Okay, good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for this latest discussion in the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum which sponsors monthly roundtables and panels on issues relevant to peace building. My name is Patricia Taft and I am a Programs Director at the Fund for Peace and I'm very excited today to be moderating a discussion on such an important topic and to be joined by four well-known and expert panelists. So first what I would like to do is introduce our panelists to you and then I'm going to present some initial remarks and a few questions just to frame our discussion today. So starting from my left, Beth Cole, in September of 2015 Ms. Cole joined the USIP as a special advisor on countering violent extremism, conflict and fragility and Ms. Cole served in leadership positions in and out of government for more than 30 years working on conflict and security issues. Prior to rejoining USIP Ms. Cole was appointed by President Obama as the director of the Office of Civil Military Cooperation at USAID where she was responsible for managing the relationship between USAID and the Department of Defense. Ms. Cole has led pioneering initiatives including USIP hosted working group on civil military relations and non permissive environments where she helped negotiate the landmark guidelines for relations between US Armed Forces and NGHOs in hostile or potentially hostile environments. She was the lead writer of the first interagency doctrine for stabilization operations, guiding principles for stabilization and reconstruction. She's authored and co-authored numerous books and publications and speaks widely on issues related to conflict. Ms. Cole is currently an adjunct professor at the Elliott School for International Affairs at George Washington University. Next Ms. Sanam Nargahagi, I'm sorry am I mispronouncing your name, Andalini. Sanam is the co-founder and executive director of ICAN for over two decades. She has been leading international and leading international peace strategists in 2000. She was among the civil society drafters of the UN Security Resolution 1325 on women peace and security. In 2011 Sanam was the first senior expert on gender and inclusion on the UN's mediation standby team. She provides guidance and training to senior personnel and UN agencies, governments and NGOs worldwide and has worked in conflict affected communities globally including leading assessments and Maoist contendments in Nepal. Between 2002 and 2005 she worked as the director of Women Waging Peace Policy Commission and led groundbreaking field research on women's contributions to conflict prevention, security and peacemaking in 12 countries. Between 2008 and 2010 she led UNDP's 10 country action research on men in crisis settings. She served on the advisory board of the UN Democracy Fund and was appointed to the civil society advisory group on Resolution 1325, chaired by Mary Robinson in 2010. Since 2013 she has served in the working group on gender and inclusion of the Sustainable Development Network. Currently Sanam is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and in between 2014 and 2015 she was a research associate and senior fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies. She has published extensively on peace and security issues. According to the leftist Sanam is the animal Vivian Laurie Derrick who launched Bridges to strengthen African governance and leadership by forging trade and social development links between Africa and the BRIC nations, the United States, the European Union and the African diaspora. When she was inaugural fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University in 2009. Prior to her year at Harvard she was a senior vice president and director of public partnerships at the former AED, a U.S.-based nonprofit which worked on education, health and economic development in more than 125 countries. Previously she served as the assistant administrator for Africa for USAID and as the senior government official directing foreign assistance to Africa. A veteran foreign affairs specialist she has held numerous positions in both government and the nonprofit sector including deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of State, executive vice president of the National Council on Negro Women, vice president of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, president of the African American Institute and senior advisor of the African leadership forum. She has taught at New York City Technical College and the University of Liberia and for decades has concentrated on sustainable development, education, political participation, conflict resolution, leadership development and women's leadership in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. And all the way to the left Madeline Rose from Mercy Corps. She is a senior policy advisor leading Mercy Corps work, policy and advocacy work on peace and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. This includes policy portfolios on peace building, violence reduction governance and countering violent extremism. Madeline has previously worked for the United States Congress, the United Nations, the Friends Committee on National Legislation with community-based human rights groups in South Africa and in Zimbabwe. So a warm welcome to all of our panelists and thank you very much for joining us. So to start out with framing the discussion a little bit, today we're going to be looking at the topic of fragile states and of course given all of what's been happening in the world over the past few weeks and months, I think we can all agree that this topic is more than relevant than ever. My organization, the Fund for Peace, has been looking at the issue of state fragility for the past two decades and most of our programming centers around early warning and response in fragile states and fragile regions within fragile states. Fund for Peace is most famous or sometimes infamous depending on who you're talking to. The product in this area is the annual fragile states index, which we've been producing for the last 15 years. The FSI is a global ranking that looks at specific risks and pressures that make a country fragile or prone to violence. Specifically it looks at national level risk according to 12 indicators that span social, political, economic and security factors and these are informed by millions of pieces of quantitative and qualitative data. So I would like to put it up here. On the screen you'll see the, this is the 2017 Fragile States Index which we launched last month. And these are the top 20 countries in the index and as far as definitions for FFP we, our definition of state fragility is very much in line with the findings of the Fragility Study Group which was sponsored by Carnegie and Center for New American Security and USIP. And while there's certainly no one-size-fits-all definition for fragile states, they do tend to share some common characteristics. Some of those include the breakdown of the social contract between the government and its people or the perception by proportion of the population that the government is either not representative of them or not fulfilling their needs. This is often coupled with a reduced legitimacy or a lack of legitimacy on the international stage. Fragile states often have reduced institutional capacity to deal with internal and external shocks from things like pandemics, fluctuations in global markets, environmental disasters, elections, labor protests and so on. And of course the heightened risk that even small shocks could result in instability if not outright violent conflict. So looking at the top 20 I think for most of us we intuitively know the poster children of state fragility. And as you can see there's not too many surprises here for the past several years South Sudan and Somalia have kind of switched back and forth as far as the top two. The next slide however shows from the index what the most worsened countries were in 2017. And again I think anybody who follows the news won't see too many surprises here. However what I did want to discuss and have the panel dive a little bit deeper into is this question of why some states or some countries like a South Sudan or like a Somalia seem to be forever in a state of chaos and crisis and going from one year to the next seemingly increasingly fragile while others and I'm thinking here of a lot of my own work a country like Nigeria that seems to be consistently tottering on the brink with pockets of fragility cycles of violence that afflicts entire regions but don't bring down the state. These one of the things that we're quite interested of course of the fun for pieces looking at trends as well and so this slide shows the trends of the most worsened countries in the past decade. Again there's not too many surprises here although some of the countries I think that we as particularly in Africa assume are the most stable are actually worsening at quite a rapid rate South Africa being one of them. But what I wanted to direct attention to here as well to kind of also frame this discussion is looking at the most improved countries of the past decade. I wanted to ask the panel if you would in your remarks address some of the characteristics in your opinion of what a recovering or a recovered fragile state looks like and what factors might have played a role in that. And also given your individual topical and regional country experiences I'd like you to address where you can, what has worked and what hasn't worked in fragile states particularly in regard to considering the intersection of gender and conflict in fragile states countering violence or violent extremism and defense and development initiatives. We also have begun to talk quite a bit about resiliency and the role of resilience particularly at the local level in preventing fragile states and helping to improve them and strengthen their capacities once they are they've become quite fragile. And so with those few framing questions I'd like to take it from the left to the right and so I will turn it over to Madeleine for from Mercy Corps to start off. Thanks. Am I mic'd? Yeah, okay. Well thank you so much to USIP for inviting Mercy Corps to be here and to the Fund for Peace and to Beth Cole and to so many of you I feel like starting with the youngest on the panel who has you know personally followed the careers of all three of the all four of the women sitting next to me so I'm really grateful to be here personally and Mercy Corps appreciates it a lot. So we were asked to talk about sort of what we've learned around what's working, what are the factors that contribute to improvements among fragility indicators but I think just because I'm starting and I think given the political conversation around the future of foreign assistance it's important to first emphasize that development in its own right does work. I was really struck by former USAID administrator Gail Smith's outgoing cabinet memo when she talked about Afghanistan and Pakistan and if you look at this year's 2017 fragile states index I was really struck that Pakistan was one of their most improved if not the most improved this year and that goes to show that you know we have to remember in the broader conversation around fragility and fragile states that the development investments of the Millennium Development goals that the focus on hitting specific development targets even in these conflict-affected states 15 years ago are starting to bear fruit and you've seen incredible improvements in literacy and access and electricity in Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular despite the fact that they're still ongoing conflict and so when we think about so it's just really important to take stock of we think and I was an interesting conversation yesterday at the World Bank where they were talking about this how do we reconcile this sort of seeming fragile states complex sort of the fact that we're still dealing with Paul Collier's bottom billion in many ways and I think it's that the development challenges that we've put on our shoulders are just getting harder so you know the MDGs were really a lot of just basic access and basic quantitative indicators goals that we set for ourselves as a community but if you look at the sustainable development goals and about this frame of fragile states it's really that we've taken it to the next level that we've recognized that for sustainable development you need to address structural issues asymmetric power about imbalances you need to address inequalities so a lot of these goals have gone beyond just basic quantitative achievements to more of those that looking at the imbalances and I think that that's where we are and that's what's so important about the fragile states framework it's it's that this the fragile states working group has led that okay you know we've we've made a lot of basic achievements and now what and I think that's how mercy core thinks about it so to that end the sort of now what I think you know if you look at the the fragile states index and if you think about fragility you realize there's a lot of competing variables so there's you know basic public services that needs to be delivered there's the human rights indicators there's grievance indicators there's a lot of different subsections around how they do their methodology the task of and from a policy perspective that's really important to maintain that the policy of fragile states need to recognize that there's a lot of these are multivariable phenomenon that perpetuate chronic under development but as a development practitioner it's our and as many in the room it's our jobs to take that big problem set and turn it into smaller problem sets that we can tackle so mercy core in the fragile states has really prioritized sort of two main programming and research tracks to mitigate fragility one has been on building resilience to the shocks that are inherent in fragile states and the second has been on trying to promote stability which we have defined and measured as reducing people's propensities to participate and support in violence so I'll talk about two case studies of what we've learned on both of those tracks on the resilience track our flagship work and this has been in East Africa so Somalia Uganda Southern Ethiopia and there's a study it's outside but it's called conflict to coping which we wrote in 2011 which was an assessment of essentially eight years worth of relief to resilience programming and what we were trying to understand was what makes communities more resilient to the shocks of drought food insecurity and conflict but I emphasize and it's really important increasingly in the conflict and sort of fragility field we're talking about resiliance ease it's really important to note that so far the resilience field has really focused on resilience to the shocks I just mentioned so resilience on to the effects of conflict meaning lack of purchasing power lack of access to finance food insecurity household you know things like that we haven't yet really developed the field of building resilience to conflict itself so within that field though of what does it mean to build to help communities be more resilient in the face of these shocks and fragile states what we found was conflict management skills and natural resource management were the most critical underpinning so in Southern Ethiopia Northern Uganda and Somalia where we invested and this was at the time humanitarian money but where we invested in conflict management systems and facilitated space for communities to reconcile grievances over land and natural resources communities freedom of mobility increased and when their mobility increased their grievances and their conflicts over natural resources decreased building on that sort of natural resource management foundation we were able to facilitate essentially local peace treaties and governance agreements around natural resource management land sharing and power sharing that transcended farmer pastoral communities and helped build the foundation for municipal and national policy change around land if you look at the Ethiopia findings in this report a lot of what they define as the root causes of increased escalation and conflict is still built the failure to deal with natural resource sharing and land and how that intersects with other issues and so you know this is it it's that's I think it's really important to emphasize that those natural NRM skills were helped to facilitate the resilience to these shocks of course what did what we don't see and what didn't work is that you know not all law enforcement not all security approaches or approaches to combat security are going to promote resilience so for example force relocations around pastoral livelihoods and some of the heavy-handed activities by the state actually decrease communities resilience the other so that's sort of big big picture on the resilience side and happy to answer more questions that the second is on sort of stability and violence reduction so the study that we're most excited about is in Somalia so this is one of those states that's been on top of the list for the last 25 years and when you think about how do you deal with multiple different drivers of chronic stability through one program we put out a study last November called critical choices and it was a quasi-experimental impact evaluation that evaluated the effects of a five-year USAID education program in Somalia so the program what had this his overarching goal of contributing to Somalia's stability by increasing the education system and so it had you know a lot of these millennium development goals type indicators around increasing literacy increasing access increasing just physical schools so the program had a lot of development achievements in its own right it doubled the amount of schools public schools that are open in Somalia and helped over 50,000 Somali youth get access to secondary education but in our impact evaluation we actually found that students who had access to education alone were more likely to support political violence and so we you know we dug around into the data and the mechanism and I see some heads nodding you know we all kind of know that but there's not a lot of rigorous data in the field which is sort of why we invested in the study and so we found that youth who had access to schools were more frustrated with the state's provision of basic services because the quality of even if they could go they felt the quality was unfair the quality was unjust so you exacerbate that governance grievance but in the communities that we tested where we did access to education and civic engagement youth's propensity to both participate and support political violence dropped by 20 and 14 percent respectively so again we went back and we dug into the data of like trying to understand that difference and you know it won't be that surprising to this group of experts but what we were able to essentially determine through a rigorous you know quantitative way was that it was really that behavior change and that it's so what our civic engagement activities were as we essentially created youth clubs in a lot of the schools and in those youth clubs there were training programs around youth mobilization around how to what is advocacy 101 how do you start a campaign around an issue that matters in your community what is advocacy how do you do dialogue how do you mobilize how do you organize in in apolitical ways but just that learning those skills of the tools around sort of confronting the injustices or confronting your perceived grievance in a productive way and it and so what we found in our data was that even as basic services didn't deliver didn't in the quality of basic services didn't increase at a rate that was satisfactory just something we're gonna see in all these fragile states you can offset that that sort of decision-making of okay I'm frustrated so I'm gonna participate in violence you can offset that with the behavior change mechanism around both youth believing that they can do something about the injustices you know and facing them and that change is really key for us and we're doing similar programming in Nigeria and Lebanon and Jordan Afghanistan you know but this is just the one that we've had a rigorous evaluation of recently but when it comes to the fragile states problem set you know we all need to do more around improving basic services by the state but in the short term that might not offset propensity to violence and so to make sure that we're actually mitigating and decreasing the risk of youth young people or anyone participating in violence that will even put even more pressure on these burdened states we think that that emphasis is really important so to kind of wrap up and happy to talk about other studies as well but I think as Mercy Corps is thinking about the sort of fragility problem set and how they had to prioritize the various variables we're looking at sort of three big initiatives moving forward so one is that we're doubling down on violence reduction in addition to the fragile state study group there was a wonderful report by the OECD that their states of fragility report where and similar to the fragile the FFP study but they essentially said that the most common denominator if you look at all the fragile states and the fragile states that have been there for 25 years it's the it's the constant existence of violence and the inability of the state to deal with violence if you look at the ODA data sets of all the development assistance in the world 1% is spent on conflict mitigation and management 8% is on security justice and human rights so that means 91% is spent on all of the other things even though we all say that conflict governance security are the crux of chronic underdevelopment and fragility so so doubling down on violence reduction and trying to get the sort of community to get on board with that is a big priority for us to anchoring everything through a lens of governance so thinking about no matter the program no matter the sector you're working on how are you thinking about SDG 16 and SDG 10 so SDG 10 is around reducing structural inequalities and SDG 16 is sort of around peace justice and inclusion how do we make sure that no matter the sector if it's financial inclusion in Tunisia how do we make sure that we're designing our programs through a lens that will achieve some of those index sub indicators and on SDG 10 and 16 and then the third is really the Somalia funding but we're really trying to focus on self-efficacy youth you know these this this being more intentional about the behavior change mechanisms and how we facilitate space and provide assistance to support the foundations for youth led you know sort of justice movements in the world in a way that can sort of offset the pressure that some of the some of these armed movements or violent movements are putting on fragile states who are already really struggling to cope with the governing burden that they face thanks so much Madeline Vivian I think that I probably need to go up there because I need to see the slides good morning and I too want to thank USIP and the co-sponsors for really focusing on this issue and I'm going to talk about the Sahel and fairly specifically about Mali I'm really delighted that this is this is happening because when you think about the Sahel and the 11 countries that the next one the that of this of the Sahel they're probably the poorest region in the world and it's in some disarray and chaos can't which can result in a major conflagration that then spreads to North Africa and then across to to Europe so it's really critical to think about this and I think that attention goes elsewhere and the Sahel is under appreciated and also note that the Sahel when you look at the fragile states index each of the countries is red various shades of of of crimson so what I'm going to to do is focus on on Mali and how it got to this situation I began working on Mali way back in the 70s and 80s but in 1991 in that particular coup the interim prime minister Simano Sacco was a graduate of a program got a PhD under the auspices of the African-American Institute so we had a program and I asked him Simano how did you become such an advocate for democracy and he said that he had learned the contribution and the context of democracy through the PTA in Pittsburgh and I've never I've never forgotten that because to me that's the essence of civil society and how one has to learn over time the basic concepts and tenets of democracy so I've been following Mali all these these years in 2012 after that particular coup I asked Molly and at the African Union meeting that year what should we do and they said it's too soon we have to absorb this and think about what we want came back and began to work with the ambassador so I came back and we said well there are all these people in the the US and globally who are committed to to Mali so we'll start a Mali watch that turned into Mali moving forward and now since Mali is not really pacified into the Mali affinity group so we put all this money into Mali all this energy into Mali plus we have minutiae which is the largest peacekeeping force in the world and the most dangerous but Mali still isn't pacified it isn't secure and the reconciliation hasn't taken place so it began to expand from Mali to the Sahel more broadly and the more that I look at this the more fragile these states are and there are certain constraints obviously one is the the demographics Africa has the youngest population in the world and you certainly see that all of the the numbers tell you that and particularly in Mali poverty is again the poorest region in the world the per capita income GDP per capita in Mali is $840 of course the conflicts its low level of conflict continues and climate change is wreaking havoc and we can talk about the relationship between climate change and conflict and the underlying causes but the fact is that still it's it's a major detriment so this leads to structural fragilities and I see that there are four that at least that that I think are important first of all the state security that's the basis of the architecture climate change in in agriculture you can't talk about democracy and good governance if you're hungry look Levant Rafa made up how do I you and the hungry stomach doesn't have any any years and education and I'm particularly interested in what you said about education because it's the linchpin of development and get higher yields per hectare you have lower infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates you have higher labor force participation you have better civic engagement with with education but the nuance is that you talked about Madeleine are really quite quite important so in terms of state security the the army the military is the essence and I don't think we pay enough attention to the rank and file soldier this is Corporal Amadou he's in the Malian army and he has all of these influences that are impinging upon him he's got to think about has he been trained to think about his loyalty to the Constitution to the rule of law as opposed to individuals is he thinking about the doctrine and the the mission or is he conflicted and is he thinking about these people might be of my ethnic group and I don't want to be involved in this particular conflict or is he thinking about the fact that he may not have been paid and he has a family so therefore when some jihadist or ISIS representative encounters him they have an encounter he may be willing to consider it because he hasn't been paid because of corruption so I think that we need to focus more on how we interact as civilians how populations interact with these particular with the the the military and that civ mill is really an important focus for anything that has to do with in increasing I'm resilience in particularly in the south Sahel and in Mali and then there's a whole question of of agriculture and the point being that since agriculture is the basic economic pillar for most of sub-Saharan Africa it doesn't matter where you are agriculture is the basis and then we see all of these challenges the lack of infrastructure the the land use conflicts are the ones that I think are particularly important because you have pastoralist versus to our eggs in this particular instance and and other nomadic groups so you've got this particular conflict that's that's going on you add to that then the disruption of the planting cycles through the ongoing low-level conflict that you see at least in the upper two-thirds the northern two-thirds of of Mali and then of course you've got the warming temperature in Burkina Faso the temperature is going to increase two to three degrees by 2050 it's an it's an incredible phenomenon that we're seeing and I don't think that we're paying enough attention to it so all of this in terms of agriculture leads to the growing food insecurity then of course there's civil society which is the most critical factor I think but you know civil society in many Sahelian countries but again particularly in Mali is is driven by fissures there are cleavages again between the the pastoralist and the the nomads but also between north and south and to our agreeances are well-known they go back to 1963 in the beginning of the of the the country but it's still it's it's an incredibly important part of civil society I'm not going to talk very much about women's roles in civil society except to say that Mali and women farmers are some of the best in West Africa there's an expression in and about Mali and women and their their assertiveness and their sense of agency they farm Malian Elzon bossay so these Mali and women there they are out there and I began to become really reconnected with Mali and women through a woman who serves on the Human Rights Commission and this particular picture is of women who are involved in electoral processes and make sure that they come and monitor elections so Mali is part of a larger group but the point is that Mali and women are a real source for improving and re-knitting civil society and I've already talked about the Tawar eggs and the pastoralist but some of the programs that are specific programs that have been mentioned and will be mentioned may be an opportunity to help again knit together the Tawar eggs and pastoralists because otherwise we're going to see this continued low-level violence the and it's it's so demoralizing to both to both parties so education is the fourth structural frailty that that I see and for all the reasons that we've mentioned Mali really needs to improve the level of literacy and numeracy we know we're talking about ways that this large youth bulge can become productive citizens these citizens are going to need jobs they need to have necessary skills and you need to be literate to do that one of the most distressing facts is that 70 percent of primary school leaders in sub-Saharan Africa 70 percent do not go on to secondary school so the question is what do you do with these students they are ripe for recruitment by ISIS Boko Haram al-Qaeda because they are literate disaffected without real prospects but they still need to get that basic literacy so education is so important and it certainly becomes a counterweight to extremism as we have heard from other examples young people are an incredible possibility within terms of civil society one of the programs that's across Africa now is Jane Goodall's roots and shoots and if you can get young people in these programs to think about one the environment they're reinforcing their literacy and it's easy enough to introduce a component of basic civic values the importance of conversation and dialogue as opposed to to conflict so one of the proposals that I would make is to engage youth and in programs add a civic education a peacemaking component to these programs and you can do it with virtually across the continent because there's so many programs that are in multiple multiple countries so we're talking we're supposed to think about discuss positive outcomes and positive projects so I'm going to introduce you to a project on ethical monotheism ethical monotheism is the idea that there are basic ethical principles that you find across the five Abrahamic religions so these programs that we're proposing is to explore the ethical roots of Islam and Christianity by getting a group of persons together 50 per country that will meet develop bonds of trust and communication look at economic development skills building among individuals and then also look at the possibilities of look at the roots theatrical roots of the religion then go back to communities and talk about work with the community in terms of skill building activities and then secondarily but equally important talk about the religion talk about what it means to be a Muslim that's following the Koran and look at basic values we hope this we're doing this with the the government of Morocco because Morocco is committed to encouraging a brand of Islam that they call tolerant they use the word tolerant and the word moderate so it's not us using the word but it's following what Moroccans and Muslims are using so we hope that this will have a cascade and multiplier effect and behind the is the the Islamic center in Rabat that is teaching imams and bringing imams from many sub-Saharan African countries and the program is includes the skills building that I talked about as well as of course the the theological basis of Islam but what the Moroccans are doing which is so fascinating is that they are incorporating women and they're the only country that is doing this in this measured way women are in the same classes as as men although they're separately seated and women are teaching men they're using four different economic development foci technology electronics agriculture and couture now I'm not I don't know enough about the couture to know whether that's one that's encouraging both men and women or or not but we'll get to that point as we move through the through the program so ultimately the goal of this is to have these cadres of 50 persons per village per per country in six countries and that there will be a multiplier effect and hopefully that's going to help build resilience so to conclude think about Corporal Amadou and it's so important that he becomes a patriot for his country and is willing to work with others to secure the the peace civic engagement is absolutely the best antidote and the more programs that we can find and encourage locally the better off that we are going to be we have to listen to communities because ultimately it's the individuals in the communities that are going to make the difference and the and the and help build the resilience that the set the cell needs so that countries do not become make that transition to failed states but rather become resilient good neighbors and good world citizens thank you thank you so much thank you it's it's a pleasure to be here with you it's always hard to go after two people who've said so much because I now I want to respond to everything that you're saying and pick up from there so let me just give you a bit of framing around the work that we do I can as a small organization here and based in Washington but we have a network now of about 90 organizations across 30 countries they are independent women-led organizations working on peace and security issues it's called the Women's Alliance for Security Leadership we are very conscious of the fact that this is not just a network of individuals it's really about and our philosophy is the importance of building and enabling the strengthening of local organizations so we we are small we have one office here we're six people but we have this mass network and and we really work collaboratively with our partners it's it's partly about resources to make sure that our resource the resources that are available don't just get stuck in Washington or stuck with us as we go and open office I offices elsewhere because I think that that's in a form of colonization sometimes when we have international organizations going and taking resources it's it's partly about that but it's also recognizing that if we become too dependent on international donors when the money goes you pull out as well and you haven't really left anything behind if you look at when we talk to our partners in Iraq and Afghanistan they say all this money that came you know at some point we shut down all the Iraq programming and there was nobody in Washington that would meet you to talk about Iraq and the problem had not gone away right and yet our local partners are there and they say you know for 20 years the international community has been coming in and they haven't they in fact we kind of gouge out local staff and experts to work for international organizations and we don't really build up the institution so for us it's really a reverse of that that we really believe it's important to enable the local institutions to be strengthened and our focus has been primarily on women ladder organizations doing peace and security work because it's very dangerous work there not many people who do it and yet the work that they do is quite extraordinary and I'll give you a few examples of that now it's always my focus has always been on conflict affected countries and inevitably as we started specifically with the ICANN outreach to the Middle East North Africa and Asia countries Asian countries in 2012 and when we asked them to do an analysis of what was going on trends analysis and so forth extremism was one of the things that came up very very strongly long before the the State Department and President Obama picked it up and what was notable was that women around the world have actually been highlighting and you know literally sort of speaking out shouting out screaming out about the rise of extremism for at least the 20 years I've been in this field we've seen them at the UN space coming in and and and trying to address these issues but also we've seen the pushback we've seen the sort of the cabal of the Vatican the Islamist states and others really pushing back on reproductive health and then and then all sorts of things to do with women's rights and and there is a level of violence that has been related to this which we at the international level have not picked up because it really hasn't been state level state it hasn't it hasn't been a threat to us it hasn't been a bomb in London or Paris or so forth so so when we talk about CVE or PVE or you know prevention of violent extremism or countering violent extremism for us and our partners the first point of contact is when do you see the spread of extremism nonviolent but very intolerant bigoted ideology that that goes that goes mainstream it's really important because before it becomes violent that that spread has happened and actually if you look at this country and you think about kind of you know the white supremacist kind of spread that that we're seeing these are these are signs that we shouldn't we shouldn't be ignoring so it's the same thing it's the same thing there that we have to be looking at it and women in particular have a hat you know as I say they notice it first for a number of reasons number one the ideology of every single identity-based extremist movement that is arising right now in the world whether they're ethno-national so white supremacist or whether they're the ones that couch themselves in Islam but actually are sort of derivations of Wahhabism and Salafism that comes from Saudi Arabia essentially or whether it's the ones that are now sort of you know quasi extremist Buddhists that you might see in you know elements in Burma or elsewhere Hindu extremists Jewish I mean we're seeing every single major religion in the world has a little outcrop of a fringe group that's arising and it's quite intolerant and violent and every single one of them has an issue with women's place in society right so it's what you know they have a good they want to control whether it's our bodies whether it's what we hear aware and we're on our heads whether we're in public or not where we speak and so forth and so naturally women are also the first ones to be speaking out about it now what's interesting and the changes that we're seeing right now is that these groups are very very clever and very much more proactive than we are about how they recruit their strategies and so forth and when it comes specifically to women what we're seeing is that there's a real recognition especially in the Islam in these ones that are sort of couched in is in a whether it's a Boko Haram or ISIS good derivations and so forth they recognize the power and influence of women in society in their communities in their families that very micro sort of that micro level but that incredible influence that they have so they are co-opting women and what they're doing is that they are tapping into the grievances and aspirations of women and saying you know whether it's violence whether it's poverty whether it's injustice and corruption in the community they're saying you come to us and the new state that new society that we're creating you will have a role in it right you will it will be different it won't be corrupted well and so they're actually co-opting with these messages and and bringing them on board and enabling them to be recruiters that that's one thing we're seeing the next thing that we're seeing and this is this is work that our partners in Kenya have been doing through some of the funding that we've been providing them with they were doing assessments and one of the things they realized was that there is there are a lot of trafficked young women between Somalia and Kenya and one and again they're promised a job they're promised something positive but actually it's a forced marriage and and and they find themselves isolated in communities and the recruiters come along and they're very and of course these girls have no real knowledge of Islam and somebody comes along and is nice to them and starts telling them out their faith and so forth and basically recruits them to become recruiters and and and radicalizes them and they are invisible to the eyes of the security forces because who looks at young women who cares about their invisible in society right especially poor young women so so it's very interesting how they are tapping into the inequality and and the injustices and and but spinning their own message of empowerment and I can give you more of these more of these examples from from other places so so we see that aspect of the gender dimension then as I say the other part of it which which is the area that that you know for us has been very important is recognizing that we also see women at the community level are the first ones to rise up and start fighting against this and trying to kind of come up with alternatives and the alternatives that they provide are not surprisingly very much couched in economic social religious it's psychosocial economic sort of economic skills social conditioning and and and cultural activities and so forth it's it's not just one of one thing right because people need to be connected in multiple ways and and and the and the alternative one of one of the things that that is that is working very well is their ability to promote religious literacy to say look religion you know this is what Islam is and this is what it is but to be able to do that you have to be trusted at the local level so it's not about you and me and the State Department and and the UN going in with big counter messaging it's actually about who do you trust in your community and how do we enable them to do their work without bear hugging them and branding them as if they are one of us because this is also one of the dangers we have a colleague in in Basra for example who has been doing a lot of this work because her own sons were basically radicalized and she had to go pull them out from from from local militias she's you know I tell the boys jihad is in spelling blood on the streets jihad is giving blood in the hospitals God's God's work is done in the community you don't need to die and you know it's not with death and violence and so forth so they're able to take and understand what the local culture and religious narratives are and what what people are hearing and give them the reframing which is which is a more positive peace and nonviolent oriented approach but but that issue though the reason why it works is because they're trusted and so for us the question is how do you enable them to continue their work and spread that work and so forth and it's really and I've come to conclusion it's really not about scaling up as it is about scaling across it's about saying okay in this community it's these people these people we can connect them to these people in this other community who are also good and and actually it's multitudes of small initiatives as opposed to trying to brand it as one thing which which which also makes it much more resilient so that that's one set of that that's one set of issues that that that we're seeing now one of the challenges that we are also finding is that there is a lot of you know on the one hand we want this emphasis on what's happening at the local level and enabling the local work on the other hand it's not enough because frankly whatever my partners in Iraq or Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan do I can tell you the minute that Moab was dropped on Afghanistan many many years of work was destroyed right because it's a it's a giant bomb right and so and we have to recognize that international the international actors we as the United States the United Nations and so forth when our policies are wrong and when our actions are so detrimental we can't just fix it with a little grad here and there and small little programs and say oh but let's put the burden back on the community so so it's really important to be looking at what's what the locals are doing and enabling that work but then also connecting them to the international spaces and to the regional and national spaces and one of the things that we've started to do this year through through I can and and through the West Alliance was we've set up a new platform called the global solutions exchange in partnership with with a number of other smaller it with a number of think tanks and others including the Royal United Services Institute in the UK and search for common ground and the global center that has offices here in New York and elsewhere and with the Norwegian government and the idea for us is that it's really important for us to create a new platform to enable local organizations women especially women led organizations and youth organizations to have direct access to the policy community to international policy makers whether it's government multilaterals and to do the to talk start talking about these issues sectorally because PVE and CVE as well as you know prevention of violent extremism countering violent extremism we know this is not that there it's a complex set of issues that have led us to this phenomenon and and we can't just have national action plans on PVE and CVE without actually saying what is the economic side of the story what's the educational side of the story what is the security side of the story and bringing those voices up that that notion that that your model when we talk talk about the feedback loop so this is what we've been we've been looking at and I just wanted to share with you a couple of the of the sort of areas that that were considering number one is when we talk about economics a lot of the discourse internationally has been around livelihoods let's give them some skills let's give them some jobs what we're finding and in this in the work that I did with UNDP when I was looking at the gender dimensions of violence from the standpoint of young men who get involved what really struck me was that all this development assistance that has been flowing into these countries for all these years actually isn't reaching the most vulnerable communities right so where is it going folks what are we doing right and so that that's it and so then when you when you start peeling that and you start looking at further and further what you realize is that this this the nexus between you know years and years of neoliberalism and structural adjustment and and what has really become what I personally call extreme capitalism and what we're seeing on the ground now that we need to be exploring this because the money isn't worth you know we've defunded social you know education and healthcare we have reduced policing we we don't pay our police services enough etc so what does it mean what does it do the policemen as you were mentioning where the army guy you know if somebody comes and offers him a you know some corruption money and so he'll he'll take it he might have a second job we were talking I was talking recently to some British military officers and they said you know we couldn't understand why the Afghans that we trained to become teachers and police officers and so forth just weren't leaving the town to go and beat go to their posts until we realized that they had a second job in town right so we're if we're not actually paying our policemen an adequate salary and we're not recognizing and giving it prestige because in the work that I did I want it was when we think about masculinity being a provider is really important but a prestigious job is there has to be some element of prestige right men don't want to go and do microcredit not the women necessarily want to do it either but men certainly don't want to do it so it's we're not we're not kind of saying look you're a policeman you've been trained here's a uniform here's a decent salary by the way if you get involved in corruption all of this will go right we're actually not giving them what they need so you have you have this kind of shrinking of positive or effective community policing and security at the local level education but by virtue of the fact that we have not supported education and national education across countries for many many years or we've kind of forced it to be paying and and and so forth guess who comes in and fills the void people want their kids to be educated well if the Islamists come in and say we're gonna have a madrasa and the Catholic say we're gonna have a Catholic school and and you best start to then fragment based on religion what you've done is actually instead of having social cohesion and using education as a means of creating social harmony and a kind of a mixing of our pluralistic societies and all these societies are pretty plural if when you when you look down to we're now creating silos right and everybody's learning that you know my religion is better than yours and so forth and this this is this lays the groundwork for a lot of intolerance as well in the meantime at the national in the national curricula as well our colleagues are saying you know there is a lot of either explicit or implicit intolerance and bigger tree that's being promoted whether it's that we don't teach the history whether it's you know you ban languages even in the European context things like not teaching colonial history very well why do we have so many Asians and Africans and others in England or in you know with Africans in France well because the French at some point we're there right now the British at some point we're in India and so so we need to be teaching this history and making people making kids feel a sense of belonging and inclusion otherwise they look at the history and they're like well this isn't me well where am I and somebody else is pulling them aside health care similarly in Tunisia after the after the 2011 revolution the Muslim brotherhood was providing free clinics to people right your kid is sick your wife is sick you're feeling ill somebody's providing free health care versus paid health care so these are these are all related actually to macro economic policies and it's not to say that the state has shrunk in the city because because the security forces have been bloated that the money that goes into security spending to repress people is actually increasing and that in itself is also then creating radicalization because because they're not actually protecting the civilians they're oppressing them so so we need to look at the the sort of the bigger picture and then and then how it looks out on the ground and kind of have this this this continuous loop that that goes on and when and so for us when we actually are talking to women on the ground and our and our partners these are the kinds of things that that that they begin to it's almost like a lens that you put on and you begin to see the connectivity and then the work that that they're doing I'll end with a couple of examples of of of the work that we're seeing we've we've started something called the inclusive sorry the innovative peace peace fund and and essentially we're channeling resources to our local partners to let and we call it investing and trust because we trust their judgment about what is needed at the local level we don't want to tell them what to do right and it's and it's a very participatory process so our partner in Nigeria came we started this two years ago and she said you know Boko Haram is saying education is not is against his law right so that that's why kids aren't going to school and then they're spreading this this version of their interpretations or their particular messaging for 15 weeks she brought local Islamic scholars to the local radio speaking in local language with a call in program so that people could call in and ask questions about what is long and all sorts of aspects of this after 15 weeks we they had a 40% increase in school enrollment in that area this year we and this it was a 15 week program because by the time we were able to get the money from the donor and give it what what should have been a one year program was ended up being a three to four month program the donor didn't release the money until month six or seven into the into the year and they didn't give no cost extensions and all the rest of it right we did it again this year say she one of the things that they did was they did develop a handbook about that that was how it was a peace peace building and Islam together and they they started working with the Islamist schools and the and the leaders of these community of these schools and and she has now become a source for these Islamic scholars in terms of the nexus between Islam and the teaching of tolerance and so forth and and so they're now using them in the in the in the Islamist schools and doing the radio work and now they and this year the one of the things she said we've reached a point where there's so many people who want to come to school we don't have the buildings right and so and so this is this these are small amounts of money going into the right hands at the right time enabling them to do what they think is important without us dictating from from from from above we have similar pro results from from from work that was done in in Iraq in Pakistan in in Tunisia in Nigeria and and I mean in in Kenya so we're seeing that this model is something that we should be continuing and expanding and enabling so that they can do this and at the same time we can we connect our partners together so that they're actually learning from each other and the resources that they're developing can be translated and used in multiple places and and one of what what our our Kenyan partners said to us was that this even though the program this year was only three or four months again that we funded the work carried on because the locals felt it was theirs it wasn't an international organization coming and putting a label and saying we have a project and then and people looking and participating and then thinking it's gone it was like we were never there it wasn't it had nothing to do with really I mean we you know we it's there so they have a sense of ownership and I think that ownership and sustainability are really the things that we should be focusing on going forward one final point the UN is right now producing UN and World Bank are producing a report on conflict prevention and I have a real problem with the terminology of conflict prevention because if you come from a dictatorship dictatorships are really good at preventing conflict they get rid of all dissent right they are not fragile right because so we should be thinking about what is it that we are for similarly with CVE with PEEP we're countering violent extremism preventing violent these are all negative framings the reason why we're losing this battle and I trust trust me we are and we can talk about it is because we're not really articulating what is it that we are for what is that higher level aspirational thing that we should be fighting for conflict prevention and fragility should be the the floor it should not be the ceiling and somehow they end up being the ceiling and and so we should be thinking what does it mean to have inclusive just peace for people how do you create institutions so that when conflict arises whether it's generation or otherwise you have the mechanisms for people to engage and feel that they're being heard and for changes to take place this I think is the is the is the area we should be going towards thank you thank you so much Beth all right so I have the unenviable position of being the cleanup and but it also offers me a chance to calibrate and condense because I really want to bring you guys into the conversation so I'm just going to do a couple of quick hits here and and hope you can stay with me first of all I just want to ask how many of you are currently in the U.S. government or have worked in the U.S. government and how many of you worked with you alongside or near the U.S. government out there and in in zones of conflict or fragile states okay so my third question is what would you have done in 2011 if your boss had come to you and asked you in the in the very beginning days of the conflict in Syria when it really wasn't a full blown conflict at all what what are the lessons that we have learned from working in all of these places that would help me to take into the deputy's committee meeting that I'm about to go to and and and tell them what we should be doing to actually sorry prevent or conflict and mitigate instability in Syria what would you have said and we're and if you couldn't come up with them where would you go to get those lessons succinctly the truth of the matter is is that the department of fence is pretty good at generating those lessons and sending them up to leadership but on the civilian side great work from mercy core all of you have given us some really rich lessons and experience but we're really not good at actually getting those to the people that need them to be able to make decisions that are informed and that on things that actually work evidence experience so as a follow-on to the fragility study group report which is outside the United States Institute piece decided to undertake just a closer examination of a couple of places all all characterized by state fragility where conflict and instability were really important factors and where we had a chance to prevent things from getting worse as you as you spoke about our assumptions were that working in fragile states that are affected by conflict and instability are really the new normal for all of the all of us that are working out there and that if we don't harvest our lessons we're not going to get to a better better decision-making and so we are really we really focused on looking at the United States government and principally we focused on looking at the 3Ds defense diplomacy and development in 3 places the first was Jordan Jordan as you know is a you know kind of a buffer state encircled by conflict and instability had already had a lot of refugees from Iraq and Palestine living within its borders that have never gone home very resource scarce nation among the most water scarce countries in the world suffers from that relation you know very delicate and fragile relationship between the state and the population and then all of a sudden they're getting not just a trickle but a stampede of refugees coming across the border from Syria USCID was scheduled to get rid of its health program and you know it was on a downward slide and instead what happened was is this in really I don't want to say a nanosecond but very quickly the United States government in Jordan in 2011-2012 pivoted from a normal embassy and turned it into really a crisis embassy to focus on helping communities that were impacted by this influx of refugees again with underlying fragility in education and health in water and sanitation mounting garbage people puncturing water systems because there was no water just trying to and then sabotaging them as a result I mean just voluminous problems that Jordan was not equipped to handle and the principally the USCID and the Department of State and the Department of Defense decided, learned from past environments that they had to lash up in a way that they hadn't before so they weren't working across purposes so they were actually layering their authorities and their funding and their programs to actually help Jordan weather this crisis help the population to weather this crisis and I can say I think we can say comfortably today that something that we did helped them do that Burma Burma was a prior state flirting with North Korea around nuclear weapons great concern to the United States and others and went from being that state to having it in 2015 the freest and fairest elections in its history how did that happen? What we found was this innovative action for action approach where you would give them something in return for them doing something positive this was after we seized a political opening really helped to spur the Burmese along on a path towards more openness to helping to address some of their core problems we focused on support to civil society support to the peace process and interestingly we were able to I keep saying we I'm sorry the three of these were able to take advantage of a special authority in Congress that allowed them to bring armed actors into the peace process a political process that we haven't been able to do in a lot of different environments and they also took advantage of flexible funding transition initiative funding and other funding that allowed people on the ground to respond to things as they were evolving this is definitely not the norm third case Lake Chad region 2011-2012 Boko Ram is on a on a on a trek across the region a murderous trek and seemingly no one can stop them right to 2015-2016 where Boko Ram has been largely contained it's broken up and it's on the run what happened what happened in that interim well it was a tough slog and I'm not saying any of these places are out of the woods by any means but something happened in that period to help to help that effect and so what we found was after struggling with trying to get Nigeria obviously a very fragile state to get Nigeria to do anything about Boko Ram the United States and its allies and others decided okay even though we're not good at it we're going to focus on a regional approach and so they last together the other countries in the Lake Chad region to both do programming across those countries CVE programming to help build resilience to Boko Ram among communities throughout the region and standing up some very purposeful regional platforms to do that again making sure that the U.S. military was embedded in those platforms so that there was no daylight between these actors as we've seen in many other environments and then they also simultaneously worked with those countries and with the French and others to help build this multinational joint to actually go after Boko Ram you know this is I'm not postulating nirvana here but I'm just saying that if you really look under the hood and look at some of these cases you'll find that we are learning that we are adapting we are learning lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and we are actually helping to make situations from getting worse I know the countries weren't on that list but maybe they should be and you know finally just to bring you guys in I just want to tick off five things because we're sending memos up to the leaders of the United States government and the various agencies we will publish three detailed case studies and some lessons memos in a couple of weeks but what we found in quick order is that people matter we have to train our leaders and our personnel to deal with what is now the new normal of dealing in crisis and we're not good at doing that if they haven't seen the situation before or they don't know what another agency is doing or their capabilities are when they get to the ground it's going to be chaos and it's going to be a mess and in all these cases we had those kind of seasoned leaders that had 3D experiences we found that planning state to state planning planning processes that we have hey they're just not good for these type of environments and so you need to have the ability to do crisis planning that takes into account things that are happening on the ground that allows you to just continually evolve your approach the third is that you need that those planning processes then will tell you hey your authorities and your funding cycles that are built for three to five year programming are not good for this situation you need to do something about that like a carve out to allow OTI to bring armed actors into the peace process in Burma like another permission that OTI has recently received to work with the Nigerian military on a dd, Sarmat demobilization and reintegration plan to bring in help the Boko Haram defectors and then you need some flexible funding you need, you cannot get rid of these flexible funding accounts because those are the things that you need for crisis and instability if you're going to be able to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of the situation on the ground you need adaptation of typical embassy structures and processes and we did that all across these cases from standing up a special platform co-located with the embassy in Jordan to relieve them of the burden of dealing cross-border assistance into Syria and helping to help Jordan to deal with the flow of refugees across that border to creating a CVE unit in Akron, Ghana that USAID managed immediately brought in a military planner to embed with them so that there was no confusion between them as they started to march out programs across the region. There are a lot of innovations that are happening. I'm just, oh, and the final one is working regionally in a bilateral system and we are not built for attacking regional problems yet state fragility isn't just within the state it's a result of many factors in a region and we simply have to get better at addressing regional and transnational issues and we found in Lake Chad that we actually are learning to do that. It's not easy, but we're learning. So I'm just gonna leave you with that.  I know it's a little bit different from what everybody else talked about here but hopefully I think we're learning and we're adapting and we're getting a little bit better. Thanks, thank you so much to all four of our panelists and I'm cognizant of the time and I'm sure that there are a lot of great questions. So what I would like to ask is maybe we'll take two or three questions just so a few more people have a chance. If you can keep your question brief and also let us know who you are, where you're from and if your question is directed to one panelist please, please let us know when you ask the question. So, and there's a microphone moving around so just raise your hand. My name is Manshid Kovari. I teach at Charnady Washington University and I was wondering what will be the effect of environmental refugees that you see in the region and the contribution they have in stability to the region. Thank you. Maybe we'll take two questions or three just so we can make the best use of time. Nope, nobody else has a question. Okay, environmental refugees, anybody wanna take that? Environmental refugees? Sure. Environmental, climate change refugees? Climate change refugees. Is that, you were asking, climate change refugees? I'm happy to quickly, I mean, so Mercy Corps director for research and learning, John Kurtz, he just spoke at a panel last week at the New America Foundation and that is webcast but it was about climate change related conflict and displacement and spoke basically in brief about the filling time. But I think one of, in the framework of fragility I think one of the things that we're emphasizing is that while climate change is breeding refugees and is likely to create conflict, there are some other frameworks that matter for understanding when climate change will create conflict, which mainly anchor to fragility. So the inability of the state to manage is really the number one indicator. So some states are demonstrating that they can prevent conflict even when they're dealing with massive climate change. But I think one of the biggest issues pertinent to this panel that we're seeing with refugees is around how displaced people are integrated into societies and the fact that displacement, there was this idea that it used to be one year, three year, six years. The average displacement timeline is around 26 years now, according to HCR. So you have the didob scenario is no longer an extraordinary situation. That is what's going to likely be the most consistent case for displaced people in the world today. And so how do you make sure that you're facilitating, we're having a lot of issues around where we do displacement programs around issues of identity. So if minority groups are the most likely to be displaced because of environmental related conflict, such as into lower Somalia and the tribes are different or that these are minority groups that aren't necessarily welcome into the social fabric. How do you provide support to those refugees in a way that doesn't exacerbate grievances between displaced and the host communities who are receiving them? That's the really big challenge. And so that's where I think we're seeing the biggest risk to refugees exacerbating conflict in the areas where they settle. So that's a big challenge right now. So the other thing I just wanted to add to that was in Jordan because of the situation where refugees actually are not returning home anytime soon, decade or more. They're staying in the countries that they flee to. For the first time, the United States government decided to count refugees and the development beneficiaries together. Typically, refugees are treated separately. And so refugee assistance goes to the refugees as if they're not existing for most of their lives potentially in a particular place. And that was really, really important because it helped recognize that refugees are making a contribution to that community and to help them instead of being separate and apart because they are living in communities to actually receive assistance that would let them just be a regular participant in that community. I would just add that so many of the environmental refugees talk about lack of access to inputs to credit, et cetera. And then when they move into a new community, then there is the tension between the indigenous people and these new refugees. So we need to be focusing on ways to work with both populations. And so that and encourage welcoming refugees because they can bring different skill sets just in terms of managing crops. And that's certainly been the case in some of the places in northern Mali. Hello. Hi, my name is Luen. I am with the Voice of America, VOA. My question is for Beth Cole. You mentioned about helping peace process in Burma. I am wondering what are the lessons that you learned from helping the peace process in Burma, like you said, bringing EEO together? Yeah, I mean specifically, we were looking at innovations that showed that we were learning from other past experiences where you didn't have an inclusive peace process and where you left armed actors out. And so you were never going to be able to stabilize or bring peace to that place. And the notable thing that we found was that the US government realized that peace process wasn't going to work if we didn't include the armed actors. And typically, you're not allowed to work with armed actors in any one of these environments. You were prohibited from Congress, from legislation and authorities from doing that. And so in this case, there was a recognition that, which is a recognition from having learned the hard way, that we needed to do that in order to help facilitate the peace process. So this was just the beginning. Yeah, I just want to add to that. I've just come back from the Philippines. And I was in Mindanao. And we were meeting with the Banks for More Development community and so forth. And I don't know whether you're following what's happening, but there's been a terrorist attack in Marawi City. And there's been martial law and so forth. And there was a real concern about whether this peace process that has been working for so much time and many years and so forth working on it, whether this was also going to be a casualty of what's happening right now. And what was interesting, and for somebody who's been advocating inclusivity for many, many years, it was really great to see that one of the side effects, which we've always understood, is that if you have an inclusive process with multiple actors involved, different sectors, whether it's your civil society, the women, the security. First of all, the relationships are there, so that when there is crisis, they can talk together on a human level. It's not just institutional, but it's they actually know each other. And secondly, because the process has been going on for so long, and I think with Burma, the time makes a difference. People have made a commitment. So they're not willing to let it go so fast, right? And I think this is something that we always fail to recognize here. We want to shove people in a room and get a peace deal in two weeks or three weeks or two days or six months or something. It doesn't work. Actually, the time factor makes a difference. And that inclusivity of sensing, we've all come along this way. We're all knee deep in this. And what does it mean to go back? It is part of the notion of enabling the process to become more resilient. And I think that's an important lesson to bear in mind. Thank you. Unfortunately, we are out of time. It is 11 o'clock, but I did want to extend a big thank you to all four of our panelists. Thank you very much for your contributions. And also, thank you to USIP for hosting this event. And on your way out, I believe there are publications that go into a little bit of what we talked about up here. So thank you very much.