 Okay. Welcome everybody. Glad that you could join us this afternoon. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the President of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and I'm delighted this afternoon to have this happy convergence of being able to hear at USIP presents very important research by an organization that I used to serve as President for Mercy Corps. So this is a wonderful coming to its worlds colliding in the best way. And I'm very happy to see a number of you here. A lot of thought leaders, a lot of practitioners, people who know Iraq well, because this is, I think, a good opportunity for all of us to take a hard look at what is working and how to make progress in Iraq so many years into this. USIP is an independent federal institute, and we are tasked by Congress to develop very practical solutions for preventing and managing conflict. And so for the last 30 years, we have done so by applying the best research, fieldwork, techniques, and training. And today's event is very much a part of our commitment to showcase and to learn from the kind of research that has important applications for both policy and practice. And so thank you all of us for joining us. Mercy Corps report comes at a really critical time, as everybody here knows, where you have 3 million people who are displaced in Iraq. You have many parts of the country overrun still by Daesh and active conflict underway. It's a country that is very much at the mercy of many regional interests and regional powers, and of course we're all watching the news very closely and seeing how the latest episodes in the Middle East will further affect Iraq. I was there in September, and I, in the midst of all of that, was really struck by two things. The first is I had an opportunity in both Erbil and Baghdad to meet with many civil society members and civil society leaders. And they made it clear to me that over the past decade there has been this important emergence of a strong and vibrant civil society that simply did not exist under Saddam Hussein. And that is an important realization and a game changer for us all to keep in mind. And secondly, while I was there, there were street protests in Baghdad and cities across Iraq by youth who were rallying on a regular basis not to protest sectarian related issues, but very much to demand more inclusive, more accountable, more effective government. And this is a very hopeful sign that we all should take note of what today's report is very much looking at in a systematic evidence-based way. So I'm delighted to have with us today Dr. Jacob Shapiro, who's an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and served as an advisor to Mercy Corps on this report. We have Michael Young, who is Mercy Corps senior advisor on thought leadership. And the two of them will present the report and walk us through their research and findings. We'll then have a panel discussion with the two of them and our own USIP director of Middle East programs, Eli Abu-Aun, who joins us here from Beirut. And I'm sure this will be a very lively conversation and we will have time for questions and comments from all of you. And to get us started, I'm going to ask the moderator of the panel, who is also our USIP senior program officer for the Middle East and Africa, and he leads our work in Iraq, Sarhan Hamasayid, who's an invaluable member of our Middle East team, and he's really helped guide our Iraq program forward for the past five years. So please join me in welcoming Sarhan. Just to make sure the microphone is working. Yes, and I have the pointer for you, so you should be all set. Thank you, Nancy. And just before we get into introducing the panels, I have a few points to raise that. One, this event is live streamed through USIP's website, USIP.org and MercyCorp's website, MercyCorp.org. And also the event is carried live through C-SPAN, so welcome to those who are watching us online or through the live streams. And we have an event, hashtag for today, Governance Iraq. So if you are following us through Twitter or you'd like to join the conversation via Twitter, hashtag Governance Iraq is the hashtag, and I'll try to take questions from that as much as possible throughout the conversation. It is definitely a privilege for me to be part of this distinguished panel because it provides a rich experience on Iraq, rich experience on the topics that will be discussed. There's data from the field. They bring in the voices and the realities of Iraq and the situation over there, so this promises to be a great discussion. And this is our first Iraq event of the year for those who have been following us. We try to make sure that the voices of Iraq, the realities of Iraq, are reflected in our conversations and the data. Iraqi voices are present through the data and through the work. And just to quickly, so the presentation of the report will be done, as Nancy mentioned, by Michael Young first, and she gave you a brief background of their bios, and so I will not get into that again, and the bios are outside. You can pick them up, but they definitely come with a rich experience, and Michael will go first. Then we have Professor Shapiro also comment on the report. Then Dr. Ilya Buon, Michael. It's up to you. You can do it from here. Thanks. Thank you. So thanks very much to the United States Institute of Peace for this opportunity to talk about mercy-causing research. And to all of you for coming along, and hope to hear about what we found out about being governance, sectarian identity, and opposition groups in Iraq, and hopefully have a bracing discussion about what peace findings might mean for all of us as policy makers and policy shippers. First of all, I think I want to make a kind of upfront shout-out to, first of all, USAID and the U.S. Department of State, particularly the Democracy Rights and Labor section of the department whose consistent support for civil society work in Iraq has actually made this research possible. Secondly, actually lastly, as an introductory note, I just want to point out the real author of the report, who's Beza Desai there, in the audience, and she'll be here to sign your copies. And also to answer any really difficult nasty questions that you have. Okay. So what am I going to do? I'm basically going to take you through the headlines of the research findings and what those research findings might tell us. I'm going to talk a little bit about the research methodology that was involved, but not that much, because I think Professor Shapiro will go a little bit more detail about why that methodology is considered so robust and allows us some kind of unique insight into the interplay of all these dynamics and deceptions. I'm going to set out the key research findings, again, in kind of pretty much a bullet point headline manner, and hopefully we can get more deeply into those findings and what they may have in the Q&A afterwards. And finally, I'm going to highlight some of the takeaways for policy makers and policy shapers from those findings, and hopefully those will also serve as starting points for deeper and wider discussion. Okay. So this is what we did in conducting this research. So first of all, it's important to note that the core of this research, the quantitative part of it, the surveying, was part of a USAID-funded program called Broadening Participation in Civil Society. It's a $55 million multi-year program that Mercy Corps implemented in partnership with both international and Iraqi organizations over those years. So every year, as part of that program, Mercy Corps and an independent pulling firm basically pulled, surveyed, over 5,000 Iraqis across the country. 2014 and 2015, it wasn't truly nationwide for obvious reasons. It couldn't get into Anbar governor, it couldn't get into Nino governor to the same extent. But it's a good, solid representative sample. And Iraqis were pulled for a number of different, a number of different questions, but broadly captured their attitudes towards government, civil society, and public goods like public safety, provision of electricity, access to the job market, and opportunities. And as part of the surveys, in 2014, it was kind of a happy accident in that right in the middle of the surveying in August 2014, the former premier, Nuri Almanaki, announced his resignation. And this allowed Mercy Corps and the surveyors to look at how opinions changed from before resignation to the period immediately after the resignation. And here, I think the most interesting findings, particularly for this discussion, is focusing down in one group of respondents, which is the people who identified as Sunni Iraqis. So what did we find? So first of all, note that between 2013 and 2015, the BPCS surveys that broadly found that in key indicators about Iraqis' attitudes towards governance, civic engagement, et cetera, those indicated worsened, seriously worsened across the three years of polling. That was a broad finding. So whether it's about perceptions of corruption, perceptions of healthcare provision, electricity provision, a vast majority of Iraqis thought things were basically getting worse in their country. So Iraqis in general also felt that their ability to influence government was weakening, that lawmakers didn't properly represent them, and that the government itself was discriminatory towards them or fair towards them because of their ethnic or sectarian identity. So however, in August, Premier Al-Maliki announced his resignation and opinions changed quickly and dramatically in the work of that resignation announcement. So what's really interesting is this led to an uptick basically in people's expressed hope for strengthened government performance and government delivery. And that changed most dramatically, most significantly among Sunni respondents. So across the board, Sunnis expressed after the announcement of resignation much stronger hopes for government and governance, and there was only actually one key indicator that went down. And this is where it gets really interesting and the other indicator that went down, and it almost halved from 49% to 26%, is those Sunni respondents expressing sympathy for what you might broadly call armed opposition groups. But what's the upshot of all of that? So first, note that we're not saying that there's some kind of magic bullet of stability in Iraq. But what these findings tell us, well, these findings are really signposts. They're signposts that indicate effective solutions in terms of governance and stability. So what you might say first is that sectarianism, which has gained a lot of attention and is presently right now getting a huge amount of attention globally, is probably overplayed as the driver of conflict and stability in Iraq. Secondly, we can tell you from what Iraqis themselves have told us is that poor governance and justice are important drivers for conflict and stability. So Iraqis themselves have made that explicit link in terms of the survey information and the key informant interviews that we conducted in September last year. So, I'm sorry, just a little digression there. Why that particularly resonates for us in Mercy Corps is that we've done other research and other fragile conflict affected states and situations around the world that tell us broadly the same thing. It's that the same kind of linkages, for example, were found among young people in Somalia, Afghanistan and Columbia when they were seeing the linkages between their expressed support for armed groups like Azhabaab or the Afghan Taliban or the FARC, for them directly sprung from a sense of injustice. So the same kind of expressions of feelings of injustice and support for armed groups and issues of governance we find those in other context too. So it really resonates with the findings in Iraq. Therefore, it seems to suggest that getting governance right may well be more powerful in preventing or countering violent extremism than has previously been acted upon. So, and what it also tells us from other information within the survey and within the research, the other allied research done for this report is that part of getting governance right, the big part of getting governance right is actually fostering a vibrant and active civil society in Iraq. So, the conclusion being we all have a stake in assisting Iraq and Iraqis rebuild their country against stability. In doing this most effectively, we do need to pay serious attention to issues of governance and justice. And within that, it's not only about increasing state capacity, it's not only about rebuilding public infrastructure and public services, all of those are important. But it is really about investing big in civil society as an actor able to change citizens' perceptions of governance and governance and help the Iraqi government authorities, help their ability to have a constructive relationship with an active civil society, widen the space where they can have dialogue so that citizens can begin to see that dialogue bears fruit and delivers what's really important to them and addresses these issues of perceptions of injustice and weak governance. So, I'm going to stop there. Thank you. These are the podiums, so I have somewhere to view some notes I was taking during the presentation. So, what I want to start by highlighting is really what's unique about this study. And there are a couple of things here that are, I think, very important to take into account. One is this is a piece of research of really unusual scale when it comes to evaluating civil society programs, right? You have these three nationally representatives, each large enough that you get resolution down to the problems level if you want it. You can look at lots of subgroups and you carry this out over a period of tremendous political flux in Iraq. And that's a really unique thing and in a report, I think Mercy Corps has done a great deal to learn from that. So, let me talk specifically about the value of the natural experiment that's embedded in the approach, right? So, Mercy Corps was in the field, it's a large survey, so they were in the field for a long period of time, basically spring and summer, 2014. And during that period, you have the Maliki resignation. What that lets you do is it lets you rule due to very important things. First, because none of, no one expected this specific timing of the resignation, the only factor differentiating survey respondents before and after is this change in national level government. So, you get a really clean measure of how important politics are to people's perceptions of what's going on in the country, right? How important those national level politics are. And you learn from the report, A, that that result is very big, but what's not in the report but is in the underlying analysis, is it is remarkably robust. Basically, you can take any time window you want around that resignation, they show you in the report, 2014 to 15, but you can bring that time window down to one week, either side of the resignation, or move it out to basically the entire wave of the survey pre-post, and you still find that change. There's this dramatic and kind of durable change in attitudes. So, you're sure that's because of national politics, and that's kind of an amazing thing. You never get that when you're studying views of conflict and politics in conflict zones. The second thing, though, that you get from that is you don't really believe that, like, 49% of SUNY's support on groups when they respond directly on that in a survey, because there are all kinds of reasons for people to assemble when they respond on a survey. But there's no reason that the incentives to lie would change dramatically between immediately before the resignation and immediately after. So you can take that difference of about 50% in support, and you can kind of benchmark that and say that's credible, all kinds of other things in terms of what we might think of as like, monarchy resignation units. So you can think of the difference between, say, men and women, rich people and poor people, SUNY's and she is. You can benchmark all of those differences in terms of that quantity that you know is kind of right. And that's a very big deal from the perspective of understanding what's going on. So, for example, the response in kind of perceptions about how much civil society can help increases by roughly half, we'll call it a monarchy unit. So what that's telling you is that's a huge difference, right? Over that year period, people's attitudes change as much as having this incredibly polarizing figure leave the national government. So that's quite valuable. Now, being an academic, I want to do two other things. I want to say some grumpy stuff because that's our obligation. And then I want to mention basically how this relates to some other work. And so on the slightly grumpy side that the claim at the end of the report is that civil society investments are important. And you don't quite have evidence of that in the survey, right? Or in the results here, right? You know there's a link between governance and attitudes about civil society, right? And you know the changes in governments can dramatically change support for our groups. But you don't yet have the link that says the kinds of things that outsiders can come in and support will lead to changes in perceptions of governance that will be consistent with those political changes. And so I think the next challenge is to figure out how do you make that link, right? How do you make sure you can attribute the kinds of changes that you see here to the kinds of programming that we can do. And that's a challenge for MercyCorps. I think USIP and lots of folks in the room. Okay, the last thing I want to talk about is how this relates to other work. And the research here is kind of massive in scale compared to most other things we have. But it's actually quite small compared to some other survey efforts in Iraq. So the US military during the Iraq War funded tens of massive surveys. And in particular one I've worked with is multinational corps of Iraq, the military unit that was responsible for ground forces in Iraq, ground forces. Ran surveys of about 9,000 people a month from September 2004 through September 2010 in Baghdad. So basically everyone in Baghdad was surveyed at some point by these surveys. And if you look at those data, you see a couple things that are very consistent with what the MercyCorps team found here over a long span of time. And the two things I want to highlight is first that the way armed groups treated civilians had very clear impact on their support for non-state armed groups. So people who lived in little neighborhoods that experienced violence at the hands of either the insurgents or the coalition in subsequent periods, down to very small time periods, a week, 30 days, were more or less negative towards those groups in the same way you'd expect from the results here. So the insurgents imposed costs people's support for them went down, the government or coalition forces did and support for the insurgents went up. Critically though, and I think this is the important thing we learned from that, that reaction was not uniform. The reaction during that time period was much stronger among the poor, the young and the uneducated than it was among the wealthy, the older or the better educated people. And so what that suggests is a very encouraging thing for the kind of programming that Mercy Corps is doing, which is that the populations you're targeting are the populations whose politics will respond. Because even very large stimulus like having a large attack in your neighborhood in 2004 to 2010 wasn't changing the political attitudes of people in Baghdad who were kind of wealthy, well educated. But that's not who you're going after in a lot of these programs. And so I think that's a very encouraging point. And so just to end here, I want to say it's fantastic to see this kind of research supported. And from the perspective of the research side, we've, I've been part of a team that has been pushing folks at aid and folks in other parts of the US government for years to engage in these kinds of long-term surveys. And it's fantastic to see that when that's done and when Mercy Corps executes on that, you get results like this that are really teaching us something we didn't know before about politics in the important conflict area. Thank you. Sure. Dr. Lee, you can sit there if you want where you can use the podium. Good afternoon. Just to manage expectations, I don't have an academic background and I don't have a lot of experience in research. So I spent most of my time in the field, so I tried to convey a few observations from my field experience. I would like first to start by thanking Mercy Corps and the USIP teams for organizing this event. I would like also to praise the work that Mercy Corps did on this report. It's a very spot on report and a very useful policy tool, especially that it outlines the different layers of the conflict and many of the drivers. However, for my presentation, I decided to focus on one dimension that is usually unaddressed in many of the literature that is being written about Iraq and the rest of the region. There's no question that the conflicts in the region have multiple layers as the report describes them and each layer is also driven by a multitude of factors. So it's not only a religious conflict, it's not only an ethnic one, it's not only a sectarian or a social one, but all these are intertwined all together and they make these conflicts, as I said, multi-layered. Based on this analysis, a lot of recommendations and interventions are adopting approaches that would focus on one or many of these conflict drivers, which is definitely needed and I'm not questioning this approach. However, what I'm questioning is the fact that one element is usually, as I said, unaddressed. It's the underlying conditions that make these drivers activated or that make these drivers affect a given conflict. To make myself clear, we all know that poverty is often associated today with terrorism, extremism, whatever you want to call it, or radicalization. But I know and I'm sure you do know a lot of poor and excluded young people who didn't become terrorists. So it's not, there's no causality between poverty and radicalization or terrorism, but there are underlying conditions that make it possible in some cases for people to become radicalized or extremist. And this underlying condition in the region can be summarized as the praise of violence. At the social level in the Middle East, people praise violence as a virtue. It's not considered as a bad thing, it's considered as a good thing. Not only in politics, it's also considered as a good thing in their personal life. The same communities that are suffering from ISIS and other radical groups today have embraced violence at different times of their existence, whether in smaller conflicts, between tribes, between families, or even within the same families, and as I said at the personal level. So this is what makes, or this is what the fact that violence is praised underlies the condition of violence of conflicts in the region. And when I usually bring up this issue in front of an international audience, people, some people at least, try to deny it by saying, no, we met young people in Amman, in Beirut, in Erbil, and they don't look to be praising violence. But the issue is that usually the people that we're exposed to are the educated people who have embraced a western lifestyle, but they do not represent necessarily the majority of people who think that violence is a legitimate tool to achieve gains. And when you add the social value of praising violence as a legitimate tool to a context of political exclusion, sorry, political marginalization, social exclusion, poverty, et cetera, this is where the factors driving a conflict are aggravated. This is not to say that work should not be done on governance, on poverty, on political participation, on education, et cetera. What I'm saying is that if the programs that are addressing these issues do not take into account the fact that there is a need for a change in the social paradigms in the region, then the gains that we might be achieving will be short-lived. We can work on governance programs, we can work on poverty, we can work on education, but if violence will remain a legitimate tool, at least this is how it's perceived by the majority of people in the region, then whatever progress we can aim at will, as I said, be short-lived. At USIP, we are trying to include this element in our interventions. We interviewed, for example, in 2012 in a region called Bartella in Yenawa plain between the Christians and the Shabbat, and basically at that time what we told them in the first place is that there is a better way to address the issue of coinciding religious dates than dealing or adopting violence to solve it. And not only we told them that violence is not going to help them to address this issue, but we also helped them to find the middle ground to celebrate both Christmas and Conomerate Ashura during the same week while avoiding or while preventing violent attacks from both groups. In the aftermath of the Spiker Massacre, we also explained to Sunni and Shi'a tribes that resulting to violence will not advance the judicial process and that it will end in a perpetual cycle of violence. It will prevent the safe return of IDPs and will not keep any of the Sunnis or the Shi'a as safe. So we adopted a similar approach in other smaller scale conflicts in Diwaniya when we facilitated dialogue between a group of local public work contractors and the governor or more recently in northern Syria between Kurds and Arabs. So basically what we're trying to do is to demonstrate to the people or to the communities that there are alternatives to violence whereby they can achieve what they want without necessarily going into unacceptable compromises. We also try to demonstrate the high cost of violence. And by doing so, as I said, we aim at triggering a process of social transformation whereby the violence is not considered anymore as a legitimate tool but as something that is counterproductive in most of the cases. Now this might look trivial at first sight but my assessment makes me confident that this work is essential and should be a core element of any intervention in the region. Of course this involves policy decisions at the level of the international community to mainstream this dimension in their programs but it also involves and as the report highlights the role of the local actors including civil society in this kind of work because at the end of the day the agents of changes have to be local. The international community can support but the change has to happen through indigenous actors. So the initial question for this event and for the report was that if good governance can erode the support to militancy my point is that the answer to this question is yes if so it's a conditional yes depending on whether an element of social transformation is built into the interventions that will address governance issues. Thank you for your attention and I'm looking forward for comments and questions. Thank you Dr. Lee. Before I ask my first question as the moderate I just want to encourage the panelists if they have comments on each other's remarks I welcome any follow up on those I encourage a discussion here also between the panelists also as the same way we engage with the audience. Sure. So one thing you said which I think was very interesting is that two things actually one was demonstrating the cost of violence is potentially productive and that there's not this link between poverty and support for extremism something that we see very clearly in several years of survey research across Pakistan in all parts of the country so not an Arab country but a country that suffers tremendous amounts of political violence is that generally it is the poor who are most negative towards extremist groups so again it's kind of the poor who dislike the groups the most and we see a little bit of that in the survey data from Iraq although it's not as strong the other thing though that we see there is if you share information with people about the cost of violence to the country you have a very strong effect on driving support for militant groups down and this is across all kinds of militant groups and that effect is strongest among the poor and so it suggests the intuition at least in another context the intuition is borne out in very large scale surveys across a number of years. Thank you. I think some of the key takeaways is that I like the sort of the question underneath the research which talks about how good governance can diminish support for ISIS and sectarian militias. First of all, it highlights that the violence is not coming from a point of belief from a point of religious belief that you have to do this. Second, it gives hope that there's possibility that you can diminish that and good governance is the route to do that and civil society is a good partner that could be worked with and I think this is one of the success stories of Iraq in the post-2003 and it is important it constituted a paradigm shift for governance for government to have another partner on the scene to be an active governance player is an important one and to see acceptability by the government and by the people more so to be a partner is an important one. But I would like to get back to the issue of violence because there is support for armed groups and violent groups whether it's ISIS or somebody else as an organized group and then there is the other thing that Dr. Li talked about is that resorting to violence it may not become an armed organization but actually violence as a means whether it's a demonstration that turns into violence or it's a government that may resort to violence as a means to respond to societal demands and then also the perception that whether it was the Kurds or the Sunnis that when they had an ask of the government that when there was no consensus and when there was no agreement the response was violence. So after through the research through their interviews and this is a question for the panel after the bloody conflicts that we have seen in these different stages do you see at all any change at the policy makers level that what are the people level that they're there especially looking at the south because looking at the south of the demonstration we're close to to breaking into violence sometimes do you feel that there is any change at the policy makers level at the community level that resorting to violence may not be the way to address those differences because differences will stay that they will be part of humanity they have been the question is how do you deal with non-violent aid Elin mentioned some examples of USIP's intervention but I'm specifically interested in Mercy Corps observation from the conversations you have Okay I have a couple of points before addressing that particular issue so I think two things are particularly resonated with me reflecting on Mercy Corps' own research so first of all just this whole idea that for example poverty and a lack of job opportunities would drive young people into the hands of the arms of extremist groups violent extremist groups and a previous piece of research which is collected in this report youth and consequences which is available also here what young people in Somalia in Colombia and Afghanistan told our researchers is basically that it's not poverty it's not a lack of job opportunities that's not the main driver in terms of sympathy or lack of sympathy for armed violent extremist groups like Al-Shabab or the Taliban or the FARC Army and that's their own sense of marginalisation and injustice so yes all of these things layer over each other all of these things interplay but for the people at the sharp end the young people themselves they felt excluded they felt marginalised they felt that their own society government was not responsive to them and was unjust towards them and that's for them was what drove them to either support or support them and again that's reflected in the research that we just conducted in Iraq in that you know sectarian identity is not the prime driver for sympathy for armed opposition groups so that's the first thing just to kind of I guess support your own comments secondly just to go back to the issue of the constructive role of Iraqi civil society and basically improving governance is improving which is true so it's not prime but what do we see and what does the research tell us about how Iraqis themselves view civil society and this begins to start to address your own point so first of all what has Mercy Corps witnessed in Iraq over the past several years through its engagement through the USAID BPCS program we've witnessed as Nancy was saying a fluorescence of civil society in Iraq civil society in Iraq is very vocal and active and organized so and that level of vibrancy that level of activity has also driven changes and perceptions among Iraqis themselves in their service towards what they basically see as the usefulness of civil society and the usefulness of nonviolent ways of solving grievances and issues so when the first area was carried out only 39% of Iraqis had kind of expressed a positive view of civil society as that kind of broker that can resolve issues by the time the 2015 survey that had increased to 50% so 50% of respondents basically saw civil society as a force for good within governance and saw civil society as able to broker solutions around their own issues of perceptions of poor governance and injustice okay now I would like to open it up to the audience for questions please if you raise your hand and a microphone will be brought to you and wait for the microphone and if you also please state your name and your affiliation and for those who may have walked later just to remind that this event is being live streamed through the USAID BPCS website and it's being carried live through C-SPAN first question here thank you I suppose when you were talking about governance you were thinking about accountability and the problem in the government or law enforcement whether they are doing right whether they have something like police killing like United States or is it the first do you mean the governance and what do they have to change or correct whether they have accountability whether they have reliability whether they have corruption I suppose and whether there is data for your research well when you are looking around maybe more reliable but when you are looking at the data a lot of time is false or fraudulent so if you want to say blame on financial institution whether they take people's property or even lives away so it's what you mean by change of governance they make people feel better so what the research shows the Iraq research shows is that when people had an expectation of improved governance that really had a strong and powerful effect in terms of their own perceptions of using violence to solve problems their expectations of government performance their expectations of just basic service delivery and there have been practice examples on the ground especially in the last couple of years in Iraq of civil society groups actually making government more accountable whether that's the federal government or whether that's government at district or government at level so yes within the service the vast majority of respondents still see still perceive the government to for example be corrupt they still perceive the government to be ineffective and not representative but when you look at what's happening on the ground that can change so whether it's civil society group like the Iraqi Center for Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills moderating with the federal government about that to talk about support for Iraqi civil servants who have been affected by the ISIS takeover muscle that group was able to play a key role in changing the federal government's policy about civil service salaries for example and that's a real tangible result if you look down south and al-Masana Governorate again civil society groups were able to come together and change the way that the local government authorities were approaching the commodity of electricity provision and make that electricity provision which is pretty vital in Iraq during summer distributed in a much fairer and transparent way other civil society groups have got their own local governments to open the budget making process and all of these are small real tangible gains that shows that civil society can have a powerful role to play in making government more accountable not only making government more accountable but kind of brokering that conversation between the enraged citizen and the government authorities and brokering that in a non violent very focused way so I think one of the striking things you see in the data for this report is this disconnect the general changes and expectations of government and the general changes and beliefs about corruption so beliefs about corruption are increasing dramatically throughout the sample and expectations of how effectively government is going to perform increased dramatically from 2004 to 2015 so there's not a sense in the survey to go to the question about corruption that corruption is incompatible with government performance the survey seems to suggest that there's some set of changes going on in society in Iraq where expectations about corruption are going up but people are also expecting more of their government and so there may be some kind of tolerance for the inefficiencies or problems caused by corruption because those two things at least in western context you wouldn't think about them going on together so there should be some tolerance that's a little different than what we might expect question in the back Hi, I'm Dale Lottin with the State Department's Office of Opinion Research I wonder if you could answer a sort of nuts and boltsy question about the surveys tell me a little bit about the differences in methodology between the three there seem to be some implied differences from the slide you showed and how you think those might have affected the results I mean so Visa would really be the best person to answer that my understanding from the work I've done with the data and the work my students have done with it is the main difference is that there were certain areas you couldn't sample previously and the results aren't very sensitive to how you treat that those areas didn't move dramatically differently and so that's the main the main difference when you poke at the data hard for the differential politics of different governors and things like that the results also seem quite stable so it doesn't seem like there's a lot going on with the composition of the sample that would drive the results question belated in the middle Hi, thanks I'm Jen Hig I'm a project director for SSG Advisors but I want to be a grumpy academic for a second just like Jake so my first question is about the relationship between political attitudes and political behaviors is limited it's not sectarian violence and it's not actually political attitudes but it's tribal or family obligations at a very local level that would lead to support or lack of support for Daesh so that's a question I would love to hear my second brief question is strong support and the idea that there's a valorization of violence I've spent many years in the Middle East and I think a lot of that responsibility comes with local media and I'm curious to see any sort of intersection between civil society and media in changing this we know that even Daesh uses violence very heavily as a recruitment strategy so we know that it really turns kids on and I would love to see it an enhanced role or call for responsibility for local media thanks just to pick up the point in terms of what does the survey tell us about support for otherwise for a specific group like ISIS in fact the serving of consistently very little levels of support for ISIS among the Iraqi population that's right yeah so that's basically what the survey tells us about that specific group yeah I don't think the survey did not pull the interaction between local media and civil society in terms of so this research doesn't particularly speak to your specific the latter part of your question and this whole question about violence turns young people on and is a driver for the recruitment into extremist groups that if you look at what the Iraq report tells us but if you also look at what the youth and consequences report is telling us the indicators are that that's not the case or it's not the meaning factor yeah it's obviously a factor but what young people tell us is that it's their own sense of societal injustice towards them for example so it would make them feel more sympathetic for an armed extremist or opposition group which is offering like an alternative solution in terms of correcting what they see as the injustices rather than the violence itself so I think you raise an important point about the disconnect between behavior and attitudes and it's important though to think about I think this in terms of what happens at the end of the day in terms of violence because malicious attitudes aren't as much of a problem if they're not accompanied by malicious behavior and the ability to conduct malicious behavior depends both on your beliefs and on what other people in the community are willing to do and how likely they are to alert the authorities or other community bodies when you're going to engage in violence and so one way to think about the results of the survey is it's probably not the case that you're getting a sample result on attitudes towards violence that is the right estimate of that for the population that might engage in violence but it's still really important because you're getting the estimate for the population in which those people are embedded the community in which they're embedded and those communities can take a lot of actions on their ideology and so I think it's still quite important even if you don't have that direct link between I'll respond this way on a survey and I'm likely to go pick up a gun and you know when you think about the evolution of attitudes towards ISIS it's a shame Dr. Meade from IAACSS isn't here because they've been doing kind of like the best public opinion work on this over a long period of time and you know just to kind of paraphrase that it's generally that support for ISIS is quite low it was dropping and just the last few months they've done some surveys in Mosul which suggest maybe it's taking up a little bit in Mosul but really like you don't have the right person on the panel to speak to that Actually I want to follow up on that and ask Dr. Meade I've heard you know other conversations comment on the issue of the youth those were born in those societies especially in the provinces who have seen violence around them if you can comment on that how they may affect their vulnerability to and being prone to violence Well yes I mean the point is that before getting into this I'd like to make a very brief comment on political attitudes and behaviour I think that if you talk to the majority of people in the region you would feel there is kind of dual standard approach in this that people deny praising violence but in fact when they are prompted to act they act with violence if you talk about sectarianism about corruption you would feel the same issues that people deny they endorse corruption but when they want to do something for themselves they don't hesitate to bribe someone to get a passport done or whatever there is this dual standards that exist in the mind of the majority of the people in the region and this also should be something that needs to be taken into account now back to the issue of the youth yes I made previous comments about the vulnerability of youth especially those who are today 12 13 years old so they were born in 2003 they lived all their life in a context of conflict and violence many of these youth have seen their dads, uncles or other people from their family die in what they consider as a legitimate war against occupation, against whatever you want to call it but the increased risk on this on this group today is the heavy militarization of the community so the number of armed groups in Iraq today is scary and the way these armed groups are structured and their line of commands and their affiliation sometimes to regional patterns sometimes to local patterns is also very dangerous and my question is always and this is something I try to bring up in my discussions with Iraqi officers when I meet them is what's the plan to handle the caseload of 60,000 to 100,000 fighters who are today on the ground when the conflict ends these people have been outside the civilian life for a while now even if the conflict ends today if there is a political settlement between Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds what will happen to 60,000 to 100,000 young people who have been outside the school system who have been fighting for four or five years now if not more than this scary question that comes across my mind yeah, it highlights the need for the... that quote also makes investments in addressing those issues is a multi-year thing you have to really stay with it there was a question in the back, please yes Hi, Morgan Kay, CEO of Motive International if I'm following the hypothesis that civil society is almost a proxy vehicle to see improvements in governance as opposed to just tackling governance head on and interpreting governance as government service delivery representation accountability in this case so I think my question is and it's sort of a reinterpretation of the first question what does the data actually say about when who within civil society is very, very heterogeneous who and what elements of civil society is most effective in changing what particular aspects of governance can we be a little bit more granular maybe about tying those two together because that's really what's going to guide us in the right direction as practitioners and policy makers to select is it civil society groups that are calling for more budgetary transparency or is it religious leaders calling for decrying of violence within among political actors for example so can the panel maybe tease apart who within civil society is targeting what within governance and what the data says about that thanks actually I like that question let me add a little bit to that so if civil society and the activism that we have seen from them in the recent demonstration of the past month had Grand Ayatollah was not so strongly vocal on the issues of corruption and governance would civil society had the same level of visibility and success or do you think that there was higher chance of being the government or other actors have responded to them with more harshly I think this is really a question Thank you Okay this is going to correct me if I'm totally wrong but the data itself won't tell us which specific actors or groups within the broad sphere of civil society are the most effective yes get her microphone actually please in this survey when we refer to civil society we refer specifically to civil society organizations so we're really talking about formal civil society so the quantitative data itself which is basically the surveying the point doesn't allow you to do comparative analysis between different types of civil society actors to say okay type A is effective type B is less effective what the qualitative research does in terms of key formal interviews and the program's own engagement with these more structured formal civil society organizations shows you that across every area of Iraq you know whether it's down in Al-Mathana or Daim al-Bastra whether it's up in the Kurdish autonomous region or it's in Baghdad there are these kind of more formally organized civil society groups are able to be effective in changing the paradigm of governance in ways that are responsive to citizen voices so there might be engaging with a local government body about budget transparency but there might also be engaging about a very very tangible public good like electricity provision in during summer in Iraq which sparked a lot of protests last year and they've affected change so they really they've made government more transparent in a lot of instances they've made government therefore more accountable to its citizens they've made government change key policies that it was pretty determined to pursue before that civil society organization brokered that conversation between citizens and the people within the policy makers within government so quantitative data doesn't necessarily tell you what's the most effective form of civil society but the qualitative experience shows us that these more structured civil society organizations can be pretty effective in actually delivering real change that's about as far as we can go up right now okay question here gentlemen yes yes a friend got a foreign policy research institute looking forward oil prices have been down for a year they're now talking about a decade $50 barrel oil the Iraqi government has already cut back on its reconstruction investment the there's talk that the subsidies will be reduced for electricity and water is this going to be a strain on civil society that civil society won't be able to take thank you can you elaborate on that a little bit more please how are you seeing civil society's role in dealing with those issues well for example I guess the point is that if the pie is growing then it's one thing to argue about dividing the pie evenly when the pie is shrinking that's going to put a tremendous strain both on the formal and the informal parts of the Iraqi government I'm thinking of the Iraqi government as being the employer of first resort those days are over so unemployment growing especially among the university educated that's going to put a tremendous strain on the society thank you I have a brief comment about this I think that this crisis despite all the negative aspect that it brings with it it's also an opportunity for both the government of Iraq and the civil society in Iraq to think about many aspects that were left forgotten over the last 10 years one of them is and this is more of the government's resort is to look seriously into diversifying its economy instead of relying on the oil sector the second one is to end up the abnormal situation of having the government being the first employer in Iraq at the same time the civil society can use this crisis as well to steer the direction of some public policies that are much needed in Iraq today so I think it will put some strain on the civil society but if I were an Iraqi activist I would see it as an opportunity as well this before I get back to the question I was hoping as I was in this conflict that as oil went down it could have the transformative effects that Dr. Ali talked about but also the competition over the resources may bring other challenges and bring it down to the provincial level as Iraq decentralizes my real hope was as the Iraqi revenue is going down I hope that the different actors obviously not ISIS but at least the Iraqi actors whichever political angle you take that the cost of the conflict will be so high they will lose interest in spending so much on the weapons on the fighting the need for reconstruction but so far I don't know if the panels have seen any observations I have not seen an indicator that influences the key actors to really take it in a different direction but that is offset because of the regional interventions which I will come back to it if there is no question about it okay here Sarah Chase, Carnegie Endowment I wanted to drill down a little further into the sort of decoupling that you suggested between corruption and governance and it seems again I'm just listening to what you're saying about the report but it seems as though that perceptions of increase in corruption or increasingly negative perceptions of corruption throughout the period increasing expectations of government at a certain point but not necessarily increasing perceptions of actual government delivery and so I'd like to just probe a little further as to whether this decoupling between corruption and governance is actually fair because it sounds like given the words that you're using which have to do with transparency, justice delivery effective delivery of the things the government is supposed to do all of those things are and corruption is anathema to all of those things and so what I'm suggesting is perhaps what we're looking at is after the election the expectations of a better and a cleaner government rose but were not yet met in terms of perceptions of the outcome is that a fair alternate phrasing potentially so I would actually I would have to differ on this to ask Beza if she remembers what happens in 2015 as far as not expectations of government performance but reports of government performance so you have extremely dramatically in the 2014 wave is expectations of governance go up hugely they go up most strongly when it comes to basically the performance of the police services and among soonies and how like they are to kind of suffer negative treatment from the security services so that's like the once you control for kind of individuals' characteristics that's the really massive jump in 2014 which is completely consistent with the perceptions of the monarchy government but so it's at least in that period it's not that like there's the change and among soonies they expected all of a sudden service delivery in all other areas to dramatically improve it was really this narrow thing and I Beza I don't if you remember the 2015 results more specifically I would completely agree with your interpretation and if you have the report on page 19 you'll see a graphic where not just perceptions of corruption but also perceptions of services are worsening from 2013 to 2015 so that trend is consistent but as Jake pointed out when we looked just at perceptions of expectations of service delivery before and after the rising nation those expectations did rise so I think your interpretation is correct Nancy and then the gentleman over there Mr. Han, Nancy Lindborg again I wanted to piggyback on Sarah's question because the classic conundrum is often change happens expectations rise and change doesn't happen fast enough and you've got a very short window within which to make the kind of change that sustained whatever positive reaction there is and so is there anything in the data anything in the survey that suggests how durable the positive perception is and what might happen if Malachi Abadi continues to not be able to institute a meaningful reform program and reforms that will actually be perceived I'll just make a very general point about getting that kind of analysis and then turn it over to Mark and this is really for people in the room who might have some influence on funding or administering these things in the future it's almost impossible to answer that question incredibly with these kinds of surveys where you're not going back to the same people every time what you really want to do is you want to be able to get the same people at multiple points in time several years apart and see how their individual perceptions are changing because the thing that can happen if you don't is people who are happy can be more willing to respond on certain questions around the survey and so you get a spurious kind of result that's about what we call response bias and not people's attitudes this is actually what killed the Romney campaign in 2012 in some ways so they didn't account for this in Columbia we've just USAID has just finished a program the midline of a survey where they went to about 20,000 people and did a panel survey in 2013 and late 2015 and they got 90% of the people in 50 rural municipalities of Columbia where there was conflict in 2013 they went back and they found 90% of them in the follow-up wave so you could absolutely do that kind of research it just is expensive good afternoon my name is Jorge Shepard and I have a question made for me by Professor Shapiro more than looking the way forward as far as all these surveys that being put in place I'm actually a former member of IMF and the World Bank and also working very hard in Erbil 2007-2008 as part of the contractor under USAID and I remember working so hard on these issues around transparency specifically we would call fiscal transparency and oversight and we went through a lot of similar surveys on the grassroot level and we put a lot of energy on this so my question is in how much of value all of you obviously this has to be consulted through the other IDPs some of which I already mentioned others and we I remember tried to encourage some more capacity building at the grassroot level even working at the village level in Kurdistan region I personally went to trainer on something we call public national management specifically on accounting and treasury and we spent a lot of time and it was a very nice experience nowadays with all these changes going on with the new regime and the new government is there any kind of a blueprint that's being discussed as part of all these other efforts through a kind of a donor community or donor support community obviously with the government as far as how all these issues around oversight and institutional building are going to be literally just in the way forward so I don't know I'd actually be curious to hear from Mark what the consensus is at Mercy Corps and I received the advocacy of those kinds of programs is there a blueprint it's I'd hesitate to say there is a blueprint because that sounds so concrete and fixed but certainly those conversations go on those conversations go on between the Iraqi authorities and key institutional donors and civil society groups whether those are international civil society groups like Mercy Corps or Iraqi civil society organizations so if you take the example of how do you program most effectively to stabilize areas that have recently been retaken from ISIS for example so within those conversations international actors, those groups are very looking at this issue very seriously and developing their own strategies for engagement I think one of the kind of key messages of this research is within that conversation within that road mapping and blueprinting let's not forget the necessity of investing equally as big in governance and particularly in civil society's role within governance as you might invest for instance in infrastructure so if you look at some of the reconstruction stabilization plans they're still very output heavy in the sense of we will repair the water system for example in Tikrit or we will rebuild a certain number of schools they're very concrete in that sense but what people in the service tell us is that's not necessarily the most important factor for them most important factor for them is that they feel that their voices are listened to their head and things change when they vocalize those concerns and needs and it would the research and our own experience in countries like Iraq and elsewhere would suggest that one of the most effective ways of doing that is fostering and supporting a very active and vibrant civil society and within that two key factors we're looking at structured civil society organizations able to build the kind of level of professionalism and focus you were talking about but also within that I think youth play a very, very key role and if you look at what a lot of respondents in the surveys and the quality of the movement who's told us in Iraq they single out youth as the single most kind of civil society investment thank you first Kathy Gildenhorn here and thank you first off for a thought provoking and thorough presentation I'm very curious and going further into defining investments in civil society that might actually impact the marginalization sense that you spoke of in the youth so that we can get the most effective construct for change and if there might be any specific ways of achieving that end result that you might recommend based on your evaluation of the data and your knowledge of what's going on on the ground so I think one of the key recommendations from Mexico on that issue would be so often programs that are focused on youth empowerment tend to look at it in a very kind of stove piped single issue where you might put a huge investment in the youth employment program in Colombia but what both young people tell us and that assures is that the most effective programs are not ones that take a kind of project focus so it's not about youth employment it's looking at young people's experience in a holistic way and programming with young people at the center so that kind of more holistic approach that recognizes that young people don't live their lives in silos one day they don't think okay today I'm about youth employment or today I'm about better access to water and sanitation they live their life holistically they don't piece the show that the most effective programs in addressing that sense of injustice and marginalization when youth is holistic programs where you're able to engage with young people directly to start to address the totality of their concerns which sounds complex but actually comes down to the methodologies in terms of engagement supporting them even something as simple as psychosocial counseling and talk about their issues with other youth and with truan professionals can be powerful and affecting youth sense and marginalization and the sense of inability to control our own destinies Before I get back to your questions from the audience I have a question for you about the best of circumstances trying to reach governance or level of good governance is a challenging road and you always stumble on and hit vested interest and you talk about that in your report there is the vested interest just in governance itself but you have also vested interest in probably maintaining some aspects of the conflict you have the regional interest and the proxy wars that are happening and affecting and sometimes probably being out some of the investments you make whether it's in development or something how do you see the effect if you are someone in the international community and trying to say okay I want to invest in peace in Iraq and you look from the present of the vested interest local or regional is this a worthwhile investment is this a way to counter that can you speak about that challenge me to be fair Ili well obviously the answer is yes since USIP maintains its program in Iraq then we consider that investing investing in the peace in Iraq is a worthwhile investment now I always I always give the right value to the regional regional dynamics and I think that they can and they are already affecting a lot what's happening in Iraq as I said in my presentation I believe that peace building in Iraq and in the region has to start bottom up and this is why we are focusing at USIP at the grassroots level at this stage because we know that working at the macro level now in this regional context might not be the best option so I think that investing at the grassroots level investing in civil society investing in governments at the local level is worthwhile and is a track that should be pursued definitely so it's similar for mercy car I mean if it's less about looking at what the data tells you about that it's more about looking at work basically so if the question is is investing for example in civil society in Iraq an effective investment in terms of your ability to ameliorate the blocking effect or the perverse effect of invested interests our experience is yes it is an effective investment and it's investment that we are going to continue to make even though the program that kind of give birth to this data and this research is now ended mercy car going forward like this year next year we're not going to back away from a belief in an investment in Iraqi civil society because we have witnessed time and again their ability to challenge vested interests and change the dynamics the incentives for what the blockages of the vested interest put in place in terms of governments transparency of service delivery and yes it's an incremental process and yes it's a very very imperfect situation but we we've directly witnessed civil society effecting positive change in terms of taking on vested interests and so we'll continue our investment in that okay well I'll take the last round of questions and so that we leave time for any final remarks from the panelists so wow we have several okay well question here first and then second and I'll go to the last I have to apologize for those hopefully after the panel there will be time to interact with the panelists here yes Dan Robert Defense Consulate I meant you but we will take both I'll be fair I've got the mic my question is the integration of these efforts and the knowledge that's come out of this study with the ongoing activities in Iraq right now specifically Ramadi's being cleared we've got Mosul supposedly next on deck and probably be somewhat complicated but then the tenant underlying counterinsurgency and stability is clearing the terrain of hostile actors holding that terrain with security and then building it with the institutions that have some permanence to them so there's particular efforts being done by the Iraqi government and civil society to focus on these high priority areas that are right in the radar screen yes I'm with the International Association for Human Values I wanted to just follow up on the comment you made about having a holistic approach to the issues that young people face especially psychosocial aspects of dealing with them I think that all the issues that we've discussed the lack of opportunities, the injustice poverty are not issues that are going to go away overnight they are huge issues but the people that will be dealing with them if they are offered certain highly researched and evidence-based tools and techniques to handle negative emotions that are part of that region frustration, anger feelings of high stress perhaps how they can deal with those issues can be better and they will not so ready to resort to violence so I'm just wondering although this is a very useful and informative research are there any studies or any interest in doing research on programs that are offering these kinds of tools and techniques especially to young people so that violence is not a first option in the region thank you Hi, Eric Gustafson with the Education for Peace in Iraq Center this kind of came up a little bit about the importance of long term research but also the importance of long term programs I know up until 2014 US funding for civil society in Iraq and peace building was precipitously declining obviously ISIS has helped concentrate the mind I know that with Ramadi being close to being cleared but as was mentioned sometimes it focuses on rebuilding infrastructure meanwhile there is tremendous damage that has been done there is going to be tremendous need of peace building healing the divides that ISIS leaves behind so I'm curious how this report has been received by USAID, State Department policy makers does there seem to be more interest in longer term funding for civil society and also for youth which make up a majority of Iraq in longer term last question to the back sorry I have to end it here and give the panelists the opportunity to respond Thank you, James Cohen with US Institute of Peace diving into a comment you made on corruption within the police sector I'm wondering if we could dive into security and defense corruption a little bit more and is that a unique pillar of the government that's causing perceptions of corruption or marginalization and is civil society looking into corruption within police and the defense sector and if so are they having particular issues with those two sectors in Iraq Thank you Well each one of you will have about a minute and a half to address all these questions and make any closing remarks so I start with you Professor really quickly to please this question one very good randomized controlled trial that I'm aware of kind of cognitive behavioral therapy with at-risk youth and the basic finding is that the therapy alone doesn't work therapy combined with fairly large amounts of cash to reinforce good behavior does seem to work but that's one study it's in Liberia so it's maybe not applicable in Iraq Very quickly on your question about available tools as I said my presentation very little is being done to the best of my knowledge so I'm not aware of any extensive programs that are providing these tools or such tools to young people that on just I want to end on a positive note is that based on our experience on what we did in on the spiker issue or what we did in northern Syria peace building at the local level is possible it can be successful it can prevent further violence from erupting so this is why we're continuing in the region and we call all the other agencies to do so to try and take off things in order so your question around what's the most effective program model stabilization in areas that are retaken from ISIS is that right now I was actually speaking with the guy behind you so all right so yes it's obviously it's imperative that you get stabilization policy right in these areas like Ramadi or Tikrit that have been recently retaken from ISIS and now under government authority let's just put it like that and I think a lot of effort is put into thinking through how do you do that most effectively but I think those conversations are still heavily flavored by what you might call a classic counterinsurgency influence stabilization approach and I think that misses a trick and what this report misses a very important trick what this report tries to help in illuminating is how you might address that weakness through really looking at several people who talked about making large investments in peace building and civil society and conflict mitigation so yes I think key institutional donors do recognize the importance of those approaches and programs in areas of conflict fragility and stabilization but maybe we're just not investing at a large enough scale to make them truly truly effective so I think it is a question of volume it's a question of getting that voice into conversation most appropriately and then it's a question of volume so if you look at Mexico's own work in Iraq right now so whether that's humanitarian response to displacement or return or whether it's the kind of more development flavored programming we've been dealing with civil society in all of that work we do conflict mitigation work we do peace building work we work through and with Iraqi civil society groups so for us it's basically a way of being in Iraq and our experience in our cumulative experience of the years of engagement in Iraq which has been through a period largely characterized by large scale conflict and fragility which is a very effective approach and has not perhaps has not been given the prominence in terms of the strategies whether those are government strategies or strategies by key institutional and national actors that it should have in terms of its ability to build effective stabilization holistic approaches to youth programming I'm not going to speak to two kids because I'm totally ignorant about that area but I know that for Mexico that's one of our three priority areas of research of basically policy development is to look and basically answer the basic question what works what doesn't work so we do have a research agenda around the years and we hope to continue building that research in terms of better shaping the kind of toolkit you'd be talking about USG funding for civil society and peace building looking directly at Mr. Dale over there do you want to comment on that with all? okay again it loops back to the previous comment about most effective stabilization strategy for Mexico at least our message is that appropriate levels of investment in Iraqi peace building capacity particularly within civil society is an imperative if you want to have effective stabilization with a very fragile state security and defense corruption I don't think the survey the survey itself doesn't look that specifically into perceptions of corruption among particular okay so I guess the simple answer to your question is I can't talk about that because we don't alright well thank you so much I think I like the title of the report investing in Iraq's peace so that investment from this conversation from the survey and from the last questions about Anbar and Salahadin and stabilization it's not only an investment in Iraq's peace as it relates to countering and stabilizing after ISIS but also an investment in preventing violence down the road so I think it's a worthwhile investment and stabilization probably about a year ago it may not have been part of the countering ISIL campaign it gradually was incorporated started with infrastructure I think more recently we can see more efforts going into supporting dialogue efforts and that is definitely the right trend and I hope that line will increase so please join me in thanking our panelists and the researchers on the great work they have done with a round of applause thank you thank you so much for all of your and happy new year