 Welcome to US Institute of Peace. I'm delighted to see everybody here today. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of USIP. And I think as probably most of you know, USIP was founded 30 years ago by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, that it's practical, and it's absolutely essential for US and global security. And we pursue that mission by exactly these kinds of conversations where we seek to bring field practitioners together with policy, with academia, with research, and really try to move forward specific practical solutions to critical global problems. And fragility is one of those problems that we see as a principal driver of global conflict today. And despite having been cited in the national security strategies of the last three administrations as a key security priority, we really have not gotten our arms around how to address in a very practical and meaningful way fragility. And we see that when that state society compact breaks down and you have exclusive governments and repressive authoritarian or weak governments, that you have the potential for conflict to quickly become violent. We see today that we're in the grips of a global crisis, of unresolved civil wars, of historic levels of displacement, of new and virulent forms of violent extremism. And in the words of James Clapper, who testified this spring to the Senate, unpredictable instability has become the new normal. It's because of this that last January, we at USIP joined forces with Bill Burns at Carnegie and Michelle Flournoy at CNAS to form a senior study group on fragility to look at, given the lessons and the scholarship on fragility, how do we turn that into specific policy recommendations for the next administration? We will be launching that report on Monday. We urge all of you to join us if you're not already signed up. Steve Hadley, our board chair and former national security advisor, will open us up. And it's an effort to really take exactly the kinds of things that you will be discussing in greater depth today and turn it into the kind of policy that can be meaningful for the next administration. We can't afford to continue to be working across purposes, across our administration, given the level of crisis that we're seeing that can be traced to the fragility that we're seeing around the world. I'm delighted that you are able to gather here today to look in depth and more specifically at several of those countries that really define that kind of autocratic fragility that we see as so connected to the potential for conflict, for violence, and how to move those places into a more peaceful, inclusive future. I'm quite grateful to my colleagues here at USIP who have been leading this effort. And so it's my great pleasure now to introduce somebody I think all of you know well, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, who has a long and stored career and really through his career has been able to see this issue from different critical seats, from academia, from State Department, from USAID. And it's that kind of more panoramic vision, I think that enables us to have a better sense of how to bring all the tools that we have available to bear on these critical issues. So Princeton, we'll take us through the day. Please join me in welcoming Ambassador Lyman. Nancy, thank you so much. And let me emphasize again the importance of the Fragility State report that's coming out on Monday. It's going to be a major report. We're very fortunate today to try and get into, as Nancy mentioned, the question of how do we prevent in the cases of autocratic and sometimes military governments, those societies falling into chaos in civil war as the only means of change? And we know the terrible consequences of that. So what we're trying to look at today is how can those regimes see a pathway forward to transition that they don't have to think of as a zero sound game and can be encouraged to move toward real transitions? The fact is that many countries have actually done that. And we will be talking about that in the second panel. It's also important for the opposition elements, how they see their position. Or as we said to the opposition group in Sudan over a number of years, if you ever got to the negotiating table, what is your political platform? So it's important to think about both how governments perceive such transitions and how oppositions perceive them. And then, of course, the question of what is the role of the international community? What measures? What combinations of carrots and sticks? But most of all, what kind of engagement makes sense to encourage these processes so we don't see those societies fall into devastating civil wars or simple chaos? So we have a good program today, an excellent program. We're delighted that you're here and delighted with the panelists. I'm going to begin. We're going to begin with one of the most vexing cases we all know, which is Zimbabwe. And we're very fortunate to have an excellent panel. And I'm going to turn it over to the panel leader, Ambassador Johnny Carson. I think many of you, of all of you, know Johnny Carson 37 years of work in the United States government, an ambassador to four countries. Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe. He was the National Intelligence Officer for Africa. And he was, of course, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. He is here a senior advisor to the president, Nancy Limborg. He has been spearheading much of our work with Nigeria, with Somalia, Kenya, Ghana. He's a terrific human being. And I'm proud to have been my colleague. So I'm going to turn it over to Johnny because if anybody can solve these problems, that's Johnny Carson. Princeton, thank you very much. And what a wonderful, wonderful introduction. I have to almost hire you to do that. Nancy, again, thank you very much for allowing us to move forward with this program this morning. Let me say thank you to all of you for joining us this morning to talk about the political transition that we all expect will take place in Zimbabwe at some point over the next several years. And what we in the international community working alone and in conjunction with those in and outside of Zimbabwe can do to foster a peaceful transition, a transition that will lead to an opening of the political space and a strengthening of democracy, a transition that will bring an end to the country's recurring economic nightmares and a new start in its efforts to achieve sustained economic growth and a transition that will address some of the longstanding historical grievances and inequities that continue to generate friction inside of Zimbabwe. Since its independence in April of 1980, Zimbabwe has been led by one leader and one party, Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF. Today, Robert Mugabe is 92 years of age. And the promise and potential that was so much a part of that country's early history has all but disappeared. Mugabe's advancing age and his physical decline have given rise to increasing tensions and infighting inside of Zanu PF. And it has stirred new awakenings in the political opposition and among civil society. And the country's destructive economic policies over this time have resulted in a collapse of the country's agricultural sector, increasing poverty, widespread migration across its southern borders. And today, a humanitarian crisis ebbing on an economic collapse. This morning, we have three very distinguished panelists with us to talk about the challenges of transition in Zimbabwe. Our first speaker this morning will be Alex Vine from London's Chatham House institution. Alex has been the director of the Africa program and the international and law program at Chatham House for well over a decade. He has worked across southern Africa in Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, and has not only worked for Chatham House but also been an international civil servant. He will lead us off with 10 minutes of discussion about a new pamphlet that he has just written on Zimbabwe and one which we will share at the very end of this program. Our second commentator this morning will be a longtime friend and colleague, Whitney Steinman, formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and currently a senior associate at the law firm of Covington and Burling and one of their senior Africa experts. Our third speaker this morning will be Nicole Willett Jensen. Nicole is a vice president at Albright Stonebridge. Nicole has worked in the US government at the State Department in South Africa at the embassy in Zimbabwe and has also worked as a director at the National Security Council and the first Obama administration working on Southern African affairs. She is also a former Senate staffer having worked at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I am pleased to have all of them here and we will start with Alex with a presentation followed by our other two speakers. There will be an opportunity for everyone to have a chance to ask questions as we draw to the conclusion of this. I'm going to ask if you haven't done so already, silence your phones. Thank you very much, Johnny, for the introduction and thank you Nancy for hosting me. Oh, there you are. Thank you very much. My engagement with Zimbabwe has been decades long. I don't think even Johnny might know that. I started as one of the resident archaeologists at Great Zimbabwe National Monument in the 1980s and my career kind of moved elsewhere. But I have a deep love and still friends from that period in Zimbabwe. The paradox has always been for me that as things deteriorated in Zimbabwe, for my own country, United Kingdom, it became a domestic issue and the politics got very fractious and you couldn't have an open discussion or an honest discussion on where Zimbabwe was going. It got very polarized. That's gone and that's the reason that I'm here today because I felt that it was time to re-engage intellectually and think through the domestic and external implications of Zimbabwe's economic reform and re-engagement process. Hence this pamphlet, as Johnny calls it, is published this morning here at USIP and I brought a suitcase of 50 copies along. So if you stay long enough and are quick enough to the front, you can have one. You are the first to see it. It's the result of research this year in Zimbabwe and internationally, a number of trips. I'm not the only author. There's, well, someone Johnny knew when he was ambassador in Zimbabwe, Nox Chiteau. He was the deputy director for the Center for Defense Studies at the University of Zimbabwe. He's now one of my fellows at Chatham House and another colleague, Christopher Van Dome. Our assumption also was that fresh thinking was needed because what Zimbabweans want is a peaceful transition, a soft landing. And it's clear that President Mugabe is towards the tail end of his presidency in Zimbabwe and that change is afoot. But let's just reflect back on some of the things that have happened over the last decade. It's clear that the near loss of the 2000 assembly election and then the 2002 presidential election results and that resulting in inclusive government was an existential shock to Zhanu. And that still, that shadow of what occurred in that period looms heavy over Zimbabwe today. My own view is, and we did another report on Zimbabwe in 2014, that the presidential elections were more or less about that Zhanu recaptured the state. And the presidential election result in that period was different from those of the 2000 and 2002. But the opportunities that then opened up with those presidential elections in 2013 haven't necessarily been capitalized or took on in the way that we thought they might. We, in fact, in our 2014 Chatham House report, recommended that Zhanu re-engage with the West and the West re-engage with Zimbabwe. Look here. But things have not developed as one would have hoped in a rational, logical manner. So Zimbabwe now is at an important moment. It's at a watershed, faced with what is clearly the most serious economic crisis since 2008. My own view is, it is suffering a triple whammy of deflation, stagnation, and low productivity, exacerbated by low commodity prices, the weak regional currencies that we're seeing around the region, and particularly drought. Let us not underestimate the impact of El Nino and what drought is doing in Southern Africa at the moment. This is a serious, significant difference to what we saw in 2008. And the resilience that is in Zimbabwe that we assumed that Zimbabweans could just go back on the land isn't necessarily there, including also that Zimbabwe previously remittances could provide a basket. The value of going on to the parallel market and cashing in remittances in dollars could allow people to survive. In a dollarized economy like Zimbabwe is at the moment with a shortage of dollars, that's not necessarily the case. And that was an argument that the former finance minister and opposition leader, Tendai B.T., made very strongly to me very recently when I last saw him. So we are in a situation where a fragile state could become a brittle state. Hence, I think it's important to rethink what are our strategies, what are our approaches, what's the impact of Zimbabwe if things were to deteriorate further? It's also an important moment in that politics is opening up. You have the factionalization of Zhanu and the different contending parties over positioning themselves for succession. You have an opposition that was deeply traumatized and fragmented after the 2013 elections, now beginning to talk about working together. You do see in Zimbabwe that parts of the rule of law work. We have a strong 2013 constitution. The court yesterday said that there can be a demonstration tomorrow and threw out the two-week ban that the government had asked for on demonstrations. So this isn't Erich Rare and a number of other countries, Johnny, that I could think about. This is different. There are windows and opportunities in Zimbabwe that you do not have in some other countries that we might be talking about. And so, again, the question for policymakers is how to engage, what are the windows, what are the opportunities? The paradox, I think, is that in this context, Zimbabwe is in a neighborhood that is also degrading. You have democratic reversals around Southern Africa just at the moment. Mozambique is not in good shape. Zambia has had a election that I think we're concerned about that result. South Africa has its own problems. Overlapped that also with drought. And it's a time when the international community, meaning particularly the West, is maybe downgrading some of its engagements, focusing towards the Horn and the Sahel. My own country is actually, despite Zimbabwe officially being a priority country and is the only African country mentioned in the Conservative Party manifesto, and that's the party of government at the moment, resources are being moved towards the Sahel and elsewhere. So the assumption then, Harari, that Zimbabwe, people care about Zimbabwe internationally, isn't necessarily the case either. But the cost of not thinking about Zimbabwe, I think, is one that we really need to think about. So there have been economic reforms. My paper here with my colleagues argue that there was an opening that appeared in terms of economic reforms because Zanu had no choice. It was running out of money. It had a bloated wage bill. It created too many jobs for civil servants and it needed new money. Chinamasa, the finance minister at Chatham House, and I quote him in this report, said, I need new money. And so the re-engagement strategy with the financial institutions was about new money. The challenge was to ensure that if there was new money, i.e. if there was a rapprochement with international financial institutions so that Zimbabwe could then cover its arrears and then borrow new money, that it was going to be money that would help for development and pro-poor policies, rather than just rolling Zanu PF over to its Congress in 2017 and elections in 2018. That vision of that rapprochement with the international financial institutions is receding at the moment. It peaked in probably July, but events subsequently, the demonstrations and the reaction to them in Harari, the statement by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor in May that he would introduce bond notes, even if they were 5%, the import ban statutory instrument 64 on imports from South Africa, these have challenged fundamentally the confidence that was building up on Zimbabwe in its trajectory. And so we are a moment of reflection at the moment of whether this re-engagement process can work, whether it's stalled, and what are the options within it. There are no clear answers here. One thing was clear, though, in the research that I conducted with my colleagues in Zimbabwe was that the re-engagement with the IFIs had support of Zimbabwe in civil society, many of them. Not all of them, but many of them. What nobody really wanted, except for some of the opposition parties and their leaders, was a collapse, a violent collapse of the regime. And so, again, what Zimbabweans are looking for are soft landing. And I think, Johnny, the most telling thing is that the demonstrations that we've seen in Harari were not driven by opposition and politics. They were driven by the lack of confidence in the economy, particularly the Reserve Bank governor's decision to announce, by surprise to everybody, that he was thinking about reintroducing bond notes, which got, in people's minds, a vision that they were going back to the horrible time of 2008 with the hyperinflation and those famous zillion bank loans that are quite valuable now. I don't know if you've got one, Johnny. I do have one. You can probably cash one in for about 25 or 30 US dollars. There is an article that says that's one of the best investments you can have made, actually, to buy up all those bond notes that were worthless, not bond notes, you know, ZIM notes. So, I think this is time for, particularly the US administration, to review and rethink how can it engage on Zimbabwe. My reading is that it has been very much based just on a values, good governance, human rights strategy. There are no strategic interests to the US in Zimbabwe. None at all. It is a mid-sized, landlocked, Southern African country. And on its own, there isn't a counter-terrorism issue. However, if you factor in the regional context and that Zimbabwe is part of an important Southern Africa jigsaw puzzle that is under stress, then it becomes more important to think about Zimbabwe. And I think that's what the new administration, whoever they may be here in the US, needs to think about. That just thinking about the values side of the equation doesn't necessarily get us to where we need to be. That's certainly been the thinking within Europe and within the UK. But maybe there was a swing too much the other way. And there's a swing back to thinking about how to mix values and interests and how to ensure that Zimbabwe gets a soft landing. My report here with my colleagues is detailed and I'm not going to read much out, but it's available for you here and it's available on the website of Chatham House also. So I've seen, I've spoken for 12 minutes, Johnny, so I better stop. Thank you very much. Alex, that was a marvelous 12 minutes. And I think you've laid out a very compelling and interesting set of arguments that I'm sure that we will have a chance to talk about. I do have one of those zillion dollars in notes, but I also have a few from the Congo as well. And a couple of other places in Africa where those kind of hyperinflation dollars and currencies were on display for a while. We'll come back to that. Whitney? Great, thank you, Johnny. And thank you to Nancy and Princeton for convening this. It's a really important subject that I don't think gets enough attention. So just let me make a couple of comments about Zimbabwe. It's sort of inspired by Alex's excellent study, his pamphlet, which I highly recommend. Abe Lowenthal and Sergio Bitar noted in their recent Foreign Affairs article, getting to democracy lessons from successful transitions that past transitions offer some broadly applicable lessons. One of those lessons is that wherever the opposition fails to unite, the prospects for democracy suffer. On the other hand, opposition unity doesn't guarantee success, but it certainly increases the chances of success. And that's why the coalescing of opposition groups that we currently see in Zimbabwe, which I think Alex referred to, however embryonic is important, it is significant that the five smaller opposition parties united into the coalition of Democrats. At the same time, there appears to be a rapprochement among the leading opposition figures, including Joyce Majuru of the Zimbabwe People First Party, Morgan Changurai of MDCT, and Tendai BT of People's Democratic Party. In fact, I understand that there's a major demonstration for either tomorrow or next Friday that will be held by 18 opposition groups who have indicated that they will come together under the banner of the National Electoral Reform Agenda. And I think that's really quite important. The reality of this demonstration is that the outcome could be violent, it could lead to an overreaction by the Mugabe government and the imposition of a state of emergency, or it could proceed peacefully. What can be said with some assurance is that the opposition is getting bolder in its peaceful challenge to government and more unified. Is it unified enough? Probably not, but it is hard to dispute the trendline. At the same time, I think we have to ask how can the opposition ensure that the next elections scheduled for 2018 will be fair and free? This is a vital and tough question that deserves more time than we have today, but a unified opposition has to be critical to any successful democratic transition. The second trend that can contribute to a peaceful transition is economic reform and growth. Last August, as Alex referred, the Mugabe government announced a 10-point economic reform program to address the country's extremely dire economic situation. And it appears that the effort to re-engage with the World Bank, known as the Lima Plan, has stalled, principally because of the threat or the promise by the governor of the Reserve Bank to introduce a local currency. However, there are elements of this economic reform program that any Zimbabwe government would be wise to address. This includes the proposal to create a land compensation fund, which would compensate Zimbabwean farmers of all races who lost their farms due to cronyism and illegal land seizures. Equally important is the proposal to introduce long-term leases that could be used as collateral by farmers for commercial loans to make investment into farms which have laid fallow. Viable long-term leases enforced by the rule of law and the sanctity of tenure is the only way to restore economic growth in a sector that is the backbone of the Zimbabwe economy. Now, let me come to some of the suggestions and ideas that Alex put forward in terms of how we might be thinking about Zimbabwe from a U.S. perspective. Because in my view, and I spent a week in Zimbabwe last October, it's my view that U.S. policy is essentially ossified. It has been successful for isolating Zimbabwe in the region and successful for isolating the U.S. from Zimbabwe. As Ambassador Princeton Lyman argued in Senate testimony last June, sanctions are a tool and not a policy. As he put it, quote, without a larger strategic framework and set a supporting activities, sanctions are not likely to achieve their objectives. Moreover, sanctions work best when supported by the international community. I would argue that our strategic objective in Zimbabwe is to avoid state collapse, which is reality, and facilitate a transition to an era defined by the rule of law, respect for human rights, free and fair elections, and inclusive economic growth. Unfortunately, U.S. sanctions on Zimbabwe have come to define U.S. policy toward that country. While the U.S. describes the sanctions as targeted on only 98 individuals and 68 entities, the reality is that they are perceived in Zimbabwe and more importantly by financial institutions in the country and throughout the region as an embargo on the nation. The U.S. Embassy website maintains, quote, certain persons have been targeted for sanctions on the basis of their connection to the government of Zimbabwe. Yet the problem is that this list never seems to change. Why, for example, is Joyce Majuru who was expelled from government two years ago and now heads one of the leading opposition parties still on the sanctions list. There are other examples. As well, why has the U.S., which has worked hand in glove with the EU on sanctions policy in Iran and Russia, fallen out of sync with the EU on Zimbabwe, which has largely lifted its sanctions except for those on Robert Mugabe, his wife and his very closest advisors? And what about the supporting activities that Ambassador Lyman referred to? As Zimbabwe's transition accelerates, I think we need to be more creative in how we support those in the country who are working for peaceful democratic change. It is worth noting that the previous U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Bruce Wharton, sought to deepen ties between the U.S. and Zimbabwe private sectors. The Corporate Council on Africa was invited to send a trade mission to the country and a reverse trade mission of Zimbabwe business leaders came to the U.S. This type of activity, I would argue, should be continued. For example, a delegation from the President's Advisory Committee on Doing Business in Africa could conduct a fact-finding visit to the country, and representatives from Zimbabwe's business community could be invited to participate in the Second U.S. Africa Business Forum that will be held later this month in New York. It is in the interest of the U.S. and Zimbabwe to broaden our engagement with key actors and constituencies in the country. As Lowenthal and Bitar point out, external governmental and non-governmental actors can effectively support peaceful democratic transitions if they respect local forces and become involved at their invitation. There is no question, however, that the outcome of the country's transition will be influenced by Zimbabweans first and foremost, but also by its friends in the region and internationally. As for the U.S., which over the past several years has launched a number of vital and creative initiatives across the continent, unfortunately, it appears to me that the Zimbabwe file has been lost in the Africa policy drawer. So I'll stop there, Johnny. It's about seven minutes. A little bit longer than that, but it was worth it. Thank you. It was clearly worth it. I'm going to turn the mic over to Nicole. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you to Nancy and to Princeton and to Johnny and all of USAP for convening us today. Zimbabwe has been a long time focus of mine. I first lived in the country in 2000, which we've talked about already today was the beginning of a very volatile time and a fascinating time to be there early in my career and was back in the country in 2008 throughout the election crisis with some of you in this room. So having lived some of those experiences, I think it's really exciting that Zimbabwe's back in the policy discussion again today, both here in Washington and thanks to Alex and others robustly in other capitals as well. So hopefully this is the beginning of a longer conversation, which I think was exactly the point that Whitney was making. I may be the most cautious panelist about re-engagement. I'm going to try hard not to be a long-winded skunk at the Garden Party today. So lots of challenges there for me. I agree that Zimbabwe certainly is on the precipice amid a looming economic, political and humanitarian crises and that the weight is carried as we all know and as it always has been on the backs of average Zimbabweans. I agree that political reforms, even incremental reforms should be accompanied by policy and posture changes by the US and other donors. I think we all agreed about that. I think it's really important. I think we need to be more creative. But we haven't seen those concrete reforms yet. I do not believe that we have. I think Alec makes some really interesting points in the report, which you will all see about some signals of interest and commitment, but I'm not sure that we're there yet. Our leverage is limited, where we have few strategic interests, I think we've all mentioned that. And economic recovery packages, certainly through the ifs, are one of the few levers. And I think it's important that we reserve those for a time where we think the moment is right and that it not serve as a bailout for a regime that may not be ready to make concrete commitments. So the policy question, of course, is a difficult one. Did donors lead in now to prevent economic collapse, which probably would contribute to short-term stability, or instead reserve our strongest leverage for the moment where we can affect genuine reform? As we try and take the long view on the potential for political transitions, and by the way, I believe and I'm biased that history really is our guide. I remember sitting in a meeting at the NSC in 2007, I was working at state, not at the NSC then. We were doing some election planning around scenarios for the 2008 election during the previous administration. And in my memory, no one in the room thought that a runoff was really a viable option, that that was something that was gonna happen. Luckily, we did plan around all the scenarios, but in a year that saw, 2007, that saw Morgan Changar eyes head get cracked in in street protests that are not unlike some of the street protests that we're seeing now, I think we underestimated the energy that civil society and the opposition were gonna bring to bear during that election cycle, and also the crackdown that occurred as a result from the regime. So after the March election, well, let me back for a second. So during the crisis of 2008, while there were a lot of similarities to where I think we are today, the outlook going into that election as I've just referenced was grim, but civil society was about as unified as it had ever been before. And the MDC, though at times certainly struggling for policy cohesion and still suffering from previous fractures, was relatively strong. And they had clear asks for donors at the time. And I think that's something that we've all referenced here today too, that it's important to listen to what people on the ground are saying. And at the time it was, keep sanctions, give us room to work. And that was what we did. After the March election, and you all know what happened there, the opposition forced a runoff. Things were bad. Food was scarce. We've talked about how inflation rose into the sextillions. I have many of those in Bob Wayne dollars, which I maybe should look at cashing in. cholera returned as an epidemic. This was a tough time. And this was a regime, and we'll see if that's changed, but this was a regime full of many of the same players who were very skilled at ruling through fear. Youth militia, police, war veterans, security forces, soldiers were in the streets, established re-education camps. Hundreds were killed. Thousands were injured. Tens of thousands were displaced. Hundreds of people were showing up at embassies in Harari, including at the South African embassy, including at the U.S. embassy, requesting help terrified for their lives. Things were quite grim. U.S. diplomats, foreign correspondents, NGO workers were not immune. A lot of us were detained by youth militia or war veterans and experienced real challenges at the hands. So, which was sort of the least of what was going on in the country, but my point is that Zanipia at the time acted with impunity. In 2008, the donor community was fairly unified, and this is very different from now, in their willingness to advocate for a transitional process. The closeness of the election, the blatant violence and intimidation, and the relatively unified voice of civil society in MDC gave the international community a platform to back up their demands. Alex makes key points, I think, about the regional dynamics in Southern Africa. That's a critical component to this conversation. Mugabe came to the table in 2008 under quite a bit of pressure. We know that Ban Ki-moon was involved. Certainly the U.S., the U.K., the Aussies, the Canadians, and really importantly, the region. So, there was willingness by, of course, Taubman-Becky, as we all know, but also Yankama, Levy-Monalassa, others in the region who were willing to get involved and to help force a conversation that ultimately resulted, as we all know, in the GPA, which was flawed and imperfect, but which did bring or helped usher in and end to the economic spiral, and certainly to the worst of the violence. And so we look at the landscape and we see commonalities with 2008, as well as some evolving factors that could push Zimbabwe, again, to or over the edge. Everything that we've discussed up here is Anopia fracturing, some fights between Mugabe and the war veterans, Joyce Madruz expulsion and establishment of a party, El Nino and potentially La Nina, which I think is an extremely concerning trend that we all need to be talking about, and will only worsen in 2017. And then we've injected into that this debate about arrears clearance. I also think it's important to think about the changing demographics and others have written on this as well. But with two thirds of Zimbabweans young enough to be born after the liberation struggle without that inherent allegiance to Zanu PF that we may have seen in the past, a similar dynamic to what we're seeing in South Africa. And new access to social media, they bring a new energy into this election cycle. Technology is always really important, but in 2008, it was the ability to SMS pictures of polling results at local stations before they were put into the centralized counting machine that really was important as we talked about the plurality in the runoff. And this time, this flag, Tajamuga, other social media endeavors are bringing a whole new energy and a whole new anonymity to dissenting voices. And I think that's a really compelling and exciting component that we haven't seen before and that will drive this forward. So the critical question becomes, once again, whether the opposition in civil society, to Whitney's point, can capitalize on current momentum and concluding Zanu fracturing and economic exasperation, which we all know is a great driver of this, to mount not just a strong enough campaign on the ground to ensure a close contest, but to regalvanize the international community around the cause. Because I do think there's been quite a bit of debate within the US government, but there has been, I think, a challenge in getting creative thinking and moving to move forward. So it's not yet clear what's possible, but there are some encouraging signs. And this, of course, has brought out the worst of Zanu PF, water cannons, mass detentions, bans on public protests, though I think it's incredibly interesting that the court has held up in the past 24 hours and opened that space back up. We'll see how it goes. Politicize food assistance, politicize election registration. This is a playbook that we have seen before, and I just think it's incredibly important that we keep that in mind and that we remember that many of the same actors are involved. If the key question is whether Zim's dissident voices can capitalize on this moment, then surely the answer is not to embrace Zanu PF now with new economic packages, absent concrete demonstrated commitments to both economic reforms and political reforms, given that that's our leverage. This would only be a lifeline to a regime and take the wind out of the sails of the potential for real reform. The moment to take a chance, and I promise I will wrap it up, on a reformed ruling party, if it ever existed, and I think there was a healthy debate about, and it may have not been a public debate, but there was a debate about re-engagement. I think that time has passed. It was several years ago during the lull between election cycles, not now in the face of emergent protests and a predictable government crackdown, when Zimbabweans need to know that their efforts are being heard. Nor should, and I do think it's an interesting point what Alex has said about economics being the drivers of the protests, and we should debate that, but I think whether Zeno-PF should be enabled to fix that by external actors is a question mark. Changes in Zimbabwe, as we all agree, will be driven by Zimbabweans, and the rule of the United States and other donors should be to use whatever leverage we have to create an enabling environment, which can, and which change can occur without violence, but not to sacrifice that possibility for a short-term piece for the status quo for stability. The current US posture is to try and hold, and I do think this is concerning, an increasingly isolated principled stance why the EU, UK, and others, as we've discussed, have softened and changed some of their, or rationalized their sanctions policy is probably a better way to say it. Given the political discord in Southern Africa right now, we are not gonna have probably the support of other leaders when and if the time comes for a negotiated solution, and these are real challenges, but I don't believe that's a reason to capitulate. I think the United States must, must, must engage a new fresh thinking to create the architecture around a sanctions program, and I do think that sanction program needs to be revisited as well, in order to have a real policy framework and a plan in cooperation with donors and to whatever degree possible, the region, and that would require a lot of new energy and new thinking to come in to the conversation. And so I think we should collectively bring that leverage to bear aligning messages on the steps needed to prompt economic and political re-engagement, make that clear to try and help prevent violence, but making clear that any re-engagement transition must involve genuine reform, and this is an uphill battle as we all know, but I think that's really the only principled way forward. Great. I think we've had three marvelous and very insightful presentations. I'm going to kick this off with a series of questions to all of our panelists, and then may take an opportunity to ask a second set of questions, and then I'm going to open it up to the audience. First of all, all of us agree up here, and certainly our panelists, that Zimbabwe is in crisis, in very deep and serious crisis, political crisis, that it faces impending economic collapse and catastrophe, and that equally, we see a humanitarian emergency arising there. We also recognize that perhaps there are needs to re-look at our current strategies. Whitney has given us several pointers on strategy for changes. All three of the things that he suggested were in the economic column. The question arises as to are there other strategies beyond the two or three economic issues that he raised? What are those strategies? And importantly, who do we engage to pursue those strategies? I indicated in my initial brief remarks that Robert Mugabe had been in power since April of 1980. Many of the people who surround him today are only middle-aged and aging acolytes. They are, in fact, the Emerson Manangaguas. They are the Patrick Chinamasus. They are General Constantine Chowinga. And many of those who are in the opposition were formerly very close to him as well, including Joyce Majuru and Simba Makone and people like that. Who do we engage with inside and outside of government, especially given the fact that we have many of the same people in power? Related to that, in coming back to Whitney's question and also Alex's excellent paper, I called it a pamphlet, I apologize. It is a monograph, a short book. And a very, very good read. And it's not only Alex, but Knox Jeteo and others who I've known for many years who actually let me see it about a month ago before it was published. And it's a very good book. But let me come back and say about the economic issue and raise a question there. Some have suggested that sanctions have had very, very little to do with Zimbabwe's economic collapse or its political crisis. Very little to do with the collapse and the political crisis. And that President Mugabe and others have simply won the public relations and propaganda war by in fact saying that is the economic issues which have caused the problems when in fact they have been political mismanagement and political misbehavior. We've seen a lessening of the sanctions by the EU and the question is what have they in fact brought? So these are a series of questions, but the question is what are the strategies? And we'll come back to this, I'll add some observations myself, but what are the strategies both on the economic side, maybe Whitney can build out of the some more on the economic side and what are the political strategies? And are economic sanctions really a fig leaf and a propaganda tool for the Mugabe regime to whip up anti-Western hysteria? Okay, Alex, I'll let you start. Okay, thanks, Johnny. Well, first of all, one of the mistakes in 2008, sorry, in 2013 was to assume that the opposition would win. And so Western diplomats, many of them got caught in groupthink in Harare, where they'd been mostly, if not almost exclusively, talking to the opposition. And it was a strange situation that a number of envoys who then kind of left Harare, their contact lists didn't have anyone serious in Zanu. So rebuilding networks, understanding contacts within broad Zanu and the different factions is what's been going on since then. That further fueled the sense of betrayal and of abandonment by the increasingly fractionalised and disheartened opposition. But there was, so one of the problems was a swing from complete forensic focus on opposition to rebuild relationships with Zanu, forgetting a bit about the opposition at times. And we're now in a situation where we need proper thinking about everything. And that's the problem, there are limited resources and the Harare is seen as a place that you kind of go because it's not that important as kind of foreign service officers. It's not like it used to be. And this is the time of real upgrading, of real energy, of working out the different factions, the criminology, who's in the CIO thinking what, preparing for this transition that is coming quickly, it is increasing in speed and complexity. So this is about complexity of change and preparing for it and thinking about it and understanding it. And what I think Nicole, Whitney and myself have been saying is this has to now happen. There's been too much degrading, too much complacency. And I would say that's got to be a policy priority. It's also, it's complicated because people are talking about grand coalitions and there's all sorts of conversations going on. You know, Joyce Majura's people are talking to sphangerize faction of the opposition, but they're also talking to BT. There's all sorts of conversations taking place. And then there are brokers that are busy trying to bring in even broader conditions like Ibo Mandaza, for example, through his kind of think tanks up his trust and so on. So upgrading thinking and human resources and enthusiasm, probably one of the issues is that there are smart people in Harari, but they're not being kind of put fire under their feats to perform properly and report back because back in Washington or even at times in London, the attention is elsewhere. And I think that has to shift. Sanctions is something that does interest me a great deal. And as you know, Johnny, I've been a sanctions inspector elsewhere in the continent. I do believe that the case on Zimbabwe is that Zanu PF and Robert Mugabe won the propaganda bottle about sanctions. And I've been always surprised at how many well-educated Zimbabweans from civil society and others blame sanctions partly for economic woes and not economic policies. This is quite different from a number of other countries where I've been on the cold face as a sanctions inspector. But it is used as a fig leaf that is believed to hide for financial mismanagement and other problems. And that was one of the drivers for the European Union and Australia to significantly reduce their targeted measures on Zimbabwe to Mugabe, the first lady, Zimbabwe defense industries. And I do believe that the US and particularly Canada, I mean Canada is way worse than the US. There are all sorts of dead people on the list there. The Canadians have just stopped thinking about Zimbabwe. They need to really go through that list very carefully in Ottawa now. Because bad lists also fit in that this is about just very blunt political tools and nobody really cares. And that it's about politics, not about actually policy. So having really sharp lists and the US list, there are some names that are wrong in there. We have the footnote highlighting where they are. And to be honest, the US website, despite that particular department saying it's easy to navigate, it's not compared with the Australians, for example. So making it much easier to navigate and work out who's on the list and what the indicators of why they're on the list and who got lifted is also something I think in terms of the propaganda war needs to be done too. Great. Okay. Thanks. Whitney, do you want to? Yeah, just a quick couple of points. Number one, I think it's, you know, when we ask what is our objective here, I can't help but believing from a policy point of view, our strategic compass has to be guided by the 2018 elections and the success of those 2018 elections. Well, they may happen sooner, there may be a lot of other things, but how do we engage to increase the chances of success? And I think it's quite important that this big demonstration that's planned is being held under the banner, not of economic reform, but of the national electoral reform agenda. And when you look at that agenda and break it out, a lot of focus on the National Electoral Commission and a lot of other component points, the media, the press, social media, I think there's a lot to engage in there. So that's the number one point. To Nicole's point about if he's economic reform, it's definitely worth parsing. I don't think anybody, you know, would advocate capitulation. Maybe too strong a word. But I think it's worth to separate out the World Bank part from some of the more domestic issues. And I believe that right now, if we can get land reform and growth and resettlement and the rule of law back in the agriculture sector, which many interest groups, including many in ZANU-PF want to see, we should be working for that. And the commercial banks play a very important role in that obviously as security services do too, and that's a whole nother conversation, but we need to be aware of that and ask ourselves, how can we move that forward? Johnny, as you noted, yes, I gave a number of examples from the private sector, but I'm 100% confident there are other examples from civil society. Tajimuka, hashtag this flag, you know, all the tremendously talented young Zimbabweans that have come to the U.S. through the Young Africa Leaders Initiative over the last several years. There are a lot of opportunities to engage young Zimbabweans and to encourage them in their work about building a new future. My last point is this, you know, from my experience working in South Africa during the transition, yes, South Africa was blessed with good leadership at a critical moment, but we can't lose sight of the fact that many South Africans came together on the community level, the local level, the provincial level, the national level to talk about what kind of health policy they wanted, what kind of schools they wanted, what kind of security they wanted, and that really helped forge a consensus about the future that I think fed into the success of those 2004 elections. And it's, I think that kind of dialogue, you know, can be initiated in Zimbabwe now. Whitney, thanks very much, Nicole. I really will be brief this time. On the first question, I really agree with everything Alex said. This is not Eritrea, this is a country where we have come from a place where we have been very hardline on the U.S. stance in terms of our engagement, 100% laser focused on civil society and the opposition going into 2008 and through the beginning of the GPA. Then the GPA complicated that, and there really was quite robust debate within the United States Interagency dialogue about how and whether to engage what we at the time were calling Xano PF moderates, which I'm sure you've all heard a bit about. And so, you know, in my own thinking has changed. I think in many cases, Zimbabwe policy has been personalized. I've certainly been guilty of that, others have been guilty of that, though I wouldn't also make the argument that it's very personal for Zimbabweans living in Zimbabwe all of the time. But my thinking has evolved about who we talk to. And I think you're absolutely right, Alex, that having conversations at all levels is really important when particularly in times of stability or relative peace. And I do think it's correct that going into 2013, we were not well positioned to be having conversations with everyone, though they're in defense of certain the embassy and the state department. I think there were a lot of efforts to try and build those relationships, but it takes some time and they had certainly been held back from doing so for a very long time. So engaging on all levels, despite what are real concerns about, in my opinion about Xano PF, I think is really important on the sanctions piece. So my years at the NSE were so very heavily involved in conversations about things like getting dead people off lists. It's critical. I agree, I think the timing, maybe what we disagree about with some of this, but I agree absolutely that for sanctions, for sanctions to be an effective tool, the list has to be a living document that is regularly reviewed and updated. And it's most effective as we all know when it's in lockstep with other donors. And I do think also, I agree with Alex again, that there has been a pendulum that we sort of were all the way in one camp then swing way over into, we need to engage, we need to engage around 2013. And then now we're in a place where we need new creative thinking and we need a balanced approach that's extremely rational and that uses sanctions just as one piece and that we ensure that it makes sense. And so I absolutely agree with all this. I will say one quick thing about this, particularly for anyone who's on the appropriate side of the house. If OFAC is not well-resourced within the US government, if OFAC is not in a position to be able to have the resources to focus on Zimbabwe, say amid the Arab Spring, which was when I was trying to work with many others here on taking another look at our sanctions list, then attention is divided, right? And that's just a bureaucratic reality. It may seem like a small thing, but ensuring that Zimbabwe is not gonna rise to the level at most moments, maybe any moment as Egypt or Libya, right? And so it's gonna be really important not only that we reinvigorate the internal policy debate, but that OFAC and others are well-resourced to be able to prioritize keeping all of our sanctions lists alive and well, no matter where they are in the world and relevant. Great. I have a bunch of questions and a bunch of comments, but I'm gonna reserve those in order to give you or a few of you out in the audience an opportunity to ask questions. We're gonna try and keep this session to the time. We'll take, if I can, three quick questions. Please make the question short to the point and please give your name, not an opportunity for a dissertation. Alex, you wanna start here, young man behind Ambassador Moose and the young woman here, we've got three. Hi, everyone. Thanks very much for some really interesting presentations. Alex Noyes with the US Security Governance Initiative. The role of the security services was mentioned, I'm sure I've been passing by all of you. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more as anybody who follows in Bob, we knows the military is gonna play a critical role in any transition that's to come. So just hoping for a little bit more on that. My own research suggests that during the GPA period, the MDC really botched their involvement with trying to reform some of the security services. So just curious to hear your take, thanks very much. Thanks, Alex. Young man here. Hi, my question to Alex or Nicole. A little bit closer so people can hear you. In case of transition that occurs in the next coming years, how do you see the future of the white minority of Zimbabwe? And do you foresee a 2C scenario in that case and if so, and if the transition did not end up peaceful given the current economic deterioration of Zimbabwe, do you think the US will intervene in a more meaningful way more than beyond sanctions, especially considering that there is lack of regional interest in cooperating in sanctions, especially from South Africa. Do you see the given Zimbabwe status? Do you see the US intervening in a more militarized way if it's necessary? Thank you. Thank you, sir. Third row back, next to Terry. Thank you, Ambassador Carson. It's a while since I've been called a young lady, so that's great. Nicole Ball Center for International Policy here in DC. I want to follow up on the question, the first question that the panel got. Thank you for very interesting overall discussion, but until Nicole mentioned some of the forces of repression in her comments, I was really wondering, in fact, where the forces of repression were. And the one thing that I didn't really get from the presentation, from any of the, well, from at least the first two presentations in particular, was a sense of where we are now with who the key players are and in particular, because I disagree, Whitney, very much, that the discussion of the security services is a separate discussion. It is absolutely intimately related to any transition. I just had the opportunity to spend about 10 days in Burundi doing some work for one of the European governments, and one of the issues in terms of what is going to happen there is very much all the security-related players, and I would add some of the justice players too, because constitutional court was key in that case. So what I would like to get is a somewhat more fine-grained understanding of where, not just the military, very important, but where all of those other security actors are and what realistically we can expect in terms of their role in promoting or hindering the transition that we all would like to see, particularly who would like a system based on rule of law. Great, thanks. I'm gonna start reverse in, Nicole. Oh, good, those were easy. Well, if the security services don't get paid, they may play a more disruptive role than we had thought. They have, you know, payments of the ballooning civil service is always a real challenge in any caste-strapped economy, but we've seen this before in Zimbabwe, and my understanding is that since June, there's been real trouble in paying civil service salaries, and that has included at times the police and security services, and that is a pretty dangerous scenario for a regime that I think is very reliant on those structures to be supportive going into an election scenario, because, of course, how else does one manage the country in terms of delivery of food assistance, registration, et cetera? Certainly there are other ways, but that's not been the case there. So I think security services, and it's the same ones it's always been. It's the military, it's the police, it's the CIO, certainly. The war veterans, though, there's some interesting new dynamics in terms of their frustration with Mugabe, I should say, and I think it's a lot of the same players. And to Johnny's point, having splits, Generation 40, if you're following Zimbabwe politics, Generation 40 is yet another fracture within ZANU-PF. So we're talking about the same players, but we're talking about them, whether it's Chuang, or Majuru, or Chinamasa, or Mnengagwa, we're talking about them in slightly new configurations or quite a new configuration in Joyce Majuru's case. Talking to all of them, I think is really important. This is where having sort of a unanimous sense amongst the donors and to whatever degree possible with the region about what the benchmarks would be that are required for there to be re-engagement, for there to be a soft landing, including in what I would hope would be very quiet, very off-the-radar diplomatic conversations about those kind of things will be really important as if we have any chance of, I'm sorry, if Zimbabweans have any chance of a peaceful transition. On the white minority in ZIM, attempted to kick this to Alex, because all our citizens are mostly out, but it was interesting, I was there in 2000 when sort of the farm invasions were really at a peak, and it was interesting to see Zimbabwe covered in the New York Times in a much more robust way. As a result, and there's a lot of critique, you may remember at the time, like, oh, now of course the West Cares because some white farms have been invaded to be provocative, right? And certainly the white population, as I understand it, has decreased pretty significantly since then. I don't think that we are looking at a Rwanda scenario to your question. And similarly, I don't think that the U.S. is on the precipice of intervening militarily ever, probably. I don't think, not just because there aren't the strategic interests, which I think has been well highlighted by other panelists, but because we, I think, have made a very concerted effort to try only to put boots on the ground in the most emergency of all cases and where U.S. interests are directly threatened and it's hard to see that being the case in Zimbabwe in the near future. And then just a couple of quick points. If I downplayed the importance of the security sector, I certainly did not mean to do that because there's no question. When we look at Zimbabwe, it's easy for us to talk about the need for political reform and economic reform, but as equally important, we're gonna have to deal with the issue of security sector reform. Now what that blueprint is, you know, I can't say I know it well enough, but I have no question, I have no doubt that that's gonna be a very important issue for any engagement in Zimbabwe. And that's why I think it's important that we keep the 2018 elections forefront because the security sector is gonna be very influential in that and we have to understand that and who's doing what and how we can mitigate the risks as it were. To the question of the future of the white minority, I mean, doesn't have much of a future as it is. I mean, the numbers from 400,000, I think to about 40,000 today, you posited the Rwanda scenario. I guess I would put forward a counter scenario and that would be the Uganda scenario from this perspective. Idiomene expelled 85,000 Asians. Today, 15,000 are living there. You know, some 8,000 properties were confiscated. About 4,000 have been given back. Can we think about that kind of future for Zimbabwe to get to a society that has dealt with the past and is moving forward as an inclusive entity? Good point. Alex, and since we're running short, I'm gonna give you the last word before I close this out. Well, Alex and Nicole's point about military and security. In the report, we've got a section on that page 29 and 30. Nicole has said one of the main worries is the lack of payment and wages to the security forces and what that might do, so she's highlighted that. There is another point, though, which I'd like to highlight, which is the military are very business-orientated. They're quite discreet at times, sometimes less discreet, but they do look for economic stability and financial success. And so it's quite interesting that parts of the military were very keen on re-engagement and particularly economic re-engagement because they want to make business, and it's good for them. The second point, which I think Whitney kind of highlighted, but I want to amplify is that if we get into a really uncertain, unpredictable security situation in Zimbabwe, it will be the military that will have a role in managing that process. And I tend to still believe that the military will play a key role in whatever happens as a kingmaker in whatever coalition or inclusive political entity that might come out with opposition and parts that have split from Zanu. So the military is really, really central here. We did look at this really quite a lot more deeply in the, or I didn't, but my colleague Nox Chiteo, who's an expert in this, in his 2014 report, Zimbabwe's International Re-Engagement, that's on the Chatham House website. Now, the question about white Zimbabweans is really interesting, Juan Mohamed. One of the things that surprised me most of all in Zimbabwe in my field research, I did not expect to hear it, was that the most optimistic group of people about Zimbabwe's future was whites in the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union. And so this idea of the land grabs and the chaos that is going, and there's still some of that that's occurring, but it's much more patchy. You've got a younger generation of white Zimbabweans, these are the children now, who are on land, okay, the owner of the land is a politician, but they are producing, and at the heart of it, in their DNA, a number of them are really good farmers, and they just wanna get on, produce on the land, and as long as they know that they've got the ability to produce and make money, they're happier. And so it was one of those things I did not expect to hear. The other thing is that race politics has been really leveled in Zimbabwe by the problems over the last decade. You've got poor whites and poor blacks, and both have suffered badly from poor politics. And so I'm quite hopeful about reconciliation, and I don't see expulsions in the way that you would do in a scenario in Zimbabwe. It's actually possibly a happier place in terms of race relations now than certainly South Africa is because of the trauma that we've been through. And so it's striking that even Zimbabweans who have left Zimbabwe to Tanzania and elsewhere, they don't go to Britain or the US on holiday, they might be in Tanzania, but they go back to Zimbabwe on holiday even now. And again, that shows something, I think, for the future that one has to be optimistic about longer term when we get through this transition. Thank you, Johnny, for inviting me. Thank you, Princeton and USIP. No, thank you. I'm gonna make just a few quick very, very summary remarks that may represent my own view as a moderator and also moving into the commentary and an analysis phase. I think that there's no question that we should all be reviewing and looking at at how to make any policy that we have relevant and appropriate for the time. And that includes Zimbabwe, where the policy seemingly on the front pages has not changed very much. But we were looking here for strategies, strategies to take advantage of opportunities, strategies that would prevent further political decline, economic collapse, strategies that would lead to the kind of political space that the opposition requires and a strengthening of democracy, respect for human rights and other things. But let me just conclude with these quick points. What does the strategy do? And how do you push it forward? We must engage with the government. And clearly that means rebuilding the relationships with Zanu and to any extent possible the military. This is a challenge, not always easy. We must talk with the opposition, all of the opposition constantly and be supportive and engaged. We must talk with civil society, whether it is hashtag this flag or with women's groups or youth groups. We must engage with the business community and with religious leaders. We should coordinate and talk to the regional neighbors, South Africa Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique. And we must constantly coordinate and talk with our international partners and international institutions, the UN institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. And where we can find common consensus about the way forward, we should embrace it and push it. We must constantly be looking for opportunities to engage. And I'm gonna take a second here and be a little bit more liberal and say that over the last eight or nine years, the front pages have not always reflected what has been happening underneath the water. My own experience tells me that. In 2009, in early 2010, I engaged with Robert Mugabe. I engaged with Mr. Mugabe. I met with Joyce Majuru in New York on a visit. In 2010 and 11, we worked very closely with the South Africans, looking for solutions pushed by Ambassador Don Gipps and others in the region. And in fact, said to the South Africans as a part of the efforts there, that we and I certainly would have been willing to do everything possible to pull down the sanctions if the Zimbabweans were willing to do one or two significant things in the run up to the elections. What are they? I said, invite the Carter Center. Invite IRI, NDI, the Commonwealth to come in and be monitors for the election. If you can guarantee this, even in the beginning, I'll make every effort to pull them down. Another serious effort led by one of my deputies at the time, Ruben Brigady, with former Ambassador Andrew Young went down to Zimbabwe, again under my watch and with the permission of Secretary Clinton who believed very strongly that we should engage whenever we could. To try to see if there was an opening. And there were other efforts in this regard as well. These are just five or six. And as Whitney pointed out, our ambassadors out there, several of them led trade delegations of Zimbabweans here to the United States. Even though there is frustration, we must continue to probe and look for opportunities. We, however, must recognize that there are times when we don't have partners. And there are times when the environment does not permit. But that doesn't mean we stop engaging. We have to continue to engage to prevent the kinds of catastrophes that are out there that may be more serious than the ones that we've had. But my last admonition on this is that while we must not allow the perfect outcome to be the enemy of the good, we must also avoid making phantom concessions that will allow the ruthless to continue to dominate the victims. Thank you all for being here. And I wanna especially thank Alex for his monograph for his presence, his continuing commitment and for pushing and probing us on this and making us really, really think hard about where we should be. Whitney, the same thing you've pushed. And we've been colleagues and have set beside one another for many years, pushing as well. Nicole, again, good friend, colleague as well. Again, thank you all three. Can I ask all of you to join me in expressing our appreciation? Thank you has been a great service. Thank you very much, thanks. Yes, thank you. Great. Thank you. I hope I didn't sum up too bad on this. Thank you. You did well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. that you've made in this fine school thing that you've got this society is so full of it. This is my way to be a solution on the crushing of the ocean before it's done, or throwing the rascals out. So all I did is start from the point plus you have to describe how bad this is for you. And you can say, well, but you know if you stand back to that, you can take it away. I asked for some help in getting all the good coffee people in, and we'll start. Susan, could you encourage us to get underway? But thank you. Your article decided, by the way, in the first panel. Ms. Wicker told me. Yeah, whether you're a new US president. Do you know George most vice president, vice chair USIP, and also former assistant secretary of state for Africa. I think we're going to get started. Anybody outside, please come on in. Take your coffee with you, but we want to get started. We're running a little bit late. Thank you all again for being here. We had a very good discussion in the first panel about one of the more vexing, difficult challenges in transitions, and that was Zimbabwe. What we're going to do here in this panel is look at the question of, how have some governments, in fact, gone through such transitions, done it successfully, come out at the other end in a non-zero-some way? What were the things that led them to do it? How did they make those decisions, both on the government and the opposition side? And when we talk about engagement, what should be the substance of our engagement with both governments and oppositions in this kind of dialogue and the ways in which we can encourage such transition? So we have a wonderful panel for this purpose, and our first speaker is going to be Professor Abraham Lowenthal. His article with Sergio Batar was cited by Whitney Schneidman this morning. An article on this subject, one I have to say is actually the intellectual foundation of this seminar today, because when I read it, you use it in the speech in Sudan, and we've been talking about it, and with Alex coming on Zimbabwe, I said, let's spend the day at this. So you've been very influential already, Professor. The professor is a emeritus, Professor Emeritus at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He has been the founding chief executive of three institutions, the Latin American Program at the Wilson Center, the Inter-American Dialogue, and the Pacific Council, and he's currently on the board of the Leo Black Institute. He's published 18 books and numerous articles, and he's got a very important book out that is very relevant to our subject today, so I'm gonna ask Professor Lowenthal to go first. Next to him is Priscilla Klapp, a close colleague for many years of mine. She is currently an advisor here at USIP, writing extensively on the transition in Burma. She was a Charger d'affaires there at a very critical time as that transition was getting underway, but she has extensive experience. She was a DCM in South Africa with me. She was also my deputy at the refugee bureau where she did marvelous work. She's been in Moscow, she's been in Japan. She's written a number of books. She's a really fine, but I would put in the category of scholar diplomat. And next to her is Nadia. Nadia, also a colleague of mine at the National Endowment for the Democracy. Nadia is vice president, and when I say you, how much she's vice president for at NED, you will be impressed. She is vice president for programs for Europe, Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nadia is a marvelous, marvelous person. She is going to talk to us about experience in Eastern Europe where she has had a great deal of experience. She's written several books on this and quite a few articles. She is at NED really the source of both knowledge and inspiration on much of the democracy building throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. So thank you, Nadia, for being with us. And then we have Michael Lund. Michael Lund is a senior associate at management systems international. He is an author. He's worked on state building in Congo. He's worked on issues of preventing violent conflict. He's had several relationships here at USIP, a founding director of the Jennings Randolph program for which I benefited many years ago. Thank you. And author, he's done a lot of work on conflict resolution and assessments, and he's looked very carefully at the literature in this whole area, and he will be our fourth speaker on this subject of transition. So I think we're going to have a good discussion. We'll get underway right away. And again, thank you, Professor Lundthal, for being with us. Please begin. Thank you very much, Ambassador Lyman. Allow me to begin on a very personal note. I had the enormous privilege of being a close friend of one of the iconic figures of the last century, Father Ted Hesperig, the president of Notre Dame University, who I think holds the Guinness Book of Records for the most honorary degrees among his many other accomplishments. I remember vividly Father Ted talking to me with a tremendous glint in his eye about the project of the U.S. Institute for Peace, and it's something I really have in my mind as I enter this building, believe it or not, and I'm embarrassed to say so for the first time and engage with you here. I hope there'll be other opportunities to do so. I think it's terrific that you have a daylong seminar on these issues, and all of you are doing work day after day on these questions. I think the questions, because there are so many examples around the world in each of the major regions in Africa and Asia in Latin America of countries that are in various ways ripe for and need of peaceful transitions, and the question as to how these have been achieved, how they can be achieved, what the pitfalls are, what the ways around them are, and particularly at this period, I think the question of can one maintain some optimism that such transitions are possible even in today's circumstances? And that really is the motivation behind the project, which I'm gonna talk a little about. When I really focused on giving a presentation in a very brief period of time, I realized that what we have tried, when I speak of we, I'm referring to Sergio Bitar, the Chilean political leader and public intellectual with whom I did this project. It's very much a joint project. Sergio Bitar and I went around the world at the initiative of International Idea in Stockholm and interviewed in depth and on a well-prepared basis. We did a lot of homework before each of these interviews. We interviewed 13 former presidents, actually 12 former presidents and a former prime minister from nine countries, all of whom had the unifying factor was they all had played major roles of different kinds in effecting transitions from different kinds of authoritarian rule toward democratic governance in cases where they achieve democratic governance in the sense of government with regular, free and reasonably fair elections with effective restraints on executive power subject to horizontal and vertical accountability and to freedom of expression and assembly. And these have been unreversed transitions occurring in different parts of the world. And what we sought to learn from these interviews was from the standpoint of people who played different roles in the leadership and I'll come to what I mean by different roles. What can we learn from their experience, from how they visualized and strategized about making this kind of transition? What can we learn from that? And are there any principles that might apply in other situations? And we chose to do these interviews in different regions of the world and in different kinds of authoritarian regimes. And we sought, we chose to interview people who had played different kinds of roles. So we talked with people in Ghana and South Africa, in the Philippines and Indonesia, in Spain and Poland and Chile, Brazil and Mexico. And if you think about those cases quickly, you recognize the types of authoritarian and autocratic situations were different. The outcomes are different. These are countries that are very different in many different respect, in many distinct respects that certainly have different cultural backgrounds and different political backgrounds. But all of them in the recent past went through in a successful way, a major transition in the nature of the political system. And the outcome was to change the rules of the game, the distribution and exercise of political power in meaningful ways. And they're uneven in the outcome. And besides, democratic governance is an ongoing challenge. And so the story is never over. So if you think about the cases I've mentioned, Brazil, South Africa, Poland, the Philippines, just to mention a few of the examples, these are countries facing major issues, Mexico, major issues of governance still today. But on the other hand, effective democratic governance is never fully accomplished for all time, permanently anywhere. Think of the United States and challenges that are posed as we sit here today to effective democratic governance. But the fact is that major changes occurred in these countries. We interviewed people who were major figures in the autocratic regimes themselves, people like F.W. DeClerk and Cedillo from Mexico and Rawlings in Ghana, who then played important roles in the transition. We spoke with major leaders of opposition movements that sought to displace authoritarian governments, people like Patricio Elwin and Ricardo Lagos in Chile, Fernando Enrique Cardoso in Brazil, and Becky in South Africa, the right-hand man of Mandela and his successor as president of South Africa, Tadeusz Maciewiczki in Poland from Solidarity. And Fidel Ramos in the Philippines is again one of these bridge figures who played a role in the authoritarian regime and then played a different and very constructive role in the successor regime. And we sought to see whether we could learn some general findings that would be of importance. And we envision this not as a rigorous exercise in modern comparative politics as designed in the academy these days in which the object is to be sure one has the most complete and rigorous quantifiable data. And so one looks under the lamppost and tries to find a question that will be illustrated by the data that one can find under the lamppost, but rather to ask big questions and without being sure of these answers being standing up to every case and recognizing that there are different ways at looking at these histories to see whether some principles would emerge. And what I want to really persuade you is that the kind of people who show up for a session like this who are obviously very interested in the issues and challenges of transitions, we looked at a particular kind that is from a autocratic to democratic, but there are broader definitions of transitions. But in any case, we're all interested in many of these issues. It makes a lot of sense to read this book, not because Sir Kibitar and I wrote a concluding chapter which was then further compressed into the Foreign Affairs article that kind of reference was made in the first session and just now by our chair. But the Foreign Affairs article, I'm proud of it. I mean, I think it's a good article, but it's the cliff notes. The text is this book and the real heart of the book which accounts for 90% of the pages of the book are the interviews, the full text and transcript of the interviews with these political leaders that mentioned who they were, who responding to challenging questions from us based on careful preparation for the, and others we didn't just go in and say, hey, tell us about the transition here. We asked them questions that were based on some knowledge of the particular circumstances and we pushed to see what we could learn and many of these interviews are just really striking in the number of insights that they come up with and we told them all along, we're doing this not simply to record history and your own history, but looking for principles that are relevant in today's world and other circumstances and what some of the differences are between today's cases and the cases before and many of them really responded to that challenge so you have people of the quality of Felipe Gonzalez in Spain or Cardoso in Brazil and the others that I've mentioned really grappling with that question not only reflecting on their own experience. I don't get any royalties from the book and I'm not really in the position at this stage of life of building a CV for promotion. I just think you're trying a lot of good stuff here. It's available on Amazon and all that sort of stuff. I think one of the things that jumps out at you when you look at these different cases and that is highly relevant in the world today. I just came back from Caracas, I published a piece in foreignpolicy.com two or three weeks ago based on that visit but in various places you get the sense that people are looking for ways of making this transition. There's a lot of pessimism. Is there a way out of this situation? Is there some way to get from here to there? And people actually say, and you can see this in articles in Journal of Democracy or other such places, those big transitions, many of which I mentioned in telling you the cases we looked at of the 1980s, 1990s. You know, when you think back on it, those were the easy cases. It's a lot harder today for various reasons that people can articulate. Well, if you actually look at those cases, they weren't easy. They weren't easy at all. They weren't inevitable. They were highly surprising. They had, they took a long time in almost every case. The transitions began long before they were visible to external observers. There were lots of things going on in terms of quiet building of consensus between different opposition groups and people in civil society and in different organizations and so on. And they had ups and downs and reverses and zigzags. And so any particular zig could look like at the end of the whole process. But if you get the sense that this is the nature of the beast and that this is the way these transitions happen, then if you're looking at a case like Venezuela and let's say for example, that the revocatorio, the recalled election, which the opposition has been counting on as a way of getting rid of the president of Venezuela because it's provided as a constitutional instrument, the recall. So let's assume, which I would assume, but we can always be wrong, but let's assume the government manages to arrange things so that the recall doesn't take place during the rest of this calendar year, in which case the situation is different after that because the constitution provides for a recall by a particular deadline in the term of the president. And then if it's later in the term of the president and he is recalled, then it's the vice president who succeeds rather than new elections, which means you don't get rid of the regime. So let's just assume that that might happen, that they don't get the recall. That doesn't mean it's the end of the transition process. That's just similar to what's happened in many different cases around the world. The way in which the political leaders that we interviewed looked at the process of unifying the opposition while attempting at the same time to subtly divide the incumbent regime. And the effort put in in a number of cases, like in Chile, like in Spain, like in Brazil, like in Poland and in South Africa, to find ways to get the opposition which had many different currents and different ways of looking at things, to try to work in such a way that a broad opposition coalition committed to a set of essential principles came together, even though that required marginalizing would-be supporters of the transition, would-be members of the opposition, marginalizing those whose way of approaching the subject would put in jeopardy the possibility of a peaceful transition. And that's a challenge that occurs in many of these cases. I knew at the beginning that I was never gonna get through. Several military relations and the relations with the security forces was discussed in the first panel, which I heard the last half of. That's an issue that's been faced in every one of these transitions and these leaders talk about it in really fascinating, vivid detail, ways in which you approach the issue of preserving order and preserving forces for order and security forces, but subjecting them to civilian democratic control. It's a lot easier to express that objective than to implement it, but there are ways to implement it. And they involve, among other things, for example, making sure that the opposition forces have people in their ranks who are committed to the democratic project, but who are also very well-informed about security issues. And that's not so easy because the history of many of these countries is that the people in the opposition despise the military and don't have anything to do with the messy details of security. But you have to have in the opposition forces people who become aware of the challenges of security and you have to have respect for the function of security forces and respect for the broad number of those who have devoted their lives before the transition to being parts of the security forces. You can't just close it down and start again. And that was tried in Iraq. I mean, you know, that doesn't work. Simply conclude with, because I know I have to, in our interview with Philippa Gonzalez, who by the way was just stunningly brilliant as a strategic thinker about these issues, not only his own role in Spain, but as an advisor in Latin America, in Europe, in the Middle East and North Africa. Toward the end of the interview, I said, you know, these qualities of political leadership that we've been looking at, you know, it's so obvious listening to you how good you are at these issues. Those qualities of leadership, where do they come from? Is it innate or is it learned? And if it's learned, how is it learned? I'd really be interested in what you'd have to say about that. He said, well, I've thought about that a lot. I've talked about it with several people, including President Clinton. Here's what I'd say. It's not learned or at least it's not learned. It's learned, but it's not learned in school. It's learned in practice. So how is it learned in practice? It's learned by the application of broad principles to very different concrete realities which one has to master in order to apply the abstract principles. So you will say, and this is exactly how he, I mean, he didn't wait for the question. He asked himself his own question. He said, so you will say, well, where did the broad principle come from? And I would say the broad principles come from the narrative of previous experiences. No one could have stated more concisely and more eloquently the purpose of this project to narrate previous experiences in ways that allow for the distillation of principles that really are worth taking into account. And I'm pleased to have the opportunity to make you aware of it. In subsequent conversation, perhaps we can go into detail on some of the cases, but at least I've given you a sense of what we were trying to accomplish. Thank you very much. Thank you. And there's a lot of richness here that we will get back to some of it, but we're obviously, this is a long-term process for all of us. I want to turn now to Priscilla who was right at the heart of some of the transition going on in Burma and some of the same kind of issues we discussed on Zimbabwe in the first panel and the questions of who and with how you engage and what the processes and sanctions and everything, and Priscilla's written on some of that here. But Priscilla, please. Okay. Thank you very much. I'm finding this discussion fascinating. I've spent the last 18 years of my life deeply involved in the transition in Myanmar, both as a participant and an observer. So I may be sometimes a little bit one note and this has given me an opportunity to rise beyond, to explore beyond that and see what's happening in other transitions. Not that I haven't watched that, but this is really a rich discussion today. I was very struck this morning by the Zimbabwe discussion at how many common elements there are between the situation in Zimbabwe and the situation in Myanmar. Now Myanmar's ahead of the game because they've already started this transition, but they were stuck in essentially the same position, highly sanctioned by the United States, the UN, the West and so forth, isolated sort of living in their own world. They faced an economic, economic problems. They had a military government that towards in its last 10 to 20 years became more and more involved as businessmen in the economy because they had started opening space for a free market economy. It wasn't totally controlled by the government anymore, but the military had a special entry into the economy and individual military leaders began to identify their future very much with the economic success of the country and the extent to which it had been cut off affected them directly and they really wanted to get beyond the sanctions. They knew in order to get beyond the sanctions, they were going to have to return to some form of elected parliamentary government. They knew that they were going to have to imbue that with some sense of respect for human rights and civil rights, that they were going to have to move to empower the civilian population that they had repressed for 55 years. It took some daring on the part of military leaders to make this step and they spent 20 years preparing for it. They put together a constitution that guaranteed a central role for the military in an elected parliamentary government. They have 25% of the seats in the parliament. They're not elected to those seats. They are appointed to them. They share power essentially with the president in the executive branch. They control critical ministries that deal with the country's security and because they still have many of the elements of the old military regime built into the system, the military still controls local administration in the country, not in uniform military, but ex-military who are civilians. It's done through the Ministry of Home Affairs. At any rate, this gave them the confidence to move gradually into a civilianized elected government. The first elections were held in 2010 and they engineered the election rules in such a way that it guaranteed that the NLD, the National League for Democracy, the major, the really only significant opposition party would not run. They were afraid that if the NLD ran, they wouldn't win, just as had happened in 1990. They'd already tried this once and they were afraid of the NLD. So they engineered that. They kept the NLD leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in detention during that period so that she couldn't be a significant figure in the elections. They formed their own political party. It won. It won a major majority. So they guaranteed that the military and military, ex-military, I would say, all the leaders in the new government were the former senior generals in the last government, guaranteed that they would control that first five years of transition when they were starting to civilianize the government. It was still very military. All the ministers were ex-generals and there was definitely a military mindset to the way they ran the government. But they then made friends with Aung San Suu Kyi. They let her out of detention, made friends with her, decided that in order to make their reforms acceptable to the international community, they had to co-opt the NLD, the National League for Democracy, into the reform process. So they opened space for them to run for the parliament in some by-elections in 2012, which would have been the second year of this regime. She came into the parliament and immediately was greeted as a national leader because she was an icon, not only in the country but internationally and had a major impact on US sanctions on much of the international response to the military regime. They knew they had to have her on their side. They were smart enough to see that. She actually made friends right away with the speaker of the parliament who had been the number three general in the military regime and was very upset that he hadn't been named president in this regime. So he quickly bonded with her and they then made the parliament into a very strong force of opposition to the executive branch. So you had competing centers of power which is actually very healthy for democratic development. And they started loosening up on the restrictions for free speech or in the press, on political activity in the country. Gradually, gradually civil society was allowed to build, was allowed to come out of the shadows where it had been illegal before. The press was allowed to register and begin actually producing articles critical of the government. I mean, this had just never happened. It had been totally a government controlled press before. So over a five year period, society who greeted this with great disbelief, I might say, began to feel like they were participating in this experiment. Now there was a huge gulf of mistrust between the civilian society and the government which still exists today. But to make a long story short, let me just say that in 2015, the next elections, the NLD had become so strong that they won by an overwhelming majority. And they now control the parliament. They now control the executive branch. And they run the country in partnership with the military. It's almost inconceivable for me in all the time I've been dealing with this country to imagine that this could have happened in five years. It's not over. They have enormous problems on their hands. This country is one of the most diverse, ethnically diverse in the world. They have 135 officially designated ethnic groups in the country. Several of the major ethnic groups have been at war with the military, with the central government for 70 years. It's one of the world's longest running civil wars. It's very complicated. The first, the previous government boldly undertook a peace process that previous governments, democratic and military had refused to entertain for all of those years. They undertook it. They got as far as a partial national ceasefire and managed to tame some of the groups and bring them into the reform process. Many of them are still way outside. In fact, some of the fighting has intensified. This is now Aung San Suu Kyi's problem. And she is trying to pick up where the last government left off and broaden this engagement to include the political leaders from the ethnic minority areas and other areas and make it into more of a political reconciliation process. It's going to take decades, if not generations, to reach the end of this process. But it's underway and it is getting a lot of international support. The other thing that struck me by this morning's conversation was US policy. I'm not going to go into that in detail because that will be discussed later today. But we had enormous sanctions on the country. We had a lot of trouble getting beyond the sanctions. We are not beyond them now in spite of everything that's happened there. But the transition itself began a process here of reevaluating our interests. So that we began to strike more of a balance between the values and the interests that people were talking about this morning with regard to Zimbabwe. Definitely not there with Zimbabwe until you get a transition underway. Then it allows Washington to begin reevaluating its interests. And certainly the very fact of Myanmar coming out of the shadows and into the light in Southeast Asia makes it a very significant country. It's huge. It's the size of Texas. It's got a population of over 50 million people. It's enormously wealthy. It hasn't been spoiled yet by pollution and all of the other things that are plaguing its neighbors. And it could be one of the strongest countries in the region. And that is a reason for the US to look at it through a different lens now and we're beginning to do that. But it's still a very difficult process because there are so many vested interests behind the sanctions. And the Congress including, I mean the sanctions were encouraged by the opposition in Myanmar until the opposition comes out boldly against them. It's difficult to remove the final vestiges of those sanctions here. And I think that it's still gonna be a slow process because the NLD is not quite ready to go beyond the sanctions. They don't see them as having hurt their interests in the country but having hurt the interests of the wealthy military cronies more. There, I could go on forever with this but I know time is of the essence so I will end there and we can pick it up later. Thanks so much. So it's a rich, rich example that we really need to examine. I wanna ask Nadja to speak to her extensive experience and pick out examples that she wants to emphasize both particularly Eastern Europe. But thanks, Nadja. Yeah, thanks. Well, this has been very interesting and illuminating and it's sort of allowing me to reassess some of the things that I know about the region of the world that I know best which actually is Europe and Eurasia which we used to refer to as Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union when I first started in head. I was the program officer for that. It's a big region at the time. But it's a good time to be looking back in December. In December of 2016 it'll be 25 years since the Soviet Union dissolved and just two years ago we had sort of anniversary of the 1989 revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe when I hope some of you remember it was like one country after another beginning with Poland were kind of like falling like dominoes. We had eight countries at the beginning of that process we lost one which was East Germany which reunited with the West and then we gained another six countries when Yugoslavia broke up then Kosovo was added to that and Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic and of course 15, what we used to call newly independent states. I remember that was a term that the State Department used for a long time. So there's plenty of material here for some good analysis and so many countries and so little time so I'll be very schematic although there's of course a lot to say. Of course these events were all connected. In that region the governance and all of the countries pre-dissolution and after dissolution were sort of well for a while after dissolution were basically ruled from the Kremlin in Moscow as part of the Soviet Union before or as vassal states the Warsaw Pact communist block with nominal independence and of course there was the Iron Curtain which again for those of you who remember that sort of marked the existence of a kind of bipolar world and the countries themselves even though they went off on different paths of transition but they started from similar starting points which was that they all had a communist system and written into most of the constitutions of their countries and of course some of the constitutions were a little false because for example the constitution of Azerbaijan wasn't really a sort of operational constitution during the times of the Soviet Union but they all had written in the leading role of the Communist Party which essentially preempted the emergence of any other political party or political force and of course the Communist Party as well was the sort of administrative arm and of course each of them had a command economy which meant that prices were set by the government there was no true market economy in any of these countries so they had a lot of challenges when the transitions started and it's a dilemma that the famous Polish political commentator Adam Michnik referred to that the communists what the communists had done was easy they'd basically taken a fish tank and turned it into fish soup and the challenge for the opposition movement and those who had taken up the problems of transition was to turn the fish soup back into a lovely aquarium so if we kind of like think of it in those terms we'll be looking towards lunch with a different view and the countries of the former Soviet Union had one additional challenge which was that before they could even think in terms of transition and actually many of them didn't in the end they had to think in terms of what was their nation there were countries that were suddenly independent like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan to a great extent that had really never had statehood in any meaningful sense and there were some who'd only held it for short while and some that looked way back into their history as the last time when they really had rulers of their own so we have a broad spectrum but I'd like to focus a little bit on Poland because arguably Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic had the most successful transitions the other end of the spectrum of course is our countries like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan which now routinely gets a double seven on the Freedom House scale and arguably have made transitions but to systems that were in many cases worse than the ones that they lived under during the Soviet Union in looking at Poland which of course also was a regional leader at the time and has emerged as the sort of leading country of Central and Eastern Europe and was the first to start on a transition you can pick out some elements that contributed to that transition but these are elements that occurred to a greater or less extent in some of the other countries too and the first one I would highlight is that where the civil society groups were strong and active and there was a lively and vibrant opposition movement, civic activity, before the breakthrough that transition generally went a lot more smoothly a lot more thoughtfully than where there was little civic activity and of course Poland in 1989 had already had one wave of sort of a mass uprising the solidarity trade union at the time had at one point had 10 million members 10 years earlier it sort of coalesced all of the sort of opposition and discontented people and a lot of trade unionists and dissenters just in general into that movement it was banned, made illegal, martial law was declared it went underground and interestingly that was when sanctions were imposed by the US and sanctions have come up a lot here today and I just thought I'd kind of mention those I'll refer back to them a bit later but this civil, calling it civil society often it's like the solidarity movement actually was a very thriving underground that became very important for the transition the underground had publishers it had journals there were many groups and cultural organizations there were educational groups there were flying universities there was underground scouting organizations women's groups, video filming outfits recording history as it happened, literary circles and all of these were in one way or another still illegal because the nature of a communist state is that the state has to control everything so anything that's independent is in and of itself often illegal except of course for the Catholic Church which played a major role in Poland but one of the reasons why this underground civic civil society movement was important was because the people who were taking part in it many of the leaders really didn't believe that they would be able to change their government anytime soon that was not their aim they were not looking to bring the government down bring the dictator down change the government in any way in fact because they were so convinced that this was a system that was going to last into infinity their aim was to build a different society so that people could have their own space where they would live in freedom and somehow build alternative structures and in order for people to avoid the communist state and its authoritarian control of course this is a sort of very difficult balance if you have an authoritarian state that is very aggressive and insists on arresting people that don't bow to its control but I would argue that the resilience of this movement and the fact that they spent many years debating they debated even when they were in prison I mean there were books produced of the leading dissidents when they were in prison the debates that they had with each other so in 1989 when the communist state really showed itself to be hollow and weak the Polish opposition was as surprised as anyone that they managed to bring this government to the round table at the beginning of the year and they were negotiating from a position of strength actually and they were ready they already had plans they had thought things through they debated things ad infinitum but they hadn't actually expected to need to implement these as soon as it was necessary to do so and of course in June referring to the elections that they negotiated out at that round table agreement one third of the seats were sort of set aside for the, that were not going to be controlled by the communist government and as we know of course all of those places were swept completely by the solidarity movement at that time and after that it sort of started that whole train in falling dominoes in Eastern Europe and just a word about Western support although I don't want to dwell on it too much because of course a successful transition will always rely on the people itself but there was the Pope Ronald Reagan who had a sort of very proactive approach to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union there was the AFL-CIO anyone who remembers the late Great Lane Kirkland he was very close with Lech Waalensa the leader of the solidarity movement and later on president of Poland there was support from organizations like NED at one point I think we were supporting the entire underground publishing operation there and the sanctions as well again let's not look back with rosy glasses as to Poland was sort of very smooth when I came to Washington in the mid 1980s sanctions were a very controversial topic there were some who were saying that sanctions are sort of detrimental and that we should maybe start working with the reformist government because the reformist government will lead us to success and there were some saying that no sanctions have to be kept of course the Polish opposition was slightly divided too I just mentioned in contrast since I made a point about civil society in countries like Romania where there was very little civil society the system was so tightly controlled that it was very difficult to do anything that showed in the transition later it was very unruly the actual sort of breakthrough time if you want to call it that was became violent and the way that the dictator met his end Nikolai Ceausescu is also very telling he was kind of basically put up against a wall and shot on Christmas day of 1989 very different from what happened in Poland of course I think I might just want to mention a little bit about Yes, just very schematically then I wanted to mention some of the transitions that have taken place in the former Soviet Union and some of them we've referred to as color revolutions although I would argue that actually color revolution is not really possible now I'm thinking of the early transitions of Georgia in 2003, Ukraine 2004 which was called the Orange Revolution which sort of lent it's name these were all accomplished around the time of an election and they did produce a change of government however I would say again that as you see in the case of Ukraine it's taken another uprising the Revolution of Dignity the Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014 to finally get onto a track that looks more democratic in Georgia as well there's been a lot of backsliding so these revolutions are never sort of a be all and end all and if there's any lessons to be learned from any of this is that after a sort of uprising and a change of government there's usually a very brief window of time and in the way that Poland introduced shock therapy in its economy which was one of the things that made it successful I've often argued that we might need something like shock therapy in politics and reform of the judicial system the electoral system and getting the constitution right very quickly to make sure that the transition stays on track and another point that emerges also is what to do with all of the people from the old regime illustration has been hotly debated whether you leave them in place whether you prosecute them I know that one of the people that Professor Lowenthal interviewed Alexander Krasniewski there was a lot of debate about him in Poland as to if Poland had to have the same lustration approach that the Czech Republic did whether he would actually have survived and might he not have been prosecuted so a thoughtful approach to balancing the experience but sometimes corrupt officials of the old regime with the new Democrats who carry the values and the enthusiasm and the experience I think I'll just end there because I think I'm coming to an end but as Professor Lowenthal said the story is never over so look forward to discussing more You're right, thank you for that idea and Michael I'm gonna ask you to hold to 10 minutes so we can get a lot of discussion but thank you Michael for doing a lot of work on these Since we started 15 minutes late are you going to go still for 12? We're going to get a little out for 12 Okay, this is a great opportunity this panel for me to I thought you were right to speak about some fruits from a fellowship that I had here at the Peace Institute a few years ago which where I actually address the very topic of the panel how to avoid civil conflict and chaos after authoritarians governments break down and move toward transitioning peacefully with therefore not requiring post-conflict interventions and so on what I found in looking at the academic cross-national multi-case literature counters some sort of conventional discourse that one hears a lot in Washington It turns out that years before the Arab Spring broke out in 2011 political scientists had documented a significant statistical correlation between the downfall of authoritarian governments and increased civil war mass atrocities state failure and the return of authoritarian regimes in fact the so the relationships between democracy autocracy and conflict resembled a reverse U-curve where the worst things happened not during full autocracy or not during full democracy but somewhere in that vast middle gray area when changes and uncertainty were typical of the political situation The other finding another finding in that literature was that the places that were especially susceptible and vulnerable to breaking out in overt violent conflict were poor fragmented ethnically located in bad neighborhoods perhaps having difficult terrains and no previous experience with democratic processes Then along comes in 2011 the Arab Spring as if to confirm what social scientists had been publishing for some years The Arab Spring uprisings against the authoritarian middle eastern regimes in which civil war erupted and still going on in Syria along with lots of other things and Yemen state failure and then civil war occurred in Libya and in Egypt the coming to power of arguably a worse dictator than Mubarak only Tunisia seems to be evolving peacefully towards something that one can meaningfully call a democracy It's interesting how even yesterday in Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's interrogation on security issues the issue of the fallout from dictator's downfall has entered into the mainstream policy debate in the form of criticisms and this goes back to the debates in the spring when both Trump and Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for supporting the Iraq intervention and the Libya intervention because of all the disastrous fallout from those operations but unfortunately no coherent alternative strategies have emerged from the debates although you wouldn't expect that that to happen there but it's good that this panel and other activities and books and so on are starting to come out on this subject to remedy this gap in our understanding of a serious policy dilemma especially critical situations that couldn't possibly unravel in the coming months and years are Ethiopia North Korea Uzbekistan Venezuela and even possibly Russia I'm tempted to recommend to the peace institute that they have a panel on the question is Russia becoming a failed state but that's just my off-handed opinion so how can we get a handle on what can be done about these potentially vulnerable tumultuous situations there's various ways to look at these situations one can examine the critical moments during the revolution so to speak when economic crises, price drops failure, foreign failures by the government and so on have created threats, questions about the legitimacy and competency of a government and possibly a popular uprising such as the color revolution some people power revolution in the Philippines have gotten people out on the street another focus could be an important one after the revolution following the adoption of multi-party elections when a still very fledgling infantile so to speak democracy needs to be constrained and institutionalized and other sources that I've done in this survey corroborate the points that Abe and Priscilla and Nadia have made in terms of kinds of factors that make a critical difference between whether whether a country is going in a relatively stable direction or unraveling in a more violent direction however it seems to me it's somewhat unrealistic to only focus on either during periods during the revolution or the albeit important period after the revolution and to turn one's focus and the lens of inquiry into situations before the revolution and examples have been mentioned here today of looking at the fact that changes were taking place sometimes years before any overt newsworthy events came to the fore where success stories have occurred some prior groundwork must have been made must have uh... occurred even where when autocrats were still in control so what does the academic research literature say about internal preconditions that might help create foundations for peaceful democratic eventually peaceful democratic transitions during the rub during the period of autocratic rule before the revolution so to speak I'm just going to talk briefly about two uh... apparently pivotal areas where different policies seem to have affected whether or not uh... an autocracy was able to avoid conflict and evolve peacefully one key variable uh... which seems obvious at first but uh... has to be approached in a in a more specific way is the kind of economic policies that an autocracy adopts there's much evidence going back to the study that uh... many of you may have come across years ago by seamar martin list lipstick that there's a high correlation between gdp and uh... democracy but the in court important uh... consideration here is how uh... economic growth it was pretty pursued you probably know uh... every a dictator although that's a somewhat journalistic term in this context uh... we academics tend to shy away from such uh... uh... labels uh... it's clear that these uh... autocratic regimes and i use other autocracy and authoritarianism interchangeably uh... dip have to depend to to for staying on top staying in power on a combination of force repression uh... ideological appeals uh... but also extensively uh... doling out patronage to various key figures and who represent important constituencies in the society and indeed that game uh... it has been important in the formation and and and continued union unification of of new countries with very weak weak states uh... but patronage can be doled out in of different ways some regimes have doled out government jobs contracts and so on uh... sort of willy-nilly indiscriminately indiscriminately and and even into unprofitable uh... uh... economic enterprises but others have taken a more targeted approach that uh... focused benefits on productive economic uh... investments so that though part patronage was benefiting key players uh... it also had uh... multiplier effects in terms of boosting the general economy so what we would regard as corruption nepotism and so on can be done smartly or dumbly uh... this more targeted approach was feasible politically precisely because it could go on under the cover of an autocratic system of control the the authority of the real of the top leader was used as a protective umbrella for technocrats to do the uh... uh... economic planning and so on that that could have real payoffs uh... the the notion of and what was called embedded autonomy uh... was first noted in several south american countries such as chili uh... but then also uh... something like that was has been noted in the east asian tigers such as south korea taiwan and indonesia which are bear the label developmental states and some researchers in the u k i've also pointed out that periods uh... during the uh... post-independence period so sub-saharan african countries uh... like uh... have also seen such policies applied such as uh... ivory coast malawi kenya rwanda ethiopia and tanzania so how do these specific targeted uh... pop-up economic policies uh... make a difference in terms of creating conditions for peaceful transition they happen through creating groups within what is called the select chariot as against the electorate that the key players that have to be satisfied in order to stay in power uh... by providing uh... pipe cultivating uh... core of uh... businessmen entrepreneurs prep professionals uh... and uh... an aspiring middle-class whose rising standard of living gives them a vested interest in maintaining progress toward national press prosperity and thus maintaining political stability as well persilla mentioned uh... a group that i hadn't really thought of uh... that you might call military entrepreneurs the more invested they were in the economy apparently uh... the more they felt they had a stake in preserving political stability and in view of the opposition to the regime uh... that meant a common and moving in a more accommodative direction uh... and these new professionals new new middle class can possibly be lured into or enticed or encourage to uh... provides support for an opposition movement tacitly or or actively uh... that that might uh... in the case that uh... the top leaders start to fumble and and stumble and make make economic policy mistakes what also happens is that management and other professional skills are created among these groups for eventually taking over and running the country one of the most interesting uh... the comparisons uh... i found was of the uh... arab spring countries and it showed that of the four countries whose authoritarian leaders had to give way to uh... multi-party elections only to tunisia continued to broke progress in institutionalizing democracy the office point out that tunisia's stronger economic development levels created a complex set of trade unions and other associations whose interests and skills prepared them for engaging and compromising in intergroup bargaining and mutual compromise over the transition issues in short the nature of uh... economic development was largely responsible for cultivating the growth of uh... of a potentially capable uh... civil society civil society and support to n g o's isn't shouldn't be relied on entirely as a way to create economic development economic development creates civil society a second key opening in existing uh... autocracies is afforded by how consultative their internal decision-making processes are structures the power structure who gets this the call what shots that there's a lot of variety across the various authoritarian regimes there's been a tendency to lump all authoritarian regimes together simply because they uh... of what they are not they are not uh... what we think of as the ideals of a wet of western liberal democracies but actually uh... scholars make distinctions between single-party governments monarchy's one-man personalist regimes in military and each of them tends to operate in different ways uh... all of them however uh... set up uh... ostensibly democratic institutions uh... that have a sort of formal quality uh... in order to justify their legitimate that the rulers of legitimacy by saying that they are serving the people and so on single-party uh... autocratic regimes are in a better position than the others to use these channels like parliament political parties even elections of fraudulent so they may be uh... to help uh... not only to help maintain their legitimacy but also to uh... begin to get uh... into the what's going on in this in the society because they the single parties sink deep roots into the society through their mass memberships and they may establish rules for leadership succession that provide a way to to stay on top by scapegoating uh... leader who uh... uh... falters uh... and also by rotating okay rotating uh... uh... leaders from different factions uh... in order to keep them keep them on board so as a result single-party regimes stay on top longer and interestingly uh... though they uh... last longer they also tend to give way to more competitive multi-party systems in contrast personalist regimes one man cliques uh... lead cliques and so on uh... last for a shorter period of time and tend more to be overthrown by violence all right uh... the the uh... other two factors that stand out from the literature and which one of which has been alluded to and discussed quite a bit already this morning are unified autonomous militaries uh... this plays on the incentive that militaries and no matter what happens politically will tend to keep their jobs civilian pilot politicians who have to run for elections are at risk of losing their jobs and therefore access to the goodies uh... but military people uh... are essential and so they have uh... nose usually no deep incentive to stay in power although they do want to keep uh... make sure that they have a piece of the action the other factor that uh... a lot of researchers are working on in terms of their importance effect of providing state services throughout the throughout the the countryside uh... creating the presence of the government that people depend on and therefore uh... have a stake in preserving so what's the upshot of this uh... rather than simply lecturing to offensive non-democrats about their human rights violations imposing punitive sanctions or seeking to transplant ideal formal institutions uh... on the model of western democracy or perhaps hoping that a twitter revolution will arise and work out peacefully uh... don't give up on a more top-down reformist on the top-down reformist potential of uh... the select rates within many current authoritarian regimes this might be operationalized by doing uh... country by country political assessment of where the real power lies where the incentives and interests of the different players within the regime uh... are driving them screening all u s an international policies in the area of trade diplomacy investment military to military relations and development aid to see whether they're helping or hurting to uh... buttress some of these preconditions or or or to determined whether in fact there they're weakening the preconditions such as by uh... helping greedy oligarchs to keep keep control and then uh... one of the articles that was mentioned in last last sentence last sentence one of the articles that was given to us uh... before to the to the panel before the uh... event was chet croctor's uh... recent article in which he draws on his experience of constructive involvement in engagement in south africa uh... and which uh... reflects a strategy to engage with uh... key elites in the select rates uh... to not only point out the possible threats from social media youth bulge unemployment globalization so on but also the potential positive opportunities that they can uh... benefit from uh... by uh... nudging moving slowly toward uh... an incrementally and gradually toward opening up their their political systems rather than a strictly negative approach alright that was that that was a sense can't have another one i want to take a few minutes to let take about two or three questions and we'll have to break up but uh... let me do that uh... uh... because it's been such a rich discussion gentleman here take the first one there uh... right there uh... you have the mic thanks uh... good morning everyone i'll try to keep this brief thank you so much for your extraordinary insights my name is engman well and i'm a student at american university school of international service professor low on thought you addressed earlier in your intervention the questions of the challenges to a peaceful transition in venezuela and in your article published by inform policy you also mentioned that there's no personality nationally that has the convenient power nor the credibility or the stature even to be able to leave this process in a nationally uh... owned way uh... given also the heavily militarized situation and how everything has turned out with the rise of the general office the minister of defense as a de facto prime minister what do you think will the role of the military be in a potential transition in venezuela and what should the u.s policy be should that be the case one more thing at the u.s please please please please that's enough well we really got it really got to move on and i want to give some other people a chance any other questions uh... right there hello i mean to flow and i'm a student at uh... american university also an intern with the international center for religion diplomacy i want to ask uh... how you reconcile the fact that many pose it decent centralization of government as a solution to ensure that the citizens benefit from economically engagement increased trade with uh... speak up a little louder yeah how how do you reconcile the fact that many pose it decentralization as a way for average citizens to benefit from increased re-engagement and trade natural resources with the need for strong centralized government to give legitimacy and staying power after a political transition one more lady right there thank you uh... bernie kashat with the world bank working on citizen engagement i have a question about the top down but i'm up uh... part of this debate where it was mentioned how it uh... important to vibrate civil society is and at the same time you mentioned that the reform in the end comes from top down at least that's what you positive so and earlier we heard about the importance of an enabling environment and i would be interested in hearing how which i guess is the link between the two in a lot of ways so how what are examples concrete examples of creating an enabling environment and what is the role of donors how could that look or should change thank you okay when we start with you professor and then go down people can answer as they will will have to finish up by ten after as the great sage yogi barra is supposed to have said it's always difficult to make predictions especially about the future i can't give you a blueprint for exactly how things will evolve in venezuela uh... it certainly is i would say self-evident that the armed forces of venezuela will somehow play an important role in the future of venezuela as they do in the present situation in venezuela uh... and there is indicative evidence that the venezuelan military is as is the case in most countries averse to uh... significant repression demonstration uh... and that could very well set up an important uh... confrontation at some point in the future the appointment of the minister of defense to be in charge of the resolution in theory uh... of the problem of supplies of food and other basic goods which is a crucial humanitarian challenge you know could make could could be an intent one of several different uh... hypotheses and whatever the intent could in fact lead alternative uh... outcomes it certainly puts uh... that man who was already minister of defense before that uh... in the situation of being a figure who if he succeeds in uh... alleviating the humanitarian situation will have some greater public recognition you know on the other hand it spreads the responsibility for failure as well from the uh... from the president uh... beyond i think the what i mentioned about the fact that there's no evident national convening authority uh... not even the catholic church played a role in several of the transitions talking about i wrote the sentence carefully it's it doesn't mean that the catholic church can't play an important role uh... the catholic church is both a national institution and an international institution and i i i think there is a a likelihood or at least a possibility that uh... that the Vatican and its people in ceo and so on could play an important role there i think the for the international community which you know is in some broad sense here represented the opposition is more accessible uh... than the government venezuelan situation part of what it takes to make a successful transition an opposition that is not absolutely focused on defeating the rascals and pushing them out but rather on figuring out how to use the leverage they have and their relationship with the international community to create a different situation in which their capacity to be influential in the future of the country increases and you know like what you were saying about about various stages of that and there you know getting the opposition to think about this situation in venezuela not as a one-shot deal but as improving their leverage and their capacity to have an influence and moving through a series of stages there are you know there are obviously other national elections presidential elections in the future uh... there are also possibilities formulas for different kind of shared governance that have occurred in different situations so that's where i would kind of look for imagining a different uh... i'm gonna just ask take one minute and then we're gonna have to break i'm sorry okay um... burma was and burma was basic as that the transition that's going on in burma right now is basically a top-down transition brought about by the elites on both the the opposition and the military side uh... the government side of the major dominant ethnic group in the country the bummer uh... it will not be successful until managed to bring the minorities into the mainstream of the country's political and economic life and that is the process that's going on right now in the peace process thanks um... uh... in terms of uh... top-down bottom-up uh... i think burma and yanmar is actually unusual in uh... having sort of top uh... initiated reform because all of the countries that i've looked at in uh... so from former soviet union eastern europe generally the pressures have come from below but let me just take it thirty seconds on the other question decentralization versus centralism i mean that this is actually a key question in many transitions but the question i would counterpose to that is uh... what what are you actually trying to create and i would say we're actually trying to create engaged conscious citizens of these countries what's the best way to do that uh... probably with more decentralization of political power and economic power and of course not at the expense of the state collapsing or uh... failing but uh... there's a big role here also for democratic culture but i would say and let's keep our eyes on what is it that we want from these transitions and i would say informed democratic citizens who can choose their own form of government michael one minute uh... well the question of uh... top down versus bottom up uh... important one uh... what what is an enabling environment several things have been mentioned has been brought out uh... there's a long list of factors more or less relevant to this or that country i would argue however that the balance should be shifted particularly in the poor uh... more vulnerable cases to more direct elite engagement uh... rather than expecting civil society to save the day uh... i recommend uh... reading donald horowitz's uh... book on indonesia which uh... whose transition he calls an inside job uh... shows how uh... leaders collaborated to uh... preempt potential for social policy polarization to uh... to erupt and uh... enacted a number of reforms uh... took the initiative themselves uh... but save the day for their own interests as well so rectifying that balance not looking to uh... what kind of become a kind of crusade kind of us versus them uh... climate uh... in which people like putin can and can exploit uh... moogabi can can uh... play on uh... as as undo for an intervention thanks very much i'm sorry to go over i know that's hard on people's schedules but i just want to thank the panel we've uh... this is such a rich discussion we're gonna have to have much more but i think there's much to be learned here about the ways in which uh... one uh... can see kinds of rule and opportunities for uh... even authoritarian and autocratic leadership to evolve and some of the factors that will make a difference the roles of civil society and economic policy which came up in the zimbabwe uh... discussion very relevant uh... and uh... and and a lot to to go into i'm sorry that uh... we didn't have a few more hours but i do want to thank the panel very much and thank you all for being here and please join me in thank you