 Good morning. Welcome. This is fantastic to see everybody here. Welcome to the U.S. Institute of Peace. Welcome to the month of March, which as you know is National Women's History Month. So there are a lot of exciting things happening this month here at the Institute. We're going to get a chance to talk about them today. And of course, we are with March 1st, the beginning of lots of interesting crazy weather. It'll be beautiful today. It will snow on Friday. So there's going to be a mixture of great ideas here and a mixture of really crazy weather out there. My name is Joe Hewitt. I'm the Vice President for the Center for Policy, Learning and Strategy. And my job here is to lead a phenomenal team, one person of which is Kathleen Keynes-Twell, introduced in a second. Our job is to take all the evidence and learning that we get from our work here at USIP and use it for better policy engagement and better strategy, all with the goal of making our peacebuilding programs more effective. Let me tell you a little bit about USIP if you're new to the place. USIP was founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical and essential for US and global security. We pursue this vision of a world without violent conflict by working on the ground with local partners. We provide people, organizations, and governments with the tools, knowledge and training to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and resolve it when it does. In these ways, USIP makes peace possible. My team works, as I said, to capture and organize the evidence from all of our work to make our peacebuilding programs more effective. We know from years and years of work that peace is not possible without the full and meaningful participation of women in conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding. Often our first expectation when we think about the role of women in conflict-affected environments is to think of them first as peacebuilders. That expectation may be shaved by experiences, for example, with the role of women in ending the Civil War in Liberia. In some cases, it's an expectation that's warranted. But, however, we often overlook the multiple roles that women already do play in conflict, even as combatants. That's what we're here today to talk about. If I could, I'll share an example of a blind spot that I personally had as a conflict analyst, thinking about the role of women in conflict from some work I did in South Sudan. Before I came to USIP, which was in September of this year, I used to work at USAID as a senior conflict advisor. And in the fall of 2012, I was in South Sudan with a team doing a conflict assessment. And we were trying to figure out, this was before all the violence started in December, 2013. We were trying to figure out what was going on lately with conflict dynamics there, to try to do more work in development that could hopefully address those dynamics. One of the things that we were concerned about at that time, there were a lot of things we were concerned about at that time, was a spike in cattle rating that was going on, mostly in Changale State in South Sudan. And we were trying to understand why that was happening. Part of the reason had to do with recent inflation and the price of a dowry. Dowry traditionally had been about 30 cows before that, and it had tripled in a short amount of time to be about 80 or 90. That was driving incentives for increased cattle rating. And cattle rating was getting more and more violent. And so you had more abductions happening. There was sexual violence, a lot of killing associated with cattle rating, which was not the norm in South Sudan. So we were trying to figure out what was going on. And one of the questions that my team wanted to address was, well, what could the role of women be in this? And helping to de-escalate these pressures to help reduce the amount of violence that was happening in this practice? What could they do to be helpful? And that was the wrong question. We totally had blind spots on because, in fact, women were encouraging the cattle rating. Mothers and grandmothers were the ones who were setting the higher and higher prices on the dowry, and then encouraging boys and young men to engage in the cattle rating to build up the supply of cows in their own communities. And so we really had a blind spot to the way to do this analysis. We quickly, I hope, I like to think, we addressed that, and we started to think of more effective ways to design programs to deal with that problem. Events took a turn in South Sudan, of course, and lots of other things overwhelmed that particular case. But it's an example of how, if you go into a conflict environment thinking that women are only peace builders, you potentially have this blind spot that will make your analysis of the situation incomplete. So today, USIP begins a month-long series of events in celebration of National Women's History Month. USIP will take the time to reflect and learn from not only our work, but that of scholars and practitioners around the world. We'll have the opportunity to have multiple events in the building over the course of the month. We're going to have a rich exchange of ideas about the role of women, but generally about the relationship between gender roles and conflict. And I think by the end of the month, we are going to have a tremendous set of experiences to help us better understand this work. So I'm delighted that we're starting today with such a great audience here. So many people came out leaving your busy schedules to join us today. So I'm really delighted. So I'd like to introduce Kathleen Keynest, who is the director of our Gender Policy and Strategy Team in the Center for Policy, Learning and Strategy. She has been here at USIP for nine years, more than nine years. She leads our efforts to integrate gender into everything that we do. It was her idea when our Center was being established to make sure that gender was part of the Center, recognizing that in everything the Institute does, gender has a role in helping us to understand conflict. The causes and consequences of conflict are experienced and understood differently by gender, by across different gender groups. And if we don't institutionalize that in the work that we do, our work is going to be less effective. And so it's a great pleasure to introduce Kathleen to you. Please join me in welcoming Kathleen Keynest. Thank you. Thanks very much, Joe, and good morning to everyone. Let our last guest here get settled. So this event has really been in my sights for the last eight years when I first began my work here on gender. And I'm concerned that then as today, that too often our stereotypical portrayal of women as peaceful and men as violent, harkens to our age-old tendency to divide the world into simple binaries. Masculine feminine, protector protected, combatant caregiver, perpetrator victim, war, peace. And this oversimplification of gender stereotypes, we actually fail to understand then the complex gender relationships that actually socializes violence into our everyday lives. And thus our interventions to in-violence often lack nuance and the test of reality, as Joe gave such a great example. Therefore, our event this morning is attempt to move beyond our reliance on stereotypical frameworks that limit our ability to analyze the multiple roles and agencies that we all have regardless of our gender. You may ask why this is important to our work in peace building. Our gender work at USIP is about making the invisible visible. A foundational part of our work is the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which launched the field of women, peace and security and continues to move women from their invisible role in war and peace to one that is visible. From being counted as victims of war, but also counted as pivotal partners in peace building. So let us begin here. As the morning will proceed, you will hear from three experts whose research reveals that violence is not exclusive male bastion and that women are not always peaceful. I've asked the panelists here today to give brief and succinct overviews of their research. So we'll have time to really discuss it with you, our audience. And now I'm going to switch roles and sit down, switch mics and begin. So I'm going to introduce each of the panelists. You also have their bios. So if you want more information about them, our first panelist is Wendy Lauer. And she's the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont Mechanic College and is also now at the Holocaust Museum, where she is the acting director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. I first came across her work when my neighbor presented her book to me. He said, I think you really need to read this book. I think this is something you should know about and it is called Hitler's Fury's German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. It really intrigued me. Of course, I did read it and I'm thrilled that Wendy will be with us today to tell us more about her research. I will add that something that I think we need more in our women's peace and security work is the view of history. And Wendy will bring that celebration of Women's History Month to us all here. Thank you. Our second panelist is Hamoon Kelgat Deust. He is a PhD scholar at the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. A long way to come. He was also here for the ISA conference, so we were able to... Pleasure is mine. Thanks to good friends here. He is in his final year as a PhD candidate, where he is looking at gender dynamics within jihadi organizations focused on the relationship between jihadi's view on state building and the roles women are assigned to in these organizations. So he'll give us a much deeper dive on these issues. And our third panelist is my colleague here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Belkis Amadi, who is a senior program officer in our Asia Center. Belkis brings years of experience working in Afghanistan on issues related to gender, human rights and civil society development. Most recently, and I hope you picked up her report out at the desk, she and her colleague wrote a report and actually commissioned a study looking at the role of women in the Taliban organization. So she will be drawing from that research. So I want to begin and ask Wendy if you want to take the podium or hear either one works and please welcome Wendy Lauer. Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you, Joe. It's a real pleasure to be here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And it's just lovely to be in this marvelous building by Moshe Safdie, who by the way was the architect of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, a place that as a Holocaust scholar, I spent a lot of time at that location as well. So thank you very much. I am providing hopefully today some sort of historical perspective. Maybe open up some of the themes that will resonate into contemporary events as Mark Twain allegedly said. He's allegedly said a lot of things. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. As I got into my research on perpetrators the Holocaust and I've been at it for a couple of decades, I started to see my own blind spot in the literature. And it came to light to me by looking at the sources, by going down to the ground level and keeping my eyes open to what I was seeing in the documentation that I uncovered in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it was really driven by underlying questions of how and why women become involved in extremist movements, specifically in the history of the rise of political movements in the last century and the interwar period of fascism, Stalinist, Soviet communism, Bolshevism in Europe. Now my research focuses on the Holocaust and the role of German women who joined racist nationalist anti-Semitic movements of the time. But we assume with our gendered bias that women are nurturers, sources of progressive peaceful values and of empathetic behavior, but something went terribly wrong. Yet the history shows us in the Holocaust that genocide is women's business too. Now when I first went to the archives in Ukraine, and again this on-the-ground view, which I want to stress not only trying to open our eyes to behavior of women, women in their involvement in a political movement, extremist movement, so many things that kind of contradict what we think of, as well as break down those binaries, as Kathleen described them. It took a while for this to sink in for me. First of all, the literature was not only my own bias, but it was the weight of the historiography of the literature on the Holocaust that kind of, in a way, prevented me from seeing certain things. The role of women in the Holocaust had been predominantly focused on caricatures of camp guards in uniform, which as one historian Claudia Kunze observed, sensationalized Nazism by locating evil in eroticized women. So concepts of female violence were really rooted in these kind of pornographic sexualized portraits of women. That was one hurdle I kind of had to overcome. The other one was that they were in the system, the machinery of destruction, and formally trained in uniform. And I was out in Ukraine and doing work on archives in Belarus and in the Baltics, and this is not, if you know your history of the Holocaust, most of the crimes that occurred outside the camp system, outside the killing centers of Poland in the so-called killing fields. About almost half the victims were killed in open air kind of mass shootings in the kind of killing fields that we think of in other cases of genocide. So I had to bring, in my own thinking and in the documentation, brought me there, bring women out of these kind of enclosed domestic settings and into these sites of violence, these kind of open air, broad daylight, the Holocaust by bullets as one of my colleagues calls it. The other issue I had to overcome was the weight of the propaganda literature of Nazi Germany, that we see these visualizations that Goebbels, the propaganda ministry was projecting the kind of wish fulfillment of the regime, which was the very, you know, the pure Aryan woman, who again was a baby machine for the Fuhrer and was only valued for her reproductive ability. In the literature on the Holocaust, the perpetrator portraits, meanwhile, so there was literature on women in Nazi Germany and where their agency was or lack thereof in a misogynist kind of patriarchal system, and then the literature on Holocaust perpetration was moving in another direction in which all these portraits of male killers was becoming increasingly nuanced from, you know, of course there were the biographies of Hitler and Himmler, but as we move down and start to understand genocide as a social phenomenon, a collective experience of an entire society mobilizing, campaigning against perpetrating mass atrocities against a vulnerable minority, those portraits of men became ever more complicated. We had the technocrats in the kind of machinery of destruction who could be engineers, who could be doctors, who could be professionals. We had the so-called desk murders, those like Eichmann in Berlin, who were signing orders and weren't necessarily getting their hands bloody, but actually pushing through a system of mass murder. We had the ordinary men who were in police uniforms that my colleague worked on who were sent out into the field who were regular traffic cops and suddenly they were out and they were organized into these mobile police units. We had the voracious plunders, the role of greed, the role of sadism, the habitual killer, the role of peer pressure. It became the study of evil and cruelty that men were perpetrating became incredibly complex, and yet women were not part of that discussion. Did it make sense to study evil and cruelty as a gendered phenomenon? If we presume a female nature of innocence, do we end up removing women from the history of genocide? And losing sight of genocide is a female problem of behavior that applies to men as well as women. Historian Ann Taylor Allen, I think summed it up nicely and I'm quoting her, women while they remain in the female sphere are thus endowed with innocence of the crimes of the modern state, but at the price of being placed outside of modernity and indeed outside of history itself. In the Nazi case of female perpetration, as I started to look at it more closely, I started to also appreciate that these were women who came of age during a certain period of time. And when I looked at the records of women who were involved in these atrocities, in the killing fields, in all kinds of support functions, but also some who became killers. So there was something like, oh, about 3,600 camp guards. And then so that was one set of violent women who were trained to be violent. And then there was this whole population that were mobilized for the war and sent to the eastern territories in a kind of missionary, they were self-identifying as revolutionaries, as missionaries, as patriots, who were going to be part of a bigger war effort. A half a million nurses, secretaries who were working in these field offices, auxiliaries in the SS police offices, and Wehrmacht in the Army support offices, teachers. This was not just a campaign of war when the Nazis went to the eastern territories. If you know your history, they wanted to create this colonial empire, this Lebensraum, as they called it. And that would then involve a whole range of activities of welfare workers and teachers of building schools, and they wanted to create a whole new society. And of course, so the women fit into that effort, that bigger imperial effort. And they went there with ambitions and dreams. And they were seeking social mobility existed in these—at the edge of the empires or in these outposts. So I started to eventually place women, ordinary German women, on the map outside of Germany of where a lot of these crimes occurred in Poland and the Baltics and Ukraine and Belarus. As many as a half a million, kind of circulating in these regions. And so proximity became a very important part of the story, that there was no argument to be made that they didn't know what was going on. There was no argument to be made that they were back in the Reich tending to the home front. So that old notion of women during war being at the home front, that started to break down. Now they're actually part of an imperial kind of genocidal form of war. And so when I looked at the women who went, I noticed that most of them were born. They were single and they were born like right after the First World War, 1920, 1921. So suddenly I started to see this was a generational phenomenon and that they had been socialized. It was a cohort during a particular time. And I call them the kind of lost generation of post-World War I baby boomers. And they had a common experience in the school systems in the 1930s when this fascist, this Hitler regime, was really starting to take root in the school system. They had on the one hand been exposed to the excitement of gaining the vote. The suffragists were victorious in Germany as well as in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. So suddenly women were part of a political process. They were going to the voting booths. They were activated. Where would they go? What direction would they go with that new power of the ballot? And in this case, they were socialized during the dictatorship in the 1930s. It was this interesting mix of what we think of as a kind of new woman of Weimar Germany kind of gone wrong, but then kind of that sense of liberation and excitement and involvement and breaking out as it were is then kind of channeled through the Reich through this fascist regime in the 1930s with the dismantling of the democracy. And all of the images of women and Third Reich, when you get down to the sources and drill down into what's going on the ground, none of that holds up, right? So after 1935, the birth rate was declining in Germany and the divorce rate was increasing and statistics show that most German women were not married, were not constantly pregnant and not staying at home. As full-fledged members of Hitler's fascist society, they were political despite themselves. In fact, the woman question was not shelved but refashioned in the Nazi era. The private became political. The tentacles of the movement reached into the home and pulled women and girls out to the streets in public rallies and parades to labor assignments on farms, gatherings in summer camps, marching exercises, domestic science courses, flag-raising ceremonies and the like. When I spoke to some of the women from the time I conduct a lot of oral history interviews with them, those I could find or reading the memoir literature, I was struck by a common theme that came up which sounds kind of like a cliche now, but many of them said, you know, I really wanted to make something of my life. I wanted to become somebody, this kind of notion of self-actualization. And I think it's important to see how individuals, men and women, how these movements, for better or worse, the political activism of this, this sense of belonging to a revolution and in realizing oneself through that revolution and being bound by a certain shared conviction, political, ideological, religious conviction, how appealing that is to women as well as men. Now, in my book, I ended up focusing on 13 biographies. I couldn't deal with the whole complex of a half a million women, so I really zeroed in on 13 biographies that I thought were representative of this phenomenon of kind of ordinary German women being mobilized to participate in the Nazi war of destruction. And in some cases, actually, to perpetrate on their own the killing of Jewish children. And it's one of the things that I noticed that was rather alarming. A lot of this is overcoming certain, again, bias and you're kind of shocked and then you pull back and you say, okay, wait a minute, this is actually happening. The many of the women who did kill outside of the camp system, so took the ideas, internalized the ideas of the regime and on their own without following orders. They didn't have a defense and got involved in the killing, often targeted children. And it's just interesting dynamic or reality of women who perpetrate against the most vulnerable population, in this case, a Jewish population, and then within that population, children specifically, and doing this with their husbands. And it may just struck me, the whole family structure as well, both on the part of the perpetrators as well as the victims, how that's part of this reality, again, in these social settings. One of the women who was responsible in that, who committed these crimes, Erna Petry, who's featured in the book, when she was interrogated by the Stasi in 1961 and pressed, and she confessed to killing Jewish children and asked, you know, why could you, how could you do this? You yourself, you were a woman, you were a mother. And she said, I wanted to live up to the men around me. I wanted to prove myself to the men around me. And she's also stated that she had been indoctrinated, basically, socialized in a way that she was taught to hate Jews and Jewish children. There was no exception. How do we make sense of the cruelty and extreme violence of ordinary German men and women in the Nazi era? In my Bokeh Explore explanations, there are quite a few out there, including from primatologists, and we can go back deeper to Sigmund Freud and Cesar Lombroso. But actually, James Waller's work, I thought, was the most interesting, a social psychology, she's up at Keen State, and he stresses in his book that, of course, all men and women have the potential to commit evil acts, but it is our environment and social conditioning that brings out this capability, and it is a minority. Most of the killers in perpetrators in the Holocaust were men. Let me be clear about that. It is a minority who go to the extreme of killing. And when I interviewed some of the prosecutors who were involved in cases against the women featured in my book, they stressed that in the post-war era, they did not encounter anyone who could be described as psychopathic. One stated to me the individuals were not insane. It was the Nazi system that was crazy. The point here being that many of the individuals we look at who perpetrate these crimes in different contexts are normal, peace-loving, law-abiding citizens. They're not serial killers, habitual killers. Once this system collapsed and is discredited, they're pulled out of that environment. In many ways, my research is—Hillers Furies, the culmination of my research published—is about how we fail to reckon with the past, not so much as an historical reconstruction or morality tale, but as evidence of a recurring problem in which we all share responsibility. What are the blind spots and taboos that persist in our retelling of events and in our national histories? And why does the history of the Holocaust—and specifically these kinds of deep violations of what we think of our values, of our perceptions of female behavior— why is that so difficult to study and understand and, in some cases, actually accept? The consensus in Holocaust and genocide studies is that the systems that make mass murder possible would not function without the broad participation of society. Nearly all histories of the Holocaust leave out half of those who populate that society, as if women's history happens somewhere else. It is an illogical approach and it's a puzzling omission. The dramatic stories of ordinary German women in the Nazi era reveal the darkest side of female activism, and they show us what can happen when women are mobilized for war and acquiesce in genocide. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. Hamoon, I don't know if you want to take the podium or— I would be sitting here because I did this—I'm sorry, I didn't know my— Absolutely, yeah, no, that's perfect. Well, good morning, everyone. It's just a pleasure to be here. I have actually prepared a few slides here if you want to have a look at that. I thought maybe it would make my presentation a bit more clear. Well, the thing that I'm going to talk about today is a part of the story that might be not heard that much, and it is very much in line with what Wendy was talking about. It is about a certain class of women, a certain group of women who are participating in the atrocity of groups, such as some of the Jihadi organizations, such as ISIS, both directly and indirectly. So by that one, I'm going to take you through these slides here. If we look at the statistics that we have now, it is clear that the women's incorporation into Jihadi organizations is a rise. And at the same time, if we look closer at the whole story, we can see that this increase is not only in terms of numbers of these women, but also the roles that they are accepting in these Jihadi organizations as well. And if we actually go closer to what statistics and research show us, we can see that the increase in women's incorporation into Jihadi organizations is not proportionately distributed as well, both again, in terms of numbers and roles. What does it mean? It means that some Jihadi organizations are more inclusive of women and some of them are more exclusive of them. And that is actually fine. I mean, laying the foundation of my research on understanding why is women's incorporation is on rise anyway in general, and why this distribution is disproportionate. It means that some more, some Jihadi organizations are more inclusive, and some of them are less, and how it works. Well, to answer those questions, actually, I am presenting you the findings of my research, which I have spent about two years on field for collecting data for that in Afghanistan, in Iraq, borders of Syria, southern part of Turkey, and Lebanon. And with that one, I came up with a typology of Jihadi organization, which I guess can, which I believe, actually, it can explain disproportionate distribution of women in these organizations, both in terms of numbers and roles. And this typology includes operation-based Jihadi organizations and state-building Jihadi organizations. Operation-based Jihadi organizations are those whom we are really, whom we are more familiar with, you know, those terrorist organizations, quote-unquote, al-Qaeda, Haqqani network, and others. And the state-building Jihadi organizations are those organizations which are seeking or they have the aspiration of creating a state, a caliphate, something like ISIS, or ISIS, obviously, or groups like Jabhat Fattusham or others. With that category, I argue that the state-building Jihadi organizations provide a more favorable environment for women to incorporate into their system. It might be a bit strange, because what we hear about ISIS or groups like ISIS is nothing but atrocity of them towards women, which is absolutely a fact. It cannot be denied. But in this research, I am trying to say that there are a specific number of women, just like what Venny was talking about, that they are involved in this system, and they are contributing directly and indirectly towards the atrocity of the system, and to even run the whole system in general. So, to have an understanding of what we are roughly talking about, if we look at operation-based Jihadi organization, we are talking about groups like al-Qaeda, Jima Islamiyah, Haqqani network, Qashqatayb, and so on and so forth. And these groups are what we call, like, heat and run. They just make an attack and retrieve. They don't hold population, they don't hold treachery, they don't have any specific place that we can locate them. So, this is the kind of groups that we call them operation-based groups. And on the other hand, we have the state-building groups, like Islamic State as a flagship of that. ISIS franchises around in Libya, in Nigeria and other places, Jabhat Fattusham or Jashal Fatt, which are mostly working in, or they have their treacheries in Syria, Idlib area. It's also important to know that the state-building Jihadi organizations are only able of operating in weak or failed states. So, being a weak or a failed state provides a favorable environment for these groups to operate. So, in these groups, in these states, these groups are trying to demonstrate themselves or to portray themselves as a functioning alternative to the already failed or weak state. And to do so, they have to fill three gaps. And these gaps are gaps that I argue women are utilized by these organizations in order to make themselves a functioning state. One is the security. Secondly is the service and public good provision. And thirdly is the legitimacy. Women are important for these groups to fill up these gaps, and women contribute positively to fill these gaps for these groups. And these gaps are gaps that operation-based Jihadi organizations do not face, because they are just hit and run. They are not going to make themselves an alternative, a functional alternative to the state, to the weak or failed state that they are functioning in those territories. Look at these diagram here. These are very, it's a very rough idea of how women contribute and how women are being utilized by these groups in terms of providing legitimacy, service provision and security. For example, I mean, I'm going to explain them in further detail, but women are utilized extensively in compared with Jihadi, in compared with the operation-based Jihadi organizations. In terms of, for example, if you start from the middle one, the service provision, women are utilized by these groups as teachers, educators, doctors, nurses, tax collectors, housing and sheltering officers, and many other roles that we can talk about that in further detail a bit later. In terms of security, women are incorporated into military divisions of ISIS or Jaipat-Fato Shem and also in the police force, which is the Al-Khansa Brigade, which is, I guess, that's the most famous one when it comes to the matter of women's involvement and incorporation into ISIS. And in terms of legitimacy, women are, just let me put this one, that would be, sorry. In terms of legitimacy, there are three levels that I'm going to talk about them in detail in further detail a bit later. By making hijra, which is a migration to these groups, to the territory of these groups, by the whole country, the motherhood and family, and being an advocate and recruiter for these groups. And one thing that's very important about these groups is the mechanism by which these groups incorporate women. I call them gender segregated parallel institutions. It means that if you have a sector of, if you have an institution, whatever institution of a state you have, healthcare system, finance system, education system, and so on and so forth, a specific part of this institution would be designated for women only, run by women, and to address women's affairs. That is the way that they do the things. So intermixing between sexes would be reduced as much as possible, and women are in charge of women's affairs there. And that is the way that they are being incorporated in different aspects of this state approaches. And this is, as I said, again, going back to the whole notion of this story is to reduce intermixing. Intermixing of sexes is one thing that these groups are looking at when it comes to the women issue as the source of all the evils, the source of all the problems that they have. By reducing that, by separating them, you will be able of utilizing them in a way that ideologically, religiously, justifiable. And that is something that these groups use. To go a bit further, look at the kind of legitimacy that, for example, these women can provide. Legitimacy, if you look at that, for example, the organizational legitimacy theory, there are four steps in this theory. One is the establishment of the legitimacy. Secondly, it's maintaining of that, expansion of that, and defending of the legitimacy in case of troubles and problems. In terms of establishing legitimacy, groups like ISIS are emphasizing on this whole concept of hijra migration to their land, to their territories, to their territories, to their so-called caliphates. In countries or in the states, or in caliphate, as you call them, where we don't have popular political participation, like voting, going to make petitions and things like that. With an absence of such mechanisms, making an informed decision of leaving your home country, taking all the troubles to come to the state that ISIS has established there, is giving a sense of legitimacy, establishing a sense of legitimacy in terms of the popular support. We have women coming from all around the world, saying bye to their families, saying bye to their whole countries, and coming to ISIS territory. ISIS uses these women as a show of legitimacy among its population, specifically women. And that goes, again, if you want to look at that, it goes against what we call women's emancipation by the Western societies or secular societies. ISIS is saying, look, women who are supposedly being emancipated by you are saying bye to whatever you are saying and coming to us. And against the concept of emancipation, Western emancipation, ISIS is affording them something else, which I call it divine redemption. That is one thing that ISIS is calling it as an ideological rivalry to what emancipation of women by West is. I can discuss that later on if you would like to know more about that. In terms of maintenance, when they are coming to the state, when not only the migrant people, but the Iraqis and Syrians that are living in those countries in the Caliphate territory of ISIS, motherhood and family plays a very important role in maintaining the population, in creating a new generation of jihadis, both men and women. And therefore, motherhood, which is very, very respected in the Islamic ideology as well, plays a very important role for groups like ISIS. So they are emphasizing on the role of women as mothers and not only biological producers, but informed mothers. If you look at, for example, the propaganda or when I was talking to many of these women who have escaped ISIS territories, ISIS actually provide free education for women, for mothers, for young women. And this is ideological education for them. So they want a kind of not only biological producers, but informed biological producers. So they would be the one passing the ideological heritage of ISIS to the next generation. So informed mothers would be the ones that they can pass this heritage to their children in a way, an appropriate way. In terms of expanding their legitimacy, advocates of ISIS, online advocates of them, or face-to-face advocacy and recruiters of ISIS play a very significant role. It is very easy to go to any online platform that you have and type something like, I like jihad, I like to migrate. It would be just a matter of few minutes for ISIS recruiter or ISIS advocates to contact you and to offer you some more help, offer you what would you like to know. And that what would you like to know would end up planning everything for you, how to actually get out of your country, what kind of things you need, people that you have to meet throughout your process, who is going to greet you in Turkey, who is going to take you all the way to the southern part of Syria, southern part of Turkey, to pass you through the border. So these are there. And by that they are, at the same time, through these technical issues, technical things of the trip, they are also portraying a very idealistic utopian society of which ISIS have made in Syria or Iraq, for example. How wonderful things are, how normal things are there. You are able of accessing to your mobile phones, free education, free housing, free water electricity, free school for your children. I don't know, free cars. If you were not able of, for example, doing anything, as for example, I'm just giving an example, if you are a Muslim woman in France and you are wearing your hijab, your niqab or burqa, and you are not able of even going to a theater, to a cinema, because my law is forbidden, ISIS recruiters tell you that, all right, keep that level of religiosity, keep that ideology, keep what you wear, come to us, you will be ahead of a school. You will be, I don't know, you will be working somewhere, as the sense of giving them agency. You can be in charge of a police force, you can be a police officer and all this kind of stuff. However, at the same time, we have to understand that the legitimacy of, all right, okay, the ISIS legitimacy is very much a performance-based legitimacy. It means that as long as they can perform on ground, they would be safe and they would be the legitimacy coming. But when it comes to the matter of today's issues that, for example, they are losing a space, losing things, in that sense, they are turning towards another thing, which I call it being the flagship of global jihad, by that they are bringing women in and use them in suicide bombing, in terrorist activities all around the world. And I just go for one more second, and if you look at the service provisioning story, as you can see, there are women involved in, as teachers, educators, doctor, nurses, but in institutions that are generally segregated. Schools are for women, only for girls, and the teachers are for girls, women. Same thing goes for school and other things. And if you look at that, for example, in that picture there at the right side, in the role now, it's a medical college advertisement by ISIS, which is open to both men and women, but in separate classes. And to finally wrap the whole thing, in the military also we have women who are coming there. They have been used in the muscle front that we have now, the fighting going on as suicide bombers, and of course, at the police forces, they are the one in charge of maintaining order and observing the enforcement of moral code of ISIS on the streets. And women are torturing women. Women are torturing women who are breaking these codes. These codes, women are the one arresting them, interrogating them, putting them in prison, and even passing them as sex slaves to other agencies of ISIS, which is another complicated department. But yeah, this is how ISIS is actually using women, incorporate them to keep the state running and keep the state functioning. Thank you very much for that. Thank you, Hamoon. I'm sure you have a hundred questions like I do, so. But we have yet another excellent expert here to talk about Afghanistan and the role of women in the Taliban, Belkis. Thank you and good morning. Women are perfectly capable of mediating peace, furthering and leading political visions, constructing, helping, help constructing democratic societies based on equality and respect for human dignity. We don't need to prove that. We all know that. And there are, but there is a large body of literature, including evidence-based research, about women's role in uncontribution to peace and preventing violent conflict. What needs to be done, as Wendy and Hamoon just described, is the need to study more in depth and recognize, at both policy and practice, the multiple roles that women play and their capability to initiate, participate in, and instigate violence. Generally, I'll be talking about the research that Kathleen just mentioned in Afghanistan. So generally speaking, Afghan women are perceived as non-threatening by security forces as well as locals, making them extremely useful as intelligent collectors and as spies supporting the violent groups, including Taliban and other violent extremist groups. The extent to which Afghan women play a role in instigating violent extremism is yet to be studied. In an effort to explore and analyze the multiple roles that Afghan women play in both preventing as well as supporting violence, including violent extremism, my co-author, Sadaf Lakhani, who is not here today with us, and I conducted a research last year. It was an eight to nine months research conducted in five provinces in Afghanistan. In this research, we looked into women's roles during the Soviet invasion to give it an historic perspective. In the 80s, on what roles they played as promoters of communist values, and also in the battlefield, fighting against Soviet soldiers and recruiting for Mujahideen. We also looked into the roles that they played in feeding the Mujahideen, washing their clothes and helping them, helping them hide in their homes. We interviewed female family members of former and current Taliban fighters. We also talked to former Taliban officials and commanders, as well as Mujahideen fighters and commanders. I would like to share some of the key findings of that study with you. So as I said historically, Afghan women have played pivotal roles during the last four decades of war as mobilizers, sympathizers, logistics providers and informants. While women still play a role in support for Taliban and other violent extremist groups today, it's much less direct, and we'll talk about why is it. So in general, we found that older women have greater level of influence on their son's actions, and especially when the mother is the head of the family. And that we learned from both male and female interviews. However, in most cases, women are kept in the dark by the men in the family about their work outside their homes. Many of the female family members of Taliban that we interviewed said they had no clue that their husbands and sons were with the Taliban. They only found out from neighbors and other villagers or when the family member was injured or killed. And when we asked men for why was that the case, they simply said they could not trust women, and also they didn't want to be prevented. We also came across women who proudly expressed their support for the so-called jihad and regretted that the cultural restrictions prevented them from taking active role in the ongoing war, which they saw as legitimate cause. There are also women who actually believe that the men in the family are doing God's work because they are being told so by the men in the family as well as the mullahs. For this category of women, we found that their main source of information was their male family members or the mosque's loudspeakers, to which a significant number of mullahs glorified jihad and other politically motivated religious ideologies. We found that the narrative by violent extremist groups is powerful at so many different levels and they resonate with ordinary Afghans who have little knowledge of religious teachings. As you know, 99% of the Afghan population is Muslim and many Afghans are able to recite the Quran. They can read the Quran. Almost the entire Muslim population say their five-time prayers in Arabic with little knowledge of the language and the meanings. So what do they do? They look up to mullahs and other recognized or self-proclaimed religious scholars for guidance and interpretation of religious texts has given their religious actors a great level of influence and authority over the entire population. In most cases, mullahs choose what interpretation to use when explaining verses of the Quran or Ahudith. In most cases, their interpretation is out of context or simply unsubstantiated. Some of the examples that was narrated by the interviewees was interesting and I would like to mention two of them here. One was that the mullahs talk about how at night the grave of a martyr is illuminated with colorful lights which can only be seen by faithful and sinless Muslims and by mothers who send off their sons to jihad. Another is when a man is martyred for Allah's cause and for defending his religion, he will be rewarded to facilitate the entry of up to 70 members of his family to paradise and this is unfortunately publicly propagated by mullahs to loudspeakers. A large number of men, women and youth believe this rhetoric and are willing to die for. So the reward of paradise is also a lure for women. Women are told that if they support and encourage their sons to fight for their religion, they too will be rewarded. Conversely, if they prevent their sons and their husbands from joining the jihad, the so-called jihad, they are in fact preventing them from fulfilling their duty deemed by God and destroying their own chance at entering paradise. So in conclusion, women, as it was said before, perform multiple roles that need to be recognized at practice and policy level. If not, we will fail in preventing and countering these acts. Women perform certain functions that are critical to violent extremist groups because in a place like Afghanistan, which I'm sure is the case in other Muslim countries as well, security procedures for women are often more lax than for men. Women in many cases reinforce values and beliefs that are central to radicalizing others. I want to repeat that again, that women's potential to prevent violent extremism needs to be recognized and considered in CV and also PV programming. Thank you. Thank you, Belkis. I'll open it up in a minute or so to questions and answers. So begin thinking about that because we want to hear from you. But I want to just begin the discussion because it is National Women's History Month. Each of you brought in some thread of history and the role of history in shaping the decisions of young people, in this case young women, to engage in extremist movements, ideologies and activities. It seems like that's a gap in a lot of the policy work we do here within Washington is to reflect back on the historical predicament and what that does to motivate young people. And I'd like you to just take another minute to think about the role of history here and and really because a lot of this audience has policy makers or at least policy shapers here. What are we missing here and what do we need to bring to our current understanding of violent extremism? Wendy, I'm going to start with you. I think we saw in these cases how important the cultural context of the very particularities of cases, how much that matters because there were differences clearly as well as similarities and the issue of roles was important. But I guess what one could observe more generally is that these are women who see themselves as part of history, whether through a kind of religious lens or a revolutionary kind of secular lens, but identify in different ways, identify in their roles in a particular movement, but also see themselves as something bigger within their community and that it has an historical trajectory and they're part of that. And it might even be an historical sense or a kind of teleological sense that has a paradise, you know, that's non secular, right? But they do see themselves in this bigger kind of movement or stream of history and then maybe go to the next level and take a role, take a position and perform in some way either very with very strong convictions or even kind of ritualistically as you were saying that they join forces with that movement and find their place in it. And, you know, in genocide studies, we talk about roles to the extent that, you know, small tasks can have huge impacts and not to think of the ways that those who, you know, being a cog in the wheel is a kind of self-defense. We've been, you know, kind of brainwashing that regard as well and understanding now the some of the parts, you know, that ultimately the impact of a regime in terms of violence and violence extremism and its spread really can be broken down into these very discreet roles that men and women play self-consciously. Right. Well, I guess history plays a very important role in terms of making proper policies to address the issues that we have. For example, what we were hearing from Wendy when we are talking about the story of Holocaust or a story of women, Nazi women in World War II, we can see some, a lot of similarities between what has happened then and what is happening now, for example, in groups like ISIS. That is something that we always miss because groups like ISIS or GID groups like that, because of the media, because of all those coverage that we think that they are getting, they are portraying themselves as something extraordinary, different, something absolutely new, something that we have never heard about them, a group of group, I mean, and call them jihad organization coming, taking care of it, taking over of the territory and calling themselves a state. And we think that, oh my goodness, I mean, nothing has, like this has happened before. But if we, I mean, look back and see groups, you know, ideologically motivated groups like Nazis or other groups, even if you look at, for example, the concepts of situations like in Nicaragua, in China, in Vietnam, for example, there are so many of these similarities between these groups. I mean, the way that they exclude women in some parts of the battle and then they include them again. So I guess looking at history and looking at how women were operating within these organizations can help us way more in understanding how the mechanism, the internal mechanism of these groups, jihad organizations or the threats that we are going to face in future with play. And I guess that's one thing that we miss a lot in that sense. That's great. Thank you. This was so much a part of your story in your special report, Belkis, about the period of the Sovietization process and women, Afghan women reacting to that. Can you reflect on that? Sure. Well, first of all, I think history does play a very important role in understanding the role that women play today in participating, as well as in contributing to violence and more specifically in violent extremism. But I would also add to like the gender roles in a society, a historic review of how gender roles have evolved over time and how has that played a positive and negative role in women's decision to join or to sympathize and instigate violence that needs to be studied. What we studied in Afghanistan was that during the Soviet invasion in the minds of many Afghans, Soviet troops were seen as invaders who had invaded a Muslim sovereign society. So both men and women thought there was their national duty and religious duty to take part in so many different ways to fight against invaders. So the question we asked was, we basically wanted to know how Jihad was perceived and interpreted in those days in the 80s, because many people still call the ongoing war in Afghanistan as a legitimate Jihad. We were surprised that when we talked about, when we deconstructed the concept of Jihad, many women did not agree with seeing this ongoing war as Jihad. Why were women, during the Soviets, in fact, many accepted roles that were defined for women, traditional roles, were forgotten. Women were fighting, women were in the battlefield, women were recruiting, in fact, for the Mujahideen. And then we interviewed the Taliban and said, do you, because most of the Taliban today were Mujahideen fighters in the past, and we asked them about women's role. They admitted, they recognized that women did play a very important role to the success of the war against the Soviets. And we said, how about now? They said, we don't need women, because we have the public, the popular support. So all of a sudden, that understanding of women's role shifted to a more traditional and not so important role. That's what we discovered in our study. Fascinating. Well, thank you for that. I'm going to open it up now to the audience, and I'd like it if we could take about three or four questions. Please introduce yourself, stand up, introduce yourself, make your question or comment very succinct and quick, and then we'll wrap it back around for our panel to respond to. So I'm going to just say one, and because we have mic runners, I'm going to pick the four right up front. One, two, do we have three and four? Three and four. Thank you. All right. Dan Tickner, and I'm from American University. I wanted really to just follow on on what Kathleen has said, because I think it's so wonderful that you are indeed celebrating Moon's History Month with talking about women and the roles that they really played, because what I found in my historical research is actually women are not only forgotten in history, and that's why Wendy's study is so important. They're not only forgotten, but they're also reconstructed by history, and I think that that's something that's very important that we have to remember. You mentioned, Wendy, the sort of traditional story that's been put out about Germany as these sort of house flowers, and women staying home, and so forth, and so not only is there real stories lost, but they're reconstructed in ways that actually deny women agency, and that is a very big part of history, and even what's going on today with violent women, very often the way that violence is reported is they did it because their boyfriends ask them to, I mean, who read things in the press and so forth. There are many stories that we're studying today about the way we explain women's violence, women's agency. They still, even though they are operating in these worlds and doing these things, they're still often really denied agency, and I think this is a really important thing about getting the history right and not forgetting it this time. Thank you very much, Anne. Parker. Hi, my name is Parker Reynolds. I'm an LLM candidate at the Washington College of Law, studying human rights and gender. So my question is, post-conflict, do you think discussing gender norms at all during the prosecution of female perpetrators is of any benefit to opening our eyes to this blind spot, or do you think the gender norms should be left out of the courtroom altogether? Interesting. Thank you very much. And then it was very far back, right next to Lauren. Hi, good morning. My name is Marielle Stewart. I just finished up my political appointment at NASA, and my question is particularly for Hamoon. I wanted to know if you could talk a little bit more about the tactics that ISIS uses to counter the idea of the Western emancipation in terms of their recruitment. All right. And I know there was one more person, please. Thank you. All right. Vicki, right in the middle. Okay. Thanks. Hi, my name is Brooke Tennyson. I'm doing my Master's of Economics at George Mason. My question is more towards Hamoon and Belki. I wanted to know how the groups differentiate between women who are integrated into the state and the state structures, versus those who are enslaved or excluded or put into more submissive roles. Great. Thank you very much. I think those are a great beginning. Thank you, Ann, for your framing remarks about being forgotten and also reconstructed. I'm actually going to go to the last two questions first, and then maybe, Wendy, you would take the legal question. Hamoon and Belki. Thanks for the questions. We'll start with the last one. How to recognize, I mean, to differentiate between the women that are in perpetrators and also the victims. When we have this very strong system of self-and-othering in ISIS, so self would be people who are committed ideologically to ISIS first and foremost, secondly, considered as Sunni Muslims. So anyone out of that circle would be the others and they deserve what they deserve. That's how the things are. So if you look at the victims of direct victims, because we have indirect victims, so I'm talking about the direct victims of ISIS in terms of women, they are mostly from racial or religious minorities like the Yazidis or the Shias. So these are the ones that are targeted first as the main thing. Interestingly, women are in charge of groups like the women police force of ISIS is in charge of arresting these people. These people means that for example the Yazidi women and Shia women and then through another group that is the marriage and they call it marriage office there. So these are the ones taking these women, passing them to the marriage office. The marriage office is in charge of introducing them to Jihad e-mail. So then they would be used as slaves, they would be used as sexual bates and other things. So that is how the thing works. And then we have the other victims, you know, Syrian or Iraqi Sunni women who are not in line with the ideology of the state. They are also considered others because not because of the religious point of view, but because of the ideological point of view that they have. They are not being treated as slaves. That's Sunni Muslim women, but they are actually being arrested, they are being even tortured, but not for those kind of issues like for example not obeying the dress code, not obeying the things that the state wants in the public sphere. In the private spheres, it's quite okay, I mean like anywhere else. But in the public spheres, it is just that, the moral code that is very much concerned about them. And the second question about the techniques that ISIS use for so as I was saying, you know, the whole, the broad version is that we have emancipation from one side, which is in their opinion a secular western made up, made by infidels. And on the other hand of the story, we have what we call it, what I call actually as a divine redemption. So it means that, and one thing very, very specific about not only ISIS and many other countries that they call them Islamic countries and are running based on the Islamic regulations and rules. The main thing is the control of women. Women should be controlled. So exactly if you put your step into Islamic Republic of Iran as the only, you know, as one of those phonetic countries when it comes to the matter of women, the only difference that you see from Iran and other western societies is the way that they control women. Houses are the same, cars are the same, buildings are the same, everything is the same. It's just that how women are, how women in public are portrayed. For example, hijab is mandatory there. So the same thing in ISIS we have, women are, you know, controlling women in public sphere is the time that they can portray themselves as an Islamic society. That is the main thing. And for that, considering women as a source of sin in their ideology, the sexual sin that we are having there, segregating them is the main thing that they are having in mind. So by gender segregation, you can have, you can fulfill the requirements of having a proper Islamic society so that the genders are not mixed. And when the genders are not mixed, you are forcing them into these gender segregated institutions. And you are telling them, all right, if you do your work just for women, if you just fulfill your duty towards other women and towards your husband, then at the same time you'll have your social movements too. So that would be the way that a woman should be anyway. Thank you. Very briefly, thanks for the question. The women that we interviewed who expressed support for the so-called jihad, they felt strongly that their religion has been attacked and they see, they saw that as their religious duty to support their male family members, to basically defeat the infidels who had invaded the country. But also we asked about how about government employees who have been attacked by violent extremist groups and so on, and basically the Afghans. And almost all of them said Muslims, no one has the right to kill a Muslim, no Muslim has the right to kill a Muslim. So that was interesting to us that they differentiated between infidels and Muslims how they should be treated in this jihad. Wendy, what do you think about the question? Yeah, I'm just listening to your comments. It's really interesting. It's throwing new, gave me new perspectives on my own research about how important it is to collect these stories, conduct these oral histories, read these memoirs, especially in contemporary cases, engage with the women as much as possible because these are systems that involve all facets of society and they provide a lot of valuable information and not only participating at their agents of it, but they can tell us so much more about why these systems and why they continue to operate and can perpetrate this violence, how they come into existence. And I was struck with the question that you posed about the testimony because I learned so much going back to many of these interrogation reports, so many of the secretaries and the functionaries and the ex-lovers of these perpetrators were brought in and interrogated. They themselves thought that they would not be prosecuted. They were not, you know, indicted and they gave so much information. You know, they would say, oh, well, on this day we were brought, you went brought to the Polish border and this gentleman came up to us and they described the uniform. I could then immediately figure out, not immediately figure out which agency it was, whether it was army or military, you know, or SS police. So then I could kind of plot that. And he said to us young ladies, you secretary of pool, we're going to go in and you're going to go right to work in this case, Ukraine. And don't worry, you know, you may hear of some bullets, you may hear some shooting, it's just that a few Jews are being shot. And that story that she remembered really told me a lot about the presence of these women, about their so-called orientation, into this crossing over into these zones of violence, the official who was there, the time that this was happening, the attitude in terms of, no, don't worry, it's just a few Jews are being shot. So these stories that come out on paper in the courtroom, these interrogations are real valuable sources of information for us. And of course, it's interesting to realize at the time that they felt they understood the gendered system, that they weren't being indicted so they could speak freely. It was their male counterparts who were under investigation. And the ultimate outcome as well is that something like 20,000 perpetrators, male perpetrators were convicted in East Germany, West Germany, Austria, and the, you know, 500 women. So many of the women I investigated and the stories I collected, they, many of them got away with murder. Let's begin again. So I have one and a two, three and four. Okay, I'll come back, hopefully. Chantal Jungharte from Women in International Security. I don't have so much as a question as a little comment. And that is, I think we have to be very careful what the implications are when we say women play different roles in violent extremist groups. Because, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually have agency, because neither in Nazi Germany nor in the jihadist movement or in Afghanistan, I would argue, a lot of these women have agency. They're actually operating in an environmental structural factors where there's gender inequality. And what is so striking is that Nazi Germany, current rights extremist groups, jihadi groups, actually understand each gender roles and know are very skillful in manipulating these gender roles to continue control over women and to continue gender inequality system. Thank you. Thank you, Chantal. That's a very important point. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Carroll from the State Department Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Keeping on that theme of agency, I was wondering if from the historical accounts, are there any insights to be gleaned in terms of demobilization, reintegration of these women, particularly the fighters or people who didn't have agency before, got this perhaps false sense of importance, and then trying to go back to, quote, unquote, normal? Thanks. Thanks very much for that question. I know you and then Nega. Okay. Hi, my name is Koby Jones. I'm from Woman Form and International. And my question is about rehabilitation and post-conflict. So I feel like a lot of aid and development is really focused on women as centerpieces of rehabilitating communities in these post-war conflicts. And I was wondering if there is a specific rhetoric or thought process that we need to think about when integrating the idea that women aren't only peacemakers in this rehabilitation process. Thank you, Koby. Great question. Negaar? Negaar with the Baha'is of the United States. Negaar, bye. And I had a question, which actually you've spoken to, but I was wondering if you could maybe as an ending note provide sort of your strongest case or articulation of why this matters. I'm wondering when people ask why does highlighting women's roles as perpetrators of violence in this form of agency actually help us in advancing peace? That would be helpful. Let me take one more question at the very back, sir. Thank you, Ray, as coal U.S. Marine Corps. For the last couple years, we've been doing research about female insurgents and female terrorists and how they're used by different groups. So I had a couple questions for all of you, but I'll just use one. Wendy, in your study of the Holocaust and maybe other Holocaust as well, did you find significant female involvement in Holocaust and, for example, former Yugoslavia, Sudan, or Rwanda? Thank you. Let's begin there and then work back on the questions, Wendy. Sure. Well, two issues that just were raised and are related. I mean, it's getting into the realm of understanding these inherent contradictions in some way, these gray zones, these binaries that start to break down. So, yes, indeed, you can have incredibly repressive patriarchal systems of manipulation and power differentials that are very clear. 8,000 women, German, ordinary German women were sterilized, right? Because they were communists because they were considered kind of enemies of the state or degenerate biologically and so forth. And yet, there is still room for agency because, as I understand it, we're not talking about peaceful societies, we're talking about unstable states in the making, war, imperialist kind of, imperial on the march growing societies. And there's that energy that comes through there in terms of both how they see themselves as historically legitimate in pursuing this and involving everyone because it's got to be a total campaign. And once you have this kind of motion in place, momentum in place, boundary pushing. It's things societies are in flux. There's experimentation that goes on and certain gender roles start to break down. Now, what happens is when they, in the case of Nazi Germany, once the system then collapses and is considered in this case if it's defeated and that was all wrong, right? And the allies came in and occupied, then in the aftermath of that, oh, going back to normal means that suddenly we have to go back to those ways of peaceful gendering and then these reimposition of a very strong kind of patriarchal systems because, you know, that all went wrong and women are also, the innocence was lost and so forth and women become part of that normalization process as well, which suppresses often their actual agency in the crimes. Yes, women have been involved, the Rwandan case is probably the most famous, but more work has been done lately on Cambodia. And most of the story in former Yugoslavia, we do not have a strong case to be made or a level of documentation on women as perpetrators, as female agents of violence. I haven't seen a lot of that research because really what that case brought to light, which was very important, was the role of sexual violence in conjunction with genocide. So there's more work to be done potentially there, I don't know, but certainly in the case of Rwanda and we know the case of Pauline and she was a very active agent, officially in the state in the Hutu government and she was the one who was inciting men to perpetrate violence, including mass rape of women and she was at the ICT, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwandan, was convicted, so that's a strong case to be made there. And we're learning more about, if you go back to Armenia, the genocide of the Armenians and the roles of Turks in that, the variegated roles of collaborators and Kurds and the gendered roles, more research is coming out on that, so that's kind of interesting. The Herrero case is also a very interesting case, German women as missionaries, former Namibia very much involved in the perpetration of violence in the Herrero case, so it's taking the case like the ones we're talking about and then going back historically and rethinking, looking at women in the KKK, a lot of good research on that, women in the genocide of Native Americans in these kinds of vigilante groups on the Western frontier, so asking these questions encourages to go back and re-visit historical cases as well. Thanks Chantal for the comments, very important, specifically when we are looking at the manipulation of gender roles that we're talking about, when you look at ISIS's propaganda, it always puts itself sometimes even in comparative other Jihadi organizations, saying alright look at them, you are nothing there, but look at us, you are something here, therefore you know that Fusad is something that attracts many people, then it is of course coming to how realities and how false or imagities. In terms of returnes and rehabilitation that we were talking about, unfortunately if you look at the situation on ground, majority of the attention goes to rehabilitation and those returnes from Western societies specifically, but we have a huge number of women that are coming from other Arab nations which are mostly ignored, I mean most of what we are talking about is that alright the French women if they go back there what would happen, what nobody talks about, what about the Saudis, what about the Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, they are there too and the number of them are way more than the number of Western recruits, so it is very important to I mean when I was in the southern part of Turkey at the border with Syria you can see quite a number of these women coming from other Arab nations that they actually skipped for whatever reason they are now in Turkey, but when you talk to the officials they are saying as soon as one Western across the border to Turkey they would be caught and they would be given to the embassy of that respected person, so we don't have any kind of rehabilitation for these kind of women, at the same time countries like Tunisia are actually forcing their extremists to get away, get out of the country and they don't allow them to come back, so they just force them to go out, we don't want the problem, so outsourcing problems to somewhere else which is Syria and Iraq, so they are saying alright we are happy that we have a situation in Libya like this so we can get rid of them, they are actually facilitating the fighters, the specific women to cross the border and go back, so we are having problem in that sense when it comes to matter of rehabilitation and return needs specifically for these countries. I would like to answer the question about why does it matter, I think it's important that we understand the role that women play in order for them to be included in policy level decision making what we see although some countries have included women in decisions about how to counter or prevent violence including violent extremism, but many countries have not because they still are in denial to understand that women can play both positive and negative role, I think it's important that more and more studies be conducted to understand why do women do what they do when it comes to violent extremism and violence in general. I'm going to ask if the other panelists have any final comments before we close off today. First of all thank you for providing this opportunity for us to be here and I guess it was quite interesting to know how a combination of historical study of the whole thing and the contemporary things can merge in a way and how we can learn from history because I guess that is one of the things that we are missing very much when it comes to the contemporary events. We always look at them as one of the kinds suddenly came up but if you look at that digger I mean if you dig a bit more on the surface we can see that no I mean we had at least a trend that we can rely on which has happened in past so that can be a very very good benchmark for us to continue the way. I think it's very interesting how you some of the things that you raised I hadn't really thought about was looking distinctly at the kind of operations the security operations or in your case in the state building operations and how you know the roles that they're playing in these different endeavors and how they they cross over or they reaffirm certain you know these parallel institutions I thought that was fascinating and and and I was really struck by your presentation about the various authority figures in Afghanistan the Taliban and how women how is it that women are learning you know how are the ideas because of course all this kind of action is not they're not automatons they're doing because some sort of ideas taking hold the religious secular utopian and how how does that come to them and motivate them to get involved in different ways or perform in different roles and rituals and one thing though that we didn't get to touch on is the actual perpetration of the violence and I was one question I had in my own research was how is it that women actually are get a gun you know can can use a gun I mean at some point there needs to be a weapon there needs to be some sort of act of violence and what is that moment in which those women who aren't traditionally trained in uniform and military roles you know think it's okay to to carry it out I mean that's there's a pretty big difference between kind of working in the system versus actually committing that violence vis-a-vis against men or children or whatever group would like to say that there is a need for further research and studies as I said before about women's participation and contribution in instigating and supporting violence there's also a need for understanding women's role in promoting extremist views not violent extremist but extremist that many believe that will eventually lead to violence that needs to be studied and also for women's groups to put this on their agenda when they work on developing programs to empower women on how to enable them and provide them with the skills and tools to recognize the signs of radicalization not among boys and men but also among women and how to help them de-radicalize or prevent their family members and loved ones from doing these terrible acts thank you all I this brings us to the end of our event here today and I want to thank our panelists who I think brought very relevant and and important ideas to the policy shaping and thinking that goes on here in Washington and abroad I do want to say that our next event will be on Monday March 13th and it is looking at gender equality through investment and gender financing so we're going to pivot to a very different topic at that point but I hope you'll take a moment with me and really thank our panelists here today who I think delivered to the state.