 Well, I knew that. It was a lot of experience. And, you know, you have to sort of come here a little further. The idea is kind of left here. But as we start talking, I'm not sure what they will do with it. Playing on a course. And, of course, the particle present. I don't know what to do with that. But, excuse me. Council doesn't give the opportunity to water down. I'm just complaining to the doors. No, no. I mean, it's a functional thing about getting into it quickly. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Sorry about that. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Okay, good morning. My name is Jim Roof, and I'm the Senior Program Officer for Civilian Military Affairs here at USIP's Academy. On behalf of our co-host, the Folk of Bernadotte International Challenges Forum, we'd like to welcome you to USIP and to the Strategic Communications for a New Era in Peace Operations Challenges Forum Workshop. We have an exciting program filled with many experts from the Strategic Communications field. Before I ask USIP's president to open the workshop, we'd like to share just a couple of administrative remarks. First, as many of you probably already experienced, we have a number of team members that are located out in the hallway in the registration area, so if there's anything we can do to make your time here a little bit more enjoyable, please don't hesitate to ask us. Biographies. We have a packed day today, so in order to maximize and make the most efficient use of our time, we're going to just probably lightly touch on the biographies of the individuals here and the featured speakers and the panelists, but if you'd like to know more, their full biographies are inside your packets. Question and answers. So once the panel's portion of our session is completed, there's plan time for question and answer. If you haven't received already, you will, some cards for which you can write your questions down on and then we will take them and then we will get them to the panelists. And all you have to do is take your cards and then just pass them to the outside of your row and then we will collect them from there. Another important administrative remark tonight, beginning at 5.30, there will be a reception at the Washington Marriott Georgetown Hotel. It's on 22nd Street and I think there's some directions, but we can get those for you if you so need them. Okay. That said, it's now my privilege to introduce the President of USIP, Ms. Nancy Lindberg. On February 2nd, Nancy Lindberg was sworn in as President of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to joining USIP, she served as the Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistant, or DACHA, at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she directed the efforts focused on crisis prevention, response, recovery and transition. Ms. Lindberg led the DACHA teams in response to the ongoing Syria crisis, the Sahel and Horn of Africa droughts, Arab Spring, the Ebola response and numerous other global crises. Ms. Lindberg has spent most of her career working on issues of transition, democracy and civil society, conflict and humanitarian response. And prior to joining USAID, she was the President of Mercy Corps. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Nancy Lindberg. Thank you, Jim. And welcome everybody to USIP. It's a pleasure to have everyone here and thank you for battling the heat and the traffic. As Jim said, we're absolutely delighted here at USIP to be able to host this very important conference. USIP was chartered 30 years ago with the mission of finding practical solutions for preventing, mitigating and recovering from conflict and connecting, doing with teaching and learning. This conference is squarely, squarely in our mission. And I'd like to thank our co-hosts and recognize Annika Hilding-Norberg, the Director and Founder of the Challenges Forum, and Mr. Sven Erich-Solder, the Director General of the Fokker-Bernadotte Academy, and our many US partners for coming together on this important effort. I'd also like to welcome many of you who've traveled from other countries, who've come from across the globe from numerous organizations, government, military, business. This is exactly the configuration of people we need to tackle this issue. And I understand that we have a number of people joining us online. And I would encourage all of you who are working the Twitter sphere to use hashtag peace comms as a part of the overall conversation. So we were very happy to host in March in partnership with the UN Foundation, a conversation with members of the high-level independent panel on peace operations, which was a very, very vigorous, very engaged conversation. And this is an extraordinarily well-timed event with the release yesterday of the high-level panel report. We also had last week a report from UNHCR that we are now seeing a record level of 60 million people who are currently displaced, either within or outside their country's borders. So at a time where peacekeepers are increasingly called upon to keep the peace, where there is still active conflict, and where you are seeing complicated missions that rapidly change over time. I saw this last fall in Liberia, where the peacekeepers were suddenly in the midst of an Ebola epidemic. We see it in places like South Sudan, where you are quickly transitioning from a country that is on a pathway to peace to terrible conflict and hundreds of thousands of people seeking refuge on your compound. This is a time where we really need to enable our peacekeeping operations to fully embrace the idea of full-spectrum operations. And strategic communications are an absolutely critical part of that. So I want to really commend the organizers of this workshop and all of you for the work that you are poised to do. This is a part of a very important conversation and hopefully a part of really moving forward so that we have the kind of peacekeeping operations that are equal to an ever more complicated and conflict-affected set of crises. I look forward to continuing to be a part of this conversation and USIP is very eager and happy to have the partnership with the Folko Bernadette Academy and the Challenges Forum and others as we move this conversation forward. And to get us underway, it's now my great pleasure to welcome Mr. Sven Ericsolder. Sven Ericsolder forward, Sven Ericsolder brings considerable experience both with the private sector and inside the Swedish government to his current position as Director General of the Folko Bernadette Academy. So he's well positioned to help lead this conversation forward. Please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you Nancy and good morning to all of you. It is really a great pleasure for me as well to welcome you all to this Challenges Forum workshop that we at the Folko Bernadette Academy has the great privilege to host together with the United States Institute for Peace on this very timely topic of strategic communications for the new era of UN peace operations. I have to say that personally I feel also very strongly about strategic communications in the context of peace operations and I do that mainly for three different reasons. First, as the Swedish Agency for Peace, Security and Development under the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Sweden, the development of critical tools in support of UN peace operations is really at the heart of our work and our commitment. And second, doing so together with partners notably within the framework of the Challenges Forum also confirms our commitment to and believe in multilateralism for more effective peace operations. And last and third, I think strategic communications is a topic that I have of course a personal interest in, not only because as Nancy said that I have previously worked in this area both in the private and in the public sector, but more importantly because I really believe that strategic communications has never ever been more important than it is today when we are talking about the United Nations and peace operations. I think a central tenet for UN peace operations to be in mind is if you are not seen, then you do not exist. If you are not seen, then you do not exist. So not being seen I think makes you vulnerable because it is by being seen that you can gain confidence, trust and also support from your respective clients, from your constituencies or otherwise target audiences. And if you are not seen, then not only will your work have very limited impact, but also when times get tough you are not likely to ride out the storm. And if you are not seen, then you will not attract the support and investment that you need to persist. And you are less likely to be missed and the cost of losing you will not trump the cost of keeping you floating. It's really important to be seen. And in fact, communications is key for I think a peace operations accountability in relation to those that it deploys, of course, as well as in relation to those that it is deployed to protect. But communications also provides accountability in relation to those who deploy peacekeepers and make peace operations happen. That is both, of course, member states and the United Nations itself. And this is why we need to think about communications and how to communicate in a strategic manner in order to win the hearts and minds and thereby also secure national and local ownership of the process. For these reasons, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that strategic communications will be at the center of the implementation work that now follows in the review process that the UN peace operations is currently going through. And I think it's also clear that the UN has to become better at communicating peacekeeping mandates, but also how they are implemented, how they are translated into practice. And this has to be done continuously and in innovative ways to global and national, but also calls at local levels. But not necessarily in the same way across all those levels. Strategic communication, I think, is also a cost-effective mean for managing expectations and to inform more realistic mandates and implementation plans. I think also equally important to external communication is internal communication. And in fact, I would argue that in order to do external communication strategically, internal communication is key. The UN is, as we all know, a complex organization for obvious reasons. It has 193 member states, incorporates with a number of regional and non-governmental organizations. And it has the most important, but also the most complex, I would say, responsibilities of all, namely to save succeeding generations from war, reaffirm fundamental human rights and respect for international law, and promote social progress and better standards of life. As such, in order for the UN to communicate in a coherent, confident, and therefore also in a convincing manner, it has to be clear about the message. I think this all sounds, of course, very complicated. And we can't hide from the fact that the UN has a long, long way, I think, to go when it comes to strategic communications. And the first challenge is perhaps to ensure that all member states share the commitment to this issue. And I think this workshop we are attending here today is an important step in that direction. And we are therefore very, very encouraged by the impressive panels that we will hear today and the wide range of different types of experiences that we have here in the room to discuss the questions for the course of the day. And personally, I'm absolutely sure that this afternoon's working group discussions will result in targeted and realistic recommendations that can play an important role in the second stage of the review process, and maybe the most important part of the process, namely implementation. So, dear friends, once again, I would like to thank you, Nancy, and I would like to thank the US Institute of Peace for co-hosting this workshop with us in this really, really beautiful building. And of course, I would also like the Challengers Forum Secretariat for making this seminar happen. And finally, I would like to thank all of you very much for attending this seminar. And I'm really looking forward to participating in the discussions throughout the day. So thank you very much and may the good work begin. Thanks. Thank you. This is cooperation. Your Excellencies, partners, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. The purpose of the Challengers Forum remains steadfast over the past two decades. Our mission is to explore and develop thinking and concepts on how to better analyze, plan, conduct, and evaluate complex peace operations. We encourage action on the findings we generate. In January, concluding a two-year multi-strand project, the Challengers Forum partner organizations from 22 countries, in the picture here represented by our India and British, Pakistani, and American colleagues, presented a report on the theme designing mandates and capabilities for future peace operations. And the report contained a range of findings. We were very pleased to have the Vice Chair of the Independent Panel participate in that event. In relation to strategic communications, the Challengers Forum partners found that we need to adopt new tools and technologies in peace operations as a means for tackling emerging threats, not least in order to enhance the security of peacekeepers in the field. The application of modern technology to peace operations aims to understand and influence current day mission environments in two fundamental ways. First, by gaining trust and support by communicating with host country populations. Second, by improving situational awareness through information gathering, analysis, and dissemination among staff. The report continues, while traditional communication tools remain important, new and social media have the potential to improve both the scope and effectiveness of peace operations communication efforts. Correctly used, these tools enable missions to both take a more strategic approach to communications, as well as to enhance the ability of missions to react better to events as they unfold. And finally, the report found that new and social media enable interactive two-way dialogue not only provides a source of information to the public, but can also generate support for mission goals. And in the partnership, we came to the conclusion that there was a need to convene a workshop exactly like this one, bringing in also the business and strategic communications experts as much as our traditional constituency, the international peace operations community. And what better place to have this workshop than here in Washington DC and at the United States Institute of Peace. The purpose of our workshop here today is to, one, explore and if possible initiate new and innovative thinking in concept for strategic communications that can be applied in support of peace operations. And second, to mobilize support for the prioritization of strategic communications as a key enabler to alleviate the challenges facing modern peace operations and to better protect our men and women peacekeepers in the field. And third, we hope to contribute to the ongoing important process for review and reform that is currently ongoing. And as it happens, as Mrs. Lindberg mentioned, our workshop could not come at the more timely time. The U.N. Secretary-General's high-level panel on peace operations here represented by Ambassador Pascoe presented their much anticipated report just now with a specific section and recommendation on strategic communication, which confirms the relevance of the topic we're meeting here to discuss. The report I found is immensely rich and loaded with thoughtful and constructive and concrete proposals for enhancing 21st century peace operations. Here, we will seek to zoom in on the part of the report that deals with strategic communications and what needs to be done. And what does that mean? Which innovative concept the methods are required? What can we learn from the business and strategic communications expert community in order to realize the potential of strong and fit for purpose strategic communications? And at one workshop, what we choose to do here today matters. We are as focused on bringing the findings of today's workshop forward as we are in making the workshop happen in the first place. And for those of you that are new to the Challenges Forum, I will spend just two minutes on mentioning a couple of examples of Challenges Forum partnership contributions to major and concrete developments. Contribution to the UN-led development of the principles and guidelines for peacekeeping. The DPKO and our Jordanian partners in cooperation with the Pearson Center and the FBA brought together the five top tube contributing countries to ensure the ability of the global south to properly and fully influence the finalization of the UN principles and guidelines document. The Challenges Forum study on consideration for mission leadership in UN peacekeeping operationalizes the UN peacekeeping principles and guidelines. And since 2011, it has been used by all UN senior mission leadership courses, as well as by regional organizations and partner states across the world. The picture at the bottom was taken, I think last week at the UNSML in Cairo. The challenges, sorry, and the final example is the first strategic thematic guidelines for UN police peacekeeping is finally coming to fruition. And the workshop hosted by our Norwegian partners, NUPI, focused on UN police and capacity building and development, which is now much thanks to the strong support and sustained support from Norway of UN policing turning into the first thematic guidelines. And before closing, I would like to take this opportunity to extend our warm welcome to Canada as the 22nd partner of the Challenges Forum, building on an earlier valuable partnership that we enjoyed with the Pearson Center. I look forward to the deliberations here today. We look forward to working with the outcome and to make sure it is put to good use, taking into account forthcoming reviews, coming out of the high level panel or review of the peace building architecture as well as the review of the implementation of Security Council 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. We will continue working with the outcomes of this workshop in partnership with our organizers and in parallel to developments being generated by the international community at the fourth generation consultation in Jakarta and the peacekeeping summit in New York. In October, our Challenges Annual Forum 2015 will be hosted by Armenia in Jerevan. Our Challenges Forum workshop in Addis Ababa will further develop and test the findings of this workshop towards the field. But here and now, thank you the United States Institute of Peace under the leadership of Nancy Lindberg for hosting this important workshop. Our thanks also goes to the broader American partnership that have been involved in the planning of the workshop. I would say an innovative model of whole of government in cooperation with the think tank approach, which also includes the US Army War College Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, an effort led by Bill Flavin, the Department of State Effort Partnership, led by Victoria Holt and the Department of Defense led by Kristi Hand. And thank you, Folke Bananat Academy, forthcoming with your support to co-host this event. Thank you. Finally, this workshop will not have taken place if it was not for the efforts and engagement of UN Peacekeeping, and in particular, Nick Bernbach of the Public Affairs Section, who has both championing the issue and served as an essential and dynamic driver of this project. Having first galvanized the issue in partnership discussions at our workshop at the UN Read and Service Center in Anteb and then having stayed the course with us. Without that, we will not be here. So ladies and gentlemen, I very much look forward to today and to working with the outcomes and very much look forward for us all together making a difference in this very, very important area of strategic communications in support of UN Peace Operations. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy, Sven Erick, and Annika for your remarks and giving the workshop its charge for the day. At this time, I would like to invite our first panel to the stage. This panel will focus on strategic communications challenges today in peace operations and will be chaired by Mr. Nick Bernbach, Director of Public Affairs, Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support for the United Nations. Mr. Bernbach? Do they do? Okay, all right, yeah. How will I know who I am, though? You know your name's right. Are we microphones or no microphones? Yeah, they'll turn it on. Okay, let's see, very good. You're already on. All right, excellent. Good, thank you, and thank you for the opportunity. Thanks to the organizers for pulling this together. It is a most welcome and unusual opportunity for me personally to be able to talk about strategic communications to people who seem to actually wanna hear about it. So thank you, that's great. We have a very distinguished panel here and I will take the Chairman's prerogative of saying a few words before we turn it over to them. As you heard Annika say, one of the sort of fundamental principles behind this was the idea of being practical, was not to simply just lay out what the issues are and then wring our hands and then go back to doing things in the way that we've always done them, but rather to look at where we are, what the problems are, and to really try to come up with a couple of issues with regards to how we can try to make it better. And with that in mind, what I thought I would do is just look very quickly at what the problem set is that's been defined for this panel. And then I'll take perhaps seven or eight minutes and just go through a couple of points in that regard and then I'll turn it over to the panel. Let me take the opportunity first to introduce my colleagues from my left is Ambassador Lynn Pascoe, who up until recently was a member of the Secretary General's Independent Panel on Peace Operations. I know him as the Undersecretary General for Political Affairs and a long-serving American diplomat, a good colleague and a wealth of information if I'm very lucky to have him. Welcome, sir. On his left is Mr. Marston Moyani, the Strategic Communications Officer from the Peace and Security Department of the African Union. Welcome, thank you for being here. And at the end is my dear colleague, Yasmin Abudsen, the Chief Communications and Public Information Officer from Minusta in Haiti, but also have served in pretty much any peacekeeping operation that the UN has done that you can think of. Yasmin has been a part of it in the last 10 years and is truly one of the good people in the universe of UN peacekeeping and we're deeply fortunate to have all three of them. In terms of what we're actually here to discuss, the way that it's framed in the setup is that what are the challenges, but also what should we be doing? What are the optimal purposes of Stratcoms and what are the gaps and is the UN using Strategic Communications to its full potential? So we can just ignore it. We can get that one out of the way first, right? So is the UN using its full potential? No, it isn't. We need help and I'll let's put that over there and let's talk about other things for a little bit. So what I wanna discuss first is the optimal purposes, Ben, right? So why does Stratcoms matter and why is it necessary to try to communicate in this slightly inchoated and complicated manner that's more than just putting out press releases from time to time and answering allegations when they arise? So I've been fortunate enough to work at headquarters for many years as the press person, but I've also been deployed on a number of operations most recently in Somalia where I spent three years as the head of information there for the UN. And one of the things that you learn very, very quickly is that UN operations do not win by hard power. It's not what we do. We don't fight and win wars and if you ask us to, you will fail. We succeed when we do through the use of soft power and through the use of explaining and cajoling and deterring spoilers and fundamentally that act, that peace operations accompany a political process that we're in support of the talking and of the discussion, that that act means that we are communications driven and that if we are not getting that right then we're putting ourselves at a great disadvantage. The other side of that, the more practical side to put on my peacekeeping hat for a second is a strategic communications approach, is a defense for you. That actually it means that you are empowering your mission with more information that gives you more survivability, more situational awareness in real time and a better ability to influence the outcome. And those are from anybody's sort of practically driven approaches rather important in today's peacekeeping operations. We'll talk a little bit about that. The other point on what the optimal purposes are that I would just highlight is peacekeeping is fundamentally a partnership and it doesn't work if it's not a partnership and that partnership on the ground can be in a multi-dimensional mission between the police and the military and the various civilian components and the host authorities. But more broadly it's a partnership between everyone that has a stake in peacekeeping. So that's the civil society and that's the militaries and that's the journalists and all of them either working together or the tension of that is what will make peacekeeping successful. Explaining the work of your mission in a way that is comprehensible, that makes others want to support it, builds the partnership and builds the very thing that empowers you to complete your tasks successfully. Without partnership, peacekeeping tends to not be the right tool for the job. And the strategic communications approach helps with that. So those are my just intro comments on optimal purpose of why we need stratcoms. I'll just say a couple of words now about the center of the problem set which is what are the problems, right? What's going wrong? And our colleagues will get into some of the specifics using their experiences to discuss this but I wanted to highlight a few based on my read of where we are. The first is that there's a structural flaw and a difficulty between headquarters and the field and there's a disconnect and communicating is complicated from thousands and thousands of miles away. Nobody who is the head of a information component somewhere wants a 10,000 mile screwdriver, wants somebody calling them from four time zones over and saying we don't understand why you're not being more aggressive in saying this in public. That's a very complicated equation for us and our structure in peace operations where we are in fact quite decentralized and we delegate a tremendous amount of responsibility to the field requires that we at headquarters sitting in nice offices in Turtle Bay trust our people in the field, right? But in order for that to work there has to be a common playbook. There has to actually be a mutually agreed strategic communications plan that allows the structural issue to be addressed. That's the first thing I would say. The second is that in peacekeeping we don't end missions very well and if you look at the universe of peace operations right now many of our large operations are now past their peak and are looking towards how they're gonna transition out. And as any military person will tell you planning and organizing a retreat is a lot harder than doing in advance and the UN proves that time and time again. And so thinking through what exit strategy means in places like Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo where I've just returned from this weekend or Liberia or Haiti where our colleague is working now and these are important questions because it's very difficult to rally resources and to galvanize the attention that is necessary for peace operations to succeed when everyone knows that you're leaving. But here's the trick of it all, right? That if you don't do that you're gonna be back there and that that moment of leaving is the reason it's so complicated militarily is that you're vulnerable and it's exactly the same for us that if you leave and you leave prematurely and you pull out bad things happen you lose the progress you've made and you increase the possibility of having to be redeployed. The day-to-day life of a public information officer or chief in peacekeeping is very frequently about playing defense. And if anyone's reading the stories about you in peacekeeping right now there's your answer that when there is misconduct for example you have to respond you have to respond aggressively and nobody wants to hear about anything else that's going on on your mission. So you have this large mission spread out over the country the size of a continent and no one's interested in what's going on because that news is being subsumed by the issue of misconduct. Taking back the narrative and this is a point that General Gordon has been making for years taking back the narrative is critical in terms of preparing yourself from an informational perspective finding the good stories and telling them in a compelling manner. It's critical to a strategic communications plan that works for peace operations because it is that civil affairs officer who's a thousand kilometers away from nowhere or the air ops person sitting on a field in 145 degree heat in Mali. I mean that is actually peacekeeping right and explaining that and explaining why that has value and explaining what that means to people is not always easy but it's a sine qua non and that's one thing that we need to focus on I just have two more and then I'll turn to the panels. We're in a world of new channels for media and what needs to be understood is that this is no longer an option. Anyone who's asking the question should I be tweeting is not paying attention. Yes, if that is a question in anyone's mind yes you should be tweeting and you shouldn't be doing it without thinking about it. It should be part of your overall communications plan which is, wait for it, a political document. It is a creational document that is as important as your mission directive. So what are you gonna do? How are you gonna do it? To whom do you need to do it to and how will you judge whether or not you've been successful at doing it? Like that part of it will have a digital media component. That's true and it doesn't matter where you are it is true and so that requires training and it requires a shift in mindset because the success in a digital media campaign is not measured using the same metrics as success in a 20th century style of communicating a top down one way style of communicating. Digital media is interactive and it's two way and it involves creating a conversation and a series of other small conversations and be ready for that because that is actually how communications is done now and it isn't enough to put out a press release and then walk away from it. That isn't how people are expecting you to communicate so you are letting them down and therefore you're reducing your influence over them. So shifting that mindset. Then the last point that I wanna raise is something that I think about a lot which is that I think that peace operations in general are in a fundamentally changed context and it sounds really quite easy to say that but it's true and I mean I've heard it phrased as we were frequently caught in the crossfire now we're in the cross hairs or if you prefer we used to be attacked because of where we were now we're being attacked for who we are and that shift which is not true on every one of our missions but is frankly true on many of them and particularly the big complex ones that matter most to your Mali is in your Somalis and such. We are in a fundamentally changed environment where the threat level is astronomical. Also in these places not only is the threat level something we haven't confronted before but the environments themselves are deeply inhospitable and that change that idea of deploying a force effectively on Mars that has to be entirely self sustaining but that is also getting attacked while doing it is a fundamental shift because it isn't the UN of the 1990s which I remember where what it was about was not building walls, right? It was dropping the walls and reaching out and going and talking to people and the people that you admired when you were a 26 year old civil affairs officer like I was people that you admired were the ones that were sitting in the cafe bars with the local guys and talking usually in local language and could write these really in depth reports about what was actually happening. That's a really hard thing to do in Mogadishu really hard to do in Mogadishu for a variety of reasons and that shift in posture where our walls are now higher and blast radius is a term that I'm quite familiar with and I shouldn't be and the idea of portraying ourselves as an armed camp has a cost, right? It has a cost because it isn't what the UN is in many ways. We're not war fighters but when we drive through Mogadishu we sure as heck look like them, right? You know, we're in APCs and we're an armor and that's us. So what does that shift mean? What does operating in this fundamentally changed environment where people are trying to blow you up? And by the way are doing so fairly successfully at a rate of about 110 per year. So that shift and what it means and how you can use communications as a deterrent to these types of attacks because by the way most of these groups are quite good at using those tactics, right? The digital battle space is a very vibrant place these days. So that shift is another thing that in stratcoms that I feel that we need to think about. So with just those couple of things in mind, let me, I'd like to turn to the panel and then hopefully get into an interactive discussion. I think I'll ask Ambassador Pasco to go first. Thanks a lot, Nick. Let me just pick up on the last point. I mean, it was fundamentally this point to the change world that we're living in out there. This certainly is not your father's or your grandfather's peacekeeping. This is a very different world that's out there is what drove the Secretary General to set up this independent panel really to look at it to see what's going on, to see where we stand today, what we're doing right, what we're not doing right. And the way that we went about that business was to go out and talk with in various continents with as many people as we could from the heads of the governments down to the civil society that we're working on the ground. The ones that were actually the beneficiaries are maybe not the beneficiaries of the operations that we were carrying out into the world. I think a couple of things are really quite clear when you talk about strategic communications. In the first instance, we've got a huge international problem. As Nick pointed out, the negatives are always there. They're always pushed. Just as one illustration of that, the press conference that we had to say what we're talking about over all peace operations was about 70% about abuse by peacekeepers. These are the stories, these are the lines that people take, they run with it. And so we have that global problem that I think is very clear, which often ignores, is often ignorant, totally ignorant of the work that is being done out there in peace operations across the board. On the other hand, we have a real problem in the countries. This idea that Nick was talking about of being more in fortresses in many places, for example, leads the local people and we got this complaint repeatedly as seeing the UN as a bunch of arrogant foreigners riding around in their white Toyota SUVs with their little canned answers on how you should solve everything and telling everybody how to do it. And I think that this is a problem too that we have to work on very hard. There's gotta be a lot of reach out into the civil societies on the ground working with the partners that we have there. This was brought home to us in conversation after conversation. Let me just say though that when we're really talking about strategic communications and peace operations in general, fundamentally we've gotta look at the product. You can't go out and sell soap. You can't go out and sell other things if they don't work. And this is the fundamental question that the Secretary General really wanted us to look at. How well is it working? What should we be doing differently? What really makes for the world and the settlement of conflicts and the high ideals that are there in the charter 70 years ago? How are we measuring up on this? That's no secret to anyone that the UN has been in the peace operations business since 1948 on both the political side and the peacekeeping side. And it has continued off and on, learned a lot of things, done extremely well in some places and failed in others. My guess is if you walk out on the streets of Washington and ask people, they could tell you the failure is more than the successes. And that's a failure of communication, it seems to me, because it's not the way it should be. Let me just talk a little bit about the conclusions and I would ask people if they're interested, if they're interested enough being in here, they might want to read through the report. It's not as bad as most of you in reports, I must say. It's not bad reading. And hopefully it can give you a reasonable introduction into what we saw as the problems as they were expressed to us and how we could fix those problems. In the first instance, the secretary general wanted us to deal with peace operations across the board. That means from his own phone calls to sending envoys out into the field to regional political offices to the big, very big over a billion dollar a year peacekeeping operations. And also into what we're doing afterwards, what we're doing in sustaining peace. How does this work? We've got these little pigeon holes are we really producing what we say we're doing? Several things came to us as pretty obvious points. The one I'd like to just back up what Nick said is these are political operations. These are not military operations. We're not out fighting a war. We're trying to solve a conflict. We're trying to solve a political problem. It's tricky and it's hard but there's an occasional tendency. And if you read the report, you will notice we're sometimes not terribly kind to the security council on these kinds of issues where they because of the international press and because of the pressures on them to do something and nobody wants to use their own troops for it. So the way to do something is to throw peacekeeping operations at it. And this is exactly the wrong reason for doing it because the tool is not very good for that. It's got to keep in mind the security council, everybody involved in these issues have to keep in mind. These are all political tools for resolution of conflict. Whether in the old days, the old kind of things you were basically having a monitoring of a peace agreement or you're out there really mixing it up in Eastern Congo with the bad guys and trying to figure out how you're going to protect the population and help them. But this is fundamentally a political operation and we need to be keeping in mind that we are trying to solve problems and move on to something else and get out of them. A second issue that's out there that the panel really focused on was, how do we get the UN to be working together and not only internally because it is divided up into all of these ways that people who follow the UN know that by the funding mechanisms, by the programs and the way they work, not to mention just sheer bureaucratic arneriness which there's more than enough of too. But it is inside the UN, it is with our partners and is particularly with the regional organizations and how we cooperate and where we go. Back in my day when I was the head of the political department, I felt that on occasion the African Union, for example, was working at it, but it was struggling some in some of the way. They've come extraordinarily far. It's a very effective discussions that we had with them on where they go, how we cooperate. This has got to be made more formal. I mean, it's got to be much more closely aligned that we're talking about issues from the early days of political negotiation, prevention, other sorts of things up through the actual piece. Give me through a sustainable piece in the end and we need to be working on all these, not only with the African Union, but with other organizations as they're there. In the change situation that's out there, I think that this issue now of we're in not only peacekeeping operations, but political things are the same. You were in Somalia, you know how it works. I mean, you're a target in these places. It's not easy. It's tough. And you have to figure out how to operate and how to operate more effectively and how to actually have results. What do you do about the, I mean, Somalia is a particularly good political example because we went from absolutely nothingness to not a very good situation today, but an awfully lot better situation today than it was before and it's been a big success. And it's been done totally with the African Union and working together. They have provided the forces. The UN has supported them, done a lot of the political heavy work in the early days, but it has been a big success story for all of us and it's been done by working together, making sure that we're very close and doing it now. Can we copy that in the problems in the Middle East that we've got all over? That's a real question. And it's a serious issue that we have to keep working on. Finally, I think it's important that, it was important for us as we looked at it that we've got to remember it's not only a political operation, but it's people that are involved in the end. It's where we're gonna work with them, where they're gonna come out. It's what they see that has actually changed in their lives. It's gonna make the difference. All of us would love to have the story about the press going out and talking to some villager who said they really saved us. And if the press wants to go outside Goma to one of the towns there that had about 35,000 people in it, was then depopulated by the bad guys that came in, then the peacekeepers moved in and had to fight their way in and got there. Townspeople came out of the woods and back downtown. And if you walk around the streets there, the force commander that's there who is forces and I won't name which ones they were, were reluctant to go in in the first place and change their mind. He is now a hero in town. The little kids line up to have their picture taken. This is, these are the stories of what we can do, but it really does require this different kind of thinking. I think that the other things that we emphasize very hard was the UN has got to do more on conflict prevention. We've got to be stopping these things before they go. We've got to be doing more on peacemaking. The UN has talked about this subject ever since its founding, I think. It really gave it a big push a decade ago. Some strides have been made, but the money hasn't fallen. I mean, people have not put the money where their mouth is that there's a lot more work there that needs to be done. Protection of civilians is where we have forces on the ground is obviously absolutely critical, not only to the UN's reputation, but more importantly the people on the ground that need to help if we're there, we've got to be doing it. And we did quite a bit of talking in the report about that, about what the, how you go about making it clear between the Security Council and discussion of its mandates, what is really needed, the discussions with the troop contributors to make sure that everybody is on the same page. If they're not on the same page, they shouldn't go, it just shouldn't happen. And when you get out there, how you're gonna carry out the operations and it shouldn't be changed in the end. I mean, there's nothing worse for the UN's reputation than not protecting a bunch of civilians. On the other hand, for the newspaper to say, oh, this was only 20 miles away and it took five hours to get there through the jungle is again, a real issue that has to be discussed and there has to be fairness in the whole thing. I think also most people involved in this business, whether in the UN or in bilateral groups or countries that contribute, would think that the sustainable peace side is the weakest of the entire issue. We really don't know very well how to put countries back on their feet. We talk about it, but the areas that the countries that have actually been there and done it and put together a paper on G7 Plus, it's called, of a group that have actually been through this of very fragile states and moved on, that, the areas that they pinpoint as the most important one, get 5% of the international aid. It all goes to other kinds of projects. It doesn't go to the sustainable peace thing. We need to be much better on coordination there. We need to be better at moving it forward. Interestingly, as we looked at this overall process of the things that needed to be done, we don't really think that it's gonna cost much more money, maybe none at all. Some of the things that we do these days make no sense at all. We, for example, come up with these Christmas tree, as they're normally called, ornament mandates, which have sometimes 40 things that you're supposed to do when you get out there. Now, of course, everybody wants to put their people on the team to get out there and do that and they may end up sitting in a hotel because they can't possibly work in the atmosphere that's out there. They may have all the best intentions in the world. As Nick said, you can't go to a bar in Mogadishu or a coffee house in Mogadishu and chat up the local Chabab guy and see what he really is thinking about. You'll probably get a bullet if you try that. And this whole question, really, of sequencing of the council getting very clear on what it wants in its mandates, a few things to do, it's much cheaper to get that, much out there in the field, it can do fast. We suggest quick ways to get it out of the field, not only with our regional partnerships but also having a small force that we could put out there quickly ourselves. This really should work and look at missions hard. Are they the right size? Do they make any sense? Can they carry out what are their mandates? That's fixed, I think it will go a long way. The point of all that is, it seems to me, is that we came out of this process with several thoughts. One is, when in the first discussions that we had with people, there seemed to be a million miles between some people in the General Assembly and the Security Council on what really needed to be done, how it could be done. I mean, the rhetoric was all over the place and finger pointing. But after you started talking with people and particularly when you talk with people in the field, you find there really is a fairly strong consensus to say, we've got to do this stuff. This stuff is real, it's important. This is a function that most governments can't even consider doing. Others are not gonna be too interested in doing. The UN brings a unique distance as well as the other things. When it comes to these conflicts that I think is appreciated and very valuable. So there's much closer to a consensus, I think, on what to do. It just needs a boost to get there and depreciate along. I think that also when you look at the structure and what is being done out there in the world, despite the growing conflicts, despite the things, if we can manage to use all of the influence available to the international community, it does seem to me that we can make some real progress. And keeping focus on what the real problems are, getting away from the arguments, oh, I can't do this so that's too expensive, we gotta do something else. I'm really saying, okay, what's really needed to make this work will go forward. We're hoping that the Secretary General, Secretary General Bonn will take some of these proposals at this point and we're hoping that the next Secretary General will move forward. We do know that communication's important. We did a lot talking, Nick did a good job of propagandizing us, among other things. But it is important, it is a critical part of the overall operations. And I look forward to the discussions today, I think that as this goes forward, we can make the world understand better what valuable instrument and tool it really has here with the United Nations. And we can also make the people on the ground see the changes that really are coming to them because the UN is cared, the international community is cared, we've worked at it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ambassador Pascoe. Before I move on to Marsden for his presentation, I'd just say that when I was in Somalia working for Mr. Pascoe in the mission, the political office in Somalia, we worked alongside the African Union troops. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting was in some ways, they were the reverse of what I'm used to in UN peacekeeping context. And that a lot of the times, the contingents that you work with in UN peacekeeping have served many times before in UN peace operations. And so they're quite good at speaking the language of the UN and making sure that their presentations are pretty much the same presentation that you would have gotten from a political officer and that worked for the UN. And they kind of have integrated in terms of culture with us. And that doesn't necessarily translate to a willingness to undertake complex operational tasks. It doesn't mean it doesn't, but it means that there isn't a linear relationship between it. I found that in working with Amazon that the reverse was true, that there was a cultural divide of how we spoke to each other, but that in reality, the Amazon troops that were there knew exactly what they were there to do. And if you look at what happened over from the Ramadan offensive and onwards, I mean, Amazon is a peacekeeping operation. It says so on its card, but you would call it anything else, peace enforcement or whatever. But what it did do is essentially fight and win a war against a determined opposition. I mean, it drove Shabbat out of Mogadishu while we were there and held the city. And it's still a pretty difficult and complex place to go. And you still wouldn't wanna go and sit outside at a tea shop there if you looked like me. But you don't have a frontline anymore in Mogadishu by kilometer five. And there was a couple of years ago. And the reason that that's not there is because of the international partnership and all the great work done by people behind the scenes in countries and stuff. But it's done on the ground by the boots on the ground and the boots on the ground were Amazon. And it simply would not have happened without them. And in my head, it's important that we keep that in mind as well. So let me now please turn to Marcin Moyani from the African Union. Thank you, Nick. And thank you, Lin as well for those. A lot of the issues that I wanted to mention have actually been touched on because as the African Union, we face many of the same challenges that the UN does. And so I'll just focus my presentation on just one key issue that I want to pick up on today. And that is the engagement of the UN peace operations with the citizens through the media, through African media from an African context. Well, to remain relevant in our first changing world, UN strategic communications must be forward-looking, adaptable, flexible and connected. The world is more independent than ever with global trends in geopolitical, economic, environmental, technological and social dimensions. These trends influence the security environment in which we operate. Where there has been terrorism and extremism, asymmetric warfare and proliferation, threats will remain complex, global and subject to unforeseeable developments. In today's 24-7 information environment, nothing stays confidential for long. It's only a matter of time before information leaks and we've discovered that the hard way. We just have to simply communicate. Ingrid Lehmann in Managing Peace Processes, a handbook for EU peace operations, practitioners says in the 21st century, they are not only professional reporters covering a conflict. And from experience, countless interested observers, some maybe citizens bearing witness, who can create a story simply through a text message or simply through a photograph or a video posted on the internet, and within seconds it's gone viral. So this makes the challenge obviously for the UN peace operations greater. This has allowed everyone to express themselves publicly, including armed terrorist groups. No doubt the UN is acutely aware of the role strategic communication plays in its work, as evidenced obviously by this forum here today and many others, evidenced obviously by the elaborate communication strategies, handbooks, plans and guides that are being implemented on a daily basis, obviously with varying degrees of success. And the UN in its form and structures, including its peace operations, appears well placed to play its leadership role in global progress, and attainment of its objectives. However, like I said in Africa, I think the UN needs to adopt a more people centered approach to its communications, through strengthening community relations, in order to bring the peoples, the citizens and the organizations closer to the UN. Africans are still generally and critically uninformed about the programs and activities of the UN. And I dare say the AU that I work for. And in particular about their peace operations. And thereby you would find broadly ignorant of its vision, objectives, ideals, principles and motives. We need to cultivate a culture shift in the way that we engage African audiences, especially through communications and the media, that through the channels that are most accessible to them. We need to demystify the UN and its image in Africa. And the common perception that the UN is usually acting at the behest of Western governments by connecting directly with the people and the opportunities for these. At the same time, we must continue to strengthen, like my colleagues mentioned, collaboration with civil society organizations. And here I'm talking about CSOs that truly represent the aspirations of Africans across the continent. Public confidence in turn is enhanced by the UN's ability to achieve this mandate in a way that is open, transparent and consistent with member nations values and expectations. A membership which I must add spans 54 countries in Africa. The media is perhaps the most important channel to reach the mass of Africans, but relations with African media are checkered, inconsistent and not strongly coordinated. Whereas the UN has achieved a lot of success with international media and putting their voice in the international arena, we feel as if in Africa, this has usually taken a backbench. Television, for instance, in Africa, which is rapidly closing the gap in communication as a source of news and current affairs for Africans. You know, the global mainstream Western media is usually just available in the satellite distribution channels, which are way too inaccessible for the ordinary African. By reorienting the media relations strategies to better engage African people, the UN can help shape a positive public perception of its peace operations through the African media. But paradoxically here is where the challenge lies because with African media, there are very many challenges and I'm sure Nick and others who have worked in Somalia, in Mali, in Central African Republic can attest to is that usually it's having a lot of challenges in terms of financing, in terms of ownership, in terms of regulation, in terms of how does the UN remain, avoid being partisan in working with a lot of these African media organizations. But I think we've got to a point where we just absolutely have to, despite these challenges, engage them in a way that is constructive and positive. They, we have found are often only engaged when there is an event, a major event to be announced. Say for instance, the signing of a peace agreement or the appointment of a mediator in a process or the announcement of a new peacekeeping mission, but less through the beginning of the process. And this has an effect of limiting how objective their view of the broader issues, as well as their understanding of the conflicts and interventions that are being suggested. As a result, many African countries, the media coverage of the UN and its peace operations by local media is often ad hoc and event-driven, like I've said, and in most cases lacks meaningful depth. And the relationship in Africa with the global and mainstream news media is a little tenuous because of its well-known centuries old, the marginal and negative coverage and presentation of African realities. And this could explain perhaps why a lot of Africans are a little skeptical these days of the global, this preoccupation with the global news agencies, as opposed to the local radio stations that they listen to on a daily basis, as opposed to the television channels that they turn on every day. There are several advantages that lie in UN peace operations engaging with African media, local African media. One that comes to mind is the multilingualism that you get from and the diversity in rich and penetration when you engage these local media outlets because they serve both rural and urban and many of them broadcasting in vernacular, which often even the national broadcasters will not give you. However, like I said, there are certain risks that come with this model that call for tactical selectiveness and targeting to ensure that the UN remains impartial and maintains its moral high ground. One obvious example is that national broadcasters, for instance, mainly support government's views, whilst the private, several private broadcasters have direct ties with both the ruling and opposition political figures and elites. And as a result, African media have often have this dubious reputation of fomenting hate speech and inciting violence. The Rwanda case comes to mind and many others in Kenya from my own country where I come from. However, in many African countries in recent years, there have been national broadcasters beginning to loosen their conservative approach and with doing state funding are now seeking to re-engineer themselves more like the private players. Of course, this is both seen as positive and negative, whereas one side may look at it as unfortunate since it undermines the original intent of a public broadcaster as a provider of non-commercial and educated programs, we are now moving into an opportunity, we are now moving into a realm that is past the original mandate. But others see it as an opportunity for expanded and creative liberal space. So whichever way you look at it, that may be an opportunity right there. Also on the other hand, like I said, African media also appear to lack the capacity or orientation to cover the continent and its institutions, including the UN and the AU adequately. Most African media still rely on the mainstream media for their content and news. Even when it's about neighboring countries, you'll find someone from Somalia or from Kenya, where I come from, tuning into the BBC to get information about what is going on in Bruni, it's a fact. They may not have the resources to send journalists to Bruni to cover the conflict, yet it's within the same region. And those are the realities that we're looking at. The lack of capacity could also be attributed to the absence of freedom of expression that has existed for a long time. And this could be a challenge when it comes to the UN and UN operations engaging people, African people in a participatory manner. That could be a big challenge. The resource capacity difficulties, like I said, the financing, the ownership regulations, the ethics involved in engaging African media comes sharply into focus. And there are many other challenges. Externally, just to name a few, the challenge of, you know, journalists' income in Africa is relatively low, particularly for a huge number of correspondents who are not on formal contract. It's not the same here. From my experience in working in many countries, the proverbial Brown envelope, you simply just, you know, every press briefing, you'll find a Brown envelope going around with cash in it. And journalists have come to expect that this is a norm. These are not things, these are things that the UN, I'm sure, faces and tackles. I mean, it's unethical. But this is the reality that we are facing. Journalism training is expensive, lacking in modern equipment and facilities, and often too general in orientation and not providing the necessary specific skills that are required. Of course, the media, like has been mentioned, are much better at making stories out of problems and learn success. That's a big challenge. And the temptation is there to seek the sensation on. That is inevitable even in Africa. Internally, like has been mentioned, and as we have experienced also at the African Union, the relationship between the troop contributing countries and the UN's missions, strategic communications objectives is often tenuous. And it sounds strange, but being in Africa, I have the same problems that Nick has, because being based at the headquarters in Addis Ababa and giving instructions to our colleagues in Mogadishu about what we want done and by when, it's a bit tricky because you're not in the, quite frankly, Addis Ababa is not Mogadishu. Addis Ababa is not Bangi. So we encounter very much the same issues. But it's clear that the nation's states contributing troops, although they have their individual national political and operational imperatives, they have to align this with the communication objectives of the mission. And this is a challenge I see the UN facing as well. The missions and troops contributing countries need to maintain a unity of effort, a unity of messaging regarding the mission's activities and management of incidents. In conclusion, there are stronger media sector and up to the advantage of the UN and other international and regional organizations like the African Union is in no doubt. But what we need is an adoption of a new orientation and attitude to communication with African people through African media, despite the inherent challenges that I've mentioned. We are living in a situation where we have to explain ourselves better or mandate our mission. And we have to connect through the channels that are accessible to those people that we are trying to serve. We should combine, all these efforts should combine to transform the UN's communication practices, enhance its image and bring the organization closer home to the consciousness and the ownership of the citizens of Africa. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. I'll now turn, before we go to questions, I'll turn to Yezmina. I think I met Yezmina when she was working in Congo. I'm not sure because it could have also been when she was working in Haiti or working in Lebanon or working in Liberia. So it's hard to tell. She's the quintessential practitioner. She has an arts background, a film background, and brings that sensibility to her work, but is really one of the best that the UN is fortunate enough to have. And I'm thrilled that she's been able to come here from Port-au-Prince to talk to us. So, Yezmina. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you. Can you hear me? Thank you, Nick. And thank you, Ambassador Pasco. And colleagues, I think Nick has said it all, I can leave now. Because, and with that introduction, I don't know what more I could really do after that. But it is true. I think that what I'll maybe take some time with now is maybe talk a little bit about some of the things that did work because some things have worked and some of the challenges that we did and we still face in the field using the high panels, the panels portion on strategic communication as a sort of validation to go forward with a number of ideas, also hopefully giving us a carte blanche to be able to say. But yes, this is strategic communications when we come up with some very convoluted concept of what to do on the ground to have conversations with people and the budget officer says, but this is not in your line item, so I can't really finance this. So I thank you very much for those recommendations because this allows us to be able to do our work on the ground. I mentioned, and Nick mentioned the fact that I do come from a film background. I joined the UN in 2001 at the wake of 9-11. I had just left the film industry having tried to sell a film to make and sell the script to Hollywood about a love story on the backdrop of illegal immigration and migration to Europe from North Africa. And the film executive said, but why would you want to do that? Why don't you just make it a love story, take away all of the political background and I stood in my ground and I didn't make my film and I left and look at us here today, migration, immigration from North Africa, we're living it today. So I think that what the UN allowed me to do and gave me a license to do on the ground with my colleagues and one of them, Albert is sitting up there, thank you for coming, is to go and make that political a reality and make it be heard and make it be known, make it what we try to do on the ground in partnership with colleagues from the African Union and other colleagues, give that a voice and give the people that we are sent to support and help a voice. Not always easy, very challenging at times, but the key to it I think, and I think all of the colleagues have said it here, is really conversations. And when we say conversations, it's plural but it's actually a singular noun. It communication, communications is conversation. It is the two-way interaction. It is not only with the constituents and the beneficiaries on the ground as they're called on paper, but it's the people for whom you're working for. And that also includes conversations internally with our colleagues from the police and our colleagues from the force. We have to have those two-way conversations about what the objective is, what the outcome should be. And it is essential that those are polyphonic, that they be on various levels and that we be able to actually create strategic partnerships with the local communities. And as you rightly said, the people have to be at the heart of that conversation and have to be at the heart of the communication. And it's not only about messaging and the message that you have to get across because you do need to get the messages across, the core values, why we are there and what we're actually supposed to do. But you also have to be able to listen, to know what is expected of this process by the beneficiaries, so that that can then be translated into action and into reality. The notion that polyphonic dialogues or conversations, they're not just about languages, a great deal has to do with the different languages, but they're also about tolerance and inclusivity and being able to really listen. And if a conversation has to be changed because you need to know what your end result is first. So if a conversation needs to be changed to get to that end result, that means you have to have a discussion. And you have to have a discussion with a variety of people, be they belligerent parties, be they actual civil society, be they journalists, be they the media and not shy away from them. That is something that has to be done. I mean, we all experience it in our own households. I mean, I come from a multi-faith, multi-cultural Arab French educated in the US. And if we didn't have those polyphonic conversations at home, we'd have a huge peacekeeping problem there as well. So, and you have to be able to take that step back. That being said, maybe some of the things that I'd like to touch upon is how the success of creating strategic partnerships with local actors is crucial. A few examples, I can list one of the other things. Sorry, I'll backtrack just a little bit. Is that these conversations, they have to occur one-on-one. An individual becomes a vector of changing a behavior as well as an entire community. And those conversations are not just face-to-face. Conversations happen in Twitter. Conversations happen on Facebook. Conversations happen on Tumblr. Conversations happen one-on-one. Conversations happen in the media, even if we don't think so. The way that we respond to questions, there is back and forth. And the mediums, every single one of them have to be used, film, photo, et cetera, to have those conversations. If we look at research that says that it takes one person anywhere between 18 to 224 days to change a behavioral habit, if they're exposed to it continuously, how do we change and how much time does it take to change the behavioral habit of a young youth in Sitesole who has the option to have a lot of funds and a lot of money if he joins this gang? Or not much funds, not much money, get shot but chooses to go and take part in a workshop to sing and sing peace and value other values. How much time is that gonna take and what incentive do you give? So one example is actually creating a strategic partnership as we did just very recently with three very well-known Haitian singers who give of their time to tour the country and do their own peace workshops through song and go to get youth who are from vulnerable areas or possibly vulnerable areas prone to gang violence and say no, don't go there, come and sing. We'll give you an opportunity to be the next superstar if possible. It sounds cheesy and people will roll their eyes and say oh gosh, there's the Haitian American Idol but no, I mean if you show one person a possibility that is not violence and somebody else who has made it who you look up to can actually come and say this is what a possibility it's worth looking at and it's worth exploring or you do as Albert did in the DRC you say okay there is a new way to go about convincing somebody to change their behavior when it comes to DDR disarmament and mobilization and repatriation. You decide to take your video camera and go into the bush, try and convince somebody to talk to you about a desire to go home, to go back to lay down their arms. You take that film and you go to that person's house in another country and you show that video to the family. They look, they weep, you do another video and you bring it back into the bush and you tell that person here is the video and the mother is saying please come home, forget it, it's all over. That's a conversation but that takes time and time sometimes is a luxury we don't have. Or we do have but in the media or in the public eye we don't have. So how much time can you invest? And of course the nature of peacekeeping mandates has changed tremendously as Ambassador Pasco said. Today we're not as communicators merely reporting non-biased information through radio waves or talking about the achievements of the peacekeeping forces. The mandates themselves have changed. We have to reconstruct countries be they from natural disaster or war. We have demobilization, disarmament, we have political transition. We have, we go to places where there's not even any peace to keep yet. So what do you do as strategic communicators and how much of that can you actually resolve through strategic communication? It's easy or at some times to be working when we're going through this. I say I want to work for UNOPs. I have a bridge to show for in a week or something like that. With this timeframe how can you show the political and social behavioral change that is actually required? And in how much time can you do that? How is that measured? How much time does that take? So of course obviously surveys are important and necessary. A few, I mean there are a few other examples of ways that conversations happen but we must definitely not shy away from any use of medium because the crucial aspect is the target audience. Who do you want to reach? And if it means you keep a radio station because as you've rightly said in some places there is only radio that works and sometimes it's only a wind up radio with solar panels. And in other places you must definitely be an adapt of all of the social media. Today when YouTube becomes the new cinema veritas or the new witness to history, so as not to say the angel of history because we don't want to be looking backwards but we want to be looking forward. When that is the truth of the reality and things happen so quickly the reality happens in 30 seconds and you need to be in a number of places at the same time. I don't necessarily envy Nick's job who has to at the same time be in Mogadishu and be in Paul Prince and be in Kabul simultaneously because there is a YouTube here and there is a YouTube here and there is a YouTube here and that is reality. And unless you are present on the scene everywhere and you are a witness to that reality it's very difficult to engage in the conversations. So we have to find ways to be not only conversing but we also have to find ways to be a step forward and a step ahead so that we're not playing catch up and we're not playing the, and we're not on the defensive all the time. And of course it goes without saying that any strategic communication plan you have can be utterly eviscerated by anybody's misconduct that is or any mishap or any mishappenies that is for sure. And we all, the old adage of it takes more than 20 years to build a reputation in 20 seconds to destroy it is very true. And as communicators in the field one of the worst things are one of the worst, one of the worst things you wanna be faced with is when you come up to somebody and you say, listen, you have the right to access to justice. You have the right to all of these things or you would like to give them positive information. Yes, you have to do this. And yes, no, there is no rape as a crime. Your child should not be abused. And then you get the turn around and you get the yes, but, and we don't need to finish the sentence. What do you do with that? How do you still take that conversation to a place where the person still knows that they have the right to justice and that unfortunately there is misconduct, but others will be brought to responsible for their actions. It's difficult on the ground because you end up having to be the flak jacket for everything, but you still have to keep going because there is that possibility of changing that one person who will not go into violence, who will then report a crime, who will not stand to sexual exploitation and who will condemn SGVB. And that's the key. And if you change one person and like in DDR, if one person goes back and one person talks, that just keeps building it. I think in the discussion in the workshops we'll probably be able to go into more details about it. But again, I think just in closing, peacekeeping, peace-maintaining, what we have with our colleagues from the African Union remains one of the very crucial elements and essential elements for dialogue and for furthering political and social change. We have to tweak it a little. And of course as time goes today, everything happens so quickly, we have to quickly start tweaking to be able to adapt. And one of the main thing is being all on the same page, along the same playbook as Nick said. And that includes our colleagues, civilian within missions, as well as force and as well as police. We have to be integrated within our own house to then be able to project that forward. Just two quick things, both in Haiti and in South Lebanon, we managed at different times to really have a cohesive network and a cohesive working relationship with the spokesperson, both police, force and civilian, all on the same page, all speaking the same language, which was what was needed to be achieved in order to have that duplicating effect and in order to actually be able to push the message forward and actually have people see the UN as a unified entity. And that includes when dealing with issues in Cité Soleil and being able to pass that message in order. If you go to Cité Soleil today, extremely different slum, unfortunately still a slum, but very different in terms of the degree of violence and not after a certain amount of time in Haiti. South Lebanon as well, the construction of the mission very different, but still force spokespeople dealing and reporting to civilian who then had the same, we were on the same page speaking the same language so that that message, that search for behavioral change within the community, local community where we were operating was the same and the mixed messages didn't come across. So I mean, I think maybe I'll leave it at that and then if there's more questions. Okay, thank you very much, Yasmino. So we have not much time and a few questions. So what we're going to do is, I've received the questions and writings in each of them is addressed to a different member of the panel. So everybody's gonna get one question. And then at the end I'm gonna take just two minutes and make a couple of points by way of slightly summing up some of the themes that were raised during it. First question to Marston. Struck by your comment Marston about the challenges of an environment that embraces non-freedom of expression. And how can the UN and I would add how can the UN or the AU, how can a multilateral deployment mitigate that with regards to communications and how could we protect journalists in those contexts who are at further risk of persecution? Well, thank you Nick for the person who asked that question. That's a tough one. It's not easy. I threw it out there as a challenge but as a challenge that the UN and the AU and other organizations working in these areas have to face head on. There are examples of media, local African media that have managed to break the barrier and speak freely. But at the same time passing your messages through these channels has to be in a very tactical manner so that you do not seem to be ascribing to any political or you don't seem to be taking sides in the conversations that are taking place in the public space. Protecting journalists in countries where freedom is not guaranteed is much tougher, much tougher to deal with. The UN has been very successful in setting up its own radio in some of its missions to communicate to the local people in the local languages and I guess this is a model that needs to be continued. The only challenge here is that as maybe Nick would attest to is that it's an expensive venture to set up a radio station and transmit, create content and keep it running and maintain the equipment. It's a huge venture and you cannot do this for every sector that your peacekeeping mission operates in. So yes, it's a big challenge but these are some of the things that we need to be looking at critically and engaging with each other so that we can find solutions to. Okay, thank you, Marston. The next question is for you, Yasmeena. Yasmeena, please comment on the state of play where peacekeeping communications are in a competitive communications environment with actors in the conflict particularly with regards to social media. Can I get like something else for 500? Talk a little bit about social media and why that's important. No, thanks for the question. It is actually very challenging. It is very competitive and I think the main thing is are we in competition truly? When we go to and use social media, we have to really go back to what Nick was saying in his very beginning when he says what is the objective of the strategy you're trying to put in place? Is your objective to be that news breaking media on Twitter or is your objective to use those tools to further what you're supposed to be doing and what you have strategically put out, set out to do? And as that, I mean one of the biggest challenges when faced with a very active social media ground, I mean even if we take a look at Haiti today, sorry, everything happens on social media. Whether it's something that's political or not and I'll get a call from the leadership saying has this happened, do you have anything on whether this event has occurred? The first thing that we do is we go to look at the Twitter account of either official to say whether that's happened or not because if it hasn't been tweeted, it hasn't really occurred and it depends on the places. So it is extremely challenging and you have to, in that respect, you have to be in a competitive state. You have to learn, you have to monitor all of your Twitter, you have to monitor your Tumblr and your Instagrams and all, which is something that is crucial. But in terms of how you use it to further what your strategic communication objective is, is very different. So you don't need to rush that one, you don't need to be in a tick for tech on that because what you're trying to do is use the tools at hand to be able to do that political and social change which takes time, which takes analysis and which takes actually knowing in lieu of being able to sit at the cafe and discuss is to actually do the chats, open chats with people and to get the sense of what the community wants to be able to then translate that in the messaging that you're actually putting out on social media. It is not always easy in certain respects. I mean, in South Lebanon, sometimes a journalist knew the things that happened before or you knew them as the spokesperson. So it was very difficult and it's not always easy to monitor and to balance out. And there are two separate elements. A, knowing how you want to use your social media and for what purpose and then whether you're a news outlet or if you're usually using it only for strategic communications to achieve a particular result which is usually political social change. Thank you, Yusmeena. The third question is to Mr. Pascoe. Did the question of strategic communications and how inadequately it is being done by the UN come up in the discussions with the panel reviewing peace operations, particularly with member states or civil society or those issues that were raised and how did you address that? Yeah, certainly the most discussion was from civil society on what you're doing on the ground where you're getting your points across. Are you being too aloof? Are you bringing people in and hearing what they have to say? I think all of this was there and very much part of it. Some people on the panel had very direct experience with their efforts working with the various communities whether they were religious or whatever to reach out to make the point more. But I think this is clearly a basic issue in whether you're in a UN or in an embassy or whatever you've got to reach out to the public as much as you can. In many ways, I think the reaching out to the public is something we should be able to do and can do more easily if that's the right word than the broadest thing of changing the image and making sure people understand what the UN is doing which I find really harder. Okay, I'm getting the sign that we have to wrap up so I'll answer the question that was for me very quickly and then I'll just go to the seven points I have that I want to say and I'll just go through them rapidly. So how do you deal with spoilers from a strategic communications perspective and can you use the council and others to persuade or beat them? Yeah, I mean the short answer is that when people are actively communicating against you, response is required and when they are with spoilers on the ground, they can be deterred using communications if you can put in place something that explains why those actions are not in the interest of others or of them. And viewing potential spoilers, whether those are political spoilers or from a communications perspective, essentially as an oppositional force that needs to be engaged is a mentality that doesn't come naturally to the sort of traditional UN communicator but is one that I think is quite helpful, particularly in line of what Izmini was just saying about the instantaneous nature of these exchanges, that there's a whole realm where it's not that you have to wait an eight hour news cycle, it's that if you're on Twitter frequently, if there's an active discussion going on, your cycle is eight minutes. And so if you're engaged in a discussion in a microblogging site and you're not immediately responding, then you're no longer engaged in that discussion. And so all this requires a bit of a new perspective on things and I think that we would be well served to accept that part of modern strategic communications in a peace operation is to have a media secretariat, a strategic communications driven but digital media secretariat that whose job it is is to basically play air defense and to respond accordingly. So on just a couple of points that I wanna take away that I heard different people say different things about on strategic communications, one, measurable. The thing about stratcoms and about how you communicate in a modern way is that actually everything you do leaves a trace and everybody knows that if you touch a computer or send an email and you think you hit delete that isn't actually gone and any intelligent person can find that and there's a trail for you, right? Well, that has good sides too. It's not just that if you buy a pair of boots that the internet tracks you and tries to keep selling you pairs of boots. There's good sides to big data as well for us which is that you can measure how you're doing with your audiences and this is done to varying degrees of success. It doesn't mean that one of your key audiences is a rural population that is illiterate and no longer logged on and not able to log on to any devices. No, that isn't the right channel for them but that doesn't mean that there aren't bits where that is the right channel and you can measure whether or not your messages are achieving the desired result. Acquire is a little bit of thinking it through and having professionals who have in many ways almost a marketing background, a consumer background but it can be done and you can generate data and that's the thing about modern stratcoms is you can generate data. It's not just remember to do your audience survey but it is actually you can now tell what it is that people want and how they think about things and that measuring is a major bit. Tailoring, yeah, and this is the point that was raised by all three actually. Who are you talking to? Now in marketing this is sometimes called audience delineation but the point is that you have different audiences in a piece operations context but that doesn't mean that all the messages have to be the same. It means that you know who those audiences are and figure out the best ways to get messages to them and measure whether or not it's had its desired impact but tailoring your messages specifically to those individual constituencies by definition will increase your effectiveness. The third is, it doesn't mean as wonderful word polyphonic, which I loved. Polyphonic communications and that's absolutely right that one message many voices it should be the way it is. It's no longer this idea of monster corporate message from on high and then it gets sent out. Actually the nature of modern communications are many voices but many voices that hopefully you're singing from the same sheet and I think that that idea of bringing in others to have that conversation. So using potential advocates, civil society and others getting their voices in along the lines of what you think is important is a very nuanced and intelligent way of approaching modern strategic communications. The fourth is interactivity and this strangely enough is one of the hardest things I think in the UN context. This is really now a discussion, right? And that's easy to say and hard to implement because a lot of the times the mission doesn't wanna hear what people are saying back to them and that's unfortunate but it's true but modern communications involve a discussion and they involve a dialogue and they involve you and your shop being a part of that interactive dialogue driven by an imperative of seeking change which is a point that Yasmina made in hers that it's about a dialogue designed to achieve something. And so be it in that dialogue and measure how it's going but be a part of an interactive dialogue even if it means that you seed control over bits of the message. Practical or as Mr. Pasco put it product what's the product? We have to know what we're selling and we have to know what it is that we're there to do and we have to be able to explain it in clear and easy ways. And my sense is that the UN frequently will come up with slogans and say that's it like I'm on the road to peace or something and that's fine and that's also really useful in an electoral season and things like that but actually our mandates tend to be really complex whether they're these Christmas tree mandates or not they're difficult and they're generally unsatisfactory to the local population that frequently thinks well the UN's here so now everything's gonna be okay right? And that's not mandate the council gave you the council did not say use all resources at your disposal and just fix it. The council said do this and do this and do this but meanwhile don't forget to protect civilians under imminent threat of harm even though you don't have any resources and that sort of thing. So explaining clearly in language that is accessible to the key audiences what it is that you're gonna do practically what's your product is from my perspective a key one. Using all tools at your disposal it's really easy to sit here and say you know we need Instagram, we need Twitter, we need Foursquare, we need a Tumblr photo blog. Honestly no you don't. What you need are digital media channels that achieve an effect with a particular audience. The names of those programs will change in two years and they're frankly not relevant. What's relevant is a social networking site. What's relevant is something that allows images including moving images to be transmitted quickly between individuals. What's relevant is something that is a micro blogging platform that allows you to send short burst communications that either inform or comment in a timely manner. What's important is not the name of it. What's important is that all the tools at your disposal are used in support of your broad strategic communications objectives to reach the audiences you need. But when someone says to me you know I think we really need a Facebook account. I mean it drives me nuts. Because no, explain to me why you need a social networking account to reach a particular audience. Then let's talk about what the delivery system should be. And then the last point is responsiveness and timeliness. It's just modern news cycle. You can't let it sit. And an allegation comes up of sexual exploitation and abuse by your peacekeepers. You have to respond. And whether we're calling it deterring potential spoilers or whatever. The reality is that if you're engaged in a modern strategic communications operation, whether or not your goal is to dominate the information battle space or not, the bottom line is you must engage. And once you have engaged, you must keep that engagement up and going forward. Because that's how modern communications are done. You must be responsive and you must be timely. Or on the other hand, be entirely comfortable with just communicating once every two months by press release when a peace agreement is signed. And that's fine. But if you're going to do modern strike comms, there are things inherent in how to do that. And that needs to be accepted as part of the mind shift that I think all of us were talking about. So with that, thank you all for a stimulating conversation. And we'll get more into it later. Thank you. So Mr. Bernbach, Ambassador Pascoe, Mr. Manami, and Ms. Boozian. Thank you very much for your insightful comments and kicking off our workshop in a most meaningful way and discussing some of the challenges that are out there facing us in these peace operations. What we'd like to do now is I have about 11.25. We're going to take a 10 minute break. So please, please, when you hear the chimes, come back. And we'll get started with our second panel. Thank you. All right. Do we have a quorum? They're coming. OK, how are we doing? OK, I think we have a quorum. So we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for adhering to our wishes and coming back in. And there'll be plenty of food and beverages throughout the day. So hopefully you won't feel like you just missed a little bit. So what I'd like to do is we'd like to hear now from our second panel. And that will be chaired by Mr. Peter Loach, who's the vice president of our external relations here at USIP. Peter, over to you. Great. Thanks so much. Thanks. And greetings to everybody online. Aristotle noted there are three elements to a speech. There's the speaker, there's the subject, and there's the audience. And the last of these is the most important. With that in mind, the speakers have all promised to be brief, and I have promised to be mean if they are not. So that we can actually engage a conversation. And of course, it'll be the subject. A lot of the presentations is the focus on the audience. Almost apropos of nothing, but close enough to warrant mentioning. So over the weekend, I was reading a novel by, again, Julian Barnes, an English author. The book is Flavère's Parrot, which is nominally about Flavère. And apparently, Gustave Flavère, the noted author, among many other things he hated, was trains. Apparently trains just really, I don't know, it's not his thing. And he wrote that the problem with trains is the rare way would merely permit more people to move about, meet, and be stupid together. Could not help but think of social media. My job here is to set up, keep the conversation going, and get you on with your day, and especially since we're right before lunch. With that in mind, I'm going to introduce the panelists, introduce their bios, have a few other introductory comments, and then turn it over. In order of speaking, our first speaker is going to be Dr. Christina Lange, senior program advisor and senior fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland. She has more than a 20-year career history and security policy, lectured at universities, military academies, international organizations in over 20 countries, on subjects related to countering violent extremism, terrorism, transnational organized crime. At the Geneva Center, she directs several short courses within the Emergency Security Challenges Program on foresight and strategic planning, building a national strategy for countering violent extremism. To her left is John Haber, a friend and colleague who's president of Cascade Strategy. Prior to that, he was CEO of the American Association for Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers, a reposition to revitalize the organization. He's also been a senior partner of Fleischman-Hillard, the world's largest public relations, public affairs, and marketing company. He served in the Clinton administration as special counsel to the president for the Overseas Private Investment Corp. He was chief of staff, general counsel for Senator Diane Feinstein, general counsel, communications director for Senator Patrick Leahy on the Community and Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry. He's also in the graduate faculty at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses in things like strategic communication. To his left is an old friend, Sarah Coppersmith. Sarah is a vice president of Scott Circle Communications. She's an award-winning communications professional. She joins Scott Circle from Partnership for a Healthier America, an independent nonprofit created in conjunction with but independent from First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. She served as press secretary for US Representative Harry Mitchell of Arizona. She's worked with the Women's Campaign International, assisting with work in emerging democracies, post-conflict regions, and advanced opportunities for women to actively participate in public advocacy and political processes. And at Scott Circle, her clients have included, among many others, the United States Institute of Peace. Welcome back, Sarah. I'm trying to figure out the logistics of this panel. She actually bypassed me entirely and simply went to the people with whom she worked when she was a consultant for us. Strategic communications is much more like explaining a tomato than killing a vampire. I phrase, I'm sure you've heard, killing a vampire is easy. Wooden stake to the heart, vampire vanishes. That's how it happens in the vampire slayer. I have no reason to believe that's not how it happens otherwise. Describing a tomato is trickier. You could describe the pH balance, the flavor, the history, where it's grown, all sorts of things. That's much more like the challenge of strategic communications. It's a complicated beast. The language of communications, the language of rhetoric, semiotics, metaphor, and the role in creating war, creating peace, getting people to join war, getting people to mobilize your peace is thousands of years old. It was first written about arguably, in Thucydides, the history of the Peloponnesian War. Aristotle noted its importance, Plato, and notably, actually, the Sophists talked about the importance of learning language to communicate, to be an effective member of a society. Here in the United States, rhetoric has played a role in the nation before it was a nation. John Adams, in a letter, wrote, what do we mean by the revolution? The war, that was no part of the revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people and was affected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of 13 legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers, and the colonies ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of parliament over the colonies. The medium of the time was pamphleteers, it was pamphlets. People would hand out pamphlets, nail them to trees, all of that. George Orwell, the noted essayist and critic, wrote on the pamphlets of the time, that one has complete freedom of expression on a pamphlet, including if one chooses the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious. A pamphlet could be in prose or in verse, it consists largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of reportage. All that is required is that it should be topical, polemical, and short. Take out the word pamphlet and drop it in the word blog, vine, tweet, almost anything else. It's the same. One of the differences, of course, is the new media. Facebook is faster, Twitter is faster, social media are faster. So in many ways, the challenges we face as strategic communicators are older than the nation state by more than a thousand years, but as recent as several years ago. With that in mind, I'll turn it over to our, here's how we're gonna work conceptually. Talk specifically about challenges with combating ISIS and ISIL and social media there, and then back up to a broader strategic communications context with John and Sarah. And again, I'm gonna keep folks short, and I will, in fact, cut people off if they run long. So thank you. Please. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear organizers, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. Today, I would like to talk about strategic communications. What are the best practices today? And in order to that, we need to look at one of the greatest strategic communicators in the field today, the Islamic State. They are a huge threat as are transnational terrorism groups all over the world, and they are now facing, we peace building and peace making organizations are facing this new transnational threat. So in order to show you how they do their strategic communications, I thought it would be best since it is their grievances that they're carrying, their feedback loop that has been left because of the void that has been left in places like Syria and Iraq, the war that's are still unanswered. And it is here that we need to look at our way of strategic communications. How can we create digital peacekeepers to go up against the digital caliphate? So just to highlight a little bit of their excellence in strategic messaging, I'm just gonna highlight some of their strengths. So first of all, one of the ways that we have to understand how to counter the message is to look at how terrorists learn. There was a fantastic study done by Rand in 2005 that outlined how the ways the terrorist across the globe used the learning curve and how they share ideas and how it shapes certain outcomes. As you can see, knowledge and political violence can be used as an intelligence tool and intelligence can be used for building the best messages. So we also have to work on our intelligence in the field. What's interesting is terrorists are considered a social, but in fact they are very social and they harness this sociability. We may be able to formulate the right messages. When you look at this chart, you can see this was done by Rand in 2005 and it sees how groups are organized, managed and connected. And in order for us to understand that thoroughly, it is a way for us to formulate our counter message. When we look at the way the Islamic State works on its strategic messaging, we see that war is constantly staged online. We are fighting a kinetic war, but we are not engaging the enemy in the digital field. And I think we are trying, but we're failing at it. We don't have a story. They have a story. They are using Facebook and Twitter in order to hurt our morale. They're using PsyOps operations. They're using YouTube to demonstrate first the horror of war, but also to use it as a psychological weapon. It shows also the brotherhood in war, the sisterhood in war, and they also use it as a tool. Anwar Alaki is one of the biggest threats to us in terms of strategic messaging. And if you can see, he's a Yemeni-American who was droned. And he used also tactical ways to use for strategic messaging. For example, his Inspire magazines were used to show how terrorism can be tactically operated. And if you look at just one Inspire magazine, the exact clock that was used for the Times Square bombing was featured in the Inspire magazine. So they're also using magazines for tactical operations. You saw with the Tsarnev Brothers how the Inspire magazine on how to create a bomb in your mother's kitchen using a pressure cooker bomb was also inspired by Anwar Alaki's magazine Inspire. As you can see here, the cupcakes, that was actually a Canadian effort to change the recipe into a cupcake recipe. Unfortunately, a lot of the Inspire magazines are still available online, and none of all the actual recipes have been changed into cupcake recipes. They also have magazines and books that are available. If you look at Amazon.com just a couple years ago, you could actually buy a book called Encyclopedia of Jihad. It was $12.95, and people actually went to Amazon and bought it online. So they even have books that are featured on an Amazon that are available and ready for use. And here you can see how to organize and run a cell, how to plan and carry out attacks, how to use a gun and make a bomb, and also how to rally sympathizers to the cause. So they actually had a book on strategic messaging. What's interesting about Anwar Alaki has been drone, but his postcards still live on in a sense that he's still very widely seen and used on the web. There's still the 44 ways to conduct Jihad that are still available online, and you can still access freely. So now if you look at, we move on to the Islamic State. Here you see again, strategic messaging very, very strong. They have glossy magazines. They have messages, they have a key story. They're basically saying it's important that you come now to do religious migration. You have to hasten, you have to rush before the opportunity closes. And they have even gendered their approach. They look at, it's like a new startup company. They've looked at how women and girls and boys and even children can be rallied to the cause. And if you look at, for example, men, they're basically saying, hey, we can offer you a caliphate. We can give you a passport. We can give you an identity, a job, and religious fulfillment, even brotherhood. For girls, and they're basically targeting young teenage girls, they're saying, we can offer you romance, sisterhood, a life with a jihadi fighter, a possible life as a wife of a martyr, even IT skills. They have glossy magazines to do their strategic messaging. Their first magazine was basically Come to the Caliphate. It's here, it's waiting for you. And the second one, the flood was basically Noah's Ark. Using the metaphor of Noah's Ark, if you don't come now, you're gonna die in the flood. We are the ark, come find us. And hasten to do migration was the third magazine. The fourth one was the failed crusade, basically highlighting the crusade by the coalition forces was failing and that they were still remaining and expanding. And now they have a new magazine that is basically showing where they all want to go in terms of expansion. Where are our magazines? What are we saying? What is our story? And you can see they have basically physical control before in their part of the country in Iraq and Syria, where they're basically taking physical control before they actually create political and religious authority. And their religious argumentation is rigorous and comprehensive. Unfortunately, it's seventh century religious argumentation, which as many Muslim scholars have now argued, is no longer legitimate. They also have an apocalypse narrative. They're basically saying, come, the end is near. And come before it's too late. These are their weapons of war. They have basically accessed all the tools that we use for our daily communication and our social media. They use Google, Instagram, Second Life, Facebook. These are the tools that they use. They are quick. They can turn on a dime. We are sclerotic and slow. We're bureaucrats, bureaucracies. In their answer to Nussom's Tooth Charlie, they said, ISIS, we are all ISIS. This happened within hours of the Nussom's Tooth Charlie campaign. So they are quick. They are agile. They have a quick answer to everything that we try to accomplish. At the same time, they're all embracing. They're going after the low hanging fruit. They're basically saying, we are redeemable. Come to us. We can give you the best a new life, a new start. They're embracing criminals. At the same time, they are providing games. Games for young boys who get addicted to games like Grand Theft Auto. They have a Grand Theft Auto game, which they have put online. So they're basically providing games for children to become addicted to their message. They're also calling other people to come. They're not just going after the low hanging fruit or the criminals. They're actually trying to get doctors and engineers and specialists and scholars. And they're calling them all to come to the new caliphate. At the same time, if you're a failed wannabe doctor and you didn't get into medical school, they're basically saying, come to Mosul. We can offer you medical school. We can offer you the latest technology. Their ISHS looks very much like the National Health Service in the UK. They even use the same logo. Basically they're saying, we're here to help you. We're benevolence. We will give you free healthcare if you come to our country. So how do we counter this strong strategic messaging? We've tried very hard. We've created the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications at the US State Department. The UK contest strategy has been around since 2003. They're trying very hard to prevent people from going. We even have a new UN Security Council resolution in 2178 that was adopted, making all countries now, they must now all have a way to stop foreign fighters of leaving. And if they do come back, they have to have strategies on how to rehabilitate them. But these are all very difficult and hard to implement. How do we prevent terrorism? Well, we look at communities. We look at religious organizations. We look at international organizations. I wrote a piece on strategic messaging by the Cyber Jihad and I looked at all the NGOs that are currently in the world that are available that do this kind of work and they're formidable and they're a lot, but they're not talking together. There's no unified message on counting violent extremism. In order to prevent or stop the kinetic war, we have to work on the underbelly of this iceberg. If you look at it, it's if we kill the people that are actually fighting the wars and the kinetic wars, they will constantly be rejuvenated by new foreign fighters. So unless we actually work on the bottom of the iceberg and stop what is feeding the violence, we will not move ahead. And as you see, we have many different ways to approach this, but we need to have a unified story, a unified message, a counter message to extremism. We have a lot of ammunition. They are as IS or Diasher, Isler, whatever you wanna call them are destroying our human rights. They're the lowest form of humanity. They are not human in a sense. They are decapitating our humanity. They're not only decapitating our humanity, they're decapitating the heritage of our humanity as this Jordanian cartoonist so wonderfully displayed. And we have lots of ammunition to counter their strategic message, but we're failing to find a unified way to do so. So my key arguments are basically terrorists today are delivering a sophisticated and effective communication strategy. They are strategically recruiting young women, young men via the internet. We need to defend this new frontier. We are worried about the kinetic war, but we are not engaged in the cyber war, the cyber caliphate that they are creating. We are not engaging with them. We are not countering their message. We need to better address the roots of radicalization. Otherwise they will constantly have a new flow of recruits that will come towards them. And we need to create new and better counter narratives. Thank you so much for your attention. And just one last thing. Our strong messages are basically peace, not war, and if you look at peace building and peacemaking, we have so many lessons we can teach them and they're not effective at all, but we don't have a unified counter messages. And that's why we're here today to work on it. And that's what leads us to the next experts who will show us the way forward. Thank you for your attention. So John, Sarah, you've been presented with 2,000 years of history of strategic communications and a very immediate case study that's very present. Back it up a bit, explain messaging in general. What do we need to know? How do we go at this problem and problems of strategic communication in general? Great. I hope you don't mind. I'm gonna stand, when I teach my grad students, if I sit down, they will all immediately go to sleep, not that you all will, but Sarah and I are gonna do a little bit of a presentation. Can I stand here in one round? You stand wherever you like. I can stand in one round. So I'm gonna start it off and then Sarah will talk and then I'll sort of wrap it up. But what we wanna talk to you today really is about five sort of key success on strategic communications. But let me take one step back. How many of you have one of these things? Probably everybody in the room. How many of you like your iPhone? It's really changed our life. We forget the iPhone has been around about seven and a half years, not our lifetimes, a blink in the eye of world history. We forget sometimes that I work for a guy named Howard Dean who ran for president. He sort of changed the way American politics was done. That was 11 years ago. When Howard Dean ran for president, Facebook was at one university. YouTube hadn't been invented. Twitter didn't exist. Much of the sort of social media that we see today and which sort of drives us and we think is so critical and so important, wasn't there. But what this phone tells us and what studies will show us and folks like the Pew Center on people and the press is that there's an enormous hunger for information. More people today read the New York Times than they ever have before. Now we all know the newspapers are having a tremendous time staying in business, but more people are reading them because they're hungry. Anyone know why newspapers are going out of business? Craigslist. Newspapers used to make all their money on classified ads. Well if you have Craigslist, why do you need a classified ad anymore? That is really undermined sort of the newspaper industry. That's had a ripple effect. Most of the reporters that you see now covering whether it's world events or American politics are fairly new to the system. Their editors are fairly new. In American politics, three or four, presidential cycles ago, the same people covered each and every cycle, they knew what was gonna happen. Today, the people that are covering the business have really not written about politics before. There's a great little article about the lead political reporter on Hillary Clinton's campaign. This is her second presidential. Before that, she didn't know anything about politics when she was first covering. Nothing wrong with that, but it just means the news and information, the analysis that you get and you depend on whether it comes through a written, and I bet you a lot of you actually get hard newspapers, right? My students don't, but you actually get a newspaper that you hold in your hand. Whether you get it through there or you get it through your phone, what's happening to you is it's being written by people that don't have the same full sense. So I would challenge any of you. The next time you read an article on a subject you know a great deal about, I bet you find yourself shaking your head most of the way through the article because they don't quite get it right. That's what's sort of happening in the world. So whether it's about ISIS or other places, we have to be very aware that the way we communicate is both very different because we have social media and digital media, but it's actually quite the same and some of the basics are the same. If this was a sports game, we would say don't forget your blocking and tackling. I know it's a football analogy, but you wanna remember the basics. Whether you're in the military and you teach new recruits, you teach them the basics. So we're gonna talk about the basics today and we'll talk a little bit about the tactics as well. So the one thing I wanna just leave you with before I hand it over to Sarah, we'll go through the five rules is this is a very dynamic world. My colleague here, one of the right points she made about ISIS is they move very, very quickly. Quickly could be measured in a matter of under an hour, under half hour, 10 or 15 minutes. It's an incredibly dynamic situation. It would be if we fought a war and we made a movement and then we waited two or three months to decide what our next movement is. For those of you who've been battled and I never have, but you know how fast and how dynamic and the right commanders understand how to marshal their forces to take advantage of their opponent's weakness. So communications is dynamic. It involves usually two sides, sometimes one side in the ISIS situation is doing a better job than the other side, but it's a very dynamic situation and we have to keep our eye on the ball on certain things. So why don't we start off talking about those sort of five keys to success? Great, thanks John. So we're gonna now go over some general frameworks that just as John mentioned, can be used quickly, can be planned ahead of time so that no matter what crisis you're trying to battle through communications or program you're trying to roll out, you're prepared and you're thinking strategically about the program you're gonna do. So the first key is to define success. The biggest mistake people can make is that they won't define success before starting. So what you'll get is this, you'll sort of go around and around and I'm there. Think about what you want to do before you start and then write it down. Write down everything and I always do communication plans for my clients because I want to remember everything. I want to remember what we define success as. I want to know who our audience is. I want to all know what our goal is. So we're all working off the same plan. There's a path forward. We have a timeline and there's priorities. The next key is knowing who your audience is. There are many audiences and you have to really figure out which one is key to your success. Who are you trying to impact? Who's gonna make that difference that you're actually trying to get for your goal, for your success. So these folks on this next slide, yep, so media, government, ISIS, those probably aren't your main audience. Maybe your main audience is local aid workers or it's youth before they join ISIS or maybe it's youth that have already become interested in ISIS and you're trying to combat that. Figuring out what your audience is is the key to figuring out your message. So you may want to engage reporters, engage the government, engage academia. They all influence your key audience but they're not your ultimate audience. So remembering who you're speaking to, who you need to actually persuade to get your success is very important. The next key is I think, John and I would agree, maybe one of the most important and I think Peter as well, strategy drives your tactics. So first you have to outline your goals and objectives which are what do you need to do? What are you trying to change? Is it lessen recruits into ISIS? Is it garner more funding for a certain peacekeeping effort? What are you trying to do? Then you can outline your strategy which is how to do it. How are you going to stop youth from being interested in ISIS? How are you going to get local actors on the ground to support a bill that then gets passed in Congress or in a local legislature? And then from there you can sort of outline your tactics which are the tools to make it happen. Tools can be social media, tools can be an op-ed, tools can be a speech, tools can be talking on a panel. What does your audience read? What do they listen to? How do they get their information? That's exactly what you need to figure out to sort of create your tools and tactics so that you're actually impacting your goals and objectives in reaching your audience. So one thing I know that John and I want to distress is that social media is a tactic but not the end all and be all. Just like John said, we didn't have iPhones 10 years ago and we didn't have Facebook even 10 years ago. So though social media is really key right now and a really great tactic that should always be incorporated into a strategic communications plan, it's not the only thing that should be done. There's digital outreach, there's traditional outreach that all should be executed and thought about to make sure that you're reaching your audience because though you might want to reach youth, the youth aren't on Twitter as much anymore. So figuring out what are they on, what are they listening to, what are they reading to really impact them, then you can start to create your own message. So let's talk about, so we know what success is, we know where our audience is and we have a sense about our strategy. Then we begin to think about and people use these words, messages, what's your message? Sometimes they use and think about what your brand is but it's important to remember that everything you do communicates, everything. We often think if we go back to World War II, you might hear Winston Churchill, it was the words, it was the language, it was the things that he said. A great speech today can move people, can motivate people, can change the way people are. Peter mentioned that I used to run a group of trial lawyers, probably some of the least liked human beings in the system. They're the kind of people when you're at a garden party and what do you do, I'm a trial lawyer, the person kind of moves away from you. We realized through testing that people felt very differently about the word attorney than they felt about the word lawyer. In fact, they liked the word attorney three and a half times more than they liked the word lawyer and it's this dramatic, my attorney is positive, that lawyer. So if you understand the language and the words, if you use the word lawyer all the time, you're gonna start off in the whole, actually what's better than attorney or lawyer is to not use either words. But words and language and using words that are understandable, that are five cent words, small words, not the big convoluted words. I always say it's the words my mother will understand or my aunt will understand. It's meaningful and it resonates quickly. The second part is your tonality, how you talk, how you sound. There's some people, listen to them give speeches and they yell into microphones and there's some people that speak very quietly into microphones. Some of those quiet speakers are far more powerful because they know how to modulate their voice. Images are of critical importance too. If I were here in shorts and sandals and I hadn't shaven for a week, you probably would give me a little bit less credibility. Maybe you're not giving me much now, but you give me less credibility than if I come in a suit and a tie. So it's how you look. We have a candidate that's running for president now, Rand Paul. If I were working for him, I would make him cut his hair once a week because he has crazy hair, it's not his fault, but it sort of plays into an image of what kind of person he is. Images are important when it sort of fits into personal appearance as well. The right kind of colors and different, this becomes more challenging when you're communicating to different audiences in different countries because the colors that might work in one country might mean something else somewhere else. The hand gestures mean something. So this goes back to again who your audience is and it's all about the audience and how we're moving the audience. And lastly, it's a symbolism. Does a flag sail patriotism? Do you have an individual standing and have a group of people behind them which suggests popularity? Again, it goes back to who your audience is and how you're trying to communicate to your audience, but everything we do communicates. It's just not about words. And the other thing to remember that it happens in an instant. Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book which is of somewhat dubious social science, but it's kind of one of his fun books. It's called Blank. He's the kind of person that should basically write an article for the New Yorker and then he turns it into a book. So it sells more. But what he says, and there's a lot of truth to this, we make up our mind in an instant. Think about the next time you meet someone and you get a firm handshake, you feel a little differently than if you get kind of a limpy handshake. It's a very quick way that we make decisions. For those of you who have interviewed people for jobs, you probably decided in the first three or four minutes if you're gonna hire that person. You just have to go through a half hour interview to make it look good. So we decide things very, very quickly. And that's pretty important. So the last thing let's talk about is messages and we're happy, hopefully it'll be enough of a dialogue. We can talk about these and some other rules as well. Everybody goes, what's a message all about? It's really, it's a one sentence way. And by the way, the great thing about communications, there's no one black letter law, there's no one right way to do it. This is we're affecting human beings and different people react differently. But it is a set of statements that prompt a targeted audience to take a desired action. So it's usually language, could be images too, that prompt your targeted audience, the audience that Sarah was talking about to do something that you want them to do. That's what it's all about. It's really that simple. It has to have something in it for the audience and it has to have it something in it for you. So here's some sort of little ways that we think a lot about it. Perhaps the biggest mistake on messages is people focus on the process, not the impact. So if I wanna talk to you about Google, for example, and I start droning on about how many computers and switches they have, you're gonna, I'm gonna lose you in seconds. You care about Google because it changes the way we communicate. It's the impact of what they do, not the process of how we do it. And for a lot of you, for what you're doing, your peacekeeping, you're trying to sell impact, not the process. You know, we work hard doing this. No one cares how hard you work. They care about the impact. The second thing is focus on the heart, not the brain. We think with our hearts. We react very quickly and we react emotionally. And when we see information that is counter to what our feeling is, we come up with all sorts of rationalization to justify our feelings. Think about it's the emotion and that reaches people much more quickly. Your message is really part of two things. It's what you want and what your audience wants and where there's an overlap. Think of two circles, like a Venn diagram. The place in the middle is the nexus of what both you want your audience to do and what their motivation, what their desires are. That's a sweet spot for messaging. It's not what you care about. It's the twin thing. You short understandable words. You wanna make it easy, succinct, people can understand very quickly. It's not your emotions. You know, you'll constantly see quotes. These are, I am outraged that this has happened. I am sad, no one cares that I'm sad or outraged, who cares? Stick with your message that really drives home the most persuasive argument. And you wanna align your language and your images. If you're talking about young people, don't have a 60 year old person talking about what young people feel. Have a young person, have a student. You know, you want the images to be aligned with what you say. So those are a few things just to sort of begin to think about in terms of messaging. And that's sort of our opening. Great, thank you all very much. Thank you. Before we go to questions from the audience, what I would like, I wanna take the moderator's prerogative and ask the first one. First, I wanna thank all of you and congratulate you on driving home the difference between strategy and tactics. Everybody wants to do strategic communication and their first reactions to issue a press release, which is actually kind of a bad tactic that's not been terribly well thought out. So thank you all for driving at home. All three of you talked about the importance of audience and of course that was the heart of Aristotle. I mean, this is not a new concept, but how do you define the audience? And Sarah, I think you're the one who said that the press isn't your audience. Why not? Well, what are you trying to do? Let's say you're trying to get a bill passed in Congress. Press can write about it, but if you convince every New York Times reporter to vote for the congressman to then vote for that bill, that's not the best direct or most direct way to get there. So having a thinking about press as a sub-audience is sort of usually how I think about them because they, if you can get them your message and you're getting in a way that then your target audience is reading, then you're impacting something more meaningfully. So let's say you're trying to impact and I'm taking this domestic but a Supreme Court justice, very difficult, but where do they live? What community newspaper do they read? If you can then target a reporter to put out a message in that paper, that's so much more meaningful because that reporter isn't your audience, that you're trying to get vote for something or against something, it's that Supreme Court justice. But that applies anywhere, here, abroad. Media has a huge impact, but they're not gonna make that final jump to make sure that you have success or you're getting the outcome you want. John. Professor, anything to add to? So how do you know, how do you learn about your audience? Intelligence. I think you need to have intelligence in the field. You have to see who your audience is and you have to use multiple narratives, not just one meta-narrative because there's several different actors. You have to gender the approach. Every, it is according to you, if it's boys, girls, women or men or even elderly people. And I think if you look at the Islamic State, they have effectively done that. They have targeted exactly the different actors and we have, this is something that we need to think of as well. John. You gotta start with what success is. So let's talk about ISIS for a sec. So what should our success be? Is success stopping young boys and girls from enlisting? If that is success, then our target audience are young boys and girls who haven't joined yet. It's just as clear as that. Now they may be influenced by parents, by religious figures, by stuff they read in the news media, by peers, there's a lot of ways they can be influenced, but you have to figure out who is the decider, who has the power to allow you to succeed or not. And success is not about, we want to make people more informed about this. That doesn't do any good. We want people to put their arms down. We want people to embrace our peacekeeping mission. That works. We want boys and girls to stop enlisting. We want less legislation to be passed that will endanger our point of view. So we want a determination of what, where you can really win. Thank you. Open it up. Moderate, I've got questions. Oh, I'm getting questions from the audience. Apparently being handed three by five cards. For all, so how do we communicate the truth in a media world that is fast, shallow and only sort of kind of right? It's a cynical morning here at the US Institute of Peace. How do we communicate the truth in a media world that is fast, shallow and only sort of kind of right? Let's just work left to right. Professor? I think one of, if you look at the strategy of the media, they are basically looking exactly at what IS is feeding them. IS doesn't have enough journalists on their ground. There's nobody who dares to tread in the new Syriac region. So basically they are the ones who are feeding the media. So they even have control over what we see and what we hear. And this is really dangerous. While we are fixated on the latest beheadings or the latest kidnappings, they're quietly building a state. And I think they are basically feeding us what they want us to know while they're quietly doing their daily work. And this is really dangerous. And I think this is something that we need more investigative reporters. There is a wonderful piece in the Atlantic that was written by someone who actually went to some of these people who are, there are a lot of people who are actually trying to get people to join IS. And they're stuck in their own countries because their countries don't let them leave. So you have spiritual sanctioners in Australia, in the UK, in many different countries. And this wonderful reporter actually, Graham Wood, I believe his name is, he actually went to these spiritual sanctioners and interviewed them and asked them, what are you pushing? And what are the pull factors for the youngsters that are leaving? And it was really well done. And I think we need more of that kind of reporting so that we understand the entire picture, not just what you see in the mirror or magazines like that. John, how do we communicate the truth in a media world that's fast, shallow and only sort of kind of right? Yeah, well, you have to be very clear as to what you're saying. So let's assume we're doing a campaign together. We figured out what success is. We figured out an audience. We've done our public, we've done our research to figure out what motivates that audience. You want a message frame that can be said in about 10 to 15 words. You want to be able to say what you're talking about in a very short, succinct way. And then you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until you're sick of it and then repeat it and repeat it and repeat it again. And you have to find and drive that same message through all channels. So I'll give you that example of my friends, the trial lawyers. They were defined as greedy, evil, selfish and self-centered. We flipped around the message. And by the way, communications is like a good novel. You have a protagonist and you have an antagonist. So instead of the trial lawyers being the antagonists, we actually took them out of the story. We made the protagonist good people and the antagonist evil corporations. And we called it, we focused on justice. We focused on the system of justice. And our message became a justice message. And we repeated it and repeated it and changed the entire dynamic of the whole debate and changed the whole political dynamic. So you have to be consistent with a message frame that resonates and then find a number of different ways to drive it out. Let me just say one thing about reporters and off to Sarah. We can all, it's really easy to look down on reporters. They are hardworking people. They really try their best. Think about if you have to write every single day something which is gonna have your name on it which now lives forever because the internet, it makes every newspaper, the web, it's permanent. It's a hard thing to do. And they're gonna get things wrong but you have to understand what they need. TV reporters need conflict. That's why the Bayheadings work so well. That is why they cover crashes or murders because that kind of violence out of the ordinary drives eyeballs. So you have to understand how they're trying to do their job and you have to figure out a way to frame the message, to give them the message that resonates and gets a story focused in the way you wanna focus it. Sarah? Well John's exactly right. It's, I don't wanna echo, but it's thinking about your audiences and then realizing that people need to receive the same message in different ways. Media should get the same message but it should be curated for them. Actors on the ground should get the same message but it should be in words that they resonate, that they understand, that resonates with them. Policy makers should get the same message that you're trying to put out so that you're saying the same thing but you're molding it for each audience. I think that's the most important and the best way to get something out. I think to John's point, there's this notion of an idealized truth and an idealized reporter out there that is shining truth upon us and we should all go, ah, and see the truth. That's sort of nonsense. The issues are multi-dimensional. Most things are about many things at once. So John wasn't lying about trial lawyers. So he's saying that trial lawyers are in fact about some of them are rich guys who chase down and exploit victims. That's true. It is also about a system of access to justice which is a thing which we also all believe. John didn't try to counter that no, no, no, those lawyers aren't greedy. He said, look, you believe in justice, we believe in justice. Let's talk about how we best pursue justice, right? It's that angle of it. It's not a change of mind but rather a change of focus. I promise to keep out of these conversations as much as I can. Some of you who know me know that I'm actually being very quite good about it. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of images in strategic communications? It's easy for McDonald's to share an Instagram post of a smiling child eating a Big Mac but how do you communicate complicated policy using pictures? I mean, I'll jump in that. It goes back to what your message is and then how do you convey that message in a visual? So if you wanna talk about hope and reeducation, then use a little kid that's learning in school because that symbolizes for all of us the future. Children symbolize the future and hope and positive. It's really what you want to symbolize and you make sure the picture works and drives that way. So it's thinking about how to, that way. Any other thoughts? I was a couple days ago, I was at the British Academy and there was a wonderful conference there on how terrorists learn. And there was a couple that's working at one of the people who were working in a new book on the Cubs of the Caliphate. Mia Bloom is one of the writers. And what's interesting is I thought this would be something that we could really leverage because everyone is horrified by the fact that they're now training kids to be terrorists. And they're using kids to do horrific things. And they're literally taking visuals and pictures of children doing atrocious things. And I think that would resonate across the globe. It would be really a great way to leverage the horror that is IS. And so I thought this would be some, we need to find trigger points that are effective in our strategic messaging that would resonate across all gender, all nations, all states. And I think that's something that we could do that would be very effective. Sarah? I'll just say that don't always go down a checklist and put out everything you think should be out. Maybe sometimes you don't need an image. Be strategic, certain plans will have everything and certain plans will just have two tactics. Be smart, be nimble, don't put out something just to have it out there. That last question was used McDonald's and Big Macs as the point of the question, which seems like a good transition if an awkward one to lunch. So please join me in thanking our panelists. And that's it, thank you very much. So Peter, thanks Christina, John, Sarah, thank you for spending some time with us and sharing some insights and some best practices. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna invite you to go, if you want to, you can just come down this way, go right out the door and we invite you to join us for lunch. And then we will hear from our keynote speaker in just a few minutes. So again, thank you. Thanks folks. Sorry, I'll stand back for a minute. We can just get you to find a seat. Please take a seat, we'll go ahead and get started with one. So good afternoon, again. I hope you are all enjoying your lunch and we ask you to please continue to do so. But we're gonna go ahead and get started with our keynote speaker. So it's my honor to introduce Ambassador George Moose. Currently serving as the Vice Chairman, Board of Directors here at USIP. A little bit about Ambassador Moose. He's a career member of the US Foreign Service where he attained the rank of career ambassador. His service with the US State Department included assignments in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. He's held appointments as US Ambassador to the Republic of Benin, Senegal. And from 1991 to 1992 he was US alternate representative to United Nations Security Council. In 1993 he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, a position he held until August of 97. From 1998 to 2001 he was a US permanent representative to the European Office of the United Nations in Geneva. And in June 2007 he was appointed by the White House to the Board of Directors of the US Institute of Peace where he now serves, as I mentioned, the Vice Chair. Please welcome, help me welcome Ambassador George Moose. Thanks very much, Jim. And as Vice Chair of the Board of the US Institute of Peace, it's a great honor and pleasure for me to welcome all of you to this important workshop. We here at the Institute have had a long history of involvement with the United Nations in particular and in an effort to bring our learning and our experience to bear on the enormous challenges that the United Nations faces and no greater challenge than the challenge of peace operations. As your conversations this morning have helped to reveal, the landscape of peacekeeping has never been more complex or more challenging. And with Under Secretary General Latsu this morning, meeting with our President Nancy Lindborg, we were cataloging the different situations where the UN has been called upon to play a critical role in maintaining peace but going well beyond that in finding ways to protect civilians in trying to promote human rights, in trying to encourage good governance in dealing with issues of institutional incapacity, but increasingly having to do that not only in permissive environments but having to do it in some of the most difficult and dangerous places in the world and having to adapt its operations, its policies to those situations. Needless to say, that makes the challenges of communicating even more difficult. The number of constituencies, internal as well as external, who have to understand the mission, understand what the UN is there to accomplish and to achieve and hopefully to be a part of that effort in achieving success. So we've had this morning conversations about the conceptual framework for strategic communication but that all needs to be informed by some practical realities and I can't think of anybody better to help us understand those practical realities than the current Undersecretary General for Peace Operations at the United Nations. Ambassador Ewe Latsu has headed the Department of Peacekeeping since October 2011 but he comes to that job with a wealth of experience primarily in the French Foreign Service having served in a number of positions in the French Foreign Ministry, in Asia particularly but also as the Deputy Permanent Representative of France in the United Nations Office at UN in New York and more recently as the Permanent Representative of France to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna. Experience in some of those areas where UN has been called upon to play peacekeeping roles such as in Indonesia and more or less and more recently as France's Ambassador to the People's Republic of China. So he brings to this job just an enormous range of both practical and diplomatic experience. We were talking specifically about the role he played as the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France and agreed that of all of the missions that a diplomat has called upon to play that is perhaps the most difficult and challenging and therefore he comes with that experience with particular appreciation for the importance of communication and strategic communication. So it's my, we are honored to have him here today. I think only validates the importance of the subject of this conference. And so it's my pleasure to welcome to the podium Under Secretary-General Erwe Latzu and please join me in welcoming him. Mr. Ambassador, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for those kind words Mr. Ambassador. And indeed it is also for me a great privilege to be able to address you today under these circumstances where we just had the report of the review panel coming out last week and this is going to inform our work over coming weeks and months. Firstly I would like to thank the United States Institute of Peace and the Folk Bernadotte Academy for organizing this very important meeting today. So let me perhaps jump straight into the matter and say, describe to you very briefly how critical the juncture is that we are entering for UN peacekeeping. Because our work no longer is about many static positions overlooking ceasefire lines. It is no longer only about monitoring the implementation of a peace agreement that has been signed between well-defined parties. Today peacekeeping is about military and civilian peacekeepers working together to protect civilians, to strengthen national security forces, to strengthen political institutions, to disarm and to demobilize combatants. It is about creating a climate of trust that would reduce the levels of violence, create space for reconciliation and peace processes to take hold, ultimately to allow for peace agreements to be signed. It is also about being prepared to use force when necessary about being prepared certainly to defend against attacks. So the conflicts that we are addressing today mostly are within, not between states. They involve frequently competing modes of governance and protection between the state and the armed groups that have often taken control of various areas of the country. In some places, such as in the Sahel, the interests of some parties are increasingly linked with transnational crime. New asymmetric tactics, suicide bombs, IEDs are now being used by armed actors in some areas where we operate and in Mali indeed we have become the target of such attacks. So it is a change in nature and I think it has created new security and political challenges. Let me go first through the security challenges. The threats have evolved. The level of equipment and military training of those who refuse to give up to peace are evolving constantly. Attacks are more complex. Equipment is more sophisticated. And the UN, as I said already, is more often than not directly targeted. So there is a varying increase in the use of asymmetric warfare and Mali is the best illustration for that to also ranging to the use of civilians as a tool of war in the Democratic Republic or the Congo. In Mali, and I think it is important to note that the review panel has highlighted this, maybe in part that is my responsibility, but it is very clear that UN peacekeeping is not and will not be a tool for fighting terrorism. We are not equipped, we are not designed, and we shall not do that. But at the same time, the terrorists are operating, they are fighting us, and indeed the number of casualties over the past year sadly reflects this. Regarding the political challenges, there is I think one major one which has come to our mind over the last year or so, even though it's been there for some time, that is the non-compliance by host government to the Security Council mandates. This can take the form of restrictions of movement, it can be physical, moral harassment, PNGing of even sometimes very senior personnel, detainment of our equipment at the customs, and more generally non-cooperative behavior. And you know what I'm referring to, it's about South Sudan, it's about Sudan, it's about the DRC for instance. It is just not possible to work in a more unstable security situation, and at the same time to have to fight, to oppose, to push back the non-cooperation of the host government. So I have launched the idea that maybe we should look at the possibility of compacts between the Security Council and the host government, and so far the membership has been rather receptive to an idea, and again it is an idea that the panel has taken up, so because it does mention it positively, and I think there might be some mileage in this, and I can confide in you that we'll probably try to apply it experimentally in the case of the Central African Republic because conditions might be just about right for that. I apologize, I got a bad cold traveling a few days ago. So facing these new challenges, Security Council has mandated us with increasingly complex and challenging mandates. We do have nowadays 125,000 military police and civilians in 16 operations around the world, and that's more than ever before. So in all these areas, from the Golden Heights to the DRC, from CAR to Haiti, we have to undertake a broad array of tasks in very diverse environments. The expectations of the Council vis-a-vis us have grown tremendously. First of course we are expected to protect civilians from conflict. That is the core of our mandates nowadays, but also we do have a number of what we call multi-dimensional functions, supporting stabilization, supporting the extension of the authority of the state, strengthening the rule of law, addressing gender inequality, protecting human rights obviously, to mention just a few. So in order to prepare our peacekeepers to rise to the challenge of what we face today, has been in my almost four years on the job a very important personal priority. My focus has been on enhancing performance, and this particular year perhaps more than any before. It's about modernizing, it's about professionalizing, it's about standardizing peacekeeping, creating systems that ensure that we are constantly adapting and incorporating new tools and practices. And I'll just mention four ways in which we are doing this. The creation upon my request two years ago by the General Assembly of the Office for Peacekeeping Strategic Partnership, sorry, that's UN Speak, but actually I always refer it to as the Inspector General because that is what it's about, led by in fact a three-star general. This is a tool to identify gaps, opportunities, and lessons that we can learn that have an impact on the delivery of mandates for unified, uniform personnel. So there are periodic reviews of our operations, both on the ground, also in headquarters, and to make the adjustments when needed. The whole goal being to make our operations more nimble, leaner, more responsive as the needs evolve on the ground. For instance, in Unemid, in Darfur, we discovered there was a whole bunch of prison wardens. I know you're supposed politically correct speaking to be, to say correction officers, but prison wardens they are. The fact is that we have a whole bunch of them in El Fasher, but they never had any access to prisons, no one are likely to have. So obviously the whole team had to pack, and we recall them. It's a sort of concrete elements that are just common sense. So we have adapted. A second element is that we have to ensure that our people possess the capabilities that are necessary to implement the mandates. They need to be prepared to respond to major changes in a security situation as short notice. And this was the case 18 months ago, if you remember, in South Sudan in December 13. This of course requires us to have very robust, very mobile capabilities and reserve capabilities to change sometimes, and in the particular case of South Sudan, radically our posture. And of course, being able to counter the use of asymmetric tactics, of psychological operations. All that requires a better access to intelligence. It requires timely threat assessments. It requires more sophisticated technology. And these three areas are a high priority to me, technology and intelligence in particular. So to respond to all these needs with our brothers in the field support, we have created the uniform capabilities development agenda and identified eight priority areas for which we need to develop to improve our performance. So eight work streams, which range from existing or emerging challenges will guide our efforts, ultimately the goal remaining to make our peacekeepers more fit for purpose in this increasingly non permissive and dangerous environment. Third, for peacekeeping to be effective in the 21st century, we must have access to 21st century tools. And this brings me back to the subject of technology. The symbol of that has been the use that we pioneered of unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance drones, surveillance exclusively, of course, in the DRC. And since we've had them, it has not only made a tremendous difference in the way we work, but also it has actually contributed greatly to the better protection of the civilians and of course to the better protection of our people. And now that it's been a good experience, actually this has launched a whole process to reflect on the use of technology and innovation. And we had a rather remarkable report on this last winter, which we are implementing because there are great recommendations to capitalize on those new technologies. It's about communications, data analysis, greening the blue, although as we say, that's greening our technology. And so we are working to do that. Fourth, it's also about effective performance and therefore the need to attract new, high-performing contributors to peacekeeping and retain our most effective troop and police contributing countries at the same time. We have had a long-standing relationship with member states on their contributions, but maybe we have lacked a more strategic approach that would provide coherence to our outreach with existing and potential troop and police contributors. And this is why we have recently established a strategic force generation and capabilities planning cell, which is designed to be an interface for strategic engagement with member states over the longer term. And we continue to work on this, and I must say that the forthcoming peacekeeping summit this September will be a unique opportunity to push that further and translate it into actually reality. And I'm very grateful to the United States for the support at the highest level that they were bringing us. They are bringing us to help achieve this. And we continually prospect for new contributors. I was 10 days ago in Vietnam to talk to that government, which is for the first time ever starting to contribute modestly, of course. But these are potential contributions that we must continue to encourage. So these are the big actions that we are undertaking to improve the overall performance of peacekeeping. We pledge to do our best to ensure that uniform personnel have what they need to perform to the maximum of their abilities. But of course, those countries have to fulfill their side of the bargain. They have to make sure that their people, their women and men are adequately trained. They are well-equipped. They are prepared for deployment to our operations. So a lot of work to continue to be done about pre-deployment training, including about protection of civilians, about sexual and gender-based violence, about child protection. It also means that they have to be fully aware that accountability will take place for anything that deviates from the integrity we expect of our peacekeepers. So to come back to the central reason of today's meeting, it is obvious that in this very new landscape, effective communications is a priority, more than ever, for strategic peacekeeping. We have to communicate strategically to the local people, to the parties in conflict, to the regional actors, to other international actors and partners on the ground. All that has to be a critical component of an effective political strategy. We need support of the key audiences to succeed because it is not by force alone that we will win. It's by conquering the souls and the minds, conquering les Américœurs. That is what's about and communication is the only thing that can achieve that. Of course, I have to say, you have, we have seen recently very negative press stories that make allegations of inefficiency all sometimes malfeasance. And it is true that reputation and awareness are as important an asset as armored vehicles. Rumors, misperceptions, can have actually real security implications on the ground. So that calls for really targeted external relations initiatives and campaigns in the context into which we are now asked to build, to maintain support. So effective strategic communication does build support with key partners, with key stakeholders. It should dispel misconceptions. It should provide situational awareness that helps us also to protect better civilians as well as our personnel. Without an adequate strategic communications capability, these key constituencies can actually become spoilers and misconception and misinformation can also undo months of solid operational work on the ground. This is why development of a tailored and dynamic communication strategy based not on a monologue but on dialogue is critical. And there again, as in the field of technology, we cannot do 21st century peace operations with the tools of the past century. And this applies particularly to communications. We need to adapt to modern techniques and technologies. And we have to make sure that our people, our staff are trained adequately to handle this. The best information comes from communities themselves. And this is of course essential to understand better the needs of the people that we are there to serve. To convey also the limits of UN capabilities to manage the expectations. And in times of crisis, to maximize the support of response, not only on the ground, but also at the level of the security council. As you are aware, the peace panel's review report actually includes strong and concrete proposals on strategic communications. And I support those recommendations, especially the one that the UN's public information approach has to be more dynamic, has to embrace modern communications methods that will help us remain relevant in a fast moving world. Now Nick, this is not a reflection on your work, quite a contrary. I value that, I value your contribution, but it's true that it's a constant effort to modernize. You know, when we look at the operations on the ground, it is maybe not very well known, but in the DRC, it is the UN that runs the biggest radio operation in the country, Radio KPI, which is considered universally popular, trustworthy to the population. Unfortunately lately, the government has been less convinced to that and has been trying to force us to, if not close it, at least to curtail it. I remember the foreign minister when I was there six weeks ago telling me, and you should discontinue this show, which is one of dialogue with people on the phone. That is absolutely not in line with legislation. So I listened to him and going out of his office, I told my people, okay, I'm going to do that show tomorrow morning. And well, I think that's a good messaging. So we have to continue doing that. We have now radios also in Mali, Radio Mikado, that do all this outreach work. We have established recently one also in the CIR, Rado Geira, which is the name of the tree under which people gather in the villages to discuss situations. And all this is really, I think, doing part of the job. At the same time, I think we have also to change to the extent possible the culture of the people. And I took the initiative two years ago as we were having our yearly meeting of the force commanders, we just had this year's last week. I insisted on building a segment into that week of work to give them our generals a bit of media training. I don't know in other armies, but in the one I know best, La Grande Muette says it all, the great mute, military don't usually speak to media. But I think in our operations, it's very different than actually under the authority of the SRSG obviously, but I think they have to communicate. They have a number of messages to spread and it's happening gradually. So this is just another attempt again to give a different culture to our people. So this is what it's about. Of course, being here in this great capital city, I should also mention that we are mindful of financial constraints that we continue to take steps to reduce the cost of peacekeeping and the fact it is true that we are doing more than less. More with less. Do you know that there is only one internationally deployed armed force in the world that has over the last five years achieved a reduction in cost per head by 16% in real terms? I think no army can boast of that, but we have done it. But there is a limit to what can be cut. And of course, as we need to deploy more equipment, more sophisticated protection, counter ID, counter battery radars, other UAVs, mine protected vehicles. I think we also continue, we need to continue to receive adequate financial support from member states. So this is where we are, ladies and gentlemen. This is what we do, but we are I think all working hard. We try to make peacekeeping better every day. There's still lots of things to do, but I think with the support of the membership, with your support, we can actually make further progress. So thank you very much for your attention. Sure, sure. I always enjoyed the question and answer part even better, but under secretary general, lots who does have some other commitments and this afternoon, but he does have maybe a couple of minutes, five minutes. And I know we have some extremely knowledgeable people in the room and with Kelsey from the Department of Defense, Tori Holt from the State Department, but this is your opportunity. So perhaps I might just start by asking what you would wish most to see come out of the process that's now been launched, the high level panel. We've had an enormous opportunity now in September with presumably the presentation of a report to the general assembly. Thank you. What's your vision of how this process might unfold over the next few months? Well, thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador. I think the expectation is that peacekeeping has long been a partnership. It's a partnership between our governing body, the Security Council, the Secretariat and the community of contributors of troop and police. And this has to be constantly nurtured and fed. And I think by the fact that this review has actually re-highlighted the issues, I think it can bring forward the rejuvenation of the partnership. It also brings us, and this is also to be one of the major virtues of that peacekeeping summit we're going to have in September, bringing in either a renewed commitment or new commitments from contributors. And indeed, we've seen sprouting of countries, who come to me and say, well, we're interested. Usually I have to say every year I receive four or five visits by ambassadors whose country is running for the Security Council non-permanent seat in the autumn. And usually they come to see me sometimes in the preceding winter and say, oh, by the way, could we do something for you? So sometimes it's modest, sometimes it's not so modest. That's always welcome. But now we have seen a spate of countries new to peacekeeping who, because they got the message, because also the end of the operations in Afghanistan and that applies particularly to NATO and EU countries, because Afghanistan has come to an end for them, then they have capacities that they're ready to bring back or to bring for the first time to UN peacekeeping. So this, it's all a sort of coming together of new trends that are absolutely welcome and I'm grateful to all those who are making that possible. Thank you. Thanks very much. You've already mentioned the summit, but perhaps you could share with us some of the capabilities that you think the UN has in short supply given the breadth and depth of missions that range from some of the challenges in places like Mali, but there's also missions where it's truly post-conflict and we're seeing a transition back to the capacities of the government. So you have a broad sweep of potential capacities that the UN needs for this range of missions. And also I'd ask if there's anything in the high level panel that you think should just move forward that you would recognize? I note that that mentions rapid deployment, useful analysis, there's a number of tools and while it's never easy to, I'm sure if there was a review of the State Department we'd feel a little funny about it, but giving you the opportunity to maybe highlight some of the reforms if you've had a chance to see the panel report that you bring to our attention, thank you. Thank you for that. It's true that we have worked a lot on looking at what it is that we need and what it is that we require from Member States and it's true that it means all sorts of initiatives you know to either strengthen our cooperation bilaterally with Member States or encourage triangular cooperation, you know the examples that the US have been giving you know in this program called APREP to help six African countries, you know to be better prepared to come into our operations and Japan is doing the same right now by training some African military engineering forces training and equip them. So I think that goes all in the same positive direction. So really, we have to continue on that way but thank you Victoria for your support of your government. Very good, let me end on behalf of all of us here. Thank you, Secretary General Natsu for his presence. Thank you. But even more for his contribution to our reflection today on peace operations broadly, but importantly within that framework the increasing importance of our ability to communicate to all concern what it is we're about what we're trying to do, absent which we will not succeed in our missions. And so thank you again for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Under Secretary General LaSousa and Ambassador Moose, thank you very much for your comments and thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to share some insights with us this afternoon. What I would like to do is invite you to either A, finish your dinner, B, start on dessert, C, finish dessert, D, have dessert with coffee, but we have a few minutes so please take the time to enjoy that. What we would like to do is to start at 1345 so you go back out through the door that you entered in here and we will begin our third panel then. Thank you very much. Okay, so we may have a couple of folks that may yet trickle in but we'll go ahead and get started. Again, welcome back and I hope you enjoyed lunch and the remarks by the Under Secretary General. So thus far we've heard from a panel on strategic communications, some of the challenges in peace operations and the second one on best practices. Our third panel will look at innovations for strategic communications. Moving the strategic communications front here forward and is chaired by Mr. Sven Erich Söder, General Director of the Focal Bernadotte Academy. Sir, over to you. Thank you very much and welcome back from the lunch and to our last panel. As we said, we have during the morning had two panels, one on challenges today and another one on best practices and right now in this last, the third panel, we are going to focus on how can we move the stratcom front here forward. But personally, I have in different capacities worked with communications and stratcom and I have learned over the years that it is very practical to base communication on solid knowledge, of course, but also to try to learn from others and to see what is best practice. So if you forgive me for a minute, I would like to do some public relations for an upcoming publication from the Focal Bernadotte Academy because we are right now in the process to put together a very practical and very handy, we think, communication advises handbook to be used in the field in peace operations and in crisis management operations. And our aim with this handbook is to create a sort of a toolbox for communication professionals. And we try as much as possible to draw lessons learned from both the United Nations, the European Union, also the African Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the NATO, and also from what we can call field journalism. And this handbook deals with topics like media relations, crisis communications and importance of social media in this new communication landscape we have and we have talked about earlier today. And hopefully this handbook will be published later this year. But let's turn to our panel and this imminent panel I have here beside me. And some of the questions that we have asked our panel to consider include what tools can the UN draw upon to effectively communicate both internally and externally? What are the platforms that the UN peacekeeping should target and what tools does it need to do so? And how can the UN secure a position at the forefront in this important evolution that is strategic communication? And to my left here, first we have Stephen Dreyer. And Stephanie, sorry, Stephanie Dreyer. My dad. Dad. Stephanie Dreyer, sorry. And Stephanie is Director of Digital Media and Strategy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs Department of Defense United States. And as the Director of Digital Media and Strategy, Stephanie develops the messaging and content strategy for the US Department of Defense digital media platforms, including all the Department's social media challenges. She recently launched the first Facebook page for the Secretary of Defense to help Secretary Carter to better communicate his priorities both to the force and also to the American people. Stephanie was previously also the Communications Director of the Truman Project and the Center for Natural Policy and served as its on-the-record Spooks person. She has also been the Spooks person and Public Affairs Director for Groove Energy, Biofuels, Advocacy Group, and served as Deputy Press Secretary for US Senator Charles Chummer. Left to Stephanie is Mr. Peter Gio. Peter is President of the Better World Campaign and Vice President for Public Policy and Advocacy at the United Nations Foundation. Peter joined the Better World Campaign in 2009 and leads the Campaign's strategic engagement with Congress and the administration to promote the strong US-U.N. relationship. He also serves as the Vice President for Public Policy and Advocacy at the UN Foundation and Peter has over 20 years of legislative, analytical, and management experience, including senior rules on Capitol Hill and in the State Department. He has worked on a broad range of foreign policy and foreign aid issues leading negotiations around repayment of US areas to the U.N. being part of the U.S. delegation to the climate negotiations in Kyoto and successfully also leading negotiations for the landmark HIV, AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003. And to the left of Peter we have Mr. Daniel Storschaffer who is the President of ICT for Peace Foundation from Switzerland and Daniel is a former ambassador of Switzerland and the founder and president of the ICT for Peace Foundation which since 2003 explores the use of information and communication technologies, ICT for peace building and crisis management and humanitarian aid and supports the diplomatic processes for peaceful and open cyberspace. And as an ambassador of Switzerland and special representative of the Swiss federal government Daniel was responsible in the earlier for hosting the UN World Summit on the Information Society in 2003. Daniel has also worked in the Swiss federal office for foreign economic affairs and in the Swiss mission to the EU in Brussels. And prior to joining the Swiss Foreign Service he worked for several years in the UN based in New York but also in Laos and China. So as you can hear we have a very skilled and experienced panel here. So without further ado I give the floor to Stephanie, please. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. I hope that nobody has a food coma going on. We'll try to keep it interesting. So as Ben said I'm the Director of Digital Media and Strategy for OSDPA, the Opposite Secretary of Defense. And this is a brand new role for DOD. And the role was created to address a lot of the challenges that have been discussed here today. Obviously we all know that social media is huge. It is more prolific than traditional journalism in some areas. In the past we had policy makers sitting around in rooms thinking of policy. And then we would have events like this and journalists would come and cover the events. And that's how we would get our news. But now anybody with a smartphone can be a journalist. And this creates a lot of opportunities, right? There's this opportunity for two-way communication. There's this opportunity for crowdsourcing. There's also a lot of disadvantages to having everybody have a microphone. So although I'm not a peacekeeping expert I have a lot of experience in digital media, overseeing a very large government agency with strategy. And so I'm gonna talk a little bit today about how digital communication can help the UN embrace the 21st century. So specifically I'm gonna talk about three things. The first thing I'm gonna talk about is digital communication strategy as media strategy. The second thing I'm gonna talk about is audiences and platforms. And the third thing I'll talk about is some new tools and what are the advantages and disadvantages. So I think that based on the panels that we had today and the lunch with the Under Secretary speaking, everybody understands that embracing 21st century communication methods that are now standard practice elsewhere is critical if you want to be relevant in today's fast moving world. So the DOD was a little bit slower than other government agencies when it came to the digital media game. But we've made fantastic strides just in the last year. And part of that is because my current leadership understands this idea that digital media strategy is media strategy. And what I mean by that is that I worked in traditional communications as you would say for about a decade. And in that time we've seen social media explode on the scene. And many people were very hesitant to embrace these new technologies. And so what ended up happening is you would see the social platform as being run by the youngest person in the room or in some cases the intern. And while that may seem like an easy answer, the truth is that your social media strategist has to have a seat at the table with your traditional strategist for communications. They need to be able to work hand in glove with your traditional communication tools and personnel. So when I was interviewing for my current position, that was the first thing that I asked the people that I was interviewing with. Am I going to have a seat at the table? Are people going to take me serious? When I'm sitting in rooms with four star generals who don't understand what a Twitter feed is. And fortunately my leadership, they made good on their promises. And so they've allowed me to be in those strategic meetings and they've allowed me a lot of room to run. And so in the last few months we've really started to streamline our strategies and the DOD is in my opinion, doing a lot better in terms of communicating with our audiences. So we use social media to showcase the amazing work that our service members and their families are doing. We also use it to communicate with our stakeholders, which includes veterans and policymakers. And we use a number of different platforms to do this. At DOD we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine. We also have a Google Plus account. But we tend to focus on the platforms that work best for us. And we know that because we did the research. There are studies out there that show us that among military families, 93% of military families use Facebook. That's compared to 67% of civilians. Four million people on Facebook are veterans or active duty members. 13 million people on Facebook are family members of a veteran or an active duty member. So this is obviously a great platform for us to be using when we want to communicate to the force. And that was a huge reason why the Secretary of Defense decided that he wanted to go on Facebook. So we told him these statistics and we explained to him that, look, sir, if you want to talk directly to your audience, you want to talk to the troops, we're going to put you on Facebook because there is no way that we can have you visit every single service member across the world. But we can create a sense of accessibility by putting you on Facebook. And so after his 100 days, we launched his Facebook page. It's facebook.com slash secdef if you want to take a look at it. And we use that in conjunction with our DOD Facebook page to showcase what he's doing, to push his priorities, and to make sure that the force can stay up to date with what he's doing and what other service members are doing. So I think that it's really important, if you're going to think about using platforms like Facebook or Twitter, that you know that your audience is on there. Identifying where your audience is, where they go to get their news is going to help you define the platform that works for you. Just because Pinterest is really popular, it doesn't mean it's the right platform for you. And it means that you might have to make some tough decisions. We just recently, sorry, for years, we had something called the Pentagon Channel, which is a 24-7 television station that broadcasts around the world. And we were spending a lot of time and resources filling that content. And with the proliferation of technology and on-demand services, we noticed that we were talking to a diminishing audience. And so last month, we decided to get rid of the Pentagon Channel. And we are now throwing those resources behind our new digital media platforms. We're trying to teach our tech sergeants how to do 30-second videos instead of 30-minute videos. When we put, actually, this year, when we do the secretary's Fourth of July message, we're not going to have him sitting in front of a flag, just talking to the troops. We're going to do something a little bit more fun, something that's more designed for a social media audience. So making those tough decisions is going to allow you to focus on the platforms that are going to work best for you. So there are lots of tools out there that I think that the UN can invest in. And there are many reasons why they should do so. Just from a positive perspective, social media creates accessibility and the news streaming opportunities. UN peacekeepers are deployed in some of the most dangerous conflict areas around the world, but new technologies can help them monitor conflicts, carry out early warning, and maintain situational awareness to identify threats and support proactive peacekeeping. So obviously, there are a lot of platforms that you all know about, right? Facebook, Twitter, there are live streaming opportunities, but there are new technologies out there as well. There's a new technology called Yik Yak, which is basically, it's a tool which allows people to anonymously create Yaks, which is basically like a post, to people within a 10-mile radius. And so all users have the ability to contribute to the stream. You can write, you can post, and then you can upvote or up-down a post, depending on whether or not you like it or you want it to be seen by more. So this can obviously be used, this type of technology can be used by peacekeepers who want to easily monitor conversations in a smaller area. In addition, I just read about this new app called Jot, which is a messaging app that works without a data plan or Wi-Fi. So it's actually targeted at tweens and teens who don't have access to their data plans when they're in school, but they have access to their iPods. And so they can talk to each other without data. And so obviously there are a lot of areas around the world that do not have the best internet accessibility. These kinds of technologies could really help enhance the communication efforts in that area. Also, social media obviously creates the opportunity for transparency. I am not in any position to disclose our strategy to degrade ISIL. However, our audience really wants to know what are we doing? What are we doing every day to go after these guys? And so what we started doing is we started to get video from CENTCOM of basically strikes on ISIL. And these videos are not that great. They're grainy, they're literally, they're one shot of a missile coming in and hitting a bus or a car or whatever it is, whatever the target is. But every time that we put these videos out, we get more than a quarter million views. We get positive reinforcement on our page. People are volunteering their unsolicited advice about how we should go after the terrorists. And it's not to say that we are taking that advice, but the point is, and this is a good idea, but my point is that this is essentially a crowdsourcing opportunity. We're showcasing what we're doing without giving away the too many details. And we're keeping a positive, putting a little bit of a positive spin, because as I said in the earlier panel, ISIL is very good at using social media for propaganda purposes. And so that actually gets me into a little bit of the disadvantages. So just as we use social media to bypass the traditional communication pillars, so do terrorists. Social media plays a major role in disseminating ISIL propaganda and getting new recruits. And in addition, there is a risk that as you put out live updates about attacks or violent episodes, if you pinpoint them on maps, for example, you know, hostile parties or looters can use that information to their advantage. And so what I would caution is that it is really important that there is a balance between how much you put online. And it means you have to be careful about who posts, when they post, and what they post. Specifically because social media is in real time, when there's a crisis, there's the desire to just get out there in front. And I think that that's the right mindset, but it is very important that we don't respond without knowing all the information. So I heard this really great stat earlier, well, it's not a good stat, but the stat is that there are 148 UN Public Affairs officers to more than 120,000 peacekeepers in the field. So that means that you have one PAO to every thousand peacekeepers. And that can be tough, right? If you're trying to disseminate information to 1,000 people, right? So it means that you have to be really clear about who has the information, who do you give it to. If you're gonna put talking points out, make sure that the right stakeholders have access to those talking points. And there's nothing wrong with putting out a post, let's say that your Twitter gets hacked. There's nothing wrong with putting out a tweet that says, we are aware of the situation and we will update you when we have more to tell, right? That means that you are admitting that there is an issue, you recognize that there is something that has to happen, but you're not responding without the proper information or without talking to the right people. So again, don't get caught into this cycle where social media means you have to go like that. You do have time to take a minute, gather the troops and get out the right message. So one of the first things that I did at DOD in this role is I created a social media crisis plan. And your social media strategist should work with your communications strategist to create that. And it will identify who needs to be contacted, who gets out there in front of the camera and what gets put out. So I think that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from DOD and other agencies, but I think that in the end, it has to be a targeted strategy for the UN. So identifying the right platforms, identifying the right audiences and making sure that you're using the technologies that are going to work for you. Last thing I would say is that it's really important that you have strong passwords and two-step authentication. That's just my PSA for the day. And yeah, bottom line, I just think that if executed correctly, the advantages of social media are far outweigh the disadvantages. And the UN should dive head-first into more dynamic communications efforts that will support the mission. And that's my spiel. Thank you very much, Stephanie. Thank you very much. And please, Peter. Great, well, thank you very much. And thank you, Sven Erick, for chairing the session. And it is a pleasure as well to appear with Stephanie and Daniel. And I'm Peter Go with the Better World Campaign and our job at BWC is to create a stronger relationship between the US and the United Nations. We were created by Ted Turner 15 years ago when the US owed a billion dollars and passed dues to the UN for peacekeeping. And he was in typical Ted form pretty darn angry about it. Tried to give a billion dollars to the UN itself and that was not workable from a legal perspective and created the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Campaign instead. So our job is to work with Capitol Hill, the executive branch in the media and civil society to create the strongest possible relationship between the US and the UN and make sure that American policymakers appreciate the value in working hand in glove with the UN as a partner to tackle some of the most important global challenges out there on the development front, the economic front, the strategic front and foremost among them is peace operations. I did want to pick up on a point that Stephanie made at the beginning of her presentation which is a digital media strategy is a media strategy. We feel that strongly at the Better World Campaign because from our perspective so many of our supporters, so many of the people that we work with not only around the country but also in the executive branch on Capitol Hill and in the media are getting as their primary source of news from a digital channel. So if we're not reaching them digitally then we're not doing our jobs effectively. And as a parent of a 22 year old son and a 16 year old son, I know where they get their news now. Their first exposure to any news is on Facebook for my 22 year old and my 16 year old. His first exposure to news is he'll see it on Twitter and that's the reality. He's not gonna see it on CNN.com. They're gonna see it on their social media, digital platforms first. So we need to go to where they are as opposed to hoping to that they're gonna read some press release that we're gonna send out. So it's core to what we do and it's core to what our ability to get our job done. You know, the peacekeeping issue is always a challenge in the US context because we are the largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping at the moment more than 28% and going up as we approach the end of the year. Now, a percentage is a percentage but $3 billion which is the US share of UN peacekeeping each year is a very large and sizable contribution. And so from the budgetary perspective as Congress looks at this issue they look at $3 billion and think that's a large chunk of money as they should because these are taxpayer dollars that we're sending to the UN to enhance peace operations. Really pleased that for the past six years the United States has fully paid its dues to the United Nations and not only paid its dues to the United Nations but made up for $1.5, $1.6 billion in arrears that had accumulated at the end of the last administration. So over the last six years because of a variety of initiatives we have been paid up to the UN. So, but the only way this happens the only way that we pay our dues the only way that we make sure that Americans understand the value of working with peace operations working through the UN is by telling the UN story that peacekeeping story from an American national perspective on foreign policy and a national security basis. And so let me tell you just a little bit about how we view strategic communications and digital platforms as allowing us to tell this story because if we don't tell the story we know for a fact that lawmakers will prioritize other areas of foreign affairs spending. The members of Congress are bombarded with messages fund this fund that and unless they hear not only from advocates here in Washington but from their constituents they will fund other priorities. And we can go to the Hill as much as we want and say that the US is legally bound to pay these peacekeeping assessments but really what matters is making sure that Senator Schumer and other members of Congress hear from their constituents because as cynical as we all are about members of Congress their motivations and I worked on the Hill for 22 years I get it. Nobody loves Congress. I mean every time somebody complains about how unpopular the UN is my response is if you look at Congress's approval ratings right now I think the UN is the least of your issues there in the low 50s percent I will note which is way above Congress. But the end of the day so it's easy to be cynical about Congress but members of Congress are listening to their constituents. We see it all the time. We see it in lobby days where the members of Congress want to meet with their constituents are listening and are reprioritizing what they fight for because of what they hear. And our ability to effectively harness digital is absolutely essential to reaching members of Congress and we see it increasingly when members of Congress are tweeting themselves. Now sometimes they have their staff tweet a lot of members of Congress tweet themselves which means that when you tweet at your Senator and you tweet at your member of the House of Representatives guess what? They're going to see it. They see that message and that's an important thing. And from our perspective we're not only making sure that we're using digital platforms to reach members of Congress when there's a problem. When they do something right first thing we do we go to our constituents please use social media use digital platforms let your member of Congress know that we appreciate what they did because they've got to hear the thanks. They don't hear the thanks they won't do it again. And so the biggest way that we do this is through our annual Thank a Peacekeeper campaign. Now from our perspective Thank the Peacekeepers designed to remind Americans of the essential bargain of UN peacekeeping. You know we have enormous control because of our veto power in the Security Council there is not a mission that's created or ended or it's mission changed without active American support. So we're one of a very small group of countries that have this power. We also don't contribute troops to UN peacekeeping missions there's no more than a hundred troops American soldiers participating in UN peacekeeping missions which is a statement about the bargain which is that we pay the dues. We rely upon other countries to become troop contributing countries but we at the United States a wealthy country pay 28% of the dues. That's the bargain that's what Thank a Peacekeeper is all about. So through our Thank a Peacekeeper campaign since we've launched it we've had 130,000 Americans signed digital postcards which our friends at the UN help deliver directly to UN peacekeepers and then our friends at the UN will do videos with the peacekeepers having received the Thank you cards expressing their gratitude to Americans for supporting them in their work. And again that sort of feedback loop is very helpful in terms of the success of the campaign. It also allows us to reach a younger audience. We frequently now go to model United Nations around the country with our Thank a Peacekeeper helmets and we find that students are more than happy to participate in this campaign because it's something they can understand. They're already in Model UN so they know what the UN is. If they're in Model UN somebody's taught them about peacekeeping. So it's a captive audience and we're going to them with a fairly simple advocacy ask which is Thank a Peacekeeper for their contribution. So as a result of this effort we've had 45,000 young people take part in Thank a Peacekeeper that are not part of the Better World Campaign United Nations Association family who are using digital platforms to tell their friends about the importance of peacekeeping and how it serves not only American but global interests. So last year we decided to take it to an even greater level to try to get more young people involved and so we ran a contest where we asked students to submit various entries to explain peacekeeping from their perspective. My favorite was George Stone's students who did a comic book talking about peacekeeping. Then we had some middle school students from Washington D.C. do a video about why peacekeeping serves American interests. We brought them to New York as contest winners and they helped present the Thank a Peacekeeper helmets to the United Nations in a ceremony. So we fundamentally believe that as we think about strategic communications we think about our digital platforms that it's absolutely essential but frankly, there's a lot of fatigue. There's a lot of noise out there. You know, you experience this all the time as you probably communicate to your own troops. They get bombarded with messages. How do you reach them? How do you get them to open and read what you have to say? So this year we tried something new. We got five former presidents well fictional presidents. They played presidents on television. Alfre Woodard, Jimmy Smits, Michael Douglas, Tony Goldman and Bill Pullman to do a video thanking peacekeepers. And just within the first three weeks of launching this video we got a half a million impressions and we surpassed all of our previous records for number of actions during that period of time because we were offering something new, unexpected, different. And that's absolutely essential when we think about effectiveness in digital communications. It is a very crowded space and in fact, you have to be short in how you communicate with people. If it's long, nobody will read it. And so our most common shared item on the UN Foundation blog is the 10 facts on peacekeeping. It's been shared 11,000 times and it's because it's an infographic. It's 10 things you probably don't know about peacekeeping. And so when you break it down in that way it allows you to use the digital platform not only so that people share it on their own smaller networks but what are the advantages for us about bringing the five former fictional presidents into our family and doing videos is they all agreed to push out the thank a peacekeeper campaign to their entire network. And all of these stars have hundreds of thousands of millions of people in their various social network whether it's Facebook or Twitter. So as we think about digital communications it's also not an end in itself. We are advocates. We're trying to influence policy. So yes, digital communications, tweeting at your member of Congress is important. Tweeting at the president, sharing at Facebook all important. We're trying to move people up the advocacy commitment curve. We want people to get used to talking about peacekeeping so that they're willing to take the next step which is to send a letter or to do the next thing which is do an in-district meeting with their member of Congress or to do the next thing which is come to Washington to participate in the lobby day or do the next thing which is become a champion and train others how to do this. So our goal is to move people up. Digital media is like heroin. You know, it's a good taster. You really like it. You get used to it. And then we really in. And we find that it works incredibly effectively to try to move people up the constituency commitment curve and make them even better advocates for UN peacekeeping. And I just want to end on a point that Stephanie raised as well which is the importance of transparency. You know, I think that that's one of the best things that social media has done to all of the peacekeeping missions deployed throughout the world is by having social media presence it allows them to explain in real time to people in the country in which they're serving and to supporters around the world what that peacekeeping mission is doing and the challenges it's facing. And I think that that the use of digital media by the UN in a peace operation setting has great potential to increase transparency and with greater transparency there's greater confidence in what people are funding. So thank you very much. Thank you Peter. Thank you very much Peter. And now I'll give the floor to Daniel, please. So good afternoon. Thank you very much to the organizers for the kind invitation to participate in this very important workshop. On, I will talk about more from a maybe policy, diplomacy, procedural way or how to bring the UN into the 21st century and help move forward in this strategic frontier. So before I do that, allow me to say a few words about ICT for Peace Foundation which of course is not, let me see if I get that right, known to many of you maybe. The ICT for Peace Foundation is a think tank who does research, advocacy and it's a brainchild of the World's Homidone Information Society. Maybe some of you will remember we have some colleagues in the audience who have been very actively involved in these processes in 2003 and 2005. And in 2003, we were very worried about the digital divide and that developing countries would be left behind. So ICT for development was a very important topic. And then when we moved to Tunisia to the Summit in Tunis, some people came and said, how about peace? Couldn't we also say Mutatis Mutandis we can use information technology as we use it for business or health or for education, also for peace. And it was that reason that some leaders like Marti Addisari asked us, convinced us to do some basic research which is contained in this paper, this report which was then finally published in 2005 and which led then and here comes my diplomatic background in this paragraph 36 in the Tunis commitment which we feel at that time you have to understand that ICT was still sort of very early days and not so evident and ubiquitous as we have it today in all life. So we were able to get this paragraph where you see ICTs can as a tool help those people who are in the business if you allow me for early warning, prevention, mediation, post-conflict reconstruction, peacekeeping, peacebuilding. So this is the story, the beginning and then we had this paragraph that's all good and nice and so but what we're gonna do about it. And one of the first areas that we said, I mean it's a huge field and so we said, let's look at crisis, crisis management which sort of and define it manmade or natural so you have peacekeeping, you have also humanitarian operations and how ICTs can help in this particular field. So I will talk about the work that we've been doing and the second field increasingly cyber security became important because if we wanna use these fantastic internet and web and all these tools we have to have an open free and sustainable and trustworthy space. So that's why we then in 2007, eight and then leading 2011 increasingly got involved in this space and called for a code of conduct for responsible behavior, state behavior. We started with policy research to accompany the emerging consultations, negotiations at the UN and elsewhere and also of course trying to enable members of developing countries to participate in this increasing space. This is just to show you another area of work that we are deeply committed and which is sort of supporting the first area which is crisis information management. Now we have talked about this high level report but I think we should also look at this particular report which came out and which the Undersecretary General had mentioned out of which a lot of recommendations are coming out in the field of technology, information technology, very important and therein of course they also talk about strategic communications and we have seen a text of that but he also talks about crisis information management as such in crisis and that's why we see and it has been mentioned by some of our colleagues, Yasmin I think also, that when we look at internally and externally there is a symbiosis of the work we're doing in terms of strategic communication but also as what we're doing in crisis information management and by that we mean really how is for instance in a peacekeeping mission or in a humanitarian operation how are we collecting data, information and sharing it for better decision making and protecting and reporting and we feel these two areas are linked. I think you cannot do strategic communications if you talk with your colleagues who do information management in crisis in a peacekeeping mission and you all know how many civilians, police and military components they are in a mission and then the country team so if you don't talk to them you cannot do effective strategic communications. So that's, we have been internally thinking a little bit how the future could be, what would be sort of the terms of reference in a mission, peacekeeping mission but I would broaden it because often now we have hybrid situations, we have peacekeeping but we have also humanitarian operations and you have humanitarian actors and so we have to develop terms of reference or what we could call digital blue caps as my colleague put this term that can do information management but also be public information officers. I think again the tools that we have been describing both categories of people have to leverage them have to understand these particles and because in both cases you have these two way communications and tools and you have to understand it and to use them for both purposes. So we have to rethink in a mission what are the roles and responsibilities of any information management or strategic communication officer. So the training that we have to do let me talk about that maybe later is really needed to understand these tools and the pitfalls and the challenges and the noise and how to separate the chaff and so forth. So this is very important. So we have to create in these missions new institutional architectures to carry out our job in both internally and externally to generate data and to push it out. So maybe this is a little bit going too far but we have to really get a new way of Carter that can enable them to be able to counter even some of the narrative and disinformation and to be able to get rid of some of the wrong information and get the good message out as we have been discussing this day. Now allow me a little bit and I think it could be interesting for this because of the linkage of crisis information managers and strategic communicators and see what leverage or lever we could have within strategically, diplomatically but also from a process point of view. In 2008, the secretary general appointed for the first time a chief information technology officer at the ASG level and he, one of his first tasks was to ask us to do an inventory of tools and practices in terms of crisis information management and we wrote a report and which was of course sobering 2008, 2009 and but while doing so we were able to talk to all the organizations, the UN family from UNHCR, WFP, DPKO, DFS, UNDP, UNICEF, et cetera, how they do and how do they share information when they go into a mission and of course the report was sobering but then we had the opportunity to have them together and build this crisis information management advisory group which then collectively built the first strategy, crisis information management strategy of the secretary general first time which sort of should help as a lever again to bring about a crisis information management strategy that deserves this word and basically has this vision, recognizing the need for credible, accurate, complete and timely information for managing crisis in the United Nations, working collaboratively with its stakeholders to improve situational awareness and crisis information management capabilities to protect people, human dignity, environment, basically the UN mission. Based on that the strategy was developed and has basically four components which is so high level but so strong that all of these different organizations could subscribe to. Very important first is the data architecture, the data governance. What data actually are we need to share for each particular crisis? Even in each particular peacekeeping operations, define what's the data that we are sharing? What's the technology that we're gonna use? And there of course we know that these technologies are changing fast every six months and so we need some capabilities to follow that, the UN needs some capabilities. Then who is involved, who are the stakeholders? Now we know that even victims produce data, information that we can use and then of course capacity building. So we are implementing these strategies being implemented and has of course these outcomes which should lead to increased effectiveness impact and so forth. While we were doing that and now you know all that, we have been new tools have come about. So an additional sort of challenge to the organizations who tries to bring itself together, harmonize an information management strategy has now to its disposal these new tools which of course we now is history but the organization has to take into account. So a crisis information manager or a strategic has to look at these new breakdown of data and information. Before it was just the SRG who sent out his staff to look and report back today these information managers or analysts who have to produce information to the SRG for decision making has to look and master all this. And with regard to the data architecture, there is surprisingly still a lot of work to be done. For instance, very basic information about each country is not consistently available. So we're still always confronted where organizations come in a country and ask the same questions. Fortunately now, the UN has been making some progress in using technology to enable organizations to share data more easily and so new technologies come about. But still a lot of data, a lot of information is produced outside of the UN and the UN has to find ways and means to get in touch and obtain information from groups like crisis mappers who have been providing a lot of information for the first time in Haiti and now on a consistent basis also in other crises. And there are now new communities like the Digital Humanitarian Network that will be able to provide data information for instance now again in Nepal or in other areas. So this is positive development. We have also been able to work with peacekeeping operations and support DFS to go into a particular mission and talk and discuss how for instance a mission can develop an data architecture and within the mission we're having military police and civilian components and even try to see how they can work with the country team in each country. And so at the same time we were able to provide some training course on how to use new technologies, new media and so forth. So we feel that lastly that training is extremely important and so we have developed a training course which we call crisis information management training course. The first ones were executed in with the support of in Egypt but now we have done it in several places for peacekeeping operations again to introduce and how we could master new media in the mission. This having said I think we still have a long way to go. I think thank God we have now these reports who recognize the challenges and the opportunities and we will use these reports how we can push forward the frontier forward but is still sort of below the radar screen. Not enough money is available for information management. We have heard from our colleagues and so we are working very hard and close with some member states like Sweden and others how we can introduce more money on a consistent basis into UN operations, peacekeeping or humanitarian operations. These are the things that are cut first if money is very low. We have some progress made quite recently that now even in the budgetary process in the fifth committee and so forth based on a report by the secretary general more recognition is given to this area and potentially more funds and that there is a mechanism now how the secretary general and the secretary is doing in terms of improving crisis information management. Something which is also still missing is when we look at peacekeeping operations and others we're not looking enough how we're doing in crisis information management and I think there also some work is to be done with the competent organizations in the UN. Then also there must be a capability how the UN can follow this fast moving field and so there I think also the UN needs to be strengthened to follow for instance the policies of UN aviators including some of the tricky questions the ethical questions how, what are we doing with the data when we're flying over refugee camps and so forth. So there is a lot of work to do and so we are of course happy that we can be part of this process and having the family together. We just had a meeting two weeks ago in New York where we were reviewing process again with the support of Sweden. So thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much Daniel and we have already got some questions from you in the audience and if you have further questions you're welcome to write them down and I will be collected by our colleagues from USIP. I have a question here to Stephanie but I think it can also be a question to all of you and it has to do with the culture in our organizations company culture or organization culture well the culture in organizations and the question is can you speak about how senior DUD officials are learning about the social media to be used as a tool for spread cons? Absolutely and first actually I just want to give credit where credit is due. The statistic that I mentioned earlier was from the peaceoperationsreview.org so I just said that I would do that. Answer that question, it's a little bit varied. I convene a meeting with all of the digital leads for all the services and we're all kind of going through this process as one and we all have different leaders and we all have different leaders in terms of their familiarity and comfortable comfort with social media. So for example the Air Force, no sorry excuse me the Marines in order to get the commandant on social media they did a little experiment. They had the commandant sit down for a traditional Q and A where they asked him questions that were submitted by Marines and he answered the questions and then they put the full interview online. It was a 30 minute interview and it went online and then they decided that they were gonna do something a little different they were gonna do a Facebook town hall and so they put the commandant on the Marines Facebook page and they did a live Q and A session and they saw there were just huge differences in who was asking questions, what kinds of questions the commandant was asking what they found is that they were getting as I would say a little bit more less PC questions in the Facebook town hall people were much more willing to ask the questions that were really on their mind versus in the sit down Q and A where it was a very, it was a more formal setting they were getting technical questions tell me about my pay, tell me about my benefits but when they put them on the Facebook town hall he got questions about what if I have an alcohol what if I have a DUI how is that gonna impact my service really like hard hitting questions and so that got the commandant realizing that there were a lot of benefits to getting on social media he does not have his own account at this time and he is now going to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who does have a Facebook page so it'd be very interesting to see if he takes over that page when he becomes the new chairman in the fall and then I think just lastly with as I said earlier just to come back to what we did with the Secretary of Defense we showed him stats, right we found there was a 2014 Blue Star Families report that had all these numbers showcasing who's on Facebook we asked our Twitter contacts who's on Twitter, right we looked at where our audience was and that is how we convinced the Secretary that he should be involved I will say that I was not originally a fan of putting him on Facebook because it does require commitment from the host, right it requires the principle to be active and to want to engage and so that's something that we're working on right now trying to get him to be liking comments and responding to people and that'll just be something that we work on over the next few months Oh, sorry the only thing I would say is there's two additional points which is making sure that use of digital media is included in everybody's performance reviews because we as an organization a medium-sized organization everybody goes through the performance review process once a year and making sure that digital and use of digital media is part of the performance reviews has an amazing impact on people's willingness to use it and I think the second element is from a generational perspective I mean, 90% of the people at the UN Foundation have it as part of their DNA so you don't need to educate them but for old people like me you have to show some of the buddy that use of digital media actually produces results and so making sure that you do an internal story telling not just about number of impressions and how many people could have theoretically seen this but what happened when, you know, a policymaker, somebody in the media saw that digital trend and therefore it led to another level of either an advocacy action or a media exposure and I think trying to help tell that internal story about the relationship between digital and then a broader message sometimes helps Yeah, definitely. Daniel, would you also like to comment on his question? No, not really. I mean, I'm also part of the older generation but that's a part of our struggle to convince, I cannot talk about the UN but my government, Swiss government how difficult it is to get understanding and for this, you know, changing world and it has to do that most of our decision makers have a certain age. And then they hear from their children but how, you know, and the gene, the reaction, the reflex, so I think we have to wait a few years. Well, we have also got another question, very practical but still very important question on resources and the question is, as a first step what type of resources does the human need to take the frontier forward? What type of investments are we talking about in terms of human resources, financial resources and technical resources? And that's a question to all of you. Daniel, please. Actually, I don't think it takes much. It's just, you know, reprioritizing the money and give, you know, put the political will behind it to have staff, more staff, better trained staff who can master these challenges from a strategic point of view or information management point of view. So that is just reprioritizing staff and have it as a generalized staffing, you know. For instance, you know, I mean, talking about more like maybe a humanitarian operation but Burma, you know, when they had big humanitarian crises, you know, a lot of people, organizations come in, Ocha and so with lots of resources and information management. And then when the crisis goes down and then everybody's gone and then there's nobody there. And, you know, when it's a new crisis then you have to build up the data architecture and the capabilities. So we need also permanent staffing in and we're talking to the UNDP now and the resident coordinators. We have a minimum, you know, of capability in. Now the other one is technology. The technology, as we said, is a very fast moving and it's not costly anymore but you have to have somebody who can really handle it. And ideally, you mentioned Lebanon, I think they have a very strong capabilities there but not everywhere. So there needs to be built in some new capabilities kind of a lab, you know. Some people who understand these technologies and are part of the mission. That's my recommendation but in terms of resources it doesn't cost very much. I would agree, the other thing I would say is to echo your point which is, you know, the digital media person needs it not, it can't be their secondary responsibilities. You need to make sure that your media and outreach operation has somebody who's sole job it is to do digital and if you don't it will always be somebody's second priority. Yeah, I would just add that I agree it doesn't take much. I mean the beauty of social media is that it is social and the idea is that if you have a good piece of content your audience will share it. In my previous role at the Truman Project we had a miniscule budget and I think I spent maybe, you know, like I had a campaign where we spent $5 a week for a month and that was like the budget, you know. And we still saw gains because if you are strategic about how you're spending that money if you are using the right hashtags, if you're putting it out at the right time, if you're targeting at the right people a dollar can go a long way. At the DOD we do not have a paid strategy, it is all earned. And so we really have to think strategically about when are we posting, what are we posting about, who are we tagging, who are we talking to and what content are we sharing. And so it's a combination of those things but you really can go far with not a lot. I have also another question to you Stephanie and the question is as follows, how do you deal with a problem that military cannot or are not allowed to tweet? Practically, does everybody have to become a communicator? Observe that they can't tweet? What was the military cannot tweet? That was the question. Well, I think what they're asking is if you are not familiar with the platform but you're being put on it, I'm gonna kind of go in that direction. I think that yes, at some level you do have to understand how to communicate but if you are a policy expert I would hope that you can communicate on your issue. And what that means though is just finding maybe a less wonky way to communicate. So I always try to think story first. Give examples, behind the scenes pictures always do well on social media. So if you are about to go speak at an event or you're going to travel somewhere really cool, don't necessarily just focus on the speech but focus on what is happening. So a great example of that is the secretary traveled to Singapore recently and was on an Osprey where he flew over the Malacca Straits to see the economic activity that was going on. And of course that's a pretty cool photo but it was gonna be hard for us to explain that. So what we did instead is we contacted the literal combat ship Fort Worth which is a ship stationed on the Malacca Straits and we asked them, can you make a video one minute long of your sailors explaining why is it important for you to be here? And so they gave us a two minute video showcasing three of their sailors talking about why it was important for them to be in the Malacca Straits. And that video did so much better than if we had had the secretary try to explain I'm here at the Malacca Straits and it's important. So I think that there are different ways for you to communicate. It doesn't always have to be through you. You can showcase other people's work. We tend to use, especially for the secretary's page we use the social media strategy it's called the rule of thirds. So one third of our content is original content from the secretary's page. One third of our content is shared content from DOD channels. And then a third of our content is content from people like-minded individuals to the secretary. And that strategy helps us kind of showcase his priorities but also amplifies what DOD is doing at large. Thank you Stephanie. Well I would like to finish by putting up a question myself and let's think a little bit after the box. Next year we will get the new secretary general and let's think that he or she decides to appoint an undersecretary general responsible for communication and public affairs. And you are the person. So my question to you is what should be your first decision and advice to the new secretary general when it comes to communication and public affairs? As the new appointed undersecretary general, Daniel. Well I would ask him finally, I mean he has of course had his strategy the crisis information management strategy which could include all these components. But I think he should really put his weight behind it. And he can do quite a lot. I think that's what we could refer to. This report which I mentioned and so forth. So that's what I want to do. And then go to some countries, member states who will support him and say yes, you're doing a good job. We'll support you all the way. So that's what I would recommend. Thank you Daniel. Peter. Well when she is sworn in as the next secretary general. Because I'll be shocked if it's not a woman. Because there are plenty of qualified women in this world to be secretary general of the United Nations. So when she is sworn in my suggestion is is my advice to her new undersecretary general for public information and communications will be to get the digital communications teams like Stephanie from the member states to come brief the team there and give them advice about here are the top five or six things that you need to be doing within the UN system and work with them for a few weeks on a little bit of a detail. So I would say there's so much wealth of talent among member states and they should be asked to offer it to the UN. Thank you Peter and Stephanie. I would do obviously an assessment of the digital communications I guess capabilities and I would identify where the gaps are and then I would ask for a budget to fill those gaps. So whether or not that means hiring a graphic designer whether or not that means hiring a social media strategist or whether or not that means creating a budget for a paid strategy. That's what I would do. Excellent. Thank you Daniel. Thank you Peter and thank you Stephanie and please join me in a big hand to our excellent panel. So Sven Erick, Stephanie, Peter and Daniel thank you very much for your comments and some ideas for us to think about innovating and maybe using some of these innovations to move the communications effort forward. So what we're going to do now it's about well it's almost exactly three o'clock. So we're going to take a 15 minute break. It's going to be a little bit different. After we take the break we're going to go to our work rooms, our work group rooms which are located back up the stairs and then just across the hall. So this morning when you were registering you should have been able to sign in for a particular work group that you will find interesting. If you didn't then please stop by the registration desk and do so just to indicate which group you'd like to participate in. The intent of the work group then is to dive a little bit deeper into some of these conversations, answer some more questions and then come back with potentially some recommendations that maybe we just didn't have time for in plenary. So we want to do that and then at the conclusion of those work groups we're going to ask then the moderators to shepherd everyone back in here on around the four o'clock hour to begin our final session for the day. So are we good on that? Any questions? Okay, thank you. Please enjoy the break and then off to your work groups. Is it, isn't it just up the street? There you go. Okay. Okay. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. Okay. So welcome back. Our final session today, we're fortunate to have with us two senior level individuals who certainly have helped shape the peace operations, conversation and activities for a number of years. First we would like to hear from Major General Retired Gordy, who's a member of the Department of Defense of the United States of America, who's a member of the United States of America, who's a member of the United States of America, senior advisor for the challenges forum. And then he'll be followed up by Dr. Victoria Holt, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Department of State Bureau of International Organizational Affairs. So Major General Gordon? I've been given six minutes to talk to you. This rapidly diminished group, I see. My goodness, where is everyone? Yeah, okay. To talk to you before I hand over to Tori. I just want to start again by observing the serendipity of timing of this excellent seminar coming as it does at an increasingly difficult time for UN peace operations, as articulated at lunch by the under-Secretary-General, Ladsouce, but also right after the release of the high-level panels report. This report has tried to address some of these Ladsouce challenges and has boldly laid down a gauntlet, I would suggest, for all who have an interest or a concern in wider peace operations. As an aside, I think it's probably worth remembering the difference between interest and concern by considering the standard English breakfast of bacon and egg. Now, the chicken undoubtedly has an interest in the production of this fine breakfast dish, but I would suggest that the pig has a concern. And this is my theme because I would suggest also that all practitioners in peace operations from their grand strategic formulation in New York to their operational and tactical execution in the field are in the camp of the pig. They need to be concerned, really concerned. And now, while this seminar has not been about the panel report, it is inevitable that the gauntlet of the report has laid down will resonate for the next generation of practitioners. How we react to these challenges will help define how much we have understood of the significance of this seminar. So the link between the report and how well it is strategically communicated is central to whether it will really make a difference. And I think that speaks to the truism of strategic communications. That is not so much about how we communicate our actions, but more about what our actions actually communicate. It is therefore unsurprising that the report itself has something to say on the need, as Annika has identified, for a radical improvement in the UN's strategic communications. When I was actively or more actively involved in the business of strategic communication, it was drummed into me that if you have a plan or make a decision without a communication strategy, you do not really have a plan or a decision. And this speaks to the centrality of strategic communication. It is a political and operational prerequisite for success. And as such, has to be embedded in all our thinking and in all our actions. As Nick said this morning, peace operations do not succeed through hard power. They succeed through soft power, which implies the primacy of the political process, a message heavily underscored by the high level panel report, which in turn axiomatically demands good strategic communications. As Sven Erich Sörder said at the beginning, if we are not seen or heard, we do not exist. We have heard perhaps somewhat dryly that strategic communication is a variety of techniques used to explain, clarify, and advocate the mission of peace operations to key target audiences. Now we have heard and discussed today, but using different terms of the three core functions and their challenges of strategic communication in modern peace operations. And I would suggest those three core functions are firstly to inform, that's talking about shaping the narrative, to have a story, having a viable product, and to tell that story in a way that the public and the target audience understands. And we've spoken at length about that. The second core factor, I think, is to influence how to change behavior and perceptions. Of note, the UN staff college believes that communication is strategic when it supports and promotes a key objective. The ultimate goal of communication is to facilitate the go on, a change of behavior rather than merely to disseminate information. But we know and we've heard today that this is not easy and requires really good analysis, good strategies, and the effective deployment of a multiplicity of technologies. The third core function we have also identified but we didn't call it that, is to protect. Essentially the image of the mission and the image of the organization. To do this, we really need to understand and listen to public perceptions, understand the need for conversations and dialogue, and perhaps most of all, the need for good internal communications and consistent and coherent messaging. Most of all, we have to walk the talk, because if we don't, we'll be let down by it. I believe that these core functions are broadly understood within the UN system and those who support it, but they are understood from the chicken's perspective. They are of interest. I sense that this rather theoretical, senior level consent for the need can sometimes founder on the bewildering pace of change and emerging challenges inherent in the new communication and digital social media technologies. As such, the default setting tends to be let's leave this to the experts, or even worse, let's leave this completely. There are undoubtedly issues of multiculturalism and generation driven comfort zone issues here, which means that our current set of leaders with a few notable exceptions do not recognize that they must be actively concerned with these changes. I do believe, however, that this seminar has given us a much better handle on how UN leaders and people of influence to the UN can do better in their strategic communications for the UN. After all, it has to be concerned, as we heard this morning from Christina, that extremist organizations, such as Islamic State, have demonstrated a sophistication in using the new technologies for strategic communication in a way that makes the UN's effort look archaic. And that is our challenge. I sense that today we have set an agenda for the challenges partnership, which Annika recognized and noted at the beginning of the day, in that through a better understanding of the need and the techniques to communicate better, we can support the implementation process of the identified changes needed to improve peace operations. And after all, at the end of the day, that's why we're here. Thank you very much. I hope that's done a degree of justice to all our interventions today, but I'm going to hand out to Tori to really put the icing on the cake. So, thanks, sir. If I could just take 30 seconds, because I made an error and I didn't read your bio. And so, I want to just take 30 seconds to be able to do that. It's all written here. It must be a long day for me. So, anyways, my apologies, not an excuse. So, here's why you should have been paying close attention to Major General Gordon. He's had a full career in the British Army, including serving as sector commander in un-performed Bosnia in 94-95, and being the British Army's director of corporate communications, culminating in command of the British Army in Scotland in the north of England. He served as a force commander, both in the UN mission in Ethiopia near Atreia, and he retired in 2005, and since then has worked on projects, UNDPKO, UNOIOS, the World Bank, UNDP, and the British government and others as an international lecturer, mentor, and consultant on peacekeeping operations. He also co-wrote and helped develop the UN's first strategic-level doctrine, the capstone doctrine for peacekeeping. He's a senior advisor to Challenges Forum, special advisor until 2013 to the late Pearson Peace Centre of Canada. And in 2005, he helped develop the UNDPKO senior mission leadership training program, and since has been the lead mentor on all 21 UN courses. So, I hope you didn't need this to pay attention to his experience and what he had to say. So, again, sir, my apologies for that. Okay, moving on. I'd like to introduce Deputy Assistant Secretary Dr. Victoria Hope. She joined the Bureau of International Organization Affairs as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in August of 2009. Her portfolio includes issues before the Security Council, peace operations, sanctions, and the UN Political Affairs. It's enough to keep you busy, I think. Prior to assuming this position, she was a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Centre, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, where she co-directed the Future of Peace Operations program. During her tenure at Stimson, she wrote and spoke on peace and security issues, including the UN and regional peace operations, protection of civilians, targeted sanctions, rule of law, and U.S. policy. She is a graduate of the Naval War College and Wesleyan University. Ms. Hope. Thanks very much. Years ago, I was... I just left a different administration. I'd left the State Department. NGO asked me to travel with them to a country that was an emerging democracy. And we got briefed by the ambassador on these immense plans and how the U.S. was deeply engaged and how they really communicated about democracy. And so I did ask about their... how they were communicating with the world. And he said, well, you need to meet... I forget the guy's name, Bob. So I sat down with Bob. I said, Bob, how do you do this? He said, well, I have a fax machine. Okay. Even then, I knew that probably a fax machine alone would not be able to cover a highly populous country that was emerging from military rule and support democracy. But I think we've come a long ways from those days. And so for many of us, we may feel like we're still catching up with modern technology and trying to see how it links to peace operations and the efforts of the international community on peace and security. But we have moved forward. So I'm going to stick to my strategic message, which is two things. How, as Nick Burnback earlier said, we need to take back the narrative on peacekeeping. And second, how we can do that coming up with the events that are happening later this year. I do want a sober moment here. Between walking back and forth to the State Department, I got a little email about another accusation of sexual exploitation abuse against UN peacekeepers. That cuts through all the emails I get. I get emails on everything in the world. But this is what makes headlines. Now, why is that? And why is that the story I'm getting about peacekeeping in a country where I know people are risking their lives to protect civilians? It's because it is the main narrative that we unfortunately get covered. And I will come back to that. I also think at the strategic level, we actually have seen serious challenges when missions are upholding something that's politically unpopular. Governments and civilians, sometimes not civilians, but their opponents will fight back. There's a case in Cote d'Ivoire when we all woke up and found two people both claiming to be president after the elections there. And the UN certified the election and said, sorry, one is a legitimate leader of this country. And we had a protracted political set of pressures while the peacekeeping mission was there to try and squeeze a process so one would depart. And as the end game was coming closer, I remember reports that the government had put on a loop hotel Rwanda on the national television to communicate, do not trust the UN. They're not reliable and they will not protect you. So even this is not a new question for any of us. But as far as taking back the narrative, I can say because I traveled to peacekeeping missions and so does my team that there are too many stories that are not heard that are very positive and actually extraordinary bravery at times. I think of the civilian who stood outside the compound in Bohr soon after the crisis in December 2013. And when military, armed military came up and demanded we let in to see who were their political opponents, he politely pointed to a tree and said, you can meet with them over there. And when they came up and threatened him, he turned around and said, close the doors. And he told me, it's just me and two other guys and we were unarmed and all of them had arms. That standoff in the end saved thousands probably or at least hundreds of lives. They backed down, he had to leave the country. But many of us have never heard these stories. You can imagine what happened in Haiti after the earthquake when the very people who were phones ringing with themselves injured and trying to recover as their colleagues many too many had died or in Syria as unarmed observers bravely went in to try and deter what we've seen since which is extreme violence. When you hear news about Mali in a peace accord or an attack, we don't know the names of the people who are serving there or who's making the difference in the negotiations or with a local community, but they're there. This is an immensely powerful narrative. It's one that many of us know parts of, but how do we better communicate it? It's the reason why governments, NGOs, academics and those of us engaged care about these missions because we know all these people. I think it's over 120 countries contribute civilians, police, military. It's not cookie cutter, but every day I'm impressed when I go out to meet people I've never met in my life who have a Security Council resolution and they're trying to do the best they can with what they have. So, how do we help lift this up? Obviously, we've got a few opportunities this year. One is a high-level panel that's just been released, which is a great opportunity. In some cases, there are things in there that have been known amongst maybe many of us, but let's lift them up and say, it's not okay to have this problem set. Let's band together and say, let's figure out because we want these missions to succeed how we solve some of those problems. Many of us have been going to regional conferences that were kicked off last fall after the summit on peacekeeping and are leading up to a second summit which we're proud that President Obama will be at along with Secretary General and other governments to talk about how together countries are going to contribute more of core capacities to UN missions, whether it's personnel, enablers, or skills that the UN is in short supply of having access to. TPKO has already taken advantage of this. I must laugh a little bit. Strategic Force Generation and Planning Cell does not trip off the tongue. Why are we so excited about this? It's basically an office that you can call if you're interested in peacekeeping as a government and they will help solve your questions. Thank you. That's what it really is. Strategic Force Generation and Planning is really about how you get countries that may either want to expand into different areas of peacekeeping or maybe for the first time can have that conversation and say over the next two to five years, this is what we're interested in, this is what we're going to share. All of these are things that I think help us have an opportunity to talk about what peacekeeping is about, why it supports ending war and conflict, why it supports fragile peace, why it's made up of not just military but also police, civilians and dedicated diplomats who volunteer to go to countries they may not have ever seen on a map before and do their best on behalf of the international community. So finally, just on the summit, we're here together to try and get as many countries to come and commit something new at that event and that's just, that's not the end. I think that's the beginning of a much more robust and engaged dialogue and doing so, all of us can help change the narrative about peacekeeping and basically validate that it matters and we're here to basically fill in those gaps rather than say, ha, too bad that mission wasn't able to do X, Y, Z. So thank you very much to Folk Brenadette, to the Institute of Peace Challenge's forum for bringing us together. It's always a good opportunity to meet colleagues from across the world and sometimes down the street. Thank you again. So, General Gordon and Deputy Assistant Secretary Holt, thanks so much for taking the time to spend with us today and thanks for sharing your insights and remarks and we look forward to hearing about the successes for the upcoming summit. It's not my privilege to once again ask Ms. Annika Hilding-Norberg to come up. Thank you very much, Jim. And before I start, I would like to say special thanks to Robert Gordon and Victoria Holt for concluding our substantive discussion here today with your very thoughtful and illuminating insightful reflections on both the issues that have been discussed and the challenges facing us ahead. We are, indeed, facing tremendous challenges that we face facing tremendous challenges to modern peace operations. This, I think, have come through throughout the day. At the same time, I believe there is also an historic opportunity to make a positive difference. There is a global momentum for change generated by the various panel reports and also, of course, the galvanized interest in making a difference. And it is my hope that this time around, just as 15 years ago when the Brahimi report galvanized the international community to really make a difference, I hope this opportunity will find itself with us also now. The purpose of the workshop was, of course, to contribute to generate new ideas for strategic communications in support of UMP's operations. It was also meant to mobilize support for making that happen. Both to the UN headquarters but also to member states who want to support that effort. And if I can just add something, it was mentioned earlier that there's 150 people supporting the 125,000 in terms of public affairs and public information. But this is people in the field and my intention was drawn to the fact that from a strategic point of view at a strategic level, there's actually six people supporting 125,000. And this at the UN headquarters means there's one chief, one deputy, two desk officers and one project officer. There's no digital media officer in the DPKO DFS. Sometimes those duties are undertaken by a graphic expert and the support staff. So, I believe that is what someone called it. It's no way to run a rail wall. I would like to say, though, that of course the DPKO DFS benefits from support from the DPI, colleagues in the DPI. But in terms of having a dedicated in-house capacity in DPKO DFS to develop the strategic communication, the resources are negligible. So, despite the financial constraints, I hope, when it is time for member states to decide to recruit the 125,000 one peacekeeper, I think it would be a very well invested resource if that would be the first digital media officer in DPKO DFS. I think that's what one of the things that I'm taking out of the conversation today because they need it. They need all of our support. We have learned much from the great range of expertise and speaking to us today and which was very articulated and reflected in the presentations just made. I would like to add one particular, I think, interesting issue which was not included in the presentations today. And this was the absolutely recent move by the global review of peace operations into the digital world, which the CIC at the NYU in New York has been doing for a long time, but now finally just days ago put on digitally. It's an enormous resource that I think very much also help all of us develop our strategic communication capacities and I think I wanted to highlight that as a particular resource that we can all access as of last week. I'm still thinking of moving into the digital age, as you see on my notes here, but focusing therefore I would like to thank all the speakers and chairs for their contributions this week. It has been extremely illuminating for myself and I've heard from many colleagues as well. And I would also like to thank the participants who have come either from far or from New York or from Washington. I think everyone bringing the different expertise and experiences and of course bringing the new found insights back to their countries and functions and responsibilities will be very useful. I would also like to thank the partners of the challenges forum specifically because everything we do in challenges builds towards the next effort. So the results coming out of this meeting I will return to very shortly, but the meeting that we came to focus on here built very much on the findings of the design and madness and capabilities report. That was an effort that I would like to thank our partners from Germany, India, Nigeria, France, USA, United States, Pakistan and partners from Canada and South Africa for having spare headed over the past two years. Also Japan was kindly to support the launch of that event which was meant to the secretary general. Tomorrow we will have a wrap up session with DPCODFS identifying the key takeaways from the discussions here, building on the findings of our concluding speakers. So the organizer in contact with DPCODFS will see what we can take further and make into practical recommendations. A summary report by the organizers will be sent to you in a few weeks time and we look forward to continue working on this subject as one of the work strands over the next year. So we invite you to stay engaged, stay tuned and stay online. And before closing it is my honor to extend our collective thanks to the colleagues that were not mentioned this morning but who really have made this meeting a reality. And I would like to then invite you to join me in thanking them. From the United States Institute of Peace our main hosts here I would like to extend our thanks to George Lopez to Peter Logo of course for the background paper that really I heard very clearly Robert referring to in his concluding remarks and I think for me also learning much putting things in perspective. Jeff Helsing Jim Roof of course who has been central to this process as with Kelly Mayder. We also have a Selena Kano and Jocelyn Walker and Matt with Jamie Schillinger Steve Watson Brian Hammond remember this recorder so if the person is not here they will still know about it. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank our colleagues at the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute which of course have been focused ever since 1997 in the challenges and there I would also like to add our thanks to Dwight Raymond Belinda Matty and of course the Piki Soy interns that Piki Soy brought to join us and they have been taking note of everything that we have been saying so thank you very much it's Jonathan McMullin Lauren Renault, Walter Stankiewicz and Mary Juggernaut also at the State Department we have Deborah O'Dell who is our point of contact for all operational issues and at the Department of Defense of course Sarah Kapell is our key point of contact I would also like to thank our Swedish coordinating colleagues the armed forces here represented by Hans Grönlund and the Swedish police represented by Don Pettersson finally last but not least my colleagues in the Challenges Forum Secretariat which is Givike Jönsson my deputy and Anna Viktorsson who has really been central to this whole project here with the USIP and Jonny Börjesson and back home we have Andrea Robus who is engaged online as we are here and also Robert Gordon for his contributions to our ongoing efforts so finally again thank you everyone and stay tuned and warmly welcome to our annual forum in Jerevan 56th of October hope to see you there, thank you very much I think there are footsteps on these stairs so just two things, if I can take an alibi for you I'd like to thank our photographer who I was remiss in providing the name so Fitz, thank you very much and there will be more thanks after everybody sees the pictures and how well they turn out second of all I just wanted to remind everybody that there is a reception at the Georgetown Washington Marriott in Georgetown up on 22nd Street that begins in about 30 minutes so hurry and thank you to everybody else just to echo Annika's comments, thanks everybody for attending and it's been wonderful, thank you