Ronnie, that's because a lot of math geniuses can't teach and they assume all the complex parts are simple. To a certain degree, yeah. But I don't think math geniuses need to teach. The requirement, the quintessential requirement for teaching anything is love. As Krishna Murthy would say, you don't need math geniuses to teach high school mathematics, okay, or elementary school mathematics or even university level mathematics, the first two, three years. Anyway, I'm not a math genius, right? I don't even consider myself a mathematician. I just know how to use mathematics, the language of mathematics, to do what I need to get done. And a lot of that is because I was self-taught, right? I got my bachelors in geophysics at a minor in mathematics, but I really didn't understand mathematics until I started teaching it. And what made me understand mathematics, why we did certain things? Because my students would say, why do you do this? I go, well, because it's the way it's done. I didn't know why we did it. And I started looking up the whys. That was the love in me trying to make sure the student understood how to do mathematics that allowed me to learn mathematics to the level that I was comfortable with teaching, right? So you don't need to be a math genius or genius in anything to teach a certain topic. You have to have love to teach it, right? For the subject preferably, as well as the student, right? Because when you're asked a question and you don't know the answer, you can't dismiss that question, right? That means you're dismissing a student. That shuts them off right away, right? You need to seek out the answer so you can answer that question. And that's a love of learning because as soon as you try to seek out the answer for the question that you didn't have an answer for, you're going down a path of self-educating yourself, right? So it makes you more powerful. And that's what it did with me. It made my mathematics more powerful. So I'm not a math genius.


How many of you call yourselves Drupal site builders? Okay, cool. How many of you call yourselves content strategist? Wow. So this talk is mostly for the site builders. If you're a Drupal site builder, you'll hopefully learn a bit more about content strategy and how content strategists think. If you're a content strategist, hopefully you'll learn a bit more about how Drupal site builders think and how you can talk to them and explain what you need. I'm actually neither, which might be a problem, you'll let me know. What I do is, as I said, I'm a city of BlueSpark and BlueSpark does kind of sites for large organizations, you know, multiple stakeholders, universities, and we are also a bit weird because we spend a lot of time, we don't just do consulting for other people, we spend a lot of time building our own products. So one of them is RumiFi. If you're into travel bookings, you need to check this out. And the other one is Italy. And Italy is an online digital brand. I live in Italy, so it kind of works out. And I'm going to be using Italy as the example in a lot of the things I'm going to be talking about. Okay. The first thing is defining content strategy. And there's, if you look it up online, there's all sorts of different definitions. The way I like to think of it is content strategy is adapting your content to the context. And I have an elaborate example to illustrate this. So the example is Austin. So we're in Austin, and Blue Spark comes along to Austin. That's Blue Spark, or there you go. That's Blue Spark. And you know, we want to say we're Blue Spark in Austin, though. It's a different context. So take that away, change our world, trying to figure out how this works. Hold on. That's a bit better, right? That is Blue Spark in Austin. Adding your content to your strategy. But I'm just going to take a break here, because there was a huge, much better intro to this. And my remote thing didn't make it work. So you're going to bear with me, because this is important. That's Blue Spark. You see the effect? That's Blue Spark in Austin. Okay. Thank you. No more effects, I promise. It's all going to be serious now. Not really. Okay. So content strategy has been becoming increasingly more important for people. It's been growing, and you hear more and more about it, and people calling themselves content strategist and so on. And one of the main reasons is this, right? Smartphones. Smartphones have been the thing that made the need for content strategy very evident, because you could literally see your content in a completely different context. And it was very obvious that very often it doesn't adapt to that context. But content strategy isn't just about, you know, smartphones. And how many of you have heard Mobile First? Right? Everyone likes Mobile First. I have an issue with Mobile First. I think it's, you know, sure, Mobile First, but a few years from now, what is it going to be? Glass first, you know, adapt it to your glass. Is it going to be self-drive car first? Really, what it is, is content everywhere, right? You need your content to show up in whatever context it's going to be, and do that properly. So Mobile First is great. It's a great way of thinking about it. But it's not, you know, the end or the be all of content strategy. This is a great definition of what content strategy can really be. The practice of understanding what content is needed to meet both users' needs and organizational goals, producing it and creating realistic publishing and governance plans to keep it that way. And that's a great book, content everywhere. So if you're interested, check it out. Now, the problem with that is there is a lot going on. You know, in order to put all of that together, you have to work with information architects, user experience, there's content management, there's editorial management, there's site building, you have to tie all of this to business goals. So one of the challenges is that the content manager is kind of all the things. We love this in Blue Spark. This is one of our favorites. We need to do all the things. So you know, another way to think about what content strategy is, is think about what it does to your site, to your business. You know, what does success look like? What does it mean I've done it properly? And this is a great list that I've kind of put together from a number of different sources. So the first thing, as we were talking about before, content is not bound to a page, right? It's flexible, it's future ready. We can provide the content the best chance it stands to satisfy what a user will need. Using, using, re-sharing is easy. The message and editorial vision are clear. And that's complicated, you have to think about who you are and what do you want to say and how do you want to say it. You actually have to help content creators so that they can focus and enjoy the process and not fight with their CMS. And that we need to know it works because we measured it as opposed to, you know, we think it works. And I'm going to be talking a bit more about that. So that's content strategy. What's Drupal Site Building? And okay, this is the Drupal Site Building track, a lot of you are Drupal Site Builders so I realize this may sound superfluous but there's a point to this. So one on Drupal.org. And Drupal.org says, Drupal Site Building is implementing business functionality and features into your Drupal site. Just that. It's, you know, thinking of the structure and creating the content types, vocabularies, views, panels, menus you're going to need. And really, you know, what we end up doing is kind of figuring out of all this thousands of possibilities on Drupal.org in terms of modules, what is that ideal, magical set of modules that's going to build the perfect site for us. So what does Drupal look like with content strategy? As I said, I live in Italy. This is the Italian equivalent of Drupal. It's everywhere. It's everything to everyone, right? And you know, people use it in lots of different ways. So that's Drupal with your content strategy. You kind of figure out how is it going to carry your content from point A to point B. And the choices you make are very important. It's going to influence, you know, what sort of content you can put into it. And you know, you can, I guess, try to go for a certain demographic. Or you can make choices you will regret. So you know, we have to think this through. And this I think is very important. And I know a lot of Drupal site builders are feeling me right now. You have all these other people, you know, your content strategist and your user experience experts and your information architects and your designers and the business people. And they talk and talk and they say, this is what we need. This is what we have to do. And it kind of shows up and it's okay, build it. And the Drupal site builder is the person that's actually going to build this. That means taking any number of decisions that were never actually thought of. So the Drupal site builder is really kind of an unrecognized architect. Maybe we should do that. Maybe we should, you know, petition Drupal.org to take away the word site builder and replace it with architect because that's really what site builders are. They make all sorts of decisions about how all this stuff is going to be implemented. And they have to do that in a way that's going to support the needs of today. And you know, the needs going forward. Oh yeah. So yeah. Content strategy and Drupal site building together can be quite intense. But it's a lot of fun, you know. I'll stop now. Okay. So what's the first thing a Drupal site builder, what's the first thing they need to do? It's modeling the world in Drupal. And I think this is really the strength of Drupal. And this is the part that, you know, Drupal site builders need to think a lot about what are their tools for modeling the world. This is what they're really doing, their architects. And this is what content strategists need to understand in order to speak to site builders. And the reason I'm here kind of talking about Drupal is because of the strength of its modeling tools. So it was 2006 and I've been working on Italy, as I mentioned, the website for about a year. It was a complete mess of ten WordPress blogs, don't ask me why, but it was ten different WordPress blogs. There were two Joomla sites in there doing specific things. There was some custom script for property management. And there was a V-bulletin forum, all for one site. And the question was, you know, what do we do next? This is clearly unsustainable, we need to change it. And it kind of got down to Ruby on Rails, it was cool at the time, and Drupal. And Ruby on Rails, everyone was talking about it.  And I just so much wanted to do Ruby on Rails. But then you had Drupal, and Drupal was talking about nodes as this generic content type and fields that you attached to nodes, and taxonomies and vocabularies. And in a previous life, I was in academia and I was doing semantic web technologies. So I was saying, wow, this is awesome, these people are way ahead of the curve here. So we went with Drupal. And that's Drupal's strength, modeling your kind of domain in it. And it gives you all sorts of tools to do that. Now, as you're modeling things, it's a continuous game of balancing, abstraction, modularity. And when it's done right, it's a beautiful thing. When it's done differently, it's still beautiful, but it's just not that useful. So, and I was talking about this with some of my colleagues this morning. There is actually no mathematical proof. Now, I'm coming from academia, kind of did inference logics and constantly trying to attain the world and just write that perfect equation that proves what we wanted to do. And there isn't anything like that. There is no mathematical proof about what is the correct content type or the correct structure of a site. So what you end up doing is depending on best practices, core principles. And I think what's very important in terms of kind of building that set of best practices is to focus on a specific set of tools. And learn to use those tools very well. Because if you just keep changing your tool set, so change is healthy. But if you keep doing it all the time, you never have the time to actually develop a set of best practices. And then the other thing that's very important is build prototypes. Test them, break them, build them again. Usually when we're discussing, how should we build a site in Drupal in Newspark, we'll end up with two, maybe three competing approaches. And then someone is going to say, okay, I'm going to go away and build this, and we'll see how it works. And that's another place where Drupal is great. It's a great prototyping tool. As you're building things, please keep in mind who you're building it for. And this is kind of always a tricky point. How many of you use developed generate? There you go. I mean, it's kind of the Laura Mipsum of Drupal. And it's great, right? And actually, Laura Mipsum can be great as well. But at some point, you have to step away from that and use the real content. Give it to the person that's actually going to be producing this stuff and let them play with it. And it's not necessarily that you're wrong in how you build the content type or whatever, it's just that they will never have thought of all the things they need before they actually got the chance to use it and build something with it. So Drupal, as I said, has a great set of tools for modeling the world. And I'm just going to quickly go through these things. In Drupal 6, it was just nodes. In Drupal 7, it's entities, right? And you really need to be thinking of your Drupal site as a set of entities with the associated fields. And then everything else builds on top of that. So you have nodes, comments, files, users and terms. These are really all just entities. And the quicker you start thinking of things like that, as opposed to just nodes and nodes are one thing and they can have fields and the others don't, the faster you will be able to build more complex models of your domain in Drupal. Because you have this stuff that comes out of Drupal Core. And then you have another set of entities, products, profiles, beans, which is really turning blocks into entities. And then you can actually build your own custom entities. And all this is your world. And it's a great balance between abstraction and modularity because you can think of everything just as entities and fields. And anything you do at the entity and field level applies to everything else. If you get into some of the higher levels, one more effect, that's it. So once you get into custom data structures, that begins to be a problem. Because the model of your world starts to break down. It's no longer just entities and fields. So be very wary of kind of thinking maybe directly in terms of MySQL tables and their structure and so on. Drupal is supposed to take care of that. And you have to think of the world the way Drupal views it so you don't fight Drupal, you work with it, right? Now once you have your world thought of like this, you can start breaking that down and making models of the world. And literally Drupal is a great prototyping tool and you can go away and immediately do content types. But it's worth initially to just break things down and say, okay, what is it that I'm going to be doing here? So I'm going to be writing stories. Those stories might have a location, they might have a topic. There is an author, what is that author? Is it actually a Drupal user? Do I want that? What fields am I going to have? If I have an image, is that just something that people upload and that's the end of that image? Or is it something that I need to take care of so it's another entity and it can have its own fields and its relationship to other things and it can be reused throughout the site? And then you can take advantage of all the tools that Drupal has to bring all this stuff together. So when you're thinking fields, you're thinking, well, what sort of fields? Is it just a numeric field? Do I need to have a widget like hierarchical select? Is it just a dropdown? Is it a text area?  And it's all these things that define what the content strategist are then going to be able to do with that content. These decisions impact how and where you can display your content. So thinking of stuff like field collection so that you conceptually group things together and make them a subpart of another entity. I'm not going to go through all these modules and so on. I'll just put them up there and then I'll share the slides and you probably know quite a few of them, maybe some you don't. One of the great things is how many field modules that are out there. Then you have stuff like field group where you can decide how to group fields together in terms of the user interface. Field collection which literally semantically kind of groups them together. And yeah, there's all sorts of modules. And this is the Drupal site builder's job, right? To know how many things that are out there that can help them develop a site, model their world. Then you have another tricky decision. How many use custom text formats for their sites? This is a very powerful tool and it's not that many because you have this continuum between absolute freedom, full HTML, actually Drupal even lets you do PHP but we don't talk about that. So you can have absolute freedom. You can have absolute austerity. It's like just text, that's it. Or you can find some sort of balance between all of this. And it's very important to think every time the text gets entered somewhere in the site to which level of flexibility are you going to allow that text to be kind of entered in, right? And we'll talk a bit more about this in the example. Again, some useful modules there. And we need to keep this in mind. And it's attention. So on the one hand you have the content strategist that needs to be able to do absolutely everything, right? So we break everything down into discrete pieces of information that we can manipulate in wonderful ways. And then you have the content creators that go into node slash add. And it's, oh my god, there's like 50 fields here. There is no easy answer. There's lots of things that one can do, thinking of the user experience, hiding things, automating things. But ultimately it's just finding that right balance. Okay, so that's kind of in terms of building your content types and defining what pieces make up your world. Another thing that's quite interesting to spend time thinking about is what are the different ways you can categorize content. And obviously vocabularies and taxonomies are one of them, but there's actually quite a few variations within that. And it begins even before vocabularies. You can have stuff like just simple lists. And they have their benefits at time. It's limited choice. It can't be changed easily. But it ensures consistency. And for a few limited cases, it makes a lot of sense. So kind of step through those options and always do advantages, disadvantages, discussion to figure out what makes sense. So you can go from lists to tags. And this is using vocabularies. You can go from the open-ended. And this is great because it's very simple. But it does mean you can end up with thousands and thousands of tags and you need some strategy in terms of how you're going to manage all this. And again, we'll talk a bit more about this. Then you have fixed vocabularies that are great. They give you fine-grained control. You can also introduce fields to taxonomy terms. And that's extremely useful. But then you also have other things. You know, categorization is not just about vocabularies. You can use flags to allow content editors, users, whoever to build lists of things. Maybe that's what makes sense. So kind of think of the options. Even organic groups in a way is a way to categorize content. Because you can group content based on a certain set of permissions they should have. Organic groups let you define what users can create within a group. You can group it for community. To say this is the content that this group of people did. So it's yet another tool to model the world in Drupal. And I think maybe of all the different tools, tools for taxonomy are really important, especially for large sites. You know, you want to periodically, if you have tags, clean things up. So something like taxonomy merge that just lets you bunch things together. It's very useful. Taxonomy tool provides a whole series of useful things. We'll check that out. And don't forget, it's not just about people. Feed the machines. That's how I got into content strategy. It's thinking about how can I break the content up so that I can annotate it and feed it to the machines. And again, Drupal is great for this. So you have RDFA kind of in core. There's support for Facebook Graph, for schema of the organ, so on. Okay, that said, modeling Italy. I don't know if you can see that. So that's fine. We have all these tools to model the world. What are we going to do about it? And how are we going to use it? So I just wanted to step through a practical example and just show you how we went about implementing content strategy for Italy. Now, the first thing we did was actually, you know, because this is a site that had years and years of content, we did a content audit, trying to figure out what are the things that work, what are the things that don't work. And it's slow, and it's boring, and it's painful, but it's extremely useful, right? Because it gives you a sense of where you are now. How much do you have, what makes sense, what can you throw away, and so on. So after our audit, we spend a lot of time talking about, you know, do we want to achieve as Italy? What do our users want to achieve? Building user profiles. And I'm not going to go into the detail of that. This is kind of for triple site building rather than content strategy. But this exercises are extremely useful because they obviously give you the definition of what you need, right? So once you do all of this and you have a sense of where you are and where you want to go, you can start thinking, okay, how do I need to model my content in order to get me where I need it to be? And you start doing content models. This is literally kind of one of the early drafts of the content model for Italy Magazine, and I will spare you the details. It was very exciting. So the main issue is thinking of content, both in terms of content categories or as someone, I heard yesterday, said, you know, types of types. So you have, on Italy Magazine, we have stuff like editorial. Those are stories that journalists write. We have resources. We have things that are in a way much more evergreen. Recipes, language lessons and so on. We have listings that actually advertisers generate. And then we have things that the community generates. So this gives us a way to group the different types of types and treat it in different ways. And then think of, you know, how the navigation is going to reflect that. Something that was extremely important for Italy is, you know, the objective is to model Italy. Now, Italy has modeled Italy for people who are interested to go to Italy for holidays and kind of enjoy Italy. If we're going to model Italy, let's say, from the political perspective, I would quit. So yeah, from the lifestyle perspective, it's awesome. So you have things like culture and food and drink and art. And everything is essentially based on two main axes.  And the other one is the big cross-section. Is this about culture? Is this about art? Is this about food and drink? Then you have subtopics. So it could be things like sports or fashion or property and so on. And then you have tags. And tags are open-ended. And one of the things we needed to do with tags is sit down with the content creators and discuss what are the rules in terms of how tags get created. And no, when do you create tags? Because we'd have all sorts of weird things. And essentially, in the end, we got down to something like, you know, it's people, it's events, it's kind of big items like that. So once you have your different content types and you have your vocabularies that tie all these things together, you dive into building the, you know, sketching out the details of this. And one of the more interesting ones is recipes. Because recipes, and it's kind of the content strategy example because it's both complicated and easy to explain. Because everyone knows that recipes has a list of ingredients and it has a time and a difficulty. And what's interesting here is thinking of the structure of your content type in a way that's going to open up possibilities for you. So for example, what I have there is a field collection to enter the ingredient and the quantity, right? And this is an open-ended vocabulary. So it's essentially tags but just for recipes. So every time a new ingredient gets added to the system, we have a page that says, you know, are you interested in cooking something with prosciutto or mozzarella or whatever? You can go to that page and see all the recipes that have that. From the content creator's perspective, it's relatively simple, you know. The main rule there is please try not to duplicate ingredients and there are tools and ways to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you both get a breakdown of your content into all sorts of different categories and you also have a way to enter that. And finally, the other thing is because we're kind of pulling different things together, you can see one recipe and see the related recipes and see things like cooking schools because all that falls under our food and drink cross-section. There is kind of an interesting cut-off point between you're creating content types for content creators that belong to your organization so you can get mean with them and say, why didn't you do that? I told you not to type just anything in there, you know. Go fix it.  It's annoying. But, you know, we didn't want to miss the chance on Italy magazine to not be able to categorize our content that gets generated by users. So the approach, and we're still developing exactly, you know, what's the best balance, is to, A, make it very simple. So they just have, like, simple text box that can enter the question. They can just drag and drop images. But then on the kind of the next page, we say, you know, please help us out here. You're part of this community. If you actually add a topic and you add a location, it's going to be so much better for everyone because other people are going to be able to find your question and answer it and you're helping everyone out. And that was extremely useful and it's surprising. I think it's something like 90% of questions have topics and locations added to them. I was literally expecting everyone to be jumping that page, but you ask nicely and people respond.  And that's kind of the... This is when you start seeing that content strategy is working for you. There's a lot of upfront discussions, a lot of debate. How are we supposed to model our world? How granular do we need to make it and so on? But once you've done all that and you've implemented it, then you can kind of enjoy the results. And some of the things that we do on Italy Magazine is we generate streams of content dynamically based on rules because we have so many different ways of saying, go get me something from property that is in this section of Italy, go maybe find a related recipe, go find something from community, and kind of put it all together. And on Italy Magazine we use NodeQ to put the streams together. And they can be updated both manually, so an editor can go in and say, it's very important that we have a specific story in a specific position, but it can also be updated automatically. So you can kind of look at how your statistics are doing and just go grab that content and put it in the right position. Because we have all this division and tagging and so on, we can have an archive and we have content essentially from 99, but really from let's say from 2005 it's much more structured. So that's nine years of content. There's a lot going on there. And we use Solr in the backend to power all our searches and because there's such good integration between Drupal and Solr, we can build up all sorts of different archives of our content. And people love it, they use it a lot. We can do things like just the recipes. We spend the time to set up the content type for recipes to do all those fields and create the tags for the ingredients and so on. And now you can say, I want sweets, I want primis, a content and so on. We do location pages. Italy has 8,300 kind of different locations and those are just like the official ones. And Italy Magazine has a page for each one of those. And we pull together content from across the site building essentially these mini sites where you go to Sicily and you can see Sicilian recipes and properties and experiences and it's no effort because the content strategy up front led us in this direction. So these are kind of the things that are extremely useful and why it makes sense to spend a lot of time to think about what you need up front, think about the ways you're going to describe it. And let's say Sicily is actually a taxonomy term page. So it's just that cross-section. And we attached the fields to the taxonomy term because it's an entity and that works the same like everything else. And then we went to Wikipedia with that term and said, okay, give me all the information like longitude, latitude and so on and that's the map and info page there. I've got to put a screenshot in. And that kind of brings that cross-section of information together. Then we let with flags, as I said, it's another way to categorize things. We let our users create lists of stuff they like and for the time being it's, you know, I'm thinking of buying that. I don't know. Yeah. So yeah, you can kind of have your users generate lists and then you can group all that together and do things like most favorite properties in Tuscany and all of that stuff. And of course you can feed the machines. So right now we're working on a mobile app for the property section and it's kind of absurd how simple it is. We're using titanium accelerator and we're just providing, you know, Jason from the Drupal site putting that together. There was a presentation before about kind of building products in Drupal and startups and it's Christoph if anyone knows Christoph and something that Christoph said struck me. He said it's amazing, you know, the amount of work and technology that goes into us being in this room watching this and it's very much like that. You know, we take certain things for granted but it's an extremely staggering level of complexity that comes together and lets us just do these things very simply as long as we take the time to think of the model of our world, our domain. So everything else is taking care of us. The tools are there, it's all there. We just need to spend the time to think of how we're going to model our world. Okay, so I'm just going to talk briefly about producing and sharing content and the first thing I'm going to do which is a great shortcut is tell you that there's a great presentation, Adrian Ditt which is our technical director on showing the author some love. Best session title ever, right? And this is just all the things you can do to make it easier for content creators well maybe not all of the things, a lot of things you can do to make it easier for content creators to create content. Now, as I mentioned at the start, content strategy is thinking about the organizational goals, thinking about the user goals, thinking about the content you need to satisfy those goals. It's also thinking about how you're going to send that content out into the world and it's also thinking about what is that process, what is that workflow. And the one thing I'm going to say about workflow is the less of it you need, the better. And challenge your organizations about exactly why it has to go through five different people that have to tick some box that are so busy that they're not actually going to read it. And just think about how you can simplify your workflow. And I can't believe I'm going to do this but I'm going to plug WordPress right here. So this was from years ago I watched this interview where you had Drees and Matt and they were talking about WordPress and Drupal and I agree Drupal all the way. But there was one thing Matt said which was actually quite interesting. So they were asking about using content in large organizations and Drees was obviously saying Drupal is fantastic, you can have any workflow you need. What Matt said is when we go into organizations, when we go into newspapers and they talk to us about workflow what we say is why do you need that workflow. And I think that makes sense and it may be that you actually do need that workflow but think about it, you know, ask that question. Don't just go ahead and implement a very complex state diagram that kind of does that. Then the other thing to do is study user behavior. And this is, if you're working, how many are kind of creating content for in sort of a media setting like newspaper, magazine and so on? Okay, so you guys know what I'm talking about. I think if you're doing it internally in the organization it's slightly simpler but if you're doing it for users out there it's so much fun. Because you have to think of everything, right? You have to think how am I going to write this thing on Twitter so that it gets the right response. And, you know, we're all inundated nowadays with stuff from Buzzfeed and Appify or whatever that's called which is most amazing thing ever. You won't believe what happened next. And that's all, you know, it works for them. That's studying user behavior and kind of figuring out what people are going to respond to. Unfortunately those things are, you know, lowest common denominator. But it's, and you don't need to do it that way but that's very important.  Prepare an editorial calendar. It's kind of a shame that Drupal right now doesn't have an editorial calendar solution and that's something that hopefully we will be working on. We were kind of thinking of how to structure that. But having an editorial calendar, having something that says these things are going to be published on the states, these people are responsible, this is how it's going to go out on social media and so on is extremely important. On Italy, we're only, you know, pushing out maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 pieces of content a day of which seven are significant or maybe six. Being able to manage that is a task. If you go to larger media outlets, they're doing 50, 60, 100 pieces of content a day. Putting all that into a calendar is extremely important. As you're doing that with Drupal, kind of from the technical side, you have to think of how that's going to impact, you know, the way you publish things. So it may be that, you know, you have some caching in place that means that even though the content editor hit save, that thing is not actually visible. Or they changed it and they thought, you know, they had to fix the problem. Maybe they had the wrong title. But caching didn't fix that. And it's actually pretty simple to fix these issues. You just have to make sure you think about it. And same thing with sharing tools. They can be very annoying, although they're very useful. So, you know, stuff like Facebook likes and tweets and Pinterest and Instagram.  But it's extremely important and useful. Measure everything. So I love Monty Python. And whenever I talk about, you know, why are we doing things, it is the Spanish Inquisition. I wish I could bring some torture tools as well. Tell me why. Tell me. You know, you have to ask the right questions. Anecdotal information is great, but that's all it is. Use graphs. And the way we integrate a lot of additional information on Italy. And so just to give you one example, we do quizzes, right? This is something that our users love. So this quiz is figuring out what pizza it is, right? So you see an image. What pizza is that? Margarita. Well done. And what we did, and it was actually very painless, is we integrated event tracking with Google Analytics. So we literally know how many times people clicked on the various pizzas. And how many got it right and how many got it wrong. And this, because, you know, this is all kind of a JavaScript thing, so there's no page reloads and stuff like that. But it gives you two things. You can actually go back to whoever is controlling the budget for content creation and say, look, this is the engagement for my quiz. I built it in a way that you don't have page loads, because that's better for users. But I can still show you that there is engagement. There is value in this. And I'm not doing it just because someone said, oh, this is a great thing. I'm going back to you with numbers, right? And proving that it's a great thing. So as you're building everything together, make sure you think of what are the things that you're going to measure. Now, I'm just going to close by saying that, you know, content strategy is not kind of all there is to it. And this is something that Rick Sissel, that's over there, is working on, which is kind of engagement strategy, kind of taking it one step higher and saying what are the things that tie everything together. You know, as we go out and talk to users, what are the channels we talk to them through, what are the actions on the side that lead to goals being achieved and so on. So you need to place your content strategy within maybe a slightly higher level perspective of overall engagement. So not just creating content, but how you engage people with that content and where you engage with them with that content and so on. Okay, I think we're also almost up with time. One more time. Thank you very much. Any questions? You need that module list. The question was where can I get that module list? I'll have the slides up as quickly as possible. Not today, because we're having a huge barbecue contest later. So maybe not even tomorrow, but as quickly as possible. Okay, cool. I think that's it. Thank you, Ron.


Good morning everybody. Congratulations everyone for making it here before the traffic descends on us. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the President of the United States Institute of Peace and I'm delighted to welcome you here this morning. Both those of you in the room and those of you who are joining via webcast. We're very pleased to be able to host today a conversation with Ambassador Don Booth, the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan on his last day. I'd also like to recognize Ambassador Garong, the South Sudanese Ambassador to the U.S. Welcome. Pleased to have you here with us. As many of you know, USIP was founded in 1984 by Congress, dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, that it is essential for national and international security, and that it's a very practical undertaking and we work with partners around the world to help equip people with the tools, the knowledge, and the training that helps them manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and to resolve it when it does. And we have had a long engagement, as many of you in this room have, with Sudan and then Sudan and South Sudan, as has our government. This has been an area of deep bipartisan concern and support for several decades. And unfortunately, despite a lot of important efforts, a lot of important results, including finally an end to a terrible North-South civil war, a peaceful referendum and election, we are still seeing continued conflict and divides that afflict both countries, including a vicious new civil war in South Sudan. And just over a month ago, we gathered here at USIP with a panel of experts who expressed a uniform deep concern about the warnings of ethnic cleansing and even possible genocide in South Sudan. And while the government of South Sudan recently announced a national dialogue, we have seen, unfortunately, little movement on either humanitarian access or the reduction in violence among the armed opposition. We're seeing ongoing fighting in Equatorious Region where families are displaced. We saw a camp in Uganda go from grasslands to a refugee camp of 500,000 displaced families in just over six months. And one-third of the population has been categorized as severely food insecure. That means nearly 5 million people are approaching famine conditions. And there are challenges in Sudan as well, where negotiations on a cessation of hostilities between the government and armed groups remain deadlocked. We see this in Darfur, Southern Kordafan and Blue Nile, and millions remain displaced as a result of sustained violent and insecurity. The U.S. administration has engaged in intensive negotiations over many months to make progress against these conditions. And in the announcement of the easing of sanctions this week, the U.S. administration noted progress in Sudan on humanitarian access, implementation of ceasefires, regional cooperation and other tracks of engagement. We know that significant work remains ahead to support the Sudanese as they seek to create an inclusive, sustainable peace. We have seen that in a cartoon-based national dialogue, there has been space for real and vibrant conversation. But we also have seen limited space for civic and political opposition to discuss or debate key issues. And many of these who are believed to be linked to recent civil disobedience or political opposition remain or have been detained. So the bipartisan support as we look ahead will be absolutely essential. We hope that soon a replacement for the essential role that has been played by Ambassador Booth will be forthcoming soon. And today we're delighted to be able to hear from Ambassador Booth. And I'm very pleased that our own Ambassador Princeton Lyman, a senior adviser here at USIP, is here with us for today's discussion. And he will moderate the conversation. I think most of you know Ambassador Lyman, his long commitment to these issues, his previous stint as a special envoy. And with that, it is my great pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Ambassador Donald Booth. I first met Ambassador Booth in Ethiopia, where he was ambassador. He knows the region and the issues extremely well. He was appointed US Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan in August of 2013. That's a long time in this kind of a position where he's spending a lot of time on the plane and working tirelessly to address these critical and very sobering issues. This is the cap of a long and distinguished career in the Foreign Service, where in addition to Ethiopia, he served as an ambassador to Zambia and Liberia. Ambassador Booth, we deeply appreciate all that you've done on this critical portfolio and throughout your career. We thank you for tremendous amounts of dedication and commitment, and we welcome you here today to hear your reflections. Please join me in welcoming Ambassador Booth. Thank you, Nancy, for that great introduction, and thank you all for joining us today. Ambassador Lyman, I want to thank you also for agreeing to moderate the discussion after my remarks. I will start by saying that if there's one thing that I'm going to take away from my time as Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan is the depth of interest and involvement that so many people here in the United States have had on Sudan and South Sudan, which are distant and complex places. And yet all of you know and care so much about them and their people. You help inform and animate U.S. policy. And we've not always agreed, but I can say confidently that our role in the Sudan's would be much diminished without the rich debate resulting from your engagement. And so I want to say today, thank you. I'm grateful for this opportunity to offer some reflections as I step aside as Special Envoy. Since I took this job in August of 2013, a tremendous amount has happened in Sudan and South Sudan. More than I'll be able to review today, even though I will speak for about 55 minutes. So let me begin with South Sudan. The world's youngest country has known more war than peace. To understand the collapse of December 2013, we have to look at the conditions that led to it. There was historic marginalization and neglect of the South coupled with a half century of war. And that meant that the world's youngest country lacked the institutional foundation on which to build a stable modern state. This traumatic history meant the people of South Sudan never had an opportunity to forge a united national vision. Despite billions of dollars in aid designed to build state capacity, and that effort I think is worthy of the world's highest level of support for its own critical review. The nation's leaders struggle to make the transition from insurgent movement to governing class. Thus it may not be surprising that the South Sudan I encountered in 2013 featured leaders with a sense of entitlement and focused on securing power and wealth, not state building. Two years after independence, we saw critical initiatives such as the implementation and implementing economic reforms drifting and stalling. Meanwhile, the influence and authority of the security organs were expanding. The root causes of South Sudan's conflict were already manifest by the summer of 2013. Indeed, they had been present even before independence. For a time they'd been papered over by the shared goal of independence, but they were always there. Tensions over the border, the early stages of the economic crisis, ethnic conflict in Zhonglei and other areas, the proliferation of militias, inter-communal animosity and bloodshed, and political instability at the center. These were all on the rise when I began the job in August of 2013. So too was the eagerness of President Kier to eliminate alternative points of view and consolidate his own power. The July 2013 dismissal of the cabinet and the firing of Vice President Riaq Mashar jolted the country. In December, when President Kier took steps to tighten his grip on the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, followed by a struggle in the presidential guard, followed by targeted killings of new air in Cuba, and that triggered the civil conflict that continues today. Those of you here are familiar with the details of that conflict and of the international efforts to bring an end to it. But I'd like to say, start by saying a word about the role of the region. It's worth emphasizing that faced with a civil war on their borders, the eagad countries did come together. They agreed to mediate between the warring parties. I was personally involved from the beginning in securing commitments from President Kier and Riaq Mashar to engage in mediated peace negotiations, and I work closely in support of that eagad mediation. I'll always appreciate the dedication of the eagad mediation team led by Seyum Mesfin, and I very much respect the work that they did. But South Sudan's leaders were not interested in compromise. So talks dragged on despite numerous emergency eagad summits. I think there were nine total during the period of negotiations. After more than a year of futile negotiations and a failed ceasefire agreement, eagad welcomed first the so-called AU5 representation from each of the five regions of Africa, and ultimately of the eagad plus, which included the United States and our Troika partners, the UK and Norway, as well as China and the European Union. The eagad plus was there to bring greater pressure to bear on South Sudan's leaders to achieve peace. I mention all this because I would argue that the future diplomacy towards South Sudan is going to require a similar complicated mixture of regional and international efforts with the United States at the forefront. Let me also say this, we have made mistakes. The events of the last six months have shown that we in the region placed too much faith in the idea that Salvekir and Riyadh Mishar could peacefully share power. At certain points, we overestimated the influence we had on South Sudan's political leaders. I wish we had taken steps earlier to forge an international consensus on the need for an arms embargo to stem the flow of weapons into South Sudan. Fundamentally, I believe we in the United States wanted peace for South Sudan far more than its leaders did. And like the people of South Sudan, we have been unable to ensure that the interests of the unarmed civilian population are valued more than those of the leaders who are empowered by personal armed forces. History shows this. In May 2014, Secretary Kerry, during his visit to Juba, secured agreement to pursue peace talks on the basis of a power sharing arrangement within a time-bound transitional government. We then championed the notion that a peace agreement had to be more than a power sharing deal among combatants, that it needed input from other South Sudanese parties and civil society organizations, and that it had to prepare the way for reforms needed to make South Sudan a viable nation. President Obama's personal efforts during a visit to the region in July 2015 spurred a final unified regional push for Kier and Mashaar to finally sign the peace agreement in August 2015. Given subsequent events, however, I recognize that there is a temptation now to discard the agreement. I would strongly caution against that. It really is more than an agreement between combatants. It's a blueprint for reforming the South Sudanese state, one that remains as valid as ever in its provisions to install in one of the world's least developed countries important constitutional, economic, security, and justice reforms and institutions. The agreement required that the combatants who signed it avoid violence long enough for these reforms to be agreed upon and implemented. But sadly, that did not happen. I recognize that at present there is no functioning ceasefire. The government is not representative of all South Sudan's political factions, and there is no serious work underway on reforms. But these remain worthy goals, and I would argue that the agreement is not a hollow accomplishment. It remains the point of reference in statements by both the government and the opposition, and we should continue to encourage a return to the foundations of that agreement, and we should be present when the conditions shift to allow for its sincere implementation. I often hear the argument that the United States is somehow not doing enough in South Sudan. It's worth recalling all we have done, both before the conflict began in December 2013 and since the signing of the peace agreement. The United States maintained its presence in South Sudan even at the most difficult and dangerous times. That was not easy. We continued to push for political agreements that would allow a cessation of hostilities to hold. We spearheaded fundraising among donors to support key institutions of the peace agreement. We sought to organize the international community to help stave off economic disaster, and we have led the international response to the humanitarian crisis that Nancy referred to. It's actually the latest estimate from the UN is 7 million people in need of emergency food help. We responded with $1.9 billion in emergency humanitarian assistance since the start of the conflict. To the accusations of South Sudanese leaders that the international community failed to fund the peace agreement, I would note that neither we nor any donor nation was ever going to fund transitional institutions that were hijacked to serve the interests of narrow political factions. If the leaders had truly embraced peace, the United States and other members of the international community were prepared to help consolidate that peace. The stale argument that somehow the breakdown of peace is the result of our inaction is illustrative of South Sudan's leader's inability to acknowledge their own culpability for the disastrous situation that South Sudan now faces. Moreover, there are recent false accusations that the Troika is plotting regime change in South Sudan are both egregious and deeply offensive. Today, South Sudan is a failing state. And unfortunately, both EGAD and the African Union are currently frozen in their response. President Kier's government appears to be counting on regional and international in action, or even turning a blind eye as it seeks to resolve the country's political crisis via military force. That is unacceptable and it also will not work. We are rightly alarmed when a senior U.N. official warns of the potential for genocide. But we should not let that word and the inevitable debate about whether or not it truly applies to distract us from what is currently and inarguably happening. Hundreds of not thousands of civilians killed monthly. Tens of thousands crossing the border as refugees and increasingly complex conflict involving an increasing number of warring parties. The United States has to seek new approaches. But without question, the United States should continue to play its prominent historical role with regard to South Sudan. Ending violence in South Sudan will require finding new ways to open channels of dialogue between all parties in conflict. The national dialogue process called by President Kier may offer a constructive alternative to violence, but only if it is impartially led and it is truly inclusive. I encourage the next administration to one, continue efforts to push the African Union toward establishment of the hybrid court for South Sudan. To achieve accountability for the abhorrent crimes committed during the conflict, including widespread and shocking sexual violence. Two, to base any support for a future DDR efforts on a realistic and affordable end state for South Sudan's security sector. South Sudan has been an over militarized state since its inception and that needs to change. Three, to press for reform of the structure of the state through a transparent and coherent constitutional drafting process. And four, to make the reform of public financial management a precondition for future support to South Sudan's development. A final thought on South Sudan. The situation that led us to seek an arms embargo and targeted sanctions at the United Nations Security Council in December has not improved since our failure to secure passage of that resolution. While we have sought to use some of the tools at our disposal, including a process to impose visa restrictions on South Sudanese figures linked to official corruption in order to address the government's policies of violence corruption. I would encourage the next administration to continue to examine seriously what we can do to incentivize the parties to choose a better path forward. I now want to turn to Sudan. My engagement with Sudan goes back a ways, goes back as far as my engagement with my friend and colleague, Ambassador Lyman. In the early 80s I was a desk officer for Sudan at a time when relations were good. It was a time that Sudan was a friend in a bipolar era. And because Sudan was on our side in that struggle, we provided aid and political support. However, as the conflict in South Sudan resumed beginning in 1983 and those supporting international terrorism gained power in cartoon we found that our government shared very few values or interests. Since that time we have sought mainly to engage cartoon through pressure, to prod them to peace talks with the South, to end support for terrorism, to stop the horrific abuses in Darfur and to allow humanitarian access to address the suffering of the Sudanese people. This approach had mixed results. We have seen incremental bursts of positive news, certainly the signing of the comprehensive peace agreement in 2005. It showed that diplomacy and the incentive of sanctions relief could bear fruit even with an unfriendly regime. We've also had setbacks such as failures of the numerous Darfur peace agreement and the renewed outbreak in 2011 of conflict in the two areas. The independence of South Sudan was a moment of great hope but also one of great tension and anxiety. Ambassador Lyman played a critical role in working through the messy post-independence period and addressing key issues that threatened to undo that accomplishment. Fortunately and thanks to efforts and the African Union high-level implementation panel, as well as Ambassador Lyman and his Troika colleagues, Juba and Khartoum signed the 2012 cooperation agreements that plotted a course for the two countries to live side-by-side in peace. Unfortunately, suspicion about support to each other's rebels continues to undermine bilateral relations, blocking progress in border demarcation, trade resolution of disputed areas, among other issues. Regrettably, we are no closer to a final resolution on the status of Abye than we were in 2013. But with a steady presence of the UN peacekeeping mission, UNISFA, and some strategic assistance from the United States, the people who actually live in Abye have been spared renewed conflict in recent years. Our legacy of pressure on Sudan and the messy process of South Sudanese independence still reverberated when I came in as envoy in 2013. I regularly heard the accusation that the United States had moved the goalposts, that is that we had failed to lift sanctions when Sudan had accepted the results of South Sudan's referendum and ultimately its secession. Of course, at that time, the war in the two areas was beginning again, which in our view is Sudan shifting the playing field rather than us moving the goalposts. This created a lack of trust that productive engagement could be possible between our countries. This meant we had no leverage or influence over Khartoum's decisions. I wanted us to go beyond this unproductive game of tit-for-tat accusations of bad faith. I believed there was an opportunity to build something that would have significant positive impact for the people of Sudan and also serve our national interests. A breakthrough came when we invited Ibrahim Ghandour who was then an advisor to President Bashir, he's now the foreign minister, to visit the United States in February of 2015. Since that visit we have engaged in frank and increasingly frequent discussions about the steps needed to build trust and allow both countries to make progress toward achieving their respective goals. In this process our goal was constant ending internal conflict in Sudan and seeing Sudanese address the root causes of instability that have plagued Sudan since independence. This required looking for ways to open new engagement with the government while also enhancing engagement with the opposition, particularly Sudan call, a coalition that includes armed and unarmed opposition and civil society. It meant working with partners to construct a viable peace process. Along with the AU and other partners we helped modify what had been a compartmentalized peace process that treated Sudan's conflicts as separate and unrelated. The DDPD Doha document for peace in Darfur and the AU high level panel process was leading for the two areas. We now have parallel cessation of hostilities discussions under the African Union high level panel that once concluded and I must say they came very close to successfully concluding in August last year. It would lead to political talks to address specific local grievances and ultimately these would lead to participation of the opposition in an inclusive national political dialogue as both government and the Sudan call committed to in the roadmap of March 2016. This national political discussion was to address the systemic roots of conflict. It is imperative that all the parties continue to adhere to that roadmap. I want to pause here and I can already sense that there might be some eyebrows raised in the audience. When I talk about the Sudanese opposition groups and I must say that I think we need to be careful not to hold them in unquestioned high esteem. I think it is important to be clear eyed about whom we are dealing with. I have found that some of the leaders of the Sudanese opposition those with guns are more than willing to ignore the interests and well-being of the ordinary civilians in favor of their own political ambitions. It seems to me that just as there are hardliners within the Sudanese government who hold on to the false notion that a military victory can be achieved so too there are leaders of the armed groups who believe that they are right to fight on no matter what the cost until they get what they want politically. Power. For example, I just returned from Paris where I met with the SPLM North which I have been negotiating with, talking with for over two months now on a proposal that would be very much of help to their people. They rejected this offer of the United States to deliver humanitarian medical assistance to people in their zones of control in the two areas. This is a huge missed opportunity to advance peace negotiations and to help the people that they claim to be fighting for. So even as we hold the government to its commitment to peace we must also demand that the opposition set aside personal political ambitions and put their people first. I also know that many here have difficulty seeing the Sudanese government as a credible partner in the peace process. I understand what drives such thinking but if we allow ourselves to be bound by a mindset such as that we lose all hope of peacefully advancing causes that are important including human rights of civilians in Sudan. We believe that there is a way forward that would motivate Sudanese government to take positive action while allowing us to advance a broad range of U.S. interests. The key was turning the latent leverage of existing sanctions into active leverage by putting sanctions relief on the table in exchange for improved behavior by the Sudanese government. We understood that if we wanted to get the government to overcome its doubts we would have to offer a real incentive and prove we meant it. The five tracks of engagement that we launched in June 2016 required Sudan to undertake and sustain a series of actions over six months. If Sudan made progress and sustained action in all those tracks we offered to provide broad sanctions relief. I want to note that this plan was initiated under a desire to end hostilities and improve humanitarian access. It was not the result of counterterrorism cooperation nor was that the priority. Many have made this assumption in recent days and I want to clarify the facts on that matter. Counterterrorism cooperation alone would not have yielded this result. This shift in U.S. policy. Since the end of June Sudan announced a unilateral cessation of hostilities in Darfur in the two areas and we have observed a significant reduction in clashes involving government forces. Moreover, Sudan has not launched the annual dry season offensive that began every December or January the latest since 2011. They now have extended their unilateral cessation of hostilities for six months and they know that any resumption of offensive military action would risk the reimposition of sanctions. Meanwhile, according to our assessment Sudan has ceased providing material support to armed groups in South Sudan. Sudan has partnered with the United States and countering ISIL and other terrorist groups as well as the threat of the Lord's Resistance Army. And finally, Sudan has taken significant steps to reduce ongoing obstructions to humanitarian access and to improve the environment for humanitarian organizations and the United Nations. However, much more progress needs to be made in the coming months. The key is to sustain momentum. We want to see Sudan make progress, not stand still and certainly not regress. We have generated some momentum for a more productive bilateral engagement. This is not to say that there has been much progress on every important issue in our bilateral relationship. But our five-track engagement showed Sudan's government that if it abided by its commitments, we would abide by ours. And it puts the incoming administration in a better position with an interlocutor that trusts working with us. The Treasury Department issued general licenses that give immediate relief from the trade embargo. The Treasury 13 executive order gives Sudan a path toward formal revocation of the trade embargo in six months. The next administration will have the ability to offer further incentives toward bilateral normalization or to reimpose some or all of the sanctions depending upon the actions of the Sudanese government. I know many of you will take issue with our argument or that it has taken actions sufficient to merit last week's announcement. I respect your position and I offer you this encouragement. Sustain your engagement with us. Continue to monitor and report on what happens on the ground and provide us that information. The executive order that requires a report by the Secretary of State in six months says it must take input information from all parties including NGOs. Please take advantage of that. When I met with President Obama in August 2013 at the beginning of my mission he gave me a simple direction. He wanted to see, he said two countries at peace internally and with each other. I wish I could say that is what we have today. It is not. But on Sudan I am optimistic. As I said we leave the incoming administration with new opportunities. Ones that would have been unimaginable eight or even four years ago. Even relations between Sudan and South Sudan are more stable today although they remain fraught with challenges such as Abye. But the recent agreement on oil revenue between the two countries is a promising sign. South Sudan is as fragile as it has been since independence. Frankly the international community struggles to find the tools to deal with leaders who hide behind the rhetoric of sovereignty while engaging in self-serving actions that undermine their country's future. I am confident that only a truly inclusive national political process could address the crisis in South Sudan. But I am less confident in issuing prescriptions about how to bring about such a process. Any process that simply rebuilds the SPLM, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, is doomed to fail as it will at best only solidify Sudan's status as a one-party state. Among my hopes in speaking today is to encourage the incoming administration to continue the tradition in Republican and Democratic administrations alike of serious, active engagement with Sudan and South Sudan. In Sudan we have a rare opportunity to revise dramatically the terms of a historically problematic relationship in a way that serves our interests as well as Sudan's. In South Sudan, while I do not doubt this with its leaders will continue, I see a country whose citizens still look to the United States as a true friend and a force for good. This is a trust we should not break even as we are forced to reconsider how best to help South Sudan achieve lasting peace. I want to close much as I began by saying how encouraged I am by the undiminished energy in my room and of the many people I have met during my time as special envoy who have continued despite frustrations and challenges to continue working on Sudan and South Sudan. Our missions in Juba and Khartoum under the leadership of Ambassador Mali Fee and Sharjeh Stephen Kutsis are in good hands. I am encouraged by the energy and interest of members of Congress, many of whom I've been speaking with for the past two weeks on both sides of the aisle and their interest in Sudan and South Sudan. I am now after more than three years as special envoy stepping down. It's all of you who will continue to work these issues to search for solutions to grab on to the slivers of optimism when they come and ultimately I hope find new ways to move forward. I wish you all great success. Thank you very much. Don, thank you so much for what is a really extraordinary speech. Candid, forthright, comprehensive and perhaps controversial as well. No less so than the subjects you have been dealing with over the last three-plus years. Just a note on we don't have a enormous amount of time so what we're going to do is ask a question. We're going to take written questions on cards. We have staff available so if you raise your hand a staff person will come and you write the questions and we'll take them. While that is starting, Don, let me ask a couple. Let me start with South Sudan. You've laid out extremely well the situation. You've pointed to the importance of the peace agreement of 2015 as the structure around which peace can be built. What combination of what kind of incentives then would be needed, carrots and sticks by the region, by the international community to make that process viable? That's sort of been the fundamental question of how do you incentivize South Sudan's leaders to to put aside the personal political ambitions agreed to work together to try to put South Sudan on a formal footing. The problem with coming up with carrots and I've held many, many meetings with donors and other international partners to try to see if carrots couldn't be devised but short of supporting the institutions of the peace agreement itself getting governments highly skeptical because of actions that continue on the ground by political leaders and by statements by political leaders, highly skeptical about providing that carrot, that support. I talked early on after the agreement was signed about the need for a peace dividend yet what I found was countries said we will never get through our legislatures the ability to provide more funding until we see some progress. So there's a little bit of a chicken and egg. The other thing that we tried and also didn't achieve was really to use a bit of a stick and that was the effort to in the Security Council in December last year to try to get to at least putting the arms of Argo in place to stem the ability to buy more weapons and ammunition but also to undermine the ability to use some of the most lethal weapons in the arsenal of the government and also to put a shot across the bow of a few individuals who very blatantly had argued that the way forward was fighting and through stirring up ethnic hatred and division. So that combination of carrots and sticks yes the carrots are going to be very hard until there's some progress so that's where the pressure is going to have to come and I think that pressure ultimately has to start with the region it has to start with the region and then work its way through the African Union and then the Security Council can be an effective mechanism I think for imposing that but right now the message that has been received I think the international community is not united enough to impose any penalties and is not convinced enough to provide any incentives this is a problem that we have to work through You think that it will change at all we have a new UN Secretary General who's on his way to the AU summit and then on to Juba we will have presumably at the end of the month a new commissioner at the Africa Union do you think this offers an opportunity perhaps or some renewed high level diplomacy Well the new Secretary General has already called for the Security Council to take appropriate measures to pressure the parties forward I did not specify what those might be and we certainly would hope that whoever becomes the new chairperson of the African Union will take an active role in trying to solve the problem in South Sudan the region at this point EGAD states remain once again disunited in their views on this they're pursuing their own national interests in South Sudan and so I think we need that higher level engagement of the African Union to make the breakthrough let me just ask one question also on Sudan and I will start with some of the questions coming from I think one of the questions about the engagement and the agreements that was announced in which you describe let me put it bluntly as I've seen comments from a number of organizations you have a government with a president who's been indicted by the international criminal court for genocide and other acts there have been lots of terrible acts committed over the course of the last number of years is the lifting of sanctions going to be seen in any way in Sudan as a reward as a kind of a buy for all of that because now they're on a different path with us how do you balance that history, that ongoing history, that history of indictments and this new relationship you've described well let me start by saying that the engagement of the past six months we made it very clear at the outset that there would be no change in our position vis-a-vis President Bashir and his issues with the ICC we made it clear there were other issues that were not on the table at this point such as the desire of Sudan to be removed from the state sponsor of terrorism list and the desire to be able to have the support needed to move to debt relief so there are still many points of leverage that we have with the government we also made it very clear that the performance of six months would need to continue for the sanctions relief to continue so we think we do have leverage and that leverage I believe has truly increased by the fact that instead of now saying you need to do X, Y and Z and if you do we promise we'll do something in a situation where the government would believe we would actually deliver the fact that we have done that taken that step now of sanctions relief they have something to lose now and there's also a credibility as we go forward and discuss other issues that there would be a U.S. follow-through if the Sudanese do the things that we would press them to do so I think this has really increased our leverage the Sudanese will inevitably try to portray this you know the Americans have come along to see that we're doing the right things that's clearly not the message that we are putting out publicly and privately and the actions of Sudan will be what determines whether the sanctions relief is permanent or not not the rhetoric let me turn to the essence here relating to the role of youth the role of the diaspora this is particularly I think on south Sudan obviously those are two different constituencies although they overlap but I wonder if you could speak to both we have some youth leaders here with us at USIP for a while we've done that for some time there are other programs like that so could you speak to that how do they play a role well I've met many times with diaspora groups and spoken to many of them and I've always encouraged that one if they're working together in the diaspora they can live in the United States in peace they are a model and they can show their people at home that it's possible and they should engage they also have skills that could be brought to bear at a point when south Sudan is peaceful enough to begin to go back and do the rebuilding so I think the diasporas have a useful role to play I think we need to be careful not to overplay the role that a diaspora can play however I've worked in many countries where I've seen diasporas who left during civil wars come back with their skills, with their great ideas with their American or other ways of doing things and are resented and not just by senior officials but resented by the people because they left when things were tough so it's not always easy for the diaspora to contribute and I don't think there's any magic answer for that youth just like with women's groups, religious community we tried very hard to include those voices in the peace negotiations EGAD mediators agreed with that and tried very hard for the parties themselves who insisted that if a civil society organization wanted to be at the peace talks they had to join one delegation or the other you had to take sides that's how it was done during the CPA I've heard more times, that's how it was done during the CPA so it in effect diluted those voices though I do remember one occasion during the peace negotiations when there were a number of groups including a number of the religious leaders in the room and the arguments between the government and opposition delegations became rather hot and heated and so the mediation called to break and everybody went out to get tea and the religious leaders took members of both delegations aside and gave them a piece of their minds and things calmed down so there's certainly a value in that I've also mentioned there was a youth meeting in Nairobi I think two weeks ago to try to talk about how to get a political process an inclusive political process underway in South Sudan and unfortunately the government branded that as an effort to undermine the peace agreement and subvert the government so there has to be an openness by those in power to listen to these groups and we need to continue to encourage them in that direction you mentioned the importance of constituting the hybrid court and one of the questions is what would that mean? Should the court be pursuing for example the leadership President Keeher, former Vice President Riaq Mashaar others as part of this evolutionary process and how would that impact on your vision of a peace process you said we're not for regime change but what's the role of the court in this regard the argument is often and has been made by many in South Sudan that you need peace before you can have reconciliation and accountability the problem is how do you get to peace if people see that those who committed atrocities who ordered atrocities that there's no path to them facing accountability where's the trust so the idea behind the court is it's up to the court to decide who it's going to investigate who it might indict based on that investigation there's a lot of information that's been gathered by the United Nations by the African Union's commission of inquiry led by President Al-Basemjo by civil society groups in fact the United States funded an effort to document and allow civil society to document a lot of the information on what had gone on during the conflict so there's a lot of information there that the court could draw on I'm not going to prejudge who they should or should not go after that's up to the court but the sense that those who brought the country these horrific acts can face accountability of some sort I think we'll begin to help South Sudan in the page so that people will have confidence that their leaders will actually work for them for their benefit and not just for the benefit of the leaders themselves I have several questions here about the next administration one question has this new policy on Sudan or generally on South Sudan been discussed with the new administration do you have any sense of the new administration's approach to these issues this is a question I get from the press a lot as I think does everybody else in the outgoing administration the incoming administration has been briefed on the five track engagement but I am not in a position to opine or even guess at what positions the incoming that would be inappropriate for me to do we have to let them speak for themselves as to how they're going to tackle these part of my purpose today was to give some ideas for how to move forward on Sudan and South Sudan but the main message that I wanted to convey is that these two countries there's been a lot of US engagement a lot of bipartisan interest in and we hope that the level of engagement will continue so that both of these countries can get to the point where they are indeed at peace with themselves internally and at peace with each other there are several questions about various international actors the UN the UN peacekeepers China you mentioned the Troika how do they are they playing a role now there's been a lot of criticism of un-miss in South Sudan in terms of its ability or willingness to protect civilians you mentioned in APA evidently still doing a good job but a lot of problems with UNAMID and Darfur so you have several of these different international players how do you see those roles do they come together are they being coordinated what do you see for that in the future and that goes for Troika for China let me tackle the UN peacekeeping missions first both un-miss in South Sudan and UNAMID and Darfur face one critical challenge which is a fundamental problem in peacekeeping and that the mandates that they've been given are first and foremost protection of civilians unfortunately in both of those cases they have to protect the civilians against their own government now the UN goes into a country with the consent of the government and it's a member state and so there's this tension that exists inevitably when the UN that's there with the acquiescence of the national government has to take actions that get between the citizens to protect them and their own government there's no good answer to how to deal with that that is why those missions are perhaps more tenuous than many other peacekeeping missions where there's a clear for example in Congo where the UN is working with the government against opposition groups protecting people against the opposition groups not the government so that's a real challenge there's also at times an over-tasking of what the UN can do I mean let's remember the size of South Sudan and the fact that there are fewer than 15,000 peacekeepers that are there to do the job they get spread out very thinly Darfur the same thing to one of the brand new non-camps of people displaced by fighting in Jebel Mara and there was a reinforced company of about 120 UN peacekeepers there and they had a non-defined perimeter camp housing about 25,000 people that they had to protect against all comers if you will in the impossible situation particularly when people in the camp still had to go out to get firewood to collect water etc so I really do have to admire the efforts that the serious peacekeepers have undertaken to try to protect people in this very difficult situation the role of the international community I would say that in South Sudan the international community was actually very united and the engagement that we had with China in South Sudan was perhaps one of the best examples of cooperation between our countries and that we shared common interest in seeing a restoration of peace in a sustainable restoration of peace not simply a Band-Aid we may have come at it from slightly different national interests but those national interests coincided in South Sudan I've worked very closely with the Chinese they're a member of EGAT Plus and I've worked very closely with my Chinese counterpart Envoy counterpart likewise the Troika, the UK and Norway and the European Union all of whom have envoys and now actually in the last three months both Germany and France have appointed envoys to deal with Sudan and South Sudan so many countries are actually increasing their focus and this is quite a change from 2013 the first meeting I went to was of the Troika envoys in Oslo and my Norwegian UK and EU counterparts all announced they were leaving in two weeks and none of them had a replacement and it didn't it took the outbreak of conflict in Juba to get the UK and Norway to appoint new envoys the international community has to work with the region to work with the African Union if it's going to be effective whether it's working in support of the African Union high level panel on Sudan internal negotiations COH negotiations or on Sudan South Sudan issues we can't just go this alone it has to have the backing of those who have the most to gain and most to lose the same with South Sudan EGAT can't be ignored but at this point as I say does not have the cohesion that it had during the mediation period and so we may have to look more to the African Union to help take that leadership role forward a very specific question comes up on South Sudan again if I can it touches a little bit on your answer on the hybrid court but you said that the current government in South Sudan is not inclusive now there's some controversy about the role of the former Vice President Mishar he was forced to flee the country after the events of last year he's now I believe abroad in South Africa some people think he has to be part of the solution other people feel that it's better not but it comes back to this question of inclusiveness who represents how do you get inclusiveness does he have a role and what brings forward how does one deal with that well I'll tell you and explain why we've taken the position that we have since July and that is it's quite clear that South Iqir and Riyadh Mishar cannot coexist in the same government in the same city and both live and not have in Cuba so there's a very practical question of if you focus it on individuals and you then set yourself up for further violence if you can look at it as interest groups ethnic groups political groups then I think you can begin to have a way forward to start that dialogue if you start the dialogue to opposing polls who are going to create a clash then that dialogue won't go anywhere if you can start that dialogue with a broader group of people and the other problem is frankly in the case of Riyadh Mishar and President Iqir is this notion and this was a notion they very forcefully pushed throughout the whole mediation peace negotiations that needed to be in the room no one else you didn't need representatives of other parts of South Sudan the government claimed Equatoria is with us Equatorians don't need to be here and sadly there was one negotiating around where three governors of the Equatorian states were brought in by the government and they all basically said yes the government represents us they changed their mind a few months later at one point used to verify validate this position so it can't be binary it has to be inclusive and it's not really up to us to determine exactly how that works we want South Sudanese to begin talking about that among themselves we're encouraged by the efforts of the United Nations Special Envoy Fink Hason who has been talking to all parties to try to find a way forward again being too prescriptive is not useful but we also felt it was not useful to set up again another binary antagonistic effort to move forward when I say the peace agreement should not be abandoned you have all the reform elements of the peace agreement which remain totally valid and need to be pursued in terms of the power sharing that needs to be revised based on these more inclusive political talks so that the country can get on with the reform parts of the peace agreement there's a question that I very anxious to hear your answer and that is looking back at 15 years of Special Envoy I can't I lose track of how many we've had it depends on who you count as Special Envoy but it's at least seven or eight do we need another Special Envoy to see for a Special Envoy you've mentioned about the importance with your troika partners that they have one there was a point at which I have to say when the peace agreements were signed between Sudan and South Sudan in 2012 and then reaffirmed in 2013 that maybe the focus would be on these internal issues you would have a more normal structure and then more work is out in South Sudan so what would you say about the role should there be another Special Envoy to succeed you how would you define that role there's always got to be some dividing line between what a Special Envoy does and what are serving ambassadors in the capital state the way that I see that you need a Special Envoy as long as there are negotiations going on outside the capital outside the countries as long as there are groups outside of the country that need to be engaged so for example when the peace agreement was signed for South Sudan and the opposition went back and the transitional government was formed the view that I took was that there was actually a relatively small role left for the Special Envoy that all the political players were back inside South Sudan and it was the responsibility of the U.S. ambassador to South Sudan to deal with that where I could add value as a Special Envoy was in dealing with the broader international community to try to bring together working with my USAID colleagues bring together other potential donors and how we could support the elements of the institutions of the peace agreement and ultimately help to stabilize South Sudan economically so that's harder to do if you're a sitting ambassador now arguably that role could be fulfilled by someone else in the government the Assistant Secretary for Africa or one of the Deputy Assistant Secretaries as long as there's such an intensive and time-consuming demands from one or two countries it probably makes sense to have a Special Envoy for that because it will diminish the times that they can devote to other parts of the continent. On Sudan we still have international negotiations we still have the AU High-Level Panel that's trying to bring together the opposition outside of Sudan with the government of Sudan it's trying to focus on the South Sudan relationship again very hard as a sitting ambassador to to be able to engage opposition groups out of the country often armed opposition groups once the government has put a debt sentence on the heads of how do you justify doing that and still work with the government that's something a Special Envoy can do if you're dealing between two countries negotiations again that's a place for a Special Envoy so yes I still think in the Sudan-South Sudan context there is a role for a Special Envoy I'm not saying that it couldn't be taken over by another government official but I think it would diminish the ability of that official to to be able to deal with a whole host of other hot button issues that will be on their plate You're ready to pass the baton Let me ask one last question I know we've gone over time but I think I've covered most of the issues here I wanted to ask you to put this set of countries Sudan-South Sudan into the regional context you served as Ambassador to Ethiopia you worked on that whole region etc if you're looking at it strategically from the interests of the United States and the interest stretching from Libya on one side and as hell Chad etc Ethiopia and Eritrea etc Sudan and South Sudan does that impact for example on the engagement process that you talked about opening a dialogue and beginning to have a more workable relationship is that also part of the context of the region how do you see putting this if you were explaining it not to the next administration but also to the American public so important Sudan we've seen in the past has embraced international terrorism and they could go in that direction again many of the people who were involved in that are still either in government or on the wings of government in Khartoum the problem of greater spaces we've seen that voids are filled Somalia is a perfect example so opening greater space if not active support for those who are trying to destabilize nation states to try to drive a fundamentalist vision across the whole swath of Sahelian Africa and North Africa we have this interest to find a way to prevent that this after all is becoming and I think being shown from what's happened in Syria as an existential threat to our European partners if there's mass migration as a result of conflict and so the investment that we make in trying to keep Sudan from becoming an ungoverned space if it's governed in fact that was one of the things that I really took away from my visits to four of the five Darfur states is what the people really wanted was the government to govern and protect them against people that admittedly the government itself had armed to fight the rebellion and now the government really does have a very serious task ahead which is to find a way to disarm all of these tribal militias that it has used as allies over the past years and now actually if it's going to exercise its sovereignty in Darfur it's going to have to reign them in on South Sudan again there's the problem of again failed state, ungoverned spaces that people can take advantage of but I think our engagement in South Sudan has been very much driven more from a humanitarian perspective, humanitarian impulse and you know it's interesting when the United States has a historic relationship with the country that also feeds a bit of the that country looking to the U.S. to provide help and guidance and I've served in another one of those countries Liberia where the historic relationship goes back now almost 200 years and I think again is not in our interest to just turn our backs when we did that in Liberia it descended into 14 years of brutal civil war so staying engaged and trying to do what's good for the people whose interest we have had in mind and advocated for for the past decades again just turning our back on that I think will have a cost to us and in terms of our own international prestige well Don, I have to say the country owes you a debt of gratitude I think you told me just this last year you've put in a quarter of a million miles in travel and I know how extremely hard and dedicated you have been over three and a half years it costs your family your time and effort your absolute refusal to be daunted the difficult challenges of forging new policies and relationships dealing with a range of problems you've done an extraordinary service and I think the country owes you gratitude I think the people of the region owe you gratitude and we certainly do and I would ask everybody to please thank you Don