Good morning everyone. If I could ask everyone to grab a seat and thank you for coming out this Monday morning. For those of you who are an ongoing a regular part of the conflict prevention and resolution forum we're doing things a little bit differently. A, it is not the the second Tuesday of the month. Most of us were otherwise occupied last Tuesday for better or worse. So we have shifted things to convene this forum today, this morning, and we're delighted to explore the topic that we're going to be looking at today. We think this is a very important and appropriate topic for the conflict prevention and resolution forum but the broader peace building and conflict management community more broadly. We are webcasting this and we also have for those of you who are engaged in Twitter the hashtag CPRF. So I'm Jeff Helsing. I'm the Associate Vice President here at USIP for our Academy for International Conflict Management and Peace Building which is the education and training arm of USIP and we are very much an active partner with this forum along with Search for Common Ground, SICE, and others engaged in the focus on conflict prevention and conflict resolution. And what we're going to do today is sort of broaden the discussion to include the development community as well as the humanitarian relief community. And so we're very pleased to have with us Matt McGuire, the Executive Director of or the US Executive Director for the World Bank as well as Michael Telhami who is joining us from Amman on the screen and he is with the International Committee of the Red Cross. And then finally Carla Cappell who is the Vice President for the Applied Conflict Transformation Center here at USIP who bridges both the development world as well as the peace building world having recently served as the Chief Strategy Officer at USAID. So our challenge this morning is to really look at the humanitarian development nexus that is increasing and reflects the need to address and work in protracted conflicts. And increasingly development organizations, humanitarian relief organizations, peace building organizations, even security organizations are working in shared spaces and having to address persistent conflicts and have to be mindful of both the short term and the long term needs in doing development work, sustainable development in bringing humanitarian relief, but also being mindful of the consequences of their work in a broader peace building effort or peace building attempt. So what we want to do is really get a sense of how the different communities or the different actors might be able to leverage each other, how that there can be increased cooperation and collaboration and that's very much on the minds of the World Bank. It's something that those in the field with humanitarian relief efforts have to consider and it's certainly something we at USIP and others engaged in the conflict management field need to be very highly cognizant of. So we think we'll have a very rich discussion this morning and I will introduce each of the three speakers now and then we will go in order of Matt McGuire then we'll turn it over to Michael Tahami and then conclude with Karla Capell after which we hope to have a rich question and answer session. So very briefly Matt McGuire is the United States executive director of the World Bank Group. This is a presidential appointee so he was nominated by President Obama confirmed by the Senate June 15th 2015. So he's been in this position for about a year and a half and his position is to represent the United States as the largest shale shareholder on the executive boards of the World Bank Group institutions. He came to this position as director of the Office of Business Liaison at the US Department of Commerce and Dr. McGuire has worked considerably both as a senior executive in the financial services industries but he has also run nonprofit programs here in the US and abroad particularly in the area of workforce development and affordable housing but he's been engaged with Peace Players International I know a number of us are aware of their work and which I find very interesting given his career path he has a PhD in anthropology and we always find in the peace building field that anthropologists have much to contribute to to our discussions and bring a well needed perspective. We will then turn to Michael Tahami who is a regional water and habitat advisor for the near in Middle East for the ICRC. He's been with them since June 2011 and particularly supports the water and habitat activities in the region ensuring that victims of armed conflict have access to water, sanitation and a sustainable living environment. He's particularly focused on and is engaged in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen and the occupied Palestinian territories. He's been a policy advisor in the Middle East with such organizations as GIZ which is the Deutsche Gesellschaft for internationales, the UNDP as well as other international consultancy firms and he's very much an expert on water diplomacy and water governance and is engaged in negotiation support, technical and policy support and capacity building. He's been an environmental engineer and his degrees are in environmental and development as well as environmental engineering. And finally, Carla Capell joined USIP in February of 2016 again vice president for the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation and previously was she was chief strategy officer at USAID and she had also been USAID's first senior coordinator for gender equality and women's empowerment and served as a senior advisor to the USAID administrator. Prior to that, Carlo directed the Institute for Inclusive Security in the Washington DC Office of the Hunt Alternatives Fund and she also served as interim director of the Conflict Prevention Project at the Wilson Center and began her career at the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN in Rome. Her degree in her MA is in public policy. She also has a Bachelor of Sciences, so she brings both a perspective that merges development as well as conflict prevention, peace building and conflict management. So with that, we're delighted you all can join us in Dr. McGuire. We'll start with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much. Is this working? Can people hear me? Okay. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to this discussion in part because one of the things that at the bank we realize we need to do more of more frequently and more effectively is engage with other people, other institutions that are thinking about a lot of the same issues related to conflict, related to fostering stability and all sorts of related topics that I'm sure we'll touch on today. So the opportunity to come here for the first time, actually it's first time I've been in this building, is much appreciated. I want to touch on a couple of things, but I want to start with the very big picture and that is what role the World Bank or economic institutions and or multilateral institutions play in the prevention or the mitigation of conflict generally. And I would go back in a very simple way to why the Bretton Woods organization's institutions were founded and they were founded quite explicitly to increase stability of the world over. I want to take a step back 50 years prior to the founding of the Bretton Woods organizations. I would note that we were in a moment perhaps somewhat like the moment we're in now where there's a waning of globalization. We had seen massive globalization and changes in the economies, not only of a country like the U.S. but of many other countries around the world. We moved into a place where there was a real backlash there and protectionism was on the increase. The U.S. actually hired not one but two successive business people, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who instituted all sorts of protectionist measures like smooth holly and a number of other things, which some would argue led us directly into the Great Depression, out of which we saw increased conflict, increased tensions between countries. One could argue and many historians have. That was much of what brought us into World War II and created an awful lot of the conflict and the fragmentation of the international border that then led to many people saying we need to think about this differently. We need to create institutions that can help stabilize the global economy that can enhance cooperation, enhance discussion between nations in such a way that we can prevent a situation where we're walking into two successive global wars in the space of 30 years, which is what we saw in the beginning of the 20th century. I only go back to run all that down to say we're at a moment where we are in a similar era of waning globalization. There are any number of other developments, including enhanced protectionism and nationalism that seem to be on the rise and potentially a threat to institutions that have the values that the World Bank and USIP have. And the question I would ask is what role do places like the Bank and USIP and other multilateral institutions play in this particular moment? What we didn't have in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the first part of the last century were powerful multilateral institutions like the Bretton Woods organizations. But just as importantly, we didn't have the Organization of American States. We didn't have ASEAN. We didn't have the African Union. I could go down the list. We didn't have this same international infrastructure. And the question that I would pose to all of us is, so what role might we play in mediating some of the forces which some people could argue could be leading us into a direction which will end up looking too much like the first half of the last century. So it's in that spirit that I think about what the World Bank can do and how many of us at the World Bank come at this. Our basic premise would be that by increasing international cooperation and strengthening the economies of developing countries in particular, we can create greater stability in the international order, which leads to more peace and less conflict. I would point out because so many people as they look around the world right now are quite woeful and look at the downsides. I would note that for the first time in 50, 60 years, we have no live conflicts in this hemisphere. Now, we may have some low level ones and people may quibble with that, but we are in a place that we've not been in North and South America in many, many, many years. I would argue a lot of that is because of strengthening some of the economies through liberalizing them in part. I would argue that part of that is because of the increase in democracies over the last 50 years, not only in Latin America, but elsewhere. And I would argue it's because of the support and the efforts that many multilateral institutions have played. Again, I mentioned the OAS. I would mention the World Bank and IFC. We can mention any number of other ones. I would mention NAFTA and I would mention CAFTA and I would mention some of the other free trade agreements that have happened. The U.S. has half of all its free trade agreements in the world or in this hemisphere, 11 of the 22. So I think there are a suite of things which have led to that, but it's to say that I think we have some evidence of what works in reducing conflict, increasing stability, and we ought to play to more of that and maybe make some changes so that we make those institutions and those policies even more effective, but we ought not to pull back in the other direction. So that's the way I would just frame it broadly and thinking about the role the bank might play. Now, I'd say a couple of other things before I turn it over to others and then we can proceed with the conversation. One is that the bank has done some concrete things recently to try to more effectively work with humanitarian institutions and try to think about how we can do more in fragile and conflict affected states. And historically, this is a change. So historically, the bank has not worked in countries where there was active conflict or where things were so transitional that it was hard to know exactly how we went in and what we were able to do effectively. We're trying to engage much more in FCV countries, as we say it, those countries which are experiencing fragility, conflict and violence. And we're doing it in a way we're trying to increase quite a bit. So we have a lot to learn because working in countries that are fragile or that have ongoing conflicts often means you have weaker institutions there and it often means that the government in power is at odds with some other governments around the world, sometimes including the US on a bilateral basis. So the question becomes, how do we really do this? Do we really know how to do it? And we're exploring an awful lot. There are a couple of things that we have done specifically which I would mention. The most important which of which in the last year was creating what we call the global crisis response platform. This is a suite of new products or facilities that allow the bank to work in different ways with countries that are going through fragility and conflict, specifically relating to refugee crises in particular. This is where a lot of the effort began. And so, for example, for the first time in history, the bank has provided concessional loans or very cheap often no interest loans to Jordan and Lebanon, even though they're middle income countries. Historically, if it was a middle income country we were lending to, we lent at below market rates, but not concessional rates. So we decided to do something different here because Jordan and Lebanon had absorbed so many Syrian refugees. And their point to us quite compellingly was we already have issues with our debt to GDP ratios. Why should we pile up more debt when we're doing a global public good of integrating or absorbing so many of these refugees into our societies? Very compelling case. And of course, in the interest and not only the greater good, but of what is right, we got together and said, how do we think about what we can do differently? And this is one of the solutions we've come up with. Now, in addition, we are in the midst of trying to secure the funding, the replenishment for IDA. As you all probably know, IDA is the unit of the bank that lends to the poorest countries in the world. Sometimes they're pure grants, sometimes they're concessional loans. But what we have proposed and we're waiting for all of our shareholder governments to now follow through on and fund is $2 billion more for those IDA countries, which are especially poor, to work on issues related to refugees who come into their countries. You all might know that the more countries in the Great Lakes region, more refugees in the Great Lakes region of Africa, then there are in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, the oldest and largest refugee camp, you probably know is in Kenya. It's been there a long time. But you can go around a number of countries in eastern Africa and find just thousands and millions of refugees. And so the question is, how do we help those countries? And what we have not wanted those countries to have to do is to borrow against what their normal allocation, if you will, from the World Bank, where they're trying to, let's say, build roads and strengthen their schools and do any number of other things. We have proposed this $2 billion additional, specifically for dealing with absorbing refugees who are already there or who are coming in. So the ideas have a new pot of money so that countries can continue with any number of things they were already trying to do to develop their economies, plus they have the resource of this new money as well. We also have proposed that IFC, our private sector lending arm, have a private sector window where it can do more activities specifically in Ida countries. So in this instance, we're trying to strengthen some of those countries' economies that are the weakest in the world, and in many cases often are dealing with either fragility conflict or the absorption of refugees moving out of nearby states. So there's some specific things that we've done there, creating new instruments, creating new facilities, trying to target the places where we can be most effective. The third thing I would say, and then I'll stop, is the other very important piece to all this is how we partner more effectively with humanitarian organizations and with others generally. So we all know that official development assistance has declined by 40, 50% in the last decade or so. And so as we look around, places like the World Food Program and others just have much less money to work with. Many of those who are coming in and trying to work on humanitarian issues. We don't necessarily have a huge increase in the money that's coming to us either. So what we're trying to do is think about how we can more effectively partner with humanitarian organizations, the UNDP, UNHCR, UNRWA, any number of UN agencies, but also a number of other entities that are out there, ICRC and others, and think about how do we connect more effectively so that we continue to do the development work. We shouldn't be going in and taking over humanitarian work, because it's not what we're good at. We don't know how to do it, but we do know how to think about longer-term economic development. We do know how to think about strengthening institutions, whether they're financial, educational, healthcare related or others. So how do we come in and partner more effectively? And we're really looking for ways for models of doing that. That is nascent. That is something that will increase over time. But the president of the bank, Jim Kim, has had a very good relationship with Ban Ki-moon, and Gutierrez, who's coming in, actually started some of this work with the bank early on. So we're hopeful that we'll continue to be able to work with the UN in particular in many places, but we're also hopeful that we'll continue to expand our partnerships and think more creatively about how to team up with private sector entities, other NGOs and so on. So that isn't something we're in the middle of, and I'm particularly curious to hear any thoughts that others have about models that may work, or how lending institutions like the bank, like some of the regional development banks, how we can more effectively partner with one another. We have seen some of this already between the, as I mentioned, the World Bank and the UN, also the Islamic Development Bank. We've been partnering with them in certain instances. We need to do this on a regional bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. There are any number of other multilateral lending institutions that we can work more effectively with, and then there are any number of other non-lending institutions we ought to be partnering with. So we're curious about how that's going to develop over time, and I'll stop there and just say I look forward to the discussion. Great. Thank you very much. We'll turn now to Michael Talhami, and one of the issues that emerges is you note in thinking about how to connect more effectively with humanitarian organizations is some of what the humanitarian organizations often see themselves doing is sort of a sense creating a sort of a short-term hold that will enable development organizations to be able to build off of what they're achieving in more sustainable development ways, and certainly someone who's at the forefront of that is Michael Talhami. So thank you so much for joining us from Amman. Michael? Great. Thanks for having me. I'm pleased to have the chance to join in on this. What I'd like to do is give you a presentation, to give you a bit more of a glimpse into the humanitarian reality from an ICRC perspective in terms of a 30-year reflection that we've recently undergone, primarily out of the realization that there's so many armed conflicts that are running in parallel and playing out in urban areas and there's a tendency for many of those conflicts to become more protracted in nature, and because of that, that's really necessitated a much longer presence for the ICRC, but it's also meant that we've had to engage in more substantial ways, for instance, in urban services. So I will present that to you within the time slot that I've been allotted, and I will end basically with some recommendations on how we can possibly strengthen this humanitarian development interface. So to share my presentation, just let me know when you see it. You're good. Okay, thank you. So this is basically the cover of the the report that we released a little over a year ago called Urban Services during protracted armed conflict. What we're trying to do is really catch the imagination, I think, of a much broader audience than just the humanitarian actors, but to the development, to donors, and to political offices abroad, as well to understand the magnitude of the challenges that are faced by humanitarian actors, as well as by local authorities and service providers in terms of being able to ensure an adequate service. So the first is really that sheer scale of the challenge. Often when we think of humanitarian work, we think of water trucking, we think of bladders that can store water or water tanks and jerry cans to provide water. We think of tap stands, kind of that humanitarian organizations with Ikea style kits set up very quickly in terms of an emergency response to provide over temporary periods of time some limited access to water. But the reality today in Aleppo, in Tiaz, in Gaza in 2014, for example, and in many places in Iraq, is that we're actually engaged in much larger infrastructure. So one, water transmission lines, water infrastructure, large-scale infrastructure. Also on the energy side, it's something that's starting to emerge in our reflection and in a necessity to engage in more than just simply providing generators, but engaging to a certain degree on the energy side of the equation. Wastewater is another one, but also the machinery that's actually needed is much larger than those Ikea style kits that I had talked about earlier in terms of the emergency response. So we're often working with different interlocutors private sector contractors, construction companies to be able to accomplish some of these larger tasks. Additionally, in terms of service providers, we're dealing usually with well-trained engineers that have a significant capacity at the local level, regardless of whether that is in Aleppo or Homs or Dora in Syria, as well as in Adin, Tayez, Sada and Sana in Yemen, for instance. And so that has necessitated a different kind of technical engagement and technical competencies on our parts. Logistically speaking, our logistical capacity has really had to be reinforced. If you can imagine providing chemical consumables for water treatment to service providers, for instance, in a city like Aleppo where you have between two and three million people on a regular basis, as well as the spare parts and other consumables, year after year for the last four years, you need a very robust logistical setup to be able to do that. So the important thing here is that we've really expanded our thinking that it's not just about hardware, it's not just about infrastructure, but when you're working on essential services we have to factor in the people and the consumables as well, and sometimes that also means training and capacity building. Now the duration of the challenge, this is another key factor that has increasingly over the years driven us into this type of urban engagement. Now this is not a quantification in years of how long necessarily, from a legal standpoint, these conflicts have been protracted, but this is how long it's necessitated an ICRC presence in terms of water and habitat assistance, and so in Afghanistan we've been there for 30 years, Iraq 25 years, Gaza for some nine years, Syria five, Yemen around five, and the Ukraine a little over two. Those are just a few examples, mainly from the region I work in, but also taking one from outside. I think the third recognition that we really like to highlight is the interdependencies that exist between services. When you think of rural type of engagement and humanitarian engagement in the past, typically people were relatively self-sufficient, they could, they required assistance, but they could develop more easily coping mechanisms that are at times harder to develop in urban areas. Often what we find in urban areas is people turn on a light switch or turn on their faucet, they don't necessarily know where those services come from, and hence they're much more vulnerable to disruptions. It's more difficult to actually get adequate coping mechanisms, and so here we look at the provision of water which requires electricity to be provided, it also needs electricity to be able to pump wastewater to wastewater treatment plants, and of course hospitals require electricity water supply and an adequate wastewater supply, just to name a few. And obviously this is more intersectoral than I've given you, but I've kind of laid out the water and habitat perspective of that. If we look at kind of what's become the bread and butter of a lot of humanitarian organizations work, or at least those that are engaged in urban services, typically it's geared more towards the rehabilitation of infrastructure, and that is for many reasons. One, it's something that's visible, it's something that donors are willing to fund, and it's something that the media obviously focuses quite a bit on. If it's water infrastructure like this water reservoir or water supply networks underground, like in this case, or for instance a hospital that's been destroyed, all of that is visible and under the current mechanisms slightly more easy for us to engage in. Now the problem that we find in terms of protracted conflicts is that you have indirect and cumulative impacts that are also taking place, and so if you look at this picture here, it's I don't know how well you can see it, but it's something that's difficult to actually capture in terms of a picture. This happens to be in Iraq after some 10 years of sanctions, and you see the level of disrepair a lot of the infrastructure has fallen into simply because of a lack of proper operation and maintenance. The direct and indirect effects basically make up a cumulative impact that becomes harder to reverse during times of protracted conflict. So here's another picture of basically the infrastructure that's fallen into to disrepair and then a pumping station that happens to have most of its parts looted from it. So the complexity of this, the reason I'm highlighting this is because it requires the ICRC as well as other humanitarian actors that are engaged in urban areas to deal with more than just direct impacts, and I won't spend too much on this slide, but if you basically look at the damage to electrical transformers or the damage to water booster stations that you see on the bottom side of the access on direct impact, you can see that service provision is declining over time as those direct impacts have set in. On the top is the indirect impacts, and that's what we often don't see unless we're actually there on the ground working with service providers. You see staff that are in fear, possibly there's bombardments in the area of the infrastructure they need to operate, maintain or repair, lack of safe access, which leads to staff discontent. What compiles that then is also the fact that often bills are not being collected for the service provision, potentially central governments are not transferring additional subsidies or funding to service providers, and possibly salaries are not being paid, which feeds into not only the staff discontent, but also the brain drain. You have coping mechanisms in terms of illegal connections that feed in to service provision decline, as well as the completion of spare parts and consumables, and all of this can be further compounded in the water sector with dual use restrictions or sanctions or or embargoes. What this means is that those indirect and cumulative impacts need to also be addressed if we are to maintain or stabilize the service, and to be to be really honest, a lot of times what we're doing is we're just trying to slow the rate of service decline until the general situation stabilizes enough that more engaged action from potentially development actors can can can feed in there. It's not enough just to look at those technical aspects but also the the politics of a highly securitized operating and environment. So we we see shrinking humanitarian space in terms of the lack of safe access. We see this in places like Syria and Iraq and Yemen, even in Gaza in 2014. We look at other actors that are working a step removed from the conflict. Many humanitarian actors, for instance, in terms of Syria that could be working from from Jordan or Lebanon or even other countries, which necessitates additional level of coordination, but also a different analysis in terms of remote management that is beginning to take hold for many humanitarian actors. I wouldn't be working with the ICRC if I if I wasn't to also raise the fact that there's there's challenges based in terms of the lack of respect that we see for the rules of international humanitarian law. The reason why that's important here is mainly in relation to civilian objects, be it infrastructure objects like water for civilian the civilian population, water installations, wastewater installations, and those challenges still arise in part from the lack of respect for IHL and the weaponry used in urban areas. And so with this what we've been trying to do is not just work on the product, which is the rehabilitation of infrastructure, recognizing that many donors are getting tired of paying for the rehabilitation of the same infrastructure time and time again and working on the protection related side of that, the process related side in terms of documenting potential violations of IHL as they pertain to civilian objects and raising that in a confidential bilateral dialogue as a function of prevention, trying to prevent the root cause of the destruction of the infrastructure before having to actually engage. If we look at the humanitarian consequences I'll quickly go over just a few that we see in terms of the lack of access to the provision of services. Here you can see basically service provision declining over time as a result of direct and indirect impacts. You see these little Ts that are there which is basically a humanitarian organization doing some sort of repair work on the system with the service provider, but over time you generally see a declining trend in terms of the service provision. When you look at the impact that has on the civilian population it obviously depends on the access they have to alternatives and other coping mechanisms but typically it has a negative effect in terms of in terms of public health. Additional to that there's also displacement that's created from a lack of access to services maybe not primarily because of that in some cases I would say yes but in other cases it feeds into a whole host of reasons why people become displaced. This is a picture of displacement of IVPs in Syria where the ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent has retrofitted buildings that were not completed prior to the war to be able to house tens of thousands of families so large-scale displacement. We also see in terms of what Matt was mentioning with the World Bank's engagement in countries like Jordan so Jordan has one of the largest refugee camps in the world the Zaatari refugee camp here you can see the main avenue down the middle of the the camp which is filled with shops and stores and barbershops and then the urban sprawl that comes from that which has developed over a very short period of five years but what we don't often hear or it's hard to imagine is also the stress that's placed on urban services and the civilian population in these host communities as well in Jordan and Lebanon almost 80 to 85 percent of the population is living amongst the Jordanian and Lebanese population this picture this picture if you can see it I think does a particularly good job of helping us imagine what that stress looks like on services and people so the solid structures are the houses Jordanian houses and in their yards they've accommodated basically Syrian families up to 10 to 15 people now are living in those tents prior to the onset of the refugee crisis in Jordan most of those people were not receiving an adequate quantity and quality of water and service provision you can imagine how much more difficult it's actually become in this particular area because of the the sharp increase in the number of people relying on those those services so when we take that into consideration and specific relation to to ARM complex one we're looking to strengthen compliance with IHL as a prevention component as I said we're also looking at a broader recognition that it's not just about infrastructure but it's about people hardware and consumables and with this it requires a different set of competencies and ways of engaging with actors that possibly some humanitarian organizations are not used to engaging with whereas I would say if we look on the development side development actors are used to engaging with service providers we're looking at a level of complexity that we haven't seen in the past in terms of the interconnected nature between services so water wastewater and electricity as well as hospitals and primary health care centers and we're looking at enhanced ways of emergency preparedness and response making better use of the limited resources we have to have a longer term impact in these in these protracted conflicts and so urban resilience we find is a function of protection that protection dialogue as well as the operational responses that we we put together and to share a few thoughts on that that I think can can help feed into the framing that Matt provided as well as Jeff one broader discussions around the paradigm to potentially replace the relief rehabilitation development continuum siloing these is proving to be not useful I hope that this presentation gives a glimpse into the level of engagement and potentially where synergies could could form in terms of the level of engagement we have with development actors in current in terms of humanitarian operations we're looking at the length of current planning periods when you're engaged on big infrastructure basically we're looking at the necessity for more than a one year fiscal period in terms of funding at times if damages occur late in the year not having to wait till the following year to do the the repairs or to be able to engage and to have some continuity in the spare parts and the consumables that you're providing definitely multi-year programming is a necessity relationships with local actors and local the local population is incredibly important to build a stronger resilience within these systems on our side the humanitarian side I think the technical capacity and competency must be improved we're pretty good on the water supply side but power supply and wastewater we lag behind slightly reinforcing logistics capacity I mentioned that earlier it's not enough for us just to talk about the need for multi-year funding but we really need to unpack what multi-year programming would look like and we need to shift from a solely reactive emergency response to a more proactive long-term more structured response at least until early recovery sets in or until parts of protracted conflicts stabilize enough for other actors to engage and so that more structured support that I'm talking about is a lot of what I've talked about in this presentation and then my final slide is that regardless of the type of intervention and the approach that's used the stronger local partnerships that are necessary with service providers need to still be based on humanitarian principles neutral independent impartial humanitarian action additionally with the constraints that we see it's not only about innovation and technology but it's also about innovative approaches to get around those political challenges on the ground and to provide for more enhanced remote management mechanisms to gain access to the civilian population and help provide for their needs more effective interaction and coordination between development and humanitarian actors this is something that we've been talking a lot more about and obviously what we'll talk about here we see this as important not only in terms of the onset of crises so for instance if we look at the onset of the crisis the the conflict in in Yemen it was more than apparent to us that you had actors like the world bank kfwgiz and the Dutch development cooperation that had a 20-year plus history in in Yemen it would be ridiculous for us not to try to tap into a lot of that a lot of that knowledge and the studies that have been done to help inform our humanitarian responses at the same time I think we need to be more assertive in reaching out to development actors in early recovery in order to not only have some sustainability to the interventions that we've implemented but also then to to bring them along on the developments that have taken place during that protracted conflict and I think that there's also room during protracted conflicts even if it is a a step removed from the conflict that with the type of type of analysis that we need to factor in in terms of water resources management for instance or energy supply to actually have a more sustained engagement of development actors actually during the protracted on conflict as well and the final word I'll say in terms of the presentation is the main aim of this is to help then secure development holds against the the development reversals of protracted conflict and I think this is just as worthy of a task if we're talking about for instance asymmetric warfare and government held areas as well as it is in terms of opposition held areas often what we see is a much more sophisticated understanding of the control of territory by armed non-state actors realizing basically that to do so and to keep the population somewhat appeased you have to provide a governance structure and you also have to provide adequate provision of services and that is something that definitely we can speak to more but it's something that's a reality that we see in many of the conflicts in the Middle East today thank you great thank you very much Michael and thank you for really grounding a lot of what we've been talking about in the specific on the ground challenges that you and your colleagues face so we'll now turn to Carla to also help us think about the peace building perspective in in trying to understand this nexus between development and humanitarian relief thanks Jeff and thank you Matt Michael let me add my welcome to Jeff's to USIP it's good to see all of you here and this is an important issue which we've been grappling with over the last few months and I'll circle back to that a little bit later in my presentation I think that the picture we've gotten painted is a really important snapshot of the challenges that development and humanitarian actors are facing right now in the world today and for me this was really driven home most recently at USAID and I'll start with an anecdote because I was visiting Jordan and so appropriate that we have you Michael here in around 2013 and so we were past the period with the Syria crisis where folks thought that they were moving to Jordan for six months and then returning to Syria and so they brought nothing with them and it was gradually there was a realization that this was longer term I don't think there was a realization that it was going to be quite this long term but what I saw within the US agency for international development was the need to adapt a local office from what had been focused for a very long time on a very big development portfolio that was looking at the long term development of Jordan the integration of displaced populations including Palestinians and Iraqis to recognize the influx of Syrians and what the implications of that were both for the structure and operations of the USAID mission and the development challenges that Jordan the Jordanian population Jordanian government were going to face moving forward and what that meant for the mission and operations of the organization on the ground and ultimately what it turned into was a fundamental transformation in the operations of a long term development focus to juxtapose a long term humanitarian assistance effort on top of that and you see today in USAID Jordan two deputy mission directors one focused on humanitarian assistance one focused on long term development but working in tandem with the mission director and the US ambassador in that case on how you toggle between the two in ways that enable effectiveness and there are all kinds of complications related to for example the color of the resources that you get for different kinds of operations on the ground on the politics and the intersection with the as Jeff was alluding to the defense mission of the US forces on the ground the planning missions that they have and how that interposes with engagement with international actors multilateral and those who are working in different spaces so if you're interested in that I'm not going to dwell on it now but it has a lot of very real implications for the operating environment telescoping out from that though what you see is that this is emblematic in Jordan and elsewhere of a broader trend and Michael referred to the longevity of humanitarian assistance missions for example in many countries and when we were looking at this issue within USAID what we saw is that the development countries that we are working in that is the places where we maintain the presence were increasingly fragile in conflict affected states so the nature of nations that were getting development resources were the intersection with the nations that faced the kind of fragility the absence of resilience and placed them at risk in different ways than if you looked at a standard developing country environment had been the case over time that had implications for resource flows that had implications for the preparedness of our personnel it had implications for the intersections with the defense community the likelihood of conflict and how you needed to treat the development mission within that environment and that was further rendered more complicated by the changing nature of the humanitarian mission so you did have as Michael eloquently spoke to increased swath of urban refugees as opposed to those in camps with implications for development investments in all of those places and so what we did was having put in place a series of global goals and as you can imagine if you're looking at a long-term development assistance mission global goals related to health related to education related to combating climate change was a global goal related to addressing fragility and boosting resilience and that was the first time that we within the development assistance community there were confronting the juxtaposition of these three goals that is the humanitarian relief goal the long-term development goal and the need to confront state fragility and conflict and to deal with that in a very intentional way and it played out again in terms of our in terms of our personnel in terms of our financing and resources and in terms of the way we were approaching planning with important implications for the way we thought about how we work together with our colleagues in humanitarian space and in the in the space related to conflict and defense as well as implications for the way we simply undertook a development mission and I think Matt you spoke to that eloquently in terms of some of the facilities that have been set up in the World Bank and elsewhere I should say that I think that this shift in terms of the way we all look at the problem is really need we need to think of this as related to global self-interest because what we know is that first of all the maintenance of stability and the building of resilience within these countries will be absolutely essential to the achievement of global goals like the sustainable development goals and how we end extreme poverty we know that those fragile states are not going to be able to end extreme poverty unless we have a preventive mindset and we are unable to think about long-term development goals at the same time that we're meeting humanitarian needs and increasing that degree of stability we know that as well we're not going to be able to manage those intersections unless we begin to think about the ways of doing business differently and we begin to think about what has been here to for a set of stovepipes as really parts of one continuum or a set of actors that need to work together cooperatively and synergistically so we've had within USIP ongoing something called our fragility study group which we undertook with Carnegie and CNAS so it really was intended to do the crosswalk between development defense and diplomatic efforts with a good dollop of attention to humanitarian relief operations and humanitarian assistance and I want to recognize Lynn Wood who has spearheaded that effort for us under Nancy Lindbore's leadership here to say what does it mean to have this growth in fragile states and how do you tackle that in ways that are smarter and lead to better long-term outcomes and there are a couple of really important takeaways one is there needs to be a real focus on prevention that is how do you get out in front of some of the challenges that have been highlighted by Michael and Matt in their presentations to say we can plot a trajectory that both buffers us from the implications of either short-term or protracted crises such that they don't take away development gains with such profound implications and I would sort of parenthetically add to what Michael mentioned vis-a-vis infrastructure and service provision to say there's a whole other soft side of development gains that are just wiped out whether that's in terms of child and maternal mortality lifespan education the statistics for Syria are tragic in terms of generations of development that have been lost as a result of this crisis and we'll take an incredibly long time to recover with implications by the way for the ability to maintain service provision because you're undermining the next generation of people who would have run all of those services so that prevention is really critical the second is really increasing the resilience and stickiness of those recovery efforts so you saw on Michael's graph the sort of downward trajectory how do you soften that as he mentioned and then how do you how do you really build back faster and better and you're only going to do that by increasing the ability to connect the development and the humanitarian relief and the diplomatic efforts to build that trajectory back more effectively and fundamentally what you'll need then is better coordination and structures that enable that connective tissue and in a different effort we're working with ICRC and other partners around connecting the dots between political negotiations and humanitarian negotiations and in making a better doing a better job in connecting those you actually enable us to do all of our different tasks with greater efficacy and effectiveness and then the final point I would end with which I came through I was in a meeting last week around Syria future so I was projecting out scenarios for the future of Syria and what happens and what was interesting was the scenarios varied from everything from Assad is no longer present to there's a consolidation of power in the in the Damascus to Aleppo corridor and it was a folks that were really focused on the diplomatic defense and development efforts and what came through loud and clear was that we as an international community knew it needs to do a much better job of working with local actors on the ground because if you look in Syria even for example you have people making life go on every day notwithstanding the incredible violence and displacement and yet we as an international community are not necessarily effectively engaging with those folks and those folks don't have any choice but to engage on in the conflict on the humanitarian relief operations in the delivery of emergency services and in the recovery and reconstruction and so in working more effectively with those who are already forced by circumstance to cross cut across those stove pipes we can really build a better mousetrap and I will close it there hopefully opening up the floor for a good discussion and questions great thank you very much and I think we have some heard laid out some some real challenges not only as a question of coordination and and sort of shifting the mindset to be more preventive but obviously resources leadership strategic thinking that takes us from the local as a way to prepare and coordinate more integrated missions and where does that where does that nexus lie and what are the responsibilities and in a sense at the challenges how can we in all of our different organizations etc take on these these challenges should it be sort of the big organizations like the World Bank like ICRC do we need in a sense more effective coordination a special coordinator which in some cases at the political and negotiation level have there's been some success in that area is that also necessary in the development area so I think there's a lot of very interesting things that have been raised and so why don't we open the floor for questions just ask if you introduce yourself and your name in your organization I heard today my private capacity and this is a question for a document wire so what troubles me are those conflicts that don't fit within definitions of international armed conflict on international armed conflict so for example you raised the Americas and and certainly they're very proud to say that's one of the most specific places on this entire club however the reality is Honduras of El Salvador Guatemala you have more deaths per day than you do say in Iraq so and which also results in people fleeing so and to the point where you have children fleeing and then that also then affects the U.S. and how we address all that so my question to you is I was quite intrigued by your crisis response platform and whether or not that you allowed that and you within your modeling and within your analysis or whether it's simply limited to the very narrow definitions that we have regarding conflict thank you yeah you're hitting on the biggest challenge that I've seen and thinking about the question of displaced people in that so people always talk about 60 million refugees in the world right now well 20 million of those have crossed a border 40 million of those are in their home country and so internally displaced people are one what are you actually the larger part of the problem they're away from their homes they're away from their existing jobs or their kind of ordinary communities and yet we don't have as robust a set of interventions there within that country so I would say that's the area where we need to do a lot more thinking a lot more challenge as you would expect it is harder to have a conversation with a government that perhaps is the source of that conflict or is an active participant in whatever is driving that conflict than it is when someone has crossed a border is another place and is now dealing with all the political challenges that come from absorbing people who are from another country so the different set of problems that one has to engage and I'm going to get to the second part of your question in a second but I do think this question of how do we think about internally displaced people is a huge one that we've not done nearly enough work on as an international community or even as the multilateral lending community we have not figured out quite how we're going to intervene and quite what we're going to do there then there is the question of people who are leaving country like you say moving from the northern triangle into whether it's Mexico or Brazil or the United States or in some other places in the Caribbean how do we think about that and that I would argue is certainly an issue I think we've never dealt with some of the lower scale forms of violence around the world than we have with official armed conflict and I think of that a lot of my original research actually was here in the United States around the redevelopment of public housing and all the questions that we engage on thinking about public violence and how it can manifest in developing countries we often don't bring a lot of that thinking to bear for countries that have very very high homicide rates in their developed countries not just the U.S. but there are others who often are grappling with these things in urban environments and we don't necessarily know how to tackle that from a policy standpoint in part because we think of it as fundamentally different well if you're in a community where you are seeing people die on a very regular basis of far too high basis the mental health challenges the economic challenges all the other things really are quite similar and I don't think we've gotten our heads around that but the the answer to your question is no we do have not thought about our global crisis response platform in terms of people who are leaving places that have let's call it discord or low-level conflict in their home countries be they the categories around a country that is in conflict are a little more narrowly defined and so we've not thought about it in those terms now what we've tried to do in putting these programs together is leave flexibility so that we know we can't anticipate what's going to come down the road so at the board we were very clear with ourselves that what we don't want to do over the next 10 20 years is create keep creating new facilities every time there's a new problem what we've tried to do is say how can we think about some of our lending programs some of our monies being more flexible so that when another problem arises we don't have to reconvene as a board and come up with a whole new strategy and come up with a new product but we can utilize some of the flexibility we're trying to build in build in right now so I think the question would be alright there's where there could be some flexibility on that so I'll give you a couple if for example pick a middle income country in South America where to get the influx coming into their country that crosses a certain threshold of people from the northern triangle countries there is a case that could be made this money could be applicable to them and they could perhaps utilize it we just haven't tested that we haven't gone down that path yet if the U.S. were to say we have a million people who have come the U.S. is not a borrower from the World Bank so full stop we can't access that so it's going to depend on the country but I think that we'll have to be tested going down the road in very particular cases to see if it's something that the bank can help with or the Inter-American Development Bank or some of the others so it's a long winded answering your question did I touch on the core issues yes you did and could you be when you go back to the World Bank can you then also be proactive and say hey we need to start looking at this because I anticipate it's going to come and the issue and it shouldn't I mean again I'm not in your world and it would seem to be that it shouldn't be that you have to wait for another nation's day to say hey we need some help one thing I would add is the situation in Central America for example offers greater opportunities actually for preventive measures to stop the slide and in fact there have been interventions even with taking lessons from domestic experiments with gang violence prevention and exporting them to Central America with documented evidence of success so in that case where you don't have widespread violence a scale-up in investments in prevention actually can pay off in ways that it maybe cannot so well where you have widespread violent conflict in a war zone for example yes ma'am maybe Barbara Hendry and USAID also probably in the NLT colleges and it feels very encouraging that we're having these sorts of conversations and we had a big global moment quite recently at the World Humanitarian Summit where we talked about the need to bring humanitarian and development practice closer together and to get out of our silos and as we've heard very eloquently from our ICRC colleague practice on the ground is grappling with the sort of long-term humanitarian challenges that we're now facing but it feels that as usual thinking and practice on the ground is running ahead of our bureaucratic structures and even within USAID we do still struggle with some of our institutional constraints with the fact that our money does come in different silos and in different flavors and that we still do have this divide so I guess my question is is it a question of thinking about special coordinators to breach the divide or do we need to think about more systemic change and that includes systemic change in our global institutions including the World Bank and I have a question for Dr. McGuire about how really systemic you think this change within the bank is how much is it actually touching on operations but particularly at the U.N. we have a structure with our U.N. operational agencies that is not fit for purpose to tackle these kinds of challenges yet so I wonder do we need to think about big systemic change or is the kind of step-by-step special coordinator route the way to go So I'd be curious to hear Jeff's thoughts on the special coordinator I'll give you my thoughts you're absolutely right bureaucratic institutions move a little more slowly here and so it's one step at a time I think the creation of new facilities is the way that at least the World Bank changes so it changes through actual operations in actual countries where people craft something and can show success and then other people pick up on that and that's how change comes it comes a bit slowly at the bank so I think that is we're going in the right direction I think the question there are two questions I would ask one but is that going to be rapid enough for the problems that we're facing or do we need a much more catalytic change in the way we do things I don't know that I have a fully developed opinion on that but what I would say is the questions that were very interesting and what Michael was talking about is if you look at the actual functions of who is good at what and who can actually get things done an awful lot of what Michael was pointing to is large-scale infrastructure development and the question would be so who has experience in that who is really good at it then you might look at violence prevention and how that ties into political stability and maybe the USAID is very good at that and can advance those models the infrastructure development perhaps the bank is very good at so I think in thinking we ought to be thinking less about what's humanitarian what's development what's rehabilitation what's reconstruction and think more about what are the actual functions that need to happen what are the actual operations and then whose best position to go in and work on those things I would my bias and let me just back up one thing I would say that I think a lot of people have heard but it's worth reminding ourselves is that refugees are almost never anywhere short-term I mean the data depending how you slice it is that most refugees over the past 60 years have stayed in their host country for nine, 10, 17 years again depending how you slice it the point is you're talking a decade no one comes for a year and 18 months and goes back home interested I'm oversimplifying here but you know the point is the data is very clear people are in new countries for a long time the other interesting thing is it's a bit counterintuitive but those people most likely to return to their home countries are those who succeed economically in their host countries because you're not going to go back to a place and rebuild your house unless you've accumulated some capital and you have some money and wherewithal to do it if you're on a purely subsistence basis it's much harder to go back home so getting back to the point of self-interest a lot of what we're trying to explain to countries is the more amenable you are to giving people work permits and towards allowing them to set up some small businesses and to accumulate money and the more welcome you are the more likely it is that they will leave if that's your end goal it depends country to country so I think we have to think quite differently about what our end goal is we have to think about who is good at those various things and one of the pieces there that gets back to Michael's presentation is so who has expertise in actually working in these environments so we do an awful lot around urbanization all over the world at the World Bank and in many instances we're quite good we have much less experience in urban environments that have the daily violence that Michael is talking about and that are in the state of institutional disrepair if you will as compared to the ICRC so part of the question is well what are the things that we can learn what can we incorporate into some of what we're doing or how do we think about models where perhaps we do some of the basic financial analysis and we do some of the procurement and the contracting but some of the on the ground operation is run by somebody else I don't know but I think we need to think about exactly what needs to be done and who can do it as opposed to who's responsible for X, Y or Z the one thing I'll say and then maybe Jeff will want to jump in and argue with me the reason I'd be wary of a special coordinator is these big bureaucracies have way too much bureaucracy already and the idea of laying in someone else who will be a coordinator makes me nervous and slowing everything down so I would be biased against that but we certainly try to do donor coordination in any number of countries certainly in Amman we have with USA Aid and DFID and any number of others all sorts of efforts to try to coordinate some of what we're up to I'm a bit wary of having someone else in there as a traffic cop on all that but I'd be curious to to hear your thinking more well part of it is on in some of the political missions one of the obstacles has been sort of the notion of weak too often that you have actors that actually have an agenda that reflects their particular set of objectives or goals on the ground and what in successful cases of coordination where you've got someone who is sort of thinking at a bit of a higher level to understand the consequences of you know the development objectives as they relate to political objectives as they relate to security objectives and if you let one sort of drive a mission without sort of getting others to see the you know what the perspectives of not an issue so a step removed from the the actual armed conflict itself and when you look at that what's interesting is that you look at the response over the last five years in Jordan and Lebanon and really development organizations and humanitarian organizations fall predictably within their comfort zones so if you look at most humanitarian organizations in in Jordan they're engaged primarily within the Zatri camp the Azra camp within the camp settings although 80 to 85 percent of the refugees actually are in the host communities and to a large extent I think a lot of actors were thinking well it will take time but the development actors will adapt and as Karla said you know USAID as well as many other organizations now have a kind of humanitarian arm as well as the development arm to tackle some of those challenges but it's not just about that it's also about the level of comfort and so a lot of organizations on the humanitarian side struggle to be able to engage in urban settings like host community settings because it naturally brings along with it a whole host of challenges that they're not used to dealing with you wouldn't or I would think you wouldn't expect to see the ICRC actually engaged in host communities primarily our mandate is within the arm conflict settings and yet in a country like Jordan we are and primarily that's a function of gap filling but it's also a function of the fact that we've developed competencies in conflict areas on urban services for instance where we can apply that then in a setting like Jordan because there isn't a substantial enough response there and to do so I think that provides an opportunity then to really not only liaise more closely with other organizations be it the World Bank or others but it also provides kind of the low hanging fruit I would think in terms of being able to explore further options of collaborating on such joint initiatives primarily because you don't have those access issues that you do in conflict areas and maybe finally I would also mention in terms of what the ICRC usually refers to as other situations of violence one of the first individuals questions that was asked was raised on this and I think that is important if we look at migration above and beyond just IVPs but also to look at migration in terms of urban violence this has also been an area where the ICRC has started to explore and what we find is that there's direct applicability in terms of interventions on urban services in urban violence settings in areas that are not characterized as armed conflicts in terms of the approaches that are used and the neutral and partial and independent humanitarian action to be able to engage in those areas and so I think those humanitarian principles hold firm even if you're looking at those types of settings great thank you we'll have one last question just about out of time so please Hi Eric Pallard uniformly of the World Bank working on a project on inequality and globalization I also spent some time at the bank working on writing about natural hazard responses to natural hazards which have similar effects of creating refugees and I'm thinking back to Haiti after the earthquake and what happened in Haiti after the earthquake was the most resilient response to the earthquake were the local organizations were local people and not the international organizations I won't go into that that debate and yet I and I do hear references to we're listening to the voices of the poor which is the World Bank publication of a few years ago and I would like to see these organizations these international organizations spend more time supporting not themselves and their projects but supporting the resilience of local organizations of local actors I'm not sure whether there's no question in there I just wanted to throw that out there thank you great you want to well I was going to say I appreciate it and I think you're right I was an anthropologist I always and by the way Jim Kim is an anthropologist and for a time as Chief of Staff was an anthropologist I mean I think the the bank has shifted a bit from the days where it was all economists you know kind of winning all the debates we don't win all the debates now but at least we have a perspective I think thinking about exactly who can get what done in which locale and starting from really the ground up perspective is the way to ensure success over time what I've seen at the bank that cuts against that in some ways of course is the bank's mandate is very clear we lend to governments to central governments now there's some opportunity to lend to subnational entities and we're trying to do more of that but there is in some way that's a very powerful incentive for an awful lot of the bank's activity to go through not just the central ministries but often the finance ministry itself so you know I also am trying to be realistic about how much the bank would be more engaged let's say with local NGOs or other sorts of stakeholders we certainly push as the U.S. the bank to engage with civic stakeholders all the time to make sure that we're really hearing the voices at the very least if not thinking about other ways of doing implementation differently that goes through some other channels but I would just say the bank is one that's probably less likely to engage with a wider group because ultimately our business is lending to the central government and working through them most directly but but you're right if we don't think about these broader set of actors we're going to limit our success over time great just to conclude I think it's very heartening that these conversations are actually taking place and this is not the only forum this is not the only conversation just in the last couple of weeks I've been involved in a number of similar types of discussions both here and recently in Europe and there's a lot I think to continue to talk about and there obviously needs to be significant enhanced communication and coordination and there's a lot we can learn from each other but the key is recognition of the need to really work at that nexus of development humanitarian relief but also there are security actors including militaries that are interested in these conversations the conflict resolution the peace building community as well so I think this is really very much the beginnings of what hopefully will be very productive conversations that will lead to both better understanding but also enhanced coordination and thank you very much Matt for your willingness both to talk about this but also to be part of that conversation and Michael as well I think your presentation really helps ground this in some of the real challenges that exist in these persistent conflicts so I think this was a very rich discussion and on behalf of the U.S. Institute of Peace thank you all for coming out and we hope to be able to further this discussion going forward so thank you again to Michael, Carla and Matt and have a good day everyone thank you thank you


Let us open it up. Open the floor up to reactions, questions, comments, thoughts, etc. Amr has a microphone there. I don't know if the Twitter stream is worth invoking, but we're all in a room, too, so we can speak. Jeffrey Jarvis. Laura, I'm fascinated by the notion of the two-way effect of architecture and our notions, our definitions of public study and privacy. I've learned recently the impact of the invention of the hallway in the 18th century English home, or 17th century English home, and the impact they had on the creation of a notion of privacy. So in present architecture, not only of physical spaces, but also of the web, I'm trying to turn that back around and say, how is that changing? We start by trying to impose our given present definitions of privacy and publicity onto these new systems. I'm wondering the other way around, how do you think these new systems are having an impact on our definitions of privacy and publicity? Yes, it makes sense. Actually, as an example of the 19th century, what was at stake is that these borders could be done quite easily, only through architecture, for the main type, through space and architecture. Actually, as you said, a hallway or a vestibule, or these different spaces which make the... And now, and this is really a big issue, how much architects have to deal with these other elements, because I don't think that architecture is going to change so much as a physical space in a house, for instance. I think the main rooms are going to stay as they are, but the possibility to go into a house through different devices like internet, this is surely an important thing. And I think this is also the talk, or what was saying, were simply obviously, with new devices, you can look into the garden. Can I pick up a little bit on this, because I also find that sort of notion of liminality to be a very sort of powerful and generative metaphor. But I think, I mean, in your own talk, also, you know, pointed to Van Gennep and those kinds of places from which to take sort of notions of liminality and thresholds. And one of the things that's really important in there is the social processes of separation and reintegration that are entwined with the spatial. So as you noted, it's not simply a spatial notion, it's a social notion as well. One of the things that I've sort of struck by, or inspired by the question as well, is thinking about the notion of privacy at work in the 19th century English home is not everyone has privacy in the 19th century English home, right? Exactly. I think we're agreed. I mean, it's very different below stairs than it is than it is above stairs. And that's the whole point. And I but I think that's really important for us to continue to bear in mind as we talk about these things is that there's not purely technological arrangements, but also the social arrangements that it takes to give meaning to the to the technological. And so I worry a little about the sort of the rhetoric and language we use. I was thinking in John, when you were talking about the use, even just of the word blurring, that sort of suggests almost as if a private domain and a public domain are pre-given and that somehow we're dealing in a world, a technological environment, which is blurring a boundary between domains that exist. And I'm not sure that actually is the case here where all there's always a flux in which processes of separation and reintegration take place. This is the sort of then GANEP argument for when we carry it over is that it's about processes of separation and reintegration. I think actually the other example you gave was really is really useful, right, which is say all the sort of Fourth Amendment debates, because the idea of like, oh, dear, we're living, we haven't figured out what the what the right balance is in cyberspace suggests that we there's any other domain in which we have figured out what the right balance is. Again, I'm not terribly sure that we're good at that because, you know, we're always in this process and the evolution of space is a perfectly as an excellent example for an architectural domain, we're always in the process of reformulating what for us for different us's at any given moment is a balance that works. Now that process of reformulation, I wonder if it feels like it's happening that much more rapidly now in the sense of coming from the zone of actual physical architecture. There may be differing ideas of architecture as time goes on. Architects think about things differently, but you build a space in large part, you can reconfigure it a little internally, but the space you build is the space that sits there for 20, 30, 100 years. Austin Hall, not a bad example. And people come to familiarize themselves with and then be shaped by whatever the space might encourage or discourage in their behaviors. When we now make the analogy to the online space, and I think already we found how rich the analogies are between the two, one artifact of the online space being online and all is its plasticity, that it can be reshaped, reconfigured all the time, that the space is a service, it's not a product, which makes it hard to even talk about it totally as a space. And when the English house is built for English people to live in, we kind of know who the customer is. When an online space is shaped for us to use, especially one for free, we're kind of the customer, but what's that famous aphorism now? If what you're getting online is for free, you're not the customer, you're the product, you're the one being sold. And if you're operating in a space like that that can be reshaped at any time, the Facebook I have today is not the Facebook I had yesterday because now there's Otto, something or other that I'm supposed to go change my settings, but I'm already bored, so I'm just going to leave them the way they are. I don't know how much those constant reconfigurations of spaces for motives, it's almost like the builder of my house continues to get a vote. I made one choice about who would build my house 20 years ago, and that builder is still hanging around, oh, you lost your windows. Sorry, it's an improvement, trust me, live with it for two weeks. It's like I paid you, go away, and yet they're still here. I don't know how much that constant reconfiguration plays into things. Well, again, I suggest the constant reconfiguration is a sociotechnical phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. It's rather like that you can't step into the same stream twice. The same way, the reason Facebook today is not the same as Facebook yesterday is not purely because of what Facebook did. Heraclitus for SA Facebook. Heraclitus 2.0. The reason Facebook today is not the same as Facebook yesterday is not purely because of what Facebook did, but also because of what everybody else and all your friends did on Facebook that shapes the genre of what you will do today. It was intended for college students to know each other, but then we take it to foment revolution, that kind of thing. And I think John's example of the interoperable status update really nicely points to the sort of problems of the ways in which what I say on Twitter is different from what I say on Facebook is different from what I say on Foursquare is different from what I say on Facebook. Or at least it was until we interoperably put them all together. Yeah, well, as I deal with different audiences, different constituencies in different publics, I have certain kinds of investments in both the separations and the integrations of what is going on. So that reconfiguration is a socio-technical phenomenon in which the technology does change, the opportunities change. But our interpretations and our understandings of what genre forms are being enacted here are also up for negotiations. Yes. Speaking of socio-technical phenomenon, we have these vestigial norms at the front that we shouldn't be online while we're actually on the panel, although John is pushing that envelope. Well, the rest of us are happily clacking away, which means there's a great level of interest in the room being siphoned into cyberspace, for which we need to build a pipe to pipe it back into the physical room. So I want to invite people not only to raise their hands if they have comments, which I actually saw two hands up so we'll get to you guys, but also feel free to raise your hand and represent for something you saw online, which gives you the out to say, this isn't my view, but this seemed interesting to me. Here's something I want to put on the table. So I want to invite you to do that dynamically as a way of trying to reconnect what I suspect is a very active virtual space back to the physical one. Over here, Nell Breyer. Hi, thank you very much. Jonathan, is this on? Yeah. It's there, darling, up. Laurent, I was going to ask you if you could just speak very directly to what you feel the purpose of a threshold is. And a little bit to Julia's comments yesterday, she's talking about the idea of crawling and this notion in the art world of crawling from gallery to gallery and what the possibilities, and if there are any analogies, absent or present in cyberspace where a threshold is or is not providing the same kind of function.  No. Okay, purpose of the threshold. The purpose of the threshold. I try to show it that it's exactly this double meaning of connection and of separation, which can be dealt in many different manner and what I try to show through this little talk that this unity of space as it perhaps was, in the English as I'm not sure about this has been diluted in a series of different spaces, these are physical spaces or these are virtual spaces which interconnect in some way. I still think, I'm quite convinced that there is no distraction of the traditional architectural space but it has been overloaded or newly interpreted through its behavior. Is there more you wanted to come back with now? I was just interested in how that translates or what's missing when you have direct immediate arrival at locations online and there is a lack or a different type of experience of the threshold. Like you go- Actually, I think the danger is the highly specialization of the threshold. When you can come into a space where you can do only one thing, I think there is a huge loss of independence and there it becomes in some way. But if now's analogy is we kind of apparate like Harry Potter from one site to another online. A site is loading, it's taking too long so it's like dub dub dub dot some other site dot com and it's like, okay, we'll take that away and here's this and it just appears. Are you asking kind of, could one imagine a form of transition that respects the idea of a threshold? And that there's important things that the threshold provides, not just spatial but communal and intellectual and financial that I was asking about purpose in not just a spatial sense, but in a- How could a website be more like the science center sort of luring people in gently? From where you were into where you are and where that transitional experience actually then creates a very neutral zone which is informed by the identities of the people in it not by the context of the space that you are suddenly arriving. So there's really an important idea of lingering from the past, becoming into the present, then meeting with someone else who has a different past and in the present so that the, that's where I feel like the notion of a threshold has incredible power, political power as well and if that's missing that's why I went back to Julia's comment about crawling. If there's some lack of memory in our accessing point to point locations online how does that change identity, public brow, those things that you're talking about? I was gonna say in some ways this might be a question for Paul because maybe to make it even more concrete could you imagine a website where when you're on the website there's some visual representation of where other people contemporaneously visiting the website which you normally don't know about, right? It's like being in a movie theater with a wall around you while you watch the movie. Other people visiting, you get to see where they're coming in from. Wow, there's a bunch of people pouring in from AOL to this site I'm visiting, it must not be a cool site, I'm out of here kind of thing. You know, that's, that's... Well, I mean it's certainly interesting. I mean I'm thinking actually, webmasters already have access to all this information. Correct, and they click choose to, right. You know exactly where people come from. Right. This is information that's available to some if not to all. I mean I think that you know, I think we have to be very careful about the importation of spatial metaphors, powerful as they are, because we can't escape space or time. And so those things are powerful for us. But it's been a very long time since anybody browsed the web with only one window or only one tab, right? So I'm not just in one place, I'm in many different places simultaneously. But I do think there's a question about the appropriately historicizing what it is that's going on. Both where the website came from itself and where people came from. That, let's see, very far, not getting very far with this, but let's see, the one thing I did want to add though is we have to recognize too that one of the power of these things is their dehistoricizing ability. So that's actually often one of the things that we're about when we're, we're working online. And I do worry about this idea that we want to eliminate the opportunities for a creative reconfiguration of space by reintroducing too many of the things that we do. The metaphors can be both liberating and of course confining. And it's funny, when you talk about tabs as being multiple spaces at once, in at least my experience, it's like, no, it's a bunch of stuff that I only get to visit one thing at a time. Sometimes I'm like, if only I could configure my screen so that I could see multiple websites at once, like arranging windows in, and I'm like, wait a minute, that was the point of windows 3.1. Do you remember there was like an arrange thing under window you do, has anybody ever used arrange? Right, what is with that? It's like meant to be a fundamental function and yet we never actually go, I think because each is too small. You just buy more monitors, Jonathan. You just got five monitors. Yeah, I know I do, I buy more monitors. That I finally solved my arrange problem. You're right, with more monitors. So I can't wait for the laptop of the future, which is like flump, flump, flump, and then you're really in the zone. It's like an iPad. David Weinberger. So I want to ask an obvious question. On the grounds that you can't even step into the same stream once. So local. That's not an obvious question, David. Well, that is a cryptic question. No, it's not a question. It's an intro to the question. I say, okay. You start with a cryptic thing and then it obviously is a question. Real architecture is always local, right? In a completely literal sense. And so it's entirely possible and reasonable to use a threshold or an ambiguous ambivalent place wrong and we see that happen. The web obviously is global. Privacy, as Judith was connecting, the norms of privacy have been intensely local and definitive of cultures. So is there any hope for actual privacy norms to settle down in the spaces that are put up on the global public web? Start with the lawyer. I was gonna say, start with anyone else here. There are brilliant people in there. Fair enough. Does that mean we need to re-ask David's question because people are only sort of paying attention to it, knowing somebody else would answer it? David hit us one more time and now everybody realizes they might be called upon to answer. Given the global nature of the web, is there any possibility, and given the intense local nature of privacy norms traditionally, definitive of local cultures, of culture, is there any hope that we will come to global privacy norms that can be counted or relied upon within spaces on the web which are inherently global? Thoughts on that question? Oh, right. Ken Carson. One, it's working, yeah. One thing to think about in trying to answer that is a question I was gonna ask is, that was touched on before, is thinking about how privacy and private and public spaces are related to the function of creating communities. And I think that most communities have historically been intensely local, but now communities are being created that aren't local at all. And I'd like people to talk about the relationship between public creation of communities and private creation of communities. I think I still consider that a committee of the whole refinement and question. So if people have thoughts on that. Yes, please. John Taysum, a Harvard fellow. I think the answer to the question that David just posed comes back a bit to the presentation from Laurent. And I didn't expect to be an expert on anything today, but on English houses, I'm definitely an expert. The beginning of private-ness, if you like, in the sense that Laurent was mentioning, I think was started with the chimney, the invention of the chimney. Because with the chimney, you could finally have a private space. You didn't have to be in one big communal hall. And from then on, the whole class distinction meant that the servants had no privacy. And people who had ownership had privacy, they put themselves in a room. And where it touches back on David's point, I think, is an architectural one. If you could build large factories, you could dominate economically. And where that ties back to being online, I think is a very pressing problem, because it seems to me that the way we've architected the public spaces on the web, mean that once again, the poorest people will have the least privacy. And I'm really curious to know what the panel think of that point. So this refines the question of, you could see, if not global norms, a global equilibrium in which those who can afford it get some particular level of privacy respect, and those who can't, don't. Thoughts on that? Way over here? I'm a lowly intern. But I think that the question- Wait, did you just introduce yourself as a lowly intern? We all use names here, unless you were trying to illustrate the difference between rich and poor. I think that the question that, to me, in my personal experience is more important than the creation of spaces online is the creation of spaces where people use these technologies. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East where internet cafes are by far the norm, and laptops and personal computers at home are extremely expensive and out of the realm of possibility for the majority of people. And I think that's a kind of publicness and private-ness that is, at least thus far in this discussion, a bit absent and something about access and capital that really changes the kind of publicness and private-ness that you're creating. And I think it's, there are private forums. There are ways of making your Facebook inaccessible and accessible to certain people, and there are ways in which diasporic communities are using these to recreate the local in a globalized setting. And I think that that is worth studying, but I also think it's worth considering what I would do, like when I'm at the library, I feel particularly self-conscious about using Facebook because someone might walk by and say, you're using Facebook, you should be studying. Well, what about if you're in Syria and everything is an internet cafe and the person behind you could be a muhabarat, a spy? I don't know if that's... No, absolutely. And in fact, it probably has not escaped the notice of many regimes that want to achieve a certain level of Fourth Amendment-style ability to surveil, but don't want to eliminate internet access entirely and don't want to count only on filtering your private connection to do it, to see an internet cafe as a way to... Because you can't see the secret police, as long as there's one other person, or maybe even zero other people in the cafe and you're using somebody else's machine, you can't be assured of that privacy. And as you say, you feel it enough as a privileged person in a library, how much more must be felt? But I actually should ask you back, is your experience in those cafes that it's kind of a quiet room, clack, clack, clack, clack, kind of the way some of those gamer spaces are? The gamers are not there necessarily to have, hang out with each other, but to be online. Or is it actually a feature? People wander by, hey, what are you looking at? That's kind of interesting. It actually fosters connection that exists among the servants that sometimes Batman's sitting across the long table from his date. That was the first Batman movie? Michael Keaton, remember that one? God, I'm getting old. But very big house, very wealthy, but very isolating, precisely because it's not a shared space. I don't know what your experience was in that cafe. Sorry. Well, I think it's different, and I've been thinking about this a lot, specifically with the Syria example, because I would Skype from computers, and so whether or not I had black screens around, like, I'm sorry, walls, like miniature walls around the individual computer, you're still speaking out loud. And I think that for people who in Syria who are trying to communicate with families, for example, outside, there's a privateness to the clack, clack, clack in what you're doing in the email you're writing, and then the speech act, which inherently sort of alters the threshold. And it also definitely depends, I don't know if there was an interesting New York Times article, like several weeks ago, about China, and people who sleep in China cafes. So I can only speak about my personal experience, but I think people do play with the spaces. It actually also calls to my Nell's original point that was described as historicity, in that you could be using the computer as somebody with a nice blue passport to defend yourself, to go, I'm visiting Facebook to see if I can get there, and then the next poor person who uses the thing after you might get pegged with your historical usage. You could see that as a problem. There is actually, there's not to call it an iron key that we've been playing with that you're meant to be able to walk up to any computer, plug it in, boot from this USB key, and use it totally privately, regardless of what's on that computer, whether or not that's privacy or just security theater is another question. Paul, you've been wanting to get a last word for us. Yeah, well, I wanted to pick up on this stuff, mainly because one of my students has been doing a lot of work on with new media activists in China, and actually it started off looking at World of Warcraft players in China, and I think some of the examples that come out there really go back to one of the premises of David's question, right? The web is global, but your encounters with it are always local. They're always happening in particular kinds of places. For the Chinese World of Warcraft players, many of whom do go to public spaces to play alongside other people, not necessarily with other people, but near other people, and that's important to them. One of the things that's fascinating is they're playing World of Warcraft, they're playing an American game, and they know it's an American game, and it comes from an American company, but they also talk about it importantly as a Chinese game because for them it fundamentally embodies the principles of Guangxi and sort of the shared practice, of shared commitments, of sharing and mutual responsibility, and they say, this is a Chinese game. It has Chinese values built into it. So your encounter with these things was always intensely local. And so it does go back to David's question, about what kind of expectations do we have for privacy norms? Well, there's certainly not going to be global agreements about what happens, and they don't even necessarily need to be given that even in this sort of global cyberspace, your encounters with it and the actual practices always happen in particular places which in turn can be a feature as much as it is a bug, a federated system where you can choose the communities and the norms you want to subscribe to would be better. And where those global practices are opportunities to give you to reimagine yourself in your own position. Please join me in thanking our panel for getting us off to a great start today.