 Good morning, afternoon, and evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Katira Ariya Inesha, and I'm a program officer with the Resolve Network and with the US Institute of Pieces Program on Violence and Extremism. I'm pleased to welcome you to the third in a series of events organized as part of an ongoing collaboration between Resolve, USIP, and the Securing the Future Initiative and the second event in Resolve's 7th Annual Global Forum Series. Before turning things over to our moderator, I would like to provide some background about Resolve's work, the work of the Securing the Future Initiative, and say a bit about today's event. For those of you who are new to Resolve, the Resolve Network is housed at USIP and operates as a global consortium of researchers, research organizations, policy makers, and practitioners committed to better research, informed practice, and improved policy on violent extremism. Our research initiatives stand thematic and geographic areas that include commissioned original research, capacity building, and convening efforts focused on facilitating and elevating research and locally informed insights for policy and practice. To learn more about our work, please visit our website and follow us on Twitter. The Securing the Future Initiative, or SFI, is a joint project of the Fourth Freedom Forum and the CEPON Center. SFI was launched in September of 2021 on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. To conduct the first-ever independent review and assessment of the U.N. Security Council's counterterrorism activities since 2001, seeking to identify lessons learned in addressing the evolving Paris threat. In September of this year, SFI released its findings and recommendations and a report identifying aspects in which the Security Council can best add value to international counterterrorism efforts today and featuring policy-relevant recommendations to ensure a more effective and sustainable approach going forward. The SFI can be... A report can be downloaded at their website at ffi-ct.org. Over the course of the past year, Resolve and SFI have also partnered to produce a series of commissioned research briefs that share practical analysis to assist policymakers and practitioners and offer policy-relevant recommendations for the Security Council's future role and work in addressing terrorist threats. On behalf of SFI and our partners, we would like to express thanks and gratitude to the European Union, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and to USIP for providing generous... Today's event discusses questions on themes that emerge from SFI's research and will explore ways in which to work within the United Nations Security Council architecture to make its counterterrorism paradigm more holistic, but they focus on peace-building, development, and enhancing cooperation between the United Nations and its member state governments. Today's discussion will specifically focus on the relevance of SFI's findings to US government policy and practice in areas impacted by counterterrorism activities, such as humanitarian aid, development, sanctions, and much more. Before we get started, I'd like to go over some general housekeeping. The event will start off with some brief presentations from our themes panelists, followed by a moderated discussion. This moderated discussion will then be followed by a moderated Q&A, providing an opportunity for you, the audience, to ask your questions. We encourage you to ask questions to the speakers throughout the presentation, moderated discussion, and Q&A via the chat function on the USIP event page on which this discussion is being live-cast. Please also feel free to submit your questions on Twitter using the hashtag, hashtag resolve forum. The event moderator will incorporate as many of your questions as possible into broader conversation with the speakers. As a reminder, this event is on the record and will be available on USIP's YouTube page after this live broadcast. With that, I am honored to introduce today's moderator, Dr. Matthew Levitt. Dr. Levitt has worked on CDE issues for many years. Currently, he serves as the Frummer Wexler Fellow at the Washington Institute and director of its Jeanette and Eli Reinhardt program on counterterrorism and intelligence, where he also leads a CDE working group that meets weekly and includes over 800 people around the world. He's also an adjunct professor and holder of the Andrew H. Siegel Professorship in American Middle East foreign policy at Georgetown University. From 2005 to early 2007, he served as deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the US Department of Treasury, where he was deputy chief of the office of intelligence and analysis. In 2008 to 2009, he served as a state department counterterrorism advisor to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He also served as a counterterrorism intelligence analyst at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he was involved in a number of crisis situations, including the terrorist threat surrounding the turn of the millennium and the September 11th terrorist attacks. He's earned numerous awards and commendations for his government service and written extensively on terrorism, countering violent extremism, elicit finance and sanctions, with articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals, policy magazines, and the press. Finally, Dr. Levitt serves as a member of Resolves Research Advisory Council, and I would be remiss if I did not also mention that he is, in his own words, a fire-breathing Boston Red Fox fan. Before handing it over to Matt, on behalf of Resolves in USIP, I wanna thank you all again for joining us. We look forward to an insightful conversation. Kat, thank you so much. Note to self, I need to shorten that bio. Other than the Red Sox part, most of it can be cut. I am really thrilled to be able to moderate this session today on an incredibly insightful and important and timely report written by several close friends who have some really important and deep insights to share. The report is extremely timely, and I think that if you look back over 20 years, I think we can honestly say that we collectively in the international community have experienced remarkable success from a tactical perspective in countering terrorism. We've foiled the tax, we've disrupted terrorist networks, but counterterrorism efforts have been far less successful from a strategic vantage point, given that far more people today are radicalized to violent extremism of a very broad variety than in 2001, representing a more diversified and globally dispersed terrorist threat. Some of our successful tactical counterterrorism efforts may even serve as drivers of the broader strategic terrorism threat we continue to face today. So a conversation about how the UN's counterterrorism efforts can be updated to more holistically address terrorism in the larger context of peace building, development and human rights is just critical. And I'm thrilled to have Noreen Choudhury-Fink and Eric Rozan and Alastair Miller here to talk about it. Noreen is the executive director of the Sufran Center. She previously served as senior policy advisor on counterterrorism and sanctions at the United Kingdom's mission to the United Nations. Prior to that, she worked with UN Women and the UN Counterterrorism Executive Directorate joining several country CT assessment visits and strengthening integration of gender issues into the full spectrum of counterterrorism measures. Before joining the UN, she was head of research and analysis for the Global Center on Cooperative Security and developed a portfolio in counterterrorism and transnational security threats at the International Peace Institute. She's developed and implemented CT and CVE projects around the globe and has published widely on counterterrorism, gender, peace operations, the UN and de-radicalization and reintegration efforts. Eric Rozan is visiting fellow at the Sufran Center and senior associate fellow at Russi in the UK. He also serves as the executive director of the Strong Cities Network. He's been working in the multilateral counterterrorism space for more than 20 years, starting at the US mission to the United Nations and continuing at the Global Center on Cooperative Security and most recently in the Obama Administration's State Department. During his time at State, Eric helped lead efforts to launch a range of multilateral initiatives from the GCTF, GSERF, International Institute for Justice, Hedaya, IGAD's CVE Center of Excellence and the SCM. He's published dozens of policy papers, articles and blogs on a range of CT and preventing and countering violent extremism topics. And Alistair Miller is the president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and an adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. From 2004 to 2015, he was executive director of the Global Center on Cooperative Security. He has taught graduate level courses on international security and foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, lectured at the University of Maryland and conducted training courses on countering violent extremism at the UK foreign and Commonwealth offices, diplomatic academy and for the European Union in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He's written numerous chapters, articles and reports on international security, human rights and the rule of law, as well as on the nexus between security and development. So you are in tremendously capable hands this morning. I'd like to turn it over to Eric and then Noreen for some opening comments and then we will follow on into a moderated discussion with the three of you before we open it up to Q and A from the full audience. Thank you all for tuning in this morning. Thank you to USIP Resolve and the Secure Future Initiative for putting this event together and for putting this incredible paper together. Please do read the full paper to 50-something pages. And right now I will turn it over to Eric. Eric, please. Thanks, Matt, into USIP and Resolve and all of our sponsors for giving us this opportunity. I thought before we get into a discussion which I hope we can spend most of the time on, I would just give some background on the initiative, why we launched it, how we conducted it and then some of the key findings that were revealed. Obviously, we launched this 20 years after 9-11, an attack that fundamentally transformed the international security and wider multilateral landscape. At the time, because of its unique ability to create binding globally legal obligations and act quickly and decisively, the United States and its allies right after 9-11 turn to the council to generate a exceptional response to an exceptional threat at the time. Many states today, however, that spearheaded this heightened focus on counterterrorism now face a number of challenges that I don't need to go to, that everyone's familiar with that are equally if not more pressing. Many of these have been on the agendas of the major multilateral meetings over the last couple of years. Counterterrorism has not been. Given these competing priorities and the volume and scope of counterterrorism legal and policy measures that have been put in place over the last 20 plus years now, questions have been prompted on now how to right-size the approach towards terrorism and how to ensure it's fit for purpose given the current environment and is informed by lessons learned over the past 20 years. In fact, over 20 years, the council generated literally more than 40 resolutions on counterterrorism far more than any other topic it was seized with. It created several committees on counterterrorism that still operate independently largely expert bodies to oversee their implementation. And it did all of this without ever defining the word terrorism a term which remains highly politicized and contested. For 21 years, the international community has essentially been allowed to define terrorism as it wishes. And this of course has produced far reaching consequences that many human rights advocates and others have spoken about very eloquently and passionately. The council's response, as you may know, required countries to criminalize terrorism, not defined to prevent terrorists from crossing their borders, not terrorist, not defined to deny terrorist financial assets and bring terrorists to justice or extradite them to other countries. Over the 20 years, the council through its administrative mechanisms has helped countries adopt laws, creates counterterrorism institutions, develop counterterrorism expertise all ostensibly in line with the council's requirements. Yet recognizing that many states lack the tools to implement this ever expansive web of counterterrorism requirements. The council elevated capacity building which today is sort of a bread and butter is the bread and butter of international counterterrorism engagement but 20 years ago was largely non-existent. It elevated this to the height of numerous conversations on counterterrorism. It encouraged regional bodies from the African Union to ECOWAS, to ASEAN, to the OSCE to develop their own counterterrorism structures in part to facilitate the implementation of the council's global requirements. Yet what we found and it's not rocket science that there's never been a review of all of this effort in 20 plus years. And there's never been a review of the impact of these efforts whether from the perspective of communities, governments, civil society or even the UN itself. And all of this has contributed to a continued catalyzation of these efforts in an environment where the misuse of counterterrorism measures often developed to comply with council requirements has gone unchecked. And many states use, continue to use the narrative of counterterrorism while violating human rights, shrinking civil society space and undermining civil liberties. We launched this initiative a year ago to review the council's efforts over 20 years, reflect on lessons learned and see what a new approach might look like. And some might say that, who cares about the security council and counterterrorism? Counterterrorism is a huge animal of which the security council is a, maybe a finger of, it's not a significant piece of it. But the reality is that 20 years ago, it was the council that catalyzed so much of what exists today, internationally, regionally, domestically, that few remember that the link goes back to the council's initiatives 20 years ago. And so the thinking is that if the council doesn't change its approach, many, many countries around the world are less likely to change their approaches. Many countries around the world respond to the council's demands, requirements. They take their obligations under the UN Charter very seriously. And so when the council says something, they do it. But if they don't have guidance on how to do it right, then often it gets politicized and manipulated for domestic reasons that are not necessarily consistent with the UN Charter itself. And so over the course of a year, nine months or so, we conducted interviews in person, virtual. We convened people in person for workshops, virtual webinars. Over 500 stakeholders were consulted. And we came up with what we think are a series of practical recommendations that could be acted upon by different council members and the wider international community to help right size this approach and have it be more reflective of the needs of the current terrorism landscape. Before I give the floor over to Noreen to highlight just some of these recommendations, I just wanna flag a few of the core findings that informed our recommendations. And the first is the continued disconnect in the council's approach. So on September 12th, 2001, the primary threat, as Matt knows, perhaps better than anyone, was emanating from centralized terrorist groups with global ambitions targeting the West. Fast forward to today, and these global groups and their affiliates are now increasingly aligning with local armed groups and taking advantage of local governance deficits, human rights violations and wider instability. They're broadening geographically as they strengthen their presence in conflict-ridden regions. And it's no longer the West that is the primary target. Addressing these threats necessitates going after the grievances of these local populations and integrating counter-terrorism in a wider conflict prevention, peace building and development lens. And looking beyond central governments, national security actors, and empowering instead local actors. And in particular, recognizing the extent to which the behavior of the national governments themselves towards their citizens is continuously found to be the primary driver of radicalization that can lead to violence. Yet the council maintains an approach, as we like to say, as if it's September 12th, 2001. The second concerns the increasing use of council measures to legitimize or enable the misuse of national counter-terrorism measures that violate human rights. Many with whom we spoke lamented that the council has only adopted cursory rhetorical measures to mitigate this risk. Well, some of the council bodies have focused more attention on human rights over the last 20 years. There is little public evidence of impact. In fact, the trend line in terms of human rights-compliant CT measures, as Fiannuala Dinaldin, the special repertoire on human rights and counter-terrorism at the UN, continuously illustrates is going in the wrong direction. So the more council activity over the last 20 years has not led to a reduction in human rights violations, but has contributed to the exact opposite. Obviously, there's no direct correlation there, but there is some connection. And fourth, our interlocutors pointed to the fact that the council's failure to adopt, adapt to an expanding multilateral architecture of counter-terrorism, including within the UN itself, that the council itself catalyzed. We heard how the proliferation of counter-terrorism bodies around the world and their siloed nature, starting with the UN itself and extending to other inter-governmental actors, has strained the engagement and absorption capacities of smaller states in particular. So again, to behave as if it's September 12th, 2001, in terms of where to situate its role within the wider multilateral ecosystem, even though that ecosystem is dramatically different than it was 21 years ago. And finally, we heard that global measures to counter-terrorism elaborated by the council do not always apply to more localized or regional threat groups. And more attention is needed to tailor and contextualize these measures with relevant local partners. As with any discussion about the council and why are UN's counter-terrorism work, the SFI process feature numerous criticisms and concerns, many of which are not new and some of which are not unique to counter-terrorism, but extend more broadly to the UN system. And so while it's relatively easy to identify the shortcomings of which there are many, identifying ways to address them is more challenging. And it behooves us to remember that although counter-terrorism is not at the top of the agenda of the international community anymore, unless efforts are made to right-size counter-terrorism in the Security Council, the council will continue to be spending dramatically more time on counter-terrorism than all the other issues on its agenda. Again, if the situation isn't remedied. And for the remedies, I am turning to my colleague, Noreen, for a presentation of them. Thank you. Thanks, Eric. I'm looking to Matt to see if it's okay for me to move straight into my part of the remarks. Absolutely. Just like I said, to raise the problem and leave it to someone else to solve it. Right, so good morning, everybody. Eric has laid out the many challenges and key findings that as he mentioned in over a year, over a year and a half almost now of consultations, we came to some diagnosis. And I guess now it's for me to offer some prescriptions. So I'm going to walk you through just some of the big picture ideas that have shaped the recommendations and the way forward. So given the proliferation of counter-terrorism work, as Eric has mentioned, and the various capacities that now exist in various parts of not only the UN system, but partners and regional bodies and other local and civil society organizations. And given the increasingly technical and context-specific nature of the work, and this is another area where CT is quite different on the Security Council, right? It's an incredibly technical area of work that differentiates it from the other kinds of themes that the Council addresses and the way it addresses them. Our report stresses the importance of adhering to the principle of subsidiarity, whereby the Security Council is limited to performing only those tasks that cannot be performed more appropriately by others in the UN system or other partners. And as Eric highlighted, there is increasing capacity and expertise now. So it doesn't all have to now sit within the Council. We think it's time to really think about adopting that principle of subsidiarity. Reflecting key concerns and critiques we heard from the many interlocutors we've engaged with throughout this year of consultations, the report urges the Security Council to promote the view that terrorism in any form of manifestation is best addressed through a whole-of-society approach that respects human rights, seeks to do no harm, and is underpinned by international cooperation, one that includes regional and sub-regional bodies and civil society actors who can inform these processes with views from the ground. And I think as was highlighted with the nature of terrorism shifting to these much more diffused and localized threats, that recommendation we feel is incredibly key. So the three key ideas shaping many of the recommendations in the report have kind of clustered them, so I don't have to take you through the list, is first that the Security Council should undertake an assessment of what works and what doesn't to determine its future action. To that end, Security Council members should invite the UN Secretary General to commission an independent review of the current set of resolutions and other relevant documents that govern the work of the Council and its counter-terrorism bodies, as well as other related mandates, guiding principles, working methods, and the frameworks of these bodies, including for CTED and the monitoring team. This review should be undertaken with input from UN Security Council CT bodies and member states, UN entities, regional organizations, and civil society actors, because one of the key challenges we found is nobody knows which resolutions have worked, which haven't, many of them don't have sunset clauses. So no one has really looked at the body of work and determined what to keep and what has maybe served its purpose or is doing harm. So that assessment we think is quite key. The UN Security Council, its members and relevant Security Council CT bodies could also make more effective views of existing opportunities to assess the implementation and impacts and use the tools that are already built in the system, including through these regular CTED midterm reviews and other mandate renewals, which have become increasingly pro forma and less about really assessing what is working and what the kinds of impacts of these bodies have been. Second, the Council should adopt a more strategic and restrained approach to future CT action, considering the development of a more inclusive and transparent process to determine whether new resolutions are needed, what their content should be, and their potential impacts on other Security Council mandates and on UN priorities, including development, peace and security and human rights agendas. And that I think has been one of the really harmful aspects of the exceptionalization of the CT agenda is that no one has been able to really consider how the CT work really affects some of the wider equities of the international community through the UN. And so this brings me to that third point that the Council should move from an exceptional approach to CT that has siloed it from the rest of the UN's wider peace and security development and human rights work to a more integrated approach where terrorism and counterterrorism are considered part and parcel of wider multilateral work. Some ideas for achieving that include streamlining the Security Council CT architecture, including by creating a single CT committee and expert group that can integrate, for example, counterterrorism sanctions and the work of CTED, for example, or more ambitiously transforming its multiple CT bodies into a single body with a broader peace and security mandate that includes elements of CTED, 1267 and other threats that are on Council members' agendas. As Eric already highlighted, I did wanna point out that these recommendations come on the eve, in the wake of these widespread consultations and also the work that we certainly commissioned with the Resolve Network, including these 10 research briefs and many of the ongoing consultations. So we really have hoped that these recommendations reflect a very diverse and nuanced set of perspectives. A final point just that sort of runs through the report is that we focus on the roles and impacts of the Council, but we also consider that many of these perspectives may vary depending on where you sit. So an assessment of value added and effectiveness depended on the role of the interlocutors and which UN you're speaking to, right, which entity. So we do know that impact and effectiveness are very sort of subjective terms in some ways, but we stress that as those most affected by terrorism and counterterrorism, the perspectives of communities and organizations on the front lines of these challenges must have a strong voice in informing and shaping the discourse and the policy approaches that are designed to prevent and counterterrorism. So it's just a snapshot of our recommendations on the way forward. Super, Noreen, thank you and thank you, Eric. So that's a great kind of snapshot synapses of the problem set and some of the recommendations. I first of all wanna remind all of our viewers and participants to send their questions in so we can get your questions and perspectives into the conversation. And I wanna start asking you all to drill down a little bit and I wanna pull Alastair into this as quickly as possible. So Alastair, maybe I can start with you and ask you, I don't think that anybody would have an issue with the idea of incorporating a do no harm approach to UN and member state counterterrorism efforts, but in a practical sense, what would operationalizing a do no harm approach really mean? Yeah, that's a good question. It's something that we highlight this approach of do no harm. We highlight a lot in the report. And I think if we look at the footprint of USCT policy after 9-11 and the effects that that had and the impact that that had on the security council's approach to CT, we see some lessons about harms that were done that could have been anticipated, I think, in two regards. One of them is stemming from a sort of militarized GWOT approach, global war on terrorism approach, which Donald Rumsfeld and others soon realized was not the right approach. It sort of teed up justifications for others on the council and in the UN to behave in a sort of Connecticut militarized way and also implement UN resolutions in a way that restrict civil society and create all of the things that Eric highlighted as real challenges to fundamental human rights. So to put a do no harm approach in place, Matt, I think you need to just think very, very careful, carefully when on the council, what the impact of your initiatives are gonna have, particularly from a human rights perspective. The human rights mechanism system, if you will, inside the UN sits in Geneva. It's kind of disconnected from the council. And I think one of our recommendations is that it needs to be a lot more inclusion of those who are watchdogs on human rights, for example, to think through what the impacts are of resolutions. I could say the same for humanitarian impacts if you look at some of the sanctions that have been put in place and how sanctions sometimes contradict efforts to try and build peace and create reconciliation. So there are a lot of things I think that need a lot more careful thought. The US and the rest of the council just leapt right into resolution 1373 without really any consideration of human rights back in 9-11. While there have been improvements over the last 20 years, a lot more could be done with forethought to prevent harm and these negative things from happening. Super, thank you very much. Eric, I wanna follow up with you if I may on something Alasair just said, because a lot's been written about the growing number of instances where human rights are being violated in civil society, space is shrinking, all in the name of counter-terrorism. How has the council contributed and or tried to reverse this trend? I mean, given the composition of the P5, for example, is it realistic to expect that the council will be able to offer any real resistance to those states that wanna continue to use counter-terrorism laws to target political opponents or journalists or others? That's a very good question and particularly in the current environment, it's hard to imagine how the council can become more human rights focused. And I think this is why the council has to do a lot less on counter-terrorism. And I think the strategy should be to shift as much activity away from the council as possible. This is in line with the subsidiary principle that Noreen underscored. In the council's case, less will be more. And I think what the problem with the council has been is that it's too many countries have tried to sort of pile on more and more mandates on counter-terrorism for the council for very narrow political, often domestic reasons. But the reality is that there's this whole technical body, set of bodies that the council sits atop of but then takes those political issues that get attention in the council and basically pushes them out on the ground into every country around the world as requirements. And so the council is asking more and more countries to do more and more on counter-terrorism and without the guardrails in place to ensure that those additional counter-terrorism measures aren't misused. The result is, well, in part what we have today, which is more and more misuse. And so I think, again, it would be great if individual council members could speak out both in the council, in the counter-terrorism committee meetings about the need to ensure respect for human rights when implementing council measures to highlight instances where those measures have been implemented in a way that have violated human rights and to press the counter-terrorism leadership in the council, the head of the executive directorate, for example, or the head of the monitoring team or other senior UN counter-terrorism officials to speak out forcefully, not in general about the need to respect human rights, but specifically in certain contexts where that is not happening. And I think the US, the UK, the French and other Western democracies on the council should be doing this on a regular basis. It's not gonna change how China and Russia will, but at least it will indicate that there's a strong, strong political will to roll back some of the more aggressive counter-terrorism measures that have been adopted often in the name of the council. Noreen, if I can jump to you as my resident UN expert who's been in the system. You know, the report calls for treating counter-terrorism moving away from calling counter-terrorism an exceptional issue. And then we've already heard this term subsidiarity referred several times. How would integrating counter-terrorism into other regional thematic agenda items, what would it look like? What would streamlining the UN security councils, counter-terrorism architecture actually look like? That's a great question. You know, for about two decades, the counter-terrorism, whether it's meetings, report, discussions, resolutions, everything has existed in its own insulated stream, right? So there's very little discussion about how counter-terrorism is affecting peacekeeping or not in terms of the CT discourse. Different regional or country-specific agenda items on the council do not necessarily integrate counter-terrorism pros, cons, risks. And so this is why we never get an accurate picture about how terrorism and counter-terrorism can affect whether it's the mission on the ground that the council is debating or in a country that is coming up on the agenda and why there's very little early warning because there isn't really an early warning mechanism anymore in the security council. So the counter-terrorism kind of just continues to pace whether we're discussing new peacekeeping mandates, whether they're new countries where we are seeing crises unfold, the counter-terrorism work kind of goes untouched. So a much more integrated and less exceptionalized architecture would have greater fluidity where counter-terrorism experts and discussions can either be part and parcel of other discussions or the counter-terrorism work is actually more proactively shaped by the needs of the UN system and the actual threats that are in front of the council rather than kind of running on inertia, right? So if the council has like a couple of new countries on its agenda, we can think about what are the counter-terrorism equities and is there a need for counter-terrorism action? It's kind of where the supply and demand of CT work comes from in a way that Eric also alluded to. So I think that's one way to de-exceptionalize and mainstream it. And there are a number of areas where there are existing obligations, right? Human rights are treaty obligations without counter-terrorism resolutions. There are accountability mechanisms in the UN system. We could be making much more use of those accountability mechanisms where counter-terrorism is also being misused, as Eric pointed out. So I think greater fluidity between different parts of the UN system to really focus on outcomes rather than process on inertia would be key. Thank you very much. So look, I've been focusing myself on the United States efforts to reform and rationalize its counter-terrorism effort. And I have this report on rethinking US counter-terrorism efforts 20 years after 9-11. So I wanna ask Alistair, if I can, drawing from the reports examination of counter-terrorism at the UN Security Council since 9-11, what lessons should the US policymakers learn and apply to improve US counter-terrorism policy and practice, which is, you know, as you continue that cycle, critically important for the UN because of the kind of larger than life role that USUN, that the US plays at the United Nations. Well, Matt, let's, if we look at one area that you have been particularly closely involved in in the financing of terrorism and the impact that the US has had on global efforts, particularly those heralded and spearheaded by the UN Security Council, you'll see that there's an ongoing problem of a disconnect between what the current threat is from financial standpoint now versus what it was in 9-11 when a lot of people were using banking channels and the problem of over-compliance. So we have a system led, not, although advocated by the UN and the Financial Action Task Force, it really, its locus is really in Washington, the Treasury and OFAC and banks around the world who use the US banking system have these compliance officers who put very, very extreme restrictions on people trying to do good. Some, in some cases, in many cases, do things that can help to prevent terrorism and address grievances. So I think one lesson that comes out of this from the financing side is that US and OFAC in particular can do a lot more to be clearer about what it expects banks to be doing. It can communicate through its own US representative at FATAF about how to improve and streamline its methods and take much, much more care to ensure that civil society organizations, non-profit organizations, as the Treasury refers to them, are not caught up in this web of compliance on countering the financing of terrorism, for example. Thank you, Alastair. And Eric, that makes me want to follow up with a question to you, just continuing on the US for a moment, with all the global challenges confronting the United States and its allies, including at the UN and at the Security Council, and with the United States looking beyond kind of the 9-11 era, counter-terrorism not being the top priority issue with global power competition. Why should Washington act on the recommendations and the report, given everything else that it has in its plate? CT is no longer the priority it once was. Acting on these recommendations is going to take a lot of effort, but why should this be a Washington priority? Yeah, that's obviously a great question. And I think the answer is sort of multifaceted. First, if you look at what some of the priorities are for Washington, right? It's democracy promotion, it's human rights, it's civil society, space, it's anti-corruption. All of those issues are harder to advance in different parts of the world if counterterrorism efforts are going sideways from those agendas. And so the Council's sort of framework basically creates opportunity after opportunity for countries to adopt measures that undermine human rights, that shrink democratic space, that shrink civil society space, that undermine the ability to address conflict and fragility. And so I think, well, the United States may not pay that much attention to what the Council counterterrorism framework has elaborated, other countries still do. And so long as the Council is going out to help countries around the world, reminding them of the need to continue to strengthen their counterterrorism institutions, again, often with terrorism not defined, it's gonna rub against these other White House priorities. And I'll conclude with a sort of a good example of this disconnect, the White House, to its credit, is promoting prevention as a, the Global Fragility Act that everyone's familiar with and is a huge emphasis now being placed on operationalizing that act in key regions and countries around the world. From my understanding, counterterrorism is not part of that discussion. And so the counterterrorism institutions in the US and in these other countries are not being engaged in that conversation. So you can do all the great work you want on prevention and getting at the underlying causes and blah, blah, but if the counterterrorism approach is still heavily militarized, as it is in many parts of Africa, for example, if the counterterrorism approach is leading to repressive security measures being enforced on marginalized communities, then you're basically cutting off your nose despite your face. And I think it's that disconnect that more people need to sort of grapple with and that council approach just fuels that disconnect. So I'd like to ask a question to all three of you. Again, just trying to drill down to how do we actually, what would it actually look like to implement some of your recommendations? And one recommendation that really resonated with me is when the report talks about how the security council's counterterrorism efforts should be more inclusive and transparent, should be more focused on regional concerns and dynamics, and should take into account, for example, perspectives and capabilities, say, from the global south. How? Given the way the UN is structured, given the way P5 operates, how do we operationalize the idea of making all of this more inclusive and more transparent, but still not kind of held hostage to the lowest common denominator and still actually able to get stuff done? I mean, let's start with you and then we'll go to Alastair and Eric, I'd like to hear from each of you on this, please. Sure, so I have a couple of sort of very practical thoughts and just wanted to build on something Eric said earlier, very quickly, that another reason this is an important agenda item to pay attention to is the UN isn't a vacuum and multilateralism isn't a vacuum, right? And so as you're thinking about great power dynamics and tensions, the way we want security to look, we, you know, whether Western liberal like minded states, there is also a kind of responsibility to make sure that is protected, right? The, unless the institution disappears, it's there. And, you know, if you sort of abandon the agenda item, it starts to look very different to what was intended. So I think that's a very important thing to remember that the multilateral space is always dynamic and we can't just abandon it and think that, you know, we can still manage to influence it. But in terms of, you know, inclusive processes, one criticism of security council resolutions and lawmaking is that it's very rushed, it's very hurried, it's very opaque. And in 2019 sort of pre COVID, the last couple of resolutions, security council members tried to change it to be a bit more inclusive. They spent like a year and a half planning these resolutions. So there were more open meetings, more consultations with NGOs, more opportunities for NGOs to write in with perspectives and concerns about proposed resolutions. And I think that's a really great example of Peru did this, France did this to some extent. So I think those were great examples of within the existing structure and without changing any big picture things, you can slow down the process a little bit to make sure that those impacted by it and those with the expertise on some of these very technical issues can weigh in. So whether countries, you know, advertise their interest in a particular resolution and spend a year consulting with stakeholders and countries use some of the UN tools like special meetings, open briefings, aria formulas for more inclusive debates before a resolution is tabled and negotiated, right? But that because that's where you have a chance to really influence it. So I think there has been some recognition that that needs to happen. And like I said, in 2019, a couple of resolutions really were very different in the manner in which they were negotiated and proposed. I think that could be built on. So there's a way to do it without, you know, without changing everything sort of altogether, it can be done. And there is, for example, a CTC open meeting, I think tomorrow. That's right. So more and more of these, there are opportunities. Super, Alistair, your thoughts? Yeah, I think that the council members whether they're permanent or elected can set a tone and provide a sort of a stamp through their own leadership and initiatives. And if you see, for example, the Swiss government is going to be coming onto the council in 2023, they voluntarily made their CTED site visit report public. I think Finland has done the same thing. So there's certain things that I think the UK, the US and France at least, and then various different, let's say like-minded elected members of the council could do, including the array of things that Noreen just mentioned, bringing more people in. I also think there should be more of an effort to bring local knowledge in about conflict areas, such as in the Sahel. So you're not relying on just Western scholars and the points of view of capitals to make judgments about what is terrorism and what isn't terrorism on the ground. We're going to get to the Sahel in a minute. Let me go to Eric on this, please. I think a few things come to mind here. One is that it's interesting that you've talked about being more deliberate and being more inclusive and sort of running a sort of a more elaborate process at the Security Council to adopt resolutions that are imposing binding obligations on everyone. You're basically cutting against the whole reason why you turned to the Security Council in the first place, as opposed to traditional lawmaking at the international level, which is that you wanted an urgent response to an exceptional threat. And once you start moving away from that exceptionalization in the process, then it begs the question, then why are you using the Council at all? And why not go to a more deliberate inclusive body, which where every other international legal regime is negotiated as opposed to in the Council? The Council of the Counterterrorism is the only issue on which the Council has imposed global obligations without a time limit in its history. And so, again, maybe on September 12th, that was considered needed because of what was thought to be an existential threat. Clearly, we're not there anymore. So why are we still using the Council for this purpose? Secondly, on transparency, I think there is on the one hand the Council has generated more and more data on what countries have done in terms of counterterrorism, implementation, institutions, laws, regulations. But because of the way the Council operates, the overwhelming majority of that information is not available to anyone other than Council members and the Council staff that supports counterterrorism. And so what's the point of it all then? If the idea is to sort of, in some cases, get African governments, for example, the capacity-building assistance they need to address the gaps the Council is identifying, but most of the people who deliver capacity-building can't ever see the reports the Council teams generate, what's the point of the Council even doing this? So I guess the overarching thing is that we're in this sort of treadmill of a process where there are mandates that are renewed, there are staff that are contracts are renewed, and it's just a same old, same old, same old that is sucking up a lot of time and money. The last point is deploying to the field. So in most cases where there's a global remit at the Council and a theme, most of the work is done in the field, right? Most of the staff is deployed as part of country teams in the field. Counterterrorism is, I think, a singular exception. And so why not instead of having 80 to 90% of the UN's counterterrorism teams in Vienna, why not push them into the field offices and integrate them into the wider UN work in the field? That would seem to be an obvious way to integrate and move away from exceptionalizing counterterrorism. The UN counterterrorism architecture is exceptionalized. It is a distinct thing that is siloed from the wider system and everyone's now talking about integration. That has to start with breaking down the silos in the UN system on counterterrorism. And the Council has the ability to do that literally overnight if it wanted to by deploying its counterterrorism executive direct staff into the field. There are 40 of them, they're all in New York. That makes no sense. I'm smiling only because this is my next question, but first I wanna remind people to populate their questions into the chat. I see questions that have come in already we're about to get to them. Several people have asked where you can find the report or the recommendations. Resolve Network has shared those link in the chat box, but you can also just Google it, it'll come right up. And ResolveNet has published both just the summary recommendations. If you don't have time for the whole report, I strongly recommend the whole report. There's just a lot of gold in there to get into it. I promise I didn't tell Eric to go into the issue of the field offices, but literally my next question I'm reading it here is, what are your suggestions for taking these policies out of New York City and reorienting them into the field? So Eric, you've had your say on this. Let's go to Noreen and Alistair. Hi, Noreen. Okay, so I think there are always UN country teams around many, many regions and countries. And I think one way to consider being more field oriented is deepening the partnership with the kind of country teams that are already there. And whether it's seconding or adding, as Eric said, CTED officers to work more closely with the country team or with missions. These things get complicated because there's mandates and budgets and things like that. But the UN has a global infrastructure of field-based offices. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, their terrorism prevention branch has field offices. So really bringing things like the terrorism prevention branch in Vienna with CTED in New York, which is a very unique New York-based special political mission and bringing officers from the Office of Counterterrorism together in certain regions where the threat is most acute and have sort of a CT delivery team. There are lots of ways to do it and the UN is possibly one comparative advantage it offers is its field-based offices and its global reach. So making more effective use of what's already there seems like a logical first step. And I would only add that I think, while the UN does go to some efforts and as those have increased to try and get their act together in New York before they go in the field, there have been multiple instances where you've had different parts of the UN going and confusing people, briefing against themselves, coming up with different capacity-building programs and things like that that just end up using up a lot of people's precious time on the ground but also confusing them. So streamlining this effort in the way that Eric mentioned earlier would help on the ground as well as it would in New York. I'd like to continue this theme of thinking about things in a localized regional perspective and often the actions that member states take on their own can impact what the UN is or isn't doing. So for example, what impact has the use of counter-terrorism by states, including but not limited to the United States had on UN efforts to prevent and counter-violent extremism in particular in places like the Sahel? So Alistair, you mentioned Sahel earlier so I'm gonna throw you under the bus and start with you. Yeah, I think if you look at what the French and the US governments, for example, have been doing in that region for a long, long time in the name of countering terrorism, it has been things like training joint tasks forces, enhancing the ability of security forces without looking in many cases at what the roots of some of the problems are by painting everything with a broad brush of terrorism with a capital T, you're triggering a certain amount of policies that undermine prevention efforts, looking at traureg rebellions and other things outside the realm of terrorism or looking at fights over resource scarcity and how to solve those problems without just coming in with the capital T terrorism approach which unfortunately takes up a lot more resources and tends to favor one element of a government in questions, for example, in Cameroon or elsewhere who are beefing up their security forces at the expense of reconciliation with people who need it in the field amongst warring parties. Noreen, you wanna jump in on this? Yeah, I mean, it becomes really complicated because so much counter-terrorism is bilateral, right? And a lot of times the UN forces on the ground, peacekeeping missions don't have a CT mandate, which for many reasons people feel it should stay that way, but it also means they don't have a connection to the CT side of the house to feedback information or to make sure that the CT efforts the UN is undertaking or promoting are also not counterproductive to the aims of the peacekeeping mission. There's a complete disconnect between counter-terrorism and peacekeeping and that's a very different question to whether peacekeeping operations do counter-terrorism, right? We're talking about whether there's a sort of policy information flow between the CT side of the house and for example, the PSOP side of the house. So I think that really, without going into the question about whether peacekeepers should do CT, the fact that they're all insulated from one another really highlights the importance of some of the CT folks being there on the ground with the UN team to be able to have that kind of information flow because at the end of the day, most of the hard CT stuff is being done by states and the bulk of the funding, the legislation is being done by states. And I think that's one of the points of our report is that the council has obliged states to adopt certain laws and measures. And then what it ends up becoming is that the state's interpretation of those laws become the way they do CT and then the council is no longer holding them accountable. So I think in many ways, the council is the states. And so what we are talking about is that relationship between how states do CT and how the council can help influence and manage it. If I can just build on that. I think one of the reasons why we wrote this report is to spark conversations outside the security council and in member states' capitals around rightsizing. And so if you have a new approach coming out of London or coming out of Paris or coming out of Washington, that you then use the security, you try to get the security council to embrace and push forward, then I think you may have more chance in a lot of all of these issues and you may get more alignment between sort of the bilateral and the multi-level right now, including the Sahel. The problem is that I don't think there's been, because everything's been deep prioritized in terms of counterterrorism, there a new approach to counterterrorism has not yet been articulated by Washington or by Paris or by London, right? So the old approach is continuing, at least on paper. And when there is a desire to sort of reflect on doing things differently in the Sahel, it's not often done through a counterterrorism lens. It's done so at the UN, for example, it'll be done through different parts of the UN system, not the security council's counterterrorism architecture. Or if it's in this security council, it'll be done through under the agenda item that is focused on the region, not under the agenda item that's focused on counterterrorism. And so the whole thing sort of just reinforces the siloization of counterterrorism and the exceptionalization of this amorphous global counterterrorism agenda, when it's so not fit for purpose given what the realities of today are. So I can't remember if it was Eric or Noreen or both of you on your introduction remarks, mentioned the issue of the lack of the definition of terrorism and how the states then are able to define it kind of as they want, sometimes to include the ability to crack down on legitimate dissent. And there's also the issue that by focusing on al-Qaeda ISIS and Taliban, we've left out a whole bunch of other groups. I mean, if you're in certain parts of the Middle East today, you're much more concerned about Shia militant groups than you are Sunni militant groups. So what can be done? How important is it to have an agreed upon definition of terrorism? Is there any likelihood that this will happen given how politicized this would be? And is there any chance that we could have a definition that kind of ignores the underlying causes and just focuses on the action? Terrorism is a tactic. What actions are involved in that tactic? How important is this? How likely is it to happen? Anyone who wants to jump in? I'm happy to jump in since no one else seems to be wanting to take this on. I don't think it's likely to happen. I think that terrorism is by its nature a political term, right? And whether it's the United States or China or Nigeria, basically everyone is defining terrorism based on its own sort of political, often political interests. So I think the council is never gonna be able to agree on that kind of definition. There are of course, 18, 19 international conventions that criminalize certain aspects, certain terrorist acts and everyone talks about those as sort of encompassing basically, we look at all those different acts and those treaties, you basically covered the landscape of potential terrorist activity. And so those are very legalistic, obviously conventions and they're not widely known and not widely applied. I think the answer to the council is to just get out of the business of doing anything other than making general statements that if there is terrorism, whatever you want to define it as, the best way to deal with it and the only way to deal with it is through a whole of society approach that respects human rights and does no harm. And so that should be its mantra and then everything else should be left to other parts of the system because the council is not an operational technical body. It's a political body, it should articulate a political norm and then or the global norm and then be done with it, but not get into the weeds. And I think the problem is that it's in the weeds and how do you get it out of the weeds? Yeah, with difficulty, Noreen. Just to add, I mean, I guess the closest the council ever came to a definition as in resolution 1566, it's kind of like the working draft definition, right? And I think I just wanted to flag another worrying development in a way. In resolution 2462, actually the emphasis shifted from terrorist acts to terrorism, which I think is a very worrying trend in the council, right? Because as long as we could talk about terrorist acts, as Eric pointed out, there's something you could refer to and most states have certain definitions of terrorist acts. But 2462 switched to criminalizing the financing of a bunch of things related to terrorism, which of course isn't universally defined. So I think that's a very worrying trend line and one way you could take practical action is to dial that back. We do talk in the report a little bit about one action the council could take is to say what it does not intend it to be, right? The council could say the council wishes to restate, for example, that counterterrorism measures are not intended to target political opponents, this, that, this, that. So, I mean, we don't see that as very likely, but we do point out that in the absence of a definition, there are ways that the council could define its intention or its intended consequences, given that we do have the regime as it is. So just wanted to put that out there as well. Yeah, it still leaves the opportunity for people to say, you know, I'm still gonna target that individual. I don't see him or her as a political opponent, but as a terrorist. There is one other kind of sort of UN definition of terrorism. It's not in a security council domain, but this UN special tribunal for Lebanon, which is in the tribunal realm and was specific to that case, actually had what I think is an excellent definition of terrorism and it was in kind of the broader UN system. Let me ask one more question and then I wanna go straight into the community some great questions from our participants. And I'd like to start this one with you, Noreen, but anybody should feel free to jump in. And that is to effect meaningful change, the United States and others would have to work with all permanent members. Are there, I'm sorry, we already asked that question. That's not the one I was looking at, the one right above it. The US has reaffirmed the importance of women and girls and gender more broadly in counter-terrorism. And the report highlights a number of challenges in this space, in this area, where can the council play a valuable role? So I think, thanks for the question. I think this is one of those areas where the council's imprimatur has mattered in practice in some spaces, right? And the jury's still out about the long-term impact. But I think in a number of countries and a number of sectors, particularly the sectors dealing with counter-terrorism, to be able to have a council imprimatur on the fact that it is important to think about gender, important to consider the roles and impacts of women and girls and on women and girls the differential impacts and the effects of inequality. And that is, it's the same with the human rights discussion to be able to go to certain sectors and say the Security Council says human rights is a core part of our counter-terrorism strategy. I think that's one norm-setting comparative advantage the council has had, right? And I think it's probably the newest of the council agendas in terms of integrating women, peace and security and counter-terrorism. But I think in acknowledging the importance of the agenda and the various nuances that have been able to come out in this discussion, CTED and IPI just published a report, for example, on masculinities and the narratives of violent masculinities that groups like ISIS have been able to exploit in recruitment and their narratives. I think that's been a really valuable role. Whether states can make meaningful change and whether in the long-term we see this as a benefit or whether it ends up securitizing the women, peace and agenda unhelpfully, that remains to be seen. But I think it has been a valuable role for the council to play in saying that, look, counter-terrorism is not just about your military response. It has different aspects that it can impact and gender inequality and the fact that structural gender inequality has a deep impact on terrorism and counter-terrorism and vice versa. I think that's been a very important statement to come out of the council and it has allowed for people to then take those discussions straight into states. Matt, if I just could add one thing to that and that is that we know that the presence of women on police forces, for example, in community policing helps to build trust much more quickly and sustains it longer than just having men. And when you have security council resolutions that call for things and even mentioned the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, which has a focus to some extent on community policing, capacity building efforts should be encouraged to make sure that more women are in police forces, for example, there are operational things that can be done beyond just signaling from the council. I can just put a two-finger. I think it's great to be able to point to these positive impacts, but there's actually no evidence to show impact because there's no information that's made available about any of this by the council. So we have to take the council members and the C-10 staff members' word, essentially that their conversations, quiet conversations in capitals are having an impact because they don't ever report publicly on those impacts. And it is also the case where because the counter-terrorism muscle at the UN, in particular the security council, is the biggest muscle that there's a risk that all of these important issues are being framed through the counter-terrorism lens, right? So that the conversation, yes, it's great. You can have a conversation in Country X about gender and counter-terrorism, but you're having that conversation through a counter-terrorism lens not through a broader peace and development, peace and security lens. And I think that is again, just in some ways, reinforcing the exceptionalization of this issue as opposed to pushing for more of a mainstream approach to this issue. So I think there are two sides of this coin. One side is the side that Irene mentioned, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but I think it's not clear which side is winning the battle here. One more to finger, Noreen. Very, very quickly. There are definitely two sides to the coin. So that's a given. I would say that there are a number of countries where their 1325 strategy and their CVE efforts have started to merge and you've started to see allocation of resources, like in developing their CVE strategies, they've taken into account their Women, Peace and Security National Action Plans and vice versa, to the point that Alistair was making, like there's some common goals, right? Increasing the presence of women and the delivery of security, increasing the presence of women in the delivery of security policy at leadership levels. So there are a number of mutually reinforcing goals between the two agendas and there are countries where there have been some adaptations at least in terms of their resource allocation and their policy strategy papers, but then, as I said, the jury's out. So we'll see how that long-term impact is. Okay, people, now it gets fun. We're going to Q&A from our participants and I'm gonna treat this a little bit as a lightning round, meaning each question, I'm gonna see if any of the three of you have input, but we'll try and keep it a little tight so we can get to everybody's question and if there's any, please do feel free to put it into the chat. Our first question is from Richard Barrett, who spent some time working these issues at the UN. Richard asks, if, as seems likely, there is a reemergence of state-sponsored terrorism with plausible deniability, will the role of the UN diminish further? Can the UN do any more to work do more than work on only causes of terrorism? Don't know. I think it's gonna get even harder. If you compound what Richard just mentioned with the state of the council in terms of great power politics between Russia, China and the United States and others, I think this is just gonna get even harder when you see tactics employed by a member of the council invading Ukraine that could be quite easily included in state-sponsored terrorism. So it's only gonna get harder, I think. And this is why, by the way, this is why the approach should be basically no more discussions of global counterterrorism issues in the council is basically get rid of that agenda item if you could and try to pare down all the existing discussions that are already on the agenda every so month. Because it creating this space, this platform every few months for discussion of counterterrorism at the council level, which is what happens. You're just opening up opportunities for all of these highly contentious, highly politicized issues to sort of get attention when there's nothing the council can actually do about them. And it distracts from its other work. The next question comes from Geneviva and has kind of two related parts. The first is, so how do we strike a better balance between rule of law, human rights, and what we used to call the war on terrorism, but basically the kinetic side? And the second piece of that is, are there any examples of police protocols for fighting terrorism that specifically adhere to human rights standards? I see movement from Noreen, I'm gonna draw you out. I wanted to jump in and point out that human rights are treaty obligations irrespective of counterterrorism and states should be held accountable to meeting their obligations. So I think there's a bit of a risk when we talk about whether CT resolutions do enough to reinforce human rights obligations, they're there. And technically speaking, and the lawyers on the screen will correct me if I'm wrong, but all security is supposed to be human rights compliant in that it's a legal obligation. I think there have been a couple of police guidance notes. I believe in Europe, some of the radicalization awareness network has worked with the security sector. I don't know if they're police protocols, but I know they work with a lot of security agencies and frontline practitioners to kind of create sensitization and guidance and best practice. I know a couple of countries have talked about developing like pocket guides to CVE or different terrorist groups where they stress how to address these issues from their own legal rule of law perspectives, but I don't know specific protocols. There are a couple. I mean, the most, I think obvious example is the reforms that took place in transforming the Royal Ulster Constabulary into the Northern Island police service after the Good Friday agreements in the 1990s. There have been a lot of work to transform that. And then what Noreen referred to as an initiative that was undertaken, I believe, first by the Belgian police for these guides. I think it's important to just, you know, policing is obviously the challenges of policing extend well beyond the terrorism remit. And you can just see that looking at our own context in the United States, obviously. But I would also note that, and now I've lost my train of thought, so I'll just turn it back to you, Matt, for the next question. If it comes back to you, just let me know. There are a couple of questions that related to things that we ended up discussing. The question was asked and then we got to it, definition of terms and other things. So I'm gonna skip to some other questions here. Our scene asks, in part, what is being done? What are you doing to share the findings of the report as widely as possible, in particular with regional or sub-regional bodies that may be trying to attempt to address some of the same challenges? What's the rollout for this report? You got important information here. How are we getting it out there? Other than this critical event, of course. Well, I'll start and then others can jump in. We obviously rolled it out at the UN in September. We will be engaging in, with the European Union, the counter-terrorism body of the European Union early in the new year. We're doing a presentation and a discussion of next steps with New York, later this month with security council members, including incoming ones. And we are continuing to engage on an ad hoc basis with different regional partners. The African Union and other regional organizations were involved in a lot of the consultations. So we have opportunities there to follow up as well. But Alastair and Noreen, they wanna just add to that. Yeah, just building on that. For example, we had a big gathering in The Hague quite recently to bring together some recent security council members, some aspirational security council members who are hoping to come in soon. Members of the GCTF, European Union. As Zara mentioned, African Union. When we were in New York, we spoke with OIC members as well and had a round table with Indonesia and Tunisia. So we're working both through their New York representation and through capitals and regional organizations. And I think a big plus for us in this project is that we didn't stop with the writing of the report in September. We've been working the last three months to really get the word out there and sort of sensitize and raise awareness about the recommendations with key constituencies. And it's on the website, sfict.org. Yeah, no, I really appreciate the question because I think you guys not only wrote a fantastic report, but you really are doing a really good job of rolling it out and talking to people about it, getting the ideas up there. I wonder if one thing that could come out of this discussion and we talked about trying to move out of New York into field offices is to reach out to various UN field components and try and brief kind of bottom up that way. I bet you many of the field components hasn't occurred to them because this is how it's always been. And that would be such a big change. I'd like to go to a question from Deborah Mancini. She's at Partners Global and she notes that they see local communities tend to be unwilling to join CVE-CT efforts and because these efforts expose them to significant risks such as reprisals, it can be difficult to work in the space, how would you recommend addressing this? Well, I think this is definitely a problem. And I think if we look at the recommendation that Erica Noreen highlighted about taking this for an exceptional problem and putting it, situating it more within the realm of addressing conflict, peace building, those sort of things, you'll find you'll have a much broader audience. I also think there needs to be better understanding between council members, particularly in New York but also in the capital of what preventing violent extremism can include without ever having to mention countering terrorism or countering violent extremism at all. These can be efforts to bring different parts of communities together. They can be efforts at education, critical thinking, all sorts of things that I think do not need to have CVE and CVE plastered all over them. Just take some discipline where funding may come from CVE or CVE parts but you don't have to put that label on it when you implement it. Yeah, and this gets to the whole issue of integration and mainspelling and moving away from exceptionalization and that, you know, if more focus and attention were on addressing the local grievances using language and using frameworks that are amenable and supported by the local communities themselves as opposed to imposed from a New York sort of body thousands of miles away, I think you'd have a much better chance of getting by in. So, you know. So we've talked a lot about human rights and Noreen, you mentioned just a moment ago critically that, you know, this is a legal requirement irrespective of the CT issues. But the fact remains that even though that may be a requirement, it's frequently ignored, disregarded or just blatantly violated. So I want to come to a question on this from Jeffrey David Galant. The UN endeavors global CT efforts and advocates respect for human rights. However, the actual implementation of efforts are oft tainted by predatory leaders. How can or will the UN preclude such? What can the UN actually do? It's not enough to say you already have this requirement. What can the UN actually do to bridge this gap? Well, the tendency for the council has been to focus on capacity building, as Eric mentioned, and any effort in the past to sort of name and shame those who do commit these abuses has been prevented for political reasons. And if we're talking about, you know, a role that the council could play, they could point out where these violations occur to start with. I'm sorry, Eric, did you want to say something as well? I think Noreen wanted to and I'll go after Noreen. Just to add that, you know, the UN has a human rights due diligence policy, which is supposed to shape how it engages with sort of peacekeepers and other partners, which is to do a due diligence in who you're working with and make sure that they don't have troublesome records that don't sync with the UN. We know that doesn't always work in practice, but, you know, one of the things we have discussed at a number of SFI and other discussions, including at this OCT conference in Malaga, is that, you know, the human rights due diligence policy has not been actively applied to all the CT capacity building that the UN has undertaken. There are now discussions about, oh, maybe we should have done this, but that's a UN wide policy that should govern, you know, a first line of defense in terms of who you are partnering with and empowering. So I think that's one practical step that needs to be given more consideration, but we come back to the problem that, you know, we've all highlighted in different ways that when we talk about the UN, and certainly the council, it's the sum of its member states, and it becomes very difficult to affect that kind of change. That said, the human rights due diligence policy is there for a reason, and, you know, there's a lot of opportunity, I think, to bring that more into the CT space. And I would just add that there's really only one issue where there are any sort of real meaningful incentives built in for countries to comply with council requirements, and that's basically into the FADF regime. It's not the council itself. So if you can imagine a way that you could incentivize member state behavior on other aspects of the council counterterrorism regime, including human rights compliance, then I think that's where some thought needs to be given. And is it realistic to expect the council to sort of think about bringing every country on a sort of every, sort of doing a universal periodic review type thing that the human rights council does and do that for every country on counterterrorism, and maybe it's the council that does that review, maybe it's another body thinking about it, but something that is even handed in the sense that every country has to go through it, but that allows for a light to be shown on human rights shortcomings. And I think, but again, that requires some creativity, some new resources, change to existing structures, mandates, and if it's not a priority counterterrorism for the main sort of the dominant member states in the system, then it's not gonna happen. Yeah, and I think we just need to recognize as we begin to wrap up today's event that implementing these changes is gonna just be more difficult even than it would otherwise have been because of the nature of the composition as of the security council you just said, as the US and others, for example, are considering unilateral or perhaps some type of multilateral terrorist designation of the Wagner group. This gets complicated. I do wonder if in our counterterrorism capacity training, what if every single training on any type of issue related to counterterrorism as a requirement included a significant component, a module on the issue of human rights. I think there are ways to institutionalize this more. And it seems to me that both within the UN system and certainly the US and others, like we treat these as related but parallel things. I think there's a need to kind of cross over between, to demonstrate that by definition, human rights is not separate from, rule of law is not separate from, it is a core component of counterterrorism when it's done right. Otherwise, we will have, as I said at the opening, continued hopefully tactical success will thwart plots and strategic failure with more people radicalized to the point of wanting to carry out terrorist extremist violence targeting civilians than we did before, which is the situation today. Eric, did you have two fingers up? Yeah, just as an anecdote, I recall from my time in the State Department, when we actually gave the UN over a million dollars to develop curricula exactly along the lines you're talking about. And it basically, they couldn't get through the eternal review process to produce any kind of published material because there was so much infighting within the UN system on how to formulate the human rights language. And you have international lawyers wanting it to be sort of at the highest, highest level of specificity. And then you have more of the practitioners wanting it to be more user-friendly for the end user. And they never could agree. And so that project never saw the light of day. So I think, obviously we're talking about the council in this conversation, but there's a broader discussion to be had in terms of sort of the wider UN system and how sort of the human rights, the infighting around human rights in the system actually inhibits more human rights focus on counter-terrorism. And I would just add, Matt, that I think it's great to have all of these training modules and things, but it would have far more impact if you tied it to money, both in terms of those who receive money who are violating human rights, but also those who give money in the name of countering terrorism for capacity building in the UN and essentially a blue washing by providing money for CT when they have questionable human rights records themselves. So tie it to the money. I think that's the main way to get a grip on this problem. So the reason I want everyone who's watching this event and thank you for participating to read the full report is because there is a lot of meat on the bones that we weren't able to get to even in this detailed event about how to actually do this. There's a lot of smart thought that went into this report. No one's pretending that this will be an easy lift, a simple endeavor, but 20 years after 9-11, I think it's time everybody come to terms with the fact that doing things the way we did them yesterday because that's the way we've always done them is not a recipe for success. As a former U.S. government official, I'm thrilled that the U.S. government is finally coming to terms with this, whether we're operationalizing this shift particularly well or not as a conversation for another time, but the fact that the U.S. plays such a primary proper-sized role at the U.N. and within the Security Council suggests that maybe from a U.S. perspective, this conversation about how to revitalize, not only reorganize, but revitalize U.N. efforts might be very timely as it fits into the U.S. perspective if we're no longer going to be having as much of a kinetic kind of terrorism response if we're not going to try and arrest or shoot our way out of the terrorism problem, which was never how it was going to work, then non-kinetic kind of terrorism tools are going to be all the more critical and the U.N. by definition, I think, has to play a huge role here and that can only happen really effectively if we take a close look at this report and others like it and start thinking through how do we actually operationalize ideas like, do no harm, like making the process more transparent, like taking into account the perspectives of the countries and regions on the ground that are most being affected by events, say today in the Sahel. There's a lot of just common sense in this report and what I love about the report is that it doesn't pretend that just because the recommendations are common sense, they're going to be easy to implement. This is hard, hard work. And if you care about this work, you're going to read the report. I want to thank the three panelists here. You've done a brilliant, brilliant job. All three of you, Alistair, Eric, Normine, thank you very, very much. I want to thank USIP for hosting this event and SFI and its funding partners for making this project possible. I want to remind all of our viewers that you can check out this SFI report summary, but I'm telling you, you're going to thank me. Read the whole report. You can find this at Resolve's website, Resolvenet.org. You can follow Resolvenet and each of us on Twitter. Keep an eye out for future events. If for those of you who are asking questions about how this is going to be implemented, you'll want to watch how this rollout continues. This is a critically important topic. I'm so grateful, Resolvenet, USIP, SFI, the three of you for putting in the time and effort. This is maybe a little bit of a thankless task, but I'm going to go out and I'll limit, thank you. This is really important stuff, and you've done a great job. So thank you so much, and I'm really honored to have been able to participate and moderate this discussion today. It's a real treat for me to be able to share a podium with the likes of you. So thank you all very much for participating. Everybody enjoy the rest of your day. Be safe, be healthy, and read the full report. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Thank you.