that already existed to try and link it up to the national structure that we had built in Afghanistan it was not successful everywhere that needs to be recognized but there were cases of success and it was not you know you're seen as an occupier when you act against the interests of the local community and you're seen as a facilitator or an enabler when you're working with the communities and so this is something right if we are only working with the Afghan government which a community rejects often because it is the you know persistent marginalization or codifying a power structure that will disenfranchise the community we're going to be seen as occupiers if we are willing to break a fully state based framework and work with sub-state actors and work to re-empower the communities and not insist that a host nation government has a full authority from capital to border which is the model that we tend to support but actually doesn't work then I think that we can start shifting the narrative away because the Taliban themselves can be seen as occupiers and what they're pushing and so it's just changing the approach in order to really shift the narrative and the perspective on the US of shifting us from the military based approach that we now have inside of Afghanistan CT and looking back at how to fix the issue great thank you so we have two more minutes I'm going to ask one last question from an anonymous because it's a great summary question it's a good Denise Natali midnight phone call to all of you so you say going local grand strategy etc etc how do we address we talked about bad partners but how do we proceed if our state partner is not a good partner how do we even proceed to go local in that case very briefly down this line Linda very briefly I'll point I'll remind everyone in the audience because you probably have thought about this but not in a while of the case of the Lord's resistance army we forgot about that particular extremist group but that was a classic case where the state was a terrible partner but we didn't see it for a long time and we enriched them to the point where it was very convenient for them to just never stop the Lord's resistance army so that's a classic case of how not to do it how to do it is to partner with I've not suggesting in any of the remarks I've made earlier to ignore our state partners and our policy international law rules actually kind of dictate that we need to engage with state governments so I'm not suggesting we shouldn't but we need to get smarter about how we engage them and what we tell them we're doing and I think that there are lots of ways to work with local communities in ways that will very much prevent or build resilience and prevent vulnerability to extremist groups and start to build I think we need to play the long game I think we need to build independent judicial and security structures and those are the things we can say we want to do without always making it about violent extremism and kinetic structure thank you so we got to go to lunch so very quickly Kuda and Katie very quickly I would say mapping the local context who are the political stakeholders and being very clear when we're working on a particular context to know that other than just the state but the political stakeholders second to evaluate and evaluate and evaluate and the third when you're evaluating going back and listening to the communities and seeing whether they benefited from the programs that we have funded thank you Katie my short answer is really support we just heard but also we shouldn't partner with bad partners I mean that's the short of it and you know this goes to the question of there are actually acceptable partners that you can think of that might so having you know a containment policy in terms of our partnerships might be the way to go when a state is the wrong partner to have and then we revert to what I think is the band-aid approach which is counter-terrorism as you know from an American interest perspective that is the last step of defense great so audience members thank you for your help I'm going to hire all of you as producers when I start the David Young show and thanks join me in thanking our panelists great thank you so much to the panel as they exit the stage I figured I'd just give a couple of instructions for people for lunch so lunch will be served in the great hall you can actually exit through either one of the various doors and we look forward to welcoming everybody back here for our afternoon session thanks welcome back everybody I think we're still going to be trickling in but figured we'll try and get started welcome back for the afternoon hope everyone enjoyed lunch I hope everyone got their chip choice of choice and we are really excited to continue what I think has been a really interesting conversation from multiple different angles and we hope to replicate and continue that throughout the afternoon so we're going to open it up with three more Ted style talks as with before I'm going to introduce all three of our speakers up front and then they're going to speak in succession so we're going to start with Nafis Hamid who is a research fellow at artist international an associate fellow at the international center for counterterrorism in the Hague a bone art trust PhD candidate in the security and crime science department at the University of college London and a member of the Resolved Network Advisory Council today Nafis will present on the role of neuroscience encountering violent extremism a subject matter focus of his recent research after Nafis we will have Teyuta Abdi Matai who is a consultant on research and security policy and served as a policy advisor to the fourth president of Kosovo her research explores trends in radicalization and violent extremism in the western Balkans as well as extremist propaganda reintegration programs for returning foreign terrorist fighters and monitoring and evaluation for the P and CVE field her work in the Balkans illustrated the need for more exploration on the role of trauma and violent extremism research and that's what she'll discuss with us today and then our third Ted style talk is actually a trio Ilana Lancaster, Munir Hamisi and Felix Bivins Dr. Ilana Lancaster Dr. Felix Bivins and Munir Hamisi will each present on participatory action research Ilana is a senior program officer here at the U.S. Institute of Peace and leads our work on conflict management training for peacekeepers capacity development for educational institutions and of course on participatory action research Felix is the co-founder and co-director of the Regenerative School and Education and Research Institute rooted in international development regenerative systems participatory action research and peace building Munir is a peace and security expert and currently heads the de-radicalization CVE unit in the office of his Excellency Governor Hassan Ali Joho in the Mombasa County Government in Kenya this two year collaborative project work involved marginalized youth in Kenya and participatory action research so we'll have all three speakers start and I'm pleased to introduce Nafis to begin Thank you everyone so when we think about violent extremist movements one of the things we we worry about with them is their ability to mass persuade their ability to create these slick videos and these great online messaging campaigns that then spread out on people's cell phones into their social media that they watch on YouTube and various devices that change the hearts and minds of people but that might be a very convenient narrative that may be leading us astray in a lot of our strategic communications tactics so a colleague of mine Hugo Mercier a social psychologist has been studying the role of mass persuasion across a variety of context and what he basically finds is it hardly ever works regardless of the sector religious socialization doesn't seem to work very well when it's televangelist or people on the radio when it's negative ads on political campaigns or robocalls or online commercials doesn't seem to have a big effect on voter attitudes this is the one that surprised me even commercial advertising doesn't seem to actually be very effective it works on occasions here and there when people don't have a lot of experience with the product but otherwise it's quite idiosyncratic and there's no real systemic element when it's working when it's not working and even when we think of the Nazis this powerful machine with their great propaganda that changed the Germans minds well it turns out their propaganda was even not as effective as we generally think it was it had some effect but really what the research shows is actually their propaganda increased anti-semitism in areas of Germany that historically had high anti-semitism it actually backfired in areas where there was historically low levels of anti-semitism and a lot of their propaganda just failed it just didn't work for example they tried and failed to make the German people pro-Euthanasia they tried and failed to get German industrial workers to be anti-communist they even tried and failed at getting the German people to like the Nazis they liked Hitler as a leader but they didn't actually like the Nazi political party and their propaganda wasn't able to have much of an effect so what does matter it's not that mass persuasion or commercials or advertising has no effect but you need to see the effect you need to see it within the ecology of communication it has its biggest impact when it becomes part of the day-to-day conversations of people person-to-person communication social interaction actually causes people to change their religion to buy a product they wouldn't otherwise buy to change their their stances on various political issues and even to get pulled into extremist movements our own research that we've been doing on our database of foreign fighters who joined Al Qaeda we find that 75% were recruited by a friend 20% by a family member and 5% by someone that they didn't have a pre-established relationship with but it was still person-to-person and yes they were able to talk to people and had online communication and sometimes shared videos but the videos by themselves didn't have an effect until they became part of the actual conversation with people who had strong trustworthy and authoritative relationships and what we find is that when people fall into these conversations and they start engaging with each other and they get into these echo chambers something starts happening with their values for some of them, for some of their values their values start to turn into sacred values now despite the label sacred it actually doesn't have to be religious at all actually a lot of these values can be liberal democratic values for some people freedom of speech is a sacred value civil liberty is a sacred value is any value that you would consider inviolable and non-negotiable and our team has been studying the role of sacred values and conflicts around the world from nation states like Israel and Palestine to non-state groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and even the PKK and generally what we find is that the more sacred values enter into a conflict the more intractable that conflict becomes and the higher the propensity towards violence but in order for us to really be able to say something about CVE to counter or prevent these things we knew that we had to get deeper than just looking at the role of sacred values in a conflict but looking at the role of sacred values within a person so I spent about three years in Barcelona doing about 800 surveys with a team of research assistants and a variety of interviews and was able to find some radicalized populations one of those populations about 30 guys who were avowed supporters of La Shkari Taiba and Al-Qaeda associate these people were supporters of armed jihad they were supporters of armed jihad against the west they even said that they would be willing to join a jihadist group or carry out an active jihad right in the west themselves and so once I got them and I knew what their sacred and non-sacred values where I did the next best thing that we could possibly think of doing to understand what role sacred values play internally we put them in a brain scanner and we scanned their brains on the first ever neuroimaging studies the first ever brain scan the first ever neuroscience studies actually done on radicalization and what we found was that when they were processing their sacred values a part of the brain called a DLPFC you can see it highlighted there in green this is a part of the brain that is associated with deliberative reasoning it's when you self-reflect it's when you engage in deliberative rational thought and reasoning this part of the brain deactivates when they're thinking about their sacred values it essentially goes offline now when they're thinking about their non-sacred values you have that part of the brain active and you have another part of the brain active the ventromedial prefrontal cortex the VMPFC there in red now for most of us in all of our decisions these two parts of the brain work in tandem the subjective value part and the deliberative reasoning part so most of you out there when you were having lunch you probably had a moment of thinking do I really want to crack open this bag of chips do I really want to eat this brownie I want to but that's going to be a lot of calories that might be unhealthy I just worked out this morning maybe I worked out last week and it'll undo all the benefits of that well that was your DLPFC and your VMPFC working together most of our decisions involved both of those areas and sure enough with our radicalized population when they had low willingness to fight and die for their values both of those areas were working in tandem however when they had high willingness to fight and die for their values which were mostly their sacred values and that's where we came from the DLPFC deactivates and there's no longer a connection between these two areas of the brain basically decision making is no longer being mediated by deliberative reasoning regions of the brain so our question became how do we reconnect these areas and reactivate deliberative reasoning regions all of our research on sacred value showed that it's incredibly hard to change a sacred value to desacralize a value it happens people do deraticalize values but it's idiosyncratic we have tried a variety of experiments tried to systematically do this and we have not been able to do it so we knew that we can't go after the values that usually leads to a backfire effect people become reticent, they become stubborn they sometimes increase their propensity towards violence when they feel like someone is challenging their values so we knew we had to come at it from a different tactic so we used something called manipulation of social consensus basically we made them think that one of them was just other Pakistanis living in Barcelona that their peer group disagreed with them about their willingness to fight and die for these values for half their values and half the values we used as a control where they agreed with them and so when the participants were looking at this disagreement they were willing to martyr themselves their in-group was not willing to martyr themselves they were upset, they were outraged they even got out of the scanner and we did a post-experiment survey with them they said that they were bothered by that and they said yes, they conformed they lowered their willingness to fight and die to actually conform to their peer groups and when they were conforming when they were actually moving towards the general consensus their perception of what the social norm is about violence the DLPFC, the part of the brain that was deactive came right back online and their willingness to fight and die as it lowered those two parts of the brain, the VMPFC and the DLPFC started working in tandem again they reconnected, deliberative reasoning came back online and it reconnected with subjective value now this has a few strategic communications implications on the one hand, again going back to mass persuasion if you don't know people's sacred values and you're just targeting messages out there and one size fits all if you're hitting their sacred values you're basically targeting your message towards a part of the brain that isn't even online at that moment you're not going to have an impact it's going to be deactivated and it certainly doesn't have any access to the subjective value part of the brain so you need to know what people's sacred values are but another problem is that people's sacred values vary from person to person even within just our 30 participants we had in this neuroimaging study they had different sets of sacred values between them so again, how is a one size fits all mass persuasion attempt actually going to have an impact when you don't really know which values your messaging might be able to have an impact on it goes back to that importance of person to person interaction and leveraging the social norms you don't have to change the beliefs you just change their perception of the norms you change their perception of what they think their peer group thinks is acceptable levels of violence, if anything, at all and this fits in quite well with a lot of post-conflict reconciliation research that's been done Elizabeth Pollock, another social psychologist did work on post-conflict reconciliation in Rwanda and what she found was she dropped radios into different parts of Rwanda different villages and for half the villages they had a reconciliation theme soap opera they were listening to and for the other half it was a health program when she came back a year later she found basically the same thing that we've been finding in all of our research people's beliefs didn't change the actual strategic communications didn't actually work at changing anyone's beliefs or values but what it did do is it changed their perception of the social norms they now believed that other in-group members believed that reconciliation was important even though they personally did not and that belief that change in perception of social norms led to a change in actual behavior including a 100% increase in cooperative behavior in the trial populations so again you don't actually need to change people's beliefs you just need to change what they think their peers think about violence or certain actions and what action pathways can be taken in order to change behavior so what does that mean? it means that we should be trying to amplify the voices that believe that are anti-violence basically that don't actually believe in these violent actions many people who join these groups come from communities where there are prevailing the prevailing norms are basically non-violent they don't support many of these groups but those voices aren't being heard those voices aren't being deafening those voices are not being amplified or if they are if the messaging is coming out it's coming out through some government organization or some unknown entity that's throwing out this mass persuasion as opposed to local voices having their voices amplified so again as the speakers before me were talking about you got to go local you got to go down into the friendship circles you got to go down to the community level if you want to change people's perception of social norms it's who they think is their in-groups norms that they ultimately care about and if you can change the norms you can change behavior you can increase cooperation you can increase reconciliation you can decrease propensity to violence you can literally change the circuitry of people's brains thank you maybe get some assistance okay good afternoon everyone my name is Teuta Avdemetay and I'm a researcher and policy advisor based in Kosovo I've been researching violent extremism in the Wester Balkans for over four years alongside with extremist propaganda as well as reintegration programs before I go on with my presentation I would like to take a minute to just for us to think you know when you think about drivers of violent extremism what are some of the main three factors that come to mind so usually whenever I ask this question to an audience usually the main response that I get include poor economic conditions so a search for a sense of belonging or a desire to belong to a greater cause as well as marginalization and more often than not what is missing may be trauma so as my presentation gives it away today I'm going to talk about trauma and violent extremism and I'm going to share some of my insights drawing on my experience interviewing family members of foreign fighters as well as women returnees in Kosovo from the foreign conflict zones in Syria and Iraq we've seen that in the recent years the field of violent extremism studies has been growing however we also notice that non-ideological factors such as trauma have received relatively less attention when we try to explain these kinds of phenomena so at the outset I think we should ask the question what is trauma how well do we understand it and how well are we able to identify it so in general terms trauma is defined as an emotionally scarring experience leaving someone with a deep sense of helplessness but more specifically as the American Psychiatric Association defines it trauma refers to as an exposure to actual or threatened death serious injury or sexual violence whether directly experiencing it witnessing it in person as it occurs to someone else hearing that it has happened to a close family member that you know or a friend or just hearing about it like all those details repeatedly as is the case of first responders and when we look at these elements that constitute trauma we also know that one of the context in which we find trauma to be quite prevalent and present at a great scale is during conflicts and during wars and this brings me to Kosovo so the country where I'm from 20 years ago experienced a terrible conflict so the conflict left around 13,000 people killed an estimated number of 20,000 women and men who were raped half the country's population or about 1 million people fleeing as refugees and around 1600 people still missing according to the World Health Organization so witnessing violence and cruelty is often associated with a range of psychological and behavioral problems including anxiety, depression, suicidal behavior as well as PTSD and recently there have been studies in Kosovo that show that even several years after the war ended rates of PTSD are still quite high among the civilian population who was exposed to trauma among the former refugees as well as the war veterans and this brings us to the next question so why is this issue and why should we consider this when we talk about PVE and CVE research we know now that violent extremism is a very complex process it's non-linear it's hard to predict and it's manifested through a broad spectrum however in order for us to understand the various factors that influence it it's important to broaden the range of these factors and again drawing in my experience conducted these interviews with these groups of individuals I believe that in the case of Kosovo especially trauma may be one of those understood factors that could help us understand the radicalization process of foreign fighters so just to put things into perspective from Kosovo there are around 255 foreign fighters who travel from Kosovo to Syria and most of them went through Turkey they took a very lengthy road and through various means of transport although the map is not supposed to illustrate the exact routes it's meant to illustrate the distance between these two countries and so again going back to why should we consider trauma when we think of PVE and CVE research I did not think of trauma as one of those more relevant factors going into this research however the more the interviews kept going on I noticed that trauma was becoming a recurring theme so vivid recollections of the war memories of the war started to become a pattern for instance in one case of a foreign fighter a quite prominent one I learned that while he was just a child he was exposed to extreme violence he witnessed as his sibling was heavily beaten as well as his mother was being tortured in another case in the case of one of the first ever foreign fighters from Kosovo just looking at one of the videos that he published in 2010 he talks about Islam under threat the narrative that we see being propagated many times later on but what's interesting to see is that during his video during his remarks he talks about he makes many references to the war he makes constant comparisons between the war in Kosovo and the conflict in Syria and he talks about brothers being tortured and brothers being raped and if you look at the background of this specific foreign fighter you'll notice that the place that he comes from has been one of those regions that was most affected by conflict and rape as a tool of war was quite widespread so in spite of these cases in spite of us understanding these bits and pieces from different cases there has been no serious effort until now to fully explore this link so this leaves us with a knowledge gap and there is no study that makes this evaluation whether there is a link between trauma and radicalization in Kosovo I say Kosovo but this can be also applicable in other similar contexts as well as beyond and this again leaves us with many questions so first of all does trauma play a role in the radicalization process if so to what extent and I think this is the overarching question just to help us think through this issue then how do foreign fighters differ from the general population in the way they internalize or externalize trauma so again if the general population or have the conscious population was in one way or another what makes this individual so different some studies on PTSD on those who try to determine PTSD rate seem to suggest that having strong social support system may be one of those factors but again this was not done in relation to foreign fighters this was done just in general the next question is how does previous were related trauma influence their susceptibility to extremist propaganda so how do these individual react when they hear these narratives of the liberator and their pressure how does this resonate with them does it resonate with them differently how is the foreign fighter with war related trauma different from a foreign fighter who has not experienced conflict previously so what is the difference between a foreign fighter from the UK and a foreign fighter from Kosovo in this case and even just as important how do we account for war related trauma in relation to other traumatic events so if we take war related trauma as a proxy in a way because we know that if you experience conflict you are likely to be exposed to trauma but we cannot exclude other traumatic events that may influence another throughout their lifetime so this is also something that we need to consider but in order for us to think through this question I do believe that it is important to have more research to look more in depth into these questions to explore the link between trauma and radicalization and especially in post conflict countries as well so if we determine or if trauma is indeed one of those factors that is relevant then it is going to have important implications especially for disengagement and reintegration programs so as countries are becoming more proactive in bringing back their citizens from the foreign conflict zones in Syria and Iraq I think it is important for us to explore this more in depth so not only previous war related trauma but even with these new population for example children who are growing up in Syria and Iraq so how does trauma factor into this and I think we should along with this other range of factors we should be paying greater attention to this we should focus on this and take this seriously and I believe that if we as researchers or as policy makers don't focus on this so the question become are we going to be able to break the cycle thank you good afternoon I am Alana Lancaster and I am a senior program officer in the center for applied conflict transformation and here at USIP and I would like to begin by showing you a video in just one moment thank you Kenya has a youth bulge the community kind of see youth as a challenge they find themselves marginalized we used opening learning circles we also used world cafes where they would write what they would feel is their response and we also used theaters of oppressed this process has helped the youth researchers to actually learn about the importance of democracy and active citizenship collectively the process of participatory action research is in itself building peace having young people participate in research work this is what I always wanted to see thank you what happens when your research project comes to an end you've collected your data spent countless hours analyzing four hours writing up your research you've targeted the appropriate journals or perhaps you've had some of those testy conversations with your publications team you submit your manuscript and with relief you turn your attention to everything that you have put on hold and you wait patiently or maybe not so patiently for a response from the editor no news is good news right the editorial team liked it and good enough to go out for peer review accepted with revisions revise and resubmit revisions are minor so you revise and resubmit congratulations published your colleagues think it's really good research strong research and this work will greatly contribute to the field of knowledge but what happens next not for you but for the communities where you conducted your research what are the impacts on the lives of the people with whom you worked we stand here today with an offering and the offering is par participatory action research the three of us Munira skip Felix and I believe that par has a lot to offer you researchers practitioners policymakers and at the same time we argue that par has even more to offer the communities who are most directly affected by extremism and who safety and well-being are why we do the work I'm a relative new kid on the block I came to this work to this VE PVE space in July 2015 when I joined the institute one of my first tasks was to design and deliver the third of three workshops on P CVE VE to a group of education stakeholders from Africa and in Middle East and I was quite confident in my ability to design deliver and engaging one week workshop for educators as I come from an education background but I was less than confident in my ability to design a solid training engagement on CVE but like any good academic refugee transitioning back into the practitioner space I turned to the literature and what I found was this I think you know this all very well violent extremism is highly locally contextualized small-scale initiatives are better than national and large-scale programs like violence and there's limited research on the relationship between education and CVE what I couldn't find at all was community-led research in this space research in which the communities themselves identify the area of inquiry determine the research design and analyze the data collected by the end of 2015 Skip and I had joined forces and in January 2016 successfully facilitated the training in which education stakeholders from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Jordan came together and explored the ways in which participatory approaches can be used with vulnerable youths youth in communities that's my Kenyan English youths and communities in addressing the root causes of radicalization it was successful and by late 2016 we had secured a small amount of funding to pilot a participatory action research project with USIP generation change fellows the project kicked off in 2017 with the aim of elevating and amplifying the work of youth peace builders youth need to be seen as active producers of knowledge rather than passive recipients of knowledge generated by others knowledge generated by communities must be recognized and understood as legitimate that was the aim of this pilot project and it was actually at 7 August 7 Memorial Park in Nairobi where I met Munira Hi everyone I was born bred and educated in Mombasa I have worked as a community volunteer a social worker and a peace builder I'm the co-founder of Lonamak an acronym that stands for 3 Counties found in Kenya that is Loitoktok, Nanyuki and Machakos Lonamak is a community based organization in the heart of Mombasa founded by a group of volunteers in 2015 which core operations are the achievement of UN resolution in 2020 creation of self spaces for women affected through VE and the empowerment of local communities my journey as a peace builder was at its peak during the 2014 Masjid Mosa attacks in Mombasa County the mosque was being used as an indoctrination cell unfortunately by the lead Imam Abudwogo the clashes between the young people and the police raiding the masjid led to tensions across the county and the country respectively after that we saw an influx from civil society organizations international organizations and which had a lot of focus around research on the root causes of violent extremism the research was basically unfortunately extractive it had the traditional methodology of specifically targeting people like myself who had the courage to speak about radicalization in Mombasa when no one had the courage later learned wanted to be associated with terror related aspects the environment was tense when disappearances and killings of prominent sheikhs and imams took place and Mombasa was a hotbed of terrorism and cooperation amongst community leaders for peacekeeping and radicalization was minimal however in 2015 we formed a community based organization called LONAMAC which created peace and cohesion in a non-coercive manner as a part of USIP's participatory action research pilot program LONAMAC conducted research in 3 sub counties within Mombasa so these 3 sub counties are actually the hotpots for not only radicalization but for also organized crime and when I say organized crime I'm talking about the gang kind of culture PAR is a very participatory research approach that centrally places the community as the drivers of change communities have been in the past been used as data providers you know enumerators and validators in traditional research approaches however PAR provides the community with knowledge and power to shape and change their communities in all their different local ways all this was evident during the workshop in which every member of the community was represented so this workshop basically had members from the county government civil society faith based organization, youth led organizations, NGOs the workshop's main objective was to create a statistical platform for community members to share out their challenges and problems as well the output of the second workshop which is I think this is where the magic happened which is the research design workshop was creatively and smartly forming the research question so basically in your traditional ways of research you usually have a research question at the back of your head right but with PAR what comes out of such kind of an interactive conversation is what actually forms the research question so the research question is a contribution of everyone in the room and necessarily what you think as the researcher I know this is very radical since the musted moosa attacks youth in mombasa have had a disconnect to the police however the PAR process has helped to bridge this gap during the data collection phase researchers who are local youth who have had a range of basic primary secondary and some who have gone to college engaged senior government leaders as active citizens PAR has transformed our community-based organizations in the sense that bigger NGOs now recognize the work we do at the grassroots level as youth-led organizations like Clonomac and my fellow PAR facilitator who could not make it his name is Sungora who runs the manyata youth entertainment organization and right now we see it as members of the CV engagement forum which is a macro entity body responsible for coordinating PV programming at the county level I'd like to welcome Skip there you go Thank you Manera I'm Felix or better known around here at the institute as Skip but I did show up today so so why is this important what does this kind of process mean for research and what does it mean specifically for all of you as researchers into CBE well let's start from a purely utilitarian perspective PAR helps us as outside researchers have a better set of more grounded data our partners in the community have deeper relationships and more clear understandings of the dynamics in the community they can steer us in new directions that we may be blind to cognitively as researchers or often like the man who's dropped his keys at night under a lamp post did you drop your keys under the lamp post sir no no I didn't drop them there but that's where the light is we often build these these cognitive lamp posts out of our own preconceived ideas we're only looking for answers where we already expect they're going to find them working with community researchers pushes us you as the researcher have to give up some of your power and let the local researchers go in directions that are clear to them this change in power relations is at the heart and core of PAR work PAR is very different it doesn't sit within a positivist paradigm of knowledge creation PAR is a constructivist approach to building knowledge in CBE we aren't going to find one universal answer to this issue what works is going to be contextual and impacted by local factors and local actors those nuances can be more readily brought to light through dynamic engagement with the community where the local co-researchers find solutions that make sense within their specific milieu because power is core to PAR the process of conducting participatory research helps the co-researchers become more aware of how power works in their lives both positively and negatively they find language to talk about the structural power issues that they know surround them but they may have difficulty articulating through PAR they also understand how better to enhance their own power to act collectively and to harness the power research as a practical tool for change just don't take it on the airplane because we as professional researchers often limit the role of local partners only to data collection the fullness of the research process remains unclear to these partners design as Manera has discussed analysis, writing reports and using the findings to influence change these seem like skills that only research superheroes with advanced degrees can accomplish through PAR however the process and use of research are demystified the co-researchers in the community understand better how research happens from start to finish and how it can be leveraged to create change and meaningful impact where they are in this way PAR opens up possibility for change happening at multiple levels simultaneously we as the outside researchers use our traditional inputs out traditional outputs to leverage for policy change or building theory within our professional spaces the co-researchers on the ground use their findings to work for change simultaneously at the grassroots moreover they now have the tools to carry out their own work, their own research they embed these skills within local organizations and governmental bodies they train up others to use these same tools we have seen this with our team in Kenya the organization that Manera founded and discussed, Lanamak has embedded this tool in their community work the same has happened for her partner and co-facilitator in this work Nicolas Sangora, who Manera mentioned his organization now uses participatory research methods as the central mechanism for how the organization engages with community and conducts learning moreover the youth researchers who are part of this overall process are weaving these tools into their own work outside of these organizations whether that be as community mediators as people who are working directly in the area as a CVE or even as coaches building more collaborative sports teams this is the great thing about PAR everyone can utilize these tools in the spaces and communities where they are in this way PAR is valuable because it creates the opportunity for ongoing impact and change through capacity that is built in the local group to support ongoing work and research independent of the original process that builds the capacity of co-researchers in the community and provides practical tools for them to continue using research as a force for change long after the outright outside research has wrapped up so to emphasize this point in particular keep in mind that our project with USIP in Mumbasa ended about 18 months ago the reports have been written everything has been published our pilot project has ended and the story of PAR in Mumbasa County isn't yet finished as illustrated by Dr. Ilana in SCIP PAR is what we find useful as PVE practitioners at the grassroot level and I now stand in front of you as the county director for CVE at the governor's office in Mumbasa County and to be honest we have incorporated PAR into our policy in how we program and the way we conduct research through PAR we conduct research on how as a county government we are able to reintegrate returnees back to their communities and how do we formulate a reintegration framework so if you look at the county government mandates one of our mandates is the social services so right now we are conducting a research on how do we link our social workers into learning how to reintegrate returnees back to the community but also not forgetting that reintegration in our county currently is the work of the state government so we are looking at how do we connect the nexus between what the national government is doing what the county government is doing in able to reintegrate returnees back to the community as a community based organization LONAMAC is integrating PAR as a research methodology into finding out the roles and impacts of women as returnees and foreign fighters in the country with the recent dosage Nairobi attack security analysis distinguish that women are no longer VE victims but perpetrators as well participatory action research is a bottom-up approach that helps the government learn from the community it is what VPV practitioners and researchers have been looking for before I joined the county government I co-founded LONAMAC and it is because of PAR that now we are able to connect or rather get a feeling of you know you've worked for the community before and now you're in government so for me my work is much easier because of the PAR process and we have created one of the best strategies in the world that's the Mombasa County action plan for PVE that's a multi-agency approach in the fight against extremism our governor who is also the chairperson of the steering committee working group under the Strong Cities Network recently commissioned research that uses PAR outside the CV spaces in a different sector altogether which is economics so I think we stand here offering you PAR as a useful approach widening the field of research and extremism PAR generates actionable knowledge PAR deepens engagement with community provides community with powerful tools to address extremism at grassroots level provides locally informed solutions and expands our network of allies long after our time on the ground comes to an end if you're interested in learning more about our work in Kenya with PAR we have publications outside so thank you very much for your time and attention thank you so much to everyone who spoke in this last session we are going to break quickly for our last coffee break following the coffee break we are going to have two back to back panels so we hope that everybody can enjoy a little bit more free time coffee over the next 30 minutes and then we will see you back here in this room for our rest of our afternoon it's coming up probably till the end of the year early next year so it's like taking notes probably on that how to deliver and keep people okay so the presentation of parts of the brain with it I've not seen that before how do you fix the ribs in there by in London okay we need to I've never met him before well you know I was talking about that I've done this I'm sure it really impacts how far you can get I've done it I think it shows you wife there how many of you have their own role here and their own actress how many people say what you're right there's all kinds of yeah I imagine yeah right yeah I've been fighting that since the police last night I'm not bouncing back actually my last trip to the US when I got back to London it just took so much longer to adjust yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah good afternoon everyone I think we're about to start the final stretch of today's events my name is Georgia Homer I advise on counter-terrorism and CVE policy at the organization for security and cooperation in Europe I'm based at the secretariat in Vienna but I'm also formerly the director at USIP so I am Leanne Erberg's predecessor and I have to say how wonderful it is to be back here back in this building, back in this community this is a place that you never really leave and it's a place that never really leaves you so it's very special for me to be back here in Washington and very special to be back here at the Institute of Peace we have a very wonderful panel lined up this afternoon on the issue of disengagement from violent groups and I can tell you from my perch at the OSCE that this is a topic that has singularly seized the international community mostly in the context of dealing with returning foreign fighters and their families I think we're going to talk about it a little bit more broadly we have some brilliant researchers here with us today in the context of the conflict in Iraq and Syria but we'd like to talk more broadly about some of their trends and research that have to do with disengagement from violence in violent groups as many of you know some of the issues that are being faced with dealing with the returnees have to do with the very specific needs and concerns surrounding children it has to do with very specific experience of having been exposed to trauma in a conflict zone it has to do with the issues surrounding the capacity of the criminal justice sector to respond to the needs and issues that these returning groups face and it also has to do with the details around what happens in the non-custodial or post-prison environment when individuals need to be reintegrated back into the communities some of these are the communities in which they radicalized in the first place so there's a whole host of issues we hope to touch on in the next hour and we're going to start with some opening remarks from our three panelists but let me start by introducing them to you and tell you a little bit about their backgrounds so to my immediate left there with me here we have Dr. David Mallett Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University he previously served as the Director of Security Policy Studies at George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs and he is the author of Foreign Fighters Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts which was published in 2013 if I'm not correct next to him we have Dr. Shiraz Mayer who is the Director of the International Center on the Study of Radicalization at King's College London he also leads the Center's research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and is also an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and last but not least we have Dr. Lisa Search who is a research fellow for the Toda Peace Institute where she directs the Institute's Social Media and Peace Building Program Lisa many of you know her as a peace builder she is also on the International Review panel of G-SURF and in 2018 she published a book on the ecology of violent extremism which very much integrates a peace building lens into the topic of addressing that form of violence so we're going to start with David here and I'm going to open up the question of asking what are the current trends and research that we're seeing around disengagement from violent groups and how would you characterize what's happening in that space well thank you Georgia I guess this is going to be the panel of slides so we'll navigate those I think a picture is worth a thousand words so I can cut down a lot of words by just showing you a couple of quick graphics green button, other green button okay that's there we go when we look at I'll put this back for one second when we look at the question of FTFs and returnees, often times it's presented as sort of a binary question of are returnees a threat and perhaps can the threat be mitigated by not permitting their return one question that I was interested in with Rachel Hayes and I published a study actually that came out last year that looked at the question of returning FTFs and the question of how long are they a threat and what do we know about what they do and what do we learn and just really quickly looking at a couple of hundred cases we found that the average returnee who does become involved in domestic extremism attack or attempted attack does so within approximately six months of returning less than that there are a few outliers beyond that but when we're going to focus on this is just the grass scatterplot looking at the time can see clusters down at the bottom and they're really between 1980 and 19 at the other end there hasn't been any variation the different conflicts Afghanistan and Syria haven't really mattered in that impact so there's nothing changing in that regard the lag time between returning and some sort of extremist action is for most of them less well under a year so what this basically means is that when we are concerned about security or we're concerned about directing reintegration resources there's this critical window within the first few months that we've gone on rather than perhaps a long-term question of reintegration beyond that and one thing I should note that's relevant to current debates is that prison hasn't been a factor because if somebody is going to engage in a terrorist plot they do so within such a short amount of time that they've not gone to prison so we haven't seen people coming out we haven't seen attacks plots or attacks delayed by prison sentences at this point so I'm going to go back to the first question looking at the question of what happens to those who don't return and we were able to find 54 what we're calling career foreign fighters and it turns out that they are on the average of two and a half conflicts about a third of them a quarter of them were active previously and about a third of them are active when they return we broke them down, we're looking at career progression we sort of broke them down between the executive mid-level and then operational foot soldiers and you know there's a slight those who are in leadership positions have been in slightly more conflicts something like 2.8 versus 2.2 but what we're finding is that in terms of their prior experience it's actually the mid-level operatives who were active in domestic extremism first we tend to focus on the impact of being a foreign fighter on what you do as a domestic extremist afterwards but it looks like there may actually be some experience gained at home it's actually important for what they do in the field whether they're a leader or not doesn't seem to matter much in terms of how active they are when they return if you look at the conflicts this has been the case, a lot of people went to Afghanistan first Bosnia, I mean obviously those were longer ago so that makes sense we're seeing Syria not so much yet as a first time destination there's a place that people have gone afterwards as repeat foreign fighters and then finally just looking at career progression with three being the foot soldiers and the leaders, I think the most important finding for us is that most of the people who come in as foot soldiers don't stay at that level they tend to progress into leadership so by having individuals who don't return home you're actually looking at the possibility of them impacting other conflicts gaining more experience becoming leadership positions later on so within that context I'll just wind it back within that within that context within that context when we look at trends we're finding that people who have been extremists abroad are basically participating at the same rate that they have been in the past, this could change because we have new policies in relation to Syria but recidivism happens at a lower level than it does for domestic terrorists or common criminals and part of the reason for that more work needs to be done on this is that many of them report being very disillusioned we're seeing high incidences of PTSD which were not reported in the past and so these need to be taken into consideration when we're crafting policies to address reintegration I'll just follow up very quickly on that and build on that with a few remarks which is I think if we're looking at the field and where academics who look at this issue from all sides of the perspective are agreed upon really a lot of the mistakes that we've made in the past we have this very high number of detainees right now former ISIS fighters who are held by the Syrian Democratic Forces principally in northeastern Syria and there isn't any kind of really well conceived plan at the moment by a number of countries about what should be done lots of people have posed different ideas and I think what's particularly interesting is that there's a huge disconnect right now between politicians across the world who are quite happy to say we've defeated ISIS we heard that earlier today as well and that was of course the headline statement which does speak to the loss of the territorial dimension of this group but doesn't speak to its other aspects of its identity which is that it remains an insurgency that is active in parts of Syria and Iraq and of course it remains a potent terrorist organization which again retains a capacity and capability to act both regionally but also internationally as well and what's particularly striking now is we are essentially repeating many of the errors that were made in Iraq after 2003 where we gathered lots of really serious guys from al-Qaeda put them together in Kambuka and then did nothing about it and we had individuals who returned more or less immediately to their activities and went on to create ISIS and so there's some really interesting research which shows and has built upon interviews of people who were held in Kambuka who at some point said it was really difficult for us all to get together on the outside but once we were in prison the Americans brought us together essentially we created the spaces in which these individuals were able to socialize building on David's point here is really important there is no off-ramp you are creating avenues for people to say I'm 24, I'm 20 who were in leadership positions precisely because they had fought in other theaters before and a lot of the work we did at ICSR back in London was actually looking at this idea of what's your sort of progression if you are a foreign fighter arriving into theater in 2013-14 for example firstly you are most likely to stick within your linguistic cluster if you are an English speaker from the UK you are hung out with English speakers if you were a French speaker you hung out with French speakers and so on given that a lot of these individuals were arriving with no combat experience they occupied lower level foot soldier front line kind of positions but the ones who broke free of those strictures were individuals who had precisely that kind of prior combat experience they came in knowing what to do they generally had learned the language as well because they were able to speak Arabic and therefore were able to progress and get on through the movement so we're seeing a very clear repeat of this and whilst there's a lot of divergence within the academic community in terms of how we might best tackle this I think everyone's agreed on the fact that what's being done right now is a repetition of the failures of the past and so we're kind of heading I think in this rather slow motion disaster to what we've seen I'm not happy no I'll pass over to my colleague so if you don't mind if you could take us maybe outside of the ISIS context and especially since we're talking about repeating mistakes and talk about maybe where we could learn from other other contexts okay I'll do that but I'm going to start actually in Iraq pre-ISIS and that was in 2006 I want to tell two stories one in Iraq one Afghanistan in 2006 I worked with Iraqi peace building organizations who had a methodology that I think prevented their own young people from joining ISIS later and their methodology was this they would go into a community and it was very much participatory action research where the community would determine its development priorities whether it wanted education water healthcare etc and then the community would really do the hard work of building cross boundary relationships between Sunni Shia between Kurdish and Arab and as the community stitched that together they were taking conflict resolution courses and really starting to manage and lead their own community in a governing way that was inclusive of all the different stakeholders in that community and what they later found is these communities with this governance structure did not have young people joining ISIS so that's the first story the second story is from Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012 I was working in Kabul with a variety of different Afghan peace building organizations and these people had had two decades of work mediating land conflicts water conflicts within tribal regions so they brought a lot of experience to the table and they were very critical of the DDR model that was being used by ISAF at that point which involved some small payments to entice people to leave the Taliban and reintegrate into their communities and what Afghan peace builders were saying and the model that they were working on was and I was part of the training team for teaching all of these leaders how to do mediation about local grievances so as people were leaving the Taliban they were actually being part of a community gathering where there was a trained mediator representatives from the government different tribal groups and they were trying to deal with the local drivers and grievances that were fueling why people were entering the Taliban in the first place because the same Afghan peace building organizations had done extensive research on why fence sitters were joining the Taliban sort of if they were sitting in between government and Taliban why were they joining the Taliban and the main theories of change by the international donors at that point was extremist religion and unemployment so you saw most of the money being channeled to counter narratives religious education and employment generation but what they found is those were not the main drivers of people joining the Taliban the main drivers were very local grievances having to do with corruption and governance often having a tribal ethnic dimension because many of us know about the government Taliban conflict but underneath that there is a whole history of ethnic tensions that hasn't really been dealt with through any of the peace processes so those are driving people to join but then the second was of course what we now know because it's been replicated by the Global Terrorism Index and many other research centers that the sense of humiliation and the sense that the foreign forces were humiliating the dignity and the identity of the country and the region and the people and the religion that sense of humiliation of foreign forces was the other key driver so much of the programming wasn't going into addressing those drivers and that's why many would say the DDR programs weren't working it was sort of buying people off was more like short term rental and they went back into the system so I think those two stories and many other of my experiences working in East Africa, working in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and many other places that are facing the challenge of violent extremism and terrorism helped me develop this model in the book that we mentioned earlier the ecology of violent extremism where the peace building approach is trying to sort of back up to that context to those local grievances so requiring an in-depth stakeholder consultation to outline what the drivers are and really that peace building isn't so much competing with PCVE or counter-terrorism because they each are working within a different time frame so the very short-term immediate threat would be a counter-terrorism response, you know, the midterm targeted trying to reduce and the vulnerability or support the resilience of vulnerable communities is PCVE and peace building is looking at the kinds of factors that actually create civil war suicide violent extremism, you know there are a lot of things emerging from societies where there's not social cohesion and there's a weak state-society relationship so this model and then this next diagram just shows from a conflict resolution or a peace building approach sees this necessity that we've talked about a lot today of a multidisciplinary approach that deals with the individual, the identity issues, the community grievance issues, the national ideological and the global network exchange so really a multi-tiered multi-perspective approach which we call peace building is necessary to address these many different drivers Thanks, Lucia, I want to pick up one idea you said about understanding the reasons people join as being part of the calculus and figuring out why they disengage and actually asked the panel that question if understanding the dynamics around radicalization of joining or being recruited translates into what you need to understand around disengagement and rehabilitation and if they have any reflections on that because what we want to get to here is a conversation about how and why people are leaving these movements so could I open that up to the audience? All right, well, I'll grasp the nettle first. I think based on what we've heard earlier today as well and I think everyone in the room would agree there are multiple pathways into radicalization, people's motivations are extremely varied and the primary thing that's keeping them involved will also vary but also it's likely to evolve over time again if I use the conflict I know most about in Syria and Iraq radicalization changes in the sort of self-narrative that these individuals telling themselves about why they were there, what they were hoping to achieve so you could see earlier on a lot of humanitarian narrative and that sort of notion that we've come here to help, we've come to respond to what we've seen as a humanitarian crisis and then that evolution into we're not here to serve people, we're here to serve God and so even that story the individual were telling themselves was evolving very, very quickly but also dramatically and I think a lot of that is reflected in what we see in terms of some of the more prominent I wouldn't say successful but certainly prominent in the ones that you're able to access de-radicalization or disengagement programs that operate in the Middle East so if I take the example of the Saudi rehabilitation center which I've been to now three times I think there are some people in this room who have been because I've seen you there you know you can see different I should say as visitors not as sort of inmates you see very different things so there is a clear financial imperative for people to leave and it's a very open path of the program you are financially incentivized to leave but not just you but your community as well so your tribal connections sort of pulled upon and it's really brought into a broader sort of social investment of everyone around you has an interest in you not going back to what it was you were up to but coupled alongside that are also very dense and weighty theological discussions and we've seen again the Egyptians or the Libyan Islamic fighting group as well have these large recantation initiatives which are focused much more on the theological aspect and the other sort of reasons of why you want to not do something so on so I think we're at the same point of divergence with deradicalization and or disengagement as we are with radicalization in that it will most likely be a case by case basis and I'll stop with this and I think that's a point we've seen in the UK at least in the way that its flagship program prevent has evolved over the best part of a decade going from everything that we heard about earlier we don't have large national programs that are fairly generic versus now which is in essence the sort of front of channel taking the personal individual and trying to work out what it is about them that has led them to start to embrace or embrace extremist ideas and then to tailor a specific intervention around them which has input from a number of agencies in the UK in order to have a sort of specific program for that individual and it does operate in the shadows quite a bit we've asked for a lot more access to data but it does seem to have a relative degree of success and it doesn't just operate with jihadis but with the far right as well let me just add on to that because I wanted to talk about trauma and the Saudi center for reintegration actually really does focus on trauma recovery trauma healing whatever you want to call it through art therapy through counseling music therapy very creative ways actually and what's interesting about this is the trauma narrative of understanding how early childhood trauma or even more recent trauma is affecting young white nationalist young men who shoot down people with guns in this country often there is a trauma analysis which is interesting and kind of conserving because some of the other analysis of where that's coming from is often missing but that trauma analysis has rarely been used in the international center and certainly I think the Saudis have really been clear that addressing trauma is part of the reintegration process so I think a lot of well we've heard today that we still don't know how to identify who is going to radicalize we can look at pathways it's I think it's a similar concern about deradicalization and disengagement there's no one way out there's been focus on narratives on ideological justifications I think there's a focus as well on individual efficacy that matters and Lisa was just talking about this in terms of not just in trauma but some of the things we were mentioning earlier about programs community level grievances I think one thing that we should look at is that there are a lot of narratives in the world but we don't think that they all necessarily apply to us we all see stories about people in need people hurting and we don't say it's my responsibility to do something about this and what extremist groups of different stripes do and especially using J.M. Berger's definition of extremism with focus on group identity is that they make the focus on this is your level identity that matters this is the one that requires action reducing the pull of those types of identities and whether you want to use different social science terms like cross cutting cleavages or intersectionality the fact is everyone has different levels of identity everyone has different responsibilities different roles to different facets of their identities different groups and so by giving people a sense of efficacy perhaps or giving the sense of responsibility whether it's at the family level or the community level that they can have an impact I think would go a long way towards addressing some of these issues let's go back to this topic of trauma because we heard about this earlier today too and how exposure to war trauma is something that contributes to vulnerability to radicalization and it's something that is featuring in this particular demographic that we're talking about coming out of Iraq and Syria so thank you for putting that on the table Lisa could I ask the other speakers to reflect a little bit more about how this issue of a PTSD or experience of trauma is informing some of the responses towards rehabilitation or disengagement or perhaps some of the choices around disengagement and motivations towards it if they are I think there's a long way to go in this regard I was actually at a great resolve event on Monday here listening to some of the work that's being done on the Balkans about previous work on childhood traumas from war experience and the impact of that so I think we need more studies showing that in the case of Western countries people going off and becoming FTFs which has been the counter-terrorism pre-eminent concern in the last few years it's less trackable it's less obvious without getting a sense of individual profiles after somebody has already gone and traveled I think there are certain risk factors we've talked about developing types of individuals, at least categories for examining pathways into radicalization the work, as I understand it is still pretty rudimentary at this point it's not something I've worked with people directly in the field about Lisa maybe I think it's important to realize that there may be some kind of correlation between trauma and vulnerability to violent extremism I also think it's not everybody so there's many different pathways and when we were working in East Africa several years ago and then I participated with Department of Defense conflict analysis of what was driving young people in East Africa to join El Shabaab the thing that came out that correlated within that context is that there were so few pathways for advancement for these young men it was the most ambitious the most entrepreneurial actually in some sense the least traumatized with the ones with the most capacity were the ones who were becoming enticed with the idea of leading an El Shabaab segment so I think it's important to look at trauma and also to realize in some context it's really quite different and I think for reintegration then you're also thinking about some communities lost their most talented young people they're young people with the greatest leadership skills who left the community and went to join and lead violent extremist groups and carry out terrorism so there's actually a huge potential in thinking about channeling that kind of leadership in a different direction so there's like sensitivity to trauma is necessary and also kind of seeing the real capacity that exists with some of these groups I'll just make two very very quick points I'm glad you actually I should have mentioned the point in Saudi about the therapy and the rehabilitation if you're unfamiliar with this I would just go online and look at it there's an art therapy element to it and it's surreal I mean it is really surreal because you have these hardened individuals who are fought in foreign conflicts who are now it's just worth watching there's videos of it floating around the internet so I encourage you to take some time I'll talk again just about one other aspect of this which we haven't really touched upon but it is a latent problem it is a huge problem again bringing it back to Syria and Iraq which is the sheer number of children who are now again not just in those communities but who have actively been raised by fighters by competence who are again being held in such a secure conditions and so adding to the trauma is this further sense of humiliation and is a further sense of insecurity and it's basic human insecurity but winter is coming these are not comfortable tents to live in at the best of times the conditions are very very trying and challenging as it is and on top of that you have associated impacts of whether it's PTSD or other mental health issues that are related to this encouraging a new generation to walk this path is of course very very high and again there is not particularly significant political will to challenge this issue head on but it does require a pretty swift intervention we actually have a huge stack of questions and I think enough time to get through some of them so I'm going to turn to the audience questions now thank you for the opening reflections the first one actually is specifically for you Shiraz it's regarding the camp and the role that it played in bringing together militants and extremists and allowing them to organize and mobilize after their release and the question is given the conditions in Iraq and Syria today versus that of 2004 to 2011 given the different population of today's camps such as the women and children in residence as well how might the threat trajectory differ today is the question let me see if there is an anonymous question that's a great question I think the threat is a lot more acute in many senses today all of the underlying structural issues that we would have spoken about in relation to Iraq post-2003 in Syria pre-2011 have been exacerbated so that broader aspect I was talking about just basic human security if I were a Sunni taxi driver living in Mosul or in Raqqa life today is a lot worse than it was even under Islamic State just a few years ago the exposure to vulnerability the exposure to a political class either in Damascus or Baghdad is making me uncertain about my future but as you say it's a huge number now of women who have been very active and conscious and playing their own roles within these organizations now in a more pronounced way that they haven't done in the past and then children which are a new dynamic here again in quite significant numbers they've either been exposed to indoctrination by these groups if you follow Islamic State propaganda you will have seen lots of videos in which children were used as executioners or any children who are just growing up now and coming into their consciousness in these camps who are being fed this narrative what is very interesting and we haven't been to the camps inside Syria yet but you can see it in Raqqa to a lesser extent as well is that the women at least are much more open in terms of their ongoing support and commitment to Islamic State and again there's a lot of a reportage which talks about this and the sort of brazenness of that campaign we will come and get us out, Baghdadi will return we will revive the caliphate once again and so on and so forth there's a lot more open dogmatism there and I'm not sure why that is the case if you've seen again the interviews with male detainees particularly of western there's a lot of denial of what was really happening you would think ISIS was a dining club based on what most of them are claiming to have done just being chefs and cooks and whatnot so there's a lot of denial going on because I think they're worried much more about being turned over to local custody and of course no one wants to end up in Syrian State custody in particular so I think there's a lot of denial going on there but all of those underlying issues to my mind are worse today and so this is something that I've been really going on about a lot in various audiences such as to say the political world to start to look at how we collectively deal with this and it's worth saying there's huge division even between very close allies Britain and the United States are in wild disagreement about what should happen about these detainees the United States has repeatedly and rightly in my opinion criticised the British Government for its approach which has been to completely wash its hands of those who are in detention in a lot of cases to strip those individuals of their British citizenship to precisely force them down the road that David was talking about becoming career terrorists and so we are displacing this problem but essentially elongating it because these are individuals who now if they get the opportunity to leave their current detention have no prospect but to go back to the fight and to come back even stronger and harder than they did before so I'm afraid that outlook isn't particularly optimistic This next question is asking is a follow on David I think to your description of career foreign fighters and the related recidivism rates and the question is how does the experience of FTF differ from that of more traditional mercenaries and I think the question is specifically in terms of repeat experiences and recidivism Well labels are always a tricky thing whether it's terrorism or whether it's whether it's foreign fighters or mercenaries I would just say that we have historically if you look beyond just jihadis just beyond the formally designated FTFs we have hundreds of thousands of people who have been foreign fighters for what you would think of as extremist causes whether they're ideological groups ethnic groups probably the biggest one would have been the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s after that was over the League of Nations to send people back home and gave them pocket money to help ease their way back I guess if you're going to look at people in similar movements what has happened with ISIS is not necessarily unprecedented you had revolutionary Russia and China encouraged people to come from the west to be doctors to be teachers offered women special status in shopping districts recruited some from the Canadian parliament and from the Manhattan project to come teach and be farmers and things like that and it's not just about the children and most of the men most of the men not all end up returning to western countries and not making a big splash afterwards I don't say that everybody takes an off ramp when they're given it but most people probably do and I think that's been our experience with FTFs throughout time So here's a question that really asks about the nature of de-radicalization programming and its relevance to conflict resolution Lisa say if you mind I might throw this one your direction it says in addition to conflict resolution classes what other methods could be recommended for addressing the grievances that are found that might be relevant to de-radicalization and does this apply as a de-radicalization program So I also wanted to get out of the Middle East context and talk about white nationalism which I'm grateful that many people today have already mentioned this So as I look at my community in rural Virginia there is a lot of white nationalism we have one of the largest white nationalist radio TV programs that shows around the world and you know this thought of how are we going to address this and reintegrate I mean it's when the scale is these are not fringe group this is the mainstream of society it becomes a bit of a challenge then so what does reintegration actually mean within the American society but I think the issue that we haven't spent very much time today talking about is social cohesion which is really the focus of a lot of peace building work so what is driving young people to join white nationalist groups in rural Virginia is similar to they certainly look a lot like the Taliban they drive trucks and they have flags out the back so my street in Rockingham County looks very similar to the street I lived on in Kabul in terms of threats and there's a lot of guns everywhere but I think it's less of a question about their relationship with the state and more about the fragmentation of American society and of course social media has exacerbated that but is not completely responsible for that we have a long history of polarization and racial injustice and racial tension that needs to be addressed that issue of social cohesion though I think is a main lens to look at reintegration in every place where it exists in Myanmar with the buddhas Muslim in Israel Palestine with the radical Jewish groups and their approach to Palestinians sort of everywhere you look if you look through a social cohesion lens you can see work that needs to be done to stitch how people view each other how they perceive their own identity and whether there's a potential of work to be done that gets to some of the conversation earlier today where the perception is that an identity can exist without a death threat from another group or this sort of other group so how fear is dealt with in the society and what kind of programs are stitching people together and what kind of social cohesion is that and what kind of social cohesion is it? So Kyle from Equal Access is asking us to give some specific examples of lessons from programs that create off-ramps for those associated with violent extremist groups and he has an interesting question here about whether it's possible to replicate or scale or build a social cohesion would anyone like to talk about specific programs and some of the learning that's come out of them? Hi Kyle So when I first started looking at we're not talking only about FTLs but in terms of building alternative identities so the particular holds of groups with extremist calls would be mitigated by saying you have other obligations you have other interests I've been thinking about this in terms of national identity that there are national service institutions whether it's military or something else that would give people a sense of tie to their country. The political reality these days in a lot of countries is it's harder to build sort of a pluralistic civic nationalism so I think perhaps an emphasis can be on civil society groups on giving people alternatives I know that the UK in particular has some sport based there in some ways very similar to crime prevention programs in this country with midnight basketball leagues in the 1990s there's very limited research on how effective those were but what studies there have been show that the cities that have them everybody's crime rates fell in the 90s but those cities fell most fastest so I can easily imagine if somebody wants to feel like they are making a difference in the world if somebody wants to save people whether it's just sort of paramedic work or just programs there's opportunities like that that could be invested in. I think the most important factor for this in the first instance is the sort of ability to get people off that ramp without criminalizing them so prevent does this quite a lot in the UK as mentioned through channel as an intervention aimed at the individual and a lot of that is also saying it's not just challenging them but it's saying if you continue down this path it is likely you will fall foul of legislation which talks about X or Y this could lead to custodial sentencing and so on it's kind of fronting you up to show you where your life could be headed packaged in and around some of that broader engagement work that we're talking about and actually the slide that's still up contextual factors again shows the sort of plethora of different ways then in which you will attempt to pull on that individual but that D-Ride also takes place or disengagement stuff still takes place with those in the criminal justice system as well so those who are serving custodial sentences so it is a broader aspect to that. I think the scalability of it or like creating these things outside of their regions wouldn't work because I've spent a lot of time as I've mentioned already looking at the ones in the Middle East the Saudi one is the most well developed but there are similar ones in the UAE and so on but what's interesting about it is you could never replicate those outside the region you just simply couldn't the idea of giving financial inducements to individuals to get them to move away from it clearly not fly in any western state but what's also really interesting is that it plays upon the reality of the relationship between the individual and the state in those countries so we have the social contract and a particularly sort of different kind of relationship with our governments in the west versus the kind of relationship that you have in the Middle East so in Saudi Arabia it's very much spoken about and talked about to this notion that the ruling classes are the sort of parents and you're all the children and so in the DRAT centre they say we are being forgiven in the way that you might tell your child off if they do something wrong but you don't necessarily ground them for a week so just stop it and that's your right essentially to decide how you're going to engage with your child so others are also saying look that's okay you know our brother here fell on hard times and the government has chosen to support him and to do various things so it works very much within the particular confines and I think it does enjoy relative success within the confines of the environment in which it works but are there broader lessons for us in the West? No, not really One thing that we haven't talked about yet is that much of the research correlates reintegration or leaving de-radicalization with a former fighter being the one to invite somebody to leave so whether that's an Indonesian prisons with foreign fighters doing the work to help de-radicalize within the prison setting to here again in North America if we look at groups like Life Beyond Hate which is completely made up of former white nationalists and their work is to engage directly with white nationalist groups and young people and to invite them out in a without shaming and without the heaviness that so many groups talk about so I think that that realization that former whatever former ISIS, former white nationalists are really key to the strategy for de-radicalization and inviting people to leave and supporting their voices more We have a number of overlapping questions so I'm going to bundle them a little bit there are a couple of people who would like to hear you talk about religion and disengagement and de-radicalization you mentioned religious discourse being a component of some of the programs you've studied I'm also aware that that's a very controversial aspect of some of the programs as well for a number of reasons not least of which is sort of the human rights piece of it around freedom of belief and whether that actually is an effective way to de-radicalize so I'm wondering if you have some reflections on the issue of religion and disengagement and de-radicalization to share with the audience okay again it's a very contested space in terms of what a particular individual is going to believe as his interpretation of a particular concept or idea to drive forward their desire to be a member of ISIS or Al Qaeda or anything else again that debate happens more freely and with greater confidence by the state understandably in the Gulf the Saudi state believes it has the right to intervene in that debate and to say your understanding of the religion is wrong ours is right here's what we think they have a unit within the Ministry of Interior called the Ideological Security Unit and it's I know the whole purpose is to go to these individuals not just within the prison system but elsewhere as well and say you think this is a correct understanding for how you should have a relationship with the government that's wrong this is what it should be you think this is a correct interpretation of Jihad just to use as a broad term well you're wrong here's what our understanding of it is here's what we think the terms of engagement should be and so on even at various times early on for example the Syrian conflict in 2012 when lots of individual sort of celebrity scholars in Saudi Arabia began to fundraise for example for Syrian refugees and for Syrians who had been displaced so the government worrying about what might happen stepped in and took control of those and said it's a really good idea that you're taking raising funds to send up but we'll take control of this so it feels it has the right to do that and no western state could really intervene in quite that same way into some of those debates but the other point I'll make in relation to this and I think it's slightly I wrote a book on the belief system and sort of intellectual trajectory of the Jihadist movement but I'll contradict myself a bit by saying the average person who goes into the group doesn't know those ideas particularly well we tend to have this notion of individuals who join highly ideological movements that they are themselves highly ideological and that they've read all the books and understood the key concepts and therefore they decide to become a member of group A instead of group B or C or D in actual fact what tends to happen is people join highly ideological movements all the time without ever really understanding what's going on and what happens is that there's a leadership at the top which understands those ideas which has really imbibed them and which then gives direction to your actions and then your actions are invested with that broader political significance which might distinguish you from an ordinary criminal so the criminal might shoot somebody to steal from them someone else might shoot them in the name of a broader cause right this is revenge for X and therefore the same act takes on a different meaning so in that context there's a really good way this is not my example about you when Jay was talking earlier about the Nazis I'd read this somewhere before and it really is a great way to think of it if you think of the prison guards at Auschwitz they hadn't read necessarily in minecraft not every single one of them had but their actions were given purpose and direction by leadership that had a plan and a vision so you have an ideological with every individual necessarily understanding the Islamic state as well with its revival of slavery for example and things like that the final point I'll make on this is that having now been repeatedly as I said to the Saudi program over 10 years anecdotally what's very evident is the ones who are most susceptible to breaking down easily of course so the ones who are not of that leadership ideological level the ones who are there tend not to make it to that rehab center because they are doing funny the second time I went we met an individual and a colleague and I on the flight home were talking about him and we said he really didn't seem very repentant he seemed clearly ideological and sort of on that path three years later four years later I was talking to a British foreign fighter we were communicating over Skype and he said to me you'll never believe it I met this great brother earlier today from Saudi and it was the guy who said he was going to return to the course there are a couple other questions too that are overlapping a number of people would like to hear you talk more about this vivid parallel you drew between rural Virginia and Afghanistan and so I'm wondering if the speakers would like to talk a little bit more about some of the commonalities that exist in extreme right wing groups and these other militant groups were talking about when it comes to processes of de-raclization and disengagement if there are any reflections on that I think the audience would like to hear them I think the work of defining what is a violent extremist belief system is really important work and we did a little bit of it this morning but one of the things that was touched on maybe not clearly is the purity narrative that all of the groups have are either ethnically or religiously pure so in Myanmar the Buddhist state is looking for that pure Buddhist state the white nationalists are looking for a pure white state in ISIS you know we can go on to all the different groups around the world but that purity narrative I think really requires a different type of intervention than intervening with other armed movements so there would be many violent movements around the world that don't have this purity narrative they have a difficult state-society relationship they have ideological grievances and frameworks but people who have built their world view on fear of another and the sense of I'm going to die unless I fight and kill them that is a really dangerous part of the world view that makes people particularly vulnerable to extreme gruesome violence because the other groups have been so dehumanized and they can't even imagine this multi-cultural democratic society which you see most clearly actually within ISIS and white nationalism the real anti-democratic anti-multicultural framework and of course that came out in Norway with the attack and the ideological statement also then borrowed for the New Zealand massacre of Muslims in the mosque this idea that it's almost Franz Fanon-ish right so the purification of violence it's only through violence there can be no political process that achieves the perfect outcome it's only through gruesome violence do we establish this pure state so I think we need to do more wrestling with that it has to do with identity it has to do with the sort of psychology and trauma and fear it's a package that needs more work I guess I would just add that one thing that there's white nationalists and ISIS but really I think a lot of these groups there's this zero some sense of competition with others but of losing out in particular to others the sense that you have to take aggressive action now because your group whoever they might be will be in far worse position if you don't it justifies the costs you have a duty to people in your group there's a lot of gendering except for incel there's a lot of gendering used about why it's necessary to fight to defend innocent women and children and things like that so again it's changing I think somehow the calculus about who are we that makes people think I have to fight for us so since resolve is all about bridging research with policy and practice I think we'll wrap up a final round of reflections perhaps on how some of these ideas can inform policy and practice so why don't we go in the same order we started in and see what recommendations you might have on that level brilliant new ideas well I do think we've covered a lot of the ground today on the panel indeed at the whole conference so you see individuals who join extremist groups who are willing to engage in violence because they feel marginalized in some broader context because they feel a sense of insecurity because some group is offering them if not direct security at least a sense of purpose we see messaging that your own life is debased that you can come be a warrior for a cause or a hero that you can perhaps engage in antisocial violence you really want to do anyway but this time you'll be celebrated for it so what I think it's really about is connecting individuals to a broader sense of society where they perhaps don't feel under siege but also don't feel the same incentives to fight for a particular marginalized group because they see that as just one strand of their identity so building broader whether it's ties through other civil society groups or whether it's ties to the broader civic polity recreating the sense of linkages that people seem to lose I think that builds on this notion of what we've been discussing all day and on this panel there's a broader pattern of disorder taking place here which is feeding into whether it's jihadist violence, extreme white-wing violence or indeed as some of the other conferences heard about in Myanmar, up in Kashmir in China as well and this is all feeding off a broader sense of a breakdown in trust in political institutions in experts and expertise and so on and so forth and so actually reviving some of that confidence in what have been the traditional anchors of the state will go some way towards addressing this broader pattern of global disorder which is really quite remarkable in the pace that it's taking but it is fundamentally asserting itself as a process of othering as a process of trying to return nostalgically to some imagined glory which in reality doesn't exist and of course the most recent manifestation of someone trying to do that was Islamic State to say we will return glory to Muslims by addressing perceived injustices or slights and so on and so forth that slogan isn't too different from the ones employed by the political leaders I want to go back to this diagram and also really focus on the work of US Institute of Peace in making this research policy practice building those bridges because this is the space where I think it's happening most clearly anywhere that I know of in the world and that is because USIP put out a new report last spring which is being passed out on violent extremism and the day that I was watching that live webinar of Senator Lindsey Graham talking about what a fantastic report this is and did you know there's groups of people that study conflict analysis and that they do peace building and for Lindsey Graham to be saying this I felt like was a tremendous victory of thinking really all of the research we've done is making its way into the hands of the policymakers who are now looking at some of the data that we've put together on evidence-based approaches to addressing violent extremism and I want to thank USIP Georgia you laid the groundwork for this just incredible work because I think it's really significant that we have spaces where people from the three communities counter-terrorism CVE and peace building can all come together and mention that violent extremism needs to become a field I agree but I think the field of peace building which has existed now for 40 years and has focused on conflict analysis and social cohesion and polarization issues we have so much to give the field of violent extremism in terms of how do we get to the root causes and how do we deal with governance and polarization and many of the issues that are driving violent extremism please join me in thanking our panelists this afternoon thanks everybody for sticking around for everyone who's been here throughout the entire day and for those who are new and joining us for our last panel of the day we are going to be adding one additional chair so that is going to be taking place at this moment so if we just want to hold tight for just about 30 more seconds we should be continuing on our way to adding the chair thank you so much and I will invite our moderator and our panelists to come up on stage our last panel of the day is entitled Global Policy Trends and the Impact of Research I'm going to allow our moderator to actually introduce each of our panelists but I'd be happy to welcome you to the stage at this moment in time with over 100 years of government experience panelists our our next and final session speakers and moderators are well positioned to reflect on PCVE efforts to date focusing on a lot of the challenges that we've heard about all day today Leanne audience thank you very much I'm Dan Benjamin currently resident in northern New England and happy to be back and really thankful to Resolve for bringing together so many former colleagues and friends of mine and I hadn't expected to have so many reunions but it's wonderful to be here and I really applaud the work that Resolve is doing let me begin by introducing our panelists to my near left is General Mike Nagata an old friend for many years in the government to his left he was Lieutenant General and I guess most recently Director of Strategic Planning at NCTC did they drop the O at some point? No it's still there. Director of Strategic Operational Planning which I always felt was one of the hardest jobs in the government actually to his left is Robert Foshe who is the principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations he's a career Foreign Service Officer and served in many bureaus and in many embassies to his left is Mr. Runyon, Christopher Runyon who is Senior Official at USAID working on Africa now and has also had a long and impressive career in the government working in the field and to my far left physically if not politically is my old friend Daniel Kimmich who had the pleasure of working with for many years in government and is the man who if there's something to know about strategic communications he's the person you want to ask and he is currently the Deputy Coordinator is that the correct title? Principal Deputy Coordinator for the Global Engagement Center so by way of a brief introduction myself I was a coordinator for counter terrorism and set up the first CVE unit in the State Department and I thought that I would kick this off by venturing a few observations on what has happened in the field in the policy world since I was born in in May of 2009 and I would actually I do have to make one apology before that I just remembered so in the Academy today I'm at Dartmouth we all have to sign statements that say we will never be on man-ells all-male panels and so I want to apologize on behalf of USIP for this one and simply point out in fact that several of these men work for women who declined or could not be president so I think it's an important point I feel like we should now play the Dance of the Dinosaurs too but okay so moving right along I wanted to just venture a few observations and then throw it open to our panelists to see if they agree number one is that the first 7 or 8 years at least maybe 10 years after 9-11 the discussion about C and now PCVE was largely characterized by endless definitional fights those definitional fights I am hoping have receded somewhat and if they haven't then I will just start now number two when I came into office my view was that there was a real paucity of good social science on which to base CVE programs that seems to have changed dramatically in part because of organizations like Resolve and the many members of the Resolve Network so there's a lot more social science out there than the question that remains is is that social science being read and utilized by policy makers so there are a number of sort of sub questions there is the social science being presented in a way that policy makers with very limited time can understand is it being crowded out by what I think many who have served in government understand is the tyranny of the classified in other words if it's classified you read it if it doesn't matter and then I guess the concomitant question is when the problems with getting CVE going was that there were all these different audiences that you had to talk to senior officials who would all in as we heard earlier this morning we're not going to shoot our way out of this problem and then would immediately say no of course I'm not going to allocate $15 million for your cockamamie idea because they knew that they could never get the metrics or the support on Capitol Hill and because they fundamentally thought that social science was kind of squishy and would never deliver the kind of dramatic results that a good drone strike would so I am interested to know whether to what extent that has changed and I'm throwing too much out there I'll stop with this one our partners in this world we tried hard in the Obama administration put CVE on the international agenda through things like the creation of the GCTF and G-SERF and it seems to me that our partners have really embraced that and are perhaps less nervous about countering violent extremism or preventing violent extremism maybe even less squeamish about the notion of the therapeutic is having a role in countering terrorism and violence extremism and that we're still a little bit going in circles and that is why we don't have the funding that we might like but I put a lot on the table and I'm happy to entertain all your thoughts on that and then give you 10 more principles or observations so Mike you're retired now right as of a month and a half ago well Mazeltov and so that means you can speak more freely than our other panelists at some peril but you know please have that well these days the only person I'm worried about getting in trouble with is my wife but first of all thank you to USIP the sponsor of this forum for allowing me to be here today I'm going to react to three of the things you just said I regret to report our definitional debates have not abated they may not be as numerous or as vociferous as they once were but there is too much time still being wasted on quite literally dancing on the head of these rhetorical pins and we really need to stop it because there's more productive things we could be doing with that time and energy but unfortunately a lot of our definitional debates are driven by a sustained and pernicious degree of ignorance about what it is we are talking about or what it is we are trying to achieve which gets to the next thing I'll react to you talked about social science research I would certainly stipulate that whether it's social science or other forms of scientific pursuit that the body of research that has grown I'll just use the arbitrary date of 9-11 it's not arbitrary for Americans but it is utterly arbitrary for everybody else in the world it is inarguably larger than it once was but I think my personal opinion is that's the wrong measurement to take satisfaction that the volume of research is larger than it once was because the scale of terrorism today is much larger than it once was so I would argue that the gap between the research we need for an ever growing and diversifying problem versus the scale of what we have that delta continues to grow we are not keeping up with the need for research we are falling behind the need for research because the scale of the problem keeps growing now why is that so well you've already in many ways described it it's an absence of policy seriousness for some of those of you in the room who know my background I'm a special forces officer by background I have literally spent 20 years of my life utilizing physical violence to deal with terrorists and after 20 years of not seeing my family for more than half that time I regret to report there are more terrorists now than when I started so I've lived the dream or the nightmare of realizing that while I would certainly argue that when lives were on the line or a hostage need to be rescued that the use of violence was necessary but it is strategically and clearly inadequate to solving the problem we have because we've got more terrorists now despite all our strength the strength we've developed the use of physical force the third thing I'll just react to is really just the reverse side of the coin I've just described what would it take it would take I do not believe it would take the kind of resourcing or manpower that whether it is military forces or intelligence agencies have been lavished with particularly inside the United States since 9-11 I don't think the absorptive capacity exists in the terrorism prevention and CVE world but most importantly because of this absence of research or sufficient research I should say I want to give credit where credit is due there are incredibly courageous researchers all over the world trying their best to do this what we're looking from is inconsistent or non-existent policy support it is very popular and to a degree necessary that politicians everywhere speak strongly consistently and then match their rhetoric with legislative or policy action to support the use of kinetic forms of counter-terrorism if you try to do that what the volume is of similar kinds of political rhetoric to support things like counter-messaging or terrorism prevention or CVE or what have you it is a tiny fraction what you see in the other realm of counter-terrorism thanks I'm going to try to pick myself off the floor now and Robert what would you like to comment among that smorgasbord of different observations well again thank you and thank USIP for organizing this conference and I do apologize I know my assistant secretary wishes she were here I know you regret that I'm not the assistant secretary but please know I regret I'm not the assistant secretary too so um I have to say I would agree with those comments for the most part but I think in CSO we are working hard to provide the best way to help us in this field and to develop what I believe are some of the most important ideas of how we apply the research that is out there there is a lot of research and our team is looking at it bringing it together and trying to figure out what's the best way to apply this to the local situations that we're confronting now we're a small small organization and there's not a lot we can do other things we can do by establishing our baseline studies on the situation they're looking for indicators and then devising or helping to devise locally some kinds of strategies to address violent extremism and I think that is really the future of this field in terms of the work we're going to be doing it is not there is no kinetic solution as you said it cannot be it has to be a political solution and it has to be locally driven and locally supported it will fail and that is what we are focused on at CSO trying to find those opportunities trying to try different approaches and different places and learning from those lessons and doing this through a whole of government approach it is not just the State Department it's the State Department working with our colleagues at DOD at USAID in the field on these problems and partnering with local authorities to see if we can come up with solutions that they think will approach or will address the threat that they're facing from violent extremism so I think that is for us the way forward it doesn't take a lot of money but it does take support on the hill and other places to understand that this is a long slow process it is not a quick solution but it's one that you have to sustain and move forward on in order to be able to claim any kind of success we're now at 18 years since 9-11 18 years from now I think we could be in a much better place if we continue with this process and expand it and broaden it to other parts of the world so that's encouraging thank you can I just press you a little and you can make this sign if you don't like it but can I press you a little on the since CSO is at the center of this world now of the nexus with social science and the policy world I'm sorry you're the nexus of social science with the policy world do you feel that the US government is getting the social science it needs able to digest it and to turn it into effective policy I would say to an extent yes that we are getting the research we need we always need for more and as a consumer we will always want more are we able to turn it into effective policies the real question and that is what we're doing with our various projects but not on a large enough scale is what I would argue we need more resources especially personnel to be able to do that and we are working at the same time on how do we evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and those kind of indicators of effectiveness can they have more of a universal application than just in specific locales and that sort of thing and again I think as we do more of this work and develop these concepts more broadly and deeply we'll find the lessons that we'll have greater and more universal application Christopher Thanks I will try to address five of them and the last I will not for personal employment reasons but I would I just wanted to say in this room we've got a lot of research heroes who have done some amazing and pioneering work that I know that USAID and the rest of the US government has taken advantage of we also have some policy heroes so I did just want to give a shout out to both Dan and to Mike I really admired Dan's amazing work at CT during a tough time and then with General Nagata I witnessed you in the situation room in the White House do some pretty brave things to stand up for smart strategy in good policy so just a shout out to those guys You'll notice we're both out of government now On definitional fights, yeah I think that that's better I really do and perhaps an example of that is the fact that we're in our second perhaps third iteration of policy even within USAID which meant we had to settle on taxonomy and we had to look and talk with a lot of people to make sure we were using that stuff and I would just say on policy in 2011 we put a policy out the development response to extremism and insurgency which was a pretty important document for us that shaped a lot of our thinking and it really came out of a lot of the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences that's now being adjusted to be more direct in that it is more geographically sort of you know oriented to places that we know are of specific CVE vulnerability or direct threat it's more focused and more CVE specific as opposed to the concerns that we all had about attribution and sort of saying well a program's got this connection but there wasn't the data behind it there wasn't the research behind it and the third component of that is the measurability and making sure that there is data that backs it up our taxpayers deserve it Congress is asking for it our leadership is the new administration presently is asking for that and so we're using a more tailored definition of our to extremism and how we know that our programming is working and then the last is one that I think is really about self-reliance and about local capacity we're trying to make that more a centerpiece of our strategy and our approach and measuring that to make sure that it's not just that the problem went away well maybe the problem went away temporarily but is the local capacity there to keep that in a sustainable situation going forward and just one plug is that that strategy is available for public comment on the USAID website in a week or so so especially for all the folks in the room who are either practitioners or researchers we'd love to get your feedback on that when it does come out are we using the research? Absolutely not only are we funding it including I'm proud to say my bureau in Africa helping to support resolve but we're using those publications whether that's the governance nexus pub out of resolve which has been very helpful the secondary source research and a lot of our programming has also conducted research as either a prequel to actual on the ground activities or have tried to embed research components in the activities while we go along that said boy do I wish that we had a deployable battalion of PHD candidates who could embed with a lot of our implementing partners to be able to real time pick up data while at the same time we're trying out and experimenting with activities so I think that's probably about it classification still a challenge you know when you have to walk down hallways to get into safes to pick out hard drives to boot up computers you're just not going to have people connected the way the interagency probably does need to be connected on this let alone with research especially when that's funded perhaps by you know intelligence community organizations or others where it's even further siloed and then on resources we're still struggling with resources we've tried this 1207 we've seen CTPF we've seen there are all these others out there we know we've got some support but somehow we have not been able to crack that nut thanks Daniel so the virtue of going last is I've now forgotten all the questions but we seem to be starting with a bit of a baseline exercise in telling positives and negatives so I'll start with what I think are some positive developments and move on to some that are a little less positive I would definitely flag as a positive that on the definitional side I recall 10 to 15 years ago a huge amount of energy expended on largely fruitless polemics over monocausal explanations it's ideology it's poverty it's grievances and those seem to have subsided there are some outliers out there still advocating these but largely thanks to the efforts of the research community we have come to an acceptance that there are much more complicated factors in human behavior this leads to a bit of a negative because it would have been much simpler had there been a monocausal explanation we would design programming around it we would be well on our way to solving the problem but since we're dealing with people in the infinite number of motivations they have we've come to this very complex place so that leads me to the second development which is the genuine profusion of research and I think that here other panelists have discussed this we confront at the global engagement center what I think is a good problem to have but still a problem and that it is challenging to simply follow all of the research we have someone in our office who follows this full time she's constantly sending around summaries of the research but we struggle to make sure that this is integrated into our programs that said this is a much better place to be in than we were in ten years ago on the issue of research I sense and I'd actually be curious to hear from some of the folks here that we still face the problem that Mark was talking about the engagement outlined in a very famous paper where he said government has reams and reams of information that it keeps to itself but tends to exploit only to uncover new plots and look for threats and he characterized this as government knows everything but understands nothing the research community he said has all of the intellectual firepower and the time to really make sure that the research community understands everything but knows nothing and we I think have really not made as much progress as we should in bringing this together and making more information available I'm hoping as time goes by and there are now decades separating us from the inception that more of this will come out and become part of the public realm of the development that we're having this conversation in a vastly different policy context than we did when counterterrorism was unquestionably at the top of the agenda. Now if you just look at the headlines there are issues of geopolitical competition that have really superseded counterterrorism. Counterterrorism hasn't gone away but it is one of several competing priorities and it's unclear what are the current levels of activity. My hope obviously is that we don't lose momentum that we have built up particularly on the research side and the interaction of that research with some of the programatics so that's my preliminary balance sheet. Well very good so that's all very helpful. One issue I want to revert to which General Nagata brought up underscores kind of a big box in the situation which is that we don't have a global census of violent extremists but we know that there are a lot more of them and there were not too long ago and yet that has not really dramatically moved the needle on government interest US government interest in the social science in CVE-PVE approaches to violent extremism and it would seem like the obvious answer is because the kinetic approach did a good enough job in dealing with the imminent so we'll let the urgent just languish. Do any of your current former masters and I won't ask you to name them have a consciousness of this growth in numbers and how the environment seems to be changing? Some do but I would argue it is an insufficient number of senior policymakers not just in our own government but around the world recognize or have been able to grasp the reality that the use of physical force against terrorism necessary though it may be as I indicated earlier when lives are on the line it is strategically insufficient for the simple reason that you've already cited I mentioned when I made my remarks there were inarguably more terrorists now than there were 18 years ago not just more but the diversification of terrorism is extraordinary but why? Why is this sufficient policy maker attention so we can make what I would argue are the necessary investments and frankly the necessary priority shifts towards methods of combating terrorism that don't involve force. I think a lot of the explanation is well known to this audience I think you and I have even talked about this on one or two occasions when we were still in government we had the political event horizon particular policy maker is measured in a few short years well the use of violence can deliver satisfaction for a few short years until of course the phenomenon were struggling at morphs in a direction that we didn't expect and rebounds one need not look no farther than the fact that we thought we won against Al Qaeda in Iraq only to have it morph into a much more virulent form of terrorism that we now call the Islamic State but for the policy makers at the time they drew enormous satisfaction from the notion that we have strategically defeated AQI you know roll out the brass band have the victory parade it's all over but we didn't realize it wasn't over there were some people telling us it wasn't over but we didn't listen so that's one reason the only other reason I think worth mentioning is at the risk of sounding like I'm venturing into arenas I have no expertise I've read over the years several different versions of old psychological truth people hate uncertainty they love certainty matter of fact I've even heard one psychologist say people will choose a unpleasant certainty before they choose complete uncertainty now why am I mentioning that because there is nothing more uncertain today than how to prevent large numbers of people from becoming terrorists the journey from reasonably normal citizen to someday becoming a violent extremism the solutions for that are very uncertain right now dropping a 500 pound bomb delivers nothing but certainty you either you know you killed that person or you didn't which is why just as a matter of human nature people tend to gravitate towards what they can tangibly measure see and feel vice the uncertainty of how do you prevent someone from becoming an extremist anyone else want to comment on it I'll venture something you know this paradox here I think even as we have deepened our understanding of what I would describe as the very local dynamics of terrorism down to the kind of personal dynamics of groups there has been a phenomenon in the broader context that is in the exact opposite direction which is terrorist organizations small clandestine terrorist organizations latching on sort of lamprey like to insurgencies which are large and public and the tools that we use to counter recruitment and radicalization at the local level informed by research those are entirely different from the tools that you use to counter an insurgency which takes root in a political context that requires a completely different set of policy solutions different parts of government deal with that it is often intractably difficult it's embedded in regional and geostrategic contexts that are extremely tough to get at so I think this has been one of the conundrums we've grappled with over the last decade is that even as we've deepened our understanding of what I describe as the micro level of terrorism at the macro level it is now intertwined with insurgencies in a number of theaters that require a much different and more complex toolbox to deal with I think it's a really important point I would contend that it's always been intertwined with insurgencies whether in the caucuses or cashmere or where have you what is different is that there are just so many more now and so many states teetering on failure or failed and so on and so forth Christopher I know you are holding your mic so you want to say something so that I want to ask you to answer this question but also another question which I think is good for Robert as well and that is we have heard a lot today of really interesting and impressive work that points to the need for hugely specific localized knowledge and the understanding that every context is radically different the US government is one of the world's largest organizations and by definition has a hard time with that and I am curious to hear if you think that we are nonetheless evolving new ways of dealing with those kind of radical specificities and are you optimistic about continued progress in that direction thank you so for the earlier questions yeah we are stretched out a number of context that we are working in we weren't having these conversations about Mozambique we weren't talking about Tanzania the way we are talking about Tanzania and I really like Dan's point I just wanted to build off of that I just today was reading a little bit more about 30 ISIS guys come back from the Middle East go to the Philippines whip up in alignment what was your analogy there leech on to the local insurgency yeah lamprey and next thing you know we have a thousand people if that's ISIS 3.0 we have a whole different set of cross disciplinary things that need to fuse quite quickly and I think the resource needs are going to be very different for that type of a fight on complexity I think that's another really really important point we are leaning into complexity our new strategy will embrace that and on hyperlocalization that is absolutely critical as you can imagine the transaction costs for hyperlocalization are a lot higher when you're doing a large portfolio of activities than if you just walk in the room and say there's the problem go fix that one driver or go fix that one problem so we are wrestling with that but the good news is at least for me the development organization I mean it's malpractice in our business if you aren't using extremely local information and you get out there and you find out what's going on in that village not that village, not that village that village and the differences between those are so terribly important on terrain and understanding that terrain and turning that into good project designs and good interventions that try to have a CVE impact one other thing I did want to say was you know we started to allude to like the terrorist criminal nexus that haunts my dreams a bit because of these shifting loyalties and allegiances and the commercial aspect of things we'd love more and more research on that and right now I'm finally getting to the Kilcullen book which talks about the out of the mountains book which talks about competitive control and I think there's a whole thing there that I think would be very useful for researchers to read just as a construct for how we try to respond to the challenges of governance and the absence or the presence of state and how that becomes a rational choice for local people we talked about that during counter insurgency work somehow we need to go back and read that chapter again now in a terrorism or extremism mindset and then one other thing I would just plug would be I