counter-terrorism. My name is Leanne Erdberg. I am the director of our Countering Violent Extremism Program here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For those of you who don't know about USIP, we were founded by the Congress in 1984 as an independent, nonpartisan American institution dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, it's practical, and it's essential for global security. Today we welcome you to this event at the George H.W. Bush Peace Education Center. Like all Americans, last week we mourned the loss of America's 41st President. Here at USIP in this Bush building, we have the honor of reflecting on his skill at finding compromise amid conflict and the leadership that he offered our nation during our nation and the world during a period of international turmoil and historic change. He was a great supporter of our mission and our nation's ability to wage peace, and in that vein, we pursue our work all over the world, waging peace. USIP believes in a vision of a world without violent conflict, and we practice that belief by working on the ground with local partners to provide tools and knowledge and training to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and resolve it when it does. When it comes to countering violent extremism, we operate along a few different lines. The first is we house the Resolve Network Secretariat. Resolve stands for researching solutions to violent extremism because we believe deeply that research helps us advance a deeper, more nuanced understanding of local factors relating to violent extremism and local sources of resilience. Second, we practice in the field to test what works and what doesn't. We apply peace building and conflict transformation approaches and tools to transform attitudes and relationships and structural factors that are associated with violent extremism. And third, we use this practical knowledge as well as the research and analysis to work with policymakers and other professionals to respond to some of the most critical global challenges of our time. A key aspect of our work is to convene people around challenging and important topics like today's, and we help ensure that many viewpoints are uncovered and combined to come up with innovative solutions. So our forum today is an extension of this important work. It's why we are delighted to be showcasing the release of the Sixth Annual Global Terrorism Index as produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace and built upon the database housed at University of Maryland's Start Consortium. This is the fifth forum that we've had the pleasure of hosting here at USIP and allowing us to dig deeper into the data presented in the Annual Index. We're looking forward to another great discussion today. As the report shows, efforts to address terrorism are happening against the landscape of profound vulnerabilities facing governments and communities in fragile states. When I say fragile, I'm referring to the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people in their government and fragility when mixed with violent extremism continues to challenge stability, security, capacity and resilience. In part, that's why the Congress has charged the US Institute of Peace, an independent leader in reducing and preventing conflict with convening the task force on extremism in fragile states. The bipartisan initiative will recommend early next year a comprehensive approach for US policy to prevent the underlying causes of extremism in fragile states in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and the Near East. That complements and builds on proposed and existing US programs and international partnerships. If you haven't already read the interim report from the task force, we have copies of it available here and it's also available online. From where we stand today, any strategy for success must explicitly go beyond fighting today's terrorist and do more to prevent tomorrow's young people from ever joining in the first place. So how does trend data help us do that? How do we bridge the data policy divide? We have an expert panel that's going to help us untangle that. There is biographical information for each of the panelists in your handouts, and so I won't go into too much detail for each of our participants, but you will see their wealth of experience and knowledge showcased today. I'm going to quickly run through our agenda. We're going to start with presentations, then we're going to switch to a panel discussion and then we're going to have audience question and answers. So I'd now like to introduce Michelle Breslauer, Director of the Americas Program for the Institute for Economics and Peace to provide an overview of the report's findings. Please join me in welcoming Michelle. Excuse me. Excellent. Well, thank you for having me here today. And thank you to USIP for hosting. As Leanne mentioned the fifth time that we're doing this in conjunction with USIP here in Washington DC. I work up in New York and my colleague Gloria Smolenski is here with me as well. So if you have questions about this report or the work that we do, feel free to talk to one of us after the panel. I'm here on behalf of the Institute for Economics and Peace and we are a not for profit nonpartisan independent think tank. We produce metrics to measure peacefulness to try to understand the drivers of peaceful societies and to try to understand the economic benefit that reductions in violence can bring to the economy. So while our major research output each year is the Global Peace Index, which is a measure of peacefulness across 163 countries and territories around the world, one indicator of that index is the global terrorism index. So we build that in as an indicator. Now this is the sixth year of the GTI. We are looking here at 163 countries and we're looking at the relative impact of terrorism. So I'll describe in a moment how we build that index to try to try to capture how terrorism impacts multiple areas of society. I mentioned that we use it as an indicator for the Global Peace Index and it's developed by our organization, the Institute for Economics and Peace and we have an advisory panel that's there. So looking at how we build this index, measuring something like terrorism is quite difficult. We rely on the world's preeminent database of terrorist activity. That's the Global Terrorism Database at the Start Center and we have the manager and builder of that database here. So I'll let Erin talk about the definitions used for coding terrorist attacks and how all of that information is put together. But this is really the the largest source of terrorism data. So we we start with the data, right? And then what are we doing to try to build this index? Well, we're trying to look at the different impacts of terrorism on society. So we take incidents, injuries, deaths and property damage into account, and those have a different weighting or impact on the actual index. Then we look at the scores over five years to try to measure the longer term impact of terrorism and try to account for some of the psychological impact of terrorism on society. So what we're doing is that the terrorist attack that happens in 2017 is going to have the strongest result in the score for 2017. But the the indices afterwards for 2018, 2019, 2020 are still going to reflect some amount of impact from that attack. Then we banned the scores. And what does that mean? What we're trying to do is even out some of the fact that violence tends to become normalized in society. So if you have a terrorist attack once a year, it's going to have a different impact in society than if you have 100 terrorist attacks a year. So these are some of the methodological models that we're using to try to bring together a slightly more nuanced idea of the impact of terrorism in a society when we're working with a data driven project. And then finally, we examine all of the socioeconomic data that we have against these scores and try to understand what correlates in terms of the environments that lead to higher levels of terrorism. So sorry, where am I pointing this towards there? Okay, excuse me. So this is an overall chart looking at 1998 to 2017. So the index that we just published last week represents 2017. And the major headline for this year is that deaths from terrorism declined by 27% in 2017. So from 2016 to 2017 and 44% since the peak of deaths in 2014. This was because we saw 94 countries whose scores improved versus 46 that deteriorated. But terrorism is still a global phenomenon. So 67 countries suffered more than one death. And five countries recorded more than 1000 deaths. 19 countries recorded more than 100 deaths. We saw terrorism in Europe, Western Europe fall by 75% in that one year period. However, far right political terrorism is on the rise in Western Europe and North America. And 99% of terrorism deaths happen in countries that are engaged in violent conflict or those that have high levels of political terror that practice state terror. So those are some of the key headlines from this year. And what you see on this chart is tracking some of these trends in terrorism, where you see a massive increase after the start of ISIL. And then we've seen after the military interventions in Nigeria and Iraq, a decrease in deaths from terrorism. Now, just four countries, I'll keep going till excellent. Four countries account for 70 70% of the deaths from terrorism globally. So we see Afghanistan with 25% of global deaths followed by Iraq, Nigeria and then Somalia. And this is the first year since we started producing the index that Iraq has not had the highest number of deaths. Perfect. And this is really partially due to the fact that the deaths in Iraq were reduced by over 5000. So we saw 5000 512 less deaths in Iraq and over 1000 less deaths in Syria. So we saw the biggest reduction or improvement in terms of deaths in these two countries. And just to put those numbers of 5000 and 1000 in a little bit more context, the global deaths from terrorism went from around 25,000 to around 18,000. So this is really a significant portion of global deaths that we're talking about. And why we saw a fairly substantial improvement around the world. Now, when we're looking at countries that had a higher impact of terrorism, we see Somalia and Egypt at the top of the list. So deaths from terrorism increased by 93% in Somalia in a one year period. And then Egypt had the second largest increase. But what has to be noted here is that both of those substantial increases were really the result of one attack in each country. So we saw the car bomb in Mogadishu that killed more than 500 people and an attack on a mosque in Egypt that killed more than 300 people. And those two attacks really drove the trend in each country or drove the result rather in each country. When we look at the terrorist groups that are driving these trends, here is a chart showing the four deadliest groups. So we've seen that ISIL still remains the deadliest terrorist group, despite having a 52% drop in activity from 2016 to 2017. And Boko Haram had a similar drop as well. So the four deadliest groups though are ISIL, the Taliban, al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. And now when we look at some of the longer term trends, and we're looking at regional attacks here. So the top line in this chart you'll see is deaths, the darker orange and then attacks is the lighter orange. And so by far, the majority of deaths and attacks have occurred in three regions, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Those regions have seen 92% of all deaths since 2002, with over 90,000 deaths in the Middle East and North Africa region alone since 2002. And I think one of the most consistent and perhaps most relevant findings for the policy discussion here, and this is something that we've seen over many years of the index, is that the vast majority of deaths from terrorism occur in countries that are suffering from conflict. So here you'll see war, minor armed conflict and non-conflict countries. War means countries that suffer more than 1,000 deaths a year. Minor armed conflict is between 25 and 1,000 deaths a year. And so what we see that 94% of deaths from terrorism occurred in countries that are suffering from conflict. If you add countries that have high levels of political terror, and political terror here is defined as detentions without a sentence, human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, then that number goes up to 99%. And you can see that further illustrated here. So this chart shows the relative change year on year, where we saw a corresponding increase of, excuse me, of deaths from terrorism and battle deaths, both of which jumped around in 2013, 2014. And now these graphs here are showing that this very close relationship between battlefield deaths and terrorism is not just a trend that we see on the global level, but we can see that very tight relationship here in the countries that are most impacted, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan. The only one that doesn't follow as closely this trend is Syria, where we've seen a high number of deaths from the civil war in Syria. And while we do see a significant impact from terrorism, those battlefield deaths have very much outweighed the terrorist deaths. And then if we take a look a little bit closer to home, now we're looking at deaths from terrorism in Western Europe and North America. And now this represents still a very small percentage of the total deaths in the world. But just trying to look at some of the trends, deaths in these regions rose every year until 2016. From 2016 to 2017, we saw a 75% drop in Europe. That was due to a 90% decrease in terrorism in France, Belgium, Germany. But it was also countered by increases in Spain and the UK, Finland, for instance. What's interesting in that Western Europe trend is that while deaths have decreased, the number of incidents have gone up. And this would suggest that increased counter terrorism measures in Western European countries are becoming more effective. And now when we look at the drivers of some of those attacks, we see that lone actors tend to be the primary perpetrators of attacks. And 54%, I'll just continue, of those lone actors were inspired by ISIL. So this means that individuals carry out attacks and claim to be carrying them out in the name of ISIL. Oh, okay, here we go. I'm just going to continue. And one thing. Cool. I mentioned in the beginning that we've seen a rise in far right political terrorism in Western Europe, and in the United States and Canada. And this has been a worrying trend since about 2011. Now, still again, to put these numbers into context, we're talking about in a one year period, 31 incidents in North America, 28 incidents in Western Europe, with a total number of deaths being respectively 16 and then one in that in that one year period. So compared to some of these levels that we see in the most impacted countries, it's not a lot, but you can see here a clear rise. And so what we're seeing is increased white nationalism, anti Muslim sentiments. We see, for instance, if we look at the number of incidents in North America, that in 2012 there was 10, then three, then seven, then 10, then six, and now 31. So we're seeing this become more of a trend that should that deserves more attention in Western Europe and in North America. And now when we look at this shifting landscape, we want to see, well, what can this data and these trends start to tell us about where we might be expecting increased terrorist activity? What's happening around the world where we look at the geographic trends and how have those been shifting? So we saw this massive decrease in ISIL activity, 52% that I mentioned. And partially this is due to a massive resource decline for that terrorist organization. And so there's been a shift in geographic targets. What we've seen is that the three sort of hot spots that are emerging right now are one, the Maghreb and Sahel regions of Northern Africa, where there's been a resurgence of terrorist activity in the past two years. In Nigeria, where there's been an increase in violence involving Fulani extremists, even though deaths from Boko Haram are falling. And then finally in Southeast Asia, where the Philippines and Myanmar recorded the highest number of deaths from terrorism in 2017 that they have since 2002. Maybe one day I'll get it. Here we go. So here we see this driving trend of the military defeat of ISIS that's also led to a 60% loss of territory and an 80% loss of revenue since 2015. And estimates now this year in 2018 at this point are that ISIS only holds between 1 and 5% of territory held in 2015. And then I was interested to show you also some of the geographic spreads in Myanmar and the Philippines particularly as I think they are interesting examples as well for the policy discussion that we're going to have. So what we've seen here is that deaths from terrorism have been steadily rising since 2011. They spiked last year with both Myanmar and the Philippines recording the highest number of deaths in their respective countries in 2017. Driving that has been a mix of Islamist groups and separatist groups. In the Philippines we saw 326 deaths last year which was an 18% rise over 2016. But what you can see here on this slide is the geographic spread and how it's starting to engulf a country geographically. So what we can see is that between 2016 and 2018 over 170 separate towns in the Philippines experienced at least one death. And visually you see this spread as well. And then, thank you. Similarly when we're looking at terrorism in Nigeria in this period we can see a change in geographic spread through the country as well. So this is looking at some of the trends and some of the emerging hotspots. And then finally another area that we examined was looking at the drivers of foreign fighters, looking at the recruitment and the return. And so what we're doing here also is pulling together relevant and current research from other organizations to try to understand from the global point of view how some of this research relates to not only the trend analysis that we're doing but the policy conversations that we're involved in. So I mentioned that conflict and political terror are the primary drivers of terrorist activity and that countries with high levels of economic development have other factors that may be more closely linked to terrorism activity such as social cohesion, alienation and involvement in external conflict. And in Western Europe individuals with a history of criminality are especially susceptible to recruitment. So we saw that the best estimates suggest that between 40 and 60% of foreign fighters going to ISIL have a criminal background and this has been a shift from for instance the 9-11 attacks where you had at least 50% of attackers with a college degree, a different sort of type of recruitment model there. And so these extremist groups are providing a redemption narrative for alienated young people with a criminal background while also giving an outlet and a chance for them to use illicit skills and networks. But now with a decline in ISIL activity we're seeing an increased return of foreign fighters to their countries of origin. And so what you can see here on this chart is that over 40,000 foreign fighters have estimated to join the conflict in Iraq and Syria over the past five years. We're seeing the return rate increasing and expected to increase in the coming year. And so this implies that we need to think about ways to not only reintegrate foreign fighters into society but think about how we are dealing with this phenomenon, particularly if such high numbers are those with a criminal background. What does that mean for not only how we deter radicalization but how we think about absorbing foreign fighters returning to populations? So I wanted to give you just a sense of some of the sort of top-line global trends in the index that we will be discussing further with the panel. When you look through the report you'll see also that we have a series of essays published in the back and this is meant to give experts in the field a chance to talk through some of their own analysis, the programmatic outputs and really what people are doing with some of these data trends and current activity. And so I think when we're looking at the index this year the three major points that are coming out of it are that there has been a substantial decline in terrorist activity but it's still a problem. Terrorism is fluid. This is a tactic of violence that can adapt and it's still a global phenomenon. So it's something that still has to be paid attention to. And we have to look at the drivers there of terrorism. We can't only look at the interventions. And when we're thinking about the drivers if 99% of terrorism occurs in countries with high levels of conflict or those with political terror then we need to think about how we're addressing those issues as well with a different subset of factors occurring in let's say France than there are in Pakistan. And finally terrorism is a significant cost. The economic impact was estimated at $52 billion. And so this does make up a portion of the global economic impact of violence that we calculate each year. So I was happy to share some of these findings with you today. I look forward to the panel discussing how they might be used to bridge the gap with policy. And also to Erin's presentation where she's going to speak a little bit more about the global terrorism database which is what we use to construct this index and the importance of us continuing to support the data collection effort there. Thank you. I'm going to do my best to drop everything on stage. Thank you so much Michelle for that informative presentation. So next I'd like to welcome Erin Miller who's the Global Terrorism Database Manager at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism known as START at the University of Maryland. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation to come and give some remarks today. I did not bring any slides which is a decision I feel pretty good about right now. So I just I want to speak with you briefly about a few different topics related to how we collect the data, how the data is used and as Michelle referenced support for the database. I will hopefully not take up too much of your time but I look forward to your questions if you have any. So as Leon mentioned the Global Terrorism Database is based at the University of Maryland. I've worked on the project for about 14 years now and I work with a team of people who I think collectively we have about 50 years of experience working on the GTD specifically. And it's a pretty big undertaking that we have. We use what we call a sort of a hybrid strategy for collecting the data. If you can imagine how the process must look like in terms of getting information about terrorist attacks into a structured format. And what we do is take advantage of automated processes and artificial intelligence processes to do what those things are good at and to take advantage of humans and our research staff and analysts to do what those folks are good at. And I'll elaborate on that a little bit. The data collection process is entirely based on open source media accounts and you can sort of automatically start to think about what the strengths of that and the limitations of that would be. You can have discussions for days about that and those are our issues that we grapple with routinely. But there's a lot of material to work with there. So we start out with a process that uses about 2 million articles published every day around the world on any different topic. We have a subscription feed to a sort of a fire hose of news. And our task our challenge is to find those articles find those news articles that have information about terrorist attacks. And we start off by using some basic filters and things like that to sort of look for articles that have broad strokes keywords that would be we would be interested in the word shooting. But we don't want articles about sports when basketball and we want articles about bombings but not about movies and things like that. And so we do some really rough filtering of those articles to narrow that down. We use natural language processing and named entity recognition to try and remove duplicate articles. When something happens the coverage for that in the media you can see it over and over and over again and we don't need to read all of those. So we minimize the number of duplicates using automated processes. We use named entity recognition to try and identify the location that is being described in the article. And that allows us to cluster together similar articles so that when our analysts are reading them they can read articles about the same types of places the same geographic locations sort of sequentially at the same time. And so all of those automated processes lead up to a machine learning model that we use that separates the remaining articles that we're dealing with into those that are likely to be relevant and those that are not likely to be relevant about terrorism. If you're familiar with how your spam filter works we do a very similar process for that except for it's relevant or not relevant to terrorism and we train that model and we've built tools that allow us to continually update those projections. And that's where our staff comes in. So we have a fantastic staff of researchers who are very thoroughly trained in applying our inclusion criteria. Michelle mentioned that I would reference our definition of terrorism. So it is the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, religious, economic or social goal through fear coercion or intimidation. We break that down into inclusion criteria. We have numerous pages of notes on how to apply those and we try and be as transparent as possible in terms of presenting all of that information in terms of how we define terrorism but also how we define other information in the GTD in our code book which is accessible online. So at that point once those events are identified we actually have a fantastic team of students who then works on filling in all of the information about what exactly happened. So the GTD has more than a hundred different variables about the details of when and where and who and what weapons were used and what tactics were used and and so on and so forth that we work to codify as extensively and thoroughly as and accurately as possible. This is the point where we're grappling with sometimes conflicting information, sometimes a lack of information, some most terrorist attacks that we include in the database actually don't have a lot of detail in terms of reporting compared to some of the more high profile attacks that you think of when you read about them in the news. And so we complete the data and we publish the data and that's a really important important sort of decision that we made very early on when we started working on the global terrorism database is that this is a public good. We put it on our website and then we sit back and watch all of the amazing things that everyone can do with the data. Sometimes scary things also but mostly amazing things that people do with the data to work into their analysis, into their learning, into their scholarship and and that's why I'm particularly grateful for the opportunity to be here because one of the most gratifying parts of my job is engaging with people who who use the data it's really fantastic to see given how hard the team works to collect it it's very very gratifying to see how people are making use of the data to learn more about terrorism, learn more about counterterrorism and just be generally more informed and the diversity of users that we have never ceases to amaze me, right? So we a couple years ago we put the data up on the Kaggle data science website I don't know if anyone's familiar with Kaggle. These are generally folks who could not care less about terrorism but they're just so interested in having a robust data set to work on and to sort of develop tools for computer science and for data science the topic is somewhat secondary in some cases and all the way ranging from that to students and scholars who are writing research papers and to policy makers who are using the database to be more informed about the policies that they consider and that they implement and so the fact that the GTD is so widely used by such a diverse set of audiences includes you know journalists who are trying to inform the public about a highly contentious often politicized often emotional topic can use the database as sort of a common foundational starting point for that aim and you know federal state and local governments in the United States and also around the world are using the data. Last week I was talking to some first responders who are interested in how they can use the data to inform their how they do their job the week before that I got an email from a gentleman who works with the VA who was telling us about how they can use the GTD to help verify claims of PTSD for veterans to help them get veterans benefits associated with with a PTSD diagnosis and so I'm always sort of gratified and surprised to learn how everyone uses the data out in the in the wild and that brings us to the last thing that I wanted to discuss which is it is not unfortunately a foregone conclusion that we will always be able to collect the database we have been extremely fortunate to receive very generous funding over the time that we've been working on the GTD from the National Institute of Justice the Department of Home and Security most recently the Department of State now we did unfortunately learn earlier this year however that after six years of working really well with the fantastic people at the Bureau of Counterterrorism the Department of State that our contract supporting the GTD would not be continued on beyond that that six year period and so because the GTD is sort of an integral part of START's mission to inform practitioners and policymakers on on sort of foundational patterns of of terrorism around the world START has been sort of self funding the collection of the data while we work to to discover and to sort of stitch together a sustainable plan for data collection I think one of the difficulties that you run into with such sort of a broad and diverse set of users is that everyone sort of always thinks that someone else will will support the database and that that's sort of an ongoing and something you don't have to worry about unfortunately that's not the case I would love if it were at the moment everything is on the table all of our options we are considering opportunities to find sustainable funding from other government agencies in the United States and in other countries around the world as well as considering options for commercial licensing and non-commercial licensing if it's appropriate so we're sort of exploring all of these simultaneously but in in summarization if you have any questions about how we collect the database I'm more than happy to to talk at length about that second if you use the database please let us know how use the database not only is it just fun for us to know how folks use the database but it helps us make a stronger case for why it's important to to continue supporting the database and and that is something that we'll be working on for the for the the coming months and years thank you very much hello okay sorry about that thank you so much for for that presentation and you will hear me remind everyone throughout the course of this discussion how important it is that databases like these do get sustainable funding from governments whether it's the United States government other governments as well as potentially from other partners that this is the type of information that is critical to take a long-term trend analysis and for institutes like the Institute for Economics and Peace to to take this information and make it really palatable for policymakers so consider that one of many plugs you will hear today on the importance of funding this so it is my pleasure to introduce the rest of our panelists who will give some opening remarks and then we'll go into a moderated Q&A before doing audience Q&A so first Elizabeth Liz Hume from the Alliance for Peacebuilding she's a vice president there please so thank you and good morning and I just also want to put a plug in I was going to say the exact same thing this research is so critical and I have been with Michelle on the Hill educating and advocating for policymakers using this information and it has been an incredibly influential and making the case for these programs for this research for the policy so I can't I can't say how important it is so that's my plug for all of this why is this report so important because it in a very professional way and in an evidence-based way proves or shows what we've all been saying for a very long time that violent conflict remains or is the primary driver of cause of terrorism violent extremism in countries throughout the world why is that so important because you can't separate the two and that's really what the Alliance for Peace Building says you can't separate the two you can't take out violent extremism from violent conflict we see violent extremism as a tool for those expressing violent conflict and so that's why you know again this report is so critical because again it focuses and it shows this really important concept that seems kind of simple and logical but it it's it shows it very clearly and one thing I would like to talk a little bit about is the Alliance for Peace Building is a member-based organization it is IEP, Mercy Corps, our members we don't have programs on the ground but what we try to do is work with our members to look at the research and findings, ensure that it is correlating to programming and policy looking at where the gaps are and trying to just lift up the field and one of the things that you know the issues and the challenges that I'm going to talk about you know this is not unique to the field of violence or the sector of violent extremism this is the entire peace building field so when when I say violent extremism I also mean the peace building field in general we have not done a good job at proving impact and making the case for our programs so one of the things I'd like to talk about in the report and just let me be clear this is an amazing report but there are a couple things that I'd like to challenge our field and even this report in terms of definitions one of the things the report says that one of the challenges is the poorly defined terms and they often disputed terms AFP when I was going back through our literature we say the same things and I think as a field we need to stop that we need to stop using that as a crutch and I think we now know what we're talking about when we're talking about either CVE, PVE, you know violent extremism, terrorism we're saying the same things and we say it differently sometimes for political reasons and we need to be very clear why we're using the different terms but not get caught up into it and not hold and not say it's a challenge for our field because we know what those definitions are and so I think that that's a really important piece of this the drivers and causes a V of violent extremism and so at AFP we use the term violent extremism instead of terrorism for example but we're saying the same thing we now know we have a really good ability to understand the drivers of violent extremism and you know in the going back we were talking about it earlier before the panel in the early 2000s you know we through tons of money added in terms of jobs you know as of 2009 USAID and MSI came out with a really comprehensive report that those findings are still relevant today and we've been building on that and you know the report rightly shows you know talks about the political and social factors including the perceptions of marginalization and justice history of discrimination human rights abuses alienation governance the desire to right the wrongs we put a lot of emphasis on the push factors not looking at the poll factors as much and that has changed so I think that that's important to understand that we have done a good job on that where we have not done a good job is figuring out what works and what doesn't work and that is the next challenge really for our field whether it is on violence reduction programming or CVE programming AFP put together a CVE sub sector review it was really hard to come up with evaluations and quantifiable data that showed theories of change that we all hold as true to show that they worked and didn't work and that I think is a really important we need to challenge even the theories of change that we hold as gospel and that's a really important piece I think is moving forward in terms of looking at data so proving impact if we think our work is important if we think it's effective then we need to hold ourselves accountable and start proving impact so this evidence has really yet to emerge and it really hinders our ability to articulate cohesive programmatic and policy responses to ve and yes organizations call everything that they're doing pve cve and we need to articulate better how we are reducing violent extremism how we are reducing violence how we are reducing the enabling conditions and this is really a systemic effort and so these are some of my points in terms why I think what we can be doing to to solve this problem one is I'd like everyone to this book by is edited by Lisa shirk the ecology of violent extremism it is something that a year and a half ago Lisa and I were talking about the fact that there was no comprehensive book that went through the the system of cve violent extremism and that's what this book attempts to do so I encourage everyone to look at it because it it does try to take a look at this systemic lens and address some of the issues that I was just mentioning so what do we need to do better we need more quantitative data and impact on eminy from partners just not reporting on programs and and their outputs but you get what you pay for so it will require more resources and donors will have to require it of of the organizations that are doing this work but even if the donors don't require it and it's one of the things afp has really been pushing in procurement reform um organizations will have to do a lot more robust eminy and this really at the front end instead of the back end meaning you have to figure out what your program is doing baselines understanding what you're measuring how you will measure measure it throughout your program um and you know i know richman will talk a lot about this but you know it's not impossible we there are partners um mercy core is one of them that has been able to do some of this work um and i know he will talk about that so i'll talk about it just more at this 30 000 foot um but again if the donors aren't requiring it it is our responsibility to our leadership to find a way to do it ourselves and we are doing it um through the cve subsector reviews putting together indicator databases international alert and undp has put together um significant eminy work and indicators on this this work and the ability to do it is out there but it requires people to want to do it um but we also need to build the capacity within the organizations to be able to do it um and also universities to ensure that students studying this come out with these skills as well and really importantly we have to figure out a way to share these evaluations that are out there on their successes and failures determine how to sanitize them a lot of people a lot of organizations are uncomfortable um with sharing these evaluations when they do have them um because they are in conflict affected areas and because they are very sensitive but as we showed through our sub sector review it you can do it you can sanitize it enough and show where you do have data and don't have data um and so again it's also critical to share those failures I know people hate to do it but it's important I also want to mention one other thing that the report talked about that I thought was really um critical that was kind of in a I think you might just kind of glance over it um is the need to research the impact of trauma of sustained terrorist attacks in communities we don't do that enough even within communities that are experiencing violent conflict and it's intertwined and that I think for our field is another challenge of work that we need to really focus on in terms of how do we focus on the psychological the trauma that has been done to communities that are experiencing these terrorist attacks so with that I will finish and I'll turn over to Richmond thank you thank you so much Liz it's my pleasure to introduce Richmond Blake the director of policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps thank you thank you Leanne for hosting this discussion this morning on international human rights day and on the 70th anniversary of the universal declaration for human rights I think this is an appropriate date to have this conversation and congratulations to my colleagues at the Institute for Economics and Peace and the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism this is a fantastic index and report and a very useful tool for all of us Mercy Corps is a global humanitarian and development organization operating in more than 40 countries around the world and we have an active peace building portfolio of 36 programs in 15 countries we believe that peace building including countering violent extremism is essential for ending the global humanitarian crisis and a precursor for economic development that's also why Mercy Corps is investing in research on the study of violence and countering violent extremism this morning I want to offer just a few observations my own observations from the index before we open the discussion to the broader group and the first is really focused on the central finding of this study 99% of terror related deaths occur in countries experiencing conflict or where there is a high degree of political terror there's also a high concentration of terrorism in a few countries this is important to policymakers because it helps us both with the prioritization process but also helps us think about the types of interventions that are required for prevention work moreover the report offers really important information about the emergence of new groups although the index points out that the four most deadly groups account for more than 56% of terror related deaths in the world it reminds us that just five years ago those same four groups accounted for 32% of terror related deaths and a decade before that only 6% the report also points out that 169 terror groups committed an attack that resulted in at least one death and of that 169 42 42 committed an attack for the first time this suggests that although counterterrorism operations may be highly sophisticated unless we begin addressing the root causes we will continue to see the same trend in the emergence of new groups some of which will grow over time that brings me to the section on costs the report points out that the global cost of terrorism what it describes itself as a conservative estimate is now 52 billion dollars a year but I'd like to put that in context because it doesn't include the amount of money that governments spend on counterterrorism operations or on countering or preventing violent extremism a report from the Stimson Center which was released in May estimates the U.S. government's counterterrorism costs at 175 billion dollars in 2017 and a report by the prevention project and Russi released just a few months ago puts the attributed amount of state department and USAID funding for countering violent extremism at 230 million dollars so the report finds that the cost is 52 billion and the U.S. government spends 175 billion on counterterrorism operations and 230 million on countering violent extremism I think these figures should leave us all with the question of whether or not U.S. government assistance resources are being used appropriately and are aligned with the threat and with what we've learned from the index about the drivers and the causes of terrorism and lastly I'd just like to lift up one of the sections from the expert section at the end of the report on the importance of multi-disciplinary and multi-agency approaches to violent extremism put forth by Eric Rosend Mercy Corps' countering violent extremism research also makes this a similar case for a multi-sectoral approach to countering violent extremism that's to say in recent reports that we've released on our work in Afghanistan and Somalia we found that a coupled or a tiered or multi-sector approach is most effective in reducing individuals moral or material support for armed actors that's to say when we've coupled access increased access to secondary education with civic opportunities for civic engagement we saw a larger decline in the beneficiaries' population willingness to support armed groups so we will continue to invest in a multi-sectoral approach to violent extremism these are some of my initial observations of the report and I look forward to our discussion thank you so much Richmond so we'll have a couple moderated questions here for the panel and then we're going to open up to audience Q&A so moderators prerogative on the first question so we heard a lot of good news in this year's report in terms of the number of civilians that are being killed the number of battlefield deaths quite a bit in terms of the trend lens finally going down but as Richmond and Liz both pointed out the places in conflict the confluence of conflict and violence is still quite high so when we think about fragile states places with high degrees of political terror and those with conflict currently ongoing there are some of the most wicked problems that the foreign policy and counter-terrorism and defense policy and the variety of different policymakers have to confront I'm going to throw this one open here because I think the peace building community has a lot to add to the counter-terrorism conversation but what are the types of things that we should be thinking about in the places where terrorism is occurring year after year year after year at the highest numbers and what more can the peace building community be adding to these places not just at the scale which Richmond talked about but the actual content of what we should be doing and welcome any of the panelists to chime in can I do a finger question on that? it should be on oh hello one of the things I also wanted to ask is in the report that in Iraq saw the steepest decline but obviously you have areas like Raqqa and that have been completely destroyed so you've had this extreme conflict there coupled with Yemen as well where you have an all out war now so you've had the decrease in violent extremism or terrorism but you have this either areas that have been completely wiped out and or you've had an incredible uptick in actual war as well so did that account for in the report as well or did you? not actually a two finger different question but please well so you know it's I have to clarify with this index it's it is focused specifically on the impact of terrorism as defined by the terrorism database and then as indexed by IEP when we take the global peace index of which of which this index is just one of 23 different indicators then we can start to see a lot more of these trends and those impacts so in the global peace index you'll see the severe deteriorations in Yemen for instance even if the the specifics of terrorism as a tactic of violence aren't showing themselves in in this index and I think that that's it's confusing to explain to people because they want to have one idea of what's going on but when we're talking about violent conflict or we're talking about the peace they're both multi-dimensional and so the I think value of doing these indices is that they can take these very multi-dimensional concepts and try to pull out some some simpler understandings of them and I use simple you know in this context understanding that it's not simple but what it what's relevant there then for the policy community is that rather than going back with these very nuanced answers or discussions or findings that are too complicated to interpret I think that these these databases and then these indices and these reports become an easy reference document to at least pull out some of these major ideas and and then you know while IEP itself doesn't do any programming on the ground or a research organization I think what what the findings are pointing to is that we need to actually look at a range of different factors in the countries that are most impacted and also not expect that purely counter-terrorism measures or military measures will be effective in countering these these multi-dimensional threats and so that means that there's more onus on not only the policy community but also the programming and peace building field to think about how you can balance interventions on the prevention side which are by necessity longer term more localized individual and then some of these broader implications around military intervention or much harder CT tactics one priority that Liz and I share is and that's the highest legislative priority of Mercy Corps is securing passage of the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act this piece of legislation if enacted would empower the U.S. government to bring greater coherence to U.S. foreign assistance and policy in fragile countries and it would select pilot countries in the initial years where we could begin to test and demonstrate a body of evidence that would make the case for investments in preventing and countering violent extremism fortunately the bill passed the House overwhelmingly in the lame duck session we anticipate that it will be reintroduced early next year in both the House and the Senate and the peace building community will be working to ensure that that this piece of legislation moves forward yeah just a second that I couldn't agree more and really it's a way to look at these problems differently and whether it's this bill it's the congressional notifications that are also up on the Hill waiting to look at how U.S. aid their new conflict bureau the stabilization assistance review as well this is the community coming together and saying we have to do it differently in these countries the way that we have been doing it hasn't been working in some of the most conflict affected in fragile states so I think that that's that's all of us trying to look at this problem from a through a different lens I'll just quickly add from the the data perspective one of the things that I think the IAP report does very well actually is sort of balance the need to summarize things but also dig in a little bit deeper to figure out what's driving these trends so one of the things that Michelle mentioned in her presentation was the fact that one of the sharpest increases was in Somalia but it's largely due to this individual attack in Mogadishu that was responsible for a large number of deaths and that happens quite frequently and it happens these outlier attacks that are driving patterns I think happen more often than people might notice in fact the the huge spike in deaths in Iraq in the summer of 2014 is largely due to two attacks it is certainly part of a general pattern and it's not the they're not necessarily anomalous but they were extremely deadly attacks and I do think that that impacts what the sort of thought process is around what policies are appropriate when you see an increase in deaths are we talking about a massive increase in the number of attacks that kill very few people or one attack that killed hundreds or even thousands of people and when it's the latter you really have to sort of puzzle through what that means for policy what what what was the difference between that attack happening and not happening and completely changing the narrative for what the the report ultimately or any analysis really ultimately concludes and why that attack was used right right and I would probably just add that the the level at which any one attack is connected to a centralized group is also incredibly important for a policymaker so if it had operational financial and and directional pieces to it then then going after the network has a different type of policy response than lone wolf attacks and so I think we've been struggling for several years on how to calibrate the difference between those who are joining violent extremist groups to be part of a group with group identity group operational capability in a group mentality versus those who are finding this information more passively operating as lone actors and are not necessarily the beneficiary is of being part of that group except in name only and the types of policy responses that are necessary to both take people out of that group mentality as well as prevent them from ever joining in the first place yeah and just and I think our community has been much more focused on the push factors of those in country those enabling communities and less on those pull factors that are making it attractive to the radicalization process so in addition to the amazing work in the index is also expert contributions and there was one of the expert contributions is from the global community engagement resilience fund GSERF and noted that community led responses to violent extremism usually fall into three categories the first being raising awareness about the challenge the second promoting community engagement and the third providing positive alternatives do particularly to to Liz and Richmond do you feel like that captures the the pve space or should we or is there more to add from your perspectives I think that there's a step before that and recently Mercy Corps implemented an assessment project where it happens before the intervention before the programmatic intervention and that we're constantly pressing for more and better data about the communities where the programs will take place first and so in Niger we implemented a new assessment model called the vulnerability and resistance assessment initiative and it essentially allowed our programmatic our country team and our researchers to go in and on a village by village basis determine which communities were most susceptible and what were drivers and what we found in that initial assessment was that the drivers even in villages that were close were sometimes different and that's the level of granularity that that implementers need to move to if we want to see the types of results that that we all want I would definitely agree with that and I think again this just becomes a language issue right I can pull out our policy document and say it differently but again you know we're saying the same thing so so Richmond you just raised a really interesting point on the granularity of the data and so maybe I'll ask a little bit too Michelle and Erin what how granular we were talking about media articles in terms of the information and then the variety of different analyses that you do once you have that data how granular do we need to get to get the most accurate information local information I mean the I think that the event level data is very is very useful to leverage to sort of again dig down very I actually find if I can confess I find the global trends very very boring they're they're not informative they are all a product of other they like anytime we have you know we release a new year of data that's last August and we write a report and we sort of there's the obligatory global terrorism increased x percent or decreased x percent that is extremely uninformative at that sort of global level because again not only as I mentioned are those trends sometimes driven by one or two events it is very important to to dig down into the the event level data and because we do collect the information on events you can do that and it's something that you know again we when we publish the data we don't just publish the the sort of overarching statistics we publish every single event so you can do analyses on what types of tactics are being used what types of targets are being affected and even within types of targets there are some types of targets right so I wrote a report a few years ago on attacks targeting educational institutions and even as someone who's responsible for collecting the data I was surprised at how diverse attacks on educational institutions can be in different countries around the world in some places they're attacking teachers in some places they're attacking schools and so the ability to to really understand what it is that's happening to produce these higher level statistics is something that is is very important I would imagine it's very important for policymakers I think it's very important for researchers and we're always when we're working on the data I mean we have a wish list of many many things that we sort of always hope to improve we've been making improvements to to how we classify the data routinely over the over the years and so you know someone will will contact us and say I am interested in attacks on on hotels and I would have I said well we have attacks on business targets you can sort of dig into that and so as a result of getting those sorts of inquiries from people who have an interest in a very specific type of of event we implemented a hundred different target subtypes and said okay we're now going to not only collect these going forward but go back through all of the data that we have so far which at that point was probably a hundred thousand attacks or so and subclassify these into more specific types and more specific types of weapons because these are really impactful and it is very easy to to sort of for your assumptions to be wrong right if you see a statistic for the number of the number of attacks that happened in a particular place it's very easy easy to sort of make inferences about what those attacks look like that are that are just not correct right they might be based on the types of attacks that are that get the most media attention that sort of if I say there were you know 300 attacks in Western Europe in a particular time frame some people tend to to think of you know the Paris style attacks there were not 300 of those that's not what we're talking about right there's a very diverse landscape of of tactics and and targets and impact and it is without digging down deep into sort of the event level information it's very easy to take away problematic conclusions I agree with Erin and I think that one of the most interesting parts of the report are measuring changes in tactics of certain terror groups and it seemed like the largest change occurred amongst the Taliban which that I think it was a attacks that resulted in death targeting civilians to climb 55 percent but targeting military personnel and police increased by 34 percent we saw similar changes amongst other groups in the study like Malaya at Sinai and also the new people's army and the Philippines and those changes lead me to the question of what does that mean about the terror groups own understanding of its credibility or its perception among the local populace and does that what does that mean then for effective CVE interventions in those communities so yes if I could just follow on that and that's what I think makes this report also so fascinating because even when we talk about at the 30,000 foot it's alienation and marginalization and you know we know these drivers of violent extremism you have to go down into the country context into the community level to actually understand and Richmond that's what you were talking about in terms of you know how important those assessments are and I know what the resolve network is doing because it isn't a one-size-fits-all and even within the country and that's also why I think this report is also so fascinating because it gives you that data into seeing these changing tactics seeing how it is adapting because conflict and violent extremism is not static it's not going to be you know the same tactics and the same conflict that was six months ago or a year from now and that I think is sometimes we also get caught up into that and thinking it's the same it's not so that leads me to one of my favorite quotes that I heard which is when you're in the midst of a trend or a cycle you can't tell which one's which so this to to Michelle and Aaron who have been doing this for a while where do you think we are today in terms of these trends we've now had two GTI reports in a year where we've seen dramatic decreases in terms of battlefield deaths as well as SIVCAS where do you think we are in terms of trends and cycles well and this follows on everybody's comments just now if you if you look at that trend the the top line headline is is promising right the sub headline is you know don't let your guard down in a way and I I try also I think in our in our communications efforts to not also be sort of fear-mongering at the same time about this in the way that I try to I think I want to balance the threat the violent extremism threat against the just the general conflict threat and and it I find it disconcerting I understand why but you know our global peace index gets much less press attention for instance than the terrorism index there is a draw towards terrorism from from the general public that when you start talking about other forms of violent conflict it just doesn't have the same interest and I want people to have an interest in the whole enchilada in a way because I think that's part of the story so whereas that top line trend is is positive you know exactly what Erin said has to be remembered that the the threat here the diminished impact been due to particular instances not particular cases but has really been primarily driven by a reduction in the impact and activity of ISIL and that has led to this dramatic reduction in deaths that lead that headline but you do actually have for instance when you look at that 75% decline in Western Europe the fact that there are more incidents means that there's still a threat so there's still people looking for an outlet through this form of violence and so I think we have to expect that as tactics change as weapons change the cyber frontier of terrorism which is something we don't go into in this report we have a short essay on it but it's not it's not indexed and then these sort of emerging geographical areas these fragile areas are going to be places where we can probably expect to have you know less positive returns but it you know has to all be balanced with the context of of what you're talking about and so I think the reminder of of what levels we're speaking at is important you know we we talk about about under 50 deaths in the United States from terrorism whereas we have very little attention paid to the much higher number of of gang led gun violence deaths so we do need to think about where where we're talking about what the numbers are and how those trends might continue and so I do think it just supports what the rest of the panel has been saying about also needing more granular granular local level data to understand what's really happening somewhere and I think especially on the the on that on the side of looking at the context and the drivers you know looking at the output the actual attack and event level data is one thing but where we're talking about for for policy interventions or program interventions is really looking at what's driving the activity in those in those areas and then we have to do get we have to get an understanding there from a local level I'll just add to that that well so setting aside for the moment the very important fact that that terrorism is just one type of of violence and a sort of landscape of different types of violence and and it you know it's important to to sort of pay attention to it in context just focusing on the trends alone to your original question is is very difficult to sort of to to assess so what I mean by that so when we're collecting the data with the data collection process has evolved over time as technologies become more accessible you should certainly read about it in the GTD code book would have could talk all day the implications of data collection methodology for what the data look like but we you know we recently developed the tools that we use now in the past six years or so and and so we were developing those tools as terrorism was increasing and at that same time the internet was becoming more internet-y right it was it's not the the ability to spread information around the world has has evolved in very clear ways over time and while we were collecting that data and terrorism was increasing we're sort of faced with this this terrifying situation that what if we are what if we're driving that the increase in the statistics right what if our our our improvements in our ability to collect the data is really driving this more so than than things are happening on the ground we're just better able to detect it and we wrote essays about it and we you know had many discussions about it and the ultimate results is you know if you're looking at the Islamic State for example of if you're talking about our the decline that we've seen in the past few years it really is a glass half full glass half empty situation and it's extremely difficult to sort of wrap your head around are things getting better now or were they just obscenely terrible in in 2014 and that was the exceptional that was the the sort of the the more meaningful pattern and now we're just sort of you know regressing back to I don't want to call normal but as you know somewhat reduced level of violence and and I can tell you you know the violence that we were collecting data on in 2014 was was just horrific it was like it was outstanding in its its sort of frequency and lethality and and we were we were you know ongoing data collection we were just continually sort of horrified how much worse the situation on the ground seemed to be getting and I think that's sort of corroborated by other sources of information that were collecting information on on what was happening in Iraq and Syria at the time and now you know we've continued were were somewhat relieved aside from the fact that terrorism and and violence has decreased we're somewhat relieved that we are still have access to more and more source content than ever before but we are actually able to capture this decrease and so it is not much to our relief just an artifact of of our ability to to collect better data and collect more comprehensive data around the world although that is always something that should be born in mind when you're looking at analysis well thank you so I think we'll now open it up to audience Q&A starting with the gentleman over here and please identify yourself with one I'm a Peter Humphrey intel analyst and a former diplomat I hope in the future you can include two trends which are very easy to track one is gender and the other is professed religion what troubles me is a parallel effort goes on in the intelligence community with multi-million dollar search engines that search in 70 languages and it drives me crazy when the taxpayers are paying for the same dataset twice and I wonder if you couldn't outreach to the intel community there's certainly no fear on sources and methods when you're you know doing this kind of level of study my question is we capture a lot of these guys in the field we ask them what their inspirations are and invariably there's some cleric that's signed off on the operation to the degree that some operations are delayed when the fatwa does not arrive in time and so I don't know I just get the sense that we set aside our political correctness at some point and address 20% of mankind and say this will no longer serve you must clean house you must no longer allow your clerics to sign off on these operations I mean I could think of one guy who signed off on 37 suicide bombings no link between Islam and terrorism are you kidding I can speak to the question about the data so we actually we've we're pretty familiar with the at least the open source resources that the intelligence community uses when they're searching 70 different languages and we they leverage a lot of automated data collection strategies almost entirely there's very little sort of human in the loop in terms of the data collection methodology for those and while they are very exciting because you can sort of push a button and have sort of instant data they're pretty terrible in terms of the actual data that they produce and so we've done systematic analysis comparing the data that we collect using this sort of hybrid approach using the sort of artificial intelligence where it's appropriate and where it's useful and where it's effective but using humans to do sort of the more heavy lifting in terms of of critical thinking and synthesizing complex information and when we compare these data sets we find some pretty scary things in the fully automated strategies so for example one of them will have 800 records of successful assassinations of Barack Obama that's obviously problematic and so the issues of duplication the issues of the fact that these automated processes when they are left to their own devices they ultimately can't read right they process words they are making really interesting advances in the ability to to sort of use natural language processing and text analysis to create structured data but it's not there yet I would be happy to report if it were and we often try and implement as sort of marginal improvements based on these technologies where possible but the data sets that they are producing are not actually they produce something but they are not a reflection of of reality I would just add that there are within the report there are some very important pieces of information about the gender dynamic and the role of gender in counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism and I'm thinking specifically of the tactic section related to Boko Haram the report does a good job again of noting one primary tactic that the group uses is kidnapping and trafficking of individuals and then forced what gender of the terrorists okay well I'm just saying that one component of this report does touch on the gender dynamic and then more broadly Mercy Corps research consistently finds that its perceptions of community exclusion perpetrated by governments egregious human rights violations that are often the most common drivers of radicalization to violence we do not find in our research that it's religiosity that's fueling violent extremism so just to follow up on that I mean and it's not political correctness it's that you're going where the research is telling you to go and um creative associates and USAID had a big a pretty significant research that came out I think about a year or so ago maybe a little bit more that was linking it more towards gang violence that people were being recruited in the same methodology through friends and family and that's where the recruitment was happening and you know is it is it linked in somehow yes but but also don't go you know I think what we're also saying is don't go to the extreme and say that this is this is the only way and also go where the research shows you and so I think that that's that's really one of the big pieces that we've been trying to dispel this myth as well I'll maybe just add two things from the USIP point of view the first is the importance of having an open source completely public available database this is not a knock on the incredible work that happens in the intelligence community and in governments the United States government and other governments around the world but the ability for GTD and this report to be publicly talked about discourse Erin and I were speaking before the panel I mean the amount of the wiki culture that happens about certain anecdotes and certain pieces of data I think makes us all much stronger as a public to be talking about issues around violent extremism this is not just a problem for militaries and intelligence services to solve this is a problem for all of us as community members to solve and so the access to the information is incredibly important in the public sphere the second thing I want to make just on the religiosity conversation so one of the things I heard from all four of our panelists here is implicit in a lot of the analysis is a need for non-linear non-causal thinking that these are incredibly complex ecosystems where a variety of different circumstances relationships and identities are colliding with each other in a variety of different ways and so one of the things I say when I speak a lot about this topic is if anybody gives you a one causal reason for violent extremism it is incumbent upon you to dig deeper there is not one reason that anybody does anything we're all very complex human beings as part of our humanity that we are able to toggle eight to twelve different pieces of information at any one time to help us make a decision and those decisions may be as simple as when to cross the street as well as when to join a group as well as when to commit horrible atrocities and so I think that if we hear religion it's often a post fact justification to try and absolve some of the responsibility for engaging in incredibly shame producing behaviors but I think it's really important of us as the policy community to continue to advocate for non-linear thinking and non-causal thinking and where parts where religion is helping justify violence it is people within that religious community that needs to be pushing back against that justification of violence and when there are places where the religious community is able to help push for messages of peace and tolerance which is the vast majority of the Islamic faith that needs to be highlighted as well so can I also just I want to say something also I think what you were referring to is women being radicalized is that also one of the things you raised? The number of women has increased I'm trying to get a handle on whether it's a flat increase or increasing through time so there are a lot of people that are doing research on that the numbers are quite low if you're looking at those from the west that are going to these areas there hasn't been a lot of research on that but there is some and again what you're seeing is that those who are attracted to it are being pulled in by friends and we're going to go to the next question sir thank you good morning my name is Olu Mide I'm a grad student at the George Washington University and I'm an Nigerian so interesting in my country has come up several times in the presentation by the IEP by the way very wonderful presentation and the data for me is very very instructive and informative so I have concerns as a Nigerian who is privileged to study here and also very passionate about what goes on back at home the East Nigeria which has been extremely affected by the current insurgency the Bokoa prior to 2009 we had relative pace in Nigeria everything was going on smoothly and the USIP wonderful job you're doing back home following up all your reports and everything and I'm trying to look at the area of human rights abuse justice system with respect to violent extremism there's a dimension that is coming up right now in Nigeria talking about the full enhancement and also the shite movement which is building momentum because that is exactly how Bokoa Ram started in 2009 and we see that the leader of the shite movement has been in custody now for more than three years without anything done about it in your data collection I don't know how human rights abuse justice system how would that how is interwoven into terrorism and what do you think we need to do and how cooperative is the intelligence unit in the military and the policy makers how receptive are they to this data that is very very instructive thank you I think you know what's what's interesting about the the findings around political terror so when we are are putting forth the finding that almost all terrorists the vast majority of terrorism occurs in countries embroiled in conflict or with high levels of political terror we're taking something called the political terror scale so that is a separate data set that measures and I can send you an email with the link to political terror scale political terror scale is measuring a subset of essentially human rights factors so we're comparing that data set which had such a strong correlation with the index that's where we're getting those kinds of findings and so that's the source we're using there I don't think that the GTD is is collecting that type of data so that's that's one of the the roles of the index itself there's a lot of interest in Nigeria there is I think differing feelings about the coding of of the Fulani as terrorist group or as terrorism it's something that we are pulling from from the database so we have to be comparable with all of the data that we're using we can't decide as IEP which elements of the terrorism database we will and will not use or we can't build a comparable index but I will say from a practitioner's point of view that that question has been raised before I don't have a a great answer for you in terms of how intelligence communities are absorbing the message around human rights but what I think we're trying to dispel through that finding or what it can dispel is is something more commonly held amongst maybe the general public than the intelligence community that the terrorism grows from from some sort of economic disadvantage and look at some of the other factors here and of course there's implications for for government strong implications for government within that and over here and then the gentleman over here hi my name is Anthony thank you all for coming so I have a question about the the types of data that are still kind of left to be desired Ms. Bresslauer you noted that the GTI tries to create some sort of composite measure of the psychological impact of terror activity and then Ms. Hume went on to note that we really need to do some better work to kind of better highlight that phenomenon so I have a two-prong question first Ms. Bresslauer if you could just elaborate on the methodology that the report uses to kind of measure that impact and then to Ms. Hume kind of what's left to be desired and what kind of data would require just to clarify I think we we were talking about two different aspects of that so when you know what the terrorism index is measuring is the impact of terrorism not so when we're looking at the impact we're looking at an output there and what we try to do to look at some of the psychological impact is to put a different percentage weight for five years running on that score at the country level and so the simplest way to describe that is to say instead of just saying that a terrorist attack has an impact on a country in only one year we understand it may have a lasting impact and an extreme example is going to be 9-11 in the United States so that's a way of taking a quantitative approach and taking data and trying to build in a methodology that accounts for some of these nuances well it's not a qualitative assessments we'll never have that sort of fear I think what Liz was referring to is the impact of trauma of an attack on people's psyche and vulnerability and how that type of trauma can then influence their decisions the same way we we think about post-traumatic stress disorder for instance of veterans right and that's what the report says it talks about the fact that there's been so much research on the drivers of violent extremism and conflict but there's been very little research done in this area so it calls it out and says this is where we need to do more research and so I was just saying I agree with it at AFP and also beyond conflict we've done some programming in this area looking at neuroscience and conflict um sponsored by USIP as well and it's really looking at what is the how does what's the impact that violence has on your brain and how does your brain get rewired but then more importantly how can the brain get rewired back and how when we are programming and designing programs here let's say in Washington or you know Richmond and I are out in Nigeria designing programs you know we're designing programs that would work on our brains but you know if we haven't been exposed to long-term violence it just doesn't make any sense so that is a lot of the research area that is being looked at now in terms of what does your brain look like on extended violence or even on a violent extremism attack and then how do you rewire your brain back and more importantly how do we make sure that our programs are not doing more harm because that's also what we're finding as well that some of the programs that we have done and thought were helping actually might not be helping from the data perspective the so we don't capture this very well at all we about I don't know 14 13 years ago we tried to implement a variable called psychosocial consequences at the event level it was massive failure as for reasons you could probably imagine it's very difficult to and it was I mean it was measured in like a like a four point scale all right from from very very low to so severe so much goes into that that sort of construct that concept that is very difficult to I mean I think the recency strategy is actually pretty interesting and sort of combining that with with you know with frequency and volume like either there are broader measures that I think you could probably come up with and make a defense for at the event level it was it was just extremely difficult and we just continue we don't discontinue many variables at all ever but that was one of them what we just gave up on the other thing that's interesting about that is that when we measure injuries occasionally someone will ask us well does that include psychological injuries does that and it does not it includes only physical injuries which is another sort of I think you referred to it is something to be desired right it's it's only physical injuries and it's something that should absolutely be taken into account when doing an analysis of of the data if you're using the GTD that those casualty variables the deaths and injuries are strictly physical and there are it would be a fascinating project honestly to just sort of brainstorm about all of the different components to assessing the the psychosocial consequences of not just an individual attack but but terrorism in a particular context broadly can I just add and what makes it so fascinating is because by definition that's what terrorists want to do they want to strike that fear varying degrees of successful threat and and that so it's just interesting I think this also is a a nice segue to Richmond's original point on the real resource imbalance for this field I mean the amount of information in the neuroscience psychosocial psychological sociological fields that could be brought to bear to help communities around the world to not only deal with their trauma but also to do reconciliation which is the a lot of the findings in the report that are about the return of foreign fighters are not even foreign fighters but just fighters coming back to home communities there's going to be a need for both reconciliation and trauma work and so I think this is a a real burgeoning field and it also ties into a little bit of the other question which is people can't always self report into everything that's happening to them so the role of trauma and stigma and some of these much more invisible issues that are happening are impacting an entire generation of youth I heard last week that's 60% of the youths of the world's youth are growing up having been exposed to conflict so this is these are real big trend issues for us as the peace building meets counterterrorism fields to really reckon with thank you for the question sir you had your hand up for several times now I'm sorry about that thank you very much I'm Phil Schrafer retired international healthcare consultant thanks very much to Mercy Corps for putting me into Baku for six months and yes there is a Trump hotel in Baku just never opened up I have a question about Iran your report makes a distinction between warfare and terrorism both of them killed a lot of people and innocents are killed in both sides in Iran the Iranian army actually fought the Islamic state you know it was a Shiite Sunni engagement so a lot of Iranian officers and men died in that the Iranians also blessed clerics blessed in Lebanon fighting the Israeli army because that army had invaded Lebanon so I guess this gentleman over here is right but you know they see themselves as patriotic resistance to an invasion what does the report say about Iran specifically well I will qualify that the definition of terrorism used in the report does not is only around non-state actors so when we're looking at some of those actions by an army that's not included in this report and that is a question that comes up frequently it is included in the measure of of violence that comes through in the global peace index but not in terms of the terrorism index and I one of the advantages that we've also found more broadly from from that definition which which comes from start is that whereas governments have their own terrorist lists and terrorist designations we can use the multiple levels of criteria that that the GTD employs which are actually much more complex than what either I or Aaron presented in terms of how they decide what is and isn't a terrorist attack from a non-state actor but it also brings us to a level where we can look at those multiple definitions and it creates a list free of what other governments may determine to be a terrorist group or designation so I will I'll leave you with that in terms of where we're looking at the example that you specifically mentioned chance to jam the bell I'm a Turkish journalist based here in DC and I have a little similar question region-specific question because I was just checking the report and you're talking about the Kurdistan Workers Party the pkk and although you mentioned that they were the bearers of the dead least terror group terror attacks in Europe in 2017 there is a fall and there was a specific mention that one attack out so I took in 2017 and on a mosque in Germany there are no deaths or injuries so if there is a decline and there is specific mentioned any terror group that you mentioned the report do you reconsider them being a terror group or how did that happen is that sorry is the question that if there are no deaths from the incident so there are no deaths in the incident that's mentioned and if there is a decline in one terror group's activities in any given year is that does that mean that this might be under consideration whether they are still a terror group or not I will let Erin answer this question about how that's coded I will say from the index perspective all right because we are pulling together not just deaths but incidents and property damage as well we would continue to count these attacks so the to reiterate what Michelle said in the previous response the the the database doesn't draw from a sort of an official list of sort of designated terrorist groups and we don't make designations about whether an organization is a terrorist group or not one of the things that we found and so it's an event level database literally any organization that is is responsible for carrying out an attack that meets the inclusion criteria will appear in the database as a perpetrator organization I tend to use the phrase perpetrator organization or perpetrator group more than terrorist group because you can then entertain many many questions about well how much terrorism does an organization have to carry out before they are a terrorist group and we see numerous groups in the database that have been identified as perpetrators of attacks that also do other things right they're not they are not exclusively engaged in in terrorism as their only form of activity they do other violent types of activity nonviolent types of activity some engage in electoral politics and so it's a very important to not sort of consider the the perpetrator groups that are in the global terrorism database and therefore in the GTI as a sort of one-size-fits-all these are all you know terrorist groups any organization that carries out an attack that meets our inclusion criteria for the for the definition of terrorism will be named in in the database as as a perpetrator of that attack it is really up to the beholder the the the viewer to determine you know whether that is sufficient activity to classify an organization as a terrorist group I would tend generally to say it's not in in terms of you know you have to look at the the broader types of activity that that organizations and groups are involved in and this might just be one of of many types of of political or non-political activity that they're undertaking well thank you we are just about at time so before closing let me please make a plug to the policymakers and funders in the room and tuning in online how invaluable the GTD is as a resource so please continue to fund its work in the entire peace building meets counter-terrorism community can do so much more with better information but that information does need to be funded produced and then analyzed in indices such as IEP's reports in order to be made use of I heard a lot today about the peace building and its peace building community and its related methods and practices and how they can add to the counter-terrorism community so I look forward to continuing this conversation and many others on how we can bridge this divide prioritize local and specific context specific information including community members beyond government actors to have a stake in this challenge and making sure that long-term sustainable community oriented solutions are part of a steady state not just an end state so I will also tip the hat to Richmond who reminded us that today is the 70th anniversary of the universal declaration for human rights and how important that is to the peace building community on respect for human rights good governance promoting inclusivity and strengthening community relations as part of this enduring challenge so please join me in thanking all of our panelists and particularly IEP for this amazing report this opportunity to talk today and thank you again for joining us here at USIP