Good morning everybody. Good morning. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. We're going to go ahead and get started. People are going to continue to dribble in. Understand there was an accident somewhere in the vicinity, so sorry for those who were caught up in it and glad you could make it here. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm really delighted to have a chance to welcome everyone today, including those of you who are watching online. The US Institute of Peace was founded about 35 years ago by the US Congress with the mission of preventing, reducing, resolving violent conflict around the world. And we're dedicated to the proposition that this is a very practical, very possible endeavor, and it's absolutely essential for our collective security. And so we work with partners around the world linking research and training and practical applications of best methods in pursuit of this mission. And here in our global headquarters, we bring people together from across disciplines, from across political lines, to grapple with some of the critical issues that are critical for maintaining peace and stability globally, like this conversation today. So thank you everyone for joining us. And violent extremism is, of course, a topic that many of us have been working with and on for a number of years. Last year, or last week, we marked the 17th anniversary of 9-11, which was the worst terrorist attack here in the United States, and it reminds us of the urgency of our mission to build peace and to resolve conflict around the world. We also, of course, were reminded that before 9-11, there were about 2,000 terrorist attacks around the world, and by 2017 there were more than 10,000. So clearly we haven't solved this issue yet. Violent extremism in the intervening decade-plus, we have seen deeply rooted self in fragile states, particularly in Middle East, in parts of Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. And we're seeing that in these fragile states extremists find very fertile ground for recruiting the aggrieved, the disenfranchised, especially youth, and often are able to win public sympathy by providing the kinds of services that the governments in those countries have failed to do. And we've seen how violent extremism has not only strangled governments and societies, but also in dangers U.S. interests abroad and our security here at home. We've seen U.S. allies and partners weakened, triggers of unsustainable mass migration around the world, and incredible disruption of people's lives and societies. Last year, Senator Graham asked USIP to host a task force on understanding the underlying causes of extremism in fragile states with a focus on the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. These are the kind of task force and commissions that USIP often hosts at the request of Congress. So this task force is being led by Governor Tom Kane and Congressman Lee Hamilton, who come from respectively the Republican and Democratic parties. They led the 9-11 Commission 12 years ago, and they see this as the unfinished business of the unfulfilled recommendations of that task force. And they are joined by a bipartisan group of 13 other leading former policymakers, legislators, and experts. Last week, the task force released its interim findings report, and you can pick up a copy of it on our publications table or find a copy of it online, and I urge you to take a look at it. The final report will not be released until January, so the hard work between now and then is to deliver recommendations on so what do we do about this and what we see in some of the initial findings of the interim report released last week is the need to really commit ourselves collectively to longer-term approaches in order to prevent the spread of extremism, and one that both impedes the spread of militant networks and staunches, extremist ideologies, but also promoting better governance, more inclusive governance in the most vulnerable regions. And we know of course, and everyone in this room knows better than most, that every fragile state is fragile in its own way. And one of the biggest challenges in coming up with recommendations on what to do is how to ensure you have the kind of granular understanding to inform policymakers. We often lack the kind of on-the-ground insights about what are the local dynamics that are driving extremism, and it is precisely these knowledge gaps that the Resolve Network addresses. The Resolve Network, and some of you maybe were there at its founding, it was founded in September 2015 with the goal of elevating key research insights and to facilitate exchanges between researchers and policymakers to close that knowledge gap. And so three years later, the Resolve Network has a very strong global consortium of researchers, organizations, policymakers, and practitioners committed to empirically driven, locally defined research on what drives violent extremism and what are the sources of community resilience to that extremism. So USIP is very proud to be one of the founders of Resolve and to house Resolve Secretariat. The network is made possible through partnerships with the US Department of State's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and the US Agency for International Development. So I want to take a moment to recognize all the folks in both of those bureaus and offices and agencies and thank them again for their support today. I also want to thank the Resolve Network partner organizations that have traveled some from very far away to Washington to join us today. So thank you, especially those of you who had long and arduous journeys. We really appreciate you are being here to enrich and enliven the conversation. And it will be a lively day. We've put together a terrific program. There will be very interesting lifestyle conversations, lots of opportunities for people to engage. I know we have a room full of experts, people who bring incredible experience and expertise to this issue. I hope and I know that you will in the discussion sessions be lively participants. So thank you. I also want to encourage everybody to follow us on social media with at USIP and to participate in today's event with the hashtag Resolve Forum. I also want to make a quick plug before I turn the podium over. Tomorrow is September 21st. Who in this room knows what that day is? It is the International Day of Peace, something that everyone in this room should care about. We are trying to elevate that and create greater awareness. And so in 2015, same year as the Resolve Network was formed, we created the Peace Day Challenge to really raise the profile of the International Day of Peace and gauge partners around the world and to underscore that peace is possible, but it requires local commitment and local action. And so we encourage everybody to step up, take action to build peace tomorrow, share it using the social media tag, hashtag peace day challenge. So whatever you're doing, whatever your commitment is, post it on hashtag peace day challenge tomorrow and join the global conversation. Last year, there were many millions of people who did so, so please join us. And you'll find on our website many ideas for action to be a part of this global effort. I know you'll do it. And with that, thank you again for joining us today. And I am delighted to now turn the microphone over to USIP's Director of Countering Violent Extremism and the Interim Executive Director of Resolve and a wonderful member of our team, Leanne Erdberg. She will give some welcoming remarks and give an overview of the day. Please welcome, Leanne. Thank you so much, Nancy. And thank you to USIP for consistent support for Resolve, as well as the unwavering commitment to elevating the discourse on really difficult and challenging aspects of today's modern conflicts. Thanks to my amazing Resolve team here at USIP, who every day I have the opportunity to learn from, I'm impressed by, and who have seamlessly put together today's event. I am just delighted to be here today as USIP's Director of Countering Violent Extremism and also as the Interim Director of the Resolve Network. And like you, I'm very excited to hear from our speakers and the salon-style conversations and then engage in breakout sessions. So today represents an opportunity to all of us to push our thinking and our understanding about violent extremism. Yesterday, the State Department released its annual 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, and I think many of its conclusions can be read on that document, but I think it really showcases to many of us how violent extremism is still evolving. There is so much that we are still learning about this phenomenon, and I hope we continue to seek out new and innovative ways to address violent extremism. I also hope that today serves as an important reminder and an important plea to fund research to help us better understand what it is that we're observing. So a little bit about Resolve. Resolve is committed to providing key insights on violent extremism. We do this by establishing connections between a multiplicity of stakeholders from academia to practitioners and try and network the community of practice that exists in this room and exists online that is committed to research around the topic of violent extremism. We also ask key questions to critical to elevating the field, expanding our knowledge base, and bringing more empiricism, more rigor, and more locally informed information to the community of practice. We also hope to inform P&CVE activities undertaken by policymakers, practitioners, and peers. So today, as we start our third annual Resolve Forum, I'd like to focus on three areas that I think are still relatively underdeveloped in our conceptions of violent extremism, and I hope we can all leave today with a few more incremental steps in broadening what we know and what we don't know. The first is about complexity. We cannot simplify this challenge to our convenience. As humans, we are deeply desirous of simple linear solutions. X diagnosis equals Y cure. Yet it's hard to overstate the complexity associated with being able to uncover, to understand, and to address the dozens of factors that contribute in differing ratios in many locations to every individual who joins a violent extremist organization. We must recognize the complexity associated with why and where violent extremism manifests when it spreads and how it implodes. And we have to address it with a complexity framework in mind. In a complex system, simply put, actors and environments interact with each other and self-organize often in unpredictable ways. It doesn't mean that progress is out of reach, but it's a helpful frame for helping us move forward. For starters, kumbaya is not on our menu today. And what I mean by that is complex systems are often distinguished by their ambiguity. That means that people at all levels and all levels of knowledge are going to disagree about what makes the system work and how to manage it. So I think we're going to have to get a little bit more comfortable with limited consensus on some of the most difficult aspects of this challenge. The second thing is that cause and effect is nearly impossible. As part of our community of practice, I think we would all benefit from a conceptual shift away from this linear causality and toward one that appreciates complexity. So I happen to love metaphors, so I'm going to start with one today, which is the vaccine metaphor is not that useful for violent extremism. But I'll give a couple that I think that might be a little bit more useful. The first is diet. The second is exercise. And as the redhead up on stage, the third is sunscreen. And what I mean by all of those type of metaphors is we're trying to think about risk factors and bolster resiliency to avoid the most dire of consequences rather than being able to inoculate, vaccinate or some of the other public health metaphors that I think are very resident in this field. Lastly, I think this shift conceptually can allow for more interactivity and non sequencing of efforts that can show more collective trends and impacts beyond any one vector. Managing confusion and uncertainty in these contexts is critical. It's inevitable, but it's often overlooked in the favor of certain comfort of tactical level outcomes. How many times do we hear the terms rulebook or toolbox when we're talking about this challenge? A complexity frame allows us to move beyond those outputs and toward outcomes. It allows us to demand flexibility and shift away from a static plan and toward investing into local change agents that can develop innumerable solutions to improve circumstances in an unknown number of ways. The second point is a little bit more controversial, but when we elevate research, it means that we also diversify our understanding to include more than just expertise. The bad news is I might be out of a job. The good news is science has so much to offer our community of practice. Empirical research has so much to offer the field of countering violent extremism. Adequate sample sizes subject to rigorous methodologies allow us to see beyond persuasive anecdotes and hopefully allow us to check our gut instincts. Behavioral science has so much to offer us in terms of recognizing our own cognitive limits as we study violent extremism. For instance, we cannot simply will away bias. This applies to bias in the big sense, trying to understand an entire nation based on information of a select few impressions, but also about bias in the small sense, being overly convinced by the last thing that you heard or ignoring pertinent information that doesn't fit our mental schemas. Empiricism also allows us to ask better questions. Earlier this week, one of our researchers associated with Resolve's Lake Chad Basin Project, who you'll hear from later today, mentioned something that I think is worth sharing here. He said that a researcher's job is to hear something, let's call it a hypothesis. Maybe it's from an expert, maybe it's from a regular person, and then ask the question, how can I design a study that would prove this to be true? It is in the research design and the methodology that we can test hypotheses and not just accept them as their logical conclusion as first heard. So today we're going to hear a lot more from speakers who are trying to push the envelope on what are indicators and how we can really elevate empiricism in our work. My third point is that at its core, violent extremism is a deeply human problem. We can easily forget this because today's terrorists are so violent, they're so vicious, they're so intolerant that seeing them as human is frankly it's a logical leap, but ultimately these groups only exist as long as people join them and people joining are uniting with these groups oftentimes because they espouse something, they espouse an ideology, they espouse a philosophy, a group identity, a family-like structure, a means for meaning, a means for a position, and then they use violence to achieve these goals. So how can we bring about more what we know about human behavior to addressing this challenge? So neuroscience and behavioral science have so much to teach us from why we have a drive for affiliation to how easy it is to dehumanize others and why adventure seeking has such strong chemical components. These all have relevance to this challenge and we'll hear more about that today from our speakers. We'll also hear about personal experiences, the stories that we tell each other and they're incredibly powerful in this effort. We'll learn more about the personal and vulnerable side of violent extremism. We'll also learn about the comedic side and the positive alternatives throughout the day today. This human lens matters because the more that we can humanize communities around the world, we can build their resiliencies in not addressing and not becoming violent extremists. We also can demonstrate to a generation of youth that there are more than a risk factor and in the eyes of international policymakers that they have a stake in their own future and their human dignity matters. So that's a bit where we're coming from and I hope that this overview just lends to the import of today's discussion because these gaps in our collective understanding are precisely why we designed today's effort this way. So now we're going to run through the day. In just a few minutes we're going to start our first session which goes until around 10 30. These are TED talk style presentations and they focus on the individual and social conduits of violent extremism. You're going to hear from three incredible speakers. Then we're going to have our first breakout discussion. We will exit this room and move into the Great Hall where we will sit in tables of 10 and each discussion will be facilitated by many of Resolve's incredible partner organizations, colleagues here in Washington and USIP experts. Please use this opportunity to contribute your own expertise via our interactive setup and we're going to capture your inputs and hopefully analyze them after the event as well. You will hear chimes when that session is over and those chimes are going to be your indicator throughout the day that you're going to have to move. That first set of chimes will have you moving back into this room and then we're going to hear from our Lake Chad project researchers about secularism in the Lake Chad basin. After that we'll head back to the Great Hall for lunch which will be available from 12 30 to 130. Then we're going to repeat the day. We're going to start back in here from 130 to 245 for our second set of TED speakers. Four incredible people, three here on stage, one via video in India. We're going to repeat the breakout sessions from 245 to 345 and then we'll end the program back in here from 345 to 5. We'll have another salon style discussion, this one on practical applications of research to policy and practice and then we're very excited to finish the day with closing remarks from Mr. Pete Morocco, Deputy Assistant Secretary and Senior Bureau Official for the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. After he concludes we're going to have a reception. Don't worry, you don't have to remember all of this. There are staff all around who can help you answer questions big and small all day today and we hope that you can stay for as long as you can. I'd like to be able to make the commitment that today will be more interesting than your inbox. So now let's get started with our first session of speakers. We're going to start with Mr. Jesse Morton. Jesse Morton is the founder and head of Parallel Networks, an organization combating hate and extremism and research coordinator for the Institute for Strategic Dialogues Against Violent Extremism Network in North America. Once a prominent radicalizer in the West Morton co-founded and was a chief propagandist for Revolution Muslim, a New York City-based active group in the 2000s where he helped insert the narrative of al-Qaeda and Salafi jihadist ideology into the American ambit. He has lectured at prestigious universities around the world and has worked here in Washington a GW's program on extremism and he has focused on issues related to jihadist propaganda. Morton was named in 2017 as one of foreign policy's global thinkers. Please help me in welcoming Jesse Morton to the stage. This is Eunice. I'm Jesse Morton after suffering from abuse and trauma as a child, running away from home at the age of 16, taking to the streets and joining an ultra-liberal counter-cultural movement and finding Islam through Malcolm X. Before founding Revolution Muslim and going on to create the first organization that unabashedly promoted al-Qaeda's perspectives in the United States from New York City. Revolution Muslim operated in an era when al-Qaeda was becoming less an organization and more a brand. Its chief strategist, Abu Musa Basuri, was instructing jihadists around the world to convey al-Qaeda's message wherever they were to the best of their ability. American jihadists that had a tremendous impact due to the First Amendment and the right of free expression so we could walk right up to the line of free speech and unabashedly again support the terrorists. We were connected to 15 terrorist plots by the time I was arrested on May 23rd, 2011, two weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed and in the middle of the Arab Spring. In 2012, I was sentenced to serve 11 and a half years in federal prison. We imagined then that the war on terror was winding down and that the jihadists had lost. But just like al-Qaeda had understood that ideas are eternal and the temple, the template that we set up was sustained and this is what that template looked like. First, I think it's important to understand that the offline feeds the online.  What it showed was that we were a band of brothers, showed that we were David and Goliath and that we practiced what we preached. We antagonized anti-Islamic activists and helped to polarize the political landscape. Every single time, someone in the United States needed to point to an organization or an individual to justify the claim that jihadists wanted to implement sharia law in the U.S., they pointed to us. We were the first to use social media and the interactivity and interconnectivity it created. This is the first YouTube video that we made. It's been cross-posted and remains online. It has several million views and it can't be taken down because it craftily does not violate terms of service agreements. We also used a program called PowTalk in a similar way to how ISIS uses encrypt-to-encrypt platforms such as Telegram Today. We gave lectures in an open room and our adherents could chat with one another. We provided 24-7 news and ideological dissemination. Then you could contact us in private messaging where we could facilitate your trek from simply holding radical ideas to committing action in the name of terrorists. We created the first English-language jihadist magazines. The first edition was produced in 2009, contrary to popular belief. It looks exactly like a copy of Inspire or Dabakin-Romea today. These magazines were advanced by my colleagues Samir Khan and Anwar Aoudaki who eventually joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. They went on to radicalize thousands in the West and because they were now produced abroad with terrorists and propagandists that had traveled to join jihadist groups, they could expand beyond simply promoting the ideology and to providing recipes and formula for attacks. We were quick to manipulate the mainstream media by CNN, leftist outlets like Russia Today, far-leftist outlets like Russia Today and anti-American outlets, even talk shows on public television. Of course the overwhelming majority rejected our extremist views but for that small fringe subset it facilitated a connection to our activity online. The other way that we look at things, I think. And this is Jesse Morton, my true self. I've returned back from where I came. Today I'm no longer a jihadist but I practice and advocate for a more progressive form of Islam. It's incompatible with democracy and liberal values. My deradicalization can be broken into key themes. First I had contact with Moroccan millennials during the Arab Spring. I fled to Morocco after threatening the writers of South Park and I taught Arab millennials there English interestingly enough. I realized in the context of the Arab Spring that they simply wanted values that I took for granted. Elections, right to speak and believe freely, less corruption from their political class. Second I spent five months in a Moroccan prison after I was arrested with a preacher that had essentially deradicalized. Mohamed Fizazi was arrested in 2004 because of Blanca attacks and was about to be released for his altered views. Third I was returned to the United States and housed in solitary confinement after I was extradited. There a compassionate and empathetic prison guard would take me to the law library for the duration of her shift to get me out of the cell. So for 10 hours a day four days a week I was located in a law library but I had access to philosophical works particularly from the Enlightenment. It was there that I read Thomas Paine, Montesquieu, Descartes, Rousseau, Jean Locke, etc. I continued reforming and when I played guilty I had to meet with an FBI agent to do what they call a debriefing process. She was also empathetic. She was a female figure that sort of facilitated an ability to tap into the root trauma that was my mother's child abuse. But we were also able to cooperate after it became apparent that I was altering my perspectives. And so we stopped several Americans overseas from plotting attacks here and from joining ISIS to the degree that they were carrying out violence there. I continued reforming my understanding of Islam while in prison and then on March 1st 2015 after originally being sentenced to 11 and a half years a federal judge reduced my sentence and released me. March 1st 2015 when ISIS was all over the news and it was apparent that the war on terror was far from over. They let me go early due to my cooperation and my altered perspectives. Re-entering and reintegrating in America was difficult to say the least. There was no re-entry program for people like me. I was one of the first convicted of terrorism related offenses to return to American society, could not find work, could not get health insurance, could not readjust after a prolonged period of solitary confinement. I lost my family and I was divorced. But to my honor I continued to work with the FBI until in February of 2016 I was outed in the media as an operative informant. I then decided to go public as America's first former jihadist and served as a research fellow at a university here in Washington DC. While I had renounced the extremist ideology I had failed to address the child abuse and trauma that led me to find meaning and significance with jihadism in the first place. I relapsed after 14 years of sobriety and thought I'd thrown it all away. But today I'm recovering and I'm going deeper into the root cause that facilitated my radicalization in the first place. I run a CVE organization called Parallel Networks Now, an organization that I co-founded with my wife and Mitch Silver, former director of intelligence at the NYPD. Mitch spent years monitoring me at Revolution Muslim, but our relationship continues to help me heal. Our paralegal networks however, Mitch and I view CVE a bit differently. Our parallel networks philosophy is based on the principle that only networks can counter We live in a world where we are all connected within six degrees, but at the same time when we map our interconnectivity we realize that hyper-polarization dominates the day. This division is tearing at the fabric of our democracies everywhere. It's also threatening the international liberal order that I think a lot of us have come to take for granted. We need to create pathways to engage, particularly with those that we disagree with the most. I think hashtag shut it down and removing radical content on social media will prove ineffective. I actually think it will prove counterproductive and make things worse. Countering something is reactive. Instead you have to build an antithetical network built on principles axiomatically opposed to those of violent extremism. Only once you have a network that rivals in size and scope extremist networks can you proactively insert a message that will actually resonate and not be drowned out by the noise. We don't believe in counter messaging as many have come to realize, but what is now promoted as alternative messaging we think also fails to realize that information alone is in suffice. People are irrational. They act on emotion. They're intuitive in connecting behavior and belief. Instead we need to think in terms of parallel networks or alternative ecosystems that convey a comprehensive worldview built upon principles opposed and antithetical to violent extremism. Most importantly I think rhetoric, policy and practice need to match. Quite frankly we could learn a great deal from the way that we built the English language jihadist ecosystem in the West. So now we're actually building a parallel network of former extremists and their allies just like me. To develop an alternative ecosystem that can turn radicalization into empowerment and shift the way we think in a tribal and a polarized world. Returning to Rumi now, the wound is the place where the light enters you. We're 17 years into the war in terror, but we must recognize that we are all tired and wounded to a degree. Not so much by words or war, but by sort of what resembles to us at parallel networks a global case of PTSD. Today I'm healing my own trauma in our struggle against hate. Today I can see on the horizon not post-traumatic stress, but post-traumatic growth. Finally the struggle gives me the same sense of purpose meaning insignificance that the extremist networks provided. But perhaps the most important takeaway I think is the imperativeness of grasping that in an age of intersecting extremisms in the plural, we all have an obligation to do something, to combat, and to counter hate. This is perhaps the most crucial message I think that all CVE work should seek to convey. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, darkness cannot combat darkness, only light can do that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Jesse. Next I'd like to welcome to the stage Mike Nickenschuk. He's an innovation lab senior researcher who spent five years in the Middle East designing neuroscience informed programs for violence reduction and psychosocial support. He works at Beyond Conflict where Mike leads several initiatives in the U.S., Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, and it's focused on two major themes. The link between neuroscience and participation in group violence, gangs, extremist groups, and other types of organized group violence, and the mind-body effects of conflict and violence on youth and adults. Mike has degrees from Tufts University and University College in London. Please welcome to the stage Mike Nickenschuk. So that's the second time I have to bat clean up after Jesse and it's never easy. It's a tough act to follow. So I just want to do a quick audience poll before I start. In the room, how many of you would say you have a brain? I see the slight majority raising their hands. The rest of you seem to need some more coffee before I ask that question. So the advantage of all of you or most of you saying yes is that that means that pretty much all of you are potential extremists, which makes this talk pretty easy because everything I'm going to say applies to you, just as it applies to Jesse, just as much as it applies to a young person sitting in Nigeria and Cameroon and Burkina and Faso, the Philippines, whatever region of the world that your work is focused on. What is the button for advancing the slide? My journey into this whole field was an unhappy accident. You could say I come from a background mostly of working in mental health programs with young refugees and with refugees in conflict with the law. I worked for four years in the border of Jordan and Syria and it was not a place where there was a lot of extremists that I'm not trying to suggest that, but it is a place where there's a lot of pain and it is a place where a certain number of individuals were either previously involved in extremist groups or were contemplating that decision of taking that bold step. Not because it was something that they ideologically aspired to, but because it was at least something that felt like a sacrifice for a home and for a place that they were losing. And I remember one young man, one of my closest friends now is named Mohammed. He said to me at the time, Mike, I think that heroes and terrorists seem to be formed in the same context and sometimes it's really hard to know which one you're choosing. He said this about a week after his cousin had joined ISIS. His cousin had talked to me for a long time about not that decision per se, but about the decision of going back home. And he said very frankly, no one can try to convince me that sitting in a camp here is any sort of sacrifice for my family. I can't go back to my home in 10 years and have people ask me, what did you do? What did you do while your people were dying? Were you sitting and taking aid from foreigners? He couldn't deal with that perspective shame that was eating away at his sense of self, at his sense of pride. And so he made a decision that affected the rest of his life, that affected countless other people's lives, a decision towards violence. When in reality that same psychological ecosystem, that same psychological ecosystem of grievance, of trauma, of pain, of wounds, of social brokenness could have facilitated his rise to be a great leader in his community. So that same ecosystem that pushed one cousin in a certain direction, pushed his other cousin to now be graduating with a university degree after working his butt off to make everything he could out of himself in a legal system that tries to keep him stateless and down. The same context led to both of those individuals. So what is the psychological scaffolding that we're talking about that facilitates someone's growth in one direction or the other? In studying neuroscience we're in a pretty pivotal time. We're in a place in technological history and advancement when we have unprecedented ways of getting access and insight into some of the unconscious or subconscious facets of human cognition, of helping people and helping ourselves get a better picture of why do we do the things that we do? The truth is we really don't know anywhere from 95 to 98% of the activity of your brain is unconscious. Not that you don't see the results of it or you can't access it, but that it's really happening below a level of your conscious awareness. And the me that I know, the you that you know when you look in the mirror, mostly exists in the realm of two to five percent of your brain's conscious and logical and rational activity. So we have many new methods and metrics for understanding what goes on in the human brain to promote decisions towards violence, towards affiliation, towards peace, including hooking people up to funny EEG machines. Imagine walking around wearing a helmet like that all day. Walk around Boston long enough and you'll see a few. The middle one up there is a Fitbit. Lots of you have that on to make sure you get your 10,000 steps in for today I'm sure. What you can also do with a Fitbit is track someone's heart rate over time. And we know that people who have post traumatic stress symptoms often have a difference in how their heartbeat functions when they get excitatory stimuli. So when you excite someone who has PTSD, their heart rate will often stay flat. Instead of like a non-PTSD individual, you see great fluctuations, what we call heart rate variability. So you can monitor trauma symptomology over time in a large swath of the population simply by giving $100 Fitbit. You also can hook someone up to a GSR machine, a galvanic skin response machine.  The GSR machine measures the opening of sweat glands in your pores and they had them interact in this VR chamber with Muslim-looking youth. And you can see when they interact with white youth versus Muslim-looking youth, their pores open up much faster. So you can even track what we call racism or racist responses to the level of physiology in the skin. And lastly on the bottom here is, looks like a guy getting a haircut, but this is my specialty in social neuroendocrinology, which is how we understand how hormones affect social behavior. And you can get a map of the stress hormones in someone's life through their hair, through 25 milligrams of hair. Each centimeter marks about one month concentration of stress hormone levels in the blood. So there's unprecedented ways to gain access to how people think. And beyond conflicts, we have a pretty simple mission. It's to generate and utilize these types of insights from social neuroscience and psychology to better understand the building blocks of cooperation on one hand and conflict on the other. And funny enough, those are the same building blocks, which makes our jobs a little bit easier. We do that by three primary strategies, one through conducting research, right? Through designing studies, through working with partners who have these advanced technologies to do studies in dynamic field settings. The second is through what we call science-informed design, which is basically us taking these insights that we're generating or that other people have generated in the field and investing those within initiatives and organizations who are designing field programs. So as Jesse was saying, how do you design a program that takes these issues of trauma and pain and tweaks the design of what you do? How does it help you ask better questions from the populations that you're claiming to serve and then actually serve the needs that they have psychologically as opposed to just resting on assumptions? And the last thing that we do is knowledge and education. We do talks. We have curricula. We have different training programs for people that are working in the P and CVE fields. A very simple way to put it is like this. We do science-informed conflict resolution programming by working with various partners and we try to push the scientific community and the research agendas in the direction of being more conflict-informed. Because science frankly should be a right. It should be a right for people who don't have access to it yet can tremendously benefit from it. And the way that academia is structured, it doesn't really incentivize doing science in favor of conflict-affected populations. So we're trying to push that agenda a little bit. The four main themes we work in in the lab are as follows. We study these building blocks as I called them before. Four building blocks of either cooperation or conflict. The first is social trust. That's trust in individuals. It's also trust in institutions. And we've observed how the breakdown of trust between people and between people in institutions can facilitate conflict. The second is empathy and dehumanization. Words that are thrown around a lot but that have very very little definitional meaning attached to them in common parlance. The third, and Jesse talked about this, is trauma and victimhood. How does that, you know, correlate to or facilitate or even in some cases serve as a buffer against violent behavior? And the last is belonging and identity. Now all of these themes are just as relevant for 2018 United States of America as they are for studying violent extremism. So these are building blocks of cooperation and conflict transcontextually that we've distilled over doing conflict resolution work for 25 years. All of these four themes come back to one fundamental issue and that's how the human brain works. Right? Your brain has one job and it's not thinking, it's not doing math problems, it's not helping you understand yourself. Sure, it does all of those things but its one job is to keep you alive. To help you navigate this world successfully so that you have enough resources to stay alive and to stay alive better than everybody else because it's a competition sometimes. Right? In order to stay alive it means many things. It's not just having enough food and water. It also means social belonging. It also means having the ability to detect threats that you sense around you. It means mate selection. It means social status and hierarchy. It means a lot of different things in a modern society. And at the end of the day every prediction that your brain is making about what's happening next is in service of that one goal of staying alive. And sometimes we don't have enough information, especially young people in the critical periods of brain development don't have enough information about what will keep me alive in this moment. So the easiest thing to do is to make the worst case scenario prediction. If you err on the side of caution, if you make a mistake in guessing what'll keep you alive, guess what happens you're dead. Right? So you always err on the side of caution from a cognitive perspective. That's a laser pointer. Sorry, Jesse. When your brain doesn't have enough information it fills in gaps.  Those are just bell peppers. We see stuff that's not there all the time because we have so many heuristics and biases that have been built up in us from the time that we're born. You see two holes on top and a hole on the bottom? It's a face. Nope, it's a bell pepper. Next thing you know someone's selling a grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary in it for $10,000 on eBay. Right? We make things up all the time because our brain is constantly predicting what's coming next for us and it's always done in service of what's the best way for me to understand this situation, what's going to keep me the most safe. And that's why we're really good at reading faces and tracing the movements in the zygomaticus major muscle because we need to know does someone look happy? Do they look angry? Do they look sad? Are they threatening me? Are they in love with me? I know it's the latter. In the context of CVE it's really important to think about this concept and these two in particular these issues of belonging and threat detection because a lot of what we see in the CVE space is some sort of manipulation of these two fundamental motivators in the brain either promoting violence or trying to engage people in another direction. What ISIS, Boko Haram and other groups are really good at is stimulating those two things.  That is a deeply potent cocktail for young people and we're really bad at designing things that counteract that because we think we just have to throw the opposite message but as Jesse said very articulately reacting to someone tapping into a cognitive mechanism is not just throwing the opposite mechanism at them. Doing effective counterme- countering a message is not as simply as counter messaging. Those are very distinct things. So from a CVE perspective when we think about what neuroscience can contribute we know that there's three core issues that we have to look at. The first is groups, how and why people form groups. The second is how and why people form and understand threats. And the third one is what are people's wounds because if you don't understand those wounds you're not going to understand the person. If you don't understand those wounds you are not going to be able to shine light into those spaces as a practitioner. And very briefly I just want to touch on those three phenomena and Leigh Ann you just kicked me off stage when you want me to. In terms of group affiliation I cannot overemphasize how strong group affiliation influences human cognition to the level that really is hard to grasp. Who you belong to and the extent to which you feel like you belong to that group affects how you see faces. And I can cite study after study about this. We're more adept at reading the emotions of people's faces if they're a member of our in-group. We have quicker reaction time to understanding what's going on in the facial muscles when we're looking at faces of in-group members. I put a chemical symbol down here that's always nerdy. Almost got it tattooed once. This is the chemical symbol for oxytocin which is a trust and affiliate of neuropeptide that runs through your bloodstream that's produced in your brainstem. Oxytocin facilitates trust. It was first studied in the context of lactating mothers and building bonding with infants. Yet we also see it happen with basketball teams. If you look at studies of NBA teams through a season, teams who have more off-court affectionate touch have higher blood oxytocin levels and score more points in games. If you inject oxytocin nasally to a group and give another group a placebo, the group that was administered oxytocin will share more information with other group members in a game paradigm. It's a tremendously affiliative and stimulatory hormone for making better group decisions, more efficacious decisions in service of your group. So how and why people bond will affect the quality of communications and decisions within that group. Another one is on dehumanization. I'll go to that really quickly in a second. What's important to know here is that when you combine group affiliation with a sense of threat it is an incredibly potent cocktail in the mind. Because the body and the brain respond the same exact way to physical safety threats as it does to identity and status threats. Your central nervous system does not have a good way of distinguishing between those two types of threats because you react the exact same way they both represent a threat to your survival as it's constructed in modern society. Because without identity, without group, you might die. Like a gazelle at the watering hole, the second that a threat comes by he's got to run back to his herd. Same thing with humans. When we feel threatened we have to run back to our herd. And if something threatens that we clam up, we tighten, we consolidate our norms, we consolidate our identities even further. And we see this manifested not just in behavior but also in neural patterns. So when you threaten a group or threaten an individual who feels a member of a certain group there's certain parts of the brain that go on and offline in different ways. There's specific networks in the mind that work with what's called theory of mind of guessing what's in someone else's head. So theory of mind was first understood in the context of research of individuals on the autism spectrum because there was some sense that there's a lack of they don't know how to ascribe intentions or understand emotional inferences and others behaviors. And then that same paradigm that was first applied to autism spectrum was then looked at in intergroup paradigms. Do we have the same ability to guess how much someone is thinking or what they're thinking or guess their emotional state if they're not from our group? Can we guess what's going on in their heads? And we do see differential data on that.  It's not practical for a lot of reasons. So through rinsing and trying many different psychometric tools we found that this tool that most specifically correlates with neural activity and empathy and dehumanization is simply by giving someone this assent of man scale. Say, hey, based on this scale rate along the scale how evolved do you think the following groups are? And truly people will give you different answers. You think that everyone would say that everybody's really human almost no one says that. And the data that people have on this lines up almost exactly with what we see in empathy and theory of mind networks the prefrontal cortex in a brain scan. And interestingly the two groups who we found dehumanize each other the most on this scale in the past five years are two groups and it'll surprise you. Answer number one, Israelis and Palestinians in 2014 during the height of the Gaza conflict and Republicans and Democrats in the US last year. So we know that dehumanization as it is manifested in different brain networks correlates with a couple of really interesting things. It's correlated with unique neural patterns and reactions. It's correlated with a willingness to see passive harm come to those groups whom you dehumanize. It's correlated with policy support. When we looked at Americans dehumanizations of Muslim refugees both the brain scan data and the self-report data along this scale correlated with their willingness to for example support islamophobic policies to support caps on numbers of refugees coming into the United States etc at a one three and six month longitudinal period. And we also know that in the brain networks that are responsible for dislike or antipathy are unique from markers of dehumanization. So relatively in conclusion after doing multiple studies in field settings and in lab settings we're developing an emerging understanding of how this combination of group identification and pain etc leads to a very very very dire state as far as intergroup conflicts. We know that strong identification with a group if you make that group perceive a threat in another group so you invoke a threat. This group is in some way an existential threat to you and your group's identity and you throw a little bit of dehumanization in there you see a lot of other behavioral variables come out and this is across multiple studies over many years. With those three things in place with strong group identification the perception of a threat and the dehumanization of outgroups you see intense consolidation of group norms that means that someone is willing to abdicate their traditional ethical stance in favor of consolidated and more conservative norms for the group because belonging matters more than your values in times of threat. Retaliative policy support restriction of civil liberties on outgroups increased conservatism increased in-group love in-group information sharing and willingness to sacrifice for your in-group. So I do hope I've convinced you that belonging matters and how we do this now and just one example of how we're carrying this forward in the CVE space is that right now we have through our science informed design process we're doing several different initiatives to try to bring a little bit of the science into how we do PVE program design. So we have three main areas of focus in the lab when it comes to CVE the first is designing more evidence-based stratcoms interventions targeting specific cognitive mechanisms if group A is tapping into a sense of isolation what do we do how do we design a message that might or might not facilitate belonging or tap into whatever wound is driving that sense of isolation we also have a program trying to understand potent groups why are some groups so sticky what are they providing for what fundamental human motives are they catering to and what needs are they fulfilling and how do we design youth empowerment programs that actually meet those same needs so basically asking the question what are they doing right that makes them so sticky and how do we design using those same design principles and cognitive building blocks and the last is exploring relationships between things like chronic stress early childhood trauma and propensities towards violence and we're doing this in Burkina Faso at the moment just some of the basic research questions that we're asking one is how do youth's perception of their own agency and social status affect how they respond to veo narratives the second part of that question is how do young people's experiences of belonging and agency affect their views towards those groups and their willingness to sacrifice for those groups because those are motivations and impulses that you can tap into and redirect for really beautiful outcomes if you can do it right and in another example potentially in the Philippines we're looking at what would make someone switch from a violent group to a nonviolent one what are the elements of group membership that would need to say stay the same across both of those group types and what are the evolutionary or psychological needs that those groups are speaking to and how do we maintain those things in our design of our programs so that's just a bit of an example of how we're doing what we do and uh yeah look forward to hearing from you thanks welcome to the stage dr chris mesero he's a fellow at the center for middle east policy at brookings he's an expert on religious and sectarian conflict the causes and consequences of political violence and the impact of technological innovation on foreign policy he's currently working on evidence-based approaches to counterterrorism and countering violent extremism his most recent research for example draws on advances and non-parametric machine learning to assess the impact of discriminatory rhetoric and the regulation on the growth of extremist networks by coupling this novel data with new methodologies his work offers original insights into how best to respond to terrorism and political violence please help me welcome to the stage dr chris mesero thank you to to you all for being here as well i'm going to speak today i've been extremism i'm going to talk about some forthcoming research that i have that builds on some some work i've done looking at historical grievances to motivate the research though i want i want to start off by talking about what what the problem is and i should probably clarify that nancy limborg is not the problem this is she's talking about the problem this is a picture of her last week um at the event on when she was usip had an event last week about their new interim report on the drivers of violent extremism and one of the points that she made which is the same point she made this morning is that we've now spent a tremendous amount of money we spent a lot of in terms of personnel and lives and yet for all that we've done over the last 15 to 16 17 years the problem is only getting worse the number of attacks have increased five-fold the growth of extremist networks themselves have has been exponential and i think all of that begs a very you know a hugely important question which is you know what are we getting wrong what is it about this issue that despite all of the policy interventions we have tried we continue to see the problem not just stay the same but actively get worse what is it about the way that we're approaching it that we're getting wrong and i would offer two things the first is that i think we've been offering some bad theories or operating under some bad theories and i think probably the worst or most pernicious is the idea that it's a simple story about you know just islam for example this is one of the frankly one of the racist dutch men that mike referenced earlier skilled geared wilzers in the netherlands and his view his whole political platform is based on the notion that Islam is the problem but i think we can go beyond that and for many researchers for those of us who research it the folks who say that it's just poverty or that it's just a lack of democracy or that it's just a lack of education i would say that that's still probably too simple a story extremism is complex and yet we use very simple theories the second issue i think is that we have bad data and in particular what i would say is that we very often as we study this we very rarely include data on the policy interventions that we are trying and as a result if our policy interventions or you know policy rhetoric are making things worse if we're not including data on that we won't be able to know um and so between the bad theory and the bad data i think that's a it's a large part of where we seem to be going wrong what i want to talk today and what encourage you all to think about today is that there's there's a way forward here and i think one is is to use machine learning to uncover the complexity of the world we ended a great job laying out how complex this issue is we need to have methods to match that and the second is that we need to have data that can actually verify and and hold accountable some of the policies that we've been implementing so today i want to talk about some research that i've got coming out on veil bands and machine learning that tries to do both of those things use original data and use some some new methodologies i'm going to start by talking a little bit about machine learning first because this issue is the complexity is a lot easier to understand in a deep politicized context i'm going to talk using an example of plant growth to start out with and when we talk about complexity or a complex system there's really two factors that make it complex the first are what are called non-linear effects and if you think about the way that a plant grows you might think it's a simple story about you add some water and the plant grows a little larger but that's not actually true if there's no water the plant doesn't grow if there's too much water the plant doesn't grow you have to have the right amount of water there's a specific range in which water helps the plant grow but the the point i'm trying to make is that the effect of water on how how a plant grows depends on how much water it already has and it's the same thing for sunshine no sunshine you don't get a plant too much sunshine you don't get a plant it has to be in the right range the effect of sunlight on plant growth depends on how much sunlight it already has had that's a non-linear effect the second kind of effect are what are called interactive effects again you can have all the water in the world at the perfect amounts but if you don't have sunlight you're not going to have a plant grow and the same thing is true in reverse you have the perfect amount of sunlight but if you don't have any water you're not going to have a plant grow and the point i the reason i bring this up is that this is a very complicated story even though intuitively we tend to think of it as very simple it's actually quite complicated and if we use the methods that we use to study social processes to study plant growth this is the key point i want to make we would not be able to tell that water and sunlight matter for plant growth which is crazy and the reason is that all of the traditional statistical models that we use they all assume by default that effects are linear and that there are no interactions yet if we think about how the world works i think we can all intuitively agree that most of the social processes we care about and that influence the world are quite complicated and have a lot of non-linear effects and a lot of interactive effects and i think extremism is the same way i would say that extremism is probably even more complicated than plant growth in many ways and therefore we need methods to match that and the value of machine learning is that you can feed it data and it will sort through the data and identify where the non-linear effects are and where it thinks the the main interactions are so that's why i think we should use machine learning to get better traction over problems like extremism to return to the project that you know that's why i wanted to use machine learning the other issue is veil bands and so why why would we talk about veil bands i wish i could say that i had this idea at the beginning i'd feel a lot smarter and this presentation might be a little tidier but the reality is that it was an iterative process a few years ago when the caliphate first started and some new machine learning algorithms came online i began to look through or gather as much data on cross-national data as i could on different potential theories about why some countries might send foreign fighters to syria and others don't when i ran the original analysis the variable that came back as being most important was actually whether or not a country spoke french and i looked in and tried to peek under the hood and see what was going on and driving that finding and the countries that seem to be driving the finding were france and belgium and tunisia all had had major contentious debates over these the banning the islamic veil in the year before the syrian civil war had started and so what i did is i went through and coded every country around the world and to see the extent to which it had either that country had either had a national controversy or debate over the veil or even imposed and enforced a national ban on a partial or full veil and the idea is the main theory for why i was doing this ties into what mike was talking about earlier which is dehumanization as these as these veil bands are debated and discussed they are very often defended on the terms that you cannot be both muslim and western at the same time you cannot be both secular and muslim at the same time you cannot have both a national identity and a muslim identity at the same time and it's a message that really reinforces the jihadist recruiter's sense of being dehumanized and the need to stress identity and force potential recruits to make a choice between islam and their other identities so that's the theory about whether it would happen and once i once i gathered the data there were about 40 countries that had either debated or enacted a veil band in the years prior to the onset of the syrian civil war and i looked through and the bivariate relationships are pretty strong about two-thirds of those 40 countries had had a foreign fighter network go to syria for the countries that did not have a debate or controversy over the veil only about a fewer than 10 percent sent a syrian foreign fighter network so there seemed to be something there just in the basic bivariate data but the question was you know are other things mattering too right are the veil bands responding to prior jihadist violence for example and to do that i went back and re-ran the same analysis i had before controlling for things like prior jihadist violence and it turns out there's really only two things you probably can't see it here but the far left column is muslim population and the one right next to it is veil band so of all the data that i passed the machine learning algorithm it flagged two variables as being important and those two variables basically account for the entire predictive power of the model which is that the size of the muslim population the extent to which a country debated or imposed restriction on the veil those were the two factors that the algorithm picked up on as being most determinative of whether or not a country sent a foreign fighter network to syria same thing comes true for for interactions i mentioned earlier that machine learning can pick up latent interactions you don't have to tell it to look for them it'll just figure out what the most important interactions are the most important interaction it found was that countries that had large muslim populations and also a debate over the veil band were the countries that were most likely of all countries to send a foreign fighter network to syria the other thing i had mentioned is that in addition to being able to pick up non-linear interactive effects machine learning can also pick up non-linear effects here's the effect of the veil band data on the likelihood of a country sending a foreign fighter network to syria and the most important thing the thing that i want to draw your attention to is that there's the gap between whether there was a local controversy or a national controversy over the band that's where you see the biggest jump in the likelihood of a country sending a foreign fighter network to syria by contrast once you've got a national controversy if you then introduce or enforce the ban it raises the probability a little bit but not nearly as much as if you've gone from having no debate to having a national debate and this is consistent in my view with again what what mike was talking about earlier and the effect of threat detection and dehumanization that they can have on in-group formation what matters here is that as national politicians like Geert Wilders and others kind of advocate for these bands they are again they're saying that you cannot be both you know you cannot be dutch and muslim at the same time and that's exactly the same message that the jihadist recruiters are using to try and draw new recruits into their networks so the debates over the van seem to be compounding the the recruiting pitch of these groups the other one last slide i'll show you from the research just to show you again the value of machine learning and this is the effect of muslim population or the relationship between muslim population and the likelihood that a country sent a network to syria what's important to note here is that there's a spot there's a very narrow range where the size seems to matter as it's you know if you have a few thousand muslims there's not really any as common sense would tell you there's probably not going to be much of a network and then as you get very very large into the hundreds of millions it doesn't really matter if you have more muslims at that point either there's a range in which it matters and the other thing is you can tell as you know as you get out to the far right despite the side each of those lines is a country and it's showing the likelihood that that country would send a foreign fighter network to syria if it had a certain amount of muslims and you can see that some have a much higher likelihood than others even if they had a lot of muslims and what that's showing you is that when you have separation like that that's showing you visually that it's picking up on an interaction and in this case it's saying countries with a ton you know hundreds of millions of muslims and no veil ban are going to have a much lower likelihood of sending a foreign fighter network than countries with you know that many muslims and a veil ban so it's another way of kind of visualizing and intuitively understanding or intuitively seeing the complexity of the process itself in your data the question of course as with any project any research project is do the results make sense especially if you're if you're using machine learning algorithm and you're really trusting it to tell you what it finds in the data you have to be very careful about checking to make sure that it passes some kind of common sense or intuitive check and in this case if this is true if there is some kind of relationship we would expect to find kind of three different qualitative markers the first is we would expect to find members of al Qaeda and ISIS themselves talking about the veil bands and citing them as cause of recruitment and in fact that's very true there's actually so many examples of this that I didn't even put a slide of it in fact Jesse mentioned the magazine that he had started earlier the first issue of that magazine had an article about the french veil controversy the second thing we would look for is that we would look for the recruiters at the local level to be able to say these veil bands in when I was building my network had an impact on recruitment this is a picture of Fuad Bilqachem he founded a group called Sharia for Belgium which sent the most number of foreign fighters to Syria from Belgium it was an instrumental group in getting the the facilitation networks going from Belgium to Syria he was arrested in I believe 2012 or 2013 and when they asked him to account for the success of his group he said very publicly that there's a local band in Antwerp in 2009 then there was the big controversy over banning the full the full veil in Belgium in 2010 he called the effect of those of those bands a bomb that helped contribute to the explosive growth of his network he may have been tongue-in-cheek as he was saying that but I don't think there's any denying that he viewed it as essential to to what allowed his network to grow the third thing that we would expect is that we would expect women themselves who have to who would be considering wearing a veil to also be identifying the veil bands as something that might contribute to their own journey into extremism and again we have evidence of this as well this is an example of there's a woman named Um Mansour from Belgium she was she tried to go to Syria she was intercepted at the border I believe she was asked to account for her own experience prior to the the Belgian veil ban she did not even wear the veil I don't know that she was particularly devout when she talked to New York Times a few years ago and she was trying to explain her own process of radicalization she said it felt like my identity had been taken away from me that band caused more harm than good you know if it hadn't been passed I wouldn't have kept myself away from the world and maybe I wouldn't have been radicalized obviously it's not that simple of a story but it's clearly a very formative point in her own journey into extremism so we have examples of both fighters recruiters and women themselves citing these bans as as being a cause of their own extremist recruitment that said this is the slide where I say that there's some limitations this this is not an experiment right this is not a foolproof kind of causal study there's also issues with if you if you're using national data to try and understand an individual process the one the one caveat I do want to flag to you is that we could control in this in this project I could control for prior jihadist violence but I could not control for because we don't have data on it nonviolent jihadist networks that may have existed in these countries so it may it's unclear whether the countries that had national controversies over the veil if they were helping to form these networks or if those networks already existed and it just kind of tip them over into violence and then the final caution I would give is that I started this by saying that I I'm very much a diverse as leon as I think to saying that this is a simple causal story in any way I do think that this matters but it is clearly not the only thing that matters and I would be very much remiss if anybody left here this morning thinking you know this is a new simple causal story it is a part of the story but it's not the whole thing that said what do I want you to to walk away with I want you to walk away with the sense that extremism is complex and that therefore we very much need methodologies that can reflect that complexity and begin to describe that complexity and the second is that we really do need to begin taking seriously in my view the notion that anti-muslim rhetoric and policies may be contributing to extremism with that I will leave you that and thank you very much all of our speakers another round of applause for a great morning you're just fantastic presentations in a few moments the doors at both ends of the auditorium will open and we will all move out to the great hall for the first breakout session when you enter the great hall you will notice tables each labeled with a number and a discussion facilitator's name please choose a table for your discussion there's coffee tea and water available we encourage you to grab it before settling into your breakout discussion and we'll reconvene back in here at 11 30 to hear more from our resolve network lake chad basin research teams about their work in chad cameroon and nigeria thank you so much i think we're about to get started so thank you all again for joining us today on resolve third annual global forum we're really excited to have you here and i am very excited to be able to introduce our next salon session so my name is katira aria in asia and i am a research associate and project manager for the resolve network and over the past year i've been helping to coordinate our newest research initiative in lake chad basin so in 2017 in partnership with usaid resolve embarked on its second research fellowship and exchange project to better understand the politics of religion in higher education in chad cameroon in nigeria this is a subject that's often talked about in cve circles but not very fully fleshed out i guess in the research so in order to illuminate and bring up local insights to better inform policy and practice um we embarked on a country case three country case study with our research teams here and our research advisor dr jacob uro uro jacob so to present the findings from their research i would like to hand over the time to them and dr jacob who will be facilitating the discussion and also give them all my thanks for being wonderful partners in this effort thank you thank you so much kat kat and the entire resolve team have worked really really hard on this research and the findings are really really interesting so um thank you so much for coming out for the saloon discussion on the lake chad region may i get the researchers um the fellows and the principal investigators to please introduce themselves starting with dr damu good morning everybody yes all right research is based mainly based on comparative religion and politics mainly religious identities and ethnic identities both in cameroon chad and nigeria my involvement in this research is mainly dealing with the regulation of religion in higher education mainly how university students can be true higher education counter to violence extremism this was the main research problematic we were dealing with with professor brandon hi i'm dr brandon kin hammer from ohio university and i was the principal investigator for the cameroon portion of the project hello everybody i'm dr medina sardulaziz i'm the research fellow for the nigerian country study for this research i'm from the nigerian defense academy good morning uh abdulae sunay i am a principal investigator on the nigerian case and i am senior research fellow at the zensko modern orient in berlin morning i am orinati remati i'm the research fellow for chat and i'm working for a chadian small social scientist labo called sound the research on anthropology and science human crash and i'm also lecturing at the department of anthropology at jamaica university and i'm daniel eisinger i'm a postdoctoral fellow at the university of kebek in montreal in the center franco pay um and i was the principal investigator for chat on this project thank you thank you so much um let me stay with you dan and romaji can you tell us the core findings of your project in chat yes so thank you i'm a star i think that we came out with some three main findings and seen as we uh have been working on secularism and the way secularism is implemented within the high education sector what we came out with first is that uh there is a big ambiguity related to the way secularism as such is accepted uh in the countries in general but also the way it's accepted within higher education and even the way it's implemented within the curriculas and also the way faculties are organized and second we also came out with the fact that in the country when talking about secularism or when talking about language for teaching or administration within universities we have a big overlap of language issues and religions this is to mean that most of the time arabic and french dividing universities so dividing students and faculty members but also are provoking a kind of two different curriculas within the same system and so most of the time you have the departments or the students divided following religious languages when it comes to francophone departments or arabic department most of the or totally all the students from arabic departments being muslims the same thing for the teachers etc so uh this is to to conclude and to hand up to to to Dan we come out with the fact that uh the state uh despite his secular agenda is unable to implement on the field you know a secular teaching curricula and the rejection of secularism as an idea is growing so within muslim communities mainly yeah perhaps i'll add just a little bit of context to say that one of the main objectives of the study was to get a handle on the different debates over the role of religion in the public sphere and institutes of higher education whether they be public universities private universities teacher training colleges or cultural centers across the region are important places where those debates are taking place and so what ended up coming out in our research is exactly what romaji was explaining is that you have different cleavages or groupings of people based on a variety of different socially constructed identity factors that kind of create a positionality in those debates and the state is both an actor in those debates but also something that structures those debates and so that's really what we've tried to capture in our findings did your findings surprise you at all yeah i mean it's a little surprising because when you just consider the idea of secularism being enshrined in the constitution so it's surprising to come on the field and see that actors that normally are controlled by the main state are able challenging you know this secular agenda and but at the same time it's not that surprising because if you see the structure of the state and the way the state is implementing on the field all its agendas this is not that surprising and at the same time to finish you can also see that this is not too much surprising because the state is playing a game with religious actors giving them more room on some issues refusing rooms on some issues so those people in in turn they also play the state you know to fulfill the agendas so it's a little surprising but not that much okay yeah i think i would simply i agree entirely there are some surprising elements and unsurprising aspects so it's not surprising to find out that there are debates over the role of religion and the public sphere it's not surprising necessarily that there's an arabic and french division in that debate right but what was surprising is how actively engaged some religious leaders on university campuses depending on their affiliations are being are shifting their stances appropriately to try and pressure the straight the state in different directions i'll come back to you a bit later on because you've raised some very important issues i'll write back to you now adama and brandon can you tell us a bit more about the research in kamerun and some of the co-findings sure so i mean the top-line finding of relevance for for policymakers and practitioners is that there's very little evidence that that ve organizations are active on kamerune campuses that they're recruiting we don't see a lot of evidence for ve support among muslim college students but what we do find is that increasingly as the kamerunian war on terror has progressed and as there's been sort of an increasing securitization of muslim life particularly on campus we do see that kind of simmering tensions and conflicts and resentments about muslim access to higher education about the inadequacies of the primary and secondary school institutions in kamerun are starting to bleed into campus life that increasingly particularly for muslim students who are on non-muslim majority campuses in the southern part of the country that there's a perception of government wearing us towards them a perception that they are increasingly perceived as being potential ve actors even where there's not a lot of evidence that that's the case and that this is undermining confidence in the sense of fairness and and and balance that's implied in kamerunian secularism so like chad kamerun has this francophone heritage of laicite that nominally suggests the separation between religion and state but that in practice is often I think understood by a lot of kamerunians is a promise that the state will be fair and balanced in the way that it manages religion and there's an increasing sense among muslim students that that's not how it's really playing out for their experience they see campuses as places that are christian spaces that are difficult for them to get equal treatment on we don't think that these are likely to manifest as ve dynamics but they do produce really challenging political consequences that we think undermine potentially the ability of the kamerunian state to fully incorporate those those students into public life later on brumaji sorry adama yeah what brandon was saying is that daily reality we are facing in our campuses as far as religious regulation by the state is concerned there is a duality in the state discourse that they are against any financial or political support of any religion be it christianity or islam but when we look at on the knee since the person is from christian origin there is a kind of state support on the knee to christianity on the campuses compared to islam and those are the sources of let's say not conflict but tension between muslim student union and christian student union and this is really difficult for the state to solve the issue as far as the management of the universities are concerned because christian students are receiving a kind of foreign support from christian organization outside the country muslim students are receiving almost the same support from muslim or arabic countries but the state is denying the islamic support in order to promote the christian support upon muslim students and this is really difficult situation in kamerun actually did you notice this contributing in one way or the other to maybe extremist opinions on campus so one of the interesting things that you note on kamerunian universities is that there's not nearly as much intramuslim conflict to visible on campuses as say in Nigeria where i've also done research and i know you guys are going to talk about that and a lot of that really does come down to the role that the state plays in regulating not just religion but civil society more generally there's really only one muslim students association that's sort of registered with the state and has the ability to kind of manage religious life on campus for muslims and that sort of need to work with the state to be visible to the state to be legible to state authorities diminishes a lot of sufi salafi conflict it diminishes a lot of intrasalafi conflict it means that the muslim students really sort of put on a brave face in front of the state how how deep that reconciliation is to what extent that's masking sort of deeper conflicts underneath i think is difficult to get at under the political context but once again we see very little evidence that what it's doing is leading to ve support i think that there's a pretty near as we could tell and we looked pretty closely near universal understanding that that ve appeals are not particularly campuses are not amenable places for ve appeals in kamerun now whether that's because muslim students are resistant who show up on campus or the because campuses are resistant that's harder to tell that's a in some ways a different project but we really don't see a lot of evidence that ve or ve organizations have a lot of obvious ways to make inroads the kamerunian governments fear that that's true compounds other problems was this surprising though i mean i i don't know that it's i mean i think it's surprising to the kamerunian government i don't think it's nearly um as surprising to us i mean these dynamics sort of play out in different ways in the different countries that we've looked at but i mean the idea that that extensive state management and control of religion has a range of impacts some of which are good and some of which are really problematic i think is not a surprise and so it's been good for intramuslim conflict on campus it's been bad for the situation of muslim students who find themselves facing what they perceive to be increasing discrimination and lack of access interesting um nigeria presents a much more complex case study um let me invite mattina and abdelahi to tell us more about the nigerian case study and the co-findings um yes so the nigerian case is somewhat complex because it's kind of similar to what the chartian research finds finds in some cases and also similar to the kamerunian situation but also different in all dynamics and i'm going to start with the fact that just like in kamerun there is no direct evidence or link to show that violent extremist tendencies are present on campus especially because there was a lot of attention when goharam started with the understanding that it was some university students who had turned their university certificates to decide to join this group and that kind of placed an assumed focus on the fact that there might be extremist threats on the university campuses but the research that we carried out didn't show this direct link however from the research we realized that student religious associations especially the muslim student association and the federation of catholic students for the christians these two groups and the other subgroups that they have on campuses have a lot of power and controlling influence and especially ability to control behavior on campus and this ability to control behavior ability to influence their members to carry out agendas of this association is kind of risky as it is and then more importantly is that apart from the fact that they have power religion is being used as a very vibrant resource on campus just the way it is used as a vibrant resource in the Nigerian society and it means that the competing factors that we have between intra-religion itself like the Salafi Sufi competition the Sufi Shia competition that we have in the Nigerian society is also being extrapolated through these associations on campus and so this competition for fellowship, competition for affairs of influence are also being played out on the campus and these are some of the risks that are beginning to play out they're not directly extremist but they also a risk that should be the attention should be paid to when i read your executive summary and the full report itself what surprised me really was that you did not find any evidence of linkages between religion on campus and violent extremism Abdulahi did that surprise you? Not really i've been working on on similar issues but in a different context in Niger but i also started some research in Nigeria and then looking at Zaria context the kind of configuration of religious organizations religious figures for example the Shia the Salafi so i already knew the significance of religion and religiosity as for example in the case of the student organizations these organizations are really socialization spaces and they really play a significant role but you can see beyond the campus so in a way that wasn't surprising to me but one element that was a bit surprising to me in this research was the role of the faculty members so we are talking about student religious associations but actually one thing that maybe get lost in in this kind of terming or naming of this organization is the the faculty members because these organizations they are very much related to to the staff i mean to the to the staff but also to the faculty members so they have this patron system they they call it in the context of a view of the university so and often the one of the category or the main one of the main patron is really the category of the faculty member who is which is basically those who are supporting these organizations in terms of yeah financial resources but also in terms of getting organized creating opportunities for activities but also networking with other religious organizations beyond campus itself it's fascinating most secularization theorists would say that the advancement of modernity would somehow result in the diminishing of religion and superstitious beliefs in that sense an idea over the past few years Nigeria has really advanced economically technologically in so many different ways and something you said which I found quite interesting um religion occupying social space can you talk more about that within religion occupying a space that's beyond transcendental ideological meaning but maybe providing a space for identity for group identity of fulfilling the social meaning yeah I think what really what was clear and really what came up clearly in our research is really that kind of yeah there is that transcendental dimension of religion and religiosity but really what you see with these organizations is the the social dimension the kind of the way religion offers opportunity to to come together to opportunities for grouping for being for me a social for social group in a context where I have to say grouping is really important so you have to to find which group you belong which organization you you belong to so that is really something that religion helps to do in on the specific context we we conducted this this research yeah and I think I would also want to taking from what Abdullah said is the fact that in Nigeria as it is it is a very not religious in the sense that everybody does some practical consistent worshiping when in the fact that religion is now such an identity tool that groups can mobilize as it is in order to achieve specific aims and in the context of this research that was done on campuses this religious associations have mastered the art of mobilizing religion transcending religious roles and carrying out activities that go beyond their expected roles as religious associations and this activities basically placed them in the heart and per view of the students so much that they become so influential in galvanizing either support or galvanizing views to support their agendas so I think also apart from the fact that religion is an identity tool more importantly is the ability for this associations to mobilize religion for their goals now that's quite fascinating although you did not find any evidence of connections between religion and extremism on campuses there in Nigeria what happens when religion is mobilized as you said what what happens when a strong leader emerges what happens if there are grievances strains political opportunities emerge did you consider that so in the research there are two distinct examples that show what happens when first religion is mobilized for goals and this happened in the Mautech issue Mautech is the medieval Adama university is located in the northeast of Nigeria and here it was a simple case of a campus election which was supposed to lead to the emergence of a student union president but a christian student had emerged as the winner and the muslim group refused to accept this leading to violence and composting to the death of one student and the closure of the university so eventually when grievances kind of trampled upon like you said when religion is grievances are aggravated the first result is that it it would lead to violence and compost which is one of the risks that needs to be mitigated the second is with the emergence of leaders as you said most of these associations especially in Amadibu university deprived themselves as being spring boards where most of the leaders of the country is like a practice but if you are student leader in these associations then it seems like it's much more possible that you will become a political figure in Nigeria and it is true because they have a lot of alumni most of their patrons are also former members of the associations when they were in the universities and that's why they still have this link but this ability to prepress students as leaders played through in the emergence of Ibrahim Elzakizaki who is the head of the Shia group in Nigeria now he was an ABU student he was studying economics and that this was it was a time when he was a student that he started to propagate Shia ideas and because the university was of us to any kind of ideology which they do not which they do not see as nominal as it is right now but he emerged and then he was expelled but this did not stop him from starting the Shia organization right now with a strong strong presence in Zaria but contemporary the Shia is becoming targeted for different reasons some organizations think they're extremists using that in like quoted inferences but like it's possible like you said for a leadership for organizations that are not nominal to emerge in this kind of spaces and it is also possible for leaders to emerge in this kind of contested spaces interesting all right Abdullahi then Brandon okay so just if we think about this as a CVE issue one of the things that comes up in all of our research is that in all of these countries the state plays a fairly big role in trying to manage what religion is like on campus state recognizes these organizations in some cases it provides them with funding it makes it difficult for other organizations to emerge it really this desire to sort of centrally manage to a certain extent the role of religious expression on campus and what emerges is a clear pattern across all these cases is that this is not a successful operation we still see religious violence in Nigeria on campus in fact religious violence is somewhat more common on campus than it is off campus we see conflicts in Chad we see resentments in Cameroon and it's it's really not at all clear that there are the institutional mechanisms on campus beyond the sort of simple fact of attempting to control what organizations exist and who their leadership are that really allow religious communities to solve these problems practically and so we think about what sort of CVE programming would work I mean there is this sort of tendency to think about it in terms of oh we need peace building or we need you know messages of tolerance and really what comes across in all these instances is that there are not places for these organizations to sit down in workout access to campus to work out where we're gonna how we're gonna do this balancing right these things come out spontaneously because the states all sort of assume that these things are taken care of by you know making sure that these organizations are formally represented rather than it being a sort of a space where these things can be worked out in practice there are not a lot of places that camp on campuses in the Lake Chad Basin where you can work out religious conflicts privately or before they pop up on the campus life yeah what I wanted to add to what Medina said is yeah of course there is no direct link between I mean in our findings we didn't really see any direct link between these religious activities or religious association and violent extremism but there is something also which is which needs to be kept in mind is really religion has become a source of conflict and it could it's it's really a site or a reason for a lot of competition on on campus or friction confrontations even so you think about for example the the opposition between the Salafi and and the Sufi the Tijania in particular over let's say the control of the mosque or competition or revelry about okay the resources because students are supposed to pay basically religious fees or fees that later on go into the hands of the the religious association so in the case for example the muslim students so the fees those resources go into the hands of the mss the muslim student society but the the Tijania organization doesn't get any of those of those fees so they have grievances so they're asking them say okay what is mss doing with those those resources so those are the kind of situations where though there are no direct relationship between these kind of activities and violent extremists we found that those could be enough reasons for radicalization on on university campuses in particular hamlet bello university and i think sorry jacob and i think to kind of put together the point that brandona abdelay were making is the state would find a way to influence japanese on campus well most times they do it through the university authorities themselves and the positions that are taken by university authorities sometimes and in the case of abu also influence the competition and the grievances so for example in abu the university has chosen to recognize only the mss as the single muslim association on the muslim student society as the single muslim student association on campus when there are in abu alone 17 other muslim religious associations that are not recognized and tim san which is the tijania muslim student association is one of them there is the association for the shia muslim students too so the decision to recognize only one association which is accused of being sylafi as it is is the detriment of the other associations who are now having to compete with mss for the control of the mosques for the use of the mosque for the control of finances which goes directly to the mss and this is the position that the university authorities have taken to recognize just one association is detrimental as it is especially when you compare the position of abu authority to school authorities university of ibadan who recognize that the seven different student religious associations giving room for everybody to be expressive with their views giving room for everybody to have access to basic amenities as religious associations so just like the state i would say also the role played by school authorities university authorities is also needs to be focused on so is the idea then of creating sort of a multi-dimensional space for various religious identities to be and to exist let me come back to you remagine and dan what then do you think in the case of chat what are the possible stimulations what are the possible strains maybe at the macro level or the meso level that can lead to extremism what are those triggers that can lead to violent extremism what did you observe well i think one of the big things that we walked away from and i guess maybe i should preface this by saying something that surprising is maybe not surprising now is that we didn't find this linkage between university campuses and violent extremist groups but something that is there is the potential for further cleavage and grievance to develop across the lines of language in particular and that has to do with the fact that certain resources are given based on universities that are there's a university that's primarily arabic speaking right and so resources are directed toward that university differently than they would be in another public setting university which is primarily francophone then in other public universities you may have a department of say history or some other discipline and you'll have faculty members that teach in french and faculty members that teach in arabic but the administration at the university level has one person in charge and they'll either belong to one group or the other and then of course opportunities for teaching opportunities for resources opportunities for research they end up being perhaps unfairly distributed and that leads of course to dynamics of cleavage and grievance within those groups and it doesn't help to establish aspects of collaboration or negotiation over those grievances like we've talked about in some of these other cases i don't know if you want to add something romaji yeah i want to add some little thing it's about the the way the the state is controlling the the universities and one of the reasons who made the fact that we didn't find very close link between v e and the campuses is also the way the campuses are managed by the state you know in chat as they have been explaining in ijewia in chat there are no possibility we have what the state called the official trend of islam in the country being here the tijania and so there's no place for the other trends to enter the public sphere officially and so on the campuses there is no possibility for teachers when they claim being not tijani or even for the students there is no room for them and so on the campus it's very difficult to make a clear link between v e and the campuses because people want play i mean a role that allowed them being part of the system but what we should be what we should care about is also what is going on besides the universities because if those people they don't have voice in the official life of the campuses at the same time they can study abroad in other universities and get back in the countries they have a lot of associations although they don't have official part in the debate they are growing and this may be something that may end up you know in more radicalization because they are not given part to the official debate and so we have associations one of the associations called ansara sunna who is a quite solid association who receive a lot of funding from other countries that are doing a lot of activities but this association is not allowed to enter the public sphere being the universities being the medias but at the same time you know their influence is growing in the country so i'm sure that even though students actually don't play the opportunity to such associations i'm sure that behind the university they are getting more and more close to those kind of association so this is something that we should also care about interesting so for for the policymakers in the room the practitioners in the room or even academic researchers they were more recommendations do you have brandon and adama if one is interested in undertaking any programming or intervention or even research in kamerun yeah as far as the kamerunian case is concerned i think the state must be fair to religious leaders or to religious associations when it comes to islam we have no income rune which is portrayed as being muslim part of the country and we have twice curricula one from islamic studies and the other one from standards official let's say western studies and those two types sorry those two types of educations are really posing a kind of conflictual issue in higher education students can register from primary secondary schools until gce level in islamic studies when they are to enter university they cannot find the same curricula they have to shift into western education and this is really conflictual for more than 30 000 students why because they cannot face the same language of education which is french or english while they are coming from arabic speaking background this is first problem the second problem is that the type of islamic education they received so far was authorized by state but this type of education cannot lead to professional integration in the national sphere so they end up without any job at the end of their training without any future in this type of system in these types of government and they still look at the other side how the government is implementing a policy to help christian students christian associations so the claim is now if the state failed to be equal to both the religious side let muslim students also have their own university a muslim muslim university in northern cameroon the state is not against of a the government is saying we are ready to provide you an authorization to open your islamic studies to your islamic studies your islamic university please but the initiative must come from the community don't expect expect any financial support any political support from the government because we are dealing with a laicite kind of secularism in in cameroon so the muslim society and muslim students are waiting the government to give them a floor to have a kind of same equal visibility at the local level and at the national level without being to those communities i think the government will be complicating the situation of religious identity or religion understanding in northern cameroon compared to the rest of the country interesting what spaces are there brandon for for possible programming intervention so i mean again one of the sort of persistent things that we see is that even for former students current students who you know lack access who struggle with employment afterwards there just doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that ve is an attractive alternative for them this is the good news it means maybe that there's not a ton of need for what you would think of as traditional cve programming on campus however with the securitization of muslim experiences in cameroon with the ongoing war on terror there is a persistent underutilization of the resources that exist on campus that could be potentially useful in a broader cve terrain in cameroon right um so we think about kam su the muslim student union the one muslim organization that's officially recognized on campus um when we talk to their leaders they were very eager to be involved in in cve style work not just because they cve is a problem in cameroon but because they also recognize that doing so would help to sort of inoculate their position with the state that they could say we're involved in cve work see we represent the sort of mainstream position of students on campus there's not a ve problem on campus perhaps this would lead to more resources or better treatment of muslim students um but it's been hard for them to break into that right there's a real need i think for international partners to engage with muslim students on campus not as a problem or a potential risk but as a resource um moreover and i i think that this is another issue um that comes up in our own research too is that there are a lot of sort of broad resources on campus people who want to get involved um researchers faculty um university administrators who recognize that there's a ve problem in cameroon would like to get involved um but they're not really able to participate as full partners because they're not able to access the cve research um they often lack the sort of methodological training to do the kinds of projects that we've been able to do and they're often engaged with again as potential ve participants rather than resources and so they need to be able to bring them into offer training um not just to sort of run another set of workshops where we can take photo ops um but to really sort of engage in finding ways that they can be participating in building cve knowledge to bring them in as equal partners in this work um would take advantage of what they're able to offer in a way that really has not been leveraged so far we didn't find a lot of evidence that there had been more than a kind of shallow engagement with those muslim intellectuals with those muslim university faculty and researchers and that's something that we see as a real potential next step thank you madina and abdelahi what do you reckon are the greatest opportunities or species that are available for programming or for the research yeah um i think for me the um major place where focus of programming for especially policy programming needs to be focused on is identifying who exactly are the major influencers that can actually um um affect behavior and for me especially with this reach that it has to be the associations but more importantly is that we it's kind of good to play safe right now because we say there are no direct links between what is happening on campus and violin extremism but most of the students don't even would not recognize violent extremist linens if it comes to them right now and i think that they need to be some kind of preparation for them to understand this extremist linens to understand how programming for violent extremism can be expunged to students to understand and be prepared for this kind of programs for this kind of linens to them when it comes it's more like knowing being prepared they do not have that and i think this is one of the areas where policy research or policy programming can be done but secondly also is to look at funding that is coming to these associations from their patrons which sometimes are not just the faculty lecturers or faculty members that i mentioned but sometimes the patrons of these associations are politicians some of them are wealthy individuals outside of the university campus and it means that the ability for them to fund these organizations also would guarantee that they would get support from these organizations for whatever agenda they would have so i think policy research or policy programming also should look at where funding is coming to these associations and guard against the ability to use this funding to either funnel any kind of negative control or funnel avenues through which extremist ideologies can be gotten to the universities through this Antelai let me be more specific with you what would you caution against in terms of a future policy formulation what are those what would you really caution against look this is don't bother about this area yeah but i think it's very important not to exceptionalize these organizations i think really looking at these organizations they they are i mean you when we we look at their dynamics their competition the kind of revelries going on i think it's it's really important not to put them out there as really exceptional organizations so that would be my really strongest recommendations while dealing with these and that i think it should be major elements to keep in mind for policymakers so for example how they they they feel about okay the kind of unfair treatment they are some are getting from the administration or from the government or from the state those would be elements that should be taken on board done for char well in terms of recommendations i think that the the biggest recommendation i would make is that i think that inter university and inter department programs aimed at collaboration would be essential if we can start to bridge these divisions that have started to emerge around language and religion across different institutions i think that that could be really beneficial and there's a real desire amongst my chatty and colleagues to do research and to engage in projects and to have those kinds of opportunities and resources and so anything that can facilitate that was from a policy point of view i think of a positive thing that could be something as simple as identifying different research centers that you know represent different linguistic groups and having them collaborate on a project together what i think that should be something that should be avoided i don't think there's any need for counter messaging or programming in the university institutions of chad at least not at this stage and i don't know that throwing week long seminars to bring people together around living together peacefully is something that's making a huge difference at this stage i think that really just brings together the people that are already living together peacefully i guess i can end on that somewhat controversial statement interesting okay yeah i would say almost the same thing because the core issue we pointed out in our research is the overlapping of language and religion and to me the most important thing to do is trying to work in order to stop languages dividing people following religious lines and so the main thing to do is for me a kind of designing a universal curricula whatever the language arabic or french the curricula to be the same and giving equal opportunity to all chadians whatever the language is this is one and also is working you know to to to make those religious curriculas that are very tough actually in arabic teaching universities to make them less obligatory than they are actually this also may be a way you know to give equal chance to everybody whatever the teaching language is and the real thing to to avoid is you know the about the the role of the state as i said and people that may read our brief we'll see that the state is playing using identity markers mainly religion and other things the state is like playing a chess game with all those markers and it's about stop playing that game because people on the field they also have agency and so ignoring their agency and their ability to play also a game against the state this is also something very dangerous fantastic um let me just ask you one question adama um the the prices in the english speaking part of kamerun did that affect your your research at all or even the methodology you choose to to adopt for the project did it come out at all yes as far as identity manipulation are concerned i think we are facing the same problem no matter how english-speaking kamerun would like to portray the uprising that's going on actually as a kind of separation from the former french type of of state going from republic type of state to federalism still the government still manipulating the regional identity and that's what they don't want to hear they don't want to hear that we are kamerun english-speaking kamerun and we are french-speaking kamerun and within two type of positions there is violence actually as a matter of discussions there's no other negotiations than violence and when it's come to northern kamerun it's not the same issue there are some issue of misunderstanding between local population local community and the state but there's no use of violence to explain the misunderstanding so the two issues can be put together as far as resolution of conflict are concerned in in common in actual situation if i can add one thing to that i so one of the and i i've told the story a number of times now since i've been back from kamerun one of the things that we would hear occasionally is adam and i would go out to do interviews with with muslim student leaders with muslim organizational leaders was oh you're here to talk about extremism we should be talking about those extremists in the anglophone part of the country and you know it's easy to sort of write that off as a deflection or you know ethnic linguistic chauvinism but i think it speaks to the degree to which a lot of muslim communities particularly elite intellectual muslim communities in kamerun feel very much like they are targeted as extremists right that they are understood to be a potential problem or risk and there is this very clear desire to deflect that or to show that they're not the problem or the only problem and obviously this has the implications that adama has suggested it makes it hard to bring anglophones and francophones together in kamerun but it also like they didn't come to that understanding by accident or in a vacuum it is very much the case that these communities have been treated as potential extremists and that's that's that's been a big part of the programming that's been run not just in kamerun but that's been sort of implicit in a lot of international partner activities and i think our researcher really speaks to the need to find ways to engage muslim communities in kamerun that don't implicitly suggest that they're the potential problem fantastic thank you so much please round of applause ladies and gentlemen the research thank you thank you i just want to say that the um the the research report will be available sometime soon but currently the um the executive summaries and the core findings are currently available thank you one more round of applause for thank you so much to our research teams um as dr jacob udder jacob mentioned the um the reports will be published later this fall please feel free to check out our mapping paper which is available outside which really shows the entire landscape the their um research briefs are are um digging further into we hope that their discussion and the previous research um as well as previous conversations during the breakout sessions will continue over lunch which is where we will be going right now lunch will be held in the great hall outside this auditorium the lunch is available right past where the coffee stations were from the last breakout um we ask that you use both the top and bottom exits to exit out there and then we'll resume today's program at 130 um back in here for our next set of ted speakers thanks um and thank you for coming back um for our second part of the day so i'm really excited um to learn as much as i did this morning as i will this afternoon from our next set of speakers our first speaker unfortunately cannot be with us here today but he had it will be appearing be a video um prionk mether is the founder of mythos labs a strategic communication and production company that partners with the world's most influential comedians to counter terrorist narratives gender-based violence and transnational crime he previously served as an intelligence analyst at the u.s department of homeland security and advertising executive at ogilvy and mather and a contributing writer for the onion um so please so and having seen him speak before his actual introduction of being both an intelligence analyst focusing on counterterrorism and a part-time writer for the onion made for um a really interesting marriage and so we will hear from him um be a video just now so thank you good afternoon ladies and gentlemen thank you usip for organizing this great event and i'm really sorry i couldn't be there with all of you in person today my name is prionk mather and i'm here to talk to you about how we can use comedy and creative techniques to fight violent extremism by way of background i'm a former policy analyst and intelligence officer at the u.s department of homeland security right here in dc and i was also a comedy writer for the onion um i now run mythos labs this is a company that partners with comedians around the world to create funny videos that counter the narrative of violent extremists but why are we looking at comedy and creative techniques why why look at all these out-of-the-box solutions well the truth is extremist communications uh have really upped their game in the past few years and a lot of that has been because of ices um pre-social media or in the earliest days of social media back when i was at dhs for example uh extremist messaging looked and felt a lot different than it does today it was it tended to be sort of low production quality very sober in terms of its tone and messaging um even though the internet was alive and well most terrorist groups chose to disseminate their propaganda through tv print and radio here's a couple examples of screenshots from a FARC video and uh of course asama bin laden and al-qaeda uh and then of course terrorist communications tended to be very centralized controlled by a propaganda department at that organization well a lot of that has changed and in large part because of ices i think the major changes in terrorist communications have been how they're communicating and where they're communicating in terms of the how there's been a push towards entertainment driven content that is directly inspired by pop culture here's an example of a poster of a very popular american video game called call of duty and right next to it this is a real poster titled call of jihad that extremist groups in southeast asia are actually using um in terms of where they're communicating there's also been major changes for example here's an image from a town called beduria in near calcutta about 300 miles away from calcutta in india those of you who follow the region might have heard of this about a year ago the town was rocked by days of violence and rioting which all started with a facebook meme apparently a hindu boy had uploaded a meme that was very offensive to to islamic sentiments um it led to a lot of very angry muslim residents of the town demanding action be taken they gathered outside around this boy's house somebody took a video of that gathering uploaded it onto youtube with no context and said look these angry muslims are threatening our hindu brothers and sisters that led to bus loads of hindus from out of state coming in which led to more tweets more angry hindus and muslims rioting fighting and and what all that led to was days of violence which led to dozens of deaths and thousands of dollars of damage and property and what we saw here was extremist groups on both sides indian nationalists and islamic extremist groups using this pernicious cycle of social media very effectively in a very savvy manner basically they were posting provocative content on facebook then mobilizing armies on twitter again playing the twitter strings and then uploading one-sided videos of violence without any context on youtube which of course led to more of the same and so on and so forth so what is one possible solution our approach is to partner with comedians particularly social influencers or comedians with large followings online to create entertaining videos that counter the narrative of violent extremism why comedians uh why social influencers um well young people in the parts of the world where we're operating tend to watch more youtube than they do television uh social influencers also have a knack for creating localized content uh owing to and that's demonstrated by the fact that they've got millions of local young followers and of course they're efficient takes about uh three to five days for a prolific youtuber in india for example to create a new video compared that to movies or tv shows it's a much quicker development cycle and why comedy comedy is the most shareable form of content online and you probably know that anecdotally just from thinking about your own facebook news feeds um comedy is also disarming which is important when you're talking about sensitive topics like violent extremism there's a quote by oscar wilder he says uh if you want to tell people the truth make them laugh otherwise they'll kill you and i think that's really appropriate for this and of course comedy is growing in popularity in asia in the middle east and africa and a lot of places where violent extremism is an issue so without further ado here's an example of what comedy uh as a counter narrative tool can look like it's a video we made with a group called east india comedy in india called i want to quit isis well i hope you enjoyed the video just real quick the impact it got a lot of great views uh in publicity but most importantly no negative comments 98.6 positive 1.4 neutral and as you can see from that bottom quote there which is an actual direct message that i and a couple of the comedians received from a young man in india this video was actually able to start a conversation with someone who had gone down started to go down the path of radicalization and that as you guys know everyone who's working in de-radicalization in cv starting that conversation is a really tough thing to do we're also doing micro influencer programs we were partnering with amateur content makers to teach them how to make entertaining comedic and non-comedic counter narrative videos using just their mobile phones we did something like that for you and women in Bangladesh we're doing more in indonesia the philippine south asia so my contact information is available to you i do hope you'll get in touch with any comments or questions look forward to hearing from you sorry again i couldn't be there in person and thank you very much for your time the pleasure of introducing our first in-person speaker uh dr ameha wood is a lecture in journalism politics and communications she researches the impact on radio on women's empowerment and conflict affected areas heywood is currently working on a two-year british academy funded project investigating local radio involvement in angio activities in conflict sensitive areas using the west bank as a case study her research has investigated european representations of the israeli palestinian conflict from 2006 to 2008 she has also examined russian french uk and palestinian audience perceptions of the coverage of the gaza war in 2014 her book european foreign conflict reporting a comparative analysis of public news providers is published by rootlage please help me welcome to the stage dr ameha wood world's global population are online internet use is up throughout the world in africa for example there are over 20 more internet users this year than the were last year mobile phone use is huge and growing there are over half the global population access their internet using their mobile devices there are over two billion um social media accounts your average internet user spends over four hours a day online well these figures are all very well but what about the individual what about the individual who has no access to the internet i want you to imagine just for a minute being one of those people who has got no access to the electricity you can't charge your mobile you can't understand the information on the screen in front of you either because it's not in your local language or because you simply can't read you have no money you've been displaced you can't afford a television and actually having a computer is beyond your wildest dreams even if you could read so i'm talking about marginalised vulnerable groups groups which are vulnerable to extremist recruitment groups which are vulnerable to the effects of extremism where infrastructure has been destroyed if it was there to start with and i'm talking about the radio this is where the radio that traditional medium comes in the radio is that simple box in your kitchen in your phone on your mobile which most of us in this room take for granted most of us in this room actually aren't really all that aware how much we use it on a daily basis and yet for some it's a lifeline for some it's the only source of information they have but the radio doesn't get the information that it deserves social media gets all the attention social media is better social media will use up the radio but radio is cheap it's easy to use it only requires batteries to run you can use it via your mobile and even if you haven't got a source of electricity you can the chances are you can charge up your mobile at a charging bank at your logical market i didn't realize the impact of radio until i started researching it in detail in my work in Gaza in the west bank and now on a large project in in Africa i see how it brings communities together how it informs people and how it unites people and brings people together what i want you to do now is imagine that you're a young person you have no job and you're seeking someone to blame you're seeking a way out and your local community radio station is being paid by extremists to broadcast their message and this local community station is trying to recruit you as a fighter this recruitment process is ongoing and yet you listen to the radio you listen to the top-down messages which are being pushed out to you there's no other source of information there's no other source of entertainment but surely if radio can be used to broadcast propaganda alongside social media and so on it can also be used to broadcast counter propaganda messages or alternative messages messages which can be refined to target specific audiences like you in your language in a language you understand in a style you understand on a subject you can relate to with people present that you can relate to you can even ring in you can have your say you can debate a subject with community leaders with religious leaders and suddenly you're contributing to your community you're contributing to society with your participation you're no longer just receiving messages you're crafting them you are now part of the solution so let's take Ali for example or Ali Meister as he prefers to be known he is well known in his community in Difa in Niger and he's well known because he's often on the large commercial radio station which broadcasts from his town he's well known for being on the radio for talking about his experiences with extremist groups who have tried to recruit him as a fighter he now uses the radio to broadcast counter propaganda messages he goes out into the community to talk to groups of young people to the youth groups and bring to them all together no other medium would allow him or enable him quite so easily to be a presenter to convey a message to the local community to go out and record a program on location and to raise a positive profile to yo