 Good morning, everybody. It's always a good sign when you can't get people's attention because they're too busy talking. So that means we're off to a terrific start. I want to welcome everybody. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of the United States Institute of Peace. And it is my privilege to welcome you here today for the first day of the 2017 annual Alliance for Peacebuilding Conference. And as you can see, we have a tremendous group here. I think the largest yet with a very wide range of participants. So we've got with us today people from academia, from the military, diplomats, NGOs, foreign embassies, peace builders, really from around the world. So thank you, everybody, for joining us today. And I want to remind everybody that you can expand the conversation by using hashtag peacecon2017. And I'm also delighted to give a special welcome to our Colombian guest here yet. We will be joined by the Colombian Minister of Finance and Public Credit and one of our keynotes later today, Dr. Mauricio Cardino Santamaria. I am pleased to welcome the United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Peacebuilding Support, Oscar Fernandez Taranco. We have Fadim Chernish, the Minister for Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons of Ukraine. Welcome. Kim Weichel, who's a lifelong gender advocate. Kim, are you here? Lifelong gender advocate and advisor to the UN. And Jin In, the founder of Four Girls G Local Leadership. And a whole lot of other people I see and recognize in the audience today. I really just want to thank you all for joining us. A special thanks also to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. He wanted to join us today. His schedule wouldn't allow him, so we will have a video greeting from him shortly. So this is the sixth time that USIP has partnered with Alliance for Peacebuilding on this conference. And they just keep getting better every day. We were founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent federal institute that was really the idea of a number of congressional representatives who were seared by their experiences in World War II and the Korean War, and who were gripped by the concept that we as a country needed additional ways to understand how to sustain peace. Just as there were all these military academies, there needed to be an academy dedicated to peace. So for 30 years, we've pursued a vision of a world without violent conflict. We work with partners around the world, including many of you here with us today. And collectively, the challenge that we all face is how to link the research, the policy, the training with the practice on the ground. And how do we enable people to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and to resolve it when it does? And that's a particularly challenging mission right now. I think for many of us, it's been over the last 30 years, we've not seen a more challenging time. For the first time since the Cold War, we're seeing renewed threats from Russia, from China, from North Korea. We've got authoritarianism on the rise. It denied more and more people their basic rights, often through violent repression. And we're seeing armed conflict in a large swath of the Middle East and Africa, as many of you are well aware. Historically, 65 million people are driven from their homes by violent conflict, civil wars. I'm very gripped, I know probably everyone has heard this, but 10 years ago, 80% of our humanitarian assistance went to victims of natural disaster. 80% to victims of natural disaster tend to victims of violent conflict, and today that's flipped. So we now have 80% of global humanitarian response going to victims of violent conflict. That makes the work of everybody in this room more important than ever. And the good news is that there's renewed focus on preventing and resolving violent conflict. Secretary General Antonio Guterres wonderfully at the beginning of his term, declared that conflict prevention is not merely a priority for, but the priority for the UN. And I'm delighted that we have here with us Assistant Secretary General Fernandez Taranco, who hopefully will mention the excellent new report that the UN and the World Bank have just launched Pathways to Peace, which really looks at prevention, including making the business case for conflict prevention, which is very important. So we all understand that peace is a process, but I also think we all need to push ourselves a little bit harder to understand what works, what doesn't work, how to work together, how to aggregate our results, how to align our efforts. So we are really, truly making a difference. I think we have the opportunity to commit more deeply to harnessing new technologies, which is something that this conference has really pushed forward over the years. Here at USIP, the PeaceTech Lab, the C5 Accelerator and our Academy are all working hard on using new technologies. And I invite all of you to go to Leland during the breaks and see what everybody is doing along those lines. We're very fortunate to have with us our Colombian dignitary, because Columbia offers extraordinary lessons as well as inspiration for what they've accomplished over the past year. And I think a lot of lessons that we're able to draw from that peace process. And although it took decades to accomplish that, one important ingredient for all of us to keep in mind is that the United States stayed committed to a course over three administrations to supporting the finding of that peace. And it was truly a bipartisan effort. And finally, we absolutely have to empower more young people. As we look at the world ahead, their role is more important than ever. I had the great opportunity to bring 28 young peace builders to visit with the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala last year. And one of the most inspiring conversations I've had in my entire career was hearing their commitment to building peace in their communities in the face of extraordinary obstacles. So we have a very important and a very special day ahead of us with this opportunity to reflect and learn together on those and other themes. I look forward to hearing many of today's distinguished panelists. What are the biggest challenges? How do we move forward together? And to get us underway, it is my great pleasure to introduce an old friend and a wonderful colleague, the president and CEO of the Alliance for Peace Building, Melanie Greenberg. Melanie has been the president of AFP for more than six years. And during that time, I think we've all seen how her efforts have broadened the alliance, expanded the impact, and really taken the alliance to a whole new level. Before joining the alliance, Melanie was the president and founder of Cypress Fund for Peace and Security, a foundation making grants in the area of peace building and nuclear non-proliferation, which is highly important again today. She has a long and illustrious resume, including teaching and working at various foundations all within this realm. So she brings a deep expertise and she's somebody who I know keeps all of us inspired. Please join me in welcoming Melanie. Thank you so much, Nancy. We are so grateful to you, to the US Institute of Peace, for your leadership of the field, for your strong voice for peace, for your partnership. And this day, as you said, for the last six years is just pure joy for all of us. So thank you. And a special thanks to your staff and colleagues here and especially to Tina Hagedorn and Jodi Nardi. Thank you so much for making this possible. I should tell you that today we had almost 600 people who registered to come for different parts of the day, which I think is a measure of the hunger and the passion that people are feeling for coming together around peace. But I wanna welcome each one of you here today and to ask how many of you have come from outside the United States to join us? That is amazing. Thank you for being here. And we look forward to hearing your voices and your stories over the next three days of the conference. And how many of you are here from outside Washington? Also wonderful. And just to ask you how many of you feel a sense of an oasis just walking into this beautiful monument for peace? I wanna thank also the people from the Alliance for Peacebuilding team who made this possible. Adam Wolfe and Rochelle Faust, are you in the room? I think they might be outside, but please let's clap loudly enough so they can hear us. And just AFP staff, can you also raise your hand if you're in the room? Thanks to all of you that I can attest that everyone has been working far longer than nine to five every day to make this possible. And thanks to all of you for making it such a joy to come to work every day. And to thank also our board, our donors, our sponsors. It just, it's just a group effort. So thank you. So as Nancy said, this feels like a very different climate than when we came together here 17 months ago. Conflict, division and polarization as Nancy said are on the rise. And we recognize that violence anywhere threatens peace everywhere. There's no such thing as violence over there that it affects all of us. And make no mistake, there are forces of hate and violence very purposely arrayed against us. Violence is not a natural disaster. Violence is manufactured and there are people who profit very greatly from it. But just as violence is shared, your peace is my peace. And one of the greatest silver linings I've seen over the past year is a willingness within our community to work together, to rise above our institutional constraints, to find new ways of collaborating, to work with public institutions, with corporations, with academic institutions, to find a new way of creating peace on a far larger scale. And every one of us can be agents of peace. I was really inspired this morning when I drove up with my trunk full of conference materials. I spoke with George, who's helping direct the parking, who has taken 10 online USIP courses and says, what can I do to be a peace builder? I want to work with you. So we're all joined in an endeavor that's much greater than even the 600 people with us here today. Throughout the three days of this conference, you're gonna hear inspiring stories of people making peace, of the United Nations. It is reconfiguring itself to put peace and comfort prevention at the center of all it does. We'll look at new ways to finance peace. And as Nancy said, to make the business case for peace. You'll move from inner peace, where we learn how to rewire our brain for peace, all the way to how we create huge social movements for peace and the vast territory in between. We're looking to become a more powerful collective and over the course of the next three days, we'll be working very intently together to find new ways to explore our peace and conflict system and to find new forms of leverage. So I want to welcome you again and to thank you. And also to thank very special people, my parents who usually come and sit in the front row are not able to join us in person this year, but they modeled for me what peace is at home and how we move beyond. So thanks to all of you and I'm delighted to introduce Robert Berg, the chairman of AFP. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you, Melanie. Thank you and your colleagues and your partnership is lovely. And thank all of you who helped put this program together. You know, there's no fee for today, but nothing is free. So let me just suggest what the payment should be. And the payment I would like to ask of you is to think about two problems, two questions that you could help solve. The first involves the three huge opportunities facing our field. We've rarely had only one, but here we have three. One of them is the reforms of peacekeeping and peacebuilding you'll learn about this morning and seeing how we can help make that happen. The second one is that the highest levels of the Vatican is now, they're now considering changing the fourth century doctrine regarding peace from just war to just peace and what is the responsibility of people to move towards that. A very important thing and since it's the church which can only wish them Godspeed. And the third one is sustainable development goal 16. Now you remember that that was conceptualized by the high level commission that said that by 2030 each country should have the institutional capacities which we probably interpret as both civil society and governmental and so forth to prevent conflict, to work towards reconciliations, to really do important work. And this is in a sense a parallel to what the international development community has done through enhancing strong national efforts for economic and social growth and a kind of a transitory role of the international community. Well, unfortunately it's off the rails and there is no indicator now any agreed way of saying, well, are countries enhancing their capacities for conflict prevention and conflict resolution? So I would like to ask you to help think through how we can put it back on the tracks because this is not just a matter of neatness. It's a matter of helping to find the future of our field. That's the first question. The second one I would ask of you is to think through what Nancy and Melanie have talked about, about this crisis that we are facing in the world. And I would say the canary in the mine on the crisis is the virtually unopposed repression of civil society around the world and this field depends on civil society so much. In addition, donor support is eroding and becoming a little precarious in some countries for peace building. Now all the leading peace building organizations including the Alliance because of this crisis have had to shift a lot of energy and human resources to advocate for our field. And a lot has been accomplished and you will learn during this conference about a number of really exciting initiatives to broaden public support of peace building. But arguably, we as a community are reaching the limits of political effectiveness. We need expanded memberships and partnerships to be blunt. Our field needs more clout. So I ask your help. Take some of us aside or send the Alliance an email suggesting best prospects for expanding our field's political influence. Tell us how you can help with groups you feel belong with us. Think big but also think doable. Well actually, think beyond doable. I'll give you an example. This week, the Center for Economic Policy and Research released a very interesting report that focus on the decisive role of the world's largest economy over the last few decades. How its growth and the growth of its trading partners has really motored the entire world economy. Of course, we're talking about China. I would add that political power follows economic power. So in the decades ahead, it becomes increasingly important to know whether China could be one of the most important peacemakers and whether they can be encouraged to be more important partners for peace. Now some groups now do confer with China, but our field is not. So the question is, how can we best find partners like this new source of political power for peace? Thank you very much for considering these two questions of re-centering sustainable development goal 16 and growing our field. I know you're going to enjoy this conference. It's a blockbuster and now on with the program. Melanie. Now it's a great pleasure to introduce via video, Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who deserves special thanks from all of us in this field for making, as Nancy said, conflict prevention, the heart of the United Nations mission moving forward, which is not only a bureaucratic restructuring, but a leap of imagination. So we're deeply grateful that we can share with the Secretary General today via video and then to follow up with a wonderful conversation afterwards. Thanks for Peace Building and the United States Institute of Peace. Our world faces complex and interrelated challenges, shifts in international geopolitics, exclusion and inequalities, climate change and transnational organized crime. In response, the United Nations needs to expand its tools to deal with conflict beyond mediation and peacekeeping. And UN is now working to support the concept of sustaining peace. That means bringing together governments and all national stakeholders in inclusive partnerships to prevent the outbreak, continuation, escalation and recurrence of violent conflict. Prevention is the priority. Prevention saves lives and money. But the incentives are not always lined up. That is why we need your help. I hope you will play a part in two key areas. First, prevention must involve all stakeholders, peacekeeping, development, justice, human rights and humanitarian activities. We need broad partnerships with young people, women, civil society groups and local organizations including the private sector to create momentum for transformative change. And second, we need to act more quickly and earlier to address grievances long before they escalate into a crisis. The 2030 agenda for sustainable development provides important entry points. For my part, I am fully committed to work with civil society. We know the challenges, but together we can find the answers. And I thank you for the commitment that you show and wish you a successful meeting. So now it is a great privilege and an honor to introduce to all of you Assistant Secretary General Oscar Fernandez Taranco. Oscar Fernandez Taranco embodies the values, the intellectual rigor, the diplomacy and the passion to make the sustaining peace agenda possible. He was a champion with all of us in the process of Agenda 2030 and especially with Goal 16. We thank you for all of those efforts and know that we stand behind you in all of the challenges ahead and are so grateful to you for your willingness to engage and to make civil society a full and meaningful partner in all of your work. So Oscar Fernandez Taranco assumed his position as Assistant Secretary General for Peacebuilding Support in November 2014. Prior to that, he worked for five years as Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and he was responsible for overseeing the department's divisions dealing with the Americas, Asia, and Pacific, Europe, Middle East and West Asia. Was there anywhere else that was possible to be? And the decolonization unit and division for Palestinian rights. He's worked within the UN system for over 30 years, both at headquarters and in the field, serving in many capacities ranging from the administrator of the West Bank Gaza program of assistance to the Palestinian people, Deputy Special Representative of the SG and Haiti, and Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Regional Bureau for the Arab States. He's a graduate of Cornell and MIT and we are again so grateful to you for being here with us today and please join us on this stage. Much gracias Melanie, thank you. Thank you very much and thank you all. It is quite impressive actually to be here and seeing you all sort of in a vertical full attention position and as Nancy was saying, I do think we are living in very unique challenging times and I think this turnout actually does speak to the challenges we all face in turning things around and doing the right things. And so following the statement from the Secretary General who is very passionate about this subject and has made actually sustaining peace and the centrality of peace building at the heart not just of the reform of the peace and security pillar as we call them in the UN, but also the reform of the development system and here we might have an opportunity to talk about how the interlinkages between the sustainable development goals and sustaining peace are and also because this is not just about ideas but how we reorganize ourselves to actually deliver the reform of the management structures of the UN. So this is a unique Secretary General in unique times trying to do unique things. I don't think we've ever had in our organization and SG who dared to brave three reform efforts at the same time. So we are extremely busy in New York but this is at the heart of what we're discussing in New York and I think there is a New York conversation that happens with development ministers, foreign affairs ministers that needs to be matched up with a lot of the discussions that happen in Washington especially around institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF with the finance ministries and I think this is where all these agendas are starting to come together, the roles of governments, the role of civil society, the role of we the peoples of agencies, funds and programs, et cetera. So again, thank you for inviting me. It is a very big honor and I'm very, very happy to be here today. Let me just build on the Secretary General's message. As he mentioned, we are living in very turbulent times. Major violent conflicts have tripled since 2010 and low intensity violent conflicts have increased as well. More countries are experiencing violent conflicts today that at any time in the last 30 years. More people are dying from violent conflicts and a record number had been forcibly displaced and terrorism attacks have surged in recent years. The challenges we face are protracted, intricate and interrelated. Violent conflicts are driven by a range of factors and involve a large array of non-state groups and external actors and spill quickly across borders. They are also related to other major trends in the world that the world is experiencing such as the shifts in international geopolitics, exclusions and inequalities, climate change and transnational organized crime. As the world is changing, we also need to change as well and fast. The traditional tools of the United Nations to address crisis, mediation and peacekeeping are not as effective in the current environment. We need to expand our toolbox and ensure that the tools that we use are tailored and working coherently and in synergies with each other. One of the things that has changed and I think it is an important part of what's going on is the fact that the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council have adopted last year a new resolution on peace building. Again, introducing this new concept of sustaining peace. And let me highlight three major tenets of this groundbreaking resolution. First, they stress that the responsibility for sustaining peace is broadly shared by the governments and all other national stakeholders underscoring the importance of inclusivity in order to ensure that the needs of all the segments of society are taken into account. Second, they emphasize the critical role of partnerships including, and especially I would say with civil society organizations. And finally, they underscore the need for a comprehensive and coherent peace building approaches before, during and after violence in order to prevent the outbreak, the continuation, escalation and recurrence of violent conflict. As you said, Melanie, the Secretary General has made prevention the priority of the UN. But in fact, it should be the priority for everyone. And this is not easy. Fortunately, we know that prevention works. It can save lives and money and is cost effective. Yet the problem we have is that of incentives. Incentives are not always lined up as highlighted in the recently released joint study on prevention and on violent conflict that the United Nations and the World Bank are in the process of completing and which was launched actually, Melanie helped us launch this together with the President of the World Bank and the Secretary General three weeks ago with huge turnout also, very much like this. So it's something that is really attracting a lot of attention. There are few reasons why these incentives are not aligned. First, there is a time inconsistency problem as the cost of prevention is accured immediately while the benefits of prevention only appear in the future, sometimes very far into the future. Second, there is a collective action problem where the cost of prevention might be borne by one group while the benefits of prevention might be felt by others or the society at large. And if the group that bears the cost is the elite in power, we can see many times why prevention is not happening. And third, maybe we should also look at the recent work of behavioral economists who have found a very strong loss aversion among human beings. That is humans weigh losses much heavier than gains. Generally they don't find a coin toss where you can lose $100 by gain 150 as particularly attractive. Thus an investment in prevention is a certain loss, quote unquote, as opposed to an uncertain gain of success. So we need to change these incentives and how do we do that? I think an essential component is the need to build coalitions, something that the three previous speakers spoke to. And civil society has been particularly successful at this. We need to create a critical mass, first and foremost at the local and national level, but also at the regional and international level of people, of groups, countries, organizations, interested in change that can countervail the vested interest of the elites. This requires innovation and open mind and political economy analysis. The UN World Bank study I just mentioned showed that nonviolent civil resistance was a key factor in driving 50 of the 67 transitions from authoritarianism to open and more inclusive societies between 1972 and 2005. Transitions driven by civic resistance led to more and greater increases in political rights and civil liberties than the transitions that were elite driven or transitions which were the political opposition engaged in violence. Effective prevention involves the formation of coalitions among communities, local authorities, civil society, the private sector, unions, the media, et cetera. This can be a long and difficult process and civil society again is a key player in this partly because they have deep roots in the communities and they know the conflict dynamics better than most and are not the subject of electoral cycles or term limits. So peace building is risky and sudden and dramatic changes and setbacks can happen but progress requires a steady accumulation of gains. Peace building is a cumulative process where one activity builds on another and rarely, rarely do we see large steps forward but if we do, they are often the result sometimes unknown or invisible of long time efforts and I think the passage of the Civil Rights Act in this country when it was adopted was precisely a manifestation of that. It took many, many years to get to that point and decades of activism. So there's a parallel in health. There's a place for acute interventions such as open heart surgery but most progress in health outcomes over the long term is made through very cost effective primary prevention. You eat well, you exercise, you don't smoke and incremental improvements over time by general practitioners who know the patient well can monitor health and recognize the potential problems early on before they happen and with iterative efforts over the years reduce, delay or eliminate poor health outcomes. The parallel in peace building involves addressing grievances early on and preventing them from being used to mobilize identity groups and escalation into violence. This is one of the key conclusions of this World Bank UN report. Thus we need to monitor for example, inequalities and exclusion which are identified in this report as major drivers of violent conflict. Inclusivity and equity might be the eating well and exercising equivalent in peace building. Let me leave you with a couple of points building on what the secretary general said in his message to you. One, preventing violent conflict must involve all of us and permeate everything we do. Prevention requires a multidimensional approaches and a range of stakeholders not only peace builders. A sustaining peace lens requiring comprehensive approaches to address the drivers of violent conflicts, working throughout the whole conflict cycle, being inclusive and involving many national and international partner needs to permeate the work of all actors across sectors including peacekeeping, development, justice, human rights and humanitarian activities. Second, we need to act earlier. When smoke emerges, our options are much more limited and often very costly. We need to address grievances and anticipate polarization and increasing tensions long before they escalate into a crisis. The 2030 agenda for sustainable development provides important entry points for this. As several sustainable development goals actually address the drivers of violent conflict in many countries. And here again, civil society plays a critical role in holding governments accountable to the promises that they made. The third is we need to build coalitions for change. Vested interests are very powerful forces, but the history of social movement, sorry, has shown that broad coalitions of agents of change including women and youth can transform the conflict dynamics even if incrementally to create peaceful, just and inclusive societies as the 2030 agenda for sustainable development promises. So I encourage you all to work closely with local actors who should take the lead take the lead in building these coalitions and reach out to a broad set of stakeholders including the private sector. The fourth, we need to change the debate around measurable results. The success of prevention is hard to prove because it did not happen. It's proving the counterfactual was one of the biggest challenge in our UN World Bank report. The increasing focus on measurable results by donors should not lead to a diversion of resources away from prevention and peace building. What is important, often more risky and more difficult to measure. Yet better try and fail and learn than not try and pay the price later. We need to do a better job at telling the stories of what we do and how it contributed to prevention. And finally, the last point, we need new and innovative sources of financing. And I'm happy to see that this is quite a major point of the conference here today. Traditional sources of financing are under big pressure right now. A lot of interesting work is being done in the area of innovative financing including by many of you here in the room today. We need to learn and scale up this work. We need your advocacy, creativity and ability to mobilize networks to ensure that the international community not only has the resources to respond to crisis but also to prevent them. And so with this, let me just wish you all a very, very successful conference. One interesting thing you might not know and I have colleagues here among you. We are preparing a very important report of the Secretary General back to member states. And among the many issues we have to report back on on this sustaining peace resolution are options in terms of new financing mechanisms to actually make investing and financing prevention something that is at the level and predictability that it is required to prevent violent conflicts from happening. So thank you again for this opportunity and really I wish you very, very good deliberations today and the rest of the day tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. And I'm very glad you mentioned the behavioral economics and the fact that Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics this week. And I think it's very interesting that a nuclear organization won the peace prize and often nuclear proliferation is gained through game theory and that an economist was at the center of really interesting counterfactual ways of thinking about peace. Amos Firsky, who's one of the fathers of behavioral economists was one of my teachers and it profoundly changed the way we think about peace building. And one of the most powerful things I think peace builders do is to frame the status quo as too costly to show the present costs in order to imagine a future in which the benefits are more uncertain. So thank you very much for those inspiring remarks. And it's a great pleasure to welcome Bridget Moykes who is a US senior representative for Peace Direct and I recognize Dylan Matthews who's a CEO also with us today and an AFP board member. Peace Direct works with civil society actors around the world at the local level. We wanted Bridget especially in light of the cooperation between the United Nations and civil society to give a response from the civil society perspective. Bridget is a close partner and a wonderful friend and it's a pleasure to have you join us today. Good morning, thank you so much Melanie. I do wanna say thanks to USIP and the Alliance for Peace Building for inviting me into this role. Although it's an extremely intimidating role to be asked to be the civil society and only one on the panel. And then I look out and I see the wealth of experience and expertise in this audience and I'm humbled even more. So I look forward to the discussion time when we can get a lot more input and insights from everyone in the room. And I wanna thank the Assistant Secretary General for his remarks. I can't tell you how encouraging it is to hear the highest levels of the UN talk about prevention and the importance of financing and civil society engagement and these messages which resonate so strongly with our community here. And thanks to all of you for being here and for all the work that you're doing. So my organization, Peace Direct works with local people to stop wars and build lasting peace. And we really do believe that local people, those who are most directly impacted by violent conflict and live through those experiences and find the resilience to turn around and work for peace in their communities are the experts on the problems that they face. And they're the experts on the solutions that are needed in their societies. So we need to be working with them more and supporting them more. We want them to be at the center and in the lead of international peace building efforts. When it comes to implementing things like the sustaining peace resolution. We believe this because we work with remarkable local peace builders around the world. Some of them are in the room and I hope that you get a chance to meet them sometime during our time together. Their work is impactful, it is scalable, it is cost effective and it is sustainable. We've seen this directly and there's a growing body of empirical evidence, some of which you also referenced that's demonstrating it as well. Unfortunately, local peace builders and civil society in countries of conflict are still often on the edges of international efforts for peace building. We believe and hope that the international community is beginning to change that and I think we heard that strongly from your remarks. And we hear a growing chorus among international institutions as well as our own organizations talking about how do we practically go local? How do we develop new partnerships? Sustainable peace will require local leadership. Effective prevention absolutely will require local leadership. I wanna offer a response a bit to the remarks today from the Assistant Secretary General by drawing on a recent survey that Peace Direct and the International Peace Institute conducted with our networks of local peace builders around the world. So this was an informal qualitative survey but it did offer some interesting insights that I think will help further our discussions. So we sent out a survey pretty broadly and received nearly 40 responses from peace builders in 22 countries in all four regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Most of the respondents held academic degrees in peace building or a related field. So it was the local leadership educated folks who responded. They also, in addition to working in the peace building field were often engaged in human rights work, women's rights work, work with youth, work on poverty, on good governance, a wide range of related practices. I think showing how at the local level peace building is an integrated enterprise much more so often than in our international institutions. So the cumulative results of the survey were rich and we'll be publishing a series of blogs with more details on them. I wanna just highlight a few points. The good news is that the results showed that most of our respondents did have some previous knowledge of the sustaining peace agenda and that it resonates with their communities. They see the importance of it and the shifts in rhetoric that it signals wanting to be shifts in practice as well. We also engaged with them on the connection on SDGs and what they were working on at the local level. SDG 16 rose to the top as expected with 80% responding, they were actively connected to that. They also talked about feeling their work related to promoting gender equality, also to eradicating poverty and to reducing inequality. Those were the highest SDG related SDGs that they related to. There were gaps though in how they saw their work connecting with the UN's agenda. And so I just wanna highlight a few of those and these will not be anything new. I don't think to the Assistant Secretary General because they speak to some of the challenges and opportunities that he raised. First, the recognition gap. Although in sync with the international community on what sustaining peace means, in principle, local peace builders had strong messages for the international community and the UN itself in terms of practice. Including points on how local communities often feel undervalued, overlooked, overwhelmed and kept out of processes of the international community. Other research has shown that recognition and respect, even more than financial support is the first thing local peace builders want from the international community. They want to be seen and heard. Just as an example, one respondent used the phrase that the UN felt like a guest walking by in their country. And this really struck me because it wasn't an intruder or someone who was unwelcome. It was a guest, someone they wanted to engage with, but they felt had sort of passed them by. This suggests that the UN and our own community of international peace building practice still needs to do more to reach out and inform local communities about the sustaining peace agenda and efforts at the international level but also to listen and to give a seat at the table. The second gap is the resource gap. We know there's not only a lack of dedicated funding for prevention and peace building, but that a very small portion of that actually gets down to local communities and local leaders. 32% of respondents said that the lack of funds or resources were the biggest, their biggest challenge to sustaining peace. And that was actually followed by 24% saying that the actual political or physical violence was the biggest obstacle for them. Government and structural obstacles, 18% responded were a real challenge for them. And religious intolerance, 18% also noted that as important. Our own research also shows that it's not just lack of funding but the mechanisms and bureaucracies of financing. So it's great to hear and I hope that we do dig in more to these new opportunities with new financing structures. Sustaining peace and achieving the SDGs absolutely will demand local leadership and research consistently shows that outcomes improve with that local leadership. It's lower cost, it's more sustainable. We know this. The resources now need to follow. Finally, the third gap that came out in our survey was a solutions gap. Clear from the survey results was a desire among local peace builders to work more in partnership with the UN and the international community to implement more effective and durable solutions to learn together and make their work more effective. As the UN takes forward the sustaining peace agenda and as we work collectively as a global community to implement SDG 16, we will need to develop new methods of engagement, new partnerships, you said and I'm glad to hear that and new forms of decision making so that there is a collective process by which local civil society can be engaged from the very beginning and provide leadership continually through the process. In the words of one respondent who was eager for this kind of strength and partnership, deeper engagement and acknowledgement of the capacity and local know how of local civil society is needed. The engagement of the UN is pretty much top down but it needs to be complimented with bottom up approaches. The distances between governments and civil society is so big that our needs are not represented by the government. The UN approach needs to be complimented by other approaches based on the primacy of local actors, non-violence and non-partisanship and it was great to hear those same themes echoed in what you said to us. So devising new approaches that fuse local leadership with international support and international leadership as well will require all our creativity and new methods of working together but there really seems no better time than to begin investing in this than now. I just wanna quote from Security Council Resolution 2282 that emphasizes that sustaining peace should be broadly understood as a goal and a process to build a common vision of society ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account which encompasses activities aimed at preventing the outbreak of conflict, escalation, continuation and recurrence. So one question I have for us and for our discussion is how can we make these words and the reforms that you're working on really practically affect the lives of local communities impacted by violence and local peace builders in engaging them? What are the practical ways we can see that happen? And then together I hope that we will try to address these three gaps. The recognition gap, the resource gap and the solutions gap. Finally, I just wanna end with a personal reflection from my own experience. I did get to work around the UN at the Quaker UN office for a couple years and I'm always impressed that the UN does remain remarkable and such a needed global institution because it's the one place where the community of nations comes together and increasingly includes civil society more and more and we hope more in the future to look at shared problems and seek shared solutions. So it is not them, it is us. And the sustaining peace agenda and the SDGs will succeed or fail only so much as all member states and civil society join together to make them succeed. It includes critical countries like my own, the United States, the other P5s and the whole membership. Being here in Washington, I think it's important for us as peace builders to ask along with our colleagues from other parts of the world, what is our role in our own communities and countries? How do we have a responsibility to strengthen peace in all our own societies to address growing divisions, intolerance and violence that may be impacting our own communities and we in the US feel this very, very real right now. And how do we look at our own systems of injustice and intolerance and work to uproot them? So as we spend the next few days together exploring peace now more than ever, I hope we will listen deeply to the voices of local peace builders from countries directly impacted by war and violent conflict and I hope we will take growing responsibility for engaging with our own national governments to make sustaining peace a real priority in practice at home and around the world. Given the deeply interconnected nature of our world, perhaps it is time to think of all our peace building as both local and global. To call ourselves local peace builders here in the global north and to listen more to those in the global south and strive to live up to their work as well. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bridget. Before we open the floor for questions, I was just based on what you just talked about, the recognition gap, the resource gap, the solutions gap. If we came back here in a year, can I ask each of you, what would success look like? Can you give us one example of what you would like to see after one more year of work together? To try to fill one or more of those gaps. It is okay. So first of all, let me say that a lot of what your survey stated resonates tremendously with my office, the peace building support office. And it resonates because actually it speaks to a huge gap in terms of delivery, in terms of delivery of results of peace building. And I say this coming from the UN system, right? I think several things are happening that I think are extremely important. One is that this space that the UN that you were referring to is extremely important, very delicate, but we have seen quite a sudden expansion of this notion and it's very, very difficult to have the Security Council and the General Assembly approving an identical resolution in this day and age when there's so much division in the council and so much disagreement on other issues. So this resolution for those who haven't read it is extremely important because it's the statement of intent of the member states, of the membership of the governments. And crucial to that resolution is this notion, not just of the national ownership of these processes, but that fundamental aspect of inclusivity. It's inclusivity that is the key word in that resolution and actually speaks to those actors beyond government actors, beyond UN agencies, beyond the international finance institutions. The specific role of civil society organizations is actually acknowledged and it's actually being sought to be strengthened. Not just civil society, but equally important, the role of programs that empower women and empower the youth. I focus on these three because I think that there's a particular comparative advantage here and one of the reasons at least that I was telling Melanie before this conference that our biggest battles many times are with our own lawyers in the organization. But we have had quite the success. We don't have to wait a year to make a change. This change has already started happening in the allocation criteria of the Peace Building Fund. We change for the first time. And I think this is the only UN entity that exists right now in the secretariat, the peace and security part of the house that is able to contract directly civil society organizations. We actually have as we speak a call for proposals that is specifically geared for civil society organizations to submit proposals for women and youth empowerment programs. And the reason we do this is that we see that many times the big limitation of UN agencies in country is that they are very capital-centric focused dealing with the national institutions that they need to deal with. But in the remote areas of the country where the study of the UN and the World Bank actually point a particular light saying most of these conflicts are coming from those areas that lack presence of the state, that lack provision of basic service, that like an inclusive dialogue between and the social contract if you will, between the citizens and the state. And so you see whether it's in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, many of these contracts have a lot to do with what we're doing at the very local level. Where many UN agencies, where many donors, where many international financial are not operating. So to the issue of recognition, to the issue of the resources, and to the issue of the solutions, I think we are trying now very quickly, and this is the big challenge we all have. How do we work coherently on this issue? Because everybody has a role to play and it has to be around a common strategy, a clarity and the division of labor, so to speak, and empowerment through financial resources. So we are changing, maybe not fast enough, but I think your survey does speak to what we're trying to do differently today. And as we speak, and I think when I go back to New York, we have about to approve some 20 million dollars for 13 organizations working across the world on these issues. So this is a big change. It's a big game changer for us, because it brings civil society, not just for consultations, not just for the thinking part, but for the implementation part. And to do this in coalitions with the partnerships that we keep saying we need to build. Good, thank you. And not to do it for free. And not to compromise the capacity that they need. The capacity is really important, yeah. Great, thank you. When we were chatting at the beginning, you said you were even thinking there might be rules that need to be broken in the UN. So maybe in a year, there will be some shakeup of some of the ways that the UN functions in a practical way. I do think that the funding and this opening for new financial opportunities and the peace building support offices work on that is really important. Flexible funding, local groups don't just need big funds that they can finally access, which absolutely they need, but also flexibility in funding. So having more mechanisms for responding to very volatile changing contexts. What you plan one year within six months in a conflict environment, things are changing. You need the ability to move money around and very few mechanisms allow that flexibility. Rapid response funding I think is another thing that we have seen as important and can be quite effective. So figuring out what our mechanisms or ways to provide that as well. And I think that the issue of how civil society sits at the table is really important and not easy. It's not easy for local peace builders and local civil society to access those environments or those tables or those places where decisions are made. So I was yesterday with some of our partners here. We were meeting with the State Department. We'll meet with the National Security Council. We'll take them up to the UN and do meetings there. And we do this regularly. And I'm always, it's always remarkable to me to see how much policymakers appreciate and want to hear from local civil society because they don't have opportunity. A lot of times don't have opportunity to have those conversations and engage with them. And how much I see the incredible insights, the incredible analysis of conflict dynamics that local people have to offer. So I think it's not just how do they implement programs but how are they helping design? How are they doing the analysis? How are they leading the analysis and helping us understand what's needed? Good, well, most of you cannot see, we have a nine o'clock sitting in front of us and we promise to end at 10, 10 so we can allow our next panel to come in. So I'm sorry that we can't take questions but I hope that we will continue this discussion. And I appreciate so much your openness to have input into the process. And please know that our community stands ready to help you in any way we can. Absolutely. So we are so deeply grateful for your passion, for your work, Bridget, for your insight today and for connecting us with local civil society. And thank all of you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, everyone, we're going just a minute into our next panel. In between panels, we're all set for peace and Mosul. And things to think about following up on our discussion about prevention. The first is that one of the great challenges for our field is in preventing violent extremism. But often the PVE or CVE discussion is somehow held in a separate breath as a conflict prevention discussion. And how do we really, as a peace building community, think of the root causes of violent extremism and develop peace building approaches? The next issue is more philosophical, is that prevention and conflict are not a straight line. And how we manage the after effects of conflict and trauma to prevent another cycle of violence is just as important as thinking about pre-conflict prevention. So thinking about prevention more systemically. So in Mosul, as you all know, with the fall of ISIS, there is now a rebuilding of society. And I just wanted to pull, before I introduce the panel and welcome our guests, three headlines from the past day about Mosul to give you a sense of the huge range of the issues. One is headline from NPR. After three years of ISIS, Mosul's children go back to school. From the New York Times, digging up the dead, probing the ruins of Mosul. And from the Gulf news quoting doctors beyond borders, Mosul residents carry deepest mental health scars. So it is a great pleasure to welcome our panel who all have deep personal experience of Mosul who've recently returned from the region and can speak to us both from the situation there now and from a broader framework of how to rebuild peace after such a traumatic several years. I would like to give a special welcome to Ambassador Farid Yassin who's joining us from the Iraqi Embassy. We're honored to have you with us. I'd like to welcome Mona Yakubian who will be moderating our panel today. Mona, thank you for organizing and making this possible. Thank you. Thank you so much, Melanie. And good morning to all of you. I think your setup was perfect because I think Melanie's leg out very clearly. The challenges I think that lie before us with respect to Mosul stabilization. As many of you know, it was this past July when Mosul was liberated, Iraq's second largest city, its largest Sunni majority city. And this was after three years, more than three years, of living under ISIS control. The military campaign took nine months and it exacted an enormous toll on the city. Thousands of people were killed, nearly a million Moslawis were displaced and there's been significant destruction. But I think in some ways, and this is really in reference to Melanie's comments, as difficult as those challenges are, I think more importantly, the stabilization of Mosul, the challenges that lie before us in many ways have to do with those impangibles, questions around the social fabric of the city and social cohesion and how to restore the questions and concerns about resurgent sectarianism. The issue that it's been three years since many Moslawi children have been in school. These are enormous challenges. And I think it raises a very important question about how we think about stabilization. Is there a new model, a more integrated model for stabilization that if done well, will ideally preclude the emergence of an ISIS 2.0? So we have assembled a very esteemed panel of experts to help us sort through these questions. It's my pleasure and honor to introduce them. First, Ambassador Farid Yassin, who has served as ambassador of the government of Iraq to the United States since November of 2016. Next, we have my dear colleague, Sarhang Hamasayid, who's director of Middle East programs here at the US Institute of Peace. Rahman El Jaburi is associate director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy. And Linda Robinson is senior international and defense policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. So what I'd like to do is engage our panelists in a bit of discussion, but then more importantly, also bring you into the discussion and make sure you have a chance to ask questions and comment. But if I could, Ambassador, I'd like to begin with you. Help us understand, put in context for us the significance of Mosul's liberation, but also the significance of the challenges that lie ahead. Well, thank you for inviting me. I thank you for a number of reasons, one of which is on part Moslawi, so the fate of the city is really important to me, and I have relatives who live there and who have been exiled. First and foremost, thank you for pointing out the discrepancies, the contrasts of the situation that we face. I too picked up these two stories that actually are two extremes that give you a complete image of the range of the things we face. On the one hand, you have children coming back to school. On the other, you have people still digging up the dead amid rubble. And I would like to focus, to begin with, on the return to the schools. One of the reasons why the Iraqi government was eager to launch the liberation of Mosul when it did about a year ago, was because we were concerned that the schoolchildren of Mosul would be subjected to yet another year of Daesh curricula. Daesh curricula, I think, is the source of the evil. And we, as we start rebuilding, as we start facing day-to-day challenges of building roads and hospitals and providing food and electricity, we should keep our eye out there to what kind of society we're trying to develop. And this is something that has been on the forefront, actually, of the Iraqi government's mind. I always tell people my background is as a political opposition person. So saying nice things about my prime minister doesn't come naturally to me. But I remember when Mosul fell, and for a few weeks we stood along. And eventually, once they started targeting minorities and were threatening Erbil, the international community, like a slow-moving giant, came along. I was a time ambassador to France and the French president decided to host a conference in support of Iraq. And he went to Baghdad, I remember the date, it was the 12th of September, 2014. And he met with Haidar Badi. And they had a discussion in which Haidar Badi told President Hollande, look, ISIS is not the problem. The problem is what comes after ISIS. We have to rebuild. And there he focused, essentially, on the need to develop funds to rebuild the city, the infrastructure, the roads, the houses, even the football fields, where a country that's crazy about soccer. So, and one of the things that ISIS had systematically destroyed were soccer fields. But beyond that, I think what we need to do is to focus also on how to repair souls. And we're grateful that the international community has taken this in stride. I think a lot of people in this room are involved in this kind of activity. On the 21st of September, last month, Security Council resolution was enacted to precisely help us to get the means to deal with, at least dealing with justice, which is a key component of trying to bring a closure to the people who suffered. But to me, the key criterion on our return to normalcy is Iraq's minorities. Iraq, without its minorities, is not in Iraq. And in fact, they are the original Iraqis, if I may. And so, it is incumbent upon us to make sure that we set up an environment where they can come in and strive and thrive as they used to in Mosul. To me, this is the real criterion of our success. And I have to say, and I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say it, is that you can do, you can take positive measures in this direction to try to ease tensions, but sometimes measures are taken that go, I don't want to say in the wrong direction, but make things a lot more difficult. And the recent referendum enforced by the KRG is one such measure. And in fact, I've heard echoes from many representatives of the many various minorities that we have living in the disputed areas, not far away from Mosul, who are really, really concerned. And so I'm hopeful that reason will prevail, that we'll be able to cycle back and try to find ways and means of bringing people together. But I'd like to say one thing. The bottom line is that the cost of what always happened to Iraq is way beyond the billions and the tons of billions that we'll have to pay, okay? And the work that people around this room do is really priceless because it is an insurance policy against that kind of behavior. And so I welcome you all to Iraq. I mean, we need your help. In many ways, Iraq has become a testbed, not only in terms of fighting terrorism, but also in trying to develop an environment that prevents extremism from emerging. And I've been involved in some of these activities already in 2006, 2007. So they started off at the high level where you take members of parliament or community leaders to somewhere in an environment where they'd be secluded. The effort I was involved in took them to Helsinki. And I remember we were caught up in Baghdad Airport, there was a sandstorm, and there was about 40 or 50 members of parliament there representing all different communities of Iraq. One of them was now a very famous warfighter against ISIS, looked around and said, if our plane crashes, all the problems of Iraq would be resolved. I won't, I'm just stating what he said. But the truth is, the real work will only happen when it's done at the grassroots level, at the community level. And here I am since I'm at USIP, I wanna, maybe that would be the segue for you, Zahra, to single out the work that USIP has done that is preemptive in nature. And the work that you've done to resolve some of the potential problems in the wake of the Spiker massacre is something that shows the way to go forward in Mosul and elsewhere. And I thank you for it. Thank you, thank you. Well, that's actually a terrific lead-in for Sarhan. I mean, Sarhan, why don't you also talk a little bit about how you see the challenges going forward, but I actually really love the ambassador's phrase about thinking about Iraq as a test bed for developing new ways of thinking new approaches to preventing the resurgence of extremism. But tell us a little bit how you see the landscape in Mosul in particular, the challenges and the way forward. Well, thank you. Good morning all. It is definitely a pleasure to be here with such a distinguished panel and with you, because I'll try not to preach to the choir and get away from the newsy aspects of Iraq, but go into it from a perspective of peace-building organization and what are the practical steps. And thank you, Ambassador. It's a pleasure to be with you and thank you for your kind notes. Before I go into, for a deeper dive on Mosul itself, I think it's important to recognize what Mosul and the Nineveh province represent. They represent the diversity of Iraq. It's a mini-Iraq in a way. So all the promises of Iraq, all the complexities of Iraq are well-represented in this province and it's a situation at the local level of ultra-diversity community fragmentation, but also promise. In that sense, looking at Mosul and Nineveh at the subnational level and how do we stabilize the province for its own sake as its own independent entity, but also what the second layer of it, what it represents in the bigger framework of Iraq. It carries the symbolism of, okay, we liberated the land and we defeated ISIS. Now we can get back to the bigger political process of Iraq. Many of people, and I'm one of those who believe that failures in the political process paved the way for the rise of ISIS, in a way gave us the challenges of the recent referendum. So the grievances at the national level, we in a way are seeing it marked, so Mosul has triggered that and we have upcoming elections next year. So I'll leave that there and happy to address questions on those, but taking it back to within Mosul and the challenges. So the diversity of Mosul and the province give us complexities and also potentials to work with. On challenges, you laid out a key one, which is we still have about 800,000 people displaced and many of them are religious minorities and so far we have not seen excitement among them to return because of a number of other challenges that we face in Mosul and in the nearby province. The second one is security. How will we live in a secure environment? And security comes from threats presented by ISIS and its leftovers, threats that may be coming from social divisions because different members of society sided with different forces, some supported ISIS, many of the religious minorities accused their neighbors of facilitating those attacks being collaborators, then you have front lines of the Kurdish Peshmerga, the popular mobilization forces, the Iraqi security forces that are crisscrossing different parts of the diversity of Mosul and the recent tensions over the referendum, tensions between the Peshmerga and the popular mobilization forces threatened. It's a threat from those communities about, okay, well, we got one fight over but we see another one potentially coming. So that's a barrier to return. That is a challenge that people as ambassador spoke about. Also, they're concerned about. The third element of that is massive destruction that the fight has left behind. A fourth element is how does, what will be the form of government in Mosul? Is it what state as a province? Will it become multiple provinces because there are different voices who are asking for forming other provinces or local administration, especially among the minorities. There are voices who say, no, let's turn into a region. The Iraqi constitution allows for those. So the basket of challenges are extremely wide and then many. But from a peace building perspective, I think it is very important to, one is flow of information and knowing what is really happening, where do the community stand has been a gap and that's what we have been trying to provide through research and analysis. The second is that there's a lot of tensions whether people, there are those who are still grappling with violence, who have lost loved ones in this fight and the revenge and justice is a key issue for them and they wanna, in the absence of the government services and the government's ability to deal with the magnitude of the problems, they are tempted to take matters into their own hand. And on the other hand, speaking of schools and services, there are those who are ready to move on. They wanna go back to their lives and they want services, they have expectations of employment and these tensions, all these give us a wide range of tensions. You have basically tensions between the citizen and the state who require services and security. You have tensions among the different communities. For example, to take a couple of examples, Talafer is a city that has a Turkmen minority, half Shia, half Sunni. You have regional powers coming in support of those communities. Iran is seen as interested in the Shia side of the Turkmens. Turkey is seen as coming in and to advance the interests of the Sunnis and these regional tensions, all of a sudden a locality is ultra-national and ultra-regional sensitive that could give you the next challenge of the problem. So designing programs in those contexts is extremely difficult. But getting to something that the ambassador said, bottom up on the local level of the grassroots, this is where we found to be the first line of defense. The first lines of defense were, there are elements of resilience that we are trying to rebuild because I think that is important for restoring social cohesion but also in the face of the next iteration, whether it's ISIS or whatever, wherever violence may come from. So rebuilding that resilience is important. The second is the society is militarized. There are dozens and dozens of armed groups, state and non-state. And so in this moment of tension, this moment of division, this moment of ultra-sensitivity, if we do not provide alternatives where those communities can't talk to each other, well, their choices are either using the weapons that they have or the media, as we have seen from many leaders and politicians, turn this to the platform of exchange that will be polarizing for the community, that will be causing, that will be insightful for violence. So allowing, providing dialogue processes where the communities come to the table and address these issues, even if they do not resolve their problems, you are at least keeping the conversation at the table in a non-violent environment. And that has paid off. As the ambassador alluded to, we have invested a number of dialogue processes in also in Tikrit and Salah al-Din, but also in Talafar in Bartollah, where it has the different members of the community participating. And those are really important to help with removing barriers to return, preventing social violence and helping the community heal and rebuild and discuss their grievances in a safe space. And facilitated dialogue is really important. The humanitarian assistance, the military assistance, the technical governance assistance that Iraq is receiving has been instrumental. And Mosul, I'm proud to see that collective effort, international Iraqi government, Kurdistan regional government, the United Nations, Iraqi civil society have tried to work together, but the magnitude of the problem is much, much higher and it requires collective work. And the facilitated dialogue, I would probably single out as the most practical way for people to deal with those issues. I'll pause here and happy to take questions after. Okay, well Rahman, I'd actually like to pick up on some of the themes that Sarohan has laid out. You are recently back from Iraq and I know have engaged on some of these issues. I think it'd be really useful for us to hear, one, what were some of the insights and takeaways from your trip, but in particular with respect to Iraqi grassroots sentiments and what those challenges are, and again, how to engage Iraqi citizens and ensure that they have a voice in this challenging stabilization process that lies ahead. Shukr, thank you so much Munna. I'm still speaking Arabic because I just jet-liking. I just came last night for last night. And it's not just the Mosul, it's the referendum in Iraq and the trouble that it created and taking attention from Mosul. The Mosul is slowly moving from a horror of darkness city to a hope city. And that's really the impression I got there. I've been there for four weeks. To put it in perspective, we have to manage the state of mind of a nation of IDBs. The western of Iraq turned to be a nation of IDBs. It's not just Mosul. We're talking from north of Hala to the Mosul. We have about four million people, are all literally IDBs right now. Even they are living in their cities and that's the situation there. How do we work on this? How do we move the hope in the city? And the first, I think I heard you and Representative focusing on one thing, local, local, local issues. Local decision making, local implementation and how do we do this? Suddenly working with people who want to send their kids to school and go to the hospital. Let me just explain what I was working on this. How do I think? The day they took Mosul, that a lot of people kept working on the IDBs what to do with them. For us at the National Endowment, we took what we think it's a strategic decision. How do we work for the day after? How do we get the fabric of the society back together? We work with IDBs in their camp and create a new generation of leaders. The day will come, Mosul will liberate. Daesh will not stay forever. So we start with the IDBs to first identify the youth group and how to work with them, how to build their capacity. So we use the two years to build self-confidence, self-capacity and by the time it is liberated, we have about 200 local volunteer groups. The people you see right now cleaning the street, venting the school, these are work has been done long, long time. And beside the local group and the grassroots, how do you get the decision making within institution, within Mosul or in Anbar or in others? So we had approach basically, first we work with the local council and how do we establish their self, how do you with the bariaturized, your needs and how you advocate that needs when the time come for the national government and also for international level. We work with the political parties. How do you engage your local chapter in these cities? How do you reorganize as a political party? So when the time come also there is election, there is a need of community. We went back to the local private sector with our institute side. How do you put a task force on what is coming? What is the requirement for the future if Mosul liberated? We went to the labor and with solidarity center. How do you reorganize your labor leadership? To be when the time comes also, how do we open the factories again? So you have to take it approach. And of course with a lot of local organization and it is IDVs or exile community, whatever you call it, it is in Jordan or it is in Erbil or it is in Baghdad. So how do you rebuild their network? And we never forget how to connect them to the national level because that's important. So I know that they actually Mosul liberated. There is a whole a hundred youth leaders went to Amara for community to receive them in Amara side. To rediscover Iraq, Iraq after ISIS. So these are the kind of how do you make the decision making? How do you move? How do you see the relation between security and citizen? How you bridge that? How do you bridge them to a reconstruction trust? Ambassador, there is what they call the... How do you get... That's a complicated answer. How do you get them to sit with the reconstruction office and say, here's what we wanna do? And again, how do you manage expectation? Because that's a key with the international. How do you help these people? Because Mosul is not gonna be a Mosul before 2014 ever. The discussion is a huge. The people inside them. How do you work with the teachers? These are most of them the same teacher who under ISIS and you put them right away in a school again to teach something different. How's the Sudan teacher relationship? How's that gonna work? How's the... So we went to the professional association to basically to engage and rebuild civic work, civic institution, shift the mind a little bit. So I will leave it here, kind of this or the whole things. It's just too much to talk about it and I'll just leave it there. No, you've laid out actually very rich menu of challenges and questions to think about. Linda, you too have spent quite a bit of time undertaking research in Iraq and have recently co-authored a report looking at the stabilization challenges in Mosul. What are some of the key takeaways from the report? Thank you very much, Mona. And I'm very pleased to be on this panel with such distinguished experts. I have made my 20th visit to Iraq this year and we've made several trips to get the data for this report which is available at rand.org as a free download. It has 13 recommendations of what we consider urgent action items. I won't go through them all but I just wanted to give a brief summary and then I think we want to know sort of what are the lessons more broadly that can be applied in other conflicts. The report looks at humanitarian stabilization and reconciliation as kind of an integrated suite because things that happen in one stovepipe are dramatically going to affect the others. And we also established a criteria to develop these 13 requirements to say what is a logical precursor or prerequisite to get progress on these other items. We did recognize and heard from many of our stakeholders that the reconciliation at the national level, social cohesion, the bottom up approach and the transitional justice issues are really where the end game is. But I would like to acknowledge that we have 3.2 million is the number of displaced that the UN is using and there may be an undercounting there I recognize but we've got massive numbers of Iraqis that are displaced and West Mosul, the destruction is enormous. So we have lots of immediate humanitarian needs that need to be addressed. And our view is that on the appeal, the UN appeal is still less than half met and on stabilization. While there was good implementation of those programs, they were narrowly bound as short-term projects and with a certain amount of funding that has been pledged but there's about 50 million that hasn't been delivered. We clearly see a need for more funding. So I just wanted to quickly hit that even though I'm going to focus on reconciliation, I think we can't forget the things that are important. There is no, as far as I'm aware, still no organized orchestrated plan for return of these IDPs. And it is very important to have a formal plan to execute that. We see two key things that are very critical precursor issues. One is making sure there are enough police in place doing a credible job to secure those areas to encourage people to return. Number two, the explosive remnants of war are just off the charts. You can see online we publish one map. There's a lot of the city, West Mosul hasn't even been surveyed yet. People can't go home unless their homes are safe and the workplaces are safe in the fields for those in agricultural activities are cleared. And the narrow program that the US funded was based on critical infrastructure. And while that had some merit to try to get services on quickly, it's just a fraction of what needs to happen. What I would like to say about the programming for reconciliation and especially the bottom up, which I think is really where, one of the big lessons is I think people are understanding. Iraq has been locked in this sectarian conflict and parties battling, parties looking out for their own electoral interests. There's a lot of deadlock at the top. So perhaps focusing very intensively on this bottom level of social cohesion is where progress can be made more quickly. That does not let the politicians at the top though off the hook. And I want to note that there are four programs that have been supported by the US government and UN that I think have merit. The question is getting that synergy and making sure the implementation of each of these programs really feeds the overall progress because I do see there is a moment now where Iraq can move forward if people are sufficiently committed. The USAID has a following program called Iraqi Governance and Performance Accountability and this is really aimed at trying to push forward decentralization. And that is the one law on the books that I would call a plank of a reconciliation program. And if that law can start to be implemented, people will start feeling more empowered at the local level and government can gain greater credibility. The UNDP has a support for integrated reconciliation program and this is very important I want to just mention. The planks include civil society discussions as Sarha was just mentioning. This is very powerful to get people talking together at the local level. It also includes a media project so that people understand this knitting back together of the country is really a priority and then a memory project and that's very critical for the transitional justice issue because a lot of these, everyone's a victim in Iraq. I mean, there are competing victim narratives but the fact is there has to be a way forward on this. And then there's a strengthening participation in accountable governance program that's focused at the Council of Representatives, the Parliament and the increasing the level of professionalization there is going to greatly enhance the credibility of the Iraqi national government. And then there's a program funded to pursue a federal economic reform and increasing the effectiveness of the federal government and diminishing corruption is absolutely vital to the international donor community being willing to give continued funding because that suspicion that funds have not been well spent, I think is very much a damper on the kind of continued funding. All of these programs I think are excellent but my assessment is they're probably underfunded but mostly we wanna make sure we get that maximum synergy out of the implementation of all of them. The lessons for the future, the bottom up approach here has really worked and in a programmatic way the UNDP, which I do wanna call out, Lisa Grande has been a dedicated and important figure in this. One of the most competent international bureaucrats I've ever met and she forced a pretty rigorous approach that pushed down decision making in each province to the local officials with advisory council. So the projects were not being picked from on high. There was a 6% overhead cost which is dramatically lower than the pass through costs of many programs. And I think these are two critical lessons to apply anywhere else. The momentum issue is critical. You asked me to talk maybe briefly about Ruck and we can talk about that in the Q and A but I think as we're looking at the end of military operations is absolutely vital that the international community and key governments become very vocal about quote finishing the job because if these programs do not take hold and are not adequately funded I think it is very easy to see this hard one progress dissipating and conflict will return and insurgent groups will gain the upper hand. So I think there's quite a long way to go and I would call on the international government, the governments that have been the key players in the coalition to include the US not to pass this job off to other people because it won't get done if the primaries don't stay engaged. Thank you and I have to say anyone who's worked with Lee's Grande knows she is nothing less than a force of nature so it's absolutely true. What I'd like to do is invite people, there are mics on either side of the auditorium and I'd like to invite people that have questions to start coming in and just filing in behind the mics but before we get to the first question Ambassador I'd like to turn back to you taking advantage of you being here with us this morning to hear more from you in terms of the government of Iraq's perspective on what it is the international community can be doing in the coming months as Iraq contends with the challenges of post ISIS stabilization. We've talked a lot about the large number of IDPs, et cetera. You have a room filled with peace builders who represent both NGOs as well as US government agencies but I think it would be useful for us to take advantage of you being here to hear a little bit more concretely and specifically what it is you think that the government of Iraq would be looking for. Thank you for the question actually. It's always very well into what I'll be working on next week that their meetings of the World Bank and the IMF and the World Bank will be helping us prepare for a donor conference that's going to be organized by our Kuwaiti neighbors. Thank them for that in January of next year and it will be geared towards rebuilding of not only the liberated areas of Iraq but also other parts of Iraq that have suffered because of the fact that much of their resources were drawn into the fight to liberate Mosul and other cities that had been occupied by ISIS. But there are two things I'd like to add if I may. I don't know who alluded to the fact that our society, I thought that was Sahang, that our society because of this war has been over militarized. And that is a necessary evil, you're fighting to liberate your country so you mobilize whoever you can. But now we have to go beyond that and there are lessons that can be drawn from the history of this country. I remember that right after the Second World War which also lasted about four years which is going to be the, I hope the duration of our fight against ISIS. The United States was able to transform its soldiers into one of the most powerful reconstruction engines in history by mechanisms like the GI Bill. So things I'd like to do to see done in Iraq is to develop our own GI Bill to, and then if any of you can help us with scholarships and grants to study in the US, I'd welcome those. But one thing I'd like to add to what was said, which is the real importance of symbolic projects and measures and even images. And ISIS actually understood this very, very well. Why is it otherwise that they had destroyed what was the symbol of Mosul? Just before the Iraqi soldiers took over the city, they blew up the leaning minaret of Mosul. That is to most Moslawis, to most Iraqis, the symbol of the city. It stood for 800 years. Why do that? It's like somebody taking over a piece and blowing off or in New Washington blowing off here the Washington Monument. So the landscape of the city has changed, especially for all those IDPs that are gonna come in and not see that. And so it is important for us to focus on these symbolic gestures and projects. One just I remember is this very compelling picture of an Iraqi special operations soldier carrying back a cross to bring it, to put it back on the church from where it had been felt. That is a very, very strong message. Other important messages is something that, for example, a project that's been implemented in Tikrit to rebuild and re-equip the University of Tikrit. And Mosul's University was one of the best in the country and its library has been destroyed. And contrary to what some journalists have said, there are widespread efforts throughout the world to try to re-equip it with books and documents. Thank you. Well, let's take some questions, please. Identify yourself and if you have, if you want to direct your question to someone specifically or to the entire panel, please specify. Thank you. Thanks for the panel. My name is Li Yang and my question is really for general public or especially for the panel. I always find there is a dilemma whether justice and peace which will go first and whether you should have imperialism or colonialism or you should help the indigenous people. And we have justice and peace or non-discrimination and from local to federal to global which to start and where to end. I just finally failed as a vicious cycle and there's no end. So I just wonder if we can really go from the justice wherever you see it and fix it right away rather than let it expand everywhere. And currently I know there's a new fashion. There's a partnership, especially when there's a P3, there's public private partnership. I don't mean that you cannot find and help somebody with resources but the PPP usually is abused, extremely abused with extreme fraud and crime which really victimize general public with the resource of government. And beyond the project, beyond the project itself it's a span to everywhere, every corner. So people are victimized. I just wonder if this panel can really seek resources and peace resolving with a good approach rather than being misused and general public is victim. Okay, so I think this, I heard two questions actually. The question of the trade-offs in between peace and justice and how we think about that. And then I think if I'm understanding correctly an issue about sort of process and implementation and public-private partnerships whether they actually fuel or fuel corruption if I understood the question correctly. So why don't we start with you, Ambassador and we'll work down the line for those of you that have a thought on that. Well, ma'am, like everything it's a bit of a compromise. Compromise is sometimes difficult to achieve but they're necessary. But what that requires is goodwill. And to have people's goodwill you have to give them hope. So I think the first task that we have to do is actually to try to give people hope. On your other question, you're absolutely right. You know, public-private partnerships are one way of going ahead particularly for a country that is cash strapped but it has some requirements. One of these requirements is to have the administrative capacity of oversight precisely to avoid what the veils that you mentioned. And this is something we're working on very hard to acquire in terms of within the Iraqi government but also with the help of international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations. And thank you for saying what you said about Elise Gwendi. She is a real hero. Absolutely. Sarhang, do you have a thought? Yes, I think it's a very important question and our line of work trying to get to reconciliation reconciliation comes up a lot. If is reconciliation giving up on justice is it giving up on your right? And for us, I don't see that as a choice. We offer the platform, the dialogue process where people come to the table of negotiation and they basically agree with the other side whether that other side is a tribe whether it's a government body in the security sector or the judicial sector where they have this discussion. People define what is justice to them and they work those discussions. We focus on how do you make this conversation. The getting to justice is a nonviolent process and the Spiker example that Ambassador referred to where 1700 Shia cadets were killed, where Sunni tribes were accused of perpetrating a massacre, where 20 tribes who were representing the families and the tribes of where those 17 cadets were from, the dialogue process and agreement was not giving up justice, was an agreement that you do not seek violence, that you basically seek justice through the processes of the government, the formal judicial process. And this is where due course will be applied and you will get justice. I understand in the context of Iraq where courts are unable to function, this is a problem. So the reconciliation dialogues could buy you time but it's not asking you to give up on your right. And as the Ambassador mentioned, it comes to a fundamental personal choice, whether what do you accept as justice. And usually when the dialogue process absorbs the anger of the moment, when it leads for finding clarity, sometimes the anger could be directed at a party that is not the party who's responsible and it leads to those clarifications and as a result justice may be served and peace may be established. But in Iraq we have a problem where, okay, what justice and peace to what cycle of violence? They keep to bleeding into one another. You had Saddam Hussein, then you had the post-2003 sub conflicts and now you have ISIS and we don't know what may be coming after. So these bleeding into each other has not helped and it made the process extremely difficult. Just very short, as I said, manage your expectation. First we have to do it community reconciliation because the institution is not there. So we have at the same time working with the community and rebuilding and reviving the foundation of the state. The public is not there, probably not have. 90% of the government embolies are not there. So there is a court, there is a structure, but the people who run that system is not there. So the best way to do it on the community level first and while we are working on reviving the civic state, the institution and that's basically probably on the community level is our best approach at this point. Linda? Just briefly and going back to what the ambassador said about the test bed, I think there have been some very important innovations in this realm in Iraq in the last year and a half as opposed to the previous 13 years. The US, for example, was I think marginally effective in its return on investment in the earlier years in terms of dumping lots of money into both Iraq and Afghanistan and achieving unsatisfactory stabilization results. In the case of Afghanistan, I think some basic indices of quality of life have dramatically improved, but that said, there was a lot, I think, of overspending without the kind of programmatic results. I would like to suggest that the current and now we have a primarily, almost completely non-military effort. The military is working on security forces and the police building, which I mentioned, which is very essential to everything else, but I think this is a model of putting the civilian governmental agencies and international partners and implementing partners in the forefront of this work. So I think it's important as a test bed for that model moving forward. The other thing is we are lacking one central place to track all of the funding pledges, receipts, disbursements, and overhead costs, and that, to me, is very critical, again, as I say, for credibility and confidence so you can continue to receive the donations. We had a terrible time trying to track all of the funding sources and status of them, so it's very easy to do, and IOM, the International Organization for Migration, has terrific data up for displaced people, the maps, the rates of return. They're tracking a lot of data on that front. There's no reason why we can't do that on the financial front as well. Thanks. Shannon here. Hi, I'm Julian Hegan from International Alert, we're a peace building organization working in about 30 countries around the world. First of all, thank you very much to the panelists. I think some incredibly rich lessons around stabilization and a bit of a picture of stabilization that is far more transformative than where the original concept started out. Now, in Europe, there has been a number of different countries going through revising their stabilization approaches, in large part in anticipation of places like Mosul, but also future prospects in Syria, and as we sit in this room, the EU, the largest donor in the world, is actually developing a stabilization strategy right now, and I'd be really keen, given your experience in Mosul, given this idea around more transformative approaches to stabilization, what would your advice be for the EU as they develop their strategy? Is that directed to anyone in particular or to the entire panel? Well, I'd be keen to hear from the ambassador, but I understand people have different levels of interest and comfort in answering that question. Okay. Oh, hi, I'm Lee Scrumday. No, I'm serious. See, the problem we've had in Iraq with all the problems that we did not, we lacked the tools or the mechanisms to fix them, and so we were developing these as we were going along, and through trial and error, I think, as was pointed out, the UNDP has managed to find a way of cutting down costs, at the same time, of involving the locals in the process itself, both at the decision-making, typically which houses, for example, to build first, to bring all the neighbors, and you tell them, all right, we're gonna prioritize you decide, and then hiring locals to do the fixing, and so that actually instills an extra dose of stability, so I think you got my answer, okay. Any very quick responses, because I also wanna make sure we get more questions in, but if there's a very quick response, yes. Very quickly, I would say, sequencing, it's a stabilization, definition and sequencing. Many people have different definitions of what stabilization is. I think in Iraq, from a funding perspective, many try to have a narrow definition of what stabilization is, but Iraq's problems are bigger than some of those narrow definitions. I think having the proper definition of what stabilization is, but then probably, defining a narrow role for yourself, maybe the way to go rather than narrowing the definition of stabilization because your ability to do something is limited. The second thing on sequencing, many people saw it in 2007, and even in this round of violence, see that okay, we need to get to security, then we will worry about governance and the political process later. I think this is the second time where the international community and those who are making that sequencing, I dare say it's a mistake because it is the governance failures and issues of governance that give us the security problems. They have to go hand in hand, and unless we do that, we are risking the ISIS 2.0 to come our way. The political process in Iraq is significantly lagging. Linda, did you have a quick- Very quickly. I would like, I didn't mention the local area development program, which is the EU program that helps 12 governments improve their capacity, and I think that's a worthy program I didn't mention in my list of four, but my general observation would be that, as I said, getting synergy among the existing programs and retooling them so that you get maximum effectiveness rather than creating more programs because as I look across those, I think they're really a powerful suite of programs and sometimes there are disconnects in which governance, who's prioritizing, there's the USAID program that's also focused on improving local governance, so I would just ask to make sure that synergy is occurring for best use of the dollar. So we've been given the five-minute warning, but I wanna make sure, I'd like to have each of the remaining questioners give a brief question, and then I will allow the panel to answer as they would like. Okay, so please, this gentleman, yes. I'm Professor Ted Johnson from the Program on Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at Brandeis University. Been in the country, done a lot of study of the problems, and I'm just wondering whether the panel is optimistic that coexistence can happen. We've seen the divisions between Sunni, Shia, Kurds, and the issue with ISIS, and I know you're concerned about security as is everyone, but as you look forward, what kind of coexistence can exist if at all in Iraq? Thank you. Gentleman here. Good morning. I'm a graduate student of Conflict Resolution and Metatroning Security. Earlier I heard reference to every group in Iraq being a victim. In my studies, I've come to learn that those who embody a victim ideology rarely see their actions as being that of a perpetrator, so I'm wondering how the great peacemakers here can assist in the process of addressing grievances without protracting conflict. Thank you. And lastly? My name is Hussain Ibrahim. I'm a graduate student at NYU. My concentration is Peacebuilding. I'm from Sheikhan, which is about 20 minutes north of Muzul. What I would like to talk about is, just give me two minutes to talk about before the rise of ISIS in Muzul. I will ask you to be very, very brief because we don't have much time. The security measures before ISIS led Muzul people welcome ISIS. What happened to lack of trust? The military forces inside Muzul persecuted Muzuli people. I worked with U.S. Special Forces in Muzul. I came across three corps on the street staying there for hours. Nobody reported it to the security forces because there was a huge lack of trust between the population and the security forces. My question is what has Iraqi government done to kind of like regulate and provide guidance and restrictions to the security forces inside Muzul? Thank you. So we have three questions. The last one looking at questions regarding government of Iraq response to security measures, security abuses, draconian measures on the ground. We have a question about addressing grievances without protracting conflict and a question regarding a small one, the future of coexistence in Iraq. So I would, and we have five minutes left. So I would ask that there are great questions beginning with you, Ambassador, if each of the panelists could pick what they'd like to address and briefly address it. All right, this is not to discount the mistakes that happened before. They did happen and people are taking that into account. But the Iraqi army and the Iraqi procedures of war that you have seen now are completely different. And we mentioned, please, Grande, she has told us, I've heard this, per se, this in official meetings, that this is the first time in her 20 years of visiting theaters of conflict that an army has factored in the preservation of civilian life and its tactical objectives. Okay, and this has had a consequence. The Iraqi counter-terrorism service has a casualty rate of 30%. This is huge. And the reason is that they wanted to avoid civilians being hurt as much as possible. And this is borne out by the way people welcomed them. So I think you'll see that there has been a signal change from what has happened previously. And this has had consequences. Recently, the government advertised for about 3,000 openings in the ICTS, the Iraqi counter-terrorism service. We had 250,000 applicants on coexistence. I mentioned earlier the status of the minorities. I think, to me, this is the litmus test. Everything's being done to ensure that they return. And if they return, I think we'll be in a position where we'll be, I mean, confident for the future. One of the conditions is the establishment of the rule of law and that everybody should feel secure in their own home, wherever they are. Thank you, Sarhan. Yes, quickly on coexistence, I think you've put your finger of the most important word for me in the context of Iraq, is that usually the Iraqis, those who are trying to help them look at fixing Iraq's problems from an identity point of view. You are an Iraqi, therefore you are expected to do this, but it does not look the other way around. We are living here, whether it's a one country or we're neighbors, how can we coexist? What does it take for each other to address each other's concerns and our mutual interest and work from there? It's usually the other way around. There's a defined identity, there's a defined solution, you have to believe in that. And that is what is not working. Unless we flip this, we will not get to a solution. So I think this is what I hope this round of political conversation in Iraq will get to. The second point on grievances and victimization, you're absolutely right. This comes up a lot in our dialogue processes. But I don't have a great answer for you, but what I have observed is that these dialogue processes when people talk to each other, that has a transformative effect in the sense that where people see themselves and see others in a different light, rather than when they are distant from each other, talking to each other through media. So I think that sometimes when you neutralize the element of time, where you adjust one justice now, your definition may be something, justice down a year when things have calmed down, or you've talked to each other, the definition of justice may be something else. And it may clarify that has been a transformative effect. And one last thing for the relationship between the security community and the justice and the security actors, I would ask you to take a look at the USIP website. We have a program called Justice and Security Dialogues, which looks at this very issue. You're absolutely right. The relationship between the community and the police and the army in Iraq historically has been problematic and has just gotten more complex with the array of other armed groups, state and non-state, that have complicated the dynamics. Thank you, Rahman. I give two example of hopes from the people of Mosul. One, there is a woman, her name is Amani Saleh. Amani Saleh is chemical engineering. When ISIS get to Mosul, she locked herself in her house for three years, she learned seven language. Seven language, fluently in seven language. Speak English, but I've done my accent. So that's hope. That's people, that's people struggle and challenge. The other example, three weeks ago, there is a festival in Mosul city with all this destruction. 10,000 people showed on the street for a campaign called Reading. The books come from Mosul, come from Basra, from Najaf, from Soleimaniya, from everywhere of Iraq. 10,000 people set on the street of a destroyed city and start reading. So there is a hope. Just we have to manage that hope and help people to really show them the way. That's what my message. I'll address the comment about the Iraqi Special Operations Forces of the ICTF. I've watched them grow up over the years, visited them and seen their operations. And it was quite remarkable to see how much the population did embrace their role. They were the leading force breaching every city and every major battle in this campaign. And they are really, I think, seen as a national force. And that is in contrast, I think, to some concerns and questions about the popular mobilization forces, which are now enshrined in law, but I think that very broad language needs to be refined in the implementing guidance to really determine what is the future of that entity, should it be a feeder force to a highly professional Iraqi security force. And I think that the behavior of some units have created some concern about collective punishment. And there are reports of some families that have not been welcomed in some camps. So I don't, I think we need to acknowledge that there are risks and isolated reports that need to be followed up on because the picture has been maybe better than hoped, but we are not in the clear by any means. I want to thank all four of you for what has been an extraordinarily rich discussion. I think the Ambassador noting Iraq as a testbed for moving forward on many of these very difficult questions. I think we've already made good headway even in the discussion this morning. Please join me in thanking our excellent panel. Thank you so much, Mona, Mr. Ambassador, Sarhan, Rahman, Linda. This was so inspiring and I hope that we can all work together to amplify the messages you brought today to make sure that the general public understands and we talk about Iraq and Mosul that we understand this knitting together of society, that we learn to talk about peace in these terms and not strictly in military terms. So thank you all. Just a roadmap of where we're going next. We have a break until 1145. We then have three concurrent panels. In this room, the innovative financing for peace in Columbia will be here. Rewiring the brain for peace will be in B241 and better learning for better results will be in Kathawari Auditorium. So have wonderful conversations and we'll see you back at 1145. This is the wireless presenter right there. Fantastic. All right, so this is forward, bring, and that is reverse. Perfect. Okay. Fantastic. Making sure he has all the information he needs here. Someone told me it was a, no, no, no. It goes, they control it up there. Maybe they were typing it, okay. Maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. And he has the, so there's a clicker here. So he will control it, but we need to, we're running a little behind. I'm ready whenever you are. Okay. So how do you want these to be for him? I'll just, okay. Leave this here. Okay, good. So let me give him the clicker. In the front row, and then we'll, yes. Thank you. Conversation, and we're very honored to have with us here a number of members of the Columbian delegation including the Columbian Ambassador Camila Reyes, welcome, and we're especially honored to have with us here today the Columbian Minister of Finance, Dr. Mauricio Cardenas Santa Maria. That's the good planning of having this so close to the World Bank meetings that we're able to get distinguished speakers like the minister with us. And he's here today to discuss with us innovative approaches for financing peace. And there've been a number of references today to the very heartening and remarkable Columbian peace process. I think it's serving as a source of hope for peace builders around the world. And definitely this community stands in solidarity with Columbia as it continues to move that peace process forward. And as we know, peace is not free of cost in implementing. And we need to think very carefully about how do we finance the implementation of peace agreements? How do you provide the incentives for various actors to come together in a way that really lives up to the principles that were embodied in the peace agreement? And so we're fortunate to have the minister here with us today to talk about the innovative ways that Columbia is approaching this as innovative as their peace process was. Minister Cardenas's career has spanned public service, including Stintz as Columbia's Minister of Economic Development, Minister of Transport, Director of National Planning. And he's also served in the private sector as Director of Higher Education and Development Foundation, former president and of general manager of Empresa de Energia de Bourguilla. So he's well equipped to understand how to bring that private sector expertise forward, the need for creative financing for peace processes. And he's been recognized as one of Latin America's most effective ministers of finance. So I look forward to hearing his insights and then learning from the panel afterwards about innovative financing models that might be relevant for the process unfolding in Columbia and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the minister has a very tight schedule, so after his remarks, he will have to depart for other meetings and we will be joined at that time by Melina Lopez, who is the director for public credit at the ministry. So with that, please join me in welcoming Minister Cardenas. Well, thank you very much, Nancy. That was very kind. I'm very honored to be here. It's my first time ever at the US Institutes of Peace. And it's a great privilege also to be talking to you, an audience that is specialized, interested in peace building and peace related issues on the specific challenge that we have ahead in Columbia after successfully negotiating a peace agreement with FARC. The hardest part is implementation. And implementation, as Nancy mentioned, requires resources. So I'll be sharing with you some information about that aspect. How are we planning the implementation of the peace agreement, which is decisive for the success of peace in Columbia? Let me begin with what already happened. About a year ago, November of last year, the peace agreement was signed. This is a tremendous landmark for Columbia, more than five decades of conflict. You already know the cost associated with five decades of conflict in terms of lives, in terms of economic destruction. It divides our history in two. The agreement was structured around five different aspects, five different topics. Each one was negotiated independently and each one has its own goals and objectives. The first one, perhaps the most important one from the economic side, is the comprehensive rural reform. So conflict in Columbia, one feature of conflict in Columbia was the tremendous disparities between the level of economic development in the rural side and the urban Columbia. So the first element in the agreement is closing that gap, ensuring that there is enough investment in the rural Columbia and developing the living standards there. Second aspect, political participation, enhancing mechanisms for the emergence of new parties, for the emergence of FARC in particular as a political party, strengthening our democracy. Third aspect is the end of the conflict as such, which is essentially the ceasefire and the laying down of the arms, something that has already happened. The arms were received by the UN, they're now in containers, they'll be converted into monuments, one of them in New York at the UN, another one in Cuba and another one in Columbia. Fourth, very important issue, the solution to the problem of illicit drugs. Also requires resources because we have to help illicit crops substitution, and that requires investing in the rural areas so that coca growers find economically attractive to move towards alternative crops. And finally, the victims, the treatment of the victims, the reparation of the victims. So these are the five items. If you convert the five items into costs, you get these figures. One aspect of the agreement negotiated was the timeframe for implementation, and it was decided that the commitments that come from the agreement would have a 15-year period for implementation. And this is very important to make sure that the implementation of the agreement is consistent with our fiscal sustainability. It means that we can actually implement this over a period of time that is sufficiently long to make sure that we can accommodate this within our public finances. The budget that we have is approximately $43 billion, the implementation of these five points. $43 billion amount to somewhere around 15% of GDP. So the ballpark figure that I use is 15% of GDP over 15 years means 1% of GDP per year. That is reasonable, that is something that the Colombian government can commit to, and this is why we decided to go this way. Of course, the item which has the highest requirement in terms of resources is point number one in the agenda, which is the comprehensive rule reform because it is really the item that involves more public investment and bridging that gap. We also had to decide which municipalities of Colombia were the priorities in terms of these investments. And we, as part of the agreement committed to the PDETs. The PDETs are the development programs with an emphasis on rural and local development. These PDETs comprise 170 municipalities. This is the map on your left. 170 municipalities in Colombia that had the highest levels of poverty, had the highest level of impact by conflict, have the lowest institutional capacity and also quite affected by illicit crops. Those are 170 municipalities out of 1,122 municipalities in Colombia in total. And as you can see, they are mostly rural, that's the green map, and they're mostly areas with heavy presence of illicit crops. What kind of investments will be required in this comprehensive rule reform? Housing, culture and sports, nutrition, that means agricultural development, social development and also education. These are the main focus of this rule reform. In addition to that, we have to provide land and that's perhaps the most important item in terms of the complexity. Provide land which will come from different forms. One of them is using land that has not been titled in the sense that it's owned by the government or land that will be acquired to provide small farmers with land. This is a crucial aspect of the peace agreement. Also building infrastructure. Needless to say, these are areas of Colombia with very low levels of development in terms of infrastructure, especially roads. And this is I guess as an item, the biggest item in terms of the budget. The other items in the negotiation, the political participation are less costly in terms of resources. It's more about supporting political parties, encouraging political participation, ensuring that these groups have enough support to be able to participate in elections. The end of conflict, mostly something that has already happened, which was the creation of these temporary zones where the FARC were demobilized, disarmament and of course the protection of the former combatants. And finally, as an item with a significant amount of resources is the solution to the problem of illicit drugs. We'll have to have an entire conference dedicated to illicit crop substitution, but I'll just give you the headlines. What we're doing is signing agreements with families that are involved in coca cultivation. They are committed to substitute their crops in exchange for resources from the government for the investment in new crops, somewhere around the order of $6,000 for this new crop and a monthly payment to support that family for two years. That's essentially, in economic terms, the strategy of crop substitution. And finally, a small point, the issue of the resources, the additional resources to the victims. By the way, it's very important to know that we are already, since 2011, investing heavily in reparational victims. It's one of the largest items in the Colombian budget because we had a victim's law prior to the negotiation of the peace agreement. And that victim's law required reparations to nearly six million victims in Colombia. So we're not counting that as part of the peace agreement. We're already doing that and we will continue to do that. So this is the annual cost. And as you can see, it has a concentration of investments in the early years to make sure that the implementation moves forward at a speed that makes this irreversible and the budget is itemized for the different components of the agreement. Now, how are we gonna pay for this? That is the big question. It's a combination of sources. Many actors, many sectors have to participate. And the way we're conceiving this is that the Colombian national budget will take 36% of the cost that's essentially from Colombian taxpayers. But we're also requesting the municipalities and the states to direct their own resources to the peace implementation. They have the transfers to pay for education, health, water, sanitation. Those are locally supplied public goods and they will be in charge of making sure that these rural areas of Colombia will have the resources to develop education, health and water. That's intergovernmental transfers. This is resources we transfer to the municipalities and they in turn will have to take the responsibility of improving the coverage of these sectors in the rural Colombia. Royalties, royalties come from the extraction of mining and oil. And they are distributed nationally. Every single municipality, every single state benefits from royalties in Colombia. We just changed our constitution to ensure that the royalties have a special cost to ensure that part of the royalties, 7% of the royalties for the next 20 years will be invested in the implementation of a peace agreement. We had to go all the way to a constitutional reform because this is determined by the constitution, but we already finished that process and 7% of the royalties again in the next two decades will be used for the implementation of a peace agreement. The local entities, municipalities from their own resources, apart from the transfers that the national government makes and international cooperation. This is a crucial aspect of the implementation. So we are expecting donors to contribute with $3.9 billion. That's not a huge figure. That's about $200 million a year. It's achievable. It's something that based on what we have heard from various donors is reasonable and of course we need that level of commitment and this is a crucial aspect. And finally, private investment. Private investment meaning that the private sector itself can actually engage in this peace building and I'll explain to you in a minute how we're doing this. So the royalties are already mentioned. This is an important source and in terms of the private sector. Two days ago, I went with the president to a municipality called Uribe in the state of Meta. Perhaps one of the municipalities that was most impacted by the conflict, the stronghold of the FARC, that's where they had for many years one of their bases of operation. And in that municipality, we launched the mechanism that will provide the incentive for the private sector to participate in the implementation of agreement and there are two types of mechanisms for the private sector to be engaged. Mechanism number one is that new businesses that are created in these municipalities that were most impacted by the conflict and there are 344 municipalities under that criteria will have a tax benefit. The tax rate that will apply will be zero for the next five years, then one quarter of the national rate and then 75% of the national rate only after 10 years investments, businesses that are created in these areas will converge to the national corporate income tax rate. So this is a mechanism that will induce the private sector to go and create jobs in these areas, not just in agriculture, including also all sectors with the only exception of oil and mining, but all sectors, transportation, services, real estate activities, tourism will be benefited from this tax break. And the other element, which is gathering a lot of attraction in the Colombian business community is that corporations will be able to pay in kind their taxes. Up to 50% of the corporate income tax that different taxpayers owe can be paid in kind if the public works are done in these 344 municipalities. So how does this operate? The government will produce a list of eligible projects. School here, a hospital there, a road, a water system in these 344 municipalities most impacted by the conflict, which by the way represent 53% of the Colombian territory. So it's almost half of the country that will benefit from this. So the private corporations can pay up to 50% of their taxes by engaging directly in the construction of the projects. The corporations gain in two different ways. They make a local presence, they can actually benefit from the fact that they'll be visible as contributors to the peace agreement. And on the other hand, we in the government will gain because they'll probably be more efficient in constructing this infrastructure in these remote areas. So taxes in kind is a new mechanism that we set in motion. We did this by the way in a tax bill that was approved in Congress right at the same time when the peace agreement was being negotiated and fully ratified by Congress. It was at the same time we did these two things. I tell international audiences that Colombia is an example of a country that began thinking about the fiscal dimension of peace early on. It's not that we negotiated peace and then we're gonna renege on our commitments because we don't have the resources. This year, we produced the constitutional reform to the royalties. We incorporated in our budget the figure that is required from the national government and we also changed our tax code to ensure that these tax exemptions and in-kind payments are in place. Finally, this is costly, but it's worthwhile. It's a great investment. It's perhaps the best investment that our country can make. I'll show you the three dimensions in which I think the peace agreement will have significant benefits from the economic perspective. First, additional economic growth. There is a big debate in Colombia about what will be the acceleration of growth as a result of the peace. And the debate goes in terms of percentage points. Some people think 1%, 2%, 4%, but no one says that there will be no gain in terms of economic growth. Number two, which is already apparent, the reduction in crime. Most of the metrics that we use for violence, kidnappings, attacks on civilian population have come down in a very substantial way as a result of peace. This is another great dividend. And finally, the reduction of inequality. There are many ways in which our society is very unequal, but one aspect in which inequality is really a major obstacle to growth is the region of disparities. The fact that some regions of Colombia have development indicators that compare only with the poorest countries in the world. So the reduction of those disparities is a crucial aspect of the peace agreement. Let me just suggest, give you a sense of the order of magnitude in terms of the reduction in violence. Our homicide rate was 35 per 100,000 population. At the end of last decade, it's now 25. This year it's gonna be close to 23 homicides per 100,000 population. Or subversive actions, a 58% decline throughout these decades. So this is very important as a metric of improved well-being for the population. The terrorist attacks, illicit crops, conflict, all of them also heavily concentrated in poorer regions of Colombia with low state presence. So there is a vicious circle that we want to break. Low state presence, low infrastructure, high levels of poverty, presence of illicit crops or illicit mining. And depending on where you stand on the ideological spectrum, you decide which is the cost and which is the consequence. But let's ignore for a minute that debate. It's all part of the same vicious circle. So we have to break it. Some people argue it was the lack of presence of the state in these areas that caused all of this. Or some would say it is basically the fact that drug sponsoring organizations control this territory. There was a lot of crime. Just people didn't go and invest. Whatever your choice is, you come back to the same vicious circle. We have to break that and this is Colombia's best opportunity to do it. Now, this is the best investment our generation can make for the country. 15% of GDP over 15 years is not a huge figure. It's something that we can afford. Of course, we need the support of the international community. We need the donors to participate. We need the private sector to participate. But if we combine all these sources, we will be able to pay for an investment that will have a huge dividend in terms of well-being for our population. So this is essentially information I wanted to share with you. My job is to make sure that this is well-funded and that this is sustainable. And I think that's just the obligation of any finance minister that has made such an important proposition. Make this investment and achieve all these good outcomes for the Colombian population. More growth, less violence, and less inequality. Thank you very much. Minister Cardenas has just given us a description of both the peacebuilding process and some insights into how it will be financed. And now we're gonna be joined by a distinguished panel who is thinking about innovative financing for peace. Some thinking about Colombia, some thinking about other models and other contexts. The challenge is that peace is complicated. I think we all know that. But it means different things to different people. It can be the peace of today if you're a combatant. It can be the peace and the prosperity of the next generation for your children and grandchildren. And so all of those pieces get put together when you're talking about something as large as a peace agreement, as when you're talking about planning for peace and when you're thinking about a 15-year vision like this one is, which coincidentally brings us right up to 2030 in the Sustainable Development Goals. So thinking in a generation and thinking about how to finance these types of investments, these are massive investments, typically have only been done by governments recently, but they're also the types of investments that were done to build cathedrals and mosques and to build giant infrastructure projects. Thinking about that and then thinking about how to align the resources that are necessary for that is a big challenge. And I think people are now looking at the international environment and the kind of changing commitment to multilateralism and different sources of financing and wondering how they can develop new mechanisms for moving resources to be able to support peace. Many people think that that's a weakness of financing peace, that it means everything to everybody, but I think that it's actually a strength. I think that it is the way in which you can align multiple interests because many people can benefit in different ways. They don't necessarily need financial returns. It can actually contribute to an inclusive peace process by finding ways in which multiple actors can get different returns on a piece, on some type of peace, or on the various interpretations of peace that they have. My name is Gary Milante. I'm the Director of Studies for Peace and Development at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, CIPRI. And I've been working on financing for peace and innovating new methods for financing for peace for a while now, and I think that's why I was invited to come here and moderate this session. We have three, four experts, three of which will present their models, and we've just heard about the minister, about the Columbian experience. I'm gonna go, even though we're not sitting in the order here, I'm going to go to Luc LePont in a moment. He is the founder and CEO of the blended capital lab. Then I will go to Karen Volker. She's the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Cure Violence. I will then go to Johannes Schroeder. He is the policy officer for the UN Peace Building Support Office. And I'm going to skip Ms. Malina Lopez. She's the Director for Public Credit Ministry in Columbia for the first round, but I'm gonna come back to you in the second round because this will be an introduction to these other mechanisms, and then we'll have some discussion here. So we'll do a first round, brief introductions on each of the mechanisms, what these people are working on, what they see as a real need, what they think are the innovations here, and then we'll come back with a little deeper dive. And then I hope to be able to have time, and I'm a very, very stern timekeeper, so I will keep you all on target, but I hope we'll have time then to come out for questions. I know there are a number of experts here in the room that we would like to get involved in the discussion. So first, Luc, could we go to you and you can give us a background a little bit. Thank you, Gary, for the kind introduction. I'm not sure if the slide's gonna show up, the slide that we had for the presentation. There it is, it has shown up. Okay, and I'll speak a little bit to that slide very shortly, but I think the second good news that happened is that Columbia actually qualified for the World Cup last night, so I think it'll make a lot of happy people in Columbia. And the second things that I would like to think in the context, or would like to address in the context of what we're talking about is, we're talking about innovative financing, and I think it's innovative ways of doing finance, probably is more important than innovative financing, because if you look at this schematic on this side, you've got the money side, where all these sources of funding exist from crowdfunding at what, $55 billion a year, corporate or employee philanthropy, more or less $670 billion a year, and you've got social impact bonds now being created in Columbia. We have our first one that was just launched recently. Then you've got all of these other mechanisms. I've got some colleagues here from Impact 2030. So BC Lab is part of Impact 2030 and Impact 20 is a network of, I can't remember how many, business that are part of Impact 2030, but some of the large ones, the Google and the SAP and the IBM, they're saying, how can we participate? How can we engage our employees or human capital? So quite often, I think the other phrase that really caught my attention this week on LinkedIn is to say that money is a bad master, but a good servant, so if we focus only on money, I think we're missing the point. I mean, there's just so much money. I don't think we have to worry about this on the money side. I think we live in time where there's never been so much liquidity right now available for investment, but what we found our experience in Columbia, and it's four years now, and looking at the spectrum. So I mean, we heard the minister, Calvin asks, speak about the middle column, right? I mean, the tax revenues or what comes with regalia, so a world key from the government. And on the other side, I think he talked a little bit about, I think it was 2.8%, they're looking from the private sector or private sources. And meanwhile, I mean, there are platforms like Convergence and Axis and UBS is launching another blended finance platform right now, and those are billions of dollars that are available right now tomorrow for anybody anywhere around the world. I mean, it doesn't have to be just peace, but these are good places to do it. And when you speak to the funds and when you speak to the platform like Convergence and saying, you know, how can I get you to invest in peace? And they're saying, and this is what we see on the ground as well in Colombia, is we go to the territory and meet with the campesinos and if they've got very interesting project, right? I mean, we'll have an impact on 600 women, thousands of kids and indigenous and Afro, I mean, very interesting discussion. When it comes time to, I mean, do you have a project that is ready and to be bankable, right? How do we present this? And these projects are just so small, they're 100 million pesos, which is more or less $30,000, $200,000. So it's difficult for a fund to come in and do this type of investment. I mean, the due diligence, extremely expensive. So how do we start working on the ecosystem? And with my colleague here, David Clemens, we actually launched a working paper called a Blending Capital for Peace. So how do we look not only at the financial side, but how do we use or look at the human and social capital? And this is what we found is missing in some of this 53% of the territory where the FARC was presented, right now where the ALNA is present, is how do we build the social capital and this human capital? Recently, we met with a group of campesinos in Putumayo and they've been convinced to move from coca to peppercorn and very big cooperative and it's working well. They have a high quality pepper. I always carry it with me because it's just, I mean, one of the best I've seen. And the problem, you know, he keeps on calling me. He says, look, I've got three tons of peppercorns. He says, what do I do with this, right? I mean, he doesn't have the social capital, right? How do I get into these places? How do you engage the private sectors? And now we, I mean, there's a business well-known in Columbia called Krebs and Waffle. And so the owner now says, okay, I can introduce this into me and in my business. How do we scale this up, right? How do we scale these small projects? How do we create banks of projects? I mean, the minister talked about infrastructure, but we go to these communities. I think I'm extremely privileged because I get to teach in two universities and I spend eight hours trying to convince students that forget officially. I mean, there's no more free lunch for Columbia. You're a rich country, right? I mean, there's a lot of money in Columbia and there's a lot of funds that are not being invested in Columbia and why are Columbia's not investing in peace? And you want people from outside investors to come in, right? One minute. One minute, okay, oh my God. How do you stay at hours in glasses? That's a whole different thing. But very quickly, I think what we focused on at the BC Lab is looking at the ecosystem, not just funding one project. How do we change the ecosystem discussion three days ago with one unit of your ministry, of Minister Caldenas' areas? I mean, they're just about to raise a paper on how to do crowdfunding and what they'll be releasing. I think for me, it's very short of what it could be. And I think the discussion with the unit on financial regulation is how do we start looking at blended finance and blending capitals and crowdfunding and social impact on, how do we scale this up? Because I mean, the money is there looking for opportunities. But we need that discussion where the government says, we'll do 43% or 58% in public investment. But we can multiply this. I mean, this is what the world is looking. That was a discussion that took place two weeks ago in New York with the International Institute for Peace. I mean, Joan is there with convergence as we need to speak projects. How do we convince pension funds to come into this when we're talking about $30,000? I mean, they're not interested. So how do we build these big, these small projects into big opportunities, right? Yeah. About stuff there. Perfect. And thank you for keeping it short. And I know it's difficult to get all of this into one quick intervention. But the idea is we'll come back again in a second and there will be many questions I'm sure too. Karen, can you tell us a little bit about the cure violence work? Thank you very much. So I'm with cure violence and we take what we call a health approach to interrupting and stopping violence. We treat violence as a behavior that can be prevented and which acts or spreads like a contagious process. And understanding it that way opens up a whole new set of tools that you can use to interrupt and stop violence using credible messengers. We are a guiding and leading organization. We don't do this ourselves. We find the right local partners and then we train them in this methodology. So I think there's a slide that was supposed to be put up but it's not that important. But anyway, so we are doing this in 23 cities in the United States but we're also doing it in places like Honduras, in El Salvador, in Mexico, in South Africa or in Canada. And the program I want to focus on today is this new thing that we're doing together within Stiglio funded by UBS Foundation. We have a new project that is in Chihuahua, Mexico and it is from the beginning trying to build the database and get the information necessary to be able to build the case for results-based financing. And we're hoping that in doing this project we can begin to demonstrate to the rest of the world and to the financing community that there is a case for using results-based financing or social impact funds to fund a peace-building type program. We focus on one end of that continuum that Gary talked about. So peace-building means a lot of things for a lot of people. When we do it, what we're focused on is actually preventing the violence. That's a very quantifiable thing. You know how much violence there has been in these communities and you know how much violence there is after an intervention like this. That's gonna help us make the case. When you reduce violence, you improve the economic environment for those communities. So you improve the environment for potential investors to come into those communities. You improve the potential impact of any of those types of development programs that are focused on addressing the underlying causes. And you also improve the education prospects for the children who are growing up in those communities because when they grow up in these communities that have high levels of violence, there's records that show that there's less attendance at school. The performance at school goes down. General health is poor in these communities. So when you reduce violence, you have positive impacts that also not just have these social benefits, which people are usually willing to pay for a lot of social impact points, focus on they'll pay for education or for lowering recidivism, but they don't pay for reducing violence. We wanna change the case for that. But there's also direct costs that are savings, I should say, that are associated with reducing violence. You have cost savings associated with the healthcare sector, with the judicial sector, with police, and then in the prisons. The problem that we have and one of the challenges that we have in building the case is that these savings often accrue across these different sectors and at least in places like the United States at different levels of government. So they're not even in the same budget in some cases. So you can't add them up and then get somebody to pay for them. And so that's something we're really struggling with and I mentioned that because people in this audience may have ideas about ways to address this problem. So we're looking at that vertical budget problem. We're looking at the fact that it's in different types, different budgets are getting the savings and yet there's these perfectly wonderful, very visible social benefits to reducing violence and nobody's willing to pay for that. And so it's just real, it's something that we're really struggling with. We hope through this project to be able to build the case. The last thing I'll say, you had asked us in preparation for this to make some comment about the minister's talk if there was something specific. The thing that occurred to me that I feel like might be missing in the overall plan that they've outlined is that there are a lot of studies that show that in a conflict and post-conflict situation that violence of all types increases. So even after the peace agreement has been reached, you have an increase, spikes in violence that might be related to domestic violence or community violence, what have you. And I feel that we need to be putting into place mechanisms for trying to prevent those upticks of violence and so I'd like to know what the ministry is doing or thinking about that. And there's also norm change. We know that violence happens in a context in which it's become somewhat normal for people to use violence to address their grievances. And in a place like Columbia where you've been living in a situation where it's been a violent situation for decades that the norms in the communities have changed sufficiently that I think it's really important to maybe think about what kind of a public education campaign can be done to try to really address that overall environment and to really address those norms related to violence. I think those would be important things to build into this peace, post-conflict peace period. Excellent, thank you. And so Melina, I'm warning you that after I go to Johannes, I'm gonna come to you. Maybe you reflect both on all three of these interventions, what they're working on, what sounds interesting and maybe relevant, but also respond to the question about this culture of violence and the norm of violence and how it changes and how we know that more violence of different types occur after a war or after conflict. And Karen, I'm warning you, we'll come back to you a little bit on social impact bonds and results-based financing because I think we wanna unpack that mechanism a little bit more and people probably wanna learn a little bit more on what that means. But now, Johannes, we're gonna turn to you and you can tell us a little bit about what the PBSO, the Peace Building Support Office is doing, how you're thinking about innovative financing. Usually people don't think of the UN and innovation in the same sentence, but I know that you're all doing some really exciting work and you're really trying to move this agenda forward and we saw a really powerful speech from Oscar this morning that shows us the kind of direction you're all going. So look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Gary. Now I'm pleased to be on this panel and also I think we as a UN and the PBSO have to be modest because we still need to see how we can unlock innovative financing for Peace Building. So the examples provided by my fellow panelist and probably all of you in the room will be very important to us. It was great to hear the inspiring story and presentation of Minister Cardenas. I think that also inspired us as Peace Building Fund to heavily invest in the peace process in Colombia also because the financial leadership of the government was there. I think there are three key reasons why we as peace builders within the UN are looking at innovative financing. The first has been mentioned by various speakers this morning is the rapid increase in violent conflicts, the tripling of violent conflicts since 2010. And the second is conflict prevention is the priority of the UN and we need to rethink how we're gonna finance that new priority and how we're gonna mobilize additional resources from different avenues to do so. And I think thirdly that there's the financial landscape is changing dramatically in the past two decades and maybe we can put on a slide which shows. So this is probably recognized by a lot of you but this shows how the financial landscape have changed the bottom blue line is development assistance and we see remittances in the red line and foreign direct investment in the green line. So what you've seen is well ODA has remained relatively constant, other forms of financing has become much more important and we within as peace builders within the UN are still predominantly financed by ODA and voluntary contributions by member states. So looking at this graph and the rise in violence the prevention is main priority. We need to rethink the way we do business and also these financial flows change dramatically in the course of the conflict. When conflict erupts, foreign direct investment drops rapidly remittances go up. So if we can tap into these different forms of finance we are also be able to invest before, during and after crisis which is the fundamental part of the sustaining peace resolution. And I think as Gary mentioned how innovative is the financing I think innovative is a relative term. We look as innovative everything that's not coming directly from member states to the various UN peace building activity. So it's a broad range of voluntary contributions, foundations, taxes, social impact bonds, corporate engagement, impact investments. So it's a very broad range but it's everything that's not coming directly from member states. Maybe to provide three examples of the avenues that we are pursuing and that we have made some advances in Liberia we're working closely together with concession companies to address concession related conflicts. They're part of the discussion on the project design. They're also part of funding the program. So that's an area where we work closely together and I think addressing concession related conflict is key to sustain peace in Liberia and it's also necessary to do business in the country. Another topic that we want to look closer in is impact investments. Are there businesses with a peace building objective alongside a financial objective? And of course within the UN system we have the IFC as key lending arm but we are having discussions with them also this week to say okay is there room for grand financing expertise by the UN creating this environment in order to encourage investment and we are exploring something specifically in Colombia is there room for the UN to help facilitate an investment fund in Colombia to support to support the peace purchase and support companies in the conflict affected areas. And the last thing I want to touch upon are remittances. Normally remittances are private to private flows. It's from the diaspora providing money to their families for healthcare, education, housing but there are promising examples out there of diaspora bonds, diaspora investment funds also in conflict affected countries. So this is something we need to look into and need to see how we can join that how we can be part of that discussion. As I mentioned in the introduction we just started on this journey so here to learn and to talk and to see how we as the United Nations can help to scale up various initiatives that are out there. Within PBSO we did a short study like is innovative financing happening in a peace building sphere and what are concrete examples and what we found is that there's a lot happening a lot by civil society organizations but we are not yet fully part of that discussion so we hope to be part of that discussion and see how we can help to scale up these initiatives and we want to also because Columbia such a promising example of innovative financing and different forms to finance the peace process we hope to continue the discussion early November in Bogota on innovative financing for peace building. Let me stop here. Great, thank you very much. So since you're here to learn I'm going to come back to you later and you can pick out a couple of things that you've heard here that sound like interesting things to bring back to the Peace Building Fund and the Peace Building Support Office. We'll try to give you some suggestions along the way. Molena, tell us maybe any details you want to fill in I know the minister was rushed and so maybe you have some more details thoughts about these approaches and clarifications on violence and violence reduction. Absolutely, so I'll try to cover everything that's been said, which might be tough so apologies if I missed something. So I think one of the things that is probably the biggest myth about peace building is what you mentioned and it's the fact that it's a statistical reality that once you have a peace process that culminates you initially have spikes in violent activity. And that's just the fact. So the question really belongs not what are you going to do about it and how can you mitigate that? And I run the debt management office so I do everything on the Colombian government financing side. So I see investors on a regular basis and the first question I have always received when people ask how does your budget change once peace happens? And the first question is very basic how much is military spending going to go down by? And the answer is it's not, it will remain the same. People are initially confused people don't necessarily understand that's really the answer to this question. The question is you can't reduce military spending because you need to be prepared for this reality. The question is how do you deploy this spending? And when you look at building peace in areas in Colombia you're talking about areas that to a certain degree the government needs to re-enter. Reconquering is a bad word but you have no state presence and you need to create a state presence in areas that do not have that. And that requires public force. So what you need to do is you need to take spending that you were previously allocating to the military and a lot of that spending does not disappear. It gets migrated to police activities and that's one of the things that we need to look at. So that is a reality, that's how we're dealing with it. It's the answer to why military spending doesn't come down and it's something we're prepared for. So I think that answer is part of the question in the sense that I think there's a very large awareness in terms of the fact that that's something that we will be up against. And I think it goes hand in hand with the educational aspects you mentioned. So what are the first processes that happen when people leave FARC? They join what are called the peace houses or CASAS de Paz in Spanish where ex militants are debriefed and this usually takes two months and then they are moved into a process that involves a reintegration agency which is generally about three months. And what you're really doing is a very thorough educational process in terms of what life looks like when you're no longer a combatant and when you're no longer in a combat zone. So I think in that perspective there's a very thorough work that's being done but I do think the point is valid. Once you're looking at communities that have dealt with violence even though they are not violent actors or ex combatants, there's really two things you need to do. One is you need to prepare these people to receive ex combatants. Your new neighbor is potentially going to be an ex combatant and you need to be able to come to terms with that. And that requires outreach and I think that outreach certainly has to come hand in hand with the aspects that you're mentioning. And it's not necessarily one of the things that's top of mind. So I think message received and it's certainly something we'll be passing forward. In terms of the financing side. So there's a couple of ideas that have been passed around. One of the ideas that we've been looking into is a mix between cooperation and social impact bonds. I'm not a believer and in the fact that just saying you're going to comply with certain metrics in a social impact bond gets you 100% of the way. So I think the most effective way for you to make these instruments be truly powerful is to convert them into results-based instruments. And by that I mean, if you're able to take cooperation money, which is to a certain degree a gift and you're able to blend it together with financial instruments that make you comply with certain things, that's that much more effective. So how do you do that? It's very simple. People respond to incentives. So when you take the government and the government issues financing subject to complying with certain deliverables, which are what constitute the social benefit and the reason it's a social impact bond. Part of the way you can do this is you can take cooperation money, you can blend it within your finance instrument and as you comply with these requirements, you get interest payments that are waived, you get amortizations payments that are waived. And I think that is a much stronger link to ensure compliance and to ensure more efficient and a quicker results-based mechanism. So that's one of the things that we're looking into. And it's also something that allows us to take donation money and it allows us to scale it. Because if you're able to blend the cooperation funds that you receive, which are in essence donations and you're able to take capital markets-based instruments that raise funds, you're basically scaling your donations to a much larger level. So that's one of the things that we're looking at that I think is interesting and allows us to scale the funds we receive as donations. Second, looking through my notes. Crowdfunding, and I think technology is an ally. I think Colombia is not alone. I think many of our Latin American partners are somewhat behind on the regulatory aspect of how you deal with fintech. And that goes hand-in-hand with crowdfunding. There's a massive pool of capital. And you have an area that has traditionally been hesitant in terms of allowing fintech to scale to a large size. Among other things, because Colombia is a country where financial movements are very closely tracked. For precisely the reasons we've seen below, there's a large cocoa production. So you need to be able to create regulatory frameworks that allow you to move resources and to receive resources within the banking regulations that we have. So I think that's a challenge. But I don't think it's a challenge we can't surmount. And it brings me to the next topic, which is, I don't think that technology is just linked to fintech and to crowdfunding. I think there is a very good use of technology that can be applied to all of the projects that we're looking at. So we're looking at projects in very remote areas. Perfect example is the campesinos that have lots of products and all of a sudden, they don't know what to do with them. So I think you could potentially harness technology to create a market for those products. You want to do social impact purchases? It's very difficult because it's very disseminated. But if you have some type of technological platform that everybody can access, I want to buy social impact tomatoes as opposed to tomatoes from the marketplace. These are the types of things that we can garner with technology. And to be honest with you, I think we need to look at those more closely. So it's not necessarily financing but it is taking all these small projects, joining them together. You're not necessarily scaling them to fund them, but you are scaling a financial solution to them being viable. And I think we need to look at those types of things as well because it's not just about bringing money to finance. It's also about making projects that have their own financing because the government is actually giving a lot of these projects money. But we need to ensure that these projects are viable long-term. And this is, I think, one thing we need to work on more closely so we can harness. Fantastic. And then... Good night. I think those are pretty much the... Oh, the other one was the funds. So we've actually created the Colombian Pass Fund which is a donor-based fund. And what we've tried doing is we've tried putting together all the resources that we're receiving from different actors. And this is important because there's donation funds. There are funds that are coming from the private sector. It's very difficult for us to manage 150 funds. So we've created an umbrella fund and within that structure, we're absolutely open to seeing funds from the private sector, donations and things of the sort. So that's certainly something we should look into. Fantastic. Your last two points, particularly, are perfect transitions back to Luke. But I'm conscious of the time. So now, this is what I propose. We have a collective action problem here. We have 10 minutes, four more interventions, and I want to get to two questions. So my proposal is, I'm going to ask you each a question. It's going to be quick, maybe in just a minute or a minute and a half response and then reflect on something also that you wanted to bring up. But if there are two questions, we have one mic on each side. I'll take one person at each mic. You know when somebody's standing there that you will not be the person that's asking a question. So I see this person is moving and if somebody else gets a mic, you can ask a question. Here we go. But we're going to go back to Luke and it's exactly related to the question you just asked. Luke, at the beginning, I'd like to tell you to describe it as an ecosystem. A system is an environment where it's the movement of energy that produces outputs. And you said we shouldn't think of money as the thing we're trying to do. It's not a master, but it's a servant. It works for us. This is actually part of your answer to one of your questions, right? Leveraging, trying to get these resources that are out there and attached to other activities tell us a little bit more about how this leveraging and this kind of pooling, blending, these other types of opportunities and maybe reflect a little bit on what Milena has just said. Thank you. Thank you again. And I think there's just so much to be said on that topic. And earlier this year, and I think looking at the ecosystem one more time and same discussion I have with the students, they all say, well, the cooperation will come and save us. And I said, no, forget about cooperation. Colombia is a rich country. You'll be soon a member of the OECD. Can we look at new model? I mean, investment, there is. It's just phenomenal, the amount of investments. So how do we move this money into Colombia or not only Colombia, Syria or the place around the world? So we did an event in February in Brussels with the OECD looking at how can cooperation now can mitigate that risk of currency? Because when an investor comes in and looking at risk, how do I get out of this, right? I'll put money in, but I want my money out as soon as possible. What are the risks and what are the costs of that risk? And the risk is always passed down to the poorest in the chain of value, right? So the poorest that pays is the one that pays 30% or 40% interest because there are risks and the investor will not assume any of the risks. So I think it's important that I would love and these are some of the things that we do with discussion with the government and the financial service providers how we start taking insider, I mean, social impact bonds, great crowdfunding, great philanthropy, great thing, human and social capital, but how do we put them all at the same table? And you need all of this to actually make this work. I mean, you can't say crowdfunding is the answer. It's an answer. I mean, it's one tool, social impact bond. It took Foundation Corona and Foundations Santo Domingo took them two years to build one and there was no, there's no talent in Colombia to actually do this. And they had to rely on instiglio, which relies on Columbia University in New York. So, I mean, within the academia, and we're speaking with fractures, how do we build this knowledge in Colombia? I mean, they're very smart. It's a creative pool of individuals. But we need to create this knowledge within academia. We need the government on board as well and looking at cooperation in a different way where they can create new ways and ease that money. It's just phenomenal when you see a platform like Convergence and Access and what USB is doing and what IFC is doing. I mean, it's just so much money. And they're just saying, I'm not willing to invest in a government fund. I mean, nothing against the government fund, but how do we use, you know, how do we do this bridging between what the government does and the money that they're receiving? And, you know, maybe the government is a good place to leverage that public funding, but how do we create this space, right? And I think this is where we are and there's an election coming. So maybe a good platform in Colombia to get all parties behind something that we all believe is how do we finance peace? It doesn't matter if you're on one side or the equation or the other one. But I mean, there's great things that your government is doing. I think we need to scale this up because, I mean, that peace process is at risk because you need finance. I mean, you need human capital, social capital. All of these capitals are not being taken into the equation, right? Yeah. Well, social capital is a perfect transition to go into caring. And because part of what we're seeing, and part of really where the innovations, a lot of these innovations are coming from, innovations of ways of doing financing, part of that is linked to trust and reputation. And part of the way you build trust and reputation is promising something and actually delivering it. And part of the way we know whether we've actually delivered something is monitoring output. We know whether it's measurable or not. So those bring us back to results-based financing. Reflect now a little bit on what we've been talking about here maybe and help us to know better. When do we know when things work? So I guess what I would say is from our cure violence is an evidence-based program. We have, we're data-driven and we are very good ourselves at collecting the data to demonstrate the efficacy of the program, but we also invest in external evaluations. And I think that that helps convince potential donors or financiers that it's something is result, generating the results that you want. So I think focusing on even financing those sorts of external evaluations as a step to convince potential investors that the results are there might be something as a stepping stone on the way to getting to the point where people just automatically see that this is something that yields results. In our case, we know that you have reductions in shootings and killings. We're very specific about measuring that. And it's been demonstrated through a lot of external evaluations. So I think that what we're working with in Stiglio now in Mexico is how to package this information in a way that potential investors will see the value and sort of like be able to talk that language because it's not something that we have done traditionally. So we're getting their help. You mentioned Columbia University. We actually, they helped us do the data, the big data analysis, which is how we learned about sort of the multiple layers of the budgeting and the complications and why we couldn't like get this directly. They were helping us. We thought we'd be able to approve this for Baltimore because we have a great program in Baltimore. But what we found was that money was accruing, the savings were accruing at the state, the county and the city level. And nobody could agree on transfers between these different levels. And that was a problem. So I think you made a very good point about getting academic involved and people who can help us sort of break like solve this problem and get to the data in a way that it convinces people. If I may, I want to make one quick response to Melena's comment. Yeah, that's really increasing police. I can see it coming. No, not yell at. I would though, that is exactly where I was going. I would encourage you to think about the fact that what we know from a health perspective is that people's behaviors are modified by people that they believe have their interests in mind. They, people that they trust and people that they view as credible. Sometimes the police are not those people. So you may want to consider programming that looks at using a credible messenger approach to getting people to not do violence. And we can talk about what that looks like. And I also just want to really give a shout out to Corpo Visionarios, which is a great organization based in Bogotá that can do public education campaigns around this theme that could be nationwide or focused just in the various communities. That would really, they could be a great partner in something like this. Just out of curiosity, give us examples of the type of people you send sort of credible. So we can have an offline conversation about this, but when you're looking at ex-combatants coming into a community and you're looking at potential upticks in violence, you can identify, you can do the analysis and figure out who are the people who are most likely to do the violence and who has influence with the people who are most likely to do the violence, based perhaps on a number of factors that people locally would know. And so rather than using police forces to sort of try to prevent them from doing it, you can use the people who have influence with those people to really change their thinking about the acceptability of using violence and help them see that there are other ways to address grievances. And this is what we do in highly violent situations around the world. So you use credible messengers to detect and interrupt the violence and prevent it from happening in the first place. You use credible messengers to change the behavior of the people who are at highest risk. And then you work with the local partners to do some sort of a public education campaign around changing the norms specifically about the acceptability of using violence to address grievances. It's all locally tailored. It's very hyper-local. So it's not something that is a cookie cutter that you do the same everywhere, but it has the same general principles. And these are, frankly, come from the World Health Organization's methodology for interrupting and stopping the spread of a contagious disease. And we've just adapted and applied it to violence. I think there are things that you can learn and that can be done very easily at the local level rather than just ramping up police. Okay, I don't think, hopefully an offline conversation, hopefully you invite cure violence to come down to Columbia and work with you there. Johannes, two quick reflections, and then we go to these two questions, people that have been waiting very patiently. Yes, no, I think the healthcare example was also mentioned by Olskar this morning. And I think that's where we still need to learn as peace builders. We know that exercise helps, you've become healthier of doing exercise, that smoking is dangerous, but we need to invest more time and money in getting the same evidence-based for prevention interventions, for peace-building interventions, because in my discussions with investors, they say, okay, what can you demonstrate on the short-term, medium-term, on the long-term, and we need to have this evidence-based and we need to show it to them in order to unlock these financial flows. Good, and package it properly. That was also something that Karen was pointing out. Let's please go to this microphone and then this microphone and we'll quickly answer your questions. I'm Harriet Lamb from International Alert. I wanted to ask about the really interesting Colombian government scheme to give tax exemptions for companies that invest in the particular municipalities. To what extent you've thought about insisting on those companies meeting certain standards in the way they operate that are really careful that they not only do no harm and don't cause new conflicts in the way they work, but that they actually meet particular standards about contributing positively to peace in the way they engage with the communities or in the way they employ people. And I think likewise that sense about standards for the private sector could also be really important for the IFC in particular unless the United Nations engages more with them, how we really help drive those ways of working through with the private sector as well. Very good, thank you Harriet. So we'll come back to you in a second, Melina. Let's take the other question and then we can have quick reflections and then lunch. Sure, my name is Satishya. I school for international trading. I think that question is exactly one of the questions I wanted to ask or I saved my time. But I think the larger question I have is, for example, all the inertia of war making that will stay even in the context of peace making. So the second example of the inertia has to do with the royalty based payment, the mining and oil. There's got to be a lot of continuous negotiation about that financing scheme to be working. And that is perhaps as difficult as maybe $6,000 payment for the households which used to be doing the cocaine production to be continuously changing their behavior to prioritize peace-finding. So those are some of the concrete examples of the inertia to be overcome. I wonder if you could help us understand the responses to those predictable challenges. I'll take it sort of in different buckets. When you look at the royalty payments in Colombia, royalties in Colombia are generally, for the most part, royalties from the oil sector and from the mining sector principally from coal. And these are activities that the country has been engaged in for the last decade. So these are new activities. I think it's inevitable that Colombia will continue to do mining and it will continue to look for oil, produce oil, and sell oil. So I think the risk here is not so much the activity itself but the way you explore that activity, which goes hand in hand with how do you monitor the behavior of companies. Colombia has royalties that have existed for a while and these are going to be specifically channeled to tertiary roads. So tertiary roads are these small village roads basically that interconnect villages. And when we look at the royalty payments, we just need to make sure that when companies are operating, they're doing it according to all the standards. And Colombia has very strict standards and in Colombia, across the different regions, what we have begun to see is you actually have municipalities having referendums on whether they do or do not want mining activity in their villages. So I think there's no better enforcement than the fact that if companies do not act according to standard and to the levels that they need to be acting at, these referendums will continue to proliferate and they will have a challenge continuing their activities. So I think there are self-monitoring and regulating mechanisms for these types of things. For the taxes, one of the things that companies need to do for this tax scheme to work is they need to comply with a series of requirements. So there's a decree that's being done by the government that basically gives you the rules of the game. And these are the requirements that companies need to meet and also the types of projects that can be financed because the last thing we need is companies building the projects that they want. We need to make sure that companies are building the projects that the communities need. So that's why we're creating a register of projects and a ranking of projects to ensure that the projects that are needed by the community are actually the projects that are funded and companies need to comply with certain requirements in order for these payments in kind to be eligible. So that's how we've looked at it. Very good. And we can continue the conversation for a long time. I won't. Quick reflections, Luke, Karen and Johannes, any last comments, 30 seconds, but remember, everybody here is waiting for lunch. That's right, same here. I mean, quickly, I think one of the interesting conversation that we're having with impact 2030 and Chris Jarvis is here with us and we're having at the local level one-on-one with CEOs of corporation and big mill companies. Since I got 3,000 campesinos, I know what they need, I know how to get engaged, but it says, look, what I do is buy milk and sell milk, right? I don't do financing, right? But they're willing to come on board. It says, we know what their requirements are. Not only in the production, but what they need in health, what's missing in education in their communities, what's missing in infrastructure. I mean, there are a good case in Africa where Mars has done that with the community. So how do we engage corporation? How do we scale this up? How do we, you know, once they come in, it says, I'll do infrastructure, but how we can multiply this, right? And not just one project by one, but create these opportunities where many corporations can participate. And I think this is what impact 2030, I think is a good platform in working with the global compact as well and working with the UN. I think these are a great platform to bring all of these corporations on board. Okay. I think one of the biggest challenges that we face as a peace building community is what you pointed out at the beginning, Gary, which is that it's such an amorphous term and it can mean so many things to so many people. I think collectively, what we really need to do is to somehow sharpen the focus on this a little bit and really kind of maybe even come up with our own diagram. Maybe it exists already. Maybe the Alliance for Peaceability already has it, but somehow really crystallize for potential investors. That investing in these three, four, 10 things is investing in peace because you have to break it down for them. If you just call it peace building, people aren't gonna nest, they're gonna be like, well, that's too complicated, it's too amorphous, right? But if you say invest in this, that and the other thing and together you are investing in peace. And maybe you've started with your list of the things that are part of the, the five things that are part of the plan. That's what we need to do, I think, collectively to convince people. There's a lot of people that have a lot of money. They're investing in a lot of things and it surprises me every day that they're not investing in peace and they're not investing in the reduction of human suffering. And that's what our greatest challenge is, I think. Yeah, very good, Johannes. Yeah, I want to start with echoing Karen's comment. It's extremely difficult to explain the peace building concept to investors. It is so easy to talk to colleagues and that's what we do a lot within the UN is talk to colleagues all the time, but go outside and people who have not engaged in peace building, it has proven a great challenge. What are we investing in? How will it work? Can you provide me concrete examples, concrete outcomes? So that's what we need to do. And I think to come back to the question on responsible investments that where we see as, as PBSO elect, like there are promising examples out there, the principles of responsible investment, various other sustainability tracking mechanisms, but they are not conflict sensitive. So we need to engage these entities and we're a close partner of the principles of responsible investment to say, okay, how can we make these principles conflict sensitive? How can we further encourage conflict sensitive investments in conflict affected countries? Can I add something? Very briefly. For real. And I think something that's very important that should be part of the discussion and the analysis is it's not just what constitutes peace building, but it's very hard to draw the line in terms of what should the government absolutely be doing? What can the government be involved? And where is it best for the public sector, for the NGOs and for them to be involved? Because the answer isn't always the same and there isn't clarity on the issue. And I think that's one of the things we struggle with. To a certain degree, obviously everything is the government's responsibility and we need to make sure we create a playing field where all these things happen. But I do think there are certain things in which NGOs are more effective, where the private sector is more effective and then there are certainly somewhere the government is more effective. And having a proper map of that, I think also helps further the conversation when you're talking to investors as well. So bringing all this together, the Busan New Deal reminded us that we need one nation, one plan. One plan coming out of this. So it's very inspiring to see the minister's presentation of the plan. For a public good problem that you identified, Karen, we need collective action to be able to solve it. And a plan like that can be very good at bringing lots of actors together. And it also demonstrates that people are actually committed to that plan to delivery of it so that down the road other people can join that collective action. You don't need to expect that everybody will sign up to the piece immediately, but that they can sign up to the piece eventually and see what their gains and their benefits of it are. So collective action to be able to solve the public good problem. Before I thank them, I have been asked to ask you, if you have a green dot on your badge, that means you have registered, which means you have been promised lunch. If you do not have a green dot, you didn't register. So you are kindly asked to wait until the people that have been promised lunch get their lunch, and then you will have lunch if there is still lunch. That's the most diplomatic way I can say that. I'm gonna thank Luke and Karen and Melina and Johannes for joining us today. We'll continue the conversation over lunch, I'm sure. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. A little discussion amongst ourselves. I may have some questions, and then we'll live. Great. After two? That's the time of day, yeah. But it's not that we said for a minute. And we finish at 315. We finish at 315 and we want to leave about 20 minutes for us to do it. All right, shall we start? Okay. My name's Susan Hackley. I'm the managing director of the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School and a former chair of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. And it's just always so inspirational to be at these conferences with USIP and AFP. It's really exciting. Our topic today is transforming violent conflict where people power meets peacebuilding. And we have a remarkable panel today. Just briefly, Maria Stefan, one of the preeminent scholars in this field and the senior advisor here at the US Institute of Peace directing the program on nonviolent action. She's the author of an important book on why civil resistance works, which gave really important seminal evidence that persuaded people that it wasn't just conversationally that civil resistance works. There was a real data to prove it. And we have Ramesh Sharma, the national coordinator for Ekta Parishad India, a nonviolent people's movement working for social and land reform. They're doing remarkable work and he'll talk about that. And then Anthony Juana St. John, associate professor of School of International Service at American University, co-author of a recent publication, Negotiating Civil Resistance. Just a quick overview on this topic and my connection to it. And I hope each of us will talk about why this topic is so important to us. When I went to work at the program on negotiation right after 9-11, I met a lot of people in the nonviolent action world and of course a lot of people in the negotiation and peace building world. And I was puzzled at why they didn't talk to each other more and why they were even sometimes dismissive of each other's way of thinking about conflict. And it didn't make any sense to me. So I started a little personal journey. I brought in Gene Sharp, who has written widely and consulted with people around the world about nonviolent action. And Bill Urie, author of Getting to Yes, brought them together and we started unpacking about what were the misconceptions between the fields of negotiation and nonviolent action. A lot of people think nonviolent action is being passive or pacifist and people thought about negotiation just being, oh, you're splitting the difference or compromise. So it's clear there was a lot of work to do to show that actually a lot of the strategies and tactics really significantly overlap. So I held a conference. I brought Ila Gandhi from Durban to South Africa. And she talked about it. And then I subsequently went to South Africa and gave a talk on why Gandhi was a great negotiator. And so just working around the edges of this issue because in my view, it's incredibly important that we bring these fields together because together I think our power will be exponentially so much more. So we're going to hear from each of our panelists for about 10 minutes and then we might have a little discussion among ourselves but we'll allow ample time for questions and discussion with you. And so we'll start with Maria who'll talk to us about the linkages between nonviolent action and building sustainable peace. Okay, great. Well, thanks very much, Susan. And I want to start by saying we owe a debt of gratitude to you for organizing the year-long colloquium on negotiation and nonviolent action almost a decade ago. And as someone who participated in that colloquium when I was living in Boston and seeing the conversation between Gene Sharp and Bill Yuri and Ella Gandhi and all these people was remarkable and it helped kind of break down the barriers between the communities and the article that you subsequently wrote about negotiation and nonviolent action with Amy Finnegan and it of being one of the most influential articles I think on this nexus of nonviolent action and negotiation. So thank you very much. Thank you. It's great, a decade later to be back in the conversation. I also wanted to say that USIP is really pleased to be hosting this event as well as three others during this conference. We developed together with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a new Alliance for Peacebuilding affinity group on the nexus of nonviolent action and peacebuilding. And the purpose of that affinity group is to look more deeply at both the theoretical connections between wider peacebuilding, so not only negotiation but dialogue, mediation, problem solving, workshops and the like. The relationship between those dialogical approaches and more the direct action approaches involving tactics like protests, boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience, non-cooperation. So we're really pleased that there are four events at this year's conference and entire track. There'll be two tomorrow on the nonviolent action CDE connection as well as the role that external actors can play in supporting nonviolent movements. And then on Friday, we're gonna be having a workshop on a new practitioner guide on how to synergize nonviolent action and peacebuilding. And really just to offer a broad frame for this conversation, the kind of theoretical connection between nonviolent action and peacebuilding is based on the idea that social and political change and truly addressing the drivers of violence and violent extremism, which we heard a lot about this morning, bad governance, corruption, exclusionary policies, institutionalized discrimination, that to really address these drivers and to repair polarized broken relationships between peoples and communities, you need both nonviolent direct action and peacebuilding techniques and approaches. So really where nonviolent civil resistance and peacebuilding come together is how we understand conflict transformation. And that's how transformation of systems, relationships and the like happens. One of my favorite examples of kind of where the two approaches have come together was, and this is a case that's I'm sure known to many of you, in Liberia. So you had in 2003, the women of Liberia mass action for peace, which was a coalition of Muslim and Christian women who came together and decided they wanted to end the civil war in that country. And so they organized sustained protests. One of their more famous tactics was a sex boycott. So they refrained from having sex with their husbands until a peace accord was signed. That was just one tactic. They pressured the Charles Taylor government and the rebels to negotiate. And one of their tactics when the negotiations were taking place in Ghana was they launched a mass sit-in. So they blocked all the exits to the building where the negotiations were being held and refused to let people out until an accord was signed, which is kind of an interesting approach. And ultimately, a comprehensive agreement was signed in 2003, paving the way to the election of the first woman head of state in that country, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who incidentally was here at USIP a couple of weeks ago. And so we also, as part of this conversation on the nexus or the interface of nonviolent action and peace building, we're building on almost 20 plus years of discussion about how these fields, tools and approaches come together. Many of you will be familiar with the famous Adam Curl stages of conflict model. I know I studied that probably my first day at the Fletcher School with Eileen Babbitt in our negotiation and nonviolent action class, and also how to transform asymmetric conflict. And so Adam Curl was one of the very first people to focus on the relationship between nonviolent action and negotiation and peace building. The idea being that in a complex marked by profound power asymmetries, you have to shift the power dynamics in order to be able to get to the stage where you can negotiate a meaningful resolution or solution. So the two have to come together. Then in the late 80s, John Paul Letterock, again, probably a well-known name to this crowd, published a pretty interesting article that was about revolutionaries and resolutionaries. So the whole idea of how those who are engaged in mass nonviolent direct action, why those practices must be complementary to those who engage in conflict resolution approaches. And so this was already in the 1980s and Letterock's article was published in the Mennonite conciliation handbook. And then there have been organizations like Eastern Mennonite University under the leadership of Lisa Scherch, who have been teaching about the interface of nonviolent action and peace building since at least 1995. So so many of the greatest activists from around the world have gone through the EMU program and are now involved in some of the most interesting campaigns and movements around the world. Lisa, incidentally, is in Israel and Palestine right now and she was emailing us a story about how one of her former students, a Palestinian, who had been trained in sort of the nexus of negotiation and nonviolent action is now one of the leading proponents and activists of nonviolent resistance in Palestine. So that learning has been there for a while. But I would say still, I think there are still fundamental misconceptions that persist within the two communities and a lack of appreciation for the complementarity of these approaches. And that's really what we've been exploring through the AFP affinity group and different activities. How these skills of conflict escalation, which is what civil resistance is. So you're escalating a conflict, how they can be used together with de-escalatory tactics like negotiation and dialogue. And since the great work that Lisa and others at EMU have done, there have been some interesting publications that have come out. One that I would flag for everyone is Veronique Doudouay's recent report, which is called Powering to Peace, Integrated Strategies of Civil Resistance and Peace Building. And this was sponsored by ICNC. And Anthony obviously will be talking about the nexus of negotiation and nonviolent action. And I would also note that USIP through our global campus program has been developing online courses about civil resistance. But our newest course was done in partnership with the American Friends Service Committee. And it's about 100 years of quiet diplomacy, nonviolent resistance and peace building. So there have been a lot of kind of new tools that have been developed to focus very much on this nexus. I think the best framing of the interface of negotiation and nonviolent action came from Martin Luther King, Jr. In his famous 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote and I quote, you may well ask why direct action? Why the sit-ins, marches and so forth isn't negotiation a better path? You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and fosters such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. And I think that really encapsulates kind of where the two approaches come together. And this morning, Assistant Secretary General Oscar Fernandez Taranco emphasized the critical importance of local actors and local change agents. And the real importance of coalition building and kind of grassroots approaches to advancing the sustaining peace resolution in SDG 16. And I think this is one area and this is one big hook for focusing on where nonviolent action and wider peace building come together. So it was really helpful hearing him make the linkages to the large UN operations that have been underway. And he also noted that he was referring to the research that I've conducted with Erica Chenoweth and there have been other studies done on this that focus on the relationship between civil resistance and democratization. So he noted that there is a very strong link between grassroots nonviolent action and democratization. And I think the reason for that whereas armed insurgencies very rarely result in democracies say five years after the end of the campaign the skills involved in nonviolent organizing, coalition building, negotiations, dialogue, bringing strange bedfellows together are all kind of skills that are necessary to engage in democratic discourse and activities. So I think we've certainly been doing a lot of work here at USIP on how the UN sustaining peace resolutions and SDG-16 can help breathe life into the connections between nonviolent action and peace building and how this fundamental challenge of inclusivity that's come up throughout the day. When you think about it, nonviolent movements are inclusion in motion. They're bringing together broad spectrums in diverse groups in society. So I think when we think about how to put meat on the bones of SDG-16 in the sustaining peace resolution, thinking about how to support kind of bottom-up grassroots campaigns and movements that inherently bring together these different approaches and tools is going to be fundamental to advancing the whole sustaining peace work. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Maria. And I think you laid that up beautifully. And just one thing I would add is that negotiation is really essential every step of the way. Even in the early stages of a civil resistance, whose strategy is going to be adopted? How do you persuade other people who may have different views about it to go along with your strategy behind the table? Discussions, negotiations can be as difficult as across the table. Building coalitions require negotiation skills, et cetera. So it's every step of the way and not just when you're sitting down and working on the peace agreement itself, hopefully. Thank you. And Ramesh, we look forward to hearing from you about your work with nonviolent strategies in various conflict zones in India. Thank you. Yeah, first, I would like to express my deep regards and thanks to the organizer for giving me this opportunity to share some of our experiences with the audience here. And thanks to Chair also. Let me start with a wonderful word, which actually soon after the South Africa when Gandhi returned to India and he met with one of his political guru called Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He teach a wonderful thing. And the word I quote Gandhi, there is no path to peace. Peace itself is a path. So it's our choice, whether we want to transform something from outside or whether you want to transform within first and then to go outside. Iqta Prasad believed my organization to whom I'm working since last 18 years, that before any transformation and before any larger expectation from outside world, it's necessary to transform within. So let me start with some of our experiences, how we do to transform within first to challenge the almighty state. The growing silence, we felt is a bigger crisis than the violence. People to some extent and the insensitivity, the silence is also growing, not just the violence on the one side. And we keep reminding ourselves that, and we keep telling to the people, if you are not indifferent, the world will be different. So if you really want to see the change in the world, you should be take some position and start transformation from within. How we do this? We call it's a shift from culture of silence to culture of resistance. And perhaps I'm a land activist, so I would prefer to explain some of my experience on the basis of our land struggle. So it's more easy for me. Let me explain you a very little, very briefly, about how the violence is growing because taking the land issue as a reference point in India. The growing unrest, very recently, the government of India has published its first report on landlessness and homelessness, which actually said that close to 56% population in the rural area are landless and homeless people. Big number. The people, the rootless people, and the people's unrest is a breeding ground for violence, organized violence, whether it's a organized extremist violence or whether it's a organized state-sponsored violence. So understanding the whole land issue by understanding their deeper emotions, their dignity, identity, and livelihood on land, it's important, it's extremely important for us. And it's also important because they are the people who have only two societal options. The one societal option is the organized extremist group who are there, who claim that they are, they're giving the voices to those rootless people. And on the other side, the state which is actually retailing the reforms. So just, it's a kind of a social bribery. I prefer to say social bribery. So the growing unrest, it's extremely important in our context where we are working. The increasing insurgency. I mean, India's, we have more than 300, I don't know 300 or 400 conflict zones. And each of conflict zones, again, I can say the people, especially the young generation who live in this conflict zone, there are only two societal options, whether to go to take the favor of a state or whether to join the other side. The third, a very bigger issue for us is those people who are completely forgotten. Even by the social movements and the social organization, the last battles, I mean, we keep saying, we keep reminding ourselves, history is a statement of only those people who are the winners. What about those people who are completely nowhere in the political radar? And nowhere, even in the radar of the social movement. And we put a lot of energy to those people who are nowhere in the maps. And especially, it's important, as I said in the beginning, we are dealing with a state which has its own model of development. And again, I would prefer to say, is that they are detailing the reforms and they are, they are, they are detailing the state institutions. They are taking back from their responsibilities. So it's a bigger challenge for us. How we do this transformation from within in our organization and not just among the activists, but directly to the community. The first and for most important capital in Ektah Parishat, I can say it's a, we have a constant engagement of last three decades to build a lot of grassroots leadership and the peace activists in the countryside. And most of these camps is a very low cost because normally villages host this camp very easily. They can feed 100 young boys and girls or very easily just one meal a day or two meal a day, which is low cost and which extremely important for us to make them realize about their strength. The realization, the whole component of realization is a starting point of transformation from within. So making them realize that they have the greatest strength to change the society and to challenge the violence. So breaking those level of silence is the fundamental in our organization. The second being a part of this democratic world and one of the biggest democracy called India. We also make our self-convince that there is a strong power in understanding of the self-governance. And we're known for one of the best legislation as far as which recognize the panchayats and the village councils, et cetera. So making them realize that being a part of this larger democracy, if you really want to change and challenge something, we have to be democratic. So understanding those democratic space and using all those potential oppositional space, it's important and very integral part of our training process. The third part is the whole unizing the whole effort and whenever we talk to the people or the organization, we keep reminding ourselves. We have some degrees of fire in our hearts and minds. I have five degree, probably he has two degree, you have 10 degrees, somebody has 20 degrees, but if you really want to boil the water, we need 100 degree in one place. So how to pull 100 degree in one place if you really want to boil the situation? And that's the very basics for calling the people to work and to come together. And we do this exercise extensively in the last three decades. The one more very important, I mean, I just attend the previous session here when we talked about the whole financing and everything. I'm very happy to say here that we believe in the horizontal budgeting and horizontal financing. That means not we are looking for an institution for big funding, neither we are waiting for the state to give some funds for the peace building process, but a poor people, a landless people, the resourceless people, the one of the most deprived people, they contribute their one rupees or two rupees of coin for their own struggle. And it's a membership-based organization and we have close to 300,000 families. We give membership to the families and they are contributing for their own struggle. We are not waiting for anybody to come and to support us and we did a lot of big, big campaigns and most of these campaigns is actually, the whole capital is generated from the people itself. I'm very happy to tell it here. And the final, which is extremely important for us to understand that each and every action, each and every campaign is not just a political action. Of course, when we are talking about the land rights, it's a political action. Land rights is a political subject in India. But it's more important part is, it's a tool of social education. If 25,000 people, what we did in 2007, if they are walking in a national highway and if it's not changed the minds and hearts of those people who are sitting in the bank and universities or in their fields, my action is just a political action. And we don't want to do this only political action. So, transforming from within to the mass by showing the whole strength and the volume of non-violence action, the non-violent direct action, it's important. And we did this exercise several times. In 2007, we were about 25,000 people. We demanded the government to come and to negotiate with us in open for land guarantee legislation that was done in 2007. In 2012, we were about 100,000 people. We again walked in the national highway for capture the whole national highway for a month. We reached Delhi and there was a negotiation. And again, we are doing the next action in 2018, exactly the same day in between second to 11th of October. This time, we'll be one million people. So, the name of campaign itself is a million scan walk. So, engaging the state and as I said, by gauging those oppositional space and making and transforming them, transforming their energy and our energy to them, it's important. And we constantly, we do this exercise on ground. We have several successful cases, or more failure cases, because, as I said, that land is a very political subject. And I mean, there's a growing demand of land. It's actually also responsible for creating a lot of violence on the ground. So, I'm not going into that debate, but let me give a very concrete example. The example is from South of Baster, which is the state called Chhattisgarh, and is known for one of the biggest hideout of what we call naxals in India, the extreme left group who believe in the violence. And they are very active. They are very active since almost like two to three decades there. As a non-violent movement, since the beginning, we decided to take this challenge. To go there, to transfer our energy on the ground, and try to bring them on some process of dialogue, not just with us, but with the state also. There are several incidences when we had a very interesting conversation and negotiation with those people. I'm very happy to say here that after long, long history of defeat and sabotage from both hand, from state to naxals and naxals to state, finally there is, just last month, there was a team, there is a dialogue team as constituted by the state. They have provided equal space for those people who want to engage in the peace process, as well as some of the ideologues of the naxals group. And we are on the same table now. So, at least there is a big shift in terms of negotiating for the peace. So, these are some very recent example, but the finally, I stop here, and let me say them my final word, that each campaign, for us, it's a big transformation. Why I'm saying transformation? Yesterday I explained to one of our friends that questioning the land issue in India, it's like an experiment of a snake and a ladder. Playing a snake and ladder game. Once you get something, tomorrow it's a threat for losing. So each and every action is important for us to take the next step of a ladder. And that's how this organization is keep energizing themselves and we keep energizing ourselves. And we are ready to take this challenge for further. We know that questioning the state for the land issue, this is a lot of sad stories. Peace and justice organizations and the peace builders is not always welcomed by the state. We keep reminding ourselves what Gandhi said long back, that first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight with you, but someday you'll win. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for those stories and, wow, remarkable work you've been doing for 18 years. Thank you. And now Anthony will tell us about what are the strategic and tactical choices that nonviolent action and peace building groups make when they're dealing with conflict. Thank you. Recently saw some students of mine who graduated 12 years ago from American University. They were a very special class, the first negotiation group in the school. They had a gathering, they were all in DC for a few days before going back to other countries and deployments with the State Department or other agencies. And one couple was about to go to Nicaragua with the Foreign Service. I said Nicaragua, wow, Nicaragua, I've been to Nicaragua. I was there 31 years ago in very different circumstances, not representing the U.S. government, but very concerned with U.S. government policies. And there is deeply hidden among my personal effects, photo of me in front of the embassy in Managua at a protest looking a little different than I do now. Not wanting to be part of the machine, but wanting to tear down the machine, wanting to raise awareness, wanting to put pressure on Congress, put pressure on our diplomats to make changes that we thought were the correct and just changes. We weren't thinking about negotiation, we weren't thinking about conflict resolution, we were thinking we have to stop this essentially externally funded war. And later on in my life, of course, I started thinking about the very powerful effect that negotiation can have. And I became an aficionado of negotiation and I knew Susan in my PON days. And somehow it never made fully for myself the connection between these two things. And it was really Susan's and Maria's groundbreaking work that led me to think more carefully about what is the connection between these two and what are some of the contradictions between them. So it occurred to me that there are some real barriers to thinking about resolving conflict when you're trying to foment conflict. And the very word negotiation conjures images like yielding and surrender and compromise, compromise in the sense of it being a dirty word, right? Giving up things that you should be entitled to enjoy or compromising on those. So I think there is good work now showing why we have these obstacles to understanding each other as fields, why people might make the journey from one to the other without really understanding the bridges between them. But the great practitioners of civil resistance have always practiced negotiation. And some of them explicitly did so and identified their activities as negotiation as King and Gandhi and others have done. In the work that we did in the last year, PhD student at American University, Noah Rosen and myself for the publication that USIP brought out over the summer, we think that negotiation is taking place in three overlapping domains in the civil resistance world. And the very first is of course, building a coalition of like-minded organizations and people that requires people to make deals with each other, to reach common accord on organizational strategies, on funding, on actions to take, on leadership roles. And that's connected of course to the big activity that such movements undertake, which is to mobilize popular action. So we thought we could see negotiations happening certainly all over the place in that domain. And that's long before you get to the table to negotiate social change or political change. The second domain is about encouraging changes in the institutions that you're trying to address or target. In some cases, encouraging defections therefrom, getting people who are part of a repressive police force or military to turn around publicly or to quietly dissent from the orders of their authorities. And the third domain of course is the starts with the at the table discussions but then goes on much further from there. So if nonviolent movements anticipate getting to the table to have negotiations with authorities for political change and not all of them do, then that is the beginning. But the beginning of what? You can't just reach a deal with the state for improvements and reforms and then walk away. There has to be follow-up, there has to be implementation. There might have to be legislation and funding. There might need to be changes in who's a minister and what their portfolios are. You might need a new constitution if we're talking about a violent conflict. So numerous choices in which negotiation would be absolutely critical as a skill to be used by a continuously engaged movement or set of movements. So we're seeing negotiation everywhere in the transformation of violent conflict or in the attempts to change the nature of a government or regime or merely to reduce lethality in encounters between police and civilians which is a problem in many countries of the world. So it doesn't have to be an insurgency that's being addressed. It could be all kinds of situations of real or perceived injustice. You mentioned that issue of cultural change being a part of what civil resistance does for the movements that engage in it. Now I haven't seen it everywhere, but I have seen instances and now there's literature and research showing that the civil resistant movements that succeed in getting rid of a regime and Marie's book details how and when that happens, they are better at fomenting democracy because they participate in the making of the new society's institutions and have become used to dialogue, used to the give and take of dialogical processes, used to stepping aside for maximal demands and understanding possibly transformative solutions that may not be everything that you demanded but might be better or different or spaced in sequence differently. And a lot of that, of course, is predicated on what civil resistance movements often see as their main purpose, which is to generate leverage to create a sort of counterweight to the power of the state or whatever target institution they're trying to impact. And that leverage, of course, can be used by the savvy resistance movement and its leadership in negotiations, but I'm not sure all of them even understand that that is in fact part of their purpose to generate and then to make use of that leverage. Well, if you think about leverage and its utility in lots of different interactions, whether they are interpersonal or in the military domain, and you think perhaps a little bit about how military see their operations. Some of the typical templates include shaping the terrain, clearing out the enemy, holding onto terrain, providing humanitarian assistance and governing, transitioning over to indigenous authorities. If you think of those sort of linear stages, there are a lot of parallels to what civil resistance movements, I think, can undertake without the killing part, of course. But with a lot of the operational, I think, corollaries. So I see these things as, you know, if you think about the operational model of the military, then there are a lot of strategic and tactical choices that go into each phase of a campaign, whether it is a civil resistance one or humanitarian operation conducted by the military or a military operation conducted by the military. Along the way, of course, on the military side, you negotiate for things as well. You negotiate for ceasefires. If the ceasefires hold, you might move towards a more comprehensive peace process. You might capacity build if the state lacks qualified people to govern and you're not, and your forces don't wanna stay there forever. So lots of negotiations even on the military side, but certainly much more opportunities for negotiation if we look at the civil resistance movement corollary here. Among those choices and strategies and tactics, I'm not prepared to provide a catalog of them, but really just to raise awareness of the issue, is, I guess, possibly the central dilemma of mass mobilization itself. If you invest the time in getting people to take costly action, which is very difficult to do, to get people out in the streets, to get people to write, to get people to bear witness, to go to other countries and act as human shields in their foolish youthful days, et cetera, then when do you stop? When do you turn that off? And how long can it last? Because it's costly to maintain. Do you have the requisites momentum in place on the opposition side? Are they doing things and responding? So do you turn down the pressure? Do you turn it down conditionally and turn it up again if necessary? Ramesh, you must have some thoughts about these things. Do you keep it in ready reserve? Easily deployable. Do you keep some folks who are very special and are very quickly mobilized, whereas others need a much more long-term campaign to get organized? So I think there's plenty of interesting corollaries and I'm prepared to make room for conversation with those comments. Let me thank you so much for that. Glad we had you go last. This is excellent. So we'll just talk a few minutes here and then start thinking of your questions, please. What you said about that made me think of how dangerous it can be to engage in negotiations and nonviolent action. You can be viewed by your fellow countrymen as talking with the enemy, and talking with the enemy is exactly what is needed to happen to have any success. I come from a political background. So Democratic operative in Massachusetts, and then I took a negotiation course and had a big aha moment. Wow, this is a great process for having deeply held beliefs and differences but dealing with them in a productive, efficient way. And I think what you said about sustainability is so important because if you have a peace agreement that the work hasn't been done to bring people together, to hear each other's pain, their issues, the agreement may not last and then there's just so much more damage that is done. So Maria and Ramesh, maybe you have some thoughts on what you've been hearing. No, I think I agree completely that the perception of capitulation and negotiating with the enemy can be a fundamental obstacle to successful nonviolent campaigns and movements. We heard about that from an Egyptian colleague a few weeks back who was describing how after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, he and some others tried to negotiate with the security forces and others and they were just fundamentally ridiculed by their colleagues. How dare you engage and talk with a repressive apparatus? So I think, but if the mentality is there that as part of our strategy, we need to create the leverage to achieve concessions and to gain space and voice but we also need to negotiate to kind of concretize those small victories. So if it's seen as part of a whole progression in strategy then it's not like we're giving something up in order to engage in negotiations. So that's kind of one point and I really, I like to what Ramesh was saying about all the self-organizing and governance that's been happening in India and for me that's just such an important part of movement building is the local organizing and it's true that the cases that Eric and I looked at and why civil resistance works are maximalist campaigns challenging incumbent regimes but fundamentally the same principles of self-organizing, bringing numbers in diversity into a movement are critical to the overall success. So you need numbers to give strength to a movement and you need diversity to give representativeness to the movement and so I think kind of how this happens is really critical to kind of mobilizing people to address conflict drivers and getting to more of a just piece. Ramesh, I loved your metaphor about everybody has a few degrees of temperature, of heat or within their heart but all together you can create the boiling point and finding the boiling point at the right time is essential. If it's at the wrong time, maybe you're not ready then and nonviolent action is so important in addressing conflict that otherwise and suffering and pain that an injustice that would go on if it didn't come to that boiling point. Yeah, let me allow first to bring my own imagination and insights and understanding about I don't want to prefer to use well-called enemy because we are not used to being a Gandhian to use well-called enemy but I quote the Gandhivi, I will use the word called opponent and if we understand the people who is sitting on the other side of the table as an enemy then what left in democracy? So for me and for us and for my organization we give equal weight to the people who are sitting on the other side and it's our way of thinking of democracy if you really want democracy and if you believe in the democratic value so that's for us it's important. The second what I actually said in my presentation that the negotiation is not just kind of a political dialogue. We can do political dialogue, it's not necessarily to be in the negotiation table, we can do anywhere or everywhere. The more important is to educate and a constant engagement. I don't want to talk with those people to whom I'm meeting first time in the Delhi. I want to engage him or her much before my negotiation and to educate it's own surrounding not just one person because it's a part of a system and yesterday when I talked with my friend in ICNC I said this and this is my experience. I do negotiation for my organization since almost like more than a decade so who are the best person? Suppose you want to go for the negotiation round of table who will be your best friend before? Can you imagine? Intelligence and police. I always find they are the best people because they are the eyes and ears of the state. If 100 newspaper write one thing and if the highest authority of intelligence or police report the other way to our prime minister or to the minister, he take the other issue more seriously. So that's how I'm saying it's a whole space. It's a potential space to engage with the opponent rather than treating them that you are my enemy. So finally regarding this whole constant space and the constant process of building the mass momentum and encouraging them and motivating them. I mean three very important, I mean three vision which we believe what we call is a collectivity, solidarity and justice. So in the family these three words is important. In organization these three words is a very important value and if you really want to see a democratic world or a democratic society again these three are the core component and for each of this suppose if you want to build a kind of a struggle we need to build a lot of common understanding within the people. If you really want to see the whole values of decentralized governance we have to recognize the whole space of mass opinion on the other side. So these are kind of different values which we keep using in our way for the larger action. I think that's wise and I think not calling someone the enemy is a good thing. So a few weeks ago at Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation President Juan Manuel Santos of Columbia came and spent a day with us and talked about his negotiations to bring about the peace agreement for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize recently. And he said he negotiated, he was told by someone that this is, I think it was Barak in Israel who said negotiate as if there's no war and conduct war at the same time as if there's no negotiation. So during the Colombian peace process the war was ongoing, there was killing on both sides and it was shocking for us in the audience to hear that there were even assassinations. But he felt that that was the way to keep the pressure on and show that they were serious and not just have endless talks. So he was very insightful talking about that and that's one method other people would use others. Let's open it up now to your thoughts. Hardy, is this a microphone that will come around or bellow? I'll bellow. Okay. Hardy Merriman, International Center of the United States. Thank you all for your remarks. I wanted to ask for a question. Give us a little bit more detail about the process. Can you give us a little more detail about the process that a person goes through when they join Ektipar Shab? There's been a lot of research obviously about why people get drawn into violent movements. Here you are, someone who's been organizing for 20 years with a mass nonviolent movement that is effective, that engages in negotiations, but also nonviolent action. What's the process of someone getting involved in that movement when you meet with them, when you do workshops? What are your goals when you have that first exposure or first workshop with a person? What's the process, the pedagogy, all of it? That would be very interesting, thanks. Should I say it? Yeah. Yeah, very briefly, I don't want to get a lot of time because there may be many people who are interested. The process of encouraging and the process of involvement, as I said in the beginning, the first wherever we work or wherever there is expectation for my organization to go and to work with the people, it's sometimes goes other way around also. We try to the realization part to make them realize that they have the greatest strength, not just energy. Of course, they have a lot of energy. We call this a power of the poor. They have a very different capacities to understand those capacities, to make them encourage, as I said, to contribute something for the organization so that tomorrow they can feel the ownership of this larger process called campaign. So there may be many, but these three, they are expanding the ownership space for those people who are not just treated as a member, but as a leader of this organization. So the ownership space is a one. The second is the realization about their own different capacity. I mean, forgive me, that suppose if a student studied in IIT Delhi, might be as difficult for him to walk in the national highway for one month, take a one meal a day, sleep in the national highway, eat in the national highway, go toilet in the other side of the road, it's difficult. But for a poor people, routine. So make them realize that they have a different capacities. It's important and it's a value to bring them on board and to take it to the next level. So and what I mentioned is contribute something for the organization so that tomorrow, whenever we do action, we feel that, okay, I'm taking the lead, I'm a leader of this campaign. And just a few seconds. I mean, suppose if 25,000 people or if 100,000 people walking in the national highway for a one month, we have our own very interesting way of evolving the whole leadership matrix. It's a, maybe if somebody's interested, I can talk separately on this issue. But whenever we do action, we never treat one person or two person as a leader of action. Every person is a leader. Because that's how the whole training process has actually evolved. Thank you. Thank you. Suzanne Gase, I'm an independent mediator and facilitator based in Colorado. And I have a question about the tension between the skills and even mindsets required for an activist, compared to those required to go in successfully to a negotiation. Now from the sounds of it, movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. here managed to do both, right? The activism and the engagement in political negotiations. But just as an example of something different that I've seen here in the United States in the environmental movement, what's happened is that the environmental movement has developed a kind of division of labor. So there's sort of a spectrum of organizations from the sort of more ardent activists who will never sit a negotiation table. And they, I think kind of do demonize the opponent to some extent, right? But that's a means of riling up their, you know, the temperature as Ramesh put it. And then there are other organizations that are considered more moderate and might be considered sellouts by some of the first group who then come to the table to negotiate and through that bring about change. The parallel has been drawn to with the feminist movement that there are kind of in the 60s, 70s that there were more kind of extremists and others who were kind of more willing to more moderate and more accommodative perhaps or okay with slower change, I guess. So I'm just wondering how, where's that, how does that tension get addressed in nonviolent movements? We do very different skills and attitudes needed for activism versus negotiation. I mean, go ahead, that's a great question. And I think, you know, one way to think about it is, you know, in social movement theory, folks like Bill Moyers have been, have always written about the different roles that are played by members of a movement. So you have sometimes the radical rebels are the ones who engage in more confrontational disruptive action. You have the conciliators, you have the bridge builders. So there are different roles that are played in a social movement. And, you know, I must say, you know, Muhammad Gandhi, Martin Luther King, at one point, Alan Sonsuki got a lot of focus as leaders of successful nonviolent movements or just as leaders. But I think they're more the exception than the rule, frankly. And a lot of movements that certainly I've studied have involved very decentralized leadership that are negotiating at all different levels. So we talked about the security forces. I think about the Serbian-Oppor movement or the Orange movement in Ukraine. Constantly, at different levels, there were negotiations going on between the activists and members of the security forces to negotiate space and where they could operate. So, I mean, I think there are definitely role differences. I've spoken to some activists who say, I don't wanna learn about negotiation. That's not my role. But I would say that I think it's very important that there be connections and personal relationships between the rabble-rousers, the activists, and those who are engaged in more formal negotiations. I mean, one thing that was interesting when I was doing my dissertation research, I studied the first Palestinian intifada. And so the mass nonviolent mobilization that began in late 1988 continued until Oslo. And one of kind of the fundamental findings of that research on that case study was that I found that there was a fundamental disconnect between those who were engaged in nonviolent mobilization, nonviolent resistance during the intifada, and those who were involved in the negotiations at Oslo. And I think that kind of disconnect has contributed to the perpetuation of that conflict. So, anyway, different roles, but it is very helpful when even activists understand the value of negotiation engagement. And some of them, at least, are able to do it because you need that to sustain momentum in a movement. All right, right there. Thanks, Monica, just to follow up. What's your name? I found an organizer in... Who are you? My name is Monica, and I'm with Activate Labs. And I found an organizer in activism, one of the main ways you win is through a binary narrative, us against them. That's how you win. There's message grids, and there's a whole strategies around isolating and polarizing your opponent. In peace-building, you win by collective narrative, many stories, many truths. That's where me, as a peace-builder and activist practitioner, I found the biggest divide, and often I have to make that choice where I stand. So I just want to know with the panel how they feel about that, what, if they've experienced that. I would just say thank you for sharing that point. I mean, I would disagree. I think demonizing the other, we've seen the cause of that. This morning's panel in Iraq reminded me of that. I'm looking at what's going on now with Black Lives Matter in this country and how sports figures are taking the lead in an otherwise leaderless movement to bring visibility to various causes. I just think what our panel's been saying about making these bridges is essential. I think political leaders have always understood that a demonizing narrative helps mobilize a partisan set of activities. What they have failed to understand is where to stop it and transform it and say, now we have to talk to our enemy because that's the only party with whom we need to make peace. We don't make peace with our friends. And then the mobilized people continue to be upset, mobilize, and then they're upset about the negotiations. So it might have its purpose tactically for a while, but I think it's ultimately self-defeating to especially in large social conflicts to demonize your opponent very severely because you're gonna get a lot of people to believe that and it would be costly for them to walk away from that story. And what I would say you can demonize is systems of injustice. So you're rather than creating an us versus them with different people in different camps, it's us versus an evil system of apartheid, Jim Crow, whatever else. And so constantly if we're all resisting this evil, you're able to grow the circle of participants from different groups in society. But I agree with you. I know there's like a polarization can promote mobilization, but there are also downsides because you're minimizing participation in the movement by fundamentally excluding certain people, I would say. Okay, let's get a few more. Okay. Hi, my name is David Estrin. I lead an organization called Together We Remember and we're trying to create a synchronized movement to unite the entire peace building space around the world, relevant topic. So my question is around movements of movements and how to negotiate across different movements in the United States across the world. It seems like almost everyone's human rights are under assault and there's a proliferation of movements. Black Lives Matter is one, but there's so many others. So my question is around the processes and how we might go about creating space to negotiate across movements to build intersectionality that can lead to more effective and efficient movements. That's an interesting question. And one thing we know from history is that Gandhi and Mandela and Martin Luther King learned from each other and ideals of the civil rights movement were used in other movements continue to be to this day. But do you have any thoughts on that? Movements with movements? Yeah, I mean, there are always different issues based mobilizations that are happening in different countries. I would say that often in many cases, especially those that lead to a mass national movement, whether it's following corrupt elections or stolen elections, it's usually people who have organized, often in different sectors or segments, women's rights, good governance, environmental. And often there's overlapping membership in these cases which can enhance and promote bridge building between different movement actors. The domestic case, I mean, Black Lives Matter, as you know, is one member of the movement for Black Lives. And so just this umbrella movement has had to bring together different issue-specific groups to come up with a common platform, a common set of priorities for the movement. And so there's always kind of negotiations happening, I think, between different groups focused on different issues. And the pride of the movement for Black Lives is that it focuses on intersectionality. And that's also kind of the, has been the focus of more kind of the women's march approach in the United States. So it's bringing together, recognizing that systems of injustice reinforce each other and that being part of one movement is kind of a way to address injustices from different angles. So a lot of negotiation, but movement of movements, again, I think is more the norm than the exception. We'll go here and then Ted. Okay, go ahead. There she is. Yeah. Thank you very much. She's very thoughtful, provoking. I'm just wondering... What's your name? Sorry, big about that. Teresa de Mezzi from Consoliation Resources. And I'm just wondering what you think it means for an organization like ours, an NGO, Peace Building NGO, working with partner civil society organizations, individuals, networks in country. And in terms of linking up to spontaneous and kind of very locally led movements, the issue being that these seem to come from within. And anything we associate ourselves with, of course, has, we carried baggage with us. And so I'm wondering what, just practically what do you think it means? What can we actually do positively and what would we do negatively, I suppose in terms of our third party role? Yeah, about movements growing from the ground up and then what you, as leaders in civil society, how you can engage with that? We're supporting organizations. To connect with activism. It is perceived to be intention. And I think my argument would be that it doesn't have to be. They don't need to be mutually exclusive. And that each side can learn from each other. On the academic side, there's been a wide divergence that just kept getting wider over the years. But there really isn't a fundamental contradiction that I can see. One of the early negotiation pioneers, scholars, Bob McCursey was a civil rights activist in the United States and got very close to different civil rights movements and really saw the negotiation components of activism with open eyes, didn't ignore things that were uncomfortable but really embraced the needs for social change as well as the wide diversity of movements and the various tactics and approaches and strategies each movement had. And then served himself as one of the activists that went between those sorts of movements. Just because I think you were specifically asking about NGO roles. And I think kind of a new frontier of activity or something that requires much more emphasis and investment is building bridges between the formal NGO sector and the grassroots and activists. And formal NGOs have connections to international allies. They generally have resources. They have space. So they can provide huge amount of services to activists who may not speak English, don't have the connections, don't have money generally. And so for me, I think it's kind of the collaboration between the formal and the informal civil society sector is really one way to advance this whole field or approach of bottom-up peace building, if you will. Can you bring it down here, please? All right, Ted Johnson, speak up. Okay, thank you. Oh, all right. Okay, good. Thank you, Ted. Right there. Hi, it's Sarah Brown with this video. You've generally been talking about resistance movements that have been focused against power structures. I'm wondering if the panel would be willing to opine on what we're seeing in our present structure where we have cases of the far right in Europe. We have cases of groups like the alt-right in the United States where we may or may not be dealing with a power structure as such, but where does nonviolent civil resistance play in changing hearts and minds? Yeah, great question. And one may be that we sort of end with because I'm sure it's on everybody's minds is how do we protest if we feel the need to and what would be effective? And there's never been a more important time, in my view, in this country to really listen to the other side. And there's a lot of demonizing going on and I think each of us has to stop doing that and really engage with other people. And we can talk about the far right, but there are a lot of people in the not so far right that I think we, if we're on the left, we need to engage with and I would hope people on the right would have some curiosity about us and how we see the world. And this is one of the tenets of negotiation is to really seek to understand the other, to really listen actively, to be curious, to ask questions and to learn. And as you learn, you may find some common ground, you may find some things that matter a lot to you, matter less to the other side. You can do some trades, but if we don't really understand the other side then we're going to leave value on the table as we say in the negotiation world. Do you wanna say anything, any of you? Celeste Headley, journalist in public radio in the United States was talking recently about a Maryland activist, a jazz musician, a black man who goes and engages with people around here in this area from the Ku Klux Klan. And he just listens. He just listens. He doesn't do it at a demonstration where they are all riled up. He goes and meets them privately and has had a transformative impact on some of these people. And I was shocked by it and really delighted that there's so much power just in listening. He's not even trying to persuade them to do something more on the negotiation side of things. Just one thing, I mean, in our experiences or in our cases, before reaching to the negotiation table there are some pre-negotiation steps which is important to understand those space. The first is, as I just mentioned during my presentation, they also take you seriously when they see 100% boiling temperature. 100% boiling temperature on the other side. So when they felt the heat, then they take you seriously. So the mass mobilization plus negotiation is a perfect formula in that way. When they saw 100,000 people sitting in a deli refused to go back to their home, eating just one meal a day, not shouting any slogans against the state, they were shocked. They were helpless. So that's how this is the important component. The second component, I just want to put one very interesting observation. It's about bringing the diverse active together. And it's a whenever we talk about the allies, whenever we talk about the coalition, we need also to open the space for multi-colour work. Why only activists talking about the land issue? Why not lawyers, why not doctors, why not bank employees? So reaching to those people and bringing to them in the board, it's important. And we have to invest a substantial time to reach to those people because they are the people sometime we felt they are not a spoiled by the state but there is a space for us to go and to talk to those people. So I think, I mean, we need to, as I said that, we need a lot of transformation within. Whenever we talk to some other group because India is also known for a lot of ideological group. The ideological group, sometime belief on Gandhi, belief on Mars, belief on Ambedkar, et cetera. But we keep saying and we keep reminding ourselves and we may talk about the ideologies tomorrow. Today is the time to talk about our brand, our land. So setting the priority of alliance building process, it's an approach, it's a strategy which we keep using in our cases. That's it, Marie. And I'll just very quickly to that. I think there absolutely is a value in attempting and engaging in dialogue and listening. We've seen stories of individuals leaving neo-Nazi and KKK groups as a result of feeling like people cared about them, they were willing to dialogue them, they found a human connection with them. There are examples of this. On the civil resistance side, I think it's critically important to, dare I say in protest, massively outnumber them. And so, you know, the probably the most efficient, effective way to kind of challenge the narrative and the ideology of hate that often underpins these groups is to massively overwhelm through participation of all different groups in society coming together. You know, we saw that in the Boston mass mobilization a couple of months ago, where they canceled the speech because there were so many people surrounding the area where the kind of KKK groups were going to give their rallying cry. So I think mass mobilization is incredibly important. And I would also say addressing hate ideology with things like humor are critically important in kind of deflating the antagonism and the anger and demonstrating the absurdity, kind of the absurdity of the hate that's underlying those ideologies is critically important. So numbers and humor, in addition to the dialogue and openness to dialogue, I think are three ways to address kind of alt-right KKK in this country and around the world. Well, I'm so glad we've had this opportunity to talk about negotiation, non-violence and peacebuilding and I'm so grateful, Ramesh, Maria, Anthony for your participation and for all of you to come be coming here, thank you. Thank you. Welcome back everyone. I really encourage all of you to come towards the front of the room. There's lots of empty space here. So I am so happy to present this next amazing group of speakers that today is the International Day of the Girl Child and officially sanctioned UN Day and we wanted to celebrate the role that girls play in making peace. That there's been a lot of emphasis in our field on women, peace and security and through 1325 that we're very familiar with that and yet at the same time, we don't focus enough on the role of girls as peace builders and how we empower girls to be peace builders. We read studies that say that the surest way to make an economic impact is to give a girl education, to give a girl empowerment and we are so fortunate today to have speakers who live this every day and will inspire you with their stories of working with girls who are making peace every day. So I'd like to introduce Kim Weichel who is one of the leaders in our field in the area of women, peace and security. She's an author, a teacher, a peace builder, just a creative imaginative wonderful thinker on peace. So Kim, welcome. Well, thank you and I firstly want to thank Melanie and her team at the Alliance for Peace Building and the staff of the US Institute for Peace who put together just a thought provoking, inspiring day. So let's give them a round of applause. Well, as Melanie mentioned today is the International Day of the Girl Child which is a UN day which celebrates the power of girls as peace builders which raises awareness of their rights which encourages laws and policies to prevent child marriage and which supports girls' progress. It's really a call for social and political action to be able to take down the barriers that have continued to hold girls back. It's a day when we can highlight and we can discuss and we can take action to be able to advance the rights and opportunities of girls everywhere. Before I introduce our two wonderful panelists I just want to present two pieces of good news. The first is that last week the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan legislation to protect access of girls to education in vulnerable settings. We all know that educating girls is a key to tackling global poverty. And secondly, I'm delighted to announce since I've been part of this effort the Women, Peace and Security Act passed both houses of Congress and either yesterday or today became law that provides meaningful participation of women in all aspects of peace building. So let's celebrate those. So our first speaker is Jin Yin who's founder of Four Girls' Global Leadership or 4GGL, whose mission is to shine a bright light on the assiduous root cause to minimize the demoralization and dehumanizing of girls. 4GGL is a social change movement transforming this mindset into a new paradigm that realizes girls' empowerment in a powerful solution to poverty, authoritarianism and terrorism. Jin has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, UN agencies and hundreds of grassroots organizations. Jin has been honored for her exceptional service to the global community and featured as a global thought leader in the film One and the Book Around the World in 50 Voices. Please welcome Jin Yin. Thank you, Kim, and thank you, Melanie, for shining this light on this amazing day. And one year ago, actually, I spoke at USIP on International Day of the Girl. I hope this is a trend and I get to come back every year and speak at USIP on International Day of the Girl. I love the conference theme because it says peace now more than ever. And today we are really living in heightened, fear-mongering, terror-prone world. And I couldn't help but to think about the work that I do because we really never know at what time and what place we may run into a catastrophic storm. I actually was flying into Miami International Airport the day before Irma hit and turned into chaos and a war zone in 24 hours. And it wasn't until a nice traveler, a fellow traveler who was also terror-stricken, reminded me who I am and what I do that I remembered, oh my God, yes I can. And it was the girls that I work with that reminded me that I too can get out of this situation. So this isn't just about creating a better world. It's that they are actually role models for the skills that we need today. Every one of us in this, not in just this room, but around the world. So I always start my presentation with a very simple question. Are there more men or are there more women on this planet? So if you think there is more males, please stand up. And if you've heard me speak before, you do not get to stand up or sit down. You must answer this accordingly. So I don't think I remember. So I see one person who actually believes there's more males on this planet. So this is where I get to speak and it really saddens me that only one person actually knows the real answer. There is actually more males on this planet. In fact, there is so many more males that if we created a country with just the extra males, it would be the 21st largest country on the planet the size of France. What is really sad is that when I first began to speak about this less than two years ago, it was 61 million more males on the planet and today it is 66 more males. We have increased five more million males in less than two years. So this is an extraordinary problem and in fact, it has never been this gender imbalanced ever. And the last time our planet was balanced was 1960. So how could this be? How could there be actually more males and how could all of us, except one gentleman, got this right? That's because we've killed more girls than the total number of people who died of all the wars of the 20th century. Another way to look at this is that we've killed more girls than the total people who've died of all the genocides of the 20th century. So if you don't believe me, let's just look at the top five genocides. This number equates to about 20 million. So how many girls have we killed? 100 million girls. So one of the worst genocide ever is the Holocaust and this is where I get to say that 17 times that have happened to girls and there's no one we can take to court because it was by their own parents. So this is what's happening and this is why this has become my life mission because now we have a new word in our lexicon, gender side and that is incredibly sad to me and if we're waiting for an evolution is just too slow. We need a revolution and we need to leapfrog this business now but it's not just because we now know and people who work in this field and all of you, you know this is a good worthy effort for the future but actually I'm here to tell you that they actually hold the skills that we need right now. So this is a World Bank report and they're infographic. This is just five country. If we invested in girls and these countries are Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India and Bangladesh, if we just invested in them, this is $500 billion, half a trillion dollars into the global economy. This is the power of girls. But why is it today more than ever because it's why we're sitting here today because violence is escalating and there's another caveat to this is that we also have the largest youth population ever. You see this 60% of Middle East greater than 66% of South Asia and just about majority of sub-Saharan Africa. There was only one developed country that follows this trend. Can you guess where that is? Loudly. Nobody wants to say it after that male and female business, huh? You don't want to get it wrong. It's United States of America. The millennials now outnumber in the workforce, political participation everywhere. So this is why this is an opportunity and why we should be at the forefront because the most powerful examples of girls who are empowered are in peace building. So when I started to look at this, I looked at the neuroscience of what's so special about empowered girls and what makes a hero? Well, we now know that Hollywood has made this film but I work with the real superheroes. I don't need a comic character and I don't need Hollywood to tell me what they look like. I see it all the time. We all know who Malala is and this is, she is the UN ambassador for human dignity. Her name is Nadia Murad and because of her and her very excellent attorney, Amal Khuni, now the UN will investigate ISIS war crimes. And here is my new superhero. She is seven years old, Banna. And you see, she just, they didn't get the memo, they couldn't do it. So they just go bold. This is her tweet to our president. Even in the United States, she's now become an icon, a symbol of peace. And this is actually Black Lives Matter. She's one of the protesters. So this is why I know this works because I've seen them everywhere. I don't have to even try that hard. These girls never got the memo, they couldn't do it. So they're at the front line of war and they're at the front line of violence because to them that is their greatest challenge. So what's for GGL? I tell people I'm not interested now of chum-chain projects and getting girls to school. We need a social revolution. So it is a movement to transform this insidious mindset that things girls are disposable human trash into a powerful force for change. And we do two things. The global mission is to show and scale the next generation of girls who are change makers and locally it's to empower them. But this word empower is quite interesting. We know we can empower girls but we don't even know what that looks like. And in fact, when we're talking about SDGs, the only indicator we get for girls empowerment is girls' education. So I went out and asked girls and young women that powerful generation called millennials if they are empowered. And we created the first ever empowerment survey to collect this data. And here is who we asked them. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe including United States and UK and France. So girls, millennial young women around the world. And here's what we learned. Here's what I learned. Actually that word empowerment doesn't exist in most languages. So what are we talking about when we say we're empowering girls and women? But here is what I learned. Empowerment, I call it the can do factor. It's going from I cannot to I can. And what does it look like? It looks like her. She's a young woman who I worked with when I worked for the secretary of health. She, that was when she won the Boston Marathon, the Chicago Marathon, New York City Marathon, London Marathon all in one year and got a silver medal at SOCHI. So we know what girls mean. I mean, you could just see it. This is the can do factor. What does empowerment really mean? I needed to know do they have agency and control of their lives? And this is complete control. And when we asked them how much control do you have of your education? 40, 54% said they have complete control. Daily activities, 48% relationship, 47% career, nearly one or a little over one third. Now this is a global tally. When I gave this presentation in Pakistan, it was interesting because actually it was 4% who actually had any say so about relationship. And when I gave this presentation in one bold young woman said, I want to know who that 4% is because she believed it was 100% zero control. So this is a data that we need to collect more of. So we're talking about going from I cannot to I can. When we ask them what caused that change, how did you go from I cannot to I can? And I just presented that most globally all we do is look at girls' education. So here are the factors, here are the top four factors of what caused that change. But here is where you might be surprised. Oh, that says value. That should give you a value. That value is actually 7%. What's contributed to family and friends, education was 17%. I have this memorized, so trust me, this is not fake news. Experience, I'll see there it is, 30%. Now the number one factor that contributed to what caused that change says value, that should be 46% was knowing who they are. It was self-awareness. So this SDG focus on getting girls to school is just simply not enough. That does not create empowered girls. We should not necessarily correlate the two together. That in a pyramid, simply because I wanted people to see the Maslow hierarchy of need. When I first gave this presentation, one of gentlemen who was sitting in the audience said, now are we talking about poor girls? And what happens if they can't, they don't know who they are. And I said, sir, that's the low aspiration of adults because girls, whether they're poor or not, they are striving to actualize who they truly are. So they are aspiring to their greatness. And it's us who have been holding them back. Now for those people, I know there's a lot of people here who come from faith practices. If you think that this is maybe exceptional to the Western part of the world, it's not. Because we had just as many people from other religion as well. So we also asked them what's the most important issue. And of course it was violence against them. And don't know why China shows first, but nevertheless, for India and Pakistan, for South Asia, it was rape and domestic violence. For Middle East, it was war, child marriage, sexual harassment. For Sub-Saharan Africa, it was domestic violence. And for China, it was sexism. And for the developed countries, they also saw violence against women as a huge problem and it was sexism. So the rest of the results are on 4ggl.org. I highly encourage you to go see it. So Thomas Merton said, the root of all war is fear. And I say empowerment is fear transformed. So what we did was to see what traits do we need in this fear-mongering, terror-prone world. And what better to ask than ask the girls who are facing the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. Syrian girls and young women. And so that's what we did. That was the next place we went to. And it spanned in 20 countries around the globe, mostly Middle East, but also UK and European countries and United States. And the same thing, we asked the same question. We asked them, what caused the change? How did you go from I cannot to I can? And with this group, it was even larger. Nearly three quarters of them said self-awareness. 17% was from positive experience and 9% was actually from negative experience that caused the change. Now this is what was so extraordinary and these are the skills that are remembered at Miami International Airport. Here are the skills you must have when you are stricken with fear. Do you believe change is possible? Resoundingly, these girls all said yes. Even after only knowing war and violence, their whole life, they believe change is possible. Can you make changes now? 45% said yes, 32% said no. But here is where the mindset is so important. Look at the answers. It's exactly the same, but it's how you look at it. So the people who said yes, said yes I can because I could increase skills and I can graduate. The same answer said no I can, I need to graduate and I need skills. So the second skills you should have is aspiration. They're actively working to develop skills and expertise. So one third of them, which is what I try to highlight but it's not showing right, is they actually specifically without any coursing or even putting these as an indicator and I actually have the young woman who analyzed this data in the audience and she could vouch for this, that one third of them actually specifically named peace building. They are actively pursuing to be agents of peace. We also ask them, do you have help and support? Do you have a mentor? And 53% said yes, 33% no. So again, you can go to 4ggl.org and see the rest of the survey. So here's where I ask you to join us. Be part of a social revolution. We definitely do not have time to be wasting hair. It is truly peace now or never because this escalation of gender imbalance, I mean, next year I come here to speak, it'll be another 40 million more men and we just can't have this. Video please. Thank you, Jim. That was certainly inspiring. Second speaker is Saba Ismail who is a feminist and peace activist working for the empowerment of young women. Saba co-founded Aware Girls with her sister when she was 15 years old believing that change must come through the younger generation. Saba was awarded the Sharok Prize for conflict prevention and recognition of her work for peace, nonviolence and conflict prevention in Pakistan. Her bravery and activism was acknowledged by Foreign Policy Magazine which honored her as one of the 100 leading global thinkers of 2013. She represents Asia and the World Youth Movement for Democracy and was appointed last year as an advisor to the UN on youth, peace and security. Please welcome Saba Ismail. Thank you so much, Kim. And thank you so much, Malini, for inviting me here to speak with all of you. And thank you so much, Jin, for such an inspiring talk. First of all, I would like to congratulate everyone in this room on International Day of the Girl. Today is our day. Today is the day of young girls to celebrate the achievements of young women and girls. And today I'm going to share some stories and also the inspiration of how I'm inspired to work, but also about my she-dos as well. In my life, I have met many amazing young women and girls who have inspired me and who have changed my life. But one of them is Gulale Ismail. Not because she is my sister and that I have to mention her name, but and that I have to praise, but because of her courage to speak out and to defy extremism in the context of violence and armed conflict. Last week she was awarded Annapolis Cava Award. While accepting this award, she said that I accept this award because I am refusing to be silenced by adversity, violence and extremism. But this is not the first time that both of us has ever refused to be silenced because when I was 12 and going to school, one of my cousin who is almost of my age, one day she was told that she cannot go to school anymore because she's getting married to a man who is 15 years older than her. The dreams were shattered and I was shocked. The girl who wanted to become a pilot, she had to drop out of her school without her will. And this was the time that I realized that education, which should be a basic human right, is actually a privilege in my country. And not every girl has that privilege because the rest of the girls have to follow the norms of the society. And that actually led to the establishment of aware girls. Aware girls is led by young women and girls and it aspires other young women and girls so that they can have equal access to education, employment, to sports, social services and decision making. Aware girls is also working to promote peace and countering and preventing violent religious extremism in Pakistan. We are working to create a conducive environment where there is no space for violent ideologies and which is an environment which is conducive for peace building and for coexistence and nonviolence. Well, Aware Girls is the only young women led organization in the northwest of Pakistan. In the Khabar Pukhtun Hooperans of Pakistan and we are also working in the federally administered tribal areas in the FATA areas of Pakistan which is a very unusual happening. Well, we are working to challenge the extremist narrative. We are dissuading young people to be recruited by the militant groups in a country which is ranked number four in the Global Terrorism Index Report 2016 and through the work of Aware Girls, we are breaking the cultural, the patriarchal and social norms and values every day. Coming from the northwest of Pakistan, I have lived the reality of violent extremism and conflict but I wanted to do something to change that. So in 2009, from platform of Aware Girls, I established a group called Youth Peace Network which aims to counter and prevent extremism which is a very unique network to build peace and harmony by engaging young people, including young women and girls as peace activists, by empowering them and by creating environment where they can engage in the civic and the political processes, by imparting them the skills of nonviolent conflict resolution, tolerance, pluralism, enabling them to promote alternative narratives of nonviolence. We are engaging both young women and girls and young men and we shape our approaches accordingly because we experience firsthand the differentiated impact conflict has on young women and men and also the research has shown that gender equal societies are more resilient to violence and conflict. Youth Peace Network, we are also using different strategies like peer-to-peer education in which young people reach out to other young people who are very much vulnerable to be recruited by the militant groups. But we are also using different strategies. We have created digital stories and they're available online on our channel. We have written blogs, media campaigns, peace campaigns in the community. They include sports events, study circles with other young people, workshops, walks, like different strategies to promote the values of peace and nonviolence. We are reconstructing the bonds in the community that has been destroyed by the militant groups and we are strengthening the social fabric of different, by actually bringing together people of different faiths, different cultures and different sects, by bringing them together through interfaith and intercultural dialogues through which they understand each other but also through different intercultural exchanges programs like visiting to a mosque or to Gurdwara which is sick place but also to Hindu temples and also to churches. We are through these strategies, we are connecting communities through music, through arts, through poetry, for peace because collectively all these narratives built the values of tolerance, pluralism but it also actually ultimately takes away the oxygen from the extremist groups and narratives. We have also reclaimed spaces from the militant groups in different parts of the country and different places which were first the headquarters of the Taliban, you need the Taliban regime but we have converted them into peace institutes. A young girl from Youth Peace Network shared that we the young girls have to stand up, join hands and assert ourselves more meaningfully by ending conflicts and bringing sustaining peace. Well, in 2009 Youth Peace Network started only with 30 young people but now in 2017 we have more than 20 active groups not only in Pakistan but also in Afghanistan. They are reaching out to more than 3,000 young people annually because we believe that the millions of young people out there who are not buying the militant agenda are a huge resource for us and we have to invest in them. In 2016 a young girl started another initiative and we set up a PAK Afghan Women Peace Network which is a network of women and girls peace builders from Pakistan and Afghanistan working towards countering and preventing violent radicalization. The network is bringing together women peace builders from both these countries to strategize together this year lessons learned towards lasting peace in the region. The young women and girls are for where girls are investing in the communities for countering and preventing violent extremism and we are also dealing the issue with a very holistic approach because we are aware that working for peace is not only about countering or preventing violent extremism but it is also about ensuring policies and also have these actual, the policies which ensure inclusion, which ensure pluralism, social cohesion, protection of the freedom of the citizens and women empowerment. So CVE or PDE is just a very small part of this bigger, of this bigger solution. And we are fighting the extremist groups and ideologies also by addressing the vacuums which provides even more fertile ground to the extremist groups and extremist narratives by empowering young women and girls in the political processes and strengthening the governance structures in the Northwest of Pakistan. As we know that the weak governance structures, they're also one of the factors that give more spaces to the militant groups and young women are deliberately excluded from political participation in Pakistan through formal written agreements between the extreme religious groups and the political parties and also women polling stations being attacked and torched. Therefore, we are using different strategies for effecting participation of young women and girls as young women and girls are the best people to know and resolve not only their solutions and their issues but also their communities, but also like in their communities as well. They do have the solutions. In some parts of the Kheber Pughtunhwa such as Mardan and Savabi, we have analyzed the reasons for low participation of women in the political processes through a survey. And actually that survey showed that more than 80% of women never participated in any political campaigns, any assemblies or they ever voted. And while we were working in those communities and those rural communities in 2015, 10 women won local elections after they participated in our training program. Well, these 10 women changed the history of those villages because for the first time ever in the history of those rural communities, women were running for elections and they were winning those elections. These young women when got trained, they have helped other young women getting their national identity cards, which is actually a requirement if someone wants to vote, but also encourage them to vote in the local and into the, into the national and local elections. And they have also informed other women in their communities about their basic human rights but also to exercise them. We have also strengthened the leadership skills of elected women counselors, enabling them to participate effectively in the local government structure and actually to effectively advocate for peace processes. We also brought together young women and elected young women on one platform that we call Women Democracy Network. We have established this first ever democracy network in the Kheber-Burhtengwal to share the experiences but also to strategize for effective participation of women and girls. Another strategy that we have used is to sensitize men on this issue and we have worked with more than 5,000 men in those local communities to change their attitudes towards women and girls participation. Because for women's participation one, it's very, to increase this change in the conservative male attitude is very important and it's very necessary because in many of these communities, what happens is that men are the one who prevent women and girls from joining any political party or even campaigning, voting and they also force them to vote for a specific political party. Well, I believe that when we invest in girls and young women and when we empower women and when we invest in political stability, we are taking away the oxygen from the violent extremist groups. We have also established more than seven participatory governance structures which are known as citizens committees in the northwest of Pakistan but also in the tribal areas which actually advocate for young women's political participation in the peace processes and they provide a bridge of accountability between the citizens and between the elected officials and they also provide a means whereby women hold their candidates accountable for the promises that were made in the previous elections but they also help them to articulate demands in the next any upcoming elections. And through these different diverse strategies, we are effectively working to strengthen young women and girls' participation in the peace processes and as we know that when women are also included in the peacekeeping processes, there is a 35% increase that the agreement will last for more than 15 years. We have also started a very unique initiative, another initiative that's where girls sit in open spaces and open air spaces but that's not a common sight in the northwest of Pakistan and that initiative is called Let's Talk Politics. To promote this narrative among young women and girls that politics belongs to women and girls as well. Actually, everyone belongs to politics. So strengthening these governance structures through effective participation is, I believe that it's a very vital step towards peaceful society. Let me also share that, yes, that these women and girls, they are unstoppable force for social change and development and sustainable peace. I believe in the power of girls to change their own lives and of their communities. Girls are champions of equality and their rights matter. Their dreams matter, their voices in the peace processes matter. There are no exceptions to that. Besides working at the grassroots level, what awareness has done at the global level, we have pushed the global boundaries and awareness is the only organization from Pakistan who advocated for the United Nations Security Council resolution two to five zero on youth peace and security which was unanimously passed in December on 9th of December, 2015. And we are advocating in the UN and also in Pakistan for active and meaningful participation of young women in the implementation of this resolution. While working with girls, what I have learned that incredible things happen when young girls speak. I have learned that voices are more powerful than weapons. If wars and conflicts have to be prevented, we need more voices and more voices of young women and girls who don't need weapons. I have actually a example of another hero from Aware Girls and Jen also mentioned about her. She is the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Malala Yusufzai. Before she was shot almost 60 years ago, she attended our training program and she is a true example of the change that Aware Girls want to bring in the society and in Pakistan. She spoke up, she refused to be silenced and she raised her voice against extremists. And that's, I think today is also when just five years ago she was shot because she was speaking for the girls' right to education and only two days back she attended her first lecture at Oxford. Speaking up for girls' rights and peace has been a very fascinating journey because one that I have met so many amazing women and there are so many amazing women and girls which I am because of the time constraints, I'm not able to share their amazing stories and their powerful testimonies, but for me as well it has been a very, as I said, a very journey that I have learned so much but it also a journey that I have to pay a cost for this journey as well in terms of life-threatening situations, in terms of my family being attacked, in terms of being not safe in my own country but also the attack which continued outside of Pakistan as well. But these attacks, these threats strengthened my commitments for peace. And I never stopped even a single time just because of these threats and attacks because I always kept in mind this one quote also from Bacha Khan who is also known as the frontier Gandhi and he led nonviolent movement when Pakistan was colonized at that time here, but his quote is that it isn't enough to talk about peace, one must believe in it and it also is not enough to believe in it, one must work at it. And that actually kept me going and going and to continue my work for peace in the world. Well, as I will leave you all with some final thoughts and as you know that bigger discoveries in the world have always started by asking very simple questions and I do have very simple questions from all of you and as you know that when Newton asked this very simple question that why Apple fell on the ground and why it's not going up, it led to the discovery of the law and gravity. So I do have these very simple questions and I encourage you as well to start asking very simple questions. Why in 2017 there are, we, when Jim talked about these all, so many millions of girls being just killed and being swept away. And also why there are millions of women and girls who are forced to displace because of violence and extremism because today while we are talking about, while we are talking, we know that there are millions of camps who are being even more filling with displaced women and girls. They are becoming home to many millions women and girls. And also why there are few young women and girls in the decision-making processes? Why we are still asking and why we have to, still in 2017, we have to ask for more participation of women in all these processes. Why it's not happening? I think these are very, very simple questions and I encourage you and I believe that these questions, the answers to these questions will lead us to much bigger discoveries than the gravitational forces as well. Thank you. Sabah, and I'd like to start where you ended. You talked about some important stories of engaging girls' voices in Pakistan and elsewhere. And as you say, yet there are very few girls' voices in decision-making processes. So how do we more actively engage girls' voices in the very programs and policies that affect them? Jin, let's start with you. Oh, I thought you were going to start. I'm following up from her. I see, how can we engage more? More actively at the local, national, international level, we need to engage girls' voices if we're looking at empowerment. How do we better do that? Well, at every level. At every level. Yes, you can find girls and bring them to your program. Have them be part of your advisory board. You know, Scott, I heard Christian Nagard talk about who is the chief of IMF and she said that she had a list. She had a list of women leaders that she could tell and give to CEOs when they said, you know, we just can't find credible women who could serve on the board. So she just had this list. Kind of like the binder that Mitt Romney carried. Names of women carry names of girls. They are everywhere. And if you need them, come find me. I can help you find girls anywhere in every country. Just carry them, put them as part of your program in developing your program from beginning to end. They need to be intimately participating in every stage of the program. Thank you, Saba. Yeah, so thank you so much, Jin, for saying that yes, there are women. They need to be shown and they need to be more meaningful participation of women and more active. And I think that in terms of that, that the way I see that they can be engaged also, the way the investment in peace-building processes is happening, I think that also needs to change to make sure that young women and girls are able to participate in that. And when we see investment in local peace-building initiatives and these commitments, we have to also reduce the militarized approaches for bringing peace. This will also change the way it is. And because in the name of counter-terrorism and militancy, the world has already spent a lot of money and financial resources on more guns and more weapons and more missiles. But the amount of money and the resources that is spent on each of these instruments, you know, of these militarized approaches, it is, I believe this is injustice to every woman and girl who wants to go to school. She's not able to go. It is injustice to every kid who is hungry but is not fed. But also it is injustice to every girl who wants to be the change, you know, who wants to be the leader of the society but she's portrayed as or she's seen as only the passive victim of this war and conflicts. And she's only seen to be as someone who is victimized and not someone who can actually participate in all these processes. And I will actually share some figures by Stella Elworthy who is the co-founder of Peace Direct and she has recently launched her book which is called Business Plan for Peace. And in that she has shared that the armed conflict are causes a lot of massive economic losses every year but when we see to the peace-building and to the peace-keeping, they are very grossly underfunded. And the spending in 2015 on peace-building and peace-keeping together represented just 2% of the economic losses which was caused by the conflict. But if you look at the cost of scaling up the most effective systems to prevent war over a period of only 10 years that would only cost under two billion. And to give you an example with the currently the world is spending $9 billion on ice creams. And I'm not against ice cream. I really like ice cream but what I would like to have is that every person in this world eat ice cream in a very peaceful society and enjoy ice cream. That's a great vision. Eating ice cream peacefully. So I have one more question and I'm gonna open it up to the audience for your questions. So please be thinking of them. So Gin, you mentioned the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals as we know the extraordinary 17 interconnected development goals by the year 2030. And of course, goal five is about achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. It's so much more than education. But we often think of empowerment as education which is step one. So could you talk a little bit about the other kinds of empowerment? You talked about the importance of self-awareness. Speak about the other kinds of empowerment that we need to be working on beyond education. Sure, I love talking about the SDG because usually it's not an audience like this. I speak at universities and many, especially in the United States, they have no idea what SDG is. You know, it's like LOL. They're trying to figure out, hmm, do we have an emoji for that? And they're trying to think about SDG. I say, what does that stand for? So the field that I've lived and worked my whole life is gender equality and women's empowerment. And I've learned that we're spending so much time counting, counting, piddly numbers of how many women in Parliament are in Congress. How many girls are going to school? And we really know nothing about what empowers women, what is women's empowerment. So I think in order to leapfrog, this is why it's a social revolution, to this cause is to really learn more until women and girls are empowered. We are not going to, the numbers are just increasing too slowly. So we really need to gather more data about what empowers women. Are women and girls empowered? And this is why I uniquely and strategically focus on this group, millennials. I mean, if they are the most studied and surveyed generation ever, we know everything about their behavior and because they usually live online, it's very easy to track. So I'm doing the exact same thing. Do they have control over their lives? And it is, if we can do that, and if marketers, technology, social media can do it, why aren't we peace builders doing that? Why aren't we tracking what they're doing? Do they have control over their lives? And so that's been my goal. Great, Zafa. Yeah, so answering to the SDGs, I think that one is achieving overall the gender equality is very important to achieve all the SDGs. And SDGs are very much interconnected to each other. And I think that the world should ever forget about achieving the SDGs and about the sustainable development agenda if women and girls who are like almost half of the population of the world, if they're not included in that processes. Sorry, I'm a little sensitive about the... A little bit. 50%. So they're little, they're even less. So even less, but if they are not, but my point is that the women and girls, if they're not included in these processes, no one is going to achieve. We are not going to achieve this agenda. And also, looking at when you mentioned at the point of education, I think one, and I mentioned in the very start of the story, is also that education is very important. But I think that we can start also from educating young women and young girls. Like in Pakistan, actually 47% of children between the age of five and 16, they're out of school, and out of them, girls are actually 53% of them are girls who are out of school. And the province I come from, from the north-west of Pakistan and the tribal areas, which are most hit by the conflict. And where women and children are making at least 70% of the displaced population, insufficient arrangements are made for girls to get any opportunity to even have the initial level of education, like basic education. And why? Because again, to the point of investments that some countries think that investments and weapons is more necessary than building schools or building roads to the schools or having more teachers in these schools. And also, Malala Yusuf's day once said that to end education crisis in the world and to ensure that all children get some quality education, the world need extra $39 billion and will spending on education. This figure may seem very huge to some of you, but let me just tell you again, it's not a very big amount because if we cut down the military spending by eight days, we're able to get every kid in the world to go to school and have a complete their basic education, especially young women and girls who are able to unleash their economic potential, who are in these panels, who are able to have this education to make better change, make their communities change and have healthy lives. Thank you. So I'm going to turn it to the audience. I realize there's a lot of expertise here. So if you actually have a suggestion or a specific program that's been affected briefly, we only have a few minutes for questions. So please raise your hand and Mike will come to you. Yes, sir. Just wait if you could bring the mic. My name is Tatsushi Arai. School for International Training, I have been a student of Afghanistan. Could you put the mic close to your mouth so we could hear you? Tatsushi Arai, School for International Training, I've been a student of Afghanistan, Pakistan for some time and I really admire both of the presentations, but my question goes to Sabah about how you encourage those girls or women who face tremendous persecutions and traumatized. Do you encourage them to stand up once again to face all the violence or how do you actually cope with the psychological effects because it's a tremendous struggle you're engaged in? Are we taking a few questions together and then answering? Is there another question now? Yes, ma'am. We'll take, we'll group a couple. Okay. Do you want to pass the mic down? Thank you to both of you. My question is about maybe some of the challenges that happen when girls do try to participate or are trying to go to school. For example, jeering of maybe some male classmates when they're speaking up in class and just as an anecdote or an example of this or perhaps harassment by male teachers, which happens or girls being forced out of school if they become pregnant and not being allowed back in. So just curious, like both of your work, if you're seeing things like that and how you're handling it, these are nuanced issues, but just some of those nuances, how you're trying to approach those and improve them. Thank you. Okay, okay, one more question right there. Hi, I thank you all for your amazing presentations. My name is Yvonne, I'm from Kenya and my question is directed to Jean. Okay, as a child and later I utilitated my country, I was interested in issues, peace, building and security because when I was in high school, I started working on the summit through modern United Nations, then later pursued it academically. And as a result of my passion, I got the opportunity to travel with my government once in a while as a young woman, which was very rare to meetings, for instance in EGAD to address issues of al-Shabaab, but as I grew older, I realized that girls might have the opportunity to participate in informal peace processes, but when it gets to the formal peace processes, they don't have mentorship, which becomes a critical issue for me because I've tried to write to so many, for instance, women leaders in the African context who are on peace and security, and they're few and very busy and they cannot give me, for instance, the mentorship that I have. Well, now I'm lucky to be part of fellowship programs that help me, but do you have a strategy or any best practice that girls can really be mentored into working in the field of peace and security, especially at the very formal top level? Thank you. Great, thank you for your good questions. We have three questions, how you encourage women who face persecution, challenges when girls do go to school about harassment and mentoring in peace and security programs at the national level. Who would like to start? I can go first, and to the first question of coping up with the trauma, there is a lot of trauma in generally in a place which is so much, there is a lot of violence and armed conflict, but the strategy that we are using is that we have another program which is trauma healing of women and girls, and in which we have actually worked with some local counselors to teach them some of the methodologies and to train them that how they can work in their own communities to help other girls to heal and to cope up with this trauma. We have worked with some teachers also in our community to give them those skills that how they can use different local methodologies and how they can work with other girls who have been affected by the armed conflict. And as there are members of the Youth Peace Network, they're girls, we're working with girls, and we are aware that working on peace is a very risky job in the north-east of Pakistan. So we have also developed a security policy for our organization when my family was also attacked and we had to move our offices many times. So we have developed a partnership with some of the law enforcement institutions in order to kind of ensure that the people who are engaged in our programs, they're also secured and sometimes we'll, what we are using different like mitigation strategies, like we never share on our social media about any activity in programs that are happening on the ground. We will share, for example, after a week or after two weeks that, okay, this program happened. So like using different strategies, keeping changing some of the names while we share some of the stories. So to make sure that they are not at risk and their lives are not at risk because of some of the programs. To the other question, which was and harass the challenges that girls face while they go to school. And as it has been mentioned, that harassment is one of the issue, yes, it is. And there is another area in the Kheber-Bukhton-Khoi it's called Buneer and while we were working there, there are many parents who wanted their girls to go to school and usually, because usually there is also this perception that parents do not want their girls to go, do you know, to send to schools. And these parents were no, there are, the problem is that the school is so far and the girls face harassment when they go out of their homes that we have to see that what is priority for us, whether it's the safety of these girls or whether it's their education. And that's why parents then have to choose among one of these things and they chose for their girls to be safe and that's why not to go to school. And this is, so this is a very challenge that came up but what we actually did was there are now, in 2011 there were laws in Pakistan, they passed on anti-sexual harassment at work places and in public spaces and what we have done is we actually work in communities but also with girls, with young girls who are in eighth, ninth and tenth grade to educate them about this law and that what the law says we have also worked with some of the educational institutes to ensure that the anti-sexual harassment committees are there and they are working and they are being effective there and people know that this law exists and we have also telling girls about that how they can report any incidences even to the local police stations or two so that they know that this is something that happens but also what are the mechanisms to cope up with these issues. So I'll answer the question about mentoring because that is probably my favorite topic besides from girls. I'm the product of a mentor, of amazing mentoring. When I was born, I was actually born in one of the poorest countries and in fact the GDP of my birth country was less than Uganda when I was born and today it's South Korea. In my lifetime, I've been able to see amazing transformation of my birth country. What's even more amazing is that when my mother was born, South Korea was getting foreign aid from North Korea. So we do believe yes we can. I am actually standing on shoulders of women that made this possible. So I'm a huge proponent of finding mentor and in fact from working for the U.S. government I went directly to a huge organization, an institution, a hundred year old institution that has perfected girls leadership development and it's called Girl Scouts. So I work with 2.3 million girls in United States and 10 million girls around the world and the year that I joined to develop their global department, 93% of women in Congress were former Girl Scouts. So mentoring we know works and if you want to know more because I see a huge in-sign in front of me, please find me after this talk. As Jin says, we need to end this session and we will be here afterwards if you have further questions. I think it's so important that AFP and USIP included this topic in this conference agenda. Thank you, thank you, to acknowledge the courage and the commitment of both Sabah and Jin for all you're doing to bring this issue to all of our awareness and thank you for speaking today. Please join me in thanking them. I'd like to turn it back to Nancy Lindborg from USIP. What a great day. Really all I want to do is come back to thank everybody for joining this important day. Thank everybody who was a panelist, who asked a question, who joined us today, the moderators, the speakers, attendees for sharing your energy, your ideas. I think it's a lot of practical strategies and engaging in conversation that is a very important one to have right now as we collectively seek to look, how do we build peace? How do we prevent conflict and end violence? This is, as we said this morning, the sixth year. I think it's a more important moment than ever before that we've come together for these conferences. I couldn't be more pleased to be able to partner with the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Melanie will tell you all about what's to come, but congratulations on a wonderful first day, a very dynamic day, and I look forward to hearing how the rest of the conference goes. Thank you for joining us here at USIP. At the end of every Passover Seder, we say next year in Jerusalem, I'd like to say next year at 2301 Constitution Avenue. So thank you, Nancy, again, for your partnership. Thank you all, and I can't thank our panel enough. This was such, I feel we had one kind of inspiration at the beginning of the day and a very different kind of inspiration at the end of the day. And somehow those two are joining up in very powerful ways. So I feel inspired by your story and I know that everyone in this room joins me in offering our help to you in this mission to empower girls. So thank you. So as we come to the end of our first day, just a couple of reminders. The first is the Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium, candidate surveys. We take learning and information and data seriously. If you would please fill those out and leave them before you leave, we'd be very appreciative. Second, if any of you are not staying for the next two days but have a hard copy program, if you could please leave that in the front that will help us tomorrow for the people who are coming tomorrow who didn't have a program. If you are coming tomorrow and you have a program, keep it, because we don't have extras to give tomorrow. Moving on to happier things. Tomorrow, there will be a happy hour from six o'clock to 7.30. We invite all of you, even if you aren't at the conference tomorrow, at the Mission Restaurant in Dupont Circle. It's jointly sponsored by USIP and the Nonviolent Social Movement Group within USIP and by Peace Direct. So please, we welcome you there. I just leave you with this comment which is one of our participants today said, when I come here, I feel like it's a family reunion. And so I want to thank this family of peace builders. I feel I see Chick Donbuck sitting here at the back that we stretch through most of AFP's history and to say how privileged I feel to be part of this family and to say thank you and welcome to all of you tomorrow and that I hope all of you will bring the spirit of peace and joy with you for the rest of the week. Thank you.