Well, I knew that. It was a lot of experience.  The idea is kind of left here. But as we start talking, I'm not sure what they will do with it. Playing on a course. And, of course, the particle present. I don't know what to do with that. But, excuse me. Council doesn't give the opportunity to water down. I'm just complaining to the doors. No, no. I mean, it's a functional thing about getting into it quickly. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Sorry about that. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Okay, good morning. My name is Jim Roof, and I'm the Senior Program Officer for Civilian Military Affairs here at USIP's Academy. On behalf of our co-host, the Folk of Bernadotte International Challenges Forum, we'd like to welcome you to USIP and to the Strategic Communications for a New Era in Peace Operations Challenges Forum Workshop. We have an exciting program filled with many experts from the Strategic Communications field. Before I ask USIP's president to open the workshop, we'd like to share just a couple of administrative remarks. First, as many of you probably already experienced, we have a number of team members that are located out in the hallway in the registration area, so if there's anything we can do to make your time here a little bit more enjoyable, please don't hesitate to ask us. Biographies. We have a packed day today, so in order to maximize and make the most efficient use of our time, we're going to just probably lightly touch on the biographies of the individuals here and the featured speakers and the panelists, but if you'd like to know more, their full biographies are inside your packets. Question and answers. So once the panel's portion of our session is completed, there's plan time for question and answer. If you haven't received already, you will, some cards for which you can write your questions down on and then we will take them and then we will get them to the panelists. And all you have to do is take your cards and then just pass them to the outside of your row and then we will collect them from there. Another important administrative remark tonight, beginning at 5.30, there will be a reception at the Washington Marriott Georgetown Hotel. It's on 22nd Street and I think there's some directions, but we can get those for you if you so need them. Okay. That said, it's now my privilege to introduce the President of USIP, Ms. Nancy Lindberg. On February 2nd, Nancy Lindberg was sworn in as President of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to joining USIP, she served as the Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistant, or DACHA, at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she directed the efforts focused on crisis prevention, response, recovery and transition. Ms. Lindberg led the DACHA teams in response to the ongoing Syria crisis, the Sahel and Horn of Africa droughts, Arab Spring, the Ebola response and numerous other global crises. Ms. Lindberg has spent most of her career working on issues of transition, democracy and civil society, conflict and humanitarian response. And prior to joining USAID, she was the President of Mercy Corps. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Nancy Lindberg. Thank you, Jim. And welcome everybody to USIP. It's a pleasure to have everyone here and thank you for battling the heat and the traffic. As Jim said, we're absolutely delighted here at USIP to be able to host this very important conference. USIP was chartered 30 years ago with the mission of finding practical solutions for preventing, mitigating and recovering from conflict and connecting, doing with teaching and learning. This conference is squarely, squarely in our mission. And I'd like to thank our co-hosts and recognize Annika Hilding-Norberg, the Director and Founder of the Challenges Forum, and Mr. Sven Erich-Solder, the Director General of the Fokker-Bernadotte Academy, and our many US partners for coming together on this important effort. I'd also like to welcome many of you who've traveled from other countries, who've come from across the globe from numerous organizations, government, military, business. This is exactly the configuration of people we need to tackle this issue. And I understand that we have a number of people joining us online. And I would encourage all of you who are working the Twitter sphere to use hashtag peace comms as a part of the overall conversation. So we were very happy to host in March in partnership with the UN Foundation, a conversation with members of the high-level independent panel on peace operations, which was a very, very vigorous, very engaged conversation. And this is an extraordinarily well-timed event with the release yesterday of the high-level panel report. We also had last week a report from UNHCR that we are now seeing a record level of 60 million people who are currently displaced, either within or outside their country's borders. So at a time where peacekeepers are increasingly called upon to keep the peace, where there is still active conflict, and where you are seeing complicated missions that rapidly change over time. I saw this last fall in Liberia, where the peacekeepers were suddenly in the midst of an Ebola epidemic. We see it in places like South Sudan, where you are quickly transitioning from a country that is on a pathway to peace to terrible conflict and hundreds of thousands of people seeking refuge on your compound. This is a time where we really need to enable our peacekeeping operations to fully embrace the idea of full-spectrum operations. And strategic communications are an absolutely critical part of that. So I want to really commend the organizers of this workshop and all of you for the work that you are poised to do. This is a part of a very important conversation and hopefully a part of really moving forward so that we have the kind of peacekeeping operations that are equal to an ever more complicated and conflict-affected set of crises. I look forward to continuing to be a part of this conversation and USIP is very eager and happy to have the partnership with the Folko Bernadette Academy and the Challenges Forum and others as we move this conversation forward. And to get us underway, it's now my great pleasure to welcome Mr. Sven Ericsolder. Sven Ericsolder forward, Sven Ericsolder brings considerable experience both with the private sector and inside the Swedish government to his current position as Director General of the Folko Bernadette Academy. So he's well positioned to help lead this conversation forward. Please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you Nancy and good morning to all of you. It is really a great pleasure for me as well to welcome you all to this Challenges Forum workshop that we at the Folko Bernadette Academy has the great privilege to host together with the United States Institute for Peace on this very timely topic of strategic communications for the new era of UN peace operations. I have to say that personally I feel also very strongly about strategic communications in the context of peace operations and I do that mainly for three different reasons. First, as the Swedish Agency for Peace, Security and Development under the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Sweden, the development of critical tools in support of UN peace operations is really at the heart of our work and our commitment. And second, doing so together with partners notably within the framework of the Challenges Forum also confirms our commitment to and believe in multilateralism for more effective peace operations. And last and third, I think strategic communications is a topic that I have of course a personal interest in, not only because as Nancy said that I have previously worked in this area both in the private and in the public sector, but more importantly because I really believe that strategic communications has never ever been more important than it is today when we are talking about the United Nations and peace operations. I think a central tenet for UN peace operations to be in mind is if you are not seen, then you do not exist. If you are not seen, then you do not exist. So not being seen I think makes you vulnerable because it is by being seen that you can gain confidence, trust and also support from your respective clients, from your constituencies or otherwise target audiences. And if you are not seen, then not only will your work have very limited impact, but also when times get tough you are not likely to ride out the storm. And if you are not seen, then you will not attract the support and investment that you need to persist. And you are less likely to be missed and the cost of losing you will not trump the cost of keeping you floating. It's really important to be seen. And in fact, communications is key for I think a peace operations accountability in relation to those that it deploys, of course, as well as in relation to those that it is deployed to protect. But communications also provides accountability in relation to those who deploy peacekeepers and make peace operations happen. That is both, of course, member states and the United Nations itself. And this is why we need to think about communications and how to communicate in a strategic manner in order to win the hearts and minds and thereby also secure national and local ownership of the process. For these reasons, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that strategic communications will be at the center of the implementation work that now follows in the review process that the UN peace operations is currently going through. And I think it's also clear that the UN has to become better at communicating peacekeeping mandates, but also how they are implemented, how they are translated into practice. And this has to be done continuously and in innovative ways to global and national, but also calls at local levels. But not necessarily in the same way across all those levels. Strategic communication, I think, is also a cost-effective mean for managing expectations and to inform more realistic mandates and implementation plans. I think also equally important to external communication is internal communication. And in fact, I would argue that in order to do external communication strategically, internal communication is key. The UN is, as we all know, a complex organization for obvious reasons. It has 193 member states, incorporates with a number of regional and non-governmental organizations. And it has the most important, but also the most complex, I would say, responsibilities of all, namely to save succeeding generations from war, reaffirm fundamental human rights and respect for international law, and promote social progress and better standards of life. As such, in order for the UN to communicate in a coherent, confident, and therefore also in a convincing manner, it has to be clear about the message. I think this all sounds, of course, very complicated. And we can't hide from the fact that the UN has a long, long way, I think, to go when it comes to strategic communications. And the first challenge is perhaps to ensure that all member states share the commitment to this issue. And I think this workshop we are attending here today is an important step in that direction. And we are therefore very, very encouraged by the impressive panels that we will hear today and the wide range of different types of experiences that we have here in the room to discuss the questions for the course of the day. And personally, I'm absolutely sure that this afternoon's working group discussions will result in targeted and realistic recommendations that can play an important role in the second stage of the review process, and maybe the most important part of the process, namely implementation. So, dear friends, once again, I would like to thank you, Nancy, and I would like to thank the US Institute of Peace for co-hosting this workshop with us in this really, really beautiful building. And of course, I would also like the Challengers Forum Secretariat for making this seminar happen. And finally, I would like to thank all of you very much for attending this seminar. And I'm really looking forward to participating in the discussions throughout the day. So thank you very much and may the good work begin. Thanks. Thank you. This is cooperation. Your Excellencies, partners, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. The purpose of the Challengers Forum remains steadfast over the past two decades. Our mission is to explore and develop thinking and concepts on how to better analyze, plan, conduct, and evaluate complex peace operations. We encourage action on the findings we generate. In January, concluding a two-year multi-strand project, the Challengers Forum partner organizations from 22 countries, in the picture here represented by our India and British, Pakistani, and American colleagues, presented a report on the theme designing mandates and capabilities for future peace operations. And the report contained a range of findings. We were very pleased to have the Vice Chair of the Independent Panel participate in that event. In relation to strategic communications, the Challengers Forum partners found that we need to adopt new tools and technologies in peace operations as a means for tackling emerging threats, not least in order to enhance the security of peacekeepers in the field. The application of modern technology to peace operations aims to understand and influence current day mission environments in two fundamental ways. First, by gaining trust and support by communicating with host country populations. Second, by improving situational awareness through information gathering, analysis, and dissemination among staff. The report continues, while traditional communication tools remain important, new and social media have the potential to improve both the scope and effectiveness of peace operations communication efforts. Correctly used, these tools enable missions to both take a more strategic approach to communications, as well as to enhance the ability of missions to react better to events as they unfold. And finally, the report found that new and social media enable interactive two-way dialogue not only provides a source of information to the public, but can also generate support for mission goals. And in the partnership, we came to the conclusion that there was a need to convene a workshop exactly like this one, bringing in also the business and strategic communications experts as much as our traditional constituency, the international peace operations community. And what better place to have this workshop than here in Washington DC and at the United States Institute of Peace. The purpose of our workshop here today is to, one, explore and if possible initiate new and innovative thinking in concept for strategic communications that can be applied in support of peace operations. And second, to mobilize support for the prioritization of strategic communications as a key enabler to alleviate the challenges facing modern peace operations and to better protect our men and women peacekeepers in the field. And third, we hope to contribute to the ongoing important process for review and reform that is currently ongoing. And as it happens, as Mrs. Lindberg mentioned, our workshop could not come at the more timely time. The U.N. Secretary-General's high-level panel on peace operations here represented by Ambassador Pascoe presented their much anticipated report just now with a specific section and recommendation on strategic communication, which confirms the relevance of the topic we're meeting here to discuss. The report I found is immensely rich and loaded with thoughtful and constructive and concrete proposals for enhancing 21st century peace operations. Here, we will seek to zoom in on the part of the report that deals with strategic communications and what needs to be done. And what does that mean? Which innovative concept the methods are required? What can we learn from the business and strategic communications expert community in order to realize the potential of strong and fit for purpose strategic communications? And at one workshop, what we choose to do here today matters. We are as focused on bringing the findings of today's workshop forward as we are in making the workshop happen in the first place. And for those of you that are new to the Challenges Forum, I will spend just two minutes on mentioning a couple of examples of Challenges Forum partnership contributions to major and concrete developments. Contribution to the UN-led development of the principles and guidelines for peacekeeping. The DPKO and our Jordanian partners in cooperation with the Pearson Center and the FBA brought together the five top tube contributing countries to ensure the ability of the global south to properly and fully influence the finalization of the UN principles and guidelines document. The Challenges Forum study on consideration for mission leadership in UN peacekeeping operationalizes the UN peacekeeping principles and guidelines. And since 2011, it has been used by all UN senior mission leadership courses, as well as by regional organizations and partner states across the world. The picture at the bottom was taken, I think last week at the UNSML in Cairo. The challenges, sorry, and the final example is the first strategic thematic guidelines for UN police peacekeeping is finally coming to fruition. And the workshop hosted by our Norwegian partners, NUPI, focused on UN police and capacity building and development, which is now much thanks to the strong support and sustained support from Norway of UN policing turning into the first thematic guidelines. And before closing, I would like to take this opportunity to extend our warm welcome to Canada as the 22nd partner of the Challenges Forum, building on an earlier valuable partnership that we enjoyed with the Pearson Center. I look forward to the deliberations here today. We look forward to working with the outcome and to make sure it is put to good use, taking into account forthcoming reviews, coming out of the high level panel or review of the peace building architecture as well as the review of the implementation of Security Council 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. We will continue working with the outcomes of this workshop in partnership with our organizers and in parallel to developments being generated by the international community at the fourth generation consultation in Jakarta and the peacekeeping summit in New York. In October, our Challenges Annual Forum 2015 will be hosted by Armenia in Jerevan. Our Challenges Forum workshop in Addis Ababa will further develop and test the findings of this workshop towards the field. But here and now, thank you the United States Institute of Peace under the leadership of Nancy Lindberg for hosting this important workshop. Our thanks also goes to the broader American partnership that have been involved in the planning of the workshop. I would say an innovative model of whole of government in cooperation with the think tank approach, which also includes the US Army War College Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, an effort led by Bill Flavin, the Department of State Effort Partnership, led by Victoria Holt and the Department of Defense led by Kristi Hand. And thank you, Folke Bananat Academy, forthcoming with your support to co-host this event. Thank you. Finally, this workshop will not have taken place if it was not for the efforts and engagement of UN Peacekeeping, and in particular, Nick Bernbach of the Public Affairs Section, who has both championing the issue and served as an essential and dynamic driver of this project. Having first galvanized the issue in partnership discussions at our workshop at the UN Read and Service Center in Anteb and then having stayed the course with us. Without that, we will not be here. So ladies and gentlemen, I very much look forward to today and to working with the outcomes and very much look forward for us all together making a difference in this very, very important area of strategic communications in support of UN Peace Operations. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy, Sven Erick, and Annika for your remarks and giving the workshop its charge for the day. At this time, I would like to invite our first panel to the stage. This panel will focus on strategic communications challenges today in peace operations and will be chaired by Mr. Nick Bernbach, Director of Public Affairs, Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support for the United Nations. Mr. Bernbach? Do they do? Okay, all right, yeah. How will I know who I am, though? You know your name's right. Are we microphones or no microphones? Yeah, they'll turn it on. Okay, let's see, very good. You're already on. All right, excellent. Good, thank you, and thank you for the opportunity. Thanks to the organizers for pulling this together. It is a most welcome and unusual opportunity for me personally to be able to talk about strategic communications to people who seem to actually wanna hear about it. So thank you, that's great. We have a very distinguished panel here and I will take the Chairman's prerogative of saying a few words before we turn it over to them. As you heard Annika say, one of the sort of fundamental principles behind this was the idea of being practical, was not to simply just lay out what the issues are and then wring our hands and then go back to doing things in the way that we've always done them, but rather to look at where we are, what the problems are, and to really try to come up with a couple of issues with regards to how we can try to make it better. And with that in mind, what I thought I would do is just look very quickly at what the problem set is that's been defined for this panel. And then I'll take perhaps seven or eight minutes and just go through a couple of points in that regard and then I'll turn it over to the panel. Let me take the opportunity first to introduce my colleagues from my left is Ambassador Lynn Pascoe, who up until recently was a member of the Secretary General's Independent Panel on Peace Operations. I know him as the Undersecretary General for Political Affairs and a long-serving American diplomat, a good colleague and a wealth of information if I'm very lucky to have him. Welcome, sir. On his left is Mr. Marston Moyani, the Strategic Communications Officer from the Peace and Security Department of the African Union. Welcome, thank you for being here. And at the end is my dear colleague, Yasmin Abudsen, the Chief Communications and Public Information Officer from Minusta in Haiti, but also have served in pretty much any peacekeeping operation that the UN has done that you can think of. Yasmin has been a part of it in the last 10 years and is truly one of the good people in the universe of UN peacekeeping and we're deeply fortunate to have all three of them. In terms of what we're actually here to discuss, the way that it's framed in the setup is that what are the challenges, but also what should we be doing? What are the optimal purposes of Stratcoms and what are the gaps and is the UN using Strategic Communications to its full potential? So we can just ignore it. We can get that one out of the way first, right? So is the UN using its full potential? No, it isn't. We need help and I'll let's put that over there and let's talk about other things for a little bit. So what I wanna discuss first is the optimal purposes, Ben, right? So why does Stratcoms matter and why is it necessary to try to communicate in this slightly inchoated and complicated manner that's more than just putting out press releases from time to time and answering allegations when they arise? So I've been fortunate enough to work at headquarters for many years as the press person, but I've also been deployed on a number of operations most recently in Somalia where I spent three years as the head of information there for the UN. And one of the things that you learn very, very quickly is that UN operations do not win by hard power. It's not what we do. We don't fight and win wars and if you ask us to, you will fail. We succeed when we do through the use of soft power and through the use of explaining and cajoling and deterring spoilers and fundamentally that act, that peace operations accompany a political process that we're in support of the talking and of the discussion, that that act means that we are communications driven and that if we are not getting that right then we're putting ourselves at a great disadvantage. The other side of that, the more practical side to put on my peacekeeping hat for a second is a strategic communications approach, is a defense for you. That actually it means that you are empowering your mission with more information that gives you more survivability, more situational awareness in real time and a better ability to influence the outcome. And those are from anybody's sort of practically driven approaches rather important in today's peacekeeping operations. We'll talk a little bit about that. The other point on what the optimal purposes are that I would just highlight is peacekeeping is fundamentally a partnership and it doesn't work if it's not a partnership and that partnership on the ground can be in a multi-dimensional mission between the police and the military and the various civilian components and the host authorities. But more broadly it's a partnership between everyone that has a stake in peacekeeping. So that's the civil society and that's the militaries and that's the journalists and all of them either working together or the tension of that is what will make peacekeeping successful. Explaining the work of your mission in a way that is comprehensible, that makes others want to support it, builds the partnership and builds the very thing that empowers you to complete your tasks successfully. Without partnership, peacekeeping tends to not be the right tool for the job. And the strategic communications approach helps with that. So those are my just intro comments on optimal purpose of why we need stratcoms. I'll just say a couple of words now about the center of the problem set which is what are the problems, right? What's going wrong? And our colleagues will get into some of the specifics using their experiences to discuss this but I wanted to highlight a few based on my read of where we are. The first is that there's a structural flaw and a difficulty between headquarters and the field and there's a disconnect and communicating is complicated from thousands and thousands of miles away. Nobody who is the head of a information component somewhere wants a 10,000 mile screwdriver, wants somebody calling them from four time zones over and saying we don't understand why you're not being more aggressive in saying this in public. That's a very complicated equation for us and our structure in peace operations where we are in fact quite decentralized and we delegate a tremendous amount of responsibility to the field requires that we at headquarters sitting in nice offices in Turtle Bay trust our people in the field, right? But in order for that to work there has to be a common playbook. There has to actually be a mutually agreed strategic communications plan that allows the structural issue to be addressed. That's the first thing I would say. The second is that in peacekeeping we don't end missions very well and if you look at the universe of peace operations right now many of our large operations are now past their peak and are looking towards how they're gonna transition out. And as any military person will tell you planning and organizing a retreat is a lot harder than doing in advance and the UN proves that time and time again. And so thinking through what exit strategy means in places like Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo where I've just returned from this weekend or Liberia or Haiti where our colleague is working now and these are important questions because it's very difficult to rally resources and to galvanize the attention that is necessary for peace operations to succeed when everyone knows that you're leaving. But here's the trick of it all, right?  The day-to-day life of a public information officer or chief in peacekeeping is very frequently about playing defense. And if anyone's reading the stories about you in peacekeeping right now there's your answer that when there is misconduct for example you have to respond you have to respond aggressively and nobody wants to hear about anything else that's going on on your mission. So you have this large mission spread out over the country the size of a continent and no one's interested in what's going on because that news is being subsumed by the issue of misconduct. Taking back the narrative and this is a point that General Gordon has been making for years taking back the narrative is critical in terms of preparing yourself from an informational perspective finding the good stories and telling them in a compelling manner. It's critical to a strategic communications plan that works for peace operations because it is that civil affairs officer who's a thousand kilometers away from nowhere or the air ops person sitting on a field in 145 degree heat in Mali. I mean that is actually peacekeeping right and explaining that and explaining why that has value and explaining what that means to people is not always easy but it's a sine qua non and that's one thing that we need to focus on I just have two more and then I'll turn to the panels. We're in a world of new channels for media and what needs to be understood is that this is no longer an option. Anyone who's asking the question should I be tweeting is not paying attention. Yes, if that is a question in anyone's mind yes you should be tweeting and you shouldn't be doing it without thinking about it. It should be part of your overall communications plan which is, wait for it, a political document. It is a creational document that is as important as your mission directive. So what are you gonna do? How are you gonna do it? To whom do you need to do it to and how will you judge whether or not you've been successful at doing it? Like that part of it will have a digital media component. That's true and it doesn't matter where you are it is true and so that requires training and it requires a shift in mindset because the success in a digital media campaign is not measured using the same metrics as success in a 20th century style of communicating a top down one way style of communicating. Digital media is interactive and it's two way and it involves creating a conversation and a series of other small conversations and be ready for that because that is actually how communications is done now and it isn't enough to put out a press release and then walk away from it. That isn't how people are expecting you to communicate so you are letting them down and therefore you're reducing your influence over them. So shifting that mindset. Then the last point that I wanna raise is something that I think about a lot which is that I think that peace operations in general are in a fundamentally changed context and it sounds really quite easy to say that but it's true and I mean I've heard it phrased as we were frequently caught in the crossfire now we're in the cross hairs or if you prefer we used to be attacked because of where we were now we're being attacked for who we are and that shift which is not true on every one of our missions but is frankly true on many of them and particularly the big complex ones that matter most to your Mali is in your Somalis and such. We are in a fundamentally changed environment where the threat level is astronomical. Also in these places not only is the threat level something we haven't confronted before but the environments themselves are deeply inhospitable and that change that idea of deploying a force effectively on Mars that has to be entirely self sustaining but that is also getting attacked while doing it is a fundamental shift because it isn't the UN of the 1990s which I remember where what it was about was not building walls, right? It was dropping the walls and reaching out and going and talking to people and the people that you admired when you were a 26 year old civil affairs officer like I was people that you admired were the ones that were sitting in the cafe bars with the local guys and talking usually in local language and could write these really in depth reports about what was actually happening. That's a really hard thing to do in Mogadishu really hard to do in Mogadishu for a variety of reasons and that shift in posture where our walls are now higher and blast radius is a term that I'm quite familiar with and I shouldn't be and the idea of portraying ourselves as an armed camp has a cost, right? It has a cost because it isn't what the UN is in many ways. We're not war fighters but when we drive through Mogadishu we sure as heck look like them, right? You know, we're in APCs and we're an armor and that's us. So what does that shift mean? What does operating in this fundamentally changed environment where people are trying to blow you up? And by the way are doing so fairly successfully at a rate of about 110 per year. So that shift and what it means and how you can use communications as a deterrent to these types of attacks because by the way most of these groups are quite good at using those tactics, right? The digital battle space is a very vibrant place these days. So that shift is another thing that in stratcoms that I feel that we need to think about. So with just those couple of things in mind, let me, I'd like to turn to the panel and then hopefully get into an interactive discussion. I think I'll ask Ambassador Pasco to go first. Thanks a lot, Nick. Let me just pick up on the last point. I mean, it was fundamentally this point to the change world that we're living in out there. This certainly is not your father's or your grandfather's peacekeeping. This is a very different world that's out there is what drove the Secretary General to set up this independent panel really to look at it to see what's going on, to see where we stand today, what we're doing right, what we're not doing right. And the way that we went about that business was to go out and talk with in various continents with as many people as we could from the heads of the governments down to the civil society that we're working on the ground. The ones that were actually the beneficiaries are maybe not the beneficiaries of the operations that we were carrying out into the world. I think a couple of things are really quite clear when you talk about strategic communications. In the first instance, we've got a huge international problem. As Nick pointed out, the negatives are always there. They're always pushed. Just as one illustration of that, the press conference that we had to say what we're talking about over all peace operations was about 70% about abuse by peacekeepers. These are the stories, these are the lines that people take, they run with it. And so we have that global problem that I think is very clear, which often ignores, is often ignorant, totally ignorant of the work that is being done out there in peace operations across the board. On the other hand, we have a real problem in the countries. This idea that Nick was talking about of being more in fortresses in many places, for example, leads the local people and we got this complaint repeatedly as seeing the UN as a bunch of arrogant foreigners riding around in their white Toyota SUVs with their little canned answers on how you should solve everything and telling everybody how to do it. And I think that this is a problem too that we have to work on very hard. There's gotta be a lot of reach out into the civil societies on the ground working with the partners that we have there. This was brought home to us in conversation after conversation. Let me just say though that when we're really talking about strategic communications and peace operations in general, fundamentally we've gotta look at the product. You can't go out and sell soap. You can't go out and sell other things if they don't work. And this is the fundamental question that the Secretary General really wanted us to look at. How well is it working? What should we be doing differently? What really makes for the world and the settlement of conflicts and the high ideals that are there in the charter 70 years ago? How are we measuring up on this? That's no secret to anyone that the UN has been in the peace operations business since 1948 on both the political side and the peacekeeping side. And it has continued off and on, learned a lot of things, done extremely well in some places and failed in others. My guess is if you walk out on the streets of Washington and ask people, they could tell you the failure is more than the successes. And that's a failure of communication, it seems to me, because it's not the way it should be. Let me just talk a little bit about the conclusions and I would ask people if they're interested, if they're interested enough being in here, they might want to read through the report. It's not as bad as most of you in reports, I must say. It's not bad reading. And hopefully it can give you a reasonable introduction into what we saw as the problems as they were expressed to us and how we could fix those problems. In the first instance, the secretary general wanted us to deal with peace operations across the board. That means from his own phone calls to sending envoys out into the field to regional political offices to the big, very big over a billion dollar a year peacekeeping operations. And also into what we're doing afterwards, what we're doing in sustaining peace. How does this work? We've got these little pigeon holes are we really producing what we say we're doing? Several things came to us as pretty obvious points. The one I'd like to just back up what Nick said is these are political operations. These are not military operations. We're not out fighting a war. We're trying to solve a conflict. We're trying to solve a political problem. It's tricky and it's hard but there's an occasional tendency. And if you read the report, you will notice we're sometimes not terribly kind to the security council on these kinds of issues where they because of the international press and because of the pressures on them to do something and nobody wants to use their own troops for it. So the way to do something is to throw peacekeeping operations at it. And this is exactly the wrong reason for doing it because the tool is not very good for that. It's got to keep in mind the security council, everybody involved in these issues have to keep in mind. These are all political tools for resolution of conflict. Whether in the old days, the old kind of things you were basically having a monitoring of a peace agreement or you're out there really mixing it up in Eastern Congo with the bad guys and trying to figure out how you're going to protect the population and help them. But this is fundamentally a political operation and we need to be keeping in mind that we are trying to solve problems and move on to something else and get out of them. A second issue that's out there that the panel really focused on was, how do we get the UN to be working together and not only internally because it is divided up into all of these ways that people who follow the UN know that by the funding mechanisms, by the programs and the way they work, not to mention just sheer bureaucratic arneriness which there's more than enough of too. But it is inside the UN, it is with our partners and is particularly with the regional organizations and how we cooperate and where we go. Back in my day when I was the head of the political department, I felt that on occasion the African Union, for example, was working at it, but it was struggling some in some of the way. They've come extraordinarily far. It's a very effective discussions that we had with them on where they go, how we cooperate. This has got to be made more formal. I mean, it's got to be much more closely aligned that we're talking about issues from the early days of political negotiation, prevention, other sorts of things up through the actual piece. Give me through a sustainable piece in the end and we need to be working on all these, not only with the African Union, but with other organizations as they're there. In the change situation that's out there, I think that this issue now of we're in not only peacekeeping operations, but political things are the same. You were in Somalia, you know how it works.  It's not easy. It's tough. And you have to figure out how to operate and how to operate more effectively and how to actually have results. What do you do about the, I mean, Somalia is a particularly good political example because we went from absolutely nothingness to not a very good situation today, but an awfully lot better situation today than it was before and it's been a big success. And it's been done totally with the African Union and working together. They have provided the forces. The UN has supported them, done a lot of the political heavy work in the early days, but it has been a big success story for all of us and it's been done by working together, making sure that we're very close and doing it now. Can we copy that in the problems in the Middle East that we've got all over? That's a real question. And it's a serious issue that we have to keep working on. Finally, I think it's important that, it was important for us as we looked at it that we've got to remember it's not only a political operation, but it's people that are involved in the end. It's where we're gonna work with them, where they're gonna come out. It's what they see that has actually changed in their lives. It's gonna make the difference. All of us would love to have the story about the press going out and talking to some villager who said they really saved us. And if the press wants to go outside Goma to one of the towns there that had about 35,000 people in it, was then depopulated by the bad guys that came in, then the peacekeepers moved in and had to fight their way in and got there. Townspeople came out of the woods and back downtown. And if you walk around the streets there, the force commander that's there who is forces and I won't name which ones they were, were reluctant to go in in the first place and change their mind. He is now a hero in town. The little kids line up to have their picture taken. This is, these are the stories of what we can do, but it really does require this different kind of thinking. I think that the other things that we emphasize very hard was the UN has got to do more on conflict prevention. We've got to be stopping these things before they go. We've got to be doing more on peacemaking. The UN has talked about this subject ever since its founding, I think. It really gave it a big push a decade ago. Some strides have been made, but the money hasn't fallen. I mean, people have not put the money where their mouth is that there's a lot more work there that needs to be done. Protection of civilians is where we have forces on the ground is obviously absolutely critical, not only to the UN's reputation, but more importantly the people on the ground that need to help if we're there, we've got to be doing it. And we did quite a bit of talking in the report about that, about what the, how you go about making it clear between the Security Council and discussion of its mandates, what is really needed, the discussions with the troop contributors to make sure that everybody is on the same page. If they're not on the same page, they shouldn't go, it just shouldn't happen. And when you get out there, how you're gonna carry out the operations and it shouldn't be changed in the end.  On the other hand, for the newspaper to say, oh, this was only 20 miles away and it took five hours to get there through the jungle is again, a real issue that has to be discussed and there has to be fairness in the whole thing. I think also most people involved in this business, whether in the UN or in bilateral groups or countries that contribute, would think that the sustainable peace side is the weakest of the entire issue. We really don't know very well how to put countries back on their feet. We talk about it, but the areas that the countries that have actually been there and done it and put together a paper on G7 Plus, it's called, of a group that have actually been through this of very fragile states and moved on, that, the areas that they pinpoint as the most important one, get 5% of the international aid. It all goes to other kinds of projects. It doesn't go to the sustainable peace thing. We need to be much better on coordination there. We need to be better at moving it forward. Interestingly, as we looked at this overall process of the things that needed to be done, we don't really think that it's gonna cost much more money, maybe none at all. Some of the things that we do these days make no sense at all. We, for example, come up with these Christmas tree, as they're normally called, ornament mandates, which have sometimes 40 things that you're supposed to do when you get out there. Now, of course, everybody wants to put their people on the team to get out there and do that and they may end up sitting in a hotel because they can't possibly work in the atmosphere that's out there. They may have all the best intentions in the world. As Nick said, you can't go to a bar in Mogadishu or a coffee house in Mogadishu and chat up the local Chabab guy and see what he really is thinking about. You'll probably get a bullet if you try that. And this whole question, really, of sequencing of the council getting very clear on what it wants in its mandates, a few things to do, it's much cheaper to get that, much out there in the field, it can do fast. We suggest quick ways to get it out of the field, not only with our regional partnerships but also having a small force that we could put out there quickly ourselves. This really should work and look at missions hard. Are they the right size? Do they make any sense? Can they carry out what are their mandates? That's fixed, I think it will go a long way. The point of all that is, it seems to me, is that we came out of this process with several thoughts. One is, when in the first discussions that we had with people, there seemed to be a million miles between some people in the General Assembly and the Security Council on what really needed to be done, how it could be done.  But after you started talking with people and particularly when you talk with people in the field, you find there really is a fairly strong consensus to say, we've got to do this stuff. This stuff is real, it's important. This is a function that most governments can't even consider doing. Others are not gonna be too interested in doing. The UN brings a unique distance as well as the other things. When it comes to these conflicts that I think is appreciated and very valuable. So there's much closer to a consensus, I think, on what to do. It just needs a boost to get there and depreciate along. I think that also when you look at the structure and what is being done out there in the world, despite the growing conflicts, despite the things, if we can manage to use all of the influence available to the international community, it does seem to me that we can make some real progress. And keeping focus on what the real problems are, getting away from the arguments, oh, I can't do this so that's too expensive, we gotta do something else. I'm really saying, okay, what's really needed to make this work will go forward. We're hoping that the Secretary General, Secretary General Bonn will take some of these proposals at this point and we're hoping that the next Secretary General will move forward. We do know that communication's important. We did a lot talking, Nick did a good job of propagandizing us, among other things. But it is important, it is a critical part of the overall operations. And I look forward to the discussions today, I think that as this goes forward, we can make the world understand better what valuable instrument and tool it really has here with the United Nations. And we can also make the people on the ground see the changes that really are coming to them because the UN is cared, the international community is cared, we've worked at it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ambassador Pascoe. Before I move on to Marsden for his presentation, I'd just say that when I was in Somalia working for Mr. Pascoe in the mission, the political office in Somalia, we worked alongside the African Union troops. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting was in some ways, they were the reverse of what I'm used to in UN peacekeeping context. And that a lot of the times, the contingents that you work with in UN peacekeeping have served many times before in UN peace operations. And so they're quite good at speaking the language of the UN and making sure that their presentations are pretty much the same presentation that you would have gotten from a political officer and that worked for the UN. And they kind of have integrated in terms of culture with us. And that doesn't necessarily translate to a willingness to undertake complex operational tasks. It doesn't mean it doesn't, but it means that there isn't a linear relationship between it. I found that in working with Amazon that the reverse was true, that there was a cultural divide of how we spoke to each other, but that in reality, the Amazon troops that were there knew exactly what they were there to do. And if you look at what happened over from the Ramadan offensive and onwards, I mean, Amazon is a peacekeeping operation. It says so on its card, but you would call it anything else, peace enforcement or whatever. But what it did do is essentially fight and win a war against a determined opposition.  And it's still a pretty difficult and complex place to go. And you still wouldn't wanna go and sit outside at a tea shop there if you looked like me. But you don't have a frontline anymore in Mogadishu by kilometer five. And there was a couple of years ago. And the reason that that's not there is because of the international partnership and all the great work done by people behind the scenes in countries and stuff. But it's done on the ground by the boots on the ground and the boots on the ground were Amazon. And it simply would not have happened without them. And in my head, it's important that we keep that in mind as well. So let me now please turn to Marcin Moyani from the African Union. Thank you, Nick. And thank you, Lin as well for those. A lot of the issues that I wanted to mention have actually been touched on because as the African Union, we face many of the same challenges that the UN does. And so I'll just focus my presentation on just one key issue that I want to pick up on today. And that is the engagement of the UN peace operations with the citizens through the media, through African media from an African context. Well, to remain relevant in our first changing world, UN strategic communications must be forward-looking, adaptable, flexible and connected. The world is more independent than ever with global trends in geopolitical, economic, environmental, technological and social dimensions. These trends influence the security environment in which we operate. Where there has been terrorism and extremism, asymmetric warfare and proliferation, threats will remain complex, global and subject to unforeseeable developments. In today's 24-7 information environment, nothing stays confidential for long. It's only a matter of time before information leaks and we've discovered that the hard way. We just have to simply communicate. Ingrid Lehmann in Managing Peace Processes, a handbook for EU peace operations, practitioners says in the 21st century, they are not only professional reporters covering a conflict. And from experience, countless interested observers, some maybe citizens bearing witness, who can create a story simply through a text message or simply through a photograph or a video posted on the internet, and within seconds it's gone viral. So this makes the challenge obviously for the UN peace operations greater. This has allowed everyone to express themselves publicly, including armed terrorist groups. No doubt the UN is acutely aware of the role strategic communication plays in its work, as evidenced obviously by this forum here today and many others, evidenced obviously by the elaborate communication strategies, handbooks, plans and guides that are being implemented on a daily basis, obviously with varying degrees of success. And the UN in its form and structures, including its peace operations, appears well placed to play its leadership role in global progress, and attainment of its objectives. However, like I said in Africa, I think the UN needs to adopt a more people centered approach to its communications, through strengthening community relations, in order to bring the peoples, the citizens and the organizations closer to the UN. Africans are still generally and critically uninformed about the programs and activities of the UN. And I dare say the AU that I work for. And in particular about their peace operations. And thereby you would find broadly ignorant of its vision, objectives, ideals, principles and motives. We need to cultivate a culture shift in the way that we engage African audiences, especially through communications and the media, that through the channels that are most accessible to them. We need to demystify the UN and its image in Africa. And the common perception that the UN is usually acting at the behest of Western governments by connecting directly with the people and the opportunities for these. At the same time, we must continue to strengthen, like my colleagues mentioned, collaboration with civil society organizations. And here I'm talking about CSOs that truly represent the aspirations of Africans across the continent. Public confidence in turn is enhanced by the UN's ability to achieve this mandate in a way that is open, transparent and consistent with member nations values and expectations. A membership which I must add spans 54 countries in Africa. The media is perhaps the most important channel to reach the mass of Africans, but relations with African media are checkered, inconsistent and not strongly coordinated. Whereas the UN has achieved a lot of success with international media and putting their voice in the international arena, we feel as if in Africa, this has usually taken a backbench. Television, for instance, in Africa, which is rapidly closing the gap in communication as a source of news and current affairs for Africans. You know, the global mainstream Western media is usually just available in the satellite distribution channels, which are way too inaccessible for the ordinary African. By reorienting the media relations strategies to better engage African people, the UN can help shape a positive public perception of its peace operations through the African media. But paradoxically here is where the challenge lies because with African media, there are very many challenges and I'm sure Nick and others who have worked in Somalia, in Mali, in Central African Republic can attest to is that usually it's having a lot of challenges in terms of financing, in terms of ownership, in terms of regulation, in terms of how does the UN remain, avoid being partisan in working with a lot of these African media organizations. But I think we've got to a point where we just absolutely have to, despite these challenges, engage them in a way that is constructive and positive. They, we have found are often only engaged when there is an event, a major event to be announced. Say for instance, the signing of a peace agreement or the appointment of a mediator in a process or the announcement of a new peacekeeping mission, but less through the beginning of the process. And this has an effect of limiting how objective their view of the broader issues, as well as their understanding of the conflicts and interventions that are being suggested. As a result, many African countries, the media coverage of the UN and its peace operations by local media is often ad hoc and event-driven, like I've said, and in most cases lacks meaningful depth. And the relationship in Africa with the global and mainstream news media is a little tenuous because of its well-known centuries old, the marginal and negative coverage and presentation of African realities. And this could explain perhaps why a lot of Africans are a little skeptical these days of the global, this preoccupation with the global news agencies, as opposed to the local radio stations that they listen to on a daily basis, as opposed to the television channels that they turn on every day. There are several advantages that lie in UN peace operations engaging with African media, local African media. One that comes to mind is the multilingualism that you get from and the diversity in rich and penetration when you engage these local media outlets because they serve both rural and urban and many of them broadcasting in vernacular, which often even the national broadcasters will not give you. However, like I said, there are certain risks that come with this model that call for tactical selectiveness and targeting to ensure that the UN remains impartial and maintains its moral high ground. One obvious example is that national broadcasters, for instance, mainly support government's views, whilst the private, several private broadcasters have direct ties with both the ruling and opposition political figures and elites. And as a result, African media have often have this dubious reputation of fomenting hate speech and inciting violence. The Rwanda case comes to mind and many others in Kenya from my own country where I come from. However, in many African countries in recent years, there have been national broadcasters beginning to loosen their conservative approach and with doing state funding are now seeking to re-engineer themselves more like the private players. Of course, this is both seen as positive and negative, whereas one side may look at it as unfortunate since it undermines the original intent of a public broadcaster as a provider of non-commercial and educated programs, we are now moving into an opportunity, we are now moving into a realm that is past the original mandate. But others see it as an opportunity for expanded and creative liberal space. So whichever way you look at it, that may be an opportunity right there. Also on the other hand, like I said, African media also appear to lack the capacity or orientation to cover the continent and its institutions, including the UN and the AU adequately. Most African media still rely on the mainstream media for their content and news. Even when it's about neighboring countries, you'll find someone from Somalia or from Kenya, where I come from, tuning into the BBC to get information about what is going on in Bruni, it's a fact. They may not have the resources to send journalists to Bruni to cover the conflict, yet it's within the same region. And those are the realities that we're looking at. The lack of capacity could also be attributed to the absence of freedom of expression that has existed for a long time. And this could be a challenge when it comes to the UN and UN operations engaging people, African people in a participatory manner. That could be a big challenge. The resource capacity difficulties, like I said, the financing, the ownership regulations, the ethics involved in engaging African media comes sharply into focus. And there are many other challenges. Externally, just to name a few, the challenge of, you know, journalists' income in Africa is relatively low, particularly for a huge number of correspondents who are not on formal contract. It's not the same here. From my experience in working in many countries, the proverbial Brown envelope, you simply just, you know, every press briefing, you'll find a Brown envelope going around with cash in it. And journalists have come to expect that this is a norm. These are not things, these are things that the UN, I'm sure, faces and tackles. I mean, it's unethical. But this is the reality that we are facing. Journalism training is expensive, lacking in modern equipment and facilities, and often too general in orientation and not providing the necessary specific skills that are required. Of course, the media, like has been mentioned, are much better at making stories out of problems and learn success. That's a big challenge. And the temptation is there to seek the sensation on. That is inevitable even in Africa. Internally, like has been mentioned, and as we have experienced also at the African Union, the relationship between the troop contributing countries and the UN's missions, strategic communications objectives is often tenuous. And it sounds strange, but being in Africa, I have the same problems that Nick has, because being based at the headquarters in Addis Ababa and giving instructions to our colleagues in Mogadishu about what we want done and by when, it's a bit tricky because you're not in the, quite frankly, Addis Ababa is not Mogadishu. Addis Ababa is not Bangi. So we encounter very much the same issues. But it's clear that the nation's states contributing troops, although they have their individual national political and operational imperatives, they have to align this with the communication objectives of the mission. And this is a challenge I see the UN facing as well. The missions and troops contributing countries need to maintain a unity of effort, a unity of messaging regarding the mission's activities and management of incidents. In conclusion, there are stronger media sector and up to the advantage of the UN and other international and regional organizations like the African Union is in no doubt. But what we need is an adoption of a new orientation and attitude to communication with African people through African media, despite the inherent challenges that I've mentioned. We are living in a situation where we have to explain ourselves better or mandate our mission. And we have to connect through the channels that are accessible to those people that we are trying to serve. We should combine, all these efforts should combine to transform the UN's communication practices, enhance its image and bring the organization closer home to the consciousness and the ownership of the citizens of Africa. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. I'll now turn, before we go to questions, I'll turn to Yezmina. I think I met Yezmina when she was working in Congo. I'm not sure because it could have also been when she was working in Haiti or working in Lebanon or working in Liberia. So it's hard to tell. She's the quintessential practitioner. She has an arts background, a film background, and brings that sensibility to her work, but is really one of the best that the UN is fortunate enough to have. And I'm thrilled that she's been able to come here from Port-au-Prince to talk to us. So, Yezmina. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you. Can you hear me? Thank you, Nick. And thank you, Ambassador Pasco. And colleagues, I think Nick has said it all, I can leave now. Because, and with that introduction, I don't know what more I could really do after that. But it is true. I think that what I'll maybe take some time with now is maybe talk a little bit about some of the things that did work because some things have worked and some of the challenges that we did and we still face in the field using the high panels, the panels portion on strategic communication as a sort of validation to go forward with a number of ideas, also hopefully giving us a carte blanche to be able to say. But yes, this is strategic communications when we come up with some very convoluted concept of what to do on the ground to have conversations with people and the budget officer says, but this is not in your line item, so I can't really finance this. So I thank you very much for those recommendations because this allows us to be able to do our work on the ground. I mentioned, and Nick mentioned the fact that I do come from a film background. I joined the UN in 2001 at the wake of 9-11. I had just left the film industry having tried to sell a film to make and sell the script to Hollywood about a love story on the backdrop of illegal immigration and migration to Europe from North Africa. And the film executive said, but why would you want to do that? Why don't you just make it a love story, take away all of the political background and I stood in my ground and I didn't make my film and I left and look at us here today, migration, immigration from North Africa, we're living it today. So I think that what the UN allowed me to do and gave me a license to do on the ground with my colleagues and one of them, Albert is sitting up there, thank you for coming, is to go and make that political a reality and make it be heard and make it be known, make it what we try to do on the ground in partnership with colleagues from the African Union and other colleagues, give that a voice and give the people that we are sent to support and help a voice. Not always easy, very challenging at times, but the key to it I think, and I think all of the colleagues have said it here, is really conversations. And when we say conversations, it's plural but it's actually a singular noun. It communication, communications is conversation. It is the two-way interaction. It is not only with the constituents and the beneficiaries on the ground as they're called on paper, but it's the people for whom you're working for. And that also includes conversations internally with our colleagues from the police and our colleagues from the force. We have to have those two-way conversations about what the objective is, what the outcome should be. And it is essential that those are polyphonic, that they be on various levels and that we be able to actually create strategic partnerships with the local communities. And as you rightly said, the people have to be at the heart of that conversation and have to be at the heart of the communication. And it's not only about messaging and the message that you have to get across because you do need to get the messages across, the core values, why we are there and what we're actually supposed to do. But you also have to be able to listen, to know what is expected of this process by the beneficiaries, so that that can then be translated into action and into reality. The notion that polyphonic dialogues or conversations, they're not just about languages, a great deal has to do with the different languages, but they're also about tolerance and inclusivity and being able to really listen. And if a conversation has to be changed because you need to know what your end result is first. So if a conversation needs to be changed to get to that end result, that means you have to have a discussion. And you have to have a discussion with a variety of people, be they belligerent parties, be they actual civil society, be they journalists, be they the media and not shy away from them. That is something that has to be done. I mean, we all experience it in our own households. I mean, I come from a multi-faith, multi-cultural Arab French educated in the US. And if we didn't have those polyphonic conversations at home, we'd have a huge peacekeeping problem there as well. So, and you have to be able to take that step back. That being said, maybe some of the things that I'd like to touch upon is how the success of creating strategic partnerships with local actors is crucial. A few examples, I can list one of the other things. Sorry, I'll backtrack just a little bit. Is that these conversations, they have to occur one-on-one. An individual becomes a vector of changing a behavior as well as an entire community. And those conversations are not just face-to-face. Conversations happen in Twitter. Conversations happen on Facebook. Conversations happen on Tumblr. Conversations happen one-on-one. Conversations happen in the media, even if we don't think so. The way that we respond to questions, there is back and forth. And the mediums, every single one of them have to be used, film, photo, et cetera, to have those conversations. If we look at research that says that it takes one person anywhere between 18 to 224 days to change a behavioral habit, if they're exposed to it continuously, how do we change and how much time does it take to change the behavioral habit of a young youth in Sitesole who has the option to have a lot of funds and a lot of money if he joins this gang? Or not much funds, not much money, get shot but chooses to go and take part in a workshop to sing and sing peace and value other values. How much time is that gonna take and what incentive do you give? So one example is actually creating a strategic partnership as we did just very recently with three very well-known Haitian singers who give of their time to tour the country and do their own peace workshops through song and go to get youth who are from vulnerable areas or possibly vulnerable areas prone to gang violence and say no, don't go there, come and sing. We'll give you an opportunity to be the next superstar if possible. It sounds cheesy and people will roll their eyes and say oh gosh, there's the Haitian American Idol but no, I mean if you show one person a possibility that is not violence and somebody else who has made it who you look up to can actually come and say this is what a possibility it's worth looking at and it's worth exploring or you do as Albert did in the DRC you say okay there is a new way to go about convincing somebody to change their behavior when it comes to DDR disarmament and mobilization and repatriation.    That's a conversation but that takes time and time sometimes is a luxury we don't have. Or we do have but in the media or in the public eye we don't have. So how much time can you invest? And of course the nature of peacekeeping mandates has changed tremendously as Ambassador Pasco said. Today we're not as communicators merely reporting non-biased information through radio waves or talking about the achievements of the peacekeeping forces. The mandates themselves have changed. We have to reconstruct countries be they from natural disaster or war. We have demobilization, disarmament, we have political transition. We have, we go to places where there's not even any peace to keep yet. So what do you do as strategic communicators and how much of that can you actually resolve through strategic communication? It's easy or at some times to be working when we're going through this. I say I want to work for UNOPs. I have a bridge to show for in a week or something like that. With this timeframe how can you show the political and social behavioral change that is actually required? And in how much time can you do that? How is that measured? How much time does that take? So of course obviously surveys are important and necessary. A few, I mean there are a few other examples of ways that conversations happen but we must definitely not shy away from any use of medium because the crucial aspect is the target audience. Who do you want to reach? And if it means you keep a radio station because as you've rightly said in some places there is only radio that works and sometimes it's only a wind up radio with solar panels. And in other places you must definitely be an adapt of all of the social media. Today when YouTube becomes the new cinema veritas or the new witness to history, so as not to say the angel of history because we don't want to be looking backwards but we want to be looking forward. When that is the truth of the reality and things happen so quickly the reality happens in 30 seconds and you need to be in a number of places at the same time. I don't necessarily envy Nick's job who has to at the same time be in Mogadishu and be in Paul Prince and be in Kabul simultaneously because there is a YouTube here and there is a YouTube here and there is a YouTube here and that is reality. And unless you are present on the scene everywhere and you are a witness to that reality it's very difficult to engage in the conversations. So we have to find ways to be not only conversing but we also have to find ways to be a step forward and a step ahead so that we're not playing catch up and we're not playing the, and we're not on the defensive all the time. And of course it goes without saying that any strategic communication plan you have can be utterly eviscerated by anybody's misconduct that is or any mishap or any mishappenies that is for sure. And we all, the old adage of it takes more than 20 years to build a reputation in 20 seconds to destroy it is very true.  You have the right to all of these things or you would like to give them positive information. Yes, you have to do this. And yes, no, there is no rape as a crime. Your child should not be abused. And then you get the turn around and you get the yes, but, and we don't need to finish the sentence. What do you do with that? How do you still take that conversation to a place where the person still knows that they have the right to justice and that unfortunately there is misconduct, but others will be brought to responsible for their actions. It's difficult on the ground because you end up having to be the flak jacket for everything, but you still have to keep going because there is that possibility of changing that one person who will not go into violence, who will then report a crime, who will not stand to sexual exploitation and who will condemn SGVB. And that's the key. And if you change one person and like in DDR, if one person goes back and one person talks, that just keeps building it. I think in the discussion in the workshops we'll probably be able to go into more details about it. But again, I think just in closing, peacekeeping, peace-maintaining, what we have with our colleagues from the African Union remains one of the very crucial elements and essential elements for dialogue and for furthering political and social change. We have to tweak it a little. And of course as time goes today, everything happens so quickly, we have to quickly start tweaking to be able to adapt. And one of the main thing is being all on the same page, along the same playbook as Nick said. And that includes our colleagues, civilian within missions, as well as force and as well as police. We have to be integrated within our own house to then be able to project that forward. Just two quick things, both in Haiti and in South Lebanon, we managed at different times to really have a cohesive network and a cohesive working relationship with the spokesperson, both police, force and civilian, all on the same page, all speaking the same language, which was what was needed to be achieved in order to have that duplicating effect and in order to actually be able to push the message forward and actually have people see the UN as a unified entity. And that includes when dealing with issues in Cité Soleil and being able to pass that message in order. If you go to Cité Soleil today, extremely different slum, unfortunately still a slum, but very different in terms of the degree of violence and not after a certain amount of time in Haiti. South Lebanon as well, the construction of the mission very different, but still force spokespeople dealing and reporting to civilian who then had the same, we were on the same page speaking the same language so that that message, that search for behavioral change within the community, local community where we were operating was the same and the mixed messages didn't come across. So I mean, I think maybe I'll leave it at that and then if there's more questions. Okay, thank you very much, Yasmino. So we have not much time and a few questions. So what we're going to do is, I've received the questions and writings in each of them is addressed to a different member of the panel. So everybody's gonna get one question. And then at the end I'm gonna take just two minutes and make a couple of points by way of slightly summing up some of the themes that were raised during it. First question to Marston. Struck by your comment Marston about the challenges of an environment that embraces non-freedom of expression. And how can the UN and I would add how can the UN or the AU, how can a multilateral deployment mitigate that with regards to communications and how could we protect journalists in those contexts who are at further risk of persecution? Well, thank you Nick for the person who asked that question. That's a tough one. It's not easy. I threw it out there as a challenge but as a challenge that the UN and the AU and other organizations working in these areas have to face head on. There are examples of media, local African media that have managed to break the barrier and speak freely. But at the same time passing your messages through these channels has to be in a very tactical manner so that you do not seem to be ascribing to any political or you don't seem to be taking sides in the conversations that are taking place in the public space. Protecting journalists in countries where freedom is not guaranteed is much tougher, much tougher to deal with. The UN has been very successful in setting up its own radio in some of its missions to communicate to the local people in the local languages and I guess this is a model that needs to be continued. The only challenge here is that as maybe Nick would attest to is that it's an expensive venture to set up a radio station and transmit, create content and keep it running and maintain the equipment. It's a huge venture and you cannot do this for every sector that your peacekeeping mission operates in. So yes, it's a big challenge but these are some of the things that we need to be looking at critically and engaging with each other so that we can find solutions to. Okay, thank you, Marston. The next question is for you, Yasmeena. Yasmeena, please comment on the state of play where peacekeeping communications are in a competitive communications environment with actors in the conflict particularly with regards to social media. Can I get like something else for 500? Talk a little bit about social media and why that's important. No, thanks for the question. It is actually very challenging. It is very competitive and I think the main thing is are we in competition truly? When we go to and use social media, we have to really go back to what Nick was saying in his very beginning when he says what is the objective of the strategy you're trying to put in place? Is your objective to be that news breaking media on Twitter or is your objective to use those tools to further what you're supposed to be doing and what you have strategically put out, set out to do? And as that, I mean one of the biggest challenges when faced with a very active social media ground, I mean even if we take a look at Haiti today, sorry, everything happens on social media. Whether it's something that's political or not and I'll get a call from the leadership saying has this happened, do you have anything on whether this event has occurred? The first thing that we do is we go to look at the Twitter account of either official to say whether that's happened or not because if it hasn't been tweeted, it hasn't really occurred and it depends on the places. So it is extremely challenging and you have to, in that respect, you have to be in a competitive state. You have to learn, you have to monitor all of your Twitter, you have to monitor your Tumblr and your Instagrams and all, which is something that is crucial. But in terms of how you use it to further what your strategic communication objective is, is very different. So you don't need to rush that one, you don't need to be in a tick for tech on that because what you're trying to do is use the tools at hand to be able to do that political and social change which takes time, which takes analysis and which takes actually knowing in lieu of being able to sit at the cafe and discuss is to actually do the chats, open chats with people and to get the sense of what the community wants to be able to then translate that in the messaging that you're actually putting out on social media. It is not always easy in certain respects. I mean, in South Lebanon, sometimes a journalist knew the things that happened before or you knew them as the spokesperson. So it was very difficult and it's not always easy to monitor and to balance out. And there are two separate elements. A, knowing how you want to use your social media and for what purpose and then whether you're a news outlet or if you're usually using it only for strategic communications to achieve a particular result which is usually political social change. Thank you, Yusmeena. The third question is to Mr. Pascoe. Did the question of strategic communications and how inadequately it is being done by the UN come up in the discussions with the panel reviewing peace operations, particularly with member states or civil society or those issues that were raised and how did you address that? Yeah, certainly the most discussion was from civil society on what you're doing on the ground where you're getting your points across. Are you being too aloof? Are you bringing people in and hearing what they have to say? I think all of this was there and very much part of it. Some people on the panel had very direct experience with their efforts working with the various communities whether they were religious or whatever to reach out to make the point more. But I think this is clearly a basic issue in whether you're in a UN or in an embassy or whatever you've got to reach out to the public as much as you can. In many ways, I think the reaching out to the public is something we should be able to do and can do more easily if that's the right word than the broadest thing of changing the image and making sure people understand what the UN is doing which I find really harder. Okay, I'm getting the sign that we have to wrap up so I'll answer the question that was for me very quickly and then I'll just go to the seven points I have that I want to say and I'll just go through them rapidly. So how do you deal with spoilers from a strategic communications perspective and can you use the council and others to persuade or beat them? Yeah, I mean the short answer is that when people are actively communicating against you, response is required and when they are with spoilers on the ground, they can be deterred using communications if you can put in place something that explains why those actions are not in the interest of others or of them. And viewing potential spoilers, whether those are political spoilers or from a communications perspective, essentially as an oppositional force that needs to be engaged is a mentality that doesn't come naturally to the sort of traditional UN communicator but is one that I think is quite helpful, particularly in line of what Izmini was just saying about the instantaneous nature of these exchanges, that there's a whole realm where it's not that you have to wait an eight hour news cycle, it's that if you're on Twitter frequently, if there's an active discussion going on, your cycle is eight minutes. And so if you're engaged in a discussion in a microblogging site and you're not immediately responding, then you're no longer engaged in that discussion. And so all this requires a bit of a new perspective on things and I think that we would be well served to accept that part of modern strategic communications in a peace operation is to have a media secretariat, a strategic communications driven but digital media secretariat that whose job it is is to basically play air defense and to respond accordingly. So on just a couple of points that I wanna take away that I heard different people say different things about on strategic communications, one, measurable.  Well, that has good sides too. It's not just that if you buy a pair of boots that the internet tracks you and tries to keep selling you pairs of boots. There's good sides to big data as well for us which is that you can measure how you're doing with your audiences and this is done to varying degrees of success. It doesn't mean that one of your key audiences is a rural population that is illiterate and no longer logged on and not able to log on to any devices. No, that isn't the right channel for them but that doesn't mean that there aren't bits where that is the right channel and you can measure whether or not your messages are achieving the desired result. Acquire is a little bit of thinking it through and having professionals who have in many ways almost a marketing background, a consumer background but it can be done and you can generate data and that's the thing about modern stratcoms is you can generate data. It's not just remember to do your audience survey but it is actually you can now tell what it is that people want and how they think about things and that measuring is a major bit. Tailoring, yeah, and this is the point that was raised by all three actually. Who are you talking to? Now in marketing this is sometimes called audience delineation but the point is that you have different audiences in a piece operations context but that doesn't mean that all the messages have to be the same. It means that you know who those audiences are and figure out the best ways to get messages to them and measure whether or not it's had its desired impact but tailoring your messages specifically to those individual constituencies by definition will increase your effectiveness. The third is, it doesn't mean as wonderful word polyphonic, which I loved. Polyphonic communications and that's absolutely right that one message many voices it should be the way it is. It's no longer this idea of monster corporate message from on high and then it gets sent out. Actually the nature of modern communications are many voices but many voices that hopefully you're singing from the same sheet and I think that that idea of bringing in others to have that conversation. So using potential advocates, civil society and others getting their voices in along the lines of what you think is important is a very nuanced and intelligent way of approaching modern strategic communications. The fourth is interactivity and this strangely enough is one of the hardest things I think in the UN context. This is really now a discussion, right? And that's easy to say and hard to implement because a lot of the times the mission doesn't wanna hear what people are saying back to them and that's unfortunate but it's true but modern communications involve a discussion and they involve a dialogue and they involve you and your shop being a part of that interactive dialogue driven by an imperative of seeking change which is a point that Yasmina made in hers that it's about a dialogue designed to achieve something. And so be it in that dialogue and measure how it's going but be a part of an interactive dialogue even if it means that you seed control over bits of the message. Practical or as Mr. Pasco put it product what's the product? We have to know what we're selling and we have to know what it is that we're there to do and we have to be able to explain it in clear and easy ways. And my sense is that the UN frequently will come up with slogans and say that's it like I'm on the road to peace or something and that's fine and that's also really useful in an electoral season and things like that but actually our mandates tend to be really complex whether they're these Christmas tree mandates or not they're difficult and they're generally unsatisfactory to the local population that frequently thinks well the UN's here so now everything's gonna be okay right? And that's not mandate the council gave you the council did not say use all resources at your disposal and just fix it. The council said do this and do this and do this but meanwhile don't forget to protect civilians under imminent threat of harm even though you don't have any resources and that sort of thing. So explaining clearly in language that is accessible to the key audiences what it is that you're gonna do practically what's your product is from my perspective a key one. Using all tools at your disposal it's really easy to sit here and say you know we need Instagram, we need Twitter, we need Foursquare, we need a Tumblr photo blog. Honestly no you don't. What you need are digital media channels that achieve an effect with a particular audience. The names of those programs will change in two years and they're frankly not relevant. What's relevant is a social networking site. What's relevant is something that allows images including moving images to be transmitted quickly between individuals. What's relevant is something that is a micro blogging platform that allows you to send short burst communications that either inform or comment in a timely manner. What's important is not the name of it. What's important is that all the tools at your disposal are used in support of your broad strategic communications objectives to reach the audiences you need. But when someone says to me you know I think we really need a Facebook account. I mean it drives me nuts. Because no, explain to me why you need a social networking account to reach a particular audience. Then let's talk about what the delivery system should be. And then the last point is responsiveness and timeliness. It's just modern news cycle. You can't let it sit.  You have to respond. And whether we're calling it deterring potential spoilers or whatever. The reality is that if you're engaged in a modern strategic communications operation, whether or not your goal is to dominate the information battle space or not, the bottom line is you must engage. And once you have engaged, you must keep that engagement up and going forward. Because that's how modern communications are done. You must be responsive and you must be timely. Or on the other hand, be entirely comfortable with just communicating once every two months by press release when a peace agreement is signed. And that's fine. But if you're going to do modern strike comms, there are things inherent in how to do that. And that needs to be accepted as part of the mind shift that I think all of us were talking about. So with that, thank you all for a stimulating conversation. And we'll get more into it later. Thank you. So Mr. Bernbach, Ambassador Pascoe, Mr. Manami, and Ms. Boozian. Thank you very much for your insightful comments and kicking off our workshop in a most meaningful way and discussing some of the challenges that are out there facing us in these peace operations. What we'd like to do now is I have about 11.25. We're going to take a 10 minute break.  And we'll get started with our second panel. Thank you. All right. Do we have a quorum? They're coming. OK, how are we doing? OK, I think we have a quorum. So we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for adhering to our wishes and coming back in. And there'll be plenty of food and beverages throughout the day. So hopefully you won't feel like you just missed a little bit. So what I'd like to do is we'd like to hear now from our second panel. And that will be chaired by Mr. Peter Loach, who's the vice president of our external relations here at USIP. Peter, over to you. Great. Thanks so much. Thanks. And greetings to everybody online. Aristotle noted there are three elements to a speech. There's the speaker, there's the subject, and there's the audience. And the last of these is the most important. With that in mind, the speakers have all promised to be brief, and I have promised to be mean if they are not. So that we can actually engage a conversation. And of course, it'll be the subject. A lot of the presentations is the focus on the audience. Almost apropos of nothing, but close enough to warrant mentioning. So over the weekend, I was reading a novel by, again, Julian Barnes, an English author. The book is Flavère's Parrot, which is nominally about Flavère. And apparently, Gustave Flavère, the noted author, among many other things he hated, was trains. Apparently trains just really, I don't know, it's not his thing.  Could not help but think of social media. My job here is to set up, keep the conversation going, and get you on with your day, and especially since we're right before lunch. With that in mind, I'm going to introduce the panelists, introduce their bios, have a few other introductory comments, and then turn it over. In order of speaking, our first speaker is going to be Dr. Christina Lange, senior program advisor and senior fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland. She has more than a 20-year career history and security policy, lectured at universities, military academies, international organizations in over 20 countries, on subjects related to countering violent extremism, terrorism, transnational organized crime. At the Geneva Center, she directs several short courses within the Emergency Security Challenges Program on foresight and strategic planning, building a national strategy for countering violent extremism. To her left is John Haber, a friend and colleague who's president of Cascade Strategy. Prior to that, he was CEO of the American Association for Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers, a reposition to revitalize the organization. He's also been a senior partner of Fleischman-Hillard, the world's largest public relations, public affairs, and marketing company. He served in the Clinton administration as special counsel to the president for the Overseas Private Investment Corp. He was chief of staff, general counsel for Senator Diane Feinstein, general counsel, communications director for Senator Patrick Leahy on the Community and Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry. He's also in the graduate faculty at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses in things like strategic communication. To his left is an old friend, Sarah Coppersmith. Sarah is a vice president of Scott Circle Communications. She's an award-winning communications professional. She joins Scott Circle from Partnership for a Healthier America, an independent nonprofit created in conjunction with but independent from First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. She served as press secretary for US Representative Harry Mitchell of Arizona. She's worked with the Women's Campaign International, assisting with work in emerging democracies, post-conflict regions, and advanced opportunities for women to actively participate in public advocacy and political processes. And at Scott Circle, her clients have included, among many others, the United States Institute of Peace. Welcome back, Sarah. I'm trying to figure out the logistics of this panel. She actually bypassed me entirely and simply went to the people with whom she worked when she was a consultant for us. Strategic communications is much more like explaining a tomato than killing a vampire. I phrase, I'm sure you've heard, killing a vampire is easy. Wooden stake to the heart, vampire vanishes. That's how it happens in the vampire slayer. I have no reason to believe that's not how it happens otherwise. Describing a tomato is trickier. You could describe the pH balance, the flavor, the history, where it's grown, all sorts of things. That's much more like the challenge of strategic communications. It's a complicated beast. The language of communications, the language of rhetoric, semiotics, metaphor, and the role in creating war, creating peace, getting people to join war, getting people to mobilize your peace is thousands of years old. It was first written about arguably, in Thucydides, the history of the Peloponnesian War. Aristotle noted its importance, Plato, and notably, actually, the Sophists talked about the importance of learning language to communicate, to be an effective member of a society. Here in the United States, rhetoric has played a role in the nation before it was a nation. John Adams, in a letter, wrote, what do we mean by the revolution? The war, that was no part of the revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people and was affected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of 13 legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers, and the colonies ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of parliament over the colonies. The medium of the time was pamphleteers, it was pamphlets. People would hand out pamphlets, nail them to trees, all of that. George Orwell, the noted essayist and critic, wrote on the pamphlets of the time, that one has complete freedom of expression on a pamphlet, including if one chooses the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious. A pamphlet could be in prose or in verse, it consists largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of reportage. All that is required is that it should be topical, polemical, and short.  It's the same. One of the differences, of course, is the new media. Facebook is faster, Twitter is faster, social media are faster. So in many ways, the challenges we face as strategic communicators are older than the nation state by more than a thousand years, but as recent as several years ago. With that in mind, I'll turn it over to our, here's how we're gonna work conceptually. Talk specifically about challenges with combating ISIS and ISIL and social media there, and then back up to a broader strategic communications context with John and Sarah. And again, I'm gonna keep folks short, and I will, in fact, cut people off if they run long. So thank you. Please. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear organizers, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. Today, I would like to talk about strategic communications. What are the best practices today? And in order to that, we need to look at one of the greatest strategic communicators in the field today, the Islamic State. They are a huge threat as are transnational terrorism groups all over the world, and they are now facing, we peace building and peace making organizations are facing this new transnational threat. So in order to show you how they do their strategic communications, I thought it would be best since it is their grievances that they're carrying, their feedback loop that has been left because of the void that has been left in places like Syria and Iraq, the war that's are still unanswered. And it is here that we need to look at our way of strategic communications. How can we create digital peacekeepers to go up against the digital caliphate? So just to highlight a little bit of their excellence in strategic messaging, I'm just gonna highlight some of their strengths. So first of all, one of the ways that we have to understand how to counter the message is to look at how terrorists learn. There was a fantastic study done by Rand in 2005 that outlined how the ways the terrorist across the globe used the learning curve and how they share ideas and how it shapes certain outcomes. As you can see, knowledge and political violence can be used as an intelligence tool and intelligence can be used for building the best messages. So we also have to work on our intelligence in the field. What's interesting is terrorists are considered a social, but in fact they are very social and they harness this sociability. We may be able to formulate the right messages. When you look at this chart, you can see this was done by Rand in 2005 and it sees how groups are organized, managed and connected. And in order for us to understand that thoroughly, it is a way for us to formulate our counter message. When we look at the way the Islamic State works on its strategic messaging, we see that war is constantly staged online. We are fighting a kinetic war, but we are not engaging the enemy in the digital field. And I think we are trying, but we're failing at it. We don't have a story. They have a story. They are using Facebook and Twitter in order to hurt our morale. They're using PsyOps operations. They're using YouTube to demonstrate first the horror of war, but also to use it as a psychological weapon. It shows also the brotherhood in war, the sisterhood in war, and they also use it as a tool. Anwar Alaki is one of the biggest threats to us in terms of strategic messaging. And if you can see, he's a Yemeni-American who was droned. And he used also tactical ways to use for strategic messaging. For example, his Inspire magazines were used to show how terrorism can be tactically operated. And if you look at just one Inspire magazine, the exact clock that was used for the Times Square bombing was featured in the Inspire magazine. So they're also using magazines for tactical operations. You saw with the Tsarnev Brothers how the Inspire magazine on how to create a bomb in your mother's kitchen using a pressure cooker bomb was also inspired by Anwar Alaki's magazine Inspire. As you can see here, the cupcakes, that was actually a Canadian effort to change the recipe into a cupcake recipe. Unfortunately, a lot of the Inspire magazines are still available online, and none of all the actual recipes have been changed into cupcake recipes. They also have magazines and books that are available. If you look at Amazon.com just a couple years ago, you could actually buy a book called Encyclopedia of Jihad. It was $12.95, and people actually went to Amazon and bought it online. So they even have books that are featured on an Amazon that are available and ready for use. And here you can see how to organize and run a cell, how to plan and carry out attacks, how to use a gun and make a bomb, and also how to rally sympathizers to the cause. So they actually had a book on strategic messaging. What's interesting about Anwar Alaki has been drone, but his postcards still live on in a sense that he's still very widely seen and used on the web. There's still the 44 ways to conduct Jihad that are still available online, and you can still access freely. So now if you look at, we move on to the Islamic State. Here you see again, strategic messaging very, very strong. They have glossy magazines. They have messages, they have a key story. They're basically saying it's important that you come now to do religious migration. You have to hasten, you have to rush before the opportunity closes. And they have even gendered their approach. They look at, it's like a new startup company. They've looked at how women and girls and boys and even children can be rallied to the cause. And if you look at, for example, men, they're basically saying, hey, we can offer you a caliphate. We can give you a passport. We can give you an identity, a job, and religious fulfillment, even brotherhood. For girls, and they're basically targeting young teenage girls, they're saying, we can offer you romance, sisterhood, a life with a jihadi fighter, a possible life as a wife of a martyr, even IT skills. They have glossy magazines to do their strategic messaging. Their first magazine was basically Come to the Caliphate. It's here, it's waiting for you. And the second one, the flood was basically Noah's Ark.  We are the ark, come find us. And hasten to do migration was the third magazine. The fourth one was the failed crusade, basically highlighting the crusade by the coalition forces was failing and that they were still remaining and expanding. And now they have a new magazine that is basically showing where they all want to go in terms of expansion. Where are our magazines? What are we saying? What is our story? And you can see they have basically physical control before in their part of the country in Iraq and Syria, where they're basically taking physical control before they actually create political and religious authority. And their religious argumentation is rigorous and comprehensive. Unfortunately, it's seventh century religious argumentation, which as many Muslim scholars have now argued, is no longer legitimate. They also have an apocalypse narrative. They're basically saying, come, the end is near. And come before it's too late. These are their weapons of war. They have basically accessed all the tools that we use for our daily communication and our social media. They use Google, Instagram, Second Life, Facebook. These are the tools that they use. They are quick. They can turn on a dime. We are sclerotic and slow. We're bureaucrats, bureaucracies. In their answer to Nussom's Tooth Charlie, they said, ISIS, we are all ISIS. This happened within hours of the Nussom's Tooth Charlie campaign. So they are quick. They are agile. They have a quick answer to everything that we try to accomplish. At the same time, they're all embracing. They're going after the low hanging fruit. They're basically saying, we are redeemable. Come to us. We can give you the best a new life, a new start. They're embracing criminals. At the same time, they are providing games. Games for young boys who get addicted to games like Grand Theft Auto. They have a Grand Theft Auto game, which they have put online. So they're basically providing games for children to become addicted to their message. They're also calling other people to come. They're not just going after the low hanging fruit or the criminals. They're actually trying to get doctors and engineers and specialists and scholars. And they're calling them all to come to the new caliphate.  We can offer you medical school. We can offer you the latest technology. Their ISHS looks very much like the National Health Service in the UK. They even use the same logo. Basically they're saying, we're here to help you. We're benevolence.  So how do we counter this strong strategic messaging? We've tried very hard. We've created the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications at the US State Department. The UK contest strategy has been around since 2003. They're trying very hard to prevent people from going. We even have a new UN Security Council resolution in 2178 that was adopted, making all countries now, they must now all have a way to stop foreign fighters of leaving. And if they do come back, they have to have strategies on how to rehabilitate them. But these are all very difficult and hard to implement. How do we prevent terrorism? Well, we look at communities. We look at religious organizations. We look at international organizations. I wrote a piece on strategic messaging by the Cyber Jihad and I looked at all the NGOs that are currently in the world that are available that do this kind of work and they're formidable and they're a lot, but they're not talking together. There's no unified message on counting violent extremism. In order to prevent or stop the kinetic war, we have to work on the underbelly of this iceberg. If you look at it, it's if we kill the people that are actually fighting the wars and the kinetic wars, they will constantly be rejuvenated by new foreign fighters. So unless we actually work on the bottom of the iceberg and stop what is feeding the violence, we will not move ahead. And as you see, we have many different ways to approach this, but we need to have a unified story, a unified message, a counter message to extremism. We have a lot of ammunition.  They're the lowest form of humanity. They are not human in a sense. They are decapitating our humanity. They're not only decapitating our humanity, they're decapitating the heritage of our humanity as this Jordanian cartoonist so wonderfully displayed. And we have lots of ammunition to counter their strategic message, but we're failing to find a unified way to do so. So my key arguments are basically terrorists today are delivering a sophisticated and effective communication strategy. They are strategically recruiting young women, young men via the internet. We need to defend this new frontier. We are worried about the kinetic war, but we are not engaged in the cyber war, the cyber caliphate that they are creating. We are not engaging with them. We are not countering their message. We need to better address the roots of radicalization. Otherwise they will constantly have a new flow of recruits that will come towards them. And we need to create new and better counter narratives. Thank you so much for your attention. And just one last thing. Our strong messages are basically peace, not war, and if you look at peace building and peacemaking, we have so many lessons we can teach them and they're not effective at all, but we don't have a unified counter messages. And that's why we're here today to work on it. And that's what leads us to the next experts who will show us the way forward. Thank you for your attention. So John, Sarah, you've been presented with 2,000 years of history of strategic communications and a very immediate case study that's very present. Back it up a bit, explain messaging in general. What do we need to know? How do we go at this problem and problems of strategic communication in general? Great. I hope you don't mind. I'm gonna stand, when I teach my grad students, if I sit down, they will all immediately go to sleep, not that you all will, but Sarah and I are gonna do a little bit of a presentation. Can I stand here in one round? You stand wherever you like. I can stand in one round. So I'm gonna start it off and then Sarah will talk and then I'll sort of wrap it up. But what we wanna talk to you today really is about five sort of key success on strategic communications. But let me take one step back. How many of you have one of these things? Probably everybody in the room. How many of you like your iPhone? It's really changed our life. We forget the iPhone has been around about seven and a half years, not our lifetimes, a blink in the eye of world history. We forget sometimes that I work for a guy named Howard Dean who ran for president. He sort of changed the way American politics was done. That was 11 years ago. When Howard Dean ran for president, Facebook was at one university. YouTube hadn't been invented. Twitter didn't exist. Much of the sort of social media that we see today and which sort of drives us and we think is so critical and so important, wasn't there. But what this phone tells us and what studies will show us and folks like the Pew Center on people and the press is that there's an enormous hunger for information. More people today read the New York Times than they ever have before. Now we all know the newspapers are having a tremendous time staying in business, but more people are reading them because they're hungry. Anyone know why newspapers are going out of business? Craigslist. Newspapers used to make all their money on classified ads. Well if you have Craigslist, why do you need a classified ad anymore? That is really undermined sort of the newspaper industry. That's had a ripple effect. Most of the reporters that you see now covering whether it's world events or American politics are fairly new to the system. Their editors are fairly new. In American politics, three or four, presidential cycles ago, the same people covered each and every cycle, they knew what was gonna happen. Today, the people that are covering the business have really not written about politics before. There's a great little article about the lead political reporter on Hillary Clinton's campaign. This is her second presidential. Before that, she didn't know anything about politics when she was first covering. Nothing wrong with that, but it just means the news and information, the analysis that you get and you depend on whether it comes through a written, and I bet you a lot of you actually get hard newspapers, right?   So I would challenge any of you. The next time you read an article on a subject you know a great deal about, I bet you find yourself shaking your head most of the way through the article because they don't quite get it right. That's what's sort of happening in the world. So whether it's about ISIS or other places, we have to be very aware that the way we communicate is both very different because we have social media and digital media, but it's actually quite the same and some of the basics are the same. If this was a sports game, we would say don't forget your blocking and tackling. I know it's a football analogy, but you wanna remember the basics. Whether you're in the military and you teach new recruits, you teach them the basics. So we're gonna talk about the basics today and we'll talk a little bit about the tactics as well. So the one thing I wanna just leave you with before I hand it over to Sarah, we'll go through the five rules is this is a very dynamic world. My colleague here, one of the right points she made about ISIS is they move very, very quickly. Quickly could be measured in a matter of under an hour, under half hour, 10 or 15 minutes. It's an incredibly dynamic situation. It would be if we fought a war and we made a movement and then we waited two or three months to decide what our next movement is. For those of you who've been battled and I never have, but you know how fast and how dynamic and the right commanders understand how to marshal their forces to take advantage of their opponent's weakness. So communications is dynamic. It involves usually two sides, sometimes one side in the ISIS situation is doing a better job than the other side, but it's a very dynamic situation and we have to keep our eye on the ball on certain things. So why don't we start off talking about those sort of five keys to success? Great, thanks John. So we're gonna now go over some general frameworks that just as John mentioned, can be used quickly, can be planned ahead of time so that no matter what crisis you're trying to battle through communications or program you're trying to roll out, you're prepared and you're thinking strategically about the program you're gonna do. So the first key is to define success. The biggest mistake people can make is that they won't define success before starting.  Think about what you want to do before you start and then write it down. Write down everything and I always do communication plans for my clients because I want to remember everything. I want to remember what we define success as. I want to know who our audience is. I want to all know what our goal is. So we're all working off the same plan. There's a path forward. We have a timeline and there's priorities. The next key is knowing who your audience is. There are many audiences and you have to really figure out which one is key to your success. Who are you trying to impact? Who's gonna make that difference that you're actually trying to get for your goal, for your success. So these folks on this next slide, yep, so media, government, ISIS, those probably aren't your main audience. Maybe your main audience is local aid workers or it's youth before they join ISIS or maybe it's youth that have already become interested in ISIS and you're trying to combat that. Figuring out what your audience is is the key to figuring out your message. So you may want to engage reporters, engage the government, engage academia. They all influence your key audience but they're not your ultimate audience. So remembering who you're speaking to, who you need to actually persuade to get your success is very important. The next key is I think, John and I would agree, maybe one of the most important and I think Peter as well, strategy drives your tactics. So first you have to outline your goals and objectives which are what do you need to do? What are you trying to change? Is it lessen recruits into ISIS? Is it garner more funding for a certain peacekeeping effort? What are you trying to do? Then you can outline your strategy which is how to do it. How are you going to stop youth from being interested in ISIS? How are you going to get local actors on the ground to support a bill that then gets passed in Congress or in a local legislature? And then from there you can sort of outline your tactics which are the tools to make it happen. Tools can be social media, tools can be an op-ed, tools can be a speech, tools can be talking on a panel. What does your audience read? What do they listen to? How do they get their information? That's exactly what you need to figure out to sort of create your tools and tactics so that you're actually impacting your goals and objectives in reaching your audience. So one thing I know that John and I want to distress is that social media is a tactic but not the end all and be all. Just like John said, we didn't have iPhones 10 years ago and we didn't have Facebook even 10 years ago. So though social media is really key right now and a really great tactic that should always be incorporated into a strategic communications plan, it's not the only thing that should be done. There's digital outreach, there's traditional outreach that all should be executed and thought about to make sure that you're reaching your audience because though you might want to reach youth, the youth aren't on Twitter as much anymore. So figuring out what are they on, what are they listening to, what are they reading to really impact them, then you can start to create your own message. So let's talk about, so we know what success is, we know where our audience is and we have a sense about our strategy. Then we begin to think about and people use these words, messages, what's your message? Sometimes they use and think about what your brand is but it's important to remember that everything you do communicates, everything. We often think if we go back to World War II, you might hear Winston Churchill, it was the words, it was the language, it was the things that he said. A great speech today can move people, can motivate people, can change the way people are. Peter mentioned that I used to run a group of trial lawyers, probably some of the least liked human beings in the system. They're the kind of people when you're at a garden party and what do you do, I'm a trial lawyer, the person kind of moves away from you. We realized through testing that people felt very differently about the word attorney than they felt about the word lawyer. In fact, they liked the word attorney three and a half times more than they liked the word lawyer and it's this dramatic, my attorney is positive, that lawyer. So if you understand the language and the words, if you use the word lawyer all the time, you're gonna start off in the whole, actually what's better than attorney or lawyer is to not use either words. But words and language and using words that are understandable, that are five cent words, small words, not the big convoluted words. I always say it's the words my mother will understand or my aunt will understand. It's meaningful and it resonates quickly. The second part is your tonality, how you talk, how you sound. There's some people, listen to them give speeches and they yell into microphones and there's some people that speak very quietly into microphones. Some of those quiet speakers are far more powerful because they know how to modulate their voice. Images are of critical importance too. If I were here in shorts and sandals and I hadn't shaven for a week, you probably would give me a little bit less credibility. Maybe you're not giving me much now, but you give me less credibility than if I come in a suit and a tie. So it's how you look. We have a candidate that's running for president now, Rand Paul. If I were working for him, I would make him cut his hair once a week because he has crazy hair, it's not his fault, but it sort of plays into an image of what kind of person he is. Images are important when it sort of fits into personal appearance as well. The right kind of colors and different, this becomes more challenging when you're communicating to different audiences in different countries because the colors that might work in one country might mean something else somewhere else. The hand gestures mean something. So this goes back to again who your audience is and it's all about the audience and how we're moving the audience. And lastly, it's a symbolism. Does a flag sail patriotism? Do you have an individual standing and have a group of people behind them which suggests popularity? Again, it goes back to who your audience is and how you're trying to communicate to your audience, but everything we do communicates. It's just not about words. And the other thing to remember that it happens in an instant. Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book which is of somewhat dubious social science, but it's kind of one of his fun books. It's called Blank. He's the kind of person that should basically write an article for the New Yorker and then he turns it into a book. So it sells more. But what he says, and there's a lot of truth to this, we make up our mind in an instant.  It's a very quick way that we make decisions.  You just have to go through a half hour interview to make it look good. So we decide things very, very quickly. And that's pretty important. So the last thing let's talk about is messages and we're happy, hopefully it'll be enough of a dialogue. We can talk about these and some other rules as well. Everybody goes, what's a message all about? It's really, it's a one sentence way. And by the way, the great thing about communications, there's no one black letter law, there's no one right way to do it. This is we're affecting human beings and different people react differently. But it is a set of statements that prompt a targeted audience to take a desired action. So it's usually language, could be images too, that prompt your targeted audience, the audience that Sarah was talking about to do something that you want them to do. That's what it's all about. It's really that simple. It has to have something in it for the audience and it has to have it something in it for you. So here's some sort of little ways that we think a lot about it. Perhaps the biggest mistake on messages is people focus on the process, not the impact. So if I wanna talk to you about Google, for example, and I start droning on about how many computers and switches they have, you're gonna, I'm gonna lose you in seconds. You care about Google because it changes the way we communicate. It's the impact of what they do, not the process of how we do it. And for a lot of you, for what you're doing, your peacekeeping, you're trying to sell impact, not the process. You know, we work hard doing this. No one cares how hard you work. They care about the impact. The second thing is focus on the heart, not the brain. We think with our hearts. We react very quickly and we react emotionally. And when we see information that is counter to what our feeling is, we come up with all sorts of rationalization to justify our feelings. Think about it's the emotion and that reaches people much more quickly. Your message is really part of two things. It's what you want and what your audience wants and where there's an overlap. Think of two circles, like a Venn diagram.  That's a sweet spot for messaging. It's not what you care about. It's the twin thing. You short understandable words. You wanna make it easy, succinct, people can understand very quickly. It's not your emotions. You know, you'll constantly see quotes. These are, I am outraged that this has happened. I am sad, no one cares that I'm sad or outraged, who cares? Stick with your message that really drives home the most persuasive argument.  If you're talking about young people, don't have a 60 year old person talking about what young people feel. Have a young person, have a student.  So those are a few things just to sort of begin to think about in terms of messaging. And that's sort of our opening. Great, thank you all very much. Thank you. Before we go to questions from the audience, what I would like, I wanna take the moderator's prerogative and ask the first one. First, I wanna thank all of you and congratulate you on driving home the difference between strategy and tactics. Everybody wants to do strategic communication and their first reactions to issue a press release, which is actually kind of a bad tactic that's not been terribly well thought out. So thank you all for driving at home. All three of you talked about the importance of audience and of course that was the heart of Aristotle. I mean, this is not a new concept, but how do you define the audience? And Sarah, I think you're the one who said that the press isn't your audience. Why not? Well, what are you trying to do? Let's say you're trying to get a bill passed in Congress. Press can write about it, but if you convince every New York Times reporter to vote for the congressman to then vote for that bill, that's not the best direct or most direct way to get there. So having a thinking about press as a sub-audience is sort of usually how I think about them because they, if you can get them your message and you're getting in a way that then your target audience is reading, then you're impacting something more meaningfully. So let's say you're trying to impact and I'm taking this domestic but a Supreme Court justice, very difficult, but where do they live? What community newspaper do they read? If you can then target a reporter to put out a message in that paper, that's so much more meaningful because that reporter isn't your audience, that you're trying to get vote for something or against something, it's that Supreme Court justice. But that applies anywhere, here, abroad. Media has a huge impact, but they're not gonna make that final jump to make sure that you have success or you're getting the outcome you want. John. Professor, anything to add to? So how do you know, how do you learn about your audience? Intelligence. I think you need to have intelligence in the field. You have to see who your audience is and you have to use multiple narratives, not just one meta-narrative because there's several different actors. You have to gender the approach. Every, it is according to you, if it's boys, girls, women or men or even elderly people. And I think if you look at the Islamic State, they have effectively done that. They have targeted exactly the different actors and we have, this is something that we need to think of as well. John. You gotta start with what success is. So let's talk about ISIS for a sec. So what should our success be? Is success stopping young boys and girls from enlisting? If that is success, then our target audience are young boys and girls who haven't joined yet. It's just as clear as that. Now they may be influenced by parents, by religious figures, by stuff they read in the news media, by peers, there's a lot of ways they can be influenced, but you have to figure out who is the decider, who has the power to allow you to succeed or not. And success is not about, we want to make people more informed about this. That doesn't do any good. We want people to put th