 discuss his book, which will be out, I think, in a matter of weeks or months, Mike. Let's say weeks. Weeks. So available for you to pre-order at your favorite online bookstore, and it will be out soon, Streets Without Joy, A Political History of Sanctuary and War, published, sorry, 1959 to 2009, forthcoming Hearst and Co in the UK, and I guess the rest of the world and Oxford University Press in North America. But before I introduce everyone, just a couple of house setting issues. When we get to the question and answer session, I'd be grateful if you would type your questions into the chat function, and I'll do my best to read them out in a coherent way to our distinguished panelists tonight to answer. And I would also just like to alert you to the fact we are recording. So if there's, well, we're recording, I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what you may or may not want to do about that. Okay, so tonight's event, let me introduce Dr. Michael Innes, who's a visiting senior research fellow and director of the Conflict, the newly established Conflict Records Unit in the Department of War Studies, which is embedded in the Sir Michael Howard Center. You'll have seen Mike's full biography on the listing for tonight's event, so I won't read out everything except to say that he has a very long and distinguished career that spans academia and military service and public service with NATO. And he's the author of, this is, I guess, your sixth book, Mike? Fifth. Fifth book, sorry, fifth book. Well, I'm getting ahead of projecting great things for you in the future, but perhaps at one point we might just put in a plug for the new Conflict Records Unit, which Mike is championing in war studies, and we have a huge number of exciting developments with that. And if you check out the Conflict Records Unit website, you'll see we have some fascinating forthcoming events. And of course, I'd like to link into the chat function, Joe. Yes, I'll do that, absolutely. And of course, an enormous pleasure to introduce Chiara Libeseller, who I'm pleased to say is perhaps an incredibly competent and self-motivated and self-driving PhD student. She's got me as a supervisor, so it's very important that she's self-motivated, self-driving, and all of those things. And of course, she holds an MA in international peace and security studies from the Department of War Studies, King's College, London, and studied at the University of Initsbruck in Austria. And I should also point out is a driving force behind the women in international security network. Is that based at King's? Or is that...? That's not a women's network. There are more than one, which is wonderful. So this one where I'm part of is wise, and it's UK-wide. Oh, it's UK-wide. Okay, that's fantastic. And perhaps you'll tell us a bit about that at some stage. But in the meantime, the format for tonight's book launch is a conversation, and I'm going to drop out in a moment and turn the chair over to Chiara to ask the first question. We'll probably go on for about 30 minutes or so, and then we'll turn over to the audience. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the introduction, too. And hello to everyone in the audience, and thanks for joining us tonight. And thanks to Mike, obviously, for writing this excellent book and for giving me this early opportunity to read it. And so as Jo has said, we're going to structure this more as a conversation rather than doing two separate presentations or whatever. But nevertheless, I'm sure it's useful for everyone to first get an overview of the book. So, Mike, why don't you start us off with an overview of what the book is about? Sure. I should probably start with a quick comment to my publisher that this is not a G&T. This is water. It's ice water. Thanks, Michael. Thanks. Thanks, Joe, for maybe Chiara's got a G&T going on. That was a really generous introduction. And thank you. Thank you both. So, the book, in short, what it's about is I look at the way that parts of the National Security Establishment in the U.S. have talked about and written about sanctuary over a 50-year period. So, in a general sense, it's a history of a word. It's a history of an idea of a concept. But more than that, it's an applied history of that concept. And some of you will be familiar with that. What that means, it's the stock and trade of the Center for Grand Strategy and a couple of other academic units around the world. Applied history starts with a policy problem. And it looks to historical precedence and historical background to understand that problem in historical context and to better inform policymaking through recourse to that sort of historical knowledge. The policy problem in this case, or the policy issue in this case, is really the Second Bush administration's response to 9-11. So, the period from 2001 till 2009, really till the end of 2008. I do this. I take a look at the language in particular that gets used. And really, in a sense, it's a history of a word of an idea, but it's tracing jargon. It's taking a look at a particular kind of jargon that became extraordinarily prominent after 9-11. The shorthand for it was terrorists and sanctuaries and terrorists, safe havens. And there's a kind of a constellation of concepts and ideas that plug into that, nor that have been plugged into that. Everything from failed states and failing states to ungoverned territories to terrorist networks. And there's a whole series of related and adjacent concepts that are part of how we can be looking at that language in that period. And I do this over the course of about 9 or 10 chapters. And I take a couple of chapters where I explore the historiography of sanctuary. And what I've tried to do, there are a lot of great books that deal with aspects of this. There are some really great books that deal with UN Safe Zone project in the 1990s that failed or that deal with aspects of insurgency and counterinsurgency and how sanctuary and safe havens fit in with that. But what I've tried to do is expand the aperture a little bit and look at this within a much more of a security-wide sort of lens and look at this in terms of national security and international security. And look at the jargon itself rather than default to a sense that if our start point is insurgency and counterinsurgency, then how do we understand sanctuary? Within that, I sort of invert the problem and take a look at sanctuary itself. And without getting ahead of the rest of your questions, Kira, I think it's something that allows for a fairly broad discussion. It's partly a response to the prominence of counterinsurgency thinking that came about 15 years ago, a little bit more than that, 2003, 2004. And part of the book takes that to task and suggests that this assumption that to talk of terrorist sanctuaries is, of course, to talk about, well, to talk about terrorism, to talk about insurgency and counterinsurgency by default, to talk about particular wars. Vietnam is one that really comes up prominently. So I've looked at the historiography. It reveals some fairly remarkable contingencies, academic contingencies in the sense that it's historiography, but it's not just historians writing about this. It's historians and sociologists and anthropologists and a few other sort of academic disciplines wading into this. And it's a pretty broad kind of literature that covers a lot of territory. So it's quite rich in that sense. It's politically contingent and historically contingent, and that it's changed over time. And I've looked at, you know, seen sort of several waves of thinking and writing about sanctuary and what that means in relation to security and national security and international security issues. The bulk of the book, I think probably what you'd call the empirical section or the case study chapters. Take a look at two periods, you know, before and after 9-11. The before 9-11 period really looks at the, you know, 1959 to 1999. So if, you know, 40, roughly 40-year period with Vietnam being sort of the big backdrop to all of that. So there's, you know, sanctuary talk amongst national security elites. And this is in an American context. And then after Vietnam, sort of, you know, what sort of inheritances or survivals of that sort of sanctuary talk, do we see, you know, over that period in the 70s, late 70s and into the 80s, and then especially in the 1990s. And then the remaining three chapters focus much more closely on everything that happens after 9-11. I have three sort of mechanisms that I focus on one in each chapter. And the first one is looking at presidential rhetoric and sort of, you know, that top-down executive speech and the kind of influence that that can have, which I have to say as an aside is a real challenge these days after the last four years. You know, everything we think we know about how presidential rhetoric works, we sort of have to add a big notwithstanding clause in relation to the Trump years. So I progress from there. I look at presidential rhetoric and how that is operationalized within the system of U.S. government. How does that trickle down into different agencies and become operationalized as a working policy? The next case study chapter looks at something a little bit parallel or outside of sort of, you know, government agencies, government entities, and that's the 9-11 commission. And one particular aspect of the 9-11 commission where, you know, they produce several, a list of 42 recommendations after doing their work. And the top two of them were dealing with, you know, what to do about terrorist sanctuaries. And it was a really interesting case study because it basically, you know, it had this great weight of evidence that was compiled by the 9-11 commission about what happened, you know, up to 9-11. And then it tried to make itself relevant in relation to what was going on currently. And at that time was, you know, the invasion of Iraq was, you know, the lead up to and then the invasion of Iraq in 2003, March 2003. And then, you know, for the entire duration of that commission, you know, the first year, 18 months of that war was going on. So it was trying to make itself relevant at the same time. And it was really interesting to see how latching on to that policy language that had been iterated right after 9-11 sort of bolted on to what the 9-11 commission did as well. So there's this sort of interesting sequencing of that jargon, sequencing and amplification of it. And then in the last case study chapter, I look a little bit more closely at the interagency process. And that's that weird sort of locus of activity between government agencies, and that, you know, has to come up with sort of consensus recommendations on national security issues. And I look at two offices in particular that feed into that. One is the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the other was the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism in the State Department. And I look at the operationalized variants of sanctuary discourse or rhetoric that they produce in these sort of working manuals and these reports that they are legally required to produce as a result of, you know, the socialization of the concept over the previous years as well as legislation that came out in 2004 following the 9-11 commission. So there's these three cases operate as discrete sort of studies in the mechanics of how this language and how this concept of sanctuary diffused through government. But they also work together as a nice sort of history of the term itself over, well, from 2001 till late 2008. So that's the overview of the kind of a general overview of the book. Great. Thanks for that outline, Mike. So to start off, I want to say the main reason why I really enjoyed reading this book. And I think when one doesn't have to be a social constructivist or post structuralist to understand that discourse is met for how we interpret the world and how we act in it and how we make decisions in it, be they political decisions to go to war or the scholars decision on what kind of research they consider relevant. So I'm always keen on reading and conducting research that improves our understanding of political and academic discourses, especially discourses surrounding war. And I think in your book, you make a very important point in this regard. You point out that much of the scholarship on sanctuary and terrorism doesn't problematize or investigate its own terms of reference and and the ideas and beliefs they are based upon. It doesn't address whether these terms, which are taken from a political discourse, right? Well, these terms are useful as analytical frames for the issue at hand. And I think this issue, I think this is an issue that we often see in the fields of war studies, but especially strategic studies. And so I really enjoyed reading your effort to sort of trace the origins of this most recent revival of the sanctuary discourse and to bring together the very vast history of this idea and also to point to the omissions of the historical depth in this most recent revival. And I think your book brings forward this step of the term sanctuary and safe haven. It provides a very rich history of the situations in which these terms were used and the meanings that they had in these situations. And you also clearly show that the meaning, the meaning of these terms is sort of a sign of that times as, of course, is the case with very concept. And I think that's a very important contribution of your book. Now, I want to talk more about the discourse, but before we go into that, maybe we want to talk about the title of your book, which of course is a reference to Bernard Fall and to the Vietnam War. So how does that reference, how is it important for your research? Sure. Thanks for bringing up that question earlier in the talk, because it really sort of speaks directly to the title of the book, doesn't it? So Streets Without Joy is a straight riff on a very famous, very big book that was published in 1961 called Street Without Joy, four titles Street Without Joy, the French Debacle in Indochina. So it was actually about, that book is actually about the French experience of war in Indochina before in the decade, decade and a half prior to the American involvement growing in the late 50s and early 60s. It's important on multiple levels of course, being an academic, I have to find sort of multiple levels of meaning to make this work, but it has an historical context of its own that is, I think speaks directly to anybody who's interested in applied history and sort of the classic sense of that. And that reading that book has become part of the myth of origin for at least two generations of American soldiers going to war, right? It did so in the 1960s, Street Without Joy, the original Street Without Joy was this bestselling book and it was almost like a lesson learned manual, I guess is my poor way of describing it. And this early waves of American advisors headed to Vietnam would be packing this book and reading it and then later saying if only we'd paid attention. And policy makers would also be making that same claim. And that came up again 15 years ago in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq. Sort of new literature was emerging and it was looking for lessons in the lessons of previous wars and Bernard Fall was being cited for that work and the lessons that it carried for people might be facing in Afghanistan and Iraq. What makes it relevant here as well is that in that book, there are a couple of ideas that come out of that book and the one that makes it relevant here is that Fall talked about active sanctuaries, right? And later work in that historiography on terrorist and insurgent sanctuaries would cite, not all of it, but some of it would cite Fall's work as kind of a point of origin for thinking about this. And we do so fairly uncritically. And you cite the sources you need to support your argument, but I thought it was worth taking a look at this. So of course, I read the books and what struck me almost immediately is that Fall himself was quite equivocal about a lot of this. He was just a brilliant writer and he was able to use evocative language in all sorts of ways to really portray really difficult circumstances. He wrote military histories that they really grabbed people, right? And when he wrote about active sanctuaries, he almost always wrote it in quotes, you know, it was always in scare quotes. And that's one of those little details that struck me. I was like, why is this in scare quotes? So of course, I'm looking for the footnote, but there wasn't none. I was like, okay, this is really irritating. So we have to explore what's going on. Where is this coming from? And there are a couple of times, you know, in other things that he's published where he's questioned the credibility of the term. He's referred to, you know, so-called active sanctuaries. And when he introduces the term in Street Without Joy, he talks, you know, he says, for want of a better term, we'll call this active sanctuaries. He's like, well, where is this coming from? He's clearly, you know, he basically, he hadn't invented a term, but later the later literatures misses this point or it lights it entirely deliberately, I should say. And so there's an aspect to this that sort of begs the question, where is Paul getting this from? Is he sort of being sarcastic? Is he quoting, you know, things that he'd heard? He clearly had heard this in relation to other things. And, you know, I spent one of the chapters taking a close look at these equivocations in Paul's work and trying to get at where else this kind of jargon might have been circulating and why he picked it up and then popularized it. And then it becomes, you know, reified in later generations. And, you know, it was something straight out of the war in Korea that was happening around the same time as the French war in Indochina. MacArthur, you know, referred to sanctuary. You know, the whole idea of crossing the yellow in Korea has the language of sanctuaries written all over it. John Foster Dulles later in the decade is talking about in geopolitical terms, you know, talking about strategic bases around the world and sort of, you know, sanctuaries in a broad geopolitical Cold War sense of the term. In a way that's quite distinct from how that then becomes operationalized in Vietnam, in the American experience in Vietnam. And so there was, you know, Fall has really been my muse, I think, for he's not the subject of the book, but he's definitely been a guiding light. And he raised these questions without actually raising them, you know, 60 years ago. And so that's, you know, I thought the streets without joy was a fitting homage to his work. And to the man himself, he was really a remarkable character, he's led an extraordinary life. But that's an aside. And at least one of my colleagues is much better suited to talking about that. I have to plug it, there's another book coming out from Hearst, which is about Bernard Fall that the author is Nathaniel Moyer, he's a good friend and a fellow traveler when it comes to looking at this particular issue. So that's one to look out for. Okay, cool. I will then back to your book and the sanctuary discourse. So one of the things that I found most interesting was sort of the versatility of the term and of the sanctuary discourse. So you talk about how it has, it has been used in very different situations, and in very different meanings. So it has a positive connotation and a negative one. For example, in Bosnia in 1990s, sanctuary was something that you wanted to have that you wanted to create a safe haven. Whereas in Afghanistan was something that you wanted to get rid of. And it has, it was connected to so many topics. I mean, for me, the most interesting aspect was, I mean, maybe older folks or folks worse than the Vietnam were noise anyway. But for me, it was new to learn that it was also connected to the peace movement. There was sort of a sanctuary movement there that provided sanctuary to conscientious objectors and draft avoiders. So this, this very different meaning or situation where the term was applied to, and then obviously it was applied to Vietnam and insurgents and to Afghanistan and insurgents and terrorists. And it was also applied to nuclear weapons, which I also found quite interesting. So I think that's, that's yeah, just very amazing to read. And I just wanted to ask you maybe to expand a bit on on this versatility and how, how did this course has changed over time? Yeah, sure. I'm just, I'm just thinking for an audience that hasn't read the book, this is probably gonna, you know, sound pretty scattershot. It was like, wow, we're talking about everything. It's probably useful to start, you know, with with just a very brief discussion of the Vietnam chapter, not not being a, you know, a specialist on the American war in Vietnam. One of the things that I found most striking, you know, and I wasn't sure at least if this was based on my ignorance of the conflict when I set out to look at this. But, you know, when I look at the, there's at least one book that's a glossary of Vietnam jargon and safe haven and sanctuary are in there at all, even though this was a an extraordinarily prominent reference at the time when people talked about Vietnam, you know, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sanctuaries across the border, they defined the entire war from beginning to end. And the language is there, it's there, you sort of in the political realm. When policymakers are trying to, you know, come up with, you know, how do we, how do we deal this, whether it was, you know, Johnson or or Nixon at the end of it. So one of the things that struck me was how, when I actually looked at when people are talking about sanctuary, you know, not in how we might, you know, analyze sanctuary as we think it worked in Vietnam, but what were people actually saying at the time? It's really not much more complicated than a keyword search through some of the more interesting documents that are available on Vietnam. And you get, of course, you get more than just the classic sort of you know, the geopolitical version of sanctuaries in Vietnam, in relation to Vietnam, where, you know, North Vietnamese units and the Viet Cong would use basis, strategic basis across the border in Laos and Cambodia to stage operations into South Vietnam. That's the classic view. That's the standard sort of view. There's a variation on that theme where you have, and that's what that's what Ful was talking about when he referred to for one of a better term, active sanctuaries. But then there, you know, there's related to that also well enough known as sort of internal sanctuaries, territory within South Vietnam that had been ceded to or that had been lost to enemy control. But less well known, what people have never talked about as far as I know, and please Vietnam specialists, correct me if I'm wrong, is the, you know, the series of other sort of uses of the terminology that are quite distinct from this sort of, you know, the geopolitical cross-border and internal sort of loss of territory or use of territory. One of them is part of the air campaign, you know, into the north and the planning related to that. So, you know, at different stages in the war when, you know, the Hanoi and Haiphong harbor, you know, prominently were designated, you know, parts of it were designated with as being sort of target exempt and there'd be sort of a concentric circle, you know, overlaid on the map. And this would be, you know, the Hanoi sanctuary or the Haiphong sanctuary. And it was referred to in documents if you, if you, you know, do a search through the Pentagon papers, you'll find this. And if I found this was really, really fascinating. There's a case, you know, if you talk about the emergency mass evacuation of Saigon of South Vietnam in 1975, we're talking about something distinct entirely from, you know, either irregular or conventional warfare in the Haiphong sanctuary, you know, jargon sort of informed and shaped and branded that side of things. But you had this, you know, massive movement of troops and of people out of Vietnam into, you know, what in all sorts of planning documents and subsequent studies referred to as safe havens. And it's quite a distinct, the language is quite distinct. Sanctuaries was something where, you know, it was more on the war fighting side of things. Safe haven was more the humanitarian side of things, which makes one of the, one of the anecdotes that I found, or one of the series of cables really fascinating. And it sort of, it burst my bubble a little bit when it comes to the assumption that to talk of terrorists and territory, the word that would be used is always sanctuary. And there's always that assumption that actually comes up in a later case. And it was a series of cables from Maxwell Taylor, who'd become, you know, ambassador to Vietnam in the 60s. And he was writing about Viet Cong safe havens. And there was one with Lyman Lemnuserv as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the early 60s, where they were writing about safe havens. They were Viet Cong safe havens. And that struck me as quite, quite out of sync with the assumption that, you know, why would people don't talk about Viet Cong safe havens. And they talk about Viet Cong sanctuaries or North Vietnamese sanctuaries. And so, you know, some of the, some of the language is sloppy and there's interchangeability between the two terms all the time. But sometimes the meanings can be, you can really sort of identify distinct meanings and distinct usages. And, and where that comes up as a, as a later cable, I think it's in 1965, where Taylor's writing about herding Viet Cong into safe havens. And, and he's writing in such a way that they're not talking about a rear base or a strategic base that can be targeted for destruction, right? The way that we might normally talk about a terrorist sanctuary that, that, you know, that's where they're hiding. That's where we need to go find them. And it was, it was really talking about Viet Cong safe havens as more of a almost a negotiated or neutral sort of territory, not neutral in the sense of, well, sort of, sort of the way neutrality and neutralization was a major issue at the time. And I thought that was really fascinating. And it was, you know, I pointed out in the book and I, you know, I highlight this as a, you know, it's a big question mark. It's something that needs a lot more historical research to understand why were they using one this kind of terminology when everybody else around them was talking about sanctuaries, what did they mean exactly? What was the difference of meaning? And by implication of practice, what was it they were, they were talking about doing, if this was a Viet Cong safe haven and not, you know, a guerrilla sanctuary that, that could be the, you know, subject to military operations. And you mentioned, you mentioned, you know, this, this, this is quite a, quite a, it's not a leap, but it's quite a shift domestic issues in the US. And I thought it was worth, you know, in a study that's looking at foreign policy language to take a look at the domestic side of things. And of course, the, if you're talking about sanctuary in a domestic US context, you can't avoid looking at the sanctuary movement, which, which is widely thought to have, you know, started in the 80s in relation to Central American refugees coming into the US. And it started with, you know, this sanctuary movement had its own manifesto. And this started with, you know, a handful of church parishes in border states offering refuge, you know, irrespective of federal immigration law, counter to it. And that, that movement grew beyond local parishes into, you know, larger cities, entire states declaring themselves as sanctuary cities or sanctuary states. And that's something that, that has, you know, been revisited in several waves, you know, over the last few years, also quite, quite conspicuously. But it has its roots in, in, in the Vietnam period as well in, in, in the same parishes, you know, initially provided sanctuary in a classic religious sense of the term. I mean, this is canon law provision of refuge to those who seek it. And this was something that was, this was headline news in, in a domestic context in the US. And it was about, you know, war resistors of various kinds, whether they were draft dodgers or consciousness objectors or what have you, seeking out exactly this kind of sanctuary and referring to it as such. I mean, it's quite explicit in its language. And it was, it was, this is what it was called. And so you can actually trace the origins of the sanctuary movement that later, you know, develops back to the late 1960s. And this, this very, very prominent sort of set of, set of issues within the US. And it always struck me as, as if, you know, something that was quite remarkable about sanctuary discourse and talk of sanctuary, you know, in that same sort of universe of issues you're talking about war in Vietnam, you're talking about resistance to, you know, fighting in Vietnam. And there's this, this sense of, you know, this, this obsession, nor this, this preoccupation with, with, with, you know, what its various meanings, how they plug into, you know, a wider kind of sanctuary discourse. Yeah, as I said, I think that's, that's fascinating, really. And maybe I'll ask a final question before we go into the Q&A and just to bring this into the sort of present day-ish and to, to link it back to the, the policy problem that, that started off your interest in this. So the Bush administration's use of, of the sanctuary discourse. So what I found interesting here is that when you discuss the, the creation of those policy documents, you mentioned that a lot of those terms that were used in those documents were discussed and debated a lot. So people were conscious about what terms they wanted to use. But in regards to, to sanctuary and safe haven, there never was this discussion. So it was sort of taking for granted, it was never up to debate whether that would be a useful term that, that you wanted to use. So I just wanted to ask where you think that taking for grantedness, that power of the discourse came from? I think there's, you know, it's probably not very surprising or not much of a stretch to suggest, you know, the power of the office of the president, that executive speech set, set things in motion. So if we're talking about that period from 2001 to 2008, I mean, that, that under any circumstances will, will play a huge role. You know, in the immediate wake of 9-11, it still was just amplified by, by the sense of tragedy and sort of the emotions that were such a big part of that time. Some of you may not remember that, but some of us remember it quite, sorry, Kira, quite, quite clearly. And, and so, you know, there was a real sense of urgency about this, about everything at the time. I mean, it just animated it, you know, everything. In my case, you know, I went back into service, partly because of it, to military service. I think that the taken for grantedness is an interesting, there are a couple of, there are a couple of aspects to this that are worth talking about. One is that the language sometimes feels like it's just words, right? People are just talking about words. And some of the people I spoke to are like, I never gave it much thought. And then, you know, you have other examples. And this is what made it worth pursuing this. You have other examples of very conspicuous, self-conscious questioning of the meaning. And the two that have always stood out for me. You know, one was public information and one came out through an interview that I conducted for this. And one of them was, you know, Donald Rumsfeld, who questioned everything. You know, he was, he split semantic hairs constantly. And he was one of the few who did this and he did it very publicly in 2002 and 2003. And there was one occasion where Barbara Starr at CNN sort of asked him a question about Iran being a sanctuary for al-Qaeda. And he stopped and he said, I don't think that sanctuary is not a perfect word. That's, that's what he said. Because I think, you know, we're talking about a permanent location versus, you know, a location that's being translated. He didn't really go into too much depth. But then he tasked people internally to come up with a study to explain this further. And what, what was, what was, you know, there are a couple of events where he does this in 2002 and then in 2003. And then in the wake, not in the wake, sorry, the opposite in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in a couple of months prior, there's a lot of talk about that one thread in the Bush doctrine, which is about holding states to account. So it wasn't just about terrorists, it's about states who harbor them. And this whole harboring principle is something that defines that, that, that, that policy talk about sanctuaries. And, and so this thread is getting played up quite a bit as one of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, that Iraq was somehow, you know, a safe haven or sanctuary for, for terrorists. And it was, it was striking that this point was raised. And then Rumsfeld prompt me, you know, he mentions this in one of, one of many press conferences. And then he says, you know, a, another briefing will be forthcoming. And within, within short order, there was a public, public presentation. And the slides are, are, you know, publicly available. They're, they're floating around the, the internet. And, and they are a briefing on the idea of deceptive sanctuaries. And it's taking what it's, what it's done is it's taken a lessons learned from the first Gulf War. So from the early 1990s. And it's, it's highlighted those lessons as examples of, you know, Saddam Hussein's perfidy. And it's rebranded all of those practices, like the use of human shields, like the co-location of tanks with mosques, like the co-location of military units with heritage sites. And, and has rebranded it in the language that came out after 9 11, right, with this new policy language. So it's really, really interesting, fascinating, instrumentalized use of the, of the language. The second example was, you remember one of the chapters I look at, it looks at the, you know, I take a look at the variants, the variants of sanctuary terminology and discourse that, that, you know, were put into practice or operationalized within the office of the Secretary of Defense, within the State Department. The State Department variant was really sort of, you know, the key document there is, is the, the 7120 reports. The 7120 reports are, were, were an annex to the annual country reports on terrorism. And they were, they were, they started in, I think a draft version in 2004, and then the full version from 2005 every year. And this, this, the language that was being, that was being used, basically that's the, the, I guess, a draft version was being circulated. And the staff officer responsible, the staff officer at the State Department responsible for drafting these and conceptualizing these had used the term, you know, terrorist sanctuaries. And he described to me receiving a call from, you know, Dick Cheney's office, vice president at the time, instructing him not to use the word sanctuary. And he said, well, in the way he described it to me as well, we should, this is, this is how we talk about, you know, insurgency and counterinsurgency. Don't care. Then we use that word. He's like, well, really, we should. I was like, no, you safe haven, because sanctuary could imply, you know, a religious, you know, a place of worship or part of a place of worship. That in itself was quite striking. What was more striking is the fact that there's language then contained in the first 7120 report, which basically, you know, if you're familiar with these kind of reports and you see this kind of language, you realize that there's been a big disagreement over this. And there's a kind of a slightly disingenuous dismissal of the point that was raised while following, you know, playing, playing along. And that language basically says, we use the term safe haven. So then safe haven becomes the vernacular for those reports from that point on. And it says, but we understand the two words to mean the same thing. So as a real, it's kind of a non-apology. And, you know, when you read the book, you'll find out who this, who this person was. And you'll, you'll realize that he's quite good at prominent public non-apologies. Okay, then. Thanks for, for the right through, for your book. I think I've asked enough questions. And, and, Joe, if you want to handle Q&A, you're on mute, Joe. Classic. Classic, yes. So if you'd like to ask any questions, feel free to type them into the Q&A function. I'll just wait for a few questions to bundle into there before putting them to Mike. But maybe this is a bit on, I'll just kick things off with a question. But perhaps it's a bit unfair given that, you know, you've just written a book specifically about the U.S. case, Bernard Fall, the Vietnam War, and trying to see a continuity and an interesting interplay of contingency in the use of the term. So this might be striking as a bit unfair, but or maybe this is book two. But is it, you know, what if we, and you obviously want to take an applied history approach and see how the discourse shifts and how it frames different and shapes policy. And we might even talk about sort of causal directions there. But what I'm interested in is, is this in a sort of a systemic sort of generalizing way, is the discourse around safe havens, sanctuaries, really about describing how policymakers grapple with the limitations of their power and the limitations of the state. And I was struggling to think about sort of 19th century imperial campaigns, campaigns of colonial expansion and warfare, and particularly in Central Asia. In other words, is this kind of just a big power problem and studying the discourse in a comparative way might be really interesting, or is this a unique American political legal issue? Yeah, so not an unfair question, but I'm still struggling with the words for both sets of issues. I'd say it's yes to both of those things. I'll start with the latter of your last two points first. I think one of the questions I had when I started looking into this is like, is this an American thing? Does this go beyond US? Is it a discourse that is affected anywhere else? And my sense from my own personal exposure, this was jargon that I heard exclusively from American military officers. And colleagues, you know, uniformed colleagues from other countries, the UK comes to mind as well as really UK criticism is like, where is this jargon coming from? You know, one of the related bits of jargon was rat lines. Where is this coming from? You know, it's like, why do they keep insisting on using that jargon? There were a couple of examples, a couple of episodes where I was exposed to this, where everything got distilled. All we need to know is where they are. It's like a line out of James Cameron sort of Aliens movie. I just need to know the geography. Where do I find them? But it is and it isn't an exclusively American discourse. And one of the brief sort of cases or extensions that I look at is, I mean, I don't know if this proves the point or proves the point. But the influence of that of that American jargon sort of trickles over into NATO allies as well. And there's a great case that comes up actually comes up comes up in contained in the Rumsfeld papers, where there's a description of, you know, changes in French nuclear policy. And that policy is all about sanctuaries action, allergies, extended sanctuary. And it's part of developing the French developing nuclear doctrine. As it turns out, that is actually, at least partly informed by, you know, French strategic theorists who were big, well, big fans is probably more than I'm competent to say, but they were heavily informed by the American, the big American sort of, you know, nuclear and strategic theorists, you know, Herman Conn and Bernard Brody. And I took a look at the language that they generated around this in the, in the 1950s and how that circulates. So, so it, you know, I want to say that it starts in a US context, but then extends further than that. I don't really pursue that track too far, except to suggest here some additional lines of influence. It shows up in, you know, some French doctrine and it shows up in some UK publications. But really what I'm looking at is how this manifested in a US context. Remind me the first part of that. So the bigger issues that this might speak to. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's, there's part of this that, that, that really sort of speaks, I mean, you know, practically unequivocally to, you know, to satisfaction with those parts of the world that can't be controlled, right? Absolutely. I'm not, I'm not sure. I mean, you know, there's, it ties into discourses about empire and colonialism and, and control and dominance and preeminence and all of that. So I had to draw the line somewhere with the book. So, but, but definitely, you know, in an historical context, there's, there's a bigger story to be told in terms of how these things worked. You know, if you think about those, the classic geopolitical contensions over sanctuary and neutrality and neutralization, you know, in Southeast Asia, Laos, Cambodia and, and Indochina, then Vietnam. And, and there's, there's, you know, a really interesting history that, that remains to be told that starts with the French, probably in, in, in, in Indochina, but then goes all the way out to the Khmer Rouge, you know, you've got these bombing campaigns that, that go right after these sanctuaries in the, in the 70s, well, starting from, you know, 1970 and then in 72 as well. But then there's not much that, that, you know, there's not much exploration of then what happens to the remnants of that, that sort of cross-border infrastructure and how that enables subsequent developments, you know, particularly thinking about Cambodia and the genocide that happened afterwards and the sort of rise of the Khmer Rouge and all of that. So there's a longer story that, that, that needs to be told. So, so that's, that's not quite the, the bigger sort of world systems and international history kind of question that I think you're asking, but it, but it gets to it definitely. Absolutely. And my apologies to Gregory. I didn't see your question in the chat function. And Gregory is kind of alluding to that in his question, sort of the, in French discourse that the word is there. And he has a question about the French policy in Malay, which you might be able to address. But I'll also just bundle in the question we have in the Q&A function. And please feel free just to add your questions, type them in. And the questioner there is asked, I don't know if you can see it, Mike, but he's asking about sort of contemporary US immigration policy and the ideas of, and of course, it is kind of fascinating what you might draw from your study about the idea of walls and spaces and sanctuary in that context. And finally, I'm just going to say, maybe we need a Sir Michael Howard conference on the concept of sanctuary from the middle ages to the present sometime down the road. Right. So you want me, you want me to wade through these questions myself. I've got the chat function open. And I'm seeing one, if I missed any at the beginning, apologies, I'm looking at two sort of big questions. One from Gregory. Kevin, I'm going to guess I know who this Kevin is. And yeah, I'll get you back. Thank you for good conversation. I will definitely be getting my hands on this book. I'd love to hear the panel's thoughts on the level to which applied history such as this work relies too heavily on 20th century history. The idea of sanctuary has a much longer history in the 19th century and beyond. Do you think this history could be more useful to so I think the question I think the question is, do I think the deeper history, the longer history would also be useful? I suppose so. I mean, you know, this was about creating a I mean, when I started this, I was reading just about everything I could get my hands on on the on the idea of sanctuary and this great work on sanctuary as part of criminal law, you know, criminal law in England in particular and its medieval roots up until more recent times. And, you know, ultimately, I had to sort of step away from all of that and focus on a more manageable sort of chunk of history. Um, but I think there there's a point that this alludes to and that and I raise it in the in my historiographical chapter and that is that the the IR work and the policy work, I guess we sort of skipped over this point on on terra sanctuaries that emerged after 9 11 was was quite focused, right, is quite quite focused on that that urgency associated with al-Qaeda and safe havens and sanctuaries associated with al-Qaeda means it was a very operational sort of, you know, preoccupation with this. And that's that's where I, you know, I came to this view, you know, sort of seeing in each of these, including one of my own articles, where, you know, as academics, we have to justify right up front why this is important and almost invariably every one of these sites well this this policy of documents says it's important, right, and then sort of leaves it alone and goes off and does it's better research on, you know, Bosnia or Somalia or Afghanistan or what have you. And it's fairly limited in its scope, right, and it's fairly limited in its in the sort of theories that it brings to mind and its ideas about space and place. And it sort of, what I want to say is that some of the richest academic work out there on ideas about sanctuary aren't really dealing with al-Qaeda and sort of the national security prioritization of those kinds of sanctuaries after 9 11. They are dealing with, you know, gangs in Central America, they are dealing with I'm thinking of Alan Feldman's work on formations of violence and he has this fantastic passage that deals with the IRA and he applies critical theory to understanding the kind of relationships that are involved spatial relationships in an urban environment in particular. And that's that's a real area of weakness in if you if you look to the sort of the classic, if you will, literature on insurgency and counterinsurgency, you know, the there's this view that, you know, sanctuary is something that is that is rural and then stops being an issue once, you know, if in a classic sort of Maoist formulation, once once, you know, the war sort of proceeds into that urban phase and sanctuary is not an issue. I was like, whoa, that's kind of a limited way of looking at things in a critical or theoretical, you know, sense. And so some of that literature really gets quite quite rich and it's quite mature and it's thinking about this. And I want to say that, you know, one of the other strands of literature that is, you know, not not really it deals with the domestic sanctuary movement as it emerged in the US, but also emerged, you know, in Canada and Europe and Scandinavian countries in the 80s and the 90s. There's a level of theoretical richness there that is that is really striking. And it's unmatched in, you know, the political science and it's sort of the security oriented scholarship that's come out, you know, in the last 15 years in relation to, you know, everything post 9-11. So there's definitely utility in going more broadly. I think, you know, there could be utility in, you know, going into a longer term history of sanctuary in that, you know, guerrilla or regular warfare or, you know, if you wanted to get to, you know, really go Sir Michael Howard and war studies, you know, sort of start with close fits and work from there. I'll stop on that point. Then we got more questions coming in. Did we answer Gregory? I think we did. Yeah, we did. Perhaps you want to address Tim's next. Yeah, Tim, specific status contingent on social and political context and therefore temporary or liminal and prone to reversal or elimination. How is the status of removed or rolled back? Yeah, Tim. Well, I mean, you know, it's a status. It's also a noun, right? So we can play with that part of things. How is the status of sanctuaries removed or rolled back? You know, the easy answer is it's all politics. You know, it's that the whole positive and negative view of sanctuary and what it means is something that is that is ideologically driven politically politically framed, if you will. I think that's the quick answer, Tim. I mean, Tim and I, you know, we've discussed this over the years and he's corrected me every once in a while and I fire back. But I think I think the unquestionably, I mean, there there's a political frame that defines things and it doesn't really at the end of the day, you know, it doesn't matter. I don't want to say it doesn't matter. I want to say that, you know, statutory provisions for sanctuary, for example, that that are contained in the Hague conventions, protections of certain kinds of facilities, hospital schools, religious facilities or heritage sites, those things are are they have standing until somebody decides they don't. And then that's it. And so it's, you know, it never stops being contentious in that sense. I hope I've answered Tim's question. If I haven't, I'm sure he's going to let me know another time from Arto, the last one. Can you foresee a change in the use of the term sanctuary in the US? Yeah, so this is this is this is an interesting point. I mean, I think, you know, one of the one of the ways that I look at that sanctuary discourse that that, you know, arises in a really sort of prominent way with the second Bush administration, by the end of that, it sort of tapers tapers out. And there's a lot of public advocacy by people much smarter than myself, saying we need to change the language. And that applies in a bunch of different ways, you know, we need to be using different terms. When we talk to Al Qaeda, we need to be using sort of their own language or would have you or we need to be changing the terms of the debate. You know, I wrote a short piece for foreign policy around 2009 saying, you know, we need to stop using this language. And just because it wasn't all that useful, because it is a shorthand for some very complex sorts of issues, and it obscures more than it reveals, as most metaphors and analogies and other sort of terms, in terms of figures of speech do. What has been interesting is it's also the gift that just keeps on giving. Somebody comes into power and starts revisiting some issue. Trump came in and he started spouting off about, you know, or opposing politics associated with sanctuary cities and it became a much more prominent. It was like a fourth wave at that point of public attention to sanctuary cities. Can you see the Biden is adapting the term with her? I mean, you know, I end the book on a somewhat cynical note about what we have learned about this and, you know, at the end of the day, a word's a word, you know, unscrupulous politicians are going to make words mean whatever they want them to mean. So in that sense, you know, I don't see any any special utility in revisiting the term. It's probably it's probably more important that they sort of get to, you know, get to get to the meat of whatever it is they're talking about and not try to obscure it or confuse it with other issues, particularly this one, you know, the sanctuary, the language around sanctuary and sort of the spaces that one might associate with sanctuary ended up getting quite, you know, blurry if you're looking at sort of, you know, al-Qaeda sanctuaries or something that were far away, you know, that were that were overseas and then you had this domestic sanctuary movement and then you had this gradual crossing of the lines, you know, in the first 10 years after 9-11, think of, you know, well, what about, you know, an al-Qaeda fifth column or sort of something that's at home and then, you know, then, you know, starting to talk about the sanctuary movement, which is, you know, a legitimate sort of political movement within the U.S., but associating that with, you know, extremism and terrorism in its own right and that that whole politicization and blurring of the lines between foreign and domestic and what all of that means, you know, suggests, yeah, I mean, you could do away with the language, but I don't know that if that will do away with the problems. So, not exactly a positive or hopeful sort of statement, but yeah, adapting to the government's, you may be very pro-Chump and Harper. I mean, I don't know, I don't know what's going on in Biden's mind or within his White House, but I could see, you know, them maybe not wanting to engage with that language precisely because Trump did at, you know, closer to the beginning of his term. Chiara, do you have, I think you perhaps probably have still some abundant questions you'd like to bring in. So, let me invite you back into the conversation. I did have many questions, though I'm not sure how easy they are to answer. We'll start with the hardest. I can do that. So, I was wondering, because might you make the case that the Sanctuary discourse was very much available to politicians at the time of the 9-11 attacks. So, I was wondering whether there were any alternatives to that, but I understand if that's hard to answer, but who would say, who wouldn't identify any alternative discourses, analogies, whatever that were available at the time that could have been used to make sense of the problem. Yeah, it's actually pretty, I mean, it's a straightforward and it's a complicated sort of question to answer. It's straightforward in the sense that sanctuary per se, you know, that piece of terminology operated in conjunction with and ended up getting meshed and merged with all sorts of other issues. You know, state failure discourse is something that had been really prominent, you know, at least in the five years five or six, seven years prior to 9-11. And a lot of the, they almost become interchangeable over the several years after 9-11. You know, the 9-11 commission itself and its recommendations, you know, basically said, sanctuaries are failed states, you know, failed states are the most likely places where safe havens will develop. And it's, you know, the reason was along those lines. So, that was a big one. But, you know, there were sort of alternatives that were developed, ungoverned spaces, ungoverned territories, undergoverned territories. What's really interesting is that one of the, one of the, what I see is kind of the final output of the whole sort of cascade of discourse and discussion around this published in 2008 was a, not a field manual put up by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but it was a kind of a manual for thinking about this. And it was designed not just for sharpened military practitioners, but also for development sector practitioners. And it was a great report that is probably, you know, the most sensitive document that I've seen to date in terms of its acknowledgement of all the potential meanings and, you know, ways that terminology gets twisted. And it's actually, it's the ungoverned areas and safe havens report. And it addresses all those points and brings them all together. So, that's one aspect to it. There were others as well. I mean, you know, a lot of the discussion about terrorist networks, for example, that was quite awkwardly fit with the whole idea of sanctuaries, which were, you know, to, in order to enable, you know, the invasion of Afghanistan, you had to associate a network for the particular state. Otherwise, how do you invade a network? But you have to, yeah, you'd have to engage in a completely different way, right? So that was an awkward fit, but it was also always quite associated with it in historical terms. I mean, you know, there's no shortage of research on sort of the big, the big classic, you know, analogies, historical analogies, like Munich and Pearl Harbor and Vietnam is, is the one that, you know, has the most prominence in this book. I take a look at Pearl Harbor a little bit as well. I don't really look at Munich as much, although that was part, that was very, very much part of the, part of, you know, the discussion in the, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. But I look at Pearl Harbor, partly just to pick apart words also, because, you know, that, that term Harbor, it had Harbor in common with a lot of the language coming out of the, the Bush administration, you know, it was all about harboring at that point, then later became, you know, the harboring sort of deflated somewhat and became something else. But I thought it was worth it because, you know, in the immediate, you know, on the day and in the week after 9-11, it was all about Pearl Harbor and the surprise attack and not since 1941 had we seen anything like this. And there's between there and the fall of Kandahar in Afghanistan in December on, on declared on the anniversary, December 7th of 2001 of the Pearl Harbor attack, the two sort of get, get merged. And I thought it was a really interesting thing to sort of pull apart. But ultimately, there wasn't a lot of, you know, conjoining of Pearl Harbor with the idea of harboring states, except for opportunistic use of a particular date, you know, in the, the initial fight in Afghanistan. So, so yeah, you have the big strategic sort of analogies and metaphors. And then you have, or analogies, and then you have the more operational or tactical kind of metaphors. But sanctuary is a weird fit with all of them. You know, one of the points I make is it doesn't really fit any of the ordinary categories. Because sometimes it's used loaded with historical content. Sometimes it's just a word and there's, you know, try to pick it apart, but you won't find any direct connection to anything historical there. And that, that may speak to policymakers lack of historical awareness. But it also just speaks to, you know, the versatility, I think, which is a key point that we were talking about, the versatility of this particular term and how it played through these different streams. I'm sorry, just reading the question that popped up. We, we're, we're almost out of time, but perhaps, Mike, if you wouldn't mind addressing Muhammad's question. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a good one. Leaders language is understandably reflected public policies because beyond that almost. Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, the construct that I used to help explain this is an availability cascade, right? And so it's about the availability of certain kinds of language and how that then diffuses, right? And, and, and spreads. And of course, you can look in, you can look at that within a closed system like government and sort of from the executive down through agencies and how words, you know, words and terminology and jargon might shape things and then percolate down and then, you know, be mutated or, or you might see variance emerge from that. But then, but then, you know, that, that works much better or it's a much more effective system if then you also have media reflecting this and things get diffused also, you know, outwards, not just in a vertical sense, but laterally and horizontally through all sorts of mechanisms, especially with social media, it's unavoidable. You know, it's now, now, you know, terminology gets pushed and promulgated through through all manner of media. The, you know, one of the notwithstanding bits at the beginning, you know, of that first, first case study, looking at presidential rhetoric is looking at how this used to work. You know, you used to have, you know, a televised address, which is a major event. And now it's a tweet or a billion tweets. But, but, you know, the, the different channels worked in slightly different ways. And, and, and, you know, this is getting away from broader media engagement, but, but types of media and types of technology and certainly, you know, changes in that sense have definitely changed how these sorts of cascades work. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, Mike. Well, our time is almost at an end. So I'll just take a few moments to thank you, Mike, for presenting, giving us an advanced peak at your book. I haven't, I can't say I've finished it. But what I will say is that I found the so far what I've read to be an amazing combination of being personally deeply engaged in the subject matter, a really thorough and compelling discussion of the methodological approach. And of course, a fascinating and personal case study that on top of that brings in fall. So I mean, what more could you ask for in a single single book? And I want to thank Kyara for her fascinating engagement with, with, with, with your analysis of the discourse of sanctuary enclaves, safe havens. And to promise that we're going to invite Mike back when you publish your own, you know, definitive study of fashionable ideas and strategic studies, he's going to get his turn to question you. So everyone, do please, you know, order, order advanced copies of Mike's book. And we'll be, and just to say, of course, that anyone who's interested will be posting a video recording of this discussion on the War Studies YouTube channel. So, so again, and the link to the book has just appeared in the chat. So feel free to click that and get an advanced view of the publisher's blurbs and recommendations. So I'm always not sure how do we, how do we, as a collective thank our speaker, but I'm just going to do a quick clap on behalf of everyone and wish everyone a good and safe evening and hope you enjoy us for future events, including events related to the conflict records unit, which Mike is really the, the, the lead champion for. And I've put links in the chat to our forthcoming events. So thank you everyone. And good night. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Cara.