So, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, so good morning. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the Executive Vice President here at the United States Institute of Peace, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to Peace Con 2018. This is something that we've been looking forward to all year since last Peace Con, and this is an especially exciting one for us. The Institute of Peace is very pleased, honored to be able to host the first day of Peace Con in partnership with the Alliance for Peace Building. So it is, and it's a great day here that we'll have. The Institute of Peace is convinced that peace is possible. We're convinced that peace is practical, and it's important for U.S. national security and security of our allies. And I say possible, several of us got back from Afghanistan last week. And many in this room, many in the city, many around the world think Afghanistan's not possible, peace is not possible. Well, it is. We came away with some sense that there may be an opportunity here. The stars might be aligning for some discussion between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban with the Americans playing a role. And none of those pieces were in place before, and now they are in place. We also visited Islamabad and the Pakistanis have said, you finally understood what we've been saying all along. That is, you have to have these conversations. So peace is possible. It's possible in hard places. It's possible in other places around the world. So this is what the theme here of the Institute of Peace has. Again, great opportunity for us to have you all in the building. We're glad to have General Zinni and Tom Stahl, Rob Berg, the rest of you who have come from some far places and near to be a part of this year today. It is my great pleasure to introduce Liz Hume. We need no introduction to this group. Liz is the CEO. We talked about the title here. The CEO running the Alliance for Peace Building. And Rob will guide us on all of this. But it is a great pleasure for me and a privilege to introduce Liz. So please kick us off, Liz. Thank you. Acting CEO. So good morning and thank you, Bill. On behalf of the Alliance for Peace Building and our generous sponsors, I want to thank everybody to PeaceCon 2018. If you want to expand the conversation on social media, please use the hashtag PeaceCon 2018. We are incredibly thankful for our wonderful partnership with USIP, the seventh year that we've been partnering on this conference. So many people at USIP have been working hard to put this together today. I especially want to thank Tina Hegedorn, who has been working very a lot with us and she's on speed dial with us. So thank you, Tina. I also want to thank the AFP staff. It's a team effort. They have been working tirelessly. This is a phenomenal program. If you see them, thank them. I really want to thank Adam Wolf. I know he's probably still outside. I can't thank him enough for his work. And the whole AFP team. And I'm sure they're out there. But please thank them when you see them. It's a sobering time in the world. I don't need to tell anybody that's sitting in this room about the statistics. We are at a 25-year peak in terms of global conflict. It's a sobering time for the field, for the world. This is a challenge to our field. The world needs bold and courageous peace builders now more than ever. But there are challenges that we have to overcome in order to advance the field. There are a couple of bright spots. We'll hear about them today. The US government, a lot of new frameworks at our high-level panel with the UN. And those are all great. But it will really be focusing on implementation. But they could really change the fundamental way that violent conflict and prevention is addressed. One really important piece of legislation that I would like to point out that AFP and Mercy Corps has been leading a coalition on is the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act. We encourage you to get involved. And please talk to Laura Strawmeyer from AFP who is working on it. Two key challenges I see. We have not made the case for the field and we have not proven impact. And until we do those two things, we will not advance the field. We struggle to show evidence. So this lack of evidence, I believe, is one of the greatest challenges. If we believe that what we do is important and our work is effective, then we have to show impact. We had a solutions forum here yesterday led by our amazing director of learning and evaluation, Jessica, who is standing right there. She worked very closely with Joe Hewitt's team here at USIP. It was a phenomenal success. And we encourage people to get involved. Also, it was sponsored by One Earth Future Foundation as well. But we also have to move forward collectively. As a field, we have not done a great job at making the case for peace building. We need to work collectively to inspire more people to act. AFP, with some of its partners, Search for Common Ground, International Alert, GPAC, Consoliation Resources, is working together to form a peace building coalition to inject peace building in the mainstream media into policy. You will hear more about it as the conference goes on. We encourage you to join us as well. I would like to say one thing that we did do is we had the initial success of introducing the word peace building into the dictionary.  So I want to challenge everybody here to work on these issues to advance the field. And I want to thank everybody that's here for your time, your commitment, your passion, without it, this conference also couldn't happen as well. I hope you'll find these next couple of days inspiring. I have a couple of housekeeping things that I have to go over with you, the conference app. We have come into the 21st century. Please go to EventMobi if you haven't already downloaded it. And it will be your essential tool throughout the few days. So go to EventMobi. The password is peacecon2018. It's in the program. If I can do it, you can all do it. Trust me. I'm very technologically challenged. So we will also be doing a data collection project this year. Again, moving into the 21st century, you can give instant feedback on sessions. You can download and decide where you want to go. You can see somebody's bio. We're saving trees. It's all fantastic. So we'll be sending you notifications on your conference app, and please complete a short survey by 2 PM today. Once you do that, you'll be registered for some prizes. We'll announce at the end of the day. So with that, I want to thank, finally, AFP's board members and our incredible board chair, Bob Burke, who will be introducing General Zinni. Thank you all. Good morning, Excellencies and colleagues. Thank you so much for participating in this wonderful event. And we are particularly pleased to greet Ambassador Nimaga Mali, a country we have focused on for years in one of our 24 affinity groups, a group marvelously led by our esteemed President Emeritus Chick Dumbuck, and whose participation included frequent participation by the now current Foreign Minister of Mali. And she's doing a fine job. We also want to give a special welcome to Ambassador Tecla Berrahan of Ethiopia. His country has been seeking peace in very wonderful ways, and they have just established a new cabinet, Gender Equal, a Minister of Defense who's a woman, and a woman who is now going to head their brand-new Ministry of Peace. That's terrific. And I want to add a word about yesterday's meeting. I have very yellowed credentials in evaluation as founding chair of the OECD DAC evaluation group. And I was thrilled to see people from around the world, young people with really vibrant, fabulous ideas and programs and accomplishments in learning and evaluation. And I want to thank Jessica for organizing yesterday's terrific solution. Jessica Baumgarder-Zuzik. She did this despite a very recent tragic family loss. And Jessica, you're my hero. Thanks so much. The Board of the Alliance for Peace Building includes a number of stars, key CEOs of member organizations and several others, including retired Marine Major General Charlie Bolton. Charlie is beloved by his colleagues in the military, respected by the four space crews that he captained, and highly regarded by the 25,000 employees at NASA and organization that he directed for the eight years of the Obama administration. I ask him one time how he became such a respected and effective leader, and particularly how he became a respected military leader who searched for peace. His answer, two-word answer, was Tony Zinni. General Zinni rose to head central command, in my view, the most difficult assignment in the US military. And he has important things to say about peace and peace keeping his topic today. My mantra is that peace and security require each other. So our understanding of each other and finding common ground with each other is not just nice, it is essential. If we want peace to endure, we have to have protective security. And if protective security has a framework, it must be peace. I'm particularly pleased to ask you to join me in warmly welcoming four star general, Anthony Zinni. Thank you. I know when you hear general, you think I'm going to talk about the military aspects, and my focus is on the security dimension, and maybe just that. But I've had a very unusual career in the military, and I've spent a lot of time in the other dimensions involved in what we're here to discuss today at the conference. Somehow along the way in my military career, I ended up involved in peace mediation work. And I spent a long time while still on active duty doing that. I owed it all, I think, to Ambassador Bob Oakley, those of you that may know of him or know him. He passed away, unfortunately, not that long ago. But he taught me a lot about how to open a dialogue, how to conduct mediation and facilitation, and to look at the long-term ways we try to stabilize environments that are destabilized, and that need some sort of long-range assistance on the political and diplomatic and other dimensions that really don't involve security and humanitarian work. For some reason, that stuck. And I've done things like I headed up the US mission in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I've been involved in the Philippines, actually through USIP, through the Henri Denon Center, and a number of other NGOs. I've worked mediation processes in Indonesia, in Africa, and elsewhere. I'm currently doing work for the State Department right now and trying to resolve the rift between Qatar and the Arab Quartet. So I've seen that dimension of it, where we try to stabilize things politically, and in some ways, when we use that effort to try to prevent things from degrading into a violent confrontation or a humanitarian disaster. I've also worked on the humanitarian side, too, and I've worked with a lot of NGOs doing humanitarian work, most of it in how the military can contribute to that, and trying to do it within the framework of the way our NGOs operate so we understand that we don't have this clash of cultures and we don't get involved in where the military goes its own way, and it tries to dip into humanitarian missions and doesn't get it right because they don't understand what the requirements are, the methodology, what's sustainable, and all that. When Charlie Bolden worked for me when I was the commander of First Marine Expeditionary Force, we found ourselves involved in a great deal or a great number of humanitarian, peacekeeping, peace enforcement kinds of missions. At the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed like these kinds of missions just grew, and we found the military now trying to understand how better to deal with them, and we got into naming these things as low-intensity conflict, military operations other than war, and we came up with a plethora of names that we tried to work with. It became clear to us that we're thrown into these kinds of missions that we needed to find a way to bring all the elements together, especially when we're involved in hybrid or complex missions where there's a security dimension, there's a humanitarian dimension, and there's some sort of political diplomatic dimension, and then eventually some sort of stabilization effort. We started in the Marine Corps, we called it an exercise. It was called Emerald Express. Some of you may have participated in it. We ran it in California. It was not really a military exercise. It was trying to bring together all those that were involved in these kinds of missions, including our allies. Obviously our interagency components here in the US government, NGOs and others, to try to work through how can we work better together? How can we find a way that we cooperate in these environments and do better? Now, I'm gonna make a prediction. At the end of this conference, you'll probably come to some conclusions or recommendations. You're probably from your own experience going to talk about some things we haven't gotten right. We've been at this thing for decades in trying to understand it. I can predict when the next sort of peace enforcement, peace keeping, major humanitarian mission, complex, hybrid, whatever, we will relearn the same lessons. We will come together and tell us we should find a way to coordinate better. We should find a way to cooperate better. We should find a way to communicate better. That when we get together, we don't understand each other. When Lance Corporal, with all his combat gear, meets that young NGO out there trying to do humanitarian work, I can tell you there's a cultural difference. There's a basic misunderstanding of each other's missions. Even though both intend and want to make this thing work and are committed to it, they're gonna come at it from a different direction. And they shouldn't be meeting on a battlefield to use a military term. I would tell you the same thing as if we tried in a military operation to suddenly meet each other, different military functions on a battlefield without having planned or having exercised or having had him work together or having had a structure that we worked under, it would be a disaster. Yet we're gonna keep repeating those same lessons. We're gonna find out that we need to plan together. There's some way we need to be able to understand when we get in this environment, what are our roles? How do we compliment each other? What do we do best? How do we support or reinforce each other? We shouldn't be asking those questions when we arrive at the scene of the crime. We should have been asking those questions ahead of time. If you know the military at all and had any experience with the military, we are planning fools. We plan everything. We got a planning process that will water your eyes. I mean, it's unbelievable. We do not like doing things where people that are working with us do not have that same kind of process. They can't get into that level of details. Of course, we have gigantic planning staffs. We have a gigantic support systems that allow us to gather that information, the process, we have gigantic decision-making structures and processes. And so when others come to join us that don't have all that, how do you meld that? How do you make it work? How do we begin ahead of time? A lot of the talk here will be about prevention. How do you prevent without planning? And we're gonna relearn that lesson also. We're gonna learn about our missions and how our missions will differ. And worst of all, how our missions are gonna change. And one of the, we have a term in the military about mission creep. You go on to it, you get involved in a situation committed to it. We get very detailed missions and task statements. Once you're on the battlefield, once you're in this environment, those missions may not be relevant. We have a sort of a tradition, especially in the U.S. military, in that we kind of let the missions be what they're gonna be. And sometimes this frustrates our senior leadership in that our missions creep. And we end up doing things that we weren't sent there to do because we see a need or a requirement and we get deeper involved. One of the problems the military runs into the whole situation becomes dependent upon the military. I was in Somalia, I did three tours of duty in Somalia. The first one when I went in, we were told that we were just going there for about two weeks just to provide security on the ground because obviously the NGOs and others trying to provide humanitarian assistance now could not move because the warlords, the militias, the gangs were robbing them, stopping them. And we were very limited, short period of time, go in, freeze the situation, provide security, ensure the flow of these resources, and then somebody would take over from us. When we landed, we did, in less than three weeks, had covered the entire area in Somalia we were responsible for. These resources were flowing and we asked the question, and then what? We learned that there wasn't this magic organization or force coming in after us. And I realized this about three days into the operation when I got told there were a number of Somali, quote, intellectuals that wanted to see me. And I met with them, they were former academics and businessmen and others, and they were putting their finger in my face and saying, when are you gonna start the jobs program here? And I said, jobs program? You know, I look at my mission and tasks, I didn't see jobs program as one of those military tasks, but it made me realize we had now, to use Secretary Colin Powell's description, the pottery barn example, you break it, you own it. I would say, to paraphrase that, you touch it, you own it. And so we owned it, and we ended up getting more and more deeply involved. We ended up running the police force, trying to reestablish the government, working with Ambassador Oakley to try to get the warlords to cooperate and come to the table. But our mission went far beyond the simple mission of security. And so missions could creep, and when missions creep, we could end up getting into somebody else's business too. And in a way, with the military, where we don't fully understand that business, even though it may be well-intentioned and we wanna help. What do we do about funding? Who pays for all this stuff? When we get committed in the military, you know, it comes out of our military budget. Nobody at Congress is saying here's a pot of money to do humanitarian and peacekeeping work. And so those funds come out of our operating funds. And so when we are committed to these missions, those people in the military that are doing these things are not doing the training and education and other functions with their primary responsibilities are. Not to tell you that the military doesn't like these operations, I will tell you from my experience as a commander, when our troops are on the ground doing these things, I think their morale is higher than at any other time, especially if they can see right in front of them the benefit of what they do. And I have tons of video that show this and it brings us home that this is an important part, I think, of the missions the military has. Because I think it balances out the other more horrible missions that we have to perform at times. And so this is not anything the military rejects, it's just something that it costs in terms of funding, it costs in terms of training time and other things. So we have to appreciate that kind of commitment and that kind of trade-off that we get. The military often gets stuck with that kind of mission. I did an assessment in Iraq and Afghanistan after I retired for the generals out there. And when I went around looking at how, from soup to nuts, how everything was working down onto the ground at the district level, patrolling with the soldiers and Marines, I realized how much that the military had taken on that were non-military tasks. You know, where people in uniform were doing things because obviously we're the 800-pound guerrilla in a room. We have the people, we have the structure, we have the logistics, but the things they were doing were non-military.   No, this is OJT for them. We know where is Treasury? You know, where is State Department? Not that they aren't committed out there, but again, do they have the numbers? Do they have the ability to meet the requirements? Do they have the capacity? And so we end up then with this mismatch that comes across and we end up, especially from the military side, with people committed to doing things that they don't necessarily have the expertise in. In many ways. We overcame some of that in Somalia where we provided the military support, but people like Ambassador Bob Oakley provided the oversight. So we understood what we were doing. We were at least under somebody's direction who understood how we interacted with the warlords and others in the dialogue that was created. When we deal with the media, we have different approaches to that. You know, we come with a big public affairs section. There's a media interaction. Those other members that are out there in the same environment may not have that capacity. How are we telling people how the mission is going? How we're determining where we are? How we tell each other's stories? Or we tell a collective story in some way? And how do we organize for this? You know, the military organizes and structures for a mission. We task organize. But there are these other elements that are in the same place that are carrying on a function. How do these organizations connect? Now, we have jury-rigged a lot of things. I know when we first went into Northern Iraq to protect the Kurds and to get them down out of the hills and Turkey and back home, our initial reaction was, how do we interact with these NGOs? How do we connect to them? How do we communicate? How do we coordinate? We took our civil affairs organization. We created the first CMOC, Civil Military Operations Center, designed to do this. You know, civil affairs was created like in the aftermath of war to deal with the civilian casualties and civilians that are displaced or whatever. But now it had a much different role. At that time, we were creating one. Now it's become commonplace, but it was to interact with NGOs, private volunteer organizations, international organizations, United Nations. And as we learned that, we tried to employ it in the future. But it was never structured to be that way. This is something that was created on the scene. And the other part that I've learned, especially from the mediation part of this, is how do we understand what we're involved in? One of the things I learned in peace mediation, I finally did nine of these things and I went off and got a master's degree in mediation and dispute resolution and negotiations, because I felt there were people out there that knew tactics and techniques and procedures and processes and theories on this that I was trying to learn on the ground, working with NGOs and working with the UN and others. But how do we find a way to make sure that we bring these together, that we are all on the same sheet of music, that we understand how we each operate? Now, it's easy for me to end here and say, these are all the problems. These are all the lessons learned and you'll mull it over in each of these groups. And at the end of this conference, we'll list all these same ones. The next time we go out and engage, we will come back and we'll list these again. So I'm going to give you a proposed solution and it's going to be radical and a lot of people will object to it, but it's to get your brain fired up, get your pissed off so maybe you think outside the box. I'm going to say we need to create an interagency command. And I hate to use that word command because I don't mean it to be military. We in the military should contribute our civil affairs organization, our peacekeeping institute, the investments we make in exercises like Emerald Express. And we should create this much like we do our military commands, our regional combatant commands that have components, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and our regionally focused central command, Pacific command, European command. This organization would be interagency. It would have a State Department component. It would have a USAID component. It would be able to interact with NGOs. It might even have a representation from NGO organizations in it. It is not meant to be directive in nature. By that I mean it isn't taking the place of State Department or the military. It is just a means of organization, training, coordination, planning. It is a deployable entity. So if you go into an Iraq or in Afghanistan, you're not trying to scratch your head and saying, we need something beyond the military because guess what? Once the Republican guards defeated, the pottery barn comes into play. I have a grandson that's banned from the pottery barn so I understand the concept. You break this, you own it. And suddenly we're scratching our head and bagged out in Kabul and saying, now why? This organization would have the now why to answer. It's not gonna be a pickup team like CPA or OR-HA or whatever we throw together at the last minute with people unfamiliar with the situation that understand as I learned through the mediation process the need for research. The excellent NGOs we have out there that provide some of that research, matter of fact, US Institute of Peace is one of them. I know when we did the mediation work in the Philippines, the background information, the research that we came here to get to bone us up on what we needed to know was exceptional. But we need to really come away with some hard recommendations. You can't come away with relearning the same lessons. You have to say we need a structure for this. We need a funded, we need a train, we need a plan for these things. We need to focus these things on parts of the world where we most likely employ them. And so from somebody that has seen this from every angle in the high bread complex, whatever you wanna call it organization, I'm telling you we've never glued it together. We have the parts and the parts are represented in this room. And don't walk away from the conference without an idea as to how to move to those decision points. How do we structure this thing? How are we gonna fund it? Who should? How do we interact with others from a US perspective? How do we train, organize, plan? I mean, that's the key. It's not to repeat lessons learned. Thank you. Thank you, General Zinni. So now I have the pleasure of introducing Tom Stahl. His bio is in the app. I'm sure many of you know him. He's the counselor at USAID. He has served the majority of his 30 years in this field working overseas in conflict affected and fragile states, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon. I had the pleasure of meeting him in Ethiopia and about 2009 I was running a conflict governance program in Ethiopia. My husband had the pleasure of working directly for him at USAID. And I asked him, what would you say about Tom Stahl since you work directly for him? He said, tell everybody, he's an expert in so many sectors in this field and he is phenomenal to work for. So I just wanna warmly welcome Tom Stahl and say thank you so much. Thanks very much, Liz. And it's great to be here. Thank you all for coming and for inviting me. It's a tough act to follow to come in behind General Zinni. But I'm really glad to be here and be able to talk to you. I'll talk about a couple of things. I know I've been asked to speak a little bit about the transformation that's going on at USAID that's gonna affect our support for the work of peace building and conflict prevention. And you have more speakers I see on your schedule later today and tomorrow to get into the details. But let me talk a little bit about what we're doing. It's early in the process, of course, for me to be able to go into a lot of detail. For one thing, we haven't figured out all the details yet. And of course, there's a lot of work to be done, including getting congressional approval. Our proposal is up in front of Congress right now. And then we gotta get all the lawyers and the unions and everything on board. But as we work our way through this very large undertaking, I do wanna emphasize that the transformation has always been intended to be a genuinely collaborative process between the agency, the staff, and our many partners like you all. And so it can truly be said that the impact on your work will consist to a great degree on what you want it to be. And I hope you'll take that to heart and reach out and engage with our staff, make your ideas and concerns known, whatever other faults we may have, we don't presume to have all the answers. Now, you might ask why we're going to all this trouble in the first place to take on this huge reorganization of USAID, that's a fair question. Well, the easy simple answer is that OMB told us to. But of course, it's more than that. The world has changed a lot over the last couple of decades in the time that I've been working for USAID. The majority of countries where we work today are considered fragile or vulnerable to conflict. And that means both staff and development gains are more or less perpetually at risk to some degree. And our current structure aimed at addressing conflict and instability was essentially designed in a sort of an ad hoc manner over the last number of years. So that structure does not enable staff to effectively coordinate peacebuilding efforts even within USAID to say nothing in the interagency as General Zinni was talking about, or to fully implement the stabilization assistance review that came out recently in June. So in very concrete terms, our current structure was never intended to cope with a world that has 70 million displaced persons the most since World War II, or a world where disasters that we face were overwhelmingly man-made. So what I can tell you about the transformation is first that since I was asked to address this specifically, the key element of what we call effective partnering and procurement reform is the key element of it is known as the New Partners Initiative. And it's something that you should look into. It'll be kicked off with an early demonstration project spearheaded by what is now the Dacha Bureau that you all know and love, Bureau for Democracy Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. It's aimed at mobilizing new and underutilized partners and resources and identifying effective program models for a proposed Bureau for Conflict Prevention and stabilization. Like just about everything we do at USAID, it's designed to help our partner countries progress along the road to self-reliance. And it will incorporate our new country-specific roadmaps, which many of you have probably heard about by now. And by the way, you can view all the roadmaps now on our website. There's 130 some countries on there. And these nifty roadmap tools are designed to provide a clear understanding of where individual countries fall on the development spectrum using independent data, not USAID data, independent data to broadly evaluate their levels of commitment to self-reliance and capacity for getting there, commitment and capacity. Now, we've always believed that every nation's circumstances are unique. The roadmaps help us to do a better job of actually treating them that way. I strongly encourage you to check them out and make good use of them. But back to the matter of hand, here's what else I can tell you about the transformation. Especially with that aspect of it, focusing on conflict and violent extremism. So the proposed new Bureau for Conflict Prevention Stabilization, or CPS, we've got to have an acronym like the military, we have our own acronyms. It would create a standalone but interconnected team to focus on the non-humanitarian aspects of a crisis and provide the agency with a holistic crisis response capability. This new Bureau will give us the capability to support vulnerable countries before, during and after a crisis. Now, that's not something we really have right now. The idea is to improve our conflict early warning analysis and make our peace building programming more flexible, more nimble, more of a priority, more field focused. So this new CPS Bureau would incorporate the current offices that many of you know, the Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management, CMM, transition initiatives, OTI, civil mail cooperation, and the countering violent extremism coordinator, along with some parts of our, what we call program policy and management office of Dacia. And then CPS would serve as the US government's technical lead on conflict and violent prevention and the implementation of political transition and stabilization programs in countries that are important to US national security as laid out in the stabilization assistance review. And we believe this will result in improved civilian military coordination and communication and collaboration. And CPS would also manage the, another one that you will probably all know well, the complex crises fund. And then while the Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Center is being elevated and moved to a new technical assistance bureau, technical support bureau in USAID under this proposed reorganization, the Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, CPS bureau, would retain a core of DRG staff who focus on human rights and governance issues in fragile states that are prone to violence. And they were also proposing, as you well know, a new humanitarian assistance bureau bringing together the Office of Food for Peace and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance to build upon the world's best, most effective humanitarian assistance force and make it even better and more integrated. And then this HA bureau would then be linked with the CPS bureau under a new Associate Administrator to make sure that we maintain that linkage between the human, you know, the pure humanitarian aspects and then the conflict prevention and response aspects of the crises. Now I could stand here and run through a list of all various other bureaucratic changes, but frankly, you know, you're probably not all that interested. You'll get into it in more detail throughout the day and tomorrow, and they're available on our website. Suffice to say that a lot of very smart people and mostly career staff have put a great deal of thought into making USAID more functionally aligned, more field oriented. But I hope that gives you a sense of the shape of things to come. But now if you'll indulge me, I'd also like to take this opportunity to make a bigger pitch about what I have long felt would be among the greatest challenges to the art of peace building and conflict mitigation. I'm sure I don't have to convince an audience like this that there's more to helping a country stand on its own two feet than just economic development in the traditional sense, or transparency in government or even democracy. I'm talking about something foundational, something, one of the real basic building blocks of civilization itself. The kind of primordial human force that when neglected can wreak havoc among everything from nation states to high schools and all the way to our living rooms. And I'm sure you've already figured out, I'm talking about, of course, teenage boys. Okay, sorry to get a little melodramatic on you there, but in all seriousness, there is a direct and well documented link between a society's ability to provide purpose and direction for its young men and that society's level of peace, stability and standard of living. Popular culture is full of lamentation over the state of young men in America. Not just teenagers, of course, but well into adulthood. Living on couches in their parents' basements, playing video games all day, so on. You've heard the story. It's a real problem, it's hardly limited to the United States. Nor is it by any means a new problem. In fact, way back in 1935, the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead having studied social interaction among students at Columbia University and all the way out to Papua New Guinea declared famously that the recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough so that the male may, in the course of his life, reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement. In other words, every society must grapple with the issue of what do we do with our young men. For centuries, tribal societies have wrestled with this challenge all the way back to the ancient Spartans and beyond. And that's under the best of circumstances. When you add in an environment of political oppression, injustice, police brutality, with a serious lack of economic opportunity or even healthy activities to be involved in, you've got a recipe for disaster. The kind of slow-rolling disaster that we see playing out today in places like the Northern Triangle of Central America where an epidemic of gang violence is driving massive outmigration. And Sahab Saharan Africa in the Middle East where extremist groups find fertile soil for recruiting among large populations of young men with few prospects for better life. I know that a great deal of your and our development programming relates to empowering women and girls, and rightly so. There remain massive historic injustices across the globe that hold back societies by holding back the female half of the population in those societies from exercising in some cases even the most basic human rights. This is a vast and tragic waste of human potential to say nothing of injustice. The single most effective and important key to achieving lasting development is to empower women and girls, no question about it. But as important a focus on girls is for development, when you're talking about the challenges of conflict and peacemaking in any given time context, it's no secret that you're more likely to be talking about the boys than the girls. Research increasingly shows young men around the world today feeling aimless and adrift, bewildered by a rapid cultural change and what they mean for their roles in society, even deeply traditional societies. They lack a sense of purpose and belonging. The result is a distressing pattern I've noted time and again in a wide range of US foreign policy discussions that I've been involved in. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I've found myself the lonely advocate of addressing root causes in a room full of consensus that the best solution to the problem boils down to simply killing more bad guys and of course they're all guys. And there is our situations where that may unfortunately be the case but as no less an authority than the US military consistently testifies even before Congress, wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we put more of our emphasis on building peace than on buying more bullets? Self-reliant countries are not only more prosperous and free and resilient, they are countries that place a priority on engaging young people and addressing their unique needs and in the process reducing the lure of crime and drugs and violent extremism. Traditional mores for helping with this issue are breaking down and if we don't address them, I'm afraid that many of our efforts will amount to houses built upon sand. Simply put, if we don't give our boys something healthy to do, a purpose, a sense of belonging, there are others who will and that's not likely to be healthy for anyone. So our enhanced focus on conflict prevention in USAID will work to get young men involved in their local community, including directly in peacemaking, along with the women who are obviously critical as part of it. We'll work to address corruption and human rights abuses, other forms of injustice which young people, young men and women often see as preventing them from achieving their goals and we'll work to establish sports clubs, IT centers, et cetera, supporting civil society organizations to provide avenues for young men to get that necessary sense of belonging. I don't have all the answers, but it would be a mess if I didn't take advantage of this opportunity to challenge you, my captive audience of peacemakers to make this a priority in your daily efforts and over the next couple of days to make the world a better and safer place. Thank you very much. So I just wanna say thank you so much. That was very powerful and I just can't thank you enough for coming and speaking to General Zinni and Tom Stahl. Tom, you raised a lot of points about new transformation at USAID and a lot of new frameworks. And those are important, but they're not the only ones. And so for the next high level panel that we are going to have here, I'd like to invite our next panelists to come up that are sitting in this row here. The panel is titled Global Policy Frameworks on Sustaining Peace, A Call for Collaboration and Collective Action. Again, you'll be hearing that collaborative and collective language a lot in the next couple of days. So please feel free to come on up. I wanna thank a few people who really worked hard to put this panel together that are not here today. Corinne Graf from USAIP, from you, sorry, USAIP. Malika Joseph from GPAC and Richard Ponziow from the Stimson Center. One of the key pieces about whether it's the transformation process at the US government or a lot of the different frameworks that we're gonna be talking about or the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act or the SAR is really focusing on how do they all interrelate and implementation. So I think that's gonna be a big theme of this panel. And I just would like to introduce now Gary Milante from SIPRI, who will moderate this panel. Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Ah, there we go. Thank you very much. Thanks very much to the United States Institute for Peace and the Alliance for Peace Building for having us today, for having this conversation. This discussion, the confluence of, I think it was four or five organizations that said we need to have this conversation at the AFP. And so we put in proposals. AFP said all of you are thinking about this so we need to be able to put this together into a conversation. And eventually it became this panel. So we all think it's important. I'm going to briefly introduce the speakers. Then I'm gonna tell you the ground rules for this conversation because I wanna keep us on time. Then we have a timekeeper who is Sam. Sam, Sam is right there. So I'm gonna say the rules. Sam is gonna keep track of the time. When you see him start waving at you, you're out of time. When you see him stand up and start throwing things at you, you're gonna stop talking. And in a moment I'll get into the substance why we're here and why we're talking about this. But I wanna reflect also on the fact that we're talking about, we've already talked about US policy, US frameworks. I think those were great interventions to start us off here today. Now we're talking about global policies and kind of global frameworks. Some of them coming from New York and the UN, some of which are things we're engaging with globally that transcend any kind of agency or institution or ownership. But I think what we have to also acknowledge and realize when we're sitting here talking, I know many of the people up here will speak to it, is that this is still a very Western, Northern conversation that's happening about these frameworks and how they actually reach the ground where peace needs to be built. And so I very much encourage you to reflect on that in your conversations and I'll explain in a minute what our format's gonna be. But also you to have a dialogue here, to challenge us a little bit and say, okay well how do we make these frameworks real in the world where peace has to be built on the ground and where people need to own the peace that is being built, the counterparts there. I noticed earlier we mentioned that the ambassadors are here from Mali and Ethiopia. I will give you the first opportunity to respond if you have particular interventions or responses when we get to question and answer. So I encourage you to think about those and then we will come back to that. First, let me introduce everybody. We have Katie Thompson here, the team leader at the United Nations Development Programming program. I will not go into your entire title. All of these people are very Google-able and you can find out all of their interesting bios and profiles, but Larry Atree here is the head of policy at State for World. Ro Tucci is the director of inclusive societies at the United States Institute of Peace here. Darno Rodriguez is the executive director at G-PAC, the Global Partnership for Prevention of Armed Conflict. And David Steven is the associated director at Center on International Cooperation, CIC in New York University. I've asked them to sit in this order because in a moment I will go to them and they will have two minutes each to say their first round of these are the frameworks that they are working with, that they're engaging with and they are using for peace building. And they're also gonna place those in the kind of global context of peace building. This is where we are in these conversations for these frameworks. That's gonna be the first round. We're gonna go through to David and then I'm gonna come back again to Katie and we're gonna have a second round. They'll get three minutes each, so luxurious three minutes each, to talk about where they are implementing these frameworks on the ground, where they're doing this and what the specific cases, where are the examples where we see this happening? This goes back to the question about evidence. Where do we see this actually happening? How are these frameworks being used for peace building in these environments and these contexts? That'll be the second three minute intervention. If we do that all right and we're all on time, Sam keeps us honest, then we have time to come out to you for questions and I ask you to please ask short specific questions because there will be a lot and that way we have time to be able to respond to them here and we'll target the questions. Not everybody will be responding to all questions. Briefly, about frameworks. Frameworks are extraordinarily useful. I think General Zinni has already set us up with this. He said the army plans everything and you have this fantastic quote from Eisenhower that said the plan is nothing but planning is everything and that's where I wanna connect frameworks into this conversation. We have a number of these frameworks. I'm gonna go through them in a minute just so that they don't have to in their limited two minutes. The number of these frameworks where we are thinking conceptually about how to organize many different actors, many stakeholders, many different agencies and institutions and all of the kind of global architecture that we have arrayed to be able to help us to build peace in these environments. All of those frameworks are intended to give us a kind of common language. That's one of the principles, one of the effects of it but they also give us common principles so that we know when somebody else is invoking one of those frameworks, we think they mean the same thing. We think they are trying to achieve the same thing. So those embody the principles and in many of these cases, they are the roadmaps for us to be able to achieve things. I'll get into that in a moment. But a roadmap again is a plan. It is how we are intending to try to achieve outcomes. So the frameworks are the planning that is everything. We know when we encounter the real world with all of our frameworks and all of the intentions that we have that they don't end up being exactly what we intended. But the idea with the frameworks, remember, is that we are agreeing on some language, we are agreeing on some principles, we're agreeing on how we will do some things, how we will interact and engage with each other so that when we get to the ground we don't have to have that conversation in the battlefield or in the humanitarian field or in the development field where we are all busy doing all the things we need to do. Hopefully these frameworks are tools for us to be able to get common understanding in advance. So that's what this conversation is about. How can we use them for collaboration? I'm gonna go through quickly, very quickly. A few of the frameworks that will be mentioned here just so that they're on the table already and you don't have to spend your time defining them and introducing them and we skip the education part of it. If you wanna Google any of these, I guarantee that these terms are very Googleable and they will educate you about them. There was a report last year, the year before, that was the Pathways for Peace Report that was done by the UN and the World Bank. I would attach that underneath the rubric of the prevention agenda. The prevention agenda is a framework. The way of thinking about how prevention is done in the UN World Bank, Pathways for Peace Report, is a framework, there's two. Sustaining Peace Agenda had two dual resolutions at the United Nations. Together, that's called the Sustaining Peace Agenda. It is linked to the prevention agenda. Not exactly the same, there's some differences in language, mostly because it's a member state's activity versus a research activity by the UN World Bank report. Then, that's another framework. Then, there's the Sustainable Development Goals, another framework, a roadmap for how we achieve the kind of sustainable development we would like to achieve by 2030. Within the Sustainable Development Goals, there are 17 of them, 169 targets, 232 indicators. Within that, there is SDG-16, Peace, Justice, and Inclusive Institutions, Inclusive Governments. Though that SDG is a framework, that's a way for understanding a roadmap for how we achieve development, collectively, together. Then, there's SDG-16+, which is something that has been conceived upon to say that peace, justice, and inclusive governance are bigger than just what is listed in SDG-16. It spills over into other SDGs as well. David will get a little bit into that, but I wanted to put it out on the table. That's a different framework, and there are documents and lots of information out there available for that. Then, something else you should know, is that in the course of the Sustainable Development Goal process, every year, there's a high-level political forum on a few of the different SDGs. There will be one in 2019, in July, in the General Assembly meeting that follows that, and in this one, this year, SDG-16 is being reviewed. Remember, states come and voluntarily report on their progress on this, but it makes this a particularly important, interesting, pivotal year for setting the baseline on how we're doing on peace and knowing whether we're gonna make progress to 2030. And then, there is an entire initiative called the Pathfinders Initiative that David will speak a little bit about as well. That's 40 different pilot countries that are themselves volunteering to say they will volunteer on peace, justice, and inclusive governance. But there are other frameworks. We could just as easily talk about the stabilization agenda, including the incarnation of it here in the United States. We could talk, and a framework itself is the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act. There is another framework that has led us to here, which is the Busan framework, the New Deal, the International Dialogue. That was a framework that got us to here based on Paris principles. And then these roadmaps that we've just been talking about from USAID, they themselves are frameworks like post-conflict needs assessments, all these other things. Those are all frameworks. They are ways for us to get to common understanding of what it is we're doing. I just want to put them all out there, so now we're all on the same page. You don't have to spend time talking about them. And we can talk about what ones are the ones that are important to us. Where do we see them fitting into the global architecture right now? And that's what our first question is about. So now I'm gonna hand over to Katie, and you'll have two minutes and you can reflect on that. Thank you, thank you. Can I spend two minutes arguing with you about your hierarchy of frameworks? No, okay. So hi everybody, it's really nice to be here. I work at UN Development Program. I think I'm the representative of the UN system here, but I will speak, obviously what I will talk about is more an orientation around how development practitioners engage in peace building or conflict prevention. And to highlight that, I mean, clearly for us, the key framework is the Agenda 2030, which is the Sustainable Development Goal Agenda. The reason why, and this is the point about hierarchies is this is an intergovernmental document. It's owned by all member states. It's universal and it can be calibrated and made context specific. Some of the ways in which we are advocating around the goal 16 and 16 plus that you're going to hear about are key for those of us who are focused on peace building to make the SDG Agenda live in terms of conflict prevention. But it's very crucial and very critical that it's understood that this is our basic framework because it's nationally owned and it's universal. One that wasn't mentioned is the sustaining peace resolutions, which, I'm sorry, that was mentioned, but perhaps it can be understood if you like as the UN's linkage of the development community with the peace building community. It's important in the sense that it's brought peace builders in terms of member states to the idea that peace building is long-term and that it's very much rooted in Agenda 2030 and it sort of reframed those conversations in that dimension. And that's been very useful for development practitioners. The third one that I want to highlight, which is the one that wasn't mentioned, is the Secretary General's Prevention Plan, which is for the UN actors and entities, obviously very important because it's really the command piece. It's about directing our resources and our focus on prevention, beyond conflict prevention, but addressing all forms of risk. Okay. Is that working? Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for bringing us together to talk about this important topic today. From my side, I think, I mean, we have to welcome and support and get behind the efforts on sustaining peace that are pushed to bring peace back into the center of what the UN is all about and the reforms that are taking place there. I think the pathways for peace effort that was mentioned is also a really good process that's brought home some really important messages about priorities and partnerships to the banks, to the UN. But I really do think that the Sustainable Development Goals and particularly the commitments around Goal 16 and related targets are the biggest factor in our favor as a community and the tool that we have a big opportunity to work with. And I say that because I think, you know, Goal 16 and the other targets were constructed out of a real reflection on what are the biggest drivers of conflict worldwide. It's a vision of positive peace. It was genuinely consultative in the way it was put together but then signed off by all world leaders. And it's also this really important bridge between the peace community and the rights development actors the governance actors and between governments around the world on a common vision that they can own and understand each other on. I think, you know, thinking of the theory of change that you have to work with with the Sustainable Development Goals, you know, whether it's that it's a chance for countries to shine in comparison with each other. It's an entry point for fresh dialogue on the issues that matter on the ground, whether it's a prompt to measure the things that matter and see prevention challenges in new ways, whether it's a prompt for governments to hear feedback from their citizens. There are all these different ways in which the SDGs is a tool for pushing for change, which I think we can really use. I do, while I've got the floor also though, want to sort of strike a note of challenge coming back to what Liz said about the world we're in right now. We have commitments to things like the Armstray Treaty, but we see defense expenditure at a high in the post-Cold War era. We see autocratization taking its grip, not just in places like Russia or Turkey, but in Brazil, in India, even here at home in the US. There are big, big challenges in the way governments are behaving right now and the way they're shredding the commitments to global conflict prevention norms which we've painstakingly constructed. So we have to be dynamic in responding to that. We can't fiddle while Rome burns as a peace-building community where the framework is a tool, we have to use it, but we also have to think outside the box where the framework isn't touching the people who are changing the world for the worse right now. Thank you. Great, thank you. At USIP, we're utilizing and developing a number of the concepts within these frameworks and whether that's being adaptive and people-centered, addressing the short-term while investing in the long-term, supporting integrated strategy planning and programming, and of course, advancing inclusion and building cohesion at every stage of resolving conflict. And I wanna take a minute on that last one since that's the field that I work most closely in. So the example, when I think of these frameworks, I think they're most helpful in guiding our efforts to pursue what I work on, which is inclusive peace processes. And we know that these peace processes are critical moments in time where we can really redefine relationships and address the root causes of conflict. And so when I talk about inclusive peace processes or broadening participation in the peace processes, we're certainly talking about women, youth, civil society, religious actors, but we're also talking about how to widen citizen engagement and armed group actors in these processes. And that's at all levels of a peace process, of a multi-track peace process. And I raise this because I think the frameworks, what they help us do is make the case for creating this ecosystem, right? This ecosystem where there's multiple players brought into the process and are contributing to the solutions. Our process, they ultimately will have a shared responsibility in supporting and most likely implementing. So this is really the concept of a people-centered that you see in a lot of these frameworks. So what does that mean for what USIP is doing? We're focusing more attention and resources towards developing research and practices on track 1.5, track two, track three, looking at grassroots organizing and collective action and the role that that plays in peace processes. The last point that I wanna make is that USIP, along with many of the partners in this room, we're well positioned to seed and test many of these concepts on the ground and to help operationalize and refine these frameworks. So for inclusion, what we're doing is we're fleshing out some critical questions such as who may resist broadening participation? Why and how, how do we manage and navigate around that resistance? What are the new pockets of inclusion we are creating, right? I mean, the new pockets of exclusion that we are creating with inclusion and how can we mitigate those consequences? And finally, how could we advance social inclusion towards social cohesion? So that means helping to create safe spaces to voice differences and build bridges across divides so that we can address tensions long into the future. Well, thanks. Well, first of all, I wanted to link sort of like the broad theme of this conference, the power of collective action to our conversations because when we're talking about the frameworks, we're talking about how can these frameworks help us mobilize collective action in order to build this global architecture? So I think we should start with a question and this question is, is the peace building community actually worldwide being mobilized by these frameworks? Or are these frameworks contributing to the mobilization of the peace building community in order to move towards implementation of this agenda? I think the answer is twofold on one hand, yes. And I remember when we were discussing on where the whole agenda as these were being discussed that we had a huge mobilization of the peace building community and we're all behind that and we say we have to get this peace goal and we strategize and we got it. And I think there was a huge sense of accomplishment from our communities, like we got this peace goal. But the question is like, we have this goal, now what? We have goal 16, now what do we do with this? And we had this question actually in our community in G-PAC and we said, okay, what do you want to do with this at the regional level where our network members are working? It's like, what does this mean to you at the regional level? Help us think, what do you want to do with this SDG framework? And for us, the answer was a bit not what we expected because we saw that these frameworks actually were not getting the traction that we thought or the energy that we were having here in these discussions at the country level. So these frameworks, they didn't really help that mobilization or that we expected that they would have. So I think we should answer, we should ask ourselves, why? Why are these frameworks maybe not bringing that effect that we thought it would bring at the field level with peace building organizations, with organizations that are working at the grassroots level? And I think in general, we can talk about two things. First, lack of understanding of what these frameworks are. I was listening to Gary and I was getting confused with all these different frameworks and I work on this almost every day. So there's this lack of understanding. It's like, okay, yeah, but what does this mean for me? And the second part of it is this lack of understanding causing or generating kind of like framework fatigue for our people in the ground working on trying to implement these frameworks. And I think we have to think about, or I'll come back in my three minutes because I already see my warning to me, not even to the second warning, but my time is done. But hopefully think about and reflect how we're trying to overcome this and show the relevance of these frameworks and how we can actually work on this and how this can act as a blueprint that can help us participate in this global peace building architecture. Thank you. So I too work on the sustainable development goals. I help run the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Justice and Inclusive societies. And it was set up precisely to answer this question, a question put to us by a finance minister from a conflict affected state who'd fought very hard for these goals in a bitter and difficult negotiation and said, now we've got them, we've got no idea what to do with them. So the Pathfinders is really about trying to make some sense out of these targets. We do work with the SDG 16 plus targets, so 36 targets from across the agenda that directly talk about peace, justice and inclusion and go deep into the other goals. And one of the things that the Pathfinders did as a group of member states and other partners is put together a roadmap for what implementation looked like and I have a copy here, I have a few other copies and it's an attempt to explain how we start to turn this into action. Now, as Gary said, we're in a critical year this year and in the summer in July, ministers gather to review SDG 16, also SDG 10 on inequality. The September heads of state and heads of government leaders, prime ministers, presidents come together and they've been asked to look at all 17 SDGs and to mobilize further actions to accelerate implementation. So this is the year really for us to focus on those actions, on those solutions, the kind of solutions that were being discussed yesterday and that I hear being discussed in about a thousand different conversations like this one. It's a time for acceleration to show that we really are turning it into action and we really have to have a bigger mobilization around these issues. I don't think we're asking the grassroots to work on targets, we're asking them to work on issues and challenges but we're trying to use the targets as a common strategic language, a common strategic framework that combine these efforts together and make them the whole, the greater than the sum of the parts. For this audience I've pointed one particular headline target, SDG 16.1. That's a target that says we must significantly reduce all forms of violence everywhere and that is a target that I think we need to start taking seriously. We need to use it to bind together five different prevention communities, the folks working on conflict, the folks working on urban and youth violence really responding to the problems. So to the question of young men that was raised earlier, the folks working on interpersonal violence including women and children, the prevention of human rights abuses and mass atrocities and the prevention of violence extremism, we need to bring all of those together around SDG 16.1 and really mobilize in the next year to show that societies can work towards quantified reductions in violence and quantified increases in peace. Thanks. So very quick introductions. Thank you very much for keeping on time. To sum it up, we have all of these frameworks. We don't see necessarily the traction on the ground where the rubber hits the road in the countries, in the societies, in the people that own the peace, whether it's our counterparts from our own agencies, whether it's the national counterparts, whether it's the NGOs and civil society there, whether it's the spoilers, all of the stakeholders. We're gonna go back to them in a moment. They're gonna say these are what we see happening on the ground. This is where these frameworks actually touch peace that is being built in these particular contexts and we're gonna use those as examples for the discussion. How do we know that we see these frameworks being useful? But I think these are good challenges. From Darinel, he reminded us that we have framework fatigue. There's a lot of frameworks. Sometimes people on the ground say, is it just cut and paste? Should I just find and replace all the terms that said prevention and call it now sustaining peace? We have all of these parts, General Zinni said before, we have all of these parts that we're trying to put together. And then the question is, can we come up with solutions that work for all contexts? Do we need to tailor them for specific contexts? And then of course, Larry reminded us of the global context that we're working in. How do we actually fit what we're trying to do in all of the action and energy that we have into having effect on the ground? So now, Katie, we come back to you. You have three minutes. Luxurious three minutes. So I think I have four because I was the only one who obeyed the rules, but anyway. So I'm kind of provoked also by what some of the colleagues have said. So I'm going to go a bit off what I plan to say, which is obviously coming at this, I was originally somebody who might have classified themselves as a post-conflict practitioner who moved into development approaches because I sincerely believed and still do that working strongly to promote national ownership, which includes not just governments, but all parts of society is the only way to achieve change and that bringing executive powers to situations has a very limited impact. So I do really want to flag why the SDGs is important and why the word development is important in all of that. And it's not simply because I work for the UN Development Program. It's because it symbolizes something about the approach, which is very different from the approach which perhaps many of you use or work within your daily work. I went quickly through the agenda here and saw barely anyone having the title with the word development existing in any of the organizations are here, which I find very interesting. So forgive me if I'm saying something that's obvious to all of you, but the development discipline is largely populated globally by economists still. And so converting economists and planners and finance experts to the ideas of good governance and the ideas that are embedded in 16 plus is not an overnight transition. It's work, it's hard work. And I'm not cynical about the fact that this doesn't get off the ground overnight. I'm very positive actually about what is happening across the globe with the caveat of the points made by my colleague from Safer World. In terms of our work, what we're seeing increasingly accepted at national level in countries where it may not normally be expected, that combining work on peace and development is increasingly seen as the norm as opposed to the exception. It's not restricted to post-conflict context. It's regarded as a preventive measure. And the UN has a lot more traction in achieving that these days than it did in 2004. I think that's largely due to the SDGs. I think it's really been helped by the World Bank study and providing some substantive underpinnings for that. And I think that's incredibly positive. So for example, in 2004, we were managed to deploy under very difficult circumstances, five peace and development advisors in the field working for the UN resident coordinators with a head of the UN country level. And these days we have 49, covering 70 plus countries without much political challenge to those deployments or their work with governments. I think that's incredibly positive. It reaches the point where it's difficult to find people with the right skill set to do that work and they work with small teams of national officers. They work with volunteers, both national and international, I think is an incredibly positive change. In addition to that, I'm going to take my extra minute. In addition to that, what those people are doing, and I didn't mean to dwell on them, but I am dwelling on them to show that you can achieve change. Obviously what they're doing is working with the national authorities in order to ensure that within SDG planning frameworks, these elements of 16 plus are taken into account. And that's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Development plans are four to five years long, sometimes 10 years long. It's going to take time to work cross ministries to bring about these changes. Part of the work that we've been doing, David referenced it, is to really put governments who want to show some leadership at the center of these conversations. So they can show quite concretely how a Ministry of Justice can work with the National Human Rights Institution, can work with the Ministry of Finance to ensure that access to justice is promoted in rural communities and also ensuring that NGOs are at the table and civil society groups are there to impact on the quality and the extent of that service provision. There are governments doing that work. Final thing, because I'm abusing my time now, is so that's all of the positive side. And I think this is part of what we're trying to do at country level in the UN system. But goal 16 isn't a given at any moment in any large intergovernmental settings such as the General Assembly, what's been progressed can also be undone. And it's particularly important to work with these national partners, especially national governments in the global south, to speak to this agenda. And I'm sorry that I speak here rather than one of my national counterparts because it's those voices who will carry this agenda. It isn't going to be the countries of the global north who have traditionally supported this agenda. So that's, I think, where our focus of our work should be in the next year. And I'm sure that David will pick that up as we go forward. Thank you, Katie, so much for the rules-based international order time limits. Anyway, I'll try and do my duty. So, yeah, I mean, I struck a challenge in my first sort of opening there.  This is the majority of member states. This is the world we're in. But I think it's tremendously important to be tapping into also the civic activism that is rising up and pushing for change in dynamic ways in countries all over the world, whether we're looking at South Korea or the Gambia or Romania or Ethiopia, and to nourish that. Within the safer world, we've developed a model for trying to use and localize and operationalize SDG-16 plus commitments where we find that they can be a tool for doing things. And I think it's really leading to some exciting results.  We've seen legislation passed on female genital mutilation, on women's political participation, the chief justice and a lot of judges across Somaliland coming together, thinking how can they work towards a vision for access to justice that really identifies many of the challenges in that context and does something about them. I think another example, and it's more nascent, but it's really important is in Sudan, we found it's possible to get together civil society and government officials to talk face to face about goal 16 issues around justice, security, governance for the first time. And I think people there are very appreciative of the opportunity to actually sit and discuss frankly with government officials there for the first time on some of these things in what's been a very close space. So these are some of the ways in which we can use this to push for the kind of conversations and changes we need to see. What we've developed as a sort of model for using the framework to build that broad ownership that you were talking about is really an effort to contextualize things. So start by understanding the context. Find a way to create space for dialogue, to identify with civil society, with national authorities, what are the relevant problems in a particular context. And set out national priorities and develop the partnerships not just with government but civil society, universities, business people to take action in locally relevant ways. Try and identify champions on the ground and mobilize them. Also find ways to build on existing foundations. What are people already doing? How can their efforts be sort of highlighted, nourished, sustained rather than creating something new? Help people also to use the framework to strengthen accountability through monitoring and the indicators to get civil society and involved in holding their governments to account. And then connect these national level efforts with the global so that people are aware, they're giving praise where it's due to change on the ground. And the other thing I think to sustain these efforts, we need to formalize them into processes of working together that guarantee inclusion that have some rules around it without bureaucratizing and creating this kind of problem of isomorphic mimicry which we see so much sort of in the development sector as a kind of creating a kind of malaise. So that's the model that we've sort of working at with Safer World and yeah, I think it's something we're quite excited about and I think it reflects a lot of the other work that's being done by the likes of G-PAC and the Pathfinders and UNDP to try and take action with this framework. So KDI, I have the reverse story. I came from USAID in the development space for a number of years and now working in the peace building space and we had our own challenges in the development space of getting other development sectors to understand the importance of good governance, education and health. So it's a common challenge all around. You know, the example, the two examples that I was gonna give one project, one program, the project is actually quite similar to Larry so I won't dwell too much on it but it is this concept of integrating justice and the justice and security fields and so this is our justice and security dialogue program that's been operating in Nepal, Nigeria, Iraq and the Sahel and similar concepts as to what you described, opportunity to create forums for dialogue, to bring non-state actors into the problem-solving efforts and to address immediate issues while also building relationships to address conflict in the long term. So this seems to be a common model that has been very effective in a number of places and these are the recommendations that are in fact embedded. These elements that are embedded in this project are the recommendations from pathways to peace and in the next iteration of this project we'll also be helping the participants to apply a system-sinking approach to solving the challenges in their local area so we're taking the next step in enhancing that project. At a larger programmatic effort, one thing that USIP is putting a more concerted effort towards and many of you might already know this is towards non-violent action which we believe can really be a transformative approach within the peace-building space and I mentioned this approach because it's a real opportunity to materialize divisions that are set out in these frameworks, but specifically SDG-16 and all of the frameworks do emphasize the need to engage local actors, grassroots actors in one form or fashion but the non-violent action space really crystallizes it and we know that using an alternative to violence, non-violent action is very effective in challenging injustices and addressing long-standing grievances. So what we're doing and I dare say it with Lisa right here because she's been one of the co-creators in this effort and there'll be many sessions on this throughout the conference so I don't need to go into detail but taking the tactics of peace-building and the tactics of non-violent action and seeing how they can be synergized, what is the interplay between those and really giving the local actors a diverse range of options that they can work with to forge political and social change and so we've developed training around this, around this concept of synergizing peace-building and non-violent action and it aims to help expand participation and build coalition, sequence and diversify the use of tactics and of course remain disciplined and committed to the non-violent action and message. The last thing I would say as I see my time's up we're also rethinking conflict analysis, how we can use this analytical tool to accommodate the shifts in focus that we're seeing so to better account for multi-dimensional risk and the changing nature of conflict. We've just started that so more to come there. Let me leave it at that. Thank you. So for us at G-PAC we've been thinking and going back to the question, okay so what, so what? So we have this frame or so what? So what do we do with them? What do they mean for the work of our members especially in the global south? And so we pose again this question and again the answer was well now we don't really work on goal 16, we don't really work on the SDGs and we were like what do you mean you don't work on goal 16? Then we go back, isn't your work focused on reducing violence? It's in 16.1 about reducing all forms of violence. It's like you work on that, maybe you're not aware that you're working on that but you are working on it and that's a mission of your organization. So what we try to tell people is like you're already working on this and rather than seeing this as now something that's coming from New York and is being imposed here it's like think about it, how can I use this for my work? The work that I'm already using, how is this useful for me? And to create some spaces for what I am already doing in the Philippines, in Liberia, et cetera. So that's how we're framing our approach to addressing this issue. And then we have of course, as NGO limited capacity to do that. So from the global perspective we're thinking not okay what can we do to create this but what are we doing already to create this awareness? How can we hook up our membership into what is already happening? So we, for example, the World Federation of United Nations Association we're already doing some outreach about goal 16, the 16 plus forum, et cetera. So rather than replicating and doing the same thing we said well, can we use your forum what you're already doing? And then we sponsored some of our member organizations that they know and they participate in this dynamics and then they can take it at their country level. So we're trying to connect the different initiatives that are happening about creating awareness and bring civil society organizations from our network there. Similar with the work, sustaining peace, the prevention agenda in general which is our core business in GPAC. So we're trying to again connect. Now what does this mean in the ground? So right now we are conducting a research from the civil society perspective. What does sustaining peace mean in Liberia for civil society organizations? How do you articulate that? And we're trying to work together and we're lucky enough to have this prevention platform that has been developed with United Nations Department of Political Affairs and coordinated together by GPAC and CUNO, the Quaker United Nations Office but that brings a number of civil society organizations working on decision. We just created some space for discussion with the UN. How can we work together? And final, my final point before my time set up is the need to create these spaces for discussion. Discussion about the so what? So what do we do? The pathways for peace report, for example, it brings a number of findings about trends, of what conflict is, how conflict is developing right now, how most conflicts right now are not or are among non-state actors versus other non-state actors. What does this mean for the practice of prevention? So what we try to do is to create those spaces and say, okay, we have this very nice findings. It's like, what does this mean for your work, for our work? A civil society organization but also convening other actors. So what we're trying to do is, and specifically with the pathways for peace report, is at the regional level convene these meetings with the authors of the report, with the regional organizations there, with civil society organizations there. Okay, look at these trends that the report is pointing out. Look at some of the recommendations there. What does this mean for the practice of the African Union? And how can you work together with civil society on this? What does this mean for the practice of ASEAN? And how can you create linkages for that? So we just had my colleague Malika here, just came from a meeting that we had in Bangkok around that conversation. And we're having this tomorrow, actually, another conversation with the OAS. What does pathway for peace mean in the Americas? How can we work together? So essentially that creation of spaces and have that conversation and post this, so what question and what's coming up from here is what we're trying to do. It's running around. I've actually, like Katie Scrap, what I was gonna say, I just wanna try and pull some themes together and test my timekeepers' patience by making six points about what I think successful communities working on these SDG-16 plus targets are doing. I think first, like Katie said, they're really taking advantage of the national ownership that's inherent in this platform. Katie and I were just both in Sierra Leone and there was a very big gathering around SDG-16 plus, many countries from the regions. Ministers really coming and thinking quite hard about how to take this forward. And so we're seeing new types of conversation coming together. Secondly, they're bringing together a mix of national champions. The MDGs had a very much North-South dynamic, but we're seeing quite different types of conversation arising on this issue. So Argentina is doing a lot of work on justice, for instance, at the moment, based on its network of access to justice centers in the poorest communities. And we saw some really interesting conversations between the minister, the deputy minister from Argentina on justice with her counterparts in the West Africa region last week. Third, they have a grip on their evidence and they're talking about solutions and not about problems. I was in a country that was described in the launch of the Pathways for Peace report in this room as a test case for prevention. And I saw through a two-day workshop the planning commission being bored to death by the SDG-16 plus targets until the last, the second day, when we actually started to talk to Turkey about justice, about why young men were deeply disaffected and what to do about it. We weren't any more talking about indicators and structures. We were really talking about what action looked like. Fourth, I think communities are beginning to articulate, to bring together those solutions and articulate them in a language that practical policy makers and people who have a martial money can understand. I would give an example of that, the people working on violence against children. There's roughly 25 countries now in the global partnership to end violence against children and they're brought together around the Inspire package. Seven strategies for ending violence against children agreed by WHO, the World Bank, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a real attempt to create a framework for implementation. Fifth, they have a long-term vision. They understand that it's gonna take time to get this going, but they're determined to begin to start showing measurable change in the early 2020s. Not everywhere, somewhere, but to demonstrate that change is possible to combat the fatalism that really is one of our most serious problems. And sixth, they're part of this, I mean, they're doing what Larry is saying, but almost in the opposite direction. They're part of the fight-back narrative. They recognize that the politics are very difficult for many of these issues at the moment, that we have an opportunity through the SDGs and some of the other frameworks that we're talking about to build a new narrative, to make it practical, to turn it into action, to get national leadership, to get a diversity of countries working on that, and to begin to show that a different vision, a different strategy, a different future is possible. Under my three minutes. That was incredible. And he covered what I was gonna do to wrap up, so we actually saved time. I would encourage people to start lining up at the microphones, I'll come to you in just a moment. You're gonna pass the microphones. If the ambassadors are here and they wanna raise their hands, they could have the first crack at a question. I would second that, David. I think what's happening is people are seeing the 2030 agenda, they're seeing the value of it if they're active and agile on the ground, and they realize this is a way to be able to mobilize action. It is a common framework that people are using to be able to talk about it. They see the value of 2019 as a time to talk about baselines, how we're doing, and talk about what impact would look like. I think Ro brought up a really interesting point we should, I wanna reiterate it, that this is what SDGs, the overall framework of SDGs, and then SDG 16 and 16 plus give us, is a way, a simple way to integrate systems thinking into very, very complex development work. It is when you say systems thinking to people on the ground or anywhere, any kind of planning, people say, oh, that's just too complicated, I can't get into everything, all the complexity of the world. If you say, here are a number of things that have been identified as the core parts of development when they're in the 2030 agenda, that's actionable. People can engage with that, because these are real things that are happening. And I see the examples that you brought up where this is really happening on the ground. It's not just about whether you make a target or whether you actually make the progress that you said you were gonna make. Some real signs of progress right now are just actors, ministers of planning, civil society leaders, stakeholders, saying that's a good way to measure this. I understand now that if I use this indicator, and I report regularly on this indicator, that it helps me to understand better how the system is working, what it's producing, and how I can make that case to my constituents that we're actually making progress. So just engaging with it and using the language is itself evidence of success on peace building. These are people engaging with a peace building framework that's built into the SDGs. We're ready to go with the question. Perfect, thank you very much. Please just introduce yourself quickly, and then the question. Thank you very much. My name is Olumide, a student at George Washington University. My question is to the UCIP, United States Studies of Peace. I have released a report recently talking about the 2019 elections in Nigeria. Some areas that are projected to be very, very violent, like Lagos, we were in Kano, and with respect to grassroots strategies, I know you work a lot with civil society organizations. What are you doing with the politicians and the young people to avert this imminent violence? And I think that is the core of the issues that we have in Nigeria right now. So I'd like to know what you think we can do as young people to avert the imminent violence in these areas that you have projected, thank you. Sir, another question that's queued up, yes please. Dane Smith, this is perhaps not a question that's terribly on point with the panel, but I wanna get it out there. We heard from General Zinni about the possibility of an interagency command. We heard from my esteemed friend, Tom Stahl, about a new Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization in USAID. What we didn't hear about was the State Department. Perhaps that is not a surprise during the Trump administration. But in any case, there has been a, what I would call a 10-year experiment with what eventually became the Conflict Stabilization Operation Bureau at the State Department, which was designed to deal with conflict. And I wonder how that fits in with this overall look at how we deal with conflict stabilization and peace building. We have another question right here. I'm Milt Lauenstein and I fund various things for peace building. I'd like to ask Ms. Tucci. She said that the USIP offered all presented alternatives to local people as to what they could do for peace. And I wonder if she really believes that USIP knows what their alternatives are better than they know themselves. Okay, identify yourself right now with hands. I'm gonna go with these questions right now. We'll get started and then we'll come back to the next round of questions. But make eye contact with the people that have the microphones. I'll stay here so that the microphone can hear me. We had three questions. One was, we have an example. We know there's elections coming up. It's going to be difficult in Nigeria. I guess one of the first questions I would have is, practically speaking, or any of you working in Nigeria, but more broadly, can we generalize out of that? What do peace and development advisors, for example, do when they know that an election is coming up in the future? So Katie will come to you. Maybe Larry, you're making eye contact with me. So maybe you have something you wanna reflect on on that. We had a question, and I'm gonna broaden it a little bit. I think we could have lots of lunchtime conversations about the organization of the United States response to these issues. But I think it goes back to the question that General Zinni brought up to us before. And I think this is, I think it was a great challenge that he brought to us. You know, when military folks and defense folks encounter the peace building community, and I've taught many courses with the NATO on the comprehensive approach, they have this moment where they sit back and they step away from the table and they go, wait, there's nobody in charge? How do you do this? How do you do peace building when there's nobody in charge? There's no structure to this. And we, generally, if you're a peace builder, and I am an economist, by the way, Katie, but an economist peace builder, but we generally, we're used to that. We know that what we need to do is go around and meet and build the coalition that is the people that are gonna be working with us to be able to identify joint objectives and be able to deliver together. And we know that that has to be adaptive and it has to be very, very different in very different contexts. And that, and that it's not always the same person that's in the hierarchy or in the structure. So I think the challenge is not, you know, what are the specific parts? How is it being organized in the US government? How is it being, those are all conversations that we can have. And you can also ask our UN colleagues and people in New York about what's happening with the UN architecture. That's, you could have long conversations about that. But I think more generally, for you to reflect on, Darno, I know you've thought about this, David, you've thought about this. And Katie, I'm sure you've reflected on it. Not getting into the specifics of who reports to whom and how is this organized? What does the architecture look like? More generally, how do we solve the problem of knowing that we have multiple actors coming into these kinds of spaces? How do you solve this problem? You've all worked in the field and you've all done this. How do you solve the problem of knowing there are multiple actors coming in these types of spaces? You have some people that have expectations of an extremely hierarchical system or this type of reporting. And there are other people that don't have that expectation or don't work that way. And they need to be able to work very, very loosely. And they need to be adaptive and work with a variety of actors to find the constituency of peace. So I'll more broadly open that up that way, if I may. And then the question, and I think it's a good challenge and it's one that we had identified in setting out this panel, which was, are we, I guess I'm solving the question and I'm answering the question and responding to it. Are we facilitators or are we people that are bringing solutions? In my view, we're facilitators. We are people that help people to have a conversation. And that's what I think the panelists meant when they talked about opening up the space for these discussions. That's why the SDG framework is a useful thing. We can create a space for people that will talk about common objectives that they would like. We're facilitators helping people. Robert Sigliano, I know is here, is called a complexity coach. That's a fantastic job, right? We're helping people think through what their possible solutions would be, not coming with solutions to them. But maybe you all want to expand upon that a little bit more. So we'll just come straight back down the line because there were questions for all three of you there. All five of you. Thanks, Gary. I definitely need a complexity coach. That's a good one. So thank you for the question about Nigeria and youth. I want to preface the answer by saying, I don't think that certainly, I don't think that I'm getting the question right vis-a-vis how UDP engages youth in peace-building conversations. And I don't want to speak, I can't speak for all of our offices because I think some of the offices are doing really good work on youth mobilization and working with youth groups. But I think in terms of our theorizing and our ability to catalyze change of the nature that's been so well spelled out in the report that Graham was done, I don't know if he's here. I think that we're not quite getting it right. So thank you for provoking the question. It's really an important one. What I would hope to see happening in Nigeria is that the advisory capacity that sits in the UN office is working closely with coalitions and different coalitions, including youth coalitions and youth groups, to listen carefully to what is happening on the ground, both in the North and around the electoral process in general, in order to inform the decisions of political affairs, of human rights, of resident coordinator, and bring those messages back to government in a safe way. And I hope that that is happening. And that is the very purpose of having those people deployed, is to enable those types of conversations and to empower locally mediated solutions between those individuals and groups on the ground, local stakeholders who have a stake in the solution, a peaceful solution to the problem. We call this insight of mediation and UNDP, not everybody does, but I think this type of approach is what we should be doing to foster change. I also hope that the work that is happening there is also looking at the electoral process in general to ensure it's not just meeting minimal standards of freedom and fairness, but it's a genuinely inclusive process. And I'm very happy to talk to you offline about, in more detail about that, should it be helpful. So that's what I would hope to be seeing in a context like Nigeria, clearly in a context like Nigeria, the UN is not the only actor that's going to influence the decisions of the government and I would hope also and I would really, if I was present on the ground, be working with all forms of coalitions for peace to find other actors and champions for peaceful messaging, including bilaterals, including regional actors. I mean, the regional actors that Darinel has focused on are incredibly important and including governance that is not central, but local level governance actors who want to see peace in their communities and are working strongly to bring about change at that level, who can be incredibly influential. So those are the types of actions I would hope to see and I would hope that the UN could foster those and we can speak offline in detail about that. In terms of stabilization, I don't think I could satisfy your answer about the US and stabilization so I can speak briefly about stabilization in general. So stabilization is a favorite term of a number of Western governments who want to bring a more securitized approach to the way that they're engaging in conflict affected or post-conflict settings. It's frequently more palatable to parliaments who are in general drifting rightwards and in general moving away from ideas of development spending, but more convinced by ideas of stabilization and spending. It comes often with a heavy dose of a security component and sometimes a hard security component. So it's not uncontroversial, especially with those governments who are on the receiving end of assistance that's labeled stabilization monies. At the same time, there are some very positive things happening under the rubric of stabilization, including underwriting and supporting the types of efforts we've been discussing. So the patterns of donor engagement through stabilization approaches is varying depending on this particular national government, but many who are finding it challenging sometimes to spend quite vast budgets that put under the label of stabilization tend to orient themselves latterly towards the types of programs that have traditionally been understood as development in the rule of law sector, the justice sector, security sector, local peace building approaches, demobilization efforts and so on. So it's a complicated field. The reason why it gets extremely complicated is that generally stabilization monies are run by ministries of foreign affairs as opposed to development actors and so it makes the conversations with the national counterparts more complicated. So stabilization can be used positively, but I think it's very important to think about how that looks on the receiving end of stabilization approaches. I'll stop there. So I won't try and comprehensively answer all the things that came up, but I mean just a couple of thoughts. I mean I think on this question of how do you kind of hold back the tide of when you can see an outbreak of immediate violence coming, electoral violence, youth dissatisfaction. I think one of the really important things it can be sort of trying to build support amongst people with the power to change patterns of hard security responses which often fuel the problem. So one of the examples from our research in the last couple of years is around the Garrissa University attack by Al Shabab, how that led to a moment where Kenyan political leaders and leaders in the Northeast decided to try a different approach to security provision even when things were really sort of very violent with a group that most organizations and countries have designated as a terrorist organization, trying a different model of security provision, clamping down on arbitrary arrests and torture and abuse of youth corruption in the police service, getting communities again talking to the police and restoring trust really in that context took counties like Garrissa back from the brink. Then I think that's where also US and other governments need to leverage on governments like Nigeria and others to try a different approach and not reach for those kind of tools. But then I think on the question of do peace pool, does have the answer to local problems and need to come along and give them, I think obviously most of our experience I think would reflect a role that's more about facilitation and pointing out that there are ways of working on things. There are things you can do as communities, you can play a role. In many of our contexts we've been told women can't play a role in conversations around security but we found it in country after country that women are the backbone of local security in protecting people during conflict, finding solutions to security challenges on the ground and that we've been able to open up conversations where they do come and play a role and show their value in finding solutions to security problems. So I think as peace builders it is about opening up, facilitating things to happen but making sure that it is local actors who are working to identify the solutions and deliver them. On the question of the US peace conflict architecture, can I just shamelessly plug an event we have this evening at Tonic restaurant from 5.30 to talk about rewriting the Washington playbook and the place of peace in US foreign policy. Feel free to join us for that. Thank you. Okay, so I'll start with that last one first then. And I don't wanna respond again for the US government but I have heard that there are conflict prevention reviews under way that jointly would stay in aid. So I think there are a number of good things coming out through the stabilization effort done in coordination between state and aid. So again, leave it to the USG officials to elaborate on that. Just to pick up on your point, I don't wanna answer now that I've got Lisa, one of the co-creators of the SNAP guide and Maria, the other one up there. So I don't wanna answer for them. They have a session later on today on nonviolent action and peace building but I would even say maybe we even use a software where they facilitate. We're completely in a supportive role and we're often engaging with local actors who are already using these nonviolent action tactics or peace building tactics. So our goal is really just to expand on the diversity of options available. It is always up to the local actors. I mean, that's what we're supporting in the inclusion portfolio. It's always up to the local actors on what they choose and Maria will go into research on donor support or external actor support to grassroots movements as well in a later session. So if you're interested in that, please attend that as well. And the last point just quickly because we are running out of time. You raised an interesting point about preventing election violence. That's also another framework that we could potentially draw some lessons learned from into our prevention landscape. Yeah, quickly. So Gary poses a question. How do we bring actors together? What experiences do we have bringing actors together? I want to make reference to three examples. First one that refers to yet another global framework that I think we need to put in value also which is international dialogue on peace building and state building and the whole new deal because that framework, if there is something unique is that actually created space for civil society and official space in the table for civil society to participate. So I think that's very important. And the fact that there is a platform that facilitates the participation of civil society to play a meaningful role in that space. I think that's significant and that's something that can be maybe replicated for other global frameworks. How can you articulate meaningful civil society participation? And these platforms, I think they have a key role. Another example of that is the civil society dialogue network of the European Union, for example, where they have this consultation process on specific areas with experts. But, and if you ask, say, this, we could not do this without a platform that identifies who should be in particular conversations at particular moments. So these platforms help identify who the key interlocutors should be. Second example I wanted to give was, and again, briefly. We have limited time. I'm sorry. So very, very quickly. Very briefly. The civil military dialogues and the manual on human security that Lisa participated on how understand, basically it's a question of translation, understanding what the military culture is for civil society organizations, what they can do, what they cannot do, and what civil society organizations can do as well. So, a brief comment about mobilizing action for crisis response. We have actually, right now, having an example, and we're having this discussion with some colleagues from the Swedish International Development Agency yesterday, about a crisis in Cameroon. Our members in Cameroon are saying, it's like we have this crisis, there is a bridge. We are on the verge of really outbreak of violence here. Can you help us? We're able, as G-PAC, to mobilize very quickly in four days a response action there. And the lesson here, or what we were discussing with our colleagues, is like we need these partnerships, by which we, Acida, Acida, we are mandated to do that, but we cannot mobilize so fast. But maybe we do it through you and you help us have this crisis fund or something. You are able to facilitate that mobilization. So maybe that's something else that we can think in those moments of a quick reaction, where quick reactions are needed. Thank you. Great, thank you. I'd like to take on the facilitation points. I mean, I don't think that we are neutral facilitators. There is a huge amount of evidence out there about what works, and I don't think we should be ashamed of using it. We know, for instance, that one of the fastest ways to reduce violence against women is better regulation of alcohol in communities. There's really very strong evidence of that. I would say in the United States, one of the easiest things that the 40% of states who do this practice could do to improve their relationships with young men is to stop charging young men, children for being on probation. We have 40% of states that charge young men for being on probation and then chase them and their parents to repay those debts when the probation period is over. It's insanity. We have good evidence that that is... It's actually costing more than it raises. We have experiences of countries like Georgia that have done amazing work to improve a police service that was one of the least trusted institutions in the country, to one that has at least some respect from citizens. One of the things they did was to stop police stations having more than one story so that people in police stations couldn't jump out of windows during interrogations. We have good evidence that things like that work. And I think we really need to marshal that evidence and use that evidence and put it at the disposal of people who have the power to make change in different contexts. And then I'd like to come... I mean, I don't know much about the State Department, but I do work with a lot of governments around the world and almost every country that I work with, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is in some kind of crisis. And until we invest in ministries of a foreign affairs, until we have a different kind of diplomat that is able to respond to complexity, that is able to bring together international regional and national actors on a platform, that is able to construct that platform for change, then I think we're gonna find it very difficult too to cope with the problems that this complex global world is throwing up for us. Thank you. There's all this expertise in the room. We've summed it up in a piece I wrote that says, context matters, but knowledge transfers. Of course, in these spaces, we need to know what's going on. And of course, it's a local solution, but we have to be able to bring in what we've learned from other experiences. And that's why all of this expertise is so useful and it's so useful to be able to come together and share here.  You'll see all of these people for the next couple of days. Let's continue the conversation on all of these topics. And I thank you very much. So enjoy your break. You have about a half an hour. And please know that you are already getting alerts on your app. So take a look at those. Might be helpful down here as well. So welcome and thanks for coming today. My name is Charles North. I'm a senior advisor here at the United States Institute of Peace. Our subject today is peace building in hybrid war. I'm joined on this panel by a great panel. First, we have Dr. Marche Barkowski who is a civil resistance expert and adjunct professor at the Krieger School of Arts and Science at Johns Hopkins University where he teaches strategic nonviolent resistance. Among his publications is a 2015 white paper on nonviolent civilian defense to counter Russian hybrid warfare. And a 2018 report, the case for civil resistance to Russia's populace centric warfare, how democratic societies can fight and win against authoritarian hybrid onslaught. Next, we have Dmitry Potenkin who is a Ukrainian policy analyst and activist. He has drawn on his experiences in Ukraine's revolutions in managing a get out the vote campaign and as the IT director of Ukraine's first public radio station to train human rights organizations around the world in mass mobilization. He is the founder and CEO of Fakes Radar, a Ukrainian NGO dedicated to identifying and debunking disinformation through coalition building, gamification and crowdsourcing. And then finally we have Ambassador Sarah Mendelson who is a distinguished service professor of public policy and head of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy in Washington DC. She was previously the US representative to the Economic and Social Council at the United Nations. She has worked in government, academia and civil society promoting development and human rights and she has extensive experience in research policy and programming in Russia. There is no one definition that I've found for hybrid war and there seem to be many other terms that are used to describe the same concept. So, but today we are using the term hybrid war to represent the broad range of tools and tactics short of armed invasion that countries like Russia are using against other nations to influence, divide, polarize other societies. To subvert democratic institutions and processes and to catalyze conflict. This is not a short term fad and nor is it a tactic specific to Russia. The National Intelligence Council's 2017 Global Trends Report says that in the future of conflict, quote, more actors will employ a wider range of military and non-military tools blurring the line between war and peace and undermining old norms of escalation and deterrence. Non-combatants will be increasingly targeted sometimes to pit ethnic, religious and political groups against one another to disrupt societal cooperation and coexistence within states. So what are the implications for peace building? When the distinction between war and peace is becoming more blurred and societies are increasingly the target. How can we apply the tools and approaches of peace building to reduce, prevent and mitigate the harm to societies and prevent the outbreak of violent conflict? So let me begin with you, Maciej. Can you help us better understand what hybrid war is? You have written about populist-centric hybrid war. What is that? Thank you, Charles. And thank you for assembling this panel on this, I think, important issue. And thank you for USIP for this terrific facilities and bringing us all here. So yes, indeed, I published recently a study that was released by Free Russia Foundation on what I call Russia-populist-centric war to describe Kremlin attacks on democracies. And, but to understand where that terms comes from and to understand the hybrid war itself, one needs to go back to color revolutions in Serbia, 2000 in Georgia, 2003, Ukraine 2004 and Kyrgyzstan 2005 and reactions of the Kremlin elites to those revolutions that basically were interpreted as not authentic, as not grassroots, as being exported from abroad, as being manufactured by Western powers. Then the second wave of protests, the Arab Spring and then subsequent protests in Russia in 2012 against rigged elections, parliamentary and upcoming that time presidential elections made Kremlin even more jitter about the Western influence that time the Kremlin blamed explicitly Hillary Clinton from instigating those protests. And then revolution of dignity in Ukraine happened in 2014 that kind of proved for Kremlin the point of Western interference and Western instigation of the protests by the population. So the Kremlin, so-called Kremlin social technologist began thinking about if the Western countries are using this as an instrument of warfare, how we can utilize that. But I think the most significant and interesting development was focused centered on the Russian military itself. And it was Russian military that basically incorporated and integrated the concept that they called protest potential of the population. They used that term, protest potential of the population into the military strategies. And it was Valery Grasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian army that in his talks and publications between 2013-2014 was writing about populist kind of centric warfare as the new type of conflict. And then eventually that also this type of thinking was brought into Russian military doctrine that was issued in December 2014 that basically explicitly says about new modern conflicts that Russian military should be aware of. And they explicitly say, and I quote here, that those type of conflicts rely on non-military measures with the extensive use of protest potential of the population, including social movements and political forces. So they quickly had a chance to kind of make those strategies work. That was the case of Ukraine where basically if we saw how the hybrid war was waged by Russia and Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, it was with the use of the local civilians, pro-Russian local civilians that were on the streets and squares protesting. And Russia was using this as a pretext to intervene. And in fact, right now we have access to secretly recording tapes by Sergei Glasiyev who is the close aide to Putin on Euro-Asian integration where he was directing his associates in 2014 in Eastern Ukraine, basically to bring out people on the streets to capture squares in towns and cities in Eastern Ukraine and to capture city councils and make demands of autonomy towards the new key of government. And then at the same time call for Russian intervention to protect the rights of the supposedly oppressed rights of minorities. So the concept of populist-centric warfare directly derives from the protest potential of the population that Russia, political elites and military elites are using right now. And underlying motivation for Kremlin to attack democracies using this type of tool is understanding that basically democracies are not reconcilable with Kremlin's authoritarian rule and basically Kremlin is involved in existential conflict with democracies. And Kremlin thinks that it's kind of invented or reinvented a new type of weapon that is with low costs, that is not costly, that doesn't involve necessarily sending tanks and missiles into democracies. And that exploits vulnerabilities of democratic societies. However, I would argue that those vulnerabilities, even if they're exploited by Kremlin or China or Iran for that matter, they are at the same time the strengths. The independent societies of democracies are also the strengths that could be tapped on in order to push against Kremlin populist-centric warfare. So that leaves my next question is, this is an aggression against our countries. Why aren't we looking to, why don't we rely on our governments, our military, or even IT corporations to take care of this aggression? What's the role of civil resistance? Right, I see civil resistance as a potent tool, not only against dictatorships, and we have research that shows how effective nonviolent civil resistance is against brutal regimes, particularly in comparison with armed resistance, but also against hybrid threats emanating from abroad. And when I look at civil resistance, I define civil resistance as basically political power exercised by ordinary people in the form of disruptive actions, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, non-cooperation, civil disobedience, but also in the form of constructive type of actions that would be about building alternative media, alternative educational system, building kind of movement infrastructure to effective and managed repression against those who are mobilizing non-violently, and infrastructure that allows also movements to reach out to the opponent's allies in order to solicit effective defections from the opponent. And basically in my study, I look into defensive and offensive civil resistance strategies. And just to kind of give an illustration of one or two of them in terms of defensive civil resistance strategies, I talked about building tightly neat solidarity communities on the local level, as solidarity communities that are mobilized, that are organized and vigilant. And we have in fact examples of at least two communities in two towns, one in Ukraine, one in here in the United States that effectively I think resisted Russian hybrid warfare, and one in the United States is actually Baltimore. In 2016, it was the fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter set up that time no one knew by Russian trolls under the name of black activists. They called on Baltimore population to go and protest, and that was the first anniversary of the killing of Freddie Gray. And basically they called on people to go out and protest against police brutality and police violence. And the response on the part of the local activists when they were receiving those messages was who you are. We don't know you, you have never worked in our community. We have never kind of interacted with you.  So they pushed back, but they pushed back because they were organized. They were also organized to resist agent provocateurs, be domestic, but then they could apply that quite quickly into kind of external threats that were coming from whoever we didn't know that time. And another community, it's actually in Kharkiv in 2014 where the expectation was that after Donets and Lugansk, another major city in Ukraine that would fall would be Kharkiv and Odessa. And one reason I think why Kharkiv didn't fall into separatist hands was precisely because the pro-Ukrainian community was mobilized. They went on the streets. They were calling for basically voicing this support for the unity of Ukraine, predominantly in non-violent manner, demonstrating and pushing against pro-Russian groups that then forced the authorities to basically align with the dominant pro-Ukrainian mood in the city and then negotiate also agreement with Kiev in order to put down the kind of pro-Russian insurgency that was starting there in Kiev. So the mobilization of communities is crucial. And in terms of that's kind of more defense. In terms of offensive strategies, one of that is actually is given to us by Gandhi, which is the outreach to the population of the attacking state. Gandhi went over the head of the British government and British monarchy and reached out directly to the population, to the British public, effectively to basically win sympathy of the British public with the causes that he had. And in the context of Russia hybrid war, this is the same thing. We should make an effort to reach out to the Russian population over Kremlin. And that could be on individual kind of level and it could be on a more kind of organized collective level of different professional groups, different interest groups interacting with the counterparts in Russia. And one example to illustrate that is on the kind of individual level. I've got just a minute or two, but I don't know how many of you heard about Grigory Rochenko. This is the former head of the anti-Russian doping, anti-doping Russian agency, who basically revealed the whole kind of scheme of doping in Russia. And it was Brian Fogel, American filmmaker that reached out to Rochenko. At that time, it was just about Brian being interested in amateur cycling crisis. And he wanted basically to prove that you can dope without being discovered. And he was looking for people who could tell him how to dope effectively. And he thought, well, Russians may know about that. So he contacted Rochenko. And that was well before any news about the doping scandal in Russia. But through the interactions, they developed affinity, trust, and basically they knew about each other's families and so on. And then when the scandal, when media started writing about the doping, possible doping without evidence, suddenly Brian Fogel could reach out to Rochenko and said, so what exactly happened? So then Rochenko, fearing also for his life, went to the United States on the trip organized by Fogel privately, testified to the Department of Justice, gave major interview to the New York Times that published a masterpiece on the doping scandal that involved Putin, FSB, and the whole kind of Russian government, embarrassing Putin at the same time. So these kind of social interactions that may start without any intention of undermining the regime, they could pay off eventually, like in that case. Great, thank you. So one of the areas of hybrid war that we hear about the most is disinformation. And Dmitry, one of you, you're on the front lines of dealing with disinformation in Ukraine. Can you give us a sense of what does that look like from where you are? Well, actually, there's a whole bunch of very cool fog checkers and journalists working in Ukraine and in other countries in the European Union against disinformation. So my experience is that they need help, that they produce very good fog checking reports. And unfortunately, lots of fakes are still much more popular than the fog checkers report. And the reason I think obvious that to produce a fake, you just need good hearing and imagination, et cetera. Well, to check data, you need time, expertise. And in the end, you know, fog checkers, they are not trained to write fancy headers. Fog checkers are trained to check the facts. So as a result, they have very good content, is unfortunately much less popular.  And these myths are limiting us in lots of things. Like we, well, the least of such fakes, it's huge basically, I don't know what to start from. You have an example that sticks out for you? Oh, well, well, there are, look, you know that there are whole troll farms in Russia producing fakes. And they take information as a means of war. And this is what complements what Masha just said about their perception of non-violence as just another way of their military operations. I mean, for us, for non-violent activists and experts and trainers, when non-violent resistance is a valuable thing just because it can work itself and help people and help protect their rights. But for Russians, well, first of all, they did not invent that theory.  They took it as if both military and non-military parts are just two sides of the same job. And in their case, that job is mostly wrong job. It's a bad job. So for them, creating conflicts and creating online clashes, this is just a step in setting up violence.  If this is on the other side of the pond, but if in Ukraine, for instance, or in Georgia, then they are then coming with their military attempts to help and to protect the local Russian speaking population. So for them, the first step is creating clashes, polarizing people online, then bringing it offline, and then misusing that to basically annex, like in the case of the Crimea, was and set violence and then cover it and excuse it with lots of more lies. Good news is that, first of all, this, I mean, it's kind of products, but they're running out of fakes. I mean, several months ago I noticed that they started repeating, so. And there are several reports showing narratives of the same, basically seven or another version is 12 narratives of faking the reality in the region. And, you know, they're running out of them, so which means that it is making their propaganda less efficient, and well, basically Russia is now, and well, Putin's regime, let's be clear, and his oligarchs selling such services to him for unequal market access, et cetera, and other preferences, they basically are able to even support their economy just due to fakes. For instance, you know that Russia is exporting energy resources and I don't know, how long would they survive? I mean, the Putin's regime without the ability to sell the energy resources to the members of the European Union, for instance.  Lots of even experts in Ukraine, they believe that, you know, while Ukraine is transporting Russian gas, Russia will not start the major war, the fact is that there is a war, and this is very important, by the way, when we talk about hybrid wars. In Ukraine, this is not just hybrid, this is not just online. More than 10,000 people killed, so this is the war. This is, I mean, on the occupied territories, we have concentration camps. So what's the role of a fake radar? How are you mobilizing citizens and organizations to push back and counter the disinformation? Well, we realized in 2004, during the Orange Revolution, that we need to help people. I mean, we can't do anything without the people, and we need just to help them mobilize and protect their rights non-violently. So we need to provide that capacity to learn and then to organize themselves. And now it's online, we are trying to use those successful experiences, and we are, again, we are combining quality data from the fact-checkers, so we are not, my project is not checking facts. We take content from the professi