 good morning everybody thank you for your patience as we're starting a little bit delayed we've gotten word that there are some accidents on the metro and so that has delayed not only some of our colleagues from participating today but also our vice president for the Applied Conflict Transformation Center Dr. David Young who is going to be opening this event so I will be giving his remarks as opening so my name is Leanne Erdberg I direct our program on Violent Extremism here at the US Institute of Peace and I'm delighted to welcome you here so as I mentioned the Applied Conflict Transformation Center is one of the thematic centers here at the US Institute of Peace and we house a lot of the different ways in which we can understand comparative conflict all over the world we understand it through the lens of governance and justice through religion through different types of inclusive peace processes and through violent extremism and so I'd like to welcome you here with that in mind to to the launch of the 2019 Global Terrorism Index or GTI for short this is the seventh edition of this annual report that's produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace and this is the sixth annual event that the US Institute of Peace has been glad to partner with IEP on launching for a Washington event we are proud to continue our relationship with IEP and you can follow all of our organizations online at at USIP at Econ and Peace and today's hashtag of hashtag Global Terrorism Index quickly for those who are new to USIP we were founded by the Congress in 1984 as an independent nonpartisan National Institute that's dedicated to reducing violent conflicts internationally that pose a threat to US national security we do this directly in the field working in conflict zones around the world and also by providing people and organizations and governments with the tools and knowledge and training and know how to how to manage conflict resolve conflict so it doesn't become violent and resolve it when it does and as many of you know many of you who are familiar faces here in the audience to USIP one of the most pervasive challenges that we face today is the rise spread and evolution of violent extremism and terrorism especially as it interacts with existing conflicts and creates new ones and further damages already fragile context you'll hear a lot about that in today's presentations and we'll hear from the GTI authors not only about the trends in terrorism but some of the stories that are not necessarily straightforward so while you will hear some things about the progress that has been made to counter violent extremism and terrorism you're also going to hear about new threats that have been emerging and different countries that have been suffering from attacks sorry for the long pause as I'm reading somebody else's remarks I'm trying to make sure I don't say things that are not out of my remit so one of the things that we've realized in the study of violent extremism and conflict is that it's not always clear to see how violent extremism manifests in fragile states and how to mitigate those conditions that are conducive to the threat of violent extremism what we look at those conditions we realize that we still have significant knowledge gaps that continue to pose obstacles to knowing how when and what works to prevent violent extremism it's one of the reasons that USIP is really proud to host the resolve network which stands for researching solutions to violent extremism and it's a global consortium of researchers and research organizations policymakers and practitioners who are committed to more empirically driven more locally defined research on violent extremism as well as sources of community resilience it's precisely like networks like resolve and organizations like the Institute for Economics and Peace and the start consortium and many of the other distinguished panelists organizations that are represented here today that are focusing on new ways to translate research and analysis into better policy and practice on violent extremism help us understand the complexities of terrorism and develop better ways to address it today's panel discussion is consists of several leading experts from across the globe and the presentations about GTI's findings the main data behind it and I'm sure we will be presenting everybody here in the room as well as online an opportunity to learn and reflect on research data analysis trends and terrorism and insights made on progress have a very distinguished panel here today please allow me to introduce and not only our panelists we're going to have two specific presentations first from the Institute for Economics and Peace and then from start the national consortium for the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism and then we're going to transition to a panel discussion where we will hear both opening presentations from the counterterrorism committee executive directorates at the United Nations CTED and the Anti-Defamation League ADL but let me introduce our individuals here on stage your bios are also available online and look forward to a very robust conversation today so first to my right is Serge Strubanz he's the director of operations for Europe the Middle East and North Africa at the Institute for Economics and Peace and he will be kicking off today's presentations next was is Aaron Miller principal investigator at the global terrorism database start national consortium for the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism to her right is Alexandra dear gender coordinator at the United Nations counterterrorism committee and executive director at CTED and to her right is Ryan Greer director program assessment and strategy at the Anti-Defamation League ADL it's my pleasure to moderate this conversation we will do a couple bits of moderated conversation from the dais then we'll take questions from the audience and we're also accepting questions online on Twitter please join me in welcoming panelists and welcome Serge for his first presentation should I always this working right good morning to everybody it's really a pleasure there we are it's really a pleasure to be here today and thank you to you see two oysters for the the sixth time I mean I'm standing here because I'm considered at the Institute for Economics and Peace as a security defense specialist and and therefore sent out throughout the world to promote a global terrorism index so let's go straight into the presentation so the Institute for Economics and Peace is also a non-partisan political and independent think tank that is looking at identify the drivers for peace and we are able to measure and quantify them and also link them to the economic benefits that emerge after a more or within a more peaceful situation so next to the global terrorism index we produce more publications or flagship it's still the global peace index launch every year in June we also have national index in Mexico we do some research on the SDGs and the implementation and the SDGs trying to measure the effectiveness of measures taken in the framework of the SDGs and of course we developed a concept of positive peace that is aiming at creating peace and I would say making sure that countries investing in in peace could get to the more economic social and governance positive returns of their investments so what is it global terrorism index so it's published for the seventh year we rank one in the 60 countries so the remaining 30 countries that you won't find on the index are too small in geographical size of the population to be integrated in an index we measure the relative impact of terrorism we do it ourselves and it's overseen by a panel of experts and terrorism is one of the 23 indicators we use to produce the global peace index annually in this global peace index we measure we have three families of indicators so we measure the implication in domestic and international conflict we look at the the levels of social and safety and security and a third family is looking at militarization or levels of militarization and terrorism is in the second family this is the methodology so we are dealing with soft sciences or social or political sciences so there is no consensus global consensus on the definition of terrorism and therefore to be able to collect data and afterwards process them into an index you need to start from from definition and definition we use of course in collaboration with with star today's putting together the global terrorism database is the use of illegal force and violence by non-state actor to attain a political economic religious or social goal to fear coercion or intimidation so we are using the global database press this through the filter of four indicators so we look at the amount of incidents people killed people injured and property damaged and we also give a certain weight to each of those indicators we understand that terrorism is a specific form of violence that has that is more persistent than others because you all of course have this psychological effect that is linked to the use of of terrorism therefore over a period of five years we keep half of the previous impact into the calculation of the ranking for each of the countries I would say as IP we do a statistical job we also had some social economic indicators and this allows us to create the global terrorism index every year so let's have a look at the results first this is a map an interactive map that you will find back on our website vision of humanity.org you allow you able to click on each on each country you see on the map and you will get the direct access to all datas and for each indicators per country these maps also shows you the concentration of I would say the phenomenon of terrorism or the impact of terrorism in the world and the countries in green only 26 are countries that did not face a terrorist attack in the past five years so this is top 10 of the index so you will find back those countries I would say that are common in these type of indexes countries involved in an internal conflict or violent conflict and countries involved in political transformation linked to the use of violence. What is really important on this one is the fact that Afghanistan is number one this year this is the first time since 2003 that Iraq is not at the top of the index so you clearly see a shift there where Afghanistan is becoming more and more impacted by terrorism and where Iraq and Syria and other countries because what I would say thanks to international intervention in those regions are less impacted today by terrorism as they were in the past. The key findings so we clearly see there is good and bad news there so we clearly see a decrease of the impact of terrorism so the amount of death caused by terrorism by 15% we see that more countries improved than countries that deteriorated but we also see that more countries have faced the terrorist attack in the past year 71 countries have had at least one death on their soil and this is the second highest number of countries impacted by terrorism in the past in the past decade so you clearly see that terrorist activities or terrorist groups are less effective in creating casualties therefore are also very effective in creating this sentiment of vulnerability and fear within societies and the phenomenon or I would say this evil form of violence is also spreading to more countries so that's really really disturbing when you see this so it's less effective but still the phenomenon or the concept of terrorism is still very very present you know societies worldwide I said only 26 countries did not have a terrorist attack in the past five years and for Europe for example is still the most peaceful region of the world where a decrease again by 70 70% last year with 62 persons killed but Turkey is within the group of European countries in the index and Turkey amounted for 40 casualties last year so if we continue we need to focus on Afghanistan and we see that the Taliban became the deadliest group in the world overtook ISIS last year and an increase by 71 percent ISIS at a decrease in the levels of the people who are killed by 70 percent also Taliban amounts for 80 38% of all people killed by terrorism in 2019 and if you would add the other group active in Afghanistan the Korazan chapter of the Islamic State together the amount for 46 almost 50% of all people killed by terrorism last year fell in Afghanistan I think that's an amazing evolution to see the Islamic State that was really the leading organization in the past years but active active in many countries and now seeing the Taliban and and another local actor this chapter of ISIS being active in only one country and creating casualties in only Afghanistan so we the other the other countries in top five Iraq Nigeria and Syria and Pakistan only Nigeria increased in the number of casualties last year the three other countries decreased the number of casualties last year and this this is directly linked to the military action of security and intelligence service actions in those in those countries what we also noticed in this year's GTI is to continue the increase of the phenomenon of far-right terrorism in the past five years we have seen an increase by 320% of this phenomenon so the amount of people getting killed in the amount of incidents in the past five years last year with 26 people who were dying who would die it from from this far-right terrorism this year we already gone 77 and this was by the end of September when the terrorism index has been compiled we had we need to add two people who died in Germany in October and we were very lucky there that Germans are building very strong doors otherwise we would have it again like a mass casualty event like we we had in the mosques in Christchurch New Zealand in March earlier this year so we clearly see a continued evolution and I would say when you see those figures you can only see what the trend will be for the next global terrorism index every time you produce an index peace index or terrorism index we also try to provide data on the cost of the violence that is occurring 33 billion last year for the impact of terrorism the economic impact of terrorism and you see a clear distribution over the country's most affected and also which type of loss created this economic impact you can focus on 33 billion and think that it's a very large amount of money but please put this in perspective with the overall cost of violence that we measure at IP and it is estimated to 14.1 trillion on annual basis and this is consistent over the past over past years so let's open the time window and look at some trends in terrorism so this is a very interesting slide because you can give a lot of different interpretations to this slide so you can look at this and try to imagine this being the fourth wave of terrorism that we have been facing in the past and of course you can look at the change in influx in the in the graph and try to identify the acts of foreign policy that could be could be linked to the influx of the impact of terrorism but I think it's very interesting is to look at the peak we had in 2014 and then of course the action by the international community military action by the international community and enhanced effectiveness of security and intelligence forces that led to this steep decrease of the impact of terrorism in in the past five years so the question we should ask ourselves is this are we facing are we close to to tackling the problem or is this just another sub-wave in a larger wave and are we going to create another window of opportunity or are we going to see other groups or the forms of terrorism arise in the coming years this is a classification of the four most deadliest group in the world so this is reinforcing the point I just made about the the efforts by the international community tackling Boko Haram why you saw a coordinated effect of national security forces in northeast Nigeria combined with the activities of a multinational joint task force in the surrounding countries making sure that Boko Haram could not get resources human resources and material resources and financial resources in neighboring countries and of course the international coalition against Daesh in Syria and Iraq therefore it's even more disturbing to see this constant and almost steep increase of the impact of the Taliban and the Corazan chapter of ISIL in in Afghanistan when we look at the regions we clearly see that three regions are three regions are most impacted and this is I would say in line with the presentation he gave last year where we identified the regions to which foreign terrorist fighters but also ISIL fighters would migrate to after the crush or the Battle of Mosul in 2016 and the crush we solved in 2017 so we clearly identified of course the MENA region is still impacted and has been most impacted by with almost 100,000 people killed in the past decade but you clearly see a redistribution to South Asia in conflicts like Pakistan and Afghanistan and maybe moving more to the south to the Philippines to Indonesia and other countries in the region but also a redistribution to sub-Saharan Africa and you clearly saw that I mean I'm coming from Europe and everybody was afraid there to see all those foreign terrorist fighters or ISIL fighters migrate to Europe but from a I would say strategic point of view it makes no sense you will never send your troops against the strongest enemy or the enemy that has the best intelligence and security capacities the most efficient ones so the tactics of those terrorist groups is to find places or locations in the world where there is already a violent conflict going on with the levels of governance and the effectiveness of security and intelligence services is quite low and you can just plug in I would say their techniques tactics and procedures into an existing conflict and really thrive on on what's happening in other countries so identifying those three zones in the world or those three regions of the world this was I would say almost quite easy to do so what is interesting to see also on this slide is really the impact terrorism has had in the West compared to other regions of the world you already spoke about this and we we of course identified to this evolution spoke about 320 percent over the past four to five years in figures when you look at the amount of people and the amount of incidents getting killed by far right terrorism this is still marginal in figures compared to the overall phenomenon of terrorism and especially this ideologically inspired form of terrorism but what we see is that the movement is really picking up and it's becoming stronger every year and every year so I think it's a good time it's time maybe to have a closer look on this on this movement and I mean coming from Europe myself but this is I would say phenomenon that is going on in in more Western countries so when you talk about far right terrorism we we basically talk about 19 countries in Northern America Western Europe and Oceania that are really hit by this type of terrorism and those are also countries in which political movements far right movements become more and more mainstream and where the narrative also becomes more mainstream and really accepted I would say in daily debates what we also see is a difference between far left movements and far right movements we will see much more activity from far left movements and this is the red line on the graph so especially in the 70s 80s and 90s so those movements were much more prolific in the amount of attacks but we see that far right terrorism was much more effective creating peaks of attacks that were very very effective killing a lot of people when when occurring and the targets used by both movements are also completely different and of course so are the motivations of those groups when we look at the ideologies this is a slide it's a very interesting slide because this is showing you the impact today and the impact in the 70s 80s and 90s and I was already there born in 1969 how will turn 50 in about three weeks but I'm not I would say I'm not mentally affected by it I just accept it so I was there and I was just you know we had a discussion just before coming in and doing our presentation and I was talking about you know facing this in the news every day when I was a bit when I was a teenager some bombs went off I would say at the base of my of my building by communist combatant cells in the 1980s so this is I grew up with this with this idea of having a terrorism around me every say every day also so I was not really surprised when I was not really appalled when when it came back in the past in the past decade but you see a clear difference between the impact in the last decade and the impact we had in by previous waves and previous movements what is also really interesting here is to is to notice that this religiously in inspired forms of terrorism are not the predominant form of terrorism that we are facing today we see more and more an increased impact from these politically motivated forms of a nationalism nationalism is also one of the of the drives of terrorism today or at least a form of terrorism that is emerging again what we also see is that far right movements of far right terrorism just arrive on the strength of the narrative so the narrative is strong enough just to motivate people to start using violence to I would say apply the principles of of the narrative so you do not see is large I would say almost regional or global organizations that are going to actively recruit actively I would say instruct and train people and creates a terrorist that is going to commit an attack so the patterns that we saw for Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for example are not really patterns that we find back at the moment in this far right terrorist movement we also saw and and I just like I would check throw it in the group so to speak that the more and more mass shootings in the past 40 45 about 40 years I've been identified as being a terrorist attack so we classify a more and more of mass shootings and I guess I would say I'm in the country where this is most applicable although it's applicable also to other countries in the world and other regions of the world we saw that more and more mass shootings of those mass events received the attack terrorist attack what we clearly see an evolution of the past years if we clearly see that security services would tar or would really tag violent attacks as terrorist attacks first to make sure that they get all the necessary or more legal tools to investigate regularly you see that this tag is taking off afterwards and it's downgraded to I would say regular violent violent activity of violent crime so different inspirations and different movements there that is leading to the acceptance or the identification of mass shootings as being terrorist attacks we also clearly see a clear connection between violent conflict and terrorism 95% of all terrorist attacks or all terrorist casualties will fall in a country that is involved in at least one violent conflict so you clearly see that terrorism is used as a technique technique and procedure by by groups involved into a violent conflict and as I said to you before these groups are also trying to find those regions of the world where there is low levels of governance conflict going on so you can just plug in the ideology in their technique tactics and procedure and so the main driver of terrorism is still violent conflict for 95% and in the remaining 5% I would say that there again 90% of the terrorist attacks are linked to the application of political terror on the population so application of political terror is no respect of human rights this is the second main driver of terrorism which leads almost to the conclusion that when we are looking at the West for example where we are not directly having a conflict on our national soil and what I still expect that we are not applying political terror to a population we're basically talking about the last percent of of this phenomenon called terrorism and the impact of terrorism the more intense the conflict the more terrorism will be used and the more casualties will fall I mean it's almost straightforward to think about this but figures are clearly showing this over the past almost 50 years the targets are also completely different so if you are in vest or if you are in active in a conflict you will see that your targets will be almost I would say the regular conflict targets so you will target more police military to represent representative of the state or the power of the state but also your other terrorist groups and and and on state militia non-state actors that basically would be in competition with you in the conflict that is going on and the more you shift to non-conflict impacted societies the more I would say the targets become softer and you will target businesses journalists and media and and two risks also the last point I would like to make today is the enhanced connection between gender and terrorism so what the figures have shown is that we are we have been facing peaks of I would say female female perpetrators of terrorist acts the last peak that is shown on the slide is heavily inspired or influenced by a book or I'm who started to identify and not only other groups also started to realize that females were not really the in the center of the attention of security and intelligence services and therefore would not be the primary target for those services so you would using females and in the case of Boko Haram of course I guess you all instructed in what happened in those terrorist tactics in the past years you clearly see like small girls receiving almost as a gift a new rucksack sent into marketplace and remotely the device would just explode remotely and not the girl itself herself would ignite it I mean from my experience in my own experience in Afghanistan you clearly saw there also the use of burkas you know this this large clothing where you could not identify with some men or female underneath the burka and you also had difficulties to identify the bomb the bomb vest by doing so so we see there a clear evolution also but I would say this is more linked to those terrorist groups always trying to have this advantage compared to a security and intelligence forces and always trying to find the weakest the weakest place or the weakest link within the security and intelligence forces and always keeping this element of surprise when we have both a targeting targeting us we also see that the targets used or the targets chosen by female perpetrators variate are different from those by male perpetrators and female perpetrators would target much more these softer targets like marketplaces IDP or refugee camps I would say gathering of people rather than where you see that the male perpetrators will concentrate maybe more on other militia so you know the the targets that I spoke about before so I guess that's it for my presentation I'm looking forward to the Q&A afterwards and a panel of discussion and yeah please welcome my last client that is a little bit of a propaganda slide but do not hesitate to connect with us a set all the research and all the data are available online and this the report GTI is available online also and please do not hesitate to also check out this interactive map and the other research that we are producing at IEP so thank you very much thank you so much Serge for such a data rich presentation it's now my pleasure to introduce Aaron Miller who's going to present a bit more on the global terrorism database hi everyone thank you very much to IEP and you sip for hosting me I'm very glad to participate again I've done this a few times and it's always a good opportunity to talk to people about the data we collect so my task today is to give some background on how the global terrorism database is collected I manage the global terrorism database collection process at the University of Maryland I worked on the GTD for about 15 years now and so I'm gonna give a just an overview of how we collect the data and and hopefully there'll be some interesting questions about the details and the implications of that for what the results are in the the analysis so just by way of background the GTD is all based on open source information primarily media accounts of terrorism it's currently updated through 2018 data collection is ongoing we're working on 2019 data collection right now and includes more than 190,000 records of terrorist attacks the data is available on our website so you can see the URL there you can go browse the data you can download the data and by all means please give us feedback about the data so we always want one of the main reasons that we make the data available aside from the fact that we view it as a public good is it's actually good for the data collection process to to make it available and garner feedback from people who who use the data a little bit of history on the the GTD collection process so the original records were written by hand on 5x7 index cards we at start it was actually before start existed inherited 65,000 5x7 index cards that are in these these storage boxes here we still have them at start and our first task was to digitize these these are two examples here you can really not read them very well at all but the one on the top left is from attack in northern Ireland in 1979 and the one on the bottom right is from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 so we we originally digitize those a huge undertaking but we have improved the sophistication of the data collection process considerably since then we combine artificial intelligence and human intelligence we try and leverage those to do what each of them are best at to make sure that we're improving the efficiency of the data collection process and maximizing the efficiency of the data collection process without compromising the accuracy of the data and so our process starts with about 2 million news articles a day that we have subscription access to that are published from thousands of sources around the world so from this pipeline we apply a number of artificial intelligence processes we do some very basic bullying filtering to remove obviously irrelevant content so information about sports so a basketball article that includes the word shooting we want to discard that we want to exclude articles about bombings that are about movies and TV shows and so we're very much interested in setting those aside at the outset we use natural language processing for two reasons one is to help remove duplicate articles so anytime something happens there the same article might be republished over and over and over again we want to remove those duplicates and we also use NLP to cluster articles together based on their topic similarity so that when these articles this content gets to humans the articles are organized in a way that makes sense right they're topically similar you're not reading an article about Pittsburgh and then an article about Mosul right after each other but there's some some general consistency to how they're they're ordered and then the last part of the artificial intelligence processes before we get to the humans is a machine learning model so we've been training a machine learning model we started this in 2012 to just do a basic two-part classification it's like your spam filter your spam filters is trying to decide is this spam or is this not spam we use a two-part classification for is this relevant to terrorism does this have information about a terrorist attack or does it not and we run that filter to try and narrow down the pool of articles that our humans then will process through and and read that gets down to so we start with 2 million the team reads through we could through a process we call triaging about 10,000 articles a month we've got a team of fantastic researchers at the University of Maryland they go through and they're the ones who apply the inclusion criteria who consider the definition of terrorism who consider what constitutes a single unique event and and a single record and and instantiates that record into the database and then we work with teams of students who fill in all of the details about what happens as much information as possible about the location of the attack the target of the attack the perpetrators of the attack weapons and tactics that were involved in casualties and consequences of each attack and they'll record as much detail as possible in our structured data format and so all of that is documented in our global terrorism database codebook which you can download from our website as well so that it's very transparent how we're defining terrorism how we're defining all of the individual variables and so on and so forth this is just as a side note I like to drive home to emphasize the importance of how seriously we take the balance between artificial intelligence and human intelligence and I say that because we do not use automated event extraction from news sources there are some data collection efforts that use automated event extraction from news sources this is a table from one of those this is not global terrorism database data when you do that when you use machines to extract events from news sources you can do really amazing things like make a list of the 15 most frequently assassinated people this is problematic obviously for more than one reason first you can only be assassinated one time and also only two of these people are dead so the concern that we have as we're continually trying to improve our data collection processes improve the efficiency improve the speed is that if we over rely on artificial intelligence you end up with with sort of some nonsense data there's another from that same data set we learned that between January and February 2015 there were 252 suicide bombings in the United States obviously that's not true okay so this is our definition of terrorism you've already heard it acts by non-state actors involving the threatened actual use of illegal force or violence to attain a political economic religious or social goal through fear coercion or intimidation we break this down into a series of inclusion criteria there in our code book and we assess every individual case based on on these inclusion criteria whether the inclusion criteria are met and they're included in the database our goal is not to solve the problem of defining terrorism we have accepted that we are not going to solve the problem of defining terrorism our goal is to have a decent definition of terrorism but also provide users with as much context and information and detail as possible so they can make informed decisions about how to do their own analysis and so if you have certain expectations that terrorist attacks cannot target combatant targets that an attack on a combatant target is inherently not a terrorist attack you will have the information that you need to exclude those from your analysis of terrorism for example I'll get into a little bit more detail about the inclusion and exclusion decisions in a moment this is just the world map of terrorism in 2018 and actually I think I had a couple more slides so to the the question of inclusion let me go back so the question of inclusion decisions we take into consideration all of the attributes of a terrorist attack whether or not it was politically motivated whether or not it was intended to broadcast a message to an audience beyond the immediate victims and whether or not it was a targeted against combatant targets or non-combatant targets we also take into consideration things like was it intentional so we don't include things like accidental explosions that took place when someone was preparing an explosive device or something like that we don't include cases that are personally motivated right we don't include cases in which the perpetrators are state actors and you can imagine a lot of scenarios where it's difficult to know some of these things right there's limited information sometimes even conflicting information on whether or not these inclusion criteria are satisfied and we build that into the data collection process as well again we're not trying to create clarity where there is none we just try and keep people informed about the attributes of each attack and so we have a measure in the database that's called doubt terrorism proper if you use the GTD you might be familiar with the doubt terrorism proper designation which basically we use to signal that there are there are conflicting reports about what happened in this attack and why the attack took place and who was responsible for it we have standards in terms of the source validity the validity of the original underlying sources that we will take into consideration in terms of what the how we evaluate the details of each attack the conflicting information about casualties for example is often something that we grapple with and in conflict zones in particular so because as you saw earlier there is a high concentration of terrorist attacks in conflict zones there are important additional considerations that we we try and take into account so in general our processes are the same we evaluate every attack on a case-by-case basis but we do recognize that there are difficulties presented regarding collecting data in conflict zones right some of them are a lack of clarity over who's responsible for the attack right there might be an attack in Yemen and some sources indicate that the government's is responsible the the coalition forces are responsible and some would indicate that who these are responsible for that attack and there's just genuinely a lack of clarity about who's responsible for the attack and if we require the perpetrator to be a non-state actor we would want to exclude those attacks that are carried out by state actors so that's just sort of one indication of the importance of not an sort of assessing the the the GTD data as if it's in a vacuum right these these attacks happen in a broader context against a backdrop of other types of violence other types of non-state violence other types of state violence and I commends IP for doing such a great job of sort of presenting the context of those of those events more more generally beyond just the trends in terrorism and so finally what's next so we are currently the global terrorism database is currently funded through the end of this year which you will note is coming soon but pending funding beyond that we have some exciting plans about improving the data collection process we are hoping to do rather than annual updates we're hoping to do quarterly updates and allow API access for people who want to programmatically access the database on a more regular basis we're developing some data collection tools that involve taking text snippets and highlighting portions of the source documents to to help identify what types of information and help with our natural language processing and build more machine learning models to facilitate more efficient data collection we're working on always building out sort of different aspects of the database and so we've done some work recently on complex coordinated terrorist attacks and identifying the attributes of complex coordinated terrorist attacks in the GTD and creating sort of auxiliary data sets that people can use to evaluate these the sort of constellation of tactics and targeting strategies that contribute to a complex coordinated terrorist attack and then one of the big things that we're excited about doing doing better at improving on is movement level coding and so we've we've known for a while now that individual organizations are not very long lasting as as terrorist organizations right there are a number of axioms about how short lived the average terrorist organization is I think in our data about 65% of them last less than one year so on this gray bar here those are the life spans in gray of terrorist organizations if you combine terrorist organizations together into broader movements combining groups that are networks groups that change their name groups that undergo leadership changes that evolve over time and and sort of ebb and flow into broader networks the actual pattern of the longevity of these perpetrators is the opposite right so in red you can see the lifespan of movements is typically more than 10 years right and so it's a little bit misleading to focus specifically only on terrorist organizations in isolation because they have much more complex relationships than the than sort of meet-the-eye and and when you you know dig deep into them you see that they actually form these movements that evolve over time and and the challenge of combating them sort of takes on a different shape on the right there you can see that we've done some work initially already for combining the individual organizations the generic actors the generically identified actors who are not affiliated with a particular organization but still ascribed to the ideology of the Islamic State Network movement and the Al Qaeda Network movement so there's obviously some overlap between these at various points and the chart on the right shows the number of countries that have experienced attacks by any part of either the Islamic State or the Al Qaeda movement over time and you can see that that number of countries even though the the patterns of terrorism of individual groups come and go overall the patterns of terrorism conducted by the movements more broadly look entirely different right and these these organizations that that sort of evolve and combine together and break apart have much more challenging sort of patterns of activity and geographic expansion the geographic expansion particularly how rapid it has been of the Islamic State is something that I think we hope to to give a bit more thought to going forward so thank you very much I appreciate the opportunity and I look forward to any questions you have. Thank you so much Erin and so much important publicly available data that the GTD provides and so just a big push toward if you have used the GTD if you want to continue using the GTD please let it be known to start how important this data is and also to policymakers and other funders how important it is to fund this type of database. We're going to move into the panel discussion part of this morning you can see from both the presentations as well as from the report that's on on your chairs and available online that there are a few specific topics that are quite timely to this year's report and that allows for who we have invited to give particular commentary on two specific parts of it on both gender and extremism as well as the rise of far-right extremism these are both trends and chapters in the report itself but I think are also making their way around many different policy conversations in capitals around the world so it is my delight to introduce Ryan Greer and then Alexandra Dier to give a bit more opening remarks and then we'll move into the panel discussion I will moderate at first and then we'll take questions from the audience first Ryan. Yeah thank you and and let me say thank you to USIP for holding such an important event to the GTI team for producing a fantastic annual report and to start as always if you're not using the global terrorism database you're making a mistake it's a phenomenal resource so thank you to everyone I took two kind of main stories out of my reading of this year's results that that my colleagues can check me on whether there's a better story or better interpretation but here's the two things that I was most interested in one is if you can call it that the good news story of Iraq terrorism is still a very serious threat in Iraq but at the very least we can conclude that the threat of ISIS does not look quite the same as it did a couple years ago within Iraq and if you think about kind of how that came to be it was a comprehensive effort now it's in a war zone so some of the tools that were used were war tools airstrikes and the like but also humanitarian efforts governance efforts and kind of a comprehensive global coalition to address the challenge now again whether it's dropping in the in the rankings here is for sure a good news story or whether it's just some progress has been made we can debate but at the very least we can acknowledge that there was a comprehensive global effort to address the challenge and that there's been some results that have been made the second story which is kind of complementary to that is a is a bad news story but a rising challenge which is to say we're really we're getting pretty good at addressing comprehensively the kind of worst of the worst places where there's the most deaths from terrorism in the most years in a row we can at least somewhat rise to the challenge but as the data suggests a surge outlined more and more countries are facing terrorist threats and there are new threats that are emerging far right extremism is certainly not new but it is becoming deadlier and deadlier year on year and the role of national borders is shrinking I recall you know from preventing violent extremism countering violent extremism 101 if you want to prevent someone from going down the violent pathway there is no one path but it probably the process of radicalization process probably starts with some form of otherization so seeing your members of your community or members of the global community that we live in as an other not as a neighbor not as a community member I think it's fair to say as we're seeing from this data and others otherization has gone global and it is no longer as responsive to borders and in particular we're also seeing this as a rise of far right extremism as people are otherized based on being Latino and immigrants based on being Syrian refugees that's and so on and so forth it feeds into that grievance narrative and we're also seeing a rise in precursor crimes as people who believe in that same what we call in the US domestic terrorism ideology who also believe in committing hate crimes whether they don't rise to murder but nonetheless their discriminatory crimes committed against those people now I work for the anti defamation League ADL it's an anti hate organization and we look at extremism through a lens of a pyramid of hate there is unfortunately a lot of bias so bias is the bottom of the pyramid if that bias is not countered if it goes unchecked it could become overt hate if that hate is not checked it could escalate to extremism and terrorism and atrocities so we seek to counter everything along that sort of escalatory path in a comprehensive whole of society way so again a surge outlined hate crimes are up for our extremism is up in the United States in particular anti-semitism has virtually skyrocketed in recent years hate crimes are are increasing and domestic terrorism is increasing of the 50 murders committed by extremists in the United States last year in 2018 49 were committed by far-right extremists and the one that was an Islamist extremist had been a neo-nazi who converted to Islam and killed his neo-nazi roommate so there's a connection to far-right extremism in all 50 and we're seeing a kind of mainstreaming of otherization a mainstreaming of hate throughout the western world and we're seeing the corresponding trends in violence I mentioned we view a kind of comprehensive approach to countering domestic terrorism and that again you can debate the level of success in Iraq but nonetheless there was a comprehensive approach there we recently outlined in a blog post in lawfare blog a framework for countering domestic terrorism in the U.S. that we think could be you sort of generalizable international to create an international version of it in that framework and there were three prongs to addressing the domestic terrorism threat one being government to technology three civil society in terms of the government how does the government see the threat of domestic terrorism can it be more transparent in terms of how it sees that threat what is it doing to counter the threat can the government use all the tools in its toolbox to counter again precursor crimes if you will hate crimes and then lastly the government can't go too far and use these tools to infringe on civil liberties because not only is that bad in itself but it feeds into the same grievance narrative that creates the extremist threat in the first place so second sector technology rightfully technology companies have different tools and requirements on them than the government can they use their terms of service not to police speech but can they use it to prevent ISIS from having a 24-7 coordination platform and white supremacists from having a 24-7 white supremacist rally can they prevent it from becoming coordination that becomes violent and can they do so in concert in an appropriate civil liberties compliant way with the government and civil society and the third prong civil society so we work with the government as you know you cannot the government cannot create a case against a white supremacist for being white supremacist you can be an extremist in the united states for good civil liberties reasons but sometimes these people all too often cross the line toward criminality and become violent and so we can as a as a civil society organization can develop a specialization in understanding trends in white supremacy that the government cannot and for many good reasons should not be able to do so we have a specialization and credibility in many communities where extremism is on the rise the government is not going to be a credible messenger in any way so some civil society organizations have some credibility for some reason or another and lastly prevention so in terms of preventing violent extremists there are groups of former extremists who seek to pull people out of those movements there are groups that seek to counter the message of some of these organizations but nonetheless play some sort of valuable role that isn't the same as the government's by design but can be complementary to it so to us that framework represents a comprehensive framework that we're looking at global particularly forward extremism global extremism through that lens and we hope to see other governments and other communities take on similar similar approaches so let me pause there so Alexander can take over and just reiterate my thanks to to co-panelists and to USIP thank you very much. Alexandra thank you thank you Leanne and thank you so much to USIP for for hosting us I first of all want to congratulate Serge and the IEP team for another excellent edition of of the GTI this year and it was also a pleasure for us at CETA to collaborate with you and and contribute to this year's edition with an article by our executive director on on gender which is one of the key trends that you have identified in in your report and and I'm extremely grateful actually for for for IEP for having done that because I think I mean the numbers show why this is such an important issue that cannot be that cannot be ignored and that has to be part of our conversation on on terrorism but it is still very rare to have that conversation as part of a discussion among the wider security community rather than just among gender experts I think we've seen a lot of attention being being paid to this phenomenon among people who are interested in gender who are interested in women peace and security but we are still we still have to make an effort to ensure that it is part of a more mainstream discussion on on terrorism and I think it is our role as those who do study gender more specifically to to make the case and to explain better and in terms that are what are intelligible to a non-gender specialist audience why this issue is so important and so what we have seen recently is an exponential increase in research on this issue and I want to give a shout out again to ESIP and Liane and her colleagues who have done some some really excellent work in this field we have certainly also seen growing awareness among policymakers and in the policy discourse this is now something that is increasingly included but we are still lagging behind when it comes to the actual practice and in terms of how to translate our growing understanding of some of these gender trends into concrete policy but they are these these issues that that we are going to talk about are extremely relevant and and they are important in terms of of how we design our counterterrorism and CVE policies and I think that the example of of ISIL is really the most compelling illustration that shows us both why it is important to incorporate gender as well as what the real challenges are in terms of doing that well and and really knowing what a gender-sensitive approach to counterterrorism looks like so think about the fact and this is the figures are are included in in the GTI the huge number of women who traveled to Syria and Iraq from virtually all parts of the world this was a development that we did not anticipate and therefore we are also not able to prevent it effectively we are now today looking at a situation where many of these women are trying to return and where thousands of them are stuck in camps in in northern Syria facing a really horrific humanitarian situation as well as a very precarious security situation and what we're seeing in terms of government's responses to that is a massive challenge they do not know how to how to address this issue and the failure to understand some of these gendered factors is one of the main underlying reasons for that the challenges lie in understanding the very complex motivations that underlie women's participation in ISIL the fact that we don't know why so many of them traveled voluntarily we are still struggling to understand how many of them did so voluntarily versus those who are coerced or manipulated to do so we are then looking at the very complex roles that women played during their time in the caliphate we're looking at a whole spectrum of different different roles and functions that they performed we've seen some of them being violent perpetrators we've seen many others supporting the organization in other ways as in the online space promoting ISIL propaganda recruiting others to join we've seen an important role that women played a sort of the backbone of ISIL state building project as mothers giving birth to the next generation of ISIL fighters and we've seen many women of course being victims of ISIL in that context and so understanding these roles and understanding also often the very blurred boundaries between those different roles is is a challenge and understanding in that context the degree of of individual agency that these women have had and therefore the degree of their of their criminal responsibility is something that is extremely challenging and that translates directly into into difficulties when it then comes to developing risk assessment processes for these women that would allow us to judge when making decisions about repatriations for example to assess the risk that these women might potentially pose it is a challenge when it comes to the investigations and prosecutions of these women determining criminal culpability being able to collect admissible and sufficient evidence looking at crimes that are not necessarily violent crimes and so the level to which they are criminalized in different national jurisdictions varies and then in terms of rehabilitation and reintegration again still a lack of understanding of good practices and what the best approaches are to specifically dealing with the rehabilitation and reintegration of women so all of these are very concrete examples that that show that really the failure to to to develop more gender gender sensitive approaches and to build up our knowledge on these issues has led to a massive challenge for governments in in the current context and so I think this is really a perfect illustration for for both why we need to be paying more attention to gender and also why we still have a lot more work to do when it comes to developing guidance and good practices when it comes to developing gender sensitive approaches and that is certainly something that at the United Nations and my office seated specifically we we continue to work on and see it as as one of our priorities going forward and having better data is an essential requirement for that and this is also a challenge that we are facing in this space that unfortunately still many many governments many national authorities are not systematically collecting gender disaggregated data and so that means that we are still often struggling to understand the scope and scale of the phenomenon that that we are dealing with and it is only through better data that we are able to to understand these issues and and to also be able to ask the right questions and more nuanced questions and if you look at some of the data such you didn't present it here but it's in the report the numbers of women who traveled to join ISIL women are believed to have constituted around 13 percent of ISIL's membership but if you look at the regional differences they are they are vast and so knowing that and having that those numbers then allows us to ask well what were the context specific push and pull factors in each of the regions that led in some cases more women and in some cases fewer women to to join ISIL so so going forward I think this is this is an area where we'll continue to see to see more interest and where we have a lot of need for for more information want to work my one point the our discussion here today and and the data in the in the in the GTI and also Sita's contribution to it is very much focused on the issue of women as terrorism perpetrators and we discussed a little bit in our article some of the risks and and challenges associated with how we with how we think of women as violent perpetrators in terrorism but I do want to point out that that is only one dimension of thinking about gender and and terrorism it is equally important to think about the role of women as agents in counterterrorism and and CVE where many of them play a very important positive and transformative role looking at gender dimensions also includes looking at the specific gendered impacts and the way that women are affected by both terrorism and counter terrorism that is another important area where more work is is needed and finally if we're talking about gender then we're also not just talking about women and so applying a gender lens to the study of terrorism also means looking at the gender dimensions of male participation in terrorism and so whether that is looking at how terrorism relates to gendered power structures how terrorists use and exploit notions of of masculinity and also how we can use and promote positive notions of masculinity in our counterterrorism and CVE responses so I just very briefly wanted to touch on on some of those those other issues that that are part of a gender discussion in terrorism and I'll leave it at that and look forward to your questions thank you thank you so much for both of those opening remarks that really I think start guiding us down the path of how we can take trend level information and really make those next steps towards policy relevant conversations as well as the practice itself and so with that I'm gonna take moderators prerogative and ask maybe a first question to all of the panelists I say this as we're housed at the we're here today at the U.S. Institute of Peace and that the authors of the Global Terrorism Index is the Institute for Economics and Peace and so I'll go with the peace building theme oftentimes when we see the overall trend lines of deaths going down we assume that it's for military means that we're able to see such positive progress but I would oppose maybe our first question to the panel to how do we understand some of the peace building success stories and is it possible to have more efforts of prevention and peace even in the the biggest hotspots where conflict and terrorism are so deeply intertwined yeah I think if you look at deaths from terrorism they might go down year on year but they're still pretty historically high globally so the threat is still pretty severe there and then like I mentioned of course we should focus on the areas where terrorism is the most severe and there are the most deaths there particularly in war zones but there's a particular type of tool we can use in those in those areas that we can't use elsewhere and I would look at the cyclical nature of when those tools are used and then when the kind of unintended consequences maybe take effect in terms of if you're if you're in an unintended way decimating local governance and community structures then the same form of extremism is going to come back with a new name as we saw in al Qaeda and ISIS and there will be another generation of that of that challenge and so I I hesitate I mean of course we should look at deaths from terrorism as a key metric but particularly looking at it on a in a two-year time frame or a three-year time frame and not looking at the kind of cyclical nature of the extremist extremism that can escalate I love that IEP also has a positive peace index I wonder about creating a positive you know countering extremism index we can measure the results of efforts in local communities to prevent hate from becoming extremism and extremism from violence and I think if we were to overlay these those that index and the the the GTI index we might see a broader story about successes about extremism that is is reduced or eliminated in an enduring way versus extremism that is in sort of terrorism excuse me that is reduced year on year but I do think it's an important metric I don't want to deny that's an important metric but I think a comprehensive view certainly important and as I mentioned extremism kind of going across borders as another you know dimension that I might mention that that just because there are fewer foreign fighters going to Iraq that's definitely a success story but some of them are good because they're committing extremist acts in Philippines Libya etc and so I don't necessarily want to kind of let a national level success story at the expense of the global story be the one we primarily talk about I think as I mentioned we need a comprehensive effort on the global stage whole of society but also kind of whole of diplomatic partners and look at the 70 or so countries that join the counter ISIS coalition and that should be kind of the way we address all extremism issues because it is going to migrate across borders absolutely and I think we have made progress in sort of this more more comprehensive and holistic understanding of how tackling terrorism and violent extremism relates to wider peacebuilding activities and I think we've seen that sort of translate onto the policy level if I look at the United Nations for example many of our departments and agencies that address issues of conflict prevention and peacebuilding have traditionally been very reluctant to touch anything that had the terrorism or violent extremism label on it and that has changed in recent years and there has been a growing understanding that this is really a challenge that is central to a lot of the work that we are doing in conflict affected countries precisely because there is that link between conflict drivers and terrorism and so I think we need to we need to sort of continue to think about what more we can do to break down some of those conceptual silos and policy silos and how to integrate our analysis on of conflict and of how we look at terrorism and I do actually I want to bring in the gender dimension into this once again because one of the indicators that we have not talked about is actually gender equality and how that has been shown to be correlated to the likelihood of conflict right and countries that see greater levels of gender equality also see greater levels of peacefulness and stability and so again I think there are questions out there around how do we bring that into our understanding of violent extremism we know that actually a growth in sort of gender-based repression can be one of the most effective predictors early indicators of a potential rise of violent extremism and so how do we bring that into into our responses how do we have a truly sort of holistic approach to these challenges and so again I think this shows why the data is so important because these indicators can can really help us do better analysis and therefore design better policies. No I agree with everything that's already been said and I'll just sort of pick up where Alexandra left off about the the challenges of collecting comprehensive data on on on peace building right is is is pretty tricky I think a lot of the the metrics that are available are more macro level measures but getting really good granular information on efforts that are that are happening on the ground is is very challenging and particularly challenging to do worldwide right and to to come up with sort of a comprehensive assessment but I do think that that's a worthwhile goal right I think it's an important objective to try and continue to to build out the comprehensive understanding that we have of how all of these things factor in together what are the costs and benefits of of of counterterrorism whether it's from a military perspective or countering violent extremism perspective you know that the there are a number of contexts throughout history you know that you can you can see situations looking at the global terrorism database trends where terrorism declines rapidly and you think what we should do more of that what is that thing that happened in that in that country in that place in that conflict let's do that again elsewhere and it's not always good it's often actually very very bad so you know the decrease of terrorism is obviously a welcome development but it is often at a tremendous tremendous cost that needs to be taken into account as well well when first of all when you look at the two main drives of terrorism a violent conflict is the is the most impactful one I said 95 percent of all attacks occur in a country engage in a conflict so I guess any peace building effort in trying to reduce the amount of violent conflicts going on in the world and also trying to reduce the intensity and the I would say the longevity of these of these conflicts especially when the internationalized because most of the conflicts are internal would then might internationalize and and big and last longer and more and be more intense every effort done in finding those violent conflicts or basically preventing them is is welcome the second driver is political terror or I would say no respect of human rights and this is linking directly to what Alexandra said gender equality is especially to me a basic human right and if you start respecting human rights automatically the level of grievances will go down and and I would say the occurrence or the potential for for terrorism to thrive will go down will go down also I think when we look at the results we see this decrease and this for the fourth year of the amount of casualties by terrorism so as as Ryan said we are very good at tackling the consequences and taking away the potential and capacities of those terrorist groups to to harm us but we do not really have an action on the on the basic motivation of those groups on the on the grievances in our societies but also in a global societies that could lead to the use of violent extremism this is where at IEP we we use this concept of positive peace that is trying to create more resilient societies and and what we want to to work on is on those root causes for violence and root causes for terrorists those grievances that will that will lead to to the use of of violence in in in in different forms so I guess we are very good at tackling the consequences but we are not so good at preventing so I guess we need to invest more in so we invest a lot now in making sure that nobody can press a button or pull a trigger but we need to invest more in making sure that nobody just thinks about creating a device that could explore a shoot I would say thank you so this question is somewhat connected to the last two answers but I mentioned in my opening remarks that USIP is proud to host the Resolve Network which is really a commitment to research on violent extremism and one of the activities that we do from time to time are what we call research agenda setting workshops where we ask a variety of people who are studying specific trends in a specific place to ask themselves what are some of the unexplored gaps that we would like to see more empirical research on or more rigorous understanding of some of the most complex things and so one of the questions that I would like to ask you all is it's with some of the more trend level data in hand what are some of the most perplexing pieces that we think are relevant for policymakers that at first glance at the trend you may draw some conclusions but if you were really to have more rigorous research on it you might be able to see some other ones yeah I mean I think the the answers the last question started to hint at this but let me be more direct the the global community such as it is started to fund countering extremism efforts on a really small scale and not necessarily to include with that funding to measure the results of those efforts so we have some measurements of kind of the return on investment from an kind of extremism prevention program and those that we have are promising but we don't have nearly enough to truly know on kind of a scalable in a scalable way kind of what works like I said it beyond kinetic and coercive sort of law enforcement and and and war tools but to prevent the kind of next generation figuring that out the second element that I point to is the role of the internet and people tend to sort of look at it as oh it's an internet problem but the internet is a tool and so the really the question is how is this tool used by the humans or in some cases bots behind it and how does that actually factor in not just as oh my god the internet it's scary but in a rigorous in a rigorous way how does extremism spread from one platform to another and what has kind of worked in a civil liberties compliant way to protect protect people from being harmed on those platforms or harm coming from people who've used those platforms right and so I'd say kind of an online hate and extremism you know in index in a comprehensive way that's that's kind of challenging to to deal with but nonetheless is central to this problem in this kind of day and age and the third element is I I mentioned hate crimes and bias and how these things escalate to become extremism which is to say you know some extremists particularly on the far right seek to mainstream their views others seek to become more violent and kind of almost look like an ISIS type group with a far right ideology how can we look at kind of the the escalation and nuance in terms of how it relates to systemic racism how it relates to misogyny and how it relates to some of the other social ills that are beyond the actual sort of blunt instrument of the the security threat I think so those are some of the areas that I would look at they're big they're underfunded if you're out there in your funder like please please provide some researchers like Leanne and others and Aaron with with the resources to look at these things because we just don't have the tools at our disposal to take a comprehensive view we keep looking in a siloed way at tangible problems we can wrap our head around which makes sense but we really need to look kind of a little bit more comprehensively about social technological and preventive factors yes so I want to fully second-line on on the issue of we need to know more about what actually works and so I would say that impact evaluations is still a huge area where we need that we need more of and in terms of you know looking at it from the perspective of what is effective what does work but also in helping us understand what some of the unintended and adverse effects might be of of the many programs and interventions that we are designing and putting out there and where these things have not been sufficiently measured yet and it's it's very clear that the sort of do no harm principle is the foremost principle in in everything that we are doing in this space and so for for that to kind of have the evidence base to know where there are potentially adverse consequences is something that is that is really important so and of course then to guide us in terms of good practices what does work but what is also compliant with human rights what ensures that we are not just perpetuating some of the challenges that that we are in fact trying to address so that I would say is is a huge area for future research I would then say well I've already mentioned that in in the gender space there is definitely need for for more robust data on on all kinds of questions really and that would also allow us I mean one thing that is really missing in that space is also a more sort of cumulative knowledge in terms of going beyond just single case studies of which we have seen more and more but we have seen very little by way of comparative analysis and and research that allows us to draw some more generalizable conclusions about the the phenomenon that that we are looking at so that would be another another issue and then it's new forms of of terrorism I think whether that is sort of the evolution of the extreme right or potentially other new forms of terrorism that that we are beginning to see emerge and so that is I think there has been such a huge focus on let's say islamist inspired terrorism in in recent years and I think as we're sort of moving on and seeing other forms of terrorism emerge there will be an important need to kind of make sure we we don't overlook other manifestations of terrorism and that we are also it will be interesting to see to what extent we can apply some of the lessons we have learned over the past years when it comes to isel al-Qaeda type of terrorism and what differences we're going to see I think that's going to be another very very interesting area to to look into I again I agree with everything that's been said so far I'll add to that that's there there are you know it's it's hard to choose where to focus on in terms of you know what what information would be valuable to have I'll focus from my perspective having worked on the global terrorism database is what I one of the things that I've seen among analysis of the GTD the GTD is an event level data set and so all of the details about the about an attack that are in the global terrorism database are really limited to what happened on this day at this time and it takes a fair amount of additional work to you know as you can see as IEP has done to sort of make broader assessments based on that information and draw broader conclusions I spoke earlier about the importance of movement data and taking the information that we have about events and aggregating that into to movements and I think we we need to do more of that we're working on a number of projects on that now one of the ones that we're working on now I mentioned that we already worked on it for Islamic State and for al-Qaeda we're working on doing essentially the same thing but for far right extremist perpetrators of terrorism and the reason that this is is important or one of the reasons that this is important is because people use the term far right and it doesn't really have a particularly good definition or clear definition and so you overlook it turns out a lot of important information about well what does that mean what why are these people carrying out these attacks they fall into this this general category of far right and so what we've been doing is going through all of the attacks in the GTD I think back to 2000 and evaluating what are the specific ideologies associated with this which the the GTD currently doesn't really allow for right if there's an attack targeting a synagogue in Pittsburgh and the person's not a formal member of an organization so we're recording information about the perpetrator organization responsible there's no perpetrator organization this is a an individual well individuals have a lot of characteristics or ideological identities that they contain and and so well we're recording the information about how we want to describe this perpetrator in the global terrorism database that then everyone is going to to use in their analysis you say well we'll you know we can put this person down as a anti-semitic extremists certainly other labels would also apply white supremacists he had some anti-immigrant inclinations as well that were relevant to choosing that target and so these ideologies sort of overlap in very complex ways that are a little bit difficult to put into an excel spreadsheet and so we need to sort of think about how that works and and how these these movements these specific movements using specific terms overlap to to to produce violence and so we're marking all of the attacks down for all of the a comprehensive assessment of the ideological identities that were relevant to someone carrying out a particular attack right you can be white supremacists also anti-black also male supremacists also right we we actually came up with I think 20 different categories that specifically can characterize all of these attacks and far right also includes anti-government which is a very different and distinct movement of of people ascribing to a certain ideology and so we're trying to tease apart the the the sort of the composition of what is what is making up this increase in in far right violence that we've seen in the past Brian you had a two finger yeah just really briefly a lot let's search continue but let me just second something Erin pointed out which is about the and surged had data on this which is the level of unaffiliated people as a proportion of extremist groups in general and far right extremist groups in particular if you look at kind of the difference between a jihadist movement like an isis and a far right adherent particularly white supremacy and other and other groups but this is true in a lot of entities across the far right in the case of isis you have a defined group particularly true of al-qaeda but a relatively defined group and individuals who pledge allegiance to it in the case of al-qaeda heavy vetting to even get in the case of isis anyone can join we have to pledge allegiance and so you might be in texas and pledge allegiance to a group in iraq and syria but keep in mind how this actually helps policymakers in a way because once you say i'm a member of this group then the policies that address you the person in texas are derivative of how we approach that group so once we designate isis as a foreign terrorist organization we at least somewhat know what to do with this individual in texas who's pledging allegiance to them as erin alludes to in the case of far right extremists they either are not members of a group they jump from group to group the groups change uh you know the groups change based on you know getting sued they change because there's torrid affairs among the members they change because of of sort of ideological movement and they change much more frequently than the jihadist sense and you're not necessarily pledging allegiance you're going from group to group and kind of not necessarily attaching yourself to one or the other which then adds this new layer of complication for how to address it which is to say i don't know where you fit in my legal structure i know where the isis person fits at least relatively speaking i'm not sure kind of are you just a regular you know person with controversial political views or are you potentially violent extremists and it and adds this kind of new layer of complication i just wanted to second and just add that to erin's point but serge i didn't mean to cut you off go ahead no i don't i don't feel offended at all i think research should concentrate on i mean i said it before to me the use of violence and the use of terrorism is the end of a process and it's a consequence of grievances and and i would say other elements within within this process at iep we i spoke about positive peace but we basically what when we do so we we look at creating more equally equitable and inclusive and resilient societies societies that are able to to settle differences to settle disputes to address grievances in nonviolent ways when you and you spoke about silos i mean positive peace is a system we see peace as a system if you want to work with silos you can work with the eight pillars of positive peace one of those pillars for example is free throw of information we can look at how the internet is used how the internet should be used so enough i would say incentives to do to do specific research in basically creating societies in which it means violence should not be a way to settle disputes or at least make your point when when when you look at those countries that are topping both a global peace index and a global and or positive peace index those are usually countries that are that have a political system that is based on the on the liberal democracy and so this explains to you that those are political systems that allow i would say individual participation in in in policymaking and in influencing your governments those are systems that will provide to you a large palette of different legal and democratic means to influence government and to make your point to to address your grievance and and make sure that your government can can take it into account and maybe i will solve it through through policy or through i would say a change and change in policy also what we see is that when those legal tools and democratic tools are reduced by the use of political terror by discrimination non-access alienation from groups of people to those to those tools this is where the decision is made faster to use violence to to make your point or to address some grievances inequality or injustice so i guess if you want to do research the research on on those factors that are creating more resilient equitable equal and and just societies thank you everybody so we're going to move to the audience q and a we have had a couple questions in from twitter but i'm going to first go move to the audience and then i'll grab the twitter ones so i'll just ask that you raise your hand i'll call on you if you could quickly identify yourself and limit the question to be a question if you have a comment be please feel free to have comments after the close of the session directly to our panelists and so if there are any questions we have mic runners at both sides and i'll call on you and the mic will go to you hi there i'm matt mccallis department of state counterterrorism bureau a question is to colleagues at start and ip about whether you've ever contemplated trying to come up with a way to measure the political value of an act of terrorism an act terrorism is a means to an end the end is political there are things that one might observe within an ecosystem that you could contemplate trying to measure over time and part of the reason that this would be important is you know an act an incident of violence that kills x number of people on one day and a similar act of violence in the same location that kills a number of people in the same on a different day and have completely different impact politically that's a really fantastic question i can i kind of love that question um i mean the answer is we have we haven't done it i it's certainly something to think about because you're absolutely right i mean there are um you know attacks that take place in advance of elections to influence the election um there are are attacks that are are you know designed to uh to trigger a disproportionate reaction on behalf of the state and so they have secondary and tertiary um impacts i do not know how you would do that i mean i think it would be sort of interesting to try to yeah we should for sure um i think it would be interesting to try and it's a lot of things uh that we come across this is a good example of of the kind of thing when we're doing the data collection we're reading news articles about these things the news articles contain information about the the context what's going on what's happening um that we sort of struggle to capture in any kind of systematic way and i think that there are always um we call it information that's on the cutting room floor right we have a certain mandate to to collect the data uh and and you know not get distracted by interesting side projects um but but yeah i think that's a really great question because there it is explicitly the intention of of these assailants to have for their attacks to have follow-on effects and and figuring out a way to capture that would be really interesting well um i mean i will brief your colleagues next week just in about a week from now so i could say well give me the week to try to find an answer to your very uh interesting but difficult question also and i and you know i got a similar question um a couple of weeks ago in in paris at the at cian spo where somebody asked me well you look at this um ideologically inspired forms of uh salafi terrorism but how much political islam is there involved in in in these movements and i think that um and so the easy answer for me would be well to to get back to my presentation and you know the slide where i showed the different um the distribution of the of the motives for the use of terrorism where political motives were larger than the ideology or or nationalism uh but but i think i can go i can try to go further in in in my in answering my question your question when when you look at the figures for afghanistan and the taliban um last year we saw there were elections going on in in afghanistan and you have the negotiations where the taliban can come to the table and when when you look at the eventual goal of the action of the taliban it's to it's to topple it's to destabilize the government that is in place in afghanistan at the moment and basically in some form of insurgency and i think this is one of the main differences between terrorism and insurgency it's like a terrorism would like to influence the government and insurgent would like to become the next government so there is a political i would say underlying motive in every action that is that is made there and we see that most of the conflicts that we see today are in turn in conflicts most also based on insurgency and one of the faces of an insurgency the third face is the use of terrorism to basically destabilize so much a government and a system that you can become the next the next government so the fact that we had elections the fact that um the taliban wanted to strengthen their position on a negotiation table through the use of violence in the country there is a clear i would say there's a clear connection there between this enhanced amount of attacks and casualties and the political process going on in this insurgency in those elections and in the negotiation uh in which taliban i invited to uh to the table this would be my you know my personal analysis of what on your question uh yeah absolutely yeah just just real quick i'll fall up on that i think more directly i it calls to question whether if the the gti is a macro level assessment whether a kind of meso and micro level assessment of each attack and its impact um could be something that we could tackle and i'd be very interested in uh the impact of hate and some of these like i said kind of precursors that kind of pre-escalation to terrorism um but even also how the groups are sort of using each other as a justification for their uh their grievances and it becomes kind of cyclical in the sense of ISIS is using white supremacists and their propaganda and vice versa so the impact is you know a continuation and an exacerbation of other types of conflict just to give one um data point you know following the tree of life synagogue attack in the u.s. moonshot cve counter extremism company did an analysis of people using google to search for things that suggest that they are interested in joining a far-right group um those searches went up 92 percent in the immediate aftermath of the tree of life attack and specifically related uh terms search terms that suggest people were interested in committing violence against jews went up 182 percent uh following the kind of immediate aftermath and so the there's kind of these second-order effects that um you know i think tell in some ways even a more compelling story other questions hi doug pageant also from state i wanted to drill down a little bit on the um i mean i work on a human rights at state i'm the religious freedom office and i wanted to drill down a little bit on this sort of the context the hate crimes context the bias context and um because my completely unscientific sense is that we tend to privilege certain kinds of violence as terrorism and deep privilege uh other kinds of violence is tear as not terrorism uh terrorism has a cachet in our politics and i'm not accusing you of doing any of that at all but i'm wondering how you wrestle with it because um and and maybe you fully capture it but we do see a lot of hate motivated violence not necessarily deaths but vandalism uh on up you know different kinds of violence um we track lots of anti-semitic anti-muslim anti-immigrant attacks or sentiments um that typically aren't included in our terrorism context and i think it goes to what ryan's saying about that uh climate and it's really at the heart of what we try to do in the cv e world we're trying to address the broader context and i know that you're wrestling with how to how to understand the relationship between a movements and groups and the the convergences of incels with white supremacists with anti-semites and anti-muslims and anti-government and it's a very very difficult thing to do but i still get the sense that um at least in europe and the united states and new zealand and australia and other countries like that that are not in conflict zones that we tend to see we have very different categories for these different kinds of violence and um my goal is not to securitize or make terrorism um broaden the aperture of terrorism but to ensure that we're adequately capturing those other kinds of violence in our thinking about just viewing as a anti is sort of anti-violence policy so i'm just curious if you have reflections on how you struggle with that if you do and or if you're if you're and i knew you already actually addressed some of that in your in your speech but i just wanted to ping you again no that's a that's a fantastic point a really great question i entirely agree with um with everything you said um as a practical matter when we're collecting the data our decisions about whether we include something in the global terrorism database are not you know come down to these inclusion criteria um we have sort of fairly extensive coding notes about how we apply the inclusion criteria and and as a practical matter for for uh the difference between what we would call terrorism and hate crimes certainly not a a sort of bright line right there is overlap there there are some terrorist attacks that are also hate crimes there are some hate crimes that are also terrorist attacks the distinction that tends to differentiate between them for the purposes of the global terrorism database is um that we would not include an attack that is sort of spontaneous or impromptu uh you know i'm i'm at a bar and i'm um you know i yell a racial slur at someone and assault someone or something like that or something that that sort of arises from an altercation this is not to say that that's not terrible right those types of events particularly given their their the frequency of them right there these are these types of of more everyday occurrences um deeply impact the quality of life um for for people and so uh we grapple with it a lot um i try to you are right that the term terrorism has a certain weight to it uh that i honestly wish it didn't i i am baffled i'm genuinely deeply baffled um in many ways i mean in some ways i'm not because there are certainly you know high profile extremely devastating attacks that sort of gave the term terrorism the the weight that it has and so i i understand that um but if we were going through an exercise of you know characterizing the degree of badness associated with violence i i don't know uh i i don't really know a how you would do that right domestic violence is not terrorism but it's really truly and deeply awful right and and so i i encourage people to avoid you know making a sort of qualitative judgments about the badness of something based on the use of the term terrorism it's just it's not appropriate it's not if you think about it it's not practical right the things that terrorist attacks don't often impact someone's everyday life in the way that hate crimes do you know so if you're weighing priorities and what matters you know you just sort of have to puzzle through this a little bit um so yes while we collect uh data on terrorism it's it's it's not to the exclusion of the importance of these other types of violence i think in terms of the priority of uh of collecting data on other types of violence uh there are just some some sort of essential practical issues um create because of the the the frequency of creating the global terrorism uh excuse me the global hate crime database would be uh i mean impossible right i don't i don't know if that's possible right because of the scale because of the scope and so there are our practical considerations with doing that as a substitute for that individual countries may you know collect their own uh data on hate crimes individual jurisdictions may create their their own or collect their own data on hate crimes but it's certainly a bit of a tapestry and there are important gaps uh that need to be addressed but i think it's it is a mistake to um to assume that because we are collecting data on terrorism it's the it's the only type of violence that uh that is is significant particularly when you're considering sort of the everyday life of of citizens around the world yeah let me start with the disclaimer you ended with which is you know sometimes uh terrorism and hate crimes and other things are rightfully separate sometimes they are a symptom of the same causes we should talk about them together and not a fun answer but i think the answer to thinking about these challenges in context is seeking to provide that context so for instance um at edl we can collect annually an audit of anti-semitic incidents which includes vandalism as you mentioned and also uh you know assaults against jews that aren't necessarily uh you know it's because they're jewish but not necessarily rising to the level of uh of a you know terrorist attack it's a you know uh harassment of some kind um we also we look at kind of the most commonly used stat that we use as murders by extremists because in some cases it's lethal but it might not reach the level of a threshold where you feel comfortable calling it terrorism and so that really important metric of lethality is included in murder but it's not necessarily a terrorist act although sometimes it is um and so we try to kind of um collect information across the across the board um available online at our hate extremism and anti-semitism and terrorism or heat map for download if you're interested but i think kind of also at the crux of your question is is the interplay between the policy responses and you know we see one is this thing that we it's it's an emergency terrorism emergency and we see hate crimes as kind of not not the level of emergency and you know that's part of again i would call it a comprehensive approach in which we merge the two issues not in terms of the tools we use in terms of the priority that we give to them um so so for instance like a couple tools that we are sort of interested in in the united states which i think are are equally valid in other contexts are um providing grants to local law enforcement so that they can better understand how to identify a hate crime and also streamline their ability to report on it so the fbi publishes every year a list of the types of hate crimes by the sort of the place where they were perpetrated that that data comes from local law enforcement who are not required by law to report it and so those that have the resources to and for whatever reason wants to report it do but there are um 80 it's 82 or 83 don't quote me on the exact number i think around 83 cities around the united states that are 100 000 people or more in those cities where they either reported last year that they had no hate crimes or they didn't report whether they had hate crimes or not that's obviously in both cases ludicrous and we're not you know if if that were terrorism incidents it would be a national emergency uh but but because it's kind of a you know in some cases unfortunately is a lesser crime or lesser threat we don't kind of look at it um you know the same level of urgency and so finding ways to increase again the transparency of kind of who is reporting but also um that that you know an officer could call something vandalism and just vandalism and not a hate crime because they don't know how to identify them so increasing the ability of sort of those on the ground to to do that and create that data to create to sort of help incentivize the urgency so that we can create these types of programs and look at them so again we try our best to provide comprehensive data um you know there's some challenges to doing that and the and the like so the the government needs to have its own comprehensive data if it's going to be said to kind of address you know put its resources toward proportionately to the threat well you know when we when we compile the global terrorism index we often of course used the gtd but we from the gtd we only use those cases that are 100 percent identified as terrorist attacks so those were there where there is a doubt about is it is it a terrorist attack or not we do not take them into into the global terrorist index we concentrate basically on the tactic that is used that is called terrorism which is a crystallization of all other forms of violence and we see that when terrorism is used it's usually in an environment where all the forms of violence have been used before and I would say we can we can we can have this luxury at the Institute for Equity and Peace because we know that we measure all the other forms of violence into our global peace index so anyhow we measure those other forms of violence in another publication that we produce in which terrorism is one of the audit 23 indicators and I think I really like your question also because it's it's a matter of perspective we are going to we are going to release early 2020 a national peace index for one of the european countries and and one of the amazing results that we saw there is that you know this country when presenting the crime figures where they include all types of crime like I would say fraud or white-collar crime you could have an impression that this country is doing very well because those figures or those results are decreasing over the past years when you apply the the the system of looking of the use of violence instead of crime as such you will see that this country was basically increased the use of violence over the past over the past year so you really see contradictory results if you look at crime as such or the use of violence in those crimes or the use of violence within this society so I really like your question because you really made the point that that is that is very very important but terrorism is only it's in crystallization of other forms of crime and we we have seen in in many regions of the world local latitudes of violence that can then emerge into the use of the tactic that is called terrorism and that's where we focus on and perhaps just to add one dimension that hasn't been mentioned yet which is relevant for us when it comes to the UN Security Council and the types of of terrorism crimes that it would then put on its agenda there the decisive factor is the international dimension right whether it is a purely domestic phenomenon or whether there are international links and I think that is one very important dimension when it comes to the extreme right that we are grappling with right now in terms of understanding to what extent there are these international connections and how they actually work and and there are many challenges in that and I mean we discussed this issue of sort of you know the tendency for there to be less affiliation with one particular group and a less sort of centralized network and that poses then challenges in terms of understanding well but so how are these individuals and groups actually connected and the point that Ryan also made about the need to sort of further understand the online space in in that context I mean that is still a huge challenge and and something that we're looking at and sort of how you know there is ideological spread but to what extent there is also something more more organized when it comes to to financing when it comes to recruitment issues and other points so that that for us is the critical distinction so I'm going to go to the two questions from Twitter and then we'll come back to the audience they realize we are a little bit behind our original end time but we started about 15 minutes late if people have to leave please feel free to do so but we're going to go for about another 10 minutes so the first question is for Serge from Twitter we don't have identification of the person but the their question is what role can achieving the sustainable development goals play in terrorism would this help to mitigate the conditions that violent extremists migrate to and then the second question is for both Aaron and Serge and the question is how is data verified locally especially for more controversial findings such as do Nigerians believe the term fulani extremists accurately reflect violence on the ground let me let me start by the the second question we are very very careful when we talk about what's happening in Nigeria we recognize I mean this is exactly what I said in in my previous answer we recognize in Nigeria there are multiple form of violence organized or non-organized international influence or or national forms of violence and we see that of course this opposition between I would say pastoral pastoral people or groups of people and herders finding for the same resources land and water can sometimes crystallize in the use of terrorism so I think it would be a mistake to call to use the term fulani extremists it would be the same mistake to say that the ideologically Salafist inspired Islamist form of terrorism are the Muslims I would say it would be the same the same mistake fulani is a much larger group of population of which a very small fringe is using violence and is using then the crystallization of violence that is called terrorism can you please repeat the first one because I was so concentrated on second one on SDGs absolutely I mean this is this is this is a question question making my point about creating the goal of the SDGs is to promote development and positive peace is an innovative form of development so I guess the goal of both the SDGs and positive peace is to create those more resilient societies just equal and equitable societies in which the use of violence would not be a way to settle disputes or to address grievances and an IP has been doing a lot of research on the on the SDGs and the measurement of the SDGs and and unfortunately we have we came to the conclusion that only a 40% of all the indicators for the SDGs would be tier one so in which data is available and data is usable to to get to measure the application of those SDGs and and basically what we say at IEP is that the positive peace index and the levels of positive peace can be used kind of a surrogate of for those indicators of the SDGs that are not measurable at at the moment so the question about how to describe violence in in Nigeria and the people are carrying out violence in Nigeria is a really important one I think that in terms of how we verify the data so all of the data are based on on media accounts we do assess the the the sort of the degree to which there's any bias in the the sources and incorporate that into the data collection process specifically with respect to Nigeria I think there have been some there have been some criticisms of the use of the term fulani extremists in the global terrorism database to describe violent actors in in Nigeria for certain attacks I'll say two things the second one is far more important I think than the first one the first one is that we we do not try to impose terms from a sort of top down approach on in terms of characterizing actors we draw information from the source materials we use source materials that are as independent as possible and not sort of identified with either the state or or violent non-state actors so that's that's the that's the first thing so we repeat the terminology that we see reflected in in the media sources sometimes that's okay and sometimes that's problematic the second thing is the far more important thing which is that in the GTD we have certain sort of perpetrators that are identified by an ethnicity or a religion and that's because that's the only information we have about the the perpetrators under no circumstances ever for any place in the world Nigeria or elsewhere should anyone take that to be an indication that reflects on that broader group of people whether it is the fulani people vast majority of of whom are are not carrying out terrorist attacks whether it is um iraqi extremists in northern ireland we have attacks attributed to republican extremists under no circumstances is that a reflection on that broader group of of that broader identity group that we're that we're making a reference to it is only meant to describe that the the people who are carrying out this particular attack are identified as in the case of of Nigeria often uh as as fulani people um and it's important again and i can emphasize this is applicable for all of the uh sort of more generic identifiers that we don't have a particular formal organization um that is identified as the perpetrator of these of these attacks across the board that is not meant to reflect more broadly on on that particular identity group whether it's race ethnicity religion anything thank you thank you um um what we'll make okay i think for Nigeria what it's more important to understand for Nigeria is is the is a redistribution of the impact of terrorism in different regions of Nigeria so we saw a clear effort by the security force in the northeast tackling Boko Haramani you saw the figures on on on my slides before but while doing so they were unable to i would say maintain peace and security in other parts of Nigeria being the middle belt or the Niger Delta so you clearly see almost a a balance between there where the effort is put and where the concentration of the effort is put and on the other end other regions where the violence can emerge because there is not an influence on the security forces very helpful um so we only have a few minutes left so if anybody has questions we'll take all of them and then we will both answer questions and give last word up here so we have one two three four i'm not going to be able to get five um so if anyone wants to take back their question let me know otherwise the first four that i saw hey how you doing uh eric vanik i'm uh the fellow from the army war college here at the u.s. institute of peace thanks for your time today um i've done a lot of work within uh this is phenomenal the the amount of data that you have here and in boiling this down i can't imagine how long this takes but it really does inform a lot within do d and i'm sure within state aid and all the other individuals that are trying to really make stuff happen as well as conus um my question to you is you you mentioned search uh through terrorism and shootings it dramatically increased from 1982 to present i believe um and i i get it i understand the some of the numbers there but as we as we can you add any fidelity to do you guys take into account population growth one of the things that we always have trouble with in the army is suicide rates in relative populations i imagine you guys might be going through some of the same analytics i know it's very empirical question but it kind of helps us understand i think a little bit more of the data uh going forward thanks thank you and my name is teresa welsh i'm a reporter with devx this question is for surge i was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the economic impact of terrorism particularly in conflict states that are already struggling um you know with generating business gaining private investment etc and sort of how that you know reverberates across society and has a negative impact thank you thank you uh rachel stromsta recent graduate um you discussed a little bit about the impact of the internet uh in your presentation and i was wondering if you could further explain that and talk about some of the long-term impacts um of that on uh the research in the future per se it's my pleasure being to the us ip my name is led by i'm from nigeria but i stay in virginia so my questions i don't want to ask whether the us um ip has is there any structure like maybe a fit um um peace initiative that maybe they sense they can they they have sent or is on the ground maybe they sent to any country or any conflict zone you have to you have to keep peace among people because most of this i'm domestic violence i'm i'm migrated or generated to to terrorists should i should i go first i'm gonna look at the last one hello paul sudfin from cno resources consulting firm long-term state department thank you um part of the report's purpose is to be prospective and to use as a basis for offering advice a lot of the terrorism solutions you've discussed in what we've done are very kinetic but we have some clear parts of the aftermath of terrorism out there and i'm wondering if you can give some advice on how to deal with them or what you see they may cause specifically the tens of thousands of interned ISIS fighters in syria and many tens of thousands of family members where there's no obvious solution in every state's trying to pass the buck on how to deal with this if you could maybe draw something from your reporter research on on what that means for us and as we deal with it so i'll have i'll have surge go but let me just quickly tick them off so people know what they're and saying the first is how do we account for population growth the second is the economic impact in conflict zones the third is on the internet the fourth is on peace building directly in nigeria and the fifth is on the aftermath of terrorism um first question uh we use uh rate and percentages so we look at the amount of those type of attacks per 100 000 or so i mean i don't know if if i really got your your your question but uh yeah i mean i mean this is how you basically avoid the impact of this fluctuation in in in population uh about the economic impact so the economic impact that you saw this 33 billion this is directly related to the four indicators that we use because that's what we can measure uh so the amount of people killed injured and of course the damage that is caused to property uh what we do not include in there is i would say the indirect economic impact because it's very very difficult to uh to calculate it on a statistical basis um and also the investment made in counterterrorism i would say the extra investment made in security and intelligence services because those data are just confidential secrets so we do not we don't have access to this so this 33 billion i would say is only a portion of the real economic impact and it's focusing on the indicators that we use and that we can count and and and measure the internet i think um in february this year or the the Munich security conference um and we had a side event having basically around the table all major international organizations dealing with counterterrorism and i will not mention the which one but one of those organizations said that cyber terrorists did not exist and i was like at the really beginning of the session i was like what is this going to be a difficult session what this person meant is that um cyberspace has not been used yet to commit an attack and i would say my answer to that is is yeah that's right but everything before the the real attack is done on the internet so from radicalization recruitment training command and control name it it's already done on the internet and it's already done online um and what we also see is an evolution of what you could call the cybercaliphates in which what is not possible anymore um on the ground will now be done online um i think when you when you look at the terrorist groups or this type of organizations especially when they are crushed like i see at the moment what they are looking for is this low input high output type of of attacks so at least investment i think the internet is the best uh the best environment to uh to do so for Nigeria um i spoke about positive peace a lot today also in kind of a pve type approach we are doing workshops we are training people in positive peace we have a network of at the moment more than 1,000 vibrant ip ambassadors scattered around the world that are supporting this initiative personally personally i trained young libyans trying to you know train them in positive peace to create a better future for libya we are negotiating now with iraq especially northeast in iraq and the Kurdish part of iraq uh jordan so that's in my region so this region the men are region most impacted by by terrorism is really receiving this idea of um preventing and training in positive peace for Nigeria i think for the first time this year we were able to with one of those peace ambassadors do a gti launch for skype in in lago san jia this has been very well received and all the participants wanted to invest more into into peace and positive peace and i i really hope and i pray for to for us to be able to have this type of of positive peace training in your country also in the in the near future at ip we have an office in arari zimbabwe that is responsible i would say for the southern part of the middle part of africa and the responsibility is distributed between me and my colleague in in arari um i kind of forgot a little bit to your point is um what was the fifth one what to do in the aftermath of terrorism with situations like al hol and others um what that may mean for for our policy yeah yeah all right all right so yeah i mean yeah okay the last year one part of the one slide on the presentation last year was focusing on the response to foreign terrorist fighters and you know reintegrating those those persons into your society and we we clearly saw that western countries would focus more on um imprisonment and uh you know uh incrimination of the of the activities of those people where countries that are that would be more into the regions affected or countries where islam was the the the the main religion of representing the main religion in this country would go more for reintegration for those type of of persons and i think what we need to look at there is the socio-economic environment in which those and the government's environment in which those countries are at the moment uh when you take tunisia for example where tunisia in our is the the smallest country of the region but uh sent most of the foreign terrorist fighters to to syria and iraq um five more than five thousand i'm not sure that those five thousand were all crazy gitis thus we can have a representation of those people but i'm pretty sure that a large percentage of those of those young men and women leaving tunisia to go and and and serve the islamic state uh we in the west would call them expats trying to find a better future trying to find a job and and islamic state was uh offering a lot of jobs and not only as a as a fighter or as a terrorist fighter but also in constructing the the caliphate in constructing the islamic state so um yeah i guess that's what we need to um i mean there is another type of approach to uh returning foreign terrorist fighters or people that were in those camps um pretty clear i'm pretty with you when um when you say it's a responsibility of the states of origin of those fighters of those of those persons i think in europe we were really well placed when somebody else was taking care of those persons instead of us and now we are directly facing the problem and you you you clearly see that the answers are completely completely different and also throughout europe uh we we see a different type of answer and this really goes from a very hard answer like you come back you're jailed we don't want to see you anymore and you're not part of society and then you would uh this would go to the other direction countries like danmark that foresee an entire process of deradicalization and reintegration within uh within within society anyone else want to chime in i'll sorry i'll just do the the online radicalization questioning side brought that up um if you look at uh over 50 people killed because they were muslim in christchurch new zealand uh there was someone killed in uh poway california because they were jewish uh and then over 20 people killed in alpaso texas because of their immigrants or members of the latinx community so one attack uh two attacks in the united states one overseas uh and one attack against latinx community one against jews one against muslims what they all had in common was before the attack a white supremacist manifesto was posted online on each hand uh in the case of the pittsburgh tree of life attack the largest antesemitic attack in u.s history uh the perpetrator there posted to gab a far-right extremist social media outlet before before his attack um i'm reminded of start had a great report actually a few years ago about as foreign fighters are using are more likely to use social media the time of radicalization uh is going down right and then you have these three white supremacist manifestos all citing similar information and sometimes citing each other and and all of them site or most of them cited anders brevick who was the uh 2011 perpetrator of the attack in norway um and then brenton tarrant who perpetrated the christchurch attack was cited in the others and so you have in our data these people would be sort of tagged as lone actors and yet they're all citing each other and are part of the same movement and that movement is now sort of uh you know escalating in threat at the speed of the internet right at the same time we did a study that looked at you know when twitter kicks a lot of people off of off of their platform they then join gab and then they sort of become sort of angry they add twitter to the reason that they have a grievance that's part of their sort of radicalization grievance narrative right and then in the case of 8chan 8chan is you know people who are on reddit were too controversial they got kicked off they joined 4chan they're too controversial they got kicked off they joined 8chan and created 8chan uh then 8chan service providers pulled at service then it got new service providers came back online then those service providers pulled at service and then it came back as 8kun 8kun so now it's largely back and so i think the the story that tells is that you know as much as it would sound like a solution to just sort of delete objectionable content it is at best a partial solution and at worst kind of could exacerbate some of the problems and so when i say you know we need to pay careful attention to the rule of the internet it's it's radicalization it's coordination in some cases someone posting a manifesto on hn helps law enforcement because then they know there's something that's about to happen and i know roughly where to look so it might actually help them interdict someone before they come in and attack we saw for instance people an individual in las vegas who was posting openly online that he wanted to attack our las vegas office so we reported that to law enforcement so he was a dick that interdicted before that became a sort of proper manifesto right and so so there's that there's you know wanting to counter the objectionable content without becoming part of the grievance narrative that makes the problem worse so there's you know facebook has a policy where they will in some cases refer people that they see on their platform to life after hate the former neo-nazis that now pull people out of that group so that's another kind of type of solution that can be explored rather than you know content moderation per se and so i think you know this is a an expedited version of a complex answer to say that the internet has just fundamentally changed how these problems manifest but there's an incredibly incredible amount of nuance that we have to sort of that we use both and how we use how we assess the internet as part of the problem and also how we assess what the potential solutions are so i just wanted to come back to the question on the aftermath of terrorism and the question of return because i think i mean it is really important to to bear in mind that we do have a sort of internationally agreed normative framework on this and we have policy guidance and we have security council resolutions that talk about the need for for all states to put in place prosecution rehabilitation and reintegration strategies and so of course we have we have seen some variation in terms of how that is being done specifically and there is of course still a lot of controversial debate around the the specific issue of proactive repatriation of some of these individuals but i think it is very important to to stress that we do have policy guidance we do also have practice when it comes to to this issue and not only in the context of iso but also in the context of other terrorist groups where return is is of course a major a major policy question and how to handle that and so on on that issue i just wanted to sort of to add that when we look at the current situation with with iso one of the messages that we're not really getting out especially in both countries that are currently very reluctant in terms of how to how to handle this of a situation is that we've had a large number of returns that we've had both countries who have proactively repatriated their citizens and prior to that we have of course had a large number of independent returns from all demographics so a lot of the male fighters who have returned and who have been dealt with in their national systems either through the criminal justice process where it was possible to prosecute them where they then serve prison sentences and the rehabilitation work starts in those prison settings right as well as in alternative settings non-criminal justice settings and there have also been success stories in terms of how some of those casals have been have been handled and so i think it is it is important to to remind ourselves of that i find one of the statistics that you highlighted in the gti actually very striking in that context we know that right now there is a very large number of women who remain in in the camps in in northern syria and european states have been particularly reluctant when it comes to the repatriation of that demographic and you have one figure in there that actually talks about europe and says that 50 percent of male foreign terrorist fighters from europe have actually returned whereas the rate for women is 18 percent and so that goes to show well if it has been if we have been able to somehow address the the situation of those male fighters then surely we will also be able to to find the right means and ways of dealing with with the women and children who are in that situation that is is really untenable in in the way that that it is both for humanitarian and for for long-term security reasons but this question of of return i do also want to make the point that that is really something if we're if we're looking at some of the age groups that we're dealing with and how young many of these individuals were this is really a generational challenge that we're looking at this is not an issue that will just you know be able to resolve with a quick fix and and finding a magical solution for for this current situation and so this is why i think it is very important as as you said that this is seen as a collective responsibility that that we all share right i mean we've had citizens from literally across the whole world travel to to the conflict zone in syria and in iraq and we saw that as a collective security challenge and that collective challenge now continues and will continue for many years in terms of how how we address and and and deal with it thanks so much so as a moderator you have a couple jobs to do the first is to start on time which i failed the second was to end on time which i failed the third however is to invite excellent panelists which i think i did okay on and the fourth is to not opine too much and so far i've been pretty pretty less opinionated than my natural state would normally belie but i have to comment on this last question sir so here at the institute of peace we are launching an initiative focused on violent extremism disengagement and reconciliation trying to see both the individual and how they disengage as well as the community level and how they reconcile because what we've discovered through research and through years of practice in and outside of violent extremism is that belonging to an ideologically motivated group is inherently a social activity and so your reconnection back to social groups which has been alluded to or with regard to the far right and how you're able to have identities as part of a group identity that social aspect is incredibly important we know this through decades of peace building that that new social identities can't overtake old social identities and so we're really excited to be able to focus on that the other thing that is part of that focus is on trauma and stigma both the trauma of the individuals as well as the stigmatization and how those are barriers to that type of engagement and the last thing i'll say because i have alexandra here is trying to understand how violent extremist groups from all different types of the spectrum have become gender experts they are excellent at reifying the gendered identities and roles and responsibilities of of men and women and how do we do that in our rehabilitation and reintegration efforts as well i would like to give a big thanks to everybody who has stuck around who's been with us online and please join me in thanking our panelists i'll also let you know that there are surveys on your chair if you would be kind enough to be able to fill those out we would deeply appreciate it if you need pens i believe that we have some additional ones and if you'd like to stay involved with us here at usip please feel free to get in touch thank you so much again and enjoy the rest of your day yes yeah yeah