Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to the launch of the Global Terrorism Index, I believe is the sixth edition of the Global Terrorism Index. The report provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism over the last 20 years, covering periods from the beginning of 1998 to the end of 2017. The Global Terrorism Index is produced by an organisation called the Institute for Economics and Peace, and the index is based on data from the Global Terrorism Database. The Institute for Economics and Peace is the world's leading think tank dedicated to analysing peace and quantifying its economic value. Today we have two speakers, Serge Strobant of the Institute for Economics and Peace will introduce the index and present the findings about the key global trends in terrorism. But before that Professor Andrew Silk will deliver a keynote address to contextualise the index and frame the discussion. Before I introduce our first speaker, just a few practical housekeeping points. First of all please switch your phones to silent, but if you want to tweet using a handle at IEA please feel free to do so. The addresses by both speakers will be on the record with the question and answer session afterwards. It will be subject to Chatham House Rules which means you can use any information you get during the session but you cannot attribute it to anybody or identify any of the participants in the discussion. Our first speaker is Professor Andrew Silk who is from Atlone I think originally. He is Professor of Terrorism, Risk and Resilience at Cranfield Forensic Institute at Cranfield University in the UK. He has a background in forensic psychology and criminology. He has been involved in working with practitioners in the field of counter-terrorism and organised crime at various government departments, law enforcement agencies and security agencies mostly in the UK but some other involvements in Europe as well. He is internationally recognised as a leading expert on terrorism and conflict, especially low intensity conflict. He is the author of a wide range of publications. We are very glad he can be with us today so please welcome Professor Andrew Silk. Thank you very much for the invitation. I will keep my comments fairly brief and succinct. Serge will be talking about the specifics of the report and some of the trends that are connected to that. My comments are probably a bit more general in a lot of respects and just setting the scene a little bit. I am very keen that we have reports like the one Serge is going to talk about because it highlights trends. There is often an assumption when we are looking at terrorism and counter-terrorism that what happened yesterday is going to continue to happen today and will happen again tomorrow. There is an assumption for example that Islamist terrorism is going to remain the major threat facing Western Europe. When any examination of history tells us that isn't the case, that the type of terrorism we face and the ideologies which drive it and the motivations of the different actors changes over time. Probably one of the most famous theories on terrorism is known as the four-wave theory and some of you might have heard of it. This theory was developed by a guy called David Rappapour who is based at UCLA and is the nearest thing I have seen to a living Santa Claus. That is exactly what he looks like. David came up with this theory that if you looked at history from the 1860s onwards you could see four waves of terrorism which were driven by different ideologies. You had an initial wave kicking off in Russia in the 1860s that was driven by anarchist revolutionaries. Motivated by what we would refer to as socialism or communism but essentially they wanted to overthrow an autocratic regime. This led to the anarchist wave of terrorism which spread beyond Russia into Europe and into America where you had revolutionaries attempting by propaganda by the D to overthrow governments in a range of different countries. Now what was interesting about them is that they had a shared ideology but in modern terms we would have called it a distributed network, i.e. organizationally very very loose links, shared ideology but what was happening in one country didn't have much awareness of it in the next one, vice versa. That wave was superseded by what David Rappapour referred to as the anti-colonial wave and that kicks off pretty much with World War I and lasts up until largely the 1950s and 1960s. Now activities around here in 1916 and then later 1919 to 1921 was very much part of this anti-colonial wave and Rappapour made the point this was essentially a reaction to the old European colonial empires which had seized control of large parts of the world and gradually as the 20th century progressed lost control mainly because they were impoverished as a result of fighting the living daylights out of each other in Europe in the First World War and then the Second World War but they lost these empires. This second wave was superseded in turn by what Rappapour referred to as the new left wave and essentially what he meant here was that this was the Cold War wave where superpowers were sponsoring terrorism in different countries and were essentially fighting each other through proxy terrorist conflicts and insurgencies and then finally towards the end of the 1970s into the 1980s Rappapour identified the religious wave which was religiously motivated extremism. Today we look at it and we see it primarily associated with Islam but back in the early days there were all types of religious groups including Christian, Buddhist, another fundamentalists all of whom were embracing them embracing terrorism the further the cause. Now one of the things that this tells us is the terrorism changes over time on average Rappapour's waves tended to last between 40 to 50 years before they were superseded by something else. The anarchists had their heyday early on but you continue to find anarchist groups around today. Anti-colonial groups had their heyday but you still found remnants in different parts of the world today and the same with communist groups and Marxist groups. So what I'm I suppose the point we're making is number one the Islamists won't be the number one threat forever. Eventually they're going to be superseded by something else and we need to have a think about that as we look at trends. What will supersede them? The other one is in terms of thinking about the causes of terrorism. I think this is incredibly important and something that often gets overlooked. Now surge in the report is going to highlight that there are a number of factors that are associated with terrorist conflicts and currently the four best predictors we have that terrorism is going to emerge in a region are these. Population size. The bigger the population the more likely is you're going to have a terrorist conflict emerge in that region and the bigger the population growth the bigger the increase you're going to or the bigger the increased risk you're going to face. Now that's worth thinking about in terms of the next 50 to 100 years what parts of the planet are going to experience the biggest population increase. It's not going to be Europe. Europe is more or less stable. The only country that was growing in Europe was the UK but given half a chance of Brexit they'll bring that under control and they'll be stable just like everybody else. So Europe is stable. Most of the West is stable. The big increase is going to take place in Africa and Asia. So we're going to see big population increases there. We're particularly concerned about about what's called or what's known as youth bulges. So this is a youth bulge in your population demographics. A big increase in the population aged in the teens to 20s. Societies which experience a youth bulge in the population tend to be very unstable. There's an increase in crime there's an increase in instability there's an increase in violence. So countries currently which have big youth bulges include places like Syria and Yemen which are an absolute chronic mess. If you look at where youth bulges are about to hit it's pretty much all across Central Africa. So there's absolutely just not alone some big problems on the horizon. What else do we see? Other factors which are known to associate are human rights abuses. The higher a country or region scores on measures of human rights abuses the greater the risk of terrorism. A lack of political representation. And less political representation in society has the greater the risk of terrorism. And then one of the other remaining factors that correlates well with risk of terrorism is contagion. If the region next door to you is experiencing a bad terrorist conflict that increases the likelihood that you're going to experience a bad terrorist conflict as well. Doesn't necessarily mean that the guys who are causing trouble next door across the border and also start destabilizing you but possibly they act as an inspiration or a model for a distance within your own society to follow. Now those are the factors which we have which are reasonably good at predicting terrorism. A couple of factors which aren't in there crucially. Well number one, ideology. Ideology does not predict terrorism. Radicalization, as we understand it, does not predict the emergence of terrorism. And these are, this is troublesome because most European countries certainly their counter-terrorism strategies are built on the assumption that ideology and extremist ideology is the primary or the major driver of radicalization and thus the major cause of terrorism. The scientific evidence to back that up is weak. But nonetheless it keeps getting flagged as being one of the primary root causes of terrorism. Looking down the future just briefly over the next 50 years what are the trends we should think about in terms of thinking about the fifth wave? What replaces the Islamists? What becomes the new big problem? Well number one, we look at population. Where's population going to increase because the conflicts are going to come out of those zones? We already know Africa, Southeast Asia, Asia, those are going to experience the big population increases. There's also going to continue to be fairly substantial population increases in the Middle East so we can expect that to remain volatile. Another factor which is going to be increasingly important is climate change. The US military has quite correctly identified climate change as a strategic threat to the US. Now the US president is working on it. But the military are absolutely correct. Climate change is going to have an impact and terrorism and low intensity conflict. It already has. Some of you will be familiar for example with the fact when we look at the Syrian conflict. The Syrian conflict is often pitched in terms of spillover from Iraq, Islamic state being an offshoot of al-Qaeda, Islamist ideology kicking in and all the rest of that. And that you know there may be a role for some of it but that overlooks for example that in the five years between 2005 and 2010 Syria experienced the worst drought in its recorded history which completely destroyed agriculture in eastern Syria leading to a collapse of the local economies and a mass migration from eastern Syria into the cities and towns. At the same time that you get this collapse you also have a massive influx of refugees coming in from Iraq. Now this put extraordinary pressure onto an infrastructure which was already not in particularly fantastic shape and it collapsed. And what you have in the aftermath of this is essentially a civil war emerging where ultimately Islamic State are able to exploit the situation. But for most people environmental collapse and climate change doesn't feature into a discussion what happened in Syria. Another even brilliant example and I'll finish on this point is the rise of local harm in northern Nigeria. Now if you look at a map of northern Nigeria most maps of northern Nigeria are dominated by Lake Chad. So Lake Chad sits in the corner a massive lake that roughly the size of Scotland. Now that's what it looks like a most maps but in reality Lake Chad doesn't exist. It is gone by and large. It is completely dried up due to a range of different factors. Now imagine a lake the size of Scotland disappears. What impact is that going to have on the populations living on the on the edges of that lake? You had massive environmental collapse taking place in that region which preceded the rise of local harm and yet in most analysis people aren't looking at that instead they're talking about the influence of Al Qaeda, the influence of Salafist ideology and ignoring the lived reality on the ground for the people and communities that are living in that area. Looking ahead to this century I'm a pessimist when it comes to efforts to prevent climate change. I don't think we're going to be able to keep it below tree degrees. I think it's going to be higher. I think the impact that that is going to have is going to be catastrophic in a lot of areas. I think regions where you combine big population increase major climate change effects this is going to become for me one of the big drivers of terrorism and insurgency as we look forward for the next 50 to 100 years. To talk about current trends and where we are now I'll pass over to Serge. Food for thought there and I'm sure for questions later on but first we will have Serge Straubens introducing the Global Terrorism Index in some detail. Serge is director of operations for Europe and the MENA region at the Institute for Economics and Peace. He's a former colonel in the Belgian Armed Forces. He has an academic specialization in political sciences, international relations, security and defence, global risk analysis, crisis management. He's assistant professor at the Vesalius College in Brussels. He's a senior academic specialist in global terrorism and radicalization in Belgium and Europe and he will now present us the findings of the GTI. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for a very good introduction. I mean I'm doing this type of presentation throughout Europe and I have to say that this was if not the best one of the best presentations but Andrew I really thought you were going to crack the joke about Donald Trump. I've been recognized also by the US Army as the strategic threat to the United States as he is going on now. Thank you very much for having me here today and having the Institute presenting in in Dublin. It all started with a text message to my good friend Brendan O'Shea sitting in the back then connected with Claude I in the in the front and this is us having this presentation today so thank you for supporting my good idea and making making this this up and we are really really pleased to be here today. Presenting in Dublin for me something presenting an island for me something really really really special. I am myself a former rugby international for Belgium which means absolutely nothing but still I also heard my anthem wearing my national shirt so Brendan and Garrett know very much that I'm really interested in in the second best team in the world being Ireland and this is why in a very rebellious way today I'm wearing also my all-black socks so jokes apart let's start let's start so I just click on this yeah there we go all right so this is the Institute for economics and peace so we are focusing on quantifying the measuring peace and also identifying the economic drivers and benefits that are correlated correlating with with peace. We have six offices so the headquarters are in Sydney Australia I'm adding the office in Brussels there is another European office in the AIC we have an office in Arrares in Babway and we have an office in New York that is connected to the office in Mexico City as we produce on the annual basis also a Mexican peace index the main publication of the Institute is the global peace index that is produced every year in June and published every year in June. Next to this data-driven research we also invest a lot in communication and in the propagation of the results of our research so reach about five billion people through a regular media and we have more than 800 million internet or social media hits and as been said before so we do this we also produce research for a lot of international organizations and we have the chance to be ranked in the top 15 most influential think tanks in the world. The global terrorism index this is the sixth edition this year we rank one in the 63 countries same amount of countries that are just ratified the global compact of migration this morning but this is representing more than 99% of the world population the remaining countries are those that are too small either in geography or in population to be able to be part of a statistic analysis. We measure the relative impact of terrorism and I will give more explanation this on this later terrorism is one of the 23 indicators that we use to compile the global peace index. We do it at the Institute for Economics and Peace and this is guided by a panel of international recognized experts. This is the methodology so we always start with the definition which is the illegal use of violence or the fear of violence against so by non-state actor to attain a political economic religious social goal. So it's violence the fear of violence and intimidation. So we start with the global terrorist database that is compiled by the start consortium the University of Maryland in the United States. This data set goes through the filter of four indicators in the number of incidents number of injuries the number of people get killed in the attacks and also property damage and we give a certain weight going from 1 to 3, 3 being the weight and this is given to the amount of deadly casualties so over the four different indicators. We also recognize terrorism as a specific type of violence so it's just more than just the act of violence it's also the the persistent sentiment of vulnerability and fear of the violence. So this is why over a period of five years we all every year we divide by two the impact of an attack or the figures of the years before just to represent the persistence of of this sentiment of fear and vulnerability. We also so use those statistic techniques I would say so logarithmic bending to make sure that we are able to represent the relative impact so it's when you order your level of terrorism is zero and you go from zero to ten there is a huge difference compared to another country where they are 1000 they go from 1000 to 10 so this logarithmic bending allows us to to really represent or present the relative impact of terrorism. This is how we are able to compile the global terrorism index and then we cross check that with our databases on socio-economic databases to really make sure that in the trends in the evolution in the shifting balances we really identify the trends and the drivers of terrorism. So there we go with the result. Results always good and bad news. So the good news is that last year we saw a reduction of the relative impact of terrorism by 27% on a global scale since the peak of terrorism so since the peak of the fort wave drew so we have a decline by 44% since in the last three years we have seen that 94 countries improve their scores so at a better score on the global terrorism index while 46 were deteriorating and we saw in the total amount of death in Europe fell falling by 75% so this is really an important an important decrease in Europe in the past year. The bad news related to that is that the amount of incidents increased in 2017 so we have we have had more terrorist attacks in 2017 but a drop in 75% drop in the amount of casualties resulting from those from those attacks. So this is a direct results from I would say the impact that the international community has had on Daesh in Syria and Iraq where this capability to to prepare to plan and to conduct command and control large scale attacks or really new type of attacks disappeared over the past over the past years and now we are facing another type of threat which is more on-grown that is not so organized and that is not so effective so we have more attacks but less effective attacks over the past over the past year. What we also see and although it's still a very small it's a very small phenomenon phenomenon compared to the figures of global terrorism and I will show you a table later on with with the with the figures we see a rise in far-right extremist national extremist terrorism as I said the figures are not comparable to what we see on the on a global scale but over the past four to five years we have seen a permanent increase of this type of of terrorism and terrorism is still a global phenomenon with 67 countries suffering more than one casualty. Let's continue so we have the usual suspects the five countries recording more than 1000 deaths and we are exactly there where where you left us so Nigeria, Syria and Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and we see Somalia always also coming close to this top five so five countries with more than 1000 deaths 19 countries with more than 100 deaths Somalia and Egypt are recording the the biggest deteriorations in their scores in both cases this is linked to one single attack so for Somalia this was a car bomb next to a fuel truck on a market in Mogadishu killing more than 580 people for Egypt attack on a mosque by al-Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula killing more than 330 people. The third line is a line that I have to explain every year for the past six years now 99% of the terrorism death occurred in countries that are either engaged in violent conflict or exercise or practice political terror or high levels of political terror on their population so when we are talking about terrorism in the west we are looking at the last percent I think this is almost clear to to all of us and what we also see is a shift to east Asia and southeast Asia so terrorism is now developing more and more in in Asia and east and southeast Asia. We have seen that ISIL or Daesh as we want to call them the number of casualties that they produce was done by 52% last year but still Daesh is the most deadly group in the world and Iraq and Syria are the biggest improvers minus 5,500 deaths in Iraq and minus 1,000 deaths compared to 2016 in in Syria. So this is showing you showing basically showing the fourth wave but when you look at the fourth wave you will also see that we have like many waves within the fourth waves and so when we look at this part of the slide so this after the exponential increased until 2014 and then the decrease since 2016 either we can conclude that we are very good at we became very good at counterterrorism in 2014 or that this decrease is just the start of a new peak that might emerge in the coming years so depending on how you look at it if you look at the different waves or if you just look at the success over the last two three years this success is a combination of external internal action so of course crushing Daesh, crushing the threat where it emerges but also reinforcing especially in Europe reinforcing the capacity and the efficiency of intelligence and security services in Europe also. We have seen in the past two three years that more attacks have been foiled than ever before so this is also a double message either we could say a very positive message telling the the population that we are now very good at counter terrorism and that we foil and that we stop most of the terrorist actions but this is also confirming the high level of threat that is posing by by terrorism, that terrorism is posing to our societies. We can also see when we see this evolution and different mini waves that the start of a new wave is always an act of foreign policy and I won't say I won't link it to an intervention or an invasion somewhere in the world but we can see that when there is an influx on on this on this graph there is always a political decision and most of the time an act of foreign policy that is either provoking an increase or a decrease in the relative impact of terrorism. So those are the deaths from terrorism by country we see that Afghanistan is now number one accounting for 25% of the casualties. This is disturbing because Iraq has been the number one in this list for almost all for all six editions of the the terrorist index and when we open this time window in the last 10 to 15 years in more than 80 to 90% of the cases Iraq was number one in this list. So we see a clear shift from the Middle East to Asia East Asia and we also see a clear deterioration of security situation in Afghanistan after the NATO intervention and in the new type of mission that is more in support of the local security forces. What we also see even if terrorist is really increasing in Afghanistan we also see an increase in the attacks against military forces security forces and police forces in the same country. So the conclusion you can draw from this is that the Taliban but also Daesh active in this country see now a new window of opportunity to be more assertive and to have more effect in Afghanistan that it was capable to do and possible to do in the years before. The largest decrease is in death so Iraq 2016 the Battle of Mosul Iraq was still the largest increase this is now stabilized and we see a direct effect Syria is following and then you can go on and on and on Nigeria is only number four uh number five sorry on the uh no number four on this side minus 300 but you need to know that Nigeria was the largest decrease last year with a drop by 80% in the amount of casualties in 2016. The largest increase in death Somalia and Egypt already spoke about this and we look at the countries down there we are exactly in those regions where that you were talking about before. The four deadliest terrorist groups so Assad Daesh is still the most deadly group but a drop by 52% we see comparable movements here for the Taliban and we still see a decrease for Boko Haram also but what is disturbing is this permanently evolving and increasing impact of a group called al-Shabaab in eastern Africa. This is the economic impact of terrorism so of course this is following also the the the graph of the relative impact of terrorism as such it is estimated at 52 52 billion in 2017 so we still see a decrease compared to 2016 this is just an evaluation a very conservative evaluation of the impact of terrorism linked to the four indicators that we use to create the index so we spoke during the the lunch before about an an evaluation in the UK of the economic impact of those this this permanence recurring attacks in in London for example those figures do not account for the investments made in in counterterrorism because one it's very difficult to define counterterrorism because it's really reaches from all the four pillars that you have spoken about and a lot of countries do not provide the data about their their investment so this is just the four pillars so now if we look at the trends this is still we still see that bombing sex and explosives and also armed assault are the most likely to be used tactics by terrorist groups globally so now this is a very interesting site among many others of course this is a very interesting one when you take the the top three regions impacted by terrorism for the men are region south asia sub-saharan africa these three regions over a period of 15 years account for 92 percent of all terrorist attacks when you look at the position of europe we come sixth so top three asia pacific russia eurasia and there comes europe look at those figures and please do not get me wrong every death accounted on this slide is one too many it's one too much that's for short so but when you look at those figures and especially in comparison to the top three when you go down to places when you go to top eight over 15 years then you can ask yourself if this is really the first threat to our security all right when you look at those figures over 15 years i personally i'm asking myself the question is this really the first threat to our security there is a difference and i think this is an unacceptable difference between those figures and those figures is that those figures are very mediatized so a lot of media attention for those figures and the other evolution there is that both both europe and northern america are living in very sick in a very secure environment so we have been living at peace for more than 70 years now we all have this perception to live in a very secure environment so when you get targeted in the this last little bit of a percent of insecurity that that that is impossible to to really to really take away from our societies the perception of vulnerability this perception of fear is even stronger than other regions where i would say terrorism is becoming has become a daily routine when on the day of the attacks in Brussels in 2016 i received two text messages one from a friend in Kabul and one from a friend in in Baghdad asking me if i was okay and i answered yes i am thank you very much but do not expect that i'm going to send your three text messages a day to ask if you are okay in the coming weeks so there is a difference in perception also between those regions where terrorism is really a threat to security and where those regions where terrorism is perceived as a threat to to security so this so those average scores so you see an evolution there also between the different region this is just confirming what we have done before the type of attacks again so you see different type of attacks that is confirming the i would say the likelihood of the use of bombs explosives and armed assault but this is then distributed per region we also see this evolution this is a very interesting slide because you see that the two graphs one one graph is depicting the evolution of the amount of death goes by armed conflict and the other one is the same type of evolution but for death goes by terrorism and you see that there is it's all those are almost the same the same graph or at least parallel graphs so clearly linking the two concepts so armed conflict and terrorism there again by by conflict there again we try to see so this is a cooperation with ucdp so the University of Uppsala in in sweden they define war as a conflict to at least the situation in which there are more than 1000 deaths per year minor armed conflict 25 to 1000 no no conflict below 25 deaths per year and we clearly see that in case of of war in case of an armed conflict this is where death occur in in the first place also the evolution of death from terrorism in western europe and northern america so western europe is the blue part of the of the slide just to give you an idea of the evolution in the last years and there again confirming the previous slides we see of course a larger in a larger impact because of the the neighborhood of the vicinity in western europe than it was than it had in northern america but still an increasing uh increasing level in northern america icill activity in western europe and north america so the the plain blue the plain blue part of those histograms is showing you uh terrorist activities from other groups or even other ideologies than the islamist ideology other groups than than daesh and then you see a different distribution per country where in france for example almost all all death or all the activities are related to the ash and then if you shift to other countries uh you see that this is not uh not the case anymore spain for example but also the uk you will see that the ash is not the first sponsor of terrorism in those in those countries so a very different distribution over the the different countries this is showing you the evolution of far right extremes in and terrorism death over the past 10 years and you clearly see that in the past five years this is where after 2011-12 this is where the figures start to increase to the level that we have today that is almost five to six times higher than that we have four to five years ago so i said when you look at those figures not comparable at all to the to the global global figures but this small phenomenon is is on the rise so are we looking at the shifting uh landscape so this is the evolution of death in uh southeast asia in the global terrorism index the iap has recognized three new hot spots or three hot spots where we should keep an eye on uh for the future so maghreb and uh and the sile so really in the northern part of africa uh nigeria as such but another type of terrorism that could emerge over there and then of course uh southeast asia this is the evolution of terrorism in uh in Myanmar and the philippines so you clearly see over the last eight years the increase of the impact of terrorism in Myanmar and especially also in the philippines on Mindanao first two reasons for this of course Daesh that is migrating to the south southeast and also uh communist guerrilla communist rebellion uh still active in in the country you need to uh when you look at the actions of the international coalition against Daesh starting 2014 15 and of course 16 in the middle east crushing crushing Daesh it's very positive when you look at the figures uh in in europe for example but it has uh a less positive consequences for for the rest of the world you need to try to imagine uh being uh strategically of Daesh or strategic military leader so you look at your group of foreign terrorist fighters which can be considered as your specialized troops or even special forces and you see that you i mean syria and araca lost what are you going to do with those uh with your special forces are you going to send them back to the country origin so for most of them to uh to the region or to europe uh or going to use those forces and move them to other parts of the world where we see a lot of socioeconomic factors of destabilization and for most of the country in which in which they are present also low levels of governance already existing conflicts on which you can just uh plug in your uh your terrorist groups and your approach approach to terrorism basically this is what happened there is there was no need there was no strategic effect for the the leaders of Daesh to send their troops back to to europe because they were already troops in europe and they are called the on-grown on-grown terrorist fighters for Daesh it's okay if you just keep this level of or this perception of vulnerability and fear the big movements the big ids the big attacks are not necessary anymore and anyhow they are not capable of of conducting them anymore so shifting to other regions either south into into southern trafica or east to asia and southeast asia i would say only logic military approach to uh to the use of of your forces and especially to the use of your specialized forces when you look at those slides the evolution is comparable also in nigeria where of course you will see the action of the nigerian defense forces really pushing out Boko Haram to the northeast so this was the first phase what did we see at that time is that Boko Haram just left nigeria so left this area in which those nigerian defense forces at authority and we're going and we're getting resources from the neighboring countries the so-called lexate basin countries it's only when a combination of this action by the nigerian defense forces together with this multinational and john task force in this region that we saw a real decrease of the impact of Boko Haram what is more disturbing for nigeria is of course good news Boko Haram is less effective but there again we have another group that is now emerging or has been emerging over the past past years called the fulani extremists that in the middle belt of nigeria are becoming more and more active and committing more and more attacks and by the way i don't know if you can concur with this but i think that in africa most of the terrorist groups are growing out of the competition between nomadic troops with cattle and then sedentary groups with doing agriculture and it's all about the distribution of water and food resources in africa so as you have said climate change and this competition for resources are creating terrorism in africa terrorist recruitment this slide shows you that isil is targeting individuals with a criminal background so this is showing you that radicalization is done in violence where Daesh is looking for the easy job already targeting people that are violent people that recognized that violence and the use of violence can also make them achieve some of their goals and therefore they just have to radicalize them for 10 or 20 percent to bring them to bring them to full violence which is also showing you that at some point the ideology as such is just the justification for the use of violence but it's not really the driver of of terrorism a side comment to this slide all those criminal people all those people with a violent background there is a reason why those people are violent and why they have this background also and this is then the link that you can make with the socio-economic factor the socio-economic situation of those people within or society foreign files by country so there again we can see that the providers of the foreign terrorist files are the minaregion russia eurasia and european concert of course neighborhood a lot of migration coming from the same regions within europe a connection a connection through the ideology so this is understandable for the first pillar for this first pillar of instagram i'm always making the remark that we can try to identify those who really follow the ideology and who really fought for the ash and how much of this youth bunch of the neighboring countries because the larger part of the minaregions providing foreign fighters to the ash the countries the country providing most of those fighters to nizia to nizia that went with an enormous youth bulge went through two socio-economic revolutions to be today in a situation that is worse than before those two revolutions so imagine the impact that could have on this youth and especially i would say that a certain percentage of this large part of the foreign terrorist fighters are basically expats people that could find a job a well-paid job in a neighboring country called the islamic state there again another another slide this is looking at the strategies to deal with returning foreign fighters in our in our in our societies and i think this is really telling us a lot a lot of positive information or at least information that we could take along is that when you look at the main countries in and you can put belgium there also the main countries here in in western europe you will see that the actions regarding returnees are basically repression so criminalization prosecution imprisonment revocation of citizenship and and of the passport when you look at those regions of the parts of the world that are really impacted by the phenomenon of terrorists you will see that there will be a larger investment into rehabilitation and legalization programs and that's basically it so these were the key finding strengths of the global terrorism index 2018 and now i finish by telling you that you can follow us on all our social media or website vision of humanity.org if you go to the website you can find this report in full you can access also an interactive map where you can click country by country you can get the full stats and you will find also all or other publications thank you very much


Hello, my name is Lakaia Tyner and I am presenting nearly optimal property preserving caching. This is joint work with Justin Holmstrom, Minghao Lu, and Daniel Wicks. Let's begin by defining a property preserving hash function. We have this hash function h, which takes as input some n-bit string x and outputs a compressed n-bit string h of x. You can consider some binary property p, which is equal to zero if the property does not hold and one if the property holds. And we say that h is a property preserving hash function for the property p. If given h of x and h of y, we're able to determine if p of x, y holds. Now an nm property preserving hash family for some predicate p consists of a family of hash functions h in the following algorithms. We have sam, which samples one hash function from that hash family. An eval, which takes as input a description of h, h of x and h of y and outputs zero or one. We also have following properties for correctness. We have that for every x, y. The probability that eval outputs something different than p of x, y is negligible. If we want robustness, we must also satisfy this next property, which says that for every ppt algorithm a, correctness still holds even when a, who has seen a description of our hash function, is able to choose x and y. So why do we care about studying property preserving hashing? Pbh can be a useful tool in measuring the similarity between objects and can also have some practical applications and things such as facial recognition. In this work, we focus mainly on the hamming predicate. And this is because hamming serves as a basic unit of measure and it's also a prerequisite to understanding some more complex metrics. Hamming is also currently being used as a method for measuring similarity between feature vectors and machine learning. Here are our results. We have conceptually more simple constructions compared to prior works and we're able to achieve better parameters under minimal assumptions. Our first construction is an information theoretic non-robust pbh, which uses the center decoding of linear error correcting codes. In our work, we also prove a lower bound that shows that this construction is essentially optimal. Our next construction is a robust pbh from homomorphic collision resistance, which shows how to take our first construction and make it robust while requiring only minimal overhead. This construction is also able to achieve better compression than prior works. Our third construction is another robust property preserving hash, which while achieving a slightly worse compression than our second construction is able to basically match the state of the art while only requiring minimal assumptions such as standard collision resistance. And finally, with our last construction, we study a new notion of randomized robust property preserving hashing for hamming and we're able to provide a information theoretic construction that achieves optimal parameters. Thank you so much. We are looking forward to presenting our work to you guys at crypto. See you there.