 Good morning everybody. Good morning. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. We're going to go ahead and get started. People are going to continue to dribble in. Understand there was an accident somewhere in the vicinity, so sorry for those who were caught up in it and glad you could make it here. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm really delighted to have a chance to welcome everyone today, including those of you who are watching online. The US Institute of Peace was founded about 35 years ago by the US Congress with the mission of preventing, reducing, resolving violent conflict around the world. And we're dedicated to the proposition that this is a very practical, very possible endeavor, and it's absolutely essential for our collective security. And so we work with partners around the world linking research and training and practical applications of best methods in pursuit of this mission. And here in our global headquarters, we bring people together from across disciplines, from across political lines, to grapple with some of the critical issues that are critical for maintaining peace and stability globally, like this conversation today. So thank you everyone for joining us. And violent extremism is, of course, a topic that many of us have been working with and on for a number of years. Last year, or last week, we marked the 17th anniversary of 9-11, which was the worst terrorist attack here in the United States, and it reminds us of the urgency of our mission to build peace and to resolve conflict around the world. We also, of course, were reminded that before 9-11, there were about 2,000 terrorist attacks around the world, and by 2017 there were more than 10,000. So clearly we haven't solved this issue yet. Violent extremism in the intervening decade-plus, we have seen deeply rooted self in fragile states, particularly in Middle East, in parts of Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. And we're seeing that in these fragile states extremists find very fertile ground for recruiting the aggrieved, the disenfranchised, especially youth, and often are able to win public sympathy by providing the kinds of services that the governments in those countries have failed to do. And we've seen how violent extremism has not only strangled governments and societies, but also in dangers U.S. interests abroad and our security here at home. We've seen U.S. allies and partners weakened, triggers of unsustainable mass migration around the world, and incredible disruption of people's lives and societies. Last year, Senator Graham asked USIP to host a task force on understanding the underlying causes of extremism in fragile states with a focus on the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. These are the kind of task force and commissions that USIP often hosts at the request of Congress. So this task force is being led by Governor Tom Kane and Congressman Lee Hamilton, who come from respectively the Republican and Democratic parties. They led the 9-11 Commission 12 years ago, and they see this as the unfinished business of the unfulfilled recommendations of that task force. And they are joined by a bipartisan group of 13 other leading former policymakers, legislators, and experts. Last week, the task force released its interim findings report, and you can pick up a copy of it on our publications table or find a copy of it online, and I urge you to take a look at it. The final report will not be released until January, so the hard work between now and then is to deliver recommendations on so what do we do about this and what we see in some of the initial findings of the interim report released last week is the need to really commit ourselves collectively to longer-term approaches in order to prevent the spread of extremism, and one that both impedes the spread of militant networks and staunches, extremist ideologies, but also promoting better governance, more inclusive governance in the most vulnerable regions. And we know of course, and everyone in this room knows better than most, that every fragile state is fragile in its own way. And one of the biggest challenges in coming up with recommendations on what to do is how to ensure you have the kind of granular understanding to inform policymakers. We often lack the kind of on-the-ground insights about what are the local dynamics that are driving extremism, and it is precisely these knowledge gaps that the Resolve Network addresses. The Resolve Network, and some of you maybe were there at its founding, it was founded in September 2015 with the goal of elevating key research insights and to facilitate exchanges between researchers and policymakers to close that knowledge gap. And so three years later, the Resolve Network has a very strong global consortium of researchers, organizations, policymakers, and practitioners committed to empirically driven, locally defined research on what drives violent extremism and what are the sources of community resilience to that extremism. So USIP is very proud to be one of the founders of Resolve and to house Resolve Secretariat. The network is made possible through partnerships with the US Department of State's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and the US Agency for International Development. So I want to take a moment to recognize all the folks in both of those bureaus and offices and agencies and thank them again for their support today. I also want to thank the Resolve Network partner organizations that have traveled some from very far away to Washington to join us today. So thank you, especially those of you who had long and arduous journeys. We really appreciate you are being here to enrich and enliven the conversation. And it will be a lively day. We've put together a terrific program. There will be very interesting lifestyle conversations, lots of opportunities for people to engage. I know we have a room full of experts, people who bring incredible experience and expertise to this issue. I hope and I know that you will in the discussion sessions be lively participants. So thank you. I also want to encourage everybody to follow us on social media with at USIP and to participate in today's event with the hashtag Resolve Forum. I also want to make a quick plug before I turn the podium over. Tomorrow is September 21st. Who in this room knows what that day is? It is the International Day of Peace, something that everyone in this room should care about. We are trying to elevate that and create greater awareness. And so in 2015, same year as the Resolve Network was formed, we created the Peace Day Challenge to really raise the profile of the International Day of Peace and gauge partners around the world and to underscore that peace is possible, but it requires local commitment and local action. And so we encourage everybody to step up, take action to build peace tomorrow, share it using the social media tag, hashtag peace day challenge. So whatever you're doing, whatever your commitment is, post it on hashtag peace day challenge tomorrow and join the global conversation. Last year, there were many millions of people who did so, so please join us. And you'll find on our website many ideas for action to be a part of this global effort. I know you'll do it. And with that, thank you again for joining us today. And I am delighted to now turn the microphone over to USIP's Director of Countering Violent Extremism and the Interim Executive Director of Resolve and a wonderful member of our team, Leanne Erdberg. She will give some welcoming remarks and give an overview of the day. Please welcome, Leanne. Thank you so much, Nancy. And thank you to USIP for consistent support for Resolve, as well as the unwavering commitment to elevating the discourse on really difficult and challenging aspects of today's modern conflicts. Thanks to my amazing Resolve team here at USIP, who every day I have the opportunity to learn from, I'm impressed by, and who have seamlessly put together today's event. I am just delighted to be here today as USIP's Director of Countering Violent Extremism and also as the Interim Director of the Resolve Network. And like you, I'm very excited to hear from our speakers and the salon-style conversations and then engage in breakout sessions. So today represents an opportunity to all of us to push our thinking and our understanding about violent extremism. Yesterday, the State Department released its annual 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, and I think many of its conclusions can be read on that document, but I think it really showcases to many of us how violent extremism is still evolving. There is so much that we are still learning about this phenomenon, and I hope we continue to seek out new and innovative ways to address violent extremism. I also hope that today serves as an important reminder and an important plea to fund research to help us better understand what it is that we're observing. So a little bit about Resolve. Resolve is committed to providing key insights on violent extremism. We do this by establishing connections between a multiplicity of stakeholders from academia to practitioners and try and network the community of practice that exists in this room and exists online that is committed to research around the topic of violent extremism. We also ask key questions to critical to elevating the field, expanding our knowledge base, and bringing more empiricism, more rigor, and more locally informed information to the community of practice. We also hope to inform P&CVE activities undertaken by policymakers, practitioners, and peers. So today, as we start our third annual Resolve Forum, I'd like to focus on three areas that I think are still relatively underdeveloped in our conceptions of violent extremism, and I hope we can all leave today with a few more incremental steps in broadening what we know and what we don't know. The first is about complexity. We cannot simplify this challenge to our convenience. As humans, we are deeply desirous of simple linear solutions. X diagnosis equals Y cure. Yet it's hard to overstate the complexity associated with being able to uncover, to understand, and to address the dozens of factors that contribute in differing ratios in many locations to every individual who joins a violent extremist organization. We must recognize the complexity associated with why and where violent extremism manifests when it spreads and how it implodes. And we have to address it with a complexity framework in mind. In a complex system, simply put, actors and environments interact with each other and self-organize often in unpredictable ways. It doesn't mean that progress is out of reach, but it's a helpful frame for helping us move forward. For starters, kumbaya is not on our menu today. And what I mean by that is complex systems are often distinguished by their ambiguity. That means that people at all levels and all levels of knowledge are going to disagree about what makes the system work and how to manage it. So I think we're going to have to get a little bit more comfortable with limited consensus on some of the most difficult aspects of this challenge. The second thing is that cause and effect is nearly impossible. As part of our community of practice, I think we would all benefit from a conceptual shift away from this linear causality and toward one that appreciates complexity. So I happen to love metaphors, so I'm going to start with one today, which is the vaccine metaphor is not that useful for violent extremism. But I'll give a couple that I think that might be a little bit more useful. The first is diet. The second is exercise. And as the redhead up on stage, the third is sunscreen. And what I mean by all of those type of metaphors is we're trying to think about risk factors and bolster resiliency to avoid the most dire of consequences rather than being able to inoculate, vaccinate or some of the other public health metaphors that I think are very resident in this field. Lastly, I think this shift conceptually can allow for more interactivity and non sequencing of efforts that can show more collective trends and impacts beyond any one vector. Managing confusion and uncertainty in these contexts is critical. It's inevitable, but it's often overlooked in the favor of certain comfort of tactical level outcomes. How many times do we hear the terms rulebook or toolbox when we're talking about this challenge? A complexity frame allows us to move beyond those outputs and toward outcomes. It allows us to demand flexibility and shift away from a static plan and toward investing into local change agents that can develop innumerable solutions to improve circumstances in an unknown number of ways. The second point is a little bit more controversial, but when we elevate research, it means that we also diversify our understanding to include more than just expertise. The bad news is I might be out of a job. The good news is science has so much to offer our community of practice. Empirical research has so much to offer the field of countering violent extremism. Adequate sample sizes subject to rigorous methodologies allow us to see beyond persuasive anecdotes and hopefully allow us to check our gut instincts. Behavioral science has so much to offer us in terms of recognizing our own cognitive limits as we study violent extremism. For instance, we cannot simply will away bias. This applies to bias in the big sense, trying to understand an entire nation based on information of a select few impressions, but also about bias in the small sense, being overly convinced by the last thing that you heard or ignoring pertinent information that doesn't fit our mental schemas. Empiricism also allows us to ask better questions. Earlier this week, one of our researchers associated with Resolve's Lake Chad Basin Project, who you'll hear from later today, mentioned something that I think is worth sharing here. He said that a researcher's job is to hear something, let's call it a hypothesis. Maybe it's from an expert, maybe it's from a regular person, and then ask the question, how can I design a study that would prove this to be true? It is in the research design and the methodology that we can test hypotheses and not just accept them as their logical conclusion as first heard. So today we're going to hear a lot more from speakers who are trying to push the envelope on what are indicators and how we can really elevate empiricism in our work. My third point is that at its core, violent extremism is a deeply human problem. We can easily forget this because today's terrorists are so violent, they're so vicious, they're so intolerant that seeing them as human is frankly it's a logical leap, but ultimately these groups only exist as long as people join them and people joining are uniting with these groups oftentimes because they espouse something, they espouse an ideology, they espouse a philosophy, a group identity, a family-like structure, a means for meaning, a means for a position, and then they use violence to achieve these goals. So how can we bring about more what we know about human behavior to addressing this challenge? So neuroscience and behavioral science have so much to teach us from why we have a drive for affiliation to how easy it is to dehumanize others and why adventure seeking has such strong chemical components. These all have relevance to this challenge and we'll hear more about that today from our speakers. We'll also hear about personal experiences, the stories that we tell each other and they're incredibly powerful in this effort. We'll learn more about the personal and vulnerable side of violent extremism. We'll also learn about the comedic side and the positive alternatives throughout the day today. This human lens matters because the more that we can humanize communities around the world, we can build their resiliencies in not addressing and not becoming violent extremists. We also can demonstrate to a generation of youth that there are more than a risk factor and in the eyes of international policymakers that they have a stake in their own future and their human dignity matters. So that's a bit where we're coming from and I hope that this overview just lends to the import of today's discussion because these gaps in our collective understanding are precisely why we designed today's effort this way. So now we're going to run through the day. In just a few minutes we're going to start our first session which goes until around 10 30. These are TED talk style presentations and they focus on the individual and social conduits of violent extremism. You're going to hear from three incredible speakers. Then we're going to have our first breakout discussion. We will exit this room and move into the Great Hall where we will sit in tables of 10 and each discussion will be facilitated by many of Resolve's incredible partner organizations, colleagues here in Washington and USIP experts. Please use this opportunity to contribute your own expertise via our interactive setup and we're going to capture your inputs and hopefully analyze them after the event as well. You will hear chimes when that session is over and those chimes are going to be your indicator throughout the day that you're going to have to move. That first set of chimes will have you moving back into this room and then we're going to hear from our Lake Chad project researchers about secularism in the Lake Chad basin. After that we'll head back to the Great Hall for lunch which will be available from 12 30 to 130. Then we're going to repeat the day. We're going to start back in here from 130 to 245 for our second set of TED speakers. Four incredible people, three here on stage, one via video in India. We're going to repeat the breakout sessions from 245 to 345 and then we'll end the program back in here from 345 to 5. We'll have another salon style discussion, this one on practical applications of research to policy and practice and then we're very excited to finish the day with closing remarks from Mr. Pete Morocco, Deputy Assistant Secretary and Senior Bureau Official for the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. After he concludes we're going to have a reception. Don't worry, you don't have to remember all of this. There are staff all around who can help you answer questions big and small all day today and we hope that you can stay for as long as you can. I'd like to be able to make the commitment that today will be more interesting than your inbox. So now let's get started with our first session of speakers. We're going to start with Mr. Jesse Morton. Jesse Morton is the founder and head of Parallel Networks, an organization combating hate and extremism and research coordinator for the Institute for Strategic Dialogues Against Violent Extremism Network in North America. Once a prominent radicalizer in the West Morton co-founded and was a chief propagandist for Revolution Muslim, a New York City-based active group in the 2000s where he helped insert the narrative of al-Qaeda and Salafi jihadist ideology into the American ambit. He has lectured at prestigious universities around the world and has worked here in Washington a GW's program on extremism and he has focused on issues related to jihadist propaganda. Morton was named in 2017 as one of foreign policy's global thinkers. Please help me in welcoming Jesse Morton to the stage. This is Eunice. I'm Jesse Morton after suffering from abuse and trauma as a child, running away from home at the age of 16, taking to the streets and joining an ultra-liberal counter-cultural movement and finding Islam through Malcolm X. Before founding Revolution Muslim and going on to create the first organization that unabashedly promoted al-Qaeda's perspectives in the United States from New York City. Revolution Muslim operated in an era when al-Qaeda was becoming less an organization and more a brand. Its chief strategist, Abu Musa Basuri, was instructing jihadists around the world to convey al-Qaeda's message wherever they were to the best of their ability. American jihadists that had a tremendous impact due to the First Amendment and the right of free expression so we could walk right up to the line of free speech and unabashedly again support the terrorists. We were connected to 15 terrorist plots by the time I was arrested on May 23rd, 2011, two weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed and in the middle of the Arab Spring. In 2012, I was sentenced to serve 11 and a half years in federal prison. We imagined then that the war on terror was winding down and that the jihadists had lost. But just like al-Qaeda had understood that ideas are eternal and the temple, the template that we set up was sustained and this is what that template looked like. First, I think it's important to understand that the offline feeds the online. What we grasped was that everything we did together, whether it was eat, whether it was communicate at a restaurant, whether it was study, whether it was workouts, whether it was protest and preach, needed to be shot on video and documented. What it showed was that we were a band of brothers, showed that we were David and Goliath and that we practiced what we preached. We antagonized anti-Islamic activists and helped to polarize the political landscape. Every single time, someone in the United States needed to point to an organization or an individual to justify the claim that jihadists wanted to implement sharia law in the U.S., they pointed to us. We were the first to use social media and the interactivity and interconnectivity it created. This is the first YouTube video that we made. It's been cross-posted and remains online. It has several million views and it can't be taken down because it craftily does not violate terms of service agreements. We also used a program called PowTalk in a similar way to how ISIS uses encrypt-to-encrypt platforms such as Telegram Today. We gave lectures in an open room and our adherents could chat with one another. We provided 24-7 news and ideological dissemination. Then you could contact us in private messaging where we could facilitate your trek from simply holding radical ideas to committing action in the name of terrorists. We created the first English-language jihadist magazines. The first edition was produced in 2009, contrary to popular belief. It looks exactly like a copy of Inspire or Dabakin-Romea today. These magazines were advanced by my colleagues Samir Khan and Anwar Aoudaki who eventually joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. They went on to radicalize thousands in the West and because they were now produced abroad with terrorists and propagandists that had traveled to join jihadist groups, they could expand beyond simply promoting the ideology and to providing recipes and formula for attacks. We were quick to manipulate the mainstream media by CNN, leftist outlets like Russia Today, far-leftist outlets like Russia Today and anti-American outlets, even talk shows on public television. Of course the overwhelming majority rejected our extremist views but for that small fringe subset it facilitated a connection to our activity online. The other way that we look at things, I think. And this is Jesse Morton, my true self. I've returned back from where I came. Today I'm no longer a jihadist but I practice and advocate for a more progressive form of Islam. It's incompatible with democracy and liberal values. My deradicalization can be broken into key themes. First I had contact with Moroccan millennials during the Arab Spring. I fled to Morocco after threatening the writers of South Park and I taught Arab millennials there English interestingly enough. I realized in the context of the Arab Spring that they simply wanted values that I took for granted. Elections, right to speak and believe freely, less corruption from their political class. Second I spent five months in a Moroccan prison after I was arrested with a preacher that had essentially deradicalized. Mohamed Fizazi was arrested in 2004 because of Blanca attacks and was about to be released for his altered views. Third I was returned to the United States and housed in solitary confinement after I was extradited. There a compassionate and empathetic prison guard would take me to the law library for the duration of her shift to get me out of the cell. So for 10 hours a day four days a week I was located in a law library but I had access to philosophical works particularly from the Enlightenment. It was there that I read Thomas Paine, Montesquieu, Descartes, Rousseau, Jean Locke, etc. I continued reforming and when I played guilty I had to meet with an FBI agent to do what they call a debriefing process. She was also empathetic. She was a female figure that sort of facilitated an ability to tap into the root trauma that was my mother's child abuse. But we were also able to cooperate after it became apparent that I was altering my perspectives. And so we stopped several Americans overseas from plotting attacks here and from joining ISIS to the degree that they were carrying out violence there. I continued reforming my understanding of Islam while in prison and then on March 1st 2015 after originally being sentenced to 11 and a half years a federal judge reduced my sentence and released me. March 1st 2015 when ISIS was all over the news and it was apparent that the war on terror was far from over. They let me go early due to my cooperation and my altered perspectives. Re-entering and reintegrating in America was difficult to say the least. There was no re-entry program for people like me. I was one of the first convicted of terrorism related offenses to return to American society, could not find work, could not get health insurance, could not readjust after a prolonged period of solitary confinement. I lost my family and I was divorced. But to my honor I continued to work with the FBI until in February of 2016 I was outed in the media as an operative informant. I then decided to go public as America's first former jihadist and served as a research fellow at a university here in Washington DC. While I had renounced the extremist ideology I had failed to address the child abuse and trauma that led me to find meaning and significance with jihadism in the first place. I relapsed after 14 years of sobriety and thought I'd thrown it all away. But today I'm recovering and I'm going deeper into the root cause that facilitated my radicalization in the first place. I run a CVE organization called Parallel Networks Now, an organization that I co-founded with my wife and Mitch Silver, former director of intelligence at the NYPD. Mitch spent years monitoring me at Revolution Muslim, but our relationship continues to help me heal. Our paralegal networks however, Mitch and I view CVE a bit differently. Our parallel networks philosophy is based on the principle that only networks can counter We live in a world where we are all connected within six degrees, but at the same time when we map our interconnectivity we realize that hyper-polarization dominates the day. This division is tearing at the fabric of our democracies everywhere. It's also threatening the international liberal order that I think a lot of us have come to take for granted. We need to create pathways to engage, particularly with those that we disagree with the most. I think hashtag shut it down and removing radical content on social media will prove ineffective. I actually think it will prove counterproductive and make things worse. Countering something is reactive. Instead you have to build an antithetical network built on principles axiomatically opposed to those of violent extremism. Only once you have a network that rivals in size and scope extremist networks can you proactively insert a message that will actually resonate and not be drowned out by the noise. We don't believe in counter messaging as many have come to realize, but what is now promoted as alternative messaging we think also fails to realize that information alone is in suffice. People are irrational. They act on emotion. They're intuitive in connecting behavior and belief. Instead we need to think in terms of parallel networks or alternative ecosystems that convey a comprehensive worldview built upon principles opposed and antithetical to violent extremism. Most importantly I think rhetoric, policy and practice need to match. Quite frankly we could learn a great deal from the way that we built the English language jihadist ecosystem in the West. So now we're actually building a parallel network of former extremists and their allies just like me. To develop an alternative ecosystem that can turn radicalization into empowerment and shift the way we think in a tribal and a polarized world. Returning to Rumi now, the wound is the place where the light enters you. We're 17 years into the war in terror, but we must recognize that we are all tired and wounded to a degree. Not so much by words or war, but by sort of what resembles to us at parallel networks a global case of PTSD. Today I'm healing my own trauma in our struggle against hate. Today I can see on the horizon not post-traumatic stress, but post-traumatic growth. Finally the struggle gives me the same sense of purpose meaning insignificance that the extremist networks provided. But perhaps the most important takeaway I think is the imperativeness of grasping that in an age of intersecting extremisms in the plural, we all have an obligation to do something, to combat, and to counter hate. This is perhaps the most crucial message I think that all CVE work should seek to convey. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, darkness cannot combat darkness, only light can do that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Jesse. Next I'd like to welcome to the stage Mike Nickenschuk. He's an innovation lab senior researcher who spent five years in the Middle East designing neuroscience informed programs for violence reduction and psychosocial support. He works at Beyond Conflict where Mike leads several initiatives in the U.S., Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, and it's focused on two major themes. The link between neuroscience and participation in group violence, gangs, extremist groups, and other types of organized group violence, and the mind-body effects of conflict and violence on youth and adults. Mike has degrees from Tufts University and University College in London. Please welcome to the stage Mike Nickenschuk. So that's the second time I have to bat clean up after Jesse and it's never easy. It's a tough act to follow. So I just want to do a quick audience poll before I start. In the room, how many of you would say you have a brain? I see the slight majority raising their hands. The rest of you seem to need some more coffee before I ask that question. So the advantage of all of you or most of you saying yes is that that means that pretty much all of you are potential extremists, which makes this talk pretty easy because everything I'm going to say applies to you, just as it applies to Jesse, just as much as it applies to a young person sitting in Nigeria and Cameroon and Burkina and Faso, the Philippines, whatever region of the world that your work is focused on. What is the button for advancing the slide? My journey into this whole field was an unhappy accident. You could say I come from a background mostly of working in mental health programs with young refugees and with refugees in conflict with the law. I worked for four years in the border of Jordan and Syria and it was not a place where there was a lot of extremists that I'm not trying to suggest that, but it is a place where there's a lot of pain and it is a place where a certain number of individuals were either previously involved in extremist groups or were contemplating that decision of taking that bold step. Not because it was something that they ideologically aspired to, but because it was at least something that felt like a sacrifice for a home and for a place that they were losing. And I remember one young man, one of my closest friends now is named Mohammed. He said to me at the time, Mike, I think that heroes and terrorists seem to be formed in the same context and sometimes it's really hard to know which one you're choosing. He said this about a week after his cousin had joined ISIS. His cousin had talked to me for a long time about not that decision per se, but about the decision of going back home. And he said very frankly, no one can try to convince me that sitting in a camp here is any sort of sacrifice for my family. I can't go back to my home in 10 years and have people ask me, what did you do? What did you do while your people were dying? Were you sitting and taking aid from foreigners? He couldn't deal with that perspective shame that was eating away at his sense of self, at his sense of pride. And so he made a decision that affected the rest of his life, that affected countless other people's lives, a decision towards violence. When in reality that same psychological ecosystem, that same psychological ecosystem of grievance, of trauma, of pain, of wounds, of social brokenness could have facilitated his rise to be a great leader in his community. So that same ecosystem that pushed one cousin in a certain direction, pushed his other cousin to now be graduating with a university degree after working his butt off to make everything he could out of himself in a legal system that tries to keep him stateless and down. The same context led to both of those individuals. So what is the psychological scaffolding that we're talking about that facilitates someone's growth in one direction or the other? In studying neuroscience we're in a pretty pivotal time. We're in a place in technological history and advancement when we have unprecedented ways of getting access and insight into some of the unconscious or subconscious facets of human cognition, of helping people and helping ourselves get a better picture of why do we do the things that we do? The truth is we really don't know anywhere from 95 to 98% of the activity of your brain is unconscious. Not that you don't see the results of it or you can't access it, but that it's really happening below a level of your conscious awareness. And the me that I know, the you that you know when you look in the mirror, mostly exists in the realm of two to five percent of your brain's conscious and logical and rational activity. So we have many new methods and metrics for understanding what goes on in the human brain to promote decisions towards violence, towards affiliation, towards peace, including hooking people up to funny EEG machines. Imagine walking around wearing a helmet like that all day. Walk around Boston long enough and you'll see a few. The middle one up there is a Fitbit. Lots of you have that on to make sure you get your 10,000 steps in for today I'm sure. What you can also do with a Fitbit is track someone's heart rate over time. And we know that people who have post traumatic stress symptoms often have a difference in how their heartbeat functions when they get excitatory stimuli. So when you excite someone who has PTSD, their heart rate will often stay flat. Instead of like a non-PTSD individual, you see great fluctuations, what we call heart rate variability. So you can monitor trauma symptomology over time in a large swath of the population simply by giving $100 Fitbit. You also can hook someone up to a GSR machine, a galvanic skin response machine. And they did a fascinating study in the Netherlands where they took, frankly, a bunch of old racist Dutch people who were mostly white and they gave them those funny augmented reality or virtual reality goggles, the big headset, which they weren't used to, and they had their fingers hooked up to this GSR machine. The GSR machine measures the opening of sweat glands in your pores and they had them interact in this VR chamber with Muslim-looking youth. And you can see when they interact with white youth versus Muslim-looking youth, their pores open up much faster. So you can even track what we call racism or racist responses to the level of physiology in the skin. And lastly on the bottom here is, looks like a guy getting a haircut, but this is my specialty in social neuroendocrinology, which is how we understand how hormones affect social behavior. And you can get a map of the stress hormones in someone's life through their hair, through 25 milligrams of hair. Each centimeter marks about one month concentration of stress hormone levels in the blood. So there's unprecedented ways to gain access to how people think. And beyond conflicts, we have a pretty simple mission. It's to generate and utilize these types of insights from social neuroscience and psychology to better understand the building blocks of cooperation on one hand and conflict on the other. And funny enough, those are the same building blocks, which makes our jobs a little bit easier. We do that by three primary strategies, one through conducting research, right? Through designing studies, through working with partners who have these advanced technologies to do studies in dynamic field settings. The second is through what we call science-informed design, which is basically us taking these insights that we're generating or that other people have generated in the field and investing those within initiatives and organizations who are designing field programs. So as Jesse was saying, how do you design a program that takes these issues of trauma and pain and tweaks the design of what you do? How does it help you ask better questions from the populations that you're claiming to serve and then actually serve the needs that they have psychologically as opposed to just resting on assumptions? And the last thing that we do is knowledge and education. We do talks. We have curricula. We have different training programs for people that are working in the P and CVE fields. A very simple way to put it is like this. We do science-informed conflict resolution programming by working with various partners and we try to push the scientific community and the research agendas in the direction of being more conflict-informed. Because science frankly should be a right. It should be a right for people who don't have access to it yet can tremendously benefit from it. And the way that academia is structured, it doesn't really incentivize doing science in favor of conflict-affected populations. So we're trying to push that agenda a little bit. The four main themes we work in in the lab are as follows. We study these building blocks as I called them before. Four building blocks of either cooperation or conflict. The first is social trust. That's trust in individuals. It's also trust in institutions. And we've observed how the breakdown of trust between people and between people in institutions can facilitate conflict. The second is empathy and dehumanization. Words that are thrown around a lot but that have very very little definitional meaning attached to them in common parlance. The third, and Jesse talked about this, is trauma and victimhood. How does that, you know, correlate to or facilitate or even in some cases serve as a buffer against violent behavior? And the last is belonging and identity. Now all of these themes are just as relevant for 2018 United States of America as they are for studying violent extremism. So these are building blocks of cooperation and conflict transcontextually that we've distilled over doing conflict resolution work for 25 years. All of these four themes come back to one fundamental issue and that's how the human brain works. Right? Your brain has one job and it's not thinking, it's not doing math problems, it's not helping you understand yourself. Sure, it does all of those things but its one job is to keep you alive. To help you navigate this world successfully so that you have enough resources to stay alive and to stay alive better than everybody else because it's a competition sometimes. Right? In order to stay alive it means many things. It's not just having enough food and water. It also means social belonging. It also means having the ability to detect threats that you sense around you. It means mate selection. It means social status and hierarchy. It means a lot of different things in a modern society. And at the end of the day every prediction that your brain is making about what's happening next is in service of that one goal of staying alive. And sometimes we don't have enough information, especially young people in the critical periods of brain development don't have enough information about what will keep me alive in this moment. So the easiest thing to do is to make the worst case scenario prediction. If you err on the side of caution, if you make a mistake in guessing what'll keep you alive, guess what happens you're dead. Right? So you always err on the side of caution from a cognitive perspective. That's a laser pointer. Sorry, Jesse. When your brain doesn't have enough information it fills in gaps. You all see a bunch of faces in there? Those are just bell peppers. We see stuff that's not there all the time because we have so many heuristics and biases that have been built up in us from the time that we're born. You see two holes on top and a hole on the bottom? It's a face. Nope, it's a bell pepper. Next thing you know someone's selling a grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary in it for $10,000 on eBay. Right? We make things up all the time because our brain is constantly predicting what's coming next for us and it's always done in service of what's the best way for me to understand this situation, what's going to keep me the most safe. And that's why we're really good at reading faces and tracing the movements in the zygomaticus major muscle because we need to know does someone look happy? Do they look angry? Do they look sad? Are they threatening me? Are they in love with me? I know it's the latter. In the context of CVE it's really important to think about this concept and these two in particular these issues of belonging and threat detection because a lot of what we see in the CVE space is some sort of manipulation of these two fundamental motivators in the brain either promoting violence or trying to engage people in another direction. What ISIS, Boko Haram and other groups are really good at is stimulating those two things. We have a place for you, we have a role for you and there's a bunch of people out to get you and they're out to get you because of who you are. That is a deeply potent cocktail for young people and we're really bad at designing things that counteract that because we think we just have to throw the opposite message but as Jesse said very articulately reacting to someone tapping into a cognitive mechanism is not just throwing the opposite mechanism at them. Doing effective counterme- countering a message is not as simply as counter messaging. Those are very distinct things. So from a CVE perspective when we think about what neuroscience can contribute we know that there's three core issues that we have to look at. The first is groups, how and why people form groups. The second is how and why people form and understand threats. And the third one is what are people's wounds because if you don't understand those wounds you're not going to understand the person. If you don't understand those wounds you are not going to be able to shine light into those spaces as a practitioner. And very briefly I just want to touch on those three phenomena and Leigh Ann you just kicked me off stage when you want me to. In terms of group affiliation I cannot overemphasize how strong group affiliation influences human cognition to the level that really is hard to grasp. Who you belong to and the extent to which you feel like you belong to that group affects how you see faces. And I can cite study after study about this. We're more adept at reading the emotions of people's faces if they're a member of our in-group. We have quicker reaction time to understanding what's going on in the facial muscles when we're looking at faces of in-group members. I put a chemical symbol down here that's always nerdy. Almost got it tattooed once. This is the chemical symbol for oxytocin which is a trust and affiliate of neuropeptide that runs through your bloodstream that's produced in your brainstem. Oxytocin facilitates trust. It was first studied in the context of lactating mothers and building bonding with infants. Yet we also see it happen with basketball teams. If you look at studies of NBA teams through a season, teams who have more off-court affectionate touch have higher blood oxytocin levels and score more points in games. If you inject oxytocin nasally to a group and give another group a placebo, the group that was administered oxytocin will share more information with other group members in a game paradigm. It's a tremendously affiliative and stimulatory hormone for making better group decisions, more efficacious decisions in service of your group. So how and why people bond will affect the quality of communications and decisions within that group. Another one is on dehumanization. I'll go to that really quickly in a second. What's important to know here is that when you combine group affiliation with a sense of threat it is an incredibly potent cocktail in the mind. Because the body and the brain respond the same exact way to physical safety threats as it does to identity and status threats. Your central nervous system does not have a good way of distinguishing between those two types of threats because you react the exact same way they both represent a threat to your survival as it's constructed in modern society. Because without identity, without group, you might die. Like a gazelle at the watering hole, the second that a threat comes by he's got to run back to his herd. Same thing with humans. When we feel threatened we have to run back to our herd. And if something threatens that we clam up, we tighten, we consolidate our norms, we consolidate our identities even further. And we see this manifested not just in behavior but also in neural patterns. So when you threaten a group or threaten an individual who feels a member of a certain group there's certain parts of the brain that go on and offline in different ways. There's specific networks in the mind that work with what's called theory of mind of guessing what's in someone else's head. So theory of mind was first understood in the context of research of individuals on the autism spectrum because there was some sense that there's a lack of they don't know how to ascribe intentions or understand emotional inferences and others behaviors. And then that same paradigm that was first applied to autism spectrum was then looked at in intergroup paradigms. Do we have the same ability to guess how much someone is thinking or what they're thinking or guess their emotional state if they're not from our group? Can we guess what's going on in their heads? And we do see differential data on that. We've spent quite a few years trying to find ways to measure that outside of a scanner because you really can't bring a brain scanner to a bunch of extremist groups. It's not practical for a lot of reasons. So through rinsing and trying many different psychometric tools we found that this tool that most specifically correlates with neural activity and empathy and dehumanization is simply by giving someone this assent of man scale. Say, hey, based on this scale rate along the scale how evolved do you think the following groups are? And truly people will give you different answers. You think that everyone would say that everybody's really human almost no one says that. And the data that people have on this lines up almost exactly with what we see in empathy and theory of mind networks the prefrontal cortex in a brain scan. And interestingly the two groups who we found dehumanize each other the most on this scale in the past five years are two groups and it'll surprise you. Answer number one, Israelis and Palestinians in 2014 during the height of the Gaza conflict and Republicans and Democrats in the US last year. So we know that dehumanization as it is manifested in different brain networks correlates with a couple of really interesting things. It's correlated with unique neural patterns and reactions. It's correlated with a willingness to see passive harm come to those groups whom you dehumanize. It's correlated with policy support. When we looked at Americans dehumanizations of Muslim refugees both the brain scan data and the self-report data along this scale correlated with their willingness to for example support islamophobic policies to support caps on numbers of refugees coming into the United States etc at a one three and six month longitudinal period. And we also know that in the brain networks that are responsible for dislike or antipathy are unique from markers of dehumanization. So relatively in conclusion after doing multiple studies in field settings and in lab settings we're developing an emerging understanding of how this combination of group identification and pain etc leads to a very very very dire state as far as intergroup conflicts. We know that strong identification with a group if you make that group perceive a threat in another group so you invoke a threat. This group is in some way an existential threat to you and your group's identity and you throw a little bit of dehumanization in there you see a lot of other behavioral variables come out and this is across multiple studies over many years. With those three things in place with strong group identification the perception of a threat and the dehumanization of outgroups you see intense consolidation of group norms that means that someone is willing to abdicate their traditional ethical stance in favor of consolidated and more conservative norms for the group because belonging matters more than your values in times of threat. Retaliative policy support restriction of civil liberties on outgroups increased conservatism increased in-group love in-group information sharing and willingness to sacrifice for your in-group. So I do hope I've convinced you that belonging matters and how we do this now and just one example of how we're carrying this forward in the CVE space is that right now we have through our science informed design process we're doing several different initiatives to try to bring a little bit of the science into how we do PVE program design. So we have three main areas of focus in the lab when it comes to CVE the first is designing more evidence-based stratcoms interventions targeting specific cognitive mechanisms if group A is tapping into a sense of isolation what do we do how do we design a message that might or might not facilitate belonging or tap into whatever wound is driving that sense of isolation we also have a program trying to understand potent groups why are some groups so sticky what are they providing for what fundamental human motives are they catering to and what needs are they fulfilling and how do we design youth empowerment programs that actually meet those same needs so basically asking the question what are they doing right that makes them so sticky and how do we design using those same design principles and cognitive building blocks and the last is exploring relationships between things like chronic stress early childhood trauma and propensities towards violence and we're doing this in Burkina Faso at the moment just some of the basic research questions that we're asking one is how do youth's perception of their own agency and social status affect how they respond to veo narratives the second part of that question is how do young people's experiences of belonging and agency affect their views towards those groups and their willingness to sacrifice for those groups because those are motivations and impulses that you can tap into and redirect for really beautiful outcomes if you can do it right and in another example potentially in the Philippines we're looking at what would make someone switch from a violent group to a nonviolent one what are the elements of group membership that would need to say stay the same across both of those group types and what are the evolutionary or psychological needs that those groups are speaking to and how do we maintain those things in our design of our programs so that's just a bit of an example of how we're doing what we do and uh yeah look forward to hearing from you thanks welcome to the stage dr chris mesero he's a fellow at the center for middle east policy at brookings he's an expert on religious and sectarian conflict the causes and consequences of political violence and the impact of technological innovation on foreign policy he's currently working on evidence-based approaches to counterterrorism and countering violent extremism his most recent research for example draws on advances and non-parametric machine learning to assess the impact of discriminatory rhetoric and the regulation on the growth of extremist networks by coupling this novel data with new methodologies his work offers original insights into how best to respond to terrorism and political violence please help me welcome to the stage dr chris mesero thank you to to you all for being here as well i'm going to speak today i've been extremism i'm going to talk about some forthcoming research that i have that builds on some some work i've done looking at historical grievances to motivate the research though i want i want to start off by talking about what what the problem is and i should probably clarify that nancy limborg is not the problem this is she's talking about the problem this is a picture of her last week um at the event on when she was usip had an event last week about their new interim report on the drivers of violent extremism and one of the points that she made which is the same point she made this morning is that we've now spent a tremendous amount of money we spent a lot of in terms of personnel and lives and yet for all that we've done over the last 15 to 16 17 years the problem is only getting worse the number of attacks have increased five-fold the growth of extremist networks themselves have has been exponential and i think all of that begs a very you know a hugely important question which is you know what are we getting wrong what is it about this issue that despite all of the policy interventions we have tried we continue to see the problem not just stay the same but actively get worse what is it about the way that we're approaching it that we're getting wrong and i would offer two things the first is that i think we've been offering some bad theories or operating under some bad theories and i think probably the worst or most pernicious is the idea that it's a simple story about you know just islam for example this is one of the frankly one of the racist dutch men that mike referenced earlier skilled geared wilzers in the netherlands and his view his whole political platform is based on the notion that Islam is the problem but i think we can go beyond that and for many researchers for those of us who research it the folks who say that it's just poverty or that it's just a lack of democracy or that it's just a lack of education i would say that that's still probably too simple a story extremism is complex and yet we use very simple theories the second issue i think is that we have bad data and in particular what i would say is that we very often as we study this we very rarely include data on the policy interventions that we are trying and as a result if our policy interventions or you know policy rhetoric are making things worse if we're not including data on that we won't be able to know um and so between the bad theory and the bad data i think that's a it's a large part of where we seem to be going wrong what i want to talk today and what encourage you all to think about today is that there's there's a way forward here and i think one is is to use machine learning to uncover the complexity of the world we ended a great job laying out how complex this issue is we need to have methods to match that and the second is that we need to have data that can actually verify and and hold accountable some of the policies that we've been implementing so today i want to talk about some research that i've got coming out on veil bands and machine learning that tries to do both of those things use original data and use some some new methodologies i'm going to start by talking a little bit about machine learning first because this issue is the complexity is a lot easier to understand in a deep politicized context i'm going to talk using an example of plant growth to start out with and when we talk about complexity or a complex system there's really two factors that make it complex the first are what are called non-linear effects and if you think about the way that a plant grows you might think it's a simple story about you add some water and the plant grows a little larger but that's not actually true if there's no water the plant doesn't grow if there's too much water the plant doesn't grow you have to have the right amount of water there's a specific range in which water helps the plant grow but the the point i'm trying to make is that the effect of water on how how a plant grows depends on how much water it already has and it's the same thing for sunshine no sunshine you don't get a plant too much sunshine you don't get a plant it has to be in the right range the effect of sunlight on plant growth depends on how much sunlight it already has had that's a non-linear effect the second kind of effect are what are called interactive effects again you can have all the water in the world at the perfect amounts but if you don't have sunlight you're not going to have a plant grow and the same thing is true in reverse you have the perfect amount of sunlight but if you don't have any water you're not going to have a plant grow and the point i the reason i bring this up is that this is a very complicated story even though intuitively we tend to think of it as very simple it's actually quite complicated and if we use the methods that we use to study social processes to study plant growth this is the key point i want to make we would not be able to tell that water and sunlight matter for plant growth which is crazy and the reason is that all of the traditional statistical models that we use they all assume by default that effects are linear and that there are no interactions yet if we think about how the world works i think we can all intuitively agree that most of the social processes we care about and that influence the world are quite complicated and have a lot of non-linear effects and a lot of interactive effects and i think extremism is the same way i would say that extremism is probably even more complicated than plant growth in many ways and therefore we need methods to match that and the value of machine learning is that you can feed it data and it will sort through the data and identify where the non-linear effects are and where it thinks the the main interactions are so that's why i think we should use machine learning to get better traction over problems like extremism to return to the project that you know that's why i wanted to use machine learning the other issue is veil bands and so why why would we talk about veil bands i wish i could say that i had this idea at the beginning i'd feel a lot smarter and this presentation might be a little tidier but the reality is that it was an iterative process a few years ago when the caliphate first started and some new machine learning algorithms came online i began to look through or gather as much data on cross-national data as i could on different potential theories about why some countries might send foreign fighters to syria and others don't when i ran the original analysis the variable that came back as being most important was actually whether or not a country spoke french and i looked in and tried to peek under the hood and see what was going on and driving that finding and the countries that seem to be driving the finding were france and belgium and tunisia all had had major contentious debates over these the banning the islamic veil in the year before the syrian civil war had started and so what i did is i went through and coded every country around the world and to see the extent to which it had either that country had either had a national controversy or debate over the veil or even imposed and enforced a national ban on a partial or full veil and the idea is the main theory for why i was doing this ties into what mike was talking about earlier which is dehumanization as these as these veil bands are debated and discussed they are very often defended on the terms that you cannot be both muslim and western at the same time you cannot be both secular and muslim at the same time you cannot have both a national identity and a muslim identity at the same time and it's a message that really reinforces the jihadist recruiter's sense of being dehumanized and the need to stress identity and force potential recruits to make a choice between islam and their other identities so that's the theory about whether it would happen and once i once i gathered the data there were about 40 countries that had either debated or enacted a veil band in the years prior to the onset of the syrian civil war and i looked through and the bivariate relationships are pretty strong about two-thirds of those 40 countries had had a foreign fighter network go to syria for the countries that did not have a debate or controversy over the veil only about a fewer than 10 percent sent a syrian foreign fighter network so there seemed to be something there just in the basic bivariate data but the question was you know are other things mattering too right are the veil bands responding to prior jihadist violence for example and to do that i went back and re-ran the same analysis i had before controlling for things like prior jihadist violence and it turns out there's really only two things you probably can't see it here but the far left column is muslim population and the one right next to it is veil band so of all the data that i passed the machine learning algorithm it flagged two variables as being important and those two variables basically account for the entire predictive power of the model which is that the size of the muslim population the extent to which a country debated or imposed restriction on the veil those were the two factors that the algorithm picked up on as being most determinative of whether or not a country sent a foreign fighter network to syria same thing comes true for for interactions i mentioned earlier that machine learning can pick up latent interactions you don't have to tell it to look for them it'll just figure out what the most important interactions are the most important interaction it found was that countries that had large muslim populations and also a debate over the veil band were the countries that were most likely of all countries to send a foreign fighter network to syria the other thing i had mentioned is that in addition to being able to pick up non-linear interactive effects machine learning can also pick up non-linear effects here's the effect of the veil band data on the likelihood of a country sending a foreign fighter network to syria and the most important thing the thing that i want to draw your attention to is that there's the gap between whether there was a local controversy or a national controversy over the band that's where you see the biggest jump in the likelihood of a country sending a foreign fighter network to syria by contrast once you've got a national controversy if you then introduce or enforce the ban it raises the probability a little bit but not nearly as much as if you've gone from having no debate to having a national debate and this is consistent in my view with again what what mike was talking about earlier and the effect of threat detection and dehumanization that they can have on in-group formation what matters here is that as national politicians like Geert Wilders and others kind of advocate for these bands they are again they're saying that you cannot be both you know you cannot be dutch and muslim at the same time and that's exactly the same message that the jihadist recruiters are using to try and draw new recruits into their networks so the debates over the van seem to be compounding the the recruiting pitch of these groups the other one last slide i'll show you from the research just to show you again the value of machine learning and this is the effect of muslim population or the relationship between muslim population and the likelihood that a country sent a network to syria what's important to note here is that there's a spot there's a very narrow range where the size seems to matter as it's you know if you have a few thousand muslims there's not really any as common sense would tell you there's probably not going to be much of a network and then as you get very very large into the hundreds of millions it doesn't really matter if you have more muslims at that point either there's a range in which it matters and the other thing is you can tell as you know as you get out to the far right despite the side each of those lines is a country and it's showing the likelihood that that country would send a foreign fighter network to syria if it had a certain amount of muslims and you can see that some have a much higher likelihood than others even if they had a lot of muslims and what that's showing you is that when you have separation like that that's showing you visually that it's picking up on an interaction and in this case it's saying countries with a ton you know hundreds of millions of muslims and no veil ban are going to have a much lower likelihood of sending a foreign fighter network than countries with you know that many muslims and a veil ban so it's another way of kind of visualizing and intuitively understanding or intuitively seeing the complexity of the process itself in your data the question of course as with any project any research project is do the results make sense especially if you're if you're using machine learning algorithm and you're really trusting it to tell you what it finds in the data you have to be very careful about checking to make sure that it passes some kind of common sense or intuitive check and in this case if this is true if there is some kind of relationship we would expect to find kind of three different qualitative markers the first is we would expect to find members of al Qaeda and ISIS themselves talking about the veil bands and citing them as cause of recruitment and in fact that's very true there's actually so many examples of this that I didn't even put a slide of it in fact Jesse mentioned the magazine that he had started earlier the first issue of that magazine had an article about the french veil controversy the second thing we would look for is that we would look for the recruiters at the local level to be able to say these veil bands in when I was building my network had an impact on recruitment this is a picture of Fuad Bilqachem he founded a group called Sharia for Belgium which sent the most number of foreign fighters to Syria from Belgium it was an instrumental group in getting the the facilitation networks going from Belgium to Syria he was arrested in I believe 2012 or 2013 and when they asked him to account for the success of his group he said very publicly that there's a local band in Antwerp in 2009 then there was the big controversy over banning the full the full veil in Belgium in 2010 he called the effect of those of those bands a bomb that helped contribute to the explosive growth of his network he may have been tongue-in-cheek as he was saying that but I don't think there's any denying that he viewed it as essential to to what allowed his network to grow the third thing that we would expect is that we would expect women themselves who have to who would be considering wearing a veil to also be identifying the veil bands as something that might contribute to their own journey into extremism and again we have evidence of this as well this is an example of there's a woman named Um Mansour from Belgium she was she tried to go to Syria she was intercepted at the border I believe she was asked to account for her own experience prior to the the Belgian veil ban she did not even wear the veil I don't know that she was particularly devout when she talked to New York Times a few years ago and she was trying to explain her own process of radicalization she said it felt like my identity had been taken away from me that band caused more harm than good you know if it hadn't been passed I wouldn't have kept myself away from the world and maybe I wouldn't have been radicalized obviously it's not that simple of a story but it's clearly a very formative point in her own journey into extremism so we have examples of both fighters recruiters and women themselves citing these bans as as being a cause of their own extremist recruitment that said this is the slide where I say that there's some limitations this this is not an experiment right this is not a foolproof kind of causal study there's also issues with if you if you're using national data to try and understand an individual process the one the one caveat I do want to flag to you is that we could control in this in this project I could control for prior jihadist violence but I could not control for because we don't have data on it nonviolent jihadist networks that may have existed in these countries so it may it's unclear whether the countries that had national controversies over the veil if they were helping to form these networks or if those networks already existed and it just kind of tip them over into violence and then the final caution I would give is that I started this by saying that I I'm very much a diverse as leon as I think to saying that this is a simple causal story in any way I do think that this matters but it is clearly not the only thing that matters and I would be very much remiss if anybody left here this morning thinking you know this is a new simple causal story it is a part of the story but it's not the whole thing that said what do I want you to to walk away with I want you to walk away with the sense that extremism is complex and that therefore we very much need methodologies that can reflect that complexity and begin to describe that complexity and the second is that we really do need to begin taking seriously in my view the notion that anti-muslim rhetoric and policies may be contributing to extremism with that I will leave you that and thank you very much all of our speakers another round of applause for a great morning you're just fantastic presentations in a few moments the doors at both ends of the auditorium will open and we will all move out to the great hall for the first breakout session when you enter the great hall you will notice tables each labeled with a number and a discussion facilitator's name please choose a table for your discussion there's coffee tea and water available we encourage you to grab it before settling into your breakout discussion and we'll reconvene back in here at 11 30 to hear more from our resolve network lake chad basin research teams about their work in chad cameroon and nigeria thank you so much i think we're about to get started so thank you all again for joining us today on resolve third annual global forum we're really excited to have you here and i am very excited to be able to introduce our next salon session so my name is katira aria in asia and i am a research associate and project manager for the resolve network and over the past year i've been helping to coordinate our newest research initiative in lake chad basin so in 2017 in partnership with usaid resolve embarked on its second research fellowship and exchange project to better understand the politics of religion in higher education in chad cameroon in nigeria this is a subject that's often talked about in cve circles but not very fully fleshed out i guess in the research so in order to illuminate and bring up local insights to better inform policy and practice um we embarked on a country case three country case study with our research teams here and our research advisor dr jacob uro uro jacob so to present the findings from their research i would like to hand over the time to them and dr jacob who will be facilitating the discussion and also give them all my thanks for being wonderful partners in this effort thank you thank you so much kat kat and the entire resolve team have worked really really hard on this research and the findings are really really interesting so um thank you so much for coming out for the saloon discussion on the lake chad region may i get the researchers um the fellows and the principal investigators to please introduce themselves starting with dr damu good morning everybody yes all right research is based mainly based on comparative religion and politics mainly religious identities and ethnic identities both in cameroon chad and nigeria my involvement in this research is mainly dealing with the regulation of religion in higher education mainly how university students can be true higher education counter to violence extremism this was the main research problematic we were dealing with with professor brandon hi i'm dr brandon kin hammer from ohio university and i was the principal investigator for the cameroon portion of the project hello everybody i'm dr medina sardulaziz i'm the research fellow for the nigerian country study for this research i'm from the nigerian defense academy good morning uh abdulae sunay i am a principal investigator on the nigerian case and i am senior research fellow at the zensko modern orient in berlin morning i am orinati remati i'm the research fellow for chat and i'm working for a chadian small social scientist labo called sound the research on anthropology and science human crash and i'm also lecturing at the department of anthropology at jamaica university and i'm daniel eisinger i'm a postdoctoral fellow at the university of kebek in montreal in the center franco pay um and i was the principal investigator for chat on this project thank you thank you so much um let me stay with you dan and romaji can you tell us the core findings of your project in chat yes so thank you i'm a star i think that we came out with some three main findings and seen as we uh have been working on secularism and the way secularism is implemented within the high education sector what we came out with first is that uh there is a big ambiguity related to the way secularism as such is accepted uh in the countries in general but also the way it's accepted within higher education and even the way it's implemented within the curriculas and also the way faculties are organized and second we also came out with the fact that in the country when talking about secularism or when talking about language for teaching or administration within universities we have a big overlap of language issues and religions this is to mean that most of the time arabic and french dividing universities so dividing students and faculty members but also are provoking a kind of two different curriculas within the same system and so most of the time you have the departments or the students divided following religious languages when it comes to francophone departments or arabic department most of the or totally all the students from arabic departments being muslims the same thing for the teachers etc so uh this is to to conclude and to hand up to to to Dan we come out with the fact that uh the state uh despite his secular agenda is unable to implement on the field you know a secular teaching curricula and the rejection of secularism as an idea is growing so within muslim communities mainly yeah perhaps i'll add just a little bit of context to say that one of the main objectives of the study was to get a handle on the different debates over the role of religion in the public sphere and institutes of higher education whether they be public universities private universities teacher training colleges or cultural centers across the region are important places where those debates are taking place and so what ended up coming out in our research is exactly what romaji was explaining is that you have different cleavages or groupings of people based on a variety of different socially constructed identity factors that kind of create a positionality in those debates and the state is both an actor in those debates but also something that structures those debates and so that's really what we've tried to capture in our findings did your findings surprise you at all yeah i mean it's a little surprising because when you just consider the idea of secularism being enshrined in the constitution so it's surprising to come on the field and see that actors that normally are controlled by the main state are able challenging you know this secular agenda and but at the same time it's not that surprising because if you see the structure of the state and the way the state is implementing on the field all its agendas this is not that surprising and at the same time to finish you can also see that this is not too much surprising because the state is playing a game with religious actors giving them more room on some issues refusing rooms on some issues so those people in in turn they also play the state you know to fulfill the agendas so it's a little surprising but not that much okay yeah i think i would simply i agree entirely there are some surprising elements and unsurprising aspects so it's not surprising to find out that there are debates over the role of religion and the public sphere it's not surprising necessarily that there's an arabic and french division in that debate right but what was surprising is how actively engaged some religious leaders on university campuses depending on their affiliations are being are shifting their stances appropriately to try and pressure the straight the state in different directions i'll come back to you a bit later on because you've raised some very important issues i'll write back to you now adama and brandon can you tell us a bit more about the research in kamerun and some of the co-findings sure so i mean the top-line finding of relevance for for policymakers and practitioners is that there's very little evidence that that ve organizations are active on kamerune campuses that they're recruiting we don't see a lot of evidence for ve support among muslim college students but what we do find is that increasingly as the kamerunian war on terror has progressed and as there's been sort of an increasing securitization of muslim life particularly on campus we do see that kind of simmering tensions and conflicts and resentments about muslim access to higher education about the inadequacies of the primary and secondary school institutions in kamerun are starting to bleed into campus life that increasingly particularly for muslim students who are on non-muslim majority campuses in the southern part of the country that there's a perception of government wearing us towards them a perception that they are increasingly perceived as being potential ve actors even where there's not a lot of evidence that that's the case and that this is undermining confidence in the sense of fairness and and and balance that's implied in kamerunian secularism so like chad kamerun has this francophone heritage of laicite that nominally suggests the separation between religion and state but that in practice is often I think understood by a lot of kamerunians is a promise that the state will be fair and balanced in the way that it manages religion and there's an increasing sense among muslim students that that's not how it's really playing out for their experience they see campuses as places that are christian spaces that are difficult for them to get equal treatment on we don't think that these are likely to manifest as ve dynamics but they do produce really challenging political consequences that we think undermine potentially the ability of the kamerunian state to fully incorporate those those students into public life later on brumaji sorry adama yeah what brandon was saying is that daily reality we are facing in our campuses as far as religious regulation by the state is concerned there is a duality in the state discourse that they are against any financial or political support of any religion be it christianity or islam but when we look at on the knee since the person is from christian origin there is a kind of state support on the knee to christianity on the campuses compared to islam and those are the sources of let's say not conflict but tension between muslim student union and christian student union and this is really difficult for the state to solve the issue as far as the management of the universities are concerned because christian students are receiving a kind of foreign support from christian organization outside the country muslim students are receiving almost the same support from muslim or arabic countries but the state is denying the islamic support in order to promote the christian support upon muslim students and this is really difficult situation in kamerun actually did you notice this contributing in one way or the other to maybe extremist opinions on campus so one of the interesting things that you note on kamerunian universities is that there's not nearly as much intramuslim conflict to visible on campuses as say in Nigeria where i've also done research and i know you guys are going to talk about that and a lot of that really does come down to the role that the state plays in regulating not just religion but civil society more generally there's really only one muslim students association that's sort of registered with the state and has the ability to kind of manage religious life on campus for muslims and that sort of need to work with the state to be visible to the state to be legible to state authorities diminishes a lot of sufi salafi conflict it diminishes a lot of intrasalafi conflict it means that the muslim students really sort of put on a brave face in front of the state how how deep that reconciliation is to what extent that's masking sort of deeper conflicts underneath i think is difficult to get at under the political context but once again we see very little evidence that what it's doing is leading to ve support i think that there's a pretty near as we could tell and we looked pretty closely near universal understanding that that ve appeals are not particularly campuses are not amenable places for ve appeals in kamerun now whether that's because muslim students are resistant who show up on campus or the because campuses are resistant that's harder to tell that's a in some ways a different project but we really don't see a lot of evidence that ve or ve organizations have a lot of obvious ways to make inroads the kamerunian governments fear that that's true compounds other problems was this surprising though i mean i i don't know that it's i mean i think it's surprising to the kamerunian government i don't think it's nearly um as surprising to us i mean these dynamics sort of play out in different ways in the different countries that we've looked at but i mean the idea that that extensive state management and control of religion has a range of impacts some of which are good and some of which are really problematic i think is not a surprise and so it's been good for intramuslim conflict on campus it's been bad for the situation of muslim students who find themselves facing what they perceive to be increasing discrimination and lack of access interesting um nigeria presents a much more complex case study um let me invite mattina and abdelahi to tell us more about the nigerian case study and the co-findings um yes so the nigerian case is somewhat complex because it's kind of similar to what the chartian research finds finds in some cases and also similar to the kamerunian situation but also different in all dynamics and i'm going to start with the fact that just like in kamerun there is no direct evidence or link to show that violent extremist tendencies are present on campus especially because there was a lot of attention when goharam started with the understanding that it was some university students who had turned their university certificates to decide to join this group and that kind of placed an assumed focus on the fact that there might be extremist threats on the university campuses but the research that we carried out didn't show this direct link however from the research we realized that student religious associations especially the muslim student association and the federation of catholic students for the christians these two groups and the other subgroups that they have on campuses have a lot of power and controlling influence and especially ability to control behavior on campus and this ability to control behavior ability to influence their members to carry out agendas of this association is kind of risky as it is and then more importantly is that apart from the fact that they have power religion is being used as a very vibrant resource on campus just the way it is used as a vibrant resource in the Nigerian society and it means that the competing factors that we have between intra-religion itself like the Salafi Sufi competition the Sufi Shia competition that we have in the Nigerian society is also being extrapolated through these associations on campus and so this competition for fellowship, competition for affairs of influence are also being played out on the campus and these are some of the risks that are beginning to play out they're not directly extremist but they also a risk that should be the attention should be paid to when i read your executive summary and the full report itself what surprised me really was that you did not find any evidence of linkages between religion on campus and violent extremism Abdulahi did that surprise you? Not really i've been working on on similar issues but in a different context in Niger but i also started some research in Nigeria and then looking at Zaria context the kind of configuration of religious organizations religious figures for example the Shia the Salafi so i already knew the significance of religion and religiosity as for example in the case of the student organizations these organizations are really socialization spaces and they really play a significant role but you can see beyond the campus so in a way that wasn't surprising to me but one element that was a bit surprising to me in this research was the role of the faculty members so we are talking about student religious associations but actually one thing that maybe get lost in in this kind of terming or naming of this organization is the the faculty members because these organizations they are very much related to to the staff i mean to the to the staff but also to the faculty members so they have this patron system they they call it in the context of a view of the university so and often the one of the category or the main one of the main patron is really the category of the faculty member who is which is basically those who are supporting these organizations in terms of yeah financial resources but also in terms of getting organized creating opportunities for activities but also networking with other religious organizations beyond campus itself it's fascinating most secularization theorists would say that the advancement of modernity would somehow result in the diminishing of religion and superstitious beliefs in that sense an idea over the past few years Nigeria has really advanced economically technologically in so many different ways and something you said which I found quite interesting um religion occupying social space can you talk more about that within religion occupying a space that's beyond transcendental ideological meaning but maybe providing a space for identity for group identity of fulfilling the social meaning yeah I think what really what was clear and really what came up clearly in our research is really that kind of yeah there is that transcendental dimension of religion and religiosity but really what you see with these organizations is the the social dimension the kind of the way religion offers opportunity to to come together to opportunities for grouping for being for me a social for social group in a context where I have to say grouping is really important so you have to to find which group you belong which organization you you belong to so that is really something that religion helps to do in on the specific context we we conducted this this research yeah and I think I would also want to taking from what Abdullah said is the fact that in Nigeria as it is it is a very not religious in the sense that everybody does some practical consistent worshiping when in the fact that religion is now such an identity tool that groups can mobilize as it is in order to achieve specific aims and in the context of this research that was done on campuses this religious associations have mastered the art of mobilizing religion transcending religious roles and carrying out activities that go beyond their expected roles as religious associations and this activities basically placed them in the heart and per view of the students so much that they become so influential in galvanizing either support or galvanizing views to support their agendas so I think also apart from the fact that religion is an identity tool more importantly is the ability for this associations to mobilize religion for their goals now that's quite fascinating although you did not find any evidence of connections between religion and extremism on campuses there in Nigeria what happens when religion is mobilized as you said what what happens when a strong leader emerges what happens if there are grievances strains political opportunities emerge did you consider that so in the research there are two distinct examples that show what happens when first religion is mobilized for goals and this happened in the Mautech issue Mautech is the medieval Adama university is located in the northeast of Nigeria and here it was a simple case of a campus election which was supposed to lead to the emergence of a student union president but a christian student had emerged as the winner and the muslim group refused to accept this leading to violence and composting to the death of one student and the closure of the university so eventually when grievances kind of trampled upon like you said when religion is grievances are aggravated the first result is that it it would lead to violence and compost which is one of the risks that needs to be mitigated the second is with the emergence of leaders as you said most of these associations especially in Amadibu university deprived themselves as being spring boards where most of the leaders of the country is like a practice but if you are student leader in these associations then it seems like it's much more possible that you will become a political figure in Nigeria and it is true because they have a lot of alumni most of their patrons are also former members of the associations when they were in the universities and that's why they still have this link but this ability to prepress students as leaders played through in the emergence of Ibrahim Elzakizaki who is the head of the Shia group in Nigeria now he was an ABU student he was studying economics and that this was it was a time when he was a student that he started to propagate Shia ideas and because the university was of us to any kind of ideology which they do not which they do not see as nominal as it is right now but he emerged and then he was expelled but this did not stop him from starting the Shia organization right now with a strong strong presence in Zaria but contemporary the Shia is becoming targeted for different reasons some organizations think they're extremists using that in like quoted inferences but like it's possible like you said for a leadership for organizations that are not nominal to emerge in this kind of spaces and it is also possible for leaders to emerge in this kind of contested spaces interesting all right Abdullahi then Brandon okay so just if we think about this as a CVE issue one of the things that comes up in all of our research is that in all of these countries the state plays a fairly big role in trying to manage what religion is like on campus state recognizes these organizations in some cases it provides them with funding it makes it difficult for other organizations to emerge it really this desire to sort of centrally manage to a certain extent the role of religious expression on campus and what emerges is a clear pattern across all these cases is that this is not a successful operation we still see religious violence in Nigeria on campus in fact religious violence is somewhat more common on campus than it is off campus we see conflicts in Chad we see resentments in Cameroon and it's it's really not at all clear that there are the institutional mechanisms on campus beyond the sort of simple fact of attempting to control what organizations exist and who their leadership are that really allow religious communities to solve these problems practically and so we think about what sort of CVE programming would work I mean there is this sort of tendency to think about it in terms of oh we need peace building or we need you know messages of tolerance and really what comes across in all these instances is that there are not places for these organizations to sit down in workout access to campus to work out where we're gonna how we're gonna do this balancing right these things come out spontaneously because the states all sort of assume that these things are taken care of by you know making sure that these organizations are formally represented rather than it being a sort of a space where these things can be worked out in practice there are not a lot of places that camp on campuses in the Lake Chad Basin where you can work out religious conflicts privately or before they pop up on the campus life yeah what I wanted to add to what Medina said is yeah of course there is no direct link between I mean in our findings we didn't really see any direct link between these religious activities or religious association and violent extremism but there is something also which is which needs to be kept in mind is really religion has become a source of conflict and it could it's it's really a site or a reason for a lot of competition on on campus or friction confrontations even so you think about for example the the opposition between the Salafi and and the Sufi the Tijania in particular over let's say the control of the mosque or competition or revelry about okay the resources because students are supposed to pay basically religious fees or fees that later on go into the hands of the the religious association so in the case for example the muslim students so the fees those resources go into the hands of the mss the muslim student society but the the Tijania organization doesn't get any of those of those fees so they have grievances so they're asking them say okay what is mss doing with those those resources so those are the kind of situations where though there are no direct relationship between these kind of activities and violent extremists we found that those could be enough reasons for radicalization on on university campuses in particular hamlet bello university and i think sorry jacob and i think to kind of put together the point that brandona abdelay were making is the state would find a way to influence japanese on campus well most times they do it through the university authorities themselves and the positions that are taken by university authorities sometimes and in the case of abu also influence the competition and the grievances so for example in abu the university has chosen to recognize only the mss as the single muslim association on the muslim student society as the single muslim student association on campus when there are in abu alone 17 other muslim religious associations that are not recognized and tim san which is the tijania muslim student association is one of them there is the association for the shia muslim students too so the decision to recognize only one association which is accused of being sylafi as it is is the detriment of the other associations who are now having to compete with mss for the control of the mosques for the use of the mosque for the control of finances which goes directly to the mss and this is the position that the university authorities have taken to recognize just one association is detrimental as it is especially when you compare the position of abu authority to school authorities university of ibadan who recognize that the seven different student religious associations giving room for everybody to be expressive with their views giving room for everybody to have access to basic amenities as religious associations so just like the state i would say also the role played by school authorities university authorities is also needs to be focused on so is the idea then of creating sort of a multi-dimensional space for various religious identities to be and to exist let me come back to you remagine and dan what then do you think in the case of chat what are the possible stimulations what are the possible strains maybe at the macro level or the meso level that can lead to extremism what are those triggers that can lead to violent extremism what did you observe well i think one of the big things that we walked away from and i guess maybe i should preface this by saying something that surprising is maybe not surprising now is that we didn't find this linkage between university campuses and violent extremist groups but something that is there is the potential for further cleavage and grievance to develop across the lines of language in particular and that has to do with the fact that certain resources are given based on universities that are there's a university that's primarily arabic speaking right and so resources are directed toward that university differently than they would be in another public setting university which is primarily francophone then in other public universities you may have a department of say history or some other discipline and you'll have faculty members that teach in french and faculty members that teach in arabic but the administration at the university level has one person in charge and they'll either belong to one group or the other and then of course opportunities for teaching opportunities for resources opportunities for research they end up being perhaps unfairly distributed and that leads of course to dynamics of cleavage and grievance within those groups and it doesn't help to establish aspects of collaboration or negotiation over those grievances like we've talked about in some of these other cases i don't know if you want to add something romaji yeah i want to add some little thing it's about the the way the the state is controlling the the universities and one of the reasons who made the fact that we didn't find very close link between v e and the campuses is also the way the campuses are managed by the state you know in chat as they have been explaining in ijewia in chat there are no possibility we have what the state called the official trend of islam in the country being here the tijania and so there's no place for the other trends to enter the public sphere officially and so on the campuses there is no possibility for teachers when they claim being not tijani or even for the students there is no room for them and so on the campus it's very difficult to make a clear link between v e and the campuses because people want play i mean a role that allowed them being part of the system but what we should be what we should care about is also what is going on besides the universities because if those people they don't have voice in the official life of the campuses at the same time they can study abroad in other universities and get back in the countries they have a lot of associations although they don't have official part in the debate they are growing and this may be something that may end up you know in more radicalization because they are not given part to the official debate and so we have associations one of the associations called ansara sunna who is a quite solid association who receive a lot of funding from other countries that are doing a lot of activities but this association is not allowed to enter the public sphere being the universities being the medias but at the same time you know their influence is growing in the country so i'm sure that even though students actually don't play the opportunity to such associations i'm sure that behind the university they are getting more and more close to those kind of association so this is something that we should also care about interesting so for for the policymakers in the room the practitioners in the room or even academic researchers they were more recommendations do you have brandon and adama if one is interested in undertaking any programming or intervention or even research in kamerun yeah as far as the kamerunian case is concerned i think the state must be fair to religious leaders or to religious associations when it comes to islam we have no income rune which is portrayed as being muslim part of the country and we have twice curricula one from islamic studies and the other one from standards official let's say western studies and those two types sorry those two types of educations are really posing a kind of conflictual issue in higher education students can register from primary secondary schools until gce level in islamic studies when they are to enter university they cannot find the same curricula they have to shift into western education and this is really conflictual for more than 30 000 students why because they cannot face the same language of education which is french or english while they are coming from arabic speaking background this is first problem the second problem is that the type of islamic education they received so far was authorized by state but this type of education cannot lead to professional integration in the national sphere so they end up without any job at the end of their training without any future in this type of system in these types of government and they still look at the other side how the government is implementing a policy to help christian students christian associations so the claim is now if the state failed to be equal to both the religious side let muslim students also have their own university a muslim muslim university in northern cameroon the state is not against of a the government is saying we are ready to provide you an authorization to open your islamic studies to your islamic studies your islamic university please but the initiative must come from the community don't expect expect any financial support any political support from the government because we are dealing with a laicite kind of secularism in in cameroon so the muslim society and muslim students are waiting the government to give them a floor to have a kind of same equal visibility at the local level and at the national level without being to those communities i think the government will be complicating the situation of religious identity or religion understanding in northern cameroon compared to the rest of the country interesting what spaces are there brandon for for possible programming intervention so i mean again one of the sort of persistent things that we see is that even for former students current students who you know lack access who struggle with employment afterwards there just doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that ve is an attractive alternative for them this is the good news it means maybe that there's not a ton of need for what you would think of as traditional cve programming on campus however with the securitization of muslim experiences in cameroon with the ongoing war on terror there is a persistent underutilization of the resources that exist on campus that could be potentially useful in a broader cve terrain in cameroon right um so we think about kam su the muslim student union the one muslim organization that's officially recognized on campus um when we talk to their leaders they were very eager to be involved in in cve style work not just because they cve is a problem in cameroon but because they also recognize that doing so would help to sort of inoculate their position with the state that they could say we're involved in cve work see we represent the sort of mainstream position of students on campus there's not a ve problem on campus perhaps this would lead to more resources or better treatment of muslim students um but it's been hard for them to break into that right there's a real need i think for international partners to engage with muslim students on campus not as a problem or a potential risk but as a resource um moreover and i i think that this is another issue um that comes up in our own research too is that there are a lot of sort of broad resources on campus people who want to get involved um researchers faculty um university administrators who recognize that there's a ve problem in cameroon would like to get involved um but they're not really able to participate as full partners because they're not able to access the cve research um they often lack the sort of methodological training to do the kinds of projects that we've been able to do and they're often engaged with again as potential ve participants rather than resources and so they need to be able to bring them into offer training um not just to sort of run another set of workshops where we can take photo ops um but to really sort of engage in finding ways that they can be participating in building cve knowledge to bring them in as equal partners in this work um would take advantage of what they're able to offer in a way that really has not been leveraged so far we didn't find a lot of evidence that there had been more than a kind of shallow engagement with those muslim intellectuals with those muslim university faculty and researchers and that's something that we see as a real potential next step thank you madina and abdelahi what do you reckon are the greatest opportunities or species that are available for programming or for the research yeah um i think for me the um major place where focus of programming for especially policy programming needs to be focused on is identifying who exactly are the major influencers that can actually um um affect behavior and for me especially with this reach that it has to be the associations but more importantly is that we it's kind of good to play safe right now because we say there are no direct links between what is happening on campus and violin extremism but most of the students don't even would not recognize violent extremist linens if it comes to them right now and i think that they need to be some kind of preparation for them to understand this extremist linens to understand how programming for violent extremism can be expunged to students to understand and be prepared for this kind of programs for this kind of linens to them when it comes it's more like knowing being prepared they do not have that and i think this is one of the areas where policy research or policy programming can be done but secondly also is to look at funding that is coming to these associations from their patrons which sometimes are not just the faculty lecturers or faculty members that i mentioned but sometimes the patrons of these associations are politicians some of them are wealthy individuals outside of the university campus and it means that the ability for them to fund these organizations also would guarantee that they would get support from these organizations for whatever agenda they would have so i think policy research or policy programming also should look at where funding is coming to these associations and guard against the ability to use this funding to either funnel any kind of negative control or funnel avenues through which extremist ideologies can be gotten to the universities through this Antelai let me be more specific with you what would you caution against in terms of a future policy formulation what are those what would you really caution against look this is don't bother about this area yeah but i think it's very important not to exceptionalize these organizations i think really looking at these organizations they they are i mean you when we we look at their dynamics their competition the kind of revelries going on i think it's it's really important not to put them out there as really exceptional organizations so that would be my really strongest recommendations while dealing with these and that i think it should be major elements to keep in mind for policymakers so for example how they they they feel about okay the kind of unfair treatment they are some are getting from the administration or from the government or from the state those would be elements that should be taken on board done for char well in terms of recommendations i think that the the biggest recommendation i would make is that i think that inter university and inter department programs aimed at collaboration would be essential if we can start to bridge these divisions that have started to emerge around language and religion across different institutions i think that that could be really beneficial and there's a real desire amongst my chatty and colleagues to do research and to engage in projects and to have those kinds of opportunities and resources and so anything that can facilitate that was from a policy point of view i think of a positive thing that could be something as simple as identifying different research centers that you know represent different linguistic groups and having them collaborate on a project together what i think that should be something that should be avoided i don't think there's any need for counter messaging or programming in the university institutions of chad at least not at this stage and i don't know that throwing week long seminars to bring people together around living together peacefully is something that's making a huge difference at this stage i think that really just brings together the people that are already living together peacefully i guess i can end on that somewhat controversial statement interesting okay yeah i would say almost the same thing because the core issue we pointed out in our research is the overlapping of language and religion and to me the most important thing to do is trying to work in order to stop languages dividing people following religious lines and so the main thing to do is for me a kind of designing a universal curricula whatever the language arabic or french the curricula to be the same and giving equal opportunity to all chadians whatever the language is this is one and also is working you know to to to make those religious curriculas that are very tough actually in arabic teaching universities to make them less obligatory than they are actually this also may be a way you know to give equal chance to everybody whatever the teaching language is and the real thing to to avoid is you know the about the the role of the state as i said and people that may read our brief we'll see that the state is playing using identity markers mainly religion and other things the state is like playing a chess game with all those markers and it's about stop playing that game because people on the field they also have agency and so ignoring their agency and their ability to play also a game against the state this is also something very dangerous fantastic um let me just ask you one question adama um the the prices in the english speaking part of kamerun did that affect your your research at all or even the methodology you choose to to adopt for the project did it come out at all yes as far as identity manipulation are concerned i think we are facing the same problem no matter how english-speaking kamerun would like to portray the uprising that's going on actually as a kind of separation from the former french type of of state going from republic type of state to federalism still the government still manipulating the regional identity and that's what they don't want to hear they don't want to hear that we are kamerun english-speaking kamerun and we are french-speaking kamerun and within two type of positions there is violence actually as a matter of discussions there's no other negotiations than violence and when it's come to northern kamerun it's not the same issue there are some issue of misunderstanding between local population local community and the state but there's no use of violence to explain the misunderstanding so the two issues can be put together as far as resolution of conflict are concerned in in common in actual situation if i can add one thing to that i so one of the and i i've told the story a number of times now since i've been back from kamerun one of the things that we would hear occasionally is adam and i would go out to do interviews with with muslim student leaders with muslim organizational leaders was oh you're here to talk about extremism we should be talking about those extremists in the anglophone part of the country and you know it's easy to sort of write that off as a deflection or you know ethnic linguistic chauvinism but i think it speaks to the degree to which a lot of muslim communities particularly elite intellectual muslim communities in kamerun feel very much like they are targeted as extremists right that they are understood to be a potential problem or risk and there is this very clear desire to deflect that or to show that they're not the problem or the only problem and obviously this has the implications that adama has suggested it makes it hard to bring anglophones and francophones together in kamerun but it also like they didn't come to that understanding by accident or in a vacuum it is very much the case that these communities have been treated as potential extremists and that's that's that's been a big part of the programming that's been run not just in kamerun but that's been sort of implicit in a lot of international partner activities and i think our researcher really speaks to the need to find ways to engage muslim communities in kamerun that don't implicitly suggest that they're the potential problem fantastic thank you so much please round of applause ladies and gentlemen the research thank you thank you i just want to say that the um the the research report will be available sometime soon but currently the um the executive summaries and the core findings are currently available thank you one more round of applause for thank you so much to our research teams um as dr jacob udder jacob mentioned the um the reports will be published later this fall please feel free to check out our mapping paper which is available outside which really shows the entire landscape the their um research briefs are are um digging further into we hope that their discussion and the previous research um as well as previous conversations during the breakout sessions will continue over lunch which is where we will be going right now lunch will be held in the great hall outside this auditorium the lunch is available right past where the coffee stations were from the last breakout um we ask that you use both the top and bottom exits to exit out there and then we'll resume today's program at 130 um back in here for our next set of ted speakers thanks um and thank you for coming back um for our second part of the day so i'm really excited um to learn as much as i did this morning as i will this afternoon from our next set of speakers our first speaker unfortunately cannot be with us here today but he had it will be appearing be a video um prionk mether is the founder of mythos labs a strategic communication and production company that partners with the world's most influential comedians to counter terrorist narratives gender-based violence and transnational crime he previously served as an intelligence analyst at the u.s department of homeland security and advertising executive at ogilvy and mather and a contributing writer for the onion um so please so and having seen him speak before his actual introduction of being both an intelligence analyst focusing on counterterrorism and a part-time writer for the onion made for um a really interesting marriage and so we will hear from him um be a video just now so thank you good afternoon ladies and gentlemen thank you usip for organizing this great event and i'm really sorry i couldn't be there with all of you in person today my name is prionk mather and i'm here to talk to you about how we can use comedy and creative techniques to fight violent extremism by way of background i'm a former policy analyst and intelligence officer at the u.s department of homeland security right here in dc and i was also a comedy writer for the onion um i now run mythos labs this is a company that partners with comedians around the world to create funny videos that counter the narrative of violent extremists but why are we looking at comedy and creative techniques why why look at all these out-of-the-box solutions well the truth is extremist communications uh have really upped their game in the past few years and a lot of that has been because of ices um pre-social media or in the earliest days of social media back when i was at dhs for example uh extremist messaging looked and felt a lot different than it does today it was it tended to be sort of low production quality very sober in terms of its tone and messaging um even though the internet was alive and well most terrorist groups chose to disseminate their propaganda through tv print and radio here's a couple examples of screenshots from a FARC video and uh of course asama bin laden and al-qaeda uh and then of course terrorist communications tended to be very centralized controlled by a propaganda department at that organization well a lot of that has changed and in large part because of ices i think the major changes in terrorist communications have been how they're communicating and where they're communicating in terms of the how there's been a push towards entertainment driven content that is directly inspired by pop culture here's an example of a poster of a very popular american video game called call of duty and right next to it this is a real poster titled call of jihad that extremist groups in southeast asia are actually using um in terms of where they're communicating there's also been major changes for example here's an image from a town called beduria in near calcutta about 300 miles away from calcutta in india those of you who follow the region might have heard of this about a year ago the town was rocked by days of violence and rioting which all started with a facebook meme apparently a hindu boy had uploaded a meme that was very offensive to to islamic sentiments um it led to a lot of very angry muslim residents of the town demanding action be taken they gathered outside around this boy's house somebody took a video of that gathering uploaded it onto youtube with no context and said look these angry muslims are threatening our hindu brothers and sisters that led to bus loads of hindus from out of state coming in which led to more tweets more angry hindus and muslims rioting fighting and and what all that led to was days of violence which led to dozens of deaths and thousands of dollars of damage and property and what we saw here was extremist groups on both sides indian nationalists and islamic extremist groups using this pernicious cycle of social media very effectively in a very savvy manner basically they were posting provocative content on facebook then mobilizing armies on twitter again playing the twitter strings and then uploading one-sided videos of violence without any context on youtube which of course led to more of the same and so on and so forth so what is one possible solution our approach is to partner with comedians particularly social influencers or comedians with large followings online to create entertaining videos that counter the narrative of violent extremism why comedians uh why social influencers um well young people in the parts of the world where we're operating tend to watch more youtube than they do television uh social influencers also have a knack for creating localized content uh owing to and that's demonstrated by the fact that they've got millions of local young followers and of course they're efficient takes about uh three to five days for a prolific youtuber in india for example to create a new video compared that to movies or tv shows it's a much quicker development cycle and why comedy comedy is the most shareable form of content online and you probably know that anecdotally just from thinking about your own facebook news feeds um comedy is also disarming which is important when you're talking about sensitive topics like violent extremism there's a quote by oscar wilder he says uh if you want to tell people the truth make them laugh otherwise they'll kill you and i think that's really appropriate for this and of course comedy is growing in popularity in asia in the middle east and africa and a lot of places where violent extremism is an issue so without further ado here's an example of what comedy uh as a counter narrative tool can look like it's a video we made with a group called east india comedy in india called i want to quit isis well i hope you enjoyed the video just real quick the impact it got a lot of great views uh in publicity but most importantly no negative comments 98.6 positive 1.4 neutral and as you can see from that bottom quote there which is an actual direct message that i and a couple of the comedians received from a young man in india this video was actually able to start a conversation with someone who had gone down started to go down the path of radicalization and that as you guys know everyone who's working in de-radicalization in cv starting that conversation is a really tough thing to do we're also doing micro influencer programs we were partnering with amateur content makers to teach them how to make entertaining comedic and non-comedic counter narrative videos using just their mobile phones we did something like that for you and women in Bangladesh we're doing more in indonesia the philippine south asia so my contact information is available to you i do hope you'll get in touch with any comments or questions look forward to hearing from you sorry again i couldn't be there in person and thank you very much for your time the pleasure of introducing our first in-person speaker uh dr ameha wood is a lecture in journalism politics and communications she researches the impact on radio on women's empowerment and conflict affected areas heywood is currently working on a two-year british academy funded project investigating local radio involvement in angio activities in conflict sensitive areas using the west bank as a case study her research has investigated european representations of the israeli palestinian conflict from 2006 to 2008 she has also examined russian french uk and palestinian audience perceptions of the coverage of the gaza war in 2014 her book european foreign conflict reporting a comparative analysis of public news providers is published by rootlage please help me welcome to the stage dr ameha wood world's global population are online internet use is up throughout the world in africa for example there are over 20 more internet users this year than the were last year mobile phone use is huge and growing there are over half the global population access their internet using their mobile devices there are over two billion um social media accounts your average internet user spends over four hours a day online well these figures are all very well but what about the individual what about the individual who has no access to the internet i want you to imagine just for a minute being one of those people who has got no access to the electricity you can't charge your mobile you can't understand the information on the screen in front of you either because it's not in your local language or because you simply can't read you have no money you've been displaced you can't afford a television and actually having a computer is beyond your wildest dreams even if you could read so i'm talking about marginalised vulnerable groups groups which are vulnerable to extremist recruitment groups which are vulnerable to the effects of extremism where infrastructure has been destroyed if it was there to start with and i'm talking about the radio this is where the radio that traditional medium comes in the radio is that simple box in your kitchen in your phone on your mobile which most of us in this room take for granted most of us in this room actually aren't really all that aware how much we use it on a daily basis and yet for some it's a lifeline for some it's the only source of information they have but the radio doesn't get the information that it deserves social media gets all the attention social media is better social media will use up the radio but radio is cheap it's easy to use it only requires batteries to run you can use it via your mobile and even if you haven't got a source of electricity you can the chances are you can charge up your mobile at a charging bank at your logical market i didn't realize the impact of radio until i started researching it in detail in my work in Gaza in the west bank and now on a large project in in Africa i see how it brings communities together how it informs people and how it unites people and brings people together what i want you to do now is imagine that you're a young person you have no job and you're seeking someone to blame you're seeking a way out and your local community radio station is being paid by extremists to broadcast their message and this local community station is trying to recruit you as a fighter this recruitment process is ongoing and yet you listen to the radio you listen to the top-down messages which are being pushed out to you there's no other source of information there's no other source of entertainment but surely if radio can be used to broadcast propaganda alongside social media and so on it can also be used to broadcast counter propaganda messages or alternative messages messages which can be refined to target specific audiences like you in your language in a language you understand in a style you understand on a subject you can relate to with people present that you can relate to you can even ring in you can have your say you can debate a subject with community leaders with religious leaders and suddenly you're contributing to your community you're contributing to society with your participation you're no longer just receiving messages you're crafting them you are now part of the solution so let's take Ali for example or Ali Meister as he prefers to be known he is well known in his community in Difa in Niger and he's well known because he's often on the large commercial radio station which broadcasts from his town he's well known for being on the radio for talking about his experiences with extremist groups who have tried to recruit him as a fighter he now uses the radio to broadcast counter propaganda messages he goes out into the community to talk to groups of young people to the youth groups and bring to them all together no other medium would allow him or enable him quite so easily to be a presenter to convey a message to the local community to go out and record a program on location and to raise a positive profile to youth to local youth so what are we saying are we saying that radio can actually change people's lives can it actually have an impact on people well let's have a look at children as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency as you know thousands hundreds of thousands of children left without schooling but not only were they left without education but they were displaced but there was no possibility of building new schools for them or training new teachers for them to be taught so had nothing been done there would have been a whole generation of uneducated youth who would be sitting targets as Boko Haram recruits so one solution was to educate these children over the radio a simple solution easy to implement and one which can cover large areas and it could be done so without major construction costs and without to teacher training costs it could also be implemented very quickly so this is a project that was run by the American University of Nigeria and USAID and they used radio and mobile technology to raise the appeal of western education this project taught basic english literacy and numeracy and it used songs and radio dramas in the local language using characters that little children could relate to and they were also synchronized there we go they're also synchronized activity workbooks and they encouraged children to engage with the songs and the stories that they were listening to and so radio was used to encourage children to imagine to learn and to engage but these these programs these lessons more importantly were broadcast by a relatively new radio station Dandalkura which broadcast in the late Chad area where as we were hearing hearing before Boko Haram had a monopoly to spread its extremist narrative there was little competition for credible information and yet this is a gap that's now been filled filled by radio by this radio station this education program was broadcast over 18 months and over 20 000 children who otherwise would not have been reached have now received basic education and this is through the radio the project was so popular and successful that it was continued for a further six months by another local radio station after the initial funding had had run out so how else can radio impact people's lives how else has it been used to in this fight against extremism well simply by providing information by news programs people can receive an alternative message that it enables them to question messages that they previously had been receiving give audiences programs and then bring on experts to debate that subject to debate the subject so i'm currently working on a large project with studio kalanga which is a radio station which a radio studio run by the swiss-based media development organization fondatia kondel and it is using this approach to broadcast independent information programs over it broadcasts from the capital of mejair using satellite and then it broadcasts them to its network of community and commercial radio stations who's then rebroadcast them using fm networks so it then brings on experts moderate religious leaders community leaders people in positions of trust who can be believable to discuss this to debate the subject so what is importantly though is that these programs are broadcast multiple times in multiple languages throughout the country which means that these alternative messages can reach the population what's more we're using the prevailing radio culture to take this further the culture of listening clubs is widespread in many many countries and this is they enable the ordinary person to take part in public life people will sit around an ordinary radio set outside their houses in the streets and wherever they drink tea and they discuss the radio program they discuss it together it's a socializing medium and if it is used and if radio is used and used well to broadcast positive messages if it is targeted correctly in the correct language to the correct people it can make a difference it can have a ripple effect in mejair for example which is affected by the conflict which is spilling over its borders studio kalangu and my own project we're trying to work to contribute to empowering women it recognizes not only the gender inequality of this poverty struck country but it also recognizes that women play an essential role as policy shapers educators community builders activists and so on and it's an important role not just in developing the country but in fighting extremism as well because it's widely accepted that the capacity of women to spot and react to extremism to react to extremism in their families ranges greatly depending on levels of education social awareness and geographic remoteness those who don't have as much formal education struggle to recognize warning signs they may perceive changes in their children as simply then becoming more religious and this may be considered a good change so an obvious solution is to make and keep women informed and listening groups are an ideal solution for this so that this isn't quite so easy when women aren't allowed to come to mix listening groups for the very reason that they're mixed so what we did over the summer was set up a network of women's only listening groups in using community radio so community radio would broadcast independent information and then women come to these women's only associations in their hundreds and receive information discuss information about warning signs but also at the things like health education and so on and they pass on this information and the ripple effect continues and then the community builds get stronger and the resilience is to extremism is built so the methods and the techniques of using the radio continue so radio has a role an important role and one which isn't going to go away just because of the growth in the internet there's a picture of my ladies my women's only listening group but in short we need to ensure that radio and particularly community radio can thrive and can continue to push out these alternative messages to all forms to all effective groups and these are alternative messages to extremist ones so radio may be a traditional medium but it's a socializing one it's sociable and it can bring people together and can do so in a positive manner so radio is not past its prime it must be used and it mustn't be disregarded thank you thank you so much i'd like to now welcome our second speaker to the stage dr Pamina Furchow is a assistant professor of conflict analysis and resolution at george mason university her research interests include political violence transitional justice especially victim reparations reconciliation and peace building in particular she's very interested in the study of international accompaniment of local communities affected by mass violence her specific focus is on the role of concept formation in the measurement and evaluation of external interventions and how local people can be included in these processes please help me welcome to the stage dr Pamina Furchow i'm a professor at george mason university um and actually also a former senior Jennings Randolph fellow here at usip so it's it's really wonderful to be back i'm going to talk to you today about a project that i've been leading for about six years called the everyday peace indicators project and this approach was developed by myself and my colleague Roger McGinty from Durham University now in the uk in order to address our concerns about measurement validity and concept formation uh in traditional approaches to measuring a difficult to define concepts such as reconciliation governance peace justice and violent extremism uh the usual way to measure these kinds of concepts is to start with experts or scholars or in the cases of evaluation which some of you may be more familiar with program managers usually sitting in washington dc or london or capital city far away from the communities where the research is carried out or the evaluation is carried out many of you may be doing that yourselves and very familiar with that process so just to run through the process experts come up with their own definitions for these difficult to define concepts like peace or violent extremism in this case usually based on broad theories that are meant to be applied in many different contexts around the world and they use this theoretical definition to develop different signs or indicators to measure whether there is more or less peace or whatever social phenomenon they're studying so violent extremism for example in the places that they're studying they might use these indicators to develop a survey or then come up later with focus group questions or an interview questions these ways of measuring difficult to define concepts typically don't change from one country or another or from a region to another definitely not from a village to another for example a survey in columbia would ask the same questions in most cases in bogota as it would in in cartagena so why is this problematic well outsiders may not fully capture the concept in the way that it is being lived or understood on the ground therefore leading to concerns about measurement validity or whether or not that tool is is valid they might not fully capture what the concept means at the community level so at the village level or at the neighborhood level or reflect how the people on the ground understand it outside experts will have difficulty framing questions and indicators in a language that can be locally understood so extra processes need to be taken in order for people to understand what they're talking about so communities really are best place to identify their own indicators of the social phenomena they experience since they're already doing this in their everyday lives in other words people are already using their own everyday indicators to determine whether or not they are at peace or reconciled or there's more or less violent extremism for example so why not gather those indicators and analyze them for policy use so instead of letting experts decide what these concepts mean in different parts of the world the everyday indicators approach starts off by asking people at the village level or the neighborhood level how they define them and then it uses their answers to come up with locally specific ways of defining and measuring these concepts this process is also useful for planning and evaluation purposes of peace building related work the process that we've developed involves four key steps first we develop the indicators through a series of focus groups by asking people what signs they look to in their daily lives to determine whether they and their communities are at peace so I'm speaking to individuals about in focus group environments to really get the tangible signs what are those signs that they use in their daily lives to determine whether they are more or less at peace or whether there is more or less violent extremism for example these indicators are highly localized and contextual here are some examples of indicators from past studies so for example in Atiaki Uganda can the Boda Boda cyclist ride to certain areas as you can see it's very context specific very almost anecdotal in some cases but it's it's a local experience and this one when you dig a little bit deeper you can see that it has more layers to it because Boda Boda cyclists who in northern Uganda are the taxi drivers right they often ex-combatants and so they're plugged into post-conflict networks and clearly it makes sense that people are looking to them to decide where they can go and where they can't go right and you know we've we've done this study in other places as well in Afghanistan with USIP we did a study on violent extremism indicators where I mean the lists and lists of indicators but an interesting one that I saw was and sort of related to radio was TV antennas whether or not there were TV antennas in a village allowed people to have a better idea if there were a lot of TV antennas in a village allowed people to understand if there was more or less violent extremism in that in that particular context so as you can see very contextual again it's important to stress that what we're gathering are indicators that people are already using in their daily lives or what we call indigenous technical knowledge so people are not inventing these indicators for us nor are we asking people to you know create indicators for a particular project for example right we are sourcing indigenous technical knowledge so these are indicators that people already use in their daily lives and what we are doing is not creating new indicators we are sourcing them and then analyzing them and using them for policy guidance and then going back to the process the indicators are then verified through a participatory process that involves the community and this ensures that the indicators are as representative as possible of the community and also narrows down the list of available indicators so that we first of all have a manageable list of indicators but also you know oftentimes in focus groups there'll be someone who comes up with a one-off indicator but this process really narrows down the indicators to and also creates a list that's meaningful for the for the community and representative of the community these indicators can then be analyzed and also be coded into categories in order to help with planning and design of the projects and so the individual indicators can be analyzed or can be used for policy guidance but also we also code the indicators into categories because there can be the problem rate that you maybe are not seeing the forest for the trees and so in order to be able to or sorry the trees for the forest anyway anyway in in order to be able to see a little bit of a broader overview we can code them into categories and we usually do that through process tracing of the actual indicators so we create categories that are inductive rather than deductive but usually those categories end up shaking out to be policy areas of interest anyway and and so so then we can say for example that one area is particularly concerned with issues to do with human rights whereas another one is more interested in security or is defining peace more in terms of development or whatever so that you can zoom out a little bit because sometimes it is almost too localized right so it's important to stress that the difference between the everyday indicators and regular indicators is that the indicators themselves can already tell us a lot about what peace means to people on the ground and and therefore can be independently analyzed to guide programming so they're the indicators themselves are analyzable but then the indicators also provide the basis for questions that allow us to understand more about that concept in a community and sorry I there we go I was pressing the wrong button so the indicators are can provide the the basis for surveys but also for questions or existing data you can populate the questions with whatever data is available where we typically populate them into surveys because there isn't a lot of data available at the very local level and so one way is to survey the communities over time with the indicators in order to understand whether they are at peace according to their own indicators and how that changes over time and that's particularly also useful in evaluation the everyday peace indicators approach is concerned with rigor validity and reliability but it really also prioritizes local voices over external voices in the development and evaluation of programs and in measurement in general therefore we consider ourselves an approach to produce participatory numbers and statistics that work with communities to produce policy guidance in a language and a format that policymakers can use so the idea being that we are galvanizing communities to really help work with us to produce numbers but include them in the process of creating those measurement tools where they're usually excluded in that process they may be sources of information but they're excluded in the process and so we're including them into that process recognizing that policymakers often have a need for numbers so if you'd like to learn more about the project we have a website which you can check out everydaypeaceindicators.org and you can also pick up my new book on amazon which is here and the book engages with the academic debates on concept formation and makes an argument for participatory numbers and the everyday peace indicators approach in particular and it then goes on to make arguments about local level peace building effectiveness using the everyday peace indicators in a quasi-experimental design in villages in Colombia and Uganda. So thank you very much. Thank you again final speaker for this TED Talks series is USIP's own Dr. Maria Stefan who directs our program on nonviolent action here at the institute it focuses on applied research training and education and informing policies and practice related to civil resistance nonviolent action and the roles in transforming violent conflict and advancing just peace. She was formerly the non-resident fellow senior fellow at the Atlantic Council where she co-led the future of authoritarianism project previously Stefan was also the lead foreign affairs officer at the US State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations where she worked on both policy and operations for Afghanistan and Syria. She's also the editor of civilian jihad nonviolent struggle democratization and governance in the Middle East as the co-editor of is authoritarianism staging a comeback and is the co-author of why civil resistance works the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. Please help me welcome to the stage Dr. Maria Stefan. Last TED Talk of the day my name is Maria Stefan and I direct the program on nonviolent action here at the US Institute of Peace and I have spent most of my professional life working with writing about and otherwise seeking to support activists and organizers who are leading nonviolent movements around the world. So for the next few minutes I will discuss the role of civil resistance otherwise known as nonviolent action or people power in preventing violent extremism. So let me offer two examples to set the stage. Four years ago in Burkina Faso which we heard about this morning which has been a victim of violent extremist attacks a grassroots anti-corruption movement mobilized the population to prevent the abuse of power by its president. The Ballet Citoyenne or citizens broom movement which used the broom as a symbol of sweeping away political corruption was led by a group of reggae artists and helped mobilize the population after president Kampwari attempted to manipulate the constitution and extend his mandate. Ballet Citoyenne organized protests musically inspired street theater boycotts sit-ins other nonviolent tactics to generate pressure which ultimately forced the president to step down from power. More recently this past March in Afghanistan after a gruesome Taliban attack in Helmand province that killed scores of civilians. Ordinary Afghans from Helmand began to organize protests denouncing the violence and demanding peace talks. The protests spread to other parts of the country and culminated in a 300 mile march from Helmand to Kabul in the scorching hot sun and in the midst of dust storms. The marchers incidentally spoke with Taliban fighters along the way and when they arrived in Kabul the marchers organized sit-ins in front of Afghan government offices in foreign embassies. This nascent movement has brought Afghans together across tribal divisions. It has involved men and women young and old to up the ante for a negotiated peace. Both of these examples feature ordinary people who were fed up with violence and repression and who decided to take action to do something. They use civil resistance which is a method of struggle that involves tactics of protests and persuasion like vigils rallies marches methods of non-cooperation like civil disobedience boycott strikes and methods of non-violent intervention like sit-ins and the building of parallel structures and institutions and they use these methods to disrupt the status quo and to shift power dynamics in their societies without the use of violence. Civil resistance has been used in every region of the world in all cultures and by adherence of all the world's major religions including Islam. It's been used to advance women's rights in Pakistan to end civil war in Liberia and to challenge authoritarianism in Tunisia and corruption in the Philippines. Nonviolent movements are rooted in communities and they are led by those people who are most affected by injustices including and notably youth. Leaders of extremist groups often claim that violence is necessary to challenge tyranny and oppression that it is the only meaningful way to resist violent kleptocratic and exclusionary systems. However we know that this is not true. A few years ago my colleague Erika Chenoweth and I collected and analyzed data on close to 330 major violent and nonviolent campaigns over the past century. We intentionally chose the tough cases that involve challenging mostly repressive authoritarian regimes willing and able to use violence to stay in power. We found somewhat counterintuitively that the nonviolent campaigns were twice as successful as their armed counterparts. The primary factor in determining the outcomes of these campaigns was the size and diversity of participation. Significantly more people can participate in nonviolent resistance compared to arm struggle or terrorism and when large numbers of people withdraw their consent and cooperation from an oppressive system or an armed group and they engaged in organized non-cooperation the system can no longer wield effective control so you can win without violence. But civil resistance is not simply about protesting and stubbornly saying no. It is also about building positive alternatives and saying yes. Erika and I found in the research that nonviolent resisting resistance campaigns contribute significantly to democratization even in places where the campaigns failed to achieve their goals. This finding has been backed by seven or eight other independent studies and this is because the inclusive participatory nature of nonviolent movements is conducive to building social trust and building systems grounded in a respect for human rights. Not only is nonviolent resistance an effective means of resisting the injustices that fuel radicalization it is also empowering. There is a reason why it is called people power. We know that people join extremist groups to be part of something bigger than themselves. To make sacrifices for what they believe in one of ISIS's main messages for recruiting youth was simply join us and help build an ideal society where you will always belong. Joining a nonviolent movement provides many of the same psychosocial benefits as these groups. I've heard from countless activists around the world that their participation in nonviolent action has offered them a sense of agency of being part of a community and a sense of purpose. Movements like Balei Citoyen and Burkina Faso and the Ana Taban or I Am Tired Youth-led Movement in South Sudan like many others around the world have used humor and satire as we've seen symbols rituals and slogans that have helped build a sense of cohesion and solidarity that inspires and attracts others to join the cause. Silver resistance is life affirming and its creative potential is boundless. So there are positive effects of nonviolent action at the level of the individual but also at the community level where there is evidence that nonviolent organizing contributes to resilience. Michael Markusa conducted a fascinating comparative study of various villages in Tunisia. He found that those villages with history of nonviolent organizing experienced lower levels of violent extremist recruitment compared to those with no history of nonviolent organizing. Other research by Lauren Van Meter, Jonas Claes found that communities that focused on communities in Kenya found that those that featured high levels of self-organizing and that built autonomous governance structures were less likely to experience extremist infiltration compared to those where such organizing did not exist. So in summary, nonviolent resistance offers a propulsive in effective way of representing grievances and of resisting injustices. It offers many of the same psychosocial benefits as joining terrorist groups and it helps build community resilience. Now let me conclude by offering a few ideas for practitioners and policymakers. First, by now it should be a truism that investing in locally driven community led approaches to preventing violent extremism is both sensible and strategic. Policymakers should amplify the work of grassroots movement leaders, center them in decision-making processes and ensure that their voices are featured prominently in national and global policy forums. Secondly, governments, international organizations and NGOs can use the carrots and sticks at their disposal to help keep civic space open around the world in places where it is closing. They can use diplomatic, economic and military to military tools to mitigate violence targeting nonviolent activists and to curb the predatory repressive practices of other governments and their security forces that fuel violent extremism. Finally, outside actors cannot create movements nor should they but they can support the transfer of skills and knowledge about how to wage nonviolent struggle effectively. They can provide the convening spaces to help civic actors in fragile and conflict affected states to plan strategically and to learn from other activists. They can help influential civic leaders tell their nations often buried histories of nonviolent resistance through educational and media channels, something that organizations like ours in the international center on nonviolent conflict focus on. Equipping aggrieved oppressed people with knowledge and skills about how to organize in their communities and build powerful movements to advance rights and freedoms is a critical ingredient in the fight against violent extremism. Thank you very much. Thank you so much and that concludes our session. We are going to once again move out to the Great Hall for another breakout discussion. I hope that this afternoon will be just as fruitful as this morning as we share our impressions and we also contribute to what we're trying to do in terms of analyzing what we need more of what we'd need less of going forward. So please feel free to use both the doors and we'll come back here at 345 for our last salon style discussion. Thanks so much. So I have the honor of introducing our panelists. So all the way to my right is Dr. Todd C. Helmuss who's a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. He specializes in terrorism, strategic communications and social media. His work focuses on improving U.S. efforts to counter militant recruitment and decrease popular support for terrorism and insurgency. He has examined the networks of ISIS supporters and opponents on Twitter and identified ways to enlist key influencers in support of U.S. strategic communications. He has identified approaches to assess CVE campaigns as well. He's worked closely with U.S. special operation forces in Afghanistan where he served as an advisor to U.S. commanders and led studies on U.S. efforts to train the Afghan special security forces. In 2008 he also served in Baghdad as an advisor to the multinational forces of Iraq. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Wayne State University. Next is Cheryl Frank who joined the Institute for Security Studies in 2009 as the director of the Pretoria Office. She's currently the head of Transnational Threats and International Crime Program in Pretoria. Before joining the ISS, Cheryl was executive director at Child Rights Organization, RAPCAN, director of the Criminal Justice Initiative at the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, research and program director at APCOF and researcher at the Institute of Criminology University of Cape Town. She began her career as a social worker with the National Institute for Crime and the Rehabilitation of Offenders. Cheryl has a Bachelor of Social Science, Social Work degree from the University of Natal, and an MBA from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. And sitting next to me is Dr. Matthew Leavitt who is the Fromer Wexler Fellow and the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policies, Jeanette and Eli Reinhard program on counter-terrorism and intelligence. Dr. Leavitt has written extensively on terrorism, on countering violent extremism, illicit finance, sanctions, the Middle East, Arab-Israeli peace negotiations with articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals, policy magazines, the press including Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and numerous other publications. So I have very esteemed colleagues joining us on the stage today and this is probably just a snapshot of many of their accolades. So throughout the day today I hope we have helped sharpen why we think it was a pretty good idea back in September of 2015 for international stakeholders to launch the Resolve Network. The idea of connecting, capturing, and curating locally informed research and violent extremism and how it can promote effective policy and practice is a worthy endeavor. Almost three years after its inception and with a commitment to clarify its mission and its practice, this year's Resolve Forum is designed to push the envelope a little bit further on addressing what are our knowledge gaps on violent extremism as well as the gaps in between research and how it influences policymaking. I'm hoping that our panel here can unpack some of the very real experiences of experts well versed in the CVE ecosystem on research to policy conversations and hopefully what we can do about improving our community of practice going forward. So we're going to start I'm just going to have a little bit of an informal opening and ask each of the panelists to give opening remarks and then we'll go to a couple questions. So we'll start with Todd please. All right well thank you. I was intrigued when you sent the email describing what some of the topics you wanted to address noting that part of the question is like what are the challenges in seamlessly integrating research into practice and I find it a I'd laugh a little bit because I've never had good luck seamlessly integrating research into practice and it's so hard on multiple levels. Some ways by design and just some ways just with the difficultness of the topic we're looking at I mean number one there's in general a disconnect between policymakers and academics. From my experience academics oftentimes struggle to understand what the policymakers need, what their actual research needs are and even at Rand where we oftentimes work very closely with the policymakers at least the shop that's you know funding whatever work we're doing even then it's really hard to get a good understanding of what the policymaker wants what is their decision point and how are you trying to inform that just CVE research in general is just a very messy process getting access to subjects is hard the research that we do rarely has like gives you a hundred percent variance answer on anything so pretty much anybody can criticize most research on terrorism because there's loopholes and flaws and and everything so in some sense as researchers really just need to they're trying to provide part of an answer rarely do you ever provide a full or a comprehensive answer and oftentimes there's not much on the back end so as researchers finish their research products up oftentimes at least from my experience we spend all our money doing the research we have spent very little time and money and effort interacting with the policymakers to push our products we hope that by providing a hundred page report on the website that somehow will magically influence people and i'm shocked that it doesn't and and the policy process is hard right there's a lot of stakeholders involved in all sorts of decisions and rarely does the researcher get a hundred percent vote on anything they probably shouldn't right there's a lot of stakeholders to include the general public that has a say in these things so anyway i think it's really hard to have this seamless integration i think there's ways to address all of those factors but it's a it's a bit of a slog and i can't think of any home runs that i've had in my work i'm waiting for the day but i trust that over time by answering questions please answering part of the question continually we know that starts to get a good chunk of it addressed so and charo what are your thoughts on a similar question yeah you know if if you would have listened carefully to lianne's description of my bio is that you know my entire career has been moving around all these spaces of being in practice as a social worker and then running an NGO working in research institutes at universities and now my kind of hybrid job of doing research and then capacity building and technical assistance in africa and and my experiences are in africa and then and then also acting as an advocate for certain human rights issues and and particularly in the child rights field so you know i've been maneuvering around the space trying to find my way and find where is it that we can make the the most significant change is it in practice is it in research is it in influencing policy so my entire career is the search for has been a search for these sorts of answers but i think what you know the main thing that i struggle with currently is these three pieces of things which is one is evidence the other piece is policy and what is in policy and the other pieces actual actual practices and the huge gaping holes between all those things and how they they relate to each other so and how they communicate with each other and how one may have something stick on another such as in africa we have this i mean i'm south african so even and my career started in south africa we used to call this this problem implementitis is that we had the most fantastic policies straight after apartheid and we had the most brilliant pieces we have brilliant constitution we had all these brilliant pieces of legislation supported by the world um and we just couldn't make it happen in many places in in and with very disastrous results for children for families for women um which is the field that i worked in at the time so um this implementitis problem and in between policy and practice at the time and then um and then as a research as i developed noticing the the massive gaping hole again between evidence and the other other two things policy and practice again and the sort of triangle of things that was confused and really difficult to figure out how they linked to each other so um i remember and and i'll i'll just end my opening comments with this as i remember um we were preparing as a group as an alliance of organizations to go to the south african parliament to have south africa's first juvenile justice legislation passed so we'd been working on this for years and we're taking this to parliament and like a good research as i suppose i went to poke around in the data on you know how does um how much do parliamentarians actually listen to evidence because we were preparing submissions to present to parliament around these issues um and um i i sort of was depressed for about three or four days after that because there was a lot of evidence coming out of the uk um particularly in in terms of their overseas development assistance um analyses about how little it was happening and i see the same things over and over again i looked again yesterday when preparing for lian's comments and noted exactly the same problem so um so it's really a question i think again of communication issue between these three spheres of existence and is it a practical communication issue i wonder um and it it's what you were talking about is is it the 18 page 80 page report on the on the web on the website that is the communication problem and is that part of the problem or is it a you know a bigger dynamic that we have to address and and i suspect it is the latter and over to you matt so first of all i think that on one of the uh measures of success uh you should use as how many times it's been downloaded not how many times it's been read i personally got to page 80 but not past that um if anybody wants my business card i'm happy to give it that's one of my measures of success how often do i have to replenish my my business cards and you laugh but that's a little bit how we tend to measure some of these programs um and uh at the washington institute i lead a cv working group uh with some wonderful people involved um and uh we talk about these things and then i've also led now three different uh bipartisan study groups uh three with different reports that we published they're all available on our website and you can download them from my metrics i'd appreciate that very much um and in that we we uh brought together we're non-partisan think tank but we brought together democrats and republicans put together the support and then we kind of walked it into policy makers offices and i want to give you a little bit of feedback from that uh the first point is that uh in this country we don't have a political system that allows for failure okay so uh i give our european counterparts for example tremendous kudos for trying and failing and trying again uh lots of people like to beat up on on the brits for their various iterations of their contest strategy fair enough but they have tried and continue trying and don't always succeed and i'd like to see a little bit more of that in this country but we don't have an either side of the aisle we don't have a political system that tolerates much of that so i walked into uh various uh house and senate committees and met with members and staff with democrats and republicans from our task force and we briefed them on a whole bunch of these different issues and ultimately they'd come down and they'd say well why should i fund any of these programs if i don't know that they're gonna work and we said you won't know what will work until you fund something and you build metrics and evaluation into it and you can limit it and then then we'll have something more to talk about they only saw it from the political perspective of you're asking me in a very very sensitive area we're talking about terrorism here right to to take a risky stance um and if you can imagine how risky it is at the front end when you're talking about off-ramping people who haven't necessarily committed any crimes yet but seem to be inclined to go down a wrong path you can imagine how much more sensitive it is for an air where we are going to need to spend a lot more time and effort on the back end as people uh finish serving their terms in prison for example and come out of prison and as you heard this morning there are no not no effective there are no reentry programs to help people uh be able to to reenter society which brings me to my next point very often policymakers in this country on both sides of the aisle come at this through a very ideological lens from both sides of the aisle um and that is to say there are many people who feel uncomfortable putting in place as several people have put it to me a social welfare programs for terrorists that that's not how we deal with terrorists right our our purpose here is not to embrace terrorists before after we have other ways to deal with them um that is extremely short-sighted I said to one person um you know um we have programs for rehabilitation for people who carry all kinds of really heinous horrible crimes this the t-word becomes so emotional and so political and so ideological that somehow we put it in a completely different context every administration that comes uh into the White House um has a period of policy review that's always the case the policy review for uh what I still call CVE policy but the Trump administration now calls terrorism prevention has taken until now and the pendulum is just now beginning to come back into the larger middle after what was a very ideological discussion mostly about radical Islamism when that is not what this is actually about and that's only if anything a small small piece of it and so I think that there is an opportunity now to have some of the discussions that have come up over the course of today and that may surprise some people but I think that that's good the downside is that for many people this is an ideological issue for example some members of the task force that we put together really didn't like it when we wanted to talk about domestic terrorism white supremacist violence uh that conversation has changed post charlottesville but at the time people said to me and these are smart smart great people we've had those problems in the united states for years that's not new what's new is the radical islamist terrorism that's coming from abroad so we have this ideological piece too I think we need to think of this also however not only from the inside the beltway federal and legislative perspective we need to think about this at a local and state level not only because I think we are seeing now that there is more headway in cve programs domestically here in the united states and I should say that's that's my area of focus more cve domestically than internationally um but because ultimately these are phenomena that are happening in communities and the communities are those that are best placed to have a sense of what they need you know people in within the beltway here talk about the need to give dollars to federal state and local law enforcement to deal with terrorism but if you go out and you talk to local law enforcement across the country most of those jurisdictions they want to deal with opioid problems they want to deal with a high murder rate it's not that they're soft on terrorism that's just not something that's part of their regular lives and if you come say and you need to spend 15 20 25 30 percent of your budget on counter terrorism that's that's out of left field for them so i spoke to some of the people who lead the core initiative here in maryland some of whom she and abat and aguaire and others have been here i don't know if they're still here i think shan had to go pick up her kids at school to talk about how some of these issues of metrics and evaluation fit into how they actually run programs in communities and one of the things i heard is that there is mine phd fatigue enough with you phd's coming and telling us all the different boxes we have to check when we are running programs in communities we have to deal with the communities themselves and we have to deal with the local and state government mostly law enforcement with which we need to interact the local and state government doesn't want to know all about the phd isms what they want to know is how can i fit this into existing programs because you're not giving me more money to run these things all right budgets are limited how can i fit this into things i'm doing already and when you go to the communities they don't want you to come with a bunch of big terminalities and big ideas and tell them we've studied it here's what you're experiencing what they want is to be asked and so you know the collective impact methodology where you come in and you say hey we've done some studies and we have a sense of what's going on but we'd like your opinion here's here's what we think is this what you're experiencing in community is is there something different and there you get you get basic buy-in and the last thing which is an area of tremendous disconnect with federal government with legislature etc is that across the board i haven't spoken to every program there's across the country but every program i have spoken to unanimously says it is tremendously unhelpful to put this into terms of terrorism or any type of ideology to the extent we can put this in terms of public safety to the extent we can put this in terms of violence prevention which ultimately is what this is about we will inherently get much more community buy-in and a lot of people here in the beltway don't like that and you will notice that under this administration this effort in most not all but most federal agencies and departments is now referred to as terrorism prevention which i think is undermining the ability to run exactly the same type of programs we're talking about in communities who don't want it to only be about the big t-word ultimately what we're talking about is violence prevention and public safety so you all have given incredibly important insights i'm going to pick up on the last one for the question so one of the topics we've been trying to grapple with today is how do we get more research or expert or analytical findings to actually influence policy what are some of the incentive structures or disincentive structures that we should be advocating for and so maybe i'll hone in just on matt's last point if focusing on the word terrorism is actually a part is not necessarily helpful what are ways in which we can be as the research community as the community of experts be pushing forward on ways to do what is more helpful started a local and state level the fixation on on these terms tends to be one that is within the beltway here so for example and by the way there are parts of government for example the Department of Justice has programs for evaluating programs and they're doing great work but for example in massachusetts the state department of health and human services has partnered with academics at the state level to help drive some of their programs a lot of state money there might be some federal money but this is being done at a more local level so it doesn't all have to come out of washington for it to be effective and for it to then be available to be used by academics and others to then have conversations with policymakers about how this can inform smart policymaking i'm going to reflect just slightly on that which is um so the the name of my title and many titles of of those doing programs in this room and around in this community is countering violent extremism which i have a completely unscientific sample size that everybody hates this term so yet it is the organizing principle on this phenomenon i think there are a variety of different reasons as to why this term is um alienating to communities it is not that helpful in actually describing the phenomenon it's not the the most popular um term but it is our organizing principle and so to take what you were just saying Matt but maybe reflect on it a little bit further um if what we're trying to do is solve the challenge hopefully well what can we do about the way in which we're conceptualizing it and from the research perspective are there ways to either study this or to give analysis or empirically based study about why we're sometimes cutting off our nose despite our face even when the goals are good but sometimes the ways and means may be challenged what wait see that last part again um all right the last part was cutting off our nose despite our face um and so this was the idea that the goals of cve are quite good but perhaps the way in which we're describing it um are yeah i think well so i think i'll know you can do research at many different levels right so um for me oftentimes i'm doing research for very specific policy shops within the department of defense or department of state not trying to influence like broad u.s policy on all cve issues um which you know pretty cool matt's had a chance to do this right great bipartisan work for bipartisan committees we has a chance to do that but it's a so it's a very different type of topic i think i think ultimately um knowing your target audience who are you doing this work for um how are they going to use that work being really integrated with the implementer or the policy maker so you can provide them the product they need it's really easy to provide research that misses the mark on many different levels so i could do a study that for a specific policy shop but my recommendations are very broad and generic well that's not going to help the policy shop i could do a work for broad for broad policy goals but i'm really too in the weeds and sometimes the recommendations i'm making aren't even feasible on any real political level so i think part of it is knowing the politics what it will be acceptable what's not acceptable you can shoot for the moon but the moon's not always going to get you where you want to go um and then you know spending time and money and allocation to try and integrate those findings at the back end of it rather than just post your 100 page report up so i mean really finding ways of talking to people and communicating the results of what you're doing maybe that means using the word cv e maybe it doesn't but there's many different types of questions that researchers need to deal with when they try and think about is someone going to actually use what i'm doing um i i just have come out of you know really being embedded in thinking about practice when it comes to cv e pve whatever we want to call it and uh in certainly in west africa where we we've been looking at lots of pve cv e projects many don't call themselves that simply because that is uh it's a means for um raising funds for what you think really needs to be done which is peace building or conflict prevention so it's a very much alliance with that experience i think in africa our bigger problem is that there aren't resources being thrown at all those other things so violence prevention all of those other public safety issues so there's a limited part of money for what needs to be done um there's a very interesting observation that came out of some of the work we've been doing recently around um somebody commenting that uh and i think this was a comment from niger is that people don't ask us and that aligns with your comments people don't ask us what we they think need we think needs to be done we're dealing with a whole range of intergroup conflict we're dealing with religious christians versus muslims over many years maybe we're dealing with a whole range of ethnic difficulties between groups nomadic groups and settled groups we're dealing with a whole range of criminal violence violence in homes we're dealing with a mix of issues and the and here you come along with some money and it's focused on violent extremes right so now it's that little bit that we have to find our way through and all those complexity of issues may relate to violent extremism as we say it and seem to know what we think we mean when we say it but um so it's this question of you know what is going on those those communities and that's where i think the research matters and and and the research and and i'm particularly talking about the practice of pve now on cve and and changing things for people on the ground is that the research that you've done matters because we get an understanding of what what people need what the issues are we don't assume that there's going to be violence on those campuses um we find out about it we develop programs we um you know this entire sort of continuum of activities that we need to do to build an evidence base um that's the sort of thing we should be arguing for when we talk we're talking to our donors and we have a lot more influence on donors sometimes than others um and and possibly naming and shaming those donors that are not um and that are not really supportive of this agenda of generating evidence that is useful for everybody um so you know we're going to be raising it at our side event at umga next week um where we release this report but one of the things we keep talking about is that is is this a real thing we're talking about is this pve something different is it is it what you're talking about is it peace building so if it is something different then let's figure out what is different about it and then hone in on those issues um so um i think that the the the evidence building continuum um really we need to be uh i i think batting away at that a lot more when it comes to what we regularly say and i see emily smiling there because it is something that we talk about a lot and we say um i remember a conversation with emily um earlier emily from russi and we was we were saying we were supportive skeptics of the idea but that as researchers we do have to be skeptical at these early stages when we really do not understand what this thing is about but that as that develops but it doesn't develop unless you invest in the research and the evaluation so um yeah i'll stop there and imagine how difficult that and it is to convince policymakers when we are skeptics ourselves which we need to be just two quick comments on on on the cv terminology issue one i think we did it ourselves a tremendous disservice by failing early on to distinguish between cve and pve they are different things they include different things failing to do that led to a situation where everything was cve and we compounded that by making cve the sexy thing and giving money to cve and everybody wanted to be in cve and people described things they're already doing a cve to get in on the cve money and suddenly cve was everything from you know off ramping to building a playground in a disadvantaged community which is a misnomer of an example a straw man but you get the point the second point is this and several of you in the room have heard me say it many before and you're gonna laugh i say it so often that my former research assistant got me a mug which sits on my desk which says hater's gonna hate the situation is such that there are people who are anti cve because they're anti cve there are people who are have been convinced that cve is a cover for spying and i get that but there are also people who are against it because they're just not interested in this because they're they're they're not trying to be a part of the solution i've been doing this long enough uh where i can spend a few minutes listing off you all the different terminology as we've used for this in the past many people may not remember that cve was the vanilla term that was intended to be the least controversial and as we're not dealing with extremism that you know you can think whatever you want but have you acted on it so it's only violent extremism many people myself included at the time complained look if we're only dealing with violent extremism then we're a dollar short and a day late but it was meant to be more comforting and cve has become a term that is yes hated by a whole lot of people except state department which still has to use the term for congressionally mandated financial reasons um i still use the term too because i don't think anything that and that would come up as an alternative has been better and i especially don't like the term terrorism prevention again because it focuses wholly on terrorism and frankly if you're one of those people who was convinced that cve was just a cover for police and counter terrorism now you think that you were right you've been vindicated and good cve certainly pve is not at all a cover for intelligence or law enforcement for me that really begs the question though because from a analysis point of view from a research point of view how are we able to to adequately research certain situations if the way in which we're supposed to be doing it is for something that communities and others may find so abrasive and i ask that because one of our speakers earlier this afternoon is really talking about everyday peace indicators and how do we get this real indigenous understanding of what what looks like a safe community what looks like a secure community to you community members and if we as researchers are trying to showcase to policymakers some of those findings what what the positive trend lines look like from an analytical perspective how do we do that under the moniker of a term that that is really difficult so i mean from my perspective we've dealt with this a little bit ran a few years ago produced a report that whether you like it or not a lot of people hate it and and it dealt with sort of quote the moderate muslim issue and it sort of seemed to articulate what a moderate muslim was and was not and so it was perceived as identifying good muslim bad muslim and so with that history in comes todd helmas to go to the same people that are really upset at ran for doing this project and i hate to articulate that i'm not that guy i think part of it is just relationship building communities certainly as any community does they have their they have their perceptions and some of those perceptions are right and some are inherently some are wrong and i think it's just a matter of building a relationship with them to overcome those issues trying to address their concerns head on like hey listen i know it i know i know what you're talking about and that's not me that's we're looking at something very different um and help me help me help you and let me carry water for you because part of our job is to is to do that to doing good research requires doing interviews and talking to people and understanding what their concern issues and concerns are and i think if you can show you can listen then the terminology drops drops away very quickly i mean no one's gonna i don't very few people are going to continue to carry that water forever once they get to know you once they get to address your concerns especially if you're doing it sort of a real legitimate type of relationship perspective yeah i think that to the extent that you can build relationships you can do a lot of good things and if you can demonstrate that what some people refer to as cve let me explain to you how we implement that and the way if you can explain for example at a local level that you're implementing that through things like community policing and violence prevention the types of things that parents care about for their children you're not i'm not coming to have a conversation with you because i think you're part of the tourism problem because this community whatever this community is is generating terrorists or could generate terrorists then you can overcome some of that it's difficult to overcome all of it because people are going to have to get people in the room in the first place and it gets to some of the metrics that that we tend to get it's not that they're bad metrics they're just not necessarily truly cve metrics maybe they're pve metrics things like over a period of time taking a poll of people who participate in these community engagements that get to things like what type of level of comfort you have speaking with people from local government or if you had a problem would you approach someone or would you know who to approach and we can improve those things through community engagements of different kinds uh whether that is a true cve metric is a conversation it's also true though that if you can improve those types of metrics you can get to a place where you can then talk about other things that can be more sensitive and can get to more cve issues i'm gonna pivot us slightly and ask a little bit more of a specific question if um if you all might share some examples from your experience of when you have seen um research actually um either change somebody's mind change a policy change a practice um if you've actually seen kind of have any anecdotes or examples of that kind of evidence-based shift i think there are small examples um and this is in the days before um alternative facts and facts and not facts and and so on you know it's this it relates to the earlier conversation i was having about um you know trying to convince parliamentarians in the south african parliament to pass juvenile justice legislation that was that was pretty liberal um and liberal in the sense of treating kids through diversion you know pretrial diversion a lot of alternative sentencing etc but we managed to use evidence to to argue for something that was quite controversial at the moment anything to do with sex is controversial but um young sexual offenders particularly um the sexual offenses committed by young offenders was a big issue and we managed to argue them around purely based on international research and local research on this um but i think that um there are several examples also of practice driving policy and not the other way around um and these are two also two examples from south africa and again my juvenile justice example criminal justice examples uh but um you know in order to enable um diversion to be considered an acceptable part of a juvenile justice system this means pretrial diversion kids who have committed offenses admitted to the committing those offenses mostly nonviolent offenses being allowed to not be prosecuted based on an agreement to do some programs or to apologize or whatever so pretrial diversion was never part of the system we used um in south africa and and luckily being part of a national organization used the the idea that that prosecutors had discretion over these things and convinced each director of public prosecutions of nine different provinces that this was okay to try and let's try it in a few courts but the time it actually came to legislating over it we had it operating in 20 different jurisdictions and really had data on the fact that those kids who you know a minor number of them five percent of something reoffended so um practice drove and and similarly south africa implemented um alternative sentences um community based sentencing around community service community service orders as an alternative to imprisonment um as a sentence um and it was in practice long before it was actually in legislation um so sometimes um if it's you know these are just lucky circumstances because we were able to have little loopholes to work with uh but also is that i think that um we need to think upside down as well a little bit because the successful examples have come from practice driving policy uh and not waiting to get are the problem in africa is it takes so long to to to make policy that you might as well try and put things into practice first get it done and maybe the policy will come along later here in the united states policy making is quick and smooth so uh in 2007 we came out or the report uh arguing for population centric counter insurgency in iraq and uh lo and behold the following year there's a population centric counter insurgency strategy so i myself thought i must have had something to do with this because you know the report got some press the bright people must have seen it certainly general patreus read it um finally when i was doing my advisory work in africa in iraq had the chance to to meet patreus and became quite obvious he'd never read my report and and and but to this day my brother-in-law thinks that i was behind the surge um so i mean even when you think you have an effect you really don't know the policy process can take like a long time to follow through i know there's at least a couple instances when we seem to have good luck and these happen to be in the military side and if you get a chance to do military research it's kind of nice because a decision maker the decision making process especially in a deployed environment is pretty straightforward the commander wants to do something the commander generally can do something so if he likes what you do there's options and if you get to know this system you get to know who is reading and who can use the stuff you're doing so we did work on uh survey opinion survey research and build on a operational template that the special operations folks were doing that i've heard from multiple sources um helped to validate that operational approach because it just demonstrated that wasn't upsetting the populations like people thought they were so that's a rare chance i get the feed got the feedback from the policy makers and i saw the subsequent reports citing our work like okay so that made a difference um and that's so i think the lesson for me there's a lot of value in doing evaluation work if you can do evaluation work on ongoing efforts ongoing operations ongoing cv programs there's such a need for that there's such a hunger for results there that is almost guaranteed that if you do it well you're gonna you're gonna help make a difference either by showing that the program is worth doing or not worth doing the other piece that we did was recognizing that our audience was not necessarily the commander it was the guys on the ground the e-fives um the special operations teams working in very forward deployed areas and so we did a report looking at best practices like interviewed number of folks how can you best run these types of operations in the future um the commander had no use to the commander um but we found that folks were transitioning that around for pre-deployment training over and over and over again and years later this piece that was never published just a pdf document had really made the rounds so there again it was like thinking our target audience of in that case knowing the target audience was going to be guys who were really motivated to learn something before going um to Afghanistan um and that they would be uh suitable audiences for this and I think not that you can just do a go-to research for like special operations guys going down range but know who your audience is how are they gonna use it um and you can frame your report in ways that can be most useful to them and it doesn't always have to be a decision maker or congress it could be others that could learn from it and then the outcomes are much softer there's not like a major change that happens after a briefing like oh okay Todd now we're going to do all of that stuff that never happens um it's much more softer than that and you got to look for the cues you got to let me leave work at the end of the day and assume that everybody's read my product and is taking my advice other it's hard to hard to write it i give you i give you three examples two positive one not uh first uh you you had a judge in Minneapolis who decided based on the research of a German researcher uh who started his work on on hate groups and moved into uh terrorism uh on levels of radicalization uh to start in his sentence saying to include alternative dispositions uh this was controversial it gets back into my earlier comment about how uh we don't have a political system that uh is willing to take a lot of risk um but the other thing that was interesting about this and remains an issue today is that um this has not been done across the board so this is still one one judge uh and if you talk to prosecutors and different jurisdictions across the country uh people are left feeling like well you know someone in Minneapolis got an alternative disposition in a halfway house for a year and then the lifetime supervision maybe uh but in another jurisdiction is going to get 15 to 20 years so it's not necessarily consistent across the board but you had real research that a real impact on not just policy but on people's lives and led is continuing to lead to a real policy discussion uh another is um the uh debate as to what the biggest nature of the threat is here in the united states and and whether that includes uh what we'd widely uh broadly refer to as as domestic terrorism white supremacists etc etc um ADL and some other groups came out with a series of studies that I think really quite definitively demonstrated that the number of incidents attacks thwarted attacks etc uh number of people killed or injured by just about every metric um there was a greater threat from what you would describe as domestic terrorists here in the united states not to say that we don't have to be concerned by international terrorism we obviously do but that if you leave politics at the door um the reality in the ground was a little different an area where uh research hasn't really had quite as much of an impact and that's because it's high high policy uh is on the debate as to whether or not um um immigration and illegal immigration separate or together are a major counterterrorism problem are the majority of incidents of terrorist attacks or plots in the united states by people who came here from abroad legally or illegally um there are some in this administration who push that line very very hard uh I've written about it several times now pushing against it and there's a tremendous amount of very very strong data the data unanimous that this is not the case uh that this is not an immigration problem immigration is a third rail hot potato right now and therefore it hasn't had uh the research hasn't had the impact but that's because of the of the specific and unique circumstances of this particular hot potato issue let's see many many times in fact I had uh an article come out about it um after the uh vehicular attack in Manhattan on Halloween um the article came out the morning that I was speaking on one of the opening panels at an nctc conference on what we were then referring to as as cv e um and got pulled aside by a whole bunch of people saying well okay not necessarily uh with a thumbs up but your thing is getting a lot of attention which was great that's why I wrote it to not necessarily make people happy but to but to prompt that discussion got a lot of attention in the broader community sure uh the broader and the twitterverse community is not the same as high policy uh and uh with some critical exceptions um and uh I don't know if that policymaker saw it but I do think these voices contribute to high policy if not now then maybe eventually um so even if there's not like that direct policy result I mean to be able to change the conversation to be able to influence the conversation to be able to be a part of the conversation that's evolving I think is a real special opportunity to to be a part of that um and so I think those are those are wins even if you're still waiting for the high policy to change because I think um the wins are going in that direction if not now then later I think these are all interesting um points for us all to consider as the future of research and you know research for research sake research for influencing policy research for influencing practice and all the different permutations in between so um you have all mentioned in some way shape or form monitoring and evaluation and I'd love to kind of pull the thread a little bit more as to how monitoring and evaluation findings can be influential and if there are meaningful benefits between kind of um research for more research for research sake than research for in the monitoring evaluation vein and if maybe we can pull a little bit more nuance in those type of findings and how how they might be stratified meaningfully or if not stratified then then used in an ecosystem where we're trying to take multiple pieces of information to make better decisions. Look I when Jesse spoke this morning he put a slide up there quoting uh General Nagata from NCTC um that line was from an event that I hosted I was sitting on the day of them as he said you know uh to something to effect of you know we still don't know what drives these things and I uh I said to General Nagata after the fact that I disagree um we don't know everything but we actually we didn't actually know a lot. Again I've been doing this for long enough that you know that can tell you how many rooms the size we can fill with these studies classified and unclassified both that we've been doing over the years about all these issues. What we need are not more studies what we need is programs that are being evaluated to see if they are actually having the type of impacts we want um and we can put those programs in place because we have a decent understanding of the very very very broad waterfront of issues that can lead to radicalization from grievances to ideology and everything in between. There are now a handful of programs that have gone through some pretty good am I any and that's great but we need more so that when people like me go to members of Congress saying hey we need to put in place programs like these and they say well how will I know they're going to work why should I fund them in the first place you can say well because we've we've done some things we've measured some things here's what we can tell you from what we can tell works in certain circumstances we need that evidence base we need that ammunition to be able to get the ball rolling the most difficult thing is getting it rolling at all but I think we've done that now again there's there's there's a good program at the Department of Justice that has been funding evaluation of programs in different parts of the country it's not like we're starting at ground zero but we need a lot more of metrics and evaluations of actual programs not another study saying the role of ideology or the role of grievance and another pyramid and okay we've got plenty of these okay now tell me if the different types of programs we put in place to address different touch points on that waterfront or on that pyramid are having the intended effect I agree that the the the real space to to for us to focus now is on producing good M&E and that means producing good research right at the front end of programs and being able to measure the effects of those but I think that we're not appropriately structured and funded in order to do that yet and that's part of the advocacy we need to do around the way M&E is funded for example the duration of funding you know and the timelines required to achieve some of these things you know the violence prevention people will tell you the timelines there are sometimes 15 years and intergenerational depending on what you're trying to do so the timelines are not aligned with the actual funding available and and so there are a number of technical problems in terms of program design what's how evaluation is funded and and then and then whether you're producing monitoring and evaluation data so the second piece of this is of course communicating it and communicating it to who for what reason so let's just say we want to scale up this program and we want to do it somewhere else we want to take the principles and maybe try them somewhere else and I hate the idea of replication of programs but especially in the context I come from but you know if you want to take some principles and try them elsewhere why why we're doing the M&E is to show that maybe the program works or some principles work but I think the the biggest problem and it's a bizarre silly thing that we keep doing is communicating badly and and not communicating in a way that people can really understand the value of what we've done or the lack of value of what we've done and and what has worked and what hasn't worked and and packaging that communication in a way that people can really understand it so the hundred page report is required and and it certainly is required it sits on our websites because we do need the technical work to be done however you know the repackaging of that information we actually treat some of that information now as we've reviewed our entire communications approach as an organization the last four years is actually tweeting out research findings from reports and having those be retweeted by policymakers yay I mean if that happens you know so doing that as as a means and then also reaching policymakers in Africa is actually about getting your stuff into the media and getting you and and social media now so so putting those short little stories into the media trying to get people to interview you and to cultivate journalists and so on because policymakers are not listening to us as researchers they may be reading the newspaper and in it is the paper and radio and television so um yeah let me leave it to that I'll just I'll just a very short in time I'll just add in I think the tide is turned on this I think there's an increasing understanding that evaluations are needed for these types of things they've been sort of missing in the past I think there's value on doing evaluations on many different levels if you are running your own CVE program there's no reason all you shouldn't collect your own data to to see whether or not you're producing the type of effect you're doing there's many benefits to it it's much more than just being able to go to your funder and say ah I see I'm working give me more money it's I mean the evaluations are really critical for programmers to improve their own programming are there certain types or audience certain types of their audience that are responding well not responding well if they're not responding well you can figure it out early and change your program so they do respond well so it's it's not just to be able to have a up or down vote on is it good or bad it's to actually improve your programming and so that's really valuable um but of course um I think there's real value in also doing real academically sound research on this we're we're this is a new year for me we're doing a lot of this type of work in fact we're doing several clinical trials on CVE programming so um uh which is a sort of a different level it's a different price tag to that of course then handing out some questionnaires to your participants it's not cheap it's expensive to do but I think if an implementer is like spending if a government agency is spending a lot of money on a program um then they should need to spend a chunk of a chunk of money on an evaluation and it probably should be an independent evaluation so I'm gonna stay on that last point um how I think that I'm just so in agreement that the M&E movement has been really really useful on the idea that programs have to be evaluated and has to be built in from the outset and that um that we need to be doing more of this I wonder how we do that in um ecosystems that are so atomized by the stowed pipe efforts that happen whereas you only can impact from um a plethora of different efforts all at once and so to me some of the work for the academic community and for more external research is to look at an entire system while some of the M&E is going to be project level program level um but it kind of gets to your point Cheryl how do we do this on the time horizon where you can actually see something and I was at a lunch uh earlier um last I think it was the this week or last week where somebody said um it's very difficult to know whether you're in a trend or a cycle when you're in it because cycles look like trends until you're out of it and it struck me as something that could be you know very applicable to a lot of our work how do we get that kind of meta level of analysis how do we maximize what can be an outside look at research and combine lots of program level or project level inputs together to see what's actually happening because there is an idea that you can have many successful programs but not actually be seeing a successful ecosystem change or impact change because external environmental factors are changing at a more rapid pace than any of your interventions are addressing so can we talk a little bit about how we can get to that kind of meta level from the researching perspective I'll do my two cents on that as I to me that's like it makes it too hard to pose the issue like that that assumes that your outcome about the dependent measure of your evaluation is less terrorism more terrorism yeah can't do it you're probably not going to be able to do that evaluation um you're never going to be able to randomize enough people to find out if some people actually committed terrorist attacks and some didn't um even showing changes in attitudes do it if you can but it can be hard so to our view the really the key goal is interim outcomes um what what no program just blindly yes our goal is to reduce terrorism and that's our program that's nobody has that program the program or always have near-term interventions is it to help socially stabilize at-risk youth give them social networks is it to provide meaningful job opportunities to people coming out of prison so they have alternative actions to do rather than resort to a life of crime or maybe even violent extremism so in generally cv programs try to do something that get that is an interim objective to their big panacea outcome and that's where the evaluations I think need to occur um that is uh and those can be done in a short-term horizon so if you have a program that seeks to work with at-risk youth to give them social outlets does it increase social outlets you can test that in a very short period of time and if it doesn't then your program is not going to work um and it's probably not going to have the long-term outcome you think it will have because your long-term outcome is dependent on the short-term outcome so I think that's sort of the key goal is to is to shorten the limit your goals and objectives on your evaluation can I also just say that you know the um yeah it's a difficult question but you know other fields have been doing this for a long time um criminal violence prevention is a field that exists for more than 40 years they have 40 years of evidence of learning of techniques and strategies and um in order to to try and figure out contribution attribution all of that technical stuff which is boring but does need to be I mean we do need to engage with it as if we want to do M&E I think that those 40 years for them and it really does uh we can I mean they can demonstrate some evidence-based practices that have worked in Japan as well as they've they've worked under similar circumstances in New York City and they've worked under similar circumstances somewhere in Sweden and uh so you know they they've come really far in terms of their evidence space and this building of evidence-based practices that may work in your area for a particular thing so um I I don't think it's impossible to do any of this but we're we're at such an early stage in this in this field that it's really difficult to to try to pull it apart one of their biggest problems and and I have colleagues who work in this field at the moment is this business of scaling things up right so you may have a fantastic project that has shown that you can actually reduce terrorism in all violent extremism somewhere in the world and and it's really the the the issue is how do you scale things up unless you can get government to legislate and fund it fully you know in one go and that that process is something that that field is still struggling with um notwithstanding the massive amounts of evidence that may exist around that so again it's that conversation between what is this complication between evidence and policy and and and why is it and it's different all over all over the world every context has its own issues um and it's mostly the politicians of the that are the problem not us but really it is it is a big puzzle and we have to figure it out for ourselves in each individual case I think yeah I can only add that um to me what the biggest part of the problem is everything that you both said makes all the sense in the world except if you're a policymaker right the policymaker isn't interested in what's going to happen in the nearer they want to know how was this my goal actually is to defeat terrorism I can't tell you how often still to this day I get asked well well when is terrorism going to end anyway yeah exactly how many terrorists have you stopped um look you know when I was the deputy assistant secretary for intelligence at treasury in a different area in terror finance issues we had similar problems with uh finding methodologically sound uh um information to demonstrate that the monies we were uh getting were actually stemming the flow of funds and uh improving the uh security of the international financial system and so we did uh the methodologically unsound and politically wise thing of declassifying a small number of incidents and and stringing them into a testimony uh not methodologically sound but people would be able to go forward and say look here here are some successes we've had and so the problem is is not thought that you're wrong you're absolutely right it's just the the the when you translate this into trying to affect policymaker's decision making um that's the barrier because they want to know something beyond that and then you know your your point about criminal justice absolutely but because terrorism has been put in its own box you know I get told all the time look oh but but crime is something different gangs is something different all these things that we could learn from suicide prevention is something different I'm not saying that terrorism is exact same thing as gangs or suicide prevention or or or uh crime but there are things from each of those areas that we can learn from there's a lot of study that's been done in each of these areas that is useful to us and frequently policymakers don't want to make use for that because for political reasons uh this terrorism has seen as something different and and I think it's just a matter of an insufficient amount of resilience we usually talk about societal resilience I think there's a whole political and policy resilience that is lacking that is having a really negative impact on our ability to leverage the research that's been done already in a Venn diagram kind of way what this is separate but there's a piece of it that's relevant and we are not able to use that because so many people insist that all those other things are something completely different well this is the moment where I get to uh pet the resolve network on the back because during our discussions breakout sessions that all of you were a part of one of the um areas on that kind of sticky notes uh framework where what are other areas that we should be learning from as the CVE community of practice and I know at the tables that I got a chance to sit with uh there were a lot of different areas that I think we can learn a lot from and if we are committed to elevating the empiricism the rigor and the knowledge base on this problem set we have to be learning from other um areas not in the this is the exact same thing but there may be some extrapolatable lessons and also there may be some non extrapolatable lessons things that are absolutely different and we can be learning from that as well those are no less important yeah so with that um we are out of time I'd love to thank my colleagues and co-panelists for this last discussion so please join me in thanking them thank you thank you thank you all at the end of our day thank you to all of you who have made it to the end of the day we are at our closing remarks section and I am just delighted to introduce our keynote speaker for our closing remarks uh Mr. Pete Morocco serves as the deputy assistant secretary and senior bureau official for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations CSO at the State Department many of you have heard us refer to CSO throughout the day and our incredible partnerships um in their um support for the resolve network I'd also like to give a special thanks to Mr. Vasu Vaitla sitting in the middle who is our main point of contact on a daily and weekly basis and I'd be remiss if I didn't thank him for his consistent support for the resolve network um Mr. Morocco before assuming his current position oversaw the Bureau's Europe Eurasian Near Eastern Western Hemisphere and Analysis Planning Program and Learning Office he oversees CSO's leadership on atrocities prevention including the atrocities prevention board an interagency committee consisting of US officials from the National Security Council the departments of state defense justice and the intelligence community and others he has an illustrative career before coming to his current position and we are delighted to invite him here today so please thank you Leigh Ann for that nice introduction and I'd like to thank the president of USIP Nancy Lindborg for having me here today um they tell me I've only got about an hour and 10 minutes to speak before the reception starts so kidding I definitely would not listen to myself talk for an hour so I'll get right to it uh the subject that we're talking about today is near and dear to my heart the work that the Bureau does the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations it's this is exactly what we focus on is how we can take evidence and put it into action and have impact so this is this is a meaningful and relevant discussion to a lot of the policy and a lot of the decisions that we're making today this year's focus on innovation is important it's exciting to see the resolve network discussing actionable research our mission is to anticipate prevent and respond to conflict this includes early detection of violent extremism and our focus is evidence-based analysis and expeditionary diplomacy and when I say expeditionary diplomacy I'm talking about the Secretary of State saying we want to get our swagger back he wants to see us back in the field and that's exactly what we're doing but we can't just go there we actually have to take something valuable with us so CSO we are nimble we measure for impact we're the State Department's surge capacity and conflict zones and fragile states our methods are rigorous and proven our reports are based in evidence and action and not personal inflection we don't do advocacy and we always arrive with an exit strategy this afternoon I'm happy to report that this is exactly what our focus is on and I heard a couple of interesting remarks there at the beginning was research for impact I can tell you for instance we don't do literature reviews anymore and I know that in the past there's been a lot of questions about do you do research for the sake of research or research for the sake of having an effect and I can tell you unequivocally that we are there to have impact so let's talk about the big picture and I think the big news that we have right now is that we have a new government-wide stabilization strategy launched in May 2017 and recently completed it's called the stabilization assistance review I'm seeing a few heads nod we affectionately call this the SAR for those of you who are addicted to government acronyms in the past many humanitarian and stabilization efforts morphed into needs-based development assistance this was sometimes with no discernible national security priority across the board we're being much more selective about our engagements more targeted in our approach and much more disciplined in our spending the US government cannot serve as a world's policeman and we are not nation building not every conflict or failed state warrants us intervention and there are some cases however where in other states internal conflict and instability threatens our national security but if it's not a national security priority if we don't have reliability and effectiveness of the local partners if we don't have security of the operating environment if we don't have the opportunity for burden sharing with our partners if there's not potential for progress towards predetermined political objectives we're not doing it rather than maximum dollars out the door we must focus on targeted approaches to sustainable assistance where there's an issue in security sector reform we train the trainer and where the issue is promoting defections or countering violent extremism we identify locally legitimate actors to do this local context is critical culturally sensitive approaches are necessary for long-term stability we must avoid inadvertently exacerbating conflict and having unintended consequences and we also as they mentioned earlier have to monitor for our progress in these environments innovation to this theme I'm actually very excited about something that we're doing at CSO we're launching a new hub for forecasting conflict trends we provide data visualization to the secretary that tracks events and pinpoints risk we look at media trends hate speech fake news election violence extremist ideologies political turmoil and malign influence we can layer this with monitoring where there are resources or or people from other countries that are entering these spaces we look at the drivers of conflict for early warning we spot for leaders and losers we look for affinity dependence and dominance this technology platform allows the bureau to connect to a diverse range of sources that includes partners outside the US government and they're willing they're willing enabled to to bring us vital data that populates our models and enhances our forecasting this hub captures emerging trends in violent extremism and disseminates information very quickly we need to be creative and nimble and use today's technology for early action to prevent conflict and atrocities understanding trends online can prevent early warning for impending conflict the hub will draw insight from social media and open sources but we can't do this on our own we have to learn from you we have to learn from other people in the community innovation in government is not just leveraging new technology it's how we partner with the private sector and partners like resolve it's also innovating our missions and recognizing how we need to improve and modernize at all times and we're happy to announce that we are in fact making solutions more inclusive president trump signed the women peace and security act into law in 2017 making the united states the very first country to enact legislation on this very important issue it's now us policy to promote the meaningful participation of women in all aspects of overseas conflict prevention management and resolution so let me tell you what this looks like in 2018 this is not mere politics this is policy it is practical and here's a few examples women in many of these communities they have a much stronger concept of what civil society looked like they have a lot of information that a lot of the security sector does not directly they understand where the risk is and who to watch for where the at-risk youth are they have valuable information and contributions and they often are aware of tools that are needed to deter radical elements but they don't have access or they don't they're not in power in many places many of these women they can't go to the police and we need to find ways to facilitate that so one of the things we're doing is encouraging the communities to have more meaningful roles for women in the security sector giving them direct roles with the police force and I'll give you another example that I just saw recently in Kosovo that really troubled me they're in many small towns in Kosovo right now you have little girls that are prohibited from playing soccer they're not able to play sports and this is not something that is tradition it's not a part of their culture this is something new it's from external influence and the government is extremely unsure how to handle it and as well the the legitimate Islamic community has recognized that this is not acceptable and they don't understand why this is happening so how do we carefully address sensitive issues like this at the clash of religion and culture in the Balkans we actively engage with regional partners to counter violent extremism and it's becoming a source of strength for reconciliation between neighbors who are often at odds this crucial moment for the Balkans as they work towards a European future is highlighted by a few major events the Prespa agreement recently between Macedonia and and Greece is a historic achievement and we're going to be supporting the referendum on September 30th success in this area is going to mean huge strides for the region and intensified normalization talks between Serbia and Kosovo could also give us lots of great new opportunities but it also comes with some great risk also upcoming elections on October 7th in Bosnia and Herzegovina could lead to an extended period of protracted political uncertainty my bureau is working very closely with European partners to prevent a political crisis these dynamics change to present opportunity that is is sometimes I think confusing to many of the people that are there and it also it also gives some radicals I guess some excitement too fighters that are returning from Syria this is one of my chief concerns and there's three that I particularly highlight in the Balkans the fighters that are returning are finding new ways to radicalize online and in prison and in many cases we don't have the legal mechanisms in these countries to deal with these these individuals appropriately unresolved ethnic conflicts are presenting opportunity for these extremists to flourish in the area and we can't be timid about depriving them the opportunity to do this house mosques or paragemots are showing up with significant external funding promoting radicalism fostering friction with no connection to the local culture at all we will begin by convening a forum of mayors in November CVE coordinators researchers civil society actors women religious leaders and others from around the region and they're not only going to discuss CVE best practices but they're also going to immediately deploy action-oriented programs at the local level and resolve is critical for our strategy and this is what we're going to be relying on them for one development of the research basis to provide the local policymakers actionable programs three train the trainers to build local research capacity in the region the resolve network is a prime example of how we can achieve evidence-based research and empower local partners to sustain their efforts against violent extremism by grounding policy and local level evidence the resolve network can facilitate action grounded in local realities this is essential for more effective and sustainable solutions to preventing further radicalization and developing the capacity of local partners as I mentioned is critical we we've seen how one-off activities are just dabbling and something can actually come with great consequences can be counterproductive short-lived or or much worse our best chance of sustainability is in building capacity of local actors to be the frontline partners on countering violent extremism by connecting the right partners with the best research our strategy is to build for impact and success and we're excited that resolve is going to be joining us in this effort in closing when we talk about fragile states we're talking about states who have broken the social contract with their citizens or in some cases they have never truly established what that is and what that responsibility should be cso's analysis is highlighting global trends and violent extremism that that threaten these fragile states and thus threaten our national security we have to improve our understanding at the local level and ensure local empowerment and this will help people solve their own problems where they are we have a lot of work to do ensuring american security and extending american prosperity will require tenacity but this also requires the evidence that we've been talking about today and because we needed to have confidence in our policy and not just hope i look forward to partnering with the resolve network in this i look forward to hearing more from many of you at the reception today and i appreciate you having me here today thank you that is the end of our day we are delighted to invite you to a reception uh in the great hall um no in the international women's common which is beyond the great hall um over toward the other side of the building there will be plenty of people that are able to direct you to the correct location we hope that you can stay to those of you who have spent the whole day with us we really appreciate it we hope that everybody is leaving here having learned something new having met somebody new having figured out a way in which you can bring more research to bear on this common challenge of addressing violent extremism and i'd like to give a big thanks to everyone who made this day possible particularly all the members of our resolve and cve teams everyone here have just been incredible all day today and every day frankly um i'd also like to give a big thanks to everyone here who's worked in av our um official photographer fits and and many others here at us ip who have made today possible so please let us all go to the reception and i look forward to chatting with many more of you throughout the rest of the evening thank you