 Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome and I want to thank Dr. Mary wrong for inviting me to be a moderator on this esteemed panel. Mary said you had an admin announcement. I forgot to tell you I'll just say it. We don't know if it went all the way around or not. It's back to you. Okay, so going around when you're done, bring it out since you want to get a copy. Thank you. All right, thank you. We are going to give 15 minutes to each of the panelists and we are going to go in the order of the program, the way it's printed and the names and the order in which they're printed. I will not read any biographies that are already printed so I will just mention the names and keep time rather strictly. All right so we begin with Ms. Nicoletta, Nika, Sreemak and then next will be Jolynn Schumacher and then Benjamin Lowe-Ellen. So Nika it's all yours. Thank you Dr. Aldia. Thank you so much to Mary for inviting you to this conference and for your mentorship and for everyone for everything I've learned from all of you and so far and we'll continue too. In December 23rd 1990 Slobonan Miloševic, former leader of Serbia's Communist Party, won the republic's presidential election by a landslide of 65 pretend of votes together with the Socialist Party of Serbia which won 194 out of 250 seats in the National Assembly and at the time there were questions about voting irregularities. There were concerns about the fact that the governing party already held virtual control of the media and television and the country was on the brink of a civil war that would leave thousands dead and millions displaced. But what is the one question that no one thought to ask at the time about that pivotal election? How many women were elected to those parliamentary seats? Just 1.6% or four out of 250 seats in parliament which was one of the lowest rates in the world that year and certainly the lowest rate in Europe by far. Why was that rate so low and why did that coincide with the early stages of Miloševic's takeover and the beginning of the country's civil wars? Those were the first questions I sought to answer when I started researching Serbian women's political participation from the 90s and earlier until today and how this coincides with WPS in the country and in the region. So again, my name is Nicoleta Sremak. I work in study at the Harvard Academy School of Government where I was given the opportunity to do this research on Serbia directed by Ambassador Svanihan at the Kennedy School in WPS. I was born in that country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia, from which my family emigrated during the civil wars of the 90s and I'm lucky enough to actually have my parents with me here today be here because it of course wasn't, if it wasn't for their brave sacrifice in leaving their home country during the wars, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn from this perspective nor to be with you here today. Thank you so much. I'm here to present some of the findings of short paper which I submitted for this conference that you can read in the working paper series and this came out of a longer research project over the past few months where it conducted a series of interviews with representatives from Serbian government, from civil society, from external NGOs that work in the region like Inclusive Security and citizens of other sectors who were involved in activism against the regime during the 90s or who have emigrated since then and have stakes in the country's situation of gender equality. And as Lema Boe reminded me last night in her incredible speech, this is not important just as a case study that we can take away but also for us to amplify these women and men's voices that are doing incredible work there and hopefully find ways to directly support them. So that's what I will try to do. I'll give you a bit of a background in context of Serbia's gender integration process and why this topic matters to all of us. I'll then give you three main takeaways from my interviews and also share some quotes and stories. This is ongoing research so I look forward to any comments and questions. In my mind, Serbia is one of the most fascinating places we can look at as scholars and practitioners of WPS because it represents this convergence of hypermasculine, nationalist, aggressive, macho, political mentality taking over and exactly corresponding with a drop in female official political participation but also a case where women have been participating and organizing whether formally or informally in an almost paradoxical contrast to that political mentality and I'll explain more of what I mean by that. I don't think I need to convince this group why the issue of women's political and security sector prostitution is so crucial to peace but I will say it again because why not especially in light of our theme of amplifying the WPS agenda that in the Balkans and all over the world we cannot hope to prevent future conflicts nor to safeguard a stable democracy without the full participation and empowerment of women and there's so much evidence demonstrating this for example again the study that was mentioned that specifically found that as the percentage of women in parliament increases by just five percent and again in Serbia we are talking about one point six percent a government is five times less likely to use violence when faced with an international crisis and the same trends are true for civil wars as well. I also know that in the two thousand ninety percent of conflicts occurred in countries already uplifted by war so the rate of relapse is extremely high and peacekeeping efforts have been shown to succeed in the short term but often to fail in the long term so all of this is critically relevant for Serbia which is a country fairly recently out of a horrific civil war and peace process with definitely still present tensions and violence within with the surrounding countries as well as the various ethnic groups within its borders and we absolutely need to be paying attention to the degree of women's empowerment within Serbia and the region of the Balkans as an indicator of its prospects for lasting peace. A little bit of country background after Milosevic's ouster in 2000 and the end of the conflict period as Laura Hoover's study showed yesterday as well this was definitely an opportunity in Serbia for major democratic changes as well as of course security sector reform and gender reform such as early integration of the country's police security and military forces and these reforms happened thanks in large part to really active civil society organizations many of which came out of anti-war protest movements of the 90s and it's important to note that in Serbia and ex-Muslim women were really the drivers of creating a civil society as well as a lot of peace building during and post conflict though of course they were left out of the official peace negotiations so again thanks in large part to these organizations the country passed its first national action plan for UNSCR 3215 in 2010 and very excitingly Serbia's second nap has just been approved by the cabinet and Serbia's nap is unique in that it's housed in the Ministry of Defense rather than other more traditional ministries such as gender ministries or ministries of the interior and it really focuses on security sector integration which has actually been one of the criticisms from some sides that it's kind of narrowly focused on security sector in 2012 during the parliamentary elections of that year a gender quota system was also introduced that required a third of all candidates to be women and as we know that's the best way to ensure that they are elected so they were elected to 84 of 250 seats that year therefore dramatically increasing their political participation over 20 years since that awful 1.6 percent what is now 34 percent of seats in parliament which is one of the highest rates in the world so that's of course very exciting but there's also so much more to look into in the story of gender security in Serbia. My first takeaway from researching the Serbian case relates to the importance of understanding the specific ways that women are exercising power within a particular society whether it's formal or informal in the various roles that are available to them beyond looking at just the numbers of women in parliament for example as an indicator of likelihood to implement gender reforms. In Serbia's case there's a legacy of gender equality that stems from the post-World War II communist period lasting until the late 1980s where after World War II women were actually rewarded for their participation in the fight against fascism and the rebuilding of the country with equal rights including an education equal pay and even politically within the party holding some important positions. This legacy of participation is something that respondents told me is often not recognized from abroad and the rise of Milosevic in the late 80s is remembered as coinciding with male dominated suppression overtaking political life but as one former member of parliament Milica Delavic pointed out there was a difference between quote a formal way of wielding power and informal way of wielding power where many women who were wives of male politicians were actually able to be political leaders in their own right and importantly again there was these very strong women led grassroots protest movements including by the well-known women in black which has organized more than 500 anti-militarism protests in the region and this represents again an almost paradoxical contrast to this macho political mentality of Milosevic which emphasized women's roles as only carriers of the nation and sort of passively providing soldiers and support. This legacy is therefore key to understanding the current situation and how representation has risen so high it has actually historically been so high in different ways over time. Another thing that came up in my interviews was the importance of external actors and processes in influencing the double kids his agenda both in positive and negative ways. Serbia's political joy goal of joining the European Union for example has bolstered prospects for reform by contributing funding on by having gender inclusion provisions in their accession criteria and through measurements and indicators such as the EU index for gender equality which Serbia was the first country outside of the EU to adopt. However other respondents have negative perceptions on the relationship between these two goals telling me that gender inclusion is a priority pushed on to the country by external actors and that there is a lack of political buy-in from the government which only uses these goals as tools to gain funding or favor in the US session talks. One other factor is I think a somewhat common perspective that external actors often tell Serbia to approve or to take on these priorities without really acknowledging their continuing struggles as a nation such as economic disparity, ethnic tension, and continuing ongoing political turmoil. There's a feeling that the entire country has been continuously villainized by the rest of the world which results in a distrust of foreign intervention that can slow progress. One interviewer Natasha Kacinich, a former student protester and current social worker said and I quote there's so much blame and shame put on these people so unless you acknowledge that suffering and pain you cannot start having these conversations with people about helping others. People have to say this is what happened to us and this is what we need to do for others. My final takeaway is the different roles of structural versus cultural change where in Serbia's case there have been many structural improvements that are important but there's still very traditional patriarchal cultural norms in especially the home and workplaces which can prevent these advances from being taken seriously and implemented. I'll give you a couple of examples. One as I mentioned the quota system which would pass and benefit of women like Milica Belovich I mentioned who shared that she never would have been ranked so highly on the parties list but because it needed to be every third candidate was a woman they actually had to look for women to that could take it on into list and she got in that way. However Sofia Mundich who is a researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy told me that quote MPs have accepted the quota amendment as the necessary evil and not out of a true understanding that the underrepresented gender should increase their presence minimally in the parliament. She said that often women are forced to vote following the party command and not according to their own priorities and that there's a common belief that they're taking away seats for more qualified men. A women's parliamentary network was also formed against structurally to promote women in politics and try to propose joint amendments that address women's issues of women's issues but there is often unfortunately a culture of competition and aggression towards one another within that network that prevents it from being as supportive as possible. As a final example and another legacy of communism the country officially has an extremely generous parental leave policy which is again another legacy of the communist times that has remained but another responded Isabella Streamak experienced this right being completely disrespected by her male boss who threatened her into continuing to work for him even while on maternity leave as a first-time mother. So even when these policies are in place they can be abused if workplace culture does not take women's rights seriously. In conclusion even with these challenges as now a third session of parliament contains a higher percentage of women and as they are increasingly represented slowly in departments that were previously considered male domains such as defense, police, border security and infrastructure cultural norms are beginning to change. As Mickey Yachtovic of Inclusive Security told me, quote, as somebody who has lived through that war I just don't buy the narrative that nothing's working in Serbia. I lived through nothing is working but what I do see is when I go to Leskovac and 100 men and women show up to talk about security through a gender lens that came out of something. I always say I'm more curious about why these things work. Literally in Serbia there is a lot that is working and that we should pay attention to especially considering their recent history and the continuing struggles they face. So I would like to leave you on the optimist of feeling about Serbia and I hope to continue learning from these activists and leaders and amplifiers. Thank you. Perfect timing. Thank you very much. Dylan, you're next. Thank you. Thank you all for being here today. Well I'm I'm excited today to be presenting initial thoughts from a study that I'm doing with Sahana Dharmapuri here for our secure future women make the difference. Since December 2016 we've been conducting interviews and surveys with men from across sectors who are engaged in the women's peace and security agenda, champions of gender equality in peace and security or experts themselves on these issues. We've talked to over 50 men with the survey probably corresponded in different ways with over 75 men. From the US government's civilian side, from the US military, from other governments, from other militaries, civil society and international organizations. It's a sample obviously. It's meant to be a first step really for us to gather some views from that side of the population that we seek to engage more. We thought that we needed to talk to men who were already involved and already cared about this issue in order to better inform our policy research and advocacy, which is so often directed towards advocating towards this community. So really one of the central questions and a lot of the themes that I'll be touching upon in my presentation won't be new or shocking to any of this audience. But we really did ask, you know, what is men's role in women peace and security? Do men matter in women peace and security? Especially since there are so many misperceptions around that that seem to be obstructing men's full engagement and the agenda. So women peace and security obviously presents an opportunity to make peace processes and security structures more inclusive effective and sensitive to the capacities and needs of the entire population. Men are critical partners in this endeavor and we need to realize that men can both move this agenda forward, but also obstruct this agenda because they are dominant in peace and security structures and processes. So if we're going to get to the transformational change that resolution 1325 and women peace and security envisions, we can't do it without men's involvement. So we talked to this swath of men who are involved to get their views and this kind of represents what they said to us. So the first thing is men can be messengers for this agenda and what men told us who are involved is that they can be strong messengers, often turning the gender issues on their head. The fact that if men talk about this agenda, it is often given more weight, more credibility than women talking about the agenda. And that's a sensitive topic for the men who are involved in this agenda. They don't feel great about that, but in order to help the agenda move forward, they're willing to use that strategic advantage. We also, which will be a surprise to any of you, found that men who did come from the military and traditional defense backgrounds felt that they could convey added credibility talking to these constituencies because they have that credibility in both policy side and or operational side. And they can be bridge builders, an important role between the traditional security, national security, environment and communities and the civil society if they are able to work between those. However, the men we talked to were also cautious. They said, you know, we can play a role. We want to be allies. We want to help this agenda move forward. But don't pay too much attention to engaging us. We don't want to dilute the women, peace and security agenda. We don't want to take over the women, peace and security agenda. There should not be preference for men getting getting these positions as I think you mentioned the glass elevator. Let's keep it in perspective. But we do we do feel that we have a role to play. So how are men supporting women, peace and security right now? Well, I mean, I think we know from this environment, from being at this conference, some of that. But men have usually been the targets of our advocacy in this in this movement rather than the advocates themselves. That's slowly changing. But our study shows that for many men who have become champions or more heavily involved in this agenda, it's still a fairly new agenda to them. Most that we talked to had well 50 more than 50 percent have become aware of women, peace and security in the last five years. So it is still fairly new and fairly recent for many of them. And many of our military interviewers had interviews had only heard of it very recently. And they also told us that the national action plan in the US, but the national action plan in other countries had opened up a lot more space for them to to to understand this agenda and be a part of it. And men were observing increasingly men and women working together towards it. So one of our I think our key our key themes that came out of this that I think is really, really important is that the men that we talk to really see this as a redefinition of security. And what was interesting is we saw that across the interviews. This wasn't just talking to civil society representatives. It was also military representatives as well. So so interestingly enough, this is this is really this really shows that that the men who are getting fully engaged in this agenda are getting what 1325 and women peace and security is truly about women, peace and security emerged from an understanding among civil society that our current structures and processes just are not working. That they're exclusionary and they're not tapping into the rich knowledge and experiences and needs on the ground. And the men we talked to from across the sectors seem to realize this wasn't just a mandate driven or rule driven agenda. This is actually a transformational agenda. And they focused on that potential in the interviews. They also acknowledge that current processes instructors are not providing peace and security for much of the world right now. And that this agenda actually offers a chance for deep structural and social change. We can change how we view the world and we can change how we approach these issues. And the men that we talked to said they acknowledge the progress that we have made with the mandates with the integration so far in our structures. But they also said we now need to as we think about going into the next decade move we have the mandates in place we have much of this rule-based architecture in place. Now we really need to move into norm changing. And we've talked about this in in other panels and throughout this conference. You know they said this symbolic high level attention on women peace and security is important but not sufficient. We can't just add women to the existing structures. It's a misrepresentation of what this agenda is. The goals are to transform the perspectives the processes and institutions. We need to include women but it is not all of it. And and they were hopeful in a way that even though we're facing tremendous uncertainty in the world today these challenges that are so difficult for us to grapple with with our current processes our current structures that in a way our current security environment the instability the terrorism the scarcity the food the food security all these issues that are challenging us to think in new ways are actually an openness an opening for this agenda. And an acknowledgement even among our military interviewees military force can't solve these underlying issues. And so we need to start changing the way we think about social constructs and behaviors if we're ever ever going to address these problems sufficiently. So across interviews one of the well really men said okay what's the biggest obstacle to move this agenda forward and it is by far organizational cultures and leaders resistance from leaders. These are the greatest impediments we now face to women peace and security and they also said even in their experience coming from their standpoint obviously they can't speak for and they haven't had the experience of women but from their standpoint they were seeing pervasive gender blindness in peace and security institutions and gender bias. 50% of those that we talked to probably more than 50% at this point reported that they themselves had seen or experienced or observed instances of directed gender bias against the women peace and security agenda. So they do recognize it. So how do they themselves get from not knowing anything about women peace and security to becoming champions or experts in we wanted to know this is an important part of the story and it's been mentioned before about the personal. In this case the personal is political because the men we talk we talked to had transformational personal experiences that pushed them that made this agenda resonate deeply. So it wasn't institutional push as much as it was they had an experience growing up they saw something in their early professional careers. Military talked about seeing the realities of war or seeing exploitation and abuse. Growing up in environments where they directly experienced gender-based violence in their families or on the opposite side grew up with very feminist and empowered mothers. So we tend to like to disengage the personal from the professional in women peace and security. We can't do it I think if we're going to engage more people in this agenda I think we need to tap into that. And so you know it really altered their perspectives and as one one interviewer said once you put on the gender lens you keep take it off the world never looks the same. So I'm running in. Oh okay okay so a couple of things that we heard you know in terms of okay how do we move this issue forward. First the men the interview said yeah we've got to cultivate champions right we can't dislodge this agenda from we can't disconnect the internal change that needs to happen in institutions from the external work that we do with partners. We need to it needs to work together we need to walk the walk inside our peace and security institutions in order to make the case for women peace and security with partner nations and so forth and build the competencies we talked about core competencies the first day we need to build the competencies and give more people in our institutions the opportunity to engage with this issue the opportunity to work on women peace and security and we need gatekeepers we need the gender advisors we need the focal points to make sure it's not lost in the process we need to address gender norms as a foundation for peace it's the missing piece we need to talk about we need to open the discussion we need to talk about masculinity's good and bad we need to talk about the masculine abuse that drive conflict but we also need to talk about the positive masculinity's that can help us we need to talk about feminine too so we need to have open this discussion much more than it's ever been before that's what they're saying and we need to frame the message we need to tailor it so very careful tear tailoring bring the local needs and solutions to the table let's bridge what the local people are saying men and women to our policies and to our programs and start to broaden the conversation let's bring in business people let's bring in media let's broaden this conversation let's sometimes broaden the framing what are we really talking about what's the bottom line here that we're trying to get at the future of humanity really so really our interviewers thought we were on the cusp of a new phase for this agenda we it's time to reflect that's exactly what we're doing here reflect on the body of what we've learned but now we expand beyond the micro interventions now we expand to the structural the social these issues that are really important security depends on everyone one of our interviewers said we are not so much talking about policies we're talking about human values we have the capability to change how we see the world another said do we consider women peace and security a ceiling or a floor because it can be transformative if we see it as a floor and so that's where I will leave it and thank you so much if you're interested in our study we're not done yet so please come to me and I'd love to talk to you about it thank you we will open the floor now to Q&A yeah there you go I started with connections that I had and people that so I again was helped a lot by security and people there who helped connect me with others and other like personal connections that connect to people so that's part of it just honestly like trying to find people that would be interviewed and just starting to look at who was really advocating this agenda in Belgrade and Serbian society and it was a lot of these think tanks that are surprised by there's so many there like I don't know dozens of think tanks and civil society organizations so just looking at the names that were continuing to be repeated and trying to reach out to people but it was really I have the most success with personal connections that were able to make sure that I got responses I would like to get more responses from current members of parliament which was hard for me to reach so there are sectors that I want to hear more from that I haven't been able to but I think really there are so many different I think all sectors of the society are affected by security and haven't been at it so I was not descriptive who I got opinions from and I really let the interviews drive my questions and continuing research so again it's work in progress and I would like to be more specific moving forward but in the beginning it was really who would talk to me and who had some strong opinions about this topic and who was really working on it I hear correctly I was going to ask you if you interviewed your mother did I hear I did. Yes she was one of my first interviewers. I just think that would be one of the first interviews you do. Well again I think everyone experiences this of course women in Serbian society had opinions about what my first initial questions were what is what are the changes that you've seen in your lifetime or what are what are the challenges and what are the specific situations that you experienced and so yeah those early interviews with family and family friends were really helpful in driving the further conversations and also often correcting me and you know sort of studying me straight on my initial sort of naive questions and framing of the situation and correcting me to say no this was actually much earlier this was you know you know we don't see the problems this way we see all of these this progress that we've made and sort of really I had to step back and let the interviews. My question is for JoLynn. We talked about how to move the issue forward on WPS and need to cultivate champions working together. Did the men give you any ideas on how to cultivate champions? Any suggestions? They acknowledged the difficulty but I do think they acknowledged that how individual this is and I think on the advocacy side we felt a lot of pressure to kind of find the magic frame that's gonna you know attract people and and I think the what we got from the interviewees is saying this is really institution specific but it's individual specific so it's almost to cultivate more supporters has to almost be done on a one but one to one basis and so but they did say senior as has been brought up so many times during this conference I mean senior leadership no matter what kind of not just the military policy side civilian side senior leadership plays a really important role and senior male leadership because it let's be honest it's mostly senior male leadership plays an important role because having those men speak on this and reinforce the message starts to move that really resistant bureaucracy forward but the missed opportunity oftentimes is the mid-level the mid-level really needs to be cultivated in these institutions because we tend to pay attention to the really senior level but the mid-level there are men who really want to work on this and they're not always getting the opportunity to do so so I think that's yeah thank you all for sharing your expertise and presentations I also have a question for Jolin building off of what Sheila said and this is something that came up in the curriculum consortium that we had a few days ago is just the relationship across field so how we what we see in academia parallels what we see in the military and my question for you Jolin is has there been any coordination or are you familiar with any coordination for what's going on in the corporate world as well and is there anything we can learn from the as you said organizational culture is one of the main obstacles as well as leadership and I think we've seen a number of high-profile stories around the toxic cultures that are existing in the corporate world as well do you think there are ways to coordinate or things that could be learned across different fields yeah I think I think that's a really important point that came up in a several different dimensions so when we one thing we asked the men we interviewed is like you know how do you frame this issue because we wanted to know for an advocacy and you know it came up quite a bit in terms of you know sometimes it's effective to bring in those corporate examples as well not just limit our examples of why this matters to our own little constituency so bringing that in so it came up on that side on the framing side but it also came up as like a huge obstacle our silos and one of the things is you know as we know I mean military talks military and you know and and so we're not having that necessarily that cross fertilization but not just the corporate but like the smaller business the small business community in the communities in which we're working because we had a real cross-section of interviewees so we had interviewees who were at the policy level but we also had interviewees who were like in the communities working really deeply in these issues so it in a way it was a challenge because they're all speaking at different levels but I think you know from those working in the communities they said we have to bring in the business people and then you know from those that were really trying to make that hot those higher level arguments they were also saying we need it so silos was I mean not shockingly you know it always comes up right but you know so there was a lot of attention how we build bridges between these different communities and the other thing that came up you know some of the men said if they themselves crossed those disciplines that was really helpful so like if they had a military background and then they went into the NGO field you know or they had a you know they crossed those lines themselves then they could speak the language they could use the vocabulary strategically and start to build the bridges and still understand the importance of you know bringing in the civil society and all these things so yeah it came up in a lot of different ways Thank you Oh I was just going to add to Jill's comment about you know how to engage people because one of the feedback we did get from Westminster is that this is the first time anybody asked them what they thought about when the peace and security or how they felt about it or how they got involved in it and so we also saw the opportunity of you know given that it that they were saying like it's really personal and it's a one on one connection it's actually creating more opportunities for men to talk to other men about these issues and what looks them look like and what kind of community not leaving women out but somehow creating more space or opportunity for men to dialogue with each other Yeah I mean because there were there was really I mean there's been no opportunity for men who are advocating for the issues to share their lessons learned either so we were trying to at least document start to document it I just wanted to say though I mean that's a really important point but we're not even inviting them to our conferences you know what I mean I've been to a lot of conferences over the last few years and the amount of women that are attending the peace and security conferences is far outweighed when they're on the meeting so we should start inviting them to be panelists and to come to conferences Well one thing that they said was not that they weren't invited but they themselves were self censoring because they felt like they didn't want to intrude like the more sensitive they are to the agenda the more they self censor because they feel like they don't want to intrude on the conversation Yes I wanted to speak to the question about the global business compact The global business compact there was a women in power in principles and I don't remember which is which there's a bunch of aggregates from the United States community like we the WP the women's power in principles or maybe the other way around and then the UN adopted that and they called it something so there's two different names but if you look at the women in power principles I believe it's been done across the international sector for the global for the business side so that might be somewhere that we should start Thank you Phil I'm sorry I'm going to take this one on you Tim So I've had several women bosses and I was curious whether or not you include women in the discussion who basically stand in the way of other women They talk to talk but they don't walk the walk and in fact as you get into the higher echelons it's getting just more and more competitive and I find that I have better mentors than I do It's actually come up in other wise studies in my previous life but yeah no it did come up and I think it also came up so men brought this up definitely and it also came up in the context of the issue that we can't reduce this to parity or we can't reduce this to like just let's shove women in the existing structures and it's all going to turn out okay for women peace and security the forces to conform to those structures and those cultures are really strong so especially if you're one of the few So you know there's all these dynamics that happen and I think one of the things that was coming out is we need to peel back these layers a little bit now that we have the baseline rules and the baseline mandates and sort of let's we need to start getting into the uncomfortable conversations and I think that's what people were saying when we interviewed it might not be comfortable but we're never going to get to the agenda if we don't start doing the conversations and opening and that's one of the pieces for sure Mary if there's no one else I have another question Please go ahead I don't want to So Nika I'm going back to you because I really had two questions for you but I wanted to make sure everybody got to ask the panel the other question I had and thinking about your study is since it's kind of a personal thing for you where do you see this region of the world going with women peace and security you thought about that as a student you know as a grad student so what do you think some of the main roles are going to do and do you think they will shift? I think I was actually this was one of the corrections I had I am hopeful about the situation in the Balkans for women peace and security I think there's a lot of actual collaboration within the countries that are working on this where a lot of the people doing gender in Serbia or some of the really prominent politicians or women in government or good friends with their counterparts in Bosnia and then well maybe not so much Kosovo but in the other countries and that was surprising to me a bit so I think that's really hopeful that and another thing that maybe we don't recognize enough from here that we tell a simple story that I mentioned too about tensions and conflict and it's really not always the case there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of synergy so that makes me really hopeful for the region that especially I think as is so often the case women and men who are working on these issues see past their differences to work together and I think that's a hopeful thing another aspect that will be really important moving forward is again all of these organizations and society groups that are present in exubisobia where they have been instrumental and really driving the effort to pass the national action plans and to enforce them and implement them and monitor them and produce their own reports on what's happening but they also are not utilized enough and they're not included enough and I think that's been one of the challenges with the two I haven't read the second national action plan yet I don't think it's publicly available but definitely with the first one that there wasn't enough inclusion of those really local groups and bringing in and mentioned the think tanks that are really prominent and doing a lot of work but there are also these really local community groups that are maybe not as academic or not as formal or are sometimes like women in black I mentioned more critical and feminist like you know not going to just go with the flow of what people want to do so they're left out of the conversation and I think that if we can listen to them more both in Serbia and in the region and include them that's been one of the big successes is this partnership that has been created in collaboration and I think again that's something that's common of a lot of the national action plans that they foster dialogue between governments and society and other sectors but it's something that will be important moving forward to continue doing JoLynn, I don't mean this in any offensive way but a syndrome I've seen throughout my life is the bearded cleric syndrome, my words, of having the pretext of being a religious figure, male religious figure to tell the audience what the role and status of women is according to God have you engaged in the bearded clerics and discussion with them because if you don't their influence on society is going to continue to arguably perpetuate that disparity and a quick note to Nika, if you wish, we have just a few minutes if you want to ask your parents if they wish to say anything Alright, so this is where the caveats for the street park come in as you know this is a huge part of the discussion about engaging men at the local levels and so there's the work on this ongoing and we didn't focus on that I mean really even just like Nika the interviews kind of drove the content you know what people want to talk about and we were talking to civil society representatives that are working on the ground they tended to focus a little bit more on opening this larger space for discussion about okay men who came out of military environments or in different segments of society so there wasn't really that central focus on the religious leaders so it just didn't emerge as much but it was because I think of the nature of who we talked to and what the projects were more than any sort of sense that it's not being looked at so please look my way out of the back To answer your question, of course if my parents wouldn't like to say anything as immigrants and you know really the drivers of my interest and work in the subject please look left in here for sure If you'd like to use that please Hi everyone, my name is Isabella Strymak and obviously very proud parent of this young woman and just very quickly it's been a great joy and great experience to participate in her project and her interests and kind of revisit where we came from and what we went through and what we are building forward and you know remind ourselves that you know what was the cause of all that and what was the motivation behind it and doing this project together with her and answering her questions it kind of idealized it kind of made a full circle for us caused the circle of us living in our country to provide better opportunities we have two daughters for two young women and how she found her interest and passion we took it back at that region and with the gender frame it's been really kind of brought full circle for me as a mother we are building our path and our choices so I'm very very grateful for that