 Hello everyone. Good evening and welcome to today's second panel. Genocide does not happen by accident, early warning, prevention and intervention. It's part of the 35th annual Norison Marjorie Benditson epic international symposium on preventing genocide and mass atrocities. My name is Meera Rohera and I'm a junior at TARF studying political science and philosophy. Today we hope to explore the pressing issue of averting mass atrocities before they even arise as well as stopping them in case that they do. Genocide is never a mistake. It is not a spontaneous event that occurs randomly. There are always deliberate and they are always deliberate and organized attempts with intent to destroy a national ethnic, religious or racial group of people. We say never again, but what will it actually take to put a stop to these events that some believe exemplify the purest form of evil? Through this panel, we hope to reflect on existing early warning prevention and intervention systems, how they have evolved over time and how they can further improve in the future. I'd like to thank all of you for being here today. In a time where this global pandemic is only aggravating identity-based violence, I believe it is an important conversation for us to be having today. Thank you to our panelists, Mr. Thakur, Dr. Vahutu and Dr. Adams for taking this time to speak with us. To begin, each panelist will have five minutes for opening remarks. Then we will have a 15-minute session for interaction amongst the panelists. And following this, we will move into a three-minute, we will move into three breakout rooms with one panelist in each. Without further ado, I would like to introduce our first panelists. And while I'm introducing them, I'd also like to share some pictures that they shared with me. Our first panelist is Mr. Thakur. Mr. Christopher Thakur is the co-founder and executive director of the Sentinel Project, formed in 2008. The Sentinel Project is a Canadian nonprofit organization that works to prevent mass atrocities, including the crime of genocide. Its main goals are direct cooperation with at-risk communities, innovating use of technology to explore new ways to make an impact, mitigating active violence, peace-building, and public education. Here are some of the pictures of the group's work in Myanmar and Uganda. Mr. Thakur, you now have five minutes. Okay, great. Thank you. And I have a timer here since I have a tendency sometimes to go on a bit. So thanks very much for having me. I'm really happy to be a part of this. And you gave a great introduction to the organization, so I don't need to really go over our mission too much again other than to emphasize that when it comes to both early warning and then some kind of response, so let's say prevention and mitigation. We really focus a lot on the local level, which I think sets us apart from a lot of other organizations, and so we aim to play a complementary role there, and I'll get into a bit more of why that is. But when it comes to that kind of work, we really focus on two things. One is reducing the risk of violence. So ideally, you know, addressing both the longer term and the proximate causes of violence to prevent it from happening, ideally. And then failing that kind of prevention, assisting communities with things like access to accurate situational information to help them better cope with violence if it does in fact happen. And we're actually we're now in a critical stage as an organization of starting to scale up that work and apply those same kinds of localized principles that we've done in relatively small scale scenarios into places like South Sudan and DRC where we're hoping to achieve really wide national or at least large regional presences. And I think it's important to highlight kind of as we were discussing before the panel started that the ideal vision of our organization that we're working towards will have two elements to it. And so one will be that early warning element to basically determine where we should be deploying our resources and how, and then the second part will be that actual active on the ground aspect to try and influence outcomes. And the whole reason why that why that is what we're working towards and why that's even theoretically possible is because of the topic of this panel, which is, you know, that the genocide and by extension other mass atrocities are not accidents. There are deliberate courses of action that people and organizations embark upon for specific reasons and there's often a significant lead up to to them happening. So that means that it's theoretically possible to to predict these things, and then to reduce the likelihood of them happening. And that requires, you know, information which is information and understanding or analysis which is one of the benefits that technology gives us that maybe wasn't as available at least to civil society in past decades. And a lot of work has been done on, you know, by by political scientists and other NGOs, and people in various fields on the structural risk factors for genocide and the processes that lead up to masculine. So we're not necessarily aiming to, to replicate that sort of work we would rather let the experts that specialize in those things do what they do and then for us to be able to ideally look at that, and and build upon it for our own work but where I'm really interested in starting to focus on going forwards is actually looking at applying those same kinds of principles but at a sub national level, going along with our typically very localist approach to things. So a lot of early warning us, but a lot of early warning work that's been done up to date has been focused really on the national level which makes sense because a lot of cases of genocide and mass atrocities are of course committed by state perpetrators. So you can't ignore the national level. So looking at the sort of medium to longer term, you know what countries are at highest risk within the, you know, next, you know, some number of years, let's say, I'm really interested in starting to complement that by also building in early warning aspects that look at, you know what what state province city village is likely to be at risk of this type of violence in on a much shorter timeframe in the next month, week, or even day. Again, to inform ideally prevention, or some kind of mitigation measures that can be taken to help people have a better chance of surviving that violence, if it does happen. So, you know, keeping in mind that I'm kind of coming up on the end of my, my time here, and I am committed to not going over. I'll leave it at that. Hopefully, you know, a lot of what I've mentioned is still very conceptual. So I hope it's not too. My comments weren't too disjointed but what I would personally like to get out of this panel is actually having sort of flooded those ideas, I get feedback from people in the audience, whether it's during the q amp a or during the breakout afterwards on their own ideas for how this kind of kind of thing could work. So, yeah, thank you. I hope to learn as much from all of you as you might, might from me. Thank you, Mr. Tucker. Next we have Dr. James will do. Dr James will do is an expert in the sociology of media with an emphasis on genocide mass violence and ethnicity in sub Saharan Africa. He is also written about global media patterns in covering genocide in Africa on ethnicity land and politics in Kenya, and on the Kenyan me as experimentation with social media platforms. Dr who does research has appeared in African affairs, African journalism studies sociological forum media culture and society, and global media and communication. He is an assistant professor in New York University's department of media and culture, media culture and communication, and a faculty associated the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard. The pictures you see on screen right now are actually when he visited our epic last last year, and we really enjoy his lecture. Dr who do you have five minutes. Thank you so much. Um, thanks, everyone. I have to say that I was really excited when I saw Chris was on this panel for a couple of reasons. One, the evolution of Sentinel has been really interesting over the last few years right and this focus right now on much more local level analysis and trying to build it up to some national level to predict right the, the incidences of violence that may be showing up sooner. I think is interesting and important right so my, my five minutes will sort of build off of Chris's talk, primarily because one of the things we know about prediction models and data sets that are already out there. Is often that they're much more state centric. The danger of this is a lot of people missed the genocide against their CDs by ISIS, because ISIS are a non state actor and for for the way these models have often been built and often been leverage right the assumption had always been that a genocide would be perpetrated by a state accent. So Iraq, for example, did not fall in the list of top 10 countries that were likely to fall into a genocide between 2011 and 2015. In a lot of models. All right, so when ISIS showed up and went after is the CDs. A lot of people were taken by surprise. Now the idea and part of the things I've been trying to figure out is how do we improve this and this is where perhaps a different focus is needed right if we're to prevent or to predict the start of a genocide or the start of any kind of mass atrocity event. One of the things we need to contend with is with what we're starting to see is non state actors playing a key role and be key instigators of the studied subside Africa, right organizations like Lord resistance army are a thing, and are a thing that have been affecting a lot of people in a lot of places right so Lord resistance army have been targeting had targeted their truly for a very long time. Right, and these kinds of groups are often not easy to find data for on the prep on the prediction models that we have currently. And this is why the work central and is doing is really exciting right because what they're thinking about is okay fine. How do we move from that to a sub national level. How do we move from a sub national level to something even smaller, so to maybe able to figure out what's likely to show up that may not be caught by step level data. The other thing that I think we need to figure out how to deal with is to analyze conflicts and when conflicts likely to turn into a genocide. So, for example, we have the case of Ethiopian 1976. We have two different conflicts showing up at the same time. All right, yet the succession conflict between Ethiopian the reach back doesn't lead into a genocide. The other conflict that and if we start having conflicts as units of analysis, when you're trying to figure out how do we predict this right it's we may have much more luck trying to see okay what are the patterns that are showing up across multiple conflicts. And what does this tell us based off of what we know. Right, and we study these conflicts, not because they're showing up in Ethiopia, but because they're two conflicts showing up in a country at the same time. Right. And what are the different instances that lead one to something else and they added something else. And the thing that interests me about this is a couple of reasons one right it we may be able to figure out when is a separatist conflict likely to lead to something genocidal right when in the fall in what instances at what particular times could we think of different iterations of it as not just a separate separate this conflict, but as an actual genocide. But also we need to reckon with the fact that, and this has been my an ease with the time genocide especially when it speak to African journalists. Why do we insist on quibbling on what counts as genocide as the conflict is happening. We had the conversations earlier on where, as we're quibbling, people are suffering at the very bottom, right, and how do we deal with that and do we need to rethink what our lenses are. I used to think that this was a weird thing that I had. And then, you know, Alex has written about this, Tim Allen has written about this and a lot more people are asking are questioning the usefulness of such debates. If you're trying to predict something, should we change what we're trying to capture. How does that look like. If we're in Kenya. What does it look like when militia groups from community X, right, in the process of going to steal cattle from community Y, then shift from just stealing up to wiping everybody out. How do we have that conversation in a manner that is meaningful in a manner that allows us to be a bit more effective in what we do. I think some of these changes and some of these debates that we're having would not only help us improve production models, but also help us mitigate a lot of things that we've been missing right in Canada, I'm assuming Chris has probably worked with what folks from Shahidi and Shahidi has been doing a really good job at providing instantaneous information across the continent right to whenever issues show up. And one of the things we're trying to see is, what are they doing in Mozambique, right, they were very effective in Haiti. And these instances that think are important in for us trying to figure out how to make these models a bit more useful and a bit more accurate in the production. Thank you, Dr. Next, we have Dr. Simon Adams. Dr. Simon Adams is the executive director for the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect. He has worked extensively with governments and civil society organizations in South Africa, East Timor, Rwanda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Between 1994 and 2000, Dr. Adams worked with the Sinn Féin and former IRA prisoners in support of the Northern Ireland peace process. Dr. Adams, you now have five minutes. Thank you, Mira. And, you know, I want to first of all thank the organizers, especially yourself and Anastasia who helped bring all this together. Let me take a slightly different approach. Let me start with, I guess, this moment in history, because not only are we in this moment of this kind of global pandemic, but this year also marks two significant anniversaries for those of us who work in the world of in multilateral institutions and of ideas and norms. What I want to do then, in particular, I want to mention is it's, of course, the 75th anniversary of the United Nations this year. And it is also the 15th anniversary of the adoption of the responsibility to protect principle in 2005. And I think they're important because in the former case, the UN was formed, obviously, in the shadow of Auschwitz and the aftermath of the worst human carnage that we've sort of known. The U.P. was adopted 15 years ago in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda and at Srebrenica in Bosnia. So where are we at in this moment in history? Well, we're living through a moment in history where we not only have to deal with a global pandemic, which has been weaponized in particular kinds of ways. And maybe we can talk about that in the discussion. We currently have over 80 million people in the world who are currently displaced by persecution, by conflict and atrocities, the highest number since the Second World Wars. So even before COVID-19, we were already in the midst of a sort of human rights recession. We're living through a period where human rights defenders are under attack. We're colleagues of mine are under attack. Networks that we work with in countries that we cover, people there are in fear of their lives. We're living through an era where authoritarianism and toxic nationalism are on the rise. An area, sorry, an era I should say when people are even marching in the streets of major democracies waving swastika flags. Srebrenica has become mainstream, not just in the United States and some Western countries, but in different countries around the world. And it's an era also when it feels like multilateralism and the UN system are under attack in really fundamental ways. So, you know, if my experience working at the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect and I guess, you know, we are best known for kind of working with the UN Security Council and with the Human Rights Council and doing monitoring work. So, you know, if it's taught me anything, it's that we don't lack early warning about situations where mass atrocity crimes are threatened. It's not the knowledge gap that we're facing. What we lack is timely and decisive action in response to that. So when I look for example at the situation of the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar, you know, which started on the 25th of August, a couple of years ago, it was preceded by a decade of early warning by my own organization. And Nick, there were dozens and dozens of other organizations on the ground inside Myanmar in the Asia Pacific region around the world, warning about the systematic persecution of the Rohingya, warning about possible mass atrocity crimes being perpetrated against them. And then of course we know what happened after the 25th of August where about 780,000 people were forcibly displaced. Unknown numbers killed somewhere in the vicinity of 40,000 and about 400 Rohingya villages burned to the ground. So I mentioned this because I think, you know, the scarcest natural resource in contemporary global politics is intestinal fortitude. We need more leaders with political courage, like my friend, Abubakar Tambadou, the former Justice Minister of the Gambia. You know, it was his personal experience visiting a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox Bazaar in Bangladesh, where he walked out of there and thought, well, if the international community is not going to do anything about what happened to the Rohingya. If the UN Security Council, which had fundamentally failed to respond to that genocide because of the threat of a Chinese veto, if they're not going to do anything, then I will, my country will take Myanmar to the International Court of Justice and under the charge of genocide. But he's the exception. I think all too often we are still stuck in a world of lowest common denominator diplomacy and where the politics of inaction, the politics of indifference still predominate. And I'm conscious of the time. I know you want us to be brief. So let me just end by saying two things. One thing very quickly. And we worked very closely with the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the resolution at the UN Security Council to mark the 20th anniversary of the genocide. Great resolution. It was vetoed by the Russians. So it never got out of the council. But a few days later, I was actually in Srebrenica for the 20th anniversary and I was invited by one of the families. There's a reburial ceremony because they're still finding bodies 20 years, 25 years later. And some there were 136 bodies buried the day that I was there on the 20th anniversary. And, you know, the graves in Bosnia, they dig them very shallow. And you I was invited to participate by this family and you literally end up grabbing handfuls of dirt and putting them on the grave. And when you're nearly in the in a graveyard in Srebrenica, you know, placing handfuls of dirt on the grave of somebody who was killed not for anything that they had done but because of issues of identity because of who they are. You become very focused on how far we've come since 1995 or since the Rwandan genocide in 1994 or since the Holocaust in 1945. We have come a long way in some respects, but of how much further we still have to go to make sure that these these horrible atrocities are constantly opposed, and that the reflex response to them whenever they're threatened is action and decisive action and not indifference. So I'll leave it there. Thank you all for your opening remarks. I'd now like to open the floor to all of you to ask questions to each other. As I mentioned before, anyone can stop. Is this where we're supposed to ask each other where we went to school or, you know, what the weather is like or, you know, maybe something more, more fundamental fundamental than that. I mean, I, maybe this is a, an answer to something which hopefully provokes more questions as well because, you know, I think James did raise an important point about state centrism. And I, I disagree slightly in the sense that non-state armed groups are sometimes hard to detect. I mean, people were very surprised by the speed with which, for example, ISIL grew and then overran obviously the Sinjar region and committed the genocide against the Yazidi. And so I think it has taken international civil society in states a while to kind of respond to that and adjust to that. But I guess my kind of question to my fellow panelists is what they think about something that I would identify as a major problem in that as well, which is I think unfortunately all too often. The result is that dealing with non-state armed groups tends to get fitted into the counterterrorism narrative and tends to become about counterterrorism rather than about trying to view it through a mass atrocity prevention lens, even in the post situation. So that's what we see in Iraq, even today, you know, despite a couple of years that have passed and everything that's happened. I don't know if it would surprise people or not to know that not a single member of ISIL has ever been charged with a crime related to the genocide against the Yazidi. Terrorism have been tried and prison and hanged for terrorism offenses, but not for mass atrocity crimes. So just maybe raise that as an issue. Thanks, everyone. I think, yes, I think that's, that's a challenge, right, is there's a couple of things. One, it takes a long time sometimes to realize the speed at which a group that you're trying because it's a double-edged sword, right? To make sure that you're not overblowing what the proportion of what they can do, but also trying to signal we need to take something that's unfolding seriously. And that, you know, it's a weird balance to strike. And it does take a while for people to realize, oh, this is a group we need to take seriously, right? And I fully appreciate this. But I think there's also, there's also the facts that, and this is why I tend to follow this and maybe this is a weird academic response, non-response, right? I tend to fall on the line that, yes, these things are difficult, but that is why we should do them, right? Because otherwise we fall into this at the top, like you said, where for the ISIL folks, it's all counterterrorism, and especially in a post-911 world, we also don't want to provide authoritarian states a way through which they could prosecute a group that they do not like in the name of terror, right? And this is, and I am often one of those people who dislikes politics for this very same reason, right? And we've seen it with multiple governments across the world. I think the challenge for me, especially when I'm speaking about Africa, and in this sense I'm speaking of Africa, discussively, right? Not as a geographic space with 54 countries, right? Just to be sure. When I think about Africa, I think about the facts that for a lot of these groups, local media organizations know them, right? Local media organizations cover these groups. So for us, the challenge is, if we're in Kenya, which are the local media organizations that we tap into, which are the local systems that we're going to tap into, and it's going to look different in different countries. It's going to look different in different provinces. What has been happening in Mozambique, right? In Cabr delgado, we all know what the military folks have been doing there. We've seen people being shot in the streets. We have seen this. But there's still this wall of silence that, you know, we're trying to figure out, and we're still talking about it as a civil war. But we know what that is likely to lead to. And that, you know, it's the leveraging of local resources that I think make sure is a way forward. But that is a process that takes time. But I think we have to do it because a lot of these perpetrators are getting smarter, and we've seen them get smarter. If I may add, and I know we're supposed to go to the breakout sessions in just a minute, but from our view, I think you're both right. And we would say that, regardless of whether the perpetrators or expected perpetrators in a given situation are state-based or non-state actors, we're still very interested in working at the local level because oftentimes the least in our experience is situational awareness for people at that local level is what is most lacking. And that's what they need. Whether again, ideally to, you know, implement some kind of very localized prevention measure or at least to avoid danger. And that's what they need most is accurate situational awareness, assuming that they're on their own and nobody is coming to protect them, let's say. We've had reports of that speaking of Northern Iraq that, of course, we didn't, unfortunately, we didn't really get involved there until after things had more or less calmed down. But just some of the feedback that we got from just average people as well as civil society members there is that oftentimes when there was an ISIS attack coming, it didn't come out of nowhere. But the local people, the average citizen was the last person to know. The security forces pulled out, the government people pulled out, the NGOs, if they were there, they pulled out first because they all got the news. A lot of the people just living their normal lives, they didn't find out until it was too late, essentially, and danger was on their doorstep. We've even on a more sort of, you know, a less intensive or smaller scale situation. In 2017, we were working in the, some of the major slums in Nairobi around the, the Kenyan election. And fortunately, it wasn't as bad as, you know, previous post election violence, but there definitely was post election violence happening there a lot committed by police in terms of extra judicial killings and that sort of thing responding to protesters or even not just sort of randomly abusing and killing people sometimes and a lot of what we were doing through our system was fielding requests from people saying, you know, I'm hearing gunshots all around me what's going on. And we would, we were using our contacts on the ground to try and triangulate, you know, where are people just hearing gunshots but they're actually happening somewhere else versus where is the violence and then disseminating information out through let's say our, our first messaging system to let people know in specific villages. Okay, these areas are dangerous. These areas are safe. Here's a little bit of information on what you can do to avoid that. Or here's a bit of information on what you can do to get assistance if you've been wounded, let's say. So that's kind of where more where we're coming in, but I think there's still a lot more that can be done to make that sort of approach, a lot more sophisticated. It might be beyond what a lot of people would call early warning, maybe you would call it late warning, but I think there's still a lot of value there to look into. And again that just, I brought this up because I think it's equally applicable, although in different ways regardless of whether the perpetrators are state or non state based. Hopefully that was a relevant addition to the conversation. Let me say one thing. I didn't want to sound when I was saying that I'm opposed to early warning. You know, the whole purpose of my organization is really about early warning. It's just that, you know, I think often there's the response from states afterwards is if only we had better early warning we could have act with whereas that's not the problem at all. There's, there's always plenty of information. And I saw that firsthand again since I mentioned the Myanmar example. We did an off the record briefing with the Security Council 10 days after the clearance operations of the military began. There was satellite imagery that was shared by our colleagues from Human Rights Watch which wasn't in the public domain at the time. There was another colleague from Fortify rights who had testimonies from survivors who had crossed the border into Bangladesh, all the evidence was there. That's not a question of there was a lack of information which stopped the international community from acting. And that's why I think in organizations like the Sentinel and other organizations play a crucial role in building up that early warning picture. So I hope by anything I said didn't come across as indicating that you thought early warning was not important. I got your, your message loud and clear that, you know, we're not, we're not lacking a, we're not lacking in information and analysis on these things it's the action that's often missing. So this kind of part of our impetus to start as an organization was that, you know, others are already doing advocacy for states to take action and I think they're doing a better job of it than we ever would even though there still isn't enough state based action but we wanted to kind of complement that by, you know, going directly to the people on the ground if we can. Yeah, you're absolutely right like no government I think at this point has any excuse to say we we didn't know about any of these situations and they haven't for a very long time that wasn't a valid excuse when we're wanting to happen either any more than it is today. Yeah, I think that's important right but I also think there's also the question and and often find myself having to tell my students this often when we talk about issues unfolding on an African continent and people talk about the international community. They often use international community as shorthand for North American Western Europe, right and I was like, oh, but ways African this conversation. The reason I say this is West Africa. West Africa used to have a standby military to stand by military brigade, right and they leverage this to relative success in the variants early on in a lot of these other countries right Kenya through eager that has been involved in that part of the in that part of the world right and I think my hope is that we will get to a point where we don't consistently in in African countries we don't consistently have to go to the UN, and we can leverage the EU, right we can leverage the regional organizations. So as Chris said, everybody knew what was happening in wonder, and everyone knew what was happening in wonder before it happened, but also, Kenyan Tanzania had been covering wonder for a long time and we have been covering the peace talks and Uganda had been covering. And even when Habir Imana goes to Uganda to try and convince him so many to stand down Kagame. Everybody knew this because it just happened. And, and the regional bodies as the genocide begins, and African countries are saying Ghanaian soldier done is saying, we will give you troops. It was the US through the UN saying, Well, you know, what are we going to do. And there was a lot of fiddle fighting that was happening. Right, and therefore, there were troops, a few troops already, and I remember reading a piece about bush being in Florida. And I'm saying, Well, we will not be able to give the C 110 planes because of XYZ. Right. And at some point, we have to figure out how do we strengthen regional bodies to be able to do this work effectively and quickly. Because they, I think there is an appetite to do this, based off the people I know of and that I've spoken about, there is an appetite to do this but there's always a fear. Let me say there was a fear. Now, with the current US government who knows there was a fear that the US would come down on this. Right, and there's always been that hesitance. What is the US doing? What is the UN Security Council saying, and by the time we realize what is happening, it's too late. So there is a way to do it. We could leverage the regional bodies on the continent. Right, and say, This is it. This is demanded. Let's figure out how to do this. This consistent looking at the UN as an imposter organization as it is ends up sidelining local efforts that may have been much more useful and much more quicker to leverage. Thank you. This was a very interesting discussion but sadly we have to cut it short. Because of time, I have put down the links in the chat for the breakout rooms. I know some people put in some questions for this session but I would encourage you to ask them to the panelists in the breakout rooms. Once again, thank you all for being here today. This was very engaging, and I'm looking forward to the breakout rooms.