 So welcome back. I'm absolutely delighted to very briefly introduce the next panel, which talks about the shrinking of civil society's space. As you heard this morning from Nancy and from Sarah, in order to connect with communities, there has to be a vibrant civil society that can speak back. And one very troubling and disheartening trend that we're seeing around the world are rules which make it impossible or illegal or even fatal for civil society actors, whether they're religious, secular, around particular issues, around capacity building, to come together and build the kind of social cohesion that we need to build peace. So if you look around the world, Russia, Central Asia, parts of Africa, one of the strangest, saddest, most Freudian examples I can think of this is that South Sudan, so recently independent of Sudan, has initiated a very restrictive civil society law modeled on Sudan's. So it's a great pleasure that I introduce Rosary Tucci, who will be introducing today's panel, and Rosary was recently appointed the deputy director of the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at USAID. And for those of you who might not be familiar with the Center, it contributes to the Dodger Bureau's efforts to prevent crises and further political transitions by working to strengthen new and effective democratic institutions and enabling peaceful political transitions. So Rosary, welcome, we're delighted that you're here. So first let me thank USIP and the Alliance for Peace Building for making closed space a core part of this week's conference. My role this morning is to first frame the discussion for the panelists and conveniently dodge the difficult questions. We'll leave those for the expert panelists. And second, to share just how serious the US government is responding to the backsliding on democracy. Starting at the very top. And here you'll see in the president's own words, when citizens are free to organize and work together across borders to make communities healthier, our environment cleaner, and the world safer, that's when real change happens. So to frame the discussion, I'll talk today about the changing political landscape, the changing role of civil society, and the impact that closing space is having on civil society. And then finally, the importance of responding and how we are responding to these changing dynamics in the US government. So first I'd like to draw your attention to the screen, a few facts on the screen about the changing political landscape. Not to be too dramatic, but a bleak picture becomes more somber. Since last year we've been quoting that 50 laws were proposed that restrict space for civil society with 20 enacted. Unfortunately, when we dive a little bit deeper, we see that in the past three years, 117 laws have been proposed with 74 enacted. And so across the board, these laws are curtailing the freedom of assembly, association, and expression. Whether it's a proposed law in Cambodia that's happening right now, it's being proposed right now, that severely restricts the activities of civil society organizations, or the recently passed law in Uganda, I think it was just in March, that grants the NGO board broad powers to refuse registration to NGOs, or even worse, a series of restrictive laws. And the best case example of that is in Russia over the past decade, starting with a 2006 NGO law that introduced difficult to meet reporting requirements for NGOs. And then again, in 2012, we've got a requirement that organizations must register as foreign agents. I think most of you are familiar with that law and a number of laws in between. So this rising tide of restrictions is shrinking civil society space, but it really, as many of you know, it cuts at the very fabric of democracy. Civil society exists to ensure that people's voices are heard, felt, and most important, manifested. So Melanie used the word disheartening, and it's exactly the word I was going to use. It's disheartening to see this trend, particularly after the democratization era of the 1990s. But I think we can say that the challenges we are seeing unfolding today are because civil society organizations have been so successful, and they're perceived as a threat. And again, we have a quote from the president. It's precisely because citizen and civil society can be so powerful that more and more governments are doing everything they can to silence them. I'm gonna move now into the role of civil society and just give you a little bit of the flavor of the changing roles that civil society is playing. In its most traditional fashion, it's our longstanding media partners, for instance in Ukraine, who were speaking out for freedom in the Maidan, holding the government accountable for his actions. We are also pleased now to be supporting civil society organizations who are actually partnering with government. We see this example in the Feed the Future initiative, where jointly civil society and government are coming together to create metrics, to create messages, and to come up with solutions to food insecurity. And interestingly enough, I was going to raise the example of our support for civil society organizations in Burundi to support youth-led organizations to reduce the risk of violence before the elections next month. We'll remain hopeful that there's a positive and peaceful outcome, but as this morning's event show, that remains to be seen. But as these roles evolve, we must help civil society organizations adjust to the changing operating environment, particularly in closed space. For instance, I'll give two quick examples. We know that the source of funding for CSOs is changing. So CSOs can't really rely on the same levels of ODA development assistance that they once were receiving. Now this is particularly acute in closing space, because when you have further restrictions on receiving foreign funding, it makes it even more difficult for organizations. The second example I like to give is around the new technologies that are evolving every single day, while civil society organizations can count on these technologies to help broaden their base and reach out to more people. Unfortunately, they can also count on unfriendly actors to be one step ahead of them and thwarting their actions. And this is what's creating a whole new set of challenge we call digital security challenges. So that's something we're looking into. So given this context, why do we have a responsibility to push back on the pushback? I think that's a common phrase that people are starting to use. But I would say that this is obvious to many of you, but if we lose a functionality of civil society, who will be applying the critical accountability measures? Who will ensure that the government doesn't lose touch with the concerns and the needs of the people? And who will ensure that those typically excluded from the dialogue are part of the discussion? I don't know for any of you who might know the former deputy administrator of USAID, Don Steinberg. I'm gonna channel my inner Don right now. He never made remarks without mentioning those typically excluded. So women, youth, internally displaced people, LGBT, and indigenous populations. I think that's a good precedent to set. So I'm following in his footsteps. The other reason we have to respond, and it was raised this morning as well, neighboring countries will continue to take notes. We saw South Sudan, shockingly taking notes from Sudan. And they're pushing the boundaries of the restrictions that they can apply in their own countries. The US government has put forth a robust agenda to combat this backsliding. It's what we call stand with civil society. And this agenda, we call it an agenda, it was crystallized last June in a presidential memorandum. If you guys are familiar with the presidential memorandum. But basically what it says in very general terms, I'm gonna pull it again from something Nancy said this morning, use your own words. That's essentially what it's saying, use your own words. So for US representatives during our visits and our everyday business, engage with civil society broadly and often. Each time we encounter a restrictive law, speak up, say something, and take action. Continue to support civil society despite or in light of the restrictions that are taking place. And most importantly play that facilitator role between governments and civil society. Essentially model the type of change we are asking other governments to take. I'm just gonna rift off of, it's a little, this is our stand with civil society and some additional quotes from President Obama. If we wanna take a more practical long-term approach, we know the political space is expanding and contrasting at any moment in time. So it's our job as academics, policy makers, and practitioners to figure out how we do three things. This is how we're framing it. Prevent, adapt, and support civil society during these shifting times. I'm most familiar with the foreign assistance. But diplomatic efforts are equally as important. In fact, when we work together, we can create a robust response, hopefully capable of combating some of the most challenging environments. I'm just gonna give you two quick examples of some of the work that we're doing at USAID. First, to prevent further restrictions, I'm just gonna pull up this real quick. We have a CSO sustainability index. And what this document does is it tracks, trends, seven civil society dimensions across 64 countries. And this gives our civil society actors a tool that they can use in advocating for reform. So this is one way we're trying to prevent the restrictions. The second thing that we're doing, it's called the LEED program. And this provides civil society organizations with legal analysis, both long-term and rapid response legal analysis, that they can use to mobilize action when a restrictive law is proposed. And we are also trying to be innovative and using innovative approaches. So we are currently right now creating what we call innovation hubs. And these innovation hubs are designed to connect civil societies across regions and provide them with the expertise, training, resource, and ICT tools to better equip them in these closing space environments. I'll also just give you two quick highlights of some work that's being done in what we call the diplomatic space. We have, of course, supporting the communities of democracy through, by strengthening the diplomatic action. And State Department also has a program called Lifeline, which provides emergency assistance to CSOs who are under threat. So these are some of the tangible programs that we're doing to help civil society organizations. One more document here. I have one more document. What good would I be if I didn't come with some handouts? This is our best practices document. We just recently released this in January. And it's a short compilation of some of the best practices and how we can do program smarter. But this is just a start. We know we need the assistance from many of you to help figure out what are some more best practices. And some of the questions that we've been asking are how can we better connect civil society in closing spaces, peer-to-peer learning across regions? I mentioned the hubs, but there's many more ways that we can do this. And in general, what are some of the tools that we can use to help civil societies mobilize more effectively? I'm going to leave these hard questions, like I said, to the panelists. And I'm just going to leave you with one thought. So this is our mission. This is USAID's mission statement. And I raise this because it's really important to know that inclusive, peaceful democracies are core to our development work. Poverty reduction, economic growth, democracy, and national security are all intertwined. And so what I'm basically saying is we can't implement agriculture and global health programs without also addressing core democratic governance and human rights issues that are impeding states for providing services for their own people. Otherwise, we risk either having a job that we have to do endlessly, or worse yet, we risk leaving millions of people unheard and neglected in the background. But we have an opportunity in front of us, and we really should take advantage of that opportunity. So I'll leave it there, and we'll welcome our panelists. Thank you, Rosarie, for giving us the US government perspective on this issue of the crisis of shrinking civil society space around the world. I'd like to invite at this time our next panelists, George Lopez from our Academy, Vice President of the Academy at US Institute of Peace, will lead a discussion on the topic of silencing voices. Active space for civil society engagement is a foundation for sustainable peace. However, around the world, there is an alarming trend toward government restrictions that are making it exceedingly difficult and more dangerous for conducting this work. Today, we have before you a panel that will highlight the key issues and potential solutions for both peace building and democratic practitioners. George, so are you. Linwood, thank you. And thank you, Rosarie, for this marvelous introduction, the overview of the US government approach to this. It is, of course, a very, very complex and now compelling question with the closing of civil space and this panel is really a fabulous one to kick off this discussion because of the diversity of experience of our panelists. As you see, we have four. We break tradition of the last panel. We do have two men trying to be as inclusive as we can. Sir Michael Lee comes to us from the German Marshall Fund and with a long history of involvement in the creation of civil space, particularly in the transition from communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s to now, but also much more recent and pressing work in the Ukraine situation. So his remarks are going to be focused partly on that and engaging this question. Tanya Fafenholz is, for many of us, one of the best scholar practitioner, practitioner research scholars in the field, basing her work, of course, out of the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She's deeply involved in two particular projects, one which addresses the core of our program this morning on the widening of civil society space and how that can be done with engagement across cases and across groups, but also a broader look at the inclusion and inclusive dimensions and challenges of the peacebuilding enterprise. Maria Steffen is my good colleague as a senior policy fellow here at the United States Institute of Peace. Many of you know Maria from her work with her colleague, Erica Chenoweth, on proving empirically to us that nonviolent transition and nonviolent civic engagement movements of protest are more likely to change regimes towards democracy and towards transition than violent ones are. But she's also been very active in the transnational space of civic mobilization and its importance in what we do not only for peacebuilding but for linking peacebuilding and democracy. Kamissa Kamara joins us as a well-known specialist and senior program officer from the National Endowment for Democracy with particular emphasis on programs in West Africa, the creation and maintenance of the Sahal Strategy Forum, and with a good deal of case experience as well. So we have a marvelous and rich program. I've invited the panelists as they feel comfortable to either speak from this television interview newsroom style or to come to the podium. So we thank you for your attendance. Each of our panelists has been very disciplined and trained to bring their remarks within seven to 10 minutes, which only touches the kind of work they've done, but it ought to give us good basis for discussion. We'll begin with Sir Michael. Thank you very much for that introduction, George, and for the invitation to be with you today. I want to share with you the experience I have had at the European Commission in Brussels over many, many years working with the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and then also working with a further group of countries to the east and to the south around the Mediterranean Rim. The particular feature of this work and why I think it might be of interest at the start of our discussion is it's virtually a unique case in which a group of countries authorized, as it were, an outside authority to intervene directly within their societies to support transition towards democracy as they were candidates for membership. So the legitimacy of this intervention came from the demand within the countries themselves. It's very rare to find this around the world. And as we heard in the introduction this morning, the space is closing with countries that do not have this kind of very strong incentive. However, I do also have a rather somber message in that even with the tremendous incentives that the European Union was able to put forward in the form of membership, financial support, and other means, what we see these days is considerable backsliding even in this particular case. The European Union is very aware that the criteria for membership, including democracy, rule of law, protection of human rights, means democracy not only in the narrow sense of electoral democracy, but in the much more profound sense of liberal democracy touching the whole of society. And yet here we are a decade or so after the dramatic enlargement to 10 and then 12 new member states, 10 of them from Central and Eastern Europe, former communist countries. We actually have one of these countries, Hungary, which was at the forefront of the transition in the early days, whose prime minister is declaring his personal opposition to liberal democracy and his preference for another approach. So this is even in the case of a country that has had all these benefits that is a member of the European Union and of NATO. How much more difficult, therefore, might it be with countries that don't have this very strong structure of support and of incentives. Early on in the transition process, the European Commission identified civil society as crucial to back up this transition process and support for membership and established a well-financed civil society facility, providing three main types of support, support on the necessary legislation to permit the activities of civil society in countries where civil society had been crushed for two or three generations. And in some cases where it had been rather weak, even before the advent of communism, financial support to shore up such organizations and then people-to-people programs to bring them into contact with counterparts in older member states with a view to sharing best practice and building up partnerships. This was particularly necessary because of the many, many challenges these societies faced. The traditions of the rule of law were weak, corruption was and is a major problem. Some of the issues that we rather take for granted in Western societies related to non-discrimination, gender equality, protection of the environment were all very new to these countries. Stepping back from all this, I think one can say 10 or 11 years later that on the whole, this process has been successful. And we do see in most of the countries concerned thriving civil societies and democracy that is not seriously at threat. But we also see negative tendencies, the persistence of corruption, and even the calling into question of the notion of liberal democracy itself. The European Commission has found that as long as these countries had not yet signed their act of accession and there was still a doubt as to whether or not they were going to succeed in the process, we had maximum leverage. But as soon as this process was complete and they were on their own, we saw a very diverse trends, including serious backsliding. Now, if this was true in the countries with this very strong incentive, how much more true was it with the next ring of countries around the European Union covered by our so-called neighborhood policy where we have tried to strengthen democracy and respect for the rule of law and human rights but without the incentive of eventual membership. And there, the experience is far more mixed as anyone who reads the newspapers every day knows. In the case of Eastern Europe, moderate progress has been registered. We saw in the introduction there's pictures of the Maidan which to some extent are encouraging. But we know also that the overthrow of the Ancien Régime in Ukraine has unleashed other forces, not all of whom are liberal, but looking more generally across the Southern Caucasus, North Africa and the Levant. These days, it's perhaps only Tunisia and even there with a question mark where we see strong local ownership of this process. And this really brings me to the abiding conclusion that we have reached as a result of this experience. And that is that outside actors certainly can support, can share experience, can build alliances, can bring counterparts into contact, can launch education programs, involve young people, mobilize diplomatic pressure. But the indispensable ingredient for success in this effort is a strong demand arising from within the target country as it were itself. Let me just read you a brief paragraph of conclusions from a recent analysis that the Commission has made based on its experience ever since the overthrow of communism and with a view to financing support for civil society activities over the next seven years. This very short quote is as follows, the Commission recognizes that a genuine culture of active citizenship cannot be created with financial assistance from the outside alone. External donors may over-influence civil society activities. Organizations that are excessively dependent on international or domestic public funding can in some instances hardly be considered genuine civil society and risk delegitimizing their activities in the eyes of the public. The conclusion drawn from this is not that this activity should be stopped on the country, but that what we should do perhaps is double and quadruple our support in the case of those societies where there is a clear demand welling up from within the society. In other cases, we should do our best but also with some modesty based on experience and with the understanding that the key actors must come from within the societies concerned themselves. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, George. Thank you, Melanie and the Alliance and the Institute for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I have three issues to talk about and that is a look first a little bit at what are the different dimensions of this shrinking space. Then what are the challenges within civil society itself? And then what are the strategies in civil society support? Different dimensions of shrinking space. We have heard already the legal space. I don't have to add anything to that. Dramatic. I wanted to highlight the physical space also. I mean what we see and we have heard in the previous panel about violent extremism. That's an extreme shrinking space for active civil society groups. When we hear reports at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, for example, about groups in Syria under ISIS controlled areas, how the space shrinks. I mean, you can imagine. So the violence from all sides that are committed are extreme shrinking of the space. And I think that's a crucial problem in civil society support. So it's not about, when we talk about strategies, it's not just about the best way to support. It's really about also to address violence and protection issues. And I think sometimes the peace-building community is not good at protection issues. So we support our partners. But do we protect them? Are they still alive tomorrow to benefit from training that has been conducted? The other dimension is dividing and co-option strategies by governments. And we see that all around the world. It's not that civil society is that good entity. It's just waiting for our brilliant support all the time. Civil society is as divided as society. And there are elements in civil society that are co-opted by governments. And of course, we tend to walk with the others. But we shouldn't ignore that. And that's going on. And it's deliberate strategies by governments to do that. I wanted to talk about a particular sort of resistance issue that is going on. And we saw that in our latest multi-year project on broader inclusion, as Michael mentioned, with 40 in-depth case studies. And all across these case studies, what we have seen is that governments are extremely good at resistance for change. It's not only resistance in civil society. So we have the obvious resistance. We heard about physical space, legal space. But there are soft resistance. And I wanted to highlight an example. The undersecretary was talking about Kenya. Let me take the Kenyan example. Great success, violence has been absolutely reduced during the elections, which is a great success. But it doesn't stop here, the story of Kenya. But it stops in terms of monitoring and attention. And that's the problem. What has happened since this nonviolent election is that we see a systematic revision of the gains of the peace deal. We see commissions that have been explicitly set up in order to reduce the causes of violence, like the National Integration Commission in Kenya, that are the commissioners are not renewed. And when the commissioners were renewed, you will find all the friends of the president there. You have all parallel status nominated by only one ethnic community. But the interesting thing to all these things, the constitution that has had tremendous gains addressing the causes of conflict, the best constitution the country ever had. It has been amended 10 or 12 times already to remake the gains of the peace process. Nobody says anything, not in civil society, not in the international community. There's no monitoring. We are all happy that the violence was not there during election, and we have done well in prevention. Is that enough? So I think we should take a second look and be more careful. I might sound a bit critical. I thought as I'm not American and not getting an American funding, I can play that role today. So let me continue. And it's becoming even worse now. Let's look at number three, shrinking space. And that's ourselves. So I argue that the peace building community, right large, is contributing to shrinking space of civil society. And I'll tell you why. I'm also a member of Alliance for Peace Building Aviation Consortium. And we had interesting debates on Monday. How come that we are still talking, we see this here. We're talking about prevention. We're talking about linking security and development. We're talking about counter-terrorism. I'm in this field since 25 years. I have heard it all. Talked about that in the early 90s. We talked in the mid 90s. We talked about it after September 11. And we have spent enormous amounts of money and resources into research, into evaluations, into all that. We know a lot. We're not just starting from scratch, but it seems we always do. And the consequences for civil society are that they have to go with the flow. Now they have to rewrite their project proposals from resistance to service delivery to anti-terror. And they're just there to report and report and rewrite and rewrite, and their space for action is shrinking. And it's because of us. Just wanted to highlight that. Let me see whether I have also, I'm going to have some positive things as well, don't worry. But let me start on the challenges women's civil society. I think we in the peace building community are right to support civil society and to support the peace constituencies. That's our role, and we should do that. But we should not be ignorant of the rest. There's so much research on the NGOization of civil society that goes on. And we see that in every crisis going on. You mentioned Ukraine. We see that again in Ukraine, that we have a shift from advocacy work to service delivery work. We have a shift of gender roles, where human rights women organizations become now the protectors of the man going to war, because the narratives change and the gender roles change because of war. We have a lack of strategic vision in many civil society organizations. We've been working in Geneva a lot on the process in Libya and Syria, for example, because the UN has offices there. And you will see that all the civil society organizations coming to Geneva and all the UN agencies engaging, there's a lack of a vision what to exactly support. And civil society itself has a lack of vision. But what is done is negotiation training, leadership skills training, conflict resolution training. But where is the strategic advice, the strategic support to organizations, and making them fit for resistance? Let's put it like that. On the Libya case, just one example again. The UN has tried to set up a very inclusive process with parallel tracks, with the main negotiations, with a civil society track, a women's track. All these tracks are totally independent from each other. And we know that this has absolutely no effect. But it's still happening, it's still going on. We have all this knowledge. So what do we do with all this? There's still hope. Of course, there are very many good organizations out there. And I have been also working for the European Commission in my previous life. And as a donor, I mean, one thing I have learned is don't bombard organizations that are good with too much money, because then they can't be good anymore. They need money, of course, they need support. But I think what is a clear problem in the peaceful community is that we live in the silos and we tend to talk to our like-minded. Our like-minded's here, our like-minded's. I have often the impression, how can that we have still problems in the world? Everybody I talk to is totally convinced of inclusion, of anti-terror, I can't understand it. So it's a problem with whom I'm talking to, apparently. And I think that's what's happening. We're talking to ourselves and we're very happy among ourselves. And our like-minded friends are brought everywhere. So that's a crucial problem. And another problem is this disconnect between the program and project work and the political work. And civil society support work. If you want to help shrinking a sort of opening space for civil society, it's not enough to do a nice project. We know that all this has to come together and all this has sort of double strategies. We need the international NGOs that lobby their governments to push support to other governments. And we should not just be too much in our comfort zone and say like, well, there is these nice governments. We are having these deals and partnership agreements. I mean, let's face it. There's one word that the peace community doesn't really like, and that's power. But let's face it. When we talk about why is space shrinking, it's because nobody wants to give up power easily. And I mean, who would? So there's not enough strategies around in civil society, both locally and with international supporters, to counteract elite power and all sorts of powers and resistance within and outside of civil society. And I think we should really address that issue and build it into the programs and strategies we have. For the Kenyan example I mentioned, many human rights groups in Kenya said if we would have only worked with parliament, we didn't understand that parliament could change actually the laws. We had lobbied for. And so there is this multi-layer strategy is necessary. And I know we're talking about this joint strategizing and all this, but I think every organization has to really understand which part of the puzzle they are contributing to, and we really need for once work on the blockages. So two more last points. One is monitoring. What is really crucial, what I've seen in so many countries now and also our research confirms that monitoring is really key. And monitoring mainly takes place on human rights monitoring. That is not enough. We need to systematically monitor the gains that have been there. When we supported our partners, we have to monitor whether the gains that have made are still in place. And out of that monitoring and that data that is there, there needs to be systematic advocacy campaigns and the support can then be channeled more directly and much more targeted. The last point I would like to make is instead of reinventing the wheel all the time, I think we should really work on the question of the blockages. Why are we having brilliant conflict analysis but programming looks the same? Why do we talk every 10 years about the same thing, but nothing changes? So we know all this. What are the main blockages within our institutions, within civil society, within governments, that hold us, sort of, that prevent us from doing what should be done and what we are verbally all the time claiming to do? And I think that should be an engagement of the peace building community to really list these blockages and come up with a compact of commitment to work on these blockages. And with that, I leave you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tanya. Maria. Well, thanks very much, George. Thanks, Tanya, for that nice and feisty speech. You set up for my remarks. Very nice. I'd first like to offer a shout out to Melanie and the organizers for making governance the focus of this year's conference. I think we know that bad governance, systemic corruption, is a major driver of violent conflict and certainly violent extremism around the world. So it's wonderful that the Premier Peace Building Organization is taking governance on board in such a serious way. In addition, I would say that the closing space for civil society is, I think, an underappreciated threat to international peace and security for all the reasons that my colleagues laid out. And I'm grateful that this issue is being taken more seriously, not only in this town, but certainly internationally. We're fortunate at this point to have some excellent research. I'll wear my academic cap for a second. We're fortunate to have some excellent research that has been done on this phenomenon of closing space for civil society and on authoritarian pushback. And I would just mention a few. The great work by Tom Carruthers and Diane Grimont at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who focused on this phenomenon. Civicus, the global civil society network, has a great enabling environment index that's been very helpful. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which is focused more on the legal enabling environment. And my old professor, Sarah Mendelson, has just done somewhere from the CSIS on why governments target civil society and what can be done in response. So we're fortunate to have that research out there now. And the reality is that there's actually a skill set involved in closing space for civil society. Just as there's a skill set involved in waging civil resistance and nonviolent movements, governments basically are learning from each other how to do this. And people are starting to talk about a dictator's playbook. So there are certain techniques and tactics that governments are using to shut down the space for civil society, whether it's finding ways to criminalize dissent, whether it's proactively using state-run media to perpetuate foreign conspiracy theories, whether it's outsourcing violent repression to non-state armed groups, whether it's eliminating foreign funding for civil society, so that playbook exists. And I liked Rosary's point about, well, in our case, what is then the pushback to the pushback? And how should we be countering what is systemic learning and action by these regimes? A colleague, Larry Diamond, has referred to the past decade as a past decade of democratic recession. We've seen a third of all new democracies fail since the third wave of democratization began 30 years ago. So it's a pretty seemingly bleak picture when it comes to democratic development. But in the midst of this democratic recession and systemic crackdowns on civil society around the world, we're also seeing an upsurge in people power movements. So some people have referred to the Arab Spring and the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the social justice movements in Brazil and Malaysia, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong as sort of the fourth wave of democracy to use Samuel Huntington's term. And certainly the past decade plus has been an extremely contentious period. So we're seeing crackdowns in global space, but an upsurge in human agency and people power movements around the world. And what are we talking about with people power? So my colleague talked about the professionalization of civil society and this endemic problem of elites not wanting to give up power. Well, what people power is about is how ordinary citizens who are organized in nontraditional groups, labor unions, professional groups, women's collectives, hip hop artists who are organized, all these groups coming together and engaging in extra institutional and sometimes extra legal nonviolent direct action in an attempt to shift power in society and in an attempt to challenge power holders and essentially to advance basic human rights and freedoms. This method of struggle involves both confrontational actions and also obviously engagements with governments and with power holders. But the theory of change is that sometimes you need to shake up a system in order to get to meaningful resolution into peace building and that's sort of the essence of people power. Historically we know that social movements have been major drivers of economic, social and political change. We know from women's rights movements, from environmental rights movements, certainly banning the landmines campaign, just a few examples of how organized citizen movements have transformed global politics. Some of you may be familiar with the research that I've conducted with my partner Erica Chenoweth. We wanted to ask the question and answer the question how effective really are nonviolent movements and historically how effective have nonviolent campaigns been against the toughest of the tough opponents. So dictatorships, foreign military occupations, movements for territorial secession and self-determination. Until Erica and I undertook this quantitative study there had been no attempt to compare systematically violent and nonviolent campaigns to figure out which one was historically more effective. So we found that after collecting data on 323 campaigns from 1900 to 2006, we found that the nonviolent resistance campaigns were twice as effective historically as armed campaigns against these formidable foes and not only that, in a point that's very relevant for this conversation today, we were very interested in how the resistance type affected the society that followed and the society after the transition. And we found a very strong positive correlation between nonviolent resistance and both democratic development and consolidation and civil peace. So there seems to be something inherent in the process of nonviolent organizing, building broad-based coalitions, negotiating between strange bedfellows which happens during movements that seems to be conducive to democratic development. This work on movements, I think, is particularly relevant to this challenge of closing space because the reality is that we can no longer support civil society using the old methods in the old ways. It's become very difficult in most parts of the world to support traditional NGOs and CSOs. And also there's a fundamental flaw in the business model, the professionalization of civil society but also creating donor dependencies is not healthy for civil society. And supporting groups that have no local constituency and mobilization base is simply problematic. It detracts from what civil societies are supposed to do. So I mean, we know that collective action can help open new democratic spaces. And so we need to think about supporting these actors that historically have been in the forefront of these types of changes. So we think about the ladies in white in Cuba. We think about Ballet Citoyenne, which my colleague will talk about, the citizens' broom in Burkina Faso. We talk about the Union for Democratic Front in South Africa, trade unions and civic groups, the Polish solidarity movement, non-traditional civil society actors who ultimately immobilize people for fundamental change. The challenge is that supporting movements is not easy. It's actually quite difficult to do. The model is different. The structure of often leaderless, diffuse, decentralized movements is certainly different. From traditional NGOs and CSOs, you have this whole idea of the kiss of death dilemma. Well, if there's foreign support, is this going to delegitimize and undermine the effectiveness, especially if it's coming from US government and other bilateral donors? You have this idea that activists don't think in terms of log frames. They really don't. And their M&E is going to be very different from what we're used to, frankly. So in thinking about what support could be helpful, and I'll end on this point, I think there are two basic categories of external actor support for nonviolent movements and social movements. And the first involves the tools and the approaches to creating an enabling environment for nonviolent citizen action. And the second is providing timely, catalytic support to sort of the frontline defenders and activists. So the enabling space and then the direct support. I coauthored with two colleagues, Sara Flakhani and Nadia Navivala, a USIP special report that's out available on the tables. And basically in the report, we are advocating for a movement mindset when it comes to supporting civil society, which means coming up with innovative ways to support these local change advocates. And we're not talking, I'm glad you mentioned the money part. This is not about throwing a lot of money at movements. The worst thing we can do is to create a marketplace for activism, which would absolutely kill meaningful, nonviolent movements. But what it does mean is actively showing solidarity using the tools we know. I wish more foreign service officers studied the diplomats handbook for democratic development support. It should be a mainstay in the Foreign Service Institute. We have a military engagement handbook now that shows how militaries can help create and support democratic development in non-democracies, a military engagement handbook. And I think what we talk about is how external actors can help create fora for activists and civil society members to learn from each other. So the peer-to-peer learning at the end of the day is incredibly, incredibly important. It's so much more effective for activists to learn from activists from other countries who've been tortured in prison, put in jail, rather than Western intellectuals or educators coming in and talking about frankly why civil resistance works. So it's very important to provide those spaces. That's why I'm quite excited frankly, Rosary, about what USAID is doing with these civil society innovation hubs. It offers a huge opportunity to connect, closed and open spaces, traditional and non-traditional civil societies that can fundamentally help activists learn from each other. And finally, I would say in the area of international organizations and even World Bank, I was actually speaking at the World Bank yesterday about people power and peace building. And the question was, well, you know, should the World Bank get in the business of supporting movements and providing, you know, probably not, probably they should not be thinking about providing direct support to activists. But what they can do, of course, is they have different leverage points with governments and they can help in that enabling environment space. And they can also, through their social accountability work, support civil society, do social monitoring, auditing of services, which at the end of the day is a form of people power and a form of social mobilization. So I would say I would encourage folks to think about what a movement mindset means in your own work. And I hope that this will translate into the discussion after. Thank you. Thank you very much. And last but not least, Camissa. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. All right, so it's a little difficult to go after everybody, but I'll try to do my best. So I would like to start off by telling you about all the great things that the NED does. Our main mission is really to strengthen democratic institutions around the world and specifically to assist civil society organizations, mainly through funding, but also through strategic guidance and counsel. So please tell the World Bank not to get into that. For example, and specifically in the Africa program, one of our main objectives has been to develop civil society capacity to work constructively with their governments wherever possible, and also to resist the urge of joining these governments in either an appointed quality or in an elected official capacity. More generally, I would like to say that the role of civil society in consolidating democracy and opposing authoritarian rule is historically undeniable. And I'm sure each one of us here can cite at least dozens of countries where civil society organizations and the grassroots communities they represent have made their voices heard and could not be silenced. I am thinking the Arab Spring. I'm thinking the African Spring, which may have started back in 2012 in Senegal when youth movements have pushed President Abdul-Iwad out of power when he was seeking a third term. And more recently, the example of Blaise Comparé of Burkina Faso has made the headlines. This is all very positive. However, on the African continent and elsewhere in the world, civil society has become cumbersome to authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments and heads of states who wish to remain in power, basically. And that is because by nature, civil society is diverse and its actions and initiatives are complex and they operate on many, many fronts. Imagine a person, basically, who would want to make the sun disappear by just hiding it with both hands. I'm not sure that that person would be successful at that. And that's basically what civil society organizations are to authoritarian governments. CSO's actions and struggles have to be analyzed in the context within which they occur. And I would like my very short presentation to focus on three main countries that perfectly fit in the title, silencing voices and shrinking democratic spaces. And these countries are the Gambia, which doesn't receive much media attention, Ethiopia and Burundi. To start off, the Gambia is, I would say, the last remaining full-fledged dictatorship of West Africa. President Yahya Jami, who took over in the military coup in 1994 and has recently escaped a coup attempt, has progressively removed all liberties pertaining to the press or to NGOs working on public policy-related matters. Very much like in Ethiopia, in the Gambia, independent media and NGOs are not operating in a free manner. And state control over their activities is extremely, extremely heavy. In Ethiopia, the 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation, the CSP, prevents organizations receiving more than 10% of their funds from foreign sources, from engaging in activities that seek to promote democracy, human rights, conflict resolution and protection of the rights of women, minorities and ethnic groups. The Charities and Society Agency, which is the NGO regulatory body in Ethiopia, established under the CSP, has excessive powers to monitor NGOs, interfere in their internal affairs and decide whether an organization needs to be dissolved or not. Going south of Ethiopia in Burundi, which has been making the headlines over the past few weeks and even this morning, due to the violent protests following currencies' candidacy for a third term, CSOs have very high capacity, and I would say they're maybe the strongest of the Great Lease region. However, in that country, judicial harassment, arbitrary detention and threats to human rights defenders have been under rise. Notably, government officials have regularly been summoning human rights defenders, activists and journalists in reaction to statements and reports on human rights. So I would like to quickly mention some of the strategies used by the NED in these closed societies. First of all, it is important to support these organizations, all groups that are in country, who are seeking to work creatively within the very small spaces that they have. At the NED, what we've done is we've funded both what we call soft projects that work in a collaborative manner with the governments, as well as supported more active or adversarial initiatives that are undertaken by informal groups, or activists who may not be registered formally as an organization, but are actively advocating for human rights and democratic rights in their countries. Second strategy that we've had, and I think that it's maybe one of the most important points that I will be making here, is that in closed societies, most activists or some, or many, activists, journalists are being forced into exile. So it is important not to forget about the large and politically active diaspora of these countries. So it is important to support initiatives by activists that are also based outside of the country and could have an impact within these countries. Related to this, for organizations that are based in countries, there are ways to support offshore projects. Bring activists from the country, outside of the country, in a safer environment to discuss among themselves, to share knowledge with peers, for example. And it is also important to support regional and international advocacy efforts for these organizations that are based in country. I would like to conclude by saying three things. First of all, the de facto civil liberties. Civil society organizations should enjoy around the world, need to be solidified and expanded. Second point, harassment of CSOs in one country or the other cannot and should not be isolated. The regional repercussions of such need to be analyzed for adequate response. And finally, there are groups out there who are ready to take risks to defend their liberties and oppose authoritarian rule. These groups need assistance, they need guidance, and most importantly, they need support, be it material support, be it financial support or even moral support. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner, and thanks to our panel. The discipline that this panel has exhibited, given all that they had to share with us, I think is very, very important. We're down to about 20 minutes before lunch, so I think I'm gonna resist the temptation to pose some questions myself. Let's turn it over to you with the richness that was given us, and again, we'll have folks with the mic that are already hands up and a lot of hands up. So let's begin with these three good women in a row right here, and I promise you we'll go to a second and third round. Thank you so much. Okay, one of the good women is happy to speak. I'm Mindy Reiser, I'm vice president of an NGO called Global Peace Services. Maria, your presentation was fascinating, and I would like you to speak about something that was once upon a time called routineization of charisma, and that means how you take a movement with a lot of energy, a lot of grassroots support, a lot of charisma, and then help it channel its energy and its vision into a political system, how you take these ideas and structure them into a parliamentary process without adulterating and losing that commitment and energy. Thank you, such a good, clear question. The second one right behind here. Thank you. I'm Julia Roy, I'm president of Partners for Democratic Change, and perhaps it's a follow on comment, and then a question. Regarding this idea about the professionalization of civil society and the concern that we have after that third wave of democracy, where so many of us in the room were a part of working with and strengthening NGOs in countries. And what I've seen a lot of most recently is this factionalization of civil society in those countries between the divide of NGOs who have been doing this fight now, democracy and human rights or peace building organizations, for more than 25 years, and then they see their colleagues and their donors say, no, not anymore. We're actually really interested in people power, and we wanna go to the kind of sexy activists. And it's really causing a lot of conflict locally. And you have people who should be working together, who perhaps aren't working together, only because we see this really kind of movement towards trying to find the sexy activists, I mean that in quotes, who are bringing about real change, but then that really we need to be making those linkages and helping through our funding sources. And if we're concerned about the business model, then how do we also support as pieces of this funding pipeline, how do we support those different business models of thinking about kind of their sustained work in newsways? And with that, I would love to hear more from Camissa about how she actually gets money to those movements. Really, because that is a big challenge for us, just in practical terms, if there isn't an NGO with a bank account, how are you supporting them? Thank you. Thank you. And the last one for this round to Rosa. Thank you. My name is Moira Burse, and I work with an NGO called Peace Brigades International, and our work is to protect human rights activists and other members of civil society in parts of the world where the space is closing for them. And so I wanna ask about the question that Tanya raised about protection. And it's not just a self-serving question because I'm actually interested in your thoughts on parts of the world where PBI's model doesn't work. I mean, our model requires a space where countries care at least a little bit about their international reputation and the international levers of aid that can be brought to bear on those countries and so are on the ground monitoring and observation and physical presence in those countries can help inform those relationships. But what about countries where that kind of a model doesn't work, where the countries, where the governments don't really care about their international reputations and are willing, therefore, to ignore the kinds of international advocacy that we all in this room might do. Thanks. Thank you. Three good pointed questions to individuals and well stated in each case. Maria. Start us off. So that was a great question about the routinization of charisma. I hadn't heard that phraseology before. Very interesting. And essentially your question is sort of helping movements pivot from protest to politics. Is that, yeah. So I mean, first of all, I think the sort of the single charismatic leader as the head of a movement is more the exception, vice the norm. I mean, we know the Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi and the like but most the vast majority of other successful nonviolent movements tend to be less focused on a single individual and I think there's something to be said about when you're doing training and capacity building and skills building, sort of supporting decentralized leadership and the replication of leadership within a movement. I think that bodes well for what comes after as well. So sort of moving away from the charismatic leader model which is problematic frankly in so many respects and sort of focus on developing decentralized leadership. I would also say so there's a lot of debate. Well, when should we help youth movements form political parties? Or when should we be pushing them towards parties? Parties are critical. I mean, parties are a glue, a huge part of the glue between sort of popular movements and democratic consolidation but obviously there's no template for in this movement should always become parties. No, they probably shouldn't be. I think actually what's happening in Ukraine right now is a fascinating case of many members of the Maidan movement. Many hardcore activists have entered government and at least one I know who was always on the outside protesting the government in corruption. She's now overseeing donor funds coming into the government and monitoring. So you have this yet whereas a lot of activists have stayed on the outside. So I think, but encouraging them to think through alternative pathways to political participation, what it means to engage in a constitutional reform process, parliamentary processes, political, that should be part of the thinking as they're doing movement organization protest demonstrations. That has to be sort of forefront. Did you want to take the fractionalization of NGOs? Take it, take it, take it, take it, take it. No, I mean, so the point on, so I don't have necessarily a verse reaction. Sexy activists, I just, most of the activists I know and I'm sure you know are like some of the most courageous and imperiled and threatened people and so I think finding ways to support them and show solidarity is actually critically important and should not be sort of seen as sort of a side effort and the like. I agree with you that this divide between traditional and non-traditional civil society is problematic. Even in the report that we've written, we're not saying NGOs and CSOs should not be supported, that they should not exist. Absolutely not. CSOs, NGOs, especially in closed environments can sometimes provide convening space and they can help build capacity and inculcate skills for non-traditional civil society actors. This happened in Egypt and some other places and so, but I don't think that the effort has shifted to supporting non-traditional civil society actually. I think it's still pretty much focused on, a lot is focused on CSOs and NGOs. So again, the regional civil society hubs could play a very interesting role in bringing together traditional and non-traditional as well as closed and open spaces. Do you want to comment on that too? I think I want to add in that way bringing some of the questions together and take it from a strategic angle. What I see is, as you rightly said, is the transition from movements that happens often place is you see them either going into becoming NGOs or they become political parties and both is not wrong in a way. But what is missing in key moments of transitions is definitely the strategic vision for that and the support is often like, okay, what do you need? And it's very often focused that the partner is taken as the holy kind of thing, the partner needs, yeah? Instead of saying like, well, yes, we want to take your needs serious. We want to understand the context, but there is a lot of comparative expertise out there and we would like you to get to know about that. And here, I'm a big fan of scenario planning and I would like to link that also to the protection question. I'll give you an example. If you have in a fragile environment, for example, you do media training, you do journalist training, you work with editors to change all this, the usual things we do. And then if you then don't work with scenarios to understand like, okay, what are the different options in the country? What could happen? And is my journalist training still relevant in this or that scenario? Then the problem is that we don't move into protection with that same project if we have not planned for it. And if from the beginning of the start, we have set under these conditions, we cannot, it makes no sense whatsoever to continue journalist training. In Sri Lanka, they have continued to do journalist training while journalists were killed by weekly. And it took like another year until a fund for journalists to fly them out of the country basically and give them assignments abroad was set up. And I think this should not happen. This should be planned in. And that's the same for this transition between movements and NGOs. When we have different scenarios, we need to show the activists what are the options. And the last point I wanted to make is about what you made earlier, the peer-to-peer. The peer-to-peer exchange is important, but I would also put a caveat to it. It depends extremely how it's done. In that sense, I mentioned that yesterday in a number of workshops we had, I call it death by context. What happens very often is when you put activists together in, let's say, the wrong format, they will all tell you about the context for ages because they think you need to understand it. And they will not pull out the lessons learned that are relevant for the others. So we need to prepare well for this kind of peer-to-peer. We can just throw them together and say exchange. And I think this is what I have seen and it has not been effective. And we have to learn from that. Thank you. Commissar, the questions that were addressed. About the money. How do you get the money to them? Well, we've been very creative about that. So these organizations are sometimes informal or made up of individuals. So there are different ways. You could wire money to their individual accounts. You can wire money to other organizations who have the right to receive money from friend funding or you could do it next door, like in another country. So we don't smuggle money, per se. I don't want to say that. But there are many ways and we can talk about it later. On the record, there you go. Let's do another three or four here. You've got them right there in front of you, yes. Thank you very much. Adam Kaplan, USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives. I'd like to pose something that was mentioned early but then didn't get addressed in later comments. The closing of space by non-state actors. Yes, we have to deal with belligerent state actors but the non-state actors seem especially immune to any pressures. Comments there, please. Thank you. Right in back. Aaron Chastain, Catholic Relief Services. I really appreciated Maria's reference to the devil's playbook. And my question is about probably a key chapter in that which would be the financial action task force which has been ghost written just across the town at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and its neighbor at Treasury. Has anyone actually documented and researched the costs of such measures at the individual, organizational and institutional levels to civil society leaders, activists and to their organizations. And obviously at the institutional level looking at exactly what you're talking about, the space for civil society. Could I ask you which particular measures because there's a whole range of which one's your most concerned about? Recommendation number eight, number eight where it used to be that service delivery was the one area that civil society was allowed to operate fairly autonomously and now that's being targeted. All right, thank you. Oh, we have one right there next to you and then one in the far back. Hi, my name is Kathleen Callagie. I'm a graduate of Queens University, Belfast. Maria, I was wondering if you could expand on what an enabling environment is. What are some of the tools that you could apply? I thought that was a good suggestion. And Titania, if indeed there are too many peace builders in our space and we're asking organizations to do more reporting than they are able to do their work, is would it be a valid suggestion to have peace builders play some sort of strategic advisory role in those organizations? Say, instead of you doing all this analysis and reporting, we'll sit in and do it for you and advise, thanks. Thank you. And there's the last one up, the gentleman on the computer there. Second to last row. Thank you. I'm Noelit Kwage Ramungu from World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. I have two quick questions about people power. Could you hold the mic closer please? I have two quick questions about people power and the diaspora. From Egypt to Tunisia and Libya to Kenya and Burundi, people power proved instrumental in shaking the order regimes. However, this movement proved unable to fill the void. As a result, just violent forces took power. What can be done about that? The second question, we know that in the post World War, second World War, the diaspora proved an alternative to fascist regimes in Europe. Can this happen in Africa and other places like that? What is being done in the peace building work today? Thank you for a rich array of questions. I know my panelists have their eye on the clock, so let's begin and be succinct. Tanya, you wanna? All right, I'm starting with a closing space by non-state armed actors, I think you mean. I mean, it's a complex issue. Of course, we can talk about the consequences or the dimensions. Let me just pick out what it does. It does what was mentioned before already, of course, cause a lot of migration, people leaving, and then we have a split in civil society who stays because the ones who stay, let's take Syria as an example, they are now split between the two different controlled areas. There's no communication means, so one issue here is, and then you have the ones in the diaspora that go to different areas, and again, you have a split. What happens is different things. Like you, for example, want to set up civil society consultations. What happens is that the UN regularly says, like, well, these people are not legitimate because they are not inside, they are not this, and we should counteract that and make clear what does that mean. Then what happens is there's a need for joint communication channels between these organizations that needs to be enhanced, and these are, in my view, support projects. What is extremely important and not really happening, there's, everybody supports certain actors, for example, in Syria, brings them usually to Istanbul, and there's lots of work with these groups in good work, but they're not kind of coming together, and what we know definitely is, like, if, and that links also to what Maria said, if the biggest strength of civil society at certain moments is really sort of the joint positioning coming together and sort of making a point. That's almost impossible if you are so fragmented and divided. So how can this support of common positioning and common strategies, I think, is a major thing that needs to happen. On the crowded space, yes, I think, I mean, of course you can't counteract crowded space in working with individual organizations in terms of them becoming more effective, but I think it's a very good strategy, and I think it has become more practice now that organizations really give not only money, but really get strategic support, organizational development support, but still I think it's still underdeveloped, and many organizations tell me, for example, to say, like, if you get money from that and that organization, you can't, you have to hire a reporting officer, you have to have this. I think that should be really planned more in, and we're still talking about it, but it's still happening. But I think the strategic coming together and the facilitation, I think we need facilitators of facilitators and mediators and peace builders in the sense that more, I mean, in the Sudan peace process, they appointed Tabor and Beki to become the mediator among mediators because there were 30-plus mediators claiming to wanting to mediate, apparently all unsuccessful. And I think that is what is also needed. Let's face it, international NGOs are also competing for the money, the locals are competing for the money, the movements are there and don't want money but are competing for other things. So this is a very, very crowded space out there, and there's no, often, no entity that brings organizations together. The European Union has a meeting of our partners come together, USAID has one, our partners come together, and where is this space that is created to say like what are we doing collectively? And I think here from outside, this could be much more supported. Thank you. Michael may I ask you in your historical perspective the last question about the post-World War II diaspora and diasporas generally and how the European view of the diaspora may affect the civil society space issue? Hard to make a horizontal comment about that in specific cases, clearly there is a role. And you look at some of the conflict situations in the Balkans or around the Mediterranean, and if the diaspora of one of the parties takes a more enlightened and solution-oriented approach, they can have some influence on the parties to a conflict who they themselves don't see beyond the day-to-day. So, you know, we have seen that in the Balkans, have seen it to some degree in other situations too, but diasporas can also exacerbate the problem because they are cut off from the day-to-day reality. They're sitting safely in whatever society they may be living in, and it costs them nothing sometimes to take more extreme positions. So it would be hard to come to an overall comment about that. Thank you, though. Thank you. Others want to react to a couple of the last questions here. Just, you know, another point on the non-state actors in closing space for civil society, I think I would just, in terms of what to do about it and how to empower. So I think the best work in my field on how to support citizen mobilization against non-state actors is probably by Oliver Kaplan at the University of Denver. He's done great work and how civil resistance was used in Colombia and Syria and some of these other places. I've begun to do a little bit of work on the role of nonviolent action against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but it's obviously a very difficult context. And I think the thing to bear in mind, too, is that the rise of these non-state armed groups and extremist elements is directly linked to bad governance in most places. So helping civil society address the drivers and deal with certain governance issues, it's not the whole answer, but I think it's a large part of it. On the enabling environment, so there's a lot of work that's been done on how to support a legal enabling environment. So for example, when governments are starting to discuss or enact new rules and regulations, restricting civil society activity, coordinating diplomatic pressure. So organizations like the Community of Democracy specialize in coordinating pressure on governments when they start to do this, but also engaging with governments. So helping them develops laws that protect, for example, the financing of extremist groups in the society, but being willing to accept foreign support and foreign funding for certain civil society actors. So engagement, but also some pressure. So the diplomatic aspect as well, the diplomats handbook has a whole toolkit for what diplomats can do out at post to engage with civil society and with dissidents to convene meetings between government reformers and opposition elements, to use interpositioning, to show solidarity and worst case scenarios support asylum and exit. So the diplomats handbook has 14 different case studies. It's a living document, so a treasure trove of material for that. And then the military, actually militaries and democracies have tremendous leverage over militaries and non-democracy. So everything from mill to mill education and training to the relationships built between officers as a result of training and education and joint exercises, those relationships can be worked and used in contexts where, for example, security forces are facing their own citizens engaged in nonviolent activity, protest demonstrations. Phones can be picked up. Calls can be made. Think about your professional, your legacy. Do you want to be known in history as that officer who shot at his own people? So there's actually lots of small tools even that militaries can use. And then I'm on the stage with George Lopez, who's like the world's leading expert in sanctions and targeted sanctions. So how targeted sanctions can be used to target the enablers of violence and systematic violence is something that also contributes to a more conducive enabling environment. That's a final comment. Maybe. Final comment. It is definitely difficult to identify a specific agent of change. Somebody or this one organization that will overnight really change the political context of the political environment in which the country is currently. I think that it is important to think about funding. For example, I know that this has come up several times during the discussion. It is important not to flood these organizations or these individuals or these activists with a lot of money. But if you commit to supporting them over time, and when I say over time, not over one year, not over two years, but maybe 10 years in small increments, that's when you will be able to see changes. And I'm talking to all of you here who are USAID, US government, State Department, whoever who issue requests for proposals for two-year projects. It's not enough. It's never going to be enough. But if you divide up this amount of money over 10 years, that's when you might see results. Ladies and gentlemen, you've asked fabulous questions. Cheer yourselves. Cheer our panel. And I'll turn it over to Linwood. Thank you, George. Thank you, panelists, for this great discussion. I have a few administrative announcements we're about to break for lunch. Lunch will run from 12.30 to 1.30 a PM. The main lunch room will take place in our great hall, which is down here to my left, your right, as you're funneling down. Now, we have an opportunity to sit down with a number of folks from Alliance for Peacebuilding to discuss measurements and effectiveness, which is a subject that often comes up in this context. So if you wish to participate in an opportunity, please go upstairs into B241, where the members of the Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium Advisory Board and the Effective Interreligious Peacebuilding Global Advisory Council for small group discussions in which you set the agenda. So this is a very free-flowing conversation that you can have over lunch talking about the very difficult issue of measuring effects, outcome-driven approaches, and the different lessons that are learned, and best practices that can be applied. So again, lunch beginning now until 1.30. We'll come back here, and we will convene with the Innovation Panel. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.