 All right, good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the webinar, US Military and Civilian Partnerships for Peace, Lessons from a Veteran in Honor of Veterans Day. Thank you for joining us today. I'm also very pleased to be joined by Paul Hughes, whom I'll introduce again shortly. This webinar is the first in a new series of webinars for US-based K to 12 educators. This monthly series will provide teachers with opportunities to learn about critical issues in international conflict management and peace building and how they can integrate ready-made USIP resources into their classrooms. So new webinars are gonna be announced each month, so please stay tuned for updates. I'm Megan Chebelowski and I'm a program officer with the public education team at the US Institute of Peace where I lead our work with American K to 12 schools. We are very glad to have you join us today and we all at USIP deeply appreciate the work you do as educators. So before we get started, a few logistics. While you are all in listening mode, I'd still like to hear from you. So you're probably by this point familiar with how Zoom works, but if you run your mouse over the bottom of the call screen, you'll see several ways to communicate. In particular, I'd like to ask you to use the chat box, please, to ask a question or write a comment to the group. Just make sure that you choose the whole group as you are writing your comment. If you have any tech issues, please use the chat function to notify us of that as well and we will do our best to assist you. We are recording today's webinar and we'll post it to our website afterwards. And for those who are attending today and everyone who RSVP'd, I'll be sending around a handout with links to everything we discussed. So you don't need to be writing down the links you see on the slides. So as we get started, I'd love to get a sense of who's tuning in and I bet Paul would as well. So in the chat box, if you could share where you're joining us from, so maybe a city and state or just a state. And if you're a teacher, what you teach and please make sure to share your chat with the entire group. That would be great. Let's see, great. We have Maui Hawaii Montessori Middle School. Fantastic, hi Jeffrey. Emily, high school French teacher from Canton, North Carolina. Great, nice to have you join. Hi Dixie from Dallas, Texas. Debate coach, fantastic. Hi Tom, Plano, Texas. Speech and debate for ninth and 10th graders. Jill from Kentucky. Jill and Emily are two of our peace teachers. Nice to have you here. High school history, social studies, fantastic. Okay, well it's a good group today. And so throughout the webinar, please feel free to drop questions in the chat box, drop comments. I'll do my best to address questions or comments as they come in or at least hold on to them until there's a moment to address them. So that box is there for you. So for those of you who are new to us, I wanted to give you a quick introduction to the US Institute of Peace. We are a national nonpartisan independent Institute founded by Congress in 1984 and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical and essential for US and global security. So we are headquartered in Washington DC, which is where I'm tuning in from, just off the National Mall. Our building is in the lower left hand corner of this photo here with our lovely peace dove roof. But our work really takes place internationally with just the focus of our mandate. We work with governments and citizens in conflict zones abroad to prevent, manage and resolve violent conflict. So from training women leaders in Columbia on mediation skills to supporting reconciliation efforts in Iraq, the peace process in Afghanistan and young peace builders in Nigeria, Syria, Pakistan and other countries affected by violent extremism. We support those who are working to build a more peaceful, inclusive world. So you can learn more about our work and find great stories of peace builders from around the world on our website, www.usip.org. So complimenting this work to build peace internationally, the US Institute of Peace also serves the American people directly through public education. This is part of our mandate from Congress as well. So we work with schools, universities, organizations and communities across the US to engage everyday Americans in learning about and working for peace. And you'll hear more about that towards the end as we talk about the resources that are available to you. So we are here today to talk about an important aspect of our work, partnerships in peace building, specifically between the US military and civilians like USIP. So during this webinar, we intend that you will expand your understanding of peace building and peace builders. You will learn about, learn what military and civilian cooperation means and explore why it's important in conflict situations. And you will learn about USIP class and resources on this topic and consider connections to your own classrooms. So how does this connect to some of the content you teach or something you might like to teach? So before we jump in, I have a poll question I'd like to pose to the group. If you said if you wouldn't mind pulling that up. As another way to get to know who's in our audience today and related to today's theme, I would ask that you select all that apply to you. I have a family member in the US military, I am a veteran myself or I'm from a community with a large number of US military service members, if any of these apply to you. You said I suspect books have answered if it looks like it perhaps we could see the results. All right, so we have participants who have family members in the military. So I wanna thank you for your sacrifice and please thank your family members for their service on our behalf. So as you can see, I mean, this topic is personal to us and it's personal to many of the folks tuning in today as well. So before I introduce our guest speaker, I'd like to ask you to take a minute to think about this question. Just think about it quietly to yourself. A minute, I use that term lightly. Take 30 seconds. What impressions do you have about peace builders and what impressions do your students have about peace builders? State to yourself, you could jot down a note or two. We're gonna return to this later. Great, so let's get to the heart of our webinar today which is our conversation with Paul Hughes. I'm going to actually exit out of screen sharing for this part. So I am honored today to be joined by US Army veteran and a valued colleague, Paul Hughes. Paul is a special advisor and director of overseas safety and security at USIP which means that he keeps USIP staff safe when we are traveling and when we're working in conflict zones. Paul previously served as USIP's chief of staff, director of the non-proliferation and arms control program and as the director of Iraq programs among other roles. Prior to joining USIP, he served as an active duty Army colonel and as the Army Senior Military Fellow to the Institute for National Security Studies of the National Defense University. So Paul served in Iraq in 2003 where with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and later with the Coalition Provisional Authority, he helped develop policy initiatives like this disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of the Iraqi military. Before this, Paul offered policy guidance for the Army in areas like arms control, landmines and weapons of mass destruction and helped guide the Department of Defense's humanitarian responses and several natural disasters. So Paul, thank you for your service and thank you for joining us today for a conversation about US military and civilian cooperation. I'd like to begin the conversation by asking you some questions myself and then I will open it up to our participants to ask you some questions as well. So if you have questions while I'm talking, feel free to put them in the chat box and I will collect them to ask Paul. Otherwise, you can wait until I open up the floor and then you can put them in then. So it might surprise Paul, might surprise some of our participants that you came to work at Peace Institute after serving in the military. Can you tell me more about the decision and about what from your previous military experience maybe informs or supports your current work as a peace builder? Well, thank you for the question, Megan and I wanna thank our audience for being here. This is a topic that is timely not only here in the United States, but also internationally. In fact, the last two days I've spent in a conference with a lot of European experts and African experts talking about this very topic. Why did I join USIP after 30 years of being a Cold Warrior? Well, it was not just being a Cold Warrior, I was also involved in all of the actions in the Middle East since 1989, 1990. And so I have a rock especially tattooed all over me. When I retired, I had been back to a rock three times and it was stuck on my mind. And when USIP sought me out and said, we'd like for you to take over and create a viable program of peace building in a rock, I was more than happy to do that. So why did I focus on this peace building? Well, in 1990 and 1991 when I was in Kuwait after Desert Storm, I was thrown into the mix of trying to re-establish a sovereign state that had just come out of a war. And further on in my career, I was working on peace operations and stabilization operations within the office of the Secretary of Defense. So I had a lot to bring to this issue. And then when I was assigned to the, not coalition provisional authority originally, but the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which was the predecessor to the CPA. I found myself again involved on the ground in real world activities, trying to stabilize a country and create a new government for it. It was not the same as Kuwait. Kuwait was an ally. We liberated Kuwait. The circumstances there were entirely different than in 2003 when we took Baghdad and overthrew Saddam Hussein. So I had a lot of issues when I retired that I just felt I needed to scratch. And so this was an opportunity for me to scratch those issues, scratch my itches and continue the peace building work in Iraq. Now, big picture. Everybody needs to understand that all wars must end. The challenge is how do you end the war? Is it going to be one that subjugates the vanquished? Is it going to be one where you try to stabilize a country allowing it to find its own way forward while still making sure it's protected from violent activists? Or do you just walk away from it and say it's all yours? I'll be frank. In 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to walk away from Iraq. In fact, the military had begun to withdraw from Iraq when the decision was made based on what was happening on the ground to turn the military around and send them right back because we had occupation duties to perform. And that is a long story there. I'm happy to answer questions if you have them. But I have found myself at USIP over the years handling many difficult topics and issues that are suited to somebody with my background because I bring the knowledge about how nation-states act as sovereign entities in conflict. And I'm not one of those who come in and let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya, which I think a lot of people in America think of envisioned peace builders doing. And that's so far from the truth. It needs to be rectified. So, Megan. The perspective that you bring is so important to our work. And I think that's also why we have military fellows at USIP from the army and marines who come each year to spend with us and we value their perspectives as well. I'd like to go ahead. That is an interesting program here at USIP. A lot of people probably wouldn't expect to have active duty military officers at the Institute of Peace doing what we call their senior service college year. All of the militaries will take their promising Lieutenant-Colonels and Colonels who are deemed for greater things and send them off to a war college, the Air War College in Alabama, the Army War College in Pennsylvania or the Navy War College in Rhode Island. But they're out of the cohort every year that are considered for these colleges. A select number are considered for fellowships, fellowships that include Harvard, Yale, Stanford. You pick them, they're all there. Well, USIP is part of that group of institutions that officers are detailed to for the purpose of expanding their backgrounds and not focusing just on the military, but learning more about how America thinks and the challenges America has to confront. So anyway, interesting program. Well, this is a really nice segue into the next question because it is in itself an example, I think of military and civilian cooperation. But it's also an example they come to learn, who are all the actors in the field and the places they're going to be going as well. When you're in the military, you're not there by yourself. You're often there with humanitarian workers. You might be there with other parts of the civilian government. So I love, let's broaden it out for a minute here and talk what exactly is military and civilian cooperation. What is it? And what makes it hard? What makes it challenging? Well, quite frankly, let's go back in history about the relationship between the civilian populace of America and the military. It goes all the way back to the federalist papers, Federalist Paper 41 written by James Madison about how the military as a standing army would be controlled by Congress. And I'll let you all sort through that Federalist Paper. And then moving forward, the relationship really didn't gel until after the fall of the USSR. Up to that point in time, civilian military cooperation was an odd thing that not many people focused on. I should clarify that statement in that in World War II, at the end of the war, when the United States began occupying Germany and Japan, the Army's Civil Affairs Corps took the lead on that. And these were soldiers, they were commissioned officers and enlisted who had expertise in running towns. They'd been mayors or they had been sanitation managers or engineers or communications experts and things like that that helped to stand up these capabilities in a conflict zone. In 1991 in Kuwait city, I had civil affairs officers working for me who were helping to restore communications for Kuwait or the sewer systems or the electrical power and such. For Iraq, it was much different but we still had civilians along with us in Iraq who were coming in to help get the economy stood back up or to do engineering projects related to restoring the oil fields and things of that nature. Today, it's much different than it was back then. We've learned a lot but we don't have it right yet. And this is in the context of what we all call stabilization operations, both civilians and the military and the international community in fact. Stabilization operations are where a country where an international entity assists a country who is trying to reestablish its weak institutions to build resiliency in a fragile state. And this international entity can advise and assist the host nation while the military component is providing security for this activity or all of these activities. Frankly, it's not been done well. We don't have a good working model and that's what that conference I was in the last two days. That's what we were discussing is how to improve that. The issue of stabilization operations for the United States is best defined by a document you can find online. It's a document that was authored by the State Department, USAID and DOD and it's called the Stabilization Assistance Review or SAR and it lays out what we're trying to accomplish now in terms of building capacities within the US government and broadly the United States to help on stabilizations. So Megan. So I'm gonna come back to your question in a minute about sort of effective examples of effective cooperation, maybe in our own work at USIP or examples you've seen in your time in the military, but you hit on something I wanna come back to which is history. A lot of the tuning in our history teachers, I imagine teachers who watch this afterwards will also be history teachers. You've mentioned sort of the evolution of a cooperation of the relationship between civilians and military over the years and the history buff yourself because I know your history buff. What is it about history? What is important in history to be learning? I know we learn a lot about historic wars and historic conflicts. On this topic in particular of military and civilian cooperation, is there an angle that you think is important for young people to be learning? I would just love your take on it as a veteran and a peace builder, but also a history buff of where you think this connection lies. Well, history, I'll turn it to you. Yeah, yeah, history serves as a, what I like to call as a laboratory for learning about what went right, what went wrong. It's important that the still lessons learned from history to figure out not so much a cookie cutter solution set, but dynamics of human interaction and the things that you need to be cognizant of if you're going to engage in conflict or in stabilization. One of the bedrock elements is understanding the context of the conflict. What we at USIP refer to as conflict analysis, which is also an online course that the Institute offers free of charge to those who wish to sign up for it. But if you don't understand the nature of the conflict, whether it's for stabilizing a weak state or whether it's for engaging in war, you are best served to not even get involved. Because once you get involved, there is a logic of conflict that prevails and it will drive the train and you're going to find yourself rather than being in charge and controlling events, you're going to be reacting to events. And that's a bad place to be in, always being the person who's reacting. That said, there are times when you just have to be engaged because a greater demand, a greater good is to be attained by becoming engaged. But there's a price to be paid, both in terms of blood and treasure, but also in time. And that's a big weakness right now that history teaches us is that people engage into these in these activities, but they don't accept the fact that it's going to take years to accomplish what they thought would only take months. So on that note, I wonder if there's anything you wanna add from your time in Iraq or from your other experience that helped you better understand the importance of this cooperation anymore. Any specific examples that would be useful for folks to hear? Yeah, I mean, specific examples are at the low end, they're not grandiose, you know, aha moments. It's the sorts of things that you can discover at a smaller level, more nuanced, focused level. For example, in Iraq, one thing that I've learned over the years, dealing with insurgencies, both in my studies, but also in real life is that in fragile or collapsed states, there are two things that insurgents want, they want control of. They wanna seize control of the ministry of health or whatever that might be, and they wanna seize control of the ministry of education. Why? Why is that? It's because if you understand the context going back to that, again, many of these failed states have very large populations of poor who are incapable of providing for their own healthcare, so they rely on the state or education because they have to work long hours, they want their kids in schools, so they're willing to turn their kids lock, stock, and barrel over to the school system, whatever it may be, as long as they know the kid's safe and will come home at night. What we found in Iraq early on is that Shiite actors, Wattata al-Sadr specifically, wanted to control of both of those ministries, and he did attain control of both ministries because then immediately all the poor people come under his control. They can't go anyplace else for healthcare, so they have to go to hospitals where, if you're Shia, you shouldn't have a problem if they have the ability to care for you. If you're Sunni, different story, and in early 2000s or later 2003, when the militias really got going and the Civil War began, Sunni or Shia militia would go into hospitals, identify Sunni patients in bed and kill them right there, or doctors or nurses, if they were Sunni, they'd be shot on the spot. All in the hopes of angering the larger Shia population and evoke a Civil War in Iraq, in the Department or Ministry of Education, we wanted to try and build a curriculum, a curriculum that the national schools would take on that would be more reflective of Iraqi society to make sure that people learned that it was okay to be of a different faith or a different ethnicity in Iraq because you're all Iraqi, tried to build a sense of a national identity. And we in the military certainly did not have the ability to do that. However, civilians, especially from USIP, became involved and over the years, actually succeeded in working with the Ministry of Education on a national curriculum that would engender a sense of unity among the kids that they could then take home to their parents and explain that. And the military provided the protection for the schools and the local communities. They weren't out running around the deserts, hunting down gorillas. But by doing that, it afforded the schools to take a deep breath and work with the civilian experts coming in and together creating a curriculum that actually holds today. And I'm proud that USIP was a part of that effort. I'm guessing there might be some questions on that in particular, Laker. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I wonder if there are any other examples you'd like to share from USIP's work of this cooperation in action and the impact of it. Well, one thing early on in the days of Iraq after I took over the Iraq programs, USIP was very engaged in assisting the Iraqi Constitutional Convention in creating an Iraqi Constitution. It was too often said that Americans would come around and they just whip out their US Constitution and say, just mirror image this and everything will be fine and we can hold elections, et cetera. The civilians that we had at USIP who came in and worked with us were very dynamic and experienced in advising constitutional creations around the world. And rather than having Americans come in and tell the Iraqis, this is how you do it. What we at USIP did was facilitate bringing in constitutional experts from countries that had recently undergone their own changes. So East Timor, South Africa, and I wanna say it was Kosovo or Bosnia, one of the other came in to explain what their national experiences were as they created their constitutions so that the Iraqi experts could hear this and take that into consideration so that they wouldn't fall into the same traps or pitfalls that these other country experts had experienced turned out to be a very successful program. Now, the Iraqi Constitution still has issues with it. The Iraqis themselves know that but at least they developed a constitution that they could live with in the short term. And once the country, I believe, becomes more resilient and settles all of the, gets the outside influencers out of the way, they will manage to reflect on their constitution and make changes as they see best. So I'm gonna open it up for questions. And so if anyone who's for participants, if you have questions for Paul, please drop them in the chat box and I will communicate them to him, but anything you've heard or about anything else, maybe something you haven't heard that you'd like to hear more about. While we're waiting for questions, I am gonna pose my own to you, Paul, which is why is it important for young people to be learning about this, to learn about this topic in particular, but also more broadly about the current events that we've been discussing or the recent history that we've been talking about. I mean, it's important in that. It's very important because as I started the discussion earlier, I said, this takes time. It takes time and it's not something that's gonna be fixed or solved in a generation. It's going to take a long time and you have to sustain this progress. Otherwise, the situation will just deteriorate again. Let's look at a historical example. We all know about World War I, how it began, how it ended. Treaty Versailles basically declared as a 20 year pause in the World War until it kicked off again 20 years later in 1939. But there is another one that's still at play, another treaty that's still at play and that's the Treaty of Severus, which was enacted in 1920. And it was a treaty between the Allied Powers who won the war and the Ottoman Empire, what was left of it. And it basically broke apart the Ottoman Empire, which was a polyglot of ethnic groups, languages, religions, quite an amazing entity in its heyday. But it broke it apart using the Bidiats, the provinces of the Ottoman Empire to cobble together into new states. Now, if you believe a state is something that is identified by people who have agreed to a central government that's responsible for everything that happens within the boundaries, the internationally recognized boundaries. And that government ensures that it doesn't infringe on other states around it, that that's a state. But we often talk about nation states. A nation is a group of people who have common identities based on their religion, their history, their language, their ethnicities, et cetera. And what we found at the end of the Treaty of Severus process was a region, the Middle East, that had been created by the treaty. And in doing so, we created a region of states without nations and nations without states. So hear me out here. If you go to Turkey today, you're going to find a significant portion of Turkey occupied for centuries by the Kurds. The Kurds were promised autonomy in 1919 when Roosevelt, or when Churchill went to, oh, Churchill, when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to negotiate the Versailles Treaty. And yet they did not get that wish granted by Versailles. And in fact, today, the largest nation in the world that does not have a state is the Kurds. The Kurdish nation covers essentially a third of Turkey reaches into Iran. It covers the northern part of Iraq and some parts of Syria. And it's a problem for all those countries out there because the Kurds have a very strong nationalistic intent. Nationalism is that ideology, which says that, hey, if you're a nation, you should, by rights, have your own state and they don't, and we still have problems in the Middle East because of this. My point being that this is more than 100 years ago, we've had the sins of the father visited on the children. We're still dealing with the results of World War I today in the Middle East. And we're going to be doing that for a long time. Yeah, you hit on a number of the themes that we focus on in our work with schools, which is that piece of the process. It's not something that happens quickly. It takes time and how important that is to learn that it's not, there's not a sense of an end goal where we're going to just reach, you're going to reach peace and it's going to be done, but it's something that you're always working towards. That can be heartening in many ways because it says that if you're not there yet, you can, you can keep working towards it. But it's also a reminder of the resiliency that people need to continue through that process. I hear it goes also of conflict analysis. You mentioned earlier how important that is. And just hearing you describe that history, it is a reminder again of how important conflict analysis is. And I suspect a lot of the teachers listening now already are doing this, but when we're learning about history and about historic wars, how important it is to learn about the driving underlying factors, the peace processes that were involved, what was tried, what wasn't tried, what worked and what didn't. Because it informs so much of the world today, but also we learn so much from what maybe we did wrong for how we can do it differently going forward. And I'm going to show folks a tool for conflict analysis in a little bit, but that was stood out to me in your, what you were just saying. Well, let's take it back to the civil military relationship. When the United States gets involved in places, typically it's the military everybody turns to first to go in and take care of whatever the issue may be. And in some cases it's appropriate. For example, humanitarian assistance operations, which I ran for the office of the secretary of defense in the late 90s because the military has the organization, the resources to quickly deploy certain units into these disaster zones to work on humanitarian assistance operations. In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch blew in as a category five hurricane into the Mediterranean or the Caribbean Sea off of Central America and then sat for four days on top of Nicaragua and Honduras in those four days, it dropped 96 inches of rain, which literally filled valleys and created new ones. We had more than 32,000 dead in the region. And the US military was called in. Now, working with civilian counterparts in international commercial businesses like Dole Foods and United Fruit Company, both of whom had huge fruit plantations in Honduras. They have ships that can carry a lot of cargo. And we were able to get them to ship engineer units down to Central America so that we could get in there and start reopening roads between towns and getting medical clinics stood back up and such. Additionally, working with humanitarian demining organizations we were able to assist them to safely identify where mines had been washed away. I mean, it was a catastrophe from our demining effort because we had marked out all the minefields that we thought we had to clear in Honduras, but 96 inches of rain will wash those mines away. So we were able to help them identify where the mines went and aided them in successfully removing them without a loss of life. Again, a remarkable on the ground cooperation between civilian organizations and the US military. I'm hearing a really interesting, some interesting research projects here that assigned to students to identify examples of this cooperation and different conflicts or different maybe humanitarian disasters in history. So two ones in particular that students could grab on to that's really, that would be pretty interesting. Yeah, well, at the strategic level we had to work with our civilian counterparts in the Clinton White House and on Capitol Hill so that we knew when the military needed to withdraw and that was important so that civilians then had a goal where they could say, okay, we need to be ready to take over whatever. Yeah, so it's about working together in the moment but then also that transition, effective transformation and cooperation so that transition is seamless. Yeah, yeah. We're reaching the end of our time to have this conversation, Paul. So I wanted to ask the final question which is if today's participants are anyone watching this webinar, takes one thing away from it, what do you think it should be? What's the one thing that folks should take away? People should understand that the military is fully committed to working with civilian counterparts. That stabilization assistance report I mentioned earlier makes that loud and clear. You want to have civilians performing civilian functions not the military and they're doing those functions because number one, we probably don't have the expertise and number two, it can hurt the creation of trust between the local civilian community and the afflicted country and its own government. The military has a tendency to walk and say, we'll take over and we're gonna do this our way. That's not helpful in these situations. So one of the things that interferes with the stabilization initiatives is that there are civilians who look at the military and say, well, that's a guy in uniform, we're not gonna do anything here. That's the wrong approach because you'll find that the military more than likely will say, we're happy to help you. If you need resourcing, we'll help you. At some point in time, we need to leave and let you do your work. And that leads to the planning that helps people make the decisions about when you transition. Thank you, Paul. This has been a really rich conversation. I suspect it sparked a lot of great ideas for our participants. I've already learned a lot about history in the last half hour. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for your service. And I'm gonna transition to sharing some USIP resources that our teachers can use in the classroom. And Paul, you're welcome to linger if you wanna listen, we can come back to your questions. Yeah, I'll linger if somebody has a question. Great, all right, perfect. Thank you, Paul. I'd love to share a few resources that give you some new ideas on how to bring this topic into your classroom. So I'm gonna start screen sharing again here and pull up some slides. All right. So the first resource I'd like to share is a lesson called partnerships in peace building. And it brings to life an example of the kind of co-operation that Paul was referring to. So this lesson is centered around a five minute video of a story from Iraq. And it highlights for students the importance of viewing a situation from multiple perspectives and to forming partnerships and conflict situations. And then also offers them a chance to practice some key conflict management skills like conflict analysis, which has come up quite a bit this afternoon. So the lesson, I thought I'd talk you through it so you get a sense of what it is. It opens with a quick activity. Some of you might be familiar with this activity where students are asked to follow a set of simple instructions. You can see the two top photos, two different groups of students doing this activity. They are asked to close their eyes and fold a piece of paper with their eyes closed. And then they are given four other instructions on what to do with this paper. Then they're asked to open their eyes, hold the paper over their head and look around. And what they discover, as you can see from the example papers at the bottom of the slide is that all of the papers look very different. And there's usually a lot of laughing and a lot of pointing at each other in this moment. So then you can move into a conversation and there are some discussion questions where the students are asked what they saw and how they felt when they looked around and saw all the different papers. Did anyone think they had done it wrong? A lot of students will say yes. And I also point out that I usually see students hiding their papers because they're a little embarrassed thinking they maybe didn't do this right. Which leads to really great conversation around how did everything look different when you all heard the same set of instructions? It helps students begin to talk about perspectives and why it might be useful to look at something from a different perspective. So this activity leads into this lesson play with the video but it's also just a nice one you can use in lots of different settings. Any one time you wanna talk about multiple perspectives, why they matter and what it all can add up to. I actually heard from a choir director who used this activity at the start of the year with her choir to talk about how we all have different voices but they're all equally important. So there are lots of ways you can use this activity. So next in the lesson, students watch a short video about US Army Lieutenant Colonel William Zem and a military effort to reduce violence in an area of Iraq called Makhmudiyah. In 2007, violence between local Sunni and Shia tribal leaders or tribes and Al-Qaeda insurgents was at its peak and the area was commonly known as the Triangle of Death. To manage the conflict between various tribal leaders, the military worked with other organizations like USIP, were able to bring the conflicting parties together to form an agreement. So this video shares that process, talks about that process, tells that story. And in the video, Lieutenant Colonel Zem says, if we didn't have people there to help guide us, we would have just seen it through the Prism of War and not looked for the opportunities that some of these resolutions could have helped with. So after watching the video, students are asked by what he might have meant by that comment that they might have just seen it through the Prism of War and asked about the various partnerships they saw in this example and about why those partnerships were important. So we use this very simple lesson at this quick video in our onsite educational programs, which are now virtual educational programs. And we have found it to be a really powerful and personal way to introduce students to the topic of today's webinar. So this lesson is very effective on its own. You can work it into anything you're teaching or any time you think it would be appropriate. But I've found teachers who have also thought it's a really effective gateway to teaching key peacebuilding skills, like conflict analysis. We've talked a lot about that. There's a great lesson in USIP's Peacebuilding Toolkit for Educators on conflict analysis, where students are asked to analyze a conflict by identifying the elements of that conflict. And they're given a framework to do so. So these are those elements of that framework that are in this lesson as a handout. They ask to look at the issues, the parties to the conflict, the relationships between those parties, the history. So looking back at the history of the conflict, where does it come from? What are some underlying factors, the styles? What conflict styles do each of the party use at different times throughout the process? And the management, what is the history of the conflict management? What has worked and what hasn't worked? So this is a really effective tool for any kind of conflict that you're teaching. But it could be a really nice way to build on the lesson plan about the Lieutenant Colonel's M. Flesson and video. I have used this handout with lots of videos from USIP when I work with students. I hand it to them. I break the students into small groups. We go through the whole thing together. And then each small group is assigned one of the elements. And then they watch a short video about a particular conflict and they're asked to come back together in their small group afterwards to flesh out their element. And then as a whole, as a class, we share our full conflict analysis. And it's a nice quick way to begin to understand often very complex conflicts. So this could be a tool you could use with this previous lesson that I just talked about. You could also use it with any historic or current conflict you're teaching. In fact, I've worked with teachers who've used it to have their students better understand historic conflicts as complicated as the Rwandan genocide. So it's a really helpful tool and it's one that's really intrinsic in the peace building field. So this is an approach that is commonly used in peace building. So the Lieutenant Colonel's M. Flesson also touch on these skills of negotiation and mediation. You hear them come up in the video. So the toolkit has great lesson plans on that as well. Students develop the skills for themselves. They practice them in role plays and then they think about what it looks like around them in the world. What are some global examples of negotiation and mediation? So you could have your students develop the skills, watch this video, hear how it's used in real life in a conflict as complex as Iraq as a great way to make it very real for them. You could focus on another important partnership for peace which is between diplomats and peace builders. We have a partnership with the American Foreign Service Association each year on the National High School Essay Contest and the theme of this year's contest is diplomats and peace builders, powerful partners. You can see here that the prompt asks students to identify a situation where diplomats worked on a peace building initiative with partners from the country or region in question, non-governmental organizations and other parts of the U.S. government and then go on to analyze what characteristics and approaches made the enterprise a success. This is a great way to get more in depth on the theme and the contest deadline isn't until April and on our website you can find a great study guide that has more information on the topic, offers examples of peace building initiatives and other places to go for information. So that's another way you could dig more deeply into this topic of partnerships and peace building. This video of Lieutenant Colonel Zemp as I've said is only one of many videos that USAP has. A little while ago we rounded up some of these stories of peace builders, testimonials of peace builders from around the world into a document that includes discussion questions and activity ideas like having your students define peace for themselves. What does peace mean? And then asking who is responsible for building peace in this society, emphasizing that everybody can be a peace builder. It requires all members of society contributing to peace. And then watch a video, watch an example of a peace builder in action or maybe create peace builder projects or peace builder posters where students are assigned a particular video or a particular peace builder to cover and they have to create a poster that pictorially represents their peace builder story. And we've offered some suggestions for questions to guide that process. So we hope that our videos will be a great resource to tell these stories of partnerships and cooperation and all the different kinds of peace builders that you can find around the world. And USAP has a great YouTube page where all of these are available as well. So these are just an example of some of those videos. And last but not least, because we are having a special topic today in honor of Veterans Day, I wanted to share with you an article that is on USAP's Olive Branch blog that was published last week. We honored Veterans Day with this new blog post about USAP board member and veteran John Lancaster who was paralyzed from an injury he received in the Vietnam War. Lancaster went on to fight for disability rights of Americans but also returned to Vietnam to advocate for disabled Vietnamese. And this blog post is about that story, about that journey for him back to Vietnam. And in particular, I wanted to show you these photos that are included in the story. The one on the right shows Lancaster seated next to a former North Vietnamese soldier. They were both paralyzed by combat injuries fighting on opposite sides in 1968. And then years later, they worked together to improve conditions for Vietnamese with disabilities and became really good friends. So it's a really moving story and is a great resource. If you're teaching your students about Veterans Day, if you want to build on this theme of military and civilian cooperation and veterans working for peace, this is a really effective story. The Olive Branch blog in general has really accessible stories of peace building work and peace builders themselves. And it's a really nice resource for your students to get maybe some primary sources of peace builders from around the world. So I'm gonna stop there with just a few minutes remaining in our time and see if there are any questions for Paul, for me about any of the resources or anything more about this topic. I might need to, I'm gonna stop screen sharing because I can't seem to see the chat box. I'll just wait a minute and then if there aren't questions I'll proceed on some ways to stay engaged with us. Okay. Well, before we begin to close out, I wanted to just take a quick moment and check for some connections that you might have noticed. I'd love just to, if you could put it in the chat box, share with me how today's webinar, if it has and how it has, perhaps challenged you or your students with some impressions of peace builders. Have your impressions evolved? If you were to share some of this content with your students, do you think their impressions might be a little different than what they are now? I'd love just hear a reflection or two in the chat box, returning to that question from the very beginning. Paul, Tom says, thank you for making me think about so many things I can share with students. That's great. Oh, the slide deck be available. Educator Resources page on the website. I will email around all the resources that I talked about. So you will have those right at your fingertips. So Melvin, don't worry. Dixie says it emphasized the importance of relaying this information to your students. Thank you, I'm glad. All right, so let's just wrap up with a few ways you can stay engaged with us. And I'm going to start screen sharing here. I want to highlight some virtual resources that we have on offer for you. You have access to USIP experts. We would love to connect you with anybody here, including Paul, who works on these topics. We often connect classrooms with virtual guest speakers. So that's an option for you. We have great content on our website about current events. So if you're asking your students to pay attention to what's happening around the world, we're a great stop for them. We have additional free Educator Resources. So a lot of what I've discussed plus more are on the public education section of the website. Everything we do is for free. So everything we do and offer is free. There are additional online learning opportunities. Paul already referenced one of these, which are our courses. USIP's Global Campus offers full-length semester-long courses or micro courses, which are three hours long, that all of them are free through the end of this calendar year and the micro courses are always free. So those are great options for you, but also for your students if you're looking for some distance learning that they could do on their own. We also offer virtual visits. We know that you can't come to us now, but we would love to virtually come to you or bring the headquarters to you. So I have a colleague who offers educational programs on these topics to classrooms who would be happy to provide your students with an introduction to the Institute of Peace and even offer them a virtual tour of our headquarters, among other kind of virtual opportunities. So closing out, I'd like to encourage you please to sign up for our newsletter if you are not already on that mailing list. It's a way to hear about everything that's happening, including future webinars. So I'm gonna ask my colleague, Yusuf, to drop that link into the chat box for you to sign up. Please mark your calendar for next year's Peace Day Challenge for the International Day of Peace on September 21st. We ask everyone to take one action for peace on or around that day and share it on social media. You'll hear more about this as the year goes on, but I wanted you to mark your calendar early. And last but not least, please connect with me. I am here as a resource for you. You have my email address here. Please email me to ask about any of the resources or if you'd like to explore ways that we can support you in your work. So I'm going to close out and thank you all for joining. Please take a short survey that is also appearing in the chat box. A link will be put there. We'd love to hear what you thought of this webinar. It helps us as we plan our future webinars. And I'd also really like to thank Paul for joining us today for our inaugural webinar for educators. And I think that that will be it for the day and we will be in touch. I will send around links to everything we talked about. So thank you, Paul. Thank you everyone who's joining and we'll see you all soon.