Which is also a very common narrative that's used by violent extremist groups to recruit are these conflicts. 80% of students affiliated and unaffiliated felt that Pakistani leadership is corrupt and that non-Muslims are go far. And that was actually kind of interesting. Even the students who reported fairly high levels of engagement with all of other fates and sects and were not affiliated with any organizations over 75% of them said that they believe that non-Muslims are go far. And this actually has some serious implications because from a religious perspective Christians which are probably one of the more vulnerable minorities in Pakistan are in fact supposed to be considered a helikata which are people of the book and they have certain protections, they have a certain status in Islam because of that. But when they're relegated to go far it's a very different meaning. Very different relationship to Muslims then. So that was a little bit alarming but another thing was when we looked at religious behavior both groups reported similar mosque attendance rates but the affiliated subjects reported and we're going to explore this a bit because the reporting can be done for different reasons too with Suzy but affiliated students said that they prayed much more regularly on average and their daily prayers and also that they read the Quran the scripture much more frequently. And this is just from a fraction of the data that we've collected. Now in Sri Lanka the majority of students over 90% of the students there agree, believe that very negative narratives about Muslims that have been propagated through some of these groups like BBS and others they believe they're true or they say I don't know it means that they don't reject them but it's close enough to maybe it's true. Some of these narratives are things like Halal certification which is something that's common you know anywhere where Muslims live they want to have certain products certified as Halal so it's on the package label they can buy them easily but the students agree that Halal certification is a threat to Sri Lanka that Muslims mix drugs into food that they serve to Sinali's Buddhists to lower their birth rates and interestingly enough I met with a social worker with Sarvadaia which does a lot of interfaith work and she herself admitted that she does not go to Muslim-owned establishment restaurants anymore because she also wonders whether that's true or not that Muslims want to spread Sharia law globally Muslims have higher birth rates so they have more influence so these like really kind of terrible narratives about Muslims are very commonly held over 90% of these students agreed that these are either true or they're not sure if they're true nothing that was interesting was that 83% of the students reported believing Buddhism was superior to other religions and the same number also reported identified themselves as religious or spiritual people when we asked do you believe you're a religious spiritual person so clearly Buddhism has a place in the lives of these young people as a religion majority do feel reporting that Sri Lankan politicians are corrupt they believe that Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country and in the interview all the respondents that I spoke to on the question of whether ethnic and religious diversity as a general concept is a net benefit for society every single one of them said no it was not they said ethnic and religious diversity is bad for communal harmony they cited it as a reason for social strife and instability and say they do not accept diversity in general as something that's interesting so some of the policy implications I wanted to discuss just looking at some of the preliminary findings I think are the following so this research doesn't show a causal relationship at this point between having more friends of other religions or sects and being part of ideological extreme groups or holding certain narratives it seems to be a correlational relationship there's some correlation here we just don't know whether there's any causation but this does have implications for interfaith and intersectarian programming these countries because it seems that social contact theory is holding true in both of these settings whether it's Sri Lanka or Pakistan so I believe that the focus as we think about interfaith and what interfaiths should look like in terms of CVE should be focused on creating lasting social relationships, friendships that look like frequent and organic in-person contact instead of high level and infrequent convenings instead of retreats so much so how do we do that? I mean that would require a lot of intensive grassroots work I think another policy implication is that it seems that extreme narratives are more easily accepted by those who interact with people of other groups and they also have lasting power like for example in Sri Lanka even though there's a new administration they're trying very hard to push back on some of this stuff these young people still hold these views that have been propagated since they were very young so robust engagement between people of other groups may limit the influence of this propagation of extreme negative narratives now some CVE implications extreme narratives which are tied to radicalization and militancy there's no way to parse those out that they can be weakened through social, interfaith, intersectarian contact which then would lessen social tension decrease the recruitment pool for violent extremists and hopefully provide greater protection and support for minorities in those countries now these things are not directly these are kind of connected to the identity issues and how they view their society but it seems that youth and both in Pakistan and Sri Lanka show little confidence in state institutions so transparency, reform and government, building a relationship of mutual trust is needed to increase their faith in their own power to make change in the system but also to believe that a system actually works increased civic engagement starting at student levels might help combat this mistrust there is similarly high levels of mistrust and high powers and high level of belief that interference by foreign elements exists so there's kind of an inclination towards I would say conspiracy theories and there's very low levels of trust in the media I think this indicates an opportunity for citizen journalism and reporting empowerment through direct engagement of students with events and stakeholders and so that's it for kind of the findings from this group and others who are following us online about the kinds of questions that they would have about the study or these young people and as we go forward and we do more analysis of the data the kinds of questions that people would like answered I would love your feedback and also policy wise policy implications wise please feel free to contact me online I'm going to turn it over now to Susie I believe right and for comments from Susie and Georgia and when we go to Q&A thank you so we're going to have a little bit of a discussion among the panelists first starting with Georgia who's going to provide a response wearing her hat as director of CBE here at USIP first of all thank you Rabia and thank you Ayub for sharing this research with us it's wonderful and honestly you did a good job of sort of spelling out some of the definitional challenges around CBE at the outset and the reality is though that even though there's a little bit more definition and it's a term we throw around very comfortably in Washington DC and maybe now in New York thanks to the UN action plan and in Brussels it's still a pretty much a nascent field an evolving field and it's still a very problematic field but it's this kind of research that shapes it and moves it forward thank you for that I think there are three things I'd like to say in response to research the first is you know I feel like I go to a lot of discussions a lot of policy level discussions on CBE where we spend 75% of the time talking about what CBE is and what violent extremism is and so I've now gotten to the habit of just making a preemptive sentence about that because it really cuts short that conversation and lets us move forward on it and what I like to put out front is the fact that CBE is problematic from a policy perspective precisely because we don't know exactly where the line is when we're talking about an intervention or preventative measure when it turns back into being development or peace building it's problematic from an academic perspective because the term violent extremism is actually meaningful in the literature on political violence we're talking about violence or extremism it's not actually a category from that perspective so that's problematic and it's particularly problematic for practitioners because there's so much baggage attached to some of which you outlined and certainly Ayub talked about as well so I think we just have to accept the fact that that is the nature of a new field and it's messy and it's muddy and the more work we do to refine it and strengthen the better it will be but there's a second part to that and that is that that CBE reflects a really profound philosophical switch in the way we think about political violence and violent extremism you'll hear a policy makers in DC talk a lot about the reason we need CBE is because military and law enforcement interventions are inadequate or insufficient and therefore we must get to the root causes and we must prevent it before it happens but that's a functional explanation that's a very practical reason for needing these interventions philosophically what CBE puts forward is the idea that human beings are changeable that there is actually the ability of a human being to grow to move in a different direction to change their mindsets and change their beliefs and that is fundamentally different than the philosophy that underpins counter terrorism interventions and I think that philosophical change is really well illustrated not just by IUBE's personal story but also by the research that you're talking about here so in having followed a lot of the research in this space over the last six or seven years I can say that there is one place of really clear convergence in the research on violent extremism and that is the importance of social dynamics and interpersonal relationships and whether we're talking about it in the context of intersecretarian or interfaith groups or whether we're talking about it within a sort of a mono group the reality is it's human relationships that not only push somebody to engaging in violent extremism but it's the human relationships that mitigate that influence as well. The challenge is that programming around interpersonal relationships in group dynamics is not really possible nor is it possible to really make policy recommendations around intergroup dynamics and that's where I think that's where the peace building modalities really come in if violent extremism or radicalization is fostered through intergroup relationships but it's also prevented through intergroup relationships doesn't it then suggest that dialogue is one of the most powerful tools that is out there to prevent it and of course dialogue is one of the fundamental tools of the peace building community so part of what my job here is to help encourage and think about the intersection of peace building and the prevention of violent extremism and I think that this is some place we seem to be sort of converging around together is really the importance of dialogue as a CVE tool I think those were my big takeaways Rabia but I'll turn the spotlight back to Susie now Thank you very much Georgia and let me echo the thanks to Rabia and to IU for their participation especially to IU because he's staying up really late after just arriving back in Pakistan so thank you IU let me say a couple comments and then I'll open it up for the question and answer period there's a couple things that really stand out to me thinking coming at this from the lens I do which is understanding the role of religious ideas and actors and institutions and violent conflict and in peace building and one is that the data that is coming back from the studies show that youth are religious there's a sort of normative common popular narrative that I hear a lot about youth being cynical about religious institutions and religious practices and so they tend to be more secular at least much more critical of religion but a lot of what and especially educated youth but it's interesting to note that in the findings that Rabia has is the findings from the research that Rabia has done is showing that the youth themselves in both contexts are saying that they consider themselves religious and spiritual practitioners and they're at least reporting that they exhibit that religious or that their religious identity leads them to participate in religious worship in at the mosque or at the Buddhist temple and to pray emulate the kind of religious practices that are very traditional and so it flies against some of the popular narratives at least that I've been hearing over the past several years but what's also notable is that in the Pakistan context anyway the participation in religious life doesn't necessarily show that the person themselves is going to be more or less affiliated with some of these extremist groups so that those who are unaffiliated were at least reporting that they were participating in religious life and practice at almost the same levels as those who were affiliated with some of these extremist groups. Now I will say and Rabia alluded to this in her comments that reporting on religious practice is a very difficult thing to measure because people tend to report that they're good religious practitioners and that they go to the church or they go to the mosque at higher rates than they actually do when it comes down to it and then on the other side those who come from particular communities where secularism is or where antagonism towards religion is more vibrant might report less the level at which they participate in religious life so it's there's a certain notoriety about religious reporting as it being very difficult to measure with accuracy and I know Pew for example has struggled with understanding how best to measure religious commitments so we take all of those with somewhat of a grain of salt but regardless of whether or not it reflects their actual participation in religious life it is noteworthy that they are wanting to report or wanting to present themselves as very active in religious life on both sides of the affiliated and the unaffiliated. Now the other thing that really stood out for me is the pessimism about governance that exists among youth in both contexts as shown by the data and I would say that what the data is showing is that they're pessimistic both about the domestic governance but also about global governance and about the influence of particular foreign powers or foreign powers generally and so I'm going to come back to a couple of these things but let me just say a little bit about interfaith peace building because this is of course a field that has existed for quite a long time predated the new emergent field of CVE and I think there's a lot of things that we've learned from decades of doing activities within the interfaith peace building world that can apply and lessons that can apply from what has worked and what hasn't to thinking about CVE and I have to start by admitting that I'm both a huge advocate and a huge critic of interfaith peace building based on my experiences here but also my experiences overseas incredibly important in places where there are conflict divides across religious divides particularly in places where violence has been going on for a long time like in Sri Lanka where communities across these faith divides become more segregated from one another and in that segregation it leads to misinformation and it leads to bias and prejudice that can become more institutionalized into the state structures and into governance and that can then impact social dynamics in very real ways that can create an environment where violence is more likely to break out and in those places where interfaith peace building activities are helping to bridge some of those divides and to break down some of those formal and informal means of segregation I think these are important tools that said not all interfaith peace programming is effective and in fact some interfaith peace programming can be counterproductive or can actually create greater tensions either between religious communities within religious communities or between different communities gender communities, intergenerational communities so one of the big challenges of interfaith peace building is that it has tended to sometimes marginalize youth or marginalize women when it has focused primarily on the heads of religious institutions who tend to be older male clerics or that it has focused on ceremonial dialogue that has sometimes been looked and felt a little bit more like monologues or like interfaith theater that hasn't allowed for the actual real and honest acknowledgments of differences and challenges and conflicts within and between faith communities and that has then led to a good deal of cynicism and pessimism by those who are observing it and who see it as hypocritical or see it as theater or who see in these kinds of interfaith activities the echoing of certain power relations within the wider community so to use an example from Sri Lanka you'll sometimes see that some of the interfaith peace building activities tend to reinforce a kind of primary place of Buddhism or a Buddhist idea so that all of the minority communities feel that they need to present their religious beliefs and practices within the frame of or in response to what are central Buddhist ideas and beliefs and so on and that can sometimes reinforce some of those power dynamics that lead to feelings of marginalization or exclusion by minority communities and then another common criticism that you hear of interfaith peace building is that it tends to not be very diverse itself so you're not really exhibiting necessarily the diversity within each faith community you tend to lift up particular voices or particular denominations or sex within religious traditions and sometimes those voices don't themselves acknowledge the diversity of views within their own religious tradition but when it's done well it has several characteristics it goes beyond the dialogue and it addresses not just social relations and the need for or the existence of positive relations between faith communities but it also addresses issues of structural discrimination so it's linking the horizontal and the vertical the way that the state or other institutions treat different groups in ways that can lead to divisions between faith communities if the state is privileging certain religious communities over the others so it might link to various forms of advocacy, collective action across faith devise to try to address these issues of structural discrimination and that the interfaith activities try to go beyond the quotidian, try to go beyond daily or just the lifespan of a project to as Rabia was saying develop more organic, less manufactured more organic relationships between groups that also lead to not just mutual benefit but mutual dependency in a way so forms of civic association forms of political association that foster these kinds of relationships that endure even when tensions rise, even when it's not convenient for individuals or groups to be in a relationship with one another and then the interfaith is just as not more important from some of the interfaith now a couple things about schools and universities which is the focus of this schools and universities are often seen as opportunities because of the ways in which one, civic education includes issues of religion and history within the university context addresses issues of the historical experiences and even some of the practices or beliefs of different religious communities it creates the opportunity for more lasting bonds that go beyond the daily that creates some of the civic engagement with one another and I think for example one of the examples here in the US is of course interfaith youth core based out of Chicago led by Ibu Patel which has done a lot of work on university campuses to also try to institutionalize the promotion and the maintenance of positive relations between religious communities by helping universities think through how they operate in such a way that religious diversity is seen as something positive and peaceful religious diversity and appreciation for religious diversity has deepened now getting back to this issue that we started with recognizing that youth that at least what the data is showing here is that youth are religious and youth are pessimistic religious in their beliefs and practices and their pessimistic about governance you know I was really struck I you by what you said that when you had left participation in some of these extremist groups you needed a new cause and one thing that I hear a lot with those with whom I work overseas is that they see within youth a great deal of idealism and a great deal of passion for issues related to justice and injustice and they see injustice within their own communities they see injustice within the global community and they want to do something about it and that and you can see a link between that and perhaps some of the religious commitments or religious practice as well as fostering that sense of idealism and wanting to both recognize and do something about suffering or injustice in the world now the question then for us who are interested in peace becomes how do we tap into that in a way that allows them to address these issues of injustice but in ways that are peaceful and in ways that have impact so what do you if you do have for example in Sri Lanka if you have Buddhist youth who are concerned about the Buddhist minorities in Bangladesh in the Chittagong Hill Track about it or if you have in Pakistan concerns about Palestinians as you said or concerns about Syrians what can they do about it in ways that tap into that passion and that energy and that motivation and that idealism but direct it in ways that can be peaceful because that's a lot of the appeal of some of these extremist movements is it gives a cause and it gives a way to funnel that cause of course universities have been a place especially in the Asia region for organizing and in Sri Lanka the Marxist movements in the late 70s and early 80s came out of the universities in Myanmar another place where I worked the universities where the space in which some of this mobilizing was done and we're seeing that in the recruitment that's being done in these places and so similarly on the peace building side we need to be thinking about university spaces is also places for recruiting people helping young people understand how they can engage and address these issues of injustice that are seizing their heart and their soul and direct it in ways that are useful and then the other thing I want to point out that I hope you'll come back to a little bit in the comments Rabia is the role of global narratives and geopolitical dynamics and their influence in local religious dynamics and local interpersonal and interactive globalization and technology in foreign influences because it's easy to think about programming and implications at the local level in ways that you can try to foster some of these interreligious relationships but how do you begin to address some of the larger global geopolitical dynamics as they're influencing local dynamics in these contexts and how do you try to take advantage of some of these resources and globalization itself in doing that as well and how do you stop there and I want to open it up first just to the panel to give them an opportunity to share anything with one another I know Rabia you had a question in particular for Ayub that you wanted to start off the Q&A with so maybe we can start with you I actually had a couple of questions for Ayub one though Ayub you did address briefly in your remarks but maybe you could expound on it a bit when I was working with you in Pakistan you had mentioned numerous times about the state response to these issues and how they seem to be exacerbating the problem and driving young people towards more and increased ideological extremism and also how it creates a very complicated space for CVE practitioners could you talk a little bit more about that and the kinds of recommendations you would make for to correct the situation okay first my question to you is would you like to recommend the Pakistan policy makers or the international because for the Pakistani it will be a different one but I think that the situation how the government is responding in Pakistan so far is not in the favor of the people and I think that they are they have made a national action plan that you would have also heard that national action plan is mainly focusing on the military strategy to handle to to handle the organization to survey and use some hard strategies to execute some target killers or so but so far the missing element is that they have thought focused on the softer side of it which requires to develop a counter narrative to ideological extremism we all know that in the past in 80s in 1980 since 1980 to onward there was a proper indoctrination of jihad against against certain elements and against it was declared that we are fighting against so called infidels and there was a proper ideology that was coupled with the kind of political theory that was associated with with it and the socio-political grievances were deliberately incorporated what happened later in the Musharraf era the state altogether changed its strategy towards Taliban and the extremist outfits which were the part of somehow the part of the state and they launched an operation that is still continued until this time but they didn't offer a counter narrative at the national level to change it at the massive scale it was the requirement they didn't work on it because the population in general and the students in general they believe that they are already indoctrinated and they believe in certain kind of jihad I think that they are believing in violence of some kind so now it is the responsibility of the state to work collaboratively with CVE experts to design a counter narrative with moderate scholars with researchers with community activists so that they come up with a proper plan to offer a complete plan that allows people to think in a new way now the old era has gone and we need to advance ourselves and we need to migrate ourselves it is the responsibility of the government to work collaboratively but the government is not responding so far I am telling you that I am working with you for the research project and after that you sent me some money for the research that we did and the cost that was associated when it arrived to my bank I have received many investigative calls and they were curious to know who is actually involved with it there is no trust level I am working to counter extremism at the community level since past five years but there is no trust, instead they should own people they should respect them they should say that you are using violence they are further inquiring you they are taking you to further investigation in this situation who will work to counter violent extremism when you are taken as a suspicious entity so I think the first we need the people the government should acknowledge that we need to have we need to develop a soft approach towards countering violent extremism that challenges people's mindset and that allow them to rethink what they were believing in the past that is all debate and with regards to the policy maker who are sitting in the parliament no matter they are in the government or not they should make part of their political manifesto to not to ignite violence on the basis of religion not to use any radical talk radical slogan which is prevalent in Pakistan and we take it for granted we never take it serious because we are in Pakistan we say what will happen if they are using a radical slogan against any other community or against any other sect like it is used widely against Shias in Pakistan so we need every political party they need to put in the political manifesto that they will not ignite violence on the basis of radical slogans that they are using widely and it shapes people's perceptions people's opinion it allows people to think on those terms and it makes them violent for the CVE researchers who are working of the organization those who are working on this area I have gone through many organizations they are taking the name of CVE but they are not working on CVE I am really surprised and unfortunately I have to mention that they are not even aware how the violence is ignited organically at the grass root level they are mostly the people I met that they say that I mentioned earlier oh it is people are illiterate or they are poor people who are doing this or they are importing American or the European CVE model there it doesn't work if I suppose that if I was radical and somebody is teaching me oh you have to be a good citizen you should stop on the signals you should respect that it doesn't work for me I wouldn't be believing in that because it was the reason is the political sociopolitical ideology that was the dominant at that time because you need to engage people in a dialogue process that allows them to openly discuss sociopolitical theories narratives, slogans ideas that they are receiving from around the media around the circumstances in which they are born in which they are brought up it is not about at this stage it is not about America like I visited the United States people are so respectful to each other at this stage they don't need that it is unlikely the situation in Pakistan it is not we are comparing it with the United States we are comparing it with the European model they are on a different mindset people are here at the premature stage and sometime it feels like we are living in a medieval time we are living in a very earlier time so I think that we need to first bridge the gap we need to understand what are the basic causes and these organizations need to have a research on it and when I became part of your research I was extremely passionate and I think that I am not exaggerating but I have to say that very rarely such research has been conducted which exactly show what is happening on the ground and I think that the organization those who are working on CV they should acknowledge it and the organization should focus on a research based project let's go to the community analyze the factors and then design any project while focusing on assumptions taking it for granted or just relying on some perceptions that they have taken from any other source thank you Ayub I'd like to open it up to the broader audience now and I have a few ground rules for this so one is the time is short and I want to try to get as many voices as possible so if you could really limit to one question and say your name and organization first and then also even if you have a loud preacher voice we still need you to use the microphone because we are webcasting this and recording it and so for our friends online to be able to hear this they need to use the microphone so it's right in front of you hit talk to start it hit talk to end it we're going to do rounds of three so if there's three brave souls who want to start us off with their questions one two right next door three up and back thank you very much I think research very very useful and I think that's a very important point that Ayub made that research has to be projects has to be done based on research I'm from Global Watch Group president of Global Watch Group a human rights organization and I'm working on the issue of violent extremism one of the a question that I have for you what is the role of religious leaders and faith leaders community faith leaders in changing you mentioned Ayub that it's not that effective to educate and tell people what to do or how to not get involved in violence but with that something like that coming from religious leaders religious leaders would be effective thank you yes hi my name is Nancy I work at the state department on exchange programs and so I was very interested in your study and had a question on the difference between the results the preliminary findings between Pakistan and Sri Lanka you said I think you said that there was a difference in the affiliated unaffiliated in various having friends other sects or religions but I didn't see that for Sri Lanka I missed it I was wondering about the these believing in the narratives I was struck by how Sri Lankans all even if they were affiliated or unaffiliated all believed in the narrative and so I was just kind of missing a little bit what we can do or how to improve that thank you hi I'm Mike Gurling I'm a consultant who works on CB issues and I worked in Pakistan for a few years apologies if I missed it but can I ask Ravi to expand upon the gender angle were these mixed groups and if they were mixed kind of what the difference is between the views espoused by young male students thank you so the first question on the role of religious in changing my sets I think that was directed towards you Ayub in the last two on interfaith friendships and the gender analysis and participation of the findings is to you Ravi Ravi do you want to go first with the second two sure I'll so to address and I apologize for not making this clear in Sri Lanka we did not have the same phenomena and when you're looking at what's happening at universities you don't have the same types of things happening this happening in Pakistan you don't have a bunch of ideologically extreme groups that are like operating on these campuses as I said BBS is a group of monks although we were told that even these groups will have monks who study in universities but it's simply not we just couldn't compare its apples and oranges there so what we did in Sri Lanka was to just look at kind of a general group of students we did ask them if they were involved this is a general question in these student organizations most of them reported no some of them reported student union most of them have are not active in any kind of religious groups in fact I don't think a single one reported being active in any religious groups so this was a general group so we want to get a general sense of where Sri Lankan students fall on this spectrum of interfaith engagement having friendships and then holding certain narrative beliefs and they fell drastically below either one of the groups in Pakistan so I hope that makes it a little more clear on the gender angle we were not able to get a representatively mixed gender like a balanced kind of gender groups we had very few women who were participated in in Multan I think there might have been a few in Fasalabad there wasn't a single one so that was one of the difficulties and I think primarily to do with the way the students were approached and selected was done through not just a you but a Uub's local contacts who because of just the social structure there it was easier for them to find the students like male students basically I think we only had like three female students in the entire study so I am not sure yet I'll come back in two months and tell you but that's a great question it's useful for us to consider as we finalize the data three more, oh an IUB sorry the question having to do with the role of religious leaders in Pakistan in challenging or changing some of the mindsets that support extremism can you read the question no the question was do religious faith leaders do they have a particularly influential role to play or are they playing in Pakistan in transforming or challenging some of the mindsets that support extremism is that the answer is that sometimes it is yes and most of the time I think it is no because the thing is that the extremist group those who are working in Pakistan they are ignited by a certain ideology and certain social political narrative which is even beyond the thinking of interface scholar so I think that it is not the matter of interfaith really it is also the matter of a political struggle that they are doing so I think that if the violence is at the community level like the mob is violent and they are trying to kill the Christian community which happened in Pakistan in the past in the previous month I think so in that case we could use the local mosque leader or the other religious leader to deconstruct the violent narrative or so but in general in general if you are talking about the students or the young people that interfaith leaders or interfaith scholars they are not influential so there are many factors in it and that used to be acknowledged and I personally am telling you that it is not the matter of the sect but there are many other things which are with it that we need to acknowledge Thank you and I can add two quick comments on that as well we've done a number of initiatives to work with religious actors who are working in this space in different settings two things come out in particular one that there is a big divide between youth as Ayub said between youth and some of the most influential religious actors who are engaged in some of this peace building work and the religious actors themselves don't necessarily know how best to reach out to and engage the youth so they feel that division and they feel they are not tech savvy enough or they are not able to engage the youth effectively and that too there is a lot of cynicism on the side of the youth for some of these religious actors who are engaged in interfaith work but again tends to focus on kind of the theater or to focus on events that take place at five star hotels but they see these religious actors as not necessarily turning around and being deeply engaged within their communities in ways that support interfaith peace building so the youth themselves are really eager to get involved in their communities and are living out some of this interfaith work and work for justice in their day to day lives okay let's do another round of three I'll take these two right here how about just right across the front thank you there thanks Brian vote with USAID the first policy implication up here really resonated with me I took it as people really don't have voice in their future and that makes sense to me so the last sentence though as a solution is increased civic engagement starting at student levels combat mistrust in the system question I have is I was wondering if you could just sort of give some detail on what you see in that and how do you guard against the possibility that you get individuals really engaged in working on civic engagement but then you have a government or official bodies that simply don't respond and then you just contribute to that sense of disillusionment so perhaps it's where you target what sort of issues you deal with but I was wondering if you could just dig into that a little and what you would suggest hi my name is Mujeeb I'm a student at George Washington University and already mentioned was Interfaith Youth Corps and I'm interested in avenues or suggestions to pursue experience or training or facilitating in peace building I know that the institute of peace has classes but those are more for mid career that's what the website says and Brian and Nancy feel free to chime in with the State Department or USAID programs or initiatives that youth can actually have experience in peace building thank you my question is mostly for you but I'm curious if you can talk a little bit particularly on the Pakistan side of things about the role of civil society is there a momentum gaining around CVE programming within civil society or are you actually seeing a very challenging dynamic of a lot of competition between different aspects of civil society with regard to programming based upon funding and other issues as far as historic marginalization and the reflection of that in civil society as well great thank you so we have one question on civic engagement and ensuring that government is willing to be engaged a question on training and support for peace building for youth which I can tackle and civil society in Pakistan and the extent to which they are engaging and engaging more effectively in historic marginalization I wonder perhaps we should start with that Ayub the first thing in Pakistan it is generally believed that the civil society is the name of non-for-profits and I'm a strong pretty I'm very critical of it the civil society does not mean only the non-for-profits I take it and I think that the people who are in fact everybody who wants a positive change in the society is a part of civil society and we should not only do NGOs or non-for-profits so first we need to change that in Pakistan if we want a real change in terms of peace building and second the role that the NGOs are playing if you mean by civil society the NGOs the role that they are playing right now in terms of CDE I think that they are not accepted by the masses the reason is that the moment you say that you take the name of USAID or any other organization your message is suspicious to them they will not take it seriously they will subscribe to the message if some money is associated with it just for the money but not by heart they will not subscribe to that message so first of all we need to take CDE effort then the healthcare infrastructure school building or something like that it is not that CDE means you are going to change people's mindsets you are going to teach them not to be violent and you are somehow interacting tapping there in a conversation about the political ideology their social belief but somehow you are going to bring them on a dialogue so I think that it is not you are supposed to be building a hospital everybody would like to use that they will not question it they will come and they will try and it is simple nobody will even stop you by building a hospital but the moment you will say that you should not be violent oh come on you should not follow a certain kind of a violent ideology they will immediately be turned against you and they will not take you seriously you are taking this message to them with the help of the logo of USAID so we need to disassociate CDE efforts from branding obviously I think there is a dire need of support by the international institutions that they must because they are only the hope at this stage I think that because they are coming there researching they are giving hands to the people who are working on this area but they need to be in the efforts and the second thing is that they need to associate with the cause not with the money so if you are associating with the cause and you are trying not to brand your name then it will work and it is the need at this time because people will subscribe to the message seriously they will take it they will on the dialogue programs and it will be a community driven effort not the donor driven effort we need a community driven effort simple as that and if it is a community driven we are on the way, if it is thought we are not on the right track thank you are you, Rabia do you want to speak to the civic engagement? I am going to talk about just one very specific I think issue related to civic engagement that I am not an expert on this but this is a kind of anecdotally I can say with confidence that the citizen is so great that it prevents people from even voting it is not common for people in the middle class in Baxan to actually turn out and vote and stand in lines and the voter turnout is around 50% in Baxan I believe in elections I don't know the demographics of that but again anecdotally and from what I just my my conversations with folks working in the space I would I would bet that many of them are from rural areas and they turn up to vote for many different reasons so I think just even encouraging young people to it's one thing to say well maybe the system won't respond but you haven't engaged the system first show me you've tried to engage the system at least vote, show up to vote and I think this is a conversation I've had with many young people there have you ever voted? Do people in your family vote? No, no, no, you don't vote and so I'm like this is just one of many many different ways to get them to be engaged specifically on these issues but I you have to start at least there I think Georgia do you want to speak to any of these questions or general reflections? Just two points one is I think it's important that human rights organizations such as yours to continue to stay involved and sort of monitoring the CVE agenda as it evolves because there there is a lot of room for sort of an appropriate instrument instrumentalization of certain actors under this agenda there are ways that it can do more harm than good so that's I think an important important to have the human rights organizations part of that conversation the second thing is this what you referenced was the sort of political economy that's building up around CVE practice because there is some funding tied to it and you know there are a lot of organizations that were previously something else and have relabeled themselves CVE because they see that as a way to get fun for their work and they don't really buy into the definition or the approach or the practice as it's defined by the funders and that's really problematic and I'm not sure I have the answer for that but it's something to be very conscious of I know I don't see that there's anybody here from our Pakistan team here at USAP but I know that they don't use the term CVE in country and that's a deliberate choice that they have made and so that's a question by way of conclusion too because that allows me to talk about a couple resources at USIP that you can all turn to if you want to understand a little bit more about peace building practices one of those is the Global Peace Building Center, GPC, it has its separate website and it has a number of materials on there training and knowledge resources directed for elementary, middle school and high school students on introductions to conflict and so that's a useful resource for an introduction for anybody of any age I find it useful to sometimes go back to that from my 101. We also have on the USIP website something called Global Campus which is a set of online courses some of them are available for periods of time free of charge to be able to take on issues like nonviolent strategic action strategic peace building introduction to peace building and so on so those are great resources to turn to for resources on different campuses so USIP as part of its mandate when it was created in 1984 was to support the development of peace and justice centers and departments and conflict resolution programs and universities across the US and there is quite frequently now these kinds of programs that exist that have courses and you can get a major but they also provide opportunities for training that are extracurricular so look for those on university campuses and there's a lot of local organizations in various cities so even here in DC there's a nonviolent communication organization you can get training and support on that and that helps with dialogue and facilitation and how to communicate in situations of conflict or violence in order to deescalate situations there's organizations involved in mediation that can provide mediation training so there's a lot of local resources as well to look to and with that I want to thank all of you for attending today I want to thank you for taking a few extra minutes of your time so thank you for your graciousness and your patience in that we'll be here for a couple extra minutes if you had questions that you didn't get a chance to ask you can feel free to come on up here and ask us and we hope that we will see you in the future for other USIP events thank you again for coming everybody thank you IU