 So I'm going to, you know, overall the theme of this session is supposed to be about how various post-conflict processes. So elections or other sort of rule of law or legal mechanisms affect the prospects for constraining armed groups' propensity to, you know, commit for their violence or, you know, commit other issues that cause stability. But I want to ask a slightly different question. I want to look instead not at the purely post-conflict, but how do you try to address some of these concerns about violence or armed groups in the midst of sort of uncertain conflict situations? So most of the time we don't have a formal peace agreement. We have these situations where we're operating in a nebulous world of neither war nor peace. And in these environments, there tend to be a range of non-state or sub-state actors with a range of different affiliations and legal statuses that can sometimes be valuable allies in countering sources of violence, but also can themselves present a number of risks to political processes, to surrounding civilians, or of conflict resurgence themselves. And we are equally, if not even more interested in how you, if you can do anything to try and put constraints on those potential risks or that violence in the moment. And that's particularly the case when international actors are directly supporting or cooperating with these different armed groups. So to answer this, I tried to look to actual state practice. So I looked at what the U.S. and other NATO or coalition partners did when they were working with or partnering with some of these different non-state or sub-state armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. For example, what measures or mechanisms did they use to try to prevent the risk that they would commit human rights abuses or war crimes, that they would pass weapons or other material onto other insurgent groups, or that they would engage in other incriminality or exacerbate other political or conflict risks. And how is the treatment of these different groups or efforts to control them linked to other security sector or disarmament processes, for example. Now for this, I'm pulling from a series of different studies rather than presenting to you one paper. It's something I've been working on over the last few years. I'm not gonna get into all of these different groups. I'm just gonna pull a couple of examples from U.S. practice just for the sake of time. But I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the different groups that I'm talking about and some of the time periods that they're operating in. Now, first example. I was in Afghanistan for several years, but I was there in 2009, which was the height of the counterinsurgency strategy. And a big idea at the time was the idea of mobilizing local tribal forces and counterinsurgents. So U.S. special forces started fanning out across the country and sort of identifying tribes or leaders that would be willing to kind of stand with them and rise up against the Taliban. But back in Kabul, this idea was instantly controversial. Critics argued that it would have rolled back the last decade of state building and disarmament initiatives, that it would empower warlords, and that it would unleash unruly militias on the population. So there was a large deliberation about this, which I won't get into you. The end result was to go ahead with the forward, the program, sorry, which was known as the Afghan local police, but to do so with a range of different checks and controls. So there was supposed to be this intense selection period at the onset to check if a particular site would be prone to conflict risks or warlord entrapment or things like that. And then each of the tribal and community forces was supposed to be vetted and monitored through this multi-layered system by community or tribal elders, by the U.S. forces themselves, by the Afghan government. There was a code of conduct and a training, which included sessions on human rights law. There were specifically set out restrictions, for example, not to go beyond their home village or to engage in detention operations. And there were also supposed to be sanctioned so that they would be cut off if they committed human rights abuses or potentially prosecuted or subject to disciplinary action. Because as a conduct of being authorized, they were brought under the Afghan government, a sort of quasi security sector state-building initiative that'd be put under the Ministry of Interior. Now, there's varying degrees to which these checks or controls were actually implemented over time. I'll get to that a little bit in the conclusion. But just to have this sort of sense of the different controls, I wanna flash to another example. Flash forward a few years. After June 2014, ISIL takes a third of Iraqi territory. There's this massive effort to go back in and to retake some of it. But a lot of the Iraqi army had collapsed. And so an initial idea that the U.S. had was to go in and again mobilize tribal communities to support the anti-ISIL efforts or at least to hold the territory retaken afterwards. So the idea had a little bit of flavors of the sort of Sons of Iraq or Sahwa period, if any of you worked with that. But it also borrowed a lot of the checks and controls that I just mentioned from the Afghan local police. So again, they had this initial vetting for all of the different tribal forces that come in, vetted against insurgent links, against affiliation with Iran or other Iranian linked militias, and also for human rights record. They got a sort of big box training that was provided not only by U.S. forces but also some other coalition forces who were part of it, including also things on human rights law or the correct way to behave in addition to tactical. They were cut off. So there were forces that committed detainee abuses or that used child soldiers in their cut from the program. And then also similar to the Afghan, there's an attempt to institutionalize them within the state to make it more sustainable. So the idea first was to have them be an Iraqi National Guard. And failing that, they're brought initially under this Iraqi three star general and later integrated into a slightly more problematic part of the state, the popular mobilization force. But I'll leave that for if anyone wants to get into it in questions and answers. Now with both of these examples, of course, the efforts are happening in the context of a larger stabilization or state building initiative and with forces that could nominally be linked to the state could be considered as part of a wider security sector reform strategy. What about in a more hostile environment and with purely non-state armed groups where you have far less to work with in terms of options for control? For that, I turn to Syria. There's so many different initiatives that happen in Syria. I'm not gonna barely skim over all of them. I just put this slide up so you could get a sense of how they change a little bit during the different time period. I'm happy to get into more Syria dynamics. But suffice it to say that the US supported a lot of the different Syrian armed groups from both non-lethal assistance and CIA lethal support to the parts of the Free Syrian Army in the early stages to a much more concerted overt effort once anti-ISO became the sort of dominant theme within Syria, so to lots of different militia forces in the Northeast and also a little bit around al-Taf but also the Syria democratic forces. And with all of these different groups, you saw a lot of the same sort of mechanisms of constraints and controls that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, where you had forces on the ground and present. And the funny thing is in many ways, you saw much more stringent legal checks and mechanisms with the Syrian groups, despite it arguably being an area that had the least prospects for control. So with the non-lethal assistance to the Free Syrian Army, you had State Department officials spending countless hours doing double and triple vetting of them, pooling through information, trying to figure out if red lines had been crossed and if forces should be cut. Once funded, then you have the Free Syrian Army commanders who received the CIA lethal support and they would report monthly to these intelligence hubs in Jordan and Turkey. They'd appear before the sort of murder board and answer questions, not only about operations, but about whether so-and-so was engaged in smuggling or a particular missile strike that had gone awry and hit a civilian camp. So you had that sort of constant engagement and then groups were cut off or limited from assistance where there was evidence of red lines crossed, affiliating with the wrong group, war crimes or other different incidents. Constraints were also high with the subsequent train and equip programs which are the various anti-ISIL programs. So with the first one that Congress funded in 2014, they went through what one lawyer described as sort of the gold standard of IHL training. I just put this on there because if any of you are lawyers, maybe you'll find it interesting, but these are excerpts of the actual oath they made these Syrian forces pledge to before sending them back into the field with limited support. And they're a little sort of like mini IHL oaths which is just remarkable to look at. You also had sort of similar things going on with the Syrian democratic forces, not these sort of oaths, but checks in terms of vetting, restraints and monitoring on weapons, cut-offs, complaints raised, various things like that. So what are the potential policy and research implications at looking at practices like this? I think there's a couple of different important questions you can look at from trying to sort of regulate these issues in the midst of ongoing hostilities. And I'll take these in sort of reverse order just to make sure you're paying attention and not just reading the slide. So some of this I've used, I'm a lawyer by training initially and so some of it I've used for legal work. If there are other lawyers out there, these are really interesting examples of what state practice looks like in terms of due diligence obligations with regard to international humanitarian law. In my sort of policy I had, I often look at them in terms of what they say about theories of proxy relationships or proxy warfare. There's a lot of ways that sort of the principal agent dynamics that come up a lot in those proxy discussions play out. There's also a lot of ways that they don't really anticipate when these controls crop up and how they're used. And so I think it offers an important way to nuance those sort of theories and how we think about these sub-state relationships and what happens when you intervene in hyper-dynamics. And then perhaps more interesting for our questions that we're thinking about in this conference is what are the effects in terms of first stalling violence? How should policymakers that want to try and enact some of these standards actually respond? The results of the different studies that I looked at, they weren't overwhelmingly winning. It would be hard to say that you saw clear evidence of changes of behavior. For sure there were undoubtedly some bad apples who were prevented from having US funding. Some weapons were prevented from going astray. But the overall impression, even from those who were very dedicated in implementing these was that it's very hard to affect changes of behavior in these environments from these sort of technical checks. So from screening, from a bunch of names in a database in DC or a one day human rights training when there's no follow through and things like that. So that's an important caution is just the sort of limited effects to them. There were also significant costs to doing this in terms of the time and manpower involved, but almost even more significant in terms of the way it affected political decision making and choices. So in several of the cases, the focus on identifying forces that met this exact criteria or even just having this sort of due diligence process or checks sort of substituted or distracted from maybe a more important and deeper reflection on the larger political choices that would have had a more direct bearing on conflict drivers or some of the risks of these groups. And maybe that's something we can build on a little bit more in the final discussion. And then I just wanted to also note because it connects to a lot of some of the other discussions I've heard in other panels, I think there's also a way you could pull from some of these practices for larger learning about state building and peace building more broadly and particularly the stream that focuses on sort of bottom up state building. So this stream of examples, but particularly the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have a lot in common with the sort of bottom up or community based mobilization that you would see not only in the security sector, but say engagement and trying to use tribal dispute mechanisms in the justice sector, say informal justice or other community based or development initiatives. And they shared a lot of the similar drawbacks in that they were time intensive, slow to grow, difficult to scale, focusing here, because that's the theme of this panel on the institutional legalization, the idea that you could sort of just link them to the state and get dividends both ways. You get more of a state institution and control over them, but then you get all of these other sources coming up. Last sentence on this, I would just shorten that to say that, the idea of linking them to the state is only as good as the institutions themselves. So where you're doing this in areas that are already wrought by problematic institutions, linking to them states can cause more issues than it solves. And I can get into more of that in questions. So thank you very much.