 Welcome, everyone. My name is Linda Beshai, and I am the director of North Africa programs here at the US Institute of Peace. Thank you for joining us here today for this important discussion on women, peace, and security. For those of you who use social media, I'm happy to announce that we had a hashtag for this event. The hashtag is Nina Jender, Nina R. Caps, gender capital G. And for those of you who are less familiar with the Institute, it was founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and essential for US and global security. We pursue this vision of a world without violent conflict by working on the ground in areas of conflict with local partners. We provide people, organizations, and governments at every level with tourist knowledge and training to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and to resolve it when it does. This, of course, includes an important focus on women and their contributions to peace and security. Since its adoption in 2000, the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security has inspired more than 50 member states to adopt national action plans to implement provisions. However, for most of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa, insufficient public awareness and political buy-in and a shortage of targeted resources have stalled efforts and continue to hamper implementation even where advocates have succeeded in promoting the adoption of a plan. USIP and the University of Massachusetts Lowell have partnered on a special report looking at UNSCR 1325 and its implementation in the region. You will have seen copies of the report outside. And it's currently also posted online. This research, led by Dr. Paula Raymond, who will speak shortly, conveys a joint effort in contributing to the field of peace building by a more dedicated attention to the women, peace, and security agenda. USIP has a long history of outreach and partnership with universities, including sponsoring research, hosting conferences, providing educational tools for greater understanding of nonviolent means of managing conflict and for professionalizing the field of peace building. I would like now to recognize Martin Meehan, the president of the University of Massachusetts, to thank him and the university for their support with this report. Marty is a former Massachusetts congressman and he served for eight years in the house where he was a friend and supporter of the institute and he just got his first tour of the building today, we're pleased to say. So he knows the DC community well, he knows USIP and we're honored to have him here. I'd like to hand it over to Marty now to say a few words. Thank you very much Linda and I'm delighted to be here and I remember I was in the Congress from 1993 to 2007 and I left to become the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and I remember in 1996 when the Congress authorized a land transfer with the Navy for this property and then I remember in 2000 an appropriation that passed in order to build this building and I'm really impressed, it's a fabulous building and I'm happy that I was in the Congress to participate in this, also happy that I'm no longer in the Congress. But I'm delighted to be here for this panel discussion and to be proud of the public launch of the security report on women and security in the Middle East and North African region and delighted that the university play a important role in this. UMass is a proud to be a partner with the United States Institute of Peace and I see all kinds of important collaborations that where we could think of other initiatives that we could collaborate on. I was a chancellor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for eight years, I am now the president of the system. We're a system of basically five campuses in Massachusetts with 75,000 students. We do about $640 million worth of research a year and we had a great discussion around lunch earlier looking for ways that universities could help collaborate with this institute and think about ways that universities could play a more dramatic role around the world in fostering collaboration and peace. The university is fortunate to have exceptional faculty members like Professor Paula Raymond who are passionate about collaborating with individuals and institutions to engage and address real world problems. I wanna congratulate Paula as well as Seth Eisen who's here and Emily Parker for the work that they did on this special project. Public research universities play an essential role in addressing the challenges that our society faced today and we need to keep building on that. Public research universities were a great idea that towards the end of the Civil War, a congressman from Vermont, a congressman moral joined with Abraham Lincoln and they established land grant universities and the result of that has been research university, public research universities all across this country that provide an accessible high quality education but also engage in research to try to solve the country and the world's problems and UMass is more committed to ever in participating with a very diverse student population in trying to affect positive change in the United States and around the world and I think as university leaders we have a unique opportunity to impact students in the ability to conduct research in helping them get into a better position to improve whether it's our healthcare system in the United States, our healthcare around the world finding ways to manage global climate change, a protector environment or supplying food and providing energy and clean water and growing populations and developing countries around the world. I think universities have a very important role to take. Finally, we want to continue to engage with the United States Institute of Peace and expand the roles that colleges and universities can play so I look forward to working with the Institute to look at other ways that not only that the University of Massachusetts can collaborate but other college and university presidents from around the country. It's now my honor to introduce a colleague from UMass Lowell who worked with the United States Institute for Peace and really took the lead on this report. Paula Raymond is an outstanding faculty member who's been deeply involved for over 30 years in Middle East peace efforts including during her time as the director of the UMass Lowell's Middle East Center for Peace, Development and Culture. During her two Fulbright Awards she focused on bringing together men and women, government, NGO and community leaders involved with constructing nonviolent avenues for conflict resolution across political, religious and economic boundaries. She led the formation of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her special interest in empowering gender equity in peace negotiations led her to establish bridges between women in Northern Ireland, in Israel and the Palestinian areas that emphasize the importance of redefining national security to embrace economic development, gender equality and broad-based education. One of the things I miss about no longer being the chancellor at UMass Lowell and now being the president of the entire system is an opportunity to work directly with outstanding faculty like Paula Raymond. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor Paula Raymond. This is for the vertically challenged among us when you're making the big step. Thank you so much, President Meehan for those kind and important remarks. First of all, I want to just take a moment of silence to begin our discussion today. To be thinking about all of our colleagues, people that we interviewed, that Seth and Emily and I interviewed during the course of preparing this report, all the people in the refugee camps, all the people still living in fear and poverty and conflict. And I would like to just take a moment to bring them into the room as a sign of appreciation. Thank you very much. In particular, I do have a few more appreciations. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to Seth Eisen and Emily Parker and Victoria DeNoon for the countless hours that we can't, their priceless that we all put into this report. And together with the most amazing group of people that I've been able to work with here at the United States Institute of Peace, Kathleen and Steve and Raya and Lucy and Manal and Steve Raskin and Jeff and many others at USIP without whom truly this was a team effort. I want to thank also Danny for all the event planning and making sure we knew where to be when. And most particularly, my heartfelt thanks for the growing friendship with Linda Bishai and for her persistent perseverance and patience to shepherd this report. We give deep thanks. And as I mentioned, we interviewed 30 individuals, government leaders, men and women leaders from Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and Tunisia. And it is really their voices that I just wish to mention in a few minutes today to begin our thinking and our general understanding together. The report itself is available. It's outside the door. We welcome your comments. We urge you to read it. It is food for thought of how we can all move ahead, given our various positions and who we represent in this room. There are three primary lessons that are in this report. The first is the importance of transforming our definition of security to include women's rights and economic justice and understanding that security is more than just fueling countless military cycles, one after the other. We need peace linked with security. Second, that women and men need to be united in the struggle to ensure gender equality in all of the societies in the Middle East and in the MENA region as a whole. It is not a one-handed handshake. Men and women must do this together. And the third major lesson is how all of us that are primarily in the United States, how can we advance preparations for peace rather than continually to sell war as the means for resolving conflict? And given our discussion earlier this afternoon, how especially can we utilize the resources of universities and educational centers and places like USIP to train youth and to prepare them for a future of peace rather than war? As Alvar Mirdal said nearly 100 years ago, the famous Swedish economist, what is the true definition of national security? Alvar said, if you want a secure nation, you need to invest in healthy communities. And if you want healthy, safe communities, you need to invest in healthy families. And if you want healthy families, you need to invest in healthy women. This was a basis for the emergence of UN resolution 1325 in the year 2000. And we celebrate 16 years since then. It is perhaps one of the most important documents that we have had since the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. We learned from the men and women that we interviewed that 1325 has given them a common language to talk about injustices and violence in their regions. We learned from them not to think of women as monolithic nor any of their societies as monolithic. And at the same time, we learned, however, that they face daunting obstacles in creating community capacities to move forward on national action plans that were called for as part of implementation of 1325 and that they are still seeking the national leadership necessary to move that forward. I will not go through all the other quotes and substance of the report that Emily and Seth and Victoria and all of our friends and colleagues here at USIP helped us evolve and gather in the report. I leave that to you to read. But I would like to just end my brief remarks with four basic recommendations that are in the report just to list them very briefly. First, rather than elevating security and economic bottom line thinking, above all else, we need to foster the understanding for a women peace and security agenda. A women peace and security agenda enhances and complements any future considerations for global security and reaching the economic development goals that we have. Second, that there needs to be concerted resources put on training and awareness raising with local leaders, men, politicians, religious leaders, stressing that women's rights are beneficial to the society as a whole, not at all extraneous, not secondary, but absolutely essential. The outreach towards men and boys would also help cultivate new advocates, expand our support bases, and challenge the violent notions of masculinity that exist. Three, the international community should be encouraged to look beyond the well-recognized NGOs that exist and move towards capacity building for local NGOs, people working on the community levels, and not to forget about people in rural areas outside the city locations. We have to remove the barriers in law and practice that inhibit NGOs to provide services, and we need to create protection for women's organizations to work effectively. And finally, and this is especially to my USIP colleagues and also to people in the State Department and people working in wonderful organizations that Sonam will talk about, I can later. We need to foster and fund safe spaces for internal conversations among diverse groups. These conversations need to bring together men and women across different boundaries so that they can deep in trust, develop a greater voice, and create societies that are truly more inclusive. I would like to end with one of the most meaningful quotes from the report that we did by Shahira Shalabi. Shahira is a Palestinian activist in Israel who spoke with great caring about how it is becoming more and more difficult for Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens who are Arabs to find safe spaces to have these dialogues. She urges all of us who have the wherewithal in our different organizations to find ways to help them prepare for peace. And I hope that we can take that particular call. What does that mean? To help others prepare for peace, what is our responsibility to be thinking about that together and to share more together? Thank you so much to USIP for the opportunity to work on this report with you. Thank you so much. It is with great pleasure that I introduce a new colleague for myself, who I've had the pleasure of getting to know, who is on our advisory group, Kathleen Kunast, who is the senior gender advisor here at USIP. And I also want to say that Kathleen's voice over the past, I want to say multi-years, Kathleen, has been just such an important voice for creative thinking, for intellectual scholarship, and for leadership on issues of women, peace, and security. And it was with great pleasure. Kathleen, thank you so much. Thank you, Paula. I want to, of course, begin the conversation with you all this afternoon by once again congratulating our colleagues at the University of Massachusetts and her team. Paula, thank you. And also to my colleagues here at the Institute, who have navigated new terrain, I congratulate all of them as well, because integrating gender into all of our work here at the Institute of Peace is front and center of our efforts to be very intentional in this optic. And I think this particular program today is a great demonstration of bridging the analysis. And when I say gender analysis, I always say gender is not another name for women. It is really about men and women. It is about creating new social contracts, because that is one thing we know about violent extremism and violent conflict is that all things fall apart. And the social contracts that are built from the old fall away and in the rebuilding of society, new opportunities exist. And that is really the vision of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. And I want to really begin, for those of you who may have never heard of that, code words. So many of us think of it as inside baseball. But after you leave this afternoon, you will know 1325, you will recognize it. But it really is the founding document of what is called the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda. It is 16 years old, and it has changed the way we think about war and we think about peace. And it is really very simply recognizing that women are indeed victimized in war in many different dimensions, but that women also need to be empowered to play a key role in building the peace. And if those two pillars, there are a lot of others, but we're going to focus on two today, that will be a great way forward. I am joined this afternoon by three absolute experts in the area of women, peace, and security. And I'm going to introduce them shortly. But just as a very straightforward roadmap, we're going to do several rounds of Q&A and then open it up to you, our very much participatory audience. And we really want to begin first, though, with what was the vision of 1325, some 16 years ago. And I always remind folks when I talk about 1325 that this was not the general assembly that decided on 1325. This was the Security Council. And so I'm going to begin with that kind of looking past to our past as a way to dive into this report about the Middle East region and North Africa. So then we will really come around to the question, is this an operable way forward? Are security agreements and security resolutions useful tools to help not only change the international optics, but more importantly, the national and community optics? So without further ado, I want to introduce to you, and I'm going to introduce them all and then ask them for their comments. And Stephanie Foster is here on my left. And I will mention to those in the room a complete bio. I hope you all have. Stephanie currently serves as the senior advisor and counselor to the ambassador at large for global women's issues at the US Department of State. And she is responsible for really the world, right? But she really helps connect all of the not only regional issues, but also the functional ones. When I met Stephanie about four or five years ago, she was serving at the US Embassy in Kabul and was focusing on women and civil society. So she brings great on-the-ground experience, great optics to the work now at the State Department. She will share more of that background shortly. Next to Stephanie is another colleague I've known for a long time, Sanam Naragi Underline. She is the co-founder and executive director of ICANN. She has also served in academic arenas, both at Georgetown and at MIT and most recently at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is one of the civil society drafters of the UN Security Council 1325. How did I do that? Just to keep everyone on their toes here. And she is a voice of activism globally. And she will share with us the work that she is doing, particularly around what the women say. And to Sanam's left is my colleague, Ambassador Steve Steiner here at the US Institute of Peace, who really has led our men peace and security agenda. It's an agenda that we introduced about three and a half years ago. And it has gone through interesting times because there was actually quite a bit of pushback when we introduced it. But we were very firmly of the mindset that women can't be another silo in Washington or in New York or anywhere else. That this is a very engaged process and that men too must be a part of changing society and especially the social contract and gender equality. Steve comes to us with years of experience as a diplomat in the Foreign Service, serving in Moscow, Zagreb, Rome, and other places. And most recently at the State Department in the Office of Global Women's Issues, which I believe you were the first man in that office. I brought another young guy with me. OK, thank you. I'm not going to be too long. So I'm going to stop there because I could take the entire time with these amazing bios. But I really am going to set up the storyboard. And I'm going to ask Sanam, who was on the scene when 1325 was designed to begin setting the scene, I'm going to turn then to Stephanie and talk about the years after that and Steve most recently. So Sanam. I teach advocacy, so I have to tell you in three minutes history of 20 years of work. So the context is end of the Cold War. We saw civil wars. The UN system is not designed to deal with internal conflicts. We have to respect the sovereignty of states. So states are actually involved in massacring their own citizens. We have trouble getting in there. And our friends from Syria know that very well. And what we were seeing was that it's ordinary people taking up the role of dealing with peacemaking and dealing with relief and so forth. And in that context, we were seeing women do this work across the world. Columbia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Guatemala. In 1998, we had a conference in London that brought 50 women together from across the world to talk about their experiences. And that was really the moment where we said we need to have a global agenda that acknowledges the voices and work of women in conflict areas. And it needs to be in the Security Council because that's the premier international institution that deals with peace and security issues. That was the general thrust. We had a global campaign of going down to the grassroots, in war zones, talking to women's organizations that were active in peacemaking to get their issues and distill it and bring it into the Security Council. In 2000, we did research behind this. I interviewed many women who'd been involved in peace negotiations. It's really touching to be in this panel talking about the Middle East because Israeli and Palestinian women actually really inspired the work. People like Nomi, Hazan, and Hanna Nasrawi at the time were really critical in the work that they've been doing. And we brought, literally, we brought the Security Council to women's organizations in New York during the time of the Commission on the Status of Women, and they demanded the Security Council resolution. We drafted the first version of it. So it was very much the work and words of women from the grassroots going into the institution that is so dehumanized, if you want. And I think that the legacy of this resolution is that we brought the human face of war into the Security Council. So now when, and women peace builders, I think one of the things which is really important to acknowledge is that women who are doing peace building always talk about men. They will talk about their sons. They'll talk about their husbands. They'll talk about their communities. Through women, we see the faces and diversity of everybody on the ground. And it's not surprising for me that over the last 15, 16 years, we now do have a men's peace and security agenda. We now have a youth peace and security agenda. That's all at the Council level. So the essence of this comes from the grassroots into the Council. And so it's not surprising that it still resonates in places where there's war, and we still see women rising up as peace activists. And the challenge really is, are we willing to listen to them? Because they are challenging very strong vested interests and power interests. It's not about culture that excludes women. It's about power. And this agenda is challenging that entire power base. On that, three minutes. Well done. Thank you. So take us into what happens with a Security Council resolution like this at the national level. Because Paula talked about national action plans. Maybe you could give us a little bit of a sense of the US national action plan. Because then that will help set the framework as to what is happening in MENA today. Thank you very much. And thank you, of course, for having me here. And it's daunting, because there are many experts in this room. And I'm always somewhat daunted by that. But I will say on behalf of the work we do in the United States government, we have a national action plan on women, peace, and security as do a little less than 50 other countries around the globe. We came to the national action plan game a little bit late. Our national action plan is now four years old. It was established and launched in 2011 by President Obama. We just came off of our three year review and are in the midst of drafting the second iteration of our plan, which I'll talk a little bit about later if anyone's interested. It's somewhat of an interesting process. There are three agencies in the US government responsible for this national action plan, the State Department, USAID, and the Department of Defense. Those are the three agencies that obviously have our key actors in terms of the machinery that we have in the US government that addresses these issues. That all sounds very dry and boring, I must say. As I talk about it and as I think about it sometimes. But really what this is is the national action plan has allowed us really to have a framework for the work that gets done by people not only in Washington DC, but really more importantly on the ground in our embassies, posts, missions, and combatant commands around the world. We are very large institutions and we have people all over the place who are doing a lot of disparate things. The national action plans sometimes create frameworks for us. They help us build coherence around the work so that we start to understand the work we're doing in a different way. It also helps spur work, so it not only makes sense of the work that gets done, but it helps to do new work. It helps us to think about diplomacy differently. It helps us to think about as we're developing meetings for Secretary Kerry or the president or some other high-ranking official who goes to a country who's in the room. Are there women in the room? I can't tell you the number of times I have this conversation still. Have we invited women to that meeting? Who are they? Are they people who we feel like cannot just speak about women's lives as victims, but women as participants, women as problem solvers, and women who have helped resolve whatever problem sits before them? Not just in conflict-affected countries, but in fragile countries and frankly anywhere. So this is a tool that really helps us. And it was a very lengthy process to formulate it, to really think about what is this resolution for the Security Council say, what does it mean, what should we do. But when it comes right down to it, what it means is that it created a way for us within the US government to really think about our work differently. And it's a tool that we use, that we use as the people within our system who are responsible for being the internal champions for this to really continue to say, we do this work pursuant to the Security Council resolution, but we do it because it makes us more effective. And part of what we also do as we evaluate the work is evaluate how it has made us more effective. I think we see and we know that the statistics show in terms of peace negotiations that many peace negotiations fail, in fact, fail quite badly more than 50% of them. But when women are engaged in peace negotiations, we know that they are much more likely to succeed and last a much longer period of time. And this is a study that was just done by the UN to mark the 15th anniversary of the Security Council resolution. But even in countries where we're not at the place where we have a peace negotiation in place and a resolution, we know that engaging women creates a stronger fabric and it creates more resilience. And I'm going to end with just one story because I think it's very instructive. We had funded through actually a grant program out of our office, a group of women in West Africa in political participation, civic participation. We funded them. They built a network really focusing on the work they were doing. It was very focused on getting them engaged in civil society and perhaps running for public office. Well, lo and behold, when the Ebola outbreak occurred, these were women who were already working together, who had good networks, who had good lines into the communities in which they lived, and were able to be tapped as part of the Ebola response and recovery effort. Now, I'm not going to say that this group of women solved the problem, but they were able to really provide a very real time way for those women to be part of the solution that was being developed in a very, very difficult situation. And we think the fact that we worked with them ahead of time by happenstance. We didn't know the Ebola outbreak was going to happen, but that we had really started to help support these women in their efforts to really be participatory in their communities and civil society building their capacity. It ended up, it was another tool that could be used by their own community and by their own country to really address an issue that was very real and that threatened, particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and that part of West Africa to really undermine some very hard-fought gains in those countries, Liberia being war ravaged for many years, et cetera. So I think we see that sometimes we are taking actions that we see under this rubric of women, peace, and security in 1325 that seem very metaphysical. But when we actually think about what they are, they have a very positive impact on the ground, and they have a very positive way of moving forward. And so those are some of the things that we think about as we think about using this national action plan both to prod others who work with us in the US government and to also capture what we do. Thank you. That helps us bring us into really the work that a national action plan does in other countries. And I'm thinking, Steve, you are somebody who has walked the full path of security formally as ambassador at large on arms control and disarmament. So you know that side of the security story. And I'm interested in having you give us a little bit more of a reflection of when you made that transition in your own career and also how you saw it in your work in Iraq, because that's really where your transformation, if I can say so, as a man engaged in the women, peace, and security agenda really occurred. Well, OK, thank you, and welcome, everybody. I can tell you that in the year 2000, when the Security Council came up with 1325, I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know it was happening. I didn't know much about women's rights movements at all either. I was still in my foreign service career. And in the last several years of my foreign service career, I was doing nuclear arms negotiations, the old Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and the START Treaty, Strategic Arms. I am diversity minded and always have been, and I noted with pleasure back then that on my delegations, we have a lot of women, really good experts in the field. The Russians on the other side, I was involved in these US-Soviet negotiations. And then with the successor states, they had none. And actually, an interesting point is when Ukraine became independent and they became one of our partners, they made it a point to have women at the table in meaningful roles, I think just to show the Russians, you know, their place. And to show us, it's pertinent today, that they were sort of aspiring to the values that we hold. So that was good. When I retired from the Foreign Service in 2002, I went to work by request with a friend of mine who had become Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs. And I asked her if I could come work with her on democracy and human rights issues. And the minute I started doing that, or maybe the second day, I saw you can't get there on democracy and human rights. I was working on the Millennium Challenge Account, helping to shape it. I was working on something called the Global Community of Democracies. And I began to see you can't get there on any of these things if you don't empower women. And Condi Rice, Secretary of State then in the Bush administration, used to love to say half of democracy is not a democracy. And that's entirely true. And I feel very strongly and have felt from that time that any country that doesn't empower half of its population, particularly the female half, politically, economically, socially, is not going to be a very successful nor a very gentle country. I then got into women's rights issues and after the overthrow of Saddam in Iraq, we got $10 million to start a capacity-building leadership program for Iraqi women and I was asked to start that up and head it. And I did that for five years. And by that time I was really hooked and I was placed in the Old International Women's Affairs Office at State. And I was really into it by that time and I began to see how women are affected by conflict, the role that women can play coming out of conflict and in trying to build peace. People often ask me how I can go from nuclear arms negotiations to women's rights, but there's a really simple answer and that's in both cases, bringing down nuclear arms levels and empowering women. We're building a safer world, a more civilized world and this is definitely a security issue. So I saw that before I knew about 1325 that this is a security issue. But one problem we had then and that annoyed me a lot, I was thinking about men, I was in a room so often with 50, 55, 60 women and I was the only guy at state when I was still at state. And I realized that had to change and I came to realize that can't change by talking about gender issues because guys think that gender issues are for women and that we had to find other ways. And when I came here to work with Kathleen at USIP, the first thing we did was start a lessons learned exercise on what is the best way to empower women and countries that have gone through violent conflict. How can the international community work together on this and do a better job and be more efficient? And one of our conclusions sort of duh was much more has to be done to engage men to support the rights of women in these countries or you're not gonna get anywhere. So a little bit later, we took our men peace and security initiative. We named it very deliberately because we feel you can't succeed on 1325, you can't succeed on women peace and security if you don't in each country have a concerted, organized effort to engage men to understand and to support the rights of women. And we definitely saw it as a security issue, realized this is part of the security, particularly in rebuilding a country that has gone through violent conflict and has been largely destroyed. And the goal was to show men that this is a security issue and it affects the security of themselves, their families, their communities and certainly their country. So I think I'll stop with that, but I'd like to talk a little bit more later about how we do this work with men and what the methodology is and what are the entry points. Thanks, Steve. That really kind of opens up the field here for us to move from just counting women, how many women are in the room to how do we make women count in the security? And I'm gonna look to you, Sonam, to talk about how, and now I'm trying to pivot toward the MENA region, how you see making women count in your work and also in relation to the report. Just to give the, you mentioned that the resolution had, it's got a participation element and it has a protection element. The other two pillars were prevention of war and the fourth one was peacekeeping. And it's really important to remember those because 20, it's now 16 years since 1325, but we still have the problem of soldiers under the UN flag being involved in the sexual exploitation of girls and women on the ground. And so the importance of having women involved in peacekeeping forces is actually one way of stopping that because the worst thing that can happen is to have the UN out there with a flag and having countries hiding behind the banner of the UN but having their soldiers sexually abusing six-year-old girls in Central African Republic. And that's what's happening. So this agenda is very much about that issue. The second element of prevention of war, when we say how do you make women count, women saw the changing nature of war and the proliferation of actors and the complexity of these issues 20 years ago because they were at the front lines of this problem and the question is, did we listen to them? Right now I've been working in the last five, six years very much with the MENA region and certainly since 2011. And in 2012, we were in a room with women from 15 countries asking about the trends that are occurring and one of our Libyan partners said to me, she said the Salafis and the Wahhabis are coming, the extremists are coming. First they went after the dead because they were destroying the shrines. Then they came after women because their ideology has a specific issue of where women are situated in society and how they wanna control women. And that same day we heard the news of the Benghazi attacks and the death of the US ambassador. By the way, the women that we work with always said to us, we told, we knew, we warned the embassy not to send people there then. So they knew on the ground in Benghazi what was going on. Nobody listened to them, right? And so for us, the issue of counting and listening to women is about early warning. For the 16 years that I've been going to the commission on the status of women at the UN, we have had the issue of extremism of all forms. The Islamists, the evangelicals, the Catholics, you name it, everybody gets together and they're pushing back on women's rights. And women have been warning against this and they've been documenting this. In our international policy sphere, when these things are raised, basically we revert back to saying this is culture. Violence against women is their culture. Only when it spills over and it's metastasized into terrorism and extremism, and all of a sudden now we say, oh dear, this is a big global problem. And then guess what happens? We now have research organizations or think tanks that have come out and then they say, we need to do research to show the relevance of women to the extremism agenda, right? So it's undermining the voices on the ground. And this is something that is, the problem sits with us here. It's not the problem over there. The voices on the ground are there. If you look across the Arab world, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, women have been at the forefront of all of the peaceful revolutions in all of these countries. They have been out there. They were the first ones in Libya. They were the first ones out there. They've been, they continue to be active on the ground. And the challenge again from the international side is are we willing to design peace processes that match the complexity of the conflict? The conflict is not a two-party conflict in Syria. It's multiple actors, right? And what this agenda says is you need the war actors because we need them to agree to stop fighting. That's absolutely true. But war actors alone cannot design what the peace should be. You need the peace actors as well. And peace actors, that's when you get through women, you get civil society, you get young people, you get all the people that they've been working with. And so again, the challenge sits with us here. The question of national action plans. National action plans are a great mechanism, as we've just heard. If there is political will to actually integrate them into broader national policies, right? If you have a national action plan on women, peace, and security that's separate from your policing strategy or your military strategy or your economic and health strategy in a country that's coming out of conflict, it's useless. If you have a national action plan that has no money attached to it or isn't willing to reorder where the resources are, it's kind of useless. But just because there isn't a national action plan doesn't mean that women on the ground aren't organizing and effective. And I think again, this report really highlights this. In the same way that women were active in peacemaking and peace building before we had 1325, just because you don't have a national action plan doesn't mean that we shouldn't be listening to those voices. And our organization brings those voices out. We have a report, it's called Uncomfortable Truths, Unconventional Wisdoms, because it is about uncomfortable truths to the international community, to the U.S. foreign policy community. And I'll just give you a couple of examples of where we from the U.S. side could be doing more. In Tunisia, the U.S. was involved in training of police in the aftermath of the revolution. Tunisia and women were saying, we need our police forces to be retrained to be a service to the community, right? We need community policing. We don't need the police. Under dictatorships, police are a force of oppression for the public, right? So it's not just about adding women into the existing police structure, it's actually about transforming what the role of the police is and how they're meant to uphold the human rights of civilians. We didn't listen to them. And the problem persists, it's the same in Pakistan, it's the same in Iraq where the police that we've trained have actually been involved in violating women and so forth. So these are missed opportunities of us not listening to them and us not doing our part of the deal. On Israel-Palestine, Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and think you're gonna get different results. We bring the same people, it's literally the same people into the room thinking they're gonna make peace. Why don't we have an inclusive peace process and bring the voices of Israeli and Palestinian women into these spaces for them to do it? They did it long ago. In the 1980s, Israeli and Palestinian women were the first ones to actually publicly talk about a two-state solution and all the issues that were there. They've had iterations and iterations of working together and we from the international side have consistently ignored them. Syria right now, there's an attempt to get Syrian women into the process, but it's not enough. And I just wanna end with this. An Egyptian colleague of mine recently, on the 19th of April there was a demonstration in Tel Aviv and people were holding out signs saying, kill all the Arabs. And I shared this with an Egyptian colleague of mine saw this and she said, it seems everybody wants to kill Arabs right now. Our own governments are disappearing us. The Saudis are bombing Yemen. The Assad is bombing Syria. Everybody, and then everybody's selling weapons to kill more Arabs, right? And we've written an article about this and the ending is basically, if you look across the Arab world and you look at what Arabs themselves, Arab women, Arab youth have been doing, is they have systematically thought to have non-violent transformation from dictatorship to democracy and the world hasn't helped them. And we had Syrian partners here four years ago who told the State Department, why is everybody helping us kill each other? Nobody is helping us talk to each other. And I think this is the essence of this agenda and I think the report captures that issue very, very well that we're missing out on recognizing where peace exists and supporting and nurturing that and just thinking about all the bad stuff as opposed to all the good things that are happening there. And we take the good for granted and it's gonna disappear on us and collectively we're gonna have a much more difficult arena to deal with globally. So re-situating and looking at peace and looking at the peace actors and women are critical to that is really, I think, the message of the report. Thank you. Thank you, I'm gonna turn to you, Stephanie. And especially because of your time in Afghanistan and you saw it up close, the female participation and integration into some of the political processes. Have we reached a stagnation period or do you still see whether it's Afghanistan or other countries you're working on that we are making progress? In terms of political participation. Political of women. Well, I'd start by saying, and I think this is an interesting question for this discussion because obviously the discussion around women's engagement in politics spans not just countries that are in conflict, leading up to conflict, post-conflict, but everywhere around the world. And we know that everywhere around the world, this is the issue that is the hardest place for women to make progress. If you look at the four big issue areas that we tend to track via a document that I like to use called the Gender Gap Report put out by the World Economic Forum, the people who bring you Davos. We look at four, they look at four issue areas and they look at parity between men and women in health, education, economic access and political participation. Political participation is the place around the world where there's the biggest gap between men and women and the least parity. We have about 20% of parliamentarians around the world are women. And that inches up, inches up, inches up, but of course it's still not that high. In the US, we're about at 20%. And I embarrassingly was, of course, as I travel, people always seem to be having more women in their parliaments than we do in Congress, but that's a good thing because we like to support that and engage in being congratulatory. But in Afghanistan, it's certainly more than the quota. There's a quota there and the participation exceeds the quotas. I think here's the hard part about participation broadly and then I'm gonna talk about conflict affected countries. It is a very, politics in my view and this is something I've worked in a lot. It's obviously an area where there's a bit of a zero sum game and people don't give up power easily. So we're in a situation where women really have to, I think, be able to fight within very structured institutions that control access to power, within political parties, within electoral administration, bodies, et cetera. And it's really hard and there is violence directed at them that dampens their interest in this, whether over psychological, et cetera. So I think that's really hard and I think we have to understand that in the United States, there are barriers that make it hard for women. So think about a woman in Afghanistan, at rock, wherever, thinking about running for office, how hard that is. One thing I'd say is I think we also have to pay attention to numbers matter. I do think the number of women in a particular institution matters. I'm a firm believer that women are important for the role model effect and saying to younger people, especially that a woman can do acts, a woman can be a prime minister, a member of parliament, head of a CEO, a peace negotiator, a mediator. But I think that's not the end of the story. We need to look at who we are electing across the globe, who we're appointing across the globe and seeing if those men, women, are reflective of what's going on in their society, that it's the most inclusive and responsive group possible and not assuming that because somebody is a woman, they're necessarily going to be the best advocate on women's rights, they might be, but a man might also be. And really being, I think, a little more nuanced in how we look at that. I think conflict societies are very difficult because again, I think violence does have a really dampening impact on women's interest and ability to be engaged in public life. I will say in Afghanistan when I was there, I worked there as an NGO and then I was at the embassy. In every case in Afghanistan in the electoral process, there are threats against women who run, there are threats against women who win, there are car bombs that are utilized against women in those places and there are threats against polling stations. So these are very conflict affected countries and elections provide another opportunity for that conflict to manifest itself. Having said that, people do come out and vote and they're excited about the prospect. So I don't think it's all a bad news story. I just think we need to be mindful of the situation in which these communities find themselves, both men and women, and the risks that sometimes are associated with political participation. Having said all of that, I will say I am an optimist because I really believe that as I do my work around the globe and listening to the other people who work in my office and in other offices at the State Department, and I will comment, there are several people here who are from other offices of the State Department, not just mine, who are big advocates for gender equality and have been great friends to us. I think we see that women really want to be engaged in their communities, in their countries, in making those public policy and programming and decisions about where the roads go and the water goes and how much money gets spent on schools or whatever. And I think part of our job is to support that, is to be rising, lifting up those voices at the local, national and regional level, who are willing to get out there and be brave advocates or who want to be. And I think that's our job. And I think the job of groups like Sonoms that we don't always agree with, but is to say these are the issues we're hearing. And I think that's why this report is important. I think anytime we can get information that we get from others who are not inside our bubble, the better able it helps us to ascertain what's going on in the ground. And so I think we see tremendous appetite still, even in very difficult times, by women in their communities to be engaged, whether that's in business, in politics, in civil society, in just doing whatever needs to be done to really better their communities. I think the challenge is how we can collectively help them in the international space. Do that in a safe way and that we can highlight their voices. My one last story, I always end with one last story, is we have an award which many of you are aware of called the International Women of Courage Award. We've given it for 10 years, so 100 women have received the award. And we just heard a story recently about one of our awardees went back to her home country, and which is not the most perhaps democratic place. And she got to meet with Secretary Kerry, something that many members of the government of her country had not been able to do. And that was, people were just so stunned that it was so important to us that our Secretary of State would meet with all the international women of courage award winners to say to them, and the vice president, also vice president Biden, to say to them, you are the future of your countries and the future of the world. And I think to the extent we can really raise up those voices, it helps everyone. And not to say that that's a panacea for change, but it's something we can do as diplomats to really send a signal to the world that we think that these women and men who support them and communities around the globe are critically important to really building a different kind of world. And Steve, I'm gonna pick up on that line of international collective approach and ask you to drill down a little bit more about how men can make more of a difference, talk about maybe your work in Afghanistan and your upcoming work in Ukraine. Yeah, okay, well, Stephanie, I'm glad to hear you mentioned international women of courage. That's an initiative we took in the George W. Bush administration, actually, and we're really glad to see it stay on and thrive and be carried out by this administration, as well, because it's really important to recognize women who are on the front lines, on the cutting edge of advancing women's rights and democracy, sometimes, you know, to endangering their own lives. What we're doing on men is we're working with a network of NGOs around the world, particularly in conflict and post-conflict countries. They're run by young men, for the most part, and they train young men in their countries to have a peaceful sense of their own masculinity, to combat gender-based violence, to respect girls and women, also to recognize and combat various kinds of hate speech, including hate speech against girls and women. And most recently, we've designed a program along these lines for Afghanistan. And here, too, the entry point is to get men in the room and not start talking about gender equality, because that's a term that does not go over well in a lot of these countries, but to talk to them about what violence has done to their lives, to their families, to the communities, and to their country. And that's a very violent culture in Afghanistan. That's not really my characterization. Everybody we talked to out there informing the program said this is not only needed, but it's urgent that things were getting worse. Young men were getting increasingly radicalized, and there's a culture of violence that's a norm of violence, and it had to be attacked. So the entry point is through peaceful masculinity, what you can do to help build peace in your family, your community, and in your country. And it's essential in these things to get men to open up with each other. First of all, by talking about, you know, by admitting what violence has done to them and their families, communities, and the countries, and the effects it can have, and how they can do much better as positive members of society and as peace builders. It's difficult that you have to build trust with these groups, and we're always concerned that there could be like one guy in the group who would undermine the whole thing because he doesn't believe in this message. I like to quote Zena Bangura, who was one of the main speakers at the initial symposium we held here a couple of years ago on men, peace, and security. Men as positive agents of change. And she said, you not only have to take the guns out of the hands of the boys, you have to take the guns out of their heads. And that's because this power that they have over other people, not only making women victims, but other men and boys too, you know, by carrying these arms and sadly using them a lot, has become part of how a lot of these young guys define their own manhood. So that if you disarm them without really having a social program on peaceful masculinity, among other things, they'll feel emasculated and they could be all the more desperate and violent. So you have to get them to open up about the effect of violence. We've just had the first training in Afghanistan and went well, there was no spoiler. I'm glad to say we had 40 young men from 10 each from four different provinces. It's a pilot program funded by USAID. And it went very well and the men were enthusiastic and the trainers thought there's some guys here who are really gonna sustain their work in this field and we'll be real peace builders. We're about to go to Ukraine where we're gonna work with displaced persons. There's 1.7 million displaced persons in Ukraine. About 65% are women and we're gonna be training women in social skills, peace building, leadership skills to show that they can be valuable to their new communities to which they've been displaced and where they're not always totally welcome. But we've persuaded our Ukrainian partners to also add a segment for men because the male IDPs for a large park are even worse off. They're psychologically distressed. They have feelings of guilt that they're not in the conflicts on fighting the Russians. And drinking has gone up, domestic violence has gone up among these people. So we're gonna have sessions with men as well working through this concept of peaceful masculinity. And certainly we'd like to have a dialogue here with you folks. I know you're all experts and practitioners about how we can apply it to that area. But like Stephanie likes to end with a story, I wanna end with a quote, okay? And this is from a young guy in Africa who's a practitioner in this field. He's from Mwanda, but he's been doing this work in such easy cases as the DRC and other countries. And here's what he said. It is a masculine culture rooted in violence that is historically devalued women. At the base is an entrenched belief in the superiority of men. That kind of thinking needs to change. We have to develop a positive masculinity, one that isn't based on violence that promotes the rights of all. It starts with boys. If they are not taught human rights, respect for women, equality, these children will go into young men who think they are better than women and they will go into men who rape women who will use violence to get their way. They'll become violent men. So that's our challenge. And I think failure to do that, failure to get to these young men and to the boys will really undermine this whole cause. Thank you, Steve. I'm going to ask if you all have any comments to one another before I open it up to our community at large here. Yes. And take this as me being an anthropologist and Iranian, British, Italian, American, whatever. It's a multicultural soup of everything. I think one of the issues that is really important and for me has been a driving force in this work is approaching others with humility. Because if we go out there and we're constantly saying, we've come to empower you and we have the answers, you create a barrier. And sometimes you need to reflect back. And I'll give you an example. I was in Liberia in 2009 after they had 14 years of the most horrendous wars. There was violence in the communities. People were living in packed, really horrendous, housing situations and so forth. And we were looking at the question of violence and different forms of violence that were there as well as the mechanisms for maintaining peace. And one of the issues that was highlighted was that there was 80% unemployment. 80% unemployment. Now, 80% unemployment, I was still as a foreigner able to walk around Monrovia in the slums, go and talk to people and so forth. I came back to Washington and we did an event at the World Bank and we were talking about the violence there and the cultures of violence and so forth. And I just said to my colleagues, can we stop a minute and imagine, in Washington DC, 50% unemployment in this town or anywhere in the US, would you walk out of your house? Would you dare to walk out of your house? How safe would it be during the day, given the number of guns that float around and so forth? We need to think about these things. We don't have the answers. We need it to be a process of engagement. And I think part of this agenda is actually finding, as I said, to me, it's about finding the humanity and the others, finding the good. Because there's all, in the midst of the worst, absolute worst situations, there's always peace and normality and decency and humanity that's out there. And it's touching that aspect. I've had conversations with Taliban leaders where if you actually say to them, my conversation with them was, what do you want for your daughter and son in the next 10 years? And it opened up a field. I spent two hours talking to them. I was speaking to them in Farsi Dari and we were able to say where the international community is helpful, where it's not, what they need to do and so forth. But when you humanize it and you engage them on the basis of the people they care about and recognize that they love their families and their communities and their country as well. And that's the starting point for a peaceful world. It opens up huge opportunities for engagement. So this to me is one of the driving forces behind this agenda, again, of humanizing it, but also being very humble about the decency and the good that's out there in every culture. The bad that's in every culture, including our own international Western cultures and what we take forward and so forth. So it's that balancing act which I think is really important to address. Let me just add to that. I'm really glad you mentioned the economic side because a lot of Afghans said to us that the problem with these young men getting radicalized is to a large extent because there's a lack of jobs. The economy has gone down so fast because of Western withdrawal. And they can't find a job. They feel they're not fulfilling their manly duties, their duties to their families and they can become violent. It's not because they've taken on an extremist ideology. It's the fact that they can't support themselves and their families and the desperation that that can bring particularly with violence all around you and violence groups there, violent groups there happy to recruit you to find you and pay you. Thanks, thank you and to pay you. And I also want to mention connected with Sonam's remarks that the entry point on this training of men is not accusatory in any way. It's not guys have done terrible things to women. It's what a good, peaceful peace builder, positive peace builder you can be in your community. The good that you can do, not the bad that you've done. Obviously we're not working with criminals but we're working with guys in the middle. Not people who are already champions because they don't need this. Guys in the middle who could potentially have the right values but they've not learned to articulate them and they've not spoken up when they see wrong things being done. That's the guys we're trying to get to. And it's to show the good that can be in them and not the bad things that men have done. So that's really to your humility point. I mean the only thing I'd say is that not really to my panelist, to all of us is that this is a really important agenda but it's not separated from all the other work that gets done across the globe to try to build more sustainable and peaceful societies whether they're in conflict, post-conflict countries or countries that are not in conflict. This is, I think we have to have a holistic view being humble but understanding that this is all about how we create societies where they value men and women equally, that value everyone equally and that have that as the way that they do business. I thought one interesting thing in the report that you all did was one of the countries saying we don't need a nap because we're not in conflict. Well, I would beg to differ perhaps they are but the point isn't that country was Egypt but I would say also that this agenda is not just about for countries that are in conflict. This is about how we if you're a country that is a donor country, how you engage with the world and even if you're not, how you think about building a stronger society through gender equality and gender integration that makes it much more likely you will ever be a country in conflict. So I think looking at this holistically is important in addition to I totally take the point and agree about humility but this is not just a rarefied UN resolution that we should talk about in rarefied places. This is about real people's lives and it's about real people's lives not just in conflict affected countries. It's about real people's lives everywhere. So with those great summary remarks, thank you. I am going to do, I guess the prerogative of the moderator, I want to invite Paula with a chair and a microphone to join us in the Q&A because I think there's members of the audience who might ask you directly on this new report. So it's, Bill, would you mind helping us? Maybe by Steve and then we'll take that. I'm sorry, Danny, but I'm hoping we have an extra mic, yeah? All right, maybe we'll take that mic with us. All right, and so I do want to open it up and ask you, I'm going to take about three questions and ask if you would introduce yourself, stand up, and we'll get everyone's questions in. So I have one and two and the third question right there and then I'll do another round. Hi, Molly McCluskey, Middle East Eye, hello. I had a question for Sonam. You mentioned about extremism and how extremist group pushing back on women's rights tends to be a precursor for more violent acts. Can you talk a little bit more about that transition? Great, and over here. Thank you. Thank you, Danielle. Hi, I'm Dr. Sherry McFarland and I'm a world peace and reconciliation and we promote peace education in war-torn communities such as Darfur Sudan. And I wanted to talk, to ask the panelists, what is being done? I know there was a lot of mention of national dialogues about various issues. Is there a national framework that's being promoted to increase women's literacy? Because in these countries, as we all know, the male boys, the young boys get promoted to go to school quicker than young women. Thank you very much. And our third question and then I'll turn it back to you. Hi, Ken Lagard, World Docs. What would you call a group that believes its values are of such universal applicability and of such benefit to mankind that they are not only entitled but required to spread those values around the world by force if necessary? I think you'd call them jihadists. But doesn't that apply to us when it comes to democracy and gender equality? Very good. Okay, we'll take the fourth question and then we'll bring it back to you and we'll do another round. The ROHD, I'm from Syria. I have actually few comments and one clarification, asking for clarification. So first about the title of the event, should we keep trying or should we keep adopting the same methodology in changing women and addressing this issue in the minor region? This is my question. For instance, last year I spent the entire year at Columbia Law School addressing human rights literacy and I came up with the conclusion that in a zattery camp where you have like 80,000, it's like small, although we have this propaganda about the situation and the catastrophic issue in a zattery camp, we have also like, we have just 80,000 people in a zattery camp, one out five houses hated by a woman and what are we doing to support women there? So my recommendations were to encourage media to address this issue because women there are not refugee, are displaced. They don't have legal representation which means they are subject to exploitation, sexual harassment and they don't have any kind of right to go and sue anyone and they fear deportation so that's why they even accept the sexual harassment conducted or committed by Jordanian officials there or police officers. So another point, I would say academic arena and academic collaboration would be the best solution for us to change in Minar region because people in Minar region remain hesitant to cooperate with NGOs and governments. It's about like 40 years of dictatorship in Syria hearing the same propaganda about conspiracy and security concerns. So what I would argue that why shouldn't we, why we are not activating the rule of academic institutions to help people in Minar. The last comment about engaging women in political process in Syria and I would share with you what happened after that, the Syrian activists on ground they just named advisory council after the special envoy because of the selection process because we managed to deal with people with fluent English and sophisticated education level who cannot achieve anything actually on ground. When we wanna just deal or cooperate with people in exile we cannot change anything on ground. That's my recommendation. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm going to turn it over and I'm gonna ask who on the. I just have one quick. Yes, please and you'll have to use your microphone. I'm so sorry. I'm just going to quickly answer. I think it was point number three but I might be wrong on the number. It so happened at lunch today. Some of us had gotten together and we very, very much agree with your perspective the utilization of universities and educational centers to take some leadership role here in creating spaces for internal conversations and dialogue. I think we have a responsibility. I think we have resources. It's something I know from our conversation earlier today that we are thinking of together in terms of getting university presidents together to really make a commitment in this area perhaps with United States Institute of Peace. So I just want to commend that thought and that is something that I think that we can explore more and if you have some more thinking of that we would welcome your sharing. Thank you. Is this Anam and the other? On the point about extremism. So if you look at extremist groups that gather on the basis of identity whether it's religious or ethno-nationalism what they end up doing is they condone certain they become very exclusive. So they want me to be Iranian or Muslim or they don't want the totality of my identity and I'm just giving myself as an example. And then based on that exclusivity it's basically we, based under this identity are better than the others. And so it's condoning discrimination on the basis of that and if it's religious then it's tying it to God. It's like God says it's okay, right? So it's a very powerful potent way of doing it and it's not just Islamists or it's certainly not just that you look at what's happening in this country right now with the discourse in our elections and so forth in terms of how we the demagoguery that's going on. So it's a very powerful thing and the problem is that when it starts off with being against women, against minorities against sexual minorities, right? And all of those things we from this side of the world it's their culture. We ignore it, we ignore it, we ignore it. In Pakistan this problem has been going on for 30 years where a very diverse society multiple religions, multiple sects but overall extremism has gone mainstream and so Christians, Ahmadis, Shias, et cetera are being attacked and women as well on top of that. So it's really important to look at those early warning indicators on the extremism. On the Syrians, we have something called the Better Peace Tool. And in that, one of the things that we did was through consultations we said if you want to have civil society involved in peace processes, what are the criteria of who should get to the table? Because at the moment the criteria to get to the table is if you have guns you get invited at some point. But if you're civil society then they'll say who are you, what are you and so forth. And we said if you think about the criteria in terms of the value base, in terms of their constituency, what they're doing on the ground, what groups they're working with and their expertise this is one way of identifying and it's more important to identify organizations than individuals. And I think that those have been the problems with the process at the UN that they haven't really applied a holistic approach in terms of the criteria. It's a work in progress. So hopefully things will improve. On Zatari and others I agree with you, we just have not put the resources in terms of addressing the humanitarian and early recovery needs of people on the ground especially for Syrians that are so educated and so trade oriented that with a little bit of resources we could have done a huge amount and we didn't and I think we've lost that part of it. And then finally on the question of whether we're spreading democracy and gender equality and these are, I'm Iranian and I can tell you that this is not Western, this is our values. My colleagues in Egypt were in the streets of Egypt women on the streets of Egypt were being sexually harassed because they want equal rights for themselves. They're not holding banners up saying American values. They're saying universal human rights. So it's, again it's a question of whether we're listening to them. If we are spreading from the US side anything that is ideological I would say it's extreme capitalism that we've spread. And it's a problem here as it is everywhere else. But human rights and democracy are I think innate and they're universal and everywhere I've worked there are the vast majority of people are aspiring to that sort of those kinds of spaces. And the problem is that we end up listening to the minority violent extreme and putting our resources to that and not taking the other side seriously. So just a couple of quick things that I think are important to note to the question about literacy. I would say obviously this is a tremendous problem around the world in terms of access to education for girls. We know that 62 million girls are not in school in the world generally. We also know that while there's relative parity with regard to primary education that that really drops off as secondary education and that boys have a much higher rate of attendance and graduation from secondary school. That has tremendous impacts from increased child marriage, less family spacing for children, economic abilities later on to really provide for their families. So we know that that's a very big issue. That's certainly a very big focus in the last and change I think sea change in the last three to four years in the international community especially at the State Department USAID and other donor countries as well as the UN is really looking at how we address issues that are important to adolescent girls. Education being primarily one of them. Other traditional practices that can be harmful but really trying to ensure that we keep girls in school, that we make it as easy as possible for girls to stay in school. We know that girls aren't in school for different reasons in different parts of the world. It's not decontextualized, et cetera. We know that there's a lot of child marriage. We also know that that's done for different reasons. So there is a big focus on a girl's education right now on the State Department USAID, well the US government in general just released adolescent girl strategy which is publicly available, thank you, and which outlines all the work that we plan to do to really address those issues around keeping adolescent girls in school fully engaged so we are actually investing in our own collective futures. I would also say just briefly, and this is not a discussion about Syria or all the investments that have been made and trying to address the impact of the Syrian crisis but I feel like it's certainly worth saying that we as the US and as other international donors have invested a lot in trying to address some of the issues, probably not enough. I would obviously say there's still a lot of work to do. We are very focused in the US in thinking about how to provide livelihood training broadly based in refugee settings because we know that again this economic issue is huge and the case has to be made constantly about the importance of economic development, jobs, not just because jobs are important in terms of wage earning and being able to support families but because they give people a sense of investment and self-worth and investment in their communities. Now I promised that we would do one more round but I have to see, we started just a few minutes late, can we go a few minutes? All right, three minutes more. So Jess, I want to hear from the audience. Okay, we'll do it very quickly. I'm not sure if we'll get a full round of response but I think it's important. Right here, if you just keep your, yep. Is it two to four? It's two to four. Oh, I thought it said three to four. Is it two to four or three? I looked at, oh, well, let's go, all right. So please stand up and then one, two, three. Oh, wow. Yeah, great. All right. Hi, my name is Asma. I am an Atlas school fellow from Gaza, Palestine. I have a few questions. Just one question if we can, oh, just want to make sure we hear everyone and then we can wrap around again. Okay, so my question is that Sanam mentioned that people have, especially women have been talking for more than like 30 years about what needs to be done and there is no listening. So what's in you? What would be changing that we are actually having or seeing any new results? And one of the reason she mentioned that power is very important. It's not only the culture but also power. So what needs to be done to change power here where decision making is done on a global level as well as giving space, safe spaces for governments and political and religious leaders also on conflict areas so that they can give away or give women the chance to step up and make change. And it's just a comment. You said that the humility is important. I agree with that. But shouldn't we start from the title of the session and be like showing the humility by not putting the title should we keep trying? It's a collective efforts of people in the conflict as well as people here. Thank you. She's right. Wonderful. We'll just go from this row back. Hello, my name is Alicia Smith and I'm a first year master's student in security studies at Georgetown University. And you mentioned how the DOD is involved in the U.S.'s national action plan and I'm curious to what extent are the ministries of defense involved in the national action plans of these case studies and other cases of national action plans across the world. Great. Right behind you, just whoever was next. Thank you. Hello, my name is Ibrahim Ahmad. I'm from Somalia. I just came back from Somalia as a seven engagement specialist. Paula closed with four great recommendations. I would like you to know that the first three are not possible in Somalia or not happening. But the fourth one, which was forced and found a safer environment for dialogue is one that we greatly need. But it's not happening. Ambassador Steve said that in order to engage women in conflict zone, you have to engage men. In Somalia, you do engage men in the international community but only a power share, not about women issues. So partially, it's our fault, but we also to blame you by not really forcing our men to include women. There's no inclusivity in Somalia. Another thing I wanna ask Professor Sonam is that, you mentioned that in Central Republic, the peacekeepers rate women. In Somalia, we have 22 highly mechanized African troops. They regularly rate women and subjugate women or exploit their vulnerability. And whatever there's a complaint, they have to investigate themselves. There's no outside body. And we need help with that as well. I greatly appreciate it for the panel. Thank you. Thank you very much. I have three girls, two of them are here. I want them to see. Their world would be better than South Speed for their mothers. Thank you very much. Amen to that, inshallah. Thank you for organizing this program today. It's wonderful. I'm speaking for the private sector, Bechtel Engineering Procurement and Construction Company, we're here. Obviously, support the work that everyone is doing, this report that's come out. For us in Mina, Ambassador David Welch, who heads our region there, we have several of our construction projects. I look after sustainability issues, which looks at climate change, looks at labor, our issues, we work closely with the UN Foundation, State Department and others. How can we involve the private sector more in the dialogue to drive change? I know Washington is one place where we have many programs and dialogues and stewardship agendas that corporations, wonderful stories that we've worked on. But how do we drive the change doing more collaborative efforts on the ground? And then also social media, how is that possibility for change? I know they don't have internet access in a lot of these places, but for various reasons. But certainly on that end and our end in Washington and elsewhere, we can put the pressure on. We're at issues at the moment. Thanks very much. We'll have three more questions. So now we do track. Hello. That's very strange, excuse me. That's right. Okay, my name is Greg Aftendilian with the Middle East Center at UMass Lowell, first kudos to my colleagues, Paula, Seth and Emily for an outstanding report and their collaboration with USIP. My question is really a policy question of easily Afghanistan. We see snippets in the press from time to time about the Afghan government in discussions with the Taliban for some potentially future reconciliation or end game. In any negotiation, of course, there's give and take. So how do we assure that our Afghan government allies don't retreat from whatever advancements have been made, say on women's rights in Afghanistan, we don't want to turn back the clock. But in a negotiation, how do we ensure that that doesn't occur? Thank you. Thank you. Next to you, please. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for your talk today. My name is Christine Starkey. I'm an undergraduate student at Georgetown University. Prior to Georgetown, I served five years in the United States Marine Corps as an Arabic linguist. And so, Ms. Foster, sorry, you had touched on this a little bit, but specifically within the US and the Department of Defense here, I know there's a lot of talk about women's integration into combat roles and whether or not that's gonna shift the scene. But my question is in regards to specifically post-conflict stability operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq when we get to that point. So my question is, how are we capitalizing on women in these roles in the United States military? And if not, how can we? Thank you so much. And thank you for your service. My name is Dr. Andrews Bass. I'm from Haiti. I really want to know, since you said they have, you know, I think you know about the people who hide behind the flag of the UN and weeping our women and young girls. Did they have a policy and the United States went to complain about that? Because we sent so many paper in front of the UN and nobody ever answered back to us. And I want to know if they have a policy for that because when they leave in these countries already poor, I think we will have more children of the United Nation military than our own children. Thank you. And one more question, please. That's our last round. Hi, my name is Hannah. I'm a Georgetown student as well. I just have a comment and a question. My comment is this, that we are still trying to understand how to address the process of engagement. We are learning from our previous actions. But I have observed one thing, that there is something wrong in the way we approach human rights. In the sense that we do not, we are not supposed to see them as ideals, but as the minimum standards that define our common humanity. And that they are applicable and are not in contrast with any culture, social, cultural and religious norms. Now, when we talk about the Muslim world, 1.6 billion people, for them their religious laws or their personal laws are more important than human rights laws or the human rights framework. Because a lot of people who are uneducated, they are into what their religion says. And this is what their common understanding is. So are we thinking on lines that we don't talk about in the process of engagement, that we don't talk about gender equality, but instead we talk about gender equity? Because from there, we can begin the process of dialogue in the society and kind of engage the internal dynamics of the society. Thank you. Thank you very much for that thoughtful question. I'm gonna turn it back over and Steve, you have a response, I'm gonna ask each of our panelists to just take one question or two, if you can wrap it. Well, I just thought a quick comment on three of them. It'll be quick on the last question. I think gender equity is a good term in some of these local contexts. I think we have to be very careful about our context locally and be sensitive to the role of Islam. We had an expert dialogue once bringing together women leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and what was it for? Tunisia. And they all said that Islam is being used against women's rights, it's being distorted and misinterpreted, and that one thing they need is to have more women trained in Islam, trained in the religions so that they can counter this in an Islamic context. And we do have experts here at USIP and others who are working on this on advancing women's rights in an Islamic context. So you're right, it's very important to recognize that and to deal with it. On the gentleman who asked about peace process in Afghanistan, first of all, I don't think it's going very far right now, but it is a concern. We do wanna make sure women's rights aren't rolled back. We have a very good relationship with the president of the Afghan government. President Ghani is very committed to women's rights as is his wife, they have a visible first lady now, and she'll be here for a public forum a week from Friday, 10.30 on May 13th. So look, it's been announced publicly. And they have a new peace commission now that has a lot of women, including some prominent women, who will open their mouths and play a role because I think the former High Peace Commission didn't succeed in that regard. So it's something to watch for, but I think they have some of the right ingredients and right players in place now. And just one comment on the private sector, I think it's extremely important. I know that when I was at the Global Women's Issues Office at State, we had some programs that involved the private sector in these issues, and Stephanie can talk to that. But one thing I can suggest is form a specific group on a specific country or project. We have a US Afghan Women's Council. It's about 10 years old now. Laura Bush helped to found it. I'm a member, and we bring a lot of good private sector people in who run programs on the ground for women in Afghanistan and the public sector. Our government's involved, and the NGO sector's very involved. So a public-private partnership was one way to go. I'd say with a fairly specific goal. In fact, there's a Pakistan Council, US Pakistan, and their goal is economic empowerment. They focus in just on that one thing. So that's one way to go about these things. Happy to give you information on that, if you'd like. All those. So now, Stephanie, I have to... Okay, I'll go to the other side. You want to go first, too? Go ahead, Sue. Okay, a couple questions for a US government specific that I'll answer. In terms of the sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, obviously it's a horrific issue. We do not support it, right? As a US government, do not support it. Absolutely. And we are taking steps through the UN system to advocate for long-term reform of the peacekeeping system, for training and capacity building at the country or level of the troop contributing countries to make sure that they have adequate training of their peacekeepers and other personnel who go out to understand this is unacceptable behavior. We're also advocating very strongly for accountability, right? Because we can advocate for training, but we need to advocate for accountability processes. And I think there's been some forward movement in terms of the accountability systems getting better, but that does not obviously mean that the problem has been solved. So this is obviously a huge problem globally in different parts of the world. We know that and we are big advocates within the UN system for reforming the system broadly, accountability and for ensuring that troop contributing countries are doing the appropriate kind of training with the people that they send out to serve as peacekeepers. Some, by the way, of these peacekeepers are not, they are UN-hatted. Some are hatted through other regional organizations. So it's a broader problem than UN peacekeepers, but it's sort of a peacekeeper, unfortunately a peacekeeper problem. And we know it's a problem and we are advocating strongly to make sure that we can reform the system to address these questions. Secondly, in terms of the question about, your question about taking advantage of the resources in country around women in the military who've served. And I've met a lot of women when I served in Afghanistan who did what you did, so thank you again to your colleagues who helped me many times. I think we are, DOD, the Department of Defense here has responsibility for how the US National Action Plan is implemented and part of it is to think about how we both increase the number of women who serve and how we use those talents. So I'm not trying to punt that, but just to say obviously this is primarily a DOD function. But I would say from working in this area, we obviously know there's a tremendous amount of talent and women have played critical roles in the military, in conflicts and not in non-conflict situations as well. And we understand we need to take advantage of that talent and continue to use that talent to move forward. And then lastly, there was another DOD related question and I don't know the answer, maybe Paula does, whether or not the Ministries of Defense in these various countries are engaged in their National Action Plan implementation. I don't know the answer. I will say interestingly, we're working on a project in South America right now where a lot of countries are coming together to work on drafting National Action Plans who countries that don't have them. And it's actually being driven by a country's Ministry of Defense. They also are engaging their other ministries but the prime mover in that particular situation to really try to make South America, Western hemispheres, a regional leader in this arena is coming from a Ministry of Defense perspective. We also know that in places like Australia and other places there have been incredible leadership by Departments of Defense or Ministries of Defense around the world to integrate women fully into their militaries and also into the manner in which militaries think about the way in which they engage in their work. Alison? Very quickly, on the Peacekeepers question, if we had more women Peacekeepers, chances of SCA going down would be significant because in general women don't sexually abuse little kids. So that issue of having more women in Peacekeeping forces is really, really critical. On the question of religion and Islam and so forth, I would caution hugely because when people talk about they want an Islamic state or they want a religious state, if you unpack it and you ask them what it is that they want, they say we don't want corruption, we want justice, it's all universal values that they want and so we should not be interpreting for them and so forth and if you go back to the tenets of Islam, it says God breathed life into man and women at the same time, equality is at the base of it. So who are we to translate and take on the interpretations of the most extreme regressive Islamic sects that have been out there in the world? So that's a second thing. On the question of listening and so forth, this is the work that I'm doing right now, we've created this Women's Alliance for Security Leadership. On the one hand, we're trying to provide safe spaces for women to learn from each other on the ground and give them access to resources and technical assistance and so forth and on the other hand, we're trying to have a vertical connection up to the policy level so that we can amplify what they are saying and we would welcome the support and it's very much a collaboration that's in place. We would welcome private sector support because peace is really good for business, okay? You guys are gonna make a lot more money than we are. That's a peaceful world out there. So it's really important for the private sector to put its mouth where its money is actually and to be part of the collaboration. Similarly, social media issues. Somalia, I worked in Somalia. I was there, I heard about the UNISOM things. I reported it back to the UN when I was working at the UN. The really dangerous part right now is that when the international community doesn't respond, al-Shabaab is taking those examples and saying look at what the infidels are doing and they use it as a recruitment tool. So we have, this is a wake up call. We have to be dealing with this problem in a much more serious way. And then related to the question of Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere and the question of power, to me, what we need to do from the international community side is stop framing everything as power sharing and talk to them about responsibility sharing. So if you want to be Minister of Finance and Health in Syria or President of Puntlan in Somalia, good luck to you. It's your responsibility to provide water and healthcare and education and so forth. If it's the other flip side of power. If we could do that as part of our language, it would change the discourse and the engagement. And the second part of this I think is that very often we start from, okay, what's the problem, let's try and end it here. Instead of actually saying to people, where do you want to be? Every time I've tested this out and said to Somali elders, Afghans, Burmese generals, what do you want for your children? It opens up enormous space for us to talk as human beings. And it's almost like saying, well, let's have a vision at a blueprint of what kind of society we want and then from where we are, work towards that. It provides a lot more creativity and a space for inclusivity. It's not what mediators do. It's not how diplomacy is done, but I think that it would be extraordinary and powerful to do that. And then finally, just one thought, civil society is the engine of social change in any society. NGOs, media, journalism, and everywhere we're looking right now, NGO activists, journalists and university professors, et cetera, are the ones who are being shut down by regressive state forces, our allies. And they're using the countering violent extremism agenda to shut down moderate spaces. If we don't have moderate space for dissent, all you get is radicalization. So putting resources into this community, into the NGOs, and so whether it's national, international, or local, is absolutely critical for sustaining peace because they're also the most creative voices. We wouldn't have 1325 if it hadn't been for civil society. Governments would not have done it on their own. So I just want to put a plea out there and I'm happy to talk about it later. Paula, I'm going to turn it over to you to wrap this up and to last comments on, you'll have to use your microphone. Questions, of course we don't have all the answers up here. But we are sharing this dialogue together. In terms of Israel and Gaza and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli, I want to say that this beautiful scarf I'm making was given to me by the women in Beit Yallah and it was coming together for two-day conference, bringing together Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women to talk about exactly what Sanam just said and was identifying common spaces and common visions. And the first, just little project we did was nonverbal because not everybody spoke everybody's language equally, which is another huge issue that we face. We did an art project together. We created bowls, we made clay bowls and everybody had to put into the bowl one thing that gave them hope, just to put in the bowl. And then everybody went around and each spoke of what gave them hope and what do you think happened in that shared common space? There was so much convergence of what people's sense was of what gave them hope and exactly what we would imagine for many of us in this room and had to do with some safety for their children and not to live out of fear and violence and et cetera, et cetera. And there was an awareness there that grew that despite very grave difficulties of differences and differentiation in power and where people are coming from that there was also some commonalities. And this group has continued to go on. So I just want to say, I think it's hard in very difficult times to be optimistic, as Gramsci would say, but never, never to lose the hopefulness. And I think this is something that a lot of us agree upon in this panel. And this also goes to the remarks about Somalia, is again, I think one of the most important things that groups like USIP, the State Department, all the civil groups that Sunam talks about is to create these safe spaces. We need safe spaces in our own lives here. When I'm looking ahead to the November elections, I think that we might need them more than ever, even in our own country. But I think that something that you mentioned is how to engineer this together. I think of Bechtel, one of the things you can think about is how can Bechtel invest in creating safe spaces? Your geniuses at building and doing a kind of building invention, really to think about this. The construction of spaces to prepare people for peace. What would this look like? This is a very imaginative project. It will take a lot of resources. You can put your name on it. We'd be very happy. But I want to say this is something I think that is a common thing when we look at conflicted areas. So what I just want to end with is that we created between Emily and Seth and Victoria and I as we were writing this, a conviction to try to really listen as Sunam has said and others. Really everybody here I know believes this is to really listen to the people on the ground and to try to best represent some of the things. If you look at the recommendations, this comes from them. This is not something that we invented and sat there in the Ivory Tower and did. So how to construct this together is something I welcome all of you to share together and thank you so much and look forward to future conversations. Thank you very much and I hope you'll join me in. Thank you the panelists, Paula, Linda, our team here today and really thinking about today as a safe space in which we have honestly exchanged ideas, views, differences and building a more hopeful space moving forward. Thank you for your time today. Safe travels home.