 I think we're about to start the final stretch of today's events. My name is Georgia Holmer. I advise on counterterrorism and CBE policy at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and based at the secretariat in Vienna. But I'm also formerly the director of CBE here at USIP, so I am Leanne Erberg's predecessor. And I have to say how wonderful it is to be back here, back in this building, back in this community. This is a place that you never really leave, and it's a place that never really leaves you. So it's very special for me to be back here in Washington and very special to be back here at the Institute of Peace. We have a very wonderful panel lined up this afternoon that's going to focus on the issue of disengagement from violent groups. And I can tell you from my perch at the OSCE that this is a topic that has singularly seized the international community, mostly in the context of dealing with returning foreign fighters and their families. I think we're going to talk about it a little bit more broadly. We have some brilliant researchers here with us today that are going to talk about it in the context of the conflict in Iraq and Syria. But we'd like to talk more broadly about some of their trends and research that have to do with disengagement from violence and violent groups. As many of you know, some of the issues that are being faced with dealing with the returnees have to do with the very specific needs and concerns surrounding children. It has to do with the very specific experience of having been exposed to trauma in a conflict zone. It has to do with the issues surrounding the capacity of the criminal justice sector to respond to the needs and issues that these returning groups face. And it also has to do with the details around what happens in the non-custodial or post-prison environment when individuals need to be reintegrated back into the communities, some of these are the communities in which they radicalized in the first place. So there's a whole host of issues we hope to touch on in the next hour. And we're going to start with some opening remarks from our three panelists. But let me start by introducing them to you and tell you a little bit about their backgrounds. So to my immediate left, we have Dr. David Mallett, who is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He previously served as the Director of Security Policy Studies at George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. And he is the author of Foreign Fighters, Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts, which was published in 2013, if I'm not correct. Next to him, we have Dr. Shiraz Mayer, who is the Director of the International Center on the Study of Radicalization at King's College London. He also leads the Center's research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and is also an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. And last but not least, we have Dr. Lisa Scherich, who is a research fellow for the Toda Peace Institute, where she directs the Institute's Social Media and Peace Building Program. Lisa, many of you know her as a peace builder. She is also on the International Review Panel of G-Surf. And in 2018, she published a book on the ecology of violent extremism, which very much integrates a peace building lens into the topic of addressing that form of violence. So, we're gonna start with David here. And I'm gonna open up the question of asking, what are the current trends and research that we're seeing around disengagement from violent groups? And how would you characterize what's happening in that space? Thank you, Georgia. I guess this is gonna be the panel of slides. So we'll navigate those. I think a picture is worth 1,000 words, so I can cut down on a lot of words by just showing you a couple of quick graphics. Is it, or not? Green button, other green button. Okay, that's, there we go. So just when we look at, I'll put this back for one second. When we look at the question of FTFs and returnees, oftentimes it's presented as sort of a binary question of are returnees a threat and perhaps can the threat be mitigated by not permitting their return? One question that I was interested, I worked in with Rachel Hayes and I published a study actually that came out last year that looked at the question of returning FTFs and the question of how long are they a threat? And what do we know about what they do when they return? And just really quickly, looking at a couple of hundred cases, we found that the average returnee who does become involved in domestic extremism, attack or attempted attack does so within approximately six months of returning less than that. There are a few outliers beyond that, but when we're going to focus on, this is just the grass scatter plot looking at the time, you can see clusters down at the bottom and they're really between 1980 at one end and 2016 at the other end, there hasn't been any variation. The different conflicts Afghanistan, Syria haven't really mattered in that impact, so there's nothing changing in that regard. The lag time between returning and some sort of extremist action is, for most of them, well under a year. So what this basically means is that when we are concerned about security or we're concerned about directing reintegration resources, there's this critical window within the first few months that we should focus our attention on rather than perhaps a long term question of reintegration beyond that. And one thing I should note that's relevant to current debates is that prison hasn't been a factor because if somebody is going to engage in a terrorist plot, they do so within such a short amount of time that they've not gone to prison. So we haven't seen people coming out and we haven't seen attacks plots or attacks delayed by prison sentences at this point. And I also wanted to show very quickly a project I'm working on with Chelsea Damon who's at American University and Janine DeRoy-Venzweiderwein who's at University of Leiden for the very first time. Looking at the question of what happens to those who don't return and we were able to find 54, what we're calling career foreign fighters. And it turns out that they are on an average of two and a half conflicts, about a third of them, or a quarter of them were active previously and about a third of them are active when they return. We broke them down, we're looking at career progression, we sort of broke them down between top level, executive, mid level, and then operational foot soldiers. And those who are in the leadership positions have been in slightly more conflicts, something like 2.8 versus 2.2. But what we're finding is that in terms of their prior experience, it's actually the mid-level operatives who were active in domestic extremism first. We tend to focus on the impact of being a foreign fighter on what you do as a domestic extremist afterwards, but it looks like there may actually be some experience gained at home. It's actually important for what they do in the field, whether they're a leader or not, doesn't seem to matter much in terms of how active they are when they return. If you look at the conflicts, this has been the case. A lot of people went to Afghanistan first, Bosnia, I mean, obviously those were longer ago, so that makes sense. We're seeing Syria not so much as yet as a first-time destination, but it's a place that people have gone afterwards as foreign fighters. And then finally, just looking at career progression with three being the foot soldiers and one being the leaders, I think the most important finding for us is that most of the people who come in as foot soldiers don't stay at that level. They tend to progress into leadership. So by having individuals who don't return home, you're actually looking at the possibility of them impacting other conflicts, gaining more experience becoming in leadership positions later on. So within that context, I'll just wind it back. Within that context, when we look at trends, we're finding that people who have been extremists abroad are basically participating at the same sort of rate that they have been in the past. This could change because we have new policies in relation to Syria. But actually recidivism happens at a lower level than it does for domestic terrorists or common criminals. And part of the reason for that more work needs to be done on this might be the battlefield experiences of foreign fighters. Many of them report being very disillusioned. We're seeing high incidences of PTSD, which were not reported in the past. And so these need to be taken into consideration when we're crafting policies to address reintegration. I'll just follow up very quickly on that and build on that with a few remarks, which is I think if we're looking at the field and where academics who look at this issue from all sides of the perspective are agreed upon really is that we're repeating a lot of the mistakes that we've made in the past. We have this very high number of detainees right now, former ISIS fighters who are held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, principally in northeastern Syria. And there isn't any kind of really well-conceived plan at the moment by a number of countries about what should be done. Lots of people have posed different ideas. And I think what's particularly interesting is there's a huge disconnect right now between politicians across the world who are quite happy to say we've defeated ISIS. We heard that earlier today as well. And that was, of course, the headline statement, which does speak to the loss of the territorial dimension of this group but doesn't speak to its other aspects of its identity, which is that it remains an insurgency that is active in parts of Syria and Iraq. And, of course, it remains a potent terrorist organization as well, which again retains a capacity and capability to act both regionally but also internationally as well. And what's particularly striking now is we are essentially repeating many of the errors that were made in Iraq after 2003, where we gathered lots of really serious guides from Al-Qaeda and put them together in Camp Buka and then did nothing about it and later released these individuals who returned more or less immediately to their activities and went on to create ISIS. And so there's some really interesting research which shows and has been built upon interviews of people who were held in Camp Buka who at some point said, you know, it was really difficult for us all to get together on the outside. But once we were in prison, the Americans brought us together, essentially. Right? We created the spaces in which these individuals were able to socialize, to attack plan. And actually really building on David's point here is really important. There is no off-ramp, right? You are creating avenues for people to say, you know, I'm 24, I'm 25. I have to be a career terrorist at this point, a career foreign fighter. And as that slide showed, that was really interesting. There were numbers of people you could see who arrived into Syria, who were in leadership positions, precisely because they had fought in other theaters before. And a lot of the work we did at ICSR back in London was actually looking at this idea of what's your sort of progression if you are a foreign fighter arriving into theater in 2013, 2014. For example, well, firstly, you are most likely to stick within your linguistic cluster, right? So if you're an English speaker from the UK, you're hung out with English speakers. If you were a French speaker, you hung out with French speakers and so on and so forth. And given that a lot of these individuals were arriving with no combat experience, they occupied lower level, foot soldier, front line kind of positions. But the ones who broke free of those strictures were individuals who had precisely that kind of prior combat experience. They came in knowing what to do. They generally had learned the language as well, were able to speak Arabic and therefore were able to progress and get on through the movement. So we're seeing a very clear repeat of this. And whilst there's a lot of divergence within the academic community in terms of how we might best tackle this, I think everyone's agreed on the fact that what's being done right now is a repetition of the failures of the past. And so we're kind of heading, I think, in this rather slow motion disaster to what we've seen previously occur. I'm a happy note, I'll pass over to my colleague. So if you don't mind, if you could take us maybe outside of the ISIS context and especially since we're talking about repeating mistakes and talk about maybe where we could learn from other contexts. Okay, I'll do that, but I'm gonna start actually in Iraq pre-ISIS. And that was in 2006, I wanna tell two stories, one in Iraq, one Afghanistan. In 2006, I worked with Iraqi peace-building organizations who had a methodology that I think prevented their own young people from joining ISIS later. And their methodology was this, they would go into a community and it was very much participatory action research where the community would determine its development priorities, whether it wanted education, water, healthcare, et cetera. And then the community would really do the hard work of building cross boundary relationships between Sunni Shia, between Kurdish and Arab. And as the community stitched that together, they were taking conflict resolution courses and really starting to manage and lead their own community in a governing way that was inclusive of all the different stakeholders in that community. And what they later found is these communities with this governance structure did not have young people joining ISIS. So that's the first story. The second story is from Afghanistan. From 2009 to 2012, I was working in Kabul with a variety of different Afghan peace-building organizations and these people had had two decades of work mediating land conflicts, water conflicts within tribal regions. So they brought a lot of experience to the table. And they were very critical of the DDR model that was being used by ISAF at that point, which involved some small payments to entice people to leave the Taliban and reintegrate into their communities. And what Afghan peace-builders were saying and the model that they were working on was, and I was part of the training team for teaching all of these leaders how to do mediation about local grievances. So as people were leaving the Taliban, they were actually being part of a community gathering where there was a trained mediator, representatives from the government, different tribal groups, and they were trying to deal with the local drivers and grievances that were fueling why people were entering the Taliban in the first place because the same Afghan peace-building organizations had done extensive research on why fence sitters were joining the Taliban. If they were sitting in between government and Taliban, why were they joining the Taliban? And the main theories of change by the international donors at that point was extremist religion and unemployment. So you saw most of the money being channeled to counter-narratives, religious education, and employment generation. But what they found is those were not the main drivers of people joining the Taliban. The main drivers were very local grievances having to do with corruption and governance, often having a tribal ethnic dimension because many of us know about the government Taliban conflict but underneath that there is a whole history of ethnic tensions that hasn't really been dealt with through any of the peace processes. So those are driving people to join. But then the second was of course what we now know because it's been replicated by the Global Terrorism Index and many other research centers that the sense of humiliation and the sense that foreign forces were humiliating the dignity and the identity of the country and the region and the people and the religion, that sense of humiliation of foreign forces was the other key driver. So much of the programming wasn't going into addressing those drivers and that's why many would say the DDR programs weren't working. It was sort of buying people off was more like short-term rental and they went back into the system. So I think those two stories and many other of my experiences working in East Africa, working in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and many other places that are facing the challenge of violent extremism and terrorism helped me develop this model in the book that we mentioned earlier, the ecology of violent extremism where the peace building approach is trying to sort of back up to that context to those local grievances. So requiring an in-depth stakeholder consultation to outline what the drivers are. And really that peace building isn't so much competing with PCVE or counter-terrorism because they each are working within a different timeframe. So the very short-term immediate threat would be a counter-terrorism response. The midterm targeted trying to reduce and the vulnerability or support the resilience of vulnerable communities is PCVE and peace building is looking at the kinds of factors that actually create civil war, suicide, violent extremism. There are a lot of things emerging from societies where there's not social cohesion and there's a weak state society relationship. So this model and then this next diagram just shows from a conflict resolution or a peace building approach sees this necessity that we've talked about a lot today of a multidisciplinary approach that deals with the individual, the identity issues, the community grievance issues, the national ideological and the global network exchange. So really a multi-tiered, multi-perspective approach which we call peace building is necessary to address these many different drivers. Thanks, Lucia. I wanna pick up one idea you said about understanding the reasons people join as being part of the calculus and figuring out why they disengage and actually ask the panel that question. If understanding the dynamics around radicalization of joining or being recruited translates into what you need to understand around disengagement and rehabilitation and if they have any reflections on that because what we want to get to here is a conversation about how and why people are leaving these movements. So could I open that up to the speakers, please? All right, well, I'll grasp the nettle first. I think based on what we've heard earlier today as well and I think everyone in the room would agree there are multiple pathways into radicalization, people's motivations are extremely varied and the primary thing that's keeping them involved is we'll also, A, vary but also it's likely to evolve over time. Again, if I use the conflict I know most about in Syria and Iraq, you could see greater in theater radicalization changes in the sort of self-narrative these individual telling themselves about why they were there, what they were hoping to achieve. So you could see earlier on a lot of humanitarian narrative and that sort of notion that we've come here to help, we've come to respond to what we've seen as a humanitarian Christ and then that evolution into we're not here to serve people, we're here to serve God. And so even that story that individual were telling themselves was evolving very, very quickly but also dramatically. And I think a lot of that is reflected in what we see in terms of some of the more prominent, I wouldn't say successful, but certainly prominent in the ones that you're able to access deradicalization or disengagement programs that operate in the Middle East. So if I take the example of the Saudi rehabilitation center which I've been to now three times I think there's some people in this room who've definitely been because I've seen you there. You know, you can see different, I should say as visitors not as sort of inmates. You see very different things. So there is a clear financial imperative for people to leave and it's a very open path of the program. You are financially incentivized to leave but not just you but your community as well. So your tribal connections are sort of pulled upon and it's really brought into a broader sort of social investment of everyone around you has an interest in you not going back to what it was you were up to. But coupled alongside that are also very dense and weighty theological discussions and we've seen again the Egyptians or the Libyan Islamic fighting group as well have these large recantation initiatives which are focused much more on the theological aspect than the Sharia sort of reasons of why you want to not do something so on. So I think we're at the same point of divergence with de-radicalization and or disengagement as we are with radicalization in that it will most likely be a case by case basis and I'll stop with this. And I think that's a point we've seen in the UK at least in the way that its flagship program Prevent has evolved over the best part of a decade going from everything that we heard about earlier don't have large sort of national programs that are fairly generic versus now which is in essence the sort of front foot of channel taking the personal individual and trying to work out what it is about them that has led them to start to embrace or embrace extremist ideas and then to tailor a specific intervention around them which has input from a number of agencies in the UK in order to have a sort of specific program for that individual. And it does operate in the shadows quite a bit we've asked for a lot more access to data but it does seem to have a relative degree of success and it doesn't just operate with jihadis but with the far right as well. Let me just add on to that because I wanted to talk about trauma and the Saudi center for reintegration actually really does focus on trauma recovery trauma healing whatever you wanna call it through art therapy, through counseling, music therapy very creative ways actually. And what's interesting about this is the trauma narrative of understanding how early childhood trauma or even more recent trauma is affecting young white nationalist young men who shoot down people with guns in this country. Often there is a trauma analysis which is interesting and kind of conserving because some of the other analysis of where that's coming from is often missing but that trauma analysis has rarely been used in the international center and certainly I think the Saudis have really been clear that addressing trauma is part of the reintegration process. So I think that a lot of, well, we've heard today that we still don't know how to identify who is going to radicalize. We can look at pathways. It's, I think it's a similar concern about de-radicalization and disengagement but there's no one way out. There's been focus and Shraza just mentioned on narratives, on ideological justifications. I think there's a focus as well on this individual efficacy that matters and Lisa was just talking about this in terms of not just in trauma but some of the things we were mentioning earlier about programs, community level grievances. I think one thing that we should look at is that there are a lot of narratives in the world but we don't think that they all necessarily apply to us. We all see stories about people in need, people hurting and we don't say it's my responsibility to do something about this. And what extremist groups of different stripes do and especially using J.M. Berger's definition of extremism with focused on group identity is that they make the focus on this is your prey, you know, your level of identity that matters. This is the one that requires action. Reducing the pole of those types of identities and whether you wanna use different social science terms like cross-cutting cleavages or intersectionality. The fact is that everyone has different levels of identity. Everyone has different responsibilities, different roles to different facets of their identities, different groups. And so by giving people a sense of efficacy perhaps or giving the sense of responsibility whether it's at the family level or the community level that they can have an impact I think would go a long way towards addressing some of these issues. Let's go back to this topic of trauma because we heard about this earlier today too and how exposure to war trauma is something that contributes to vulnerability to radicalization and it's something that is featuring in this particular demographic that we're talking about coming out of Iraq and Syria. So thank you for putting that on the table, Alisa. Could I ask the other speakers to reflect a little bit more about how this issue of PTSD or experience of trauma is informing some of the responses towards rehabilitation or disengagement or perhaps some of the choices around disengagement and motivations towards it if they are? I think there's a long way to go in this regard. I was actually at a great resolve event on Monday here looking at some of the work that's being done on the Balkans about previous work on childhood traumas from war experience and the impact of that. So I think we need more studies showing that. In the case of Western countries people going off and becoming FTFs which has been the counter-terrorism pre-eminent concern I think in the last few years, it's less trackable. It's less obvious without getting a sense of individual profiles after somebody has already gone and traveled. I think there are certain risk factors. We've talked about developing types of, if not profiles of individuals, at least categories for examining pathways into radicalization. The work, as I understand it, is still pretty rudimentary at this point. It's not something I've worked with people directly in the field about, but Lisa maybe you can. I think it's important to realize that there may be some kind of correlation between trauma and vulnerability to violent extremism. I also think that it's not everybody. So there's many different pathways and when we were working in East Africa several years ago and then I participated with Department of Defense conflict analysis of what was driving young people in East Africa to join El Shabaab, the thing that came out that correlated within that context is that there were so few pathways for advance for these young men and it was the most ambitious, the most entrepreneurial, actually in some sense the least traumatized or the ones with the most capacity were the ones who were becoming enticed with the idea of leading an El Shabaab segment. So I think it's important to look at trauma and also to realize in some contexts it's really quite different and I think for reintegration then you're also thinking about some communities lost their most talented young people. They're young people with the greatest leadership skills who left the community and went to join and lead violent extremist groups and carry out terrorism. So there's actually a huge potential in thinking about channeling that kind of leadership in a different direction. But so there's like sensitivity to trauma is necessary but also kind of seeing the real capacity that exists with some of these groups. I'll just make two very, very quick points. Glad you actually, I should have mentioned the point when Saudi about the therapy and the rehabilitation. If you're unfamiliar with this, I would just go online and look at it. There's an art therapy element to it and it's surreal. I mean it is really surreal because you have these hardened individuals who are fought in foreign conflicts who are now painting pictures about their feelings. And crying. It's just worth watching. There's videos of it floating around the internet so I encourage you to take some time. I'll talk again just about one other aspect of this which we haven't really touched upon but it is a latent problem. It is a huge problem again bringing it back to Syria and Iraq which is the sheer number of children who are now again not just in those communities but who have actively been raised by fighters, by competence who are again being held in pretty squalid and insecure conditions. And so adding to the trauma is this further sense of humiliation and is the further sense of insecurity and it's basic human insecurity. Winter is coming. These are not comfortable tents to live in at the best of times. The conditions are very, very trying and challenging as it is and on top of that you have associated impacts of whether it's PTSD or other mental health issues that are related to this. So the prospect of encouraging a new generation to walk this path is of course very, very high and again there is not particularly sort of significant political will to challenge this issue head on but it does require a pretty swift intervention. We actually have a huge stack of questions and but I think enough time to get through some of them so I'm gonna turn to the audience questions now. Thank you for the opening reflections. The first one actually is specifically for you Shiraz. It's regarding the camp and the role that it played in bringing together militants and extremists and allowing them to organize and mobilize after their release. And the question is given the conditions in Iraq and Syria today versus that of 2004 to 2011 given the different population of today's camps such as the Hawaii which has women and children in residence as well. How might the threat trajectory differ today is the question and let me see if there's a it's an anonymous question. Okay, that's a great question. I think the threat is a lot more cute in many senses today. All of the underlying structural issues that we would have spoken about in relation to Iraq post 2003 in Syria pre 2011 have been exacerbated. So that broader aspect I was talking about just basic human security. If I were a Sunni taxi driver living in Mosul or in Raqqa life today is a lot worse than it was even under Islamic State just a few years ago. The as I say exposure to vulnerability the exposure to a political class either in Damascus or Baghdad is making me sort of uncertain about my future. But as you say it's a huge number now of women who have been very active and conscious and playing their own roles within these organizations now again in a more pronounced way that they haven't done in the past. And then children which are a new dynamic here again in quite significant numbers who are again they've either been exposed to indoctrination by these groups. If you follow the Islamic State propaganda you will have seen lots of videos in which children were used as executioners or any children who are just growing up now and sort of coming into their consciousness in these camps who are being fed this narrative. What is very interesting and we haven't been to the camps inside Syria yet but you can see it in Iraq to a lesser extent as well is that the women at least are much more open in terms of their ongoing support and commitment to Islamic State. And again there's a lot of a reportage which talks about this and the sort of brazenness of that campaign the men will come and get us out, Baghdadi will return, we will revive the caliphate once again and so on and so forth. There's a lot more open dogmatism then. I'm not sure why that is the case if you've seen again the interviews with male detainees particularly of Western men there's a lot of denial of what was really happening. You would think ISIS was a dining club based on what most of them are claiming to have done just being chefs and cooks and whatnot. So there's a lot of denial going on because I think they're worried much more about being turned over to local custody and of course no one wants to end up in Syrian State custody in particular. So I think there's a lot of denial going on there but all of those underlying issues to my mind are worse today and so this is something that I've been really going on about a lot and various audiences such as to say there needs to be political will to start to look at how we collectively deal with this and it's worth saying there's huge division even between very close allies Britain and the United States are in wild disagreement about what should happen about these detainees, the United States has repeatedly and rightly in my opinion criticized the British government for its approach which has been to completely wash its hands of those who are in detention in a lot of cases to strip those individuals of their British citizenship to precisely force them down the road that David was talking about becoming career terrorists and so we are displacing this problem but essentially elongating it because these are individuals who now if they get the opportunity to leave their current detention have no prospect but to go back to the fight and to come back even stronger and harder than they did before so I'm afraid my outlook isn't particularly optimistic. This next question is asking is a follow on David I think to your description of career foreign fighters and the related recidivism rates and the question is how does the experience of FTF differ from that of more traditional mercenaries and I think the question is specifically in terms of repeat experiences and recidivism. Well labels are always a tricky thing whether it's terrorism or whether it's whether it's foreign fighters or mercenaries. I would just say that we have historically if you look beyond just jihadis look just beyond the formally designated FTFs we have hundreds of thousands of people who have been foreign fighters for what you think of as extremist causes whether they're ideological groups, ethnic groups they were probably the biggest one would have been the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and after that was over the League of Nations actually arranged to send people back home and gave them pocket money to help ease their way back. I guess if you're going to look at people in similar movements what has happened with ISIS is not necessarily unprecedented. You had revolutionary Russia and China encouraged people to come from the west to be doctors, to be teachers offered women special status in shopping districts recruited some from the Canadian Parliament from the Manhattan Project to come teach and be farmers and things like that. They raised children and most of them not all ended up returning to Western countries and not making a big splash afterwards. I don't say that everybody takes an off ramp when they're given it but most people probably do and I think that's been our experience with FTFs throughout time. So here's a question that really asks about the nature of de-radicalization programming and its relevance to conflict resolution. Lisa say if you mind I might throw this one your direction. It says in addition to conflict resolution classes what other methods could be recommended for addressing the grievances that are found that might be relevant to de-radicalization and does this apply as a de-radicalization program? So I also wanted to get out of the Middle East context and talk about white nationalism which I'm grateful that many people today have already mentioned this. So as I look at my community in rural Virginia there's a lot of white nationalism. We have one of the largest white nationalist radio TV programs that shows around the world and this thought of how are we going to address this and reintegrate or I mean it's when the scale is these are not fringe group. This is the mainstream of society. It becomes a bit of a challenge then. So what does reintegration actually mean within American society? But I think the issue that we haven't spent very much time today talking about is social cohesion which is really the focus of a lot of peace building work. So what is driving young people to join white nationalist groups in rural Virginia is similar to, they certainly look a lot like the Taliban. They drive trucks and they have flags out the back so my street in Rockingham County looks very similar to the street that I lived on in Kabul in terms of the sense of threat and there's a lot of guns everywhere. But I think it's less of a question about their relationship with the state and more about the fragmentation of American society and of course social media has exacerbated that but is not completely responsible for that. We have a long history of polarization and racial injustice and racial tension that needs to be addressed. So that issue of social cohesion though I think is a main lens to look at reintegration in every place where it exists in Myanmar with the Buddhist Muslim in Israel, Palestine with the radical Jewish groups and their approach to Palestinians. Sort of everywhere you look if you look through a social cohesion lens you can see work that needs to be done to re-stitch how people view each other, how they perceive their own identity and whether there's a potential of work to be done that gets to some of the conversation earlier today where the perception is that an identity can exist without a death threat from another group or the sort of other group. So how fear is dealt with in the society and what kind of programs are stitching people together. So. So Kyle from Equal Access is asking us to give some specific examples of lessons from programs that create off-ramps for those associated with violent extremist groups. And he has an interesting question here about whether it's possible to replicate or scale or build these programs in a way that's humanizing and empowering and that is tied to social healing. So that's a good next question to your comment about social cohesion. Would anyone like to talk about specific programs and some of the learning that's come out of them? Hi Kyle. So when I first started looking at, well we're not talking only about FTFs but in terms of building alternative identities so the particular holds of groups with extremist calls would be mitigated by saying you have other obligations, you have other interests. I've been thinking about this in terms of national identity that there are national service institutions whether it's military or something else that would give people a sense of tie to their country. You know the political reality these days in a lot of countries is it's harder to build sort of a pluralistic civic nationalism. So I think perhaps an emphasis can be on civil society groups on giving people alternatives. I know that the UK in particular has some sport-based programs these days, my extremism and some others. They're in some ways very similar to crime prevention programs in this country with Midnight Basketball Leagues in the 1990s and there's very limited research on how effective those were but what studies there have been show that the cities that had them, everybody's crime rates fell in the 90s but those cities fell most fastest. So I can easily imagine if somebody wants to feel like they are making a difference in the world if somebody wants to save people whether it's just sort of paramedic work or other types of community service programs you know there's opportunities like that that could be invested in. I think the most important factor for this you know in the first instance is the sort of ability to get people off that ramp without criminalizing them so prevent does this quite a lot in the UK as mentioned through through channel as an intervention aimed at the individual and a lot of that is also saying it's not just challenging them from what they're doing but it's saying if you continue down this path is likely you will fall foul of legislation which talks about X or Y this could lead to custodial sentencing and so on it's kind of fronting you up to show you where your life could be headed packaged in and around some of that broader engagement work that we're talking about and actually the slide that's still up contextual factors again shows the sort of plethora of different ways then in which you will attempt to pull on that individual but that D-Ride also takes place or disengagement stuff still takes place with those in the criminal justice system as well so those who are serving custodial sentences so it is a broader aspect to that. I think the scalability of it or like creating these things outside of their regions wouldn't work so I've spent a lot of time as I've mentioned already looking at the ones in the Middle East the Saudi one is the most well developed but there are similar ones in the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt and so on. But what's interesting about it is you could never replicate those outside the region you just simply couldn't I mean the idea of giving financial inducements to individuals to get them to move away from it which will clearly not fly in any western state but what's also really interesting is that it plays upon the reality of the relationship between the individual and the state in those countries. So we have the social contract and a particularly sort of different kind of relationship with our governments in the west versus the kind of relationship that you have in the Middle East so in Saudi Arabia it's very much spoken about and talked about to this notion that the ruling classes are the sort of parents and you're the children. And so in the DRAT Center they say we are being forgiven in the way that you might tell your child off if they do something wrong but you don't necessarily ground them for a week because you just say look just stop it and that's your right essentially to decide how you're going to engage with your child and so others are also saying look that's okay. You know, our brother here fell on hard times and the government has chosen to support him and to do various things. So it works very much within the particular confines and I think it does enjoy relative success within the confines of the environment in which it works but are there broader lessons for us living in democratic societies in the west? No, not really. One thing that we haven't talked about yet is that much of the research correlates reintegration or leaving de-radicalization with a former fighter being the one to invite somebody to leave. So whether that's in Indonesian prisons with foreign fighters doing the work to help de-radicalize within the prison setting to here again in North America if we look at groups like Life Beyond Hate which is completely made up of former white nationalists and their work is to engage directly with white nationalist groups and young people and to invite them out in a without shaming and without the heaviness that so many groups talk about. So I think that that realization that former's, former whatever, former ISIS, former white nationalists are really key to the strategy for de-radicalization and inviting people to leave and supporting their voices more. We have a number of overlapping questions so I'm gonna bundle them a little bit. There are a couple of people who would like to hear you talk about religion and disengagement and de-radicalization and Shiraz you mentioned religious discourse being a component of some of the programs you'd studied. I'm also aware that that's a very controversial aspect of some of the programs as well for a number of reasons and at least of which is sort of the human rights piece of it around freedom of belief and whether that actually is an effective way to de-radicalize. So I'm wondering if you have some reflections on the issue of religion and disengagement and de-radicalization to share with the audience. Okay, again, it's a very contested space, right? In terms of what a particular individual's going to believe as his correct, I put that in inverted commons, interpretation of a particular concept or idea to drive forward their desire to be a member of ISIS or Al Qaeda or anything else in that context. Again, that debate happens more freely and with greater confidence by the state understandably in the Gulf, right? The Saudi state believes it has the right to intervene in that debate and to say your understanding of the religion is wrong, ours is right, here's what we think, they have a unit within the Ministry of Interior called the Ideological Security Unit, right? And it's, I don't know, I don't know. Its whole purpose is to go to these individuals not just within the prison system but elsewhere as well and say, you think this is a correct understanding for how you should have a relationship with the government. That's wrong, this is what it should be. You think this is a correct interpretation of Jihad just to use as a broad term. Well, you're wrong, here's what our understanding of it is. Here's what we think the terms of engagement should be and so on and so forth. And so even at various times, early on for example in the Syrian conflict in 2012, when lots of individual sort of celebrity scholars in Saudi Arabia began to fundraise for example for Syrian refugees and for Syrians who had been displaced and so the government worrying about what might happen stepped in and took control of those and said it's a really good idea that you're raising funds to send up but we'll take control of this. So it feels it has the right to do that. Again, no Western state could really intervene in quite that same way into some of those debates but the other point I'll make in relation to this and I think it's slightly, I wrote a book on the belief system and sort of intellectual trajectory of the Jihadist movement but I'll contradict myself a bit by saying the average person who goes into the group doesn't know those ideas particularly well. We tend to have this notion of individuals who join highly ideological movements that they are themselves highly ideological and that they've read all the books and understood the key concepts and therefore they decide to become a member of group A instead of group B or C or D. In actual fact, what tends to happen is people join highly ideological movements all the time without ever really understanding what's going on and what happens is that there's a leadership at the top which understands those ideas which has really imbibed them and which then gives direction to your actions and then your actions are invested with that broader political significance which might distinguish you from an ordinary criminal so the criminal might shoot somebody to steal from them but someone else might shoot them in the name of a broader cause, right? This is revenge for X and therefore the same act takes on a different meaning. So in that context, it's a really good way, this is not my example about you when Jay was talking earlier about the Nazis, I'd read this somewhere before and it really is a great way to think of it. If you think of the prison guards at Auschwitz, they hadn't read necessarily in Minecraft, not every single one of them had but their actions were given purpose and direction by leadership that had a plan and a vision. So you have an ideological, every individual necessarily understanding within it what is happening or we see that with Islamic State as well as this revival of slavery for example and things like that. The final point I'll make on this is that having now been repeatedly, as I said to the Saudi program over 10 years, anecdotally what's very evident is the ones who are most susceptible to breaking down easily of course are the ones who are not of that leadership ideological level. The ones who are there tend not to make it to that rehab center because they are doing much lengthier jail sentences and really funny the second time I went we met an individual and a colleague and I on the flight home were talking about him and we said he really didn't seem very repentant, he seemed clearly ideological and sort of on that path. Three years later, four years later I was talking to a British foreign fighter in Rucka, we were communicating over Skype and he said to me, you'll never believe it, I met this great brother earlier today from Saudi and it was the guy that we'd met a few years early and he'd returned to the course. There are a couple other questions too that are overlapping. A number of people would like to hear you talk more about this vivid parallel you drew between rural Virginia and Afghanistan and so I'm wondering if the speakers would like to talk a little bit more about some of the commonalities that exist in extreme right wing groups and these other militant groups we're talking about when it comes to processes of de-raclization and disengagement, if there are any reflections on that I think the audience would like to hear them. I think the work of defining what is a violent extremist belief system is really important work and we did a little bit of it this morning but one of the things that was touched on maybe not clearly is the purity narrative that all of the groups have. They want societies that are either ethnically or religiously pure. So in Myanmar, the Buddhist state is looking for that pure Buddhist state. The white nationalists are looking for a pure white state in ISIS, we can go on to all the different groups around the world but that purity narrative I think really requires a different type of intervention than intervening with other armed movements so there would be many violent movements around the world that don't have this purity narrative. They have a difficult state-society relationship. They have ideological grievances and frameworks but people who have built their worldview on fear of another and the sense of I'm gonna die unless I fight and kill them. That is a really dangerous part of the worldview that makes people particularly vulnerable to extreme gruesome violence because the other groups have been so dehumanized and they can't even imagine this multicultural democratic society which you see most clearly actually within ISIS and white nationalism, the real anti-democratic, anti-multicultural framework and of course that came out in Norway with the attack and the ideological statement also then borrowed for the New Zealand massacre of Muslims in the mosque. This idea that it's almost friends for non-ish. So the purification of violence, it's only through violence. There can be no political process that achieves the perfect outcome. It's only through gruesome violence do we establish this pure state. So I think we need to do more wrestling with that. It has to do with identity. It has to do with the sort of psychology and trauma and fear. It's a package that needs more work. I guess I would just add that one thing that, whether it's white nationalists and ISIS, but really I think a lot of these groups, there's this zero-sum sense of competition with others but of losing out in particular to others. It's the sense that you have to take aggressive action now because your group, whoever they might be, will be in far worse position if you don't. It justifies the costs. You have a duty to people in your group. There's a lot of gendering, except for incel. There's a lot of gendering used about why it's necessary to fight, to defend innocent women and children and things like that. So again, it's changing I think somehow the calculus about who are we that makes people think I have to fight for us. So since resolve is all about bridging research with policy and practice, I think we'll wrap up a final round of reflections perhaps on how some of these ideas can inform policy and practice. So why don't we go in the same order we started in and see what recommendations you might have on that level? Brilliant new ideas. Well, I mean, I do think we've covered a lot of the ground today on the panel indeed at the whole conference. You see individuals who join extremist groups who are willing to engage in violence because they feel marginalized in some broader context, because they feel a sense of insecurity because some group is offering them, if not direct security at least, a sense of purpose. We see messaging that your own life is debased, that you can come be a warrior for a cause, that you'll be celebrated as a hero, that you can perhaps engage in antisocial violence you really want to do anyway, but this time you'll be celebrated for it. So, what I think it's really about is connecting individuals to a broader sense of society where they perhaps don't feel under siege, but also don't feel the same incentives to fight for a particular marginalized group because they see that as just one strand of their identity. So building broader whether it's ties through other civil society groups or whether it's ties to the broader civic polity, creating these, recreating the sense of linkages that people seem to lose. I think that builds on this notion of what we've been discussing all day and on this panel. There's a broader pattern of disorder taking place here, which is feeding into whether it's jihadist violence, extreme right-wing violence, or indeed as some of the other conversations we've heard about in Myanmar, up in Kashmir, in China as well and stuff. And this is all feeding off a broader sense of a breakdown in trust in political institutions, in experts and expertise and so on and so forth. And so actually reviving some of that confidence in what have been sort of traditional anchors of the state will go some way towards addressing, as I say, this broader pattern of global disorder, which is really quite remarkable in the pace that it's taking, but it is fundamentally asserting itself as a process of othering, as a process of trying to return nostalgically to some imagined glory, which in reality doesn't exist. And of course, the most recent manifestation of someone trying to do that was Islamic State to say we will return glory to Muslims, right, by addressing perceived injustices or slights and so on and so forth. Well, that slogan isn't too different from other ones employed by the political leaders. I wanna go back to this diagram and also really focus on the work of US Institute of Peace in making this research policy practice, building those bridges, because this is the space where I think it's happening most clearly, anywhere that I know of in the world. And that is because USIP put out a new report last spring, which is being passed out on violent extremism and the day that I was watching that live webinar of Senator Lindsey Graham talking about what a fantastic report this is and did you know there's groups of people that study conflict analysis and that they do peace building and for Lindsey Graham to be saying this, I felt like was a tremendous victory of thinking really all of the research we've done is making its way into the hands of policymakers who are now looking at some of the data that we've put together on evidence-based approaches to addressing violent extremism. And I wanna thank USIP, Georgia, you laid the groundwork for this, just incredible work, because I think it's really significant that we have spaces where people from the three communities, counter-terrorism, CVE, and peace building can all come together. Earlier today, someone mentioned that violent extremism needs to become a field, I agree, but I think the field of peace building, which has existed now for 40 years and has focused on conflict analysis and social cohesion and polarization issues, we have so much to give the field of violent extremism in terms of how do we get to the root causes and how do we deal with governance and polarization and many of the issues that are driving violent extremism. Please join me in thanking our panelists this afternoon. Thank you.